A Redhead for Mike Shayne

9

Shayne held her arm tightly as they went out through the lobby together, and he loftily disregarded the smirk on Dick’s face when they went past the desk.

On the sidewalk Molly gestured toward a sleek, late-model light sedan parked just beyond the entrance, and said, “We can take my car, Mike. It’s on the expense account.”

He shook his head, turning her in the opposite direction around the side of the hotel toward the row of garages. “You can pick it up later. It’s all right parked there… for all night if you want.”

“Do you think I will… want?” she asked lightly, squeezing his arm against her body and lengthening her stride to keep up with him.

“That probably depends on what sort of evening we have.” He led her around to the right side of his heavy car, opened the front door and closed it softly when she got in, then went around to the driver’s seat and backed out of the stall.

She stayed well over on her side of the wide seat and said nothing while he drove north to First Street and then west past the courthouse and Lummus Park. It was fully dark now and the downtown street lights were on and traffic was heavy with cars headed for the West Flagler Kennel Club, so Shayne turned north to Third Street and west again, through a dingy neighborhood of small shops and shabby dwellings.

He slowed after a short distance, checking the street numbers, and then parked on the right between a run-down garage and a brightly lighted delicatessen shop.

The Liberty Loan Shop had two grimy windows on the street with light showing dimly behind them, and living quarters overhead.

Shayne slid out and went around to Molly’s side of the car and pushed her door firmly shut as she started to get out. “I’ll go in alone,” he decreed. “No gentleman takes a lady along while he’s buying a pistol illicitly.”

She settled back resignedly and got a cigarette case and lighter from her handbag.

Shayne went up two scuffed wooden steps to the door between the two windows, and tried the knob. It opened easily and a bell tinkled in the back as he stepped inside. There was a narrow aisle between two long display cases littered with cheap watches, imitation diamond rings and such. A bare, fly-specked bulb hanging on a cord from the center of the room gave the only illumination, and the room was silent and empty.

Shayne walked slowly back between the display cases toward an enclosed latticework cage at the rear that had an arched aperture in front like a cashier’s window. A wooden counter on the other side of the opening was scattered with a jeweler’s tools, with a three-legged stool drawn up close behind it.

Beyond the stool was a big, old-fashioned iron safe with the door standing slightly ajar. Shayne stood there for a moment frowning in puzzlement, cocking his head to listen for some sound from the living quarters upstairs where the warning bell must have sounded when he entered.

There was only silence. An empty, deathlike sort of silence. There was a closed wooden door at Shayne’s right at the end of the aisle, and as he turned toward it from his position in front of the cashier’s cage the sole of his left foot was gripped slightly by some sticky substance on the floor.

He dropped to his knees to examine the floor, and drew in his breath sharply. He had stepped in a small puddle of blood that was seeping out from the latticework cage.

He took two steps to the rear door and threw it open and saw a dimly-lighted stairway leading upward in front of him and an open door on his left opening into the cage.

He stepped inside, feeling for a switch inside the door and finding one. An unshaded two-hundred watt bulb sprang into brilliant light over the jeweler’s work bench and illuminated the floor beneath and the crumpled body twisted in the confined space between the stool and the open safe.

He lay on his right side, and the left side of his head and face was crushed, a bloody mess of splintered bone and smashed flesh.

Shayne dropped to his knees beside the body and touched a thin, outflung wrist. The flesh was still warm to the touch, and the blood seeping out of his body and along the floor had not yet congealed.

Shayne heard the faint sound of light footsteps on the stairway beyond the open door, and he rose to his feet slowly as the figure of a stooped little old lady materialized in the doorway. She stood very still for a long and agonizing instant with the unshaded light bright on her seamed face, reflecting from rounded and frightened marble-like eyes which stared into his for a moment before dropping to the corpse at his feet.

Then she screamed. A high-pitched, keening scream, and Shayne took one step forward involuntarily, pressing the palm of his big hand against her mouth to cut off the sound, putting his other arm tightly about her frail body and drawing her against him, holding her strongly as she twisted and writhed while he repeated soothingly in her ear:

“Don’t be frightened. Relax and I’ll let you go. It wasn’t I, you understand. I found him. I am the police. Do you understand that?”

He started to release her but she clawed and struck at him viciously, and guttural moaning sounds escaped her lips from behind his palm.

He realized she was completely in shock and probably hadn’t heard a word he said to her, and he kept on holding her tightly while he unhappily tried to decide how to handle the situation, and the tinkle of the entry-bell sounded eerily in the silence, and he turned his head and looked over his shoulder through the lattice-work to see Molly hurrying toward the back of the shop.

