Dividend on Death

CHAPTER 14

He slept four hours and woke up wondering where he was and why he hadn’t just gone on and died. He remembered where he was when he turned on the light, and he knew why he had kept on living when he remembered Gordon. Somewhat to his surprise he found that he was hungry, and his first act was to call down and order dinner sent up. Then he phoned the clerk at his apartment hotel while he waited for it.

“There are two calls for you, Mr. Shayne,” the clerk told him. “Both of them important, I guess. One is from the Tropical Steamship Company. They left a message.”

“Read it to me.”

“Here it is: ‘Photograph identified by steward as Miss Mary Gray, disembarked this morning on inland vacation tour of Cuba. Can be reached through American Express.’ That’s all of that. The other call-”

Shayne said, “Hold it. One thing at a time is all I can handle tonight. Get a cablegram off to Miss Mary Gray. Take this down. You are already involved in one murder and may avert other deaths by immediate co-operation stop. Cable my expense full particulars your reasons for sailing under assumed name who financed trip and why. Read that back to me.”

The clerk read it back to him. Shayne told him to get it off right away and hold the answer when it came. Then he asked, “What about the other call?”

“Mr. Painter called from the Beach an hour ago. He wants you to contact him immediately.”

Shayne thanked the clerk and hung up. There was a light rap on his door.

He went to it and opened it a wary crack. It was a waiter from the hotel restaurant with the meal he had ordered sent up.

He let the waiter in and went back to the phone while the man set up a folding table in the center of the room.

Peter Painter’s voice sounded irked and worried over the wire. “Shayne! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you on that fingerprint request you made this morning.”

“Did you get something on Oscar?”

“Plenty. He was released from the New York penitentiary three months ago after serving a sentence for manslaughter. He has a long record, but is clear with the law at present.”

Shayne said, “Wait. Let me think.” His head throbbed with pain, and it was difficult to think. This meant something. It was the link he had been looking for. While he tried to put things into their right places, Painter barked at him.

“For God’s sake, Shayne, if you’ve got anything, let me have it. That art robbery at the airport has put additional pressure on me. It seems to tie up to the Brighton killings, somehow. I’ve got to give the papers something.”

Shayne grinned at the phone. The angle was coming to him now. “Let ’em wait until tomorrow. Noon tomorrow. Promise them anything, but don’t open your mouth before I tell you to. I’m going to hand it to you, all sewed up in a bag. There’s only one piece lacking in the whole puzzle. You can get that for me. Get the warden of the New York pen on long distance and find out if Julius Brighton is still an inmate or whether he has been paroled or pardoned.”

“Julius Brighton? What the hell?”

“Don’t mess things up by trying to lame-brain your way into it now,” Shayne crackled. “Get that information and call me back here.” He gave him the number and hung up.

The soup was thick and hot and good. The steak, however, was a mistake. It was quite tender, but not tender enough for Shayne’s bruised jaws to handle. After painfully wrestling with it for a time, he gave up and ordered another bowl of soup.

He was finishing that when his telephone rang. It was Painter with the information that Julius Brighton had been released on parole, an extremely sick man, a week before Oscar’s release-with the additional information that Brighton was now being sought in New York for violation of his parole, not having reported to the parole officer for the past month.

Shayne curtly thanked him and hung up while Painter was demanding to know what it was all about. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and stared at the wall. He had all the pieces, now. How the hell did they fit together? He closed his eyes and mentally tried to piece them together. It took him a long time. And in the end he had only a theory. It was a good theory but he wasn’t satisfied. There was one gruesome bit of proof lacking.

He sighed, knowing he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to know why Oscar wouldn’t let him in his room that first afternoon. He had to know what heavy object had been dragged out of Oscar’s room during the interval between his first and second visit to the garage apartment. A cobweb clinging to the sleeve of a pair of coveralls, dirt-stained knees, clean fresh beach sand in the cuffs of that pair of coveralls.

His entire theory rested on that flimsy basis. He couldn’t hand it to Painter that way. He had to know.

He got up and went out, his face grimly set. It was the showdown. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

The cool night air felt good as he walked down the street to his parked car. It was where he had left it before receiving Gordon’s message earlier in the day. It seemed as though he had parked it there weeks ago.

