Death Has Three Lives

by Brett Halliday

  “Good idea. You go down, Roberts. Hustle the others up out of the way. Having a boat on hand will save time, though, God knows, whoever went down in the car won’t be caring by this time.”

  A uniformed man came sliding down, brusquely ordering the onlookers up to move their cars from blocking rescue operations. He stood stock-still and stared with openmouthed astonishment at the redhead and his secretary sitting in the boat under the bright light from above.

  “Michael Shayne, by all that’s holy! What in the name of God are you doing here?”

  “Offering to help you locate the car that went over,” Shayne snapped. “Hello yourself, Roberts. Ever met my secretary, Miss Hamilton?”

  “No—I—” The young patrolman was still goggling helplessly. He turned to shout lustily up the bank, “It’s that redheaded shamus from Miami, sarge. Here in a rowboat with a dame.”

  “Okay. So it’s a cinch they didn’t shove him over,” an irate voice shouted back. “Row out from shore a little and try an oar to see if you find anything. Wrecker’ll be here in a minute with grappling hooks.”

  “You step out, Lucy,” said Shayne quietly. “I may be stuck here for hours helping them. No use your staying. Why don’t you go up and bum a ride back to Miami? Get some sleep and I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

  She bit her underlip and nodded unhappily. “All right, if that’s what you want me to do, Michael.”

  The young officer moved forward to stand in a few inches of water and give her a hand so she could leap from the prow to dry sand, and Shayne ordered sternly from behind her, “Don’t let any of the cops up there give you any lip, angel. Just because I want to take a moonlight boatride with my secretary isn’t any reason for them to get fresh.”

  She knew he was trying to tell her she mustn’t under any circumstances admit the truth about the part she had played in the accident to the gray sedan, and she replied meekly, “All right, Mr. Shayne. Please do be careful.”

  She climbed upward slowly, coming on a scene of utmost excitement and confusion when she reached the roadway.

  At least fifty motorists headed in both directions across the Causeway had been morbidly attracted by the accident, and half a dozen policemen were cursing and arguing with them to get back in their cars and clear the traffic lanes for rescue vehicles.

  No one paid any attention to Lucy as she shrank back out of the glare of the searchlights, tried to pick her way across to the other side of the Causeway where she might ask some motorist for a lift home.

  She reached the safety island between east and westbound traffic, and paused to catch her breath when a man hurried up behind her and caught her arm tightly. She whirled about to see Timothy Rourke’s grimly elongated countenance. “What happened, Lucy? Where’s Mike? Did it happen to the man we wanted?”

  Lucy nodded mutely to the last question, wilted suddenly in Rourke’s arms, and sobbed.

  “Michael’s down there in a rowboat helping the police find the car. He told me to catch a ride home. It was awful, Tim. It happened just the way you and Michael thought it would. Only he was going too fast when your bomb went off, and lost control and there wasn’t any fence to stop him.”

  “Tough,” said Rourke tersely. He guided her up the safety island to his car with its Press sign on the windshield. “You hop in and wait a few minutes. I’ll just make one check to see if anyone knows anything, then drive you home.”

  Lucy settled back with a shudder and closed her eyes tightly as he slammed the door and hurried away. She tried desperately not to think about the man in the front seat of the gray sedan at the bottom of the bay. He probably deserved it, she told herself over and over again. And it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Things had just gone wrong. Shayne had had to do it that way, she told herself desperately. The man had given him no choice. He had simply signed his own death warrant when he assumed the redheaded detective could be blackmailed.

  She remained with her head back against the cushions and did not open her eyes when Rourke returned and started his motor. He pulled out slowly past a policeman, gained the right-hand lane toward Miami, and told her ruefully, “I was about five minutes too late to do anybody any good. I was hurrying back from the Beach on my last round trip because I had a feeling it wouldn’t be much longer, and suddenly saw cars piling up in front of me and knew it had happened. Did you see him, Lucy? Get any dope at all?”

