Death Has Three Lives

by Brett Halliday

  There wasn’t any really good reason why Joseph Agnew should have paid attention to the parked car. It might have been the automobile of any householder along the street who’d come home late and hadn’t bothered to garage his car.

  But Joe’s sixth sense was a little lacking when he failed to note that the parked car pulled away from the curb without headlights and swung in behind him as he turned the first corner onto a northbound avenue; and that before he had traveled two blocks on the avenue, twin headlights of a car turned the same corner behind him and continued to follow along a few blocks behind while he hurried to keep the rendezvous.

  But he was too full of thinking about how he had finally had something interesting to tell Irma, and how he’d added on a few touches to make it sound like he’d been smarter than the police.

  She’d listened to the embellished story with openmouthed admiration, too, making him out to be some kind of hero for reporting it to the police and all, and even wondering if there mightn’t be a reward for him if the girl killer was caught as a result of his quick thinking.

  He’d discouraged that idea, but now he remembered the interview with the skinny reporter from the Daily News and the famous detective, and how the reporter had promised to write up a story all about him maybe put in, too, how he was on call at home at night if anybody needed a cab special. If he did put that in the paper, Joe Agnew reasoned happily, thousands of people would read about it and as a consequence there might be a lot more calls like this one tonight in the future.

  Maybe he’d even be able to build up a sort of special clientele in time, so he could really be in business on his own and not have to split with a company.

  By that time he was on Biscayne Boulevard speeding smoothly northward with no traffic to think about, so he daydreamed happily on, the one-man taxi business mushrooming to a volume that required him to put on a whole fleet of cabs, and with very special and trustworthy drivers, of course. Fellows like him who had a sort of sixth sense about certain things you might say, because he would build the reputation of his company on that sort of special service and he’d take mighty good care that any driver working for him was absolutely discreet and could be trusted to do a job like this one tonight and never open his mouth about it. No, sir. Not even if the lady’s husband was to have her trailed and come around and offer to pay him a lot of money to tell where his wife had been before he brought her home.

  Now, that was a good thought. It had never happened just that way in the past, but maybe the talk with Michael Shayne had brought it to his mind and made him see just what might happen.

  Suppose a private detective like Mr. Shayne, now, was to be hired by the husband of the lady he was going to pick up on 148th Street. Suppose, now, that a private eye like Shayne was to be hanging around her house at two a.m. to see who she came home with.

  And he drove up with her in his cab. He. Joe Agnew. He would drop her there and then drive on. And it wasn’t difficult to envision another car following him, forcing him into the curb a short distance from her house, a man like Shayne getting out and talking tough out of the side of his mouth while he demanded to know where the woman had been that evening.

  Well, not a private eye like Michael Shayne, Joe Agnew conceded to himself. A man like that had more important cases than just checking on an erring wife. Seemed like he’d read that Shayne didn’t take cases like that.

  All right. Some other private eye. One not so famous who did take cases like that.

  So—all right. Some other detective pushing him over to the side of the road, getting out of his car, tough and mean, talking out of the side of his mouth. First threatening and then, realizing that threats would get him nowhere, cajoling and offering money (huge sums of money) for the information he wanted.

  And Joe Agnew spitting (figuratively) in his face. Joe Agnew explaining concisely that he didn’t run that sort of business. That a client of his who called him out on a special run in the middle of the night expected and deserved confidential treatment. He saw his upper lip curling contemptuously as he explained this to the importunate private eye. No threats, no amount of money, would induce him to divulge a confidence.

  And that, by God, was the basis on which he would build the future of the Joe Agnew Cab Company. Complete and utter confidence in any driver furnished by Joe Agnew. The men would be bonded, by God! That was it. He would advertise that. Bonded not to talk under any circumstances.

  Our Lips Are Sealed.

  That was it! That was the ticket. Once get that reputation, and your fortune would be made. Like tonight. Like this man tonight who had telephoned him and waked him up and got him out of bed instead of phoning one of the regular cab companies.

  Why?

  Because someone had told him Joe Agnew could be trusted. Someone had told him Joe’s Lips Were Sealed. That no threats of physical violence, no offers of huge sums of money would ever induce him to violate a confidence.

