“The car that crashed into me was a black limousine,” Shayne went on swiftly. “The left fender and radiator grill were smashed in the crash. When you find that car you’ll have your double murderer, Painter. It isn’t just chance that Stallings owns a black limousine. The man who slipped into my apartment and murdered the girl is one who knew she was coming there to expose the whole rotten situation. Stallings is the only man who knew she was going to me to spill the beans. He admits that Baldy telephoned him from the Bugle Inn. I advise you to check the condition of Stallings’s limousine.”
“Good God above, Shayne.” Painter’s forefinger trembled across his tiny black mustache. “Are you actually serious?”
“I demand that you assure yourself my automobile is undamaged,” Stallings put in resonantly. “This entire fabric of lies is the most preposterous thing I ever heard of.”
“Well, I—sure. In fairness to you, Mr. Stallings, I’ll have a man look at your car.” Painter turned to one of his men and said, “Blake, go out to the garage and see that’s what.”
“And I would advise that you check the car over,” Shayne suggested. “There may be other clues in the back seat where the body-switching took place. A checkup should have been made immediately after the accident—wreck,” Shayne amended.
When Blake departed hurriedly, Shayne turned to Painter and went on.
“I’ve got all the proof you need. Give me that water tumbler, Tim.”
Rourke drew the glass from his coat pocket, carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. Shayne handed it to Painter. “There’s a full set of fingerprints on that glass. I took them from the girl’s fingers after I found her murdered. All you have to do is compare them with the prints of the body from the bay to prove I’m right.”
Blake rushed excitedly into the room while Painter was examining the tumbler. Blake was carrying a long white muslin garment unzipped down the front.
“Look at this, chief. Found it stuffed down behind the back seat. And the fender’s smashed right enough, just like Mr. Shayne said.”
“What is that thing?” Stallings demanded. “The fender can’t be smashed. I tell you it can’t.”
“You’ll hang, Stallings,” Shayne told him quietly, “just because your chauffeur neglected to get that fender fixed today.”
“By God,” said Painter softly, “this is a robe from the Patterson Sanitarium, all right. Must have been stuffed in there when he stripped it off her.”
“No—no,” Stallings argued in a choked voice. “I don’t know how that got there. It’s a frame-up. I’ve been framed, I tell you. That fender was all right an hour ago.”
“Framed, hell!” Shayne snorted. “Why, it had to be you, Stallings. You were the only one who knew the girl was going to my office. No one else could have done it.”
“That’s not true. I’m not the only one. He knew.” Stallings pointed a shaking finger at Arch Bugler. “I phoned Bugler and told him what Baldy said. He’s the one—”
“You dirty rat.” Bugler’s laboriously cultivated purr deserted him. He came out of his chair with a gun in his hand.
Whit Marlow had been sitting quiet throughout Shayne’s recital. His silence was more that of a man stunned by grief than by the revelations of the redheaded detective. He came to life like a snarling tiger and rushed Bugler with flailing fists.
“You doped her—you killed her! You killed Helen! You strangled my wife. Why didn’t you kill me, too? You had the opportunity when you doped me in your office.”
Bugler’s pistol was aimed at the young man’s heart, his finger on the trigger when two Miami Beach policemen caught his arms from behind and pinioned them to his side, disarming him with deft, strong hands. Another policeman was busy taking the handcuffs from Shayne’s wrists to shackle Bugler.
Marlow, taking advantage of Bugler’s helplessness, landed a right and left to his pudgy jaws, then fell back, sobbing. In a few minutes he went quietly from the room.
Stallings stopped his babbling to look on with grim satisfaction, then continued.
“Bugler got me into all of it. He suggested putting Helen in the asylum and substituting another girl who looked like her. He had some hold on Doctor Patterson and arranged with him to keep my wife drugged. I was crazy to agree to it, but I didn’t mean any real harm to Helen.”
Shayne interrupted harshly, “Not so fast, Doctor Patterson. You might cut yourself if you try to go through that window.”
Peter Painter echoed his words. “Not so fast, Doctor Patterson. Cover him there, you men.” With Bugler shackled, one of the officers stepped over to Patterson and shoved him back in his chair.
Stallings went on. “I meant to have Helen released after I had time to straighten out the estate. Then last night when I called Bugler he said for me not to worry, that he’d take care of everything. But, God! I didn’t know what he meant. I swear I didn’t. I thought he was just going to get hold of her and keep her quiet. I wrote that kidnap note thinking to take advantage of the situation and implicate Shayne as an election trick. But I’m not guilty of murder. I swear I’m not.” He sank into a chair, bereft of all his splendid dignity.
“I guess it was Bugler, all right.” Shayne turned to Painter. “That sanitarium Mother Hubbard could have got into his car a lot of ways. And I just happened to remember that I saw his chauffeur run into the bridge abutment this evening. He must’ve been drunk. You’ll probably find him sleeping it off now.”
Painter strutted forward and commanded, “Take Stallings and Patterson into custody along with Bugler.”
“One other thing,” Shayne said, turning to Stallings. “Your maid, Lucile. It might interest Mr. Painter to know he’ll find her in the padded cell recently vacated by the Duchess.”
