A Redhead for Mike Shayne

11

In the second-floor hotel sitting room, Shayne went toward the kitchen waving a big hand at the two wineglasses they had upended less than an hour before, and said, “Pour us a drink, Molly. I’ll get some ice water.”

He came back with two glasses with ice cubes floating in them, and nodded approvingly at the glasses she had filled to the rim. He said abruptly, “I feel like hell, Molly. Two guys are dead just because I didn’t get to them in time.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You got to both of them just as fast as you could.”

“It’s always my fault,” he muttered angrily. “If I’d done things differently… if I’d been home when Papa Gonzalez called, for instance.” He shrugged and drank deeply of the cognac she had poured. “What I’m trying to say is… it’s my job to be on time. All right. Forget it.” He dropped into a chair and reached into his pocket to bring out the crumpled newspaper clipping he had found in Captain Ruffer’s pocket.

“I don’t know what significance this has… if any. It was neatly folded in the Captain’s breast pocket, and it must have meant something to him.”

He smoothed it out on the table between them and Molly Morgan leaned over with her red head close to his and they read it together.

It was a local item and not datelined. It said, briefly, that Roy Enders had been granted a parole from the state penitentiary after serving six years of a seven-year term for statutory rape, and had arrived in Miami that morning to be met by his attorney, John Mason Boyd, who had defended him originally and who (the paper stated) had worked tirelessly for his release on parole ever since his incarceration.

Mr. Enders’ only statement to the press, the item concluded briefly, was that it was good to be back in the Miami sunshine and that he asked only to be left strictly alone and in privacy to go to his fishing lodge on the Keys south of Miami and relax in seclusion.

Shayne looked up at Molly as they both finished reading it, shaking his head dubiously. “There’s no date on it but it looks recent. We can check, of course. The name strikes a vague chord in my memory. Six years ago… Roy Enders?” He narrowed his eyes and tugged at his left ear-lobe. “Seven years for statutory rape is a mighty stiff term,” he muttered. “Seems to me there were other circumstances surrounding that case I should remember… but I don’t. Again, we can check. But here’s one thing.” He put his blunt forefinger on the name of the lawyer mentioned in the story.

“John Mason Boyd. That just happens, Molly, to be the name of the white-haired gentleman who followed Will Gentry in tonight, and the man who evidently brought the police into it. I gathered he’d had an earlier appointment with the captain, and got worried and called on Will when Ruffer didn’t show up.”

Molly Morgan looked back at him steadily, her eyes interested and alert. “We’ll have to find out more about Roy Enders,” she murmured. “All right. Here’s my contribution to the puzzle.”

She reached down beside her chair and lifted the big black leather handbag into her lap, unzipped it and reached inside.

Her newspaper clipping was yellowed slightly, and brittle with age. It had a date on it, October 16, 1958, and it had a photograph of a serious-faced Captain Samuel Ruffer above the caption, DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE.

It was a feature story, by-lined by Timothy Rourke, Shayne noted with quirked eyebrows, and Rourke had pulled out all the stops in relating the incredible saga of the master of the fishing sloop Mermaid which had been sunk in a tropical storm fifty miles off the Florida Keys on October 13th, and related the miraculous survival of Captain Samuel Ruffer who had managed to say afloat in the angry seas for three days supported only by a life preserver until he had been sighted by a private fishing cruiser some twenty miles off the coast and taken aboard.

The two crew members of the Mermaid had been washed overboard during the storm and vanished, and Rourke had made much in his story of the rugged constitution of the captain which had survived three days of burning heat and thirst and hunger which should have killed any ordinary man.

Michael Shayne shook his red head dubiously a second time after he finished reading the story. “I suppose this is the sort of thing a man might keep for his memoirs, but I don’t see that it adds much to our knowledge of the situation. He was a tough old sea-dog in those days, and he survived the elements six years ago only to succumb tonight when some bloodthirsty bastards pulled three of his fingernails out by the roots. Why, Molly?”

“You know why,” she told him quietly. “They wanted the rest of those Russian Lenskis which he had promised Mr. Wilshinskis.”

“What’s that got to do with him being shipwrecked six years ago?”

“I don’t know. But you do think that was why he was tortured and killed tonight, don’t you?”

“It adds up,” Shayne agreed cautiously. “You asked about my going into the ditch when I turned onto the captain’s street tonight. I did it to avoid a car coming from his house without lights. There were two men in the front seat that my headlights picked out momentarily. A couple of well-known hoods around town on the payroll of a bigshot named Armin Lasher. One of them happens to be a tall stringy guy, and the other is short and dumpy.”

