Death Has Three Lives

by Brett Halliday

  “What? Oh, the appendectomy. What of it?”

  “How recent would you say it was?”

  Dr. Martin shrugged. “Within the last six months at least. I wasn’t aware it was relevant when I examined her.”

  “Will you swear she isn’t Arlene Bristow?” demanded Gentry.

  “Why no. I never saw Miss Bristow.”

  “But Lucy could swear to it?”

  “I presume so. I believe she knew the girl fairly well a few years back. See here, Will, what the devil are you getting at? What possible reason have you for thinking she might be Arlene?”

  “From now on, you’re going to be answering questions instead of asking them,” was the police chief’s uncompromising reply. He turned back to the man behind the desk. “You were just about to tell us about some other parties who have been in tonight to see her.”

  “You bet, chief. Like I said, I’ve had two customers before Shayne and Rourke.” He nervously shuffled some cards on the desk, read aloud: “‘Albert Jenkins. Eleven twenty-six Twelfth Street, Miami.’ And then there was a young lady. She came in just as I was bringing him back up. No luck for him. Or, maybe it was luck for him. He’d feared it was his daughter. Didn’t get the young lady’s name. Friend of Mr. Jenkins, I gathered, and come here for the same reason. She was standing here waiting to register, and soon’s he saw her he went to her fast and grabbed her arm and said something like: ‘No need for you to go through the ordeal of looking at her, my dear. Thank God, it isn’t Helen.’ Or something like that. Then he just hurried her out the door an’ that’s the last I saw of them.”

  Shayne was breathing heavily when he finished. He leaned forward with his palms flat on the desk and said harshly, “Describe the young lady.”

  “Well, I—She was right pretty, I noticed. Pert-lookin’. Maybe twenty-five. Brown hair, I guess. She wasn’t wearing any hat. Brown eyes, maybe. You know how it is.” He extended both his palms. “Just saw her that one little minute before she went out.”

  “What was she wearing?” demanded Shayne hoarsely.

  He held his breath while the attendant haltingly described the dark wool suit Shayne had last seen Lucy wearing, and a light wrap he immediately recognized as hers.

  Will Gentry tried to break in impatiently by demanding to know why he cared to know what some woman had been wearing, but Shayne silenced him with a savage gesture.

  “This Jenkins! What did he look like?”

  “Nothing particular. Sort of heavy-built and fiftyish. Wearing a gray suit and gray hat pulled down so you couldn’t see his face so good. Almighty worried, he was, about seeing whether she was his girl or not.”

  “Wait a minute, Will.” Shayne’s voice was like a whiplash as he prevented the chief from speaking again. “Tell me this one thing. Any report from Miami Beach tonight about a man that might have been picked up on the Causeway after the car went over the edge?”

  Will Gentry studied him curiously for a moment. “You mean the car that had the woman in the trunk? The one where you and Lucy just happened to be rowing out on the bay near by when it occurred?”

  “That one,” said Shayne with savage intensity.

  “The one,” Gentry went on stolidly, “that showed signs of some sort of explosive having gone off in the front seat? Just about the same amount of damage that might have been caused by that gas bomb you got Pete Fairwell to make up for you earlier this evening?”

  “All right,” agreed Shayne grimly. “That one. Though I didn’t know about the signs of an explosion.”

  “Why, yes,” said Gentry, rocking back on his heels and taking a thick black cigar from his pocket while he studied the redhead intently. “My men did get a report that some passing motorist maybe picked up the driver and took him away from the scene before they got there. But we haven’t been able to locate either one of them yet. No one has come forward to verify the story. Can you?” He shot the two final words out like two rocks.

  “Not personally. Tim Rourke got the story from his paper. I want to know one more thing, Will. Any slugging or anything like that reported on the Beach in the last hour?”

  Will Gentry rolled the cigar slowly back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other, his shrewd eyes hooded by wrinkled brows.

