The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Brett Halliday was one of the pseudonyms of the prolific Davis Dresser (1904–1977). Born in Chicago, he spent his childhood in Texas, where he ran away from home at the age of fourteen to join the army until his true age was discovered when he was sixteen. He returned to school and received a civil engineering certificate but, when work was hard to come by during the Great Depression, began to write, turning out scores of mystery, Western, romance, adventure, and sex stories for the pulps. His first novel, Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938), was published under the pseudonym Asa Baker, as was his second, The Kissed Corpse (1939). He also wrote as Matthew Blood, Peter Shelley, Anthony Scott, Hal Debrett, and many other pseudonyms.

It was with the character Michael Shayne, however, that Dresser found success. Based on a character he had met while working in Mexico on an oil tanker, the big redheaded private eye was one of the most popular detectives of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with more than sixty novels, numerous short stories and novelettes, a magazine named for him, a radio series (starring Jeff Chandler), a television series (starring Richard Denning), and a dozen movies in the 1940s, the first seven of which starred Lloyd Nolan, while the final five saw Hugh Beaumont portraying a tough but humorous Shayne. One Shayne vehicle, Time to Kill (1942), was based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The High Window, with Philip Marlowe displaced by Shayne.

“A Taste for Cognac” was published in the November 1944 issue.

“You’re horning in on things that don’t concern you,” the voice over the phone cautioned Mike Shayne. An unnecessary and futile warning, since the red-haired private shamus was always concerned with murder and lovely maidens in distress — particularly when his experienced nostrils sniffed a case of rare pre-war Monnet cognac as the payoff!

Chapter One Monnet ’26

Michael Shayne hesitated inside the swinging doors, looked down the row of men at the bar and then strolled past the wooden booths lining the wall, glancing in each one as he went by.

Timothy Rourke wasn’t at the bar and he wasn’t in any of the booths. Shayne frowned and turned impatiently toward the swinging doors.

A voice called, “Mr. Shayne?” when he reached the third booth from the end.

He stopped and looked down at the girl alone in the booth. She was about twenty, smartly dressed, with coppery hair parted in the middle and lying in smooth waves on either side of her head. She didn’t wear any make-up and her small face had a pinched look. Her eyes were brown and shone with alert intelligence. Her left hand clasped a glass half-filled with dead beer as she smiled at Shayne.

The Miami detective took off his hat and stood flat-footed looking down at her. Lights above the bar behind him cast shadows on his gaunt cheeks. He lifted his left eyebrow and asked: “Do I know you?”

“You’re going to.” The girl tilted her head sideways and looked wistful. “I’ll buy a drink.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Shayne slid into the bench opposite her.

A waiter hurried over and the girl said, “Cognac,” happily, watching Shayne for approval.

The detective said: “Make it into a sidecar, Joe.” The waiter nodded and went away.

“But Tim said cognac was your password,” the girl protested. “That you never drank anything else.”

“Tim?” Shayne arched a bushy red brow.

“Tim Rourke. He thought you might tell me about some of your cases. I do feature stuff for a New York syndicate. Tim couldn’t make it tonight. He’s been promising to introduce me to you, so I came on to meet you here instead. I’m Myrna Hastings.”

Shayne said bitterly: “When you order cognac these days you get lousy grape brandy. California ’44. It’s drinkable mixed into a sidecar. This damned war...”

“It’s a shame your drinking habits have been upset by the war. Tragic, in fact.” Myrna Hastings took a sip of her flat beer and made a little grimace.

Shayne lit a cigarette and tossed the pack on the table between them. Joe brought his sidecar and he watched Myrna take a dollar bill from her purse and lay it on the table. Shayne lifted the slender cocktail glass to his lips and said: “Thanks.” He drank half of the mixture and his gray eyes became speculative. Holding it close to his nose, he inhaled deeply and a frown rumpled his forehead.

Joe was standing at the table when Shayne drained his glass. “I’ve changed my mind, Joe. Bring me a straight cognac — a double shot in a beer glass.”

Joe grinned slyly and went away.

Sixty cents in change from Myrna’s dollar bill lay on the table. She poked at the silver and asked dubiously: “Will that be enough for a double shot?”

“It’ll be eighty cents,” Shayne replied.

She smiled and took a quarter from her purse. “Tim says you’ve always avoided publicity, but it’ll be a wonderful break for me if I can write up a few of your best cases.”

The waiter brought a beer glass with two ounces of amber fluid in the bottom, took Myrna Hastings’ eighty-five cents, and went away.

Shayne lifted the beer glass to his nose, closed his eyes and breathed deeply of the bouquet, then began to warm the glass with his hands.

“Tim thinks you should let yourself in on some publicity,” the girl continued. “He thinks it’s a shame you don’t ever take the credit for solving so many tough cases.”

Shayne looked at her for an instant, then slowly emptied his glass and set it down. He picked up his cigarettes and hat and said: “Thanks for the drinks. I never give out any stories. Tim Rourke knows that.”

He got up and strode to the rear end of the bar. Joe sidled down to him and Shayne said: “I could use another shot of that stuff. And I’ll pour my own.”

Joe got a clean beer glass and set a tall bottle on the bar before Shayne. He glanced past the detective at the girl sitting alone in the booth, but didn’t say anything.

The label on the bottle read, MONTERREY GRAPE BRANDY — Guaranteed 14 months old.

Shayne pulled out the cork and passed the open neck of the bottle back and forth under his nose. He asked Joe: “Got any more of this same brand?”

“Jeez, I dunno. I’ll see, Mr. Shayne.” He went away and returned presently with a sealed bottle bearing the same label.

Shayne broke the seal and pulled the cork. He grimaced as the smell of raw grape brandy assailed his nostrils. He said angrily: “This isn’t the same stuff.”

“Says so right on the bottle,” Joe argued, and pointed to the label.

“I don’t give a damn what the label says,” Shayne growled. He reached for the first bottle and poured a drink into the empty beer mug. Keeping a firm grip on the bottle with his left hand he drank from the mug, rolling the liquor around his tongue. His gray eyes shone with dreamy contentment as he lingeringly swallowed the brandy, while a frown of curiosity and confusion formed between them.

“Any more of the bar bottles already opened?” he asked Joe.

“I don’t think so. We don’t open ’em but one at a time nowadays. I’ll ask the barkeep.” Plainly mystified by Shayne’s request, Joe went to the front of the bar and held a whispered conference with a bald-headed man wearing a dirty apron that bulged over a pot-belly.

The bartender glanced back at Shayne, waddled toward him. He looked at the two bottles, and asked: “ ’Sa trouble here?”

Shayne shrugged his wide shoulders. “No trouble. Your bar bottle hasn’t got the same stuff that’s in the sealed one.”

The hulking man looked troubled. “You know how ’tis these days. A label don’t mean nothin’ no more. We’re lucky to stay open at all.”

Shayne said: “I know it’s tough trying to keep a supply.”

“You’re private, huh? Ain’t I seen you ’round?”

Shayne said: “I’m private. This hasn’t anything to do with the law.”

The bartender regarded Shayne for a moment with murky, bulging eyes. “If you got a kick about the drink, it’ll be on the house,” he decided magnanimously.

“I’m not kicking,” Shayne told him earnestly.

“I’d like to buy what’s left in this bottle.” He indicated the partially empty one which he had moved out of the bartender’s reach.

The man shook his head slowly. “No can do. Our license says we gotta sell it by the drink.”

Shayne held the bottle up and squinted through it. “There’s maybe twenty ounces left. It’s worth ten bucks to me.”

The big man continued to shake his head. “You can drink it here. Forty cents a shot.”

“Maybe I could make a deal with the boss.”

“Maybe.” He waddled around the end of the bar and preceded Shayne to an unmarked door to the left of the ladies’ room. Shayne saw Myrna Hastings still sitting in the booth watching him.

The bartender rapped lightly on the door, turned the knob and motioned Shayne inside.

Henry Renaldo was seated at a desk facing the doorway. He was a big flabby man with a florid face. He wore a black derby tilted back on his bullet head, and an open gray vest revealed the sleeves and front of a shirt violently striped with reddish purple. He was eating a frayed black cigar that had spilled ashes down the front of his vest.

The bartender stood in the doorway behind Shayne and said heavily: “This shamus is kickin’ about the service, boss. I figured you might wanna handle it.”

Renaldo’s black eyes took in the brandy bottle dangling from Shayne’s fingers, and they became unguarded for a moment. He wet his lips, said, “O.K., Tiny,” and the bartender went out.

Renaldo leaned over the desk to push out his right hand. “Long time no see, Mike.”

Shayne disregarded the proffered hand. “I didn’t know you were in this racket, Renaldo.”

“Sure. I went legal when prohibition went out.”

Shayne moved forward, set the bottle down with a little thump and said mildly: “This is a new angle on me.”

“How’s that?”

“Pre-war cognac under a cheap domestic label. Monnet, isn’t it?”

“You must be nuts,” Renaldo ejaculated.

“Either you or me,” Shayne agreed. “Forty cents a throw when it’d easily bring a dollar a slug in the original bottle.”

Henry Renaldo was beginning to breathe hard. “What’s it to you, Shayne? Stooging for the Feds?”

Shayne shook his head. He lifted the bottle to his lips, let cognac gurgle down his throat and murmured reverently: “Monnet, Vintage of ’26.”

Henry Renaldo started and fear showed in his eyes. “How’d you...” He paused, taking the frayed cigar carefully from his lips. “Who sent you here?”

“I followed my nose.”

Renaldo shook his head. He said huskily: “I don’t know how you got onto it, but why jump me?” His voice rose passionately. “If I pass it out for cheap stuff, is that a crime?”

Shayne said: “You could make more selling it by the bottle to a guy like me.”

Renaldo spread out his hands. “I gotta stay in business. I gotta have something to sell over the bar. If I can hang on till after the war...”

Comprehension showed on Shayne’s face. “That’s why you’re refilling legal bottles.”

“What other out is there?” Renaldo demanded. “Government inspectors checking my stock.”

“All right, but let me in on it,” Shayne urged. “A case or two for my private stock...”

“I only got a few bottles.”

“But you know where there’s more.”

“Make your own deal,” Renaldo said sullenly.

“Sure. All I want is the tip-off.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“No one,” Shayne insisted. “I dropped in for a drink. And got slugged with Monnet when I ordered cheap brandy.”

“Nuts,” sneered Renaldo. “You couldn’t pull the year on that vintage stuff. I don’t know what the gimmick is...”

A rear door opened and two men came in hastily. They stopped in their tracks and stared at the detective seated on one corner of Renaldo’s desk. One of them was short and squarish, with a swart face and a whiskered mole on his chin. He wore fawn-colored slacks and a canary-yellow sweater that was tight over bulging muscles.

His companion was tall and lean, with a pallid face and the humid eyes of a cokie. He was hatless and wore a tightly belted suit. He thinned his lips against sharp teeth and tilted his head to study Shayne.

Renaldo snarled: “You took long enough. How’d you make out, Blackie?”

“It wasn’t no soap, boss. He ain’t talkin’.”

“Hell, you followed him out of here.”

“Sure we did, boss,” Blackie said earnestly. “Just like you said. To a little shack on the beach on Eighteenth. But he had company when he got there. There was this car parked in front, see? So Lennie an’ me waited. Half an hour, maybe. Then a guy come out an’ drove away, an’ we goes in. But we’re too late. He’s croaked.”

“Croaked?”

“So help me. Then we beats it straight back.”

Renaldo said sourly to Shayne. “Looks like that fixes it for us both.”

Shayne said: “Give me all of it.”

“Can’t hurt now,” Renaldo muttered defensively. “This bird comes in with a suitcase this evening. It’s loaded with twenty-four bottles of Monnet, 1926, like you know. It’s pre-war, sealed with no revenue stamps. All he wants is a hundred, so what can I lose? I can’t put it out there where an inspector will see it, but I can refill legal bottles and keep my customers happy. So I give him a C and try to pry loose where there’s more but he swears that’s all there is and beats it. So I send Blackie and Lennie to see can they make a deal. You heard the rest.”

“Why yuh spillin’ your guts to this shamus?” Lennie rasped suddenly. “Ain’t he the law?”

