Michael Shaynes' 50th case ms-50

by Brett Halliday

  His bag was still there and the room had not been made up. Rourke sat on the edge of the rumpled bed and gave the switchboard operator Shayne’s office number in Miami and told her to charge the call to his room, remarking that he would be staying over at least another day.

  Lucy Hamilton’s lilting voice came over the wire first from Miami, and when Rourke said, “Good morning, doll,” she said, “Michael just came back, Tim. I’ll put him on.” There was a click and a moment of silence, and then Shayne’s voice:

  “Pretty much of a wild goose chase, Tim. I talked to some of the delegates at the hotel, and several of them know Marvin Blake personally, but they were all nursing hangovers and didn’t remember too much about last night. It was one of those free-for-alls, I gather, small-town boys having a wild night out in the big city. A pornographic movie and liquor flowing all over the place. Your man did check out yesterday. Just before four o’clock, without telling anyone or giving any explanation it appears. Paid his hotel bill in cash and just walked out. I did find the bellboy who brought his bag down. He remembered it because it was funny for a delegate to be checking out before the convention was over, and by chance he happened to notice that Blake ducked into a rather expensive gift shop next door and made a purchase. I checked that out as best I could with a rather vague description of Blake, and I believe he bought a twenty-eight-dollar pair of earrings which he had gift wrapped. Nobody remembers seeing him around the hotel after that, but that doesn’t mean he mayn’t have been there for the high-jinks.”

  Shayne paused and Timothy Rourke took a moment to digest this information, and Shayne asked, “Does that help any?”

  “I don’t know how it fits in, Mike. Look, I’m getting in over my depth up here. Are you tied up on anything important?”

  “Nothing I can’t walk away from for a couple of days.”

  “Then you’re retained by the News, Mike. Jump in your car and get up here, huh? I’ll be at the Sunray Beach Motel or leave a message. It’s about a three-hour drive. If you leave right away you should be here in plenty of time to join me as a welcoming party for Marvin Blake if he does arrive on that afternoon train he’s expected on.”

  Michael Shayne was not one to waste time with unnecessary questions. He said, “I’ll see you, Tim,” and hung up.

  Rourke broke the connection and got the motel switchboard again. This time he made it a person-to-person call to his City Editor at the News. When he got through, he said swiftly, “Tim Rourke in Sunray Beach, Cal. I ran into a real juicy murder here, and stayed over.”

  “Sunray Beach? Woman named Ellie Blake strangled in her bed while her husband attends convention in Miami? We got a first lead over the wire.”

  “Right. Nude body and all. Discovered by her six-year-old daughter early this morning. No clues. Here’s your headline, Cal. News offers thousand-dollar reward in Blake murder and retains famed Miami sleuth to assist local police in solving case. You can fill in the rest.”

  “Wait… a… little… minute. Is it really that good?”

  “I got a feeling in my bones, Cal. I just talked to Mike Shayne and he’s already on his way up. Play it my way, huh? Chances are Mike and I’ll solve it and save you the reward. But get moving fast to hit the late edition.”

  “If you say so, Tim. I’ll have to get an okay…”

  “Make up your headline first,” Rourke advised him blithely, “and then get your front office okay. I’ll be back to you later on this afternoon.”

  He hung up and looked at his watch again. It was not yet noon. Still too early to buy a drink in Sunray Beach. He opened the telephone directory and looked up the address of Doctor Higgens.

  9

  The doctor’s office was one of several ground-floor suites arranged around three sides of pleasant, palm-bordered courtyard with colorful flowerbeds and a fountain in the center of it. It was entered from the street through an archway bearing the inscription, Sunray Medical Center, with plaques on either side giving the names of the doctors and dentists who were conveniently grouped inside.

  Timothy Rourke found a sign indicating Doctor Higgens’ office on the second door from the archway on the right. He entered a pleasant waiting room with comfortable chairs and smoking stands ranged against two walls and a desk at the far end with a pert young lady in nurse’s uniform sitting behind it. She was the only occupant of the waiting room, and she looked up with a bright smile as the reporter advanced to the front of her desk.

