Never Kill a Client

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne said, “The police will be here in a few minutes asking you more questions. Keep that cabin locked until they get here. Did you check Jenkins in?”

  “I reckon. I been trying to recollect.” The bald man frowned and then looked up at Shayne with renewed interest and said, “It’s comin’ back to me now. Say! He was a big redhead a lot like you. Yeh. That’s right. Younger though, an’ better lookin’. No offense meant,” he added hastily.

  “What did his wife look like?”

  “She wasn’t with him when he checked in. I remember it real good now. Lots of ’em don’t, you know? Not when they check in. Not if… well, you know how it is,” he continued hastily. “Nothing wrong about that. I recollect he said his wife was downtown shopping an’ she’d be along later.”

  “Then you didn’t actually see her?”

  “No. I reckon not. After they’ve registered, they drive in and out without stoppin’. Say! Number Nineteen? Ain’t that the one the other fellow was askin’ about yesterday evening? Kinda thick-set an’ mean-lookin’? He come in first and used the telephone, then went out without saying thank you or go-to-hell, and about five minutes later he was back askin’ who was registered in Nineteen. I didn’t tell him, by golly. Figgered it wasn’t none of his damn business.”

  That would have been Brenner, Shayne thought. He tapped the registration card with his fingertip and asked, “Did you check this man’s car and license number when he registered?”

  “Well, you know how it is, Mister. Mostly they stop out there about where your car is.” He gestured out the door. “You see the car standin’ there, and if it’s what he says it is you don’t go out to look at the license number. Nothing in the law says I gotta do that, I reckon.”

  A whining note crept into his voice, and Shayne agreed, “I guess not.” He turned away, saying over his shoulder, “The police will be here in a few minutes. Don’t let any cleaning woman in that cabin until they get through.” He got in his car and headed back to downtown Miami.

  16

  Fully clothed and freshly shaven, with his sparse hair combed smoothly and his glasses firmly settled on the bridge of his nose, the man looked as though he might actually be named Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third when Shayne walked into Gentry’s office twenty minutes later and found him seated there in earnest conference with Miami’s chief of police.

  Will Gentry still hadn’t been to bed, and he looked it. His heavy body sagged behind the big desk and his florid face was grayer than usual. He looked up at Shayne disapprovingly and said, “From what Rexforth here has been telling me, Mike, I think you’ve got yourself into a hell of a tight spot this time.”

  “Forget that for a moment, Will.” Shayne’s gray eyes were very bright although he hadn’t been to bed for more than twenty-four hours either. He disregarded Rexforth entirely, and told Gentry, “I think I can clean this whole thing up fast. Just get that woman in here. Elsa Cornell. I think I know the right sort of questions to ask her now.”

  Gentry rolled his rumpled eyelids down like tiny Venetian blinds to shut out Shayne’s piercing glance. “I’d be glad to,” he muttered, “if we had her. All right, goddamn it,” he added angrily, rolling his eyelids back up again to meet Shayne’s gaze squarely. “I don’t need any remarks about the efficiency of my police department. She got away from Ed Corby and Jim Greene while they were bringing her in from the morgue. She was sitting in front with Greene and he stopped for a stop sign. When he pulled into the intersection with traffic coming from both ways, she calmly opened the front door and stepped out. He couldn’t stop, damn it, without causing a couple of wrecks. And by the time they got clear and went back for her, she’d vanished.”

  Shayne simply said, “My God, Will,” and sank into a chair on the other side of the chief’s desk from Rexforth. “She was the only link we had. Driving back from that motel…” He stretched his big hands out in front of him and closed the fingers slowly into fists. “… I decided I was going to get the truth out of her if I had to choke it out of her lovely throat.” He paused. “All right, Will. So we haven’t got her. What have we got?”

  “In the first place, Mike, I’ve got two witnesses who place you square in Miami yesterday noon and at five o’clock,” Gentry told him heavily. “Want to comment on that?”

  Shayne looked across at Rexforth and said, “The five o’clock thing is his, of course. Why doesn’t he produce his man named Brenner who’s supposed to have tailed me out to the Orange Palms Motel?”