He got in and drove slowly toward the causeway, stopping at an all-night garage where he was known and borrowing a spade and a slender steel rod with a sharpened point.

There was a pale arc of moon low in the west, and fleecy clouds overhead. A light breeze rippled the surface of Biscayne Bay as he drove over the causeway. It was past midnight and there was little traffic to bother him. By the time he reached the ocean drive and turned north, the breeze was freshening, whipping in whitecaps from the Atlantic. He drove more slowly, taking deep breaths of the salt-tanged air, subconsciously delaying as much as possible.

He stopped his car beneath a palm tree a quarter of a mile south of the Brighton estate, took his steel rod and spade and made his way between two palatial residences to the water’s edge. There he turned and plodded along on the hard-packed sand. The tide was out, leaving a wide expanse of sloping wet sand which glistened in the faint starlight. He mentally checked each narrow strip of private beach as he passed until he knew, suddenly, that he was approaching the south boundary of the Brighton estate.

A low stone wall ran down to a point some twenty feet away from the water’s edge at low tide. Shayne stopped at the wall and leaned his spade against the rocks. Through the wind-whipped fronds of tall palms the house could be faintly seen. One upstairs window showed a dim light. That, he reasoned, was the sickroom.

Beyond the house, the garage and its upstairs apartment was dark. He took the pointed steel rod in his good hand and went to work, probing down through the beach sand at two-foot intervals, following along the upper tide-line to the north wall of the estate and then coming back with his probing a couple of feet east of his first row.

The heavy rod sank easily into the sand, and Shayne didn’t try to force it down more than a foot. There was no need to bury it very deeply. He thought of Oscar as the type who would not dig a deeper hole than was necessary. He began to wonder if he had guessed wrong as he probed back and forth without striking anything except yielding sand. Yet, he knew he couldn’t have reached a false conclusion. It had to be this way. It was the only reasonable answer to the whole complicated puzzle. And every puzzle has to have a reasonable answer. Still, a little practical proof of his own rightness would help.

He had worked down to within six feet of low waterline when his probe struck something hard less than six inches beneath the surface. Shayne leaned on the steel rod, panting, with a strange glint in his eyes. Miniature waves rolled in, wetting his feet as he stood there. He looked toward the silent house and garage again, then carefully probed around, outlining a rough rectangle about two feet by four.

Leaving his rod sticking thereto mark the spot, he went back for the spade and awkwardly began the one-handed job of turning back a six-inch layer of beach sand on top of something which appeared to be a steel-banded trunk when he laid the spade aside and turned the light of his flash upon it. He turned the light off at once, dropped to his knees, and dug the sand away from the lock with his hands. It was locked, but his steel rod made quick work of the flimsy clasp, and he knelt down again to lift the lid.

A thick nauseating stench rolled up and struck him sickeningly in the face when he threw the lid back. He closed his eyes against it, turned his head to cough and spit the vile taste out of his mouth. Then he picked up his flashlight and turned its beam into the open trunk.

He stared at the naked corpse of a man he had never seen before, cramped grotesquely into the small space and in a remarkable state of preservation which indicated the rude use of some embalming fluid or pickling process. Perhaps, he thought, the sea water when the tide was in. Shayne didn’t linger with his discovery very long. He dropped the lid back, hastily shoveled most of the sand back over the trunk, knowing the inflowing tide would hide all trace of his work by morning.

He went back to his car the same way he had come, drove back to Miami and to his newly-rented hotel room where he called the clerk at his apartment hotel and asked if an answer to his cable had come. It had, and the clerk read it to him.

DON’T UNDERSTAND REFERENCE TO MURDER BUT HAVE NOTHING TO CONCEAL STOP TRIP WAS PAID FOR BY A MISS GORDON WHO WANTED MY PLACE ON TOP OF NURSING REGISTRY LIST TO BE CALLED ON SOME CASE FOR PERSONAL REASONS WHICH WERE NOT DIVULGED TO ME STOP AM FRANTIC WITH WORRY PLEASE EXPLAIN FULLY OR SHALL I COME BACK

MYRTLE GODSPEED

Shayne told the clerk to cable her not to worry but to hold herself in readiness to return as a witness when she was required.

Then he went to bed and to immediate sleep. He had more than a theory, now. He had the case sewed up and ready to dump into Painter’s lap- after he had collected a couple of debts.