  “Funny you should ask that. As a matter of fact a man was picked up unconscious just beyond the end of the Causeway about fifteen minutes after the sedan went over. Apparently slugged over the head and tossed out of a moving car. He was a respectable citizen of Miami Beach who is supposed to have been driving home from Miami about that time. Any more questions you feel like asking right now, Mike? Or, is it my turn?” His voice was deceptively even and calm, but there was a note of iron in it that warned his patience was exhausted.

  “I don’t think I need to ask any more questions,” said Shayne. He started out of the morgue fast. “Be seeing you around, Will.”

  “Stop!” Gentry’s voice rang out loudly.

  Shayne hunched his shoulders forward stubbornly and increased his pace toward the exit.

  Will Gentry jerked his coat open and drew a .38 from his shoulder holster. His voice was like ice as he ordered, “Halt, Shayne. I’ll shoot if you go through that door.”

  Shayne heard and recognized the note of stolid determination in Chief Gentry’s voice. He had heard it once or twice before, but never directed at him. He was still three strides from the door, and common sense told him this wasn’t the way to handle the situation.

  He slammed to a halt and whirled to face the gun in the police chief’s hand. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Will. While we’re standing here talking, Lucy Hamilton is being held by a killer. A two- or three-time killer, by my guess. Put your gun away, Will.”

  The gun remained steady in Gentry’s hand. He jerked his head in a curt negative. “You’re going to headquarters with me, Shayne. You and Tim Rourke both. When you’ve told me everything you know about this, the police will take over. Before God, Mike, I mean it.”

  “But Lucy—”

  “Lucy Hamilton is a woman exactly like the one downstairs. Exactly like the one strangled on Eighteenth Street tonight. We’ll do exactly the same to protect her as we did to protect them.”

  “A fine goddamn job you did for them,” raged Shayne. “If you think I’m going to sit on my hands until Lucy’s corpse turns up, you’re crazy.”

  “You’ll sit behind bars if you want it that way.” Will Gentry’s voice was inflexible and he made no move to holster his gun. “It’s my own hunch that one or both of those other women would still be alive if you hadn’t tried to play God tonight. If you hold out on us now, it’ll be Lucy you’re holding out on. I’m Chief of Police in Miami, and I’m still running my department the best I can with all the interference I get from smart private dicks.”

  Shayne hesitated a long moment, glancing from the Police Positive in Gentry’s big hand to the look of iron determination on the chief’s beefy face.

  Lucy was the one who needed help now. His personal reputation in Miami, his license to practice his profession didn’t matter so much any more.

  He nodded and said thickly, “All right, Will. For God’s sake, let’s get going before we have a couple more murders to really hang up a record in Miami for one night.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “It all began,” said Michael Shayne evenly, “when that blundering Cossack of yours tried to force his way into Lucy’s apartment while I was visiting her, without any real explanation of what he wanted, and with a couple of insults tossed in for good measure when he thought she was alone.

  “Wait a minute, Will.” Shayne held up a big hand to shut off the chief’s protest. The two men, together with Timothy Rourke and a police stenographer were seated in Gentry’s private office at headquarters.

  “I’m going to tell the whole thing straight and fast without too many excuses for Lucy and me. Tim, you’ll see, got pulled into it inadvertently and played ball with us for pure friendship. So,
I got sore and socked your cop there in Lucy’s doorway, and that started the whole train of events.”

  He hurried on to relate concisely how Lucy had admitted to him there was a wounded young man in her bedroom at the very moment the police came searching for him.

  “I hurried out at once to find Sergeant Loftus, but he had left the premises. Then I broke down the bedroom door to take the guy myself, but found the screen ripped away from in front of the fire escape, and heard a man running away in the dark alley below.

  “So—there it was.” He spread out his palms. “It was done. Through no fault of anybody’s really. Jack was an old friend of Lucy’s and had sworn to her he’d committed no crime. She didn’t know about Eighteenth Street or the strangled girl. I did get on a phone fast, Will, and make an anonymous call to headquarters giving Bristow’s name and description. It seemed the only thing to do. Then I beat it to the rooming-house on Eighteenth to see what I could find out.”

  He briefly related his conversation with the police detective, and how the woman had stopped him with questions as he was getting into his car.