“The way Mrs. Wilshinskis described the two men who visited her husband.”

Shayne nodded. “This Lithuanian bit,” he probed. “You say it’s your native language?”

“My mother was Lithuanian,” she told him.

“That’s Russian, isn’t it?”

“Since nineteen forty-six. And the Lithuanians still don’t like it. Any more than the Poles or the Hungarians do. So don’t get any funny ideas, Mike. I’m an American citizen even if I do speak Lithuanian and recognize a Russian Lenski pistol when I see one.”

“Yeh,” he said drily. “I recall that you read me a lecture on patriotism this afternoon.”

“All right. I thought we had agreed to by-pass that. Where do we go from here?”

Shayne leaned back comfortably and lifted his cognac glass to sip from it. “Do we have to go anywhere? There’s another bottle where this one came from.”

“You pointed out, yourself, that two men have already been brutally murdered tonight… because you didn’t get to them in time. And you pretended you felt responsible. Right now you’re sitting on top of some very important information that the police should have if they’re to catch the two killers. If you’re not going to use it, I’ll take it to Chief Gentry myself.”

Shayne took another sip of cognac and asked equably, “Are all Lithuanians beautiful when they get mad?”

“Don’t flatter me,” she stormed. “I’m serious about this, Mike. If you’re not going to do something, I am. You can’t solve two murders just by sitting here.”

She got to her feet defiantly and turned toward the door. Shayne swung to his feet and moved in front of her. “We’ve still got things to talk about, Molly. I’m still not completely convinced…”

She drew back suddenly and tried to dart past him. He caught her right forearm and pulled her back roughly, and her big leather handbag clutched in her right hand swung in an arc and struck him solidly on the thigh.

His grip tightened on her arm and he demanded, “What in hell are you carrying in that handbag? A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, for Christ sake?”

“It’s none of your business,” she said bitterly. “Just let me out of here, Mike Shayne. That’s all you can think about,” she gibed at him. “A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, and getting your hands on a shipment of them. You don’t care how many people die in the meantime. Take your hands off me.”

Instead of releasing her, he pulled her to him roughly and reached down with his right hand to wrest the heavy handbag from her grip. He shoved her back from him saying coldly, “You can beat it if you want to. But I’m going to have a look inside this outsized bag you’re toting.”

She bit her underlip angrily and said, “I realize, now, it should go to the police… and that’s where I was going to take it.”

Shayne turned his back on her and stalked to the center table and opened her bag.

She walked back slowly and stood beside him while he lifted out a heavy brass-bound book, about four by six inches in size and at least two inches thick, held shut by a brass clasp.

He turned it over slowly in his hands and looked sidewise at her. “Captain Ruffer’s personal record of forty years at sea,” he muttered. “My God, you went whole hog when you started stealing evidence, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think about that at first… in all the excitement. Then as we began talking I realized it might be important. If he’s been mixed up in gun-running for the Communists in Cuba this last year or so, it may have a record of a shipment that included a number of Lenski pistols.”

“And when you did realize that, you decided to keep it to yourself?”

“Well, I… you’ve been acting so funny, Mike. Ever since this noon when you talked about getting hold of those guns for yourself… for the money they might bring. And those two men murdered tonight. You didn’t call the police in. You didn’t mention the Russian guns to Chief Gentry. What am I supposed to think?”

Michael Shayne hesitated a long moment, holding the heavy brass-bound book in his hands without unfastening the clasp. “Do you think this would be safer in the hands of the C.I.A.? Eddie Byron, wasn’t it? Than in my hands? Is that what you think, Molly?” His voice was curiously gentle.

“I don’t know,” she confessed miserably. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Make up your mind.” He put the book down on the table in front of her. “You can’t have it both ways. Either I handle this affair my way or I don’t handle it at all.”

“I… you still haven’t kissed me, Mike.”

He turned toward her slowly and his telephone rang. He picked it up and barked, “Yes?”

Dick’s voice answered from the desk downstairs. “Chief Gentry’s on his way up, Mr. Shayne. He’s just getting in the elevator now. I thought maybe you’d like…”

Shayne said, “Thanks, Dick,” and slammed the receiver down. He told Molly, “Gentry’s on his way up. Stay here and turn this book over to him, or else get out the back way fast.”

“What will you do if I go?”

“Read it for myself first and then decide what’s best. Either you trust me all the way or you don’t trust me at all, Molly Morgan.”

She looked deep into his eyes for an instant and then reached for her handbag. “Which way is out?”

