The blonde cried murder ms-28

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne didn't reply. His eyes were narrowed and very bright behind slitted lids as he stared down at the dead man. His left hand went up absently to tug at the lobe of his ear.

  He had a disquieting sense of recognition as he stood there. It had hit him hard but fleetingly at first glance. It went away when he strove to pin it down in his mind, but the feeling remained, elusive and tantalizing.

  Without taking his gaze from the white face, he muttered, "I've seen him some place. Recently. I swear it." He closed his eyes tightly and his rugged features hardened in a mask of concentration.

  Gentry and Rourke waited without speaking. He shook his head slowly, still not opening his eyes. He muttered, "It runs away from me. Like quicksilver. I know I've seen him. Probably just once and briefly. It isn't real familiarity. But it's there. Just beyond'my goddamned conscious grasp of it."

  He opened his eyes suddenly for another long look at the pallid face. He shook his head disgustedly and turned away. "I have to put it out of my mind. It'll pop up unexpectedly. I know I should recognize him, and I know it's important. 'Way down deep beyond reason, something tells me it's damned important. That we'll know some answers when it comes back to me."

  The others turned away behind him and the attendant closed the drawer with a soft thud.

  Shayne had reached the stairway and started up when he whirled about abruptly, his face lighting with satisfaction. "Got iti And it messes up our nice little theory all to hell. That guy couldn't possibly have been murdered in the Hibiscus Hotel at nine-thirty tonight. At ten o'clock he was alive in the Silver Glade."

  He was fumbling in the side pocket of his jacket, and he pulled out the photo the girl had thrust into it in the lobby of his hotel while she was importuning him to accept a retainer from her.

  He thrust the photograph at Will Gentry. "Take it back and compare the two. You'll see it's the same man."

  FOURTEEN: 11:12 PM

  Michael Shayne dropped Timothy Rourke at the News Tower on his way back from the morgue to police headquarters. The reporter was anxious to get out a preliminary story on the "Body in the Bay" as he was already calling it in headlines, and he promised Shayne to withhold most of the other stuff the detective had given him, merely mentioning the curious incident that had happened at a local hotel earlier, without naming the Hibiscus and without using the Paulson name in connection with the dead man.

  Back in Will Gentry's office at headquarters, Shayne found the chief about to interrogate a quiet-faced bronzed man who was clad only in skin-tight swimming trunks and whom Gentry introduced as Norman Raine.

  "Mr. Raine brought the body in from the bay," he told Shayne. "I've got wires out to New York and to Jacksonville. Let's hear what Mr. Raine has to tell us."

  "It isn't much and I'm afraid it won't be very helpful," Raine said in a resonant baritone. "I've a boat anchored in the yacht basin and I sleep aboard-alone. Only tonight I couldn't sleep." He showed even, white teeth in a smile and nodded thankfully as he leaned forward to accept a cigarette from the redhead, averting his eyes from the black cigar Gentry puffed on.

  He drew in smoke and expelled it, leaned back comfortably and went on, "That's what brought me ashore in my skiff. I was out of cigarettes, and about ten-thirty I got to the point where I just had to have a smoke. So I started rowing in."

  "You're anchored off Tenth Street?" asked Gentry.

  "Just about opposite the end of Tenth. The tide was running out, but there was a nice breeze behind me and I was pulling along steadily, about half-way to shore I guess, when suddenly my bow struck something in the water.

  "It gave me quite a start. It was a funny, solid, dead sort of thud. You know, I was rowing along thinking about nothing at all except about a cigarette and how good the first puff was going to taste, and then-pow! Like that.

  "Well, the poor devil was floating face down in the water. I saw he must be a goner right away. Face down and all. I had a little trouble getting him aboard, and then went on in as fast as I could. I tied up and ran to the nearest place I saw a light, and telephoned the police. That's absolutely all I know about it"

  "How far out are you anchored?" Shayne asked him.

  "About-oh-a half mile. It's the Marjie J. You can check it easily enough. She's a forty-foot single-master."

  "Then you'd say you were about a quarter mile off-shore when you struck the body?"

