The Private Practice of Michael Shayne (9 page)

He looked up, and a delighted grin broke over his elongated face as Shayne drew up a chair and sat down.

“Hi there, Shamus,” Timothy said heartily. “Committed any murders since I saw you last?”

“No murders,” Shayne had to admit. He lit a cigarette. “Anything new on the Grange killing?”

“Not a damned thing. Petey Painter is running around hunting clues like a bantam with his neck wrung. I don’t think he’s looking very hard because he’s afraid he might turn up something that would point away from you.” Rourke’s wide grin moved his ears a trifle.

Shayne let out smoke to becloud the atmosphere further.

“He’s always picking a victim and trying to fit the crime on him. What sort of dope do you fellows have on Harry Grange, Tim?”

“Grange? Not much except the playboy angle. Wealthy socialite wintering at the beach.”

Shayne said drily, “Any fourflusher who can pay the tariff at a beach hotel is a playboy to you birds. What do you know about Elliot Thomas?”

“Now it’s Thomas, eh? What are you fishing for, Mike?”

“Damned if I know, Tim,” Shayne responded truthfully. “What am I going to catch?”

“I don’t know much about Grange, but Elliot Thomas isn’t any fourflusher. Not with a hundred-and-twenty-foot yacht riding in the bay, and running a string of bangtails at Hialeah. Those diversions spell ready money, my boy.”

“I didn’t know he raced horses.”

“Well, I’ll be damned! So, there are some things you don’t know?” Timothy Rourke stared at the detective in pretended amazement.

“What’s his stable?” Shayne asked without rancor.

“Um-m. I think he calls it the Masiot Stables. Last three letters of both names in reverse. He’s got old Jake Kilgore training for him. Quite a track character, old Jake is. I ran into him in Hialeah at a beer joint, drinking with Chuck Evans last week. The old boy was half-seas under and shooting off about a winner he had coming up.”

“That so? You don’t remember the name of the horse?”

“No. I bought the hot-bloods my last bale of hay years ago—betting on straight tips from the trainers.”

Shayne got up, letting smoke curl up past narrowed eyes.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Chuck lately?”

He spoke with offhand disinterest, but Tim Rourke knew him of old.

“What’s up, Mike?” he demanded. “You promised to let me in on anything when it breaks.”

“I will,” Shayne promised, “when it breaks.”

He sauntered out to his car and drove to police headquarters.

Will Gentry was out to lunch, and he left Marsha Marco’s handkerchief on Gentry’s desk with a note asking to have it compared with the one he had left to be analyzed that morning.

Arriving at his hotel, Shayne got the pistol he had taken from Marsha’s room and slid it into his hip pocket. He went in through the lobby and learned there had been no calls, went up to his apartment where he locked the door and settled in a chair before the center table. He took out both .32’s and laid them side by side: his pistol, and the one he had brought from Marsha Marco’s room.

He poured a drink and studied the two automatics. They were of the same manufacture, identical except for different serial numbers and the nick in the butt of his.

He released the magazine in the Marco gun and found it fully loaded. Picking up his own pistol he worked with the jammed carriage for a moment, exerting his strength to force it open, and turning it in his hands to let the unfired bullet which had caused the jam drop out on the table.

He then released the magazine catch, pulled it out, and saw by the holes through the magazine that it held six cartridges. Adding the one that had been jammed made seven, showing that only one shot had been fired from a full magazine.

He laid both pistols down and took another drink, stared broodingly at them for a long time.

He aroused himself and slid the carriage on his pistol back to the mark where it permits the barrel of a Colt automatic to turn and be released, pulled the fouled barrel free from the other two parts.

Carrying it to a window, he carefully studied the barrel in the sunlight until he had assured himself there was no serial number or identifying mark stamped on the barrel itself.

Back at the table, he laid the folded barrel of his gun aside, and repeated the process with the Marco pistol.

Again he went to the window with the other barrel, to assure himself there was no possibility of proving which barrel belonged in which pistol.

Carefully polishing his fingerprints from the clean Marco barrel, he inserted it in his pistol and locked the carriage on it. Ejecting one cartridge from the full Marco magazine, he put that and the other loose bullet in his magazine and slid it back into his pistol.

