Killers from the Keys ms-39

by Brett Halliday

  “Steven simply could not have stolen that money,” she insisted tearfully, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “There is some dreadful mistake. I know there must be. Steven was a loving husband and a devoted father. He has lived an exemplary life in this community for twenty years, and it is utterly absurd to think he is capable of such an act. Someone else must be responsible, and I fear that Steven is the victim of foul play because he may have tried to prevent it.”

  The quote from Mrs. Shephard ended there, and the newspaper story went on to briefly rehash the known facts in the case.

  Steven Shephard, it appeared, had been an officer and a trusted cashier of a Mutual Savings and Loan Association in Springfield, Illinois, for the past twenty years. A Sunday School teacher and a Boy Scout leader, he had been universally respected by a wide circle of friends and associates, and had been known as a man with no vices, and no bad habits. He owned his own modest home, mortgage-free, paid his bills promptly on the tenth of each month, and over the years had built up a substantial savings account in the Mutual Association with which he was associated.

  And then, approximately three weeks ago, Steven Shephard had disappeared and $200,000.00 of the mutual funds had disappeared with him.

  Auditors going over the books reported evidence that the theft was the result of careful planning and preparation for at least one year prior to Shephard’s disappearance. During that period, it appeared, he had been secretly diverting cash deposits into his own hands by falsifying the daily records, until a cash reserve of United States currency totalling exactly $200,000.00 was in his possession.

  Then Steven Shephard had walked away from his office and his home, leaving no trace behind him. There were indications that he had fled westward, and the account stated that he was being actively sought in Southern California and Mexico at the time of the writing, which was one week previous.

  Shayne’s gray eyes were bleak as he put the clipping down. He muttered, “So she really fed me a story, and I swallowed it, hook-line-and-sinker.”

  “Want to tell me about it now, Mike?” Rourke asked eagerly.

  “Not for publication.” Shayne gave him a wry smile and lit a cigarette. “She told me her name was Mrs. Renshaw when she came to my office this afternoon to retain me to find her husband. From Chicago, where her husband, Steven… she was smart enough to use his first name so she wouldn’t make any slips,” he interpolated, “… had run out on a Syndicate gambling debt and was supposedly hiding in Miami to avoid their vengeance.

  “She made it sound real good, Tim. So good that I was sympathetic as hell.”

  “Smart woman,” Rourke said admiringly. “She knew Mike Shayne would be a pushover for a story like that. That why you were checking The Preacher out with Joe Hoffman?”

  Shayne nodded moodily. “From another source, I got a description of a man on his tail who sounded like The Preacher. Sheer coincidence, I guess… since it appears The Preacher has been dead six months, and the Syndicate isn’t interested in her husband after all.”

  “This guy you thought was The Preacher. Could he be the dead man?”

  “Could be,” Shayne conceded morosely. “Goddamn it, this knocks everything into a cocked hat… though a lot of things do make more sense this way than they did before. Have you given this to Will, Tim?”

  “Hell, no. Let him read about it in the paper tomorrow morning. I’m just about through with my story.”

  Shayne said, “No soap, Tim.” He leaned forward and picked up the photograph of Mrs. Shephard and the newspaper clipping he’d just read. “Will gets these right now.”

  “For Chrissake, Mike! Let him do his own deducing. Won’t be the first time you and I held out information.”

  “Not this time,” Shayne said firmly. He got to his feet, shaking his head sternly as Rourke tried to protest further.

  “I helped you walk off with this picture, Tim. It changes everything, and I’m taking it to Will right now. He can check fingerprints and find out who was who in that cabin tonight. Then maybe we can start adding things up. Go ahead and write your story. You’re still ahead of the pack on it. But Will gets this in the meantime.”

  He turned and went out of the City Room fast, and Rourke sank back to his desk with a sour look on his face, and went back to typing his story for the early edition of the News.