“What on earth, Mike? I thought I heard a scream…” She stopped outside the window, breathing hard, and her eyes rounded at sight of the old woman struggling futilely in his arms.

“Come around and help me,” he snapped. “Try to talk to her. There’s been a murder and she walked in on me kneeling over the body. We don’t want the whole neighborhood on our necks.”

Molly took in the situation instantly and she acted with singular competence and clear-headedness. She stepped swiftly through the rear door and around to Shayne’s side, put her arms gently about the shaking old body, crooning softly to her without words like a mother to a frightened child, and Shayne gladly released the woman to her ministrations, watching carefully and vastly relieved when she didn’t start screaming again as soon as he took his hand away from her mouth.

Instead, she began sobbing violently, and a stream of foreign words spilled swiftly from the thin lips.

Molly continued to hold her gently, but she bent her head to listen to the babble of words, and then spoke gently in reply in what sounded like the same language to Shayne.

This brought more sobs and a further surge of incomprehensible words, and Molly backed away slowly toward the door, drawing the old woman with her and keeping her head turned away from the dead man on the floor. Over her bent head, Molly explained in a wondering tone to Shayne. “She’s Lithuanian, Mike. Poor thing. She either doesn’t know any English or else the shock has knocked it all out of her. Yah, yah,” she crooned, bending her head close to the other’s ear, and then spoke on swiftly in cadenced syllables that had the sound of a mountain stream rippling swiftly over pebbles.

“And you just happen to speak Lithuanian?” Shayne demanded incredulously.

“Along with four other languages,” she told him calmly. “But Lithuanian, I learned at my mother’s breast if you’re interested. You call the police. I’m going to take her up-

stairs now.”

He said quickly, “We’re ahead of the police, Molly. Let’s stay ahead. The old man is dead. Nothing can change that. Tell her that I’m a detective and we’re her friends and want to help avenge her husband’s death. Get her to tell you everything. Ask about the Russian guns. She’ll talk to you. Right now, she’ll spill everything to anyone who talks her own language.”

“I’ll see, Mike.” Molly Morgan’s voice was cold. “But if you don’t call the police, I shall.”

“I’ll call them in good time,” he grated. “But take her upstairs and talk to her. If the police come barging in now you and I’ll spend the rest of the night at the police station making statements. As it is, we just might get a jump on her husband’s murderer if she’ll talk to you fast.”

“About the Lenskis… or about murder?” asked Molly coldly.

“Both… I think. Don’t you see there must be a connection? It can’t be sheer coincidence that he was knocked off tonight while we were on our way here to ask him about the pistols. Get the chip off your shoulder and start putting your Lithuanian to use while she’s in a mood to talk to you.”

He turned his back angrily on her, and stared down at the dead man, trying to visualize how the killing had occurred.

It was clearly evident that the murderer had been in the small cage with the proprietor when he struck him down. There was no death weapon in sight. The bloody wounds indicated that several blows had been struck with a heavy instrument… quite possibly the butt or the barrel of a revolver.

Shayne got a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over his fingertips, then cautiously touched the inner edge of the safe door that was standing ajar, and drew it open. He squatted down in front of it to study the contents without touching anything.

There wasn’t very much inside the safe. It appeared that the Liberty Loan Shop did not deal with a great many objects that were valuable enough to deserve locking up inside a safe. There were several small metal lockboxes which probably held precious or semi-precious jewelry, but there were no Russian handguns such as he had hoped to find. He didn’t know, of course, whether such merchandise would deserve a place in the safe, but he had a hunch that is where they would have been found if there were any left in the shop. Not so much because of the intrinsic value, but because of their nature. They weren’t the sort of thing, Shayne thought, that the proprietor of the Liberty Loan Shop would have been likely to keep out on open display.

The only other thing inside the safe of any possible interest was a canvas-covered ledger or cashbook about thirteen by six inches in size. It seemed a curious place to keep an ordinary ledger, and Shayne was tempted to take it out and examine it, but he kept sternly reminding himself that this was the scene of a homicide and it was his duty as a licensed private investigator to leave all the evidence intact until the police arrived and took charge.

He heard the sound of descending footsteps on the stairway outside, and got to his feet hastily and turned from the open safe to face Molly in the doorway.