  "Something like that. It's purely a guess, of course, but the best I can do under the circumstances."

  Will Gentry removed his cigar from between his teeth and nodded. "Anything else occur to you, Mike?"

  Shayne shook his head. "I don't see how Mr. Raine can help us any more than that. You didn't search the body?" he added.

  "Naturally not." Raine was quite properly indignant. "I could see it was murder right away and I didn't touch him."

  Gentry got up to shake his hand. "Thanks for being so co-operative, Mr. Raine. You're not pulling out right away?"

  "Not for ten days at least."

  "A man outside will drive you back to the pier," Gen try told him. "Have him stop some place for you to buy cigarettes." He shrugged when the door closed behind the man. "Without getting technical with tide and current tables, I'd say it matches up with the Hibiscus pretty well."

  "I know." Shayne scowled angrily. "But you can't get away from the gal who tried to force a hundred and forty bucks on me at ten o'clock to pick the guy up at the Silver Glade."

  "I'm not trying to get away from her. Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she just thought he was there at that time. Maybe she was lying like heU."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know why. Why does any woman lie?"

  "If I'd taken the assignment, I was bound to find out at once that he wasn't there," Shayne pointed out.

  "But you didn't take it. I wish to God you had. Then we wouldn't have all these other unanswered questions."

  "Any report from your boys at the Hibiscus yet?"

  "I'm waiting for it." Gentry drummed fingertips on his desk irritably. "There's a telephone listed for Barnes at that New York address. It didn't answer. I phoned the police to get anything they could on Barnes. And I've got a detective driving down from Jax with a picture of Bert and Nellie Paulson. Nothing to do but mark time, I guess."

  Shayne squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. He wished, now, that he had told Gentry in the beginning about sending the girl to Lucy's apartment. He wasn't quite sure why he had held that fact out. With a vague feeling of protecting her, he supposed glumly. In a sense, he looked on her as a client, and until he knew more about the case he had instinctively withheld the information that would have automatically brought her in for police interrogation.

  Now he probably had a positive identification of the dead man in the palm of his hand, but he hesitated to admit that fact to Will Gentry yet. The chief would be sore as a boil because Shayne hadn't told him earlier, and Shayne still felt there were a lot of things he'd like to know, about the case before seeking a showdown with her.

  Of course, if she were just a cheap little accomplice in ' a badger racket in wliich her brother had gotten himself murdered, he had no sympathy for her at all. But he | couldn't help feeling there was something mixed-up in ¦ that diagnosis. Recalling her as he had first seen her waiting for him in his room, she simply didn't fit into the picture that way.

  He was roused from his brief reverie by a tap on the door and the entrance of Sergeant Hopkins of the Identification Squad.

  He was young and square-jawed and had a crew-cut, and was not in uniform. He nodded incuriously to Shayne, stood stiffly in front of the desk and reported, "I'm just back from the Hibiscus, sir. We gave three-sixteen the works."

  "Well?" Gentry rumbled.

  "We got nothing very definite, I'm afraid. Photographs of the bed with careful lighting indicates someone has lain heavily on it since it was made up. We found no bloodstains. One set of fingerprints pretty well all over, in places that indicate they must be from the occupant o
f the room-another set that we checked out as the hotel maid. Prints of an unidentified man on the door-frame and the back of a chair."

  When he stopped, Shayne broke in, "What about the windows?"

  The sergeant regarded him stolidly. "Only the occupant's prints there. One of the screens is very tightly latched and probably hasn't been opened for months. The other opens easily and there was no dust underneath or on the sill." He shrugged and added, "On the other hand, the maid says she quite likely opened it herself recently in cleaning up the room. She can't swear to that, so there's nothing conclusive either way. It certainly could have been opened tonight to allow a body to be shoved out, but there's no way of proving that happened."

  Gentry took his saliva-soaked half cigar from his mouth and glared at it, fielded it expertly into the spittoon. "Get out to the morgue and fingerprint the Barnes stiff. See if they check with the extra set you found in the room and let me know."

