Never Kill a Client ms-43

by Brett Halliday

  “I don’t know what sort of proof you have cooked up, Mr. Shayne, but I doubt that it will stand up against the direct testimony of a trained observer like my man Brenner. Certainly I will amplify it if you wish. It is one more of the trumps I hold. An ace this time.

  “I have stated that Brenner followed O’Keefe directly to your office from the prison gates without losing sight of him once. He was in the elevator with O’Keefe, and got off behind him on the second floor. He followed him down the corridor, watched him enter an office with your name on the door, and passed by behind him in time to catch a glimpse of your secretary seated at her desk and smiling a welcome at O’Keefe. Then the outer door was shut.

  “That was shortly after four o’clock, Mr. Shayne. I haven’t the exact time, but it will be carefully noted on Brenner’s written report when he submits it. He loitered on the second floor for a time, keeping the closed door of your office under observation with O’Keefe inside. Then, not wishing to become conspicuous, and quite properly in my opinion, he returned to the ground floor and took up a position where he could observe everyone who came out of either elevator.

  “O’Keefe did not show up… nor did you or your secretary. He had a newspaper picture of you and a physical description, of course, which I had supplied him with before sending him on the assignment, and he had seen your secretary through the open door.

  “At five o’clock, or shortly thereafter, when none of the three of you had shown in the lobby, he chose a moment when both elevators were going up empty, and rode up to the second floor again to see what the situation was. He had scarcely stepped out of the elevator when the door of your office opened and you emerged, Mr. Shayne, with your secretary directly behind you. He turned his back and pressed the Down button, and rode down in the elevator with the two of you.

  “At that moment he didn’t know what had become of O’Keefe, but he knew there were stairs, of course, and he quickly assumed that you had cautiously sent your client down by those stairs before locking up for the night. It was the sort of precaution, he knew, that a smart detective like you might well insist on.

  “At the moment, Brenner had no recourse except to follow you. He did so. Out the front door, in the stream of home-going office workers, and around the corner where you and the young lady got into a car that was parked there. Brenner was lucky enough to hail an empty taxi in time to follow you. He trailed you to a motel west of town on the Tamiami Trail, and observed you drive in and go directly into the carport attached to one of the cabins.

  “You and she got out, and he was able to observe you unlock the door leading directly in from the carport, and both of you went inside.

  “At that point he felt it would be wise to report to me and get further orders. After all, he felt it was quite safe to leave you together in the cabin for a time. A man doesn’t normally take his secretary directly from the office to a motel room, which he has already engaged in advance, without planning to spend, at least, a few minutes inside, alone with her. Not if the secretary is as attractive as yours, Mr. Shayne. Remember, I saw her in the morning.

  “No, I don’t blame Brenner for seeking a telephone at that point even though it did prove a mistake. He had the taxi drive on to the motel office, where he found a telephone booth and called me here. I was annoyed that he had lost O’Keefe, but I suspected that he planned to meet you at the motel later, and instructed Brenner to remain unobtrusively in the cab and watch your cabin, with orders to follow you, if you left, or to telephone me immediately, if O’Keefe showed up.

  “Five minutes later I received a second, disconsolate call from Brenner. By the time he returned to view of your cabin, your car was gone. He investigated and found both side and front doors locked, and he knocked loudly without getting any response whatsoever. It hadn’t been more than five minutes since you drove up, and both of you had vanished.”

  Rexforth stopped talking and sighed deeply. “I assumed that Brenner had bungled the job of tailing you. That you had spotted his cab following you from town… which would not be unlikely for a man of your experience. That is when I made my first telephone call to your hotel, Mr. Shayne.”

  Shayne’s cheeks were deeply trenched and his big hands were knotted into fists when Rexforth stopped talking. “What was the name of that motel?”

  “The name… of the motel? Surely, you know that, Mr. Shayne. Much better than I. It wasn’t I who…”

  “Goddamn it, Rexforth, stop stalling. Give me the name of the motel before I beat it out of you.”

