Weep for a Blonde

by Brett Halliday

  “I do deny it. Absolutely. Every word of it is an outright lie. Do I have to stand here and listen to him blacken my wife’s reputation?” he demanded of Painter.

  The detective chief said, “All we want is the truth about it, Mr. Kane. You see, Shayne is trying to sell us the idea that your wife had another lover who made a habit of slipping in the back way from the beach while you were out at night … and that this was one of his nights.”

  “It’s a bare-faced lie he’s thought up to try and save his own skin. There’s not a word of truth in it.”

  “Then why in hell,” demanded Shayne, “did your wife tell me the story in such detail tonight? What reason would she have for lying about a thing like that to me?”

  “She wouldn’t,” Kane conceded promptly. “I don’t believe she did.”

  “But I say she did,” exploded Shayne. “We sat right here on the sofa and she told me how you ran him out the back door one night with a gun.”

  “I won’t stand for any more of this,” Kane told Painter flatly. “My wife would never think up that sort of falsehood. She can’t deny it now, and Shayne thinks he’s safe in lying about it.”

  “How about it, Shamus?” asked Painter silkily. “Assuming for the moment that you are telling the truth … why would Mrs. Kane have lied to you? What possible motive could she have for something like that?”

  “I don’t believe she was lying. She told it in too much detail for that. But Kane’s motive for lying is clear enough. He’s ashamed to admit the truth even if his wife’s murderer does get away because of it.”

  “I’m not worried about Lydia’s murderer getting away. Not as long as Chief Painter keeps you in custody where you belong.” Kane picked up his highball glass and drank deeply from it, turned and stalked out of the room.

  With narrowed eyes, Shayne watched him go. Was it possible Kane was telling the truth? Why in the name of God would Lydia have lied to him about having had an affair? But, perhaps she wasn’t lying altogether. Perhaps the story had been a cunning mixture of truth and falsehood. Perhaps the existence of a lover was true enough, but her husband didn’t know anything about it.

  But Shayne didn’t think so as he went back over the conversation in his mind. Over the years he’d become fairly adept at separating truth from falsehood, and he didn’t believe Lydia had been lying to him. So that left Kane. He told Painter:

  “No matter what Kane says, there was someone else in this house tonight who shot Lydia and escaped along the beach to a parked car at the dead-end street south of here.”

  “It’s your word against his,” Painter said pleasantly.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re the one who’s trying to beat a murder rap,” Painter went on in the same pleased tone. “Between the two of you, you have a strong motive for lying.”

  “He’s trying to protect his dead wife’s reputation.”

  “And you’re trying to save your own life by building up a story about a non-existent lover. Which one of you do you think a jury will believe?”

  Shayne shrugged and said, “If you investigate the whole thing the way you should, it’ll never reach the point for a jury to decide between us. There must be several people who know about the man named Roger. Friends of the Kanes. Women in Lydia’s set whom she was intimate with. A situation like that is always known and whispered about.”

  “If there was such a situation,” agreed Painter blandly. “In the meantime, I don’t think even you will blame me for locking you up on suspicion of homicide.”

  Shayne rubbed his angular jaw thoughtfully. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “Of course not,” Shayne said angrily. “You’ve known me a long time, Painter.”

  “And for along time, by God,” said Peter Painter exultantly, “I’ve waited for the day when you’d really put your head in a noose, Shayne. This is it. Look at what we’ve got. A dead woman whose husband has twice in the past twenty-four hours publicly warned you away from her. An admitted secret assignation with her alone in her husband’s house. A bullet fired into her head by the same calibre pistol you admit you carry and which you had with you tonight. A pistol you cannot produce in evidence because you threw it into the ocean before we got here. A story without one scintilla of evidence of chasing someone else down the beach and away from the house. Another story, vehemently denied by the bereaved husband, about another lover whom you’d like to frame for the killing. Look at it objectively, Shamus. I should rightly be kicked out of my job as Chief of Detectives if I didn’t lock you up pending a more complete investigation.”

