Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 18

The bailiff opened the door.

“Chief of Police wants to talk to you, Judge. Judge? Where’d he go?” he asked Shayne. “Oh, my God!”

Will Gentry pushed past. The police chief was an old friend of Shayne’s, a red-faced, scrupulously honest cop who had seen too much violence and heard too many lies and alibis. Shayne was on his knees beside the unconscious judge. He let Gentry check Shanahan’s breathing and make the necessary phone call.

“He was telling me something when he collapsed,” Shayne said thoughtfully. He touched the drawn flesh at the corner of Shanahan’s mouth. “He’s been under a strain. I’d say he was the cardiac type, but it seemed to me it hit him in the belly.”

Suddenly Shayne’s face changed. He stood up and strode to the courtroom.

Except for the bailiff and one old man asleep on a bench, the big room was empty. The bailiff, at the judge’s bench, was shaking two aspirins into his hand, his face the color of dirty snow. He popped the aspirins into his mouth and raised a glass of water.

“Drop that!” Shayne commanded.

The bailiff’s hand jerked and the glass fell and shattered. He gulped down the aspirins dry and cried, “Look what you’ve done! I was going to get a clean glass for the judge. Who do you think’s going to clean it up?”

The big double doors burst open to admit a compact group, including Tim Rourke and two courtroom reporters. Rourke signalled to Shayne as he passed, then went through into Shanahan’s chambers with the others. Shayne took a paper tissue out of the soggy box of Kleenex on the bench, wrapped it carefully around the water carafe and carried it down to a table in the well of the court.

He heard a hum of excited voices from Shanahan’s chambers. More officials arrived, including a short preoccupied man he recognized as the medical examiner. Rourke and a reporter for the rival paper ran out to the phones.

Shayne was frowning at the burning end of his cigarette. Will Gentry appeared in the doorway. Seeing the private detective, he came over and sat down across from him.

“He’s dead. I don’t suppose you’re surprised.”

“That makes three,” Shayne said. “Two more to go.” He pushed the carafe across the table. “Better have this analyzed.”

“You think he was poisoned?”

“I know damn well he was poisoned. Shanahan’s a Monday-morning hangover man. Listening to lawyers argue is thirsty work. If the water bottle was full when court convened, he must have drunk at least two glasses.”

Gentry called an assistant, who listened to Shayne’s theory and picked up the carafe.

Rourke came in and dropped into the chair beside Shayne. “‘Jurist Collapses, Dies,’” he said. “They’ll be satisfied with that for the time being, but when they find out he was part of the Gaspar set-up they’ll scream for an explanation. I can’t play it coy much longer, Mike. I’ll have to give them what I have if I want to go on working there.”

“Yeah.” Shayne turned to Gentry. “I gave you five people, Will. We can cross off Shanahan. Now where the hell are the other four?”

Gentry flushed angrily. “Mike, there are five hundred thousand people in greater Miami, two hundred thousand cars. If you have any suggestions on how to narrow it down I’ll be delighted to hear them. I’ve got the head of security at Kennedy Airport checking to see if Kitty Sims, or anybody who looks like Kitty Sims, got on a Miami plane this morning. We’ve found out quite a bit about Barbara Lemoyne, who her friends are, where she has her hair done. So far we haven’t found her. She never showed at the hospital. A woman answering to the description of Eda Lou Parchman took a cab from Watson Park to the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. Needless to say, she is no longer at the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. I have two men watching Hank Sims’s office. It’s one room and a darkroom. He’s been sleeping there on a cot. He doesn’t make his bed, so we don’t know if he was there last night or not. Give us time, Mike. We’ll collect them for you.”

“Time is the one thing we don’t have.”

“Mike,” Rourke said pleadingly. “You don’t want the TV boys to beat me on a Mike Shayne story. Talk.”

Shayne rubbed his hand wearily across his face. “There doesn’t seem to be much else to do but talk.”

Rourke put the names of the five joint tenants of Key Gaspar at the top of a folded sheet of yellow copy paper. While Shayne talked, he made aimless doodles up and down the page, and by the time his friend had finished he had put little checks after the names of three of the five. As for Shayne, he had a helpless feeling, a rarity at this stage of a case. He had most of the facts he needed, but none of the people.

The detective who had been talking to the bailiff came over to the table.

“We don’t have the lab report, Chief, but everything else fits. Want to talk to him?”

When Gentry nodded, the detective called the bailiff over. He was still pale, shaken by the narrowness of his escape from the same fate that had overtaken Shanahan. Prodded by the detective, he repeated his story.

He unlocked the doors at nine-thirty. In the next half hour a dozen people had drifted in, the usual courthouse loungers. He had remained in the courtroom continuously until court convened at ten-thirty, except for one short period when he was called to the press-room phone. That had been sometime around ten. No one was on the line by the time he got there.

