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

Chapter fifteen Death on a side street

In the dock office Shayne snatched up a telephone from the desk nearest the door and said to the operator, “Get me the airline that flies to Miami — fast.” His bleak gaze went down to the clerk seated at the desk who started to protest the rude intrusion.

“Sorry, bud,” said Shayne. “Police business.” Into the telephone he asked curtly, “Has your one o’clock plane taken off yet?”

“It’s just turning now,” a voice said.

“Hold it. Call your pilot back. Fifty bucks if you hold it until I get there.” He cradled the receiver, said “Thanks” to the clerk, and lunged out through the door. A cab was cruising past. He called out, ran to catch it.

In less than five minutes he arrived at the airline dock. The seaplane was still at the pier, the office manager standing beside it and conferring with the pilot through a window in the cockpit. They both looked inquiringly at Shayne as he strode up.

Pulling out his wallet, Shayne extracted a fifty-dollar bill. “Thanks for holding it. I have a return ticket.”

The man took the bill and opened the door for Shayne to step inside. There was only one other passenger aboard, a fat, elderly man who looked slightly apoplectic in the steaming interior of the small plane.

Shayne sank into a bucket seat as the propellers roared and the craft headed out across the water, lifting its stern, then rising smoothly into the air and circling sharply eastward.

For the first time since listening to Arthur Devlin’s story, Shayne settled back and studied the situation from the perspective of accepting him as a liar. He still did not know who had radioed Mrs. Brice from Miami. Nothing made any sense any more. One thought kept pounding at him insistently. If the message was from Devlin, it indicated that he had known Janet’s name all along — that he had deliberately lied about having forgotten it. How much of the rest of his story had been lies? What sort of game was the man playing? What had he hoped to accomplish by telling such a story?

Early that morning Shayne had scoffed at the suggestion that Devlin might have been the man who had lured Doctor Thompson from his house with a fake call in order to get at his office records. Now he realized it might easily have been Devlin.

But why? What had Devlin hoped to gain by it?

Shayne squirmed in the low seat in an effort to make his long legs more comfortable. His eyes were bleak as he realized there was no sane answer to the question. Perhaps Devlin had gone completely crazy. He hadn’t had a great deal of experience with insanity, but he had heard that persons suffering from certain forms of mental derangement were exceedingly crafty about concealing their condition, thus making it almost impossible to detect except by a psychiatrist. If that was the case with Devlin, then Shayne knew that Janet Brice was probably already in the power of a homicidal maniac whom he, Shayne, had illegally protected from arrest after gullibly believing a story that even

Devlin’s best friend had not been able to accept.

As the plane roared above incredibly blue waters sparkling with sunlight, Shayne moodily went over each development in the strange and baffling case, and at the end of an hour not one of them made any more sense than they had before.

He was on his feet when the plane swooped down to the surface of the Miami Yacht Basin, and was ready to step out as it nosed up to the pier and the door was opened. He long-legged it to the airline office at the end of the pier, burst in without ceremony, and demanded of the clerk from whom he had bought his ticket three hours previously, “Have you seen a Mrs. Brice — a passenger from Key West — in the last couple of hours?”

“Mrs. Brice?” The clerk blinked uncertainly and shuffled some papers on the desk. “I believe she came in on the noon flight.”

“That was two hours ago,” Shayne muttered, looking at his watch. “Do you know where she went from the dock? Did she take a taxi, or—?”

“No, sir. I asked her if she wanted a taxi, but she said someone was meeting her.”

“And did someone meet her?”

“I presume so,” said the clerk coldly. “She went out immediately and I had other things to attend to, and—” Shayne went out of the office while the clerk was talking. He hurried to his car, which he had left parked at the curb when he caught the eleven-o’clock plane. He had the left-hand door open before he saw the burly uniformed figure lounging on the right-hand front seat.

“Hi, shamus.” The Miami Beach cop showed two gold teeth in an unfriendly grin. “Hop right in.”

“What in hell are you doing in my crate?” Shayne growled, sliding under the wheel.

“Just waiting for you to drive me to headquarters.”

“Nuts.” Shayne put his key in the ignition. “I’m headed for Miami fast. Hop out if you don’t want to walk back.”

“That’s what you think. I said headquarters.” The officer’s voice was hard.

Shayne had his foot on the starter. He lifted it and said, “Look. I’m in one hell of a hurry. Save the boxing bout for some other time.”

“You’re not in a hurry to go anywhere, Shayne. Except to headquarters. Now step on it and let’s have less of the big jaw.”

Shayne’s big hands tightened on the wheel, the knuckles showing white. “What is this?” he asked.

“Painter wants to see you,” said the big cop promptly.

“Is it a pinch?”

“Any way you want it. I’m taking you in.”

