Shoot to Kill (5 page)

SERGEANT GRIGGS WAS A SHORT SQUARELY-BUILT MAN in plain clothes, but his driver who entered the doorway behind him was in uniform. Griggs had an intelligent, weathered face, shrewdly cold eyes, and a completely bald head. He pivoted slowly, just inside the room, scrutinizing each man carefully, and not a flicker of surprise showed on his impassive features as his gaze slid over the detective and the reporter.

With no indication of pleasure, he said, “Well, well. Miami’s gift to television and the demon reporter of the daily press. Just what goes on here?”

“There’s been a shooting, Sarge. Upstairs,” said Powers eagerly. “These fellows claim that one sitting down there did it.”

Griggs’ gaze rested briefly on the seated Ralph Larson, and then shifted back to Shayne. “Who’s the stiff?”

“Wesley Ames,” Shayne told him.

“They tell me your secretary called in the first alarm. What do you do… get printed announcements when a murder’s about to be committed?”

“Not quite. This time it just happens…”

“Skip it for now. Let’s go upstairs and get the picture straight. You may as well tag along, Rourke, so we can get full newspaper coverage. That way, you can write the facts for once without having recourse to your imagination. You stay here with Powers,” he directed his driver. “Send the other boys on up as soon as they get here.”

He went toward the stairs and Shayne and Rourke followed him with their glasses in their hands.

Griffin was standing importantly at attention outside the open door of the study. He said, “Not much work for you on this one, Sarge. Here’s the murder weapon.” He held out Larson’s .38. “I took it off that big redhead while it was still hot and smoking.”

Griggs nodded and walked into the room past him, disregarding the gun. “You hang onto it, Griff. Maybe you’ll get a citation for discovering important evidence.” He stopped and surveyed the sagging door with its DO NOT DISTURB sign still hanging from the knob, then turned his attention to the inner door jamb where a heavy brass socket for a bolt still dangled from one half-withdrawn screw.

“Looks like we not only got murder, but a breaking and entering rap to boot,” he observed sourly.

“I’m guilty, Sergeant,” Shayne admitted cheerfully. “It seemed like a good idea with shooting going on inside.”

Griggs shrugged and walked on into the room, coming to a halt beside the dead man behind the desk and looking down at him fixedly. “He looks dead enough,” he observed without emotion.

Wesley Ames did look very dead. In life he had had sharp features, and in death they were tight and pinched. He wore a white shirt without a tie and unbuttoned at the throat, and a heavy, fancy waistcoat of garish red that was tightly buttoned up the front with a row of large silver buttons. The center button was missing. In its place was a round hole where the .38 bullet had entered his body. Around the hole was a wide stain of darker red. Slumped sideways out of the chair as he was, the white leather-cushioned back of the arm-chair showed another round hole where the bullet had come out of the body and entered the chair. Griggs said, “Right through the heart, it looks like. He probably died instantly.”

Shayne said, “He was like that when Tim and I busted in not more than sixty seconds after the shot was fired, and he wasn’t moving a muscle. I guess he didn’t know what hit him.”

Griggs straightened up and looked around the room alertly. “This the only entrance?”

“I don’t know anything about the set-up and I haven’t asked any questions. I’m just an innocent bystander on this one, Sergeant.” Shayne looked around the room with Griggs. “That door in the back must open out onto a balcony.”

There was a door at the rear of the room on the left that had a wooden bottom and the top half of glass. To the right of the door there were two wide windows, evenly spaced, and both of them were tightly closed and latched on the inside.

Griggs and Shayne walked over to the door together while Rourke watched and listened alertly and made an occasional note. The door had a heavy brass bolt on the inside similar to the one that was fitted to the other door. The bolt was securely pushed inside the hasp. There was an outside light turned on over the door, and peering through the glass they could see a narrow balcony with a wrought iron railing, and a stone stairway leading down to the ground at the side of the house. It was pseudo-Moorish architecture, such as had been much the vogue in Miami in the early twenties.

