Framed in Blood ms-20

by Brett Halliday

  Rourke stood up and began pacing the floor restlessly, combing his hair with thin fingers. He came back to face Shayne. “You’ve known me a long time, Mike. Will you take my word for it that I’m not a murderer?”

  “I like to know where I stand if I start tangling with Will Gentry.”

  “Look-suppose I told you that I killed Bert Jackson tonight, that that’s his blood. What would you do then?” Rourke’s eyes were feverishly bright, his tone demanding.

  “Did you, Tim?” Shayne asked gently.

  Rourke shrugged his knobby shoulders and resumed his pacing with his hands clasped behind him and his chin bent upon his chest.

  “If I say no, you’ll still want to know where the blood came from. Aren’t there certain conditions under which it might be better for you not to know the full truth?”

  Shayne considered for a moment before asking, “Better for whom?”

  “For you, for me, for everybody. Suppose I did kill somebody. You couldn’t cover up for me. Not legally or ethically. Your license carries a certain responsibility,” he went on in a strained, weary voice. “I’m asking you not to push me too far. That way, you’re in the clear to go ahead any way you want.” Rourke stopped pacing. His back was toward Shayne, and there was silence in the room for a full minute.

  Shayne’s chair scraped back. He came to his feet saying, “All right, Tim. If that’s the way you want it. I’ll keep Gentry away from you as long as I can.”

  Rourke turned and said, “Thanks. I guess-I might as well be going.” He started toward the door.

  “I guess you’d better,” said Shayne grimly, “if you don’t want to answer any more questions,” but his rugged features softened at the look of abject misery on his friend’s face. “Have a nightcap before you go.”

  “No, thanks. I-”

  The telephone rang. Rourke paused on his way to the door. Shayne picked up the receiver.

  Will Gentry said with barbed sarcasm, “Hope I didn’t interrupt your beauty sleep, Mike.”

  “Oh, no,” Shayne assured him breezily. “I’ve practically given up the habit. What’s on your mind now?”

  “I want you to come out and identify a dead man.”

  “Who?”

  “Stuff in his wallet says he’s a reporter on the Tribune named Bert Jackson,” Gentry growled. He cleared his throat significantly and added, “I just happened to remember that Rourke mentioned the name in your office an hour or so ago.”

  Chapter Five

  CORPSE WITH A KEY

  “That’s right. I believe he did,” Shayne said with deliberate indecision.

  “If Tim is with you now, better bring him along,” the chief of police ordered curtly.

  “If you need Tim, why don’t you call his apartment?”

  “I have, but he doesn’t answer. You know where he is?”

  Shayne glanced at Rourke’s back. He was moving slowly toward the door, and Shayne said truthfully, “Rourke was headed for home the last time I saw him. Where are you, Will?”

  “On Northwest Thirtieth. Come out Okeechobee Road and turn right on Thirtieth.”

  “Right away.” He hung up and said to Rourke, “They’ve found Bert Jackson’s body.”

  Rourke’s hand was on the doorknob. He turned, nodded, and said, “Where?” without surprise.

  “Out in the northwest section. Gentry remembered you mentioning his name in my office, and wants me to come out and identify him.”

  “Let’s go,” said Rourke listlessly. “I’ll drop you there and go to Betty.”

  “You’ll do no such damned-fool thing,” Shayne snapped. “You heard what I told Will. Stay away from this as long as you can. Beat it to some bar where you’re known and have a few drinks. They’ll be on your tail fast enough without your stepping up and asking for it.”

  “But Betty will need me, Mike. I can’t just-”

  “You’ll stay away from the Jackson house,” Shayne ordered more gently. He went over and clamped a big hand on the reporter’s thin shoulder. “Damn it, Tim, don’t you realize Gentry’ll eventually turn all this stuff up? Your friendship with the Jacksons, the fact that you and Bert have had a fight, your hunting through bars for him tonight? That doorman at the Las Felice will remember your asking about him there. Keep out of it. Make them come after you. I’ll get out there and see what’s what.” He rushed the reporter out the door and closed it.

