“I’m not coming with you,” Harley muttered. “You understand?”
“How’ll I know Milford?”
“Guy in the blue shirt. At the poker table.”
Shayne lounged across the room casually, stopping at the craps table, and stood listening to the jumbled groans, chuckles and exhortations as the dice rolled. It was a game of high stakes, as most of these continuous games were, and the tension of it showed in the lined faces, sweating brows and tired eyes of the gamblers. Only the stickmen seemed unperturbed.
After a moment, the redhead wandered on to the poker table, stopping behind the chair of the man in the blue shirt.
“Move, fella, will you?” Milford said petulantly. “You’ll jinx me.”
“You’re already jinxed.” Shayne eyed the small stack of white chips. “Get yourself dealt out. I want to talk to you.”
Milford turned to look squarely at Shayne. He was heavily built, with a sad, ruddy face and pale blue eyes, a big sheep-dog of a man, neither the prototype of a murderer, nor the great lover Clarissa had led Shayne to expect.
He shook his head almost helplessly and sighed. “Deal me out, Gus.”
Leaving the few white chips lying on the table, he pushed back his chair and stood up clumsily. He was over six feet tall, his eyes on a level with Shayne’s. Like a man sleep-walking, he moved to a worn mohair davenport flanked by standing ash trays and spittoons, sat down without speaking and buried his face in his hands, the picture of a man in utter dejection and total defeat.
After a moment he raised his head slightly and looked through his fingers at Shayne. “What are you waiting for? Let’s get going.”
“Where?”
“Out to the alley. Or to the car. Or wherever you plan on doing it.”
Shayne said, “I have no plans. Who do you think I am?”
“You’re from D. L. I know.”
“No, I’m not. I came on my own to help you, or maybe to get you to help me. Someone has threatened to kill your wife.”
Milford stared. It took an instant for the words to penetrate. Shayne watched in cynical dispassion as fear and anger in slow succession, and lastly something that might have been remorse, filled the pale and red-veined eyes. Finally big tears squeezed from between his lids and rolled untended down his face.
“Oh, God!” Milford said.
10
Shayne sat down on the davenport as Milford rose and towered above him, clenching his big fists and beating them futilely against his thighs. “The bastards! I’ll kill them first!”
“One has been killed,” Shayne said evenly. “Henny Henlein.”
“Henny’s not enough. Kenny’s nothing. It’s the big ones—” Milford stopped suddenly, fighting for control.
“Did you kill Henlein?”
“No.” Sanity seemed to be returning. Milford blinked fiercely at the redhead, asking, “Who are you?”
“Mike Shayne. How long have you been sitting in this game?”
“Since before Henlein was murdered, if that’s what’s on your mind.”
“How do you know when Henlein was murdered?”
“I heard it on the radio here.”
“Can you prove it?”
Milford fastened raging eyes on Shayne, as though he were the source of all his misery. “I wish to God I had killed Henny. I wish I had, by God! He’s the one who threatened Clarissa—”
“Sending a voodoo doll doesn’t seem quite in line with Henny’s method of operation, or D. L.’s either.”
Milford stared in what seemed like genuine perplexity.
“Somebody left your wife one, stabbed through the heart with a black-headed pin.”
“God! She didn’t tell me.”
“Somebody sent Henlein a couple too—one stabbed and one strangled—and then followed it up by murdering him and leaving him with a hang-rope around his neck.”
Milford looked dazed. He rubbed his big hands over his face, pushing at his eyes, then said slowly, “De Luca told me something would happen to Clarissa if I didn’t get up the money by twelve tonight. I thought he was trying to scare me—”
“How much do you owe him?”
“Around four thousand.”
“Have you got it?”
“No, and I never will now. My luck’s gone bad.”
“You thought you’d get it here? In Harley’s rigged game?”
“I didn’t know any other way.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Shayne was watching Milford through lidded eyes. “Your wife’s life insurance would more than cover it.”