  “Doctor’s office hours are from one to four,” she told him, studying his face with frank curiosity.

  Rourke said, “I don’t want to see him professionally. That is, I haven’t got anything the matter with me.”

  She said, “Oh?” as though she doubted that statement, and waited for him to go on.

  Rourke smiled his nicest smile and eased his left hip down onto a corner of the wide, bare desk in front of the girl. “I’m a reporter on the Miami News,” he confided to her, “and I’d like to get some information from the doctor about the woman who was murdered last night. Was she a regular patient of his?”

  “Oh, yes. Wasn’t that an awful thing to happen? She was in just a couple of weeks ago with her little girl. She’s a real, living doll… Sissy, I mean,” she added in some confusion. “When I think about her… finding her mother like that this morning, it makes me want to cry.”

  “Go ahead,” Rourke said. He got a limp cigarette out of his pocket and put it between his lips and fumbled for a match.

  “What?”

  “Cry,” Rourke told her gently, putting flame to the end of the cigarette and drawing in deeply. “Then I’ll put you in my story,” he went on in a tone that was half-bantering, half-serious. “With a picture,” he added enthusiastically. “It’s always a good idea to inject some good, healthy sex appeal in a rape murder story.”

  She said, “Oh, you!” and wrinkled up her nose at him, and then asked in a low, hesitant voice, “Was she… raped?”

  Rourke said, “I’m hoping the doctor will tell me that. I understand he’s doing the autopsy. Do you know if he’s completed it?”

  “I guess he has.” She bit her under-lip and looked embarrassed for some reason. “He came back from the hospital a little while ago.”

  “Do you suppose I could see him for a minute?”

  “I’ll see.” She got up and went through a door behind her desk, closing it carefully behind her, and Rourke sat on the corner of her desk and swung one leg lazily and wondered if it was worthwhile trying to make a date with her that evening.

  She came back through the door after a moment and held it open invitingly and said, “Doctor can see you for a few minutes, but he has an important appointment at twelve.”

  “So have I,” Rourke told her with a wide grin. “With a tall glass of bourbon and branch water as soon as the local bistro opens its reluctant doors.” He went past her into a brightly-lighted consultation room where a tall, white-haired man with very bright, very blue eyes regarded him without noticeable pleasure and said flatly, “I don’t want to waste your time, young man, nor my own. I have no intention of discussing one of my patients with a representative of the press.” The sour emphasis he put on the final word made it sound like an obscenity.

  Rourke said, “Ex-patient, Doctor. Ellie Blake has become news, whether you like it or not. I won’t quote you if you prefer not, but I would like to get my dope from the horse’s mouth instead of having to pick it up in bits and pieces and rumors from around town.”

  “I do definitely prefer not to be quoted. Now, what is it you want to know?”

  Timothy Rourke sat in a straight chair and got out a pencil and some copy paper and matched the doctor’s own cold, impersonal tone.

  “What do you make the time of death?”

  “Between ten P.M. and two A.M.”

  “And the cause?”

  “Manual strangulation.”

  “By a strong man?”

  “That is a matter for conjecture. It wa
sn’t accomplished by a weakling.”

  “Did she struggle much?”

  “As much as any woman could, I presume, with a man’s hands throttling her. You know this isn’t a proper subject for medical testimony, Mr. Rourke.”

  “I’m trying to get a picture. Was she undressed before or after she was murdered?”

  “How on earth would I know a thing like that?”

  “Had she been sexually attacked?”

  “Exactly what does that euphemism mean to you… and your readers?” the doctor demanded disagreeably.

  Rourke looked up guilelessly. “All right. We’ll skip the euphemisms. Was she raped?”

  “I can’t say. She was a mature married woman with a six-year-old daughter. There are no definite outward signs of rape, but that signifies nothing.”

  “Had she had sexual intercourse?”

  “There was a quantity of fresh seminal fluid with live spermatozoa in the vaginal passage,” the doctor informed him drily.