  Shayne long-legged it into the bedroom, stripping off his coat and shirt as he went, hurried to the bathroom and wet a hand towel, sopped it over the hairs at the back of his neck, soaped and washed his hands, then dried neck and hands on the way to a chest of drawers for a clean shirt.

  In three minutes he was at the front door with his hat on. He lifted the slight sag, slammed the door hard to make the night latch catch, and hurried down the steps to the side entrance. Rourke’s car was gone, and he strode back to the tenants’ garage for his car.

  Once on the Okeechobee Road with the Miami Canal shimmering with moonlight on his left, he stepped hard on the accelerator and did not slow until he passed the Seminole Village and began to watch for street signs. He swung to the right on 30th Avenue and a few blocks ahead he saw the spotlights of police cars and an ambulance. He pulled up behind them and got out.

  Bert Jackson lay on his back in the weeds choking the gutter. Gentry nodded curtly as Shayne pressed in beside him. “Recognize him?” grunted the chief.

  “It’s Jackson, all right. Legman on the Tribune. Hit-and-run accident?”

  “Bullet through the back of his head,” Gentry told him, shifting the soggy butt of a black cigar to the other side of his mouth and rolling his puffy eyelids up to look somberly at the rangy detective. He spat out the cigar as a short man wearing thick spectacles rose from a squatting position beside the body. “What do you make of it, Doc?”

  The police surgeon climbed up the shallow embankment and stood beside them. “Not much, Will. He has been dead several hours. Either side of midnight. Shot once directly through the back of the head with a small-caliber bullet. Twenty-two is my guess. Either a rifle or a long-barreled target pistol. Everything indicates he was killed elsewhere and dumped here sometime later.”

  “We figured that,” said Gentry, “from the position of the body and tracks of a car that pulled off to the side. Would you say he was shot in the car that dumped him?”

  “I can’t say, Will. It’s possible. But-there are a couple of curious aspects that’ll have to wait on a p.m.” The physician shook his round head and said mildly, “That’s all I can give you right now.”

  “Here’s a funny thing, Chief,” said a Homicide man who squatted on the edge of the pavement going through the contents of Jackson’s pockets and cataloging them. He held up the brass key to a Yale lock. “There’s a regular key ring in his pocket, but this one was zipped inside his wallet. Funny place for a man to carry a single key. And it’s not a duplicate of any on the key ring. ‘Three A’ is the only marking on it. Might be the number of a room or apartment.”

  Shayne went over to the officer and said, “What else did you find on the body?”

  “That’s about all. Some loose change in a trouser pocket. Cigarettes and a book of matches from a Flagler Street bar.”

  “Nothing else in his coat pockets?” Shayne persisted.

  “A handkerchief, that’s all.”

  “What are you getting at, Mike?” rumbled Gentry, stepping up beside Shayne. “What else did you expect to find on him? How well did you know Jackson?”

  Shayne didn’t answer, but continued to stare down at the motionless body. “See if there’s a hole in the lining of the right-hand coat pocket,” he suggested, “where something could have slid through to the coat lining.”

  The man squinted up at Shayne, frowned, then stooped again to explore the inside of Jackson’s jacket pocket. He turned the coat back to show his thumb protruding through a hole in the bottom of the pocket. “Here’s the hole,” he admitted, “but the coat
isn’t lined. If anything went through it would fall out and be lost.”

  Shayne’s face was grim, but he said lightly, “So we’ll never know what might have fallen through, will we?”

  “What sort of hocus-pocus is this, Mike?” Gentry demanded impatiently. “What do you think is missing from his pocket-and why?”

  “It was just an idea, Will,” Shayne told him. “Probably nothing to it at all. That hole is just about big enough for a key to slide through,” he added with a shrug.

  Gentry took Shayne by the arm and drew him aside as two men bearing a stretcher came up to remove the corpse. “What do you know about Bert Jackson, Mike?”

  “Not much. I first met him a couple of years ago when he went to work on the News with Tim Rourke. He seemed a nice kid, newly married and enthusiastic about being a reporter.”

