Never Kill a Client

by Brett Halliday

  “If he is from the bonding company, it probably ties in with the embezzlement.”

  Shayne nodded and emptied his paper cup. He sat erect, crumpling the empty cups in a big fist and throwing them toward a wastebasket in a corner.

  “You said there was a lot of money involved?”

  “Quite a hunk of dough as I recall the case.” Rourke shrugged. “Fifty or a hundred grand? Something in that neighborhood.”

  “Much of it recovered?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so. As I recall he was offered a lighter sentence if he returned the money, but he stubbornly insisted he’d spent it all.”

  Shayne got to his feet and suggested, “Why don’t you check your old file on the case? Nothing else we can do here. I’ll drop you off at headquarters to pick up your car, huh?”

  “Where are you headed all in a hurry?” Rourke demanded suspiciously as he followed him out.

  “Home and a shower and lots of coffee,” Shayne told him. “Until nine o’clock when I’ll call Jacksonville and see if I can get any dope on Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third.”

  “Want me to tell Will about him?” Rourke asked while they waited for an elevator to take them down.

  “Keep it under your hat,” Shayne growled. “If it gave us any real lead in Lucy’s direction, sure. I’d hand it to Will on a platter. But all it does is point up more strongly that Julius O’Keefe was headed straight for my office as soon as he was released, and Will already halfway suspects I’m lying about that. Damn it! He should know by this time that he can trust me.”

  Timothy Rourke grinned, crookedly as the elevator stopped for them and they got in. “You’ve given him some bad times in the past, Mike.”

  “But I’ve never told him an outright lie… not in a murder case,” Shayne defended himself morosely.

  “Maybe not outright, but I’ve sure as hell seen you skirt the truth… particularly if there was a buck involved. Or a lot of bucks,” he added hastily.

  12

  Michael Shayne stopped in front of police headquarters to let Rourke out so he could get his own car, and the reporter hesitated with his hand on the door handle.

  “You want me to call you after I’ve checked our old file on the O’Keefe case?”

  “Sure. Do that. I won’t be asleep,” Shayne assured him with a wry smile. “While you’re at it, see if any mention of a bonding company is made in connection with the case.”

  Rourke got out and Shayne drove away, headed for his hotel which was only a few blocks distant. He had driven about three blocks eastward when, on a sudden impulse he decided to continue on to Biscayne Boulevard and take a look at Lucy Hamilton’s apartment himself.

  True, Rourke had told him over the telephone in Los Angeles that he and Will Gentry had already checked her apartment and found nothing amiss there, but they didn’t know Lucy and her habits as well as he did… and he had at least an hour to kill before he could check on Rexforth.

  He continued eastward and drove directly to Lucy Hamilton’s apartment house on a side street between Biscayne Boulevard and the bay.

  He stopped inside the small foyer to pick out the key which Lucy had given him many years before and which he had used only a couple of times in somewhat similar circumstances, went in and climbed one flight to her door where the same key admitted him.

  He switched on the overhead living-room light and stood at the entrance to the familiar room and looked searchingly about.

  Everything appeared to be in perfect order. Every ashtray and the glass top to the coffee table was clean and polished. Shayne walked across the room slowly, pausing at the telephone desk to glance at the scratch pad beside it, then turning to look into the immaculate bathroom, and thence into the bedroom where the bed was neatly made, the closet door closed, and everything in perfect order.

  It was exactly as Lucy left it every morning in the world when she departed for work. He knew because he had dropped by from the office often enough for a drink or to relax while she freshened up to go out to dinner with him.

  He went slowly back into the living room with a preoccupied, almost a listening look on his gaunt face, moved on automatically to the kitchen where he switched on another light and found it in the same perfect order as the rest of the apartment.

  Still moving with a peculiar, automatic sort of precision, Shayne reached up to open a cupboard door on his right and take down a bottle that was a little more than half full of cognac. He pulled the cork and set it on the drainboard, got a tray of ice cubes and put two in a tall glass which he filled from the water tap. He poured cognac into a four-ounce wineglass to the brim, and carried the two glasses into the living room and set them on one end of the coffee table. He sat on the sofa in front of them and deliberately lit a cigarette, then slowly drank half the cognac and held the clean, biting taste in his mouth for thirty seconds before taking a sip of ice water.