  “During which time the real killer is given time to escape and build up his alibi for the killing,” grated Shayne. “You know that’s the way it will be. Give me a few hours on my own to turn him up. That’s all I ask. Do you want this murder solved, or don’t you?”

  “I think it is solved, Shayne.”

  “Nuts! You’re too good a cop, Painter, to let personal antagonism get in the way of justice. Every minute we spend sparring around here is wasted. Give me until morning and I’ll hand you your killer on a silver platter.”

  “You’re intimating you can accomplish what my men can’t.”

  “I have in the past,” Shayne reminded him angrily. “Do you want me to quote chapter and verse?”

  “Several times in the past,” said Peter Painter in a strained voice, “you’ve thrown your weight around here on the Beach and messed up cases to a point where you realized a personal profit from them. This time I’m going to put you behind bars where you won’t have an opportunity to destroy evidence and build up a frame against some poor devil who doesn’t know what the score is.”

  Shayne hesitated, his right hand balled into a big fist that had an almost irresistible impulse to smash itself into the taunting face in front of him. His voice came out in a low growl as he controlled his anger enough to say, “God help you if you lock me up tonight, Painter. There’s a killer loose in your town, and I’m the one who can pin him down. Give me a few hours. Just until morning. I know this town, Painter. I know how to tear it apart with my two hands and rip the truth out of it. You know I do. As a cop, you go through certain legal motions and you’re hampered by the fact that you are a cop. But I’ve got my own methods.”

  “I know all about your methods, Shayne. This is one case that’s going to be handled legally and according to the rules of evidence.” Painter’s voice was concise and cold. He swayed forward on the balls of his feet, thrusting his jaw out aggressively. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt by checking the whole goddamned house from top to bottom to prove or disprove your contention that someone entered before the tide came up and waited to shoot Mrs. Kane as soon as your back was turned. As soon as I get that report, I’m arresting you for murder.”

  As though entering on cue in a stage play, the head of Painter’s technical squad entered and said, “We’ve got it for you, Chief. We’ve checked every possible surface on both floors for fingerprints.”

  “And?” demanded Painter, wheeling on him.

  “And we make those of Mr. and Mrs. Kane and another set that we tentatively identify as those of the maid. No others. Except we didn’t check this room because I understood Mr. Shayne admitted being in here.”

  “How do you like that, Shayne?” demanded Painter triumphantly, swinging back to face him.

  Shayne said, “I don’t like it.” He tugged at his earlobe and asked the fingerprint man directly, “What about smudges overlaid on other prints in certain places? What you’d expect if an intruder wore gloves?”

  “Nothing of that sort,” was the prompt reply. “Of course, certain prints are fragmentary and smudged as is always to be expected. But nothing beyond normal expectations.”

  “As an expert witness,” demanded Peter Painter, “are you prepared to swear under oath that no fourth person has been in this house during the past few hours?”

  “I couldn’t swear to
that, Chief.”

  “Why not?” demanded Painter.

  The detective shrugged. “Nobody could swear to a thing like that. I’ve tagged every print and made notes on every surface tested and I can swear that in my expert opinion it is beyond reasonable doubt to believe anyone else has been in the house recently. But there would not necessarily be identifiable traces if someone had taken every possible precaution not to leave prints behind.”

  “Satisfied, Shayne?” demanded Painter triumphantly.

  “I’m satisfied your man has made an honest answer. So now, I think we have to look for someone who entered the house with murder in his heart and with the realization that such a fingerprint check might be made. That indicates definite premeditation instead of a spur-of-the-moment crime, and should make the job lots easier.”

  Painter said, “To me it indicates that you’ve used up all your rope.” He turned aside, grating, “Put the cuffs on him.”

  “Wait one more minute, Painter,” Shayne interjected harshly as two detectives closed in on him. “You’re forgetting my one ace in the hole. I’ll slap a million-dollar false arrest suit on the Beach if you throw me in your can without checking all the evidence in my favor.”

  “What evidence are you talking about?”

