Brett Halliday

A Redhead for Mike Shayne

1

It was pitch dark inside the narrow confines of the dispatcher’s office in the big liquor warehouse, but Michael Shayne’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness during the two hours of more-or-less patient waiting that had gone before, and he could make out everything about him with fair clarity.

Not that there was very much to see inside the small office. There was a telephone on the desk beside him, and a water cooler with nested paper cups on the other side of the open door leading out to the big padlocked back doors that opened wide during daylight hours to let the trucks back in on loading ramps. To the right of that same open door was a five-gallon electric coffee maker, and a china mug on the table near Shayne’s right hand held the dregs of the fifth cup of the strong black stuff he had downed since settling down for his lonely vigil at eight-thirty.

It was the first routine stake-out job that the red-headed private detective had undertaken personally for a good many years, and he’d forgotten how tiring and boring such an assignment could be. But the Acme Bonding Company which had the contents of the warehouse covered against theft was one of Shayne’s oldest regular clients, and they had paid him a substantial annual retainer to look after their affairs in the Miami area for more years than he liked to remember. Indeed, back in those years of slim pickings when he was first establishing himself in private practice the Acme retainer had often meant the difference between paying office rent and not paying it, and he owed them enough loyalty to take on this onerous job tonight himself when he was unable to find another competent operative to handle it on short notice.

It was the result of a vague inside tip that this particular warehouse was slated to be burglarized tonight. Two similar warehouses (neither covered by Acme) had been knocked off in Dade County during the preceding two months, both resulting in heavy losses and with no clues to the perpetrators.

Both had been carefully planned and seemingly inside jobs, smoothly and daringly carried out under cover of weather conditions similar to those prevailing tonight.

Because it was the hurricane season in Miami, and thus far during the autumn months the southern end of the Peninsula had been swept by the tag-end or side-effects of three vicious storms which had passed by at sea. At the height of two of those storms the warehouses had been raided. With winds of seventy miles an hour and occasional gusts reaching an intensity of ninety or a hundred miles, it was commonplace for power service to be disrupted in various sections of the area for periods of a few minutes to an hour or more before emergency crews could repair the damage, and the liquor thieves had taken advantage of this situation and the resultant confusion by selecting vulnerable targets in sections that were blacked out during the storms.

It could have been, authorities conceded, mere chance that the two successful operations had taken place with only the assistance of natural forces, but it seemed much more likely that the thieves had carefully determined their target beforehand while the storm was brewing and cut the power lines at a strategic point at the height of the storm to black out the section surrounding the selected warehouse.

This had the effect of not only giving them cover of darkness in which to operate, but also cut off the automatic alarm systems installed in the warehouses for protection.

That is why Michael Shayne sat alone in the darkened dispatcher’s office tonight and moodily and uncomfortably waited for something to happen.

For two days now, the course of Tropical Storm Fatima had been charted by government experts and reported to the residents of Miami in the newspapers and over the radio. Small-craft storm warnings were out from Key West to Jacksonville, and communities along the coast were comfortably battened down to withstand gale winds up to a predicted eighty miles per hour. Since early afternoon the skies over Miami had been sullenly overcast and the humidity had become increasingly oppressive. By early evening the wind was rising and heavy showers were sweeping the city. The rain had developed into a heavy deluge at seven-thirty when Shayne drove across the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach where the warehouse was located, and fifty-mile gusts of wind swayed his heavy car on the unprotected causeway. The height of the storm was predicted for eleven o’clock, and inside the well-constructed building there were creakings and groanings while a steady downpour of wind-driven rain assaulted the arched roof overhead.

Inside the small office Shayne was as snug and comfortable as a man could be under the circumstances. The airconditioning system throughout the building was normally kept in operation twenty-four hours a day to provide a steady temperature for the wines and spirits stored there, the manager had explained to Shayne when he settled him in at eight-thirty after all the other employees had gone home, so he would be cool enough during the night and would have immediate warning if the power inside the building were cut off during the storm.

The hum of the airconditioner and the flow of cool air from an opening overhead were steady and reassuring — and increasingly soporific. Shayne stirred in his chair and yawned widely, and lit another cigarette, grateful for the draft of forced air which would carry away the smoke and the telltale odor of tobacco if an entrance were attempted. He grinned wryly as he recalled other stake-out jobs in the distant past when such assignments were a routine part of an operative’s job, when he had been carefully searched for cigarettes and matches before being planted in a spot like this for similar night-long vigils which had generally ended in frustrating failure.

That was long ago when youth was daring and impatient, and preferred action to inaction at any cost. Tonight, Shayne admitted to himself comfortably and with another yawn, he would be perfectly content to have the storm pass overhead with no interruption, proving the tip of attempted robbery as baseless and allowing him to go home and catch a few hours sleep in his own bed.

At that moment the steady hum of the airconditioner ceased. Shayne straightened alertly and snubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. He had no way of knowing, of course, whether the power interruption was purely accidental or whether it had been carefully arranged. In any event, the burglar alarm system was now inoperative and the building could be broken into with impunity.

Remaining quietly in his chair, the detective withdrew a short-barrelled.38 from his waistband and cocked it. With his left hand he got a powerful flashlight from his side coat pocket and rested it on his knee with his thumb resting lightly on the switch. His position just inside the open door of the office had been carefully selected strategically. Directly beyond the opening were the big back doors that would have to be unlocked from the inside and swung open before any major theft could take place.

It seemed suddenly very quiet with the hum of the air-conditioning off. The creakings and the groanings of the building and the noise of rain lashing the roof were intensified with the absence of other sound.

Shayne glanced down at his wristwatch and the illuminated hands stood at a quarter of eleven. It was the right time. If anything was going to happen it would begin happening in the next few minutes. One could never be sure how long it would take an emergency crew to locate the damage and repair the service on a night like this. If the gang was well organized they would have men ready to enter the building as soon as the alarm system was put out of commission.

He heard the faint tinkle of glass not far away and knew that a window had been smashed. They wouldn’t be careful of noise at this point. Speed was essential. It would be one of the ground-floor windows of the main offices down the hall, he thought, and he leaned forward in the chair to peer in that direction.

He waited tensely and saw a dancing flicker of light play against the wall of the corridor. It steadied as he watched it, and almost immediately a flashlight, held waist-high, emerged from one of the office doors and swung down the corridor in his direction.

He drew back so the light of the flash would pass him by and shine harmlessly into the interior of his hideaway as the man came closer, his own flashlight held ready, the first finger of his right hand firmly on the trigger of his revolver.

He would wait as long as possible before exposing himself to the intruder. It was almost a certainty that the man had a duplicate key to the padlock on the back door, and if he felt sure he was alone in the building he would first unlock the doors to let a truck back inside.

There would be two or three men with the truck, Shayne reasoned, to do a fast job of loading it, and if he were lucky he’d be able to take them by surprise and round up the whole gang.

The light flashed through the door opening in front of him from a distance of twenty feet, casually showing the emptiness of the small office, flickered away to the right as the bearer of it hurried around the bend in the corridor with the beam directed toward the back doors.

He passed within two feet of Michael Shayne, and was silhouetted momentarily against the reflected light of his flash, showing a medium-sized, slender, bareheaded man, bent forward slightly, and there was the glint of metal in his right hand as he approached the locked doors.

He straightened in front of the doors and Shayne waited breathlessly for him to pocket the gun and produce a key to unlock the padlock.

Instead, there occurred one of those inexplicable happenings which confound reason. Perhaps some sixth sense warned him of danger from behind. Perhaps there was some animal emanation from the detective who waited so tensely. Shayne was destined to never know what caused him to whirl about suddenly, sinking into a crouch and shining the beam of his torch directly into the detective’s face as he waited inside the open doorway.

Michael Shayne’s left thumb and right forefinger reacted simultaneously. The powerful beam from his flash bathed the crouching figure in white light at exactly the same moment as the gun in the man’s right hand erupted in an ear-shattering series of explosions so closely spaced that they sounded like one long-drawn blast. And Shayne practically felt the bullets fanning the still air above his hair by the fraction of an inch.

At the same instant, his own weapon punctuated the r-r-r-r-r-r of the other gun.

The flashlight and the gun clattered to the floor, and the shadowy figure of the man swayed and then crumpled downward into a shapeless heap of lifeless flesh.

The flashlight lay on the floor with its beam focussed on the wall four feet away. The gunman lay quiescent, un-moving.

Shayne got up from his chair stiffly. Faintly, through the closed and padlocked doors, he heard the roar of a truck’s motor, the high-pitched whine of gears as it moved away in the blacked-out area, and he knew he had muffed the assignment to a certain extent.

Only one of the gang lay dead in front of him. The others outside had heard the rattle of gunfire inside the warehouse and were escaping.

He went through the door shining his light down on the recumbent figure. He was young and had a pallid, ratlike face. He wore a blue, rain-repellent jacket which was un-zippered to the waist, showing a black-and-white checkered sport shirt beneath. A spreading stain of crimson showed in the exact center of the chest of his sport shirt. Six inches from the curled fingers of his right hand lay the weapon which had thrown the lethal bullets that had sung their song of death above the red hairs on Shayne’s head just a minute before.

It was a curious and ungainly sort of hand-weapon, unlike any pistol Shayne had ever seen before. He held his light full on it for a long moment, then stooped and picked it up speculatively. It felt curiously light in his hand for its bulk and its demonstrated lethal potential, and he hesitated before dropping it into his coat pocket and then bringing his thoughts back to the necessities of the moment.

He turned back from the dead man, went into the dispatcher’s office and lifted the telephone to see if it had been put out of operation with the disruption of power.

He was rewarded by the welcome humming of a dial tone, and he dialled the Miami Beach police headquarters and reported who he was and where he was, and that he had a dead body for them to come and pick up at their convenience.

Then he hung up and poured himself a sixth mug of coffee, sat down and lit a cigarette and waited for the police to come.

2

Michael Shayne grew restive as he sipped the hot coffee and waited. He might be in for a long wait, he realized, before the police got around to answering his call on a night like this. There were innumerable small emergencies to be coped with during a storm like this one. Branches of trees blocking city streets, cars skidding on rain-slicked pavements or stalled at intersections under the pounding of wind and rain, flooded basements and terrified housewives phoning in to report suspected prowlers in their yards.

And the Miami Beach police force would not consider his call a real emergency. After all, he had reported the man dead and promised to wait for them to come and pick up the body.

The other man’s flashlight lay on the floor outside where it had fallen, still burning brightly, and Shayne had lain his own on the desk beside him, so the interior of the office was now quite well illuminated. Outside, the storm continued to rage without seeming abatement, while inside the heat seemed heavy and oppressive due to the sudden cessation of forced cool air. Sweat formed on Shayne’s forehead and he wiped it away angrily. He knew the apparent rise in temperature must be purely psychological. It probably hadn’t risen more than a full degree since the airconditioning went off, but it seemed at least ten degrees hotter.

He shoved the mug of hot coffee away from him while it was still half full, and suddenly recalled that he had promised to telephone the warehouse manager the moment there was anything to report.

There was a slip of paper beside the telephone with his name and home number written on it. Shayne turned his flashlight slightly to better illuminate the instrument and paper, bent forward and dialled the number written there.

A woman’s voice answered the third ring. “Hello.”

“Is Mr. Ericsson there?”

“Just a moment.” And then he heard her voice calling faintly, “John. It’s for you.”

The manager’s voice came over the wire twenty seconds later, “Yes? Ericsson speaking.”

“Mike Shayne, Mr. Ericsson. Maybe you’d better come down to the warehouse.”

“What? Has something happened, Shayne? Did they…?”

“The power went off ten minutes ago,” Shayne told him succinctly, “and a man came in through one of the office windows. I had to kill him. I’m waiting for the police now.”

“Gracious! That’s terrible. If you could have captured him alive…”

Shayne interrupted wearily, “I couldn’t. He was too quick on the trigger for that. Might be a good idea if you were here when the police come to verify the fact that I was hired to do the job.”

“Of course, I… as soon as I can make it in all this wind. I’ll come to the side door, Shayne. The office entrance. I’ll… ah… knock twice and then once to let you know it is I. Please wait for me.”

Shayne said drily, “I have no intention of going anywhere,” and hung up. He stood up, then, his mind active and interested now that he knew Ericsson was on his way. He picked up his flashlight and swung the beam across the desk to the opposite wall and focussed it on a series of six distinct round holes in the woodwork spaced not more than a quarter of an inch apart and almost exactly horizontal.

They were no more than four or five feet above the floor, directly in line with the chair in which he had been sitting and the point from which the man had fired through the open door.

Shayne winced as he leaned forward to examine them more closely, knowing the bullets could not have passed many inches above his head. The round holes looked awfully big to have been made by slugs fired from a handgun, and he recalled the impression of an almost continuous blast of explosions which had blurred together into what was practically a single loud and murderous roar just before he pressed the trigger of his own gun.

He shook his head angrily at the recollection. His memory and his imagination must be playing tricks on him. There was no automatic weapon on the market capable of throwing lead that fast.

Still frowning, he reached in his pocket and took out the weapon to study it again, more closely. It was some sort of foreign make, he guessed, though he couldn’t identify it by sight. There was a six-inch barrel mounted solidly on an oval-shaped metal frame which extended all the way from trigger-guard to muzzle. It was hammerless. The butt was solid metal and rectangular, slanting backward from the frame at an odd angle of ten or fifteen degrees which gave the weapon an ungainly appearance, but which contributed a wonderful feeling of balance as he hefted it curiously, and which, in turn, probably gave the illusion of weightlessness which he had noticed when he first picked it up from the floor.

He looked from the gun again to the row of even-spaced holes in the wall, and knew that whatever it was it was certainly the most dangerous and deadly hand-weapon ever devised by man. And he knew also that death had never brushed him more closely than it had tonight.

The airconditioner started to hum as he stood there. It was a welcome sound, meaning that power had now been restored to the building. He dropped the gun back into his side pocket and moved around the desk to switch on the office lights. Then he stepped outside and pressed another switch that lighted the truck entrance and loading platform, and stood there a moment looking somberly at the body of the man he had killed.

He felt no remorse or compunction, only an irrational sense of irritation at the dead man for having forced the issue as he had. Put a gun into the hands of a punk like that, and he felt invincible. Particularly a gun such as the one he had brought on this job tonight.

Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders and turned away, went to the corridor and turned on more lights, then down to the office which had been entered and saw broken glass on the floor and two panes knocked out. Luckily, the wind was from the other direction and no rain was blowing into the office. He went out and down the hall to the side door which Ericsson had mentioned, unlocked it and turned the knob, bracing himself against the force of the wind.

It wasn’t blowing nearly as hard as he expected, and he let the door slam back against the wall and stood in the doorway, looking out into the night appreciatively. The rain had also lessened perceptibly and the heavily overcast sky had lightened since he had entered the warehouse. Directly in front of him a row of palm trees was outlined against the sky, fronds slanting eastward with the prevailing wind, but with their trunks not bending before the gale and threatening to uproot as they would be if the wind was more than fifty or sixty miles an hour.

The night air, too, was fresh and crisp and cool, in direct contrast to the oppressive humidity which had marked the late afternoon and evening hours, and Shayne breathed it deeply and gratefully into his lungs knowing the satisfaction that only a long-time resident of Miami can know when another tropical storm has passed by with no more actual damage than had been caused by Fatima.

The lights of an automobile turned into the driveway as he stood there, and a sedan drew up in front of him and a raincoated man slid out of the front seat and hurried toward him.

It was John Ericsson, pudgy-faced and unsmiling, panting heavily as he ducked inside the corridor to stand beside Shayne, exclaiming contritely, “I suppose I should have congratulated you on the telephone, Shayne, instead of seeming to complain. But I was taken aback. Death seems so… final and unnecessary.”

“I agree to both those terms,” Shayne told him unsmiling. “But the guy gave me very little choice. He started shooting before we could discuss the situation.”

“I understand, of course.” Ericsson shuddered and pressed his lips together firmly. “Is he one of our men, do you suppose?”

“I have no way of knowing. Why not come back and take a look at him before the cops get here?”

Shayne turned away, leaving the door open to guide the police inside when they arrived, and strode down the corridor on long legs with Ericsson pattering along beside him and saying distractedly, “I was saying to my wife this evening, while we were sitting in our living room all safe and snug from the storm raging outside waiting to receive a report from you, I was saying to her: ‘Why do men persist in breaking the law in times of comparative economic ease such as our country is now enjoying? There are jobs for all. Well-paid jobs. I have difficulty keeping a full staff even in a small operation such as this. If this man is one of our own employees, I shall feel responsible somehow. I shall feel I have failed to understand…”

Striding ahead of him, Shayne rounded the corner into the truck entrance and drew aside with a wave of his hand. “There he is. Take a look and see if you identify him.”