The big man eyed Shayne with such flaming rage that for a moment the redhead thought he was going to have a fight on his hands. “Isn’t your indignation a little forced,” he prodded. “I understand you wanted a divorce—”
Milford clenched his fists so tightly the veins bulged, then suddenly his body went limp. He dropped to the davenport and sagged forward, burying his face in his hands again and speaking in a muffled voice through his fingers. “I did it to protect her. I thought if D. L. got the idea she didn’t mean anything to me, she would be safe. I thought he wouldn’t try to get at me through her. I guess I was wrong.”
“What about Madame Swoboda?”
“What about her?”
“Your wife thinks you’re in love with her.”
“I let her think that.” Milford uncovered his face, looking at Shayne in undiluted misery. “I didn’t know what else to do. I had to make my wife break away from me for her own safety. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“But it isn’t true that I didn’t love her,” Milford cried. “I do love her. I always will. She’s the only one I’ll ever love.”
Despite the fact that Shayne had not expected to like Dan Milford, he was finding that he did. At least, he pitied him and pity was close to liking. Milford showed an unexpected honesty and, out of keeping with his size, a humbleness. It was easier now to understand Clarissa’s stubborn love, even though Milford had tried to make her think that he loved another woman.
However, emotions should not influence judgments. No matter how convincingly he might talk about his love for Clarissa, the hard fact remained that her insurance money would get him out of a bad spot and, apparently, it was the only thing that would.
To determine just how bad the spot was, Shayne asked, “What happens now that you can’t pay off D. L.?”
Milford said, almost inaudibly, “He’ll kill me, I think. He might have been contented with working me over for a long hospital stay, but now with his muscleman murdered—he’ll blame me for that—”
“Why not go to the police? Get protection?”
Milford faced the detective squarely, his jaws drooping, his mouth twisted. “What’s the use? They can’t watch over me all my life. Myself, I don’t deserve it anyway. But I’ll go to them for Clarissa, now that I know.”
“Don’t worry about Clarissa. She hired me to find out who sent her the voodoo doll, and I’m having her guarded.”
“Thanks, Mr. Shayne.”
“Do you think it’s possible,” the redhead asked, drawing out a cigarette and lighting it, “that your brother-in-law believes it was Clarissa who ran over his son?”
“Why would he think it was Clarissa?”
“It was Clarissa’s car. The hit-and-run driver hasn’t been identified. Why couldn’t it have been Clarissa?”
“I’ll tell you why it couldn’t. Clarissa had the set of keys she always uses in her purse. She always kept an extra set hidden in the car—ever since she got locked out of her car one time.”
“Where in the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“So when the car was found abandoned, it was the extra set of keys that was in it?”
Milford nodded.
“Did anyone tell that to the police who investigated the accident?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, it was obvious that
the car thief found the hidden keys.”
Shayne said, “Let’s come back to Percy Thain. Wouldn’t you say sending a voodoo doll seems more characteristic of him than of D. L. or his muscle-men?”
“Yes. Only why would he stab Henlein? I don’t think he ever heard of Henny Henlein.”
“Who said Henlein was stabbed?” Shayne asked quietly.
“Didn’t you?”
“I said one of the voodoo dolls he received was stabbed, and one was strangled. Henny Henlein was shot—with his own gun.”
Milford’s face grayed. “With his own gun,” he repeated dully. “Was it a .32 Colt with the corrugations on the walnut handle cut off on the lower side?”
Shayne’s gray eyes held on Milford with quickened interest. “I could find that out. At the police station they told me the gun had been positively identified as Henlein’s.”
“Mr. Shayne, I’m going to level with you. You say you’ve put protection on my wife and I’m grateful. And anyway, I’ve gambled and lost, and lied to Clarissa about Madame Swoboda, and I’m in debt to a loan-shark who is undoubtedly going to kill me, so what have I got to lose by a little involvement in Henny’s murder?”