  “Hardly. Not to recognize him again. He was big, and I had the impression middle-aged. It was a gray sedan, Tim. He did it exactly the way he said he would. What—was in the package, Tim?”

  “A gas bomb with a slight charge of explosive,” he told her moodily. “We had to figure it out fast, and Mike got Will Gentry’s top explosives man to put it together for him. The explosion wasn’t meant to be much, but the gas should have knocked him unconscious before he could stop the car and get out. It figured good,” he went on angrily. “I was to drive back and forth on the Causeway without being conspicuous, and Mike was to keep close offshore in that rowboat. He figured he’d be able to see you walking along, silhouetted in passing car lights, so it’d be only minutes before he could row ashore and reach the guy after the gas knocked him out. Just what did go wrong, Lucy?”

  “Maybe it didn’t go off soon enough. I pulled the knob and threw it in.” She shuddered at the recollection. “He accelerated so fast. He must have been going forty when it happened. Even then, it might have worked the way Michael planned if the guard fence hadn’t happened to be down right at that point.”

  “It was set for ten seconds after you pulled the pin,” the reporter explained. “Mike wanted to give you time to get out of the way, but he couldn’t risk giving him time to pick it up and examine it.” He shrugged wearily. “Now he’s going to have a hell of a time explaining to the police what he was doing out in a rowboat right where the accident happened. And if there’s anything to connect him with the dead body when they recover it, there may really be hell to pay. The cop who fixed the bomb for him was plenty curious, though he didn’t ask many questions at the time. But if he ever adds things up and gets the right answer.” He shrugged again as he left the end of the Causeway and turned toward Lucy’s address. “It sounded like a good idea.”

  “Come up and have a drink with me, Tim.” Lucy impulsively put her hand on his arm as he stopped outside her door. “I just don’t want to be alone. And I’m sure Michael will call here the moment he can get away from there. I know you want to know what happened.”

  “And I can use a drink of your good bourbon, honey child.” Rourke swung his long-legged body out and followed her to the foyer where she unlocked an inner door and preceded him up one flight of stairs.

  While Lucy hurried into the kitchen for glasses and liquor, Rourke went to the telephone and dialed a number. He asked for the city desk when he got an answer, then asked casually, “Got anything yet on a car that went over the County Causeway into the drink about half an hour ago? This is Tim Rourke.”

  He listened, nodding his head without much interest until he jerked to attention suddenly just as Lucy entered the room behind him.

  “Are you sure about that?” he demanded incredulously. “I drove by shortly after it happened and didn’t hear about that.”

  He listened again, then said tensely, “This may be a hell of an important story, Ed. Put every man you can roust out into checking that story and trying to get hold of the fellow. Look! I’m at this telephone number.” He read Lucy’s number out loud. “Call me here the moment you get a single thing on it.”

  He hung up slowly, turned to Lucy with an odd expression on his face. “Just called the paper.” He tried to keep his voice calm, but couldn’t conceal the racing excitement that filled him. “They’ve got a tip that the driver of the car didn’t go over in it at all. That he was thrown clear in the roadway and the first motorist at the scene picked him up unconscious and rushed him off to a hospital.”

  “Thank heavens for tha
t,” said Lucy thinly. “I feel less like a murderer.”

  “Maybe it’d be better if you were. If the cops get to him before we do—” He shook his head angrily and strode forward to snatch the bottle from Lucy’s tray.

  Chapter Ten

  Using one oar as a scull, Michael Shayne maneuvered the rowboat in the deep channel near the foot of the Causeway while Patrolman Roberts knelt in the bow and probed over the side with the second oar attempting to locate the submerged automobile.

  “Don’t know how deep it is here,” Shayne warned him. “At least twenty feet, I’d guess. I don’t believe you have a chance in the world of finding anything with that oar.”

  “I don’t think so, either. Right here should be about it. I can’t touch anything. They’ll have ropes with grappling hooks in a minute.”

  “Not much hurry now,” Shayne commented grimly, resting his oar in a lock and getting out a cigarette. “Anybody know how it happened? More than one car involved?”

