Shoot the Works

by Brett Halliday

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  Shoot the Works

  A Mike Shayne Mystery

  Brett Halliday

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the telephone rang, Michael Shayne said, “Let it ring, angel,” without lifting his head. He made his voice sound placid and almost drowsy. He was stretched out full-length on the sofa, in Lucy Hamilton’s sitting room, and his left cheek was pressed against Lucy’s warm lap. He had his jacket off and his tie loosened and his shirt collar unbuttoned, and Lucy was leaning slightly forward over him and her fingers were tangled in his coarse red hair.

  It was almost eleven o’clock, and a half-filled brandy bottle stood on the low coffee table directly in front of Shayne beside an empty wine-glass and a tumbler with two partially-melted cubes of ice in the bottom.

  The telephone across the room continued to jangle insistently. Lucy did not speak or move until the fourth ring. Then she sighed lightly and Shayne felt the muscles of her thigh tighten beneath his cheek, and he knew he had lost.

  From the first ring, he had known he would lose, of course. His effort to hold on to the lazy mood of the evening had been purely a mechanical reflex. No woman can resist the summons of a telephone. Particularly late at night, when she hasn’t the faintest idea who might be calling at that hour. Why, it might be anyone or anything! The building might be on fire, or it might be long-distance from California with a message that some distant relative had died and left her a fortune.

  Shayne lifted his red head enough to allow Lucy to slide out from under and cross the room to the telephone. She was wearing a full-skirted print dress that swished delightfully below her nice hips, and her brown curls glinted in the soft light from two shaded floorlamps at either end of the room.

  Shayne suppressed a rueful groan as he dragged himself into a sitting position and leaned forward to splash a finger of brandy in the empty glass. He irritably tried to close his ears to Lucy’s voice speaking into the mouthpiece, but the words came across clearly:

  “Mrs. Wallace? Why, I thought you weren’t due back until … I see … But what’s the matter? I can hardly understand you. Why, yes, he’s … he’s right here with me, Mrs. Wallace … Well, if it’s really important, I guess.…”

  Lucy’s voice changed perceptibly after she listened for a long moment. It became brisk and soothing at the same time. “Of course, Mrs. Wallace. No trouble at all. Michael will be glad to. In about ten minutes. I know the address.”

  Shayne took two deep swallows of brandy as Lucy dropped the receiver and swung around. “What will I be glad to do?” he asked sourly. “It’s eleven o’clock and I was practically asleep, and.…”

  “That was Mrs. James Wallace. You know. Helen Pearce’s mother. She’s in some dreadful trouble, Michael. Weeping and practically hysterical. I could hardly understand her. Hurry and get your jacket.” She whirled away toward the closet near the door to pull down a light wrap.

  “What’s Mrs. James Wallace got to do with us?” Shayne thumped his glass down and ran bony fingers through his tangled hair. “You’re the one who’s always telling me to keep decent office hours. You’re the one who’s always griping that we can’t spend a quiet evening together without some interruption like this. But when it’s some old dame you happen to know.…”

  “Michael Shayne! You get up off that sofa and move.” Lucy Hamilton snatched his jacket from the back of a chair and hurried toward him holding it outstretched. Her brown eyes were unexpectedly blazing and her firm chin jutted forward. “I told you it was Helen Pearce’s mother. You know Helen’s one of my best friends. Something awful has happened and she needs you. If it were some dizzy blonde friend of yours, you’d be on your way by now.”

  Shayne’s frown changed to a grin. Lucy was beautiful when she was angry. He surged to his feet and turned with his arms held out behind him. Lucy shoved the sleeves of his coat on and pushed it up across his wide shoulders. She grabbed his elbow and tugged him toward the door, saying breathlessly, “It’s up in the Northeast section. Hurry, Michael! You heard me tell her we’d be there in ten minutes.”

  “I heard you,” he grumbled, stretching his long legs to keep pace with her, out the door and down the single flight of stairs to his car parked in front of the apartment house. “What did she say was the matter?”

