The Homicidal Virgin

16

It was less than a half-hour drive by taxi from the O’Hara Airport to the small town of Denton. Shayne had the driver stop at a filling station on the outskirts of the village, where he consulted a telephone book and got the street address of Roy Combs. The station attendant told him to continue as they were to the first traffic light, then turn left for a block and a half.

They did so, and drew up in front of a small sunbathed house in a row of similar small, frame houses, each with its neat rectangle of front yard and attached one-car garage.

There were small children playing in some of the other yards, but none in front of the Combs’ residence. Shayne got out and told the driver to wait with his flag down, and strode up the cinder walk to the front door framed by trellised roses. There was no electric button, so he knocked and waited.

The door opened and a young girl stood in the dimly cool interior looking out at him questioningly. She wore tight, black Toreador pants and a fresh white cotton blouse, and was barefooted. Smooth black hair with curling tips hung down on each side of her face to frame the piquant features.

Shayne took off his hat and said gravely, “Hello, Jane Smith.”

A little cry of terror and of recognition escaped her lips. Her black eyes widened and she put her right hand impulsively up to her mouth, gnawing at the knuckles with sharp white teeth like a small child in the face of catastrophe.

Otherwise, neither of them moved for a long moment. Then she wrenched her gaze away from Shayne’s and turned partly aside with a half-sob, bending her head abjectly so the long black hair swung forward and formed a curtain to hide her face.

Shayne stepped inside the square living room and closed the front door behind him. As his eyes adjusted themselves from the bright sunlight, he gazed somberly about at the worn rug on the floor, shabby cretonne slipcovers on the furniture and two Grant Wood reproductions on the walls. The sitting room was clean and tidy, and spoke of lower-middle-class poverty.

His gaze went back to the slender figure of the girl whose head was still bowed and turned away from him, and then it lifted and went beyond her to the figure of a young man standing in the open doorway beyond her. He wore cotton slacks and a Tee-shirt, and his sandy hair was damp and freshly brushed.

Shayne said sardonically, “And Paul Winterbottom. Last time I saw you was in a Miami bar, Paul. Or do you prefer to be called Roy?”

“It’s Mike Wayne!” The young man’s tight features fell apart suddenly. He blinked his eyes vacuously and his mouth drooped open. Then he got hold of himself and darted forward fiercely to put his arm tightly about his wife’s slender waist, and he exclaimed too loudly… for Shayne’s benefit rather than hers: “Don’t you worry, Hon. We haven’t done anything… no matter what he says.”

She turned into his encircling arms and clung to him, sobbing. He wet his lips and glared defiantly over the top of her head at the Miami detective.

Shayne dropped his hat on a low table and lowered his rangy body into a deep chair near the door. He said dryly, “I have a seat reserved on a four-o’clock plane back to Miami. Let’s get some talking done.”

“All right,” said the young man fiercely. “So you chased us down. So what? You can’t pin anything on us. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Have you seen today’s paper?”

“No.”

“Your father shot and killed a man in Miami last night,” Shayne informed him bleakly.

Roy Combs staggered back, releasing his wife. He stuttered, “My… father?”

Free of his arms, the girl straightened and tossed her head back, then whirled to face Shayne, advancing toward him soundlessly on bare feet, hands outstretched, curved and clawlike.

“Don’t call him that.” Her voice and face were dangerously calm. “Don’t ever call him that.”

“Wait, Beth.” Roy stumbled forward and caught her arm, pulled her back. “Who did he kill, Mr. Wayne?”

“Harry Gleason.”

They stood close together in front of him, trembling and looking at each other.

Shayne kept his voice hard and impersonal. He said, “Sit down on the sofa, you two, and answer some questions.” He got out a cigarette and lit it while the frightened young couple moved back and sat down side by side on the sofa, holding hands tightly and with their eyes fixed on Shayne as though he were a bomb with a short fuse that was burning down fast.

“How much do you know about what happened in Endore, Colorado, more than twenty years ago?”

“Everything,” said Roy Combs bitterly. “When Harry Gleason finished his stretch in the penitentiary, he took me out of the State Home where I’d been since birth and put me with a private family where he paid my room and board until I finished high school. Then he showed me the old clippings and told me the whole story about my father and mother. And now you say Harry’s dead. Henderson killed him? Just like he killed my mother…” He broke off into dry sobs.