  Gentry brushed this nonessential information aside and said brusquely, “You threw him out of your apartment this afternoon. Why?”

  “A personal matter.”

  “You told Rourke you didn’t like his proposition.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What sort of proposition?”

  “It can’t have any bearing on this,” he answered stubbornly.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Gentry growled. “Why did you throw him out?”

  “I’ve told you it was personal.”

  “Privileged communication from a client?”

  “You might call it that.”

  “You said you didn’t have any clients,” Gentry reminded him with thinly controlled anger.

  “I didn’t then.” Shayne drew in a long breath. “But this changes things. Mrs. Jackson is now my client. My talk with Bert Jackson also concerns her.”

  “Don’t push me too far, Shayne. Don’t forget that as soon as Rourke saw the condition of your office he guessed it had a connection with Bert Jackson. We had one murder then, but I let you walk out without giving me anything. Now we’ve got another.”

  Shayne hesitated before answering. He knew Gentry to be a man of long patience, but the fact that the chief had addressed him by his last name evidenced that his patience was reaching the breaking-point.

  “Look, Will,” he said placatingly, “Jackson couldn’t have done the job in my office. The doc said he’d been dead since about midnight.”

  “I’m not saying he did that job. I want to know why Rourke thought there was a tie-up.”

  “Ask him,” said Shayne.

  “Morgan,” Gentry called, and an officer detached himself from the group and came toward them. “Put a pair of cuffs on Shayne,” the chief directed pleasantly.

  Shayne thrust his hands deep in his pockets and took a backward step. “Dammit, Will,” he raged, “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “I don’t think so. You can either talk now or sit in a cell until you decide to give me what you’ve got.” The trenches deepened in Shayne’s cheeks, and his voice was hoarse with anger and disbelief.

  “This is a fool move. Let me work out my own angles and I’ll solve both murders for you.”

  “Give me what you’ve got and I’ll attend to solving the murders. I can’t take this sort of thing from you any longer, Mike,” he continued in a pleading tone. “I’ve let you have your head too often in the past, and look at the publicity it’s got me. People read the papers and get the idea that we don’t need a police department in Miami, that you’re a one-man homicide bureau.”

  “Maybe they’d be right at that,” Shayne said angrily. “Give me a little time on this. Just a few hours.”

  “I’ve done that too often,” Gentry told him stolidly. “We sit around and twiddle our thumbs while you withhold vital information until you can work out some sort of deal to collect a whopping fee for solving a case we’d have tied in knots if you didn’t hold out. This time it’s going to be different. If you won’t give, at least I’ll know you’re put away where you can’t make a deal. Go ahead and put the cuffs on him, Morgan.”

  Shayne was shaking with rage. He backed away another step, taking his hands from his pockets and clenching them into fists.

  “Before God,” he grated, “I’ll break the jaw of the first man-”

  “Dennis-Martin,” Gentry ordered gruffly, “help Morgan arrest this tough shamus.”

  Shayne was thinking fast and fighting against his overpowering anger as the three officers moved toward him. “Better hold it a minute, boys. I’ve got to figure this thing out.”

  The trio paused, glancing at Gentry for orders, uneasily aware of the redhead’s long friendship with the chief.

  “You’ll have lots of time to figure it out in jail,” said Gentry. “This time I mean it, Mike.”

  “Call Mrs. Jackson first,” Shayne demanded. “Get her permission for me to give it to you. That’s all I ask, Will, that you don’t force me to betray the confidence of a client.”

  “We’ve already tried to call her. Right after I tried to call Rourke. No one answered at the Jackson house. What the hell does that add up to? Nobody home at four o’clock in the morning?”

  “I can’t help that,” Shayne pointed out. “I don’t go around tucking my clients in bed. Wait until you get hold of her. If she agrees-”

  “I’m not waiting any longer. Either give it to me now or stick out your wrists for the cuffs. Or take them the hard way,” he added uncompromisingly.

