Guilty as Hell

by Brett Halliday

  “Falling?” Shayne said.

  Hallam brushed his forehead. “No, he couldn’t have been falling. He was coming toward me, his arms out. But why was he there at the front of the blind? He hadn’t moved off the bench all morning. I need to sit down.” He took a step toward the blind. “No. Not in there.”

  Shayne summoned young Hallam with a movement of his head. “Take him to the lodge. I’ll wait for the sheriff.”

  “We’d been arguing,” Hallam said. “He was intense about it, as usual. Why couldn’t I just let it go? Once he got an idea in his head, you couldn’t get it out unless you used dynamite.” Forbes started to take his arm. He pulled away. “I’m all right. Bring my gun, Shayne.”

  “Yeah,” Shayne said, and watched them go off across the marsh toward the road.

  When they were out of sight, he stepped into the blind again and studied the body, checking the angle of the shot. The flies were already gathering. Shayne took off his canvas hunting vest and spread it over the bloody head.

  He returned outside and lit a cigarette. The tide was going. He heard a rustle of wings overhead and a shotgun banged in the last blind, off by itself a quarter mile to the south.

  Half an hour passed. Finally a car came down the gravel road, traveling very fast, and skidded to a stop. Three men got out. They were all heavily built, and at that distance they looked somewhat alike, but it was easy to see that the man in the middle was the sheriff.

  Shayne walked into a constrained silence in the lodge an hour later. It was a low, unpretentious building of split cypress logs, one large central room separating the kitchen from a bunkhouse. Shayne took a quick head count. Begley was still missing.

  The senior Hallam, in a chair in front of the big fireplace, was intent on a crossword puzzle. Shayne went over to him.

  “I’d like to see you outside for a minute.”

  Hallam looked up. After a pause, he completed lettering the word he had begun. Then he crumpled the newspaper and threw it in the fireplace.

  “Where’s the sheriff?”

  “He’ll be along in a minute.”

  They went outside and got into one of the two open jeeps. Hallam’s normal color had returned, but he still gave the appearance of being so wound up that a touch would send him spinning out of control.

  “What did the sheriff have to say?”

  “Not much,” Shayne told him, “and he took his time about saying it. He’s a slow talker.”

  “Yes, Ollie’s slow.”

  “He’ll want to take you through it step by step, but I can’t waste that much time. What were you and Langhorne arguing about?”

  Hallam gripped the wheel in both hands. “The usual thing. The way I run the company. We’ve had the same argument at two-week intervals for fifteen years.”

  “Specifically.”

  Hallam hesitated. “He didn’t like the idea of taking the T-239 investigation outside the company. The whole thing is my fault, for not moving into production on the strength of the preliminary tests. That was a hard decision to make. But if I’d hurried, if trouble had developed later, the board would have been justified in asking for my resignation. Walter worked himself up to quite a pitch. Finally, for the nth time, he told me he was quitting. I made some slighting comment, and then the duck came over. When I brought the gun around, there he was in front of me.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  Hallam moved his head. “You couldn’t tell with Walter. His speech wasn’t slurred or heavy.”

  “Will you try to remember what you said just before he jumped? It might be important.”

  Hallam reflected. “It had something to do with you. I believe I said to wait till we found out if you deserved your reputation. Something like that.”

  “Do you think he’s the one who passed the paint material to Begley?”

  Hallam turned his head sharply. “Certainly not.”

  “Forbes doesn’t think it’s impossible.”

  “Forbes doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Hallam snapped.

  “Were you told that Langhorne had been dickering with Candida Morse of the Begley firm?”

  “What do you mean, ‘dickering’? They were seen together once, at a sort of party. We don’t know who initiated it or what was said. I don’t condemn a man on that kind of evidence.”

  “How was he fixed for money?”

  Hallam shrugged. “We paid him a good salary. He had no one to spend it on but himself. And it always seemed to me that he kept getting small inheritances from various aunts. He never talked about the vulgar subject. That’s usually a tipoff that somebody’s not suffering.”

