Too Friendly, Too Dead

14

Back at the Miami airport Shayne found Timothy Rourke, as expected, waiting for him at a small table just inside the bar. The reporter had a drink in front of him, and he was alert and eager as Shayne sat down and ordered a drink. “What’s this fast trip to New York about? Damn it, Mike. Why don’t you keep me posted?”

Shayne said, “Hold your horses. I’ll bring you up to date fast enough. One thing at a time. Is Linda Fitzgilpin still missing?”

“Right off the face of the earth. And Painter is really gunning for you. He blames you for preventing him from getting her story earlier.”

“At noon today he was thanking me for it. You heard him yourself.”

“Yeh. But that was noon. Level with me, Mike. Did you arrange to have her hide out from Painter?”

“No. In fact the last time I spoke to her… before noon… I extracted a solemn promise from her that she’d tell him the exact truth when he came around. When did he discover she was missing?”

“About five o’clock. After he’d checked out Nourse in L. A. and become convinced the man hadn’t been in Miami last night. You’re sure he was, Mike?”

“No. I’ve only the widow’s word for it. No one else saw him that I know of.”

“Any reason for her to lie about it?”

“I sure as hell can’t see any.” Shayne sipped his drink and frowned. “It was about the worst sort of admission she could make, and I had to drag it out of her piecemeal. Painter went to her place at five?”

“Yeh. With Sergeant Drake from Miami Homicide. They got no answer at her door, and got the super up to let them in… fearing, I guess, that maybe she’d done both herself and the youngsters in. No sign of them. Everything in order. No evidence of packing or hurried departure. He figured, naturally, that you’d spirited her away.”

“Naturally,” Shayne agreed blandly. “After all, she is a good-looking redhead. We’ll find her, Tim. I can’t believe she’s gone very far. What did you pick up on that other? Any unidentified female bodies in the last two months?”

“Just one.”

“That’s all I need. Give.”

“It was just about two months ago.” Rourke got some notes from his pocket and consulted them. “Body of a young woman washed up on the West shore of Biscayne Bay about Eightieth Street. She’d been in the water several days and just wore a slip and underwear. Her face had been bashed in, and several days in the water hadn’t improved her appearance. There was never any identification. Missing Persons put flyers out on her all over the country with no results. And you know something, Mike?” Rourke paused dramatically, pleased as a child with the secret he was about to impart.

“Not very much.”

“Autopsy showed she was full of sodium amytal when she was beaten and thrown in the water. How do you like that?”

“Very much. Rose McNally.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Rutherford Rodman. Remember the photograph I showed you this morning? Together with this menu?” Shayne got them from his pocket and showed Rourke the picture again. “That’s Rose McNally when she got married over a year ago. The man is Rutherford Rodman. Jerome Fitzgilpin was a witness at their wedding.”

“How do you know all this?” Rourke asked helplessly.

“That’s why I flew to New York. Rose disappeared from there headed for Miami about two months ago. She told a girl friend she was excited about getting her hands on a big wad of money. How does that figure to you?”

“Attempted blackmail?”

Shayne shrugged. “She wouldn’t be the first blackmailer who ever turned up floating in the water.”

“But who, Mike? Where would blackmail come in? And how does that connect with Fitzgilpin’s murder last night?”

“The sodium amytal connects the two. It worked successfully once two months ago, why wouldn’t it work again? Murderers aren’t too imaginative.”

“But why?”

“That’s for us to figure out.”

“The way I get it, Fitzgilpin did the couple a favor purely out of the goodness of his heart. Why should someone kill him for that?”

“What reason did anyone have for killing him? That’s what we’ve been up against from the beginning. Friendliest man in the world without a single known enemy. Yet someone fed him poison. That’s been the stumbling block. Now it begins to look as though he was killed because he was so friendly.”

“Hell of a note,” muttered Rourke, turning up his glass. “Generally when you dig back into a man’s life you discover scads of people who wanted him dead the worst way.”

“That’s right. So you trace down a few alibis and find one that doesn’t stand up, and that’s it.” Shayne sighed and rubbed his angular jaw reflectively. “That’s not the way it comes out this time.”

“There is the widow. She admitted having an affair and asking him for a divorce.”

“Yeh,” Shayne agreed noncommittally, “we’ve still got the widow.”

“Only, we haven’t got her. She did take a run-out powder, damn it. If you’ve got any idea where to find her…”

“Let Painter find her,” said Shayne grimly. “Right now, I believe Linda’s story: That she and her husband were reconciled and she hadn’t seen or heard from Nourse until he turned up unexpectedly last night. Women don’t normally kill a husband who has been good enough to take them back after an affair like that.”

“Then who…?”

“There’s that goddamned telephone call. Kelly!” Shayne ran knobby fingers through his bristly red hair. “If we could only tie someone named Kelly into the picture. A woman looking for an insurance broker who is willing to disregard the rules and sell her a quarter-million dollar insurance policy on her husband’s life without his knowledge. Just the first premium on that policy would be a hunk of money. I wonder if she went elsewhere after Fitzgilpin turned her down. I suppose there are plenty of crooked brokers who would arrange a deal like that.”

“No doubt.”

“If she did succeed in putting it over, we’d be doing the husband a favor by telling him. How many Kellys do you suppose there are in Miami?”

“Several hundred. It’s a damned common name. Almost like Smith or Jones, I think.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne slowly. “Almost as common as Smith or Jones. I wonder, by God, if we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

“How?” asked Rourke alertly.

