Death Has Three Lives

Chapter Nineteen

There was a depleted bottle of cognac on the table in the middle of Michael Shayne’s living-room, and an almost full glass of ice water beside it. There was also an uncorked bottle-of bourbon and a highball glass with half-melted ice cubes and a watery brownish mixture in the bottom. There was an uncapped beer bottle with a finger or so of fairly flat beer in the bottom.

And there was the money!

Stacks and stacks of new, crisp bills, neatly arranged in piles all over the surface of the table. And a discarded money belt of dark-brown leather lying on the floor with all its compartments open and empty.

And beside the cognac bottle lay the crumpled sheet of paper on which Lucy Hamilton had written her message to Michael Shayne under the direction of the man who was now dead.

Chief of Police Will Gentry and Daily News reporter, Timothy Rourke sat at the table. Rourke’s thin fingers were counting the crisp bills in their stacks of various denominations. Will Gentry was settled solidly in a comfortable chair close to the beer bottle. His glance kept going back casually to the stacks of bills on the table and the counting job that Tim Rourke was doing, but mostly his attention was centered on the restless figure of Michael Shayne, pacing back and forth the length of the room monotonously with a glass of cognac in his hand from which he took a sip every now and then.

For perhaps the tenth time during the half hour that the three of them had been together there, Chief Gentry reminded the redhead patiently, “You can’t blame Loftus and Powell for Switzer getting killed, Mike. I’m not asking you to blame yourself, but if you had trusted us a little more they would have been glad to hold back and let you grab him alive. They didn’t know you were there, damn it.”

“And I didn’t guess they would be there, either,” countered Shayne, also for perhaps the tenth time. “From my experience with the way the average cop’s mind works, I had no reason to believe any of you would realize that Switzer might hear the broadcast and come to the conclusion that Bristow had ditched the money behind the cushion of Agnew’s taxi after he was wounded and being driven to Lucy’s place.”

“Any sensible person who heard the broadcast,” said Gentry, “would immediately think of that as a possibility. The way Bristow made a point of getting Agnew’s name and number. Why else would he do that except that he planned to hide the money there and hoped to recover it later? Then when you and Tim put in that stuff about Agnew being on call any time at night for special trips in his cab, it was a definite invitation for Switzer to use that method of getting at the money.”

“All right,” agreed Shayne savagely. “So, you’ve made the point that you cops were as smart as I. And you sent Loftus and his sidekick out to see if Agnew did get a call. There was still no reason on God’s earth why they had to blow the top of his head off before he could be forced to tell us where he had Lucy and the Bristow girl hidden out.” He stopped beside the table and put his forefinger down hard on the message Lucy had written to him. “Read that again, goddamn it! Right at this moment, two innocent girls may be breathing their last breath in the cellar of a deserted house. Only one man in the world could have saved them, and one of your trigger-happy goons kills him before he can be made to talk.”

“I know how you feel about Lucy, Mike,” Gentry tried to soothe him. “But you’ve got to take it easy. She’ll be rescued all right. You know what we’re doing. Right now I’ve got every available man on the force working over every vacated house in Miami that we have listed in our files. And most people do list them with us if they go away for a time, as you know. Tomorrow morning both daily papers will carry a headline story about Lucy and Arlene, urging every resident of Miami to communicate with us at once the location of any vacant house in their vicinity. Take it easy, damn it. We’ll have Lucy and the Bristow girl safe and sound tomorrow afternoon.”

“If they’re still alive by that time,” said Shayne. He picked up Lucy’s note and read from it: “‘We are bound with ropes in a damp cellar that is practically airtight in an empty house where we will suffocate or die of slow starvation unless you or someone else comes to our rescue.’”

“An airtight cellar, Will. What makes you think they’ll last until tomorrow afternoon?”

“Take it easy, Mike.” Timothy Rourke finished his counting of the bills taken from the money belt Shayne had found hidden behind the rear-seat cushion in Joe Agnew’s taxi. “Roughly seventy-four thousand, I make it. You know no basement is actually airtight, Mike. There’s always enough air seeping in to keep a person alive. If you’re so eager to find them,” the reporter went on caustically, “why don’t you develop and expatiate on the theory you had in the beginning? That Lucy had somehow incorporated a secret message in code in this note to you?”

Shayne glared at him angrily and then down at the note in his hand. “I know it’s here, damn it. It’s here in front of our eyes, and we’re all missing it. You both laughed at me when I tried to point out certain things to you. ‘Dearest Boss’” he read aloud harshly. “Lucy never called me either ‘Dearest’ or ‘Boss’ in her life. That’s phony. And: ‘This is the last love letter I shall ever write to you—’ I told you in the beginning, damn it, that Lucy never has written me a love letter before. So, how could this be the last one? She’s trying to tell me something in that phrase! She knows that I know, this can’t be her last love letter since she never wrote me another. So what does it mean?”