  “I will, Mr. Shayne,” said Rexforth happily. “He should be on his way here now.”

  Shayne said, “Fine. I’d like to hear him tell his own story. What’s this noon deal, Will?”

  “It’s a lad who works for the lunchroom down the street on Flagler where Lucy often orders lunch delivered up to the office. He knows her well, Mike, and says he knows you by sight. He’s prepared to swear that you met him down in the lobby of the building about twelve-thirty yesterday when he was taking a tray up to Lucy, and you gave him a dollar tip and told him you were going tip and you’d take it to her.”

  “So that’s how they pulled it?” muttered Shayne. “That adds up. Anyone who bothered to check carefully would know that Lucy always orders lunch sent up from that lunchroom, if I’m not in the office.”

  “He says he can identify you, Mike,” Gentry pressed him. “That he’s seen you in the office with Lucy several times.”

  Shayne nodded disinterestedly. “I’ve probably seen him a couple of times when he delivered lunches. If we’re tied up, Lucy orders something for both of us. Is that all you’ve got?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “No, by God, it isn’t!” Shayne exploded, leaping up from his chair angrily. “Where are these witnesses who are supposed to identify me? Jesus Christ, Will! You’ve listened to Rexforth’s story. Don’t you get the implications?”

  “The implications I get,” Gentry told him coldly, “is that there was a hundred thousand dollars floating around loose in Miami and you figured to grab it. I’m not saying what happened in your office yesterday afternoon, Mike. I’m not saying either you or Lucy killed the guy. But I think both of you know a hell of a lot more about it than I do… and I’m waiting for you to let me in on it.”

  Shayne let out a long breath and said, “I’ll agree there probably was a hundred grand floating around Miami yesterday waiting for somebody to grab it. And someone did… or made a hell of a good try. But it wasn’t I, Will. And it sure as hell wasn’t Lucy. Did you send a man out to the Orange Palms Motel?”

  Gentry nodded, reaching in his pocket for a thick black cigar which he rolled between his fingers and sniffed gravely. “That’s where Rexforth says you took Lucy yesterday afternoon from the office. And that part doesn’t make sense, I’ll grant you. If you and Lucy suddenly decided to bed down together, I can’t see you shacking up in a motel to do it.”

  “I’ve told you a dozen times,” said Shayne tensely, “that I was in California at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. It was some other man, Will, pretending to be me to try and get his hands on that dough.”

  “And Lucy went out to a motel with him?” Gentry looked properly incredulous.

  “I didn’t say that. I said…”

  “When you telephoned in,” Gentry reminded him, “you said you wanted Cabin Nineteen checked because Lucy had been there. Now you say she wasn’t there. You can’t have it both ways, Mike. But you’re never going to make me believe Lucy went out to a motel with another man. Maybe with you, damn it, though I should think you could plan it better than that, but not with some other lug.”

  Shayne gritted his teeth and said as patiently as he could manage, “I know Lucy was in that cabin yesterday, Will. I don’t know when she was taken there, or how, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t willingly on her part. Don’t you understand, goddamn it?”

  “I don’t understand much of anything,” confessed Gentry. “What makes you so sure Lucy was there at all? She leave y
ou a note or something?”

  Shayne hesitated, the wispy bit of embroidered blue nylon in his pocket seeming to burn against his flesh. He couldn’t confess the truth to Will Gentry. Not even to Gentry, damn it. There was something so leeringly sexual about a girl leaving her panties behind her in a motel room. No matter how well you knew Lucy… no matter how much you liked and respected her… a pair of discarded panties were… well, a pair of discarded panties.

  He replied stiffly, “Something like that. I’ll bet you a hundred to one they find Lucy’s fingerprints there… left not later than six o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

  “Just when Rexforth claims she went there with you,” Gentry commented stubbornly, putting light to his cigar and puffing on it with a sour frown as though it tasted worse than it smelled.