Ericsson went forward slowly and looked down at the dead man’s waxlike features. He sighed deeply and turned back, shaking his head. “I’m glad to say he isn’t one of our men. However, from your viewpoint I suppose that makes it more difficult, doesn’t it? We still have to assume he had inside help and information. Dear me, I simply don’t see…”

“Not necessarily,” Shayne told him. “A well organized gang such as these liquor thieves seem to be would have means of getting information… even duplicate keys. One of your men may have been indiscreet… talked out of turn to the wrong man…”

He broke off as the dying wail of a police siren came to them from outside over the sound of the storm.

“That’ll be the police now. Remember that even I don’t know where you got the tip that this place might be knocked off tonight. Tell them if you like, or merely tell them that you had a hunch because of the coming storm and the other two warehouses being robbed recently under similar circumstances.”

“Yes… I…”

But Shayne was already striding away from him down the corridor toward the open side door which was now lighted by a police spotlight from outside.

Two burly, raincoated patrolmen stomped inside, and Shayne was glad to recognize the florid, good-natured face of Jim Hogan as one of the pair. That made everything easier and a lot less official because Hogan had known Shayne for many years and was perfectly willing to accept the redhead’s explanation for the manner in which the homicide had occurred without officiously taking him in to headquarters as another cop might have been inclined to do.

Besides it was still a rough night and the pair in the radio car already had a half dozen calls on their agenda, and it was no time for formalities that could be dispensed with.

Shayne greeted Hogan with a handshake, was properly introduced to his younger partner who knew the redhead by reputation, and the pair went back to view the body while Shayne swiftly explained the circumstances that had brought him to the warehouse that night.

“And here’s Mr. Ericsson, the manager, who will verify what I’ve told you, Jim,” Shayne ended. “There’s the guy on the floor who broke in a window and started shooting at me while I was sitting inside this office here. He put a row of bulletholes in the wall behind the desk there, if you need any proof that I shot him in self-defense.”

Officer James Hogan looked at the dead man and at the bulletholes and at the chair in which Shayne had been sitting, and muttered feelingly, “Holy Mother of God, Mike, ’tis lucky your red hair was smoothed down slick tonight or I swear you’d of got a singe for free.”

At that point an ambulance drew up outside and two whitecoated men came trotting in with a stretcher and Hogan officially ordered the removal of the body to the morgue without waiting for an authorization from the medical examiner. He conferred briefly with John Ericsson, and made a note of the testimony of both Shayne and Ericsson, and dismissed them both with a wave of his hand.

“Come around to Headquarters tomorrow morning, Mike,” he directed the redhead gruffly. “You’ll have to sign a formal report as you know, and no doubt Petey Painter will want to know why in blazes you didn’t sit still in yon chair and get your head blown off instead of using your own gun. But you know how Petey is.”

Shayne said feelingly, “I know exactly how Petey is, Jim.” He clapped Hogan on the shoulder and said, “You’ve got things to do and I’ve got some sleep to catch up on.”

“Right you are. Early in the mornin’ at Headquarters, Mike. I’ve got your promise on that?”

“That you have, Jim.” Shayne went out with a wave of his big hand, happy to escape before some higher brass arrived on the scene and decreed that official protocol demanded that formal statement be made that night and that, at the very least, he should be locked up and held on an open charge until his claim of self-defense was fully substantiated.

He went around the corner to where he had parked his car earlier in the evening, got in and drove away swiftly, happy that the rain had ceased falling and there were only occasional gusts of strong wind to contend with.

The sky was clear and the stars were out brilliantly as he drove across the Causeway to the mainland. Whitecaps still rippled on the surface of Biscayne Bay, but the tropical night was unexpectedly serene in the aftermath of the storm, and Michael Shayne also felt unexpectedly serene after having taken the life of a fellow human being.

For, despite his profession as a private detective, the redhead had actually been responsible for the deaths of very few men during his long career. Normally, he never carried a gun on a case. Tonight had been an exception, of course, fully justified by the way things had turned out.

He resolutely put the affair out of his mind as he reached the end of the Causeway and turned down Biscayne Avenue toward his hotel on the north bank of the Miami River. What he needed now was a long drink of cognac and a few hours sleep. Tomorrow, he confidently expected to learn that the man who had died from his bullet tonight had a long record of violence and deserved no more pity than a savage beast of the jungle turned man-killer. Any man, Shayne told himself grimly, who sets out on a burglary job equipped with a hand-gun capable of doing the job that gun had done on the office wall tonight, is asking for whatever comes to him.

That gun! As he turned left off the Boulevard onto S.E. 3rd Street, Shayne was suddenly conscious of the weight of it in his side pocket. He hadn’t turned it over to the Miami Beach policeman. In fact, Jim Hogan hadn’t even asked to see the weapon which Shayne claimed had fired the shots into the wall of the office over his head. Shayne slowed his car as he approached 2nd Avenue, considering the matter carefully.

Hogan had been negligent in that respect. True, it had all been very hurried and very informal and he had been in a hurry to get on to other pressing calls, and his negligence would probably be overlooked under the circumstances, but Shayne hated to consider the possibility of Hogan being disciplined for his negligence.

He could, and he probably should, turn his car around and drive back to Miami Beach Police Headquarters, and turn the gun in tonight.

But that would entail all sorts of official explanations and the signing of detailed statements, and in the long run it might only serve to draw attention to the fact that Hogan had let him walk away with the gun in his possession without even asking to see it.

It might be better, Shayne decided gratefully, to forget the whole matter for tonight. He’d go to Beach Headquarters promptly the next morning, deliver the gun and take full blame by admitting that he had walked off with it in his pocket before either he or Hogan had realized what he was doing.

He turned the corner on 2nd Avenue toward the river and pulled into the curb in front of the side entrance to his hotel. He parked there and went in and climbed one flight of stairs, avoiding the lobby and the elevator.

In his apartment near the end of the hall, he turned on the overhead light and started to shrug out of his jacket, was suddenly conscious of the unaccustomed weights in both pockets and went to the table in the center of the room to empty them.

First, the flashlight from his left pocket, and then the large-caliber pistol from the right. Then his own.38 from his waistband where he always carried it on the rare occasions when he packed a gun because he had never owned a shoulder holster in his life.

He laid the three objects on the table in front of him and his gaze brooded down at them for a long moment, then he turned away into the kitchen where he ran hot water over a tray of ice-cubes and broke three of them loose, dropped them into a tall glass which he filled with water from the tap.

On his way back into the living room, he stopped by a wall cabinet and picked up a four-ounce wine glass and a half-filled bottle of cognac. He carried them to the center table, filled the glass with the amber fluid and settled himself in a deep armchair.

He lit a cigarette, took an appreciative sip of the mellow liquor and washed it about in his mouth to savor the taste after a long evening of only warehouse coffee to drink, then chased it down with a swallow of ice water.

He turned his gaze to the flashlight and the two guns on the table beside him, and considered them somberly. The familiar.38 had killed a man tonight. The other gun, unfamiliar and curiously designed, had tried to kill him. He stretched out one hand and turned it slowly so he was looking directly into the muzzle opening.

It seemed huge to him. As big as a.45? Bigger, he thought. But a.45 was the largest caliber pistol he knew. Of course, he wasn’t an authority on the calibers of foreign pistols.

He picked it up and turned it over and over in his hands, studying it curiously. The metal was dark, with no hint of chrome or of glisten to it. It looked brand-new, pristine, as though it had never been handled by human hands before.

It was a completely new design to him. Looking at it casually, he was unable to determine how it was supposed to work, where the cartridges were stored or how they were fired. He discovered three small push-buttons set in the butt of it where a man’s right thumb would normally rest, and he pressed each one of them, getting a faint click each time but no other result.

He shook his head disapprovingly and put it down and picked up the wine-glass to have another drink.

When he set the glass down he sat frowning at it, at the faint but very distinct fingerprints left on the clean outside surface of the glass. He rubbed the tips of his thumb and the first three fingers of his right hand together thoughtfully, and felt what appeared to be a thin film of oil on the skin.

He got out his handkerchief and wiped his fingertips carefully and discovered faint greasy smudges on the clean linen.

He looked from the stained handkerchief to the pistol on the table, and the faint glimmerings of a memory nagged at him. There was something about that gun. Something he should remember. He had seen it before somewhere. Or its counterpart. It should mean something to him.

But he didn’t know what.

He was tired. He had killed a man tonight.

He needed sleep.

He tossed off the rest of the cognac and drank half a glass of ice water, and got up decisively.

He turned out the living room lights and went into the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went.

Ten minutes later he was sound asleep.

3

Michael Shayne awoke at eight o’clock the next morning. He felt wonderfully relaxed and rested, and hungry as a bitch wolf suckling sixteen pups. The morning sun slanted into his bedroom with vivid intensity, yet there was also a caressingly cool breeze coming through the open window as a reminder of last night’s storm.

He lit a cigarette from the bedside table, got into a robe and slippers and went out into the kitchen where he ran hot water into a pot for the dripolator, measured six heaping tablespoons of coffee into the top, and then put an iron frying pan on another burner and arranged five strips of bacon in it.

By the time the water had come to a boil and dripped down through the powdered coffee, the bacon was crisp and toast was browned and buttered, and five eggs were lightly scrambled in the hot bacon grease.

He poured his first mug of strong black coffee and ate every scrap of the food unhurriedly and appreciatively there in the small kitchen, washing it down with the last of the coffee, then lit a cigarette and poured himself another mug, carried it into the living room and set it on the center table where he laced it liberally with cognac from the open bottle he’d left standing the night before.

His flashlight and.38 and the queer-looking pistol still lay on the table before him, and he studied the three objects through half-closed eyes while he took a tentative sip of coffee-royal.

That damned gun! He had dreamed about it in the night. Mixed-up, absurd dreams which were blurred and nonsensical now in his memory. But there was still, even stronger than he had felt it the night before, that nagging sense of familiarity as he looked at the weapon. Somewhere… somehow… he had seen just such a gun before. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, he thought. Just a passing glimpse which had not impressed itself on his conscious mind, but it was back there in his subconscious, eluding him, twitting him as he searched for it.

He blinked his eyes and firmly turned his gaze away, concentrated on the enjoyment of his cigarette and the pungent taste of his favorite eye-opener, switching his thoughts to the day that lay before him and things that he must do.

First: Miami Beach Headquarters to deliver the gun and make out a formal report on last night’s affair. There would be acrimonious questions to answer from Peter Painter, dapper Chief of Detectives on the Beach, who considered it an encroachment on his own private hunting preserve if a private detective was called in on a case from the mainland.

His telephone rang while he was mentally preparing answers to Painter’s acid questions.

Timothy Rourke’s voice came over the wire. “Mike. They tell me you had a little target practice over at the beach last night. What’s the story?”

“Just a punk trying to knock off another liquor warehouse.”

“One less punk, eh?” The reporter’s voice was cheerfully callous. “You gave him first shot, huh?”

Shayne said, “Yeh. Six of them to be exact.” Then he paused suddenly, holding the instrument away from his ear and turning his head to look at the pistol on the table. Things clicked into place in his mind.

He said quickly, “Maybe there is a special angle for a story, Tim. You had coffee?”

“Yeh,” said Rourke disgustedly, “my own lousy bachelor’s brew, and not even a wee drap around this dump to taste it up a bit.”

“You’re still at home?”

“Sure. Where else at this time of night?”

“I,” said Shayne happily, “have a fresh pot of my own brew on the stove with a bottle of cognac in readiness. Want to drop by?”

“Why else do you think I wasted a phone call? Keep it hot and the cork in the bottle for ten minutes.”

“Don’t hang up, Tim. You got copies of the last few papers around?”

“I guess.”

“Take a look about three days back. Maybe four. It was an inside story, Tim. Page two or three. Holdup man on the Beach that got blasted by a storekeeper. There was a picture taken at police headquarters of the arsenal he had on him. Remember that? A switchblade, gun and sap lying on a table with Painter pointing down at them.”

“Last Monday, I think it was.”

“Bring it along, Tim. It’s worth a double shot of French grapejuice in your coffee.”

Rourke said briskly, “I’m on my way,” and hung up.

Shayne drank off the rest of his coffee without lingering over it, then shaved and showered quickly and was emerging from the bedroom fastening the top button of a sport shirt at his throat when Rourke’s knock sounded on his door.

He opened it for the lean reporter who carried a folded newspaper in his hand and wore a look of hopeful anticipation on his gaunt face that was almost emaciated in its thinness.

He stopped inside the door to sniff the air happily, and the tip of his sharp nose quivered as he looked at the bottle on the table.

Shayne took the paper from him and said, “Pour yourself a mug and refill mine, Tim. It’s on the stove keeping hot.”

While Rourke hurried into the kitchen, Shayne walked slowly back to the center table, unfolding the paper to the news story and picture which had come back clearly to his mind as he talked to Rourke on the phone.

He hadn’t been mistaken. It was unmistakably a picture of the same gun that he had brought home last night. He spread it out and was leaning over it reading the story beneath the picture when Rourke returned from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of coffee with plenty of room below the brim for a healthy slug to be added. He set them down and picked up the bottle, hesitated with it in mid-air as his gaze was caught by the objects on the table in front of him. He glanced quickly at the newspaper picture and back at the pistol, then poured cognac in both mugs and said conversationally, “I see what you mean, Mike. You think Painter’s renting out firearms to hoods on the Beach?”

Shayne looked up from the story he was reading with a grin. “Not exactly. Though I wouldn’t put it past him if he’d known I was planted in that warehouse last night. But he didn’t, so we’ll have to skip that intriguing possibility. Ever see a gat even remotely like that one before?”

Rourke shook his head. “I’m no expert. About all I know about a gun is which end shoots. Foreign, isn’t it? Something like a Luger?”

“Something. Not much.” Shayne looked back at the paper. “This other man appears to have been a loner. New in town and no known record. He died before he could do any talking.”

“Is that bad?” Rourke pulled another chair closer to the table and sat down comfortably, his deep-set eyes bright and probing.

Shayne shrugged and said, “I don’t know. My boy died the same way last night. I hoped maybe we could tie them together somehow. That gun worries me, Tim. It’s a real son-of-a-bitch on wheels. There never was such shooting in this world before.” He dropped into his own chair and took a sip of coffee. “I was sitting in the dark waiting and he flung his light on me, Tim. Then there was one goddamned b-r-r-r-r-r… like that. Only loud enough to split your eardrums. I got off one lucky shot and that ended it, thank God. But when it was over, Tim, believe this or not, there was a row of six holes in the wall above my head. Evenly-spaced and every one the size of my thumb. Look at that muzzle. Six of them… all in the space of one b-r-r-r-r-r.” Shayne shook his red head slowly, still refusing to quite believe what his memory told him was true.

The reporter’s ignorance of hand-guns left him singularly unimpressed by his friend’s recital. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “One bullet from your gun was more than a match for his six. What’s eating on you?”

Shayne continued slowly shaking his head. “I don’t know… really. It’s just… There was something goddamned eerie about my experience last night. If you’d been there… if you’d heard what I heard…” He paused and ran knobby fingers through his coarse red hair and then grinned ruefully. “I sort of got the jitters over it,” he confessed. “I kept looking at this gun and trying to remember where I’d seen one like it before. Then I remembered this picture in the paper…” He broke off and took a long drink of coffee-royal.

“One thing you don’t have to be a gun-expert to notice, Tim. That gun on the table is spanking new. Like it just came from the factory. I don’t know whether that means anything, but… what about this twin in the picture? Did you happen to get a look at it? I wonder if it’s a virgin also.”

Rourke said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t on that story myself. I’ll check if you want.”

“No need,” Shayne told him decisively. “I’ve got a date with Peter Painter this morning, and I’ll have to turn this in to him. Merest oversight that I didn’t do so last night.”

“What about last night, Mike?” Rourke got out a wad of copy paper and a pencil. “The way I got it, you had a tipoff that warehouse was scheduled to be knocked off during the storm and you staked the place out. By yourself, huh? You want me to mention this particular gun in my story?”

“No,” Shayne told him vehemently. “Stay off that angle right now. I want to do some more checking. Just put it down that I got in a lucky shot last night. How’s your cup?”

Rourke lifted his mug to his lips and drained it. “Empty,” he sighed, setting it down in front of him. “Lousy service you got here, Mike.”

Shayne said, “I’ll speak to the management. In the meantime… how about a refill?”

“I’d love one, but I emptied the pot last time.” The reporter’s thin hand snaked out and closed around the cognac bottle. “I can still stand this stuff straight.” He tipped it over his empty mug and splashed in a couple of ounces, then held the bottle out toward his old friend. “Have one on the house?”

Shayne shook his head with a grin. “I’ve still got to beard Petey Painter in his lair and justify last night’s killing.”