“And Will and I both pointed out,” said Rourke soothingly, “that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Take the ‘Boss,’ for instance. Switzer was probably standing over her with a gun when he forced her to write the note. He’d probably say to her: ‘Write your boss a letter telling him just how things are.’ So she addressed it ‘Dearest Boss.’”

“I still think she would have normally written ‘Dear Mike,’” said Shayne stubbornly. “How do you explain that this is her ‘last love letter’ when she never wrote me a love letter before?”

“It’s a question of semantics,” said Rourke easily. “She thinks this may be her last letter to you. She’s scared to death as she writes it, and wants to make it a love letter. You know the gal has been in love with you for years, even if she’s never said so. This is her last chance. If this is a love letter, and if it’s her last letter also, it has to be her last love letter. I simply think you’re driving yourself crazy trying to read something into it that isn’t there, Mike. Consider the circumstances. This was written hurriedly and under the greatest stress and almost surely under Switzer’s eye. She had no chance to work out an elaborate code such as you hypothecate. You say yourself that Lucy knew nothing of formal codes. Seems to me it would take the greatest expert on earth to incorporate a code in a letter like this under the circumstances.”

“I never said Lucy was dumb,” snapped Shayne. “I didn’t say I thought she had used an elaborate or formal code. But I know she is trying to tell me something in this note other than appears on the surface, and her life may depend on my being smart enough to figure it out.” He looked down at the note in Lucy’s handwriting again.

“There are several awkward constructions. Not the way Lucy would phrase the same thought. Nothing you can put your finger on, but there they are. I tell you, she wrote it that way for a purpose. Near the end, she uses the word mazuma. Now, that’s a word Lucy never used in her life. I’d swear to it. Yet she uses it in this note to me. Why? I tell you she had a reason. But instead of helping me figure out the reason and maybe save her from suffocation, you both sit back and shake your heads indulgently and count the bank loot I recovered for you.”

His voice shook with anger as he finished. He sank into a chair and dropped the note on the table before them, finished his drink and threw the empty glass across the room where it shattered into tiny pieces against the wall. Then he buried his face in his hands and drew in a great shuddering breath.

Will Gentry looked over his bowed head at Timothy Rourke, and neither of his two best friends knew what to say to him at the moment. Rourke finally picked Lucy’s note up and studied it again with narrowed eyes, then shook his head helplessly.

“Blessed if I can decipher any secret message in it. Listen, Will. Don’t you have an ex-Army Intelligence officer on your staff who’s supposed to be a whiz at cryptograms and codes? Why not give him a whirl at her note?”

“Why, sure,” agreed Gentry. “He was major or a colonel in the last war. I’ll call him.”

“Nuts to your expert,” said Michael Shayne wearily, lifting his head and reaching for the single sheet of paper again. “I’ve told you Lucy is no expert. Anything in here is meant for me alone. Calling me ‘Dearest Boss’ wouldn’t mean anything to your code expert. He’d have no way of knowing she hadn’t written me hundreds of love letters in the past, any more than Switzer knew it. Don’t you see? Whatever she was trying to say, she had to put so Switzer would accept it as perfectly normal under the circumstances. But she had to trust me to get the nuances and put them together logically. And I’m failing her, God help me. My mind’s a goddamned blank on it.” He got up angrily and went to the wall cupboard for another glass and came back to splash it full of amber liquor.

“Better go easy on the brandy,” cautioned Gentry. “If you are so certain there’s something hidden in her letter, you need a clear head to find it.”

Michael Shayne laughed jarringly and emptied his glass in two fast gulps. “Maybe that’s what’s the matter with us. We’re all too goddamned sober and trying to use our so-called intellects instead of our instincts. The more you apply logic, the less you rely on inner knowledge. On hunches. Time and again in my own life, I’ve suddenly known something was true. I didn’t know how I knew it. It just was.

“Long ago, I would stop and question this inner knowledge,” he went on. “I would try to apply the rules of logic to it, and if they didn’t apply I would begin to question the rightness of my hunch. And, invariably, I’d discover later that my original idea had been right. Don’t ask me why it works that way.” He shrugged and poured himself another drink. “Lots of guys a lot smarter than I am have observed the same thing and wondered why. You get into the realm of metaphysics along that line. All I know right now is that I know there’s some concealed message in Lucy’s note for me. Not for you guys. Not for Mark Switzer. She knew he wouldn’t stand for it if it didn’t sound all right to him.”

Shayne paused to drain his glass of brandy, glaring at Will Gentry in defiance. “It’s here, Will.” He struck the sheet of paper with his fist.

