Pay-Off in Blood

CHAPTER EIGHT

The gunman on the right said quietly, “Just say: ‘Hi, there,’ like we were pals, then turn around slow and we’ll walk out together without any fuss or trouble.”

Shayne said, “Hi, there,” loud enough for Pete and the elevator operator to hear him. He turned about slowly, and they stepped forward to press in closely on each side of him. He grinned wryly at Pete over his left shoulder as they started back toward the street entrance. “I’ll be back for that roll in the hay, Pete. Take a message, if Tim Rourke calls.”

“Sure, Mr. Shayne.” Pete stood behind the desk and watched the trio march out together.

Outside, in the cool night air on the sidewalk, one of the men jerked his head toward a dark sedan parked at the curb just beyond the hotel entrance and said, “We’ll take a little ride, Shamus. Boss wants to talk to you.”

The muzzle of a gun was pressed against his left side just below the rib-cage, and Shayne forced himself to relax as best he could.

He moved toward the sedan between them, and said, “Sure. As a matter of fact, I’m just as anxious to talk to the boss as he is to see me.”

“That makes everything hunky-dory.” They stopped beside the sedan, and the man on Shayne’s right stepped on two paces, holding his gun ready. “Give him a fast shakedown, Jud. This joker has a rep for having all sorts of tricks up his sleeve.”

Jud slid his revolver into a shoulder harness and expertly shook the detective down. He said, “He’s clean,” and opened the rear door of the sedan, stepping back and drawing his own gun again.

Shayne got in and slid over to the left side of the rear seat while Jud’s companion circled behind the car and opened the left front door. Jud got in and closed the rear door, resting the barrel of his gun on his right knee with the muzzle pointing toward Shayne. The other one got under the wheel and started the motor.

The entire operation had been accomplished with split-second timing and careful precision. Since being confronted by them in the lobby, there had not been a single instant in which the redhead had one chance in hell of seizing the initiative… even if he had been carrying a gun in every pocket.

He relaxed against the seat cushion and asked, “All right if I reach for a cigarette?”

Jud said indifferently, “Sure. Just don’t make any sudden moves because my trigger-finger is nervous.”

Shayne got a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. The smoke was clean and satisfying in his lungs. The driver drove carefully, turning north and then east toward Biscayne Bay. Shayne said, “The boss must be a big-shot, huh? Imported talent, aren’t you?”

“You sounded back there like you knew him… saying you wanted a talk, too.”

Shayne said, “In my business, the only way I can get answers is to talk to the people who know them.”

“Lay off it, Jud,” the driver said over his shoulder. He slowed as they approached one of the large and better-known hotels fronting on the Boulevard, pulled in smoothly and cut the motor-well back of the canopied entrance so the doorman wouldn’t bother with them.

He got out and opened the door on Shayne’s side. “We’re going to walk in through the lobby and go up in the elevator. That’s all. Just take it real easy and we’ll all stay happy.”

Shayne got out and Jud slid out after him. They walked companionably together toward the canopy and the doorman held the door open for them.

There were only a few people in the lobby at that hour, and no one paid any attention to them. An elevator was waiting, and they got in and Jud said, “Four.” They got out at the fourth floor and turned to the left and then to the right and stopped in front of a door numbered 430. Jud turned the knob and pushed the door open onto a lighted and luxuriously furnished sitting room, and his companion gave Shayne a little push forward over the threshold and he looked at the lone occupant of the room who sat back comfortably in a deep chair with a cigar in his left hand and a highball glass in his right.

He was a complete stranger to Shayne. He was about forty, and very slender, but with the well-fed look of good living about him. He was bare-headed, with thinning black hair that was very carefully combed to conceal the bald spot on top, clean-shaven, with cold gray eyes and thin lips that were parted in a frosty smile.

When he spoke, his voice was modulated and his words precise, though with a trace of midwestern nasal twang. “It was nice of you to accept my invitation, Shayne. No trouble, boys?” he asked the pair who had entered the room behind the redhead and closed the door.

Jud responded affably, “Not at all, Boss. Acts like he knows what the score is.”

“That’s what I’ve heard about you, Shayne, and it should make things easier. Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured toward a chair in front of him with his left hand, and a large diamond reflected brilliant fire from the third finger.