He got out a cigarette and looked at his watch. “Joe Hogan is going to be on a spot if I don’t turn up pronto at Beach Headquarters to plead justifiable homicide.”

Timothy Rourke nodded, sipping his straight cognac from the warm mug with gusto. “Keep me informed, huh?”

Shayne nodded, getting up. He casually folded the newspaper Rourke had brought him, and then shrugged into a sport jacket. The reporter leaned back in his chair and watched interestedly while Shayne opened a center drawer of the desk and put flashlight and his own.38 inside, then picked up the other gun and dropped it into a side pocket. The folded newspaper went into the opposite pocket, and Rourke drained his mug and set it down regretfully.

He got to his feet and said, “Lunch?”

Shayne said, “Probably. At Tony’s. If I don’t show up, give Lucy a ring and she’ll know where I am.”

He turned to the door to go out and Timothy Rourke followed him.

4

From the point where he had left his car parked the preceding night, Michael Shayne made an illegal U-turn in front of the bridge and headed north on 2nd Avenue. He was frowning, in deep thought, as he drove, and he didn’t turn east on either 4th or 2nd Street to get over to the Boulevard. Instead, he continued on to Flagler and turned right, and moved into the first vacant parking space he found on the right-hand side of the street.

He got out and walked briskly to one of the arcades opening off Flagler, turned in and went halfway down to a ground-floor office opening directly off the arcade.

A neat brass plaque over the door said: “Rufus O’Toole, Gunsmith.”

Shayne opened the door onto a small, unadorned reception room with a glass counter at the end of it and several comfortable chairs and smoking stands ranged along the wall.

A bell sounded in the workshop at the rear of the office when Shayne opened the door, and he strolled up to the counter and waited.

In a moment a small, gnomelike man emerged through the curtained doorway at the rear. Rufus O’Toole had a hunched back, a wrinkled, leathery face, and the brightest blue eyes in the world. His eyes twinkled happily when he saw Shayne waiting at the counter, and he said in a lilting brogue, “The top of the marnin’ to ye, Michael me bye. You’re lookin’ well for an old lecher with the years you do be carryin’.”

Shayne grinned and said, “The same goes double for you, Rufe. I need some information.” He withdrew the pistol from his pocket and laid it on the glass counter in front of O’Toole. “Ever see one of these before?”

The gunsmith’s bright eyes studied the weapon for a long moment, and then he reached out for it with slender, strong fingers and turned it slowly, lifting it in both hands and then sliding the butt of it into his palm and holding it caressingly as he tested the weight and balance.

“No, Mike,” he said soberly, dropping his professional Irishness. “I’ve never laid eyes on the like before. Is it for sale?”

“I’m on my way to turn it over to Peter Painter at Beach Headquarters,” Shayne explained. “I hoped you’d recognize it and be able to tell me exactly what the devil it is.”

“Oh, I recognize it all right, Michael.” O’Toole laid it down carefully and then looked at his fingers and rubbed them together, sniffed them and wrinkled his nose slightly. “I merely said I’d never had the pleasure of seeing or handling one before.”

“Some foreign make?” Shayne asked dubiously.

“Indeed, yes. Our mass production economy would never waste the time and money to produce a beautifully tooled precision instrument like this.” He touched it lovingly again with his fingertips. “Not even Germany ever turned out a gun like this. They might have in the old days… if they’d had the modern alloys to work with… this particular metal has several times the strength of steel… has to in order to withstand a muzzle energy of more than two thousand foot pounds.” He paused, screwing up his face in concentration. “Twenty-one hundred and eighty pounds, I believe, to be exact. Though I would have to check before I made a flat statement.”

He tilted his head on one side and saw from the look on Shayne’s face that the figures meant nothing to the detective, and he added gently: “That, coupled with a muzzle velocity of nineteen hundred eighty feet per second and a caliber of twelve-oh-seven millimeters should give you some idea of the tremendous force embodied in this little fellow which weighs only thirty-seven ounces. That’s two ounces less than a Colt forty-five, Michael. Ten ounces less than a forty-four Magnum.”

Shayne leaned his elbows on the glass counter and gazed down at the gun and said slowly, “Translate those figures for me, Rufe. Your muzzle velocities and energies. Remember, I just carry a thirty-eight Special… and that very seldom.”

“Well, your regular thirty-eight Special has a muzzle velocity of about eight hundred feet per second,” explained O’Toole briskly, “and a muzzle energy of less than three hundred foot pounds.”

“As against two thousand and two thousand on this one,” said Shayne, nodding slowly. “How does it compare, for instance, with a forty-four caliber Magnum? That’s the biggest hunk of hand-gun I’ve ever handled.”

“Throwing a much larger slug than the biggest Magnum,” said O’Toole with relish, “this little fellow develops four or five hundred more feet per second of muzzle velocity, and almost twice the rated muzzle energy of a forty-four Magnum. And this is a fifty caliber gun, Mike. Not a forty-four.”

Shayne drew in his breath slowly, “Sweet Mother! Those slugs that sang over my head last night! As I recall it, a forty-four Magnum has penetration of about a dozen one-inch pine boards.”

O’Toole nodded happily and purred, “Frankly, I don’t know what it would take to stop one of the fifty caliber bullets fired by this baby. But I don’t think they’d be likely to bounce off even your skull.”

“You’ve been throwing a lot of technical data around,” said Shayne, “but you still haven’t given chapter and verse on this thing. What is it?”

“It’s Russian, of course. They’re the only ones with the technical know-how and the sort of police state than can order such a thing produced regardless of cost and the economics involved. It’s known as a Lenski twelve-oh-seven. It was perfected and officially announced as in limited production in the mid-fifties. Fifty-six, I think. I could check on that if you want. And there’s still one small gimmick that I haven’t mentioned, Michael. This is the first truly automatic hand-gun ever invented. It is credited with firing a burst of six rounds in something less than a second. Or, twelve rounds in slightly over a second. That’s comparable with the performance of an automatic rifle.”

Shayne said in an awed voice, “Then I didn’t dream it. The damned thing did make a row of six holes in the wall over my head last night. Each one of them the size of my thumb.”

O’Toole nodded sagely. “They would be close-spaced, Michael. If it was set on first automatic.” He picked the gun up again and studied it reverently, turning it around and around in his hands.

“You mentioned twelve rounds in little more than a second,” said Shayne dubiously. “Do you mean to say it only fired half its load last night?”

O’Toole shrugged his thin, hunched shoulders and hefted the gun in his right hand. “It’s heavy for the weight it’s said to carry. I’d guess it’s still half loaded. It carries a total of twelve rounds, Michael. See these three buttons on the side of the grip?” He turned it to expose the three buttons Shayne had discovered previously. “They control the automatic mechanism. The top button, here, puts it on single shot. Each time you touch the trigger one bullet is fired. The second one gives you a burst of six, and the bottom one empties the chamber of all twelve rounds.”

He leaned over the gun absorbedly and his fingers delicately manipulated it, and all at once the under part of the carriage beneath the barrel swung open revealing an intricate mechanism inside with some of the ugliest and biggest metal-cased cartridges Shayne had ever seen, spaced in a plastic belt which apparently moved on rollers to feed a fresh cartridge into the firing chamber each time a bullet was discharged.

“You see, Michael, how beautifully it is designed. Here is your second burst of six fifty caliber bullets ready and waiting for a second touch of the trigger. It’s a real beauty. We must give the Russians credit where credit is due.”

“What would it be worth in this country?” Shayne asked.

O’Toole shook his head and shrugged his shoulders again, closing up the gun as he did so. “There’s no catalog price. None have ever been imported to my knowledge. Collectors would pay five or six hundred… up to a thousand dollars to possess a clean specimen like this.” He cocked his head on one side and studied the gun speculatively. “’Tis comparable to a newly minted coin, Michael, or an unlicked postage stamp.” He rubbed the tips of his fingers gently over the metal surface again, sniffed them and then touched them to his tongue. He nodded with the rapt look of a wine-taster testing for bouquet and vintage. “It’s been poorly cleaned by an amateur and retains traces of the original fish grease it was packed in at the factory… corresponding to our own cosmoline. And so, Michael. How did it come to Miami and into your hands?”

Shayne said flatly, “I took it off a cheap hood last night… after he tried to liquidate me with it.” He paused and added thoughtfully, “It’s not the only one either, Rufe. Another one exactly like it turned up several days ago. Maybe Russia is shipping them into this country on the sly.”

The gunsmith shook his head and said authoritatively, “It’s an expensive item for export, Michael. They were produced in limited quantities in the late fifties, and production ceased in nineteen fifty-eight, I believe it was. They were not regular issue, you understand, but were designed for the use of special police and saboteurs operating under particular conditions. The possession of one of these, you comprehend, transforms an individual into a one-man army.”

“That,” said Shayne feelingly, “is the impression I got last night when I was on the receiving end of a burst from that baby.” He paused thoughtfully. “I suppose some of them could have made their way into Cuba with the Russian arms build-up there. With refugees and what-not floating back and forth, I suppose we’ve got to expect stuff like this to turn up in Miami now and then.”

“It’s been happening of late,” O’Toole agreed cautiously. “Many queer ones are turning up about town. But this Lenski is in a different category, Michael. This gun has actually never been handled. It’s factory-fresh, you might say. A man with a case of those at his disposal would be in the way of making a fortune.”

“There would be legal formalities about putting them on the market,” Shayne suggested.

The gunsmith shrugged and smiled cynically. “Rare gun collectors are a breed like any other collectors, Michael. Not likely to ask embarrassing questions or stand on legalities.” He hesitated and then said quietly, “I will pay a flat five hundred each for as many as you want to bring me. Pass that word around if you run into the right people.”

Shayne nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll keep it in mind, Rufus. Yours would at least end up in private collections and not in the hands of indiscriminate criminals.”

“There would be that advantage to keep in mind,” O’Toole agreed cheerfully.

Shayne hesitated before picking up the Russian hand-gun again, shuddering a trifle inwardly as he recalled the careless manner in which he had handled it when he innocently assumed that six rounds was all it carried. “I suppose the damned thing is cocked now and ready to start firing,” he said with a frown. “How safe is it to carry around in my pocket?”

“Perfectly safe. It can’t fire unless one of those three buttons is depressed at the same time the trigger is pulled. It’s an automatic locking device that is practically foolproof. But I’ll be happy to unload it for you if you’ll feel better about carrying it.”

“I would feel a little better,” Shayne admitted honestly. “But I’d better leave it as is to turn over to Painter. He’s going to take a very dim view of my walking off with it last night anyhow.”

He picked the weapon up gingerly by the butt and dropped it into his pocket. “I’ll let you know if anything develops, Rufe.”

“You do that. The offer I made was for a quantity, Michael. For just one I will double the ante.”

With a grin, Shayne said, “If Painter gets wind of that he may be around to make a deal with you.” He went out with a farewell wave of his big hand, and Rufus O’Toole watched the door close behind his broad back with a speculative gleam in his bright blue eyes.

5

In his private office at Miami Beach Police Headquarters, Chief of Detectives Peter Painter greeted the detective with an irascible scowl when he walked in. “You took your own sweet time getting here, Shayne. Another half hour and I would have had a warrant sworn out for your arrest.”

Shayne said, “In that case I’m glad I didn’t take time for that extra cup of coffee I wanted.” He pulled a chair closer to the chief’s wide, uncluttered desk and sat down. “You know I promised Hogan I’d be in first thing.”

“Hogan exceeded his authority by permitting you to walk away from the scene of the crime last night,” snapped Painter. “You can’t just come over to the Beach and knock off our citizens at your pleasure, Shayne.”

Shayne said wearily, “Come off it, Painter. You know how things were last night. Hogan had a lot more important things to do than drag me in to make a formal statement. I’m here now, so what’s the fuss?”

“I’d like some factual evidence that last night’s killing was justifiable self-defense. All we have right now is an unsupported statement from you that the other man fired at you first.”

“Did Hogan mention the six bullet-holes in the wall of the office directly over the chair I was sitting in?”

“There was some such notation in his report.” Painter leaned back stiffly and brushed his pencil-thin black mustache with his left thumb-nail. “You want us to think you were staked out waiting for him to break into the warehouse and sat quietly in your chair while he fired six bullets over your head before you got off one of your own? Even on TV the noble private eyes don’t give a killer six shots to one. Did you have to get your gun out and load it before you started shooting back?”

Shayne reached in his pocket and got out the Russian pistol and put it on the desk in front of him. “That’s the baby that did it,” he said easily. “If you want to know the truth, I had exactly less than one second to get my shot off.”

Painter blinked incredulously at the strange-looking gun and shook his head. “What is it? A pocket bazooka?”

“That’s not a bad guess,” Shayne agreed. “Actually it’s Russian. A Lenski twelve-oh-seven. That’s twelve millimeters,” he added. “Fifty caliber by our standards.”

“Fifty caliber?” Painter leaned forward and poked at the gun with one fingertip to turn it so he could peer into the yawning muzzle.

“It carries a full load of twelve fifty-caliber bullets,” Shayne told him, “and is fully automatic and discharges six of them in less than one second. That’s what happened in the warehouse last night,” he added grimly, “while I was fooling around and getting set to shoot back.”

“Nonsense,” said Painter briskly. “It’s sheer impossibility. Something you dreamed up from reading too much science fiction and listening to too much Russian propaganda.”

“Not only that,” said Shayne, calmly disregarding the detective chief’s sarcasm, “but it’s something like twice as powerful as our Magnum forty-four. This funny-looking contraption,” he went on acidly, “is manufactured from some alloy that weighs a couple of ounces less than a standard Colt forty-five, yet is strong enough to withstand a muzzle velocity of nineteen hundred and eighty feet per second and a muzzle energy of more than two thousand foot pounds. Just to give you an idea of what that means… the thirty-eight you normally carry has a muzzle energy of two hundred and sixty-six foot pounds.”

“Where the devil do you get all this information about guns?” growled Painter.

“It’s part of my job to know all about guns,” Shayne lied to him happily. “You never know when some stray bit of information may come in handy. But the important thing is this, Painter.” He leaned forward seriously now. “So far as any records show, there has never been a Lenski twelve-oh-seven imported into the country. Where did our boy get hold of it for last night’s job?”

“Maybe he’s a Russian spy?”

“Knocking over our liquor warehouses?” Shayne smiled grimly. “I doubt it somehow. What did you get on him?”

“Nothing important.” Painter moved a sheet of paper in front of him and studied it. “Name was Miles Leiffer. Twenty-eight. Resident of the Beach. A punk. He’s been in and out of trouble since he was eighteen. Petty stuff. Not even armed robbery in the past. His known associates are all the same ilk. No tie-up with any gang such as the warehouse looters seem to be.”

“I’d like to know how a guy like that got hold of this Russian time bomb.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Mike.” Painter was suddenly and excessively cordial. “Lots of stuff from Cuba is getting into circulation here nowadays. Refugees get over here broke and peddle anything they’re carrying for a few bucks to eat on.”

“I know. One more thing I didn’t mention about this little item is that it’s brand new. Still has traces of the original grease it was packed in at the factory for shipment overseas. You can tell by the fishy smell it has.”

“I know there’s something damned fishy about it. What kind of crap are you feeding me, Mike? Fish-grease, by God!”

“Ask any expert,” said Shayne calmly. “Get your own Sergeant Anderson in here. If he’s as good as I think he is, he’ll verify every statement I’ve made.”

“Anderson is one of the best ballistics men in the state, but I seriously doubt he’s that good,” fumed Painter. “We’ll see.” He pressed a button at the edge of his desk and spoke into an intercom, “Send Sergeant Anderson in here.” Then he leaned back and thumb-nailed his mustache again, and his black eyes glittered at the gaunt-faced redhead. “Suppose what you say is true, why worry about one gun? No matter how lethal it may be. We’ve got it out of circulation.”

“There’s one other little thing that bothers me.” Shayne pulled the folded newspaper from his pocket and pushed it across the desk under Painter’s nose. “Do you remember posing for that picture a few days ago?”

Painter glanced down at the paper and stiffened. He looked at it a long moment, and then slowly, seemingly unwillingly, transferred his gaze to the pistol in front of him. He wet his lips and muttered, “I see what you mean. I remember about that damned gun now. I asked Anderson what in hell it was, and he said he thought it was a Russian make, and he was going to try and look it up in some arms manual he has.”

“Two of them here on the Beach in three or four days,” Shayne pointed out. “Law enforcement is liable to get tough if many of those baby cannons get scattered around among your underworld.”

The door of the office opened and Sergeant Anderson stepped inside. He was a tall, bulky man, with snow-white hair and placid features. He lifted his eyebrows in surprise at the sight of the Miami detective whom he knew well, said, “You wanted me, Chief?” to Painter, then drew in his breath abruptly as he caught sight of the gun on the desk.