“Shayne’s private,” Renaldo told him. “He was trying to horn in...” He paused, his jaw dropping. “Maybe you know more about it than I do, Shayne.”

“Maybe he does.” Lennie’s voice rose excitedly. “Looks to me like the mug that came out an’ drove away, don’t he, Blackie?”

Blackie said: “Sorta. We didn’t get to see him good,” he explained to Renaldo. “He was dressed like that — an’ big.”

All three of them looked at Shayne suspiciously. Renaldo said: “So that’s how—” He jerked the cigar from his mouth and asked angrily: “What’d you get out of him before he kicked off? Maybe we can make a deal, huh? You’re plenty on the spot with him dead.”

Shayne said: “Nuts. I don’t know anything.”

“How’d you know about the Monnet?”

“I dropped in for a drink and knew it wasn’t domestic stuff as soon as I tasted it.”

“Maybe. But that didn’t spell out Monnet, ’26. Now my boy’ll keep quiet if...”

Shayne slid off the desk. His gray eyes were very bright. He said dispassionately: “You’re a fool, Renaldo. Your boys are feeding you a line. It’s my hunch they messed things up and are afraid to admit it to you. So they make up a fairy tale about someone else getting there first, and you swallow it.” He laughed indulgently. “Think it over and you’ll see who’s really on the spot.” He turned toward the door.

Blackie got in front of him. He stood lightly on the balls of his feet and a blackjack swung from his right hand. Behind him, Lennie crouched forward with his gun hand bunched in his coat pocket. His pallid face was contorted and he panted: “Don’t you listen to him, boss. Blackie an’ me can both identify him.”

Shayne turned and told Renaldo: “You’d better call them off. I’ve a friend waiting outside and if anything happens to me in here you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

“If I turn you over for murder...”

Shayne said: “Try it.” He turned toward the door again, the open bottle of cognac clutched laxly in his left hand.

Blackie remained poised with the blackjack between him and the door. He appealed to Renaldo: “If it was him out there an’ the old gink talked before he passed out...”

A sharp rapping on the door behind Blackie interrupted him. A grin pulled Shayne’s lips away from his teeth. He said: “My friend is getting impatient.”

Renaldo said: “Skip it, Blackie.”

Shayne went past the dark, sweatered man to the door and opened it. Myrna Hastings stood outside. “If you think—” she began.

He took her arm firmly and pulled the door shut behind him. He slid the uncorked bottle into his coat pocket and started toward the front with her. She twisted to look back at the closed door, and said uncertainly: “Those men inside. Didn’t one of them have a weapon?”

He said: “You’re an angel and I was a louse to treat you as I did.” They went out through the swinging doors and he stopped on the sidewalk. “Keep on being an angel and beat it. I have things to do.”

Myrna looked up into his face and was frightened by what she saw there. “Something is wrong. I felt it when you acted so funny.”

He shrugged and said: “Maybe this’ll be a case you can write up.” He went to his sedan parked at the curb and started to get in.

“Can’t I go with you?” Myrna asked breathlessly. “I promise not to be in the way.”

He took hold of both her elbows and turned her about. “This is murder, kid. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

Chapter Two The Emaciated Corpse

Shayne drove out Biscayne Boulevard and turned right on Eighteenth Street. A slim crescent of a moon rode high in the cloudless sky overhead and the Miami night was humidly warm. He drove slowly to the end of the street and stopped his car against a low stone barrier overlooking the bayfront.

He turned off his motor and lights and sat for a moment gripping the steering wheel. Light glowed through two round, heavily glassed windows in a low, square stone structure at his left. It sat boldly on the very edge of the bluff overlooking the bay, and a neat shell-lined walk led up to the front door.

Shayne got out and went up the walk. The little house was built solidly of porous limestone and its only windows were round, metal-framed portholes that looked as though they might have been taken from a ship. The door had a heavy bronze knocker, and the hinges and lock were also of bronze.

Shayne tried the knob and the door opened inward easily. A square ship’s lantern fitted with an electric bulb hung from a hand-hewn beam of cypress in a narrow, cypress-paneled hallway. An open door to the right showed the interior of a neat and tiny kitchen. Shayne went down the hall to another door opening off to the right. The room was dark and he fumbled along the wall until he found a light switch. It lighted two wrought-iron ship’s lanterns similar to the one in the hall. Shayne stood in the doorway and tugged at his left earlobe and looked at the man lying huddled in the middle of the bare floor.

He was dead.

A big-framed man, his face was bony and emaciated. His eyes were wide open and glazed, bulging from deep sockets. He wore a double-breasted uniform of shiny blue serge with a double row of polished brass buttons down the front. His ankles were wired together, and wire had cut deeply into his wrists.

Shayne went in and knelt beside the body. Three fingernails had been torn from his right hand. These appeared to be the only marks of violence on his body, which was warm enough to indicate that death had occurred only half an hour or so before. Shayne judged that shock and pain had brought on a heart attack, causing death. He was about sixty and there was no padding of flesh on his bony frame.

Shayne rocked back on his heels and looked morosely around the room, which was bare of furniture except for a built-in padded settee along one wall. Bare and scrupulously clean, the room had the appearance of a cell.

Shayne wiped sweat from his face and went through the dead man’s pockets. He found nothing but a newspaper clipping and the torn stub of a bus ticket. The ticket had been issued the previous day, round-trip from Miami to Homestead, a small town on the Florida Keys.

The clipping was a week old, from the Miami Herald. It was headed, PAROLE GRANTED.

Shayne started to read the item, then stiffened at the sound of a car stopping outside. He thrust the clipping and ticket stub in his pocket.

He heard footsteps coming up the walk and the voices of men outside. He got out a cigarette and lit it, blew out the match to look up with lifted brows at the bulky figure of Detective Chief Will Gentry in the doorway.

Shayne said, “Dr. Livingston?” and Gentry snorted angrily. He was a big man with heavy features and a solid, forthright manner. He was an old friend of Shayne’s and he said scathingly: “I thought I smelled something.”

Shayne stepped aside and nodded toward the body on the floor. “He hasn’t been dead long enough to stink.”

Gentry strode forward and scowled down at the body. A tall, white-haired man hurried in behind the chief. He wore an immaculate white linen suit and his features were sharp and clean. He stopped at the sight of the body and said: “Oh my God, is he—”

Gentry grunted: “Yeah.” He knelt by the dead man and asked Shayne in a tone of casual interest: “Why’d you pull out his fingernails?”

The tall man exclaimed in a choked voice: “Good heavens! Has he been tortured?”

“Who is he?” Shayne asked sharply.

“It’s Captain Samuels,” the white-haired man said. “I knew something must have happened to him, Chief, when he wasn’t here to keep his appointment with me. If only I’d called you earlier...”

“What are you doing here?” Gentry’s eyes bored into Shayne’s.

“I was driving by and saw the lights. I don’t know.” Shayne shrugged. “As you said, something just seemed to smell wrong. I stopped to take a look and that’s what I found.”

“I suppose you can prove all that?” scoffed Gentry.

“Can you disprove it?”

“Maybe not, but you’re holding out plenty. Damn it, Mike, this is murder. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. I’ve told you how I drove by—”

Will Gentry raised his voice to call: “Jones. You and Rafferty bring in the cuffs.”

A voice answered from the front door and feet tramped down the hall. At the same time there was the light click of heels outside and Myrna Hastings came in breathlessly from the rear end of the hall. “You don’t need to cover up for me, Mike,” she cried out. “Go ahead and tell them I asked you to stop here. Oh! It’s Chief Gentry, isn’t it?”

Gentry muttered: “I don’t think—”

“Don’t you remember me?” Myrna laughed. “Timothy Rourke introduced me to you in your office today. I do feature stuff for a New York syndicate. You see, I’m to blame for Mike stopping here tonight. I’d heard about Captain Samuels, about his shipwreck and all years ago, and I thought he might be material for an article. So I asked Mike to stop for a minute tonight and — well, that’s how it was.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Gentry growled at Shayne.

“I think he had some idea of protecting me,” Myrna laughed merrily. “You see, I didn’t tell him why I wanted to stop, and then when he found the dead man, well, I guess maybe Mike thought I knew something about it. Wasn’t that it, darling?” She turned to Shayne.

“Something like that,” he said stiffly.

“All right, Jones,” Gentry said to one of the two dicks hovering in the doorway. “Put your bracelets away and go over the house.”

“Now that you’ve got me cleared up,” Shayne suggested, “why not tell me about it?”

“I don’t know any more about it than you do,” Gentry admitted. “Mr. Guildford called a while ago and asked me to come out here with him. Seems he had a hunch something had happened to Captain Samuels.”

“I felt sure of it after I had time to think things over,” the white-haired man said. “I had a definite appointment here with the captain for nine tonight and I waited almost half an hour for him.”

Shayne said: “It’s almost eleven now. Why did you wait so long before calling the police?”

“I had a flat tire just as I reached the boulevard driving away,” Guildford explained. “I had it changed at the filling station there and was delayed. I called upon reaching home.”

Shayne said: “Were the lights burning while you waited?”

“No. I’m quite sure they weren’t. The house was dark and apparently empty.”

“What was your appointment for?” Shayne pressed him.

Guildford hesitated. He glanced at Will Gentry. “I don’t mind answering official questions, but what is this man’s connection with the case? And the young lady?”

“None,” Gentry said. “You can beat it, Mike, unless you feel like telling the truth.”

“But we have told the truth,” Myrna asserted, her eyes wide and childlike. “We were just—”

Shayne took her arm tightly. He said, “Come on,” and led her out the door.

Neither of them said anything until they were in Shayne’s car headed back for the boulevard. Then Myrna leaned her head against his shoulder and asked in a small voice: “Are you terribly angry at me, Mike?”

“How did you get in that house?”

“You brought me. I hid in the trunk compartment of your car. Then I slipped in the house while you were searching the body. I was in the rear bedroom all the time, and when I heard you getting the third degree I knew you didn’t want to tell the truth and I thought I’d better stick my oar in. Didn’t I do all right?”

“How did you know the captain’s name, about him being shipwrecked?”

Myrna chuckled. “I found an old log-book by his bed. I had my flashlight and there was a clipping in the book.” She patted a large suede handbag in her lap. “I’ve got the book in here. It made a pretty good story if I did think of it on the spur of the moment — the one I told Inspector Gentry, I mean,” she amended, and chuckled again.

“Why did you hide in the back of my car?” Shayne asked angrily.

“Because you were trying to get rid of me and I wanted to see the famous Shayne in action,” she said. “But I must say you didn’t do much detecting out there.”

Shayne braked suddenly in front of an apartment building on the riverfront.

“I live here,” he told her, and went toward a side entrance.

Myrna Hastings went with him. She said hopefully: “I’m dying to taste whatever is in that bottle you’ve got in your coat pocket.”

She waited quietly behind Shayne in the hallway while he unlocked his apartment door. He went inside and switched on the lights and she followed him into a square living room with windows on the east side. There was a studio couch along one wall, and a door on the right opened into a kitchenette. Another door on the left led into the bath and bedroom.

Shayne tossed his hat on a wall hook and went into the kitchen without a word or glance for Myrna.

He soon came back from the kitchen with two four-ounce wine glasses and two tumblers filled with ice water. He walked past her, ranged the four glasses in a row on the table, and filled the wine glasses nearly to the brim with cognac. He pushed one of the tumblers toward Myrna, and set the smaller glass within easy reach of her hand, then pulled another chair to the table and sat down half-facing her.

It was very quiet in the apartment, very restful. Shayne sighed when he drained the last drop from his glass of Monnet. He frowned at the portion remaining in Myrna’s glass. “Don’t you appreciate good liquor?”

She smiled and told him: “It’s so good I’m making it last.”

Shane lit a cigarette and spun the match away into a corner, then got the purloined clipping and bus ticket stub from his pocket. He laid the stub on the table and read the short clipping aloud. It was an AP dispatch from Atlanta, Georgia.

It stated that John Grossman, suspected prohibition-era racketeer, sentenced to federal prison in 1930 on income tax charges from Miami, Florida, had been released that day on parole. Grossman announced his intention to take a long vacation at his fishing lodge on the Keys.

