Death Has Three Lives

Chapter Fifteen

“It all began,” said Michael Shayne evenly, “when that blundering Cossack of yours tried to force his way into Lucy’s apartment while I was visiting her, without any real explanation of what he wanted, and with a couple of insults tossed in for good measure when he thought she was alone.

“Wait a minute, Will.” Shayne held up a big hand to shut off the chief’s protest. The two men, together with Timothy Rourke and a police stenographer were seated in Gentry’s private office at headquarters.

“I’m going to tell the whole thing straight and fast without too many excuses for Lucy and me. Tim, you’ll see, got pulled into it inadvertently and played ball with us for pure friendship. So, I got sore and socked your cop there in Lucy’s doorway, and that started the whole train of events.”

He hurried on to relate concisely how Lucy had admitted to him there was a wounded young man in her bedroom at the very moment the police came searching for him.

“I hurried out at once to find Sergeant Loftus, but he had left the premises. Then I broke down the bedroom door to take the guy myself, but found the screen ripped away from in front of the fire escape, and heard a man running away in the dark alley below.

“So — there it was.” He spread out his palms. “It was done. Through no fault of anybody’s really. Jack was an old friend of Lucy’s and had sworn to her he’d committed no crime. She didn’t know about Eighteenth Street or the strangled girl. I did get on a phone fast, Will, and make an anonymous call to headquarters giving Bristow’s name and description. It seemed the only thing to do. Then I beat it to the rooming-house on Eighteenth to see what I could find out.”

He briefly related his conversation with the police detective, and how the woman had stopped him with questions as he was getting into his car.

“She was scared to hell of cops, and wouldn’t have talked to any of you,” he argued. “I did manage to get some dope out of her, and got a hunch she was mixed up with Bristow and the killing somehow. So, I put her on ice at the motel. That license number you’ve got belongs to my Hudson, Will.”

Will Gentry was seated stolidly across from Shayne at his desk, mangling the saliva-soaked butt of his cigar between strong teeth. He nodded noncommittally and rumbled, “I recognized the license number soon as I saw it, Mike. Go on from there.”

“You and Rourke turned up at Lucy’s right after I got back.” Shayne shrugged. “You know what happened. Can you say, now, that it would have helped any if I’d come clean at that point?”

“The woman from the motel would probably still be alive.”

“There was no evidence to tie her to what had happened. Just my hunch. I doubt whether you’d even bothered to question her at that time. If you had, I doubt seriously you’d have put a guard over her,” protested Shayne, the trenches showing very deep in his cheeks. “Later, I made a bad mistake leading the killer to her, but I don’t believe keeping still at that time made any real difference.”

“I don’t suppose it matters to her now,” said Gentry. He took the soggy cigar butt from his mouth, looked at it distastefully and in surprise as though wondering how the devil it had got in his mouth, and threw it toward a spittoon in a corner. “What comes next?”

“Next,” said Shayne carefully, “was after you had gone, Will.” He drew in a deep breath and leaned forward. “I found Jack Bristow’s body shoved underneath Lucy’s bed with his throat slit. It hadn’t been he escaping down the fire escape after all, but his murderer whom I almost caught.”

“Now, by God!” thundered Chief Gentry. “You were in on that, too, Tim? Both of you covered up? How did Bristow get out on the street where we found him later?”

“Tim knew nothing about it,” said Shayne swiftly. “I managed to get him out before I moved the body. You can’t blame him—”

“Wait a minute, Mike,” interrupted the lanky reporter. “Don’t lie for me. If Will Gentry doesn’t like what I did tonight he can prefer any sort of charges he wants.” He turned fiercely glowering eyes on the chief and struck the table with his clenched fist.

“Mike and Lucy were in a hell of a spot with that body in her bedroom. Through no fault of their own, damn it. But would a cop look at it that way? You know he wouldn’t. I knew they were telling the truth. They were caught in a lousy web of circumstances. But cops have to go by rules. That’s the way they exist. That’s the way they get to be chiefs.” His fist thudded the table again. “Once we reported the truth to you, there were certain things you would have to do. You couldn’t help yourself. You’d have arrested Mike and Lucy then and there and the official investigation would have blundered on and probably got nowhere. It was my own decision to help Mike move the body.”

“And because you made that decision, we’ve got a dead woman in the morgue waiting to be identified,” said Gentry inflexibly.