“Through the kitchen. Back door and fire escape. Key’s on a nail beside the door.” Shayne grabbed up her two glasses and thrust them at her. “Close the door to the kitchen and put these in the sink. Where you staying?”

“The Park Plaza Hotel.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can.” Shayne heard the elevator stop down the hall and he gave her a little shove toward the kitchen. She went out of the room fast and closed the door behind her. Shayne whirled back to the table and opened the center drawer and swept the captain’s book and the two clippings inside. He stood frowning down at the table while a knock sounded on his door. Everything looked okay. Only one glass of water and his own wine-glass with cognac in the bottom. None of the cigarette butts in the ashtray showed any lipstick.

He went to the door as another knock sounded, opened it and looked surprised at the sight of the chief of police on the threshold with the white-haired attorney directly behind him. He said, “It’s a hell of a time to come visiting, but come on in.”

He stepped aside and Will Gentry moved slowly and steadily past him, glancing suspiciously about the room. “Where’s the Morgan woman, Mike?”

“At her hotel, I suppose.” Shayne raised his eyebrows and grinned as Gentry stopped at the table to look at the pair of glasses sitting there, one with ice water and one with cognac, then went on purposefully toward the closed door leading into the detective’s bedroom. “You don’t think I’ve got her stashed out here, do you?”

“I’m going to find out,” Gentry said placidly. He opened the bedroom and looked inside, turned back and glanced inside the open bathroom, then went to the kitchen door and opened it and turned on the light.

Shayne pretended to disregard him and turned to the attorney who had entered behind Gentry and was looking ill-at-ease. He held out his hand and said, “Your name is Boyd, isn’t it? Will forgot to introduce us, but I think I’ve seen you around town.”

Boyd shook his hand laxly and said, “You probably have, Shayne. I know you, of course, by reputation.”

“All right, Mike. So she isn’t here.” Will Gentry came out of the kitchen looking stolid and purposeful. “So, where is she?”

“I told you…”

“She isn’t at her hotel,” Gentry informed him. “Hasn’t been in her room all evening.”

“How did you know where to look?”

“I called Tim Rourke. She’s staying at the Park Plaza but isn’t in.”

Shayne shrugged and said, “You know how these New York dames are. Why come here looking for her?”

“Because I do know how New York dames are… and how you are.”

“Why do you want to find Miss Morgan? It was the merest chance that we stopped by there tonight and found the old sea captain murdered.”

“So you said. It sounds like a pretty thin story, Mike. Mr. Boyd suggests you know more about the affair than you admit.”

“The hell he does.” Shayne looked at the attorney bleakly. “What gives him that idea?”

“As I mentioned a moment ago,” said the attorney thinly, “I know your reputation in Miami, Mr. Shayne. I suggest you are seeking a way to profit by Captain Ruffer’s death.”

Shayne looked at him incredulously. “A poor old man like that? Good God, he looked to me as though he hadn’t had a square meal for weeks.”

“It is true he’s been in financial straits for some time,” Boyd conceded. “On the other hand, when he asked me to come and see him tonight he intimated that he was on the verge of coming into a large sum of money.”

“And he was obviously tortured before he died, Mike,” Gentry put in, watching the detective keenly. “Torture generally indicates extortion… the effort to extract a secret.”

“Are you accusing me of torturing him?” fumed Shayne.

“Look,” said Gentry patiently. “I’ve told Boyd that I take your word for it that you arrived on the scene only a few minutes before we did. On the other hand, I doubt the young lady’s glib explanation for your being there. Sure, he lost his boat at sea five or six years ago and has been in retirement since then, but why should that interest a writer of nationally syndicated articles who is in Miami on an assignment to study the Cuban situation? It sounded like a spur-of-the-moment explanation to me… made to cover up the real reason you and Miss Morgan were there.”

“There is also abundant evidence,” said Boyd severely, “that his house was burgled tonight and presumably his private papers were taken.”

“You’re accusing me of that?” demanded Shayne angrily.

“Wait a minute, Mike. The bed had been pulled away from the wall in the bedroom in some sort of struggle, and a hiding place in the wall was exposed. Personally, I think the struggle was with his murderer, not you, but the hiding place went unnoticed by him.”

“What was in this so-called hiding place?” Shayne asked bitingly.

“That’s one of the inexplicable things about the whole affair,” admitted Gentry. “There was nothing there except a new and almost unused set of skin-diving equipment. It hardly seems the sort of thing a man would secrete so carefully.”

“Which leads us to suspect that you removed the captain’s private papers to study them at your leisure,” put in Boyd waspishly.

“What’s your interest in all this?” demanded Shayne.