“I thought you said you weren’t involved.”
“I didn’t kill him. But last week I took his gun away, when he came threatening me with it for De Luca.”
“What did you do with the gun?”
“Took it home. Put it in a dresser drawer. I haven’t looked for it since. I thought it was still there.”
Shayne dropped his cigarette butt into a spittoon. “I suppose you know what you’re saying. The person most likely to find it there would be your wife.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Milford denied loudly. “You must be crazy if you think Clarissa would, or could, kill Henlein.”
“She had good reason. She knew you were in up to your ears with D. L. So maybe Henny threatened her. Maybe he ordered her to meet him and she took the gun along, just in case—”
“If you think that—” Milford rose suddenly, glaring down at Shayne. “I don’t want you to have any more to do with her. We’ll hire someone else—”
“Take it easy. I don’t think Clarissa killed Henlein. He got two dolls and she got one. I think the same person sent them all.”
“Then why’d you say that?”
“I thought you were trying to make me think she killed him.”
“God, no,” Milford said huskily. “I love my wife.”
“You’ve a poor way of showing it. She’s worried sick about you. Go home to her.”
“How can I? I’m broke. She thinks I don’t love her—”
“Even a married man can kiss his wife,” Shayne said, his gray eyes bright. “One kiss will take care of everything. All she wants is you.”
He rose and walked away, past the poker table and the dice table, and some of Shayne’s heartsick anger about Sylvester spilled over to touch Dan Milford. Somehow, he still couldn’t help liking the man.
11
Shayne got into the car, swung around in the middle of the block and turned north. An unpeopled silence had been about him when he left the river, but as he approached the center of town the tempo of city noises increased and when he parked, the hum of life was around him.
It was well known in certain circles that the loan-shark racketeer, De Luca, headquartered at a place called Joe’s Bar, near Southeast First and Flagler.
Inside Joe’s he ordered a Hennessy, turned sideways and leaned one elbow on the bar while he surveyed the long smoky room. Despite the fact that D. L. was known to be tops in mobster money, Joe’s Bar looked no more plush than a thousand others.
The room was half full, three men at the bar beside himself and five or six more in booths at the side. In the rear, next to the cigarette machine, a man slouched against a door, seemingly unconcerned, but obviously on guard. Downing the cognac, Shayne left a bill on the bar and walked over to him.
“Where do I see D. L.?” The redhead put coins into the cigarette machine and pulled a handle. With a tinkle and a thud the cigarettes dropped down.
The man looked at Shayne expressionlessly. The skin on his face was ridged and flaking, much like that of the man who had been tailing Shayne in the gray Buick. Acne was either an occupational disease of gangsters, or the result of childhood malnutrition.
“He ain’t in.” The words were insolently mouthed, the stream of smoke in Shayne’s face a calculated challenge.
“Then why are you playing bulldog?” With a violent yank Shayne grabbed the man’s coat collar in his big hands and pulled him close, holding him dangling with his heels off the floor as though he were a dog on a short leash. Then suddenly he released him with a shove that sent him thudding against the door.
The man swore viciously and, bracing his shoulders against the door, aimed a disabling kick at Shayne’s groin. The redhead stepped aside, throwing his own heel sideways and connecting with the guard’s knee. The man let out a yelp of pain. Shayne broke the sound midway with a short-armed jab that slammed his head against the door again.
One of the bartenders slid under the bar and moved in fast. The redhead stepped inside a murderously aimed leather sap and put two jabs to the flabby stomach. The bartender bent double, gasping. On the instant, the guard at the door slashed out with a switchblade knife. It cut only air before Shayne had the knife wrist in the vise of his big fist. With something tangible to vent his anger on, he crashed his other fist into the man’s jaw, watching him hang against the wall a moment before his body sagged and he slid to the floor in a crumpled heap, his eyes blank and empty.