  He shrugged at Shayne as the young sergeant wheeled about and went out. "Wouldn't you know that's about what we'd get?" he demanded savagely.

  Shayne let out a deep sigh. "I guess that puts it straight up to me."

  "Puts what up to you?"

  "You're not going to like it, Will."

  "Holding out on me?" Gentry was instantly and suspiciously alert.

  "Not very much, but- I guess we'd better see if we can get our corpse identified before we do any more guessing."

  "It wouldn't be a bad idea at all," Gentry agreed in a very smooth voice. "You got an idea?"

  Shayne grinned at him. "The girl who claims he's her brother."

  Gentry's heavy black brows came down threateningly. "You told me she ran out on you. Down your fire escape and disappeared."

  "She did. But I somehow forgot to mention that before she went into the kitchen I'd given her Lucy's address with a note to Lucy, and told her to go there."

  "Goddamn it, Mike! Do you mean to say you've got reason to think she's at Lucy's now?"

  Shayne kept his grin working and said lightly, "I can do better than that. I know she is. Remember when Lucy telephoned? That was to say she'd arrived safely."

  Shayne reached for the telephone hastily as a rumble of anger spilled out from between Gentry's thick lips.

  "You've got to admit we're lucky to have her on tap this way." He gave Lucy's number into the phone and settled back, not looking at Gentry who was cursing in low monosyllables.

  He listened to her phone ring five times before she answered. Then her voice sounded curiously thick, and the words were fuzzy at the edges. "Hello. Who is this?"

  "Mike. Have you been asleep?"

  "Just dozed off, I guess."

  "Well, get yourself waked up," he said impatiently. "Both of you. I'm on my way over."

  "Both of us? What do you mean, Michael?"

  "Miss Paulson. Is she in bed?"

  "But she left, Michael."

  "What? When? Goddamn it, Lucy, I sent her there for you to take care of her."

  "You didn't tell me I was to lock her in, did you? How was I to keep her here if she decided not to stay?"

  "When did she leave, Lucy? What did she say?"

  "Fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She didn't say anything. Just thank you for the drink and I tank I go home now. And she went."

  Shayne slammed the phone down to prevent himself from taking any more of his sickening anger out on Lucy. He looked up, bracing himself to meet Gentry's fierce gaze, and said unnecessarily:

  "She's ducked out on us, Will. God knows where-on why."

  FIFTEEN: 11:20 PM

  As Lucy Hamilton put the telephone down in her apartment, she sat silently and with bowed head for a long moment, feeling the impact of her employer's anger and sensing his frustrated disappointment in her as he slammed down at his end.

  The only sound in the apartment was the labored breathing of her guest standing close behind her.

  Lucy fought to remain calm, lifting her head finally and forcing herself to turn and ask listlessly, "Is that what you wanted me to do?"

  "You were just fine that time. If he calls back again, or anyone else, be damn sure and tell them not to come here tonight. That you're in bed or sick or something-or else you get this fast."

  Lucy shuddered and closed her eyes as the ugly, short-bladed knife made a sickening arc close to her throat. She heard a pleased giggle bubble up out of the other girl's throat. There was already blood on the blade of that knife. Whose, she didn't know. The girl hadn't said whose blood it was as she calmly withdrew it from her bag and displayed it when Shayne's call came through.

  But the fierce glitter in her eyes as she crisply told Lucy what to say over the phone had been proof enough that she wouldn't hesitate to use the knife again if she were thwarted in any way.

  It was all so utterly incomprehensible. They had been sitting on the sofa calmly chatting away when the phone rang and Lucy had involuntarily exclaimed, "That'll be

  Michael now." The other girl had been telling her an involved story about being in Shayne's apartment when some man had come looking for her and how she'd escaped down the fire escape.

  Then the wild gleam in the girl's eyes and the bloodstained knife that came leaping out of the suede bagl

  Now the girl backed away from her and said calmly, "Get up and move away from the telephone. You won't get hurt if you do exactly as I say. Not until I can fix things up a little better anyhow. Then we'll see. Sit in that chair across the room and don't move out of it while I use the phone."