“As Captain Ruffer’s attorney, and now his executor,” snapped Boyd, “my interest is quite proper.”

Shayne put his hands on his hips and studied the attorney for a long moment with his upper lip curling angrily. “You’re also Roy Enders’ attorney, aren’t you? Are you his executor, also?”

“I appeal to you, Chief,” said John Mason Boyd. “What on earth does this man mean by his allegations? I am attorney of record for Roy Enders… as well as for many other clients. What has that to do with this affair?”

“Well, Mike? What has it?”

Shayne shrugged. “Boyd knows more about that than I do. Ask him, Will. Look, all of this seems to me to be a lot of crap,” he went on angrily. “You’re here because you both seem to think something was stolen from a secret hiding place in the captain’s bedroom and you’re accusing me of getting it. I wasn’t even in his goddamned bedroom, Will. I told you. I walked in the front door, and I found him dead.”

“But Miss Morgan was in his bedroom,” Boyd put in quickly. “I suggest that she found his private papers where he had hidden them, and that she stole them.”

Shayne balled his big hands into fists and glared at the attorney, and then told Will Gentry, “Why don’t you get hold of Miss Morgan and ask her these questions?”

“We’d like to,” Gentry told him quietly. “We just don’t know where to find her, Mike. That’s why we came here.”

“I think you’ve got her hidden away, Shayne. It is my conviction that you don’t dare let her be questioned by us,” said Boyd venomously. “We agree that you probably weren’t in the bedroom of Captain Ruffer’s house tonight… but all of us know that Miss Morgan was. We would like to hear her story under oath.”

Shayne moved toward the attorney slowly, his grey eyes glinting, big fists doubled at his sides, and lips drawn back from his teeth.

“You know what I’d like, Boyd?”

The attorney backed away from him fearfully. “No. I’m not sure…”

Shayne laughed hoarsely. “I’d like to know what you hope to get out of this. Why in hell are you throwing your weight around tonight? You could get your goddamned face beaten in without a great deal more effort on your part.”

“Lay off the guy, Mike,” groaned Gentry. “You got to admit he’s got a good case.”

Shayne swung around and faced Gentry angrily with his fists still doubled. “I don’t admit anything. Is a two-bit shyster running your department now?”

Boyd said in a trembling voice, “I resent that, Shayne.”

Shayne laughed harshly. “You resent it? What about you, Will?”

Gentry said in an even tone, “I’m still running the police department, Mike. But I don’t mind listening to advice. Are you willing to swear that you and Miss Morgan just dropped by the captain’s house by accident tonight and that neither one of you removed anything from the premises that might have a bearing on the reason for his death?”

Michael Shayne faced him squarely and said, “Put me on the witness-stand if I’m going to be cross-examined. If not, why don’t you and Lawyer Boyd get the hell out of here?”

Chief Will Gentry stood facing him, flat-footed, his eyes serious and questioning, for a long moment. He asked quietly, “Are you sure that’s the way you want it, Mike?”

Shayne said, “I’m sure.”

Gentry drew in a deep breath, then turned and stalked to the door. After a moment of bewildered hesitation, John Mason Boyd turned away and followed him out. Shayne stood where he was in the middle of the room for at least thirty seconds after the two men went out. Then he exhaled a deeply-held breath, went to the table and picked up the wine-glass and drained it in a single gulp.

He put it down empty and lit a cigarette, then went out to the kitchen and tried the back door leading out onto the fire escape.

The door was locked, and the key to it was missing from the nail inside where it always hung. Molly had evidently paused to lock the door behind her and taken the key away.

Shayne went back into the sitting room, obscurely pleased with the thought that Molly Morgan had the key to his back door in her purse.

He poured himself another very moderate drink of cognac, and then opened the table drawer and took out the captain’s brass-bound book.

He unfastened the catch and spread the book out on the table, seeing that it consisted of unlined white pages which were covered with clean meticulous script in black ink. The first entry on the first page was faded now, after forty years, but the handwriting was strong and clear. The page was headed, “June 3rd, 1925,” and beneath that was written: “Today I shipped out of New York on my first command berth, 3rd Mate of the Mark Savage, Capt. J. K. Kellog in command. We are bound for Valparaiso with a mixed cargo…”

Shayne flipped the pages rapidly, finding the book a continuation of the same as Molly had suspected. A terse, matter-of-fact, day-by-day seaman’s journal, covering forty years of sailing the seven seas in every sort of merchant vessel and in every position from Third Mate to Skipper, until, in 1955, Captain Samuel Ruffer had retired from commercial shipping after thirty years, and bought his own auxiliary sloop, Mermaid, whose home port was Miami.

