Death Has Three Lives

Chapter Ten

Using one oar as a scull, Michael Shayne maneuvered the rowboat in the deep channel near the foot of the Causeway while Patrolman Roberts knelt in the bow and probed over the side with the second oar attempting to locate the submerged automobile.

“Don’t know how deep it is here,” Shayne warned him. “At least twenty feet, I’d guess. I don’t believe you have a chance in the world of finding anything with that oar.”

“I don’t think so, either. Right here should be about it. I can’t touch anything. They’ll have ropes with grappling hooks in a minute.”

“Not much hurry now,” Shayne commented grimly, resting his oar in a lock and getting out a cigarette. “Anybody know how it happened? More than one car involved?”

“No. I don’t think so. We happened to be cruising by and saw the other cars pulling up. No one actually saw it, I guess. Speeding probably, and lost control. Hell, there’s no use keeping this up.”

He settled back disgustedly, and Shayne lifted his oar to scull back to shore as two more searchlights were suddenly switched on above and a voice shouted down, “Bring that rowboat back, Roberts. We’ve got a crew here to do the job right.”

Shayne stepped out of the boat onto the sand when it nudged in close, relinquishing his place to a trio of firemen equipped with long iron rods for probing deep in the water, and steel hooks attached to heavy Manila ropes to drag beneath the surface.

He drew back toward a group of officers, from both Miami and Miami Beach and watched with interest as the boat set out again.

There was little talk among the group. Two or three of them who knew Michael Shayne well made bantering remarks about his propensity for being on the spot when tragedies occurred, and speculated lightly on how the devil he had managed to wreck a car on the Causeway while rowing with his secretary on the surface of the bay.

Shayne grinned and explained he had been experimenting with a new sort of ray by remote control, and promised that when the victim was recovered from the submerged car he would prove to be none other than Nicolai Simonovith, personal representative of the U.S.S.R. with secret plans for blowing up the entire United States with one bomb.

There was a shout from the men in the rowboat, a great deal of activity as they maneuvered around one spot, letting their hooks down carefully until two of them appeared to be firmly caught by some object below. Then they rowed back a short distance as the ropes were tightened by a winch truck securely anchored on the edge of the Causeway above, and the heavy motor roared loudly in the night as the strain on the ropes became intense.

One of the hooks broke loose, but the second held fast as the rope was reeled in, and under the bright lights the front wheels and engine hood of the gray sedan suddenly broke the surface of the water.

Shayne hurried forward with the others as the sedan was dragged up on the sand on its side, was one of the first to peer into the interior and discover there was no body inside.

Both front windows were rolled all the way down, and it was the immediate consensus that the body of the driver had drifted out through one of the open windows while the sedan rested on the bottom, and probably wouldn’t be recovered until gases gave the corpse enough buoyancy to bring it to the surface.

With no official reason for staying around any longer, Shayne retrieved his boat and left them dragging the sedan up to the top, rowing strongly back the half mile to the dock where he had borrowed the craft earlier from a friend.

All he could do now was wait for something to happen. It was midnight, and the man on the telephone had set one o’clock as the time the woman he called Mrs. Allerdice would tell her story to the police unless he had received $70,000 first.

At the moment, Michael Shayne saw nothing in the world he could do to prevent that from happening on schedule. He had hoped, of course, to capture the man on the Causeway and get the truth from him and perhaps have the case settled by the one-o’clock deadline.

But now the man was almost certainly dead and all chance of getting his story was over. Michael Shayne had blundered again. The police were going to take a very dim view of the entire affair when they had the full story of Shayne’s actions during the evening.

From first to last, he had erred in judgment. From the first moment he had started withholding information from the authorities, he had been inexorably forced into new deceptions which had dug the pit deeper and deeper for him.

Not only for him, he thought ruefully, but for Lucy Hamilton and Timothy Rourke, also. Lucy Hamilton deserved to share the responsibility with him, but Rourke was a completely innocent bystander who had become enmeshed in the affair through his long-time friendship with them both and his absolute conviction that Michael Shayne would always come out on top no matter what the odds.

So Rourke had backed the wrong horse tonight, Shayne told himself grimly. There seemed no possible way to hide the full truth any longer. Within an hour the three of them were destined to be in very bad trouble indeed. Will Gentry was a good friend and a fair man, but he was also a sternly just man. In the past he had overlooked many minor deviations from the strict line of legality on Shayne’s part, but the things that had occurred tonight were much too much for even Will Gentry to stomach.

At the very best Shayne knew it would mean the loss of his license. At the worst there could easily be jail terms for all of them.

Yet, looking back on it now, Shayne did not honestly see how he could have acted otherwise. Each decision had seemed right at the time. But as a result of those decisions, two men were now dead who might still be alive, and the murder of Gladys Smith was no nearer a solution than before.

Shayne was utterly weary in body and numbed in mind when he pulled in to the small dock and tied the skiff up. He stepped out and paced doggedly down to his parked car, wondering if Lucy was home yet, and where he might find Tim Rourke for the conference that was desperately indicated.

A fast, clean breast of the whole thing to Will Gentry before the woman got her story in would probably be best. It meant disgrace and probable arrest, but it had to be faced.