  “She didn’t say. Exactly.” Lucy settled into the seat beside him as the motor hummed and the heavy sedan surged forward. “Just that something dreadful had happened and could I find you and get you to come. Up the Boulevard to Fortieth will be fastest,” she directed.

  “She’s been visiting in New York and wasn’t due home until tomorrow,” Lucy went on rapidly. “I know because I had lunch with Helen today and she planned to meet the noon train. But Mrs. Wallace flew back unexpectedly, I guess, and … well, I don’t know what happened. Something terrible though. She’s not the hysterical type, Michael. She’s one of the calmest, nicest women.…”

  “No really nice woman,” gritted Shayne, “comes home a day ahead of schedule without notifying her husband.”

  “But Mr. Wallace isn’t.… He’s nice, Michael. They’re the nicest middle-aged couple I know. If something like that has happened it’ll be terrible for Helen. She’s pregnant, you know. And she’s already had two miscarriages and has to be very careful not to get upset or to overdo or anything. And she just adores her father.… That was Thirty-Seventh, Michael.”

  He grunted, “I know,” and started applying the brakes, slowing from fifty to a speed that allowed him to swing to the right onto Fortieth Street with only a faint scream of outraged rubber.

  “It’s in the next block on the right. A big apartment building.” Lucy was leaning out the door, her curls flying in the breeze. “Here, Michael. Park behind that convertible.”

  Shayne pulled into the curb in front of a six-story modern building and cut the ignition. Lucy had the door open and was running up the walk by the time he got out. He followed with long strides, conscious of a bad taste in his mouth. He remembered Helen Pearce vaguely. An ethereal sort of girl with a pleasant, blond, boyish husband with whom she was desperately in love. He and Lucy had had dinner with them a couple of times, had spent one pleasantly relaxed evening in their modest home on Miami Beach. It was one of the nicer evenings he and his secretary had spent together during their many years of association. He now recalled thinking at the time that if anything could convince him that marriage was the wonderful institution it was cracked up to be, seeing Helen and Bob Pearce together, in the intimacy of their home, would do it. Indeed, he had egotistically wondered at the time if that had been Lucy’s motive in taking him there.…

  But now a simple-minded housewife had returned home from New York unexpectedly, and there was some sort of hell to pay. And the sins of the fathers would be visited on the daughters.…

  Lucy had her finger on a bell in the small foyer when Shayne entered behind her. The release catch on the inner door buzzed, and Shayne strode past to turn the knob. A wide, tastefully decorated hallway led to twin self-service elevators at the rear. One of the cars was waiting, and Lucy pushed the button for 4 when they got in. They rode up in silence, with the redhead’s arm tightly about Lucy’s slim waist, so he could feel the trembling of her body against his.

  T
he car stopped and the door slid open silently. Down the carpeted hall to the right, a woman’s figure stood outlined in a rectangle of light from behind her. With a little choked cry, Lucy sped down the hall toward the waiting Mrs. Wallace. Shayne drew in a deep breath and followed more slowly. They were locked together on the threshold in a tight embrace when Shayne reached them.

  He waited a moment, studying Mrs. Wallace’s face over Lucy’s left shoulder. Her eyes were tightly closed and tears squeezed out from behind the lids, streaming down the smooth, unlined face. She had dark hair, faintly sprinkled with gray, drawn back tightly from a rather high forehead into a bun at the back. She was inches taller than Lucy, and, when they drew apart, Shayne saw a willowy, well-preserved woman of fifty, wearing a plain white blouse and the tweed skirt of a serviceable travelling suit; a woman whose anguished dark eyes looked deep into his while the tears continued to roll down her cheeks; a woman whose tormented soul cried out to him for help and for understanding. He knew instinctively there was a hard core of practicality beneath that exterior, that beyond the normal passivity of her unlined face was a mature strength that had met adversity on equal terms in the past and was capable of doing so again in the future.