  “She was scared to hell of cops, and wouldn’t have talked to any of you,” he argued. “I did manage to get some dope out of her, and got a hunch she was mixed up with Bristow and the killing somehow. So, I put her on ice at the motel. That license number you’ve got belongs to my Hudson, Will.”

  Will Gentry was seated stolidly across from Shayne at his desk, mangling the saliva-soaked butt of his cigar between strong teeth. He nodded noncommittally and rumbled, “I recognized the license number soon as I saw it, Mike. Go on from there.”

  “You and Rourke turned up at Lucy’s right after I got back.” Shayne shrugged. “You know what happened. Can you say, now, that it would have helped any if I’d come clean at that point?”

  “The woman from the motel would probably still be alive.”

  “There was no evidence to tie her to what had happened. Just my hunch. I doubt whether you’d even bothered to question her at that time. If you had, I doubt seriously you’d have put a guard over her,” protested Shayne, the trenches showing very deep in his cheeks. “Later, I made a bad mistake leading the killer to her, but I don’t believe keeping still at that time made any real difference.”

  “I don’t suppose it matters to her now,” said Gentry. He took the soggy cigar butt from his mouth, looked at it distastefully and in surprise as though wondering how the devil it had got in his mouth, and threw it toward a spittoon in a corner. “What comes next?”

  “Next,” said Shayne carefully, “was after you had gone, Will.” He drew in a deep breath and leaned forward. “I found Jack Bristow’s body shoved underneath Lucy’s bed with his throat slit. It hadn’t been he escaping down the fire escape after all, but his murderer whom I almost caught.”

  “Now, by God!” thundered Chief Gentry. “You were in on that, too, Tim? Both of you covered up? How did Bristow get out on the street where we found him later?”

  “Tim knew nothing about it,” said Shayne swiftly. “I managed to get him out before I moved the body. You can’t blame him—”

  “Wait a minute, Mike,” interrupted the lanky reporter. “Don’t lie for me. If Will Gentry doesn’t like what I did tonight he can prefer any sort of charges he wants.” He turned fiercely glowering eyes on the chief and struck the table with his clenched fist.

  “Mike and Lucy were in a hell of a spot with that body in her bedroom. Through no fault of their own, damn it. But would a cop look at it that way? You know he wouldn’t. I knew they were telling the truth. They were caught in a lousy web of circumstances. But cops have to go by rules. That’s the way they exist. That’s the way they get to be chiefs.” His fist thudded the table again. “Once we reported the truth to you, there were certain things you would have to do. You couldn’t help yourself. You’d have arrested Mike and Lucy then and there and the official investigation would have blundered on and probably got nowhere. It was my own decision to help Mike move the body.”

  “And because you made that decision, we’ve got a dead woman in the morgue waiting to be identified,” said Gentry inflexibly.

  “Not exactly.” Timothy Rourke’s eyes were fever-bright. “You’ve got a dead woman in the morgue, but we can identify her for you simply because Mike stayed out of your jail long enough to do the job.”

  “You can identify the woman?”

  “Sure,” said Rourke casually. “She’s Beatrice Allerdice from New Orleans. Wife, or widow, of one Hugh Allerdice, convicted bank robber who supposedly died in a car accident three days ago. You tell him, Mike.”

  “I’ll tell it the way it happened,” said Shayne stubbornly. “Jack Bristow was dead, Will. Nothing could change that. His murderer had escaped and no one knew who he was or what he looked like. He’d been shot outside the rooming-house where the woman claimed she was to meet her husband. They’re both young, and it seemed to me at least reasonable to suppose he might be the missing husband. So I bundled him up in one of Lucy’s blankets and took him out to the motel to see if she could identify him.”

  Will Gentry had gotten out a fresh cigar and was angrily biting the end off it. “Like a one-man police force,” he said bitterly. “All right, goddamn it, what laws did you break next?”

  Shayne related Mrs. Allerdice’s reaction to the sight of Bristow’s corpse, how he’d had the feeling she recognized him though he wasn’t her husband, and how he’d warned her of possible danger to her if she didn’t tell the truth.