  He was deliberately slowing himself down, forcing himself not to think, swallowing back the sour taste of fear that was in his stomach.

  He smoked the cigarette down deliberately until it began to burn his fingers, crushed it out in an ashtray, emptied the wineglass and took a big drink of cold water. Then he got up and crossed to the telephone stand, wrote the date and “8:30 A. M.” on the clean pad, added below it, “I’m back in town. Mike,” tore off the top sheet and took it over to the coffee table where he placed it beneath the empty wineglass. Then he turned out all the lights and went out, moving deliberately but not slowly.

  It was only a few minutes’ drive to his hotel. He stopped in front and went into the lobby carrying his briefcase. Fritz, the night man, was on duty behind the desk and Pete stood beside him, evidently just coming on duty.

  They both looked up in surprise to see Shayne striding toward them, and Pete exclaimed, “Jeez, you made a fast trip out to Hollywood and back, Mr. Shayne. I was just telling Fritz…”

  Shayne dropped his briefcase in front of the desk and demanded, “Why didn’t you tell Fritz last night when you went off duty, Pete? I understand the police were here looking for me and no one could tell them where I was.”

  “They sure were,” Fritz said feelingly. “All over the place. Made me unlock your room like they thought you might be hiding up there.”

  “I just didn’t mention it to Fritz when I went off,” Pete said unhappily. “I didn’t know there was any special reason to say anything.”

  “There wasn’t,” Shayne relented. “I don’t blame you, Pete. But I’m surprised they didn’t roust you out at home to ask you questions.”

  Pete had a shamefaced smile for that. “They tried to all right. Trouble was, I wasn’t home when they came around looking for me. I was out on a hell of a toot, and boy have I got a head this morning.”

  “What was it all about somebody getting himself killed in your office, and them looking for Miss Hamilton, too, and not being able to find her either?” asked Fritz eagerly. “Gee, I hope she’s okay.”

  Shayne said, “I do, too. No word from her since I left, huh?”

  Both men shook their heads lugubriously. Both were long-time employees of the hotel where Shayne had maintained a suite for many years, both knew Lucy Hamilton personally and admired her extravagantly.

  Then Fritz said, “But there is this man’s been trying to reach you ever since early last evening.” He turned to reach into a cubbyhole behind the desk and pulled out three telephone messages. He glanced at one of them and said, “Name of Rexforth. First one’s marked six-fifteen…”

  Shayne reached out his hand for the three slips. The first one said merely, “Mr. Shayne. Call Mr. Rexforth at once,” and gave a local telephone number and an extension.

  The second one was marked ten-thirty, and as Shayne looked at it, Fritz told him importantly, “I took that one myself. Switchboard operator goes off at ten, you know. He sounded mad and wanted to know why you hadn’t answered his other call, and made me look in your box to see if the message was still the
re, then said it was important you should call him the minute you got in.

  “Then he called again at one o’clock and said you was to telephone him no matter how late you got in… three or four o’clock, or whatever.”

  Shayne fingered the slips a moment and then said, “Call that number. It’s probably a hotel in town. Don’t ask for him or the extension,” he added harshly. “Just find out which hotel.” Pete, who was evidently now officially on duty at the desk, took one of the slips and turned to a telephone behind him.

  He turned back in a moment and said, “It’s the Atlantic Arms, Mr. Shayne. On Fourth Street just off Biscayne.”

  Shayne nodded and turned away from the desk leaving his briefcase sitting forgotten on the floor in front of it.

  13

  Shayne wasted no time inquiring for Mr. Rexforth downstairs in the Atlantic Arms Hotel when he reached it. He crossed the old-fashioned lobby in long strides and stepped into an elevator that was waiting to go up. He glanced down at one of the telephone slips in his hand and saw the extension 718. He told the operator, “Seven,” when he closed the doors, got out on the seventh floor and found the room number.