  But at this moment she was a shattered woman, clinging weakly to Lucy’s younger strength, wetting her lips helplessly and striving for words that would not come while her eyes searched his rugged face in desperate appeal.

  Shayne pushed them both gently forward over the threshold into a small reception hall, and closed the door firmly behind him. Making small, clucking sounds of sympathy, her arm tightly about the older woman’s waist, half-supporting her, Lucy led Mrs. Wallace through an archway, into a neat and pleasant low-ceilinged sitting room, where two pieces of matched airplane luggage stood together just inside.

  Mrs. Wallace set feet in well-made, Cuban-heeled shoes firmly on the rug and drew away from Lucy as the girl urged her toward a rose-covered divan. The older woman stood stiffly erect with her arms pressed tightly to her sides and stared at Shayne, working her mouth for a moment and blinking her eyes rapidly.

  Then she opened them wide and said in a low, precise voice, “It’s Jim, Mr. Shayne. In there.” She rotated slowly on the rug like an automaton, lifting her right arm to point to an open door on the right of a small hall leading off the living room.

  Shayne nodded and passed her swiftly to the threshold of a fair-sized bedroom with neatly made twin beds, side by side, with a night table between them.

  The body of a man lay on the floor, on his back, at the foot of the twin beds. There was a small, neat hole in the middle of his forehead from which a trickle of congealed blood showed. His eyes were open and staring upward and his mouth was slack. He was middle-aged and of medium build, in his shirtsleeves, with a blue bow-tie knotted neatly beneath his chin, wearing belted, dark blue trousers and well-polished black shoes.

  Shayne stood very still in the doorway and studied the room carefully. There was no sign of struggle and everything appeared to be in order, except that three of the four drawers of a mahogany dresser stood open and, on the left-hand bed, there were neat piles of men’s clothing. Freshly laundered white shirts, undershirts and shorts, neatly rolled pairs of socks, half a dozen ties laid out carefully.

  A large, empty suitcase was spread open on the other bed. Beside it, near the foot of the bed, lay a man’s wallet, spread open, so that, when Shayne stepped forward, he saw an identification card, behind cellophane, that said James Wallace.

  Shayne knelt beside the dead man and touched his knuckles to the cheek. The grayish flesh was cool, but not clammily cold.

  He got up and went back into the living room. Mrs. Wallace and Lucy were sitting side by side on the sofa across the room. Mrs. Wallace sat almost primly, her feet close together, her knees forming a right angle. Her hands were folded loosely in her lap and she leaned back with her head resting against the cushion. The line of her throat was clean and the flesh beneath her chin was firm and unlined. Her eyes were closed again, but the flow of tears had ceased. Lucy’s right hand was pressing her shoulder comfortingly, and Lucy looked at Shayne with fearful, questioning eyes.

  He shrugged slightly and crossed the rug to stand close in front of the older woman. “Have you informed the police, Mrs. Wallace?” He kept his voice at a quietly conversational level.

  She did not open her eyes. No expression showed on her face. She answered just as quietly, “No, Mr. Shayne. I wanted to consult you first.”

  He said, “Where is the telephone?”

  She stirred then. Opened her eyes and leaned forward. She said, “Jim is dead, Mr. Shayne. Calling the police can’t change that. Will you listen to me first?”

  “Did you kill him, Mrs. Wallace?”

  “I?” A look of momentary bewilderment crossed her face. “I kill Jim? Of course not. He was my husband. I loved him.”

  “Tell me about it,” Shayne said patiently.

  “I’ve been away. In New York for ten days. I had a train reservation to leave New York today. Jim was expecting me at noon tomorrow. But I had only an upper berth and an application in for space on a plane. They telephoned this morning that there was a vacancy on an afternoon flight and I cancelled my train reservation and took that instead.”

  “Without informing your husband?”

  “I tried to telephone Jim,” she said with dignity, “but failed to reach him. When I reached the airport at eight o’clock, I telephoned here the first thing because I have always promised Jim I would never come home unexpectedly without letting him know.” A wan smile touched her lips. “It was one of our little jokes. A solemn promise that neither would ever do that to the other, though we both always knew it couldn’t possibly matter.”