When Shayne finished reading the clipping aloud, he placed it beside the ticket stub and told Myrna: “Those two items were the only things I found in the dead man’s pockets.”

“You didn’t tell the police about them?”

He shook his head in slow negation.

“Isn’t that against the law? Concealing murder evidence? Who’s John Grossman and why was the old sea captain interested in the clipping about his parole?”

Shayne said slowly: “I remember Grossman. He was one of our big-time bootleggers with a select clientele willing to pay plenty for high-class imported stuff. Like Monnet cognac. I don’t know why the captain was interested in Grossman’s release.”

“What’s it all about, Mike?” Myrna leaned forward eagerly. “It began back in the tavern with something funny about those drinks, didn’t it? Why did you go back to the proprietor’s office and come out with a bottle, and then drive straight out to the scene of the murder?”

Shayne said softly: “You’ve done me two good turns tonight — when you knocked on the door of Renaldo’s office, and out at the captain’s house when I didn’t see how in hell I was going to explain my presence there without telling Gentry the truth.” He hesitated, then admitted: “You deserve a break. You’re in it now because you lied to Gentry and he’ll probably discover you lied.”

He began at the beginning and related what had happened in Renaldo’s office. “You know what happened after I drove out to the house.”

“And this is real pre-war cognac?” Myrna lifted her glass and her voice was incredulous.

“Monnet 1926,” Shayne said flatly. “The captain sold Renaldo a case of it for a hundred dollars, and was tortured to death immediately afterward. Renaldo admits he had his men follow the captain to try and persuade him to tell them where they could get more, but they claim he was dead before they got to him.”

“Do you believe them?”

Shayne shook his head. “It doesn’t do to believe anything when murder is involved. Their story sounded all right, but that wire and those torn fingernails could very well be their idea of gentle persuasion. And if the captain did fool them by dying before they got the information, they’d hate to admit it to Renaldo and might have made up that story about his being murdered by an unknown visitor.

“And there’s another angle. Maybe Blackie and Lennie are playing it smart and did get the information they wanted before the captain croaked. If they decided to use it themselves and cut Renaldo out...” He paused and shrugged expressively.

“What makes you and Renaldo so sure there’s more cognac where that first case came from?”

“I imagine it was just a hopeful hunch on Renaldo’s part. And I wasn’t sure until I found this clipping indicating a connection between the captain and an ex-bootlegger.”

“Would it be sufficient motive for murder? At a hundred dollars a case?”

Shayne made a derisive gesture. “A C-note for two dozen bottles of Monnet is peanuts today. That’s what got Renaldo so excited. It shows the captain knew nothing about the present liquor shortage and market prices. It could retail for twenty or twenty-five dollars a bottle, properly handled today.”

Myrna Hastings’ eyes widened. “That would be about five hundred dollars a case!”

Shayne nodded morosely. “If Grossman had a pile of it cached away when he was sent up in ’30,” he mused, “that would explain why it stayed off the market all this time. But Grossman would know what the stuff is worth today.” He shook his head angrily. “It still doesn’t add up. And if the captain knew about the cache and had access to it all the time, why wait until a week after Grossman’s parole to put it on the market? Did you notice the condition of the captain’s body?” he asked abruptly.

Myrna shuddered. “I’ll never forget it.”

“He looked,” said Shayne harshly, “like an advanced case of malnutrition.”

“Who was the white-haired man who brought the police?”

“Guildford. He’s a lawyer here. Very respectable.”

Myrna said hesitantly: “His story about waiting at the house half an hour for Captain Samuels to keep the appointment — do you think he could be the man the gangsters saw drive away from the house just before they went in and found the captain dead.”

“Could be. If there was any such man. The timing is screwy and hard to figure out. Guildford claims his appointment was for nine and he waited half an hour. It was well past ten when the mugs got back to Renaldo’s office. That leaves it open either way. Guildford could have waited until nine thirty and then driven away just before the captain returned with Blackie and Lennie trailing him. Or Guildford may have deliberately pushed the time up a little. Until we know why Guildford went there...” Shayne shrugged.

He poured himself another drink and demanded: “Where’s that log-book you mentioned, and the clipping about the shipwreck?”

She reached for her handbag and unsnapped the heavy, gold clasp. She drew out an aged, brass-hinged, leather-bound book with SHIP’S LOG stamped on the front in gilt letters.

Shayne opened it and looked at the fly-leaf, inscribed, Property of Captain Thomas Anthony Samuels. April 2, 1902.

“The clipping is in the back,” Myrna told him. “Lucky I saw it and made up a story that Chief Gentry would swallow.”

Shayne said: “Don’t kid yourself that he swallowed it. He knows damned well it wasn’t coincidence that put me at the scene of the murder.” He turned the log-book upside down and shook out a yellowed and brittle newspaper clipping from the Miami Daily News, dated June 17, 1930. There was a picture of a big man in a nautical uniform with the caption, SAVED AT SEA.

Shayne read the news item swiftly. It gave a dramatic account of the sea rescue of Captain Samuels, owner, master, and sole survivor of the auxiliary launch Mermaid, lost in a tropical hurricane off the Florida coast three days before the captain was rescued by a fishing craft. He had heroically stayed afloat in a life-preserver for three days and nights.

“Where,” asked Shayne, “was the book when you found it?”

“In a small recess in the rock wall at the head of his bed. The bedding was torn up as though the room had been hastily searched, and the bed was pulled away from the wall. That’s how I saw it. Normally, the wooden headboard of the bed must have stood against the wall, hiding the recess.”

Shayne began thoughtfully flipping the pages of the log-book. “This seems to be a complete account of Captain Samuels’ voyages from—”

The ringing of his telephone interrupted him.

The voice of the clerk on the night-desk came over the wire: “The law’s on its way up to your apartment, Mr. Shayne. You told me once I was to call you—”

Shayne said, “Thanks, Dick,” and hung up. He whirled on Myrna and directed her tersely: “You’d better get out. Through the kitchen door and down the fire escape. Take your two glasses to the kitchen and close the door behind you. Key on a nail by the outside door.”

Myrna jumped up. “What—”

“I don’t know.” Shayne heard the elevator stop down the hall on that floor. “Better if Gentry doesn’t find you here. He’s already suspicious. Go home and go to bed and be careful. Call me tomorrow.”

Chapter Three blackjack Persuasion

Shayne breathed a sigh of relief when she went without demur. Most women would have argued and asked questions. He opened a drawer and thrust log-book, clipping and ticket stub in it. A loud knock sounded on the outer door of his apartment and Will Gentry’s voice called: “Shayne.”

He darted a quick glance behind him and noted Myrna had closed the door as she went into the kitchen. He sauntered to the outer door and opened it, rubbed his chin with a show of surprise when he saw Chief Gentry and the tall figure of Mr. Guildford waiting in the hallway. He said, “It’s a hell of a time to come visiting,” and stepped aside to let them enter.

Will Gentry strode past him to the center table and stopped to look down on the bottle and two glasses suspiciously. He went to the bedroom door and opened it, stepped inside and turned on the light, then looked in the bathroom. Shayne grinned as Gentry doggedly opened the kitchen door and turned on that light.

The chief came back, shrugged his heavy shoulders and sat down heavily across the table from Shayne. “Where is she, Mike?”

“Who?”

“The Hastings girl.”

“I told her she’d better go home and get some sleep. She was quite upset, you know. Seems she was rather fond of the old sea captain — though she’d known him only a couple of days,” he added quickly.

“She isn’t in her room. Hasn’t been in all evening.”

“How,” asked Shayne, “did you know where to look?”

“I called Tim Rourke. He told me she was stopping at the Crestwood, but she’s not in.”

Shayne said: “You know how these New York dames are. Why come to me?”

“I hoped I’d find her here,” Gentry admitted, “knowing how New York dames are, and knowing you.”

Shayne said: “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Mr. Guildford said: “May I?” He cleared his throat and looked at Gentry.

The chief nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Knowing your reputation, Mr. Shayne,” Guildford said flatly, “I suspect you withheld certain information tonight.”

Shayne said: “That’s illegal. Concealing murder evidence.”

“To hell with that stuff,” Gentry put in impatiently. “What did you and Miss Hastings find before we got there?”

“You know I wouldn’t hold out on you, Will. Unless there were something in it for me. And who could possibly profit by the death of a poor old man like that? He looked to me as though he’d gone hungry for weeks.”

“That’s true,” said Guildford helplessly. “I happen to know he was in dire straits. Our appointment tonight was to discuss a payment long overdue on his mortgaged house.”

“But the poor guy was obviously tortured,” Gentry broke in. “Death resulted from shock due to his poor physical condition. Torture generally means extortion.”

“Which makes us wonder if he harbored some secret worth money to someone,” Guildford explained. “We found none of his private papers but we did find evidence that the house had been burgled.”

“So you think I did it?” Shayne fumed.

“Wait a minute, Mike,” Gentry soothed him. “You see, we found that the bed had been pulled back and there was a sort of hiding place exposed. Mr. Guildford suggested you might have discovered the cache and taken the captain’s papers away to examine privately.”

Shayne snarled: “The hell he did! What’s his interest in it?”

“As Captain Samuels’ attorney and now his executor, I have a natural interest in the affair,” Guildford snapped.

“Come off it, Mike,” Gentry said wearily. “If you’ll tell me what you were doing there I won’t be so sure you’re holding out.”

“I told you. Miss Hastings did.”

“That doesn’t wash, Mike. Rourke told me she didn’t hit town till this afternoon. How could she have met Samuels and learned about the shipwreck story?”

“Ask her?”

“I can’t find her. I’m asking you. Did you get any stuff from the bedroom?”

“I wasn’t in the bedroom.”

“But Miss Hastings was,” Guildford reminded him triumphantly. “And I suggest she found his papers and looked through them while we were in the other room with you and the body. And I further suggest that was how she learned about the shipwreck and her agile mind framed the excuse she gave us for your presence there.”

Shayne stood up and balled his bony hands into fists. “I suggest that you get out of that chair so I can knock you back into it.”

“Lay off, Mike. You’ve got to admit it’s good reasoning.”

Shayne swung on Gentry angrily. “I don’t admit anything. Is a two-bit shyster running your department now?”

Guildford said: “I resent that, Mr. Shayne.”

Shayne laughed harshly. “You resent it?”

Gentry said doggedly: “I’m running my department but I don’t mind listening to advice. Are you willing to swear you and Miss Hastings just dropped in on the dead man by accident?”

Shayne said: “Put me on the witness stand if I’m going to be cross-questioned.”

Gentry compressed his lips. He started to say something, then tightened his lips and got up. He and Guildford went out.

Shayne stood by the table until the door closed behind them. Then he strode to the telephone and asked for the Crestwood Hotel.

He frowned across the room and tugged at his left earlobe while he waited. When the hotel answered, he asked for Miss Myrna Hastings. Without hesitation, the clerk said: “Miss Hastings is not in.”

“How the hell do you know she isn’t?” Shayne growled. “You haven’t rung her room.”

“But I saw her go out just a moment ago, sir,” the clerk insisted.

Shayne told him: “You must be mistaken. I happen to know she just went to her room.”

“That’s quite true, sir. She came in and got her key not more than five minutes ago, but she came downstairs almost immediately with two gentlemen, and went out with them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, sir. I saw them cross the lobby from the elevator to the front door.”

“Wait a minute,” barked Shayne. “Did she go with them willingly?”

“Why, I certainly presumed so. She had her arms linked in theirs and I didn’t notice anything wrong.”

“Can you describe them?”

“No. I’m afraid I didn’t notice—”

“Was one of them short and the other one tall?”

“Why, now that you mention it, I think so. Is something wrong? Do you think—”

Shayne hung up, went into his bedroom and got a short-barreled .38, which he dropped in his coat pocket. Then he went into the kitchen and tried the back door. Myrna had locked it behind her when she slipped out.

He turned out the kitchen light and strode across the living room, crammed his hat down on his bristly red hair and went out.

Ten minutes later Shayne parked in front of Henry Renaldo’s tavern. He shouldered his way through the swinging doors and found half a dozen late tipplers still leaning on the bar. Joe was in the back with a mop bucket, turning chairs up over the tables, and the paunchy bartender was still on duty in front.