Painter whirled to face Shayne. “Maid? Duchess?”
Shayne grinned widely. “I mean the padded cell occupied by Helen. Lucile had some information for me that I never got. Stallings and Bugler and Patterson saw to that.”
“Stop your clowning, Shamus, and talk straight,” Painter demanded.
“Doctor Patterson’s institution could stand an investigation by the Beach authorities,” Shayne said grimly. “You’ll find the Stallings maid, a perfectly sane girl, in a padded cell, and it wouldn’t surprise me any if he isn’t keeping some of the others nutty by feeding them dope.” Painter looked a long way up into the detective’s eyes with a glint of suspicion in his own snapping black ones. “Are you sure all this is on the level, Shamus?”
“There’s your case, all done up in tissue paper and ribbon.” Shayne chuckled.
Painter clicked his heels and whirled toward his men. “Take them out—all three of them,” he commanded.
When Rourke and Marsh and Shayne were alone, Jim Marsh sidled up to Shayne. The expression on his face was painful to behold.
“Even though Stallings isn’t the actual murderer,” he said, “this disgrace is sure to defeat him at the polls tomorrow. Do you realize what that means, Shayne?”
“Sure. It means I win five grand by backing you. Five grand of your own money, by the way.” Shayne hesitated, then demanded angrily, “What in hell got into you, anyway, Marsh? When I backed you for mayor I knew you weren’t any second Roosevelt, but I didn’t expect you to turn into a stinker who’d lose his nerve and bet money against himself—and then plan on withdrawing to make sure he won his bets. Hell, that’s the lousiest sort of thievery possible.”
Jim Marsh looked old and stricken. He avoided Shayne’s relentless, boring eyes. “I deserve everything you say. I deserve to lose that money I bet against myself. I haven’t told you this, but a week ago I received an anonymous death threat unless I withdrew from the race. I guess I just went crazy with worry. It seemed to me I’d be striking back by taking advantage of the situation to bet my money on Stallings. I realize now how dishonest it would have been. The men who’d have lost wouldn’t have been the ones who threatened me. It’s retributive justice that I should be the one to lose.” He squar
ed his shoulders and faced Shayne with a look of new-found dignity.
“I’ll be cleaned out when I win tomorrow. I’ll start afresh, and I swear I’ll keep the slate clean.”
Shayne took his hand and pressed it hard. “I believe you will, Marsh. I knew I couldn’t be altogether wrong about you.” He turned to Tim Rourke and grunted, “You’d better start writing for the headlines. And I’ve got to catch a plane. I’m afraid Phyllis hasn’t been enjoying herself much in New York. And I could certainly stand a date with a live woman for a change.”
MICHAEL SHAYNE AS I KNOW HIM
by Brett Halliday
MANY OF MY READERS are familiar with the dramatic first meeting between myself and the man who was later to become the central figure in a series of mystery novels featuring a redheaded, fighting Irishman whom I call Michael Shayne. This first meeting occurred on the Tampico water front more than a quarter of a century ago. I was a youngster then, working as deck hand on a Pan American oil tanker, and on a stopover in Tampico a bunch of us spent the evening ashore in a tough water-front saloon.
I noticed him before the fight started, and was intrigued by him even then. A big, rangy redhead with deep lines already forming on his face. He sat at a table in the rear, surrounded by lights and music and girls. There was a bottle of tequila on the table in front of him, and two glasses. One of the glasses held ice water, and he was drinking straight Mexican liquor from the other.
I don’t remember how the fight started, but it turned into a beautiful brawl with half a dozen unarmed American sailors slugging it out on uneven terms with twice as many natives who seemed to be carrying knives or guns.
We were doing all right, as I remember, making what you might call a strategic retreat and almost out the door, when I got a crack on the head that sent me under a table.
I remember lying there and wondering dazedly, What next, little man? when I heard the crash of a rear table overturning and peered out to see the redhead sailing into the fracas.
He was a fighting man, and you could see he loved it. Three or four Mexicans went down in front of his fists before he reached me, dragged me from under the table, and tossed me out the door bodily.
That was all of that. I got back to the ship somehow; we sailed the next morning, and I didn’t know who the man was or what he was doing in that saloon or why he came to the rescue of a fool kid he’d never seen before.
I still don’t know any of those things, though I believe I now know him better than any other man alive.
It was four years before I ran into that redheaded Irishman again. A coincidence? Sure. This story is full of crazy coincidences—the sort that happen in real life but that no writer would dare put between the covers of a book.
It was in New Orleans, and I was four years older and maybe a little wiser. I was broke and jobless, and I wandered into a Rampart Street bar on a foggy night. There he was, sitting alone at a rear table with a bottle in front of him and two water glasses. One of them was half full of ice water, and he was sipping cognac from the other.
He didn’t recognize me, of course, but he did remember the fight in Tampico, and he grinned and gave me a drink of cognac when I thanked him for that time. He didn’t talk much, but he did say he was working as a private detective. He was friendly, and we were getting along fine until a girl walked in and stood at the bar, looking the place over.