  Nossir. He had a sort of sixth sense about that. He knew when it was important to keep a tight mouth and when it didn’t matter. That’s why he was out here tonight, by God. That’s why he was slowing, now, on the Boulevard for the turn-off on 148th. Why his cab was doing the job instead of someone else.

  It was a small thing, Joe Agnew told himself judicially as he negotiated the turn off the Boulevard. This thing tonight was just a straw in the wind. But a mighty important straw. No one knew what might develop from it. If he handled this delicate situation right—anything might happen.

  He was so absorbed in his own daydreaming that he paid no heed whatsoever to the car that had been discreetly and efficiently behind him ever since he pulled away from the driveway of his house. It slowed down to a snail’s pace behind him as he turned to the right, and his eyes were only concerned with looking ahead for a glimpse of the woman whom he was to gallantly pick up and escort home so her reputation might not be smirched.

  He saw the car parked beside the road a short distance ahead, and the man standing beside it. He slowed and pulled up behind, discreetly cutting his headlights as he did so. Let her get in the back seat without being seen by him. That way, he could honestly deny in the future that he recognized her as the woman he had picked up that night.

  Things like that were important, Joe Agnew thought smugly. A man like this, now, would recognize the delicate perceptions of the driver of this particular taxi.

  He was walking toward Joe’s taxi in the moonlight. He did not appear a particularly romantic figure in his gray suit with a gray felt hat pulled rather low over his eyes. Sort of middle-aged and heavy-built, he looked to Joe.

  But that was the kind, he told himself. That was the kind that got into troubles with a married woman and needed Joe’s help to get out of it.

  He didn’t see any woman, though. Just the parked car and the man walking toward him. Maybe she was hiding out until the man fixed things up. Maybe, by God, she was lying in the back seat of the parked car with her dress disarranged and—

  The man in the gray suit stopped beside Joe momentarily and asked in the same voice Joe had heard over the telephone, “You’re Joe Agnew?”

  “That’s right, mister.” Joe tried to make his voice light, but not too light; confidential, but not too confidential. “You wanted me to pick up a fare here?”

  The man just grunted. He reached out his hand to open the back door of the cab.

  At that exact moment the car that had followed Joe all the way out the Boulevard turned into the side street fast, switching on a powerful searchlight on the turn so the cab and the man were suddenly bathed in bright light.

  The man in the gray suit whirled away from the cab and dived for the fringe of underbrush beside the road.

  Two things happened at the same moment. The oncoming car jerked to a stop on screeching tires, a man tumbled out brandishing a revolver, shouted, “Halt,” and began firing at the man pinpointed by the searchlight.

  At the same moment, the rear door of Joe Agnew’s cab cam
e open from the inside and Michael Shayne’s rangy figure catapulted out from the cramped space in which he had been hiding since picking the lock of Joe Agnew’s garage shortly after two o’clock.

  He had a gun in his hand, and he was also shouting, but his voice was directed at the man from the other car, yelling for him to hold his fire, for God’s sake.

  Shayne was too late. In the glare of the searchlight mounted on the second car, their quarry was seen to stagger just on the fringe of the underbrush, plunge forward on his belly, and wriggle convulsively a couple of times.

  He had stopped wriggling by the time Michael Shayne reached his body. The redhead straightened to glare at the two police officers who came trotting up with drawn guns.

  “Goddamn you both to hell for blundering idiots!” Shayne shouted hoarsely. “I’d have had him alive in one more second. Now he’s dead. Of all the fast-triggered bastards—”

  “Shut up, Mike!” One of the officers was the same Sergeant Loftus whom Shayne had encountered earlier in front of Lucy’s apartment. “I ordered Powell to shoot. How the hell were we to know you were in the cab waiting to grab him? If we’d known you were there, we’d let you have him. But when we saw him escaping—”

  He shrugged and knelt beside the body, rolled him over on his back, and nodded somberly as he put his head down to listen for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

  “Dead, all right,” he announced unnecessarily, since half the side of the man’s head was torn off with a soft-nosed slug. “Know who he is, Mike?”