Shayne went up to the bar and said: “Give me a shot of cognac, Monnet.”

The bartender shook his head. “We got grape brandy—”

Shayne said: “Monterrey will do.”

The bartender set a bottle and glass in front of the detective, keeping his eyes secretively low-lidded. Shayne poured a drink and lifted it to his nose. He shook his head angrily and said: “This stuff is grape brandy.”

“Sure. Says so right on the bottle.” The bartender’s tone was placating.

Shayne shoved the glass away from him. “I’ll have a talk with Henry.”

“The boss ain’t in,” the bartender told him hastily.

“How about his two ginzos?”

“I dunno.”

Shayne turned and went along the bar to the back. Joe pulled the mop bucket out of his way and turned his head to stare wonderingly at the set look on Shayne’s face.

He knocked on the door of Renaldo’s office and then tried the door. It opened into darkness. He found the light switch and stood on the threshold looking about the empty office. He strode to the rear door through which the two gunsels had entered earlier, and found it barred on the inside. It opened out directly onto the alley.

He relocked it and went out of the office, back to the bar. The bartender was lounging against the cash register. He said, “I tol’ you,” and then backed away in alarm when Shayne bunched his hand in his coat pocket over the .38.

“Where,” asked Shayne, “do Blackie and Lennie hang out?”

“I dunno. I swear to God I don’t. I never seen ’em in here before tonight.” He was frightened and he sounded truthful.

“Where will I find the boss?”

“Home, I guess.”

“Where’s home?”

The bartender hesitated. He pouched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger and said sullenly: “Mr. Renaldo don’t like—”

Shayne said: “Give it to me.”

The bartender wilted. He mumbled an address on West Sixtieth Street.

Shayne went out and got in his car. He started the motor and hesitated, with his big hands gripping the wheel. He got out and went back into the tavern. The bartender looked up with naked fear in his eyes and put down the telephone hastily.

Shayne said: “Don’t do it, Fatty. If Renaldo’s been tipped off when I get there, I’ll come back and spill your guts all over the floor. The name is Shayne if you think I’m kidding.”

He went out again and swung away from the curb. He drove north a dozen blocks and stopped in front of a sign on Miami Avenue that said, CHUNKY’S CHILI. It was crammed in between a pawnshop and a flophouse.

Shayne went in and said, “Hi, Chunky,” to the big man picking his teeth behind the empty counter. The long, narrow room was empty save for the proprietor.

Chunky said, “Hi, Mike,” without enthusiasm.

Shayne asked: “Any of the boys in back?”

“Guess so.”

Shayne got out his wallet. He extracted the ten-dollar bill and folded it twice lengthwise. Chunky kept on picking his teeth. Shayne extended the bill toward him. “Blackie or Lennie in there?”

Chunky yawned. He took the bill and said, “Nope. Ain’t seen either of ’em tonight.”

“Working?”

“I wouldn’t know. Gen’rally hang out back when they ain’t.”

Shayne nodded. He knew that. Chunky’s chili joint was a front for a bookie establishment in the back that served as a sort of clubroom for the better-known members of Miami’s underworld. He asked: “Seen John Grossman around since he was paroled?”

Chunky took the frayed toothpick from his mouth and squinted at it. “A guy’s on parole, he don’t hang out much with the old gang. Not if he’s smart.”

“Have you seen him around?” Shayne persisted.

Chunky put the toothpick back in his mouth and chewed on it placidly. Shayne grinned and got out his wallet again. Chunky watched him fold another bill twice lengthwise. He took it and suggested: “Might ask Pug or Slim. They usta work for John, some.”

“Are they in back?”

Chunky shook his head. “Went out ’bout an hour ago.”

Shayne said: “Tell them I’m passing out folding money.” He went out and climbed into his car, drove north to Sixtieth and turned west.

Henry Renaldo’s address was a modest one-story stucco house in the center of a block containing half a dozen such houses. It was the only one with lights showing through the front windows.

Shayne drove past it to the end of the block, swung around the corner and parked. He got out and walked back, went up the concrete walk lined with a trim hedge on both sides, and rang Renaldo’s doorbell.

He got the gun out of his pocket while he waited.

He showed the weapon to Henry Renaldo when he opened the door. Renaldo was in his shirtsleeves with his vest hanging open. The cigar in his mouth looked like the same one he had been chewing on some hours previously. He blinked, wrinkled lids down over his eyes when he saw the gun in Shayne’s hand, and backed away, lifting his hands, palms outward, and mumbling: “You don’t need to point that at me.”

Shayne followed him in and heeled the door shut. The living room was small and crowded with heavy overstuffed furniture. A gas log glowed in the small fireplace at one end. There was no one else in the room.

Shayne gestured with his gun and asked: “Where’s Miss Hastings?”

Renaldo rolled up his wrinkled lids and looked at him stupidly. “Who?”

“The girl who left your place with me.”

“I sure don’t know anything about a girl,” Renaldo told him earnestly. “Look here—”

Shayne’s eyes were bright with a fierce light. He palmed the gun, took a step forward and hit Renaldo in the face. He staggered back with blood oozing from a cut lip.

Shayne said coldly: “Maybe that’ll help your memory.”

Renaldo took another backward step and sank down on the red divan. He got a handkerchief from his hip pocket and dabbed at his cut lip. He moaned: “Before God, Mike—”

Shayne rasped: “Where are your two gun-punks?”

“Blackie and Lennie?” Renaldo shook his head from side to side. “How should I know?”

“They grabbed Miss Hastings from her hotel half an hour ago.”

“I don’t know about that.” Renaldo looked at the blood on his handkerchief and shuddered. “I haven’t seen them for two hours.”

“Didn’t you have them tail me when I left your place?”

“What if I did? But I didn’t tell them to grab any girl.”

Shayne narrowed his eyes. It sounded like the truth. He said: “I’ll search this dump anyhow.”

Renaldo got up slowly. There was a certain dignity in his posture as he objected: “This is my house. If you haven’t got a search warrant—”

Shayne said: “I’m not the police.” He turned toward a passageway leading to the rear of the house.

Renaldo moved in front of him. He folded his arms stubbornly. “My wife and kid are asleep back there.”

“We’ll take care of him, boss,” Lennie’s voice rapped out behind Shayne.

Renaldo’s eyelids twitched and his eyes showed frantic terror. “I told you to stay in the kitchen, Lennie.”

“To hell with that. Drop the gat, shamus,” he rasped.

Shayne dropped the gun on the rug. He turned slowly and saw Lennie hunched forward and moving toward him from an open door. Blackie sauntered through the door after him.

Lennie had a heavy automatic in his right hand and his eyes glittered. His face was twisted and tiny bubbles of saliva oozed out between his tight lips. He was coked to the gills and as dangerous as a maddened snake. He glided soundlessly across the rug, and the muzzle of his .45 was in line with Shayne’s belly.

Renaldo said: “Wait, Lennie. We won’t want any trouble here.”

Lennie’s hot eyes twitched toward the tavern proprietor. “He come here lookin’ for trouble, didn’t he? By the sweet Jesus—”

“Hold it, Len,” Blackie said coolly from behind him. “Stay far enough back so’s you can blast him if he starts anything.” He moved around Lennie on the balls of his feet, one hand swinging his blackjack in a short, lazy arc.

Shayne jerked his head back and it struck him on the side of the neck just above the collarbone. It was a paralyzing blow and he hit the floor before he knew he was falling. He heard Renaldo cry out: “Watch it, Blackie. Keep him so he can talk. If he croaked the old man he’s maybe got some info.”

Blackie said: “Sure. He’ll talk.” He drew back his foot and kicked Shayne in the face.

The detective saw the kick coming but he couldn’t move to avoid it. He closed his eyes and lay inert, pushing with his tongue at two loosened teeth.

Blackie put his heel on the side of his face and twisted it viciously with a downward thrust. It tore flesh from his cheekbone and the pain brought knots in his belly muscles. It also drove away the paralysis that had numbed him.

He sat up with blood streaming from his face and pulled his lips away from his teeth in a wolfish grin.

He asked thickly: “Didn’t you bring your pliers along this time, Blackie? I’ve got ten fingernails to work on.”

Blackie hit him viciously with the blackjack again.

Shayne toppled over and he heard Lennie laughing thinly somewhere off in the background.

Somebody got a pan of cold water and dumped it in his face. He lay quiescent and listened to Renaldo and Blackie arguing fiercely about him. Renaldo gave Blackie hell for knocking Shayne out so he couldn’t possibly talk if he wanted to, and Blackie angrily reminded him of Shayne’s reputation for toughness. Lennie put in an aggrieved voice now and then, begging for permission to finish him off.

It was all pretty foggy, but Shayne didn’t hear any of them mention the girl. He gathered that they had followed him from the tavern to the little house on Eighteenth and had seen the police come. If they had followed him back to his hotel and tailed Myrna from her fire escape exit, it was evident that they were keeping that fact from Renaldo for reasons of their own.

“We gotta get him out of here,” Renaldo said at last. “You boys’ve messed the hell out of this whole thing and the only way I see now is to finish him off.”

“He pushed his face into it,” Blackie muttered.

“Sure he did,” Lennie said eagerly. “Don’t worry about him none, boss.”

“We’ll take him out through the kitchen to our car.” Blackie was placating now. They withdrew a short distance and began talking further together in low voices. Shayne kept his eyes closed and gathered together the remnants of his strength.

They came back after a time and he heard Lennie saying happily: “Once in the heart to make sure is the best way. We don’t wanna muff this.”

Shayne saw the glitter of a knife in Lennie’s hand as he uncoiled and rose from the floor. He saw Blackie’s mouth drop open just before he hit him in the belly with his shoulder. They went to the floor together and Shayne kept rolling toward the kitchen door. He stumbled through it just as Lennie’s gun roared in the living room behind him.

Chapter Four Bottled Death

With a rush, Shayne jerked the back door open, staggered out into the night. He leaned against the side of the house and hoped Lennie or Blackie would follow him out. A light came on in the house next door and an irate voice bellowed: “What’s going on over there? Was that a shot?”

Shayne tried to call back but his throat muscles were queerly knotted and he couldn’t utter a sound.

He shambled down the alley to the street where he had left his car, and got in. He started the motor and drove away, made a circle back to Miami Avenue and drove to his apartment hotel. He didn’t feel like tackling the side stairway, so he went in through the lobby toward the elevator.

The clerk hurried out from behind the desk when he saw the detective’s condition. He exclaimed: “Good God, Mr. Shayne! What happened?... Here. Lean on me.”

Shayne put his arm around the clerk’s shoulders. He croaked: “It’s O.K., Dick. More blood than anything else.”

Dick helped him into the elevator and rode up to his room with him. Shayne was an old and privileged client in the apartment hotel and the clerk had seen him in bad shape before, but never quite in this condition. He took Shayne’s keyring and unlocked the door, then stared around in amazement when he turned on the light.

“Good Lord!” he ejaculated. “Did the fight start here in your room, Mr. Shayne?”

Shayne looked around the room with bleary eyes that refused to focus on any object. Things seemed to be in a sort of jumble but he didn’t see why the clerk was so excited. He pushed past him toward the center table and stared down stupidly at the drawer that was pulled all the way out. He knew he had left it closed — with the things he and Myrna had brought from Captain Samuels’ house. His fingers closed around the neck of the brandy bottle still sitting where he had left it, and he used both hands getting it up to his mouth. A long pull at it relaxed his throat muscles and cleared the film away from his eyes. He looked around the disordered room and then at the clerk.

“Have I had any visitors since I went out, Dick?”

“Just that tall man with Chief Gentry — he came back right after you went out. He didn’t stop at the desk, but went straight up. He came back almost immediately and went on out and I thought he’d come back hoping to catch you and found you’d already left.”

Shayne took another slow drink of cognac. It brought the warmth of life back to him. “Was he up here long enough to do this?” He waved his hand around the room.

Dick wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t say for sure. You know how it is. It’s hard to judge time. It didn’t seem as if he were up here more than a few minutes.”

Shayne nodded. He said, “Thanks for coming up with me,” in a tone of dismissal. He stood with the bottle in his hands until Dick went out and closed the door. Then he held it to his lips and drained it. He went out to the kitchen and set the empty bottle carefully on the sink beside the two glasses Myrna had put there on her way out. He tried the back door and found it unlocked.

