Shayne poured himself a long drink of cognac while Rourke dialed the police. He sank into a chair and listened with a pleased grin while Rourke poured it on. He demanded the immediate arrest of one Whit Marlow. Shayne’s grin widened when Rourke came back to the living-room, complaining.
“The desk sergeant wasn’t impressed. He said he’d have to check the Florida statutes to see if there was a law about attacking a nosy newspaperman. I have to go down and swear out a formal complaint if they pick him up.”
“You’re doing all right.” Shayne gestured toward a built-in wall mirror which concealed a well-stocked bar. “I think there’s a virgin bottle of Scotch. Pour a snifter, but, for God’s sake, don’t hit it too hard. I’ve got more work for you first thing in the morning.”
“Whose case is this?” Rourke complained. He swung the mirror out and found the bottle of Scotch. “All I’ve got out of it so far is a headache.”
“There’s a headline in the offing,” Shayne reminded him.
“I’ve already passed up a couple of extras. Say, Mike, that’s an idea! Why don’t I discover the body where we planted it? The News could hit the streets with a special while the Herald is still wearing pajamas.”
Shayne considered the suggestion briefly. “It couldn’t hurt anything. But you’d better not discover the body. Let that come in the normal course. You could have the story all set up, though.”
“Sure. I’ll get over and write it now.” Rourke pulled a chair up to the table and dragged a wad of copy paper from his pocket. “Maybe I can slip a lad out there at daylight and get a shot of the body without being noticed. Let’s see—Helen Stallings, nee—what the hell was that name on the wedding certificate?”
“Devalon. But that marriage stuff can’t go in.”
“Sure not. I just want my facts straight. Strangled, eh? Been dead eight or ten hours. Disappeared from home yesterday noon. How is she dressed, Mike?”
Shayne wrinkled his forehead. “Wearing a silk dress. Blue, isn’t it?”
“Yeh. Sort of greenish blue. I remember noticing it when you carried her across the road. Short sleeves with white lace.” Rourke’s pencil was speeding across his copy paper.
“Hey! For God’s sake don’t say you saw me carrying her body across the street,” Shayne shouted.
Rourke grinned. “I turned back the cover for a look at her lying in the bed back there and I’m not putting that down.” The grin went from his face. He said gravely, “I can’t use the kidnap note nor the stuff about Stallings accusing you.”
“Not yet, but you will. I’d be just as happy to let that wait until Stallings decides to give it out. Besides, you’ve got to make your story sound as if you haven’t been lugging her body around half the night helping me dispose of it.”
“Yeh,” Rourke mused. “You get a hell of a story and can’t use it without getting yourself dressed up in a new striped suit and peeking through bars.” He finished the notes, opened the bottle of Scotch, and drank lingeringly.
“You can do something else for me,” Shayne told him. “Make a note of this. A maid has disappeared from the Stallings estate. First name is Lucile. Brunette, stocky build, thick lips.”
“The one stood you up tonight?” Rourke chuckled. “Going to advertise for her, eh? That’ll make a nice human interest story. Private detective seeks soul mate. Brunette—”
“Nix,” Shayne said sharply. “First thing in the morning I want you to start calling the employment agencies that handle domestic workers. See if you can get a line on her that way. I’m worried about her.”
In terse sentences Shayne told Rourke of the brief talk he had with Lucile in the garden and of her inexplicable absence from the house later in the night. “Maybe she has been fired. Maybe it has nothing whatever to do with her talk with me, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something back of it,” he concluded. “I’d like to know just what she was going to tell me.”
“Have you thought about the body of the girl who was found in the bay?” Rourke asked. “Remember the police call we heard while we were going back to retrieve your first corpse?”
“It was a good hunch, but no soap.” He told Rourke of his hurried trip to the morgue.
Rourke got up and said, “I’ll get over to the office and write this story. I’ll check on Lucile as soon as the agencies are open and let you know.”