Shayne said, “I’m afraid it was self-defense. Gleason came to his house with a gun at midnight, and Henderson shot first.”

“I don’t believe it. He just fixed it to look that way. Harry wouldn’t have ever done that. He was hell-bent on peace. He made us promise we wouldn’t do anything to Henderson after he saw him on television that time and knew he was still alive.”

Shayne shook his head. “There’s evidence that Gleason made one previous attempt with the same gun he threatened Henderson with last night. And whoever you hired to plant the bomb on Henderson’s boat didn’t help matters either,” he went on deliberately. “With two unsuccessful attempts on his life in the last few days, he had every legal right to shoot first without asking questions when Gleason turned up on his doorstep last night.”

“We don’t know anything about a bomb,” said Roy fiercely. “We didn’t hire anybody to do anything. You tell him, Beth.”

“I couldn’t find anybody who’d do it,” she said listlessly. “Even with that wonderful story I thought up and offering them all the money in the world. They still wouldn’t do it. Just like you,” she ended with a faint curl of her upper lip. “All I got was good advice like you gave me.”

“It was a crazy idea from the word go,” put in her husband vehemently. “My God! if I’d had the faintest idea what Beth was up to, I’d never have let her go to Miami. But she claimed she just wanted to find out what kind of man he was… to spy out the situation for Harry and help him put the clamps on him later.”

“To blackmail him?” asked Shayne harshly.

“Call it blackmail if you want to. I don’t. I didn’t blame Harry one bit. God in heaven! think what he’d been through on account of him.”

“What,” asked Shayne, “had he been through?”

Then the whole story of perfidy and cowardice and near-murder almost a quarter of a century before poured out of the young man’s eager lips while Shayne sat very quiet in the small living room and listened to it.

In mid-depression years, Ernest Combs and Harry Gleason were equal partners in a wholesale business in a suburban community near Denver, Colorado. With slack times and a succession of bad breaks, they faced the prospect of losing their business and everything they had invested. With a large stock of heavily mortgaged and completely insured goods in an isolated warehouse, the two desperate men had hit upon the expedient of selling off the stock secretly and at a high discount, and salting away the proceeds in cash-then burning the empty warehouse to the ground and collecting insurance on the non-existent contents.

The plot had been carefully planned and was put into effect one wintry evening when a heavy snowfall made it difficult for fire engines to operate.

One terrible hitch occurred at the last moment after the fire had been carefully set in several places and the two partners were escaping safely. Combs’ young wife, seven months pregnant, had learned of their plan and gone to the warehouse to stop them, unknown to either of them.

It wasn’t until the incendiary flames were raging and they were both safely outside the building that they became aware that Mrs. Combs was trapped inside and would surely perish unless they took prompt action to save her.

According to young Roy Combs’ bitter story, the two men reacted differently under stress. Combs cursed his wife’s stupidity in putting herself in jeopardy and washed his hands of the whole affair, disappearing into the night without a trace-and taking with him the entire cache of cash the two men had secreted.

Harry Gleason, on the other hand, turned in the other direction to turn in a fire alarm and then sped back into the burning building in an effort to save his partner’s wife.

Due to his prompt action, the fire apparatus arrived in time to save the building from complete destruction (thus baring the arson plot) and to rescue Gleason and Mrs. Combs alive.

The woman, however, suffered such severe burns that she was hospitalized and never recovered, dying two months later because of her weakened condition as a result of her injuries when a son, Roy, was born to her.

Gleason had been promptly sentenced to the penitentiary for his part in the crime, and a nationwide search was instituted for Ernie Combs-without avail. No trace of him had ever been discovered-until one night in Algonquin, Illinois, when his face appeared on the television screen in front of a bartender and his wife, and he was identified as Saul Henderson, wealthy widower of Miami Beach and mayoralty candidate of that city.

“Harry telephoned me that night,” Roy Combs told Shayne stonily. “He was all fired up to notify the police immediately, but I told him to wait. I drove up and talked to him one afternoon. By that time he had quieted down and was talking about threatening Henderson with exposure and making him pay all his money for our silence. We talked it all over and couldn’t agree on anything. Frankly, I wanted to see him suffer for what he had done to my mother, but I couldn’t help thinking about all that money he had inherited from the woman he’d married… and the way Beth and I live here on my salary as a garage mechanic. Much as I hate to admit it, I am his legal son, and can prove it, and I would inherit everything if he died.