He remembered it had been locked and Myrna Hastings had had the key when he went away a little while before.

He went into the bedroom and stripped off his clothes, turned water into the tub as hot as his hand could stand it. His face was pretty much of a mess, with both his lips puffed and bluish, lacerated flesh on his cheekbone clotted with blood, and streaks of dried blood running down his chin.

He grimaced at his reflection in the mirror, cautiously testing the two teeth loosened by contact with the toe of Blackie’s shoe. They were wobbly but would probably grow back solid if left alone. All in all he was in pretty good shape, considering the way he’d been knocked around.

He got a soft washcloth steaming hot and held it gently against his face while he waited for the tub to fill, loosened the dried blood and cleaned it away carefully.

When he sank into the hot water to soak his long frame, he continued the ministrations with the washcloth. When he got out of the tub he swabbed his face freely with peroxide, then dusted it with antiseptic powder and plastered a bandage over the worst cut on his cheek. He vigorously toweled himself and put on clean clothes, then went to a wall cabinet in the living room and got out a bottle of Portuguese brandy guaranteed to be at least five years old.

During all this time he had methodically gone about the things he had to do, consciously refraining from thinking. He had a factual mind and he liked to use it in an orderly fashion.

He filled the wine glass on the table and got a fresh tumbler of ice water from the kitchen. He sank into a chair and lit a cigarette, letting it droop from an uninjured corner of his mouth, took a sip of brandy and began slowly and unhurriedly to go over the events of the evening, testing each incident as he came to it in the light of later occurrences.

It started with his entering Renaldo’s saloon expecting to meet Timothy Rourke.

Myrna Hastings had been there instead. She accosted him, and he had only her word for it that she was what she claimed to be and had been sent to meet him by Rourke. Still, Gentry had phoned Rourke for her address, and at the captain’s house she had mentioned that Rourke had introduced her to Will Gentry that afternoon.

Shayne went on from his meeting with Myrna. He carefully studied the scene in Renaldo’s office, then jumped to Captain Samuels’ home on the bayfront. In secreting herself in the back of his car, slipping into the house without his knowledge, coming to his aid while Gentry questioned him, and finally in composedly stealing the log-book which she claimed to have found in a hiding place that another searcher had overlooked, had Myrna Hastings stepped out of character?

It was difficult to say. No one could guess what a young feature writer from New York was likely to do. She had left his apartment willingly enough and had gone directly to her room as he had told her to. Then she had been immediately escorted away from the hotel by two men vaguely described by the clerk as short and tall. Had she gone willingly, or been coerced? He had immediately suspected Blackie and Lennie of her abduction, but after the interview with them at Renaldo’s house he was inclined to believe they might not be responsible. It didn’t quite add up. Now that he was thinking along logical lines, he realized they would have to have trailed him back to his hotel and somehow learned of her departure via the fire escape in order to have followed her to the Crestwood. He saw it was necessary to determine whether the two men who had accompanied her out had been there waiting for her return or had followed her in and up to her room. If they had been waiting, it could not have been Blackie and Lennie — unless Myrna were involved in some way he knew nothing about. And that left the whole business of the missing murder clues up in the air. When she left the room they had been lying on the table. If she had come back to get them, she wouldn’t have known to look in the drawer. She might have searched the rest of the room first. She didn’t, in fact, know the table had a drawer.

He switched his thoughts from Myrna to Guildford. Had he told the truth about waiting for the captain to return? Or, granting that Blackie and Lennie had told Renaldo the truth about their venture, was Guildford the killer whom they had seen drive away after being closeted with the captain for half an hour? If Guildford were the killer, why had he drawn attention to himself by calling Will Gentry? It would have been safer and more natural to say nothing about his visit and leave the body to be discovered by chance.

What about the paroled convict, John Grossman? This seemed to Shayne the crux of the affair. He was certainly mixed up in the possession of smuggled cognac somehow. Had Captain Samuels worked with or for him in prohibition days? Did both men have knowledge of a cache of illicit cognac undisposed of at the time of Grossman’s arrest? If so, why had Captain Samuels waited fourteen years to put a case of it on the market — waited until he was weak from malnutrition? It seemed likely that the captain couldn’t get his hands on it while Grossman was in prison, since the first case appeared soon after Grossman had supposedly returned to Miami.

But it seemed definitely unlikely that John Grossman was in on the deal with Renaldo. The ridiculous price accepted by the starving captain showed that it must have been his own idea. Grossman was smart enough to learn what the stuff was worth in today’s market. It looked more as though the captain had put over a personal deal — one that for some reason he had been unable to put over while Grossman was in prison, one that Grossman might have resented even to the point of murder.

Shayne finished his glass of brandy and his musings at the same time. He needed more facts before he could do more than ask himself a bunch of unanswerable questions.

He heaved himself up from his chair and gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness. The loose teeth pained sharply when he gritted them, and that dispelled the dizziness. He had lost his hat in the fracas at Renaldo’s, so he went out bareheaded, thinking the cool night air would feel good on his head.

Dick frowned and shook his head despairingly when he crossed the lobby, but Shayne pushed his swollen lips into the semblance of a grin and waved a derisive hand at the clerk. He got in his car and drove to Second Avenue.

The Crestwood was a small, moderately priced hotel, and the clerk was a thin-chested 4-F who tried to conceal his hostile amazement when Shayne showed his battered face at the desk. He shook his head firmly and began: “I’m afraid...”

But Shayne reassured him by saying: “I don’t want a room, bud.” He showed his badge and went on: “About a guest of yours, Miss Hastings.”

“Oh yes. Room 305. I’m afraid she isn’t in. There’s been—”

“I’m the guy who telephoned you about an hour ago. Can you describe the men she went out with?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. You see, I didn’t notice their faces.”

“Could one of them have been holding a gun on her?” Shayne demanded harshly.

The clerk began to tremble. “I really don’t know. I— Do you think something’s happened to her?”

“Do you know if they came in after she got her key and went up, or whether they were up there waiting?”

“I really don’t know. I didn’t see them come in after she got her key but I’m afraid I can’t swear whether they were upstairs waiting for her or not.”

Shayne nodded and went over to the elevator. There was only one elevator in the hotel and it was manned by a young Negro boy who stood very stiff and straight but couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling around toward Shayne’s bruised face.

Shayne stopped outside the elevator and asked: “Do you know the girl in room 305?”

“Yassuh. I know the one you mean. Checked in jes’ today.”

“Do you remember her coming in late tonight and then going out again almost immediately?”

“Yassuh. That’s what she did. Yassuh, I ’member.”

Shayne got out his wallet. “Try to remember exactly what happened. Did you bring her down in the elevator with two men?”

The boy’s eyes rolled covetously toward the five-dollar bill Shayne was extracting. “Yassuh. I sho did. Right after I’d done taken her upstairs.”

“How long afterward?” Shayne prompted. “Did you make many trips in between?”

“Nosuh. Not none. I ’member how s’prised I was when I stopped at the third floor on the way down an’ found her waitin’ with them two gen’lemen ’cause I’d jes’ dropped her off at three on my way up.”

“Are you sure of that? You didn’t take them up after you took her up?”

“Nosuh. How could I when I’d done taken ’em up prev’ous?”

“How much previous?”

“Ten minutes, I reckon.”

“Did you notice anything peculiar about the way any of them acted when they came down together?”

“How d’yuh mean, peculiar?”

Shayne said: “I’m trying to find out whether she wanted to come down with them or whether they made her come.”

The Negro boy chuckled. “I reckon she liked comin’ all right. She was sho all hugged up to one of ’em. The skinny one, that was.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Nosuh. Not much. One was skinny and t’other weren’t. I reckon I didn’t notice no more.”

Shayne said: “You’ve earned this.” The bill exchanged hands and he went out. He had learned something but he didn’t care much for it.

His next stop was at the Miami News tower on Biscayne Boulevard. An afternoon paper, the early hours of the morning were the busiest ones for the staff, and Shayne found Tim Rourke in one corner of the smoke-hazed city room pounding out copy with one rubber-tipped forefinger.

The reporter looked up at Shayne with a startled oath and then laughed raucously and gleefully. “I’m not the beauty contest editor. You go down that hall—”

“And you,” said Shayne bitterly, “can go to hell.”

“Michael!” Rourke drawled the name disapprovingly. “Such language in a newspaper office. Did he get his littlum face scratched?”

“It’s all your damned fault for sicking that female onto me.”

“My fault? My God, don’t tell me a female did that to you!”

“How well do you know Myrna Hastings?” Shayne demanded.

“Not as well as I’d like to. Or, is she that sort of girl? Maybe I don’t want to—”

Shayne said wearily: “Cut it, Tim. I’m up to my neck in murder and God knows what-all. What do you know about the gal?”

“Not much.” Rourke instantly sobered. “She brought a note from a friend of mine on the Telegram. I took her around and introduced her to a few places this afternoon. She found you at Renaldo’s, huh?”

“She found me all right,” Shayne said grimly.

“What’s doing, Mike? I wondered when Will Gentry called me about her tonight, but—”

“Do you know if she’s known in Miami?”

“I don’t think so. Said it was her first trip.”

“Has anyone else called you for her address, Tim?”

“Only Gentry. Is it a story, Mike?”

Shayne’s gray eyes brooded across the room for a long moment. He and the reporter had been friends for a long time and he had given Rourke a lot of headlines in the past. He indicated the typewriter and asked: “Busy on something?”

“Nothing I can’t give the go-by.”

Shayne said: “I could use some help in your morgue.”

Rourke led the way back to a large filing room guarded by an elderly woman rocking silently while she knitted. “I’m interested in John Grossman,” Shayne told him.

“The bootleg king?” Rourke stopped between a double row of filing cases. “He’s back in town on parole.”

“When did he get back?”

“Three or four days ago. I tried to interview him but he had nothing to say for publication. All he wanted was to go down to his lodge on the Keys and soak up some Florida sunshine.”

Shayne said: “I want to go back to his arrest by the Federals — June 1930.”

“We’ve got a private file on him. It won’t be hard to find it.” Rourke checked a card index and went to a file at the back of the room. He brought back a bulging manila envelope and emptied it out in front of Shayne. He started pawing through it, muttering: “Here’s the trial. It was a honey. With Leland and Parker representing him and not missing a legal trick. And here you are — June 17, 1930. Federal agents nabbed him at Homestead on his way in from the lodge.” He spread out a large clipping.

“I remember it now.” He chuckled. “They had the income tax case all set but had been holding off, hoping they could hang a real charge on him. They thought he used his lodge to receive contraband shipments from Cuba and they raided it several times but never found any evidence. This time they thought they had him for sure, with a red-hot tip that he was expecting a boatload of French stuff, and they kept a revenue cutter patrolling that section of coastline day and night for a week. Here’s the story on that.” He turned back to a clipping dated June 16, captioned, CUTTER SINKS BOOTLEG CARGO.

“I covered that story. I rode the cutter three nights and nothing happened, and after I was pulled off, on the night of the 15th, they encountered a motor craft creeping along without lights just off the inlet leading to Grossman’s lodge. They tried to make a run for the open sea, and bingo! The revenue boat cut loose with everything she had. There was a heavy sea running, the aftermath of a hurricane that blew hell out of things the day before, and they never found a trace of the boat, cargo or crew. After that fiasco they gave up and decided they might as well take Grossman on the income tax charge.”

“Wait a minute,” Shayne said. “How bad was that hurricane?”

“Plenty bad. That’s really the reason I missed the fun. The cutter had to run for anchorage on the 13th, and she couldn’t put out again until the 15th on account of the storm.”

“Then that strip of coast wasn’t being patrolled the two nights before the sinking,” Shayne mused.

“Nope. Except by the elements.”

“Then that rum-runner might have been slipping out after discharging cargo, instead of being headed in.”

Rourke frowned at the red-headed detective. “If the captain was crazy enough to try and hit that inlet while the hurricane was blowing everything to hell.”

Shayne said gravely: “I think I know the captain who was crazy enough to do just that — and succeeded.”