Shayne didn’t remember ever having seen the officer before, but he was definitely a type Peter Painter liked in his department — big and dumb and stubborn, and sadistic enough to enjoy meeting resistance from an unarmed man.

Shayne stepped on the starter, slid into low gear, and lurched away from the curb and went ahead full speed.

The officer tapped him on the knee and said, “Next turn to your right.”

Shayne stepped hard on the brake, slewed around the corner on screaming tires, went another block and a half to park in front of the Beach police station.

He flung the door open before the car stopped rolling, was across the sidewalk and going up the steps before the cop was out of the car. He heard a growled protest behind him as he strode past a couple of cops lounging on wooden benches in the corridor and on into Chief Peter Painter’s private office.

Painter sprang up from behind his big, polished desk as Shayne slammed the door hard behind him. “What do you mean barging—?” Painter began sharply.

“One of your mugs said you wanted to see me,” grated Shayne. “So you see me. Now I’m leaving. And if you’ve got the sense God gave a louse you’ll—”

He heard the door open and turned to see the doorway blocked by the panting, burly officer whom he had left behind at the curb. He had a service revolver in his hand and his eyes were slitted with anger.

Shayne started toward him, growling contemptuously, “Get out of my way and put that thing away before it goes off and hurts somebody.”

“Shall I drill him, Chief?” He didn’t move and he kept the revolver aimed at the detective.

“Certainly,” said Painter.

Shayne stopped within two feet of the revolver. He whirled on Painter and said, “You’ll regret this. I have to get to Miami fast.”

“What’s the hurry?” asked Painter.

“It’s too long a story to tell now. But take my word for it, Painter, it may mean a woman’s life for me to get to Miami in a hurry.”

Painter said, “I see. If it’s too long a story to tell here and you’re in such a hurry, why not tell it to me while we ride over there together?”

“There’s no particular reason why I should tell any of it to you,” Shayne said flatly.

“The only way you’ll reach Miami in a hurry is for me to go along,” said Painter silkily. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do on this Devlin case, Shayne, and I’m not letting you out of my sight until I get some answers. If you’d rather be locked up for a few days—”

“On what charge?” Shayne grated.

Painter smiled thinly. “Attempted extortion will do. Bert Masters will be happy to swear out a warrant that’ll keep you quiet for some time.”

Shayne knew when he was licked. If Masters wanted him out of circulation badly enough to swear out a false charge against him, it was too tough a set-up for one man to buck. “My car’s out front,” he snapped. “If you insist on going, let’s get started.”

“You come along with us, Martin,” Painter said to the big cop in the doorway, “just to make sure Shayne doesn’t get some foolish idea about slipping away from me again.” They went out with Shayne in the lead, Martin behind him, and Painter’s short legs doing double time to keep up with the angry redhead’s long strides.

Painter got in the front seat with Shayne, and Martin sat in the rear. No one spoke until the car was on the causeway headed toward Miami at sixty miles an hour.

“You had a story to tell me,” Painter reminded him. “Something about a woman whose life is in danger.”

“That’s what I said, and if I’m too late — you’ll be hearing about it, Painter. Her name is Janet Brice. She’s — a sort of witness in the Devlin case, and I just flew back from Key West, where I went to interview her. But someone evidently didn’t want me to hear her story, and wired her to leave Key West for Miami before I got to her.” He paused, concentrating on his driving, wondering how much he dared tell Painter — whether the detective chief would recognize the name and understand the implications of his statements.

Apparently Janet Brice’s name meant nothing to him, for Painter said querulously, “A sort of witness, you say? What sort of witness?”

“She was friendly with Devlin on that cruise he just returned from.” Shayne told him cautiously, wondering whether Will Gentry had spilled any of Devlin’s amnesia story to the Beach chief.

Again it was apparent that Painter knew nothing at all of Devlin’s loss of memory, for he said complacently, “Perhaps, then, you picked up some information in Key West that will strengthen a theory I have formulated on this affair.”

“What is your theory?”

“It seems to me there were two questions that had to be answered to explain why a man like Arthur Devlin murdered Skid Munroe,” Painter said didactically. “First: Why did Devlin break his vacation short and return before his ship did? Second: What connection was there between Devlin and Skid Munroe?”

“And?”

“I came to the conclusion that the two questions were essentially the same,” Painter told him. “I made an intensive investigation into the victim’s background and I have it on good authority that since leaving Masters’s employ he has been peddling heroin — smuggled in from the West Indies,” he ended triumphantly.

“That’s most interesting,” Shayne encouraged him. “How do you figure that ties Skid up with an insurance executive?”

“How do we know Devlin wasn’t leading a double life, with dope-smuggling as a profitable sideline? What better opportunity would a man have for picking up small quantities of drugs at various ports of call than going on a luxury cruise and posing as an innocent vacationer?”