He said, “Another one of those, eh?” and glanced from the weapon to Shayne. “I admit I wondered this morning when I saw Hogan’s report in last night’s shooting. But he wasn’t very clear about it, and didn’t mention the type of weapon involved.”

Peter Painter cleared his throat unhappily. “Recognize it, Sergeant?”

“It’s known as a Lenski twelve-oh-seven. A Russian product, Chief. After reading up on it in the International Small Arms Manual, I experimented some with the one that turned up last Monday. My God! the penetration power that thing carries. I added three sandbags to my Ballistic Range before I even slowed it down.”

“Why wasn’t I given a report on the previous one, Sergeant?” demanded Painter in an ominous voice. “Goddamit, do I have to wait for a private dick from Miami to come in here and tell me what’s going on in my own town?”

“I wrote you a detailed report day before yesterday,” Anderson told him calmly. “Remember, when you first showed it to me I admitted I didn’t know what the hell it was, but promised I’d find out. If you don’t read reports from Ballistics how do you expect to know what’s going on?”

Anderson was an old and valued department-head in the Miami Beach Police Force and one of the few men serving under Peter Painter who would dare to speak up in that manner, and the chief conceded gruffly, “All right, Anderson. There’s just too much paperwork involved in my job. So, it’s a Russian gun, eh? How did it get into Miami?”

“That, I can’t say. Not officially or legally, I’m quite certain. There’s no record of any such importations. So, you ran up against this last night, Mike?” he added curiously. “And came out of it alive?”

“By the grace of God and a lot of luck. Tell me, Andy. About the other one. Was it brand new also? Factory-fresh?”

“That’s one of the first things I noticed about it. The Russians use a special type of grease as a protection in packing their guns for shipment,” he went on, speaking half to Shayne and half to his superior. “My tests confirmed the presence of that grease on the other gun, and I’d guess this one will show it up, too.”

“So, there it is.” Shayne spoke musingly, narrowing his eyes in thought and tugging worriedly at his left earlobe. “Two completely virgin Lenskis popping up in your territory within days of each other, Painter. Each one in the hands of a punk who probably didn’t have the slightest idea what he had hold of. Does either one of you have any idea what price they would bring from a rare gun collector in this country?”

Both the detective chief and sergeant were silent for a moment, and then Anderson offered diffidently, “I got interested and checked all the information I could find in technical journals, and while the Russians don’t quote any actual retail prices as we do, I gathered that the production cost on this model was roughly equivalent to a hundred and fifty of our dollars.” He paused and then added strongly, “From what I’ve seen of its performance I’d say it was a hell of a bargain at that price.”

Shayne shrugged and offered blandly, “I’ll double that price for a dozen of them if you can turn them up, Sergeant.”

“You planning to equip a private army?” sneered Painter.

“It’s my thought,” said Shayne equably, “that if there’s a supply of these loose around these parts, I’d much prefer to get them into my hands instead of in the possession of trigger-happy boys like the one I came up against last night. I think we should make a hell of an effort to locate the source of supply and cut it off before your men start getting blasted off their beats,” he added seriously to Painter.

“So now you’ve started worrying about the welfare of my men,” said Painter bitingly. “That’s very commendable. Just how do you suggest we go about locating the source of supply?”

Shayne shrugged. “Routine police work. These two men who were both killed with Lenskis in their possession… check back on all their associates and try to learn where they might have picked the guns up… find out how long they’ve had them in their possession.”

“Sure. We ask questions like that, you know what kind of answers we’re going to get. Any other bright ideas about how I ought to run my police force?”

Shayne said dispassionately, “You asked me.” He turned to Sergeant Anderson. “Where do punks like these normally pick up a gat if they need one for a job?”

“Any pawn-shop… second-hand store. You know how it is. Of course, the boys in the rackets that really have connections…” He shrugged significantly. “That’s a different story. But on your own, you’d just ask around, I guess.”

“Then why don’t you try asking around?” Shayne suggested sharply to Painter. “Cover every pawn-shop on the Beach, and get Will Gentry to do the same in Miami. He’ll cooperate if you explain how important it is.”

“Do you know how many pawn-shops there are in the Miami area?” demanded Painter witheringly.

“I haven’t any idea. It takes a dick five minutes to make his visit and ask a question.”

“And you know what sort of answer he’ll get to that sort of question. Christ alive, Shayne. You haven’t cut your eye-teeth in police work.”

“You’ve got stoolies, haven’t you?” persisted Shayne. “Put the word out.”

“I think you’re making a hell of a mountain out of a damned small molehill,” fumed Painter. “Personally, I’m not ready to concede that any gun produced by the damned Commies is so far superior to the ones we produce. It stands to reason, dammit. This lousy thing will probably fall to pieces next time anybody fires it. What’s all the excitement about? You’d think, by God, we’re about to be invaded.”

Shayne said, “Okay. It was just a suggestion.” He paused and then added, “If you want to get a stenographer in I’ll dictate a statement on last night and sign it. You can also get an affidavit from Ericsson, the warehouse manager, if you want it, testifying to the effect that I was officially on guard duty last night, and was protecting their property when the shooting occurred.”

He settled back and lit a cigarette while Painter dismissed Anderson and ordered a stenographer to come in.

6

It was after eleven o’clock before Michael Shayne finished dictating the long and detailed report required by Painter, waited for it to be typed in triplicate and signed all three copies.

It was hot as he emerged from Police Headquarters, the cool breeze of early morning having died away during the time he had wasted inside, and he got in his car and pulled away hastily, crossed to the mainland by the Venetian Causeway which was comparatively cool with open blue water on both sides of the roadway.

At the end of the Causeway he continued on directly to Miami Avenue and turned southward, cruising down the crowded street slowly while he considered various possible courses of action, discarding each one as impractical until his eye was suddenly caught by the faded sign on a dingy bar on the right hand side of the street which was called starkly and simply, “PAPA’S PLACE.”

He eased into a parking spot a short distance ahead, pleased that he had been reminded of Papa Gonzalez at this juncture. He walked back briskly and entered the ill-lighted barroom which stank of stale beer and human sweat.

But it was cool inside, and crowded for that hour of the morning. At least a dozen men were hunched over mugs of beer at the long bar, all of them Cubans and chattering explosively in their own language. Half the tables along the wall were occupied, with two checker games and one game of dominoes in full swing, and these tables were surrounded by onlookers who watched and commented on each move made by the players.

Shayne stopped at the unoccupied end of the bar, blinking his eyes at the dimness and trying to remember how long it had been since he had last entered Papa’s Place. More than a year, he guessed. Probably two or three. Soon after the initial Castro triumph in Cuba, he thought, and prior to the disillusionment of so many Cubans and the influx of refugees into Miami.

The bartender came toward him languidly, a tall, mustached, one-eyed Cuban, with a questioning scowl on his swarthy face at the sight of the red-headed gringo. Silence had fallen over the men seated at the other end of the bar, and their heads had turned to regard him furtively.

Shayne looked dubiously at the row of dusty bottles behind the bar and decided to play it safe by ordering Bacardi. “A straight shot with a little water on the side,” he told the bartender, getting out his wallet and extracting a five-dollar bill.

When the drink was set before him he sipped it blandly, facing straight forward and paying no attention to the watching and waiting men on his right.

The bartender went to the till and returned, placing four dollar bills and four dimes in front of him. Shayne put his forefinger on one of the bills and pushed it forward, saying courteously, “For this, would one of the hombres at the end of the bar be persuaded to go upstairs and tell Papa Gonzalez that Michael Shayne is here and desires a word with him?”

The bartender paused, cocking his head and rubbing the side of his nose, “You are a friend of Papa’s, Señor?”

“Michael Shayne,” the redhead repeated gently. “Por favor.”

The bartender scooped up the bill and went to the end of the bar where he spoke in a low voice to one of the men. Shayne continued to sip his good Island rum, looking straight ahead and disregarding the others.

He drained his glass and set it down when he was aware of movement behind him and felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and a very thin young man of about twenty with glossy black hair and smouldering black eyes said, “You will come with me, Señor?”

Shayne followed him to the rear, behind the backs of the men seated silently at the bar, to an uncarpeted stairway that led up to the second floor where the young man stood aside and silently gesticulated upward.

Shayne climbed the stairs, hearing the resumption of animated conversation in the room below as he reached the top. A door stood open directly across an unlighted hallway, and Papa Gonzalez got up from behind a bare desk in the center of the room as Shayne stepped inside.

He was a tall, spare, distinguished-looking Spaniard, with silvery hair and aquiline features which remained unsmiling yet held a pleased, welcoming look as he leaned across the desk to offer Shayne a sinewy hand, and said pleasantly, “When the man said your name I did not know whether he erred or not. It has been a long time since you honored my poor place with a visit.”

Shayne shook hands warmly and said, “You can relax, Papa. I’m here to ask a favor of you.”

“There is no one in the entire city of Miami,” said the old man courteously, “to whom I would rather grant a favor.”

Shayne turned and closed the door behind him, then sat down in a wooden chair in front of the desk and crossed his long legs. Gonzalez reseated himself behind the desk, leaned forward with both elbows on the bare surface and rested the tips of his fingers on both sides of his forehead, shadowing and half-hiding his bronzed features.

“You are still… detecting?” he probed delicately. “I read… things in the papers.”

Shayne nodded, getting out a cigarette. “From the looks of things downstairs, you’re keeping busy, too.”

“So many of my countrymen are here with much leisure and little money,” said Gonzalez sadly. “For the price of one beer they are welcome in my place for as many hours as they wish.”

“That should make many of them available for a job that would put money in their pockets,” suggested Shayne.

“Yes. You have such a job, my friend?”

“I want your boys to find a gun like this one for me.” Shayne withdrew the folded newspaper from his pocket and pushed it across the desk. Gonzalez looked down at the picture and shook his whitehaired head, making a deprecatory clucking noise.

“I know nothing of guns. My boys, as you are pleased to call them, know nothing of guns. It is a rule…” He paused, regarding Shayne thoughtfully.

“This is a very special kind of gun. Look at it carefully, Papa. It is manufactured in Russia and two of them have appeared in Miami this past week. I must consider the possibility that they are part of a shipment of arms furnished Fidel Castro by the Russians and are being brought to Miami by refugees. This would disturb our government, Papa. It would be well if it could be proved otherwise.”

The Spaniard shook his head and sighed audibly. He repeated, “Those who come to my place know nothing of guns. It is a rule.”

“Those who do not know your rule would not refuse to sell your boys a gun like this,” Shayne told him. “If there is some place in the city where such a gun is for sale, it is worth a great deal of money to me to have the name of such a place. Pawn-shops and second-hand stores. Those who buy and sell merchandise without inquiring as to sources too closely. Perhaps you could have inquiries made at such places. It is an urgent matter, Papa. Perhaps twenty or thirty men asking questions in the right places both here and on the Beach.”

He got out his wallet as he spoke and opened it to extract a sheaf of bills. “Perhaps some small pocket money for each man to encourage him in the search?” He laid down three hundred dollar bills and looked across at Gonzalez inquiringly. The strong old face looked placidly interested.

“With a bonus,” Shayne went on, “for the lucky one who finds what I want?” He added another hundred and two fifties to the other three bills. “It is important to me. And it could be important to Cuba,” he added softly, “if what I suspect turns out to be true.”

“You do not ask them to buy a gun? It is a rule…”

“They don’t have to buy one. Just find out where one is for sale, and pass the word on to me. You have my telephone number?” Shayne got a business card and hesitated, then wrote his home number on it also and laid it on top of the five hundred dollars. “Any moment of the day or night. If no one hits the jackpot by tomorrow night, you can divide up the entire sum among those who tried.”

Shayne smiled and got up from the chair. “It will buy a lot of beers, Papa. Most of it spent across your counter.”

Papa Gonzalez stood up politely and inclined his head. “I will do what can be done. If you have no report by tomorrow night you will know we have failed.”

7

After leaving Papa’s Place Shayne got in his car and glanced at his watch indecisively. A little after twelve o’clock. Tony’s was only a few blocks away, closer than his own office. Timothy Rourke would probably be waiting for him at Tony’s with a couple of drinks already inside him. On the other hand, Shayne hadn’t even checked with his office that morning. Lucy Hamilton would be furious even though there might not be anything important on the agenda. She had known he was going on that warehouse stake-out last night. She would have read a brief account of the affair in the morning paper…

He sighed and started his car and turned around the first corner toward Tony’s. Sometimes Lucy was a trial. She mothered him, damn it. She worried about things when there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He’d call her from Tony’s, he decided, else she was very likely to start phoning all over the city trying to locate him.

Tony’s was a small, unpretentious, roast-beef and steak house not far from the News office. There were no tablecloths on the wooden tables, and if you ordered a very dry martini you got straight gin on the rocks. Their shot-glasses were honest measure with no false bottoms, and it was the kind of joint where the hard-worked waiters were happy to place a bottle of your favorite beverage on the table and leave you to do your own pouring and your own totting up of the bill. Most of the luncheon customers were habitués, and while there were no Men Only signs hung out, there was a severely masculine atmosphere about the place which effectively discouraged female customers.

Two bartenders were busy behind the long mahogany bar when Michael Shayne walked in out of the glaring sunlight. He stopped for a moment and glanced down the line of standing men (bar stools were considered too effete for Tony’s clientele) without seeing Tim Rourke.

The elderly beer-bellied bartender nearest him caught his inquiring glance and jerked his head toward the row of booths at the rear.

“Last booth at the back, Mike. Tim Rourke and a broad.”

Shayne raised his ragged red eyebrows incredulously. “A broad, Jimmie?”

“A dish,” Jimmie amplified with a broad wink. “A real dish.” He moved closer and added in a conspiratorial whisper which could be heard only half the length of the bar, “Lushing it up on cognac, she is, on account of that’s her favorite detective’s favorite juice. How do you like them apples?”

Shayne grinned and said, “It’s okay by me if Tim can afford to pay for them.” He turned to an enclosed phone booth behind him, stepped inside and closed the door. He dropped a dime in the slot and dialled his office, and his secretary’s warm voice came lilting over the wire, “Good afternoon. Michael Shayne’s office.”

“It’s barely afternoon,” he protested. “You make it sound…”

“Michael! Where have you been all day?”

“Over at Beach Headquarters trying to explain to Petey Painter why I didn’t sit quietly with my hands folded last night and get my head blown off.”

Lucy said, “I read about it in the paper. You might have called to say you were all right.”

“I’m always all right, Angel. You know that. Anything important?”

“Oh, no,” she told him airily. “I’ve just been putting off prospective clients… turning down commissions. Are you coming in?”

“After I’ve had lunch at Tony’s. With a broad,” he added.

“A what?”

“A dish. Right now she’s waiting for me in the rear booth lushing it up on cognac on account of that’s her favorite detective’s favorite juice. How do you like them apples?”

There was a pause, then Lucy asked severely, “Just how drunk are you, Michael?”

“Not too, but give me time,” he told her cheerfully. “Tim’s buying.” He hung up and went out and down the length of the room to the rear booth where Timothy Rourke and a red-haired young lady of striking beauty sat opposite and so engrossed in each other that neither of them noticed his arrival.

She was in her thirties and well-fleshed in an exceedingly feminine sort of way. She had shoulder-length, flame-colored hair, and smooth, intelligent features that were lightly and beautifully tanned. Her generous mouth looked as though it would smile easily and unreservedly, and her large brown eyes sparkled with a happy zestfulness that held no hint of coquetry.

She wasn’t actually beautiful, Shayne decided as he stood at the end of the booth looking down at the two of them. That was just a first, fleeting impression. When you looked again you saw something else beneath the surface beauty and far more important. It made you glad you had paused to look a second time, and made you want to keep on looking.

Her strong, well-shaped left hand lay on the table between the two of them, palm upward, with the fingers curved up slightly to disclose untinted but beautifully polished nails. Just beside her hand stood a shot-glass with a trace of amber liquid in it, and an uncorked bottle of Monnet stood a little to one side. Timothy Rourke’s left hand gripped a bourbon highball and the fingertips of his right hand caressed her wrist gently where two blue veins showed clearly beneath the white skin. Rourke was leaning far forward and peering up into her face, and saying laughingly but vehemently, “But I have got etchings up at my place, Molly. I got the damned things in self-defense a long time ago when the unpleasantly suspicious brother of a girl I was trying to make insisted on coming up with her one night to see for himself. It worked, too,” he chuckled. “Next time he let her come back by herself.”

“And so you laid her, Timothy?” Her voice was serene and full-throated and happily amused. “How nice… for her. But that was a long time ago, and you’re certainly not trying to make me.”

“But I certainly am” he argued indignantly. “It wasn’t that long ago. What makes you think…?”