  “No. I don’t think so. We happened to be cruising by and saw the other cars pulling up. No one actually saw it, I guess. Speeding probably, and lost control. Hell, there’s no use keeping this up.”

  He settled back disgustedly, and Shayne lifted his oar to scull back to shore as two more searchlights were suddenly switched on above and a voice shouted down, “Bring that rowboat back, Roberts. We’ve got a crew here to do the job right.”

  Shayne stepped out of the boat onto the sand when it nudged in close, relinquishing his place to a trio of firemen equipped with long iron rods for probing deep in the water, and steel hooks attached to heavy Manila ropes to drag beneath the surface.

  He drew back toward a group of officers, from both Miami and Miami Beach and watched with interest as the boat set out again.

  There was little talk among the group. Two or three of them who knew Michael Shayne well made bantering remarks about his propensity for being on the spot when tragedies occurred, and speculated lightly on how the devil he had managed to wreck a car on the Causeway while rowing with his secretary on the surface of the bay.

  Shayne grinned and explained he had been experimenting with a new sort of ray by remote control, and promised that when the victim was recovered from the submerged car he would prove to be none other than Nicolai Simonovith, personal representative of the U.S.S.R. with secret plans for blowing up the entire United States with one bomb.

  There was a shout from the men in the rowboat, a great deal of activity as they maneuvered around one spot, letting their hooks down carefully until two of them appeared to be firmly caught by some object below. Then they rowed back a short distance as the ropes were tightened by a winch truck securely anchored on the edge of the Causeway above, and the heavy motor roared loudly in the night as the strain on the ropes became intense.

  One of the hooks broke loose, but the second held fast as the rope was reeled in, and under the bright lights the front wheels and engine hood of the gray sedan suddenly broke the surface of the water.

  Shayne hurried forward with the others as the sedan was dragged up on the sand on its side, was one of the first to peer into the interior and discover there was no body inside.

  Both front windows were rolled all the way down, and it was the immediate consensus that the body of the driver had drifted out through one of the open windows while the sedan rested on the bottom, and probably wouldn’t be recovered until gases gave the corpse enough buoyancy to bring it to the surface.

  With no official reason for staying around any longer, Shayne retrieved his boat and left them dragging the sedan up to the top, rowing strongly back the half mile to the dock where he had borrowed the craft earlier from a friend.

  All he could do now was wait for something to happen. It was midnight, and the man on the telephone had set one o’clock as the time the woman he called Mrs. Allerdice would tell her story to the police unless he had received $70,000 first.

  At the moment, Michael Shayne saw nothing in the world he could do to prevent that from happening on schedule. He had hoped, of course, to capture the man on the Causeway and get the truth from him and perhaps have the case settled by the one-o’clock deadline.

  But now the man was almost certainly dead and all chance of getting his story was over. Michael Shayne had blundered again. The police were going to take a very dim view of the entire affair when they had the full story of Shayne’s actions during the evening.

  From first to last, he had erred in judgment. From the first moment he had started withholding information from the authorities, he had been inexorably forced into new deceptions which had dug the pit deeper and deeper for him.

  Not only for him, he thought ruefully, but for Lucy Hamilton and Timothy Rourke, also. Lucy Hamilton deserved to share the responsibility with him, but Rourke was a completely innocent bystander who had become enmeshed in the affair through his long-time friendship with them both and his absolute conviction that Michael Shayne would always come out on top no matter what the odds.

  So Rourke had backed the wrong horse tonight, Shayne told himself grimly. There seemed no possible way to hide the full truth any longer. Within an hour the three of them were destined to be in very bad trouble indeed. Will Gentry was a good friend and a fair man, but he was also a sternly just man. In the past he had overlooked many minor deviations from the strict line of legality on Shayne’s part, but the things that had occurred tonight were much too much for even Will Gentry to stomach.

  At the very best Shayne knew it would mean the loss of his license. At the worst there could easily be jail terms for all of them.