  “You’ve been living with this thing for several months now. If you don’t think Langhorne did it, do you suspect anybody else?”

  “I suspect everybody. That’s the damnable thing. Everybody suspects everybody. This has opened a real fissure in the company, and we won’t be able to close it until we find out who’s actually guilty.”

  “Forbes said he was beginning to suspect himself. I don’t think he was serious. What do you think of the possibility?”

  At his son’s name, Hallam’s arm jerked and the horn blared. “Excuse me. I don’t think much of it. He’ll inherit fifty percent of my stock. He’d be going against his own interests. I don’t want to close off any legitimate inquiry, but you’d be throwing away your time pursuing that one. I suppose he meant he had the opportunity. So did fifteen or twenty other people. You’d better sit down and have a talk with Miss McGonigle, our counterintelligence department.”

  “That’s the first thing I’d do if I had time,” Shayne said. “But if I’m going to come up with anything between now and Monday, I’ll have to work on it from the other end.”

  “By that you mean Begley?”

  “Begley’s firm. He didn’t break out of the small time until Candida Morse went to work for him. She’s the brains of the combination. And Begley’s going to be out of contention all day, probably into tomorrow. As a rule, he’s a fairly cool drinker. His strategy for the weekend is to get drunk and stay drunk, so nobody can ask him any questions.”

  “You know your business,” Hallam said doubtfully. “But if you simply go to this Morse woman and ask her who she was dealing with at Despard’s, why should she tell you anything?”

  Shayne’s eyes were hard. “That’s not the way I’ll do it. I’ll push her a little first. We have a small score to settle. It may not work, but I can’t see any other way of getting results in a hurry. If there isn’t a quick payoff, I’ll come to the office Monday morning and run a routine credit check on the list of possibilities.”

  A black Chevrolet appeared, moving fast.

  “There’s the sheriff. If he talked as fast as he drives, I’d stick around. He’ll tie you up most of the day. Is your plane still at the airstrip?”

  “Yes. Use it if you want to. Some of the others may want to go back at the same time.”

  The Chevy went into a long screeching skid in front of the lodge.

  Shayne said, “Do you think there’s any chance Langhorne committed suicide?”

  “Suicide?”

  “He did everything but throw himself on your gun. People sometimes have scruples against killing themselves, and get somebody else to do it for them. It’s not unknown.”

  Hallam squinted at the approaching sheriff. He didn’t answer.

  Shayne went on, watching him, “And there’s a third possibility. Homicide.”

  Hallam’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “I think I see what you’re trying to do, Shayne, prepare me for my morning with the sheriff. But I doubt if Ollie Banghart will want to open up that area. You’re wondering if Walter admitted selling us out and I lost control and shot him. The answer, for the record, is no. It’s true that I identify myself closely with the interests of my company, but anyone will tell you I am not what you would call a passionate man.”

  CHAPTER 4

  At 6:30 that evening, the phone clange
d in Michael Shayne’s Buick. Shayne and his friend Tim Rourke, a reporter on the Miami News, were parked in front of a fire plug on Biscayne Boulevard, talking quietly. Rourke had a big square Speed Graphic camera on his lap. He was slumped deep in his seat with his bony knees up against the dashboard. Extremely thin, unshaven, his clothes wrinkled and spotted, he gave no indication that he was actually extremely hardworking and very difficult to fool. He had won one Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and had been cited three other years, usually in connection with stories he had worked on with Shayne.

  Shayne picked up the phone.

  “Teddy Sparrow,” a voice said. “The Morse dame. She’s having dinner at Larue’s with a date.”

  “Who’s the man?” Shayne asked.

  “I never saw him before, Mike. He hasn’t got much of a tan. Good clothes—I think he’d be tanned if he lived here year-round. He’s driving a Hertz Chevy. I peeked at the card on the steering column.”

  “Good, Teddy. Wait there. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  He hung up and started the motor. Rourke dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out.

  “How hammy do you want this to be, Mike? I take it the girl isn’t too stupid.”