Sergeant Griggs turned back and investigated the locked windows and muttered, “Everything locked up tight as a drum, with a don’t disturb sign on his door.” He went back and glanced at the flat top of the big desk. Wesley Ames had evidently been a very orderly man. There was no ashtray, no evidence that he had smoked. A chromium electric coffee percolator stood on a round, heat-resistant pad near the right side of the desk. It had an electric cord plugged into the base that dropped off the side of the desk and was plugged into an extension cord leading to a wall socket. It was the automatic type with a built-in thermostat that shuts it off when it has finished percolating and keeps the contents just below boiling for as long as it is left connected.

Beside the pot was a coffee cup in a saucer, and it contained a slight residue of very black coffee. At the left of the arm-chair in which Ames had been sitting were two wire mail baskets. The one on the left held a dozen or more unopened letters addressed to Wesley Ames. Between the two baskets was a stack of neatly arranged empty envelopes, each one carefully slit open the long way, and the other basket held a pile of letters which had evidently been removed from the empty envelopes.

Directly in front of the dead man was a very modern and very expensive Dictaphone with a gleaming chromium microphone set upright in a holder placed close to the edge of the desk so it could take dictation easily from a person seated behind the desk.

Nothing was out of place and nothing was disarranged in the smallest degree. It gave the impression that the dead man was methodical and orderly, who believed in a place for everything and everything in its place.

Their silent survey of the death scene was interrupted by Griffin announcing loudly from the hall, “Here come your smart laboratory boys now, Sergeant. Not much for them to do this time, I guess. You want me to hold ’em outside here ’til you’re through?”

Sergeant Griggs said, “I’m through in here.” He went to the door with Rourke and Shayne behind him and met the technicians of his squad coming down the hall. There was a cameraman with his tripod, the fingerprint expert with his kit, a man carrying a powerful portable vacuum cleaner, with an assistant M. E. bringing up the rear. Griggs waved them into the room saying pleasantly, “Give it a fast once-over, boys. Pictures and prints for the record. And you tell us when and how he died, eh, Doc? Watch it, because this time we’ve got a pretty good check on your guesswork.”

He waited until they passed him into the room and then went toward the head of the stairway, saying over his shoulder to Shayne and Rourke, “Come on with me and let’s get some statements on this thing. Then we can all go home and to bed… or wherever you two bachelors are going to bed these days.”

Downstairs, Ralph Larson was still seated on the settee where they had left him, bent forward with elbows resting on his knees and face buried in his hands.

The attorney from New York was slumped back comfortably in an overstuffed chair with a fat cigar clenched between his teeth and the remnants of what Shayne suspected was his second drink in his hand, and the brother of the murdered man sat bolt upright in a straight chair near the door, nervously smoking a cigarette in a long holder and darting worried glances around the room while he obviously waited for something to happen which he also obviously hoped wouldn’t happen.

Sergeant Griggs stopped at the foot of the stairs and said bluntly, “I don’t know who’s who around here. Can anyone suggest a private room I can use to talk to some of you people?”

Mark Ames came to his feet lithely. He said, “I’m Wesley Ames’ brother, Sergeant. This is Mr. Sutter from New York, an overnight guest. Both Mrs. Ames and Wesley’s secretary are out somewhere. The secretary, Victor Conroy, has an office fitted up over here through these double doors in what used to be the library. Is that what you want?”

“Do you live here with your brother?” asked Griggs.

“Certainly not.” Mark Ames looked appalled at the idea. “He hated my guts… and I his,” he went on frankly. “Tonight is the first time I’ve darkened his doors for months.”

“All right,” snapped Griggs. “I’ll get to you in a minute, Mr. Ames.”

He strode toward the double doors indicated by Mark, calling over his shoulder to his uniformed chauffeur who stood by the front door with Powers, “Come in, Jimmy, with your notebook. I’ll want some shorthand.”

He opened one of the doors leading off the living room and reached inside to switch on an overhead light. Then he turned back and said gruffly, “You first, I guess, Mike. And you come in, too, Tim. We’ll get this over as fast as we can.”

Two walls of the library were still lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books, the third wall had a row of businesslike filing cases against it. There was a long refectory table along one side that was littered with newspapers and typed manuscripts and manila folders and with half a dozen leather-seated chairs lined up against the wall behind it, and there was a large typewriter desk in the opposite corner with an electric typewriter and a Dictaphone playback machine on a stand beside it. Griggs chose the only comfortable chair in the room, upholstered in green leather, and motioned the patrolman toward the desk. There were two straight chairs on either side of Griggs, and Shayne and Rourke sat in those.