  13

  Chief Will Gentry wasn’t at Police Headquarters when Shayne got there. The chief had not been in his office, Shayne was told, since leaving for home late in the afternoon. Neither had Lieutenant Yager come back from a Homicide call to the Pink Flamingo Motel. Shayne went out slowly, still carrying Mrs. Shephard’s photograph and the newspaper clipping. He was sure that Gentry had been headed for his office when he left the Bright Spot, but with a two-way radio in his car, Yager might have intercepted him with a message. That indicated that some sort of break might have occurred in the Pink Flamingo killing.

  Acutely conscious of the important information in his possession and feeling guilty about helping Rourke unearth it without Gentry’s knowledge, Shayne paused indecisively outside the building in front of his parked car. If it weren’t for his worry about Lucy, he knew he would wait right there and wait for Gentry to return so he could turn the information over to him.

  But he was worried about Lucy… and the fact that she was his only means of contacting Mrs. Shephard.

  He made up his mind abruptly and got in his car and drove down Flagler Street to park in front of his office building. The night operator took him up to his floor, and Shayne had his key out as he approached his office door.

  He switched on the anteroom light, and wrinkled his nose when he discovered that the heavy scent of Sloe Burn’s perfume still lingered in the outer office.

  Crossing swiftly to Lucy’s desk, he opened the center drawer and took out the daily record where she kept notes of his appointments and phone calls on the chance that she might have entered Mrs. Shephard’s address under the name she had given them.

  She had. There was the notation: “Mrs. Renshaw, 3:30,” and beneath it: “Room 334, Corondao Arms.” Beneath that, Lucy had efficiently entered a local telephone number.

  Shayne closed the drawer and lifted Lucy’s phone to dial the number. He got the hotel operator and asked for extension 334. After a short wait, she told him brightly that the room did not answer.

  Shayne hung up and glared sourly across the empty and silent anteroom. Then he tried Lucy’s number and let the phone ring four times before slamming the receiver down.

  He lit a cigarette and strode into his private office to drink a short slug directly from the cognac bottle. Then he called his own apartment hotel and the night clerk assured him there had been no calls for him that evening. He took another swallow of cognac, but it didn’t really taste very good. He lowered one hip to the edge of his desk and tugged at his left earlobe angrily and stared out the window and down at the slow-moving headlights on Flagler Street below.

  Where in hell was everybody all at once? As a final effort, he dialled the News and got Tim Rourke.

  The reporter was still irritated because Shayne had taken his dope on the absconding Shephard to Gentry, and he told him shortly that Lucy had not called him, and that he was headed for home and bed… and why didn’t Shayne do the same.

  Shayne told him another place he could go that was reputedly hotter than Miami, and hung up.

  Then he stood up and went out decisively.

  The Coronado Arms Hotel was a modest structure in the Northeast section of the city a few blocks from the bayfront. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and potted palms and sturdily upholstered chairs in the lobby, and a scattering of middle-aged, middle-income guests as Shayne strode through it toward the elevators without pausing at the desk.

  An elderly man and a middle-aged woman got off in front of him on the third floor. Both appeared to be pleasantly tipsy, and they didn’t look married to Shayne’s worldly gaze. With their arms tightly about each other’s
waists, they turned to the right down a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, and Shayne followed an arrow pointing to the left below the numbers: 300–340.

  He stopped in front of a door marked 334 and knocked. He expected no reply, and received none. The corridor was vacant, and there was no one to observe him as he got out a well-filled keyring and studied the hotel lock. He tried three keys unsuccessfully before his fourth choice unlocked the door.

  He stepped in and turned on the light and pulled the door shut behind him. It was an impersonal and cheerless hotel room, with neatly made twin beds and no outward indications of occupancy. He walked in slowly, noting an open closet door on the right with a neat travelling case on the floor, a pair of bedroom slippers and of spike-heeled shoes beside it. On hangers were a woman’s light coat, a dark tweed suit, and a serviceable wool robe.

