A Redhead for Mike Shayne

by Brett Halliday

  He heard footsteps and voices outside, and he lit the cigarette and blew out the match and waited.

  The outer door opened and a breeze blew in and there were heavy footsteps in the hallway, and Shayne raised his ragged red eyebrows in surprise when the bulky figure of Chief Will Gentry loomed up in the doorway, and he blew out a puff of smoke and said, “Dr. Livingstone, as I live and breathe.”

  Gentry snorted, glancing from the redhead to the body on the floor, and then back at the detective. He was a big man with heavy, florid features, and an old friend of Shayne’s. He growled, “I thought I smelled something funny when I walked in that door.”

  He stepped past Shayne heavily and scowled down at the dead man. A tall, white-haired man bustled in behind him. He was bare-headed and wore a white linen suit and he was breathing excitedly.

  He stopped short at sight of the body, stared downward in horror and groaned, “Oh, my God! It’s old Captain Ruffer. Is he …?”

  “Dead,” grunted Gentry as he knelt down to examine the body. He turned his head slowly to look at Shayne and asked in a tone of casual interest, “Why did you pull out his fingernails, Mike?”

  “What’s that?” demanded the white-haired man, turning pallid. “Tortured? I knew something must be wrong,” he went on excitedly, “when he wasn’t here to keep his appointment with me after he’d been so specific about it. You know I told you, Chief.…”

  Gentry disregarded him. He got to his feet and faced Shayne. “All right. Give it to me, Mike. All of it.”

  “I got here about three minutes ago and found him like that. He’s been dead at least twenty or thirty minutes, Will.”

  “Maybe. I want to know why you came here. Did you have business with him?”

  “I never saw him before in my life,” Shayne said truthfully. “I didn’t even know who he was,” he added not quite so truthfully, “until I heard this man call him Captain Ruffer.”

  “What are you doing here in this house if you didn’t even know him?”

  Shayne hesitated, then he said, “You’re not going to believe this, Will, but the fact is I was just driving around getting a little fresh air and I happened to come up this dead-end road to the bay. I parked out there for a minute, and then I got a funny feeling. You know how it is in police work,” he went on earnestly. “You get hunches. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s ESP. Anyhow, I just felt there was something wrong in here. I knocked and got no answer, found the door unlocked and walked in on this. Believe it or not …” He spread out his hands and shrugged. “That’s the way it was.”

  “So I don’t believe it,” Gentry said heavily. “You’ll have to do better than that, Mike, or by God I’m going to lock you up.” He was breathing angrily. “I want the man that did this, and if you’re covering up something.…”

  There was a sound behind them and Shayne and Gentry both turned their heads to see Molly Morgan open the door across the hall and step out toward them.

  “He’s covering up for me, Chief Gentry,” she told him warmly, “and I’m not going to let him. It’s just foolish, that’s what. I don’t know what kind of quixotic notion Mike has got, but I’m afraid he suspects I steered him here on purpose because I knew something was wrong. That’s not so at all. It’s just the way I told him when I asked him to bring me here. You know I’m getting material for some syndicated articles about Miami, and I ran into that fascinating story about Captain Ruffer’s shipwreck a few years ago and thought it would make an interesting feature. We came in together to see the captain,” she went on, entering the room to stand beside Shayne, and lifting her chin. “And when we found him lying like that, Mike shoved me across the hall and told me to go out the back way and he’d take care of everything. You don’t have to cover up for me, Mike,” she added sweetly, pressing close to him and slipping her arm through his. “I swear I was just as surprised as you were.”

  Chief Will Gentry wrinkled his eyebrows at her disapprovingly while she spoke, and opened his mouth twice as though to interrupt her, but let her finish her glib speech before he said heavily, “Didn’t I meet you this morning?”

  “Yes. Timothy Rourke introduced me to you in your office. I’m Molly Morgan. Remember?”

  Will Gentry said, “I remember now. You do get around, don’t you … for a stranger in town?”