  “She’s probably smarter than both of us put together. We’re not trying to fool her. This is pressure.”

  “The funny thing is,” the reporter said thoughtfully, “it would actually make a very nice series. These headhunters haven’t had much publicity yet. There’s a couple of others in town besides Begley. Miami’s logical place. A guy can come down and a personnel man can meet him. It’s really a job interview, but the theory is that everybody’s just on vacation.”

  Shayne drove south on the Boulevard, turning left after a dozen blocks to a long ramp which took him onto the MacArthur Causeway. Halfway across the bay, he dropped onto Poinsettia Island and parked near a small French restaurant that had recently opened there, with a long private dock for customers who came by boat from the Miami Beach marinas.

  Teddy Sparrow shambled up as Shayne got out. He was a mountainous, hopelessly inept private detective who seldom handled anything except open-and-shut divorces or tracer jobs for collection agencies.

  “They got their table, Mike. They had one martini at the bar, one at the table. How do we handle this?”

  “I handle it, Teddy,” Shayne said. “She’ll probably come out alone. See where she goes. She may have spotted you by now, but that’s not too important. Just don’t lose her.”

  “I don’t get flimflammed too often,” the other detective said confidently. “Then I call you on the car phone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I wish I had one of those phones in my car,” Sparrow said wistfully. “Throw me some more business, Mike, and damn if I won’t put my name on the waiting list.”

  Shayne and Rourke entered the restaurant. “What’s the name of the maître?” Shayne said. “George, isn’t it?”

  “Hell, no!” Rourke said, shocked. “Albert. Imagine forgetting anything that important. You could end up at a table next to the kitchen.”

  A dark man in a tuxedo came out of the crowd that was overflowing from a small bar.

  “Mr. Shayne!” he exclaimed, glad to have the well-known detective to dress up his room. “A table. Certainly.” He looked at Rourke with less enthusiasm. “For two?”

  “Not right now—Albert,” Shayne said. “You know Tim Rourke, don’t you? Of the News.”

  “Of course,” Albert said with more warmth.

  “We won’t give you any trouble,” Shayne said. “We want to get a picture. If the paper uses it, Larue’s will be mentioned.”

  “Whatever you wish, Mr. Shayne. And if you could mention the location? Poinsettia Island.”

  Shayne explained what they wanted while Rourke shut himself in a public phone booth and dialed Larue’s number. The phone rang in an alcove between the bar and the main dining room. After answering, Albert-dispatched a waiter to tell Candida Morse that she had a phone call from Pride’s Landing, Georgia.

  Shayne, meanwhile, worked his way through the crowd in the bar. He came out at the far end as Candida Morse crossed the room and picked up the phone.

  She had been given one of the desirable tables on the glassed-in terrace, with a view of the lights of downtown Miami. The man she was with had close-cut hair and black-rimmed glasses. He seemed pleased with himself. There was a tiny American Legion pin in his buttonhole. He was somewhat overweight, but expensive clothes took care of the problem. He was thinking pleasant thoughts as he fingered his martini, which had been served on the rocks in an old-fashioned glass.

  His eyes met Shayne’s as the detective passed his table.

  Their eyes held for an instant. Shayne gave him a half-nod of recognition, then turned back after a step and studied his face.

  “Your name wouldn’t be Stanley Woodward, by any chance?”

  The other man smiled. “Case of mistaken identity. Sorry.”

  “From New York,” Shayne said. “Stanley J. Woodward. Cashier, Guaranty Trust Co. Butch haircut, horn-rims, always has an American Legion insignia in his buttonhole.”

  The man glanced down humorously at his own buttonhole. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, I assure you.”

  “For your sake I hope so,” Shayne grated, “because the man I’m thinking of beat his bank out of forty-odd thousand in cash.” He flipped open his leather folder to give the man a fast glimpse of his private detective’s license. “Your identification, please.”

  “Look here—” the man started to protest, but broke off and took out his wallet. “Driver’s registration. Diner’s Club. Social Security card. Take your pick.”