  “My gun that hasn’t been fired for months.”

  “The one you took care to get rid of before we could check it?”

  Shayne said steadily, “The gun I grabbed from my glove compartment after I heard the murder shot fired in here. The one I’m licensed to carry, and that I had in my hand when I ran in here and found Mrs. Kane dead. The one I unintentionally lost down on the beach while I was chasing the killer.

  “Don’t make an absolute ass out of yourself, Painter,” he ended fiercely. “Don’t you realize that’s proof I didn’t kill Mrs. Kane? Once that pistol is found lying on the sand where it flew out of my hand, without a shot fired from it, your crazy case against me collapses like a punctured balloon. I’m doing you a favor by mentioning it at this time,” he went on angrily. “I should, by God, have let you arrest me while it stayed there to be turned up later for solid proof in a false-arrest case. But I happen to want Lydia Kane’s killer more than I want to win a case against you and the city, so let’s go find the gun and settle this nonsense fast.”

  “Maybe there won’t be an empty shell in it,” conceded Painter. “Maybe you took a moment to reload it after firing a bullet into Mrs. Kane’s head. That won’t constitute proof of anything.”

  “But goddamn it, a ballistic test with it will be proof,” raged Shayne. “Why not admit you’re afraid to look for it and make a test?”

  Peter Painter smiled thinly. “I have no reason to be afraid. In fact, it’s a hell of a good idea to establish once and for all that the gun isn’t where you claim it is. Then you won’t have a chance to plant another one later to upset the apple-cart. Take him down to the beach, Hyams,” he addressed a sergeant. “Take Bolton, Archy, and Deblin with you. Let him show you where he claims he lost his gun. Give him every, by God, chance to find it. And you four make damned sure you do find it, if it’s there to be found. If not, I want all four of you to be ready to swear it isn’t there. Understand that?”

  Sergeant Hyams said he understood. He sent Detectives Bolton and Archy ahead out the kitchen door, told Shayne grimly, “You go ahead, with Deblin and me behind you, and don’t try anything funny.”

  Shayne said, “Nothing could suit me better.” He moved around from behind the coffee table and through the archway into the wide hall leading to the rear of the house. Richard Kane sat alone in the dining room as he went past, with a bottle of whiskey, an ice-bucket and a half-emptied glass in front of him.

  The two leading detectives were half-way down the stairs when Shayne went out the back door. The tide was flowing back now with little swishing noises, and when Shayne reached the bottom of the stairs there was an expanse of wet sand of from one to three feet in width between the edge of the receding water and the base of the cliff.

  Each one of the four detectives had powerful flashlights, and the pair in front of Shayne were ten or fifteen feet southward along the shore with their lights circled out on the edge of the water when he stepped away from the floodlighted area into moonlight and the soft sounds of night.

  Two other flashlights behind him in the hands of Sergeant Hyams and Detective Deblin made similar circles of light on the wet sand and the edge of receding water as Shayne turned confidently to his right and followed along the base of the cliff while he tried to reconstruct as nearly as possible what had happened less than an hour earlier.

  It was extremely important, Shayne knew, to judge the exact point where he had stumbled in his pursuit of the unseen killer and where his gun had flown out of his hand. Without the unfired gun as evidence, he could not honestly blame Peter Painter for charging him with the crime and jailing him until other evidence turned up to prove him not guilty. But with the gun to clinch his story, Painter would have no recourse except to accept his version of the affair and release him to make his own investigation of Lydia Kane’s death.

  There were no landmarks to guide him, but Shayne instinctively judged he had covered about half the length of the Kane’s private beach before he had stumbled. Now, with two flashlights in front and two behind him supplementing the light from the moon that had risen higher in the clear sky since his previous foray along the beach, Shayne moved along carefully on the narrow strip of wet sand and stopped when he came to the half-embedded branch of a tree, curving upward in an arc half a foot above the surface which looked perfectly capable of having tripped him as he ran through the water an hour before.