  “It’s my business,” she told him defensively. “Is it all right for us to go now, Chief? I feel we’re just in the way here while you want to conduct a murder investigation.”

  “Sure,” said Gentry bitterly. “Take her away from here, Mike. I’ll be talking to you later. On your way out tell the sergeant on the door to radio in for the Homicide Squad.”

  Shayne turned Molly about and led her down the hallway to the front door before Gentry could change his mind. Will Gentry’s driver was there, and he gave him the chief’s message, and then hurried her down the walk and past Chief Gentry’s car to his own which was parked against the stone barrier.

  He let go of her arm so she could go around and get in by herself, got under the wheel and started the motor and waited in stony silence until she was settled in the front seat. Then he backed around and headed out grimly, and when they were on the boulevard and moving toward the city at a moderate pace, she finally asked in a small voice:

  “Are you angry at me, Mike?”

  “Why should I be angry? You practically saved my life back there, didn’t you?”

  “You are angry,” she said wonderingly. “Why? I thought I was helpful. You didn’t want to tell Chief Gentry why you were there, did you? About the guns and the Lithuanian pawnbroker and all?”

  “No,” Shayne conceded gruffly. “I had no intention of telling Will any of that. But for a good many years now I’ve been in the habit of telling my own lies and getting out of my own messes without any help from female reporters.”

  “Oh, Mike,” she said sadly. “The truth of the matter is that it’s all because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You’re one of those excessively masculine individuals with a penis complex a yard long who thinks a woman’s place is in the home and nowhere else, by gum and by God.”

  Shayne said stiffly, “I thought it was women who had penis complexes.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care one damned bit for your cheap psychoanalysis.” His voice rose explosively. “How the living hell did you get out to that house in the first place?”

  “I thought you knew.” There was the warmth of laughter in her voice. “I told Chief Gentry that we went there together.”

  “Which was a flat lie.”

  “Oh no, Mike. I don’t lie. At least not flatly. I did ride out with you. Hunkered down in the back seat. When you shoved me aside in the pawnshop and stamped out, I suddenly realized I had your car keys and you couldn’t take off without them. So I put them on the counter where you’d see them and slipped out the back door and around to your car while you were inside getting them. What on earth happened when you turned off the highway?” she added pensively. “It felt like you went in the ditch and I thought we were going to turn over. I think I squealed, but you didn’t even hear me.”

  Shayne suddenly exploded into laughter as the ridiculousness of it all came to him. “Then you came into the house behind me?”

  “Around by a side door that opened into the captain’s bedroom. I kept listening for conversation, but I couldn’t hear anything until your friend the police chief came in, and then I realized he was dead and you were in sort of a spot explaining how you had got there. I thought I came up with a very convincing story.”

  Shayne said, “You did fine, Molly.” They were nearing Flagler Street and he turned toward her with a grin. “I guess you’re right. I’m just not used to hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. But what was that yarn you told him about the captain having been shipwrecked? I thought you’d never heard of the guy until we got his name in the pawn-shop?”

  “I hadn’t. But I
looked around in his bedroom while I was deciding whether to come out or not, and I found ah old clipping he’d saved which I glanced at. It was hidden in a built-in cubby-hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed along with some other things that I thought might be important because they were so carefully hidden.”

  Shayne turned off the boulevard onto Third Street and said feelingly, “My God! You took time to burgle the joint during those few minutes before Gentry arrived?”

  “I was lucky,” she told him complacently. “It looked as though there had been a struggle in the bedroom, and the bed had got shoved away from the wall so the hiding place was visible.”

  Shayne had circled around from the boulevard and he drew up in front of his hotel behind her rented automobile which still waited there. He turned off his lights and ignition, but didn’t get out immediately. He put both hands on the steering wheel instead, and turned a long, inquiring look at Molly Morgan.

  “You said there were some other things hidden with the clipping. What sort of things?”