  Shayne looked at the data on the Missouri driver’s registration. The man’s name was Clark Ahlman. He lived in St. Louis, where he worked for a large lead company.

  “I may have made a mistake, Mr. Ahlman,” he said more politely. “That’s the trouble with these condensed descriptions—they fit too many people. That American Legion button did it.”

  “No harm done,” Ahlman said. “I’m sorry to hear a fellow Legionnaire’s an embezzler.”

  “It’s Michael Shayne,” Candida’s voice said coolly at Shayne’s elbow. “The line was dead, which seemed odd. Now I understand it. You two know each other?”

  “We just met this minute,” Shayne said cheerfully, returning Ahlman’s wallet.

  He stepped aside. Tim Rourke, who had followed Candida back through the dining room, crouched with the big Speed Graphic to his eye and shot a picture of Ahlman pulling out her chair so the girl could sit down. She was wearing a low-cut black dinner dress. The exploding flashbulb caught her with an expression Shayne had never seen her without: cool, withdrawn, faintly amused. It went with her careful makeup and well-groomed hair.

  Ahlman said threateningly, scowling, “What is this? What are you people trying to pull?”

  “It’s on the nature of a practical joke,” Candida said, seating herself. “I wouldn’t worry about it. I won’t introduce you because they aren’t staying.” She brought a waiter to the table with a flick of her finger. “Will you ask Albert to step out here, please?”

  The waiter disappeared.

  “Practical joke, hell,” Rourke said, unscrewing the blackened flashbulb. “We’ve been trying for a picture of Candida Morse in action for a couple of weeks. And it wouldn’t be any good without the guy’s name.”

  “Candida,” Ahlman murmured, “I think on the whole—”

  “Sit down, Clark. Mr. Shayne and friend are merely trying to rattle me in connection with something altogether different. We’re within the Miami Beach city limits, aren’t we, Mr. Shayne? I believe so. And it’s well known that you’re not popular with the Beach police. I’ll call them if you like, but it would be simpler if you just went away. Take Tim Rourke with you.”

  “We don’t seem to be wanted, Mike,” Rourke said, grinning. “And I thought she’d like to hear about the series we�
��re running.”

  “What series?” Ahlman said, alarmed.

  He had sat down, but he was using only the front few inches of his chair, unable to imitate Candida’s ease of manner.

  “I’m on the News,” Rourke explained. “We’re working up an expose of industrial-spy outfits that masquerade as executive employment agencies. People are always complaining that I only give one side of the story. I thought I’d give Miss Morse a chance to express her point of view.”

  Candida shook her head pityingly. “What a hypocrite you are, after all, Mr. Rourke. I know the kind of hatchet job you’re capable of. I’m certainly not going to offer the back of my neck.”

  The waiter appeared and said almost rudely, “Albert had to go out.”

  Clark Ahlman stood up. “Candida, this isn’t anything that calls for the police. Let’s simply cancel our dinner order and go somewhere else.”

  “They’d come with us, I’m afraid,” she said with a smile. “One of the things a private detective and a newspaper reporter have in common is a thick hide. Let’s assume our evening is over. I’m sorry. You go on, Clark. I’ll call you at the hotel later.”

  “Are you sure it’s O.K.?” he asked, itching to leave. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to feel—”

  “I’m quite sure. Don’t be concerned about me. I eat private detectives like canapés.”

  Picking up a stalk of celery, she bit into it with a quick crunch of her even white teeth. She held out her hand. Ahlman shook it quickly and went off among the tables, turning to glance back at the entrance.

  “Farewell, cowardly lion,” Candida said coolly. “Farewell ten-percent commission. When I call his hotel, I’m afraid I’ll be told he’s already checked out. Are you really doing a piece on us, Mr. Rourke?”

  “Thinking about it,” he said, grinning. “But Mike’s been telling me that if I do it his way, I could end up with something bigger. He’s usually right.” He flicked a hand at the detective. “That gets rid of the guy, and I’ve got to take off. See you, pal.”