  She paused thoughtfully, blinking her eyes again in a manner that gave her face a look of little-girl bewilderment, and Shayne prompted her gently, “So you telephoned home?”

  “Yes. There was no answer, so I assumed Jim was having dinner out. I felt foolish about not coming straight on home at the time, but we had made that solemn promise to each other, you see, and I was determined I wouldn’t break it after thirty years.” Her voice broke slightly on the last two words. She pressed her lips together tightly and her fingers writhed together in her lap. She opened her eyes wide and forced herself to go on.

  “So I took a taxi in to town from the airport and stopped at a restaurant to dawdle over some food, though I wasn’t really hungry, because there’d been dinner on the plane. But I had to do something, don’t you see?” She was speaking faster and her voice rose slightly. “To keep myself occupied until Jim got home, so I could telephone ahead. As we’d always promised each other, you see. I tried at nine o’clock and again, just a little before ten. And again at ten-thirty. When there still was no answer, I decided it was just being childish to put it off any longer, so I came on home.”

  “At ten-thirty?” Shayne asked.

  “I left the restaurant at ten-thirty-five. I noticed the time carefully. It took the taxi about ten minutes. I had the driver bring my bags up, and let myself in. All the lights were out and I had no idea at all that Jim was … here. I paid the driver and, when he left, I went into the bedroom and turned on the light. And I saw Jim. He was dead, Mr. Shayne. Someone had shot Jim. So I called Lucy. I remembered about you and I called Lucy.”

  “Why not the police?” asked Shayne. “Every minute of delay gives the murderer a better chance of escaping. Where is the telephone?”

  “Please, Mr. Shayne. Don’t you understand? Did you see Jim’s things laid out on the bed? The open suitcase?”

  Shayne nodded and said casually, “As though he were packing for a trip.”

  “But he expected me home at noon tomorrow. Don’t you understand what that means?”

  “There might be a lot of explanations,” Shayne said briskly. “No reason to delay notifying the police any longer.”

  “You still don’t understand,” she cried out in anguish, her voice rising c
loser to the hysteria she was fighting to control. “Look on the table near the door. Then you’ll understand why I called you instead of the police. His wallet was lying there open on the bed and I couldn’t help seeing the airline envelope with one end of it tucked in the little slit where Jim always carried theatre tickets. Two airplane tickets on the seven o’clock plane to South America tomorrow morning. What was Jim doing with two tickets to South America on a flight that left a few hours before he expected me back? Tell me that, Mr. Shayne. That’s why I didn’t call the police.” Her voice rose shrilly and her calm deserted her utterly. She slumped sideways against Lucy Hamilton and great, racking sobs shook her entire body.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Shayne stood very still, rubbing his angular jaw thoughtfully and looking down at the distraught widow. Lucy Hamilton held her tightly and whispered comforting words in her ear, and neither woman looked at the detective.

  After a long moment of indecision, he turned back to the table Mrs. Wallace had indicated. The airline envelope was there. He picked it up and drew out the two Pan-American one-way tickets to Rio on Flight 17, departing at 7:00 A.M. the following morning. His gray eyes became bleak as he returned the tickets to the envelope and turned back, holding it in his hand.

  Lucy had quieted Mrs. Wallace, so that she was no longer sobbing, but leaned supinely against the girl. Lucy’s face was strained and anxious as her dark brown eyes studied her employer’s face. “You’ve got to help her, Michael. Don’t you see …?”

  He held the envelope up and said flatly, “The best way we can help her right now is to get Will Gentry up here. Unless she wants her husband’s murderer to escape. Is that what she’s driving at?”

  “Of course not, Michael. I’m sure it isn’t that. What a nasty thing to say.”

  Shayne shrugged and spoke as casually as though the older woman were not there. “She doesn’t want the police. What else is on her mind?”