She had turned her head as he was speaking, and she looked up at Michael Shayne. Her full lips curved in the easy and unreserved smile Shayne had expected to see on them, and she said gently, “We have an eavesdropper, Timothy. There being a dearth of keyholes for him to peek through.”

Rourke turned his head slowly with a pained expression on his thin face. “Go away,” he groaned. “Come back another day. I’m trying to convince Molly that my intentions are strictly dishonorable and that I’m not a man to take no for an answer.”

Her eyes held Shayne’s steadily and speculatively during the period that both of them spoke, and she appeared not to hear Rourke’s voice. She was saying something to Shayne alone, she was establishing a bond, there was a shared intimacy in her look that set off a warning bell deep inside the redhead.

He sat down beside her and said, “Molly? I didn’t know girls were called Molly any more.”

Rourke sighed and said gloomily, “Molly Morgan, Mike. I don’t have to tell her who you are.”

“I know,” Shayne said. “I’m her favorite detective and she’s lushing it up on my favorite juice. Are you, Molly? Lushing it up, I mean.” He reached for her almost empty glass and the open bottle and poured the glass full.

She said happily, “I’m three drinks ahead of you if that’s what you mean. Go ahead and catch up,” she added generously. “It’s always more fun that way.”

Shayne said, “Thanks,” and lifted her glass to sip from it. Sitting beside her as he was, he couldn’t look into her eyes any more. But he could feel her body warmth and he could smell her.

Timothy Rourke sighed and closed his eyes tightly for a long moment, then he lifted his glass and drank from it deeply, holding it to his mouth until the last drop was drained from it. Then he set it down with a dull thud, opened his eyes wide and smiled happily and unexpectedly across the table. “You know something, Mike?”

Shayne asked, “What?”

“This little girl… Molly Morgan… she’s really on the ball, Mike. She knows things you and me never dreamed of knowing. You follow me, Mike?” He rested his elbows on the table and clasped the fingers of both hands together, making a bridge to rest his pointed chin, and glared across the table at his old friend.

Shayne said lightly, “I don’t think I follow you. Most girls do, of course. Know things you and I never dreamed of knowing. We’re built differently, if you come right down to it.”

As he spoke he was acutely conscious of Molly Morgan sitting close beside him, of the unashamed aura of sexuality emanating from her, enveloping his senses, penetrating to the innermost recesses of his being.

“Oh hell, Mike,” said Timothy Rourke plaintively, “I didn’t mean that there kind of thing. You don’t know who Molly Morgan is, do you?”

“No,” said Shayne carefully. “I haven’t the slightest idea.” But I know what she is, his racing thoughts were telling him. And she knows I know. We’ve got this man-and-woman thing between us…

“For one thing,” said Timothy Rourke, pausing to hiccough and then speaking with great distinctness, “she’s one of your pet peeves. A newspaper gal. She’s a feature, by-lined writer for a newspaper syndicate who’s down here in Miami to pick our brains clean and go away with a series of syndicated articles that will explain to all the stupid newspaper readers in the United States just exactly what all this Cuban mixup is about, and which one of the seventeen warring factions is right, and just what action our esteemed president and our State Department should take to fix everything up hunky-dory in Latin America and restore the proper image of Uncle Sam to the poor, downtrodden masses of peons…” Rourke paused and then grinned sweetly and muttered, “Oh, hell, Rourke. Get off your soap-box. What I’m trying to tell you, Mike. She’s great. That’s the word for Molly. She’s been around. She knows what the score is.”

He paused and looked up gravely at a waiter who stood at the foot of the table looking at his empty glass. Rourke shoved it toward him, muttering, “Sure. A refill. And whyn’t you bring Mike Shayne a glass of his own so he and this bewitching young lady won’t have to share a loving cup together.” The waiter smiled and went away, and Molly Morgan said clearly and decisively, “But I don’t mind sharing a loving cup with Mike Shayne.”

“There you got it, Mike,” Rourke warned him. “She’s after you, boy. Picking your brain, that’s what she’s doing. Know when she took fire this morning and insisted on meeting you? When she found out about that Russian Lenski, that’s when. That it, Molly? A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, didn’t you say?”

Shayne turned his head slowly and found Molly Morgan looking at him with worried eyes and slightly parted lips. She looked suddenly like a little girl who has been caught eating the wrong dish of ice cream at a birthday party. She shook her head slowly and her voice sounded almost tearful as she supplicated, “Timothy is telling it all wrong. I saw that picture in the paper a few days ago and I wondered. It looked like a Lenski to me, but I wondered what one of them could possibly be doing in Miami. When I mentioned it to Timothy this morning, just casually, he told me about your experience last night, and so I wanted to meet you and talk to you about the possibilities. If the Cubans are bringing Russian weapons into this country, I wonder which faction and why.”

Shayne held her gaze steadily while she spoke. When she ceased, he asked coldly, “Where did you run into a Russian Lenski before?”

“In Paris, I think it was. Two or three years ago. I was covering a meeting of high NATO brass and they had a complete display of Russian armaments. That particular automatic pistol was pointed out as having been terribly effective during the Hungarian affair.”

The waiter came with a fresh highball for Rourke and an extra shot-glass which he set in front of Shayne. Shayne pushed it over in front of Molly and refilled his glass and set the bottle over for her to pour her own if she wished.

He scowled down at his own drink and welcomed an irrational feeling of antagonism that was beginning to build up inside him against Molly Morgan. She had no business being so damned smart and so damned sexually attractive at the same time. One or the other was fine. A man could understand that and cope with it.

He hunched his big shoulders forward and said coldly, “I don’t see that a couple of Russian pistols turning up in Miami is anything to get excited about.”

“But Timothy said it was absolutely new, Mike. Mightn’t that be very important? If it’s part of a larger shipment of arms, I certainly think our C.I.A. should be informed and given an opportunity to trace it down.”

“The C.I.A.” snarled Shayne. “Those bunglers? I wouldn’t trust one of those cloak-and-dagger boys…”

“Oh, stop it, Mike.” Molly put her hand on his forearm and squeezed it tightly. “Just because some mistakes have been made in the past, you mustn’t condemn them out-of-hand. I happen to know Eddie Byron very well, personally. He heads the entire operation here in Miami.”

“And I happen to know the unholy mess they’ve made out of the Cuban situation ever since Castro came into power,” said Shayne hotly. “Keep your Eddie Byron out of this.”

“He isn’t my Eddie Byron,” she retorted.

“Hey, you two.” Timothy Rourke spoke softly from across the table. “What’s the C.I.A. got to do with this?”

“I just don’t want them messing into my personal affairs,” Shayne said hotly. Without looking toward Molly, he reached over with his left hand and firmly removed her hand from his arm.

“But what’s personal about a shipment of Russian guns?” she expostulated. “It seems to me the patriotic duty of every American citizen to cooperate with our government…”

“I’ll take care of my own patriotism,” Shayne said coldly. “What’s personal about this is that I want to get my hands on those guns if any of them are available. And I expect to,” he added grimly, “if I’m allowed to go about it my own way without interference. Do you know what a dozen of them would be worth on the open market, Tim?”

The reporter shrugged and hazarded, “A thousand bucks?”

“Multiplied by six, at least.”

“Six grand,” said Rourke evenly. “Hell, Mike! You’ve got six grand.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve got a living to make. I don’t get a check from Washington each month, paid out of taxpayers’ money the way those fancy-pants boys do.”

He was conscious of Molly moving on the hard seat beside him, drawing farther away toward the wall, and he heard her cool voice telling Rourke, “This cognac doesn’t taste so good any more, Timothy. Might I have a good clean drink of American bourbon and branch water to wash a bad taste out of my mouth?”

“Sure.” Rourke chuckled hollowly and signalled to the waiter and gave the order. Then he leaned back and sighed and clucked reprovingly. “Get off your high horses, both of you. You just happened to step on one of Mike’s pet peeves, Molly.”

She said, “I’m very sorry. Should I apologize?” and her voice was laden with venom.

Shayne turned his head and looked at her bleakly. “You’re awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you, Molly Morgan? You’ve been twitching your butt and trading on your sex appeal for a long time, haven’t you?”

She regarded him steadily, her full upper lip curling a trifle and her nostrils distended. “And you’re God here in Miami, aren’t you, Mike Shayne? Good Lord! When I think how I looked forward to meeting you. I was practically in a tizzy when Timothy brought me here today. You know something, Big-Shot? You make me slightly sick at my stomach. I don’t think I’ll bother with that drink after all, Timothy. If Mr. Shayne will be kind enough to let me out of here where it smells better.”

Shayne said, “With the greatest pleasure, Miss Morgan.” And he slid out to the aisle and stood up while she moved past him and stalked angrily to the front of the restaurant. Timothy Rourke craned his neck over the back of the booth to watch her departure, and he whistled softly and murmured, “She sure enough does twitch that thing. Watch her go.”

Shayne sank back on the bench and exhaled a long breath. “You know how these self-important females get my goat, Tim. Just because she writes her guff under a by-line for some lousy syndicate…”

Timothy Rourke turned back, shaking his head wonderingly. “You know what’s the matter with you, Mike?”

“Sure, I know,” Shayne said roughly. “It makes my ass tired when a bitch like that starts telling me what my patriotic duty is.”

“Nuh-uh,” Rourke shook his head sagely. “She scared the pants off you, Mike. You were falling for her like a ton of bricks, and that’s what scared you. My God, I could practically feel the heat waves all the way across the table when you sat down beside her. She’s got a lot on the ball, that gal has, Mike. She’s one of the top foreign correspondents in the country, and she hasn’t gotten up there just by twitching her butt, you can bet on that.”

“It’s helped her along the way,” Shayne growled. The waiter brought the drink Rourke had ordered for her and looked confused when he saw the two men sitting alone.

The reporter said, “That’s okay. I’ll drink it. Want to order, Mike?”

Shayne said, “Cold roast beef sandwich on rye.” He poured another shot-glass of cognac and warmed it slowly between his palms.

“How well do you know her?” he demanded suddenly.

“Molly? I just met her this morning when she dropped into the office. But I’ve been reading her stuff off and on for years. She’s been in Miami about a week interviewing Cuban refugees and trying to get a line on things over there.”

“And in another week she’ll have the whole mess all figured out and neatly categorized, and she’ll go back up north to write a series of articles which will then become the basis for our future foreign policy.”

“She’ll probably do just that.” Rourke grinned widely. “Forget her, Mike. I think she’ll stay out of your way while she’s here.”

Shayne nodded and said, “I hope so,” knowing it to be an untruth when he said it.

8

Michael Shayne put in a long, hot and frustrating afternoon before he finally got back to his hotel a little before dark that night.

On his return to the office after lunch, Lucy Hamilton had insisted on a detailed account of the warehouse affair, was properly wide-eyed and aghast at his description of the six large-caliber bullets which had missed him so closely, and intensely interested in the Russian weapon that had discharged the bullets in less than a second.

She then tried to twit him good-naturedly about the “dish” whom he had met at Tony’s with Timothy Rourke, but quickly concluded from his short and ill-tempered replies that he had not been impressed by a nationally syndicated writer named Molly Morgan, and that she had no cause to harbor any jealousy toward her.

Then they cleared up a lot of past-due correspondence, and Shayne was about to call it a day and suggest they go out together for a drink when there was an urgent call from an insurance company asking him to go at once out to North Miami where a dowager named Mrs. Drewther-Jones had just reported the loss of an eighty-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet and that it was definitely an inside job and she was positive one of the servants was the thief.

Shayne drove out dutifully to the huge estate on the Inland Waterway near Sunny Isles where he interviewed a big, lantern-jawed woman who had very positive ideas about the ingratitude and the thieving propensities of modern servants, and her meek husband who looked startled and said, “Yes, my dear,” each time she addressed him.

There were eight servants, and Shayne interviewed each one of them separately, patiently and painstakingly, eliciting a great deal of extraneous information about the character of their mistress and the rigors of servitude in newly-rich society, but nothing whatever about the theft of the diamond bracelet.

He was giving it up for the night and was waiting in the huge, panelled library for Mrs. Drewther-Jones to appear so he could report his negative findings when Mr. Drewther-Jones scuttled in to inform him unhappily that his wife (it now appeared her name was Amanda) had apparently mislaid the bracelet herself when she had last worn it a few nights previously, and that the services of a detective were not required after all.

Shayne was not particularly surprised and not really displeased by this denouement, and he assured the apologetic husband that such mistakes often happened and warned him he would receive a bill for the time the detective had wasted.

The little man didn’t even offer him a drink before he left, and Shayne made the long drive back to downtown Miami in the warm dusk increasingly eager to reach the relaxation of his bachelor quarters and the pleasure of the bottle that awaited him there.

He put his car in its accustomed stall in the hotel garage, and entered through the lobby, pausing at the desk to see if there were any messages or mail.

The night clerk was an old and privileged friend and he greeted him with a sympathetic grin. “You look all fagged out, Mr. Shayne. Like you been, maybe, slaving all day over a hot secretary, huh?”

Shayne said reprovingly, “Watch your language, Dick. You know Miss Hamilton.”

“Well, sure. And no disrespect meant, you can be sure of it. She’s a real lady. It was just that, well… uh… you look sort of like you could stand a real restful evening all by yourself, huh? With maybe a bottle of good cognac to keep you company.”

Shayne yawned widely and agreed, “That’s what I came home for, Dick. Nothing for me?” he added, looking past the clerk at an empty pigeonhole above his room number.

“What I’m telling you.” Dick leaned forward and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “You got company upstairs.” His pale blue eyes glistened and he held his hands wide apart and moved them suggestively. “This chick ain’t looking forward to no restful evening, Mr. Shayne. Not if I know my onions.”

Shayne stiffened and his heart started pounding unaccountably. “Did she give any name?”

“Nope. Just said it was important and she’d wait when I told her I didn’t know when to expect you. So I told her to go on up and wait in your place if she liked. You know you always told me that if they were between sixteen and sixty and their faces wouldn’t stop a clock… Well, this one sure ain’t no clock-stopper.”

Shayne said, “That’s okay, Dick.” He turned away from the desk and went to an empty elevator that was waiting, and the operator smiled admiringly as he closed the doors and said, “You sure do pick some honeys, Mr. Shayne. What kinda case you workin’ on this time?”

Shayne said, “I honestly don’t know.” He got out on the second floor and went down the hall toward his door, automatically getting out his key-ring and separating his room-key from the others.

The transom over his door showed a light inside. Shayne hesitated for perhaps ten seconds before inserting the key and turning it and pushing the door open.

Molly Morgan stood up slowly from one of the deep chairs in the center of the room and faced him with her hands demurely clasped together in front of her.

She said gravely, “Let me make a little speech before you throw me out. After that… I’ll go quietly, if you insist.” She drew in a deep breath and lifted her determined chin so the line of her throat was smooth and taut.

“We acted childishly at lunch. Both of us did. I tried to analyze it afterward and I finally realized why I reacted as I did. You frightened me, Mike. What I mean to say is, I frightened myself. And I said to myself, ‘My God, Molly Morgan, you’re thirty-seven years old. Suppose that redheaded bastard did make you get weak in the knees and wet between the thighs. Is that any reason to run from him?’ No, wait a minute,” she went on desperately as Shayne was about to speak.

“There’s more to it than that. A lot more. We’re both good at our own jobs. We’re both damned well determined we’re not going to let that old debbil sex sidetrack us from going on and doing a job. That’s fine. I say let’s go right on being determined. In the meantime there’s one whale of a story here in Miami that I’m going to get. With your help, or without it. Right at the moment, I think you’re on the trail of something important, and I’d like to follow that trail with you. Maybe I can’t help you any. That remains to be seen. Maybe, on the other hand, you’re not so goddamned self-sufficient as you’d like to think you are. Think that over, Mike Shayne, before you throw me out of here and out of your life.” There was the faint suggestion of a desperate sob in her voice when she concluded, but there was no suggestion of it in her defiant stance as she stood there facing him.

He heeled the door shut behind him, and he said, “Molly,” and that was all he could think of to say for the moment.

Then he moved toward her slowly and she stood waiting for him. Her gaze held his, desperately seeking for something in his eyes, searching for something which he could give her and which he withheld from her.

She did not move or shrink away as he stopped in front of her, very close to her, and stood flat-footed and lifted his hands to place them on both of her shoulders.

She stood tall and strong in front of him, the level of her eyes not more than two inches below his, and they were unblinking and demanding.

His fingers tightened on the smooth flesh of her shoulders and he said roughly, “I’m going to kiss you, Molly.”

Her lips curved into a smile that might have been mockery or might have been something else. She said, “And God have mercy on both of us.”

With his hands tightly on her shoulders, he pushed her away so there was at least twelve inches between them, and he demanded angrily, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I think you know what I mean, Mike.”

