Her face was a long triangle, with high firm cheekbones and a small slash of red-lipped mouth. The chin was pointed and strong and there was the thin white line of a knife scar under the makeup across her left cheek. She was slender, but well curved in the right places.
Shayne couldn’t begin to tell her age. It might have been anywhere from a battle-hardened twenty-five to a well-preserved and sensual sixty. That part wasn’t important anyway.
What was important was that she had all the controlled ferocity and the skilled, quick-witted alertness of the killer on the living room floor—or of Shayne himself. This one was a professional.
“Have a good look, lover.” she said scornfully.
“You’re worth looking at,” he said with some genuine admiration.
“Flattery gets you nothing today,” she told him. Then, suddenly and with heat: “Why did you kill Charlie, lover? Why?”
“I suppose that’s Charlie in there on the rug?” Shayne said. “He played rough. He killed my friend. He was going to kill me. What did you want me to do, challenge him to a game of Indian hand wrestling? I didn’t have time. Now suppose you tell me what Charlie was doing here at all?”
“I said I’d ask all the questions,” she said. “You want me to think you were just an innocent bystander defending himself. Well, what were you doing with the rod I just took off you? I suppose that’s what got Charlie?”
Shayne sat there and looked at her, locking his gaze on her two brown eyes. Those eyes looked soft, but they didn’t flick away.
“You aren’t the first to try to stare me down,” she said. “It’ll be a stand-off. Why not just tell me who you really are?”
They both sat silent. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, she shrugged.
“I can shoot you and then go through your wallet. I will too if you make me. Why not do it the easy way? You’re too fine a hunk of man to waste on mullet bait.”
Shayne decided she meant what she said.
“I use the gun in my business,” he said. “I’m a private detective. My name’s Mike Shayne. If you’ve been around Miami long, you’ve heard of me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve heard of you. So what’s a big shamus like you doing here? Let’s get back to the basics, lover. Why did you kill Charlie?”
“I told you the truth,” Shayne said. “I just happened to get caught in the middle. Smitty, the guy who Charlie killed, was a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years until I ran into him downtown today. He asked me to come back here for a drink with him.”
“Go on, lover. Go on.”
“That’s it. All of it. I didn’t know Charlie from a Boston bus driver. When we came in here Charlie killed Smitty. Then he tried to kill me. Like I said, it wasn’t any time to play patty-cake. What would you have done in my place? What’s this Charlie hombre to you anyhow?” Shayne asked.
She kept watching him. ‘That’s a nice story,” she said ,”but it doesn’t wash so good, lover. No innocent bystander goes ahead and kills people and then sits down for a drink. That’s what you did. If you’d called the cops, they’d be here by now, so you didn’t do that. You sat down for a drink.”
“I was shaken up,” Shayne said. It didn’t sound very convincing even to him.
Obviously, the woman didn’t buy it at all.
“You was shook up in a pig’s ear,” she said. “I’ve heard about how easy Mike Shayne gets shook up. I think you know what Charlie was doing here. I think this Smitty was working for you.”
“I said I hadn’t seen Smitty in years.”
“And the wolf told Little Red he was her grandmother. You got teeth like a wolf, Mike. I think I better take you and turn you over to somebody else higher up on this ladder than me.”
“Maybe he’ll have sense enough to know the truth when he hears it,” Shayne said.
“Don’t you worry about that, lover,” she said. “You worry about this, though. Mr. Jay catches you telling one lie, just one little lie, and you’ll have breakfast in hell with Charlie and Smitty in the morning. You will for sure.”
IV
THEY RODE AWAY from Smitty’s place in Mike Shayne’s own car, with the big private detective himself at the wheel. The woman had his forty-five automatic inside the shoulder bag with the muzzle rammed hard against his right side under the ribs and her finger on the trigger. At that point-blank range the hand-loaded three hundred grain hollow point slug would have torn him in half, and Shayne knew it.
He also knew she was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger at the slightest suspicious move on his part. He drove as carefully as a teenager taking his first driver’s license test.
“That’s good, buster,” she said. “Turn where I tell you and don’t attract attention from anybody.”
The fact that he was driving and so would know exactly where they were going sent a cold chill up Shayne’s backbone. It meant that she didn’t care if he knew where he was going. That in turn meant she didn’t expect him to leave again alive.
The route took them over one of the causeways to Miami Beach and then to an area of expensive homes fronting on Biscayne Bay from one of the small islands abutting the main Beach strip.
The house they were headed for was set in grounds of at least a couple of acres, surrounded by a high rock wall and with big wrought iron gates. There was a guard who looked like a common hoodlum at the gates to let them in. The drive curved through heavy ornamental shrubbery to an old house sitting facing Biscayne Bay.
The woman made Shayne park in front and then took him around the side and in by a kitchen door. The kitchen was big and furnished expensively in old style ranges and appliances, all first quality but twenty years out of date.
Mike Shayne got the impression that the place hadn’t been occupied for some time. There had probably been a caretaker, but the place had a musty, unlived-in smell to it.