  He walked around the end of the first bed, and between the two to a telephone on a table. Beside the telephone lay a message from the hotel operator. It carried the number, 334, and the time of receipt, 9:22 P.M. The message said: “Please call Mr. McTige. Ext 826,” with a Miami telephone number.

  Michael Shayne stood staring down at it and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Leaving it beside the telephone was exactly the sort of thing anyone is likely to do when returning to a hotel room with a message that requires an immediate call.

  He lifted the receiver and asked for the number written on the message. The phone rang twice before a man’s voice said, “Yardley Hotel. Good evening.”

  Shayne said, “Good evening,” and hung up. He turned and hurried out of the room, turning out the light and closing the door firmly behind him.

  Outside the revolving doors, he walked unhurriedly along the sidewalk to his parked car and got in.

  The Yardley was an older more run-down hotel in an older more run-down section of the city. It took Shayne ten minutes to reach it from the Coronado Arms.

  The lobby floor was tiled and the furniture was rattan but there were identical potted palms to those in the Coronado Arms. Again, Shayne walked through the lobby briskly as though he belonged there, got in an elevator and went up to the 8th floor alone. There were transoms over all the doors along the corridor, and a bright light showed behind No. 826 when he stopped in front of it.

  Again, he knocked, but this time he waited a much longer time for a response that was not forthcoming. He knocked more loudly, and waited another long minute before resorting to his keyring again.

  This time, the first key he selected did the trick. He walked in to a brightly lighted, empty room. This one was larger than Mrs. Shephard’s, and looked a lot more lived in. The spreads on both twin beds were pushed back and rumpled, the pillows balled up and showing depressions where they had been lain upon. A pair of discarded socks lay on the floor behind one of the beds, and room-service tray stood on a low table near the door. It held an ice bucket and two large bottles of Club Soda. One was open and almost empty, the other uncapped.

  Tossed over a chair near the low table was a rumpled black suit coat with the side pockets turned inside out. From where he stood just inside the door, it looked very much to Shayne as though it might match the dark pants on the corpse he had found at the Pink Flamingo.

  The telephone table between the two beds held a large chinaware ashtray that was overflowing with cigarette butts, ashes, and the short ends of two well-chewed cigars, and the stale air in the room was redolent with the stench of burned tobacco. On each side of the ashtray stood an empty highball glass.

  Shayne’s bleak gaze slowly wandered over everything in the room while he stood there without moving. Only after he had mentally catalogued everything to be seen, did he move forward and go around the foot of the first rumpled bed.

  He stopped there and stared down at Baron McTige’s body lying between the two beds where it couldn’t be seen from the doorway. He lay on his side, and his right cheek rested in a pool of blood that had seeped around a conch shell that was firmly embedded in his left temple. He was dressed exactly as he had been in Shayne’s office that afternoon, and the yellow and green sport shirt on his dead body managed to appear more offensively vulgar than it had when it covered the man’s animal vitality.

  In death, his suety-fat face with the blubbery lips and receding hairline was more obscenely babyish than in life. Indeed, he had the look of a bloated and overgrown foetus as he lay between the two beds with his knees drawn up tightly against his chest and his arms hugging them.

  Clutched tightly between the fisted fingers of his right hand was a $1,000 bill.

  Michael Shayne stood for a long sixty seconds looking down at the dead man. Then he backed slowly around the end of the bed and sat down near the head of it, draped a handkerchief over his hand, stretched out a long arm to pick up the telephone.

  Just as he put his hand on it, it rang loudly in the deathlike silence of the room. His hand jerked back instinctively as though the sound were the whirring of a rattlesnake. It rang again and he picked it up, settling the big knuckle of his right forefinger tightly between his teeth to blur his voice a trifle.

  He said, “Yeh?” into the mouthpiece.

  Mrs. Shephard’s voice came over the wire, the tone anxious but the words precisely enunciated, “Is that Mr. McTige?”

  “Yeh.”

  “This is Mrs. Renshaw. I… have been trying to reach you ever since I got your message.”