  “Never saw him before.” Shayne was breathing heavily, knotting big fists in an effort to control his futile anger at this outcome of his carefully prepared trap. “I think, though,” he went on harshly, “you’ll find out he’s one of your pals from New Orleans. Detective First Class Mark Switzer, to be exact.”

  “Yeh,” muttered Loftus defensively, spreading back the gray coat to go through the dead man’s pockets. “Chief said something about a New Orleans cop maybe going bad.”

  He rocked back on his heels with a wallet, flipped it open and nodded soberly. “Here’s his identification. God knows, he deserved killing, Mike. When a cop does turn wrong—”

  “Sure, he deserved it,” snarled Shayne with lips drawn back from his teeth. “But he’s got Lucy Hamilton somewhere, goddamn it! And probably another innocent girl he kidnaped in New Orleans and brought here. All I wanted, for God’s sake, was two minutes alone with him. That’s why I didn’t tell you cops what I was planning. I knew you’d interfere. And now you did interfere. And now he’ll never talk to me or anybody else.”

  “Tough about Lucy,” said Sergeant Loftus gruffly. He began to explore the other pockets in the dead man’s gray suit, came up with a folded sheet of paper which he opened and read carefully in the glare of the searchlight.

  He looked up at Shayne with a troubled expression as he finished reading it, hesitated momentarily, then passed it to the angry detective, saying, “Guess this is meant for you.”

  Shayne took it and read:

  Dearest Boss:

  I am sick terribly at heart. I have been a fool, and so—this is the last love letter I shall ever write to you, my sweet.

  This is just exactly what happened. I made a fool of myself by going to the morgue. The man I met on the Causeway was there and has me prisoner with Arlene Bristow. We are bound with ropes in a cold damp cellar that is practically airtight, in an unoccupied house where we will suffocate or die of slow starvation unless you or someone else comes to our rescue.

  Please, my dearest Mike, don’t do anything to hurt him or we will die. I don’t know where you will find the seventy thousand dollars in cash money that he thinks you have, but unless you do get the mazuma for him we shall both soon be dead.

  As you read these lines, please, oh please, realize, Mike dearest, that I shall love you even to the very end.

  Lucy

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was a depleted bottle of cognac on the table in the middle of Michael Shayne’s living-room, and an almost full glass of ice water beside it. There was also an uncorked bottle-of bourbon and a highball glass with half-melted ice cubes and a watery brownish mixture in the bottom. There was an uncapped beer bottle with a finger or so of fairly flat beer in the bottom.

  And there was the money!

  Stacks and stacks of new, crisp bills, neatly arranged in piles all over the surface of the table. And a discarded money belt of dark-brown leather lying on the floor with all its compartments open and empty.

  And beside the cognac bottle lay the crumpled sheet of paper on which Lucy Hamilton had written her message to Michael Shayne under the direction of the man who was now dead.

  Chief of Police Will Gentry and Daily News reporter, Timothy Rourke sat at the table. Rourke’s thin fingers were counting the crisp bills in their stacks of various denominations. Will Gentry was settled solidly in a comfortable chair close to the beer bottle. His glance kept going back casually to the stacks of bills on the table and the counting job that Tim Rourke was doing, but mostly his attention was centered on the restless figure of Michael Shayne, pacing back and forth the length of the room monotonously with a glass of cognac in his hand from which he took a sip every now and then.

  For perhaps the tenth time during the half hour that the three of them had been together there, Chief Gentry reminded the redhead patiently, “You can’t blame Loftus and Powell for Switzer getting killed, Mike. I’m not asking you to blame yourself, but if you had trusted us a little more they would have been glad to hold back and let you grab him alive. They didn’t know you were there, damn it.”

  “And I didn’t guess they would be there, either,” countered Shayne, also for perhaps the tenth time. “From my experience with the way the average cop’s mind works, I had no reason to believe any of you would realize that Switzer might hear the broadcast and come to the conclusion that Bristow had ditched the money behind the cushion of Agnew’s taxi after he was wounded and being driven to Lucy’s place.”