Glancing at a few lines here and there every dozen or more pages, Shayne turned swiftly to read the details of the captain’s final voyage which had resulted in his shipwreck and rescue at sea, the sole survivor.

Shayne read the detailed account carefully and grimly, and when he reached the end and closed the book and refastened the catch he knew why Captain Samuel Ruffer had been murdered tonight, and why torture had preceded his death. There were still some unanswered questions, including the all-important “Who?”, but Shayne felt sure that a little checking of the records would produce all the evidence that was needed.

He replaced the journal carefully in the table drawer and closed it, his mind racing ahead to the steps that were now open to him.

He had made a sort of pact with Molly Morgan, he reminded himself. Without her, he would never have read the captain’s journal and been able to piece the truth together.

He sank into a chair and tossed off the short drink he had poured before becoming engrossed in the journal, then riffled though the telephone book and found the number of the Park Plaza Hotel.

He gave the number to Dick downstairs, who doubled on the switchboard at night, and when a pleasingly female voice inquired if she could help him, he said, “Miss Morgan, please. Molly Morgan,” and leaned back comfortably to wait for her voice while he phrased exactly what he would say to her.

He waited at least a full minute before the same female voice told him, “Miss Morgan’s room doesn’t answer. I checked with the desk, sir, and the clerk says she went out just a few minutes ago.”

“But I happen to know she just came in,” Shayne said disbelievingly. “May I speak to the desk?”

She said, “Certainly,” and a moment later a reedy masculine voice asked if he could help the detective.

“I’m calling Miss Morgan,” Shayne told him. “I know she returned to the hotel just a few minutes ago.”

“That’s quite correct,” the desk clerk agreed. “She stopped for her key not more than ten minutes ago and went up to her room, but came down again almost immediately with two gentlemen and went out with them.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m positive, sir. I saw them cross the lobby from the elevator to the front door.”

“Wait a minute,” said Shayne, thinking hard. “Did she go out with them willingly?”

“I… presume so,” the clerk said stiffly. “I certainly noticed nothing amiss. They were on each side of her and had her arms linked in theirs.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Not in detail. I can’t say that I noticed “

“Was one of them short and the other quite tall?”

“I think perhaps… yes. Dear me. Do you mean to intimate that something was, perhaps, wrong?”

Michael Shayne slammed up the receiver. He reached for the cognac bottle to pour out a drink, paused with the neck of it inches from his glass. He decided, quietly, that he didn’t need another drink at this point.

What was needed right now was some solid thinking and reasoning. There were certain facts that pointed toward certain conclusions.

The two men who had visited the pawnbroker and left him dead had been described by the widow as a tall man and a short man.

The two hoods whom he had glimpsed in the front seat of the car coming from the captain’s house without headlights were known as Bull and Dixie. Bull was short, heavy and bowlegged; Dixie, tall, slender and fair-haired. The timing was about right for them to have gone directly to Captain Ruffer’s house after leaving the pawn-shop… which they would almost certainly have done if they had succeeded in getting his address from Wilshinskis before the man died.

Then, some forty minutes later a tall man and a short one had turned up at the Park Plaza Hotel and escorted Molly Morgan out into the night.

How could Bull and Dixie have known where to find Molly?

More important, why did those two hoods want to find her? Who knew that she was mixed up in the affair at all? Shayne had met her for the first time at Tony’s at noon, and she’d been waiting for him in his room later where she had taken the telephone call from Papa Gonzalez.

They had gone directly to the pawn-shop together, arriving after the killers had left… and had gone directly to the captain’s house from there.

Then back to Shayne’s hotel, where Molly had slipped out the back door and down the fire escape to avoid an interview with Chief Gentry.

Where, in any of those events, was there anything to have sent Armin Lasher’s men to the Park Plaza to pick Molly up immediately after her return?

There was one faint possibility, Shayne realized. If Lasher were aware of Shayne’s interest in the Lenski guns, and if Bull and Dixie had seen and recognized Shayne in the car they almost ran down, it was possible that Lasher had sent them to stake out Shayne’s hotel when they returned without having got the information they wanted from Captain Ruffer.

In that case they might have arrived in time to see Molly coming down the fire escape and followed her to her hotel.

It was very thin reasoning and based on a lot of “ifs,” but it was the best answer Shayne could come up with at the moment.

And, whether or not they were the two who had taken Molly away, Shayne still had some questions to ask them and their boss. Without positive identification from Mrs. Wilshinskis (who hadn’t seen their faces) there was no proof that they had killed the pawnbroker, of course.

Shayne got up abruptly and started for the door.