Rourke studied him quizzically. “You’ve got something up your sleeve.”

Shayne nodded. “It adds up. Tim, I’m willing to bet there was a boatload of 1926 Monnet unloaded at Grossman’s lodge while the hurricane was raging. And it’s still there someplace. Grossman was arrested on the 17th, before he had a chance to get rid of any of it, and he left it there while he was doing time in Atlanta.”

Timothy Rourke whistled shrilly. “It’d be worth as much now as it was during prohibition.”

“More, with the country full of people earning more money than ever before in their lives.”

“If your hunch is right...”

“It has to be right. How long do you think a man could stay alive floating around the ocean in a life-preserver?”

“Couple of days at the most.”

“That’s my hunch, too. From the 15th to the 17th might not be impossible. But the hurricane struck on the 13th and the 14th. Take a look at your front page for June 17 and you’ll see what I mean.”

Rourke hurriedly brought out the News for June 17. On the front page, next to the story of Grossman’s arrest, was the story of the sensational rescue of Captain Samuels, which Shayne had already read in his apartment. Rourke put his finger on the picture and exclaimed: “I remember that now. I interviewed the captain and thought it miraculous he had stayed alive that long. Captain Thomas Anthony Samuels. Why, damn it, Mike, he’s the old coot who was found murdered tonight.”

Shayne nodded soberly. “After selling a case of Monnet for a hundred bucks earlier in the evening.”

“He was the only survivor of his ship,” Rourke recalled excitedly. “Then he and Grossman must have been the only ones who knew the stuff was out there.”

“And now Grossman is the only one left,” Shayne said flatly. “Keep this stuff under your hat, Tim. When it’s ready to break it’ll be your baby.” He turned and hurried out.

Chapter Five Murder Setting

Shayne didn’t reach his apartment again until after three. He took a nightcap and went to bed, fell immediately into deep and dreamless sleep.

The ringing of his telephone awakened him. He started to yawn and pain clawed at his facial muscles. He got into a bathrobe and lurched to the telephone. It was a little after eight o’clock.

He lifted the receiver and said: “Shayne.”

A thick voice replied: “This is John Grossman.”

Shayne said: “I expected you to call sooner.”

There was a brief silence as though his caller were taken aback by his reply. Then: “Well, I’m calling you now.”

Shayne said: “That’s quite evident.”

“You’re horning in on things that don’t concern you.”

“Cognac always concerns me.”

“I’m wondering how much you found out from the captain before he died last night,” Grossman went on.

Shayne said: “Nuts. You killed him and you know exactly how much talking he didn’t do.”

“You can’t prove I was near his place last night,” he was told gruffly.

“I think I can. If you just called up to play ring-around-the-rosy, we’re both wasting our time.”

“I’ve been wondering how much real information you’ve got.”

“I knew that would worry you,” Shayne said impatiently. “And since you know Samuels was dead before I reached him, the source of information you’re worried about is the log-book. Let’s talk straight.”

“Why should I worry about the log-book? I’ve got it now.”

“I know you have. But you don’t know how much I read about the Mermaid’s last trip before you got it.”

“The girl says you didn’t read it any.”

Shayne laughed harshly. “You’d like to believe her, wouldn’t you?”

“All right.” The voice became resigned. “Maybe you did read more than she says. How about a deal?”

“What kind of deal?”

“You’re pretty crazy about Monnet, aren’t you?”

“Plenty.”

“How does five cases sound? Delivered to your apartment tonight.”

Shayne said: “It sounds like a joke. And a poor one.”

“You’ll take it and keep your mouth shut if you’re smart.”

Shayne said disgustedly: “You’re rolling me in the aisle.” He hung up and padded across the room in his bare feet to the table where he poured out a good-morning slug of Portuguese brandy. The telephone began ringing again. He drank some of the brandy and grimaced, then lit a cigarette and went back to the phone, carrying the glass. He lifted the receiver and asked curtly: “Got any more jokes?”

The same voice answered plaintively: “What do you want?”

Shayne asked: “Why should I deal with you at all? I’ve got everything I need with Samuels’ description of where the stuff is hidden.”

“What can you do with it?” the murderer argued.

“The Internal Revenue boys could use our dope.”

“And cut yourself out? Not if I know you.”

“All right,” Shayne said irritably. “You have to cut me in and you know it. Fifty-fifty.”

“Come out and we’ll talk it over.”

“Where?”

“My lodge on the Keys. First dirt road to the south after you pass Homestead, and the next to your right after two miles.”

Shayne said: “I know where it is.”

“I’ll expect you about ten o’clock.”

Shayne said: “Make it eleven. I’ve got to get some breakfast.”

“Eleven it is.” A click broke the connection.

He dressed swiftly, jammed a wide-brimmed Panama down over his face and went out. He hesitated a moment and then went back in. He flipped the pages of the telephone directory until he found the number of Renaldo’s tavern, lifted the receiver and got a brisk, “Good morning,” from a masculine voice at the switchboard downstairs. A frown knitted his forehead, and instead of asking for Renaldo’s number, he said: “Do you have the time?”

He was told: “It is eight twenty-two.”

In the lobby, Shayne went across to the desk and leaned one elbow on it. He simulated astonishment and asked the day clerk: “Where’s Mabel today?”

The clerk glanced around at the brown-suited, middle-aged man alertly handling the switchboard and said: “Mabel was sick and the telephone company sent us a substitute.”

Shayne went out, got in his car and drove to a drugstore on Flagler. He called Renaldo’s number, and said briskly: “Mike Shayne.”

“Mike?” Renaldo sounded relieved. “You’re all right? God, I’m sorry about—”

Shayne laughed softly. “I’m O.K. Your boys could be a little more gentle but I feel I owe them something for last night. I’ve got a line on that stuff you were after.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t know...”

“I need some help to handle it,” Shayne went on briskly. “I figure Blackie and Lennie are just the boys — after seeing them in action.”

“I don’t know,” Renaldo said again, more doubtfully.

“This is business,” Shayne said sharply. “Big business for you and me both. Have them meet me at your place about nine thirty.”

He hung up and drove out to a filling station on the corner of Eighteenth and Biscayne. He said, “Ten gallons,” to the youth who hurried out.

He strolled around to the back of his car and asked: “Were you on duty last night?”

“Until I closed up at ten. Just missed the excitement, I guess.”

“You mean the murder?”

“Yeah. The old ship captain who lives down the street. And I was talking about the old coot just a little before that, too.”

“Who with?”

“A lawyer fellow who’d been down to see him and got a flat just as he was coming back.”

“What time was that?” asked Shayne.

“Pretty near ten. I closed up right after I finished with his tire. If that’s all...” He took the bill Shayne offered him.

The detective swung away from the filling station and back south of the boulevard. He stopped on First Street east of Miami Avenue and went into the lobby of an office building mostly occupied by lawyers and insurance men. He stopped to scan the building directory, then stepped into an elevator and said: “Six.”

He got off on the sixth floor and went down the corridor to a door chastely lettered, LEROY P. GUILDFORD — ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.

There was a small, neat reception room, and a tight-mouthed, middle-aged woman got up from a desk in the rear and came forward when Shayne entered. Her hair was pulled back from her face and tied in a tight knot at the back of her head. She wore rimless glasses and low-heeled shoes, and looked primly respectable and quite efficient.

She shook her head when the detective asked for Mr. Guildford. “He hasn’t come in yet. He seldom gets down before ten.”

Shayne said: “Perhaps you can tell me a few things. I’m from the police.” He gave her a glimpse of his private badge.

She said: “From the police?” Her thin lips tightened. “I’m sure I don’t know why you’re here.” Her gaze was fixed disapprovingly on his battered face.

He said easily: “It’s about one of his clients who was murdered last night. Mr. Guildford gave us some help but there are a few details to be filled in.”

“Oh, yes. You must mean poor Captain Samuels, of course. I know Mr. Guildford must feel terribly about it. Such an old client. So alone and helpless.”

“Did you know him?”

“Only through seeing him here at the office. Mr. Guildford was trying to save his property but it seemed hopeless.”

“In what particular capacity did he need a lawyer?”

“It wasn’t much,” she said vaguely. “He was one of Mr. Guildford’s first clients when he opened up this office after resigning his position with the firm of Leland and Parker. There was something about the collection of insurance on a ship that had been lost at sea, and later Mr. Guildford handled the purchase of a property where Captain Samuels later built his little home.”

“Do you know whether Guildford saw much of him lately?”

“Not a great deal. There was some difficulty about the mortgage and Mr. Guildford was trying to save him from foreclosure. He pitied the old man, you see, but there was little he could do.”

“And this appointment last night. Do you know anything about that?”

“Oh, yes. I took the message early yesterday morning. Captain Samuels explicitly asked him to come at nine last night, promising to make a cash payment on the mortgage. I remember Mr. Guildford seemed so relieved when he received the message and he didn’t seem to mind the unusual hour.”

Shayne thanked her and told her she had been of great assistance. He started out, but turned back. “By the way, is Guildford generally in his office throughout the day?”

“Yes. Except when he’s in court, of course.”

“Was he in court last Tuesday?”

“Tuesday? I’m sure he wasn’t.”

“That’s queer. I tried to phone him twice during the day and he was out both times.”

She frowned uncertainly and then her face cleared. “Tuesday! Of course. How stupid of me. He was out all day with a client.”

Shayne lifted his hat and went out. He drove north on Miami Avenue to Chunky’s place and went in. A couple of men were seated halfway down the counter. Shayne took the stool by the cash register, and Chunky drifted up to him after a few moments. He leaned his elbows on the counter, carefully selected a toothpick from a bowl in front of Shayne and began picking at his teeth. He murmured: “Looks like someone prettied you up las’ night.”

Shayne grinned. “Some of the boys got playful. Look. I’m still hunting a line on John Grossman. Pug or Slim been in?”

Chunky shook his head. “Ain’t seen ’em. Grossman usta have a fishin’ place south of Homestead.”

“Think he went there after he was paroled?”

“Good place to hole up,” Chunky murmured. “I know he stayed in town just one night.” He took out the toothpick and yawned.

Shayne got up and went out, leaving a dollar at the place where he had been sitting. There was a public telephone in the cheap hotel next door. He called Timothy Rourke’s home number and waited patiently until the ringing awoke the reporter. He said: “There’s about to be a Caesarian operation.”

Rourke gurgled sleepily: “What the hell!”

“On that baby we were talking about in your morgue this morning.”

“That you, Mike?”

“Doctor Shayne. Obstetrics specialist.”

“Hey! Is it due to break?”

“It’s coming to a head fast. Get dressed and hunt up Will Gentry if you want some headlines. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, tell him I tipped you, but stick to him like a leech.” Shayne hung up and drove to Renaldo’s saloon.

Blackie jumped up nervously from his seat beside Renaldo’s desk when Shayne pushed the door open. He sucked in his breath and stared with bulging eyes at the result of his work on the detective’s face, while his hand instinctively went to his hip pocket.

Behind him, Lennie leaned against the wall with his hand in his coat pocket. Lennie’s features were lax and his eyes were filmed like a dead man’s. The left side of his pallid face twitched uncontrollably as Shayne looked at him.

Seated behind the desk, chewing savagely on a cigar, Henry Renaldo looked fearfully from the boys to Shayne. He said: “I don’t know what you’re up to, Mike. The boys didn’t much like the idea...”

Shayne closed the door and laughed heartily. He said: “Hell, there’s no hard feelings. I’m still alive and kicking.”

Blackie drew in another deep breath. He essayed a nervous smile. “We thought maybe you was sore.”

Shayne said gently: “You got a pretty heavy foot, Blackie.”

“Yeah.” Blackie hung his head like a small boy being reprimanded. “But you come bustin’ in with a gun an’, jeez! What’d you expect?”

“That was my mistake,” Shayne admitted. “I always run into trouble when I pack a rod. That’s why I’m clean now.” He lifted his arms away from his sides. “Want to shake me down?”

“That’s all right.” Renaldo laughed with false heartiness. “No harm done, I guess. The boys’ll forget it if you will.”

“Whatcha want with us?” Lennie demanded thinly.

Shayne said bluntly: “I need help. I’ve run into something too big for me to handle, and after seeing you guys in action last night I think you’re the ones I need.”

