Call for Michael Shayne [= Case of the Missing Twelve Days]

Chapter one Black void

It was a strange awakening for Arthur Devlin. He was accustomed to waking up all over at once, and bounding out of bed. This morning only a small part of his mind was active and he felt paralyzed except for the sharp, tearing pulsations of agony in his head and a gagging nausea in his throat. The bed began swaying when he moved. He reached out and grasped the side iron rails and clung to them until the motion gradually subsided, like the “cat dying” in a child’s swing.

God! What a sea! He tried to speak, but his tongue filled his mouth, rough and parched. He tried to open his eyes. The lids stuck fast. He made another cautious move to raise himself to a sitting position, but the exertion brought the reeling and the nausea and the unendurable throbbing to his head again. He fell back on the pillow and lay very still, swallowing hard to keep the knot in his throat down.

Gradually, through the torturous pain in his head, he tried desperately to rouse his numbed brain cells. It was odd that he should be seasick. He had always been a good sailor. Then a blurred and foggy thought came through. The storm — the tossing of the boat — he recalled vaguely the weather reports before he sailed, promising fair weather.

He held fast to returning consciousness, obsessed with the fear that if he let go the beginning train of thought for an instant he would drift again into the blackness. There had been a party — much earlier in the evening. Cocktails and dinner and champagne. A stag affair. Celebrating something. Doc Thompson and Bert Masters and Joe Engals. Some others. Wraiths of memories, blurred and indefinite.

He moved slightly and uneasily. The dizziness swept over him again, reeling in his brain, but he clung to sanity with grim determination. The memories whirled in his mind as though projected from a machine suddenly gone out of control, flickering, darting crazily back and forth, over and over again.

Then the bed was still and the room was still and the knot was gone from his throat. Only the throbbing pain in his head remained.

He breathed deeply and slowly. Sure. A going-away party. Bon voyage for someone. Banter and boisterous laughter and a great many drinks. Oh, a great many drinks in rapid succession. Because it didn’t matter how drunk he got. Because it was his vacation and he didn’t have to go to the office for two weeks — because the party was for him. For Arthur Devlin.

God! What a hang-over! And he had thought the sea had gone wild! He tried to laugh. His lips were stiff and dry, parched, as was his tongue and the walls of his mouth. If only he had a drink of water! He forced his eyes open but could see nothing in the darkness. He cautiously reached out his right hand to feel for a table. There might be a glass of water. But he could feel nothing.

There must be water somewhere in his cabin. His thirst was more than he could endure. He rolled over slowly and carefully, easing his legs toward the edge of the bed, squirming until they touched the floor, then edged slowly downward until his hands gripped the iron rail at the foot of the bed.

The shrill blast of an automobile horn split the air. The pain in his head gave a violent throb and a tremor of fright panicked through his body. He fell back and lay inert.

His senses were alert now. He held his breath as a chorus of horns joined the first sound. That could mean only one thing! Someone had not moved the instant a green light came on.

There could not be a traffic jam aboard the Belle of the Caribbean.

Pulling himself up by the iron foot of the bed, he steadied himself, then let go and staggered toward the wall. Leaning against it, he moved slowly, feeling for a light switch. He bumped into a lavatory, ran his hand upward and felt a chain. He pulled it, and the room was diffused with dim light that stabbed pain through his eyes like a burning torch.

Shielding his eyes with his left forearm, he squinted around the small, dingy room. There was one window with a faded shade drawn, a wicker chair, and a dirty rag rug in the center of the room.

After one quick glance around he closed his burning eyes, turned on the cold-water faucet, and bracing himself with his left hand splashed his face and head with the tepid water. He cupped his right palm and poured water into his parched mouth until he could drink no more.

With his face and head dripping he glanced into the mottled mirror above the lavatory and gazed in horror at his reflection. There was a huge knot the size of an egg just above his right ear and the part that showed in front of the hairline was an angry purple and dotted with blood. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed and he had a growth of dark beard.

“My God!” he muttered. What time was it? How long had it been since he shaved? He reached up and pulled his left coat cuff back and stared stupidly at his wrist. His watch was gone.

His aching eyes saw the coat sleeve. A grayish checkered material, dingy and frayed at the cuff. Squinting in the mirror again, he saw an atrocious blue-striped shirt with the collar frayed and a tie that looked pinkish in the dim light.