Shayne went to the door with him. “I may not be around when this case starts to break. The boy at the desk will take any messages.”
He watched Rourke disappear down the hall, then closed the door and went back into the room. He methodically cleared up the disorder left in the wake of Marlow’s attack on the reporter and sat down by the center table with three objects laid out before him. They constituted the only actual clues he had in the case.
The small beaded bag found gripped in Helen Stallings’s hand, her wedding certificate, the water tumbler on which he had taken an impression of her fingerprints before definitely identifying the body.
Shayne sighed and pushed the glass aside. It had no bearing now. After a moment’s hesitation he also pushed the bag back. They had been important only when he was seeking to identify the corpse.
The wedding certificate was all that was left and it told its own story. He lit a cigarette and sat staring somberly at the embossed document which spoke of youthful passion, young love impatient of the restrictions set forth in a will executed by a father who sought to rule his daughter after death. Wealthy men often made that fatal mistake—and tragedy so often followed.
Wills like that of Mr. Devalon made work for private detectives, Shayne mused while a cynical glint shone in his gray eyes. He should be the last person to condemn the practice. He was still staring at the wedding certificate when sunlight slanted into the corner apartment. He roused himself with a tired oath and went to the east window to turn back the draperies and open it wide. Beyond the palms fringing Bayfront Park the shimmering surface of Biscayne Bay lay redly gold in the morning sunlight.
Householders would be stirring throughout the city, yawning and stretching, turning off insistent alarm clocks and slipping into robes to go out and bring in the morning paper.
A man would stop on his doorstep and blink stupidly at the still form of a young girl lying on his lawn. Perhaps he would go tentatively forward for a terrified look at the body and sprint wildly back into the house to convey the news of his appalling discovery to the police.
Shayne’s belly muscles tightened.
A stone cast upon the serene surface of a new day, and from the impact ever-widening ripples would spread swiftly to rock the foundations of various human lives. There was a feeling of tensity in the clean air of the new morning, as though it held its breath expectantly, waiting for the discovery which would set inexorable forces in motion.
Shayne turned from the window and went to the telephone. He called the telegraph office and directed a message to his wife on her train speeding northward. It read simply,
Everything under control at this end but I am like a rudderless ship without you. May be detained here another day. I love you. Mike.
He then called a rental agency and ordered a car sent around.
He broke that connection and called the Burt Stallings home on Swordfish Island. Mrs. Briggs’s militant voice answered the ring. He put his lips close to the mouthpiece and in a disguised voice said, “Federal bureau for the prevention of the spread of contagious diseases calling. We are conducting a statistical survey in this area and we have information concerning an unreported case of contagion at this address. We are sending an inspector out to investigate. We expect your full co-operation.”
“There’s some mistake,” Mrs. Briggs protested. “There is no case of contagious disease here.”
“We have to check up on all reports,” Shayne told her sternly. “However, if you’ll give me the name of the attending physician we might take the matter up with him directly.”
“I’m sure Doctor Patterson
will give you all the information you require.” Mrs. Briggs’s sigh of relief was transmitted over the wire. “Doctor R. Lloyd Patterson of Miami Beach has been seeing Mrs. Stallings every day and I’m quite sure—”
“Thank you. It’s possible there has been some mistake.” Shayne hung up and looked in the telephone book for Patterson, R. Lloyd. He found two Miami Beach numbers listed under the doctor’s name. One said Sanitarium and the other Res. He tried the residence number first. After the phone had rung for a long time a feminine Swedish accent answered. Shayne asked for Dr. Patterson.
“The doctor is at the sanitarium and isn’t expected in this morning.”
“He gets out mighty early,” Shayne growled.
“He sleeps at the sanitarium mostly. The number is—”
“I know,” Shayne cut in. “I’ll call him there.”