  Lucy stood up slowly, averting her gaze from the knife. She crossed to the indicated chair and sat down. She heard the girl dialing, and tried to concentrate on the clicking of the dial to try and get the number-although Shayne had often laughed at fictional detectives who were supposed to be able to accomplish that trick.

  She heard the girl ask, "Is Mr. Bert Paulson there?" and say after a moment, "If he does come in soon, please give him this message. It's very important. He's to call his sister at this number." And she read Lucy's number from the telephone.

  Then she hung up and sat quietly for a moment, biting her under-lip broodingly and frowning across the room with eyes that seemed not quite to focus.

  She nodded her blonde head slowly after thinking for a moment, dialed another number and repeated exactly the same instructions she had given on the first call.

  After hanging up the second time, she got up from the chair and moved back a few feet, gesturing to Lucy with her knife. "Sit down here by the phone and do exactly as I tell you if you ever want to see your precious Michael Shayne again. Wait a minute though," she said rapidly as Lucy dragged herself up. "Go into the bedroom first and get a sheet and bring it out. I'll be right behind you all the time."

  Lucy went into the bedroom and got a sheet from her linen closet. Her mind was working desperately to think of some ruse to escape or overcome her visitor, but even years of close association with Michael Shayne had not fitted her to cope with exactly this situation. She was bitterly certain he could think of all sorts of clever things to do under the same circumstances, but why, oh I why, had he sent this insane girl to take refuge in her apartment with a bloody knife in her handbag?

  "Drop the sheet on the floor," she was directed, "and then sit in that chair beside the telephone. If any calls come, you'll have to answer them in case it isn't Lanny calling for me. And everything will be a lot easier if I just tie you up so you won't get any funny ideas. Don't think I care whether you keep on living or not," the voice went on coldly as the girl picked up the sheet and slit strips in it which she ripped all the way across.

  "It's just that you're my insurance, see? I've got to get that call from Lanny, and I figure this is just about the safest place to stay until it comes." She giggled happily again as she came up behind Lucy with three long strips of sheeting trailing behind her.

  "Who'd think of looking for me holed up cozily with the great detective's girl-friend? Put your feet back solid against the legs of the ch
air. And lay your right forearm on the arm of it. I'll leave your left hand free to manage the phone."

  Lucy sat tense and strained in the chair, biting her under-lip hard as the other knelt beside her and started winding a strip of cloth around each ankle and the chair-legs.

  Now? Was this the moment? If she twisted quickly and tried to throw herself and the chair on top of the girl?

  No. Her instinct for self-preservatioji was too strong. Something would happen. Something would have to hap pen. Michael would certainly come. He had sounded so terribly outraged and angry when she told him the girl had already left. Certainly he would be arriving in a few minutes to question her more closely.

  It had all happened so fast. She'd had no chance to adjust her thoughts and think of something to say over the telephone that would indicate to him that she was talking under duress. But she had tried desperately to be flip about it and not even apologize for letting the girl go. That should be a clue he would understand.

  But suppose he didn't? Suppose he thought she was just being jealous and irritated because he had gone off at the summons of an unknown blonde instead of staying with her? She hadn't tried to conceal her feelings earlier when he had dashed off, leaving his drink untouched behind him.

  Now her legs and right arm were bound tightly to the chair and she was helpless. It was too late now to make any attempt. If Michael would only come or telephone againl She began thinking desperately of something she might say to him if he did call that would not arouse the girl's suspicions but would tell him what she wanted to convey.

  Her captor stepped back coolly to survey her work, and she nodded with a smile that held more venom than humor. She walked across to the sofa to drop the knife into her open bag and sat down, saying, "Now we're real comfy. Just so you don't try to say the wrong thing over the phone if it rings. If it's someone asking for Nellie or Miss Paulson, just say I'm here and I'll take it from there. But if it's anyone else, you be damn careful to stall them off. No matter what you scream over the phone or how fast they can get here-it'll be too late to do you any good." She leaned forward to pick up her drink, and smacked her lips with relish as she sipped it.