“It would be a damned good dodge,” said Shayne, egging him on. “No one bothers to check the passengers when they return to the ship after a sight-seeing trip in the various ports.”

“Exactly,” said Painter. “But the Customs officers are very thorough when the passengers debark. So I presume Devlin waited until he had collected a good supply and then simply jumped ship and probably chartered a plane to fly him back and land him at some outlying Key where he wouldn’t have to go through the Customs. Presumably he was to turn the stuff over to Skid last night, and there was some sort of quarrel, resulting in Skid’s death.”

Shayne had reached the mainland and slowed to forty miles an hour going south on Biscayne Boulevard.

“It’s a good theory,” Shayne continued to encourage the dapper little man beside him. “Want me to drop you off at Gentry’s office so you can talk it over with him? Last time I saw him he hadn’t thought of that connection between Devlin and Munroe.”

“I’m in no hurry to tell Gentry anything. I’ll just go along with you.”

Shayne passed Flagler Street and turned west at the next corner. “I’m stopping by my apartment before I see Gentry,” he said. “If you and your mug in the back seat don’t mind waiting a moment here in the car—”

“We’ll go up with you,” Painter told him. “I haven’t seen your apartment for several months. Do you still have the same one?”

Shayne parked at the side entrance of his hotel, looked down at Painter with lifted brows, and asked, “Why this sudden yen to see my apartment?”

“Frankly,” said Painter with a venomous smile, “I have a curious hunch we’ll find a murderer hidden there.”

“Suppose,” said Shayne, “I skip my visit upstairs and we go straight to Gentry’s office to get out a radio pick-up for the missing witness?”

“That will be perfectly all right with me,” Painter assured him. “It will turn my hunch into a certainty, and I’ll insist that Gentry return with us to search your apartment.”

Shayne nodded and said, “Let’s go up then.” He swung his long legs out the door and stalked inside with Painter double-timing beside him and the big cop bringing up the rear.

They climbed the stairs and Shayne’s face was impassive as he went down the hall toward his door, getting his key out. He couldn’t stall Painter any longer. He knew the little man would stick to him until he was satisfied that Devlin either was or wasn’t in his apartment.

Frankly, Shayne hoped Devlin would be there. That would prove he had nothing to do with calling Janet Brice to Miami, and even though Devlin were immediately locked up on a murder charge, things were moving fast now and Shayne felt he was getting hold of some of the devious threads that would eventually prove his innocence. But if Devlin weren’t inside his apartment—

He unlocked the door and flung it wide open, stepped back, waved the men inside, and said, “Take a look for yourself. You know your way around.”

“I intend to take a look.” Painter strutted inside followed by Martin, who kept a suspicious eye on Shayne and a fat, hairy hand on his holstered gun.

Shayne went in after them. He had a sick feeling in his belly when he saw the three doors leading into the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen standing open. Upon leaving Devlin there, he had warned the fugitive to go into the bedroom and close the door the moment he heard anyone at the front door.

While Painter began officiously searching every nook in the apartment Shayne went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a big drink. He needed a big drink. Devlin’s absence could mean only one thing.

He started to the telephone to call Will Gentry to have an alarm put out for Janet Brice. He looked around and saw Painter coming out of the bedroom and going into the bathroom.

The phone began ringing just before he picked up the receiver. He answered it and heard Gentry’s voice saying, “Where have you been, Mike?”

“To Key West.”

“Oh.” There was a brief pause. “Did you contact a woman named Janet Brice on the Belle of the Caribbean?”

“She had flown to Miami before I reached Key West. I was just going to call you, Will, and find out if you had anything,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry as he wondered how Gentry had learned Janet’s last name. Had Devlin gone to him?

“That’s too bad,” Gentry said heavily. “I hoped there might be some mistake, but I guess there isn’t.” He paused again, briefly, then went on: “She’s dead, Mike. Her body was found on one of the side streets off Seventy-Ninth — about half an hour ago. I’ve been trying to call you ever since.”

“Why — did you — call me, Will?” The words stuck in his throat and it took effort to make them come out clearly. “How did you connect her with me?”

“There was a radiogram in her handbag, Mike. Addressed to her in care of the Belle at Key West. Wait a minute and I’ll read it to you.” In a drawling monotone he read: “Imperative you catch first plane to Miami. Will meet you at landing, dock and explain everything.”

“Is that all?”

“All except the signature. It’s signed Arthur Devlin.”

Shayne said, “I’ll be right down, Will.” He replaced the receiver very gently.

Painter entered briskly from the kitchen and admitted, “My hunch seems to have been wrong this time. But I still think you had him here, Shayne, and I’m having Gentry send a man up to go over the place for his fingerprints.”