She exclaimed, “It was two men, Mike. One very tall and the other quite short, is the best Mrs. Wilshinskis can describe them. She looks out the front window, you see, from upstairs and sees people who come in and out of the shop. About half an hour ago, or a little more. They were the last ones before you came, and must have done that terrible thing. She heard them talking down here with her husband, but the conversation was in English and she didn’t understand it, and then they went out together and got in a car and drove off. She didn’t see their faces and couldn’t identify them. And then she saw you come in the front door about ten minutes later and she listened at the head of the stairs, but didn’t hear any talk this time. And that’s why she got frightened and came down to see… and found you kneeling beside her husband’s corpse. Poor, frightened thing,” Molly ended compassionately. “She just sits up there on the edge of the bed rocking back and forth with her hands over her face and sobbing her heart out. She has a niece out in Coral Gables whom I telephoned and who promised to come down at once.”

“What about the Lenski pistols?” Shayne demanded. “Did you get any line on them? Are they what the killers were after?”

“She doesn’t know, of course. I’ve told you all she saw and heard tonight. Oh, your tip was right. There were six of them originally. A man brought them in for sale about a week ago. She realizes it was not a strictly legal transaction, of course, but these poor people are accustomed to making a dollar any way they can. Her husband paid twenty-five dollars each for them, and he’d already sold four of the six for a hundred dollars each up to this afternoon. It was a great windfall for Wilshinskis, and there are two of them still in the safe waiting to be sold.”

Shayne shook his head as she paused for breath. “Not now, there aren’t. It looks as though that’s what the men were after, but why did they kill him in the process? To save two hundred bucks? And then go off leaving boxes of jewels in the open safe?”

“There’s one thing she did say, Mike, that may be very important,” Molly went on hurriedly. “The man who brought in the first half dozen told Mr. Wilshinskis there was an unlimited supply where those came from and he would be glad to furnish more in the future at the same price. They had visions of building up a steady trade and selling three or four a week, Mike, at a net profit of at least ten times what a store like this normally brings in.”

“What was their source of supply?” demanded Shayne. “Who brought in the first six guns and promised them more in the future?”

“She doesn’t really know, except he’s a former customer who has pawned small things here in the past. You see, she gets all the shop business second-hand from her husband, Mike, from what he tells her at night. But she says he was a sailor… a seaman is the way it translates from the Lithuanian… wearing a uniform with brass buttons. She never saw him actually… it’s just her husband’s description. But, Mike! She says there is a special ledger in which he made a note of transactions like this… under-the-counter business. If you could find that ledger it might have something written down.”

Shayne turned back to the open safe and crouched in front of it. He spread his handkerchief over his hand to pull the canvas-covered cashbook out and lay it on the counter. He turned swiftly to the center of the book and the last page on which a transaction was noted, saw the date was the previous day, and turned back a page, muttering, “There are names and dates and prices entered here. Let’s see… a week ago. This must be it: Six Len. 12-0-7 Pd. $150. Cap. Sam Ruffer. And there’s an address out in the northeast section… one of those streets that dead-ends on the Bay. I’m going out there to find Captain Ruffer, Molly. Sounds like it might be a boathouse or a beach cottage. You stay here and call the police as soon as I leave. Tell them everything except about the call from Gonzalez and the reason we came here. Tell them any damned thing except the truth.”

She shook her head, standing flatfooted in the doorway and barring his exit. “I’m going with you, Mike. Why should I stay here and make statements to the police?”

“Because this is murder,” he told her savagely, “and I want you out of it. We don’t know what he told those men tonight before they killed him. If I get there in time I may surprise them interviewing Captain Sam Ruffer.”

He moved in close to her and caught both her wrists in his big hands and swung her aside easily. “You stay here and comfort the old lady with your Lithuanian crooning. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

He hurried out through the front door without looking back, closed it carefully behind him, and then went around his parked car to slide under the steering wheel. He switched on the headlights and reached for the ignition key, and his hand brushed the empty lock.

He stared down at it stupidly for a moment. He had left the key in the lock when he got out. He knew he had. Molly had been sitting in the car and he hadn’t bothered to lock it.

Molly! Of course. She must have taken the key from the lock when she heard the old lady scream and hurried inside.

He jerked the car door open and leaped out, went back inside the pawn-shop and found it empty. He went back to the rear calling as loudly as he dared without arousing the neighbors, “Molly. You’ve got my keys.”

He paused at the back door, looking up the stairway and listening, but he could hear nothing from above.

Damn her! he thought angrily. She’s sore because I refused to take her along, and she’s going to make me come up and get my keys from her.

A glint of metal on the counter in front of the arched opening in the lattice-work caught his eye just before he started up the stairs.

It was the set of keys to his car which Molly had evidently placed there after he shoved her aside and hurried out.

He grabbed them up and called up the stairway, “Okay. I’ve got them. See you tomorrow,” and long-legged it back out of the shop without waiting for her answer.