  Shayne said helplessly, “None of this is helping us find Lucy. If your lousy cops had just kept their hands on Elsa Cornell after I turned her over to you…”

  He was interrupted by the breezy entrance of Timothy Rourke into the room. He stopped dead in his tracks at sight of Shayne.

  “I’ve been trying to call you, Mike. You know I’ve been checking back in our old files on that O’Keefe embezzlement in Jacksonville and by God, Mike, this may be important. There was a round hundred thousand stolen… and not one penny of it was recovered. North American Bonding Company paid off in full. O’Keefe claimed he had spent it all prior to his arrest, but rumor was rife that ’twasn’t so. That he maybe had it put away until he got out of the pen and could enjoy it. Hey!” Rourke paused in his recital and glanced around uncertainly at the wooden faces about him.

  “None of you seem very much excited about this,” he said in a deflated voice. “I thought it might be important as a motive for O’Keefe’s murder.”

  Shayne said, “It’s important all right, Tim, but we’ve already got the same dope from Mr. Rexforth here. Remember the nasty little man Lucy mentioned in her notes?”

  “Oh. Sure.” Rourke glanced at Rexforth and agreed, “He is sort of a nasty little man at that. All right. Maybe you already know this, too, but I thought you’d be interested. I know who the dame is you had at the morgue, Mike. The one you called Elsa Cornell.”

  Shayne swung on him eagerly. “You do? Who is she?”

  “I had a kind of funny feeling all along,” Rourke confessed, “that I’d seen her picture in the paper somewhere… sometime. And when I was looking over the O’Keefe file, there it was. Right in front of me. A few years younger, but not a damn bit prettier.”

  “Who?” Shayne breathed, his throat constricted.

  “Mrs. Julius O’Keefe, that’s who. At least she was when he stole the money. She divorced him later and married his ex-boss. A guy named Robert Long. And you know what’s one of the funniest coincidences of all, Mike? That Robert Long is the same one that got killed here in Miami a few months ago in a shooting scrape you were mixed up in. I don’t know whether you remember…”

  “I remember all right,” Shayne said grimly. He grabbed the reporter’s arm and swung him toward the door. “Come on, Tim. Let’s get going.”

  “Hold it,” shouted Gentry angrily. “I’ve got two witnesses on their way in here to identify you, Mike. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

  “To find Lucy,” Shayne said over his shoulder as he jerked the door open and shoved Rourke through it in front of him.

  17

  “Where are we headed?” Timothy Rourke demanded breathlessly as Shayne gunned his car away from the police station.

  “To visit a guy named Dirkson Boal,” Shayne grated. “Lives out north, I think. Miami Shores, maybe. Do you know without stopping to look up the address?”

  “The lawyer? Yeh. I interviewed him at home a couple of months ago. Big place off the Boulevard… north of Hundredth Street.”

  Shayne nodded, pushing through traffic as fast as he could east to Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s still twenty minutes before most business places open up. If we’re lucky we’ll catch Boal at home.”

  “What’s he got to do with it, Mike?” Rourke asked helplessly. “Fill me in a little.”

  “He’s got everything to do with it. He and Mrs. Robert Long… O’Keefe’s ex-wife. They’re in it together. There are a couple others, but I imagine they’re just hired hands. You were right about the money O’Keefe stole. I don’t think he did spend it. It looks like he and Long were in it together and put it away in a safe place… probably in Miami… until he got out of jail to claim it with Long.”

  He had to stop for a signal light at the Boulevard, and waited impatiently until he could cross the intersection and swing into the outer lane of northbound traffic where he began passing every car in sight.

  “It started four months ago when Long died and I was with him. The story was in the papers and it evidently gave various people ideas about the money.”

  He swiftly outlined the theory Rexforth had formed independently, and ended flatly, “He was wrong, of course. Long told me nothing and didn’t turn over any half of a claim check to me. His wife held it, of course, and she evidently got the same bright idea that Rexforth had… that O’Keefe would be willing to split with me, although he’d never in the world split with her.

