A Redhead for Mike Shayne

10

Shayne swung back and threaded through traffic as fast as he could make it to Biscayne Boulevard, then straightened out northward in the inside traffic lane and stepped hard on the accelerator. Traffic was heavy in both directions on the boulevard at this hour, and he continued at high speed for only a short distance before he had to start easing off and moving over to the right to be ready to make a right turn onto Captain Ruffer’s dead-end street.

He watched the street signs tensely, braked to fifteen miles an hour and made a wide sweeping turn onto the narrow, palmetto-lined street, then cursed savagely and jerked his wheel to the right when a car suddenly loomed up directly in front of him, moving toward him in the center of the macadam strip without lights.

His heavy sedan lurched down into a shallow borrow-pit and Shayne fought the wheel to hold the car upright, then gunned the motor hard and was back on the pavement almost before he had time to realize what had happened. In his mirror he saw the lights of the other car flash on, and it made a fast turn into the boulevard northward.

He made no attempt to stop and back up and pursue the car, knowing it would be at least a mile from the scene before he could complete the maneuver, and he had seen and recognized the faces of the two men in the front seat in that brief instant while his headlights were full on them. He would know where to find them later if he wanted them. Right now, having recognized the pair, he was more than ever anxious to get to Captain Ruffer fast.

It was less than a quarter of a mile to the bayfront with no houses on either side of the narrow roadway.

There was a solid stone barrier and a turn-around at the dead-end where Shayne stopped and turned off his motor and lights. There was a cool breeze from the bay, and night silence broken only by the sound of small waves splashing against the foot of the cliff in front of him.

On his left a squatty stone structure was perched boldly on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the bay. Light glowed through a round window like a porthole in the front door and a neat shell-lined walk led up to the door.

Shayne got out and strode up the walk. The driving sense of urgency had deserted him now that he was here. Those two hoods in the unlighted car had been here first and he was strangely reluctant to follow them inside the sea captain’s house.

The door had a heavy bronze knocker, and the big strap hinges were also of bronze. Shayne looked for an electric bell without finding one, lifted the heavy knocker and dropped it twice. He waited no more than ten seconds before trying the doorknob.

It turned easily in his hand and the door opened inward. There was a narrow hallway lighted by an electrified ship’s lantern hanging from a hand-hewn beam of cypress. An open door on the right showed the interior of a tiny and tidy kitchen. Inside the thick walls of coral rock it was unnaturally quiet in the captain’s small house. Not even the faint splash of waves from the beach below could be heard.

Shayne hesitated in the hallway a moment and called loudly, “Captain Ruffer.” His voice echoed back at him from the low-beamed ceiling. He strode to the end of the hall where there were closed doors on the right and left. He opened the door on the right and the room was dark. He fumbled inside the door for a light switch which illuminated two wrought-iron ship’s lanterns in brackets on either side of the sparsely furnished, square sitting room.

He stood in the doorway and tugged at his left earlobe and looked down somberly at the body of the man lying outstretched on the floor in front of him.

He was dead.

He lay on his back and his eyes were open and glazed, bulging from deep sockets in a bony, emaciated face. He was a big-framed man, who now looked curiously shrunken in death. He wore a double-breasted uniform suit of shiny blue serge with a double row of brass buttons down the front of the coat. The buttons were brightly polished and they reflected light from the ship’s lanterns.

His wrists were fastened together in front of him with a length of copper wire which had cut deeply into the swollen flesh.

Shayne took two steps forward and knelt beside the body. The tips of three fingers of his right hand were bloody stumps where the fingernails had been torn from them. There was no other mark of violence apparent on his body which was still warm enough to indicate that death had occurred not more than thirty or forty minutes before, and without a complete physical examination Shayne guessed that the shock and pain of torture had brought on a heart attack that had caused his death. He appeared to be in his seventies, and there was no padding of flesh on his big, bony frame.

Shayne rocked back on his heels and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. For a moment he thought he heard a sound from the other side of the house, and he started to get up, but decided it was a shutter moving in the wind. Whoever had done this job on the old sea captain, he thought angrily, had gotten out of there as soon as he died… either with or without the information they had tried to get by torture.

He hesitated a moment and then carefully went through the dead man’s pockets. He found nothing except a neatly folded newspaper clipping in the breast pocket of the serge coat. It looked recent and was from the Miami Herald and it was headed, PAROLE GRANTED.

He stood up slowly and began reading it, and then stiffened as he heard the sound of a car drawing up outside. He crumpled the clipping into a ball and thrust it inside his coat pocket, and stepped back to the side of the room near the door and got out a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.