Devlin groaned aloud. He closed his eyes tightly. He had to quit having these hallucinations. That Arthur Devlin, who had the reputation of the best dressed man in his set, could be wearing these clothes was impossible. He had to get out of this room — get aboard the Belle of the Caribbean before it sailed at midnight. He struggled fiercely with another wave of dizziness, tightening and relaxing his muscles until a semblance of normalcy came. Then he opened his eyes and looked in the mirror again.

The checks and stripes and pinkish tie were still there. God! What a fool he’d been! He must have drunk himself into insensibility — had a fight with someone. The last thing he could remember was Doc Thompson urging another drink on him — or was it Bert Masters?

He looked down at the suit, saw that his right sleeve was spattered with blood. He took his left hand from the wall, determined to stand alone. He had to get hold of himself — get out of this room.

He was Arthur Devlin. Of that he was certain. Arthur Devlin, bachelor, insurance executive of Miami, Florida, and he had passed out cold at his own farewell party just before his scheduled departure on a two weeks’ vacation.

That much he knew — and no more. He turned slowly away from the lavatory. His vision was growing normal now, and he stopped rigidly when he saw two hats lying on the floor. A stiff straw hat with a red and yellow band — and a soft snap-brim gray felt lying side by side. Arthur Devlin had not owned or worn a hat for ten years.

He was inured to shock now, he thought, and possessed only of a compelling urgency to get out of that accursed room — to escape from this impossible nightmare.

It was then that he saw the shoe. The sole of a man’s shoe protruding from under the foot of the bed.

His heart pounded furiously and the knot on his head pulsed with stabbing pain. His body muscles tightened. Arthur Devlin stood rigid, fighting down the wave of nausea convulsing his stomach and throat.

He couldn’t run away now. Somehow, he knew the man was dead. Before seeing the body, he knew. He moved slowly and stiffly around the bed and dragged the body out into the light.

He had never seen the man before — a youngish-old man, slight of body and sharp-featured. His upper lip was drawn back in horrible grimace of fear or of hatred. He had on a tan sports suit, a pongee shirt open at the neck, yellow striped socks, and two-toned sports shoes. His face was crusty with blood and his left temple was crushed inward like an eggshell that had been struck a sharp blow with the back of a spoon. A blood-smeared blackjack lay on the bare floor.

As he bent over the body the throbbing pain in his head was intensified, dulling his senses. He felt numbed by a terrible sense of inevitability. It even seemed to him that he had subconscious knowledge of the presence of the corpse all along.

All this had happened within the space of a few hours and Arthur Devlin was no longer an ordinary man. He was a murderer, and he didn’t know the name of the man whom he had murdered. Nor why. The hand that wielded the blackjack must have been his, but in a larger sense it had not been his, for his brain had not willed his hand to strike. Arthur Devlin was a gentle man, incapable of murder. He knew himself for a gentle man even as he painfully lowered his body to sit flat on the floor to go through the dead man’s pockets. Bending over was becoming intolerable.

There were some folded bills in a silver clip in a side pocket of the sharply creased trousers, some change and three keys on a ring in one of the patch pockets of his coat. Nothing else. No wallet or papers, no other clue to his identity. He belonged to the blackness of those vanished hours, and there was nothing to indicate what he was doing in this room nor what possible connection there had been between himself and the dead man.

A wrist-watch was strapped to the bony wrist of the dead man. Devlin lifted the inert arm and looked at the dial. The hands pointed to 1:30, and he could hear the watch ticking.

One-thirty! And his ship sailed at midnight! For the first time since regaining consciousness the full impact of the situation smashed through the fog of unreality. He sat there, cross-legged, beside the corpse, gripped by the sheer horror of it and by the full realization of his position.

What had happened? How could all this have happened within the short time since he passed out at Bert Masters’s party? It was fantastic and incredible and impossible, yet he knew it was true. There was no use hoping that he was still in a drunken stupor or stricken with delirium tremens. The shabby room and the disreputable clothing and the hats and the dead man were hideously real.

His eyes focused on a folded newspaper lying on the floor and under the bed. He reached across the dead man and picked it up. It was the evening edition of the Miami News. He vaguely recalled glancing at the headlines in his apartment just before leaving for the stag party.