  “Well, there was an old heavy brass-bound book that seems to be a sort of personal record dating back forty years. I just had time to glance at the first couple of entries. And along with that was a box containing a set of practically new skin-diving equipment. You know … flippers, mask and oxygen tank. And that seemed a funny thing to be hidden there.” She paused with a frown. “He didn’t look like a skin-diver, did he? But then he was a sailor, and I suppose all of them do maybe.”

  Shayne drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel and said thoughtfully, “About that clipping you mentioned. What sort of ship was wrecked? Where and when?”

  “It was a few years back. In a Caribbean hurricane. The captain was the only survivor. That’s as far as I got with it before Chief Gentry came in.”

  “I’d like to know more about that shipwreck,” muttered Shayne. “It could have an important bearing on the whole situation. Those Russian guns he sold the pawnbroker last week …”

  She said sweetly, “So why don’t we go up to your place and have a drink and see? Maybe we can figure out the whole story before the police connect up the two murders tonight. Because he was tortured and killed by someone trying to find out about the guns, don’t you think?”

  “Probably by the same two men who killed your Lithuanian friend. Have you got that clipping, Molly?”

  “Yes. I automatically stuck it in my handbag when I heard the police car stop outside. At that point I didn’t know he had been murdered, Mike, and didn’t realize those things hidden there might be important evidence. I guess … it’s a felony or something to take anything away from the scene of a murder?”

  “You’ll get ten years at least,” Shayne told her cheerfully. “One nice thing about it is that they’ll send us up together. I’ve got a clipping of my own that I forgot to mention to Will Gentry. Let’s go up and compare notes.”

  11

  In the second-floor hotel sitting room, Shayne went toward the kitchen waving a big hand at the two wineglasses they had upended less than an hour before, and said, “Pour us a drink, Molly. I’ll get some ice water.”

  He came back with two glasses with ice cubes floating in them, and nodded approvingly at the glasses she had filled to the rim. He said abruptly, “I feel like hell, Molly. Two guys are dead just because I didn’t get to them in time.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You got to both of them just as fast as you could.”

  “It’s always my fault,” he muttered angrily. “If I’d done things differently … if I’d been home when Papa Gonzalez called, for instance.” He shrugged and drank deeply of the cognac she had poured. “What I’m trying to say … it’s my job to be on time. All right. Forget it.” He dropped into a chair and reached into his pocket to bring out the crumpled newspaper clipping he had found in Captain Ruffer’s pocket.

  “I don’t know what significance this has … if any. It was neatly folded in the captain’s breast pocket, and it must have meant something to him.”

  He smoothed it out on the table between them and Molly Morgan leaned over with her red head close to his and they read it together.

  It was a local item and not datelined. It said, briefly, that Roy Enders had been granted a parole from the state penitentiary after serving six years of a seven-year term for statutory rape, and had arrived in Miami that morning to be met by his attorney, John Mason Boyd, who had defended him originally and who (the paper stated) had worked tirelessly for his release on parole ever since his incarceration.

  Mr. Enders’ only statement to the press, the item concluded briefly, was that it was good to be back in the Miami sunshine and that he asked only to be left strictly alone and in privacy to go to his fishing lodge on the Keys south of Miami and relax in seclusion.

  Shayne looked up at Molly as they both finished reading it, shaking his head dubiously. “There’s no date on it but it looks recent. We can check, of course. The name strikes a vague chord in my memory. Six years ago … Roy Enders?” He narrowed his eyes and tugged at his left earlobe. “Seven years for statutory rape is a mighty stiff term,” he muttered. “Seems to me there were other circumstances surrounding that case I should remember … but I don’t. Again, we can check. But here’s one thing.” He put his blunt forefinger on the name of the lawyer mentioned in the story.

  “John Mason Boyd. That just happens, Molly, to be the name of the white-haired gentleman who followed Will Gentry in tonight, and the man who evidently brought the police into it. I gathered he’d had an earlier appointment with the captain, and got worried and called on Will when Ruffer didn’t show up.”