He shook her then, savagely, and she laughed deep in her throat and she moved her body forward against him so they were standing knee to knee, thigh to thigh, torso to torso, and her softly heaving breasts held their straining bodies apart.

Her red lips parted less than four inches from his, and she said, “There’s work to be done, Mike. You haven’t given me a chance to tell you. There was a telephone call not more than fifteen minutes ago… from someone who said he was Papa Gonzalez.”

Shayne’s fingers slowly released their grip on her flesh. He moved backward, almost imperceptibly, but enough so there was no longer the intimate pressure of flesh against flesh.

Shayne said, “You took a message?”

“I took the call,” she told him evenly. “I told him I was your secretary and he called me Miss Hamilton, and I am to inform you that the gun you are interested in is for sale at a cash price of one hundred dollars at the Liberty Loan Shop in Miami. The address is…” Molly turned away from him and his hands dropped from her shoulders to his sides.

She put her finger on a scrap of paper on the table and read off an address on N. W. Third Street not far from the railroad station. She turned back and leaned her hips against the table and put her hands on both sides of her to support her weight, and smiled up at him happily and said, “I knew my intuition was right and that I’d do well to stick by you, Mike Shayne. Shall we go out to the Liberty Loan Shop and find out what’s what? Maybe,” she added gently, “you’ll be able to pick up a dozen at the bargain price of a hundred dollars each. That would be a clear profit of… what? Almost five thousand dollars, isn’t it? Quite a sum for an indigent private eye who doesn’t get a check from Washington every month.”

Shayne grinned faintly and said, “Suppose you go to hell, Molly Morgan?” He moved around her to the table and looked down the cognac bottle and the two coffee mugs still sitting there from breakfast. He circled the table toward the wall liquor cabinet, saying, “I’m going to pour myself a drink of cognac before taking off. Do you prefer good clean American bourbon?”

She shuddered and said, “I hate the taste of it. That’s one reason why I got out of Tony’s when I did today. I was afraid I’d have to drink the one I ordered. Right now, cognac will be wonderful.”

Shayne came back with two wine-glasses and filled them both. “Why don’t you settle down here and relax,” he suggested. “I’ll take a run out to Third Street and see what’s what. Then maybe we can have dinner together, and… who knows? I still haven’t kissed you, Molly.”

“I’ve got a rain-check on it,” she assured him happily, lifting her glass and boldly downing half of it while her eyes watched him over the rim.

“But I’ll run out to Third Street with you, if you don’t mind. I’m as much interested in the source of those guns as you are.”

“Suppose I do mind?”

She said composedly, “I’ve got a rented car parked outside. Let’s not fence with each other, Mike. I had the address of the Liberty Loan Shop ten minutes before you got here, and I played fair, didn’t I? I could have gone out there on my own and never told you about the call I intercepted. Damn it, don’t I get any credit?”

“All right,” Shayne agreed lightly, “you get full credit, Molly. Bottoms up, and then we’ll go buy a Lenski twelve-oh-seven, and if you’re a real good girl I may get you an extra one to give to your boy-friend at the C.I.A. Eddie? Was that his name?”

Molly Morgan giggled and stuck out her tongue at him. Then she finished her drink with a flourish and ceremoniously set the glass on the table upside down, saying dubiously, “I suppose that’s the kind of bottoms-up you meant.”

“For the moment,” Shayne told her, “that’s what I meant. Let’s hope there’ll be time for another sort later on.” He tossed off his drink and set his glass upside down beside hers, then took her arm firmly and hurried her toward the door.

9

Shayne held her arm tightly as they went out through the lobby together, and he loftily disregarded the smirk on Dick’s face when they went past the desk.

On the sidewalk Molly gestured toward a sleek, late-model light sedan parked just beyond the entrance, and said, “We can take my car, Mike. It’s on the expense account.”

He shook his head, turning her in the opposite direction around the side of the hotel toward the row of garages. “You can pick it up later. It’s all right parked there… for all night if you want.”

“Do you think I will… want?” she asked lightly, squeezing his arm against her body and lengthening her stride to keep up with him.

“That probably depends on what sort of evening we have.” He led her around to the right side of his heavy car, opened the front door and closed it softly when she got in, then went around to the driver’s seat and backed out of the stall.

She stayed well over on her side of the wide seat and said nothing while he drove north to First Street and then west past the courthouse and Lummus Park. It was fully dark now and the downtown street lights were on and traffic was heavy with cars headed for the West Flagler Kennel Club, so Shayne turned north to Third Street and west again, through a dingy neighborhood of small shops and shabby dwellings.

He slowed after a short distance, checking the street numbers, and then parked on the right between a run-down garage and a brightly lighted delicatessen shop.

The Liberty Loan Shop had two grimy windows on the street with light showing dimly behind them, and living quarters overhead.

Shayne slid out and went around to Molly’s side of the car and pushed her door firmly shut as she started to get out. “I’ll go in alone,” he decreed. “No gentleman takes a lady along while he’s buying a pistol illicitly.”

She settled back resignedly and got a cigarette case and lighter from her handbag.

Shayne went up two scuffed wooden steps to the door between the two windows, and tried the knob. It opened easily and a bell tinkled in the back as he stepped inside. There was a narrow aisle between two long display cases littered with cheap watches, imitation diamond rings and such. A bare, fly-specked bulb hanging on a cord from the center of the room gave the only illumination, and the room was silent and empty.

Shayne walked slowly back between the display cases toward an enclosed latticework cage at the rear that had an arched aperture in front like a cashier’s window. A wooden counter on the other side of the opening was scattered with a jeweler’s tools, with a three-legged stool drawn up close behind it.

Beyond the stool was a big, old-fashioned iron safe with the door standing slightly ajar. Shayne stood there for a moment frowning in puzzlement, cocking his head to listen for some sound from the living quarters upstairs where the warning bell must have sounded when he entered.

There was only silence. An empty, deathlike sort of silence. There was a closed wooden door at Shayne’s right at the end of the aisle, and as he turned toward it from his position in front of the cashier’s cage the sole of his left foot was gripped slightly by some sticky substance on the floor.

He dropped to his knees to examine the floor, and drew in his breath sharply. He had stepped in a small puddle of blood that was seeping out from the latticework cage.

He took two steps to the rear door and threw it open and saw a dimly-lighted stairway leading upward in front of him and an open door on his left opening into the cage.

He stepped inside, feeling for a switch inside the door and finding one. An unshaded two-hundred watt bulb sprang into brilliant light over the jeweler’s work bench and illuminated the floor beneath and the crumpled body twisted in the confined space between the stool and the open safe.

He lay on his right side, and the left side of his head and face was crushed, a bloody mess of splintered bone and smashed flesh.

Shayne dropped to his knees beside the body and touched a thin, outflung wrist. The flesh was still warm to the touch, and the blood seeping out of his body and along the floor had not yet congealed.

Shayne heard the faint sound of light footsteps on the stairway beyond the open door, and he rose to his feet slowly as the figure of a stooped little old lady materialized in the doorway. She stood very still for a long and agonizing instant with the unshaded light bright on her seamed face, reflecting from rounded and frightened marble-like eyes which stared into his for a moment before dropping to the corpse at his feet.

Then she screamed. A high-pitched, keening scream, and Shayne took one step forward involuntarily, pressing the palm of his big hand against her mouth to cut off the sound, putting his other arm tightly about her frail body and drawing her against him, holding her strongly as she twisted and writhed while he repeated soothingly in her ear:

“Don’t be frightened. Relax and I’ll let you go. It wasn’t I, you understand. I found him. I am the police. Do you understand that?”

He started to release her but she clawed and struck at him viciously, and guttural moaning sounds escaped her lips from behind his palm.

He realized she was completely in shock and probably hadn’t heard a word he said to her, and he kept on holding her tightly while he unhappily tried to decide how to handle the situation, and the tinkle of the entry-bell sounded eerily in the silence, and he turned his head and looked over his shoulder through the lattice-work to see Molly hurrying toward the back of the shop.

“What on earth, Mike? I thought I heard a scream…” She stopped outside the window, breathing hard, and her eyes rounded at sight of the old woman struggling futilely in his arms.

“Come around and help me,” he snapped. “Try to talk to her. There’s been a murder and she walked in on me kneeling over the body. We don’t want the whole neighborhood on our necks.”

Molly took in the situation instantly and she acted with singular competence and clear-headedness. She stepped swiftly through the rear door and around to Shayne’s side, put her arms gently about the shaking old body, crooning softly to her without words like a mother to a frightened child, and Shayne gladly released the woman to her ministrations, watching carefully and vastly relieved when she didn’t start screaming again as soon as he took his hand away from her mouth.

Instead, she began sobbing violently, and a stream of foreign words spilled swiftly from the thin lips.

Molly continued to hold her gently, but she bent her head to listen to the babble of words, and then spoke gently in reply in what sounded like the same language to Shayne.

This brought more sobs and a further surge of incomprehensible words, and Molly backed away slowly toward the door, drawing the old woman with her and keeping her head turned away from the dead man on the floor. Over her bent head, Molly explained in a wondering tone to Shayne. “She’s Lithuanian, Mike. Poor thing. She either doesn’t know any English or else the shock has knocked it all out of her. Yah, yah,” she crooned, bending her head close to the other’s ear, and then spoke on swiftly in cadenced syllables that had the sound of a mountain stream rippling swiftly over pebbles.

“And you just happen to speak Lithuanian?” Shayne demanded incredulously.

“Along with four other languages,” she told him calmly. “But Lithuanian, I learned at my mother’s breast if you’re interested. You call the police. I’m going to take her up-

stairs now.”

He said quickly, “We’re ahead of the police, Molly. Let’s stay ahead. The old man is dead. Nothing can change that. Tell her that I’m a detective and we’re her friends and want to help avenge her husband’s death. Get her to tell you everything. Ask about the Russian guns. She’ll talk to you. Right now, she’ll spill everything to anyone who talks her own language.”

“I’ll see, Mike.” Molly Morgan’s voice was cold. “But if you don’t call the police, I shall.”

“I’ll call them in good time,” he grated. “But take her upstairs and talk to her. If the police come barging in now you and I’ll spend the rest of the night at the police station making statements. As it is, we just might get a jump on her husband’s murderer if she’ll talk to you fast.”

“About the Lenskis… or about murder?” asked Molly coldly.

“Both… I think. Don’t you see there must be a connection? It can’t be sheer coincidence that he was knocked off tonight while we were on our way here to ask him about the pistols. Get the chip off your shoulder and start putting your Lithuanian to use while she’s in a mood to talk to you.”

He turned his back angrily on her, and stared down at the dead man, trying to visualize how the killing had occurred.

It was clearly evident that the murderer had been in the small cage with the proprietor when he struck him down. There was no death weapon in sight. The bloody wounds indicated that several blows had been struck with a heavy instrument… quite possibly the butt or the barrel of a revolver.

Shayne got a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over his fingertips, then cautiously touched the inner edge of the safe door that was standing ajar, and drew it open. He squatted down in front of it to study the contents without touching anything.

There wasn’t very much inside the safe. It appeared that the Liberty Loan Shop did not deal with a great many objects that were valuable enough to deserve locking up inside a safe. There were several small metal lockboxes which probably held precious or semi-precious jewelry, but there were no Russian handguns such as he had hoped to find. He didn’t know, of course, whether such merchandise would deserve a place in the safe, but he had a hunch that is where they would have been found if there were any left in the shop. Not so much because of the intrinsic value, but because of their nature. They weren’t the sort of thing, Shayne thought, that the proprietor of the Liberty Loan Shop would have been likely to keep out on open display.

The only other thing inside the safe of any possible interest was a canvas-covered ledger or cashbook about thirteen by six inches in size. It seemed a curious place to keep an ordinary ledger, and Shayne was tempted to take it out and examine it, but he kept sternly reminding himself that this was the scene of a homicide and it was his duty as a licensed private investigator to leave all the evidence intact until the police arrived and took charge.

He heard the sound of descending footsteps on the stairway outside, and got to his feet hastily and turned from the open safe to face Molly in the doorway.

She exclaimed, “It was two men, Mike. One very tall and the other quite short, is the best Mrs. Wilshinskis can describe them. She looks out the front window, you see, from upstairs and sees people who come in and out of the shop. About half an hour ago, or a little more. They were the last ones before you came, and must have done that terrible thing. She heard them talking down here with her husband, but the conversation was in English and she didn’t understand it, and then they went out together and got in a car and drove off. She didn’t see their faces and couldn’t identify them. And then she saw you come in the front door about ten minutes later and she listened at the head of the stairs, but didn’t hear any talk this time. And that’s why she got frightened and came down to see… and found you kneeling beside her husband’s corpse. Poor, frightened thing,” Molly ended compassionately. “She just sits up there on the edge of the bed rocking back and forth with her hands over her face and sobbing her heart out. She has a niece out in Coral Gables whom I telephoned and who promised to come down at once.”

“What about the Lenski pistols?” Shayne demanded. “Did you get any line on them? Are they what the killers were after?”

“She doesn’t know, of course. I’ve told you all she saw and heard tonight. Oh, your tip was right. There were six of them originally. A man brought them in for sale about a week ago. She realizes it was not a strictly legal transaction, of course, but these poor people are accustomed to making a dollar any way they can. Her husband paid twenty-five dollars each for them, and he’d already sold four of the six for a hundred dollars each up to this afternoon. It was a great windfall for Wilshinskis, and there are two of them still in the safe waiting to be sold.”

Shayne shook his head as she paused for breath. “Not now, there aren’t. It looks as though that’s what the men were after, but why did they kill him in the process? To save two hundred bucks? And then go off leaving boxes of jewels in the open safe?”

“There’s one thing she did say, Mike, that may be very important,” Molly went on hurriedly. “The man who brought in the first half dozen told Mr. Wilshinskis there was an unlimited supply where those came from and he would be glad to furnish more in the future at the same price. They had visions of building up a steady trade and selling three or four a week, Mike, at a net profit of at least ten times what a store like this normally brings in.”

“What was their source of supply?” demanded Shayne. “Who brought in the first six guns and promised them more in the future?”

“She doesn’t really know, except he’s a former customer who has pawned small things here in the past. You see, she gets all the shop business second-hand from her husband, Mike, from what he tells her at night. But she says he was a sailor… a seaman is the way it translates from the Lithuanian… wearing a uniform with brass buttons. She never saw him actually… it’s just her husband’s description. But, Mike! She says there is a special ledger in which he made a note of transactions like this… under-the-counter business. If you could find that ledger it might have something written down.”

Shayne turned back to the open safe and crouched in front of it. He spread his handkerchief over his hand to pull the canvas-covered cashbook out and lay it on the counter. He turned swiftly to the center of the book and the last page on which a transaction was noted, saw the date was the previous day, and turned back a page, muttering, “There are names and dates and prices entered here. Let’s see… a week ago. This must be it: Six Len. 12-0-7 Pd. $150. Cap. Sam Ruffer. And there’s an address out in the northeast section… one of those streets that dead-ends on the Bay. I’m going out there to find Captain Ruffer, Molly. Sounds like it might be a boathouse or a beach cottage. You stay here and call the police as soon as I leave. Tell them everything except about the call from Gonzalez and the reason we came here. Tell them any damned thing except the truth.”

She shook her head, standing flatfooted in the doorway and barring his exit. “I’m going with you, Mike. Why should I stay here and make statements to the police?”

“Because this is murder,” he told her savagely, “and I want you out of it. We don’t know what he told those men tonight before they killed him. If I get there in time I may surprise them interviewing Captain Sam Ruffer.”

He moved in close to her and caught both her wrists in his big hands and swung her aside easily. “You stay here and comfort the old lady with your Lithuanian crooning. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

He hurried out through the front door without looking back, closed it carefully behind him, and then went around his parked car to slide under the steering wheel. He switched on the headlights and reached for the ignition key, and his hand brushed the empty lock.

He stared down at it stupidly for a moment. He had left the key in the lock when he got out. He knew he had. Molly had been sitting in the car and he hadn’t bothered to lock it.

Molly! Of course. She must have taken the key from the lock when she heard the old lady scream and hurried inside.

He jerked the car door open and leaped out, went back inside the pawn-shop and found it empty. He went back to the rear calling as loudly as he dared without arousing the neighbors, “Molly. You’ve got my keys.”

He paused at the back door, looking up the stairway and listening, but he could hear nothing from above.

Damn her! he thought angrily. She’s sore because I refused to take her along, and she’s going to make me come up and get my keys from her.

A glint of metal on the counter in front of the arched opening in the lattice-work caught his eye just before he started up the stairs.

It was the set of keys to his car which Molly had evidently placed there after he shoved her aside and hurried out.

He grabbed them up and called up the stairway, “Okay. I’ve got them. See you tomorrow,” and long-legged it back out of the shop without waiting for her answer.

