Pay-Off in Blood ms-41

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne sat up and blinked at her. Belle Jackson was quite a hunk of woman. She lay on her side with her skirt riding high up on thick but beautifully formed thighs, and her big breasts were heaving, and the panicked look slowly went away from her face as it was replaced by an expression of recognition.

  She said, “Mr. Rourke! Whatever in the world?” She pushed herself up to a sitting position, glanced down at her exposed thighs and modestly tugged the hem of her skirt down, and looked at Shayne accusingly. “If you’re a friend of Mr. Rourke’s…?” There was acid in her tone.

  Shayne sat there on the floor in front of her and clasped his arms about his knees and began laughing helplessly. She was about forty, with a well-fleshed, un-lined face, and soft, blue eyes that were so righteously indignant that it seemed to him the most ludicrous moment he had ever known in his life. As he continued to laugh, he heard her voice going on severely, “Really, Mr. Rourke! You and your friend might have knocked. This is a private office and it’s closed, you know.”

  And he heard Rourke moving over to her, and his voice was soothing. “We thought it was a murderer in here, Belle.” He choked back his laughter and opened his eyes to see Rourke gallantly offering his hand to assist her to get up. The reporter looked down at him and explained, “This is Dr. Ambrose’s nurse. Miss Jackson.”

  She got to her feet with a sort of flounce, and settled her skirt down over her hips. She looked down at Shayne doubtfully and repeated, “A murderer?” and then her placid face fell apart and she wailed, “Doctor’s dead, Mr. Rourke. He’s de-ad! Oh, Mr. Rourke!” And her big body wilted and she collapsed against him, sobbing convulsively.

  Shayne figured she must weigh at least thirty or forty pounds more than the emaciated reporter, and he got to his feet hastily before she overwhelmed him with her blubbering weight.

  He slid one arm around her quivering shoulders and pulled her away from Rourke, turned her about to face him and deliberately slapped her face-hard. She choked over her sobs and looked at him blankly. He put both hands on her well-fleshed shoulders and shook her roughly.

  “Come out of it, Belle. I’m Mike Shayne. A detective. How do you know Doctor Ambrose is dead?”

  “I heard it on the TV. I couldn’t believe it… and then…”

  “And then what?” Shayne shook her again.

  Her head lolled back loosely. She had corn-colored hair that was woven into two heavy braids on each side of her head and twisted together in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her soft blue eyes were glazed over for a moment, and she wasn’t seeing him.

  “I knew what I had to do,” she said slowly speaking with great precision. “Doctor had told me what I must do if that ever happened. So I called a taxi and came straight down here to get the box from the bottom drawer of his desk like he always said to do if anything happened to him.

  “But it was lying on the floor, open and empty when I got here. I was too late to even do that last thing for him. Oh, God! I got here too late.”

  Shayne shook her again. “What was in the box, Belle?”

  “I don’t know. He never said. Just that I was to take it away locked and get rid of it. ‘Throw it in the ocean,’ he said. I don’t know.” She wailed, awareness creeping back into her eyes. “I just knew I should do it.”

  Shayne stood with his hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes for a long moment. He had a feeling that this was a lot of female… that if she gave herself to a man she’d give every bit of herself. With no reservations.

  He released his grip on her shoulders and stepped back from her, knelt down in front of the metal strongbox and studied it carefully without touching it. It had a hinged top like a bank safe-deposit box, and a strong, well-made lock in front that would require a small flat key to open it. There was no indication that it had been forced open. He asked Belle over his shoulder, “Did you have a key to this?”

  “Oh, no. Doctor had the only key… so far as I ever knew. He carried it on his car key-ring… along with his office and house-key.”

  Shayne rocked back on his heels and looked up into her face with narrowed eyes. “Let me get this straight… fast. You were at home and heard on TV that your employer had been murdered. He had previously instructed you to take possession of this locked box and dispose of it with contents intact if anything happened to him?”