Another man was moving from the bar when the door to D. L.’s office opened, and a quiet voice said, “Let him come in, Max.”
Shayne stepped over the unconscious guard and the crime chief closed the door behind him.
If the front of Joe’s Bar was not plush, the same could not be said of D. L.’s private office. Here the walls were covered with red velvet with a silken sheen. The furniture, even to the massive French desk, was a shiny gold. A four-foot crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling reflected the colors in its ever-moving prisms with a dazzling effect.
Amid all this splendor the man in the room wore a rumpled white shirt that had an elongated coffee stain down the front. His collar was half open, his sleeves rolled up, his tie awry. He padded across the oriental rug to his desk where he squatted like a frog, smiling ironically and flashing gold fillings which matched the furniture.
The man from whom De Luca had inherited this loan-shark empire was dead and moldering—if not by De Luca’s hand, then by his direction. And lucrative as was the loan-shark racket in Miami, it was generally thought to be only a sideline with De Luca, and that his real profit came from narcotics smuggling. He master-minded the details of bringing it into the country for the Syndicate and seeing it safely on its way to cutting and distributing centers in the North. It was rumored that he had known Lucky Luciano before Luciano was deported to Italy, and had since visited with the dope and vice czar there. However, as yet no crimes of consequence had been hung on De Luca by local or federal lawmen, for he was cunning and capable as well as ruthless.
“I was expecting you, Mr. Shayne,” De Luca said in a soft voice, “though I was hardly prepared for such a violent entry. I deplore violence.”
Shayne said dryly, “Then you ought to teach your goon some manners.” He rubbed his knuckles and followed De Luca to the desk.
“My goon, as you inelegantly put it, is an ignoramus. Good muscles, though. Still, yours must be better. I admire both the mental and the physical.”
“Red velvet and gold don’t seem conducive to good muscles.”
“They aren’t. I haven’t good muscles myself. But I admire beauty too.”
“Such as Madame Swoboda’s?”
Shayne sat down on a red-velvet-upholstered chair beside the desk, eying the rumpled shirt with the coffee-colored stain. De Luca’s head reflected the red
and gold lights almost as sharply as the chandelier prisms. His face was soft and round, his dark eyes puffy, his nose and mouth fat. Protruding and unsymmetrical ears broke the circular effect, emphasizing the only slight difference between the width of his face and his bull-like neck.
“Madame Swoboda? I don’t think I know her.” D. L. sounded contrite. “Ought I to?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“And she runs a whorehouse in Miami?” He looked honestly incredulous.
“She’s not that kind of madam.” Shayne played it straight. “Madame Swoboda’s a mystic. She holds séances and communicates with the spirit world.”
“I’m sure I never heard of her.”
“One of your musclemen must have known her. Henny Henlein.”
“Ah, yes. Poor Henny.” D. L. opened an ebony box on the desk and pushed it toward Shayne. The redhead shook his head and took a cigarette from his pocket. D. L. reached into the box himself, removed a cigar from its little wooden coffin, bit off the end and spat it carefully over the shoulder away from Shayne. He lit it from an ornamental desk lighter and leaned back in the ornate chair. “That was very unfortunate. You didn’t do it, did you?”
“No.”
“I heard the police thought you did. Henny had your address in his pocket.”
“Henny tried to hire me. You didn’t have him killed, did you?”
“Don’t you know yet?” D. L. blew a billow of smoke at the ceiling. “I thought you’d have it all unraveled by now. One just can’t believe everything one hears about the miracles private detectives perform.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“My dear Mr. Shayne, Henny was one of my most valued—henchmen, I believe you’d call him. Not mentally, of course. Mentally, he was an imbecile. But he had beautiful muscles.”
“Who killed him?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. There’s always an occupational incentive, of course, for a man like Henny to branch out on his own. Being stupid, he would have muffed it. Whoever he was doing it to probably killed him.”
“And who was that?”
Dolls Are Deadly Page 9
