So he walked stiffly and circumspectly between the two men to the front of the building, jerked his head toward the right-hand rear of the rows of parked cars, and said, “It’s over that way … if you boys still insist.”
“Boss wouldn’t like you to get lost on your way out,” Bull told him gruffly. “Which one is yours?”
Shayne led them to it and the three of them stopped beside the left-hand front door. Half a dozen other cars had pulled up since Shayne had parked there, and filled up that row, and the attendant was now busy down at the other end of the line directing late-comers into parking places.
They let go of his arms and stepped back and he reached for the door handle, and Dixie’s venom-laden voice hissed, “Sap him good, Bull. We’ll put him in his car like the Boss said.”
The blackjack whistled through the night air and took him cunningly on the side of the neck just below his right jaw-line, and as he went down he felt Dixie’s sharp fingernails raking the other side of his face while laughter happily gurgled out of the hophead’s mouth.
“That’ll learn him,” Bull said virtuously. “He’p me lift him up now and shove him in the front seat.”
Shayne had enough sense and consciousness remaining to keep his body perfectly limp as the two hoods lifted and wrestled him into the car beneath the steering wheel. He slumped back against the cushion and waggled his head gingerly to be sure it was still set solidly on his shoulders, and then put his left hand up to his face wonderingly and took it away sticky with blood.
Bull slammed the door shut and peered inside, snickering happily, “You sure marked him up good, Dixie. If he does find that dame tonight, he ain’t gonna be much use to her. Get that heap movin’,” he went on harshly to Shayne. “Next time you come around with a pack of lies, Dixie an’ me’ll work you over good.”
Shayne straightened himself behind the wheel and turned on the headlights and ignition. He was trembling with rage and there was a red mist before his eyes, but he had managed to stay alive a lot of years by knowing when discretion was the better part of valor.
This was one of those times, he told himself grimly, and he devoted all his energy and attention to the task of getting his car backed out and headed out of the parking lot and away from the Little Revue.
13
It was midnight when Shayne pulled up in front of his hotel again and got out. His legs were shaky and there was a lump the size of a duck’s egg on the right side of his neck and his entire head throbbed painfully, but the three diagonal scratches on his cheek had stopped bleeding while he drove back, and he decided he was in pretty fair shape considering everything.
The lobby was dimly-lit and deserted except for Dick, who stared at him with his thin face screwed up in an expression that was a peculiar mixture of awed sympathy and poorly-concealed mirth.
“Gee whiz!” he exclaimed, “You look like.…”
“Like what?” demanded Shayne.
“Well, like … doggone it, did she do that, Mr. Shayne? I wouldn’t have believed it. When you two came in together that second time and went up to your room she looked like … well … like you weren’t headed for that restful evening with a bottle of cognac you mentioned earlier. But that was before your cop friend barged in, wasn’t it? Say, I’m all confused. I never did see her come back down. You went out a little later by yourself, didn’t you? Then how come …?” He broke off, looking embarrassed and turning his gaze away from the scratches on Shayne’s face. “It’s none of my business. You in for the night this time, Mr. Shayne?”
The redhead managed a lopsided smile. “I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it … the way things have been going around in circles tonight. Looks pretty bad, does it?” He touched the dried blood on his cheek gingerly.
“Not too bad,” Dick told him judicially. “I mean … I’ve seen you when you looked worse. But, gosh! That’s some lump you got on the side of your neck.”
Shayne nodded slightly, wincing and keeping his head tilted a little to the left. “Nothing a few drinks and a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”
He went on to the elevator with Dick staring after him open-mouthed, and he knew the clerk must believe Molly was still up in his room waiting for his return, and that he must be wondering how she would react to the scratches which looked as though they had been inflicted by another woman while he was gone.
Well, he was grateful he didn’t have that to worry about, he told himself ruefully as he unlocked his door on the second floor.