“Oh, we talked it over and over and over,” he went on with a bitter twist to his young mouth. “Harry and I, and Beth and I. Beth, I think, hated him worse than I did. I guess it was a female trait… because of what he did to my mother. Anyhow, in the beginning Beth talked wild and crazy about killing him so I’d inherit his money, but I talked her out of it. And I didn’t want Harry to try to blackmail him either… not because I didn’t think he deserved to be blackmailed, you understand, but because I was afraid he’d be too smart for us and the whole thing would backfire. But I couldn’t make up my mind to denounce him to the law either,” he went on helplessly.

“He certainly deserved no better, but what good would that do us? We’d never get a penny of his money… as long as he was alive and knew he had a son who was alive.”

“So you and your wife decided on this Jane Smith deal?” said Shayne as the young man paused.

“Not exactly. That was entirely her own idea, and she didn’t confide a word of it to Harry or me. What she did do was to offer to take what money we had in the savings account and go down to Miami and nose around and find out everything she could about him. Then she promised to come back and we’d put our heads together and decide what to do next. She went up and saw Harry herself late one night, and got him to promise he wouldn’t do anything until she came back and reported. And now you say he went down anyway and Henderson shot him.”

Roy Combs jumped to his feet and clenched his fist angrily. “Damn it! That’s what I was afraid would happen. I told Harry he’d be too smart for us. Well, he won’t get away with it. I’m not going to hold back any longer. Damn all his money to hell! I’ll see he spends the rest of his life in jail.”

Shayne said dryly, “I don’t think you need to worry too much about that aspect of it. But I’m curious about you, young lady.” He turned his attention to Beth. “Where did you get the idea of masquerading as Henderson’s stepdaughter and telling the weird tale you unfolded to me in that hotel room?”

She sat bolt upright on the sofa with her hands clasped primly in front of her. “It seemed like a perfectly wonderful idea. I went down and read all the newspapers and talked to people and found out everything I could about him and his dead wife and Muriel Graham. And then I just made up that story. I tried to think of some good reason for wanting him dead and for offering to pay so much money to hire it done.”

“I told her it was the craziest thing in the world, Mr. Wayne. As soon as I found out what she had done. You see, she didn’t tell me a word about it until you had answered that advertisement and she had made her plans to meet you. Then she wrote me a letter. I hopped on a plane and went right down there to stop her, and got to Miami that evening while she was meeting you.

“When she saw me afterward and told me what you said… about being a friend of that famous detective, Mike Shayne and all, I was scared to death you would tell him, and that’s why I called you next day and pretended to be Paul Winterbottom… so you’d know she wasn’t going to go on with it and try to get anyone else to do the job.”

“But she did,” Shayne said flatly. “She found someone who planted a bomb on his boat and tried to kill him that way.”

“You didn’t, did you, Beth? You promised me…”

“I swear I didn’t, Roy. I did have the name of one other man in New York that I didn’t tell you about, and I tried to get him to do it when I stopped off there on my way home. B-b-but he was just like Mr. Wayne.” Tears streamed down her face and she wiped them away with the back of her hand defiantly.

“It seemed like it was foolproof when I made it up,” she sobbed. “Saul Henderson doesn’t deserve to keep on living. And it wouldn’t really have hurt the Graham girl any. She could easily deny knowing anything about it and refuse to pay the money I was promising in her name. And I bet she hates him too and would be glad to see him dead,” she added viciously. “Maybe he never did do to her what I dreamed up and told you, Mr. Wayne, but I bet he did plenty of other things just as bad. I’m not sorry I tried at all. I’m just sorry that I failed.”

“Yeh,” said Roy dismally. “And that Harry got impatient and went down and tried to shake him down on his own. If he’d only waited. We could have figured out something better between us. And no matter what you say,” he went on forcibly, “I don’t believe Harry ever went gunning for him. He hated his guts plenty, and figured he was due at least his share of the money Henderson ran off with, but ten years in prison was plenty for Harry and I swear I don’t believe he’d take a chance on ever getting sent back.”

Shayne looked at his watch and got up. He said, “After all this blows over, Roy, I suggest you take this wife of yours out to Hollywood. She’ll make your fortune for you.”