He drove to Lucy’s place first, was encouraged to see light in her front windows and Rourke’s car parked in front. He pulled in behind it and went doggedly into the foyer to press Lucy’s button. Her voice came over the speaking tube promptly and when he said, “Hi, angel,” her buzzer sounded. He climbed the stairs, and she met him in the hallway outside her lighted door. She cried out humbly, “I feel so terrible, Michael. I don’t know what—”

He caught her slender body to him in a hard embrace, kissed her lips, and muttered huskily, “Nobody’s fault, angel. The gods were against us tonight.”

He released her and stepped inside to see Timothy Rourke lolling back with a highball glass in his hand. He stopped in the center of the floor and announced flatly to both of them, “I stayed until they got the sedan out. No body in it. He must have drifted out an open window and floated away. So now we’ve got to do some hard thinking. I suggest—”

“No, Michael!” Lucy’s voice was hopeful as she interrupted him. “We don’t think he’s dead at all. You tell him, Tim.”

“That’s right, Mike. There’s strong reason to believe the driver of the car was thrown out before it went over the edge, and taken away unconscious by a motorist before the police got there. I’m trying to have the story verified and the man located before the cops reach him.”

Michael Shayne stood stock-still, looking from one to the other while his weary brain tried to assimilate this information, to see how it changed the present picture, to determine whether it was good or bad, whether it should change his decision to go at once to Gentry with the whole story.

He tugged for a moment at his ear lobe with left thumb and forefinger, then shook his red head slowly and sank into a chair. “I need a brandy, Lucy. And I want to know exactly what did happen on the Causeway.”

She had cognac and a wineglass on the tray, and she poured him a drink while she related the events of her evening stroll rapidly.

“So you see,” she ended hopefully, “there’s really nothing at all to connect me or you or Tim with the accident. Even if the police do find and question him, do you think he’ll tell the truth about how it happened? The blackmail attempt and all?”

“God only knows what he’ll tell,” said Shayne moodily. “He won’t have the money. He’ll know that we tried to trick him — capture him with a gas bomb. And there’s still the woman waiting to tell her story.” He glanced at his watch. “In exactly fifty-two minutes, the way he warned me he had it set up, the police will start asking her questions.”

Rourke sat up straight, his eyes bright and probing. “Let’s have it from the horse’s mouth, Mike. If we don’t get to him, or even if we do but the woman still tells her story, where do we stand with Will Gentry?”

“Bad,” said Shayne. “God knows how many laws Lucy and I have broken. And you’re little better off, Tim.” He paused to take a long sip of cognac. “There simply aren’t any extenuating circumstances. If we had managed to pull this off and get the guy and solve the case on our own, Gentry probably would have been willing to forgive and forget. But everything we’ve done has botched it further. At the very least, I’ll be out of business tomorrow — and you and Lucy will be out of jobs. And we’ll probably all three be behind bars, looking out and repenting our misdeeds.” He smiled grimly and finished his drink.

“And every bit of it’s my fault,” faltered Lucy Hamilton in a choked voice. “If I’d told you about Jack Bristow right away — if I’d telephoned you as I should have—”

Shayne shook his head and held up a big hand to stop her self-accusations. “None of that is important now.” He drummed blunt finger tips on the arm of his chair. “How does it look to you, Tim? Feel like taking a ride to headquarters with me and dumping it all in Gentry’s lap?”

“If you say so, Mike.” Rourke studied the big redhead alertly. “First time I ever knew you to toss in a hand before the showdown.”

“First time you ever saw me holding such a lousy hand. We can get our story in first, or we can sit back and wait.”

“I’m ashamed of you, Michael Shayne,” exclaimed Lucy with red flags showing in tearstained cheeks. “Tim’s perfectly right. A hundred things might happen.”

“What, for instance?” demanded Shayne harshly.

“I don’t know. But they might. If you give up now, you admit you’ll be through as a detective in Miami. This case will never be solved if you’re pulled off it.”

“Miami will still have a functioning police force,” Shayne reminded her.

“But think how many times in the past you’ve succeeded where they failed. Just because one little thing went awry tonight, you can’t just give up.”

“Lucy’s right.” Rourke surged to his feet. “We’ve still got fifty minutes. And something may happen to upset whatever plans he had made for the Allerdice woman. I’m going to phone in and see if there’s any dope.”

Shayne lit a cigarette and leaned back moodily while Rourke called his paper. He said, “Hi, Ed? Any news yet on the driver of the car that went off the Causeway?”

He listened a moment, and Shayne knew by his expression that there was no good news. Then the reporter stiffened abruptly and exclaimed, “What? Say that again, Ed... Are you certain?”

He listened intently, his brow furrowed, thin face hardening perceptibly. He nodded after a long interval of silence, said emphatically, “I’m damned interested, Ed. In anything that comes up on any of this. I’ll be at the same phone or you can get a message to me from here.”

He quietly replaced the receiver and looked down at it for a moment, then turned with a soberly preoccupied expression to announce, “You didn’t stay there long enough, Mike. Should have waited until they opened the luggage compartment of the gray sedan.”

Shayne asked just as quietly, “Why, Tim?”

“Because there was a woman locked in there. Tied up with ropes. Dead, of course, when they took her out. The brief description coincides with the one I saw in the tourist cabin, Mike. And they found a motel key in her pocket.”