There was another man in the kitchen sitting in his shirt sleeves playing solitaire with an old pack of cards. The shirt was very “mod” with wide stripes of purple, buff, and shocking pink. The face over the unbuttoned collar was narrow boned, blue-jawed and feral, the face of a big-town hood.
The woman with Shayne conferred briefly with this man and then they unlocked a door in the kitchen wall and motioned the big man to go through.
“Leave this door alone, Shayne,” the woman said. “There’ll be a gun on our side of it all the time. Just sit loose. We’ll come for you when you’re wanted.”
“You tell him, Nita,” the hood in the awning striped shirt said and laughed.
Then the door closed and Mike Shayne heard the heavy padlock being put through the hasp and snapped locked.
Right at first he could see nothing at all. He was in the heavy, oppressive blackness of a completely enclosed and windowless space. The air was old and musty and thick with the smells of cobweb and layered dust and something else he couldn’t quite place at first.
Some small animal, mouse or lizard, scittered its claws on the stone flooring off to his left somewhere.
Outside of the woman taking Shayne’s gun nobody had bothered to frisk Mike Shayne. The normal contents of his pockets were undisturbed.
They included a tried and razor honed Case XX two-bladed pocket knife that was both tool and a weapon of sorts. Shayne took the knife out of his pocket now and slipped it inside the top of the elastic stretch sock on his right foot. They might miss it there when they finally got around to searching him.
After that he took out his pocket cigarette lighter and flicked the flame into life. An ancient unshielded light bulb with a chain pull was almost directly overhead. The bulb was a small one but the yellowed light let Mike Shayne see where he was. The room was small, stone-floored and lined with shelves. There were other shelves jutting out from the walls. Most of them were empty but a few were not.
Shayne looked again and then broke out in a broad grin. They’d locked him into the old mansion’s wine cellar. Some of the shelves still held
old, dust coated bottles, vintages which time had made legendary. What a place to put a prisoner! At least he wouldn’t die of thirst in there.
In other respects, though, the room really was a logical place for a prisoner. It was windowless and the only door opened into the kitchen where the guard was sitting.
At first Shayne was worried about ventilation. Then he realized that air was moving in the room. A sheet metal square pipe came in one wall at the corner and turned sharply upward to disappear through the ceiling. It puzzled the detective until he realized that it must be a vent to carry hot air to the upper floors from a furnace somewhere on the bottom floor. He examined it carefully until he was sure he could break it apart at the joints where the separate pieces were soldered together. For the moment he left it as it was.
He found a bottle of his favorite brandy and worried the cork out with his teeth. A long drink warmed his stomach.
After that he pulled out the light and sat down in the dark. He was directly opposite the door and against one of the shelves which still held some filled bottles. He left them alone though. He didn’t even take a second drink from the brandy bottle.
Shayne was thinking hard. The Esperance Diamond, one of the world’s most famous stones, was due in the Miami International Airport late that night in one of the registered mail sacks coming in from New York. It had been shipped by mail instead of traveling under guard in an armored truck ostensibly so that it would pass unnoticed by potential thieves.
Mr. Hargrove of the insurance combine had been sure, as had Mike Shayne, that the gang they were after would learn of the shipment. Shayne had planted Smitty on the mail handling gang at the airport precisely so that he would get the tip if the gang planned a hit tonight. Smitty, before he died, had confirmed the fact that they did.
Mike Shayne had been prepared, with the aid of some very special equipment, indeed, to stay on the tail of the fabulously valuable jewel until it reached the head man behind the whole operation.
That is, he had been prepared until the woman, Nita, had put the gun to his head and brought him to this wine cellar. He sat in the dark and cursed himself for a fool. She’d rung the doorbell to attract his attention, then slipped quietly around and let herself in the back door to the kitchen. He’d then walked into the trap like any tyro. He should never have assumed that the killer called Charlie had operated alone.
Well, there was no sense crying over spilled milk now. What was done was done.
The big man pulled a bottle out of the rack behind him and hurled it into the far corner of the wine cellar where it smashed with a crash on the stone floor. Then he began to groan as loud as he could.
After a moment he heard the guard from the kitchen at the door. “What’s going on in there?” His voice was muffled by the heavy door.
Mike Shayne shook one of the rows of shelves till the bottles clattered and clanked. He groaned some more.
He heard the snap of the padlock, and then the door into the kitchen swung open. Shayne threw his third bottle. It was a quart of wine in a heavy glass bottle and he hurled it as hard as he could right at the head of the man in the doorway.
The bottle took the guard squarely on the forehead and staggered him back, half stunned, into the kitchen.
Mike Shayne followed the bottle in a lunging rush. His big right hand smashed the guard’s chin and completed the knockout.
He got all the way into the kitchen itself before he even saw the three other men. They were big and tough and much like the one he’d knocked down and they closed in on the big detective with the controlled ferocity of professional fighting men.
One of them got hold of each arm and the third cocked back his fist and slammed Shayne in the face hard enough to rattle his teeth and jar him dizzy.
Shayne reacted by sheer instinct and brought up his knee at the attacker’s groin. The blow only half landed but the man fell back a pace and Shayne brought up a big foot and kicked the fellow in the stomach hard enough to knock him clear across the big kitchen. He hit the table, fell across the top and went down with a crash when one of the table legs splintered.
