The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  He remembered it had been locked and Myrna Hastings had had the key when he went away a little while before.

  He went into the bedroom and stripped off his clothes, turned water into the tub as hot as his hand could stand it. His face was pretty much of a mess, with both his lips puffed and bluish, lacerated flesh on his cheekbone clotted with blood, and streaks of dried blood running down his chin.

  He grimaced at his reflection in the mirror, cautiously testing the two teeth loosened by contact with the toe of Blackie’s shoe. They were wobbly but would probably grow back solid if left alone. All in all he was in pretty good shape, considering the way he’d been knocked around.

  He got a soft washcloth steaming hot and held it gently against his face while he waited for the tub to fill, loosened the dried blood and cleaned it away carefully.

  When he sank into the hot water to soak his long frame, he continued the ministrations with the washcloth. When he got out of the tub he swabbed his face freely with peroxide, then dusted it with antiseptic powder and plastered a bandage over the worst cut on his cheek. He vigorously toweled himself and put on clean clothes, then went to a wall cabinet in the living room and got out a bottle of Portuguese brandy guaranteed to be at least five years old.

  During all this time he had methodically gone about the things he had to do, consciously refraining from thinking. He had a factual mind and he liked to use it in an orderly fashion.

  He filled the wine glass on the table and got a fresh tumbler of ice water from the kitchen. He sank into a chair and lit a cigarette, letting it droop from an uninjured corner of his mouth, took a sip of brandy and began slowly and unhurriedly to go over the events of the evening, testing each incident as he came to it in the light of later occurrences.

  It started with his entering Renaldo’s saloon expecting to meet Timothy Rourke.

  Myrna Hastings had been there instead. She accosted him, and he had only her word for it that she was what she claimed to be and had been sent to meet him by Rourke. Still, Gentry had phoned Rourke for her address, and at the captain’s house she had mentioned that Rourke had introduced her to Will Gentry that afternoon.

  Shayne went on from his meeting with Myrna. He carefully studied the scene in Renaldo’s office, then jumped to Captain Samuels’ home on the bayfront. In secreting herself in the back of his car, slipping into the house without his knowledge, coming to his aid while Gentry questioned him, and finally in composedly stealing the log-book which she claimed to have found in a hiding place that another searcher had overlooked, had Myrna Hastings stepped out of character?

  It was difficult to say. No one could guess what a young feature writer from New York was likely to do. She had left his apartment willingly enough and had gone directly to her room as he had told her to. Then she had been immediately escorted away from the hotel by two men vaguely described by the clerk as short and tall. Had she gone willingly, or been coerced? He had immediately suspected Blackie and Lennie of her abduction, but after the interview with them at Renaldo’s house he was inclined to believe they might not be responsible. It didn’t quite add up. Now that he was thinking along logical lines, he realized they would have to have trailed him back to his hotel and somehow learned of her departure via the fire escape in order to have followed her to the Crestwood. He saw it was necessary to determine whether the two men who had accompanied her out had been there waiting for her return or had followed her in and up to her room. If they had been waiting, it could not have been Blackie and Lennie—unless Myrna were involved in some way he knew nothing about. And that left the whole business of the missing murder clues up in the air. When she left the room they had been lying on the table. If she had come back to get them, she wouldn’t have known to look in the drawer. She might have searched the rest of the room first. She didn’t, in fact, know the table had a drawer.

  He switched his thoughts from Myrna to Guildford. Had he told the truth about waiting for the captain to return? Or, granting that Blackie and Lennie had told Renaldo the truth about their venture, was Guildford the killer whom they had seen drive away after being closeted with the captain for half an hour? If Guildford were the killer, why had he drawn attention to himself by calling Will Gentry? It would have been safer and more natural to say nothing about his visit and leave the body to be discovered by chance.

  What about the paroled convict, John Grossman? This seemed to Shayne the crux of the affair. He was certainly mixed up in the possession of smuggled cognac somehow. Had Captain Samuels worked with or for him in prohibition days? Did both men have knowledge of a cache of illicit cognac undisposed of at the time of Grossman’s arrest? If so, why had Captain Samuels waited fourteen years to put a case of it on the market—waited until he was weak from malnutrition? It seemed likely that the captain couldn’t get his hands on it while Grossman was in prison, since the first case appeared soon after Grossman had supposedly returned to Miami.

  But it seemed definitely unlikely that John Grossman was in on the deal with Renaldo. The ridiculous price accepted by the starving captain showed that it must have been his own idea. Grossman was smart enough to learn what the stuff was worth in today’s market. It looked more as though the captain had put over a personal deal—one that for some reason he had been unable to put over while Grossman was in prison, one that Grossman might have resented even to the point of murder.

  Shayne finished his glass of brandy and his musings at the same time. He needed more facts before he could do more than ask himself a bunch of unanswerable questions.

  He heaved himself up from his chair and gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness. The loose teeth pained sharply when he gritted them, and that dispelled the dizziness. He had lost his hat in the fracas at Renaldo’s, so he went out bareheaded, thinking the cool night air would feel good on his head.