Shayne listened intently. “Where do you keep your cleaning equipment?”

“You mean mops and pails and so on? In a closet down the hall. Why? Because the funny thing is, I found a wet mop right outside the door. I don’t know who left it there.”

“All right,” Shayne said slowly. “Here’s how it was worked, Will. It would have to be a woman. She called the press room from one of the dial phones, to get the bailiff out of the way. All she’d need would be a mop and a scarf around her hair. Nobody would give her a second look. A couple of passes at the bench with a dust cloth. Check the wastebasket. See that the judge has fresh water.”

Gentry nodded. “See if you can dig up any witnesses,” he told his men.

Two other detectives came through the swinging doors, bringing a husky young man in a light blue sports shirt, a 35 millimeter camera over his shoulder. He was clean-shaven, but as he approached the wooden barrier, Shayne saw that his forehead and nose had had more exposure to the weather than the rest of his face.

One of the city detectives opened the gate. Shayne came out of his chair as the burly young man came through and met him with a hard rising right to the point of his jaw.

He went backward, collided with the end of a bench and slid slowly into the aisle.

“Mike, what the hell?” Gentry protested.

“Just paying a small debt,” Shayne remarked, loosening his shoulder muscles.

“Who is it, Hank Sims?” Rourke said. “But what’s this debt stuff? Maybe I wasn’t listening, but didn’t you say you had the field glasses on him when somebody skulled you in the tree house?”

“Yeah.” Bending down, Shayne unclenched the unconscious man’s grease-smeared right hand. “What he did do was loosen the lugs on the wheel of my Volkswagen. I lived through that, but he didn’t care whether I did or not.”

He looked around for the bailiff, who was swallowing more aspirin. “Was this man in the courtroom this morning?”

The bailiff looked down doubtfully. “I couldn’t say, Mr. Shayne. They’re all reading morning papers at that hour. I just don’t think I could say.”

Sims sat up, waggled his jaw to see if anything was broken, and came to his feet with a roar. He was grabbed by three detectives and made to hold still.

“Where’s your wife?” Shayne demanded.

Sims looked around and began to do some thinking. “You’re Mike Shayne, aren’t you? No point in asking me. We’re separated. I haven’t laid eyes on the bitch in weeks.”

“You’re a liar,” Shayne told him. “And that’s not the only thing you’ve been lying about lately. You were out in that boat last night, weren’t you, Sims? Didn’t anybody ever tell you there’s a law against shooting at lighted windows with a carbine? You wanted Barbara to think it was Shanahan. And that’s why you faked those affidavits, to make her think her fiance had changed sides and gone in with Kitty. And then you couldn’t resist making a play for her, could you, on the off chance that she’d turn out to be the survivor?”

“You’ve got the wrong idea about me,” Sims said. “I do things on the spur of the moment.”

“Will, have somebody develop the film in his camera.”

Sims took a backward step. “Like hell! Didn’t you ever hear about Amendments One to Ten in the United States Constitution? Let’s see your warrant.”

Shayne grinned. “There’s no shortage of judges in this building. It won’t be hard to get a warrant.”

Sims’s hand went to the snap of his camera case. Shayne took a stride forward and clamped his wrist before he could open it.

“Hell with the warrant,” Sims said in disgust. Slipping the camera off his shoulder he handed it to Gentry. “Let’s have a receipt.”

For a moment longer he looked at Shayne, then he said softly, “What’s it take to stop you, anyway?”

Another cop came in hurriedly with a yellow sheet. “Chief, a call from the morgue about the Lemoyne woman.”

“The morgue!” Shayne swung toward him savagely. “Another one.”

“No, she’s alive, or she was at ten o’clock. She was just identifying Tuttle and picking up his stuff. The call on her hadn’t filtered down that far yet.”

“That’s what I mean, Mike,” Gentry said. “Just be patient. We’ll get everybody for you.”

Shayne felt absently for a cigarette. “How close to ten was she there?” he asked the detective.

The man consulted his slip. “They signed her in at two minutes after.”

“Then she couldn’t have put the slug on Shanahan,” Shayne said. “Nobody gets around as fast as that in this town. But on a day like today, why would she go to the morgue? It couldn’t be out of respect for the dead. Nobody had much respect for Brad Tuttle.”

His eyes rested on Hank Sims’s face without really seeing him.

“Don’t ask me,” Sims said. “I’m only the guy who gets shot when the cops aim at the hold-up man.”

Shayne pushed off from the table. “O.K., Will. If she didn’t go there to see what Brad looked like dead, she went to get something he was carrying when he was killed. One of the things he was carrying was the key to Kitty’s apartment. I may be wrong, but let’s check.”