  Yet, looking back on it now, Shayne did not honestly see how he could have acted otherwise. Each decision had seemed right at the time. But as a result of those decisions, two men were now dead who might still be alive, and the murder of Gladys Smith was no nearer a solution than before.

  Shayne was utterly weary in body and numbed in mind when he pulled in to the small dock and tied the skiff up. He stepped out and paced doggedly down to his parked car, wondering if Lucy was home yet, and where he might find Tim Rourke for the conference that was desperately indicated.

  A fast, clean breast of the whole thing to Will Gentry before the woman got her story in would probably be best. It meant disgrace and probable arrest, but it had to be faced.

  He drove to Lucy’s place first, was encouraged to see light in her front windows and Rourke’s car parked in front. He pulled in behind it and went doggedly into the foyer to press Lucy’s button. Her voice came over the speaking tube promptly and when he said, “Hi, angel,” her buzzer sounded. He climbed the stairs, and she met him in the hallway outside her lighted door. She cried out humbly, “I feel so terrible, Michael. I don’t know what—”

  He caught her slender body to him in a hard embrace, kissed her lips, and muttered huskily, “Nobody’s fault, angel. The gods were against us tonight.”

  He released her and stepped inside to see Timothy Rourke lolling back with a highball glass in his hand. He stopped in the center of the floor and announced flatly to both of them, “I stayed until they got the sedan out. No body in it. He must have drifted out an open window and floated away. So now we’ve got to do some hard thinking. I suggest—”

  “No, Michael!” Lucy’s voice was hopeful as she interrupted him. “We don’t think he’s dead at all. You tell him, Tim.”

  “That’s right, Mike. There’s strong reason to believe the driver of the car was thrown out before it went over the edge, and taken away unconscious by a motorist before the police got there. I’m trying to have the story verified and the man located before the cops reach him.”

  Michael Shayne stood stock-still, looking from one to the other while his weary brain tried to assimilate this information, to see how it changed the present picture, to determine whether it was good or bad, whether it should change his decision to go at once to Gentry with the whole story.

  He tugged for a moment at his ear lobe with left thumb and forefinger, the
n shook his red head slowly and sank into a chair. “I need a brandy, Lucy. And I want to know exactly what did happen on the Causeway.”

  She had cognac and a wineglass on the tray, and she poured him a drink while she related the events of her evening stroll rapidly.

  “So you see,” she ended hopefully, “there’s really nothing at all to connect me or you or Tim with the accident. Even if the police do find and question him, do you think he’ll tell the truth about how it happened? The blackmail attempt and all?”

  “God only knows what he’ll tell,” said Shayne moodily. “He won’t have the money. He’ll know that we tried to trick him—capture him with a gas bomb. And there’s still the woman waiting to tell her story.” He glanced at his watch. “In exactly fifty-two minutes, the way he warned me he had it set up, the police will start asking her questions.”

  Rourke sat up straight, his eyes bright and probing. “Let’s have it from the horse’s mouth, Mike. If we don’t get to him, or even if we do but the woman still tells her story, where do we stand with Will Gentry?”

  “Bad,” said Shayne. “God knows how many laws Lucy and I have broken. And you’re little better off, Tim.” He paused to take a long sip of cognac. “There simply aren’t any extenuating circumstances. If we had managed to pull this off and get the guy and solve the case on our own, Gentry probably would have been willing to forgive and forget. But everything we’ve done has botched it further. At the very least, I’ll be out of business tomorrow—and you and Lucy will be out of jobs. And we’ll probably all three be behind bars, looking out and repenting our misdeeds.” He smiled grimly and finished his drink.

  “And every bit of it’s my fault,” faltered Lucy Hamilton in a choked voice. “If I’d told you about Jack Bristow right away—if I’d telephoned you as I should have—”

  Shayne shook his head and held up a big hand to stop her self-accusations. “None of that is important now.” He drummed blunt finger tips on the arm of his chair. “How does it look to you, Tim? Feel like taking a ride to headquarters with me and dumping it all in Gentry’s lap?”