  “You took samples, Doctor?”

  “I made several slides from smears obtained from the interior of the vagina.”

  “Did you test for blood-grouping to possibly identify the source?”

  “I did not,” snapped Doctor Higgens. “Perhaps you labor under the delusion of many laymen that all proteinaceous body fluids carry the same isoagglutinogens found in the blood corpuscles. In some cases this is true, but often it is not the case.”

  “Are you saying, Doctor, that seminal fluid cannot be tested to indicate the blood group of the man who produced it?”

  “In some instances it can. Often it cannot.”

  “And you haven’t determined which is which in this case?”

  “I have not yet done so.”

  Rourke shrugged and tapped the end of his pencil against his teeth. “I’m a layman, of course, but I have covered a lot of crimes and it has been my understanding that semen can be typed the same as blood. How about this, Doctor? I’ve also been told that the spermatozoa themselves can be identified under a high-power microscope as having come from a certain individual. That they have definite characteristics that are identifiable. Is that not true?”

  Doctor Higgens made a tent out of his ten fingers and peered over the top of it at the reporter with an irritable frown. “I haven’t the time to give you a classroom lecture on the subject. Nor the inclination.” He hesitated and then went on stiffly, “There are some indications that the morphology of spermatozoa may be characteristic of the individual… and can be positively identified by a highly trained technician in that field.”

  Timothy Rourke shrugged and dropped the subject, which he felt was getting beyond him. “Did you test the victim for alcohol in the blood?”

  “I did. With the generally inconclusive results that are normal with such tests. It is my opinion that Mrs. Blake had had from one to three drinks following dinner.”

  “Then she wasn’t drunk?”

  Doctor Higgens shrugged and stood up. “That is a completely relative term. A matter of semantics. And also a matter of the individual capacity to absorb and carry alcohol. Mrs. Blake was not a drinking woman. It is impossible for me to form any opinion of the effects one to three drinks might have had on her following dinner.” He paused and looked at his watch pointedly. “And now, if you don’t mind, I have an appointment.”

  Rourke said blithely, “I don’t mind at all. And thanks.” He thrust the copy paper in his pocket and went out.

  10

  Dave’s Bar and Grill-Package Liquor was on Main Street just past the City Hall where Mabel Handel had told him it would be. Rourke found a parking slot just beyond, and glanced at his watch as he strolled back to the entrance. It lacked five minutes of twelve o’clock, but the door was invitingly open and Rourke went in hopefully.

  There was a short bar on the left and half a dozen tables in the small room that was partitioned off from the dining room with an archway between the two. At the end of the bar there were shelves of bottled goods with an iron latticework drawn across the front of them and secured with a padlock.

  There were no customers, but there was a slight, sandy-haired man wearing a fresh white jacket polishing glasses behind the bar. He looked at Rourke curiously as the reporter seated himself at the far end of the bar, nodded amiably and said, “Morning,” giving an extra flourish to the glass in his hands.

  Rourke said sadly, “If it’s still morning I suppose that’s too early to get a drink.”

  “Well, sir.” The bartender turned and craned his neck to look up at the big clock behind the bar. The big hand was two minutes short of twelve. “I reckon that clock of mine could be a couple minutes slow. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Bourbon. Make it a double shot just to celebrate the beginning of a new day. With a little water but don’t drown it.”

  The bartender made his drink, splashing in extra whiskey to give it a good dark color, and set it in front of him. “Stranger in town?”

  Rourke took a long experimental drink and smacked his lips. “I’ll probably be sticking around a day or so… on account of that murder you had last night.”

  “Terrible thing, wasn’t it? Mighty fine woman. First time anything like that ever happened in Sunray Beach, I can tell you. Gives the town a bad name. Say you’re here on account of it? State police, or like that?”