“Now then,” said Griggs. “Michael Shayne being interviewed, Jimmy. Tell us what you’re doing here and what you know about this, Mike. Just the simple facts.”

Shayne started with Rourke’s appeal to him on Larson’s behalf that afternoon, said he’d gone out to see Dorothy Larson and got her agreement to break off her affair with Ames, and mentioned dinner at Lucio’s.

“We got to my place a little before eight. Tim and Lucy Hamilton and I. The phone rang and it was Dorothy Larson saying her husband had a gun and was on his way to kill Wesley Ames. I hung up and told Lucy to call the cops, and Tim and I came out as fast as we could. Not more than ten minutes, I guess, but Larson’s car was already parked in front behind that black Cadillac. We saw the front door open and him run in… or somebody run in… just as we pulled up. The door slammed shut and there was a shout from inside and then a sort of crash. We ran in and saw Mark Ames lying on his back on the floor and a silver tray with broken glass near the stairs. A man wearing a white coat was just disappearing up the stairs shouting something in Spanish. We ran up, and Alfred… in the white coat… was pounding on that locked door with the Do Not Disturb sign on it.

“I jerked him back to take a crack at the door, but before I could hit it a gun was fired inside. I had to use my shoulder twice before that bolt gave. Ralph Larson was standing there with a smoking revolver in his hand. Wesley Ames was behind the desk as you saw him. Dead. At least he looked pretty dead to me. I took Ralph’s gun, but before I could check Ames your cops got here and Griffin took over. We all got out and Mr. Sutter was outside in the hall with the others… Mark Ames and Alfred. He said he’d been in his room when he heard the commotion. We all came downstairs and Alfred cleaned up the broken glass from his tray and brought us fresh drinks. That’s about it.”

Griggs glanced at Jimmy and got a nod from him. He said to Shayne, “Then it’s your testimony that Ralph Larson ran inside this house just ahead of you, knocked Mark Ames down and broke Alfred’s tray, ran upstairs and into Ames’ room where he bolted the door and shot him to death?”

Shayne said, “I assume that’s what happened. I wasn’t here and I haven’t stuck my nose into your case by asking any questions. All I know for certain is that Ralph Larson was inside that locked room with a smoking gun when I broke in. And that Ames was dead and Ralph
said
he’d killed him.”

“He admitted it, eh?”

“He boasted of it.”

Griggs turned to Rourke. “Anything to add to Mike’s story?”

“I can’t think of anything. That’s the way it was. But goddamn it, Sergeant, for the record I’d like to say that Ames deserved killing if any man ever did. He drove Ralph to it, and the kid was insane with jealousy. You heard him yourself, Mike. He said that Ames just sat there in his chair and laughed in his face when he said he was going to kill him. He was out of his mind when he did it. If there ever was a case of justifiable homicide…”

“All right, Rourke,” Griggs said impatiently. “We’re not trying the case here. Wait until you get in the witness chair. You two stick around until I see if any more questions come up. Send the brother in, huh? Mark Ames.”

Shayne got up hesitantly, “Do me a favor, Sergeant?”

“I don’t know, Mike. Will it cost me my arm?”

Shayne grinned, “Just let me sit back in one of those chairs behind the table out of the way and hear what these other people have to say.”

“What the hell for? It’s cut and dried, isn’t it? All we need to do is get the sequence of things straight.”

“I don’t know,” Shayne said slowly. “I guess I feel more or less responsible for that guy sitting out in the other room with the electric chair in front of him. If I’d paid more attention to Tim this afternoon this mightn’t have happened.”

“But you did pay attention to me, Mike. You went out and talked to Dorothy Larson as I asked.”

“But it wasn’t good enough,” Shayne reminded him grimly. “I should have talked to Ralph, too. Thrown him in jail, maybe. It sticks in my craw,” he went on explosively. “Our getting here just about one minute too late. If I’d got a little more speed out of that car of mine on the Boulevard…”

“If you’d gotten any more speed we’d probably both be dead along with Wesley Ames,” Rourke interrupted him.

“Anyhow let’s say I don’t like to walk out on something before it’s finished.” Shayne moved around the long table to an unobtrusive seat in the far corner.