  “Where’re you now?” grunted Shayne.

  “I… is this really Mr. McTige? Your voice doesn’t sound like his.”

  “’Smee awright,” Shayne averred. “Where’re you at?”

  “I don’t believe…” There was a long pause laden with suspicious doubt. And then she simply hung up.

  Shayne did likewise. He used the handkerchief draped over his left hand to mop sweat from his corrugated brow. Then he carefully covered his palm with it again, and again reached to pick up the telephone.

  As though this were a signal that activated the buzzer, it rang once more just as he touched it.

  He put his forefinger back between his teeth and said, “Yeh?” again.

  He almost dropped the instrument when the well-recognized voice of his secretary came over the wire.

  “Baron McTige?”

  “Yeh.”

  “This is Mrs. Steven Shephard speaking, Mr. McTige. Or Mrs. Renshaw, if you prefer.” Lucy Hamilton was forming her words precisely and clearly, and her voice vibrated with strain. “Do you hear me, Mr. McTige?”

  Shayne growled between set teeth, “I hear you.”

  “I understand you are holding a large sum of money for me… which you obtained from my husband?”

  “Yeh. I…”

  “I want you to bring it to me at once. I will be waiting for you at the Dolphin Bar. That is on the north bank of the Miami River between Sixth and Seventh streets. I will expect you with the money immediately.”

  “Sure. Right away.” Shayne heard a decisive click of the receiver at the other end, and he dropped his instrument back into place.

  He was really sweating by this time. He mopped his face slowly, staring across the room with baffled gray eyes. What in the name of God did this mean?

  Had Lucy recognized his voice over the telephone? He didn’t think so, yet he couldn’t be certain. If she had recognized it, wouldn’t she have given him some sign? Surely… unless? Unless she was making the call under duress. Where she could be overheard and had to choose her words carefully.

  He shook his red head slowly from side to side in utter bafflement and then grabbed the phone and lifted it swiftly to forestall another possible ring.

  He gave the switchboard operator the number for the Homicide department, and when a voice answered, “Homicide. Sergeant Getts…” he broke in fast:

  “Reporting a corpse in room eight-two-six the Yardley Hotel.”

  He slammed the receiver down and rolled off the bed to his feet, strode to the door and pulled it open with his handkerchiefed left hand, rubbed his fingerpri
nts off the outside knob while pulling it shut, and then long-legged it down the hall to a red light marking the stairway.

  He plunged down one flight and rang for an elevator, was fortunate enough to get a down car a moment later, and strode briskly through the lobby and out onto the street without looking to right or left.

  He was settling himself behind the steering wheel of his sedan when a prowl car slid past him and into the curb in front of the hotel.

  He waited until two uniformed men jumped out and trotted inside before putting his car in gear and driving past, headed for the bar on the riverfront to keep a dead man’s rendezvous with his own secretary.

  14

  The Dolphin Bar on the riverfront was old and dark and smelly. It was frequented mostly by the crews of small fishing boats tied up at the docks nearby, and it smelled of fish and sweat from the work-stained clothing of these men; native Crackers, all of them, mostly recruited from the Keys where fishing for a living was the natural way of life.

  Lucy Hamilton forced a faint smile onto her trembling lips as she clicked the receiver back into place on the wall telephone at the end of the bar. She turned to the sullen-faced young man standing directly behind her and assured him, “He’s bringing the money right away.”

  “He better.” Ralph Billiter’s close-set eyes glittered meanly. “You take it real easy when he comes. One wrong word outta you, an’ you know what’ll happen.”

  Lucy said simply, “I know.” She winced as he took her upper right arm roughly and turned her back to the rear booth where they had been sitting before she made the call. He pushed her in against the wall facing the front, and settled his body solidly beside her.

  There was a shot-glass of whiskey in front of him, and a beer chaser beside it. It was his fifth since they had come to the bar, and he was showing the effects of the drinks in his increasing aggressiveness.