Shayne said, “Thanks,” and sat down facing him.

He took a thoughtful sip from his highball glass, and a thoughtful pull on his cigar. “How well do you know Dr. Ambrose?”

“I met him for the first time tonight.”

The slender man frowned down at his cigar. “In what capacity?”

Shayne did not reply. He sat and looked steadily at his questioner, who raised his steely gaze to his for a long moment, and then sighed. “I think I should warn you that Phil and Jud have means to make you talk. I advise you not to be stubborn.”

Shayne grinned slightly and said nothing.

His host sighed again. “Perhaps I should make my position in this matter very clear.”

Shayne said, “It might help.”

“Dr. Ambrose owes… owed me a large sum of money which he had promised to deliver to me tonight. I have been sitting in this room since ten o’clock waiting for a telephone call from him advising me where we should meet for the pay-off. The deadline was midnight. I had the television set on while I waited, and on the eleven-thirty newscast I learned that Dr. Ambrose had been murdered. Your name was mentioned on the newscast, Mr. Shayne, as having been with him earlier in the evening and possibly having some knowledge of the events leading to his death. That’s why I asked you to come here.”

Shayne said, “I see,” though he didn’t see at all. He got out a cigarette and lit it. “What sticks in my craw,” he said flatly, “is your word owes… owed. Not in a legal sense, certainly.”

“We’ll dispense with legalities. Let us merely say that I am a collection agent. The sum was twenty thousand dollars, Mr. Shayne. I want it.”

“Do you think I have it?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I am positive he planned to have that sum in readiness… in cash… tonight. It now appears that he was murdered before he was able to turn it over to me. According to the newscast, no such sum was found on his person. Did he entrust it to you before he was shot?”

Shayne said, “No.” He took another drag on his cigarette and did some very hard thinking. What was the angle? He had seen Dr. Ambrose turn the money over in the Seacliff Restaurant. And the doctor had made the phone call arranging the pay-off at nine o’clock from his hotel bedroom. What was this thing about a phone call at ten to arrange it? All he could do was to play it by ear and see what happened.

He said, very slowly, “Someone must have pulled a fast one on you. Dr. Ambrose made the twenty grand pay-off, all right. At nine-thirty. I watched him do it. If you didn’t get your money, someone else sure as hell did.”

The slender man stiffened perceptibly. He stretched out his left hand to drop the smouldering cigar butt in an ashtray, and very carefully set the highball glass down on a table beside him. His eyes were very cold, and his mouth tight-lipped.

“I don’t believe you, Shayne.”

Shayne said, “That’s your privilege.” He settled back comfortably and grinned. “Why don’t you go to the police and protest? They’d be delighted to hear all the details about your arrangement to collect twenty grand from Doc Ambrose tonight.”

His host was leaning toward him stiffly, breathing sibilantly through flared nostrils. “I think you’re lying. I think you got your big hands on that money, Shayne, by some sort of hocuspocus… if you didn’t gun him down yourself and lift it off him. I want it.”

Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders. “Sue me.”

Without shifting his gaze from Shayne’s, he said, “Sap him, Jud.”

Shayne sensed motion behind his chair… too late. The roof fell in on him. He rocked forward in his chair, and then slid laxly to the floor. His eyes became glazed and he fought back successive waves of unconsciousness, and then he pushed himself up to his knees and began laughing up into the face of the seated man.

He nodded his head, and Phil kicked the redhead in the ribs. There was searing pain as though all the bones had given way under the shattering impact, and he pitched heavily to his side.

Dimly and from a vast distance, he heard the incisive voice say, “Put him out cold, Jud.”

Jud was, as Shayne had realized the first moment he saw him, a professional. He carried out the boss’s order swiftly and efficiently. Shayne felt numbing pain, and then he heard no more and was conscious of nothing more for a long time.

He came back from blackness very slowly into darkness. Queer images wavered back and forth haphazardly in his mind, and it required certain periods of recurring consciousness for him to realize where he was and how he had got there. Slowly, lying on his back on the hotel carpet and blinking upward into the darkness, it came back to him. The meeting of the two men in his hotel lobby, the ride to the Bay front hotel, and his encounter with the boss.