  Shayne was rising slowly as he spoke. Rexforth looked up into his implacably gaunt face in consternation, and protested, “I really don’t see…”

  Shayne slapped him on the side of his face with his open palm in a swinging blow that knocked the bonding company executive flat on the unmade bed, where he cowered and made whimpering sounds.

  Shayne leaned over him and got both big hands on the collarbone on either side of his neck and lifted him up in the air and shook him angrily.

  “I don’t care what you see or don’t see,” he raged. “It’s my secretary you’re talking about. What motel was it?” He held the man’s scrawny body in front of him with his bare feet above the floor. “Tell me,” he grated, “or I’ll break your neck.”

  “I don’t know the name,” wailed Rexforth. “Brenner didn’t say over the phone. It’ll all be down in his written report. You’re acting like a wild man.”

  Shayne shook him in the air again. “Damn the written report. I want it… now. Where is Brenner?”

  “He’s… here,” gasped Rexforth. “I had him stay over last night because I didn’t know…”

  “In this hotel?”

  “No. A cheaper one. The Royalton.”

  Shayne threw him sprawling back on the bed. “Get him on the phone. Get the number of the cabin and the name of the motel.”

  “Of course.” Rexforth scrabbled across the bed away from Shayne and trotted to the telephone across the room. There he hastily consulted a memorandum pad beside the instrument, then asked the hotel operator for a number in a quavering voice. When he got it, he gave an extension number, and Shayne moved over to stand close behind, as he said tremulously:

  “That you, Brenner? Rexforth. I called to ask the name of the motel and the number of the cabin you tailed Shayne and his secretary to yesterday.”

  He listened a moment and then wailed, “I know it will be in your report. But I want it now. All right, then, look up your notes. I’ll hold on.”

  He turned his head and said unnecessarily, “He has to check his notes to be sure.”

  Shayne waited on wide-spread feet, his nostrils still flaring angrily.

  Rexforth finally said, “Thank you. No, that’s all for now,” and hung up.

  He told Shayne resentfully: “It was the Orange Palms. On Southwest Eighth Street beyond Coral Gables. Cabin number Nineteen. I still don’t understand why on earth…”

  Shayne had whirled away and was headed for the door on long legs. Rexforth scuttled after him, crying out in high-pitched exasperation, “Wait. We haven’t settled anything. You can’t just dodge out…”

  Shayne was out the hotel door by that time, and he slammed it shut behind him. Rexforth reached it and jerked it open, thrust his tousled head out and called down the corridor at the redhead’s retreating back, “I’m taking this to the police, Shayne. I warn you. Straight to the police.”

  Shayne kept on going around a corner to the elevators. He stopped and viciously punched the Down button. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized Rexforth apparently wasn’t aware that O’Keefe had been murdered the day before. He was due for a surprise, if he did go to the police.

  15

  Michael Shayne’s mind worked feverishly as he headed westward on the Trail at twenty miles above the speed limit on that crowded thoroughfare. It hadn’t been Lucy, of course, who went to the motel room from his office. Not at five o’clock. Not leaving a dead man lying on the floor behind
her and in company with another man.

  It was the same woman Brenner had seen sitting at Lucy’s desk through the open door when O’Keefe went in. That meant they had managed to replace Lucy with another woman by four o’clock.

  How? What had they done with her?

  They might have lured her out of the office by some ruse, although Lucy was very reluctant about leaving the office while Shayne was out. She even refused to take time off for lunch, had milk and sandwiches sent in from a nearby lunchroom that specialized in sending out office lunches.

  So, even if they had succeeded in luring her away by some ruse, Lucy would not have stayed lured away very long. She could only have been prevented from returning to her post by physical force… held prisoner some place until their business with Julius O’Keefe in Shayne’s office was completed.