He strode inside purposefully, and the first thing he saw as he crossed the room was the center drawer of the table pulled wide open. He stopped in front of the table and looked down at the open drawer. Captain Ruffer’s journal was gone. The two newspaper clippings were still there, but the heavy, brassbound book had vanished.
He turned on his heel and went into the kitchen where he tried the back door from the fire escape and found it unlocked. He distinctly recalled that it had been locked and the key was missing after Molly had gone out that way.
He returned slowly and went into the bathroom where he examined his face in the mirror and found the scratches were quite shallow. He daubed iodine on them and then got out a roll of adhesive tape and tore off three strips which he affixed to cover most of the damage. The big lump from Bull’s sap was extremely painful and it had turned an ugly greenish blue, but he knew from experience that there was nothing to do about it except wait for it to go away.
He went back and sat down and poured himself a drink, and tried to sort out possibilities from probabilities. There wasn’t any doubt that his apartment had been entered from the back way by use of the key Molly had taken with her.
He had no proof, he reminded himself, that she had not gone out of the Park Plaza Hotel with her two escorts voluntarily. He had jumped to the original conclusion that Bull and Dixie had taken her away, but after the session at the Little Revue he was inclined to doubt that they even knew of her existence.
So, what did it add up to? His head ached too badly to do much thinking. Besides, there were too many gaps in his knowledge.
He drank half a glass of cognac and his head began to feel better, and then he took the two newspaper clippings out and reread them both carefully. He particularly noted the date of the clipping about the captain’s sea rescue, October 16, 1958, and then turned to the more recent news story on the parole of Roy Enders. It stated he had been released after serving six years of a seven-year term. That would set the date of his conviction in 1958, if this clipping was as recent as he believed it to be.
He sat back and closed his eyes to slits and sipped the rest of his drink while he thought about that. His mind was alert now, his thoughts racing. He knew there was not going to be any sleep for him that night until he found out exactly what had happened back in 1958. His previous reading of the final items in the captain’s journal explained what had really happened to the Mermaid at that time, but it didn’t explain a lot of other things.
His thoughts of the book jolted him into the realization that someone else was reading those pages right now. Molly Morgan? Would she have returned on her own initiative to get the journal?
What about the C.I.A.? Could those two men who had taken her from her hotel have been agents of the Central Intelligence Agency where Molly had a buddy named Eddie Byron?
Shayne knew it was useless to sit there speculating. The News was an afternoon newspaper and the hours between midnight and dawn were the busiest ones for the reporters and editorial staff. Timothy Rourke was almost sure to be at work in the City Room.
Shayne got up and went out again, grinned crookedly at Dick and waved a big hand at him as he crossed the lobby, got in his car and drove to the newspaper office.
As he had anticipated, the City Room of the News was smoke-hazed and filled with the clatter of typewriters. Shayne threaded his way back to a far corner where Timothy Rourke was hunched over a machine batting out copy with one-fingered precision that did the job almost as
fast as a professional typist could do it with ten fingers.
The reporter looked up at Shayne, stared disbelievingly at the adhesive strips on his face and then shook his head and said seriously, “You’re in the wrong pew, fellow. Beauty editor is down that way.”
Shayne said, “Go to hell,” and dropped one hip down onto a corner of the reporter’s desk and lit a cigarette. “Didn’t you tell me at noon that you only met Molly Morgan this morning? So you don’t know much about her personally?”
“That’s right. Did she do that to you? You must have used the wrong approach.”
“Did Will Gentry call you for her address this evening?”
“Yeh. He refused to say why he wanted it. I’d introduced her to him in his office this morning.”
“Anybody else call for the same information?” Shayne asked.
“No. What’s up, Mike? You got a lump below your right ear that could only have come from a real heavy sap. What kind of company you been keeping?”
Shayne said, “A couple of Lasher’s boys decided it would be fun to rough me up.” He looked at the sheet of paper in Rourke’s typewriter. “Are you real busy?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.” Rourke’s eyes glittered with interest. “Armin Lasher, huh? What sort of angle …?”