Shayne gritted his teeth against the dull, grinding pain in his head, and sat up. He reached up gingerly and encountered two egg-shaped and egg-sized lumps on his head. His left side was a solid mass of hurt, and he suspected that several ribs were cracked. He rolled over on his hands and knees, and then stood upright, staggering as he did so and encountering a floor lamp which fell onto the carpet beside him. He knelt by it, and groped for the switch and turned it.

Light came from the bulb, and he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked around in a dazed way.

It was the hotel sitting room as he remembered it. Empty, now, of everyone except himself. He looked around slowly, blinking his eyes open and shut, and they settled on the highball glass still sitting on the table where the boss had placed it. The ice in the glass had long since melted, but there remained a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom which looked damned enticing to Shayne in his present condition.

He dragged himself forward on the floor, crawling on his hands and knees, until he could reach up and get the glass in a firm grasp. He lifted it to his mouth and drank avidly. It was good Scotch, and he knew it must have been at least a double shot in the glass to leave the dregs so strong.

He dropped the empty glass on the floor and got to his feet, located the bathroom door and stumbled in on rubbery legs to run cold water in the wash-bowl and duck his head into it repeatedly.

He toweled his face carefully, wincing when he touched either of the lumps on his head, and finally knew that he was going to live.

Back in the sitting room, he glanced around carefully, turned on the overhead light, and could see no sign of occupancy except the empty highball glass on the floor and two cigar butts in the ashtray by the chair where the slender man had been sitting.

Shayne went to the bedroom door and turned on the light. Twin beds were neatly made, and there was no luggage or any evidence that the room had been used.

His watch told him it was 12:48.

He left all the lights on, and went out the door and down the corridor to the elevator. His hat remained behind him in the empty apartment because he knew it wasn’t going to fit those two lumps on his head.

The elevator man regarded him dubiously as he rode down, but Shayne didn’t look at him. In the lobby, he stood for a moment looking around, and then made his way to an alcove beyond the desk where a long-legged, bald-headed man was relaxed in a leather chair with his head back and his eyes closed, snoring as blissfully as a small child.

Shayne poked a thumb in his ribs, and he jerked erect, blinking his eyes indignantly and making mewling sounds. When he recognized the redhead, he muttered, “Mike Shayne? What the hell you think you’re doing?”

“Hell of a Security Officer you are. Here I get clobbered in your goddamn hostelry and you sleep peacefully through it all.”

“I wasn’t asleep. Just catching forty winks. Hey, Mike!” He sat up aghast with his eyes wide open finally. “You look like the devil.”

“Which is exactly how I feel. Got a drink in your office?”

“Sure, Mike.” He got up fast and took Shayne solicitously by the arm, leading him back behind the desk. “You got clobbered? How come?”

“That… I don’t know… yet.” Shayne went into a small office with him and sank wearily into a chair while the hotel detective got a bottle out of a desk drawer and offered it to him with the top unscrewed. It was cheap, blended rye whiskey, but Shayne took a long pull out of the bottle and nodded his gratitude. “Suite Four-Thirty, Hank. Got anything on it?”

“Nothing I know about.” Hank’s face was worried, his eyes alert. He pressed a button on the desk and spoke into an intercom, “What’s with Four-Thirty? I got a complaint.” While he waited, Shayne said, “I think they’ve skipped, Hank. I went up with two guns on me and got sapped. At least an hour ago.” He paused as a voice came from the intercom:

“Suite Four-Thirty was rented at eight o’clock for overnight by Robert Jenson, Number Two-Three-Eight East Eighteenth Street, New York City. No luggage, cash paid in advance with statement he needed the suite for a business conference. No checkout.”

“Mr. Jenson checked out all right,” Shayne said grimly, after Hank pressed the button. “Call the cops, Hank, and have them go over the suite for fingerprints. They’ll find some of mine. I’ll check with Will Gentry in the morning, and sign a complaint, but right now I’m passed out on my feet.” He got up and swayed a little, and Hank hurried around the desk to help him out the door and flag a cab for him at the entrance. Shayne gave the driver the name of his hotel and sank back, fighting off nausea until they arrived.

He got out a dollar bill and made it through the lobby, shaking his head wearily at Pete as he stumbled past the desk.

In his own apartment, he went straight through to the bedroom where he collapsed on the bed fully clothed, and sank dazedly into dreamless sleep.