  It was situated just about right, Shayne calculated, as he paused in front of it and looked back at the floodlighted area behind him. Just about half-way between the two stairways as he remembered it. The two preceding detectives had gone on about twenty feet ahead of him, and the following pair were not more than a dozen feet behind when Shayne halted and announced confidently in a loud voice:

  “Right here, I think. I was running and I tripped and fell forward on my knees. My gun flew out of my hand, and shouldn’t be more than twenty feet from here in any direction.”

  The leading pair of flashlights stopped and swung back at sound of his voice.

  Sergeant Hyams and his partner moved up closer from the direction of the house and threw circles of bright light on the narrow strip of wet sand and out over the surface of the water as it rippled out on an ebbing tide.

  “So where’s the gat?” asked Hyams with interest.

  Shayne said, “I’m pretty sure this is the branch I tripped over. It was under a few inches of water at the time, and I was sloshing through it as fast as I could. I fell flat in the water and my gun would have been thrown forward.” He moved past the branch slowly, searching the uncovered strip of sand, walking hard on his heels and finding the sand so hard-packed that it was extremely unlikely a pistol would have sunk out of sight in the short time since he had dropped it.

  “Stay back there, fellows, and give him all the light he needs,” the sergeant directed Bolton and Archy. “If that gun is here, Chief Painter wants it.”

  “It’s here,” Shayne said confidently. “But we may have to wait a time for the water to recede a good deal more to find it. It could have been flung as much as fifteen or twenty feet out from the cliff.”

  That’s right. It sure could,” said Hyams sardonically. “And if a guy had happened to wade out deep and throw it good and hard it could even be away the hell and gone out in deep water. Most of the beach along here shelves off fast about thirty feet out.”

  The four detectives stood back on the wet sand playing their flashlights on the water as Shayne moved back and forth in parallel lanes, shuffling his feet along the surface beneath the water so he wouldn’t step over the weapon and miss it.

  The detectives stayed back, keeping their feet dry and watching with silent and skeptical interest while he moved far
ther and farther from the shore without success, the ocean water deepening as the gap widened between him and shore, lapping over the tops of his shoes and up on his legs to his knees and thighs.

  After the first few minutes of shuffling back and forth, Michael Shayne began to have a sickening feeling that his search was going to be useless. There was a lot of oceanfront here, and he couldn’t even be sure that the half-buried branch was what he had tripped over in the darkness. But he kept on doggedly because there was nothing else he could do. Without his gun to prove he had not fired the bullet into Lydia’s head, he knew Painter would lock him in a cell for the night.

  Of course, the gun would be found later at low tide. He wasn’t worried about the ultimate result of the charge against him, but with Painter convinced he had Lydia’s murderer in jail, the detective chief would not push a further investigation of the case and the real killer would have time and opportunity to build up an alibi or escape.

  Shayne was the only man who knew that Lydia had told him about a former lover named Roger who had kept his trysts by coming along the beach at low tide, and he was the only man who was convinced that close investigation of Lydia’s personal life would provide the clue to her killer. He had to find the gun in order to stay out of jail and carry on the investigation.

  But he didn’t find the gun. Wading back and forth doggedly in the deepening water while the four detectives watched him skeptically from the shore, Shayne realized it was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. He was already at least twenty feet out from the base of the cliff, and he was convinced it could not have been thrown out that far as he tripped and fell. He must have missed it on one of his trips back and forth—or else he had miscalculated the spot where he had fallen.

  He stopped with the cold water swirling up almost to his waist, and looked hopelessly up and down the coastline. It would be two or three hours before the tide would be low enough to make it certain the gun would be visible. And with Shayne securely locked in jail, Painter would not be eager to press the search for the gun. Indeed, knowing the Chief’s long-standing animosity toward him, Shayne was not at all sure that if he didn’t find the gun himself it would ever be found. All of Painter’s men knew of the ill-feeling between them, and it was actively shared by many of them who were jealous of his long record for solving crimes under their noses. Any search conducted by the Miami Beach police force would be perfunctory at best, and might easily result in intentional failure.