“She calls me ‘Boss,’” he reminded the two men harshly. “She says it’s her last love letter when she never wrote me a love letter before. She ends that sentence: ‘My sweet.’” His harsh voice made a parody of the two words.

“That’s not Lucy Hamilton talking. Not under the greatest stress in the world. She’d never call me that. My sweet! It’s an adolescent phrase. But she used it for some reason. Because she expects me to realize it isn’t the way she would normally write to me, and thus she has used it for a special reason.

“Hell, there are a dozen more examples as you read on,” he continued fiercely. “‘Please don’t do anything to hurt him or we will die.’ And ‘mazuma!’ A word Lucy would never normally use. And then the corny ending, of course. ‘As you read these lines, please realize, Mike dearest, that I shall love you even to the very end. Even to the very end,’” he repeated savagely. “Unh-uh. Not Lucy.”

“All right,” said Gentry patiently. “I’m willing to accept everything you say. But where does it get you? Why did she write down those words and phrases you say she wouldn’t normally use?”

“To tell me something, damn it! Something I’m too dumb or too sober to get hold of.” He put the letter down on the table and emptied the cognac bottle into his glass. “I can’t do anything about my congenital dumbness but, by God, I can get drunk enough to maybe figure what Lucy was trying to say.”

He lifted the glass and started to drink from it, still staring down at Lucy’s letter. His features tightened suddenly in a look of intense concentration. He lowered the glass to the table, slopping some of the liquor out of it because his gaze was fixed on the penned words.

He said, “By God! I wonder—” and picked up the letter in both hands to study it intently.

In a choked voice, he demanded of the two other men: “Is there a Saltair Street in Miami?”

Chief Gentry shook his head doubtfully, but Tim Rourke showed alert interest.

“Yes. I’m sure there is, Mike. One of those streets far out in the Northeast section that cross Biscayne Boulevard and dead-end against the bay.”

Shayne whirled on Gentry. “The Northeast section! From Hugh Allerdice’s story, that’s about where Switzer ditched Arlene Bristow this evening. That’s it, Will! Get on the phone.” He snatched up the telephone and shoved it at the Chief of Police.

“Get men out there. Saltair Street and the bay. They’ll find a deserted house — and Lucy Hamilton.”

He grabbed his hat and long-legged it toward the door with Timothy Rourke trotting behind him while Gentry was getting headquarters to relay the information to them.

Though Rourke had never experienced a faster ride out the Boulevard than he had in Shayne’s black Hudson that night, there were already three radio cars clustered together in front of the boarded mansion on Saltair Street where it came to a dead end against Biscayne Bay when they arrived.

Searchlights were turned on the isolated house, and as Shayne pulled up behind the police cars, two uniformed men came around from the bay side of the house each supporting a slender feminine figure.

Shayne leaped out and ran forward to catch Lucy Hamilton in his arms away from her uniformed rescuer. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and she was sobbing with happiness and relief, and Shayne held her tight and kissed her lips gently and assured her.

“It’s all over, angel. Relax. You’re okay.”

“I knew you’d find me, Michael! I knew you would. I kept thinking — when he reads my letter — as soon as he reads my letter — he’ll know. But it was so long, Michael! I didn’t know when he’d show you the letter. I didn’t know how long we’d have to wait. And the air was getting worse all the time.”

“It’s all right,” Shayne reassured her gruffly. “It’s ended. I did get the letter, and I finally did figure it out. Nothing else matters now. It was damned clever of you, angel.”

“Too clever for me to figure out yet,” said Rourke aggrievedly, trotting along beside them with the letter in his hands. “Give me the dope on it fast, Mike. I got maybe twenty minutes to get a story in the early edition. How in the name of God did Lucy put it in? And how did you figure Saltair Street on the bay from this note?”

Shayne grinned down at Lucy and said, “It must have been plenty tough figuring out the right words on the spur of the moment while Switzer was watching you. I told you and Will,” he went on blandly to Rourke, “that a dozen things in the letter made me realize Lucy was trying to point the way for me.

“The payoff was her phrase. ‘last love letter.’ And at the end, the two significant phrases, ‘As you read these lines,’ and ‘to the very end.’ Add those up to the other curious words I pointed out that Lucy wouldn’t normally use: ‘Boss — my sweet — mazuma.’ All of them phony words or expressions for Lucy to use.”

“You said all that back in your apartment,” Rourke reminded him impatiently. “But how in the name of God do they add up to tell where we found her?”

“The last letter of each line,” said Shayne. “Beginning with the s on Boss and reading down. Last letter,” he repeated. “These lines. The very end.

“Read the last letter of each line, of course,” Shayne ended briskly. “Any moron should have figured that out in a minute, and if I hadn’t been so damned sober I might have done better. Go write your story, Tim. I’m taking Lucy home.”