  Belle Jackson nodded wordlessly when he paused. Her face was composed again, though tears rolled in a stream down both cheeks.

  “So you hurried down here,” said Shayne dispassionately, “unlocked the outer door with your own key and came in… to find the box lying on the floor, opened and empty?”

  “Yes. I…” She paused, biting her full lips and darting a glance aside at Timothy Rourke. “And then you slammed through the door and knocked me down. If you’re really a detective like Mr. Rourke says…”

  “All right,” said Shayne wearily, getting to his feet. “I guess we were all too late. Tim. Call the police. Get Painter if he’s back yet. Tell him to get over here. You and Miss Jackson wait, and don’t touch anything until they get here. Tell them the exact truth except about me. Better just say you drove by the office out of curiosity or something and saw a light. When you investigated, Miss Jackson opened the door and told you about the box.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “Home and in bed… I hope and sincerely trust.” He sidled past them toward the door. “Miss Jackson. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, and next time we roll on the floor together I hope it’ll be because we both want to.”

  He went out into the reception room fast, and through the outside door into the night, hurried down the flagged walk and around the corner where their cars were parked.

  Shayne got in his own car, and pulled past Rourke’s shabby coupe, and stepped hard on the accelerator across the Causeway and south on Biscayne Boulevard to Southeast First Avenue, where he turned west across Second Street to the hotel garage where he parked the sedan for the second time that night.

  He walked back up the street with dragging footsteps to the lobby and went in. Only a few lights were lit, and it looked completely deserted except for Pete behind the desk.

  Michael Shayne was headed past him toward the waiting elevator with no more than a glance and a good-night nod, when Pete’s sibilant voice slowed him to a halt.

  “Hey, Mr. Shayne?”

  He swung his head toward the desk with a weary scowl. “Not tonight, Pete. This time I’m really rolling in the hay, and I don’t care who wants me…”

  “Happens we want you, Mister.”

  The curt voice came from his left, close at hand, and Shayne swung about in surprise to blink at the two goons who had materialized from the shadowed lobby to stand uncompromisingly between him and the elevator.

  They were two of a kind. Cut from the same pattern which Shayne knew so well. Medium height and slender, and about thirty. With thin, hawk-like faces that looked as though they saw little sunlight, wearing sharp suits and highly polished patent leather shoes.

  They both held their right hands pressed close to their sides, and in each right hand was a short-barrelled, big-calibre double-action revolver pointed at his belly.

  He knew that his body hid the guns from Pete’s sight, and the elevator man who was waiting for him behind them had no idea of what was going on either.

  They were both pros who knew exactly what they were doing, and Shayne stood very still in front of them, and waited for them to call the signals.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The gunman on the right said quietly, “Just say: ‘Hi, there,’ like we were pals, then turn around slow and we’ll walk out together without any fuss or trouble.”

  Shayne said, “Hi, there,” loud enough for Pete and the elevator operator to hear him. He turned about slowly, and they stepped forward to press in closely on each side of him. He grinned wryly at Pete over his left shoulder as they started back toward the street entrance. “I’ll be back for that roll in the hay, Pete. Take
a message, if Tim Rourke calls.”

  “Sure, Mr. Shayne.” Pete stood behind the desk and watched the trio march out together.

  Outside, in the cool night air on the sidewalk, one of the men jerked his head toward a dark sedan parked at the curb just beyond the hotel entrance and said, “We’ll take a little ride, Shamus. Boss wants to talk to you.”

  The muzzle of a gun was pressed against his left side just below the rib-cage, and Shayne forced himself to relax as best he could.

  He moved toward the sedan between them, and said, “Sure. As a matter of fact, I’m just as anxious to talk to the boss as he is to see me.”

  “That makes everything hunky-dory.” They stopped beside the sedan, and the man on Shayne’s right stepped on two paces, holding his gun ready. “Give him a fast shakedown, Jud. This joker has a rep for having all sorts of tricks up his sleeve.”