Laying that gun aside, he put the dirty barrel of his pistol into the Marco framework after cleaning it of fingerprints, polished the magazine with its one missing cartridge and put it back where it belonged. He then went over the entire Marco pistol with cleaning fluid, polishing it off with an oiled rag, and dropped it into the drawer.

Putting his pistol in beside the other, he looked upon his work with satisfaction. His own weapon was clean and fully loaded. The Marco pistol had a barrel which had been recently fouled by one shot, and one bullet was missing from the magazine.

He was closing the drawer when he remembered a small detail he had overlooked. Every time an automatic is fired, it ejects the empty shell and throws another one into the firing chamber under the hammer. Leaving the Marco pistol this way, with the chamber empty and seven cartridges in the magazine, would be immediate proof to anyone familiar with firearms that it had been tampered with after being fired.

Fervently thanking the gods who control the destinies of private detectives, Shayne got out a handkerchief and lifted the pistol out, pulled the carriage back and threw a loaded shell under the hammer. He pushed the safety on, but left it cocked, as it should properly be.

He closed the drawer on the two weapons and took another short drink, then went into his bedroom and pulled the shades, slid out of his jacket and stretched out full length on the bed.

In five minutes he was asleep.

The telephone wakened him late in the afternoon.

John Marco was on the wire. He sounded worn out, harassed.

“I’ve been thinking it over, Shayne. I’m ready to do business with you. How soon can you have Marsha back home?”

“Wait a minute,” Shayne protested. “You sound as though I had the girl on tap. I’m not holding her for ransom. I’m not even sure I can find her. I simply offered to go to work on the case if you want to retain me.”

There was a long pause.

Then, Marco said harshly, “All right. Put it that way. How much is it going to cost?”

“More than your daughter’s worth,” Shayne assured him cheerfully. “Ten grand should be about right.”

“Ten grand? My God, Shayne—” Marco’s voice trailed off into shocked silence.

Shayne held the receiver to his ear and listened with a sardonic gleam of amusement in his eyes.

“All right.” Marco sounded utterly defeated. “C.O.D., eh?”

“Listen,” Shayne warned sharply. “You’re trying to make this sound too damned much like extortion. Here’s the way it’ll be handled—or not at all. Bring a certified check or the cash over to the First National Bank first thing in the morning and put it in escrow for me. Leave a signed affidavit that the money is payment for services rendered in returning your daughter who left home voluntarily—with definite instructions that it shall be paid over to me when the girl is safely back. That’s the only way I’ll lift my finger to find her.”

“You’re getting awful legal all at once,” Marco complained.

“I trust you just as far as I could throw a bull by the tail,” Shayne told him pleasantly.

There was another long pause, and Shayne wondered who Marco was consulting with. Painter, maybe.

Finally, the gambler asked, “Will you personally guarantee her safety until I can get the money in the bank?”

“How the hell can I do that? I don’t know where she is. I’m not even going to start looking until you put that money in escrow.”

He hung up the receiver and went to the table to pour himself a drink. Sipping it, he spread out the sheet of paper bearing the eleven questions he had written out that morning. His gaze slid down the list morosely until it reached number eleven. His eyes brightened, and he ran a line through it with a pencil. After all, the most important question was answered.

He finished his drink and went out to the kitchen where he made a pot of coffee and a huge stack of whole-wheat toast, scrambled five eggs, and sat down at the kitchenette table to eat with the gusto of a man virtuously hungered by his labors.

He had finished every crumb and was carrying a final cup of coffee into the living-room when his telephone rang again.

It was Will Gentry.

“Nothing on the accident car or victims, Mike. I’ve wired the license number of the car to New York, and sent prints to Washington. No identification numbers on the guns. It’s a cinch they either haven’t been in Miami long, or have been laying low.”

“How about the handkerchief?”

“Nothing stirring on the one you gave me this morning. Our chemist put it through every known test and some that he made up as he went along. It’s nothing but a handkerchief. The one you left on my desk at noon is identical, though.”

“Keep a tight hold on them,” Shayne cautioned. “They’re exhibits A and B in the Grange murder case. The bodies you dug out of the canal are exhibits C and D.”