  “Any sensible person who heard the broadcast,” said Gentry, “would immediately think of that as a possibility. The way Bristow made a point of getting Agnew’s name and number. Why else would he do that except that he planned to hide the money there and hoped to recover it later? Then when you and Tim put in that stuff about Agnew being on call any time at night for special trips in his cab, it was a definite invitation for Switzer to use that method of getting at the money.”

  “All right,” agreed Shayne savagely. “So, you’ve made the point that you cops were as smart as I. And you sent Loftus and his sidekick out to see if Agnew did get a call. There was still no reason on God’s earth why they had to blow the top of his head off before he could be forced to tell us where he had Lucy and the Bristow girl hidden out.” He stopped beside the table and put his forefinger down hard on the message Lucy had written to him. “Read that again, goddamn it! Right at this moment, two innocent girls may be breathing their last breath in the cellar of a deserted house. Only one man in the world could have saved them, and one of your trigger-happy goons kills him before he can be made to talk.”

  “I know how you feel about Lucy, Mike,” Gentry tried to soothe him. “But you’ve got to take it easy. She’ll be rescued all right. You know what we’re doing. Right now I’ve got every available man on the force working over every vacated house in Miami that we have listed in our files. And most people do list them with us if they go away for a time, as you know. Tomorrow morning both daily papers will carry a headline story about Lucy and Arlene, urging every resident of Miami to communicate with us at once the location of any vacant house in their vicinity. Take it easy, damn it. We’ll have Lucy and the Bristow girl safe and sound tomorrow afternoon.”

  “If they’re still alive by that time,” said Shayne. He picked up Lucy’s note and read from it: “‘We are bound with ropes in a damp cellar that is practically airtight in an empty house where we will suffocate or die of slow starvation unle
ss you or someone else comes to our rescue.’”

  “An airtight cellar, Will. What makes you think they’ll last until tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Take it easy, Mike.” Timothy Rourke finished his counting of the bills taken from the money belt Shayne had found hidden behind the rear-seat cushion in Joe Agnew’s taxi. “Roughly seventy-four thousand, I make it. You know no basement is actually airtight, Mike. There’s always enough air seeping in to keep a person alive. If you’re so eager to find them,” the reporter went on caustically, “why don’t you develop and expatiate on the theory you had in the beginning? That Lucy had somehow incorporated a secret message in code in this note to you?”

  Shayne glared at him angrily and then down at the note in his hand. “I know it’s here, damn it. It’s here in front of our eyes, and we’re all missing it. You both laughed at me when I tried to point out certain things to you. ‘Dearest Boss’” he read aloud harshly. “Lucy never called me either ‘Dearest’ or ‘Boss’ in her life. That’s phony. And: ‘This is the last love letter I shall ever write to you—’ I told you in the beginning, damn it, that Lucy never has written me a love letter before. So, how could this be the last one? She’s trying to tell me something in that phrase! She knows that I know, this can’t be her last love letter since she never wrote me another. So what does it mean?”

  “And Will and I both pointed out,” said Rourke soothingly, “that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Take the ‘Boss,’ for instance. Switzer was probably standing over her with a gun when he forced her to write the note. He’d probably say to her: ‘Write your boss a letter telling him just how things are.’ So she addressed it ‘Dearest Boss.’”

  “I still think she would have normally written ‘Dear Mike,’” said Shayne stubbornly. “How do you explain that this is her ‘last love letter’ when she never wrote me a love letter before?”

  “It’s a question of semantics,” said Rourke easily. “She thinks this may be her last letter to you. She’s scared to death as she writes it, and wants to make it a love letter. You know the gal has been in love with you for years, even if she’s never said so. This is her last chance. If this is a love letter, and if it’s her last letter also, it has to be her last love letter. I simply think you’re driving yourself crazy trying to read something into it that isn’t there, Mike. Consider the circumstances. This was written hurriedly and under the greatest stress and almost surely under Switzer’s eye. She had no chance to work out an elaborate code such as you hypothecate. You say yourself that Lucy knew nothing of formal codes. Seems to me it would take the greatest expert on earth to incorporate a code in a letter like this under the circumstances.”