I saw his big frame stiffen and the lines in his cheeks deepen into trenches as she walked toward us. His left thumb and forefinger went up to rub the lobe of his ear as she stopped beside our table and leaned forward and said, “Hello, Mike,” in a throaty voice.
That was all. He didn’t reply, and in a moment she turned away and went swiftly out the door. Two men had followed her inside, and they began to move slowly toward us—casually but purposefully.
That’s when he leaned forward and told me swiftly to get out of town fast and forget I’d seen him.
He stood up before I could ask any questions, strolled forward, and the two men closed in on each side of him. They went out in a group and disappeared in the swirling fog of Rampart Street.
That was our second meeting. I didn’t know who the girl and the two men were, or why Mike walked out with them so quietly.
I still don’t know, though I have a feeling that things happened then that had some bearing on the feud between him and Captain Denton of the New Orleans police—a feud which flared up anew during a case described in the book I titled Michael Shayne’s Long Chance.
It was years later when the next act occurred. I had begun writing books (not mystery novels) and was living in Denver, Colorado. I had never been able to put the memory of the redhead out of my mind, and there was a network radio program originating in New York which offered people a chance to broadcast an appeal for information concerning relatives or friends with whom they had lost contact.
Planning a business trip to New York to see my publishers, I wrote the manager of the program and asked to be allowed to tell my story over the air.
I did so, with an astonishing and completely unforeseen result. A few days after the broadcast I was informed from Denver that a man named Connor Michael Shawn, ex-actor, theatrical manager, and private detective, had tuned in my broadcast on his deathbed and declared to his wife that he believed himself to be the man I was describing over the air.
Connor Michael Shawn died the next day, and when I returned to Denver a few days later I immediately visited his wife and discussed the situation with her. Many of the facts of his life as she knew them checked with the dates and places of my story. The photographs she showed me were not conclusive. I felt that Shawn might have been my “Mike,” but I couldn’t be positive.
I wasn’t positive until more than a year later when I was holed up in a one-room log cabin at Desolation Bend, on the Gunnison River in Colorado, trying desperately to write three novels in thirty days (which I did, incidentally).
Mike turned up one day in a cabin near mine on the river. That was when I learned his real name (which isn’t Shayne). He gave no explanation for his presence except that he was on vacation from a lucrative private detective practice in Miami, Florida.
This meeting, I now believe, was not so much of a coincidence as it appeared at the time. From small things he has let slip since then, I believe he had heard about the radio broadcast and, being in the neighborhood, had taken the trouble to look me up out of curiosity.
At any rate, that was the beginning of an intimate friendship that has now endured for more than a decade and has furnished material for twenty books based on his cases.
We drank cognac together in his cabin and mine during the long lazy evenings that followed my stint at the typewriter, and talked about his work as a detective and my unrealized dream of writing mystery stories. There was no real compact reached between us at that time, but when he left to go back to Miami I had an invitation to visit him there whenever I wished.
I followed him South a couple of months later, and he seemed pleased when I turned up in his modest apartment on the north bank of the Miami River, overlooking Biscayne Bay.
That night over a bottle of Martell, he told me he had fallen in love for the first time in his life—with Phyllis Brighton whom he had just cleared of a charge of matricide.
Mike was a lonely and brooding man that night. He had sent Phyllis away, gently but firmly, a few days earlier, and he honestly did not hope ever to see her again. She was too young, he told me over and over again. Too young and too sweet and trusting to waste herself on a man like him.
I didn’t argue with Mike that night. Nor point out any of the obvious things. I did draw him into a discussion of the case just ended, and before the sun rose over Biscayne Bay he had agreed to turn his notes on the Brighton affair over to me for a novel which I called Dividend on Death.
Before this book was published, he had met Phyllis Brighton again (as I have related in The Private Practice of Michael Shayne), and when that case was ended M
ike had capitulated.
I was best man at their wedding, and saw them installed in the larger corner apartment above Mike’s old bachelor quarters which he kept and fitted up sketchily as an office.
The next few years, I am positive, were the happiest Mike has ever known. Phyllis worried him sometimes by insisting as acting as his secretary and getting herself mixed up in some of his cases, but there was perfect companionship and understanding between them, culminating in a long-delayed honeymoon trip to Colorado—where Mike managed to get himself mixed up with murder in the old ghost town of Central City. He gave me the details of this case, and I used them in Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask.
Back in Miami, there was one more adventure together before that black night when I sat with Mike in the hospital waiting-room, sweating it out with him while the baby which Phyllis so ardently desired was being born.
I went back to his apartment with him at dawn, and sat across the room from the big redhead in a deep chair while he wept unashamedly. Both Phyllis and the baby were gone, and the doctors didn’t know why.
He swore at that time he would never touch another case that dealt with death, and I think he might have kept that resolution had he not received a telephone call in the night that sent him out on the trail of a vicious gang of black marketeers. I wrote about that one in Blood on the Black Market.
I noted a subtle change in Mike’s inner character after Phyllis’s death. In some ways he became more ruthless and driving and demanding of himself, but the hard outer shell of assumed cynicism was cracked, and for the first time in his life he wasn’t afraid to let traces of gentleness and pity shine through.
Bodies Are Where You Find Them Page 17