  Jud slid his revolver into a shoulder harness and expertly shook the detective down. He said, “He’s clean,” and opened the rear door of the sedan, stepping back and drawing his own gun again.

  Shayne got in and slid over to the left side of the rear seat while Jud’s companion circled behind the car and opened the left front door. Jud got in and closed the rear door, resting the barrel of his gun on his right knee with the muzzle pointing toward Shayne. The other one got under the wheel and started the motor.

  The entire operation had been accomplished with split-second timing and careful precision. Since being confronted by them in the lobby, there had not been a single instant in which the redhead had one chance in hell of seizing the initiative… even if he had been carrying a gun in every pocket.

  He relaxed against the seat cushion and asked, “All right if I reach for a cigarette?”

  Jud said indifferently, “Sure. Just don’t make any sudden moves because my trigger-finger is nervous.”

  Shayne got a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. The smoke was clean and satisfying in his lungs. The driver drove carefully, turning north and then east toward Biscayne Bay. Shayne said, “The boss must be a big-shot, huh? Imported talent, aren’t you?”

  “You sounded back there like you knew him… saying you wanted a talk, too.”

  Shayne said, “In my business, the only way I can get answers is to talk to the people who know them.”

  “Lay off it, Jud,” the driver said over his shoulder. He slowed as they approached one of the large and better-known hotels fronting on the Boulevard, pulled in smoothly and cut the motor-well back of the canopied entrance so the doorman wouldn’t bother with them.

  He got out and opened the door on Shayne’s side. “We’re going to walk in through the lobby and go up in the elevator. That’s all. Just take it real easy and we’ll all stay happy.”

  Shayne got out and Jud slid out after him. They walked companionably together toward the canopy and the doorman held the door open for them.

  There were only a few people in the lobby at that hour, and no one paid any attention to them. An elevator was waiting, and they got in and Jud said, “Four.” They got out at the fourth floor and turned to the left and then to the right and stopped in front of a door numbered 430. Jud turned the knob and pushed the door open onto a lighted and luxuriously furnished sitting room, and his companion gave Shayne a little push forward over the threshold and he looked at the lone occupant of the room who sat back comfortably in a deep chair with a cigar in his left hand and a highball glass in his right.

  He was a complete stranger to Shayne. He was about forty, and very slender, but with the well-fed look of good living about him. He was bare-headed, with thinning black hair that was very carefully combed to conceal the bald spot on top, clean-shaven, with cold gray eyes and thin lips that were parted in a frosty smile.

  When he spoke, his voice was modulated and his words precise, though with a trace of midwestern nasal twang. “It was nice of you to accept my invitation, Shayne. No trouble, boys?” he asked the pair who had entered the room behind the redhead and closed the door.

  Jud responded affably, “Not at all, Boss. Acts like he knows what the score is.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard about you, Shayne, and it should make things easier. Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured toward a chair in front of him with his left hand, and a large diamond reflected brilliant fire from the third finger.

  Shayne said, “Thanks,” and sat down facing him.

  He took a thoughtful sip from his highball glass, and a thoughtful pull on his cigar. “How well do you know Dr. Ambrose?”

  “I met him for the first time tonight.”

  The slender man frowned down at his cigar. “In what capacity?”

  Shayne did not reply. He sat and looked steadily at his questioner, who raised his steely gaze to his for a long moment, and then sighed. “I think I should warn you that Phil and Jud have means to make you talk. I advise you not to be stubborn.”

  Shayne grinned slightly and said nothing.

  His host sighed again. “Perhaps I should make my position in this matter very clear.”

  Shayne said, “It might help.”

  “Dr. Ambrose owes… owed me a large sum of money which he had promised to deliver to me tonight. I have been sitting in this room since ten o’clock waiting for a telephone call from him advising me where we should meet for the pay-off. The deadline was midnight. I had the television set on while I waited, and on the eleven-thirty newscast I learned that Dr. Ambrose had been murdered. Your name was mentioned on the newscast, Mr. Shayne, as having been with him earlier in the evening and possibly having some knowledge of the events leading to his death. That’s why I asked you to come here.”