He disconnected the residence number and called the sanitarium. A crisp voice told him that Dr. Patterson was asleep and offered him an appointment at eight o’clock. Shayne thanked her and went into the bathroom, took a long time shaving around the bruised place on his face, then took a stinging cold shower.
Downstairs in the lobby he spoke to the clerk. “I’m going out on business. I imagine there’ll be some cops dropping around after a while, and I won’t be coming back. Don’t tell them that. Ask them to wait for me.”
“Sure, I get it,” the clerk answered in a conspiratorial tone.
“And take any telephone messages that come in for me,” Shayne went on. “Don’t hand out any information to the cops. I’ll call in for any messages, and keep that under your hat, too.”
“You bet I will, Mr. Shayne. Say, there’s a car waiting for you outside. A rental agency said you ordered it.”
“That’s right. I wrapped the old car around a lamppost last night.” He nodded to the clerk and strolled out.
The rented automobile was a medium-priced coupé. He got in and drove out Biscayne Boulevard to an all-night restaurant where he stopped for a hearty breakfast and glanced over the morning Herald.
The finding of a girl’s nude corpse floating in the bay made the headline. The body had been discovered by two lads in a rowboat, and there was no clue to her identity. Police thought she had been dead for a couple of hours before her body was found.
The writer of the front-page item had ingeniously made up for the lack of facts concerning the crime by the use of inflammatory conjecture coupled with a glowing and adjective-laden description of her nude body and hints that the police expected important developments momentarily.
The story of Shayne’s automobile wreck was a four-line paragraph, the last of a dozen accidents reported during the night. It contained a brief statement that the hit-and-run driver had not been apprehended as the Herald went to press but that garages were being checked for a black limousine with a dented fender and radiator grill.
Shayne laid the paper aside and finished his breakfast. It was seven-thirty when he left the restaurant and started across the causeway to Miami Beach. Rourke’s extra of the finding of Helen Stallings’s body was not yet on the streets. Either the people in that part of town were late risers or strangely unobservant.
He would not let himself consider the unpleasant alternative that the body had been moved in the meantime. Even though this would take the pressure off him for a few hours, he had a feeling that he would start talking to himself if the body disappeared again. After all, there was little enough that one could bite into on this case, and access to the girl’s body was one of them. Without this evidence of a crime actually committed, Shayne decided he might as well grab a plane to New York and let the whole mess take care of itself.
ELEVEN
THE PATTERSON SANITARIUM was a square, flat-roofed, two-story building of stuccoed concrete situated in the center of an entire city block on Miami Beach. A high, clipped hedge of intertwined Australian pines circled the block, effectually shielding the grounds from view. A heavy gate of oak timbers blocked the only entrance to the inner sanctum of a ten-foot coral wall immediately surrounding the building.
Shayne rattled the gate and found it locked. By the side of the gate was a rubber mouthpiece and an earphone above a button with the directions: Push button.
Shayne pushed the button and put the phone to his ear. He heard a metallic click, and a brusque voice said, “Hello?”
“Mr. Shayne. I’ve an appointment with Doctor Patterson.”
There was a brief wait, then the voice said, “Come in, please.”
An electric release clicked on the gate lock. Shayne turned the knob and went in, impressed and perplexed by the elaborate precautions to keep out unwanted callers. As soon as he was inside, however, he realized that the precautions must be for keeping the patients in rather than preventing the entrance of visitors. There were low board benches scattered around the enclosed lawn, and a dozen inmates of the institution sat on them and stared at him. Men and women alike wore white garments reaching to their ankles. Their dull, unfocused eyes told him that this was a mental institution rather than an ordinary private hospital as he had supposed.
One of the women patients, who was angular and heavybreasted, hummed the tune of an obscene song as he passed her. She stared at his figure with glazed eyes and suddenly stopped her humming to exclaim, “You big brute—you’re the cause of my being here.” Her voice was without inflection, a dull and meaningless monotone. The others looked on apathetically from their benches in the bright sunlight.