“That’s white of you,” Blackie mumbled.

“I never hold a grudge if it’ll cost me money,” Shayne said briskly. “Here’s the lay.” He spoke directly to Renaldo. “I can put my hands on plenty of French cognac. Same as the case you bought last night. And this won’t cost us a hundred a case. It won’t cost us anything if we play it right.”

Renaldo licked his lips. “So the old captain did talk before he died last night?”

“Not to me. I got onto it from another angle. Are you interested?”

“Why are you cutting us in?” Renaldo protested. “Sounds like some kind of come-on to me.”

“I need help,” Shayne said smoothly. “There’s another mug in my way and he’s got a couple of torpedos gunning for me. I need a couple of lads like Blackie and Lennie to handle that angle. And after that’s cleared up, I still need somebody with the right connections like you, Renaldo. I haven’t any set-up for handling sales. You know all the angles from way back. And since you put me onto it in the first place I thought you might as well have part of the gravy. Hell, there’s plenty for all of us,” he added generously. “A whole shipload of that same stuff.”

“Sounds all right,” Renaldo admitted cautiously.

“I’m the only one standing in this other guy’s way,” Shayne explained. “So he plans to put me on the spot. I’ve got a date to meet him out in the country this morning, and I know he’ll have a couple of quick-trigger boys on hand to blast me out of the picture.” He turned to Blackie. “That’s where you and Lennie come in. I’m not handing you anything on a platter. This is hot, and if you’re scared of it say so and I’ll find someone else.”

Blackie grunted contemptuously. “Lennie an’ me can take care of ourselves, I reckon.”

“That’s what I thought,” Shayne grinned, “after last night. Both of you ironed?”

“Sure. When do we start?”

“Well, that’s it,” Shayne told Renaldo. “You sit tight until the shooting’s over. If things work out right we’ll do a four-way split and there should be plenty of grands to go around. I’m guessing at five hundred cases but there may be more,” he ended casually.

Renaldo took out his cigar and wet his lips. “Sounds plenty good to me. You boys willing to go along?”

Both of them nodded.

Shayne said briskly: “We’d better get started. I’m due south of Homestead at eleven o’clock.” He led the way out to his car and opened the back door. “Maybe both of you will feel better if you ride in back where you can keep an eye on me.”

“We ain’t worryin’ none about you,” Blackie assured him, but they both got in the back while Shayne settled himself under the wheel.

In the rear-view mirror he could see the pair conferring together earnestly in the back. Both sides of Lennie’s face were getting the twitches and his hands trembled violently as he lit a cigarette. He took only a couple of drags on it, then screwed up his face in disgust and threw it out.

Shayne turned slightly and observed sympathetically to Blackie: “Your pal doesn’t seem to feel so hot this morning.”

“He’s all right,” Blackie muttered. “Sorta got the shakes is all.”

Shayne said: “He’d better get over them before the shooting starts.”

Lennie caught Blackie’s arm and whispered something in his ear, and Blackie cleared his throat and admitted uneasily: “Tell you what. He could use somethin’ to steady him all right. You know.”

Shayne said: “Sure, I know. Any place around here he could pick up a bindle?”

“Sure thing,” Lennie said, violently eager. “Couple of blocks ahead. If I had two bucks.”

Shayne drove on two blocks and then pulled up to the curb. He passed four one-dollar bills back to Lennie and suggested: “Get two bindles, why don’t you? One to pick you up now and the other for just before the fun starts.”

Lennie grabbed the money and scrambled out of the car. He hurried up the street and darted into a stairway entrance.

Blackie laughed indulgently as he watched him disappear. “You hadn’t oughta give him the price of two bindles,” he reproved Shayne. “He’ll be plenty high in an hour from now on one. Another one on top of it will pull him tight as a fiddle string. Like he was last night,” he added darkly.

Shayne said: “I want him in shape to throw lead fast. Those boys who’ll be waiting for me may not waste much time getting acquainted.” He lit a cigarette and slouched back in the seat.

Lennie came trotting back in about five minutes. His pinched face was alive and eager, and his eyes glowed like hot coals. He slid in beside Blackie and breathed exultantly: “Le’s get goin’. Jeez, is my trigger finger itchin’!”

Shayne drove swiftly south on Flagler past Coral Gables and on to the village of South Miami, then along the Key West highway through the rich truck-farming section with its acres of tomatoes and bean-fields stretching in every direction as far as the eye could see.

By the time they reached the sleepy village of Homestead with its quiet, tree-shadowed streets and its air of serene dignity, he began to feel as though he were the one who had sniffed a bindle instead of Lennie. There was a driving, demanding tension within him. It was always this way when he played a hunch through to the finish. He had planned the best he could and it was up to the gods now. He couldn’t turn back. He didn’t want to, of course. The approach of personal danger keyed him up to a high pitch, and he exulted in the gamble he was taking. Things like this were what made life worth living to Michael Shayne.

He drove decorously through Homestead and looked at his watch. It was a quarter to eleven. He stopped at a filling station on the outskirts of the village where the first dirt road turned off the paved highway to the left. He told Blackie and Lennie, “I’ll be just a minute,” and swung out of the car to speak to a smiling old man in faded overalls and a wide straw hat.

“Does the bus stop here, Pop?”

“Sometimes it do. Yep. If there’s passengers to get on or off. ’Tain’t a reg’lar stop.”

“How about yesterday? Any passengers stop here?”

“Yestidy? Yep. The old sailor feller got off here to go a-fishin’.” The old man chuckled. “Right nice old feller, but seemed like he was turned around, sort of. Didn’t know how far ’twas to the Keys. Had him a suitcase, too, full of fishin’ tackle, I reckon. Him an’ I made a deal to rent my tin Lizzie for the day and he drove off fishin’ spry as you please. No luck though. Didn’t have nary a fish when he come back.”

Shayne thanked him and went back to his car. That was the last definite link. He didn’t need it, but it was always good to have added confirmation. He wouldn’t have bothered to stop if he hadn’t had a few minutes to spare.

He got in and turned down the dirt road running straight and level between a wasteland covered with tall Australian pines on either side.

“This is it,” he told the boys in the back seat calmly. “Couple of miles to where I’m supposed to meet these birds, but they might be hiding out along the road waiting for me. You’d both better get down in the back where you can’t be seen.”

“We won’t be no good to you that way,” Blackie protested, “if they’re hid out along the road to pick you off.”

“They’ll just pick all three of us off if you guys are in sight, too,” Shayne argued reasonably. “I don’t think they’ll try anything till we get there, and I want them to think I came alone so they’ll be off guard. Get down and stay down until the shooting starts or until I yell or give you some signal. Then come out like a couple of firecrackers.”

The two gunsels got down in the back. Shayne drove along at a moderate pace, watching his speedometer. It was lonely and quiet on this desolate road leading to the coast. There were no habitations, and no other cars on the road. It was a perfect setting for murder.

Chapter Six Last Round on the House

A narrower and less-used road turned off to the right at the end of exactly two miles. A wooden arrow that had once been painted white pointed west, and dingy black letters said, LODGE.

Shayne turned westward and slowed his car still more as it bumped along the uneven ruts. Sunlight lay hot and white on the narrow lane between tall pines, and the smell of the sea told him he was approaching close to one of the saltwater inlets.

The car panted over a little rise, and he saw the weathered rock walls of John Grossman’s fishing lodge through the pines on the left. It was a low, sprawling structure, and a pair of ruts turned off abruptly to lead up to it.

Two men stepped into the middle of the lane to block his way when he was fifty feet from the building. This was so exactly what Shayne had expected that he cut his motor and braked to an easy stop with the front bumper almost against the men. He leaned out and asked, “This John Grossman’s place?” then opened the door and stepped out quickly to show he was unarmed and to prevent them from coming to the side of the car, where they might look in the back.

One of the men was very tall and thin, with cadaverous features and deep hollows for eye sockets. He wore a beautifully tailored suit of silk pongee with a tan shirt and shoes and a light tan snap-brimmed felt hat. He had his arms folded across his thin chest with his right hand inside the lapel of his unbuttoned coat close to a bulge just below his left shoulder. His face was darkly sun-tanned and he showed white teeth in a saturnine smile as he stood in the middle of the road without moving.

His companion was a head shorter than Slim. He had a broad, pugnacious face with a flat nose spread over a lot of it. He was hatless and coatless, wearing a shirt with loud yellow stripes, with elastic armbands making tucks in the full sleeves. He stood flat-footed with his hand openly gripping the butt of a revolver thrust down behind the waistband of his trousers.

Shayne stood beside the car and surveyed them coolly. He said: “I don’t think we’ve met formally. I’m Shayne.”

Pug said: “Yeah. We know. This here’s Slim.” He jerked the thumb of his left hand toward his tall companion.

Shayne said: “I thought this was a social call. Where’s Grossman?”

“He sent us out to see you were clean before you come in.” Slim’s lips barely moved to utter the words. He sauntered around the front of the car toward Shayne, keeping his hand inside his coat. His deep-set eyes were cold and glittered like polished agate. His head was thrust forward on a long thin neck.

Shayne took two backward steps. He said: “I’m clean. I came out to talk business. This is a hell of a way to greet a guy.”

Pug moved behind Slim. He was obviously the slower-witted and the less dangerous of the pair. He blinked in the bright sunlight and said: “Why don’t we let ’im have it here?”

Slim said: “We do.” His lips began to smile and Shayne knew he was a man who enjoyed watching his victims die.

Shayne pretended he didn’t hear or didn’t understand the byplay between the two killers. They had both moved to the side of the car now, and were circling slowly toward him.

He said: “I brought along some cold beer. It’s here in the back.” He reached for the handle of the rear door and turned it steadily until the latch was free. He flung himself to the ground, jerking the door wide open as he did so.

Slim’s gun flashed in the sunlight at the same instant that fire blazed from the back seat. Slim staggered back and dropped to one knee, steadying his gun to return the fire.

Shayne lay flat on the ground and saw Pug spun around by the impact of a .45 slug in his thick shoulder. He stayed on his feet and his own gun rained bullets into the tonneau.

Slim fired twice before a bullet smashed the saturnine grin back into his mouth. He crumpled slowly forward onto the sunlighted pine needles and lay very still.

Pug went down at almost the same instant with a look of complete bewilderment on his broad face. He dropped his revolver and put both hands over his belly, lacing his stubby fingers together tightly. He sank to a sitting position with his legs doubled under him, and swayed there for a moment before toppling over on his side.

There was no more shooting. And there was no sound from the back of the car.

Shayne got up stiffly and began dusting the dirt off his clothes. He heard shouts and looked up to see excited men filtering through the trees and coming from behind the lodge to converge on the car. He went around to the right-hand side and opened the back door to peer inside.

Both Blackie and Lennie were quite dead. Blackie lay with his body sprawled half out on the running board, his gun hand trailing in the dirt. Blood was trickling through two holes in his yellow polo shirt. His mouth was open.

Lennie was crouched down on the floor behind him and there was a gaping hole where his right eye had been. His thin features were composed and he looked more at peace with the world than Shayne had ever seen him look before.

Will Gentry came puffing up behind Shayne, his red face suffused and perspiring. A tall, black-mustached man, wearing the clothes of a farmer and carrying a rifle, was close behind him. Other men were dressed like farmers, and Shayne recognized half a dozen of Gentry’s plainclothes detectives among them. He saw Tim Rourke’s grinning face and had time to give the reporter a quick nod of recognition before Gentry caught his arm and pulled him about angrily, demanding: “What the bloody blazes are you pulling off here, Mike?”

“I? Nothing.” Shayne arched his red eyebrows sardonically at the chief of detectives. “Can I help it if some damned hoods choose this place to settle one of their feuds?” He stepped back and waved toward the rear of the car. “Couple of hitch-hikers I picked up. Why don’t you ask them why they started shooting?”

“They’re both dead,” Gentry asserted angrily after a quick survey. “And the other two?” He started around the car.

“This one’s still alive,” Rourke called out cheerfully, kneeling beside Pug. “But I don’t think he will be long.”

Shayne sauntered around behind Gentry. Blood was seeping between Pug’s fingers laced together in front of him, but his eyes were open and when Gentry shook him and demanded to know where Grossman was, he muttered thickly: “Inside. Cellar.”