  He knocked loudly and waited. It was a solid oak door without a transom and he could hear no movement inside the room. He knocked again, impatiently, and the door finally opened a few inches with the rattle of an inside chain that was still in place.

  A sleepy and irritable voice said, “Yes? What is it?”

  “Michael Shayne. Open up.”

  Something like a gasp sounded through the crack. Then the door closed enough so the chain could be loosened, and swung open again.

  Shayne pushed in and confronted the scrawny figure of a man wearing rumpled pajamas and with grayish hair standing wildly on end. He was bare-footed and thin-faced, and he retreated hastily toward the bed as though in acute embarrassment, blinking his eyes nearsightedly and swallowing a prominent Adam’s Apple while he quavered, “I was sleeping very soundly. I’ll get a robe and… and my glasses.”

  He snatched up a bathrobe that hung over the foot of the bed and thrust his arms into the sleeves, then padded nervously to the head of the bed where he picked up a pair of rimless glasses from the table and settled them firmly on his nose.

  Thus properly attired, he lost his embarrassment and seated himself on the edge of the bed and said severely, “I’ve been expecting you to telephone me, Mr. Shayne. I sat up very late waiting for you to return my calls.”

  Shayne said, “I just now returned to my hotel and found them.”

  “Indeed? And may I inquire where and how you spent the night? And please, Mr. Shayne, don’t expect me to believe the implausible story your secretary gave me yesterday that you had flown unexpectedly to the West Coast.”

  Shayne stood flat-footed on the floor in front of the man and glared down at him with his hands knotted into fists. “Where is she, Rexforth? Where is Lucy Hamilton? If she’s come to any harm…”

  “Your secretary, Mr. Shayne? I’m sure I have no idea. I saw her only once, briefly, yesterday morning. If you’ve mislaid the young lady, it is scarcely my affair.”

  Shayne stood looking down at him for a long moment while he battled with the irrational anger that had possession of him. This man knew something… but what? He was altogether too calm, too sure of himself. The important thing was to find out what he knew about the whole affair as fast as he could get it out of him.

  He moved back to sit in a chair, and began by asking, “What makes you so sure I haven’t been to the Coast?”

  Rexforth’s brown eyes glittered behind their glasses and his tight lips smiled thinly. “Because I have been certain that Julius O’Keefe would make a bee-line for Miami and you as soon as he was released from prison. And, Mr. Shayne, because I know he did visit you in your office yesterday afternoon… and remained closeted with you for a good period of time.”

  “What do you know about O’Keefe?” Shayne demanded.

  “What do I know about him?” Rexforth permitted himself a little, cackling laugh. “Everything, I assure you. I don’t think we understand each other, Mr. Shayne. Perhaps your secretary misunderstood me or neglected to inform you. I represent the North American Bonding Company. Manager of our branch office in Jacksonville, to be exact. Does that answer your question?”

  Shayne said, “No.”

  Rexforth sighed and placed the tips of five fingers precisely against the tips of his other five. “Perhaps it doesn’t,” he conceded. “I tend to forget that you entered the affair only recently and may not be fully cognizant of its past history. My company had bonded O’Keefe, of course, when he embezzled the hundred thousand dollars. We paid the loss. The full amount. I consider that case one of my failures, Mr. Shayne. One of my few failures. Now do you understand?”

  Shayne said again, “No.”

  “Oh, come now. Let’s not spar with each other. I am wholly and completely convinced in my own mind that Robert Long confided the entire story to you… or at least the salient points of it… when he died some four months ago.”

  “Robert Long?” Shayne repeated the name slowly. It came as a complete surprise to him and he actually had to force himself to think over the past months to bring the incident into focus in his mind.

  Of course! Long was the gambler who was reputed to have welshed on some large bets and incurred the anger of the Syndicate. Their enforcers had gone after the man and gunned him down in his automobile on a remote section of the Tamiami Trail, and by the merest chance Shayne had been present at the time of his death. He’d had no interest in Long himself, hadn’t known the man or even met him before that night.