  A secluded motel room would be a good place for that. You could leave her there bound and gagged, or thoroughly drugged, while you waited for the ex-convict to arrive and unsuspectingly lead you to the money which he and Robert Long had cached together years before.

  But evidently O’Keefe had not been quite so obliging after he reached Shayne’s office. Something must have gone sour in the pitch. Shayne doubted that murder had been planned in the beginning. Not right there in his office, at least. They might have planned to dispose of the guy after the money was safely in their hands… or the passport to the money at least.

  No. O’Keefe’s death by the filing spindle in front of Lucy’s desk had all the earmarks of hasty improvisation. Suppose something had occurred to make him suspect the impersonator was not actually Michael Shayne? He would have started out… and there would be one hundred grand going out the door with him.

  All right. Suppose it had happened that way? There they’d be behind the closed door of another man’s office with a dead man on their hands. A hasty search to snatch his wallet… maybe find what they were after inside it. Maybe not. Either way, what came next?

  The corpse on the floor would change everything. Now it wasn’t a simple impersonation and con game. Now it was murder.

  Maybe they’d planned just to leave Lucy in the motel cabin to be found eventually… after they’d got the money and left town. But now, they’d panic. Unexpectedly turned into murderers, they’d panic fast.

  Lucy must have seen them. At least one of them. They couldn’t afford to leave a witness around who might testify against them later.

  Was that why they had driven straight to the motel after leaving a dead man behind them?

  They hadn’t stayed in the cabin long. Not more than five minutes according to the bonding company detective.

  How had they utilized those five minutes?

  Shayne’s foot was grimly heavy on the gas pedal and there was a gnawing knot of fear in his stomach, the sour taste of fear in his throat, as he neared the outskirts of Coral Gables, and began looking for the Orange Palms Motel, which he vaguely remembered having seen in the past.

  It was still early in the morning. No one would normally have entered the locked cabin since the preceding afternoon. That was one of the things you got with a motel room. Complete privacy and the absence of prying eyes.

  He saw the big sign ahead on the right, and took his foot off the accelerator. There was a row of stunted palms in front, and all the cabins were painted a bright orange color. There were about thirty units built in a semicircle, each with its individual carport separating it from the next unit for maximum privacy.

  Shayne skidded to a stop in front of a sign that said, OFFICE, flung himself out and pushed inside a small room with a desk across the middle of it.

  A slatternly, fat woman got up from a chair behind the desk and looked at him appraisingly as he stalked in. It was the wrong hour for people to be stopping to register for rooms.

  He stopped in front of her and said, “I want the key to Number Nineteen.”

  “Do you now?” she countered coldly. “Are you registered here, Mister…?”

  “I’m not registered,” he said flatly. “Give me the key or I’ll go out and kick the door down.” He laid his hand flat on the desk with open palm upward.

  She looked into his hot eyes and the width of his shoulders and knew he not only meant the threat, but was also physically capable of carrying it out.

  Reluctantly, she reached behind her and produced a key with a brass tag attached to it. “If there’s trouble, I’ll have no part of it,” she told him virtuously.

  He snatched the key from her fingers and strode out, left his car sitting there while he went down the curving row of cabins to Number Nineteen.

  Most of the units had cars still in their ports. Nineteen didn’t. He put the key in the lock of the front door and it turned easily.

  He stood for a moment without opening the door, while his guts churned up a storm inside him. Then he set his teeth together, turned the knob and thrust the door open.

  The square room with its double bed looked completely empty from where he stood on the threshold. The bedspread had been thrown back and the blanket underneath it was rumpled as though a body… or two bodies… had lain there, but the bed hadn’t been slept in.

  There was no other sign of occupancy as Shayne stepped inside. He paused beside the bed, then dropped to his knees beside it and peered underneath.

  There was nothing to be seen there. The churning was subsiding inside him when he stood erect again. There was only one closet with the door shut, and a bathroom with the door standing open.