He hung up and slouched over to the light switch to dispel the gloom of evening, went back to the table and distastefully drank half his cup of cool coffee.

He sat there sprawled out in a chair for a long time, mulling over and over the meager facts in his possession. A lot of little things. Unimportant items. Each one insignificant in itself.

Tied together, they had to mean something. As yet, he hadn’t found anything to tie them with. The most important findings did not lift his spirits any.

His gun—evidently stolen by his best friend, Larry Kincaid. The gun which had almost certainly killed Harry Grange.

He welcomed the ringing of the telephone. It was Tony, very excited.

“Say, Mike, you ast me this mornin’ did I know where Chuck Evans hangs out.”

“Yeh. He’s moved from Mamma Julie’s.”

“I can tell you where his dame is right now if you wanta know.”

“Belle? You bet I want to know, Tony.”

“She’s stewed to the gills out in a little dump on Seventy-ninth Street. The Round-up. It’s a lousy joint—”

“I know where it is,” Shayne interrupted. “How do you know she’s there?”

“I just met a lug that come from there. He says she’s singin’ the blues about Chuck takin’ a runout powder. She gets on a tear ever so often and—”

“I’ll go see if I can locate her.”

“Listen, boss. You better let me go along. Bernie’s gang hangs out there mostly, and you know how Bernie don’t love you none.”

“That hophead?” Shayne laughed scornfully. “Who told you I was slipping?”

He hung up and got his coat and jacket, went down to the lobby and said to the night clerk, “I’m going out for a little while. If my sister should come by—just let her in my room and ask her to wait.”

“Which one of your sisters?”

“Any of them,” Shayne said blithely.

He went out to his car and drove north toward Seventy-ninth Street.

WEST ON Seventy-ninth Street, past the Little River business section, stores and residences gave way to small truck farms and long, sheltered stands with artistic arrangements of golden citrus fruits. Here, stretches of native pines and thickets of semitropical shrubs have not been reached by the long arm of the ever-developing city, though bisected by paved crossroads leading to the airport, Opa-Locka, Hialeah, and other outlying developments which sprang into being during the hectic boom days.

The moon had not yet risen, and stars studded the dark velvety blue of the tropical sky, casting an illusively perceptible sheen through the still night. Yet there was that peculiar quality of humid coolness characteristic of a spring night in Miami.

Driving slowly, relaxed behind the wheel of his roadster, Michael Shayne drew long drafts of the heavy-bodied air into his lungs.

It seemed to him that time stood still as he approached the Round-up. He shook his head irritably. It was a silly thought, of course. A poor way of expressing what was in his mind.

Yet, the illusion persisted. It was a night for illusions—as are so many nights in Miami. Shayne caught himself wondering if the night air actually had some toxic effect upon otherwise sane men. Possibly that was what poets meant when they wrote about the lotus flower of the tropics. The poisonous conviction that only the present is important. This hour—this moment—time standing still.

He wrenched his thoughts back to reality when a cluster of lights showed a low building set back from the thoroughfare in a clearing hewed out of the jungle growth. Dim colored lights were strung between tall coco palms, and faint yellow half-moons showed through shuttered windows.

After parking his car near the street, he got out and picked his way across embedded coral rocks toward the low building with its furtively darkened doors and windows.

He knew little about the Round-up except by reputation. Obviously it was one of the many cheap dives that open up on the outskirts of Miami at the beginning of each winter season, favored by the scum of the winter visitors, and inquisitive yokels who can’t afford the cover charge at glamour joints on the beach and in downtown Miami.

A head-high screen of laced bamboo separated the darkened entry from the purplish gloom of the interior. A fat-bottomed boy with rosy cheeks and penciled eyebrows leaned on a pine counter just inside the door. He screwed his face up into a smirk that was intended to suggest unmentionable depravities, and said in a falsetto voice, “Check your hat, mister.”

Shayne brushed past him without replying.

A roped-off square in the center of the large room was surrounded by tables. In the dingy half-light provided by dim ceiling globes, half a dozen of the tables could be seen to have occupants. Along three of the walls, intimate booths were partitioned off by shoulder-high enclosures of unpainted wall board, with curtains suspended on steel wire.