  Molly Morgan looked back at him steadily, her eyes interested and alert. “We’ll have to find out more about Roy Enders,” she murmured. “All right. Here’s my contribution to the puzzle.”

  She reached down beside her chair and lifted the big black leather handbag into her lap, unzipped it and reached inside.

  Her newspaper clipping was yellowed slightly, and brittle with age. It had a date on it, October 16, 1958, and it had a photograph of a serious-faced Captain Samuel Ruffer above the caption, DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE.

  It was a feature story, by-lined by Timothy Rourke, Shayne noted with quirked eyebrows, and Rourke had pulled out all the stops in relating the incredible saga of the master of the fishing sloop Mermaid which had been sunk in a tropical storm fifty miles off the Florida Keys on October 13th, and related the miraculous survival of Captain Samuel Ruffer who had managed to stay afloat in the angry seas for three days supported only by a life preserver until he had been sighted by a private fishing cruiser some twenty miles off the coast and taken aboard.

  The two crew members of the Mermaid had been washed overboard during the storm and vanished, and Rourke had made much in his story of the rugged constitution of the captain, which had survived three days of burning heat and thirst and hunger which should have killed any ordinary man.

  Michael Shayne shook his red head dubiously a second time after he finished reading the story. “I suppose this is the sort of thing a man might keep for his memoirs, but I don’t see that it adds much to our knowledge of the situation. He was a tough old sea-dog in those days, and he survived the elements six years ago only to succumb tonight when some bloodthirsty bastards pulled three of his fingernails out by the roots. Why Molly?”

  “You know why,” she told him quietly. “They wanted the rest of those Russian Lenskis which he had promised Mr. Wilshinskis.”

  “What’s that got to do with him being shipwrecked six years ago?”

  “I don’t know. But you do think that was why he was tortured and killed tonight, don’t you?”

  “It adds up,” Shayne agreed cautiously. “You asked about my going into the ditch when I turned onto the captain’s street tonight. I did it to avoid a car coming from his house without lights. There were two men in the front seat that my headlights picked out momently. A couple of well-known hoods around town on the payroll of a bigshot na
med Armin Lasher. One of them happens to be a tall stringy guy, and the other is short and dumpy.”

  “The way Mrs. Wilshinskis described the two men who visited her husband.”

  Shayne nodded. “This Lithuanian bit,” he probed. “You say it’s your native language?”

  “My mother was Lithuanian,” she told him.

  “That’s Russian, isn’t it?”

  “Since nineteen forty-six. And the Lithuanians still don’t like it. Any more than the Poles or the Hungarians do. So don’t get any funny ideas, Mike. I’m an American citizen even if I do speak Lithuanian and recognize a Russian Lenski pistol when I see one.”

  “Yeh,” he said drily. “I recall that you read me a lecture on patriotism this afternoon.”

  “All right. I thought we had agreed to by-pass that Where do we go from here?”

  Shayne leaned back comfortably and lifted his cognac glass to sip from it. “Do we have to go anywhere? There’s another bottle where this one came from.”

  “You pointed out, yourself, that two men have already been brutally murdered tonight … because you didn’t get to them in time. And you pretended you felt responsible. Right now you’re sitting on top of some very important information that the police should have if they’re to catch the two killers. If you’re not going to use it, I’ll take it to Chief Gentry myself.”

  Shayne took another sip of cognac and asked equably, “Are all Lithuanians beautiful when they get mad?”

  “Don’t flatter me,” she stormed. “I’m serious about this, Mike. If you’re not going to do something, I am. You can’t solve two murders just by sitting here.”

  She got to her feet defiantly and turned toward the door. Shayne swung to his feet and moved in front of her. “We’ve still got things to talk about, Molly. I’m still not completely convinced …”

  She drew back suddenly and tried to dart past him. He caught her right forearm and pulled her back roughly, and her big leather handbag clutched in her right hand swung in an arc and struck him solidly on the thigh.