At the same moment Shayne brought his kicking foot back and out to the right as hard as he could. The heel of his heavy shoe took the man at his right across the ankle. The fellow yelled and let go of Shayne’s arm. He hopped unsteadily on one foot, yelling in pain.
The big redhead flexed his suddenly freed right arm and launched a vicious judo chop with the calloused edge of the powerful hand at the hopping man’s neck. The blow landed solidly and the hood suddenly lost all interest in his bruised ankle. His jaw dropped open, his hands flew out convulsively, and then he went down flat on his face.
That was when the roof fell in on Mike Shayne.
The fourth man let go of the detective’s arm, snatched an old twelve inch iron skillet off the stove and brought it down full force on the top of the detective’s head.
Smashing, blinding pain. Then merciful darkness and peace.
When Mike Shayne began to regain consciousness it was minutes later. His arms were tied behind his back with clothesline which was then tied a dozen times around trunk and arms. His ankles were hobbled with another short length of the clothesline so that when they pulled him to his feet he could stand and take short steps only. His head was an inferno of pain.
Two of the men hauled him to his feet. Then a third hauled off and landed a smashing haymaker that knocked him down again.
Then they repeated the process.
The third time they tried to hoist him up, Shayne made his knees stay limp. He was down on the floor again before he could be hit this time.
One of the men kicked him in the ribs instead.
Given time, they very well might have beaten the big man to death. Fortunately they weren’t given the time.
The woman Nita came back into the kitchen.
“What the hell is going on here?” she asked.
They told her.
“Well, stop your fun,” Nita Nolan said. Her tone was as impersonal as if she’d found them stamping a rat or a snake to death instead of a man.
“Wipe some of the blood off him and take him into the library. Mr. Jay wants a talk with this hero—and he wants it right now.”
They threw a pitcher of water into the big redhead’s face in lieu of washing him off and then hoisted him up to his feet again. He let himself hang limp until he decided they were going to let him walk instead of knocking him down again. Then he planted his feet, but when they let go his arms he almost fell down again anyway.
Even as strong a man as Mike Shayne could take only just so much beating.
“I need a drink,” he said.
“Damned if I don’t think you do, lover,” Nita said. “You’re going to need your strength to talk to Mr. Jay. Give him a swig, Rocky.”
One of the hoods got a bottle from the wine cellar and broke the neck on the iron stove. It was wine. Shayne took a good three swallows from the jagged neck, trying not to cut his mouth on the sharp glass. That amused the hoods. They had a good laugh about it.
After that two of them took his arms and made him follow Nita out of the kitchen.
They went through what had been a butler’s pantry though the shelves and cupboards were now bare and then across a dining room with a table that could seat twenty guests at need. That and the big entrance hall beyond were only about half furnished. Mike Shayne decided he was right in thinking the house had not been lived in for a long time.
The library across the hall had empty shelves and a big rug on the floor. Somebody was sitting in a chair by the windows. Afternoon had become evening. It was dusk outside and the room was full of shadows.
“Here he is, Mr. Jay,” Nita Nolan said.
V
THE MAN IN the chair shifted his position so that he could look directly at the big detective. Even at the distance of ten feet, and in that heavily shadowed room, Mike Shayne could feel the impact of those eyes. It reminded him of a big serpent
, a boa or a cobra, looking at a potential living meal brought for his contemplation. The eyes were hooded, jet, serpentine, alive with evil.
Mr. Jay wasn’t a big man physically. Even in shoes with heavy heels he wouldn’t have stood more than five foot six or six and a half inches. He was small-boned and his flesh looked soft from too much easy living, rich food and complaisant women. In a fight he couldn’t have stood up to Nita Nolan for thirty seconds, let alone any one of them in the room.
In spite of that all of them seemed to cower before him.
All of the power of the man was in the eyes.
When they fastened their gaze on Shayne’s face it was almost as if a physical force had been applied. The big man put his shoulders back and returned that look without dropping his own eyes.
If that feat surprised Jay he managed not to show it.
“Has he been searched?” The voice was as vibrant with evil as the eyes.
“Nita took his gun,” the man Rocky said. “We didn’t have time for more.”
“By the looks of you all you had time to get your ears beat back,” Jay said. “Search him now.”
Two of the men frisked Shayne thoroughly and professionally. They got his wallet and all the contents of his pockets. One of them found the clasp knife he had hidden in his sock. They offered the things they had found to Jay who looked at them indifferently.
“Put that junk back in his pockets,” he said indifferently. “All but the knife, that is. Nita, you know what I want. Get it for me.”
The woman swiftly unfastened Shayne’s belt and removed the big silver and copper Western style buckle that he wore. Shayne was glad the suit was a bit tight. This would be no time to lose his pants. Fortunately they rode his big hip bones without slipping.
Nita took the big silver buckle to Jay. She didn’t toss it to him or drop it in his lap. She held her own hand palm up under the Western buckle and offered it to him as if it were some rare and delicate object for his approval.
The Postman Brought Murder Page 2