  Dick frowned and shook his head despairingly when he crossed the lobby, but Shayne pushed his swollen lips into the semblance of a grin and waved a derisive hand at the clerk. He got in his car and drove to Second Avenue.

  he Crestwood was a small, moderately priced hotel, and the clerk was a thin-chested 4-F who tried to conceal his hostile amazement when Shayne showed his battered face at the desk. He shook his head firmly and began: “I’m afraid …”

  But Shayne reassured him by saying: “I don’t want a room, bud.” He showed his badge and went on: “About a guest of yours, Miss Hastings.”

  “Oh yes. Room 305. I’m afraid she isn’t in. There’s been—”

  “I’m the guy who telephoned you about an hour ago. Can you describe the men she went out with?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. You see, I didn’t notice their faces.”

  “Could one of them have been holding a gun on her?” Shayne demanded harshly.

  The clerk began to tremble. “I really don’t know. I— Do you think something’s happened to her?”

  “Do you know if they came in after she got her key and went up, or whether they were up there waiting?”

  “I really don’t know. I didn’t see them come in after she got her key but I’m afraid I can’t swear whether they were upstairs waiting for her or not.”

  Shayne nodded and went over to the elevator. There was only one elevator in the hotel and it was manned by a young Negro boy who stood very stiff and straight but couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling around toward Shayne’s bruised face.

  Shayne stopped outside the elevator and asked: “Do you know the girl in room 305?”

  “Yassuh. I know the one you mean. Checked in jes’ today.”

  “Do you remember her coming in late tonight and then going out again almost immediately?”

  “Yassuh. That’s what she did. Yassuh, I ’member.”

  Shayne got out his wallet. “Try to remember exactly what happened. Did you bring her down in the elevator with two men?”

  The boy’s eyes rolled covetously toward the five-dollar bill Shayne was extracting. “Yassuh. I sho did. Right after I’
d done taken her upstairs.”

  “How long afterward?” Shayne prompted. “Did you make many trips in between?”

  “Nosuh. Not none. I ’member how s’prised I was when I stopped at the third floor on the way down an’ found her waitin’ with them two gen’lemen ’cause I’d jes’ dropped her off at three on my way up.”

  “Are you sure of that? You didn’t take them up after you took her up?”

  “Nosuh. How could I when I’d done taken ’em up prev’ous?”

  “How much previous?”

  “Ten minutes, I reckon.”

  “Did you notice anything peculiar about the way any of them acted when they came down together?”

  “How d’yuh mean, peculiar?”

  Shayne said: “I’m trying to find out whether she wanted to come down with them or whether they made her come.”

  The Negro boy chuckled. “I reckon she liked comin’ all right. She was sho all hugged up to one of ’em. The skinny one, that was.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Nosuh. Not much. One was skinny and t’other weren’t. I reckon I didn’t notice no more.”

  Shayne said: “You’ve earned this.” The bill exchanged hands and he went out. He had learned something but he didn’t care much for it.

  His next stop was at the Miami News tower on Biscayne Boulevard. An afternoon paper, the early hours of the morning were the busiest ones for the staff, and Shayne found Tim Rourke in one corner of the smoke-hazed city room pounding out copy with one rubber-tipped forefinger.

  The reporter looked up at Shayne with a startled oath and then laughed raucously and gleefully. “I’m not the beauty contest editor. You go down that hall—”

  “And you,” said Shayne bitterly, “can go to hell.”

  “Michael!” Rourke drawled the name disapprovingly. “Such language in a newspaper office. Did he get his littlum face scratched?”

  “It’s all your damned fault for sicking that female onto me.”

  “My fault? My God, don’t tell me a female did that to you!”

  “How well do you know Myrna Hastings?” Shayne demanded.

  “Not as well as I’d like to. Or, is she that sort of girl? Maybe I don’t want to—”

  Shayne said wearily: “Cut it, Tim. I’m up to my neck in murder and God knows what-all. What do you know about the gal?”

  “Not much.” Rourke instantly sobered. “She brought a note from a friend of mine on the Telegram. I took her around and introduced her to a few places this afternoon. She found you at Renaldo’s, huh?”

  “She found me all right,” Shayne said grimly.

  “What’s doing, Mike? I wondered when Will Gentry called me about her tonight, but—”

  “Do you know if she’s known in Miami?”

  “I don’t think so. Said it was her first trip.”

  “Has anyone else called you for her address, Tim?”

  “Only Gentry. Is it a story, Mike?”

  Shayne’s gray eyes brooded across the room for a long moment. He and the reporter had been friends for a long time and he had given Rourke a lot of headlines in the past. He indicated the typewriter and asked: “Busy on something?”

  “Nothing I can’t give the go-by.”

  Shayne said: “I could use some help in your morgue.”

  Rourke led the way back to a large filing room guarded by an elderly woman rocking silently while she knitted. “I’m interested in John Grossman,” Shayne told him.

  “The bootleg king?” Rourke stopped between a double row of filing cases. “He’s back in town on parole.”

  “When did he get back?”

  “Three or four days ago. I tried to interview him but he had nothing to say for publication. All he wanted was to go down to his lodge on the Keys and soak up some Florida sunshine.”

  Shayne said: “I want to go back to his arrest by the Federals—June 1930.”