  Shayne said, “I see,” though he didn’t see at all. He got out a cigarette and lit it. “What sticks in my craw,” he said flatly, “is your word owes… owed. Not in a legal sense, certainly.”

  “We’ll dispense with legalities. Let us merely say that I am a collection agent. The sum was twenty thousand dollars, Mr. Shayne. I want it.”

  “Do you think I have it?”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I am positive he planned to have that sum in readiness… in cash… tonight. It now appears that he was murdered before he was able to turn it over to me. According to the newscast, no such sum was found on his person. Did he entrust it to you before he was shot?”

  Shayne said, “No.” He took another drag on his cigarette and did some very hard thinking. What was the angle? He had seen Dr. Ambrose turn the money over in the Seacliff Restaurant. And the doctor had made the phone call arranging the pay-off at nine o’clock from his hotel bedroom. What was this thing about a phone call at ten to arrange it? All he could do was to play it by ear and see what happened.

  He said, very slowly, “Someone must have pulled a fast one on you. Dr. Ambrose made the twenty grand pay-off, all right. At nine-thirty. I watched him do it. If you didn’t get your money, someone else sure as hell did.”

  The slender man stiffened perceptibly. He stretched out his left hand to drop the smouldering cigar butt in an ashtray, and very carefully set the highball glass down on a table beside him. His eyes were very cold, and his mouth tight-lipped.

  “I don’t believe you, Shayne.”

  Shayne said, “That’s your privilege.” He settled back comfortably and grinned. “Why don’t you go to the police and protest? They’d be delighted to hear all the details about your arrangement to collect twenty grand from Doc Ambrose tonight.”

  His host was leaning toward him stiffly, breathing sibilantly through flared nostrils. “I think you’re lying. I think you got your big hands on that money, Shayne, by some sort of hocuspocus… if you didn’t gun him down yourself and lift it off him. I want it.”

  Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders. “Sue me.”

  Without shifting his gaze from Shayne’s, he said, “Sap him, Jud.”

  Shayne sensed motion behind his chair… too late. The roof fell in on him. He rocked forward in his chair, and then slid laxly to
the floor. His eyes became glazed and he fought back successive waves of unconsciousness, and then he pushed himself up to his knees and began laughing up into the face of the seated man.

  He nodded his head, and Phil kicked the redhead in the ribs. There was searing pain as though all the bones had given way under the shattering impact, and he pitched heavily to his side.

  Dimly and from a vast distance, he heard the incisive voice say, “Put him out cold, Jud.”

  Jud was, as Shayne had realized the first moment he saw him, a professional. He carried out the boss’s order swiftly and efficiently. Shayne felt numbing pain, and then he heard no more and was conscious of nothing more for a long time.

  He came back from blackness very slowly into darkness. Queer images wavered back and forth haphazardly in his mind, and it required certain periods of recurring consciousness for him to realize where he was and how he had got there. Slowly, lying on his back on the hotel carpet and blinking upward into the darkness, it came back to him. The meeting of the two men in his hotel lobby, the ride to the Bay front hotel, and his encounter with the boss.

  Shayne gritted his teeth against the dull, grinding pain in his head, and sat up. He reached up gingerly and encountered two egg-shaped and egg-sized lumps on his head. His left side was a solid mass of hurt, and he suspected that several ribs were cracked. He rolled over on his hands and knees, and then stood upright, staggering as he did so and encountering a floor lamp which fell onto the carpet beside him. He knelt by it, and groped for the switch and turned it.

  Light came from the bulb, and he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked around in a dazed way.

  It was the hotel sitting room as he remembered it. Empty, now, of everyone except himself. He looked around slowly, blinking his eyes open and shut, and they settled on the highball glass still sitting on the table where the boss had placed it. The ice in the glass had long since melted, but there remained a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom which looked damned enticing to Shayne in his present condition.