  “I suppose she went to Boal with her bright idea about that time, and they worked it out together. Get hold of some guy who could be made up to look enough like me to pass casual inspection… send him to the pen to gain O’Keefe’s confidence… pull strings to get the man pardoned… then arrange to get Lucy and me out of the office on the crucial day of O’Keefe’s release.”

  “Why rush out to Boal’s house like this?” asked Rourke. “You’ve got Mrs. Long under arrest. Why not…?”

  “That’s the point. We haven’t got her. She got away on her way from the morgue to the station this morning. It’s my bet that she went straight to Boal. Remember, she knows it’s turned into a murder now. She stood there beside me in the morgue looking down at the man she used to be married to and never turned a hair.

  “She and Boal are worried,” he added grimly. “The whole thing blew up in their faces when O’Keefe got himself killed in my office by their two hired hands. If they did get what they needed to recover the money off the body of O’Keefe, it’s my guess they’ll try to pick it up from wherever it is as soon as the place opens for business this morning, and get out of town.”

  “What about Lucy all this time. You figure Boal has got her?”

  “That’s the only way it does figure,” Shayne told him, hoping to God he was right. “I’m pretty sure the pair in my office panicked yesterday after killing O’Keefe, and rushed out to get Lucy from a motel room where they had put her for safe-keeping. They’d go straight to the boss with her… I hope. And dump her in his lap.

  “Boal isn’t the type to panic,” he went on slowly. “He wouldn’t take it on the lam without sitting tight until this morning to make a last try at the dough. So far as he knew I was still cuddled up cozily with Mrs. Long in Los Angeles, and even when O’Keefe’s body was found he didn’t see anything to tie him into it.

  “That’s what he must have thought, at least, until she turned up here in Miami this morning after eluding Gentry’s dumb cops.”

  He slowed down to sixty for a changing traffic light at 79th Street.

  “That was less than two hours ago.” He slammed through the intersection and added, “You said north of Hundredth?”

  “Yeh. Not far. Just a few blocks, then it’s a turn to the right. Better get over in that lane and slow down a little.”

  Rourke leaned out the window on his side to peer ahead, said sharply, “Next turn beyond that filling station. I remember…”

  Shayne braked hard as he went past the filling station indicated by Rourke, moved into the right-hand lane and made the turn onto a side street with screeching tires.

  Still leaning out the window, Rourke told him, “It’s along here. Big stone gateposts on this side. There. Up ahead.”

 
Shayne slowed still more and swung in between the stone gateposts on a macadam driveway that curved up a slight slope toward a modest stucco house surrounded by tropical shrubbery.

  He was just beyond the gate when the front end of a gray Cadillac nosed around the curve in front of them headed downward.

  Shayne slammed on his brakes hard and threw his car into reverse. It lurched backward and he swung the steering wheel hard to settle his car firmly between the gateposts, crosswise of the driveway, so the other car could not possibly get past it. He set the hand-brake and jerked his keys from the ignition and leaped out on his side as the big Cad ground to a halt with its grillwork almost touching the side of his car.

  Shayne trotted around the back of his car, noting that a man and a woman occupied the front seat of the other car. The man was Dirkson Boal and the woman beside him was Mrs. Robert Long.

  “Take her, Tim,” Shayne panted, heading for the left side of the Cad where Boal had his door open and was stepping out.

  Dirkson Boal was a big man, broader than Shayne, but not so tall. He was immaculately clad in a cream-colored suit, a yellow polo shirt open at the throat, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat.

  He was heavily tanned and looked physically fit, and his normally pleasant features were contorted with rage as he squared off in front of the detective and sputtered, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  Shayne hit him in the mouth before he could get his guard up. Blood spattered and he staggered backward on the dew-wet grass beside the road with arms flailing wildly.

  Shayne followed him coldly and methodically, his gray eyes blazing with all the accumulated fury that had been building up inside him for the past twelve hours. He drove a short left to the lawyer’s hard guts and then a swinging right to the side of his jaw that drove him to the ground.

  He lay there gasping, looking up fearfully at the detective with blood running out the side of his mouth. He turned his head from side to side in denial when Shayne demanded, “Where’s Lucy Hamilton? My secretary.”