“Not exactly.” Timothy Rourke’s eyes were fever-bright. “You’ve got a dead woman in the morgue, but we can identify her for you simply because Mike stayed out of your jail long enough to do the job.”

“You can identify the woman?”

“Sure,” said Rourke casually. “She’s Beatrice Allerdice from New Orleans. Wife, or widow, of one Hugh Allerdice, convicted bank robber who supposedly died in a car accident three days ago. You tell him, Mike.”

“I’ll tell it the way it happened,” said Shayne stubbornly. “Jack Bristow was dead, Will. Nothing could change that. His murderer had escaped and no one knew who he was or what he looked like. He’d been shot outside the rooming-house where the woman claimed she was to meet her husband. They’re both young, and it seemed to me at least reasonable to suppose he might be the missing husband. So I bundled him up in one of Lucy’s blankets and took him out to the motel to see if she could identify him.”

Will Gentry had gotten out a fresh cigar and was angrily biting the end off it. “Like a one-man police force,” he said bitterly. “All right, goddamn it, what laws did you break next?”

Shayne related Mrs. Allerdice’s reaction to the sight of Bristow’s corpse, how he’d had the feeling she recognized him though he wasn’t her husband, and how he’d warned her of possible danger to her if she didn’t tell the truth.

“Then we ditched Bristow in the street where he was sure to be found soon, and went to my place for a drink. The telephone rang while we were kicking things around — and that was the real payoff.”

In a flat, unemotional tone, he told Gentry exactly what he had been told over the telephone.

“So, there we were,” he ended. “Stop a minute, Will, and consider the situation. What would you and your entire police force have done at that moment if I’d taken the story to you?”

“We could have saved the woman’s life and gotten the whole story from her by sitting tight and doing nothing,” blustered Gentry. “He told you he had her hid out with arrangements for us to find her if you didn’t come across with the money in a certain length of time. You caused her death by forcing the issue.”

“He told us he had her hid out,” Shayne reminded him. “But he didn’t in fact. We know now that he had her tied up and locked in the trunk of the stolen car all the time. Tell me one thing truthfully, Will.” Michael Shayne’s voice had an unaccustomed note of pleading in it. “Do you have Doc Martin’s preliminary report on her?”

“Yeh.”

“Tell me this. Did she die of drowning — or suffocation?”

Will Gentry hesitated, then he conceded gruffly, “Doc didn’t find a trace of salt water in her lungs. She must have been dead before the sedan went over. Suffocated in the trunk.”

“How long before the car went over, Will?”

“At least half an hour,” said Gentry grudgingly. “But that doesn’t absolve you, Mike. If you had come to me in the beginning—”

“I know, I know,” said Shayne wearily. “If you’d had a jackass for a father, you’d be out in a field braying right now instead of sitting at this desk. So, I made a fast decision. There was one way we might trap the guy. By sending Lucy out with a decoy package under her arm — and don’t blame Pete Fairwell for helping me make up that bomb. I gave him a good story for why I wanted it, and he simply co-operated the way you’ve always had your men co-operate with me before.”

“I’m not blaming Fairwell,” said Gentry shortly. “I blame you for bungling the deal.”

“Fair enough. I did bungle it. By about two minutes. There again, we have a whole batch of ifs. If he hadn’t gunned the motor so fast before the bomb went off. If the guard fence hadn’t been down at exactly that point. If an officious motorist hadn’t picked up the unconscious man and carried him away before the police or I got there. Those are ifs no one can anticipate. I took a gamble on catching him and lost. If I’d succeeded, you’d be pinning a medal on me instead of having me on the carpet.”

“But you didn’t succeed. Go on with your wild story about a bank robber named Hugh Allerdice.”

“Tim and I went through back issues of the paper and found the whole story.”

Shayne went back to the time of the payroll theft and related the sequence of events leading up to the automobile tragedy while Allerdice was being taken to prison.

“So Tim and I hurried to the morgue to see if the woman has had a recent appendectomy. She has. Not positive identification, but a pretty good lead. What the devil did you mean, Will, by saying you wanted Lucy to come down and see if she was Arlene Bristow? What gave you that idea?”