  “Reporter,” Rourke told him. “Miami News. We’re offering a thousand-dollar reward for pertinent information.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, I sure hope you get to pay out that reward money, Mister. Man that’d do a thing like that just isn’t human, the way I look at it. I’ll help string him up my own self when they catch him. Some damned hobo, you can be sure of that. Marvin and Ellie Blake was mighty well liked here in Sunray. I guess you might say there wasn’t a better-respected woman in town. Hanging’s too good for a bastard’d do a thing like that. Oughtta string him up by the balls and set a slow fire going underneath him.”

  Rourke nodded soberly and said, “It was a mighty nasty thing. Tough on the little girl. The husband, too.”

  “It’ll just about finish up old Marv. God! Think about coming home to that. After being off on a convention and all. He just about worshipped the ground his wife and little Sissy walked on, Marv did. I’m telling you I’d hate to be the man to meet that train this afternoon and tell Marv the news.”

  “You mean he hasn’t been notified yet?”

  “I reckon not. I was talking down the street in the drug store a little while ago and one of the fellows there had just been talking to Ollie Jenson… he’s Chief of Police here… and Ollie said he didn’t see any good in breaking the bad news to him till he had to. Stands to reason there’s nothing Marv can do about it. Bad enough when he does get home and has to find out.”

  A party of three men entered the front door and seated themselves on stools. The sandy-haired man bustled to them and took their orders, and Rourke turned his head to watch them idly over the rim of his glass.

  As the bartender set drinks in front of them, he leaned forward and spoke rapidly in a low voice, and all three of them turned their heads simultaneously to look at Rourke.

  He blandly disregarded their interest, emptied his glass thirstily and set it down. When the bartender approached him again, he said, “I’d like another. Better make it a single this time.”

  The bartender set it in front of him and said, “One of those fellows there is Harry Wilsson. He and his wife were about the closest friends the Blakes had in town, and Harry’s taking it mighty hard. Mrs. Wilsson’s the first one Sissy Blake telephoned to this morning after she woke up and found her mamma choked to death in bed, and she went right over there without stopping to get dressed and called the police and Doctor Higgens. They got Sissy at their house now, until Marvin gets back anyhow.”

  Rourke took a sip of his drink and glanced at the three men. “Which one is Wilsson?”

  “One on this end.”

  The man seated nearest to Rourke
was in his early thirties, tall and well-built, with carefully-combed, glossy black hair and a somewhat bushy black mustache. He was drinking whiskey, Rourke noted, straight from a shot-glass, with a small beer as a chaser.

  Rourke nodded and said, “Thanks.” Then he looked at the still locked supply of bottled liquor at the end of the bar, and asked, “Do you sell stuff by the bottle?”

  “To take out, yeh. I just haven’t got around to opening it up yet.”

  “Let me have a pint. Four Roses, I guess.”

  The bartender got a key from a hook behind him, unlocked the padlock and pushed the iron lattice back. He put a pint bottle in a brown paper sack and set it on the bar beside the reporter.

  Rourke slid it into the side pocket of his coat, then got off his stool and with his drink in hand approached Harry Wilsson.

  The man jerked around nervously when Rourke stopped beside him and asked, “Mr. Wilsson?”

  He had very black eyes and full, almost pouting, lips beneath the heavy mustache. He said, very quickly, “That’s right,” and wet his lips nervously and glanced away.

  The reporter said, “My name is Rourke… from the Miami News. I’m in town covering the Blake murder, and I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes.”

  “I guess so,” Wilsson said huskily. He gave a little self-conscious laugh that turned out to be more of a snort. “Don’t know what I can tell you, though, except I’m mighty well broken up about it.”

  “I understand you were close friends,” Rourke said sympathetically. “Why don’t you bring your drink and let’s go back to a table where we can talk a moment?” He turned and led the way to the farthest table in the rear, and Harry Wilsson followed him, carrying his half-emptied shot-glass in one hand and beer in the other.

  Rourke took a chair and Wilsson sat down opposite him, grimacing and shaking his head slowly. “I just can’t get it through my head. I keep thinking about Marvin. How I would feel if a thing like that happened to my wife while I was off raising hell at a convention?” He closed his fingers tightly about his shot-glass, lifted it to his mouth convulsively and tossed off the remainder of the whiskey.