But this was not yesterday’s paper. The headlines were different. He stared stupidly at the heavy black print. It had been folded narrowly, the way a man carries a newspaper in his pocket. Devlin never carried a paper in his pocket.

Every muscle in his body stiffened when he looked at the date. He held his breath in consternation while the small black figures danced a rigadoon before his frantically staring eyes.

The date was June 20th.

This was June 8th — the 9th, rather. The early morning of the 9th. The day his vacation began.

He had heard of fake copies of newspapers being printed to trap criminals — usually just the front page. Devlin’s fingers trembled violently as he turned the page to look at the date. His mouth and tongue were dry again, and his breath wheezed audibly as he scrambled through page after page. Each bore the date of June 20th — just two days before the Belle of the Caribbean was scheduled to return to Miami.

The newspaper dropped from his hands. He knew the truth now. There was no room for any doubt in his mind. It was June 20th. Almost two weeks since he should have boarded the Belle of the Caribbean as she lay off Miami beyond the breakwater. Twelve days instead of a few hours. Twelve days of blackness. A blank void. It explained his shabby clothing, the growth of beard.

But how could a man stay passed out for twelve days from drinking even as much as he had drunk at Bert Masters’s party? In the name of God, what had happened! Devlin caught his aching head between his palms and moaned.

A shrill ringing tore at his eardrums and seemed to lift the top of his skull from his head. He jerked his head erect and stared at the old-fashioned wall telephone. It stopped ringing and the world righted itself for an instant, and then it resumed its rasping, nerve-wracking jangling. To Devlin it became a sentient thing with a mind and will of its own. It wouldn’t let him alone. He had to answer it. It would keep on and on until he did answer, and the high-pitched shrilling was certain to arouse every person in the rooms around him, bring them on the run to discover him — to discover Arthur Devlin sitting beside the man he had murdered.

He reached out and got a firm grip on the iron bed rail and dragged himself up. He staggered to the phone and snatched the receiver off, leaning against the wall while the receiver dangled in his right hand near his knee. The abrupt cessation of persistent ringing was soothing and somehow comforting.

He could faintly hear a voice jabbering around his knee. Slowly he lifted the receiver to his ear. It was a woman’s voice, husky-soft, yet harshly compelling, with a timbre of fright and of worry and of gritted-teeth determination. She was saying, “Joey! Is that you, Joey? Who is this? Why don’t you answer me?”

Devlin heard his own voice, strange and hollow, as though echoed from a great distance. “Hello. I don’t know—”

“Joey! Joey, darling!”

“He’s — there’s no one—” Devlin sputtered.

“I was so frightened and worried when you didn’t come, Joey, darling. Is everything all right?” The last words were accompanied by a little gasping intake of breath.

That voice — remote and disembodied — at the other end of the wire was his only contact with the black void of the past twelve days, a tiny hole pierced through the black curtain that separated him from he knew not what. He had to keep her talking. He had to put up a pretense. He couldn’t let her hang up without learning some of the things he had to know.

Thickening his voice to a mumble, he said, “Who is this?”

There was a slight hesitation, then a high, flute-like laugh. “Why, Joey! It’s Marge. Who’d you think it was? Is anything wrong? Is — somebody — there?” she ended softly.

Keeping his voice thick he said, “Things are all wrong. Terribly wrong. Where are you calling from — Marge?”

“Why — Joey. From home, of course. Joey — tell me — what’s wrong?” The anxiety in her voice reached through to an emotion he had forgotten he had.

“I — can’t tell you,” he muttered.

“Didn’t Skid get there?”

It was as though she held her breath to hear his answer. He hesitated, striving desperately for a clue that would tell him what his answer should be. Was the dead man Skid? Or was that Joey lying on the floor and she had mistaken his voice for the dead man’s.

He said, “Skid came all right. But—” He paused, straining his ears to hear some revealing word, every sense alert for an inflection or a sigh or a swiftly caught breath that would tell him how to proceed.

“Listen, Joey.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse and intimate whisper, anxious and caressing and warm.

“Yes — Marge,” he answered.

“Did you kill him?”

Devlin’s hand tightened on the receiver. He turned his head slightly to look at the slender crumpled body lying at the foot of the bed. In a flat monotone he said, “I killed him all right.”