  “Then we ditched Bristow in the street where he was sure to be found soon, and went to my place for a drink. The telephone rang while we were kicking things around—and that was the real payoff.”

  In a flat, unemotional tone, he told Gentry exactly what he had been told over the telephone.

  “So, there we were,” he ended. “Stop a minute, Will, and consider the situation. What would you and your entire police force have done at that moment if I’d taken the story to you?”

  “We could have saved the woman’s life and gotten the whole story from her by sitting tight and doing nothing,” blustered Gentry. “He told you he had her hid out with arrangements for us to find her if you didn’t come across with the money in a certain length of time. You caused her death by forcing the issue.”

  “He told us he had her hid out,” Shayne reminded him. “But he didn’t in fact. We know now that he had her tied up and locked in the trunk of the stolen car all the time. Tell me one thing truthfully, Will.” Michael Shayne’s voice had an unaccustomed note of pleading in it. “Do you have Doc Martin’s preliminary report on her?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Tell me this. Did she die of drowning—or suffocation?”

  Will Gentry hesitated, then he conceded gruffly, “Doc didn’t find a trace of salt water in her lungs. She must have been dead before the sedan went over. Suffocated in the trunk.”

  “How long before the car went over, Will?”

  “At least half an hour,” said Gentry grudgingly. “But that doesn’t absolve you, Mike. If you had come to me in the beginning—”

  “I know, I know,” said Shayne wearily. “If you’d had a jackass for a father, you’d be out in a field braying right now instead of sitting at this desk. So, I made a fast decision. There was one way we might trap the guy. By sending Lucy out with a decoy package under her arm—and don’t blame Pete Fairwell for helping me make up that bomb. I gave him a good story for why I wanted it, and he simply co-operated the way you’ve always had your men co-operate with me before.”

  “I’m not blaming Fairwell,” said Gentry shortly. “I blame you for bungling the deal.”

  “Fair enough. I did bungle it. By about two minutes. There again, we have a whole batch of ifs. If he hadn’t gunned the motor so fast before the bomb went off. If the guard fence hadn’t been down at exactly that point. If an officious motorist hadn’t picked up the unconscious man and carried him away before the police or I got there. Those are ifs no one c
an anticipate. I took a gamble on catching him and lost. If I’d succeeded, you’d be pinning a medal on me instead of having me on the carpet.”

  “But you didn’t succeed. Go on with your wild story about a bank robber named Hugh Allerdice.”

  “Tim and I went through back issues of the paper and found the whole story.”

  Shayne went back to the time of the payroll theft and related the sequence of events leading up to the automobile tragedy while Allerdice was being taken to prison.

  “So Tim and I hurried to the morgue to see if the woman has had a recent appendectomy. She has. Not positive identification, but a pretty good lead. What the devil did you mean, Will, by saying you wanted Lucy to come down and see if she was Arlene Bristow? What gave you that idea?”

  “Arlene Bristow is missing from her home. Supposed to have left for Miami a couple days ago under somewhat mysterious circumstances. With her brother dead here, I naturally wondered if it was she in the luggage compartment of the sedan. Particularly when Pete Fairwell told me about the bomb he fixed for you, and I tied you to the sedan, also.”

  “Arlene in Miami!” exclaimed Shayne. “Lucy must have learned that after we left her somehow. And that’s what took her down to the morgue. I wondered why the devil—”

  “From what you said there, I gathered you thought Lucy was the woman whom the man recognized as he came out, and who took her away with him. Some man named Jenkins from Twelfth Street, who was afraid she was his daughter. Could he be Arlene’s father?”

  “Nuts! He’s the murderer, of course. The man who was driving the sedan. He recognized Lucy at the morgue, caught her by surprise, and hurried her out before she could protest. His Miami street address was the giveaway, Will. No one in Miami lives on plain Twelfth Street. It’s either Northwest or Northeast, Southwest or Southeast. That mistake proves him a stranger.”

  “Why would the murderer go down to try and identify the body?” argued Gentry. “He certainly knew who she was.”