10

Shayne swung back and threaded through traffic as fast as he could make it to Biscayne Boulevard, then straightened out northward in the inside traffic lane and stepped hard on the accelerator. Traffic was heavy in both directions on the boulevard at this hour, and he continued at high speed for only a short distance before he had to start easing off and moving over to the right to be ready to make a right turn onto Captain Ruffer’s dead-end street.

He watched the street signs tensely, braked to fifteen miles an hour and made a wide sweeping turn onto the narrow, palmetto-lined street, then cursed savagely and jerked his wheel to the right when a car suddenly loomed up directly in front of him, moving toward him in the center of the macadam strip without lights.

His heavy sedan lurched down into a shallow borrow-pit and Shayne fought the wheel to hold the car upright, then gunned the motor hard and was back on the pavement almost before he had time to realize what had happened. In his mirror he saw the lights of the other car flash on, and it made a fast turn into the boulevard northward.

He made no attempt to stop and back up and pursue the car, knowing it would be at least a mile from the scene before he could complete the maneuver, and he had seen and recognized the faces of the two men in the front seat in that brief instant while his headlights were full on them. He would know where to find them later if he wanted them. Right now, having recognized the pair, he was more than ever anxious to get to Captain Ruffer fast.

It was less than a quarter of a mile to the bayfront with no houses on either side of the narrow roadway.

There was a solid stone barrier and a turn-around at the dead-end where Shayne stopped and turned off his motor and lights. There was a cool breeze from the bay, and night silence broken only by the sound of small waves splashing against the foot of the cliff in front of him.

On his left a squatty stone structure was perched boldly on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the bay. Light glowed through a round window like a porthole in the front door and a neat shell-lined walk led up to the door.

Shayne got out and strode up the walk. The driving sense of urgency had deserted him now that he was here. Those two hoods in the unlighted car had been here first and he was strangely reluctant to follow them inside the sea captain’s house.

The door had a heavy bronze knocker, and the big strap hinges were also of bronze. Shayne looked for an electric bell without finding one, lifted the heavy knocker and dropped it twice. He waited no more than ten seconds before trying the doorknob.

It turned easily in his hand and the door opened inward. There was a narrow hallway lighted by an electrified ship’s lantern hanging from a hand-hewn beam of cypress. An open door on the right showed the interior of a tiny and tidy kitchen. Inside the thick walls of coral rock it was unnaturally quiet in the captain’s small house. Not even the faint splash of waves from the beach below could be heard.

Shayne hesitated in the hallway a moment and called loudly, “Captain Ruffer.” His voice echoed back at him from the low-beamed ceiling. He strode to the end of the hall where there were closed doors on the right and left. He opened the door on the right and the room was dark. He fumbled inside the door for a light switch which illuminated two wrought-iron ship’s lanterns in brackets on either side of the sparsely furnished, square sitting room.

He stood in the doorway and tugged at his left earlobe and looked down somberly at the body of the man lying outstretched on the floor in front of him.

He was dead.

He lay on his back and his eyes were open and glazed, bulging from deep sockets in a bony, emaciated face. He was a big-framed man, who now looked curiously shrunken in death. He wore a double-breasted uniform suit of shiny blue serge with a double row of brass buttons down the front of the coat. The buttons were brightly polished and they reflected light from the ship’s lanterns.

His wrists were fastened together in front of him with a length of copper wire which had cut deeply into the swollen flesh.

Shayne took two steps forward and knelt beside the body. The tips of three fingers of his right hand were bloody stumps where the fingernails had been torn from them. There was no other mark of violence apparent on his body which was still warm enough to indicate that death had occurred not more than thirty or forty minutes before, and without a complete physical examination Shayne guessed that the shock and pain of torture had brought on a heart attack that had caused his death. He appeared to be in his seventies, and there was no padding of flesh on his big, bony frame.

Shayne rocked back on his heels and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. For a moment he thought he heard a sound from the other side of the house, and he started to get up, but decided it was a shutter moving in the wind. Whoever had done this job on the old sea captain, he thought angrily, had gotten out of there as soon as he died… either with or without the information they had tried to get by torture.

He hesitated a moment and then carefully went through the dead man’s pockets. He found nothing except a neatly folded newspaper clipping in the breast pocket of the serge coat. It looked recent and was from the Miami Herald and it was headed, PAROLE GRANTED.

He stood up slowly and began reading it, and then stiffened as he heard the sound of a car drawing up outside. He crumpled the clipping into a ball and thrust it inside his coat pocket, and stepped back to the side of the room near the door and got out a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.

He heard footsteps and voices outside, and he lit the cigarette and blew out the match and waited.

The outer door opened and a breeze blew in and there were heavy footsteps in the hallway, and Shayne raised his ragged red eyebrows in surprise when the bulky figure of Chief Will Gentry loomed up in the doorway, and he blew out a puff of smoke and said, “Dr. Livingstone, as I live and breathe.”

Gentry snorted, glancing from the redhead to the body on the floor, and then back at the detective. He was a big man with heavy, florid features, and an old friend of Shayne’s. He growled, “I thought I smelled something funny when I walked in that door.”

He stepped past Shayne heavily and scowled down at the dead man. A tall, white-haired man bustled in behind him. He was bare-headed and wore a white linen suit and he was breathing excitedly.

He stopped short at sight of the body, stared downward in horror and groaned, “Oh, my God! It’s old Captain Ruffer. Is he…?”

“Dead,” grunted Gentry as he knelt down to examine the body. He turned his head slowly to look at Shayne and asked in a tone of casual interest, “Why did you pull out his fingernails, Mike?”

“What’s that?” demanded the white-haired man, turning pallid. “Tortured? I knew something must be wrong,” he went on excitedly, “when he wasn’t here to keep his appointment with me after he’d been so specific about it. You know I told you, Chief…”

Gentry disregarded him. He got to his feet and faced Shayne. “All right. Give it to me, Mike. All of it.”

“I got here about three minutes ago and found him like that. He’s been dead at least twenty or thirty minutes, Will.”

“Maybe. I want to know why you came here. Did you have business with him?”

“I never saw him before in my life,” Shayne said truthfully. “I didn’t even know who he was,” he added not quite so truthfully, “until I heard this man call him Captain Ruffer.”

“What are you doing here in this house if you didn’t even know him?”

Shayne hesitated, then he said, “You’re not going to believe this, Will, but the fact is I was just driving around getting a little fresh air and I happened to come up this dead-end road to the bay. I parked out there for a minute, and then I got a funny feeling. You know how it is in police work,” he went on earnestly. “You get hunches. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s ESP. Anyhow, I just felt there was something wrong in here. I knocked and got no answer, found the door unlocked and walked in on this. Believe it or not…” He spread out his hands and shrugged. “That’s the way it was.”

“So I don’t believe it,” Gentry said heavily. “You’ll have to do better than that, Mike, or by God I’m going to lock you up.” He was breathing angrily. “I want the man that did this, and if you’re covering up something…”

There was a sound behind them and Shayne and Gentry both turned their heads to see Molly Morgan open the door across the hall and step out toward them.

“He’s covering up for me, Chief Gentry,” she told him warmly, “and I’m not going to let him. It’s just foolish, that’s what. I don’t know what kind of quixotic notion Mike has got, but I’m afraid he suspects I steered him here on purpose because I knew something was wrong. That’s not so at all. It’s just the way I told him when I asked him to bring me here. You know I’m getting material for some syndicated articles about Miami, and I ran into that fascinating story about Captain Ruffer’s shipwreck a few years ago and thought it would make an interesting feature. We came in together to see the captain,” she went on, entering the room to stand beside Shayne, and lifting her chin. “And when we found him lying like that, Mike shoved me across the hall and told me to go out the back way and he’d take care of everything. You don’t have to cover up for me, Mike,” she added sweetly, pressing close to him and slipping her arm through his. “I swear I was just as surprised as you were.”

Chief Will Gentry wrinkled his eyebrows at her disapprovingly while she spoke, and opened his mouth twice as though to interrupt her, but let her finish her glib speech before he said heavily, “Didn’t I meet you this morning?”

“Yes. Timothy Rourke introduced me to you in your office. I’m Molly Morgan. Remember?”

Will Gentry said, “I remember now. You do get around, don’t you… for a stranger in town?”

“It’s my business,” she told him defensively. “Is it all right for us to go now, Chief? I feel we’re just in the way here while you want to conduct a murder investigation.”

“Sure,” said Gentry bitterly. “Take her away from here, Mike. I’ll be talking to you later. On your way out tell the sergeant on the door to radio in for the Homicide Squad.”

Shayne turned Molly about and led her down the hallway to the front door before Gentry could change his mind. Will Gentry’s driver was there, and he gave him the chief’s message, and then hurried her down the walk and past Chief Gentry’s car to his own which was parked against the stone barrier.

He let go of her arm so she could go around and get in by herself, got under the wheel and started the motor and waited in stony silence until she was settled in the front seat. Then he backed around and headed out grimly, and when they were on the boulevard and moving toward the city at a moderate pace, she finally asked in a small voice:

“Are you angry at me, Mike?”

“Why should I be angry? You practically saved my life back there, didn’t you?”

“You are angry,” she said wonderingly. “Why? I thought I was helpful. You didn’t want to tell Chief Gentry why you were there, did you? About the guns and the Lithuanian pawnbroker and all?”

“No,” Shayne conceded gruffly. “I had no intention of telling Will any of that. But for a good many years now I’ve been in the habit of telling my own lies and getting out of my own messes without any help from female reporters.”

“Oh, Mike,” she said sadly. “The truth of the matter is that it’s all because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You’re one of those excessively masculine individuals with a penis complex a yard long who thinks a woman’s place is in the home and nowhere else, by gum and by God.”

Shayne said stiffly, “I thought it was women who had penis complexes.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care one damned bit for your cheap psychoanalysis.” His voice rose explosively. “How the living hell did you get out to that house in the first place?”

“I thought you knew.” There was the warmth of laughter in her voice. “I told Chief Gentry that we went there together.”

“Which was a flat lie.”

“Oh no, Mike. I don’t lie. At least not flatly. I did ride out with you. Hunkered down in the back seat. When you shoved me aside in the pawnshop and stamped out, I suddenly realized I had your car keys and you couldn’t take off without them. So I put them on the counter where you’d see them and slipped out the back door and around to your car while you were inside getting them. What on earth happened when you turned off the highway?” she added pensively. “It felt like you went in the ditch and I thought we were going to turn over. I think I squealed, but you didn’t even hear me.”

Shayne suddenly exploded into laughter as the ridiculousness of it all came to him. “Then you came into the house behind me?”

“Around by a side door that opened into the captain’s bedroom. I kept listening for conversation, but I couldn’t hear anything until your friend the police chief came in, and then I realized he was dead and you were in sort of a spot explaining how you had got there. I thought I came up with a very convincing story.”

Shayne said, “You did fine, Molly.” They were nearing Flagler Street and he turned toward her with a grin. “I guess you’re right. I’m just not used to hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. But what was that yarn you told him about the captain having been shipwrecked? I thought you’d never heard of the guy until we got his name in the pawn-shop?”

“I hadn’t. But I looked around in his bedroom while I was deciding whether to come out or not, and I found an old clipping he’d saved which I glanced at. It was hidden in a built-in cubby-hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed along with some other things that I thought might be important because they were so carefully hidden.”

Shayne turned off the boulevard onto Third Street and said feelingly, “My God! You took time to burgle the joint during those few minutes before Gentry arrived?”

“I was lucky,” she told him complacently. “It looked as though there had been a struggle in the bedroom, and the bed had got shoved away from the wall so the hiding place was visible.”

Shayne had circled around from the boulevard and he drew up in front of his hotel behind her rented automobile which still waited there. He turned off his lights and ignition, but didn’t get out immediately. He put both hands on the steering wheel instead, and turned a long, inquiring look at Molly Morgan.

“You said there were some other things hidden with the clipping. What sort of things?”

“Well, there was an old heavy brass-bound book that seems to be a sort of personal record dating back forty years. I just had time to glance at the first couple of entries. And along with that was a box containing a set of practically new skin-diving equipment. You know… flippers, mask and oxygen tank. And that seemed a funny thing to be hidden there.” She paused with a frown. “He didn’t look like a skin-diver, did he? But then he was a sailor, and I suppose all of them do maybe.”

Shayne drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel and said thoughtfully, “About that clipping you mentioned. What sort of ship was wrecked? Where and when?”

“It was a few years back. In a Caribbean hurricane. The captain was the only survivor. That’s as far as I got with it before Chief Gentry came in.”

“I’d like to know more about that shipwreck,” muttered Shayne. “It could have an important bearing on the whole situation. Those Russian guns he sold the pawnbroker last week…”

She said sweetly, “So why don’t we go up to your place and have a drink and see? Maybe we can figure out the whole story before the police connect up the two murders tonight. Because he was tortured and killed by someone trying to find out about the guns, don’t you think?”

“Probably by the same two men who killed your Lithuanian friend. Have you got that clipping, Molly?”

“Yes. I automatically stuck it in my handbag when I heard the police car stop outside. At that point I didn’t know he had been murdered, Mike, and didn’t realize those things hidden there might be important evidence. I guess… it’s a felony or something to take anything away from the scene of a murder?”

“You’ll get ten years at least,” Shayne told her cheerfully. “One nice thing about it is that they’ll send us up together. I’ve got a clipping of my own that I forgot to mention to Will Gentry. Let’s go up and compare notes.”

11

In the second-floor hotel sitting room, Shayne went toward the kitchen waving a big hand at the two wineglasses they had upended less than an hour before, and said, “Pour us a drink, Molly. I’ll get some ice water.”

He came back with two glasses with ice cubes floating in them, and nodded approvingly at the glasses she had filled to the rim. He said abruptly, “I feel like hell, Molly. Two guys are dead just because I didn’t get to them in time.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You got to both of them just as fast as you could.”

“It’s always my fault,” he muttered angrily. “If I’d done things differently… if I’d been home when Papa Gonzalez called, for instance.” He shrugged and drank deeply of the cognac she had poured. “What I’m trying to say is… it’s my job to be on time. All right. Forget it.” He dropped into a chair and reached into his pocket to bring out the crumpled newspaper clipping he had found in Captain Ruffer’s pocket.

“I don’t know what significance this has… if any. It was neatly folded in the Captain’s breast pocket, and it must have meant something to him.”

He smoothed it out on the table between them and Molly Morgan leaned over with her red head close to his and they read it together.

It was a local item and not datelined. It said, briefly, that Roy Enders had been granted a parole from the state penitentiary after serving six years of a seven-year term for statutory rape, and had arrived in Miami that morning to be met by his attorney, John Mason Boyd, who had defended him originally and who (the paper stated) had worked tirelessly for his release on parole ever since his incarceration.

Mr. Enders’ only statement to the press, the item concluded briefly, was that it was good to be back in the Miami sunshine and that he asked only to be left strictly alone and in privacy to go to his fishing lodge on the Keys south of Miami and relax in seclusion.

Shayne looked up at Molly as they both finished reading it, shaking his head dubiously. “There’s no date on it but it looks recent. We can check, of course. The name strikes a vague chord in my memory. Six years ago… Roy Enders?” He narrowed his eyes and tugged at his left ear-lobe. “Seven years for statutory rape is a mighty stiff term,” he muttered. “Seems to me there were other circumstances surrounding that case I should remember… but I don’t. Again, we can check. But here’s one thing.” He put his blunt forefinger on the name of the lawyer mentioned in the story.

“John Mason Boyd. That just happens, Molly, to be the name of the white-haired gentleman who followed Will Gentry in tonight, and the man who evidently brought the police into it. I gathered he’d had an earlier appointment with the captain, and got worried and called on Will when Ruffer didn’t show up.”

Molly Morgan looked back at him steadily, her eyes interested and alert. “We’ll have to find out more about Roy Enders,” she murmured. “All right. Here’s my contribution to the puzzle.”

She reached down beside her chair and lifted the big black leather handbag into her lap, unzipped it and reached inside.

Her newspaper clipping was yellowed slightly, and brittle with age. It had a date on it, October 16, 1958, and it had a photograph of a serious-faced Captain Samuel Ruffer above the caption, DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE.

It was a feature story, by-lined by Timothy Rourke, Shayne noted with quirked eyebrows, and Rourke had pulled out all the stops in relating the incredible saga of the master of the fishing sloop Mermaid which had been sunk in a tropical storm fifty miles off the Florida Keys on October 13th, and related the miraculous survival of Captain Samuel Ruffer who had managed to say afloat in the angry seas for three days supported only by a life preserver until he had been sighted by a private fishing cruiser some twenty miles off the coast and taken aboard.

The two crew members of the Mermaid had been washed overboard during the storm and vanished, and Rourke had made much in his story of the rugged constitution of the captain which had survived three days of burning heat and thirst and hunger which should have killed any ordinary man.