He heard footsteps and voices outside, and he lit the cigarette and blew out the match and waited.

The outer door opened and a breeze blew in and there were heavy footsteps in the hallway, and Shayne raised his ragged red eyebrows in surprise when the bulky figure of Chief Will Gentry loomed up in the doorway, and he blew out a puff of smoke and said, “Dr. Livingstone, as I live and breathe.”

Gentry snorted, glancing from the redhead to the body on the floor, and then back at the detective. He was a big man with heavy, florid features, and an old friend of Shayne’s. He growled, “I thought I smelled something funny when I walked in that door.”

He stepped past Shayne heavily and scowled down at the dead man. A tall, white-haired man bustled in behind him. He was bare-headed and wore a white linen suit and he was breathing excitedly.

He stopped short at sight of the body, stared downward in horror and groaned, “Oh, my God! It’s old Captain Ruffer. Is he…?”

“Dead,” grunted Gentry as he knelt down to examine the body. He turned his head slowly to look at Shayne and asked in a tone of casual interest, “Why did you pull out his fingernails, Mike?”

“What’s that?” demanded the white-haired man, turning pallid. “Tortured? I knew something must be wrong,” he went on excitedly, “when he wasn’t here to keep his appointment with me after he’d been so specific about it. You know I told you, Chief…”

Gentry disregarded him. He got to his feet and faced Shayne. “All right. Give it to me, Mike. All of it.”

“I got here about three minutes ago and found him like that. He’s been dead at least twenty or thirty minutes, Will.”

“Maybe. I want to know why you came here. Did you have business with him?”

“I never saw him before in my life,” Shayne said truthfully. “I didn’t even know who he was,” he added not quite so truthfully, “until I heard this man call him Captain Ruffer.”

“What are you doing here in this house if you didn’t even know him?”

Shayne hesitated, then he said, “You’re not going to believe this, Will, but the fact is I was just driving around getting a little fresh air and I happened to come up this dead-end road to the bay. I parked out there for a minute, and then I got a funny feeling. You know how it is in police work,” he went on earnestly. “You get hunches. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s ESP. Anyhow, I just felt there was something wrong in here. I knocked and got no answer, found the door unlocked and walked in on this. Believe it or not…” He spread out his hands and shrugged. “That’s the way it was.”

“So I don’t believe it,” Gentry said heavily. “You’ll have to do better than that, Mike, or by God I’m going to lock you up.” He was breathing angrily. “I want the man that did this, and if you’re covering up something…”

There was a sound behind them and Shayne and Gentry both turned their heads to see Molly Morgan open the door across the hall and step out toward them.

“He’s covering up for me, Chief Gentry,” she told him warmly, “and I’m not going to let him. It’s just foolish, that’s what. I don’t know what kind of quixotic notion Mike has got, but I’m afraid he suspects I steered him here on purpose because I knew something was wrong. That’s not so at all. It’s just the way I told him when I asked him to bring me here. You know I’m getting material for some syndicated articles about Miami, and I ran into that fascinating story about Captain Ruffer’s shipwreck a few years ago and thought it would make an interesting feature. We came in together to see the captain,” she went on, entering the room to stand beside Shayne, and lifting her chin. “And when we found him lying like that, Mike shoved me across the hall and told me to go out the back way and he’d take care of everything. You don’t have to cover up for me, Mike,” she added sweetly, pressing close to him and slipping her arm through his. “I swear I was just as surprised as you were.”

Chief Will Gentry wrinkled his eyebrows at her disapprovingly while she spoke, and opened his mouth twice as though to interrupt her, but let her finish her glib speech before he said heavily, “Didn’t I meet you this morning?”

“Yes. Timothy Rourke introduced me to you in your office. I’m Molly Morgan. Remember?”

Will Gentry said, “I remember now. You do get around, don’t you… for a stranger in town?”

“It’s my business,” she told him defensively. “Is it all right for us to go now, Chief? I feel we’re just in the way here while you want to conduct a murder investigation.”

“Sure,” said Gentry bitterly. “Take her away from here, Mike. I’ll be talking to you later. On your way out tell the sergeant on the door to radio in for the Homicide Squad.”

Shayne turned Molly about and led her down the hallway to the front door before Gentry could change his mind. Will Gentry’s driver was there, and he gave him the chief’s message, and then hurried her down the walk and past Chief Gentry’s car to his own which was parked against the stone barrier.

He let go of her arm so she could go around and get in by herself, got under the wheel and started the motor and waited in stony silence until she was settled in the front seat. Then he backed around and headed out grimly, and when they were on the boulevard and moving toward the city at a moderate pace, she finally asked in a small voice:

“Are you angry at me, Mike?”