“Tell you about it later,” Shayne said, standing up. “Right now I’d like to check your morgue. Files for six years ago.”
“Sure.” Rourke sprang up and led the way back to a large filing room. “Six years?” Rourke said. “Nineteen fifty-eight?”
“October.” Shayne had the two clippings in his hand and he consulted them. “First. Take a look at this recent one, Tim.”
He showed it to the reporter, explaining, “It doesn’t have any date on it.”
Rourke glanced at it and grunted, “Roy Enders. About two weeks ago. I was one of the welcoming committee when he got off the bus from Raiford. Along with his attorney and a couple of friends from the old days.”
“John Mason Boyd?” Shayne asked.
“That’s right. And two characters named Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. They look respectable now, but they were pals of Enders before he was sent up and I doubt they’ve changed much. What’s your interest in Enders, Mike?”
“Where is he right now?”
“Down at his fishing lodge on the Keys, I guess. When he got off the bus he said all he wanted to do was get back there and lie in the sun and relax. Claims he holds no grudges, and had nothing to say for publication.”
“Grudges?”
“It goes back to his phony conviction for statutory rape in fifty-eight. It’s a long, involved story. Interested?”
Shayne said slowly, “I might be. Here’s this other one, Tim. You wrote this one yourself. Remember it?”
Rourke took the clipping headed DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE and glanced down it swiftly. His brow contracted and he muttered, “That’s the old boy who got knocked off tonight. When I heard about it, I remembered this incident and told the rewrite man to check on it for human interest. Sure, I remember the old geezer. He was quite a man back in those days. Survived three days and nights at sea with just a life preserver, after his boat went down in a hurricane off the coast. What’s his connection with Roy Enders?”
“That’s what I want to find out. You got a file on Enders?”
“There should be.” Rourke went to another part of the morgue where individual files were classified alphabetically, and returned in a moment with a thin cardboard folder which he opened on a counter under a bright light. “Not as much as I would have thought,” he muttered. “But now I recall it didn’t get much publicity at the time. One of those cases that we got our own Iron Curtain clamped down on. Pressure from the government to soft-pedal it for reasons of national interest.” Rourke spat out the words disgustedly as any good newspaperman would after he has had a story killed.
“Here’s the report of his arrest. A bare few lines, you see. October twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-eight. He’s described as a wealthy sportsman with a luxurious fishing lodge on the coast below Homestead, and it’s written in a way to give the impression that sex orgies among the rich were a commonplace there. Roy Enders was arrested on the complaint of a sixteen-year-old Cuban girl who had been his mistress for at least a year. It was cut-and-dried. Hell, he’d been living with her and she was under the age of consent. Normally, a man would get about one year suspended sentence for that offense. Enders got seven years.” Rourke thumped his fist down on the file and looked up disgustedly. “John Mason Boyd was the defense attorney, but what could he do except plead his man guilty? He never expected a wallop like that … and he’s been fighting behind the scenes ever since to get a pardon or parole for Enders.”
“What was the background?” Shayne demanded.
“It was all pretty damn well mixed up and we weren’t allowed to print a word of it.” Rourke scowled angrily. “First, you have to know who Roy Enders was. An American citizen who had gone over to Cuba in the early fifties and made his pile in sugar refineries. But he got disgusted with Batista and his police state, and he pulled out in about nineteen fifty-six. With a couple of million in cash, it was rumored, leaving lots more behind him in the hands of Batista. And he began backing any rebel group seeking to overthrow the regime. Not openly, of course, because our government frowns upon private citizens entering into that sort of political activity, but quietly and behind the scenes. He had this big estate down on the Keys, and it was supposed to be a sort of clearing house for rebel intrigues at that time. Then Fidel Castro began emerging as a leader and as the real hope of the Cuban revolutionaries. Nobody knows to what extent Enders financed him in the beginning, but it was probably pretty extensive.