  Shayne, on another case entirely, had been on the trail of one of the trigger-men who went after Long, and it was quite by accident that he had come upon Long’s wrecked car that night and found the gun-shot, dying man inside the wreckage. Robert Long had continued to live for at least twenty minutes while Shayne remained alone with him by the roadside, but during that period he had been delirious and babbled only senseless nothings.

  The newspapers hadn’t got or printed the full story, of course. There had been intimations that he had been Shayne’s client and the detective had tried to save his life from the gunman, which Shayne hadn’t bothered to deny publicly.

  “What has Robert Long got to do with this matter?” he asked slowly.

  Rexforth snorted sarcastically. “You were alone with him for half an hour when the man knew he was dying, Shayne. He had a burden of guilt on his conscience, and inside him was the bitter knowledge that all of it had been for naught. That all his careful plans and the subsequent wreckage of his business had been for nothing and now the money would never be recovered. Because even if Long’s wife knew the secret… and I am convinced she did… he knew O’Keefe would never in this world be willing to share it with her.

  “How fortuitous it must have appeared to Robert Long that you were there to hear his dying confession and listen to his secret. Not the police. Not some crook who would try to take it all. But Mike Shayne. A tough private detective with a reputation for flouting the law when it served his own ends, yet with a certain reputation as a square-shooter withal. Of course he made an arrangement with you to approach O’Keefe in prison and induce him to cooperate with you, on your promise, I assume, that it was strictly a private matter between the two of you and that O’Keefe’s former wife would not share a cent.

  “Without flattering myself unduly, Mr. Shayne,” Rexforth went on complacently, “as soon as I read the newspaper story about Long’s death, some such possibility of an arrangement flashed through my mind. It was so obvious… if one has dealt with thieves and crooks as long as I and know how their minds work. And so I waited, continuing the same careful surveillance over O’Keefe in prison that I have maintained ever since he was sentenced. And when I was informed of your first visit to him shortly after Long’s death, I knew my deductions were correct. I knew I had only to wait for you to conclude your careful arra
ngements to recover the money, and be ready to claim it for my company.”

  He stopped talking abruptly, took off his glasses and polished them carefully with a corner of the sheet from the bed.

  “It seems to me,” Shayne protested mildly, “that you’re making a lot of wild assumptions based on very few facts… or no facts at all. I’m not admitting anything at this point, you understand? Since I don’t know any of the background on the case, I simply don’t see how you arrived at any of these conclusions.”

  Rexforth replaced his glasses firmly on his nose and smiled boastfully. “The embezzlement stunk to me from the beginning,” he announced. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you get a feeling about such things. There was Julius O’Keefe, a six-thousand a year bookkeeper completely bonded by our company, and there was Robert Long, owner of the brokerage firm and consequently not bonded at all. O’Keefe did not impress me as the type of mentality to work out the details of a theft on such a grand scale. He was a little man, driven to distraction by a young, avaricious and very beautiful wife, who might pilfer a few hundreds or a few thousands from his employer, but would never think beyond that.

  “So I looked for a master-mind who had planned and guided the operation, and there was only Robert Long who could possibly fit into the picture. He was in the perfect position to have conspired with O’Keefe, and I was convinced almost from the first that he had done so.”

  “But you say he was owner of the business,” Shayne protested. “How could he profit by stealing from it?”

  “It is not at all new in my experience,” said Rexforth didactically, as though delivering a lecture on economics in a classroom. “Consider first: He had absolutely nothing to lose. O’Keefe was fully bonded and North American would make good every penny of the loss if O’Keefe were convicted. He had only to confess and accept full blame, and we had no alternative. We did pay that loss, Mr. Shayne. The full hundred thousand. Not a penny of it was ever recovered. O’Keefe’s story was that he had spent it all over a period of time… on gambling and women. It was a manifest absurdity when you explored the man’s past life, but there was no proof. It is almost impossible to prove a negative.”