“Why should I be angry? You practically saved my life back there, didn’t you?”

“You are angry,” she said wonderingly. “Why? I thought I was helpful. You didn’t want to tell Chief Gentry why you were there, did you? About the guns and the Lithuanian pawnbroker and all?”

“No,” Shayne conceded gruffly. “I had no intention of telling Will any of that. But for a good many years now I’ve been in the habit of telling my own lies and getting out of my own messes without any help from female reporters.”

“Oh, Mike,” she said sadly. “The truth of the matter is that it’s all because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You’re one of those excessively masculine individuals with a penis complex a yard long who thinks a woman’s place is in the home and nowhere else, by gum and by God.”

Shayne said stiffly, “I thought it was women who had penis complexes.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care one damned bit for your cheap psychoanalysis.” His voice rose explosively. “How the living hell did you get out to that house in the first place?”

“I thought you knew.” There was the warmth of laughter in her voice. “I told Chief Gentry that we went there together.”

“Which was a flat lie.”

“Oh no, Mike. I don’t lie. At least not flatly. I did ride out with you. Hunkered down in the back seat. When you shoved me aside in the pawnshop and stamped out, I suddenly realized I had your car keys and you couldn’t take off without them. So I put them on the counter where you’d see them and slipped out the back door and around to your car while you were inside getting them. What on earth happened when you turned off the highway?” she added pensively. “It felt like you went in the ditch and I thought we were going to turn over. I think I squealed, but you didn’t even hear me.”

Shayne suddenly exploded into laughter as the ridiculousness of it all came to him. “Then you came into the house behind me?”

“Around by a side door that opened into the captain’s bedroom. I kept listening for conversation, but I couldn’t hear anything until your friend the police chief came in, and then I realized he was dead and you were in sort of a spot explaining how you had got there. I thought I came up with a very convincing story.”

Shayne said, “You did fine, Molly.” They were nearing Flagler Street and he turned toward her with a grin. “I guess you’re right. I’m just not used to hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. But what was that yarn you told him about the captain having been shipwrecked? I thought you’d never heard of the guy until we got his name in the pawn-shop?”

“I hadn’t. But I looked around in his bedroom while I was deciding whether to come out or not, and I found an old clipping he’d saved which I glanced at. It was hidden in a built-in cubby-hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed along with some other things that I thought might be important because they were so carefully hidden.”

Shayne turned off the boulevard onto Third Street and said feelingly, “My God! You took time to burgle the joint during those few minutes before Gentry arrived?”

“I was lucky,” she told him complacently. “It looked as though there had been a struggle in the bedroom, and the bed had got shoved away from the wall so the hiding place was visible.”

Shayne had circled around from the boulevard and he drew up in front of his hotel behind her rented automobile which still waited there. He turned off his lights and ignition, but didn’t get out immediately. He put both hands on the steering wheel instead, and turned a long, inquiring look at Molly Morgan.

“You said there were some other things hidden with the clipping. What sort of things?”

“Well, there was an old heavy brass-bound book that seems to be a sort of personal record dating back forty years. I just had time to glance at the first couple of entries. And along with that was a box containing a set of practically new skin-diving equipment. You know… flippers, mask and oxygen tank. And that seemed a funny thing to be hidden there.” She paused with a frown. “He didn’t look like a skin-diver, did he? But then he was a sailor, and I suppose all of them do maybe.”

Shayne drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel and said thoughtfully, “About that clipping you mentioned. What sort of ship was wrecked? Where and when?”

“It was a few years back. In a Caribbean hurricane. The captain was the only survivor. That’s as far as I got with it before Chief Gentry came in.”

“I’d like to know more about that shipwreck,” muttered Shayne. “It could have an important bearing on the whole situation. Those Russian guns he sold the pawnbroker last week…”

She said sweetly, “So why don’t we go up to your place and have a drink and see? Maybe we can figure out the whole story before the police connect up the two murders tonight. Because he was tortured and killed by someone trying to find out about the guns, don’t you think?”

“Probably by the same two men who killed your Lithuanian friend. Have you got that clipping, Molly?”

“Yes. I automatically stuck it in my handbag when I heard the police car stop outside. At that point I didn’t know he had been murdered, Mike, and didn’t realize those things hidden there might be important evidence. I guess… it’s a felony or something to take anything away from the scene of a murder?”

“You’ll get ten years at least,” Shayne told her cheerfully. “One nice thing about it is that they’ll send us up together. I’ve got a clipping of my own that I forgot to mention to Will Gentry. Let’s go up and compare notes.”