  “We’ve got a private file on him. It won’t be hard to find it.” Rourke checked a card index and went to a file at the back of the room. He brought back a bulging manila envelope and emptied it out in front of Shayne. He started pawing through it, muttering: “Here’s the trial. It was a honey. With Leland and Parker representing him and not missing a legal trick. And here you are—June 17, 1930. Federal agents nabbed him at Homestead on his way in from the lodge.” He spread out a large clipping.

  “I remember it now.” He chuckled. “They had the income tax case all set but had been holding off, hoping they could hang a real charge on him. They thought he used his lodge to receive contraband shipments from Cuba and they raided it several times but never found any evidence. This time they thought they had him for sure, with a red-hot tip that he was expecting a boatload of French stuff, and they kept a revenue cutter patrolling that section of coastline day and night for a week. Here’s the story on that.” He turned back to a clipping dated June 16, captioned, CUTTER SINKS BOOTLEG CARGO.

  “I covered that story. I rode the cutter three nights and nothing happened, and after I was pulled off, on the night of the 15th, they encountered a motor craft creeping along without lights just off the inlet leading to Grossman’s lodge. They tried to make a run for the open sea, and bingo! The revenue boat cut loose with everything she had. There was a heavy sea running, the aftermath of a hurricane that blew hell out of things the day before, and they never found a trace of the boat, cargo or crew. After that fiasco they gave up and decided they might as well take Grossman on the income tax charge.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shayne said. “How bad was that hurricane?”

  “Plenty bad. That’s really the reason I missed the fun. The cutter had to run for anchorage on the 13th, and she couldn’t put out again until the 15th on account of the storm.”

  “Then that strip of coast wasn’t being patrolled the two nights before the sinking,” Shayne mused.

  “Nope. Except by the elements.”

  “Then that rum-runner might have been slipping out after discharging cargo, instead of being headed in.”

  Rourke frowned at the red-headed detective. “If the captain was crazy enough to try and hit that inlet while the hurricane was blowing everything to hell.”

  Shayne said gravely: “I think I know the captain who was crazy enough to do just that—and succeeded.”

  Rourke studied him quizzically. “You’ve got something up your sleeve.”

  Shayne nodded. “It adds up. Tim, I’m willing to bet there was a boatload of 1926 Monnet unloaded at Grossman’s lodge while the hurricane was raging. And it’s still there someplace. Grossman was arrested on the 17th, before he had a chance to get rid of any of it, and he left it there while he was doing time in Atlanta.”

  Timothy Rourke whistled shrilly. “It’d be worth as much now as it was during prohibition.”

  “More, with the country full of people earning more money than ever before in their lives.”

  “If your hunch is right …”

  “It has to be right. How long do you think a man could stay alive floating around the ocean in a life-preserver?”

  “Couple of days at the most.”

  “That’s my hunch, too. From the 15th to the 17th might not be impossible. But the hurricane struck on the 13th and the 14th. Take a look at your front page for June 17 and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Rourke hurriedly brought out the News for June 17. On the front page, next to the story of Grossman’s arrest, was the story of the sensational rescue of Captain Samuels, which Shayne had already read in his apartment. Rourke put his finger on the picture and exclaimed: “I remember that now. I interviewed the captain and thought it miraculous he had stayed alive that long. Captain Thomas Anthony Samuels. Why, damn it, Mike, he’s the old coot who was found murdered tonight.”

  Shayne nodded soberly. “After selling a case of Monnet for a hundred bucks earlier in the evening.”

  “He was the only survivor of his ship,” Rourke recalled excitedly. “Then he and Grossman must have b
een the only ones who knew the stuff was out there.”

  “And now Grossman is the only one left,” Shayne said flatly. “Keep this stuff under your hat, Tim. When it’s ready to break it’ll be your baby.” He turned and hurried out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MURDER SETTING

  hayne didn’t reach his apartment again until after three. He took a nightcap and went to bed, fell immediately into deep and dreamless sleep.

  The ringing of his telephone awakened him. He started to yawn and pain clawed at his facial muscles. He got into a bathrobe and lurched to the telephone. It was a little after eight o’clock.

  He lifted the receiver and said: “Shayne.”

  A thick voice replied: “This is John Grossman.”

  Shayne said: “I expected you to call sooner.”

  There was a brief silence as though his caller were taken aback by his reply. Then: “Well, I’m calling you now.”

  Shayne said: “That’s quite evident.”

  “You’re horning in on things that don’t concern you.”

  “Cognac always concerns me.”

  “I’m wondering how much you found out from the captain before he died last night,” Grossman went on.

  Shayne said: “Nuts. You killed him and you know exactly how much talking he didn’t do.”

  “You can’t prove I was near his place last night,” he was told gruffly.

  “I think I can. If you just called up to play ring-around-the-rosy, we’re both wasting our time.”

  “I’ve been wondering how much real information you’ve got.”

  “I knew that would worry you,” Shayne said impatiently. “And since you know Samuels was dead before I reached him, the source of information you’re worried about is the log-book. Let’s talk straight.”

  “Why should I worry about the log-book? I’ve got it now.”