Shayne went up the walk into a wide white-tiled hallway. There were padded seats along the wall, no movable furniture.
A tall, thin-lipped woman looked out from a side room. She wore a nurse’s uniform, white and stiffly starched. She inquired, “Mr. Shayne?” and when he nodded, “Please have a seat. Doctor Patterson will be free to see you soon.” Her placid gaze rested on his face fleetingly before she turned away. Shayne had a feeling that she was puzzled by his presence, that her professional curiosity was aroused by her inability to diagnose the particular mental disorder which had brought him to the Patterson Sanitarium.
He turned away and sat down on one of the padded seats. The utter absence of sound inside the building was peculiarly forbidding. He caught himself straining his ears for the welcome sound of a car in the street outside—for any one of the multitude of unnoticed sounds which impinge upon our hearing every moment of the day and come to one’s attention only when completely absent.
Then he realized that the outer walls of the building must be soundproofed, and he stopped straining to hear.
He lighted a cigarette and the sound of a dull, muffled thumping came from the rear as he expelled smoke from his lungs. He glanced around but could see only the empty hall. The thumping continued, muffled and monotonous.
The palms of his hands were sweaty, and he was angered by a dryness in his mouth and throat. The unexplained thumping was more eerie than the silence it had supplanted.
A woman screamed somewhere inside the building. A ululating howl of inhuman ferocity knifing thinly through the air, rising to a shrill crescendo and descending jerkily to a minor key.
The thumping stopped, started again. Shayne looked down at his big hands and saw them bunched tightly into fists. He unclenched them, one finger at a time, forcing a rueful grin to his lips. He wondered why normal human beings react so strongly to abnormal mental conditions. It is silly as hell, of course.
He heard a slithering sound beside him and jerked his head around to see a gnomelike little fellow sliding up on the leather-covered bench beside him. He wore the shapeless white garment of a patient and held a fleshless finger pressed warningly against sunken lips to indicate silence. His features were wrinkled, and fleshless skin hung over the wrinkles in tiny folds. His eyes were very bright, gleaming with ferrety inquisitiveness.
Shayne fought back a desire to slide away and avoid contact with the strange creature. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and said, “Hello.”
The wizened fe
atures contracted still more into a frown. He shook his head and whispered, “Not so loud. They’ll hear you. I sneaked in to talk to you.”
Shayne didn’t say anything. The thumping sound had ceased.
“I know you,” his companion whispered. “I’ve seen your picture in the paper. You’re a detective—of minor fame.”
Shayne nodded agreement, still without answering. The man sounded sensible enough.
The little old man put his lips close to Shayne’s ear and whispered hoarsely, “I guess you don’t recognize me. No one does any more. I’m Sherlock Holmes.”
Shayne felt an odd desire to chuckle at his first conclusion. He said, “Is that so?” unintentionally lowering his voice to the same key as his companion’s. “Is Doctor Watson with you?”
“No. He remained behind in Baker Street to attend as best he could to any small matters. I’m in America on a secret and dangerous mission. I’m watched every minute, and if I’m caught talking with you it will be the end.”
An orderly entered the hall from a side door and tramped past them. He was a stocky young man with an unintelligent face. He glanced at the little man and winked at Shayne, then passed on.
Shayne’s companion seemed not to see the orderly. “Yes, indeed,” he insisted. “Our lives would not be worth a farthing if we were seen together.”
“Let’s just pretend we’re invisible,” Shayne suggested.
“It would do no good. They’re devils here. The Gestapo, you know.”
“Yes?” Shayne queried politely.
“I must confide in you. As a fellow member of the profession I have no course but to trust you. They murdered the Duchess last night.”
“So?” Shayne turned sharp gray eyes upon the little man. “You must be mistaken.”
“Am I not Sherlock Holmes? Have you ever known him to be mistaken?”
Bodies Are Where You Find Them Page 11