“You. Yancy and Marks,” Gentry directed two of his men. “Stay here and get a statement from him. Find out what this shooting is about. Everything. The rest of you fan out and surround the house. Take it careful and be ready to shoot. The real criminal is in there.”

Shayne took Gentry’s place beside Pug as Gentry moved away to direct the placing of his men around the house. He leaned close to the dying man and asked: “Where’s the girl, Pug? The girl. Where is she?”

“Inside.”

Shayne got to his feet. Rourke got up beside him and grabbed his arm. “Sweet Jesus, Mike! I don’t know what any of this is about, but it’s some Caesarian.”

Shayne pulled away from him and started stalking toward the fishing lodge. Rourke hurried after him, expostulating: “Hold it, Mike. Don’t try to go in there. Didn’t you hear the guy? Grossman’s inside. Let Gentry and the sheriff chase him out in the open.”

Shayne didn’t pay any attention to him. Unarmed, he strode on toward the sprawling stone house, his face set and hard.

Gentry was spacing his men about to cover all exits. He saw Shayne’s intention and called out gruffly: “Don’t, Mike. No need for anybody to get hurt now. We’ll smoke him out.”

Shayne went on without hesitation. He mounted the wide stone steps, his heels pounding loud in the sudden stillness, and went on to a sagging screen door. He pulled it open and went in, blinking his eyes against the dimness.

The interior of the house had a stale, long-unused smell. It was cool and quiet inside the thick rock walls. A wide arched opening led into a big room on the right.

Shayne went in and saw Myrna Hastings sitting upright in a heavy chair fashioned of twisted mangrove roots. Her legs and arms were bound tightly to the chair and her mouth was sealed with adhesive tape. Her eyes rolled up at him wildly as he strode across the room, getting out his knife.

He slashed the cords binding her arms and legs, pulled her upright and put his left arm about her shoulders. “This is going to hurt,” he warned. “Set your lips and mouth tightly.”

She nodded and her eyes told him she understood. He ripped the adhesive loose in one jerk and put his other arm around her. She clung to him, crying softly.

He looked around the room and gave a grunt of satisfaction when he saw a square of water-soaked canvas on the floor with a pile of straw and bottles on top of it. An empty bottle lay on its side and another stood open.

Shayne drew her forward gently, instructing her: “Try to walk. Use your arms and legs and they’ll limber up.”

She said, through her tears: “I’m trying. I’m all right. I knew you’d come, Mike.”

She drew away from him as he leaned down to pick up the open bottle. He studied the water-soaked label and his eyes glinted. It was Monnet cognac, vintage of 1926. The bottle was half-full. He drew in a long gulping breath of the bouquet, then put the bottle in Myrna’s hands. “Take a good drink. Everything’s all right now.”

She obediently tilted the bottle to her lips. A flush came to her cheeks as she swallowed. Shayne laughed and took it away from her. “It’s my turn.” He drank from it and then led her over to a dusty rattan couch.

She sat down limply and he got out two cigarettes. He put one between her lips and the other in his mouth, thumb-nailed a match and lit them both.

She started violently when Gentry’s voice bellowed at him from outside. “Shayne! What’s happening in there?”

Shayne called back: “A lady and I are having a drink. Leave us alone.” He laughed down at Myrna’s bewildered face. “We’re surrounded by a posse of detectives and deputy sheriffs. They’re summoning their nerve to storm the place.”

“What happened?” she asked tensely. “All that shooting. They were laying a trap for you, weren’t they? I heard them talking before they went out. They were going to kill you because they thought you’d read the log-book. I told them you hadn’t but they wouldn’t believe me. I was so frightened when I heard the shooting. I was sure you’d walked right into the trap.” She began to tremble violently.

Shayne patted her hand reassuringly. “I practically never walk into a trap.”

They heard cautious shuffling footsteps on the porch outside, and Gentry’s voice lowered to a rumble. “Mike. Where are you?”

“In here,” Shayne called blithely. He put the bottle to his swollen lips and sucked on it greedily. He lowered it and grinned as Gentry tiptoed in with drawn gun, followed closely by the mustached sheriff with his rifle cocked and ready.

“You look,” Shayne chuckled, “like the last two of the Mohicans.”

Gentry straightened his bulky body and glared across the dim room at Shayne and the girl. “What the devil’s going on? Who’s that and how did she get here?”

Shayne said: “You met Miss Hastings last night, Will. Why don’t you and Leatherstockings run along down to the cellar and look for Grossman? That’s where Pug said he was.”

Other men began to file cautiously into the hallway behind their leaders. Gentry turned to them and growled: “Find the cellar stairs. And take it careful. Grossman isn’t the kind to be taken alive.” He crossed the room heavily. “And you can start talking, Mike. What are you and this girl up to?”

“Nothing immoral — with so many people around.”

Gentry stopped in front of him on widespread legs. “What kind of a run-around am I getting?”

Shayne said: “You’re giving it to yourself, whatever it is. I didn’t invite you out here.”

“No. Thought you were pulling a fast one. Covering up for a murderer to get a rake-off on a bunch of smuggled liquor. By God, Shayne, you can’t wiggle out of that one.”

Shayne took a pull from the bottle. “It’s mighty good liquor. Next time you send a stool to cover the switchboard on my hotel don’t use a guy with d-i-c-k written all over him.”

Gentry gulped back his anger. “I wondered who sent Tim Rourke to me with a tip there’d be fireworks. You can’t deny you brought along a couple of gunsels to wipe out Grossman and his gang and keep the stuff for yourself. If I hadn’t overheard the call and beat it out here you might have pulled it off.”

Shayne laughed and sank down on the couch beside Myrna. “How much of the deal do you know?”

“Plenty. I always suspected Captain Samuels was running stuff for Grossman when he lost his boat in ’30. That’s why Grossman killed him last night. Fighting over division of the liquor that was cached here when Grossman was sent up.”

“You’re fairly close,” Shayne admitted. “When you find Grossman—”

“He’ll talk,” Gentry promised.

“Want to bet on it?” Shayne’s eyes were very bright.

“I never bet with you. With your damned shenanigans...What’s this girl got to do with it?” Gentry pointed a stern finger at Myrna. “One of Grossman’s little friends?”

“She wanted to see a detective in action,” Shayne replied.

Shayne set the bottle on the floor and sat up straighter when a detective trotted in and reported excitedly: “We’ve searched the cellar and the whole house, Chief. Not another soul here.”

Gentry began to curse luridly. Shayne got up and interrupted him. “I don’t think your men knew where to look in the cellar. Let’s take a look.”

He went out to the hallway and found Rourke coming up the cellar stairs with a flashlight in his hand.

“No soap,” Rourke reported to Shayne. “He must have made his getaway when we left the house uncovered to see what the shooting was about.”

“Your fault,” Gentry said bitterly behind Shayne. “If we don’t pick him up I’m slapping a charge of obstructing justice on you.”

Shayne took the flashlight from Rourke. He led the way down into a small dank furnace room with a dirt floor. He flashed the light around, then walked over to a small rectangular area where the ground showed signs of having been recently disturbed. “Try digging here, but don’t blame me if Grossman doesn’t tell you the whole story when you find him.”

“There?” Gentry gagged over the word. “You mean he’s dead?”

“Unless he’s a Yogi or some damned thing.” Shayne shrugged and handed the flashlight back to Rourke. “Hell, he had to be dead, Will. Nothing else made any sense.”

“You mean nothing makes sense,” Gentry said perplexedly.

Shayne sighed and said: “I’ll draw you pictures. One question first, though. Did Guildford make a phone call between the time you checked for Miss Hastings at the Crestwood last night and before you came to my place looking for her?”

“Guildford?” Gentry’s tone mirrored his bewilderment. “The lawyer? What the hell has that got to do with it?”

“Did he?”

“Well, yes, I think he did, come to think of it. He called his home from the public booth in the Crestwood after we learned the girl wasn’t in. I suggested that we see you and he didn’t want his wife to worry if he got home later than she expected.”

Shayne nodded. “He said he called his wife. But you didn’t go in the booth with him and listen in on his conversation?”

“Of course not,” Gentry sputtered.

Shayne took his time about lighting a cigarette, then continued. “If you had, you would have heard him calling Pug or Slim at Chunky’s joint and telling them to hang around the Crestwood until Myrna Hastings came in — and then grab her. He was covering every angle,” Shayne went on earnestly, “after he discovered that empty hiding place in the captain’s bedroom. He knew the captain knew the location of the liquor cache after Samuels brought in a case and sold it for a hundred bucks to make a payment on the mortgage. And when the poor old guy died while he was torturing him, he must have been frantic for fear he’d never find the stuff.”

“Are you talking about Mr. Guildford? The attorney?”

Shayne nodded. “Leroy P. Guildford. Once a junior member of the firm of Leland and Parker, which specialized in criminal practice and defended John Grossman in 1930. He must have known of the existence of the liquor cache all the time, but it wasn’t worth much until the recent liquor shortage, and Captain Samuels wouldn’t play ball with him. After he killed Grossman, Samuels was his only chance to learn where the liquor was hidden.”

“Are you saying Guildford killed Grossman?”

“Sure. Or had Pug and Slim do the job for him. He brought Grossman out here last Tuesday, then went to Samuels and told him what had happened, and suggested that with Grossman dead they might as well split the liquor.”

“But Grossman talked to you over the phone just this morning,” Gentry argued.

Shayne shook his head. “I knew that couldn’t be Grossman. He had to be dead. The only other person it could be was Guildford, disguising his voice to lure me out here so he could get rid of the only two people who knew about the log-book and the liquor.”

“Why,” asked Gentry with forced calm, “did Grossman have to be dead?”

“Nothing else made sense.” Shayne spread out his big hands. “Captain Samuels knew where the liquor was all the time and he was practically starving, yet he never touched it. Why? Because he was an honorable man and it didn’t belong to him. Why, then, would he suddenly forget his scruples and sell a case? Because Grossman was dead and it no longer belonged to anybody.”

Gentry said gruffly: “My head’s going around. Maybe it’s this air down here.”

In the big room upstairs, Shayne knelt beside the bottles and straw. “Do you know where this came from, Myrna?”

“Certainly. Those men fished it up out of the lagoon this morning, all sewed up in canvas. They talked about it in front of me. I think they planned to kill me, so they didn’t care what I heard.”

“What did they say about it?” Shayne was shaking the bottles free of their straw casings and lining them up carefully on the floor.

“It’s all in the bottom of the lagoon. A whole boatload. Just where Captain Samuels and his crew dumped it overboard as he described in his log-book. That’s why the authorities could never find any liquor here when they raided the place, the men said.”

Shayne got up with a bottle dangling from each bony hand. He slipped them into the side pockets of his pants as Detective Yancy came hurrying in to tell Gentry excitedly: “We got the whole story from that man before he died. Grossman is dead, Chief. Buried in the cellar. And the real guy is—”

“I know,” said Gentry wearily. “Get to a telephone and have Guildford rounded up right away. Leroy P.,” he snapped.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, as he turned in time to see Shayne slide a third and fourth bottle into his hip pockets.

“Making hay while the sun shines.” Shayne stooped stiffly to get two more bottles from the floor. “With you horning in I won’t have any chance at all at that stuff underwater.” He put two more bottles in his coat pocket and stooped for two more, looking wistfully at the remaining bottles on the floor. “This is the only fee I’ll collect on this case.”

Myrna laughed delightedly. “I can carry a few for you.”

Gentry turned away and said gruffly: “There’d better be a couple of bottles left for evidence when the revenue men get here.” He strode out and Shayne began stacking bottles in Myrna’s arms.

“You owe me something,” he told her, “for the turn I got when I went back to my apartment and found the back door unlocked and the place burgled. I thought you were mixed up in it and your feature writing story was just a blind.”

She laughed as she swayed slightly under the weight of eight bottles. “I wondered if you’d suspect me after they found the key and I admitted that it was to the back door of your apartment. I’m afraid they thought I was an immoral girl. I hated to have them take it away from me,” she ended gravely.

Shayne promised, “I’ll give you another one,” and they staggered out with as many bottles as both could carry.