  He went around the bed to the closet and jerked it open. There was nothing inside. He strode into the bathroom and saw that all of the towels hung neatly folded on their racks, unused.

  He was about to turn and go out when a glimpse of blue caught his attention on the floor between the toilet seat and the wall.

  He leaned over and stared down somberly at a dainty pair of blue nylon panties that had been waded down beside the toilet practically out of sight.

  He reached down and picked them up between thumb and forefinger, and shook them out in front of his disbelieving eyes.

  He recognized them immediately. There was a row of pink hearts embroidered across the front, and beneath them were the embroidered words, also in pink: “For my valentine.”

  They were Lucy Hamilton’s panties. He had given them to her himself as a gag last Valentine’s Day. He remembered how charmingly Lucy had blushed when he gravely presented them to her that day in the office, all done up in a big crimson-and-silver heart-shaped box. He didn’t know she had ever worn them. She had sworn that day that she never would, and had given him a mild piece of hell for selecting such a silly gift for her.

  He stood very still for at least thirty seconds staring at the wisp of embroidered blue nylon. Then he angrily crumpled it up in one big hand and thrust it into his pocket.

  Outside the cabin he paused to close the door and lock it, and then he strode back to the office and entered and the fat woman behind the desk glared at him suspiciously and demanded, “Now, what’s this all about, Mister? We run a decent place here and don’t want any trouble.”

  “Police business,” he told her, putting the key down on the desk. “Keep Number Nineteen locked tight until the police get here to check it out. Now get me the registration card for Nineteen.”

  “Police business?” she faltered, “I tell you we run a decent place here…”

  “If your nose is clean, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he interrupted. “Get that card. Did you check them in?”

  “Number Nineteen?” She frowned as her fat fingers flipped through a numbered card index and deftly extracted a registration card which she peered at before placing it in front of Shayne. “No. My husband did. See. It was a little before noon yesterday.”

  Shayne studied the card and got just about as much information from it as he expected. It was signed:

  “Mr. and Mrs. Ned Jenkins. Asheville, N. C.” and provided the further information that the North Carolina couple were dr
iving a 196 °Chevy sedan with a Dade County license number.

  Shayne looked up from it and asked, “Where is your husband?”

  “Asleep in back. He was up last night until nigh two o’clock when the last cabin was rented.”

  Shayne said brusquely, “Get him out here while I telephone police headquarters.” He turned to a telephone booth in one corner of the room and went in while the fat woman departed, grumbling under her breath, through a passage to the rear.

  Shayne put a dime in the slot and dialled a number that was very familiar to him, although not to the general public, because it was a direct line to Will Gentry’s private office.

  Gentry answered the telephone himself, and Shayne said briskly, “Mike Shayne, Will. I’m out at the Orange Palms Motel on the Trail. Send a couple of men out to check a cabin, huh? Number Nineteen. Fingerprints and anything else interesting.”

  “Listen here, Mike,” Gentry’s voice rumbled over the wire. “What the hell are you up to? There’s a guy in here named Rexforth from North American Bonding, and he’s been telling me…”

  “I know exactly what Rexforth has been telling you, Will. Did you get the name of the motel?”

  “I got it. Cabin nineteen. Mind telling me why you want it checked, Mike?”

  “Because Lucy has been in that cabin,” Shayne exploded. “I want to know when. In what shape she left it. Goddamn it, Will! Do I have to give you a blueprint?”

  “Hold your horses, Mike. I’ll have the cabin checked. In the meantime….”

  “In the meantime,” grated Shayne, “keep Rexforth there. I’m coming in.”

  He hung up and went out of the booth to find a very tall, very thin, baldheaded man behind the desk with his wife hovering suspiciously in the background. He was wearing an undershirt, with a pair of pants which he had evidently pulled on hastily, and there was a worried look on his face. He was fingering the registration card for Number Nineteen, which Shayne had left lying on the desk, and he asked diffidently, “Something wrong about this, Mister? My wife tells me…”