  Shayne relaxed his white-knuckled fists. He realized that he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. Locked up, he couldn’t do Rourke or Betty Jackson or anybody else any good. His one chance to accomplish anything was to buy a few hours of freedom with some sort of story that would satisfy Will Gentry. To even hint at the few facts he knew about in the case would be damning to Rourke and to Betty Jackson.

  “All right, Will,” he said, forcing a choke into his voice. “You’ve got me in a corner. If you’re sure you want it this way-”

  “I’m sure,” Gentry interrupted.

  Shayne took a deep breath and began tonelessly, “Bert Jackson came to me this afternoon to hire me to get divorce evidence against his wife. I threw him out because I don’t like that sort of business.”

  “And?”

  Shayne spread out his big hands. “That’s all. I refused the job and tossed him out on his ear.”

  “Maybe so. But you still haven’t told me why Tim suspected Jackson and his proposition had something to do with the elevator operator’s murder and the ransacking of your office. And where does Tim come into the picture?”

  “Tim’s an old friend of both Betty and Bert. A sort of brother-confessor. He got Bert his first job on the News, and-”

  “I want to know why Tim brought up Jackson’s name in your office tonight.”

  “I’m coming to that,” said Shayne rapidly. “I didn’t understand it myself until Tim and I left the office together. It seems that Bert had told his wife he was hiring me to get evidence against her-gave her the impression, in fact, that I had already got enough dope to get him a divorce. Tim said she was hysterical about it, and wanted him to get the evidence from me. When he refused to help her he was afraid maybe she had gone to whoever is involved with her and gotten him to search my office for it.”

  It wasn’t a very convincing story, Shayne knew, but it had to do for the moment. It would provide Gentry a tangent to investigate, and Shayne could only hope fervently that there wasn’t a man involved with Betty Jackson on whom suspicion would fall.

  Gentry was frowning and chewing on a fresh cigar. His protuberant eyes were fixed on Shayne’s brightly illuminated face, but the redhead didn’t bat an eye.

  “That sounds okay for a beginning,” said Gentry grudgingly, “but how does it fit in with this?”

  “I told you I didn’t think Jackson’s death had anything to do with it. If I have to solve all your homicides for you-”

  “Beat it!” Gentry roared. “Next time, come clean in the beginning and there won’t be any hard feelings.”

  Shayne
stalked to his car without replying, got in and gunned the motor viciously in a U-turn, hit Okeechobee Road fast, and followed it to Grapeland Boulevard, where he turned north to 67th Street.

  The cool stillness of the hour before the dawn shrouded the city as he drew up in front of a three-story stucco apartment with Las Felice lettered on the archway above double entrance doors.

  He got out and went up the walk, found the outer doors unlocked, and entered a small foyer with a row of letter boxes on each side. Shayne tried the inner door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked in the absence of a doorman to admit visitors.

  He turned back and found the mailbox for apartment Three A. A small engraved card inserted in a slot read Miss Marie Leonard. He didn’t want to forewarn the occupant of Three A of his impending visit, and decided it was too early in the morning to ring bells at random.

  Instead, he took out a well-filled key ring, stopped to study the lock for a moment, then began selecting keys and trying them. The fifth one opened the lock, and he entered a small lobby. A self-service elevator stood waiting. He got in and pressed the button for the third floor.

  Three A was the front apartment on the right. Shayne put his finger on the button and held it down while he counted to twenty. He released it, listened, and started to press it again when a crack of light showed under the door and the knob turned cautiously.

  A sleepy voice asked through the narrow opening, “Who is it?”

  Shayne said, “Police,” and shoved the door hard to confront the occupant.

  Chapter Six

  ACCIDENTAL STRIP TEASE?

  Marie Leonard looked small and appealing in a blue silk dressing-gown that trailed behind her and swept the floor around her bare feet. Her eyes were enormous and blue, round with fright in a heart-shaped face that seemed waxen without make-up. Her brows and lashes were dark; and blond, touseled hair fell around her shoulders. She looked almost childish until she drew back from the tall redhead and wrapped the robe tightly around her to reveal the mature curves of her body. She opened and closed her lips three times before she succeeded in gasping the three words, “You-said-police.”