“Anyhow, by the summer of nineteen fifty-eight, Castro was becoming a real menace to Batista, and our State Department just didn’t seem to know which way to jump. Half the time they were proclaiming that there was no Castro menace, and the other half they were admitting that he was scaring the pants off them. Our industrialists, with big financial stakes in Cuba and in Batista’s regime, put all sorts of pressure on Washington to suppress Castro.
“Of course, he was still just a bearded revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and few people thought he was a real menace. But Roy Enders had a private radio broadcasting station down on the Keys that was rumored to keep in direct contact with Castro’s group, and he was known to maintain a couple of helicopters that flew back and forth across the Caribbean landing supplies and reinforcements to Castro in his mountain hideout.
“Well, that’s the way things were in the fall of fifty-eight,” Rourke went on briskly. “Castro had control of no seaports, and about the only way he could receive munitions was by helicopter to his mountain hideouts. And pressure was brought to bear from Washington on our State authorities to halt Enders’ activities on Castro’s behalf any way they could. There was this under-age Cuban girl who gave them the lever they needed. He was solemnly arrested on a charge of statutory rape, and railroaded through to seven years in the state penitentiary. His fishing lodge below Homestead was closed up, his broadcasting station closed down, and I suppose his helicopters (which may or may not have been supplying arms to Castro) were grounded. Does any of that do you any good?” Rourke ended abruptly.
“I think it answers a lot of questions,” Shayne told him promptly. He paused, furrowing his brow in deep thought. “You don’t recall anything back in those days linking Captain Ruffer and his fishing boat, Mermaid, with Roy Enders … or with Cuba?”
Timothy Rourke hesitated for a moment, deep in concentrated thought. “N-o-o,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t think it ever … came up. I see what you mean,” he added. “The dates are about the same. But what has the loss of a fishing boat in a hurricane got to do with the arrest of Roy Enders a week or so later?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about that fishing lodge on the Keys and the helicopters that were supposed to be in contact with Castro’s forces i
n the Sierra Maestra mountains. What would be their source of the munitions they were supposed to fly to Castro?”
Timothy Rourke shrugged. “If there’s enough money involved, I guess you can find arms for sale without too much trouble.”
Unconvinced, Shayne said, “Yeh. There’s one more thing bothering me, Tim. This story of yours about Captain Samuel Ruffer surviving for three days at sea after the loss of his boat with all hands. Did you believe that story when you wrote it?”
Rourke paused to consider this question a long moment before he replied with a shrug. “It made good human-interest stuff. The tough old sea-captain in his late sixties emerged as a sort of superman. Where the hell else do you think he had been during those three days following the hurricane if he wasn’t floating around on a life preserver?”
Shayne grinned and said, “I think maybe that’s something we ought to think about.” He paused thoughtfully. “That pair you named, who met Enders at the bus station with Boyd. Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. Haven’t I seen their names in the papers the last few years?”
“They’ve been in and out of the news. At one time reputed to be mercenary pilots flying for Castro, and later they were both kicked out of Cuba, and they made some claims to being American agents employed by the C.I.A. Nobody knows who’s hiring whom in this whole mess,” Rourke went on bitterly. “Our government has half a dozen counter-intelligence outfits working out of Miami right now, with none of them knowing who the others are. All you have to do is whisper ‘Russia’ and all of them go into an internal tizzy. Slezar and Yancy were Roy Enders’ two helicopter pilots before he was arrested. They’ve never gone on the witness stand and testified exactly what they did for him. A couple of very hard-boiled yeggs,” Rourke ended wryly. “If they smelled an illegal buck I wouldn’t trust either of them as far as I could toss a cow by the tail.”
“What about John Mason Boyd, the lawyer?” asked Shayne.
A Redhead for Mike Shayne Page 11