“Arlene Bristow is missing from her home. Supposed to have left for Miami a couple days ago under somewhat mysterious circumstances. With her brother dead here, I naturally wondered if it was she in the luggage compartment of the sedan. Particularly when Pete Fairwell told me about the bomb he fixed for you, and I tied you to the sedan, also.”

“Arlene in Miami!” exclaimed Shayne. “Lucy must have learned that after we left her somehow. And that’s what took her down to the morgue. I wondered why the devil—”

“From what you said there, I gathered you thought Lucy was the woman whom the man recognized as he came out, and who took her away with him. Some man named Jenkins from Twelfth Street, who was afraid she was his daughter. Could he be Arlene’s father?”

“Nuts! He’s the murderer, of course. The man who was driving the sedan. He recognized Lucy at the morgue, caught her by surprise, and hurried her out before she could protest. His Miami street address was the giveaway, Will. No one in Miami lives on plain Twelfth Street. It’s either Northwest or Northeast, Southwest or Southeast. That mistake proves him a stranger.”

“Why would the murderer go down to try and identify the body?” argued Gentry. “He certainly knew who she was.”

“God knows what he wanted. Maybe he hoped she still had her clothes on and was afraid she had something incriminating he hoped to get from her. The important thing right now is that he has Lucy Hamilton. What are you going to do about that?”

“Why, I don’t know, Mike.” Will Gentry’s voice was deceptively mild. He had been rolling the unlighted cigar between his lips, and now he struck a match and carefully applied flame to the end. “Since you seem bent on running my police department, suppose you tell me what to do.”

“Don’t, Will. It’s Lucy we’re talking about. I’m convinced the man who has her prisoner has already killed two people tonight. Why not Lucy, too?”

“I can’t think of any good reason.” The cigar was drawing well and Gentry regarded the glowing end approvingly. “Unless he’s holding her as a sort of hostage to force you to give him the money he’s after. If you’d handed it over in the first place, he wouldn’t have bothered Lucy.”

“Damn it, Will! I told you there was no money.” Shayne half-rose from his chair with clenched fists.

“I know. You’ve told me a lot of things the last fifteen minutes. What in hell do you expect me to do about Lucy? How do I know she wasn’t simply keeping an assignation down at the morgue and went off with him of her own volition?”

“Goddamn it, Will.”

“It would be on a par with all the other screwy things you and she have pulled tonight. Give me a description of this so-called murderer — if he exists.”

“He’s heavy-set,” said Michael Shayne between tight-clenched teeth, “and middle-aged. Wearing a gray suit and gray hat. Probably driving the car he stole from the Miami Beach resident who picked him up at the accident and got slugged for his trouble.”

“That’s not much to go on.”

“Do you remember Jack Bristow told Lucy that a dead man had shot him?”

“I recall you saying that Lucy said Bristow had told her that.”

“Does that give you any ideas?”

“None that you would care to listen to, I’m afraid. When you look at the whole crazy story, Mike—”

“Call New Orleans,” said Shayne angrily. “If you want a complete description of your man. Detective First Class Mark Switzer. The cop who was handcuffed to Hugh Allerdice when the police car went into the river there three days ago.”

“Now, look here, Mike. If you’re trying to tell me that a police detective—”

Michael Shayne got to his feet slowly. “I am telling you, Will. And you’re not listening. Just as you wouldn’t have listened to a lot of other things if I’d told them to you earlier tonight. You’ve accused me of acting like a one-man police force tonight, and you got a little sore about it. Maybe, by God, that’s what Miami needs. While you sit here on your dead butt and do nothing, I’m going out to find Lucy Hamilton.”

“How?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” snarled Shayne. “You’ve been Chief of Police too long to remember the rudiments of police work. Your brains have gone to fat and your guts have shriveled up. Come on, Tim.” Shayne whirled about and started for the door.

The newspaper reporter got to his feet cautiously, looking warily for some reaction from Chief Will Gentry to prevent Shayne from walking out. Instead, to his surprise, he saw a faint smile on Gentry’s thick lips, a twinkle in his eyes as Shayne stormed out the door.

He stopped Rourke from following, getting to his feet as he did so. “Wait, Tim.”

His hand went inside his coat to withdraw the .38 with which he had threatened Shayne earlier. He held it out butt-first to the reporter, telling him wryly, “Give this to Mike, for God’s sake. He may need it if he’s going out against a cop who’s turned kill-crazy.”