“It just occurred to me that if you wanted to choose a common name as an alias you’d be smart to choose one like Kelly instead of Smith or Jones.”

“So?”

Shayne shrugged. “It’s an idea, that’s all.”

Rourke looked disapprovingly at his empty glass, then glanced down at the picture of the newly-married couple still lying face up on the table. He picked it up and turned it to get a better light, and frowned angrily. “I’ve still got that sneaking hunch I had when I first saw this picture. That I should know the guy. That I’ve seen him somewhere recently. Rodman, you say?”

“Rutherford G. Rodman. At least that’s the name he gave the New York license bureau.”

“Rodman?” Rourke closed his eyes tightly and savored the name while Shayne watched him hopefully, knowing the reporter’s uncanny ability to remember faces he had seen maybe only once or twice in the sometime distant past.

Slowly a change came over Rourke’s tight-drawn features. They relaxed and he opened his eyes wide. “I think I’ve got it, Mike. Hold onto your horses, but by God, I think I have. Let’s get the hell over to the News morgue.”

“Who is it?”

“Don’t push me.” Rourke pushed back his chair. “Don’t kill the image. It’s tenuous right now. I’ve got to hold onto it. See you at the office.”

He hurried out of the room almost at a trot, head thrust forward and thin shoulders hunched as though he were a hunting dog following an almost indefinable scent.

Shayne paid the bill and left almost immediately behind him. He got his car from the parking lot where he had left it a few hours earlier and drove at a moderate pace toward the News office.

Driving through the balmy hush of the Miami night he was conscious of the beginning of a driving excitement that welled up inside of him. He was coming close to an answer. He knew he was. All his past experience told him he was on the edge of it. Somehow the tangled threads were beginning to untangle. He didn’t know how it would happen, nor where the various threads would lead, but he knew it wouldn’t be long now. He had all the various pieces of the puzzle in his hands and it was only a matter of time before they fitted themselves together into a clear pattern.

As yet, there certainly was no discernible pattern, clear or otherwise. He discovered he was in no hurry to reach the newspaper office. The answer would be there. He had no real doubt of that. He had seen Timothy Rourke in action too often in the past to doubt the veracity of the reporter’s hunch this time.

In the meantime, Shayne enjoyed seeking the answer in his own mind, and he refused to be annoyed when he did not find it. Somewhere at the end of the line was a two-time murderer who had employed sodium amytal twice to kill his victims. It was a vicious, cold-blooded method of killing, and he wouldn’t regret tracking the murderer down.

He felt wholly calm and impersonal about it as he parked outside the News and went in to see if Rourke was at his accustomed desk in the City Room. The reporter was there waiting for him. Slouched back in his chair with two cardboard files he had gotten from the morgue in front of him, and with a satisfied smile on his thin face.

One of the files was fat and bulging with newspaper clippings, and the other was thin. The fat one was labeled “Durand,” the thin one bore the name, “Rodman.”

Rourke patted the Rodman file as Shayne sat down beside him. “This just goes back a little over two months, but I think it’s what you want.” He opened it to display the first clipping, a brief story with a New York dateline, headed: ROMANTIC OCEAN INTERLUDE.

Shayne leaned forward to read the story which began: “When the S.S. Alexander docked at pier 14 this afternoon, reporters were given the details of a moonlit-studded and tropical nights romance which culminated in a seagoing wedding three nights ago performed by Captain Jesse Bergstrom, Commander of the Bermuda vacation liner.

“The happy couple are Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford G. Rodman who became acquainted on the cruise and plighted their troth in Bermuda before the return trip began.

“The radiant bride is the former Betsy Ann Durand of Miami, Florida, daughter of land-developer and real-estate tycoon, G. A. Durand of Miami, and the couple plan to set up residence at the Durand estate on Miami Beach.

“The personable groom is clubman and industrialist Rutherford G. Rodman from Cincinnati, Ohio, who told this reporter he plans to liquidate his holdings in the mid-west and devote his future energies to managing the Durand properties in Florida.

“It was the first venture into marriage for both bride and groom…”

Shayne read the newspaper clipping no further. He pushed it aside, his forehead furrowed in thought. “If it’s the same Rutherford G. Rodman…”

“It is,” Rourke assured him happily. “Here’s a story from our society section five days later. Betsy Ann Durand is headline news in Miami, and we had a photographer out to meet their plane.”

He showed Shayne a second clipping, much longer than the dispatch from New York, featuring a somewhat cloudy shot of a man and woman poised at the top of the steps leading off a jet plane with their arms around each other.

The picture of the man was quite clear, and was unmistakably that of the same Rutherford G. Rodman whose photograph Shayne had been carrying around inside a folded menu all day. The bride was wearing a wide, floppy-brimmed hat which obscured her features somewhat; she was as tall as her husband and stood very straight and gracious beside him.

Shayne studied the picture briefly without bothering to read the text. “That’s our boy,” he muttered. “This Betsy Ann Durand, Tim?”

“One of the important catches in Miami society,” Rourke told him. “You’ve heard of Durand. An associate of Flagler in the old days. Left a lot of millions when he kicked off ten years ago. Betsy Ann was the only child and inherited most of it. Rodman did all right for himself this time.”

He opened the bulging folder marked Durand, and began leafing through it. “Here’s Betsy Ann at Hialeah last year. And another one of her opening the Flower Show at the Woman’s Club.” He slid two glossy portraits out to show Shayne, and the detective studied them with at first a bewildered and then a growing and more positive sense of recognition.

He said, “It’s Mrs. Kelly, Tim. Goddamn it, it has to be Mrs. Kelly!”