Michael Shayne shook his red head dubiously a second time after he finished reading the story. “I suppose this is the sort of thing a man might keep for his memoirs, but I don’t see that it adds much to our knowledge of the situation. He was a tough old sea-dog in those days, and he survived the elements six years ago only to succumb tonight when some bloodthirsty bastards pulled three of his fingernails out by the roots. Why, Molly?”

“You know why,” she told him quietly. “They wanted the rest of those Russian Lenskis which he had promised Mr. Wilshinskis.”

“What’s that got to do with him being shipwrecked six years ago?”

“I don’t know. But you do think that was why he was tortured and killed tonight, don’t you?”

“It adds up,” Shayne agreed cautiously. “You asked about my going into the ditch when I turned onto the captain’s street tonight. I did it to avoid a car coming from his house without lights. There were two men in the front seat that my headlights picked out momentarily. A couple of well-known hoods around town on the payroll of a bigshot named Armin Lasher. One of them happens to be a tall stringy guy, and the other is short and dumpy.”

“The way Mrs. Wilshinskis described the two men who visited her husband.”

Shayne nodded. “This Lithuanian bit,” he probed. “You say it’s your native language?”

“My mother was Lithuanian,” she told him.

“That’s Russian, isn’t it?”

“Since nineteen forty-six. And the Lithuanians still don’t like it. Any more than the Poles or the Hungarians do. So don’t get any funny ideas, Mike. I’m an American citizen even if I do speak Lithuanian and recognize a Russian Lenski pistol when I see one.”

“Yeh,” he said drily. “I recall that you read me a lecture on patriotism this afternoon.”

“All right. I thought we had agreed to by-pass that. Where do we go from here?”

Shayne leaned back comfortably and lifted his cognac glass to sip from it. “Do we have to go anywhere? There’s another bottle where this one came from.”

“You pointed out, yourself, that two men have already been brutally murdered tonight… because you didn’t get to them in time. And you pretended you felt responsible. Right now you’re sitting on top of some very important information that the police should have if they’re to catch the two killers. If you’re not going to use it, I’ll take it to Chief Gentry myself.”

Shayne took another sip of cognac and asked equably, “Are all Lithuanians beautiful when they get mad?”

“Don’t flatter me,” she stormed. “I’m serious about this, Mike. If you’re not going to do something, I am. You can’t solve two murders just by sitting here.”

She got to her feet defiantly and turned toward the door. Shayne swung to his feet and moved in front of her. “We’ve still got things to talk about, Molly. I’m still not completely convinced…”

She drew back suddenly and tried to dart past him. He caught her right forearm and pulled her back roughly, and her big leather handbag clutched in her right hand swung in an arc and struck him solidly on the thigh.

His grip tightened on her arm and he demanded, “What in hell are you carrying in that handbag? A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, for Christ sake?”

“It’s none of your business,” she said bitterly. “Just let me out of here, Mike Shayne. That’s all you can think about,” she gibed at him. “A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, and getting your hands on a shipment of them. You don’t care how many people die in the meantime. Take your hands off me.”

Instead of releasing her, he pulled her to him roughly and reached down with his right hand to wrest the heavy handbag from her grip. He shoved her back from him saying coldly, “You can beat it if you want to. But I’m going to have a look inside this outsized bag you’re toting.”

She bit her underlip angrily and said, “I realize, now, it should go to the police… and that’s where I was going to take it.”

Shayne turned his back on her and stalked to the center table and opened her bag.

She walked back slowly and stood beside him while he lifted out a heavy brass-bound book, about four by six inches in size and at least two inches thick, held shut by a brass clasp.

He turned it over slowly in his hands and looked sidewise at her. “Captain Ruffer’s personal record of forty years at sea,” he muttered. “My God, you went whole hog when you started stealing evidence, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think about that at first… in all the excitement. Then as we began talking I realized it might be important. If he’s been mixed up in gun-running for the Communists in Cuba this last year or so, it may have a record of a shipment that included a number of Lenski pistols.”

“And when you did realize that, you decided to keep it to yourself?”

“Well, I… you’ve been acting so funny, Mike. Ever since this noon when you talked about getting hold of those guns for yourself… for the money they might bring. And those two men murdered tonight. You didn’t call the police in. You didn’t mention the Russian guns to Chief Gentry. What am I supposed to think?”

Michael Shayne hesitated a long moment, holding the heavy brass-bound book in his hands without unfastening the clasp. “Do you think this would be safer in the hands of the C.I.A.? Eddie Byron, wasn’t it? Than in my hands? Is that what you think, Molly?” His voice was curiously gentle.

“I don’t know,” she confessed miserably. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Make up your mind.” He put the book down on the table in front of her. “You can’t have it both ways. Either I handle this affair my way or I don’t handle it at all.”

“I… you still haven’t kissed me, Mike.”

He turned toward her slowly and his telephone rang. He picked it up and barked, “Yes?”

Dick’s voice answered from the desk downstairs. “Chief Gentry’s on his way up, Mr. Shayne. He’s just getting in the elevator now. I thought maybe you’d like…”

Shayne said, “Thanks, Dick,” and slammed the receiver down. He told Molly, “Gentry’s on his way up. Stay here and turn this book over to him, or else get out the back way fast.”

“What will you do if I go?”

“Read it for myself first and then decide what’s best. Either you trust me all the way or you don’t trust me at all, Molly Morgan.”

She looked deep into his eyes for an instant and then reached for her handbag. “Which way is out?”

“Through the kitchen. Back door and fire escape. Key’s on a nail beside the door.” Shayne grabbed up her two glasses and thrust them at her. “Close the door to the kitchen and put these in the sink. Where you staying?”

“The Park Plaza Hotel.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can.” Shayne heard the elevator stop down the hall and he gave her a little shove toward the kitchen. She went out of the room fast and closed the door behind her. Shayne whirled back to the table and opened the center drawer and swept the captain’s book and the two clippings inside. He stood frowning down at the table while a knock sounded on his door. Everything looked okay. Only one glass of water and his own wine-glass with cognac in the bottom. None of the cigarette butts in the ashtray showed any lipstick.

He went to the door as another knock sounded, opened it and looked surprised at the sight of the chief of police on the threshold with the white-haired attorney directly behind him. He said, “It’s a hell of a time to come visiting, but come on in.”

He stepped aside and Will Gentry moved slowly and steadily past him, glancing suspiciously about the room. “Where’s the Morgan woman, Mike?”

“At her hotel, I suppose.” Shayne raised his eyebrows and grinned as Gentry stopped at the table to look at the pair of glasses sitting there, one with ice water and one with cognac, then went on purposefully toward the closed door leading into the detective’s bedroom. “You don’t think I’ve got her stashed out here, do you?”

“I’m going to find out,” Gentry said placidly. He opened the bedroom and looked inside, turned back and glanced inside the open bathroom, then went to the kitchen door and opened it and turned on the light.

Shayne pretended to disregard him and turned to the attorney who had entered behind Gentry and was looking ill-at-ease. He held out his hand and said, “Your name is Boyd, isn’t it? Will forgot to introduce us, but I think I’ve seen you around town.”

Boyd shook his hand laxly and said, “You probably have, Shayne. I know you, of course, by reputation.”

“All right, Mike. So she isn’t here.” Will Gentry came out of the kitchen looking stolid and purposeful. “So, where is she?”

“I told you…”

“She isn’t at her hotel,” Gentry informed him. “Hasn’t been in her room all evening.”

“How did you know where to look?”

“I called Tim Rourke. She’s staying at the Park Plaza but isn’t in.”

Shayne shrugged and said, “You know how these New York dames are. Why come here looking for her?”

“Because I do know how New York dames are… and how you are.”

“Why do you want to find Miss Morgan? It was the merest chance that we stopped by there tonight and found the old sea captain murdered.”

“So you said. It sounds like a pretty thin story, Mike. Mr. Boyd suggests you know more about the affair than you admit.”

“The hell he does.” Shayne looked at the attorney bleakly. “What gives him that idea?”

“As I mentioned a moment ago,” said the attorney thinly, “I know your reputation in Miami, Mr. Shayne. I suggest you are seeking a way to profit by Captain Ruffer’s death.”

Shayne looked at him incredulously. “A poor old man like that? Good God, he looked to me as though he hadn’t had a square meal for weeks.”

“It is true he’s been in financial straits for some time,” Boyd conceded. “On the other hand, when he asked me to come and see him tonight he intimated that he was on the verge of coming into a large sum of money.”

“And he was obviously tortured before he died, Mike,” Gentry put in, watching the detective keenly. “Torture generally indicates extortion… the effort to extract a secret.”

“Are you accusing me of torturing him?” fumed Shayne.

“Look,” said Gentry patiently. “I’ve told Boyd that I take your word for it that you arrived on the scene only a few minutes before we did. On the other hand, I doubt the young lady’s glib explanation for your being there. Sure, he lost his boat at sea five or six years ago and has been in retirement since then, but why should that interest a writer of nationally syndicated articles who is in Miami on an assignment to study the Cuban situation? It sounded like a spur-of-the-moment explanation to me… made to cover up the real reason you and Miss Morgan were there.”

“There is also abundant evidence,” said Boyd severely, “that his house was burgled tonight and presumably his private papers were taken.”

“You’re accusing me of that?” demanded Shayne angrily.

“Wait a minute, Mike. The bed had been pulled away from the wall in the bedroom in some sort of struggle, and a hiding place in the wall was exposed. Personally, I think the struggle was with his murderer, not you, but the hiding place went unnoticed by him.”

“What was in this so-called hiding place?” Shayne asked bitingly.

“That’s one of the inexplicable things about the whole affair,” admitted Gentry. “There was nothing there except a new and almost unused set of skin-diving equipment. It hardly seems the sort of thing a man would secrete so carefully.”

“Which leads us to suspect that you removed the captain’s private papers to study them at your leisure,” put in Boyd waspishly.

“What’s your interest in all this?” demanded Shayne.

“As Captain Ruffer’s attorney, and now his executor,” snapped Boyd, “my interest is quite proper.”

Shayne put his hands on his hips and studied the attorney for a long moment with his upper lip curling angrily. “You’re also Roy Enders’ attorney, aren’t you? Are you his executor, also?”

“I appeal to you, Chief,” said John Mason Boyd. “What on earth does this man mean by his allegations? I am attorney of record for Roy Enders… as well as for many other clients. What has that to do with this affair?”

“Well, Mike? What has it?”

Shayne shrugged. “Boyd knows more about that than I do. Ask him, Will. Look, all of this seems to me to be a lot of crap,” he went on angrily. “You’re here because you both seem to think something was stolen from a secret hiding place in the captain’s bedroom and you’re accusing me of getting it. I wasn’t even in his goddamned bedroom, Will. I told you. I walked in the front door, and I found him dead.”

“But Miss Morgan was in his bedroom,” Boyd put in quickly. “I suggest that she found his private papers where he had hidden them, and that she stole them.”

Shayne balled his big hands into fists and glared at the attorney, and then told Will Gentry, “Why don’t you get hold of Miss Morgan and ask her these questions?”

“We’d like to,” Gentry told him quietly. “We just don’t know where to find her, Mike. That’s why we came here.”

“I think you’ve got her hidden away, Shayne. It is my conviction that you don’t dare let her be questioned by us,” said Boyd venomously. “We agree that you probably weren’t in the bedroom of Captain Ruffer’s house tonight… but all of us know that Miss Morgan was. We would like to hear her story under oath.”

Shayne moved toward the attorney slowly, his grey eyes glinting, big fists doubled at his sides, and lips drawn back from his teeth.

“You know what I’d like, Boyd?”

The attorney backed away from him fearfully. “No. I’m not sure…”

Shayne laughed hoarsely. “I’d like to know what you hope to get out of this. Why in hell are you throwing your weight around tonight? You could get your goddamned face beaten in without a great deal more effort on your part.”

“Lay off the guy, Mike,” groaned Gentry. “You got to admit he’s got a good case.”

Shayne swung around and faced Gentry angrily with his fists still doubled. “I don’t admit anything. Is a two-bit shyster running your department now?”

Boyd said in a trembling voice, “I resent that, Shayne.”

Shayne laughed harshly. “You resent it? What about you, Will?”

Gentry said in an even tone, “I’m still running the police department, Mike. But I don’t mind listening to advice. Are you willing to swear that you and Miss Morgan just dropped by the captain’s house by accident tonight and that neither one of you removed anything from the premises that might have a bearing on the reason for his death?”

Michael Shayne faced him squarely and said, “Put me on the witness-stand if I’m going to be cross-examined. If not, why don’t you and Lawyer Boyd get the hell out of here?”

Chief Will Gentry stood facing him, flat-footed, his eyes serious and questioning, for a long moment. He asked quietly, “Are you sure that’s the way you want it, Mike?”

Shayne said, “I’m sure.”

Gentry drew in a deep breath, then turned and stalked to the door. After a moment of bewildered hesitation, John Mason Boyd turned away and followed him out. Shayne stood where he was in the middle of the room for at least thirty seconds after the two men went out. Then he exhaled a deeply-held breath, went to the table and picked up the wine-glass and drained it in a single gulp.

He put it down empty and lit a cigarette, then went out to the kitchen and tried the back door leading out onto the fire escape.

The door was locked, and the key to it was missing from the nail inside where it always hung. Molly had evidently paused to lock the door behind her and taken the key away.

Shayne went back into the sitting room, obscurely pleased with the thought that Molly Morgan had the key to his back door in her purse.

He poured himself another very moderate drink of cognac, and then opened the table drawer and took out the captain’s brass-bound book.

He unfastened the catch and spread the book out on the table, seeing that it consisted of unlined white pages which were covered with clean meticulous script in black ink. The first entry on the first page was faded now, after forty years, but the handwriting was strong and clear. The page was headed, “June 3rd, 1925,” and beneath that was written: “Today I shipped out of New York on my first command berth, 3rd Mate of the Mark Savage, Capt. J. K. Kellog in command. We are bound for Valparaiso with a mixed cargo…”

Shayne flipped the pages rapidly, finding the book a continuation of the same as Molly had suspected. A terse, matter-of-fact, day-by-day seaman’s journal, covering forty years of sailing the seven seas in every sort of merchant vessel and in every position from Third Mate to Skipper, until, in 1955, Captain Samuel Ruffer had retired from commercial shipping after thirty years, and bought his own auxiliary sloop, Mermaid, whose home port was Miami.

Glancing at a few lines here and there every dozen or more pages, Shayne turned swiftly to read the details of the captain’s final voyage which had resulted in his shipwreck and rescue at sea, the sole survivor.

Shayne read the detailed account carefully and grimly, and when he reached the end and closed the book and refastened the catch he knew why Captain Samuel Ruffer had been murdered tonight, and why torture had preceded his death. There were still some unanswered questions, including the all-important “Who?”, but Shayne felt sure that a little checking of the records would produce all the evidence that was needed.

He replaced the journal carefully in the table drawer and closed it, his mind racing ahead to the steps that were now open to him.

He had made a sort of pact with Molly Morgan, he reminded himself. Without her, he would never have read the captain’s journal and been able to piece the truth together.

He sank into a chair and tossed off the short drink he had poured before becoming engrossed in the journal, then riffled though the telephone book and found the number of the Park Plaza Hotel.

He gave the number to Dick downstairs, who doubled on the switchboard at night, and when a pleasingly female voice inquired if she could help him, he said, “Miss Morgan, please. Molly Morgan,” and leaned back comfortably to wait for her voice while he phrased exactly what he would say to her.

He waited at least a full minute before the same female voice told him, “Miss Morgan’s room doesn’t answer. I checked with the desk, sir, and the clerk says she went out just a few minutes ago.”

“But I happen to know she just came in,” Shayne said disbelievingly. “May I speak to the desk?”

She said, “Certainly,” and a moment later a reedy masculine voice asked if he could help the detective.

“I’m calling Miss Morgan,” Shayne told him. “I know she returned to the hotel just a few minutes ago.”

“That’s quite correct,” the desk clerk agreed. “She stopped for her key not more than ten minutes ago and went up to her room, but came down again almost immediately with two gentlemen and went out with them.”

“Are you sure about that?”

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

“Wait a minute,” said Shayne, thinking hard. “Did she go out with them willingly?”

“I… presume so,” the clerk said stiffly. “I certainly noticed nothing amiss. They were on each side of her and had her arms linked in theirs.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Not in detail. I can’t say that I noticed “

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

“I think perhaps… yes. Dear me. Do you mean to intimate that something was, perhaps, wrong?”

Michael Shayne slammed up the receiver. He reached for the cognac bottle to pour out a drink, paused with the neck of it inches from his glass. He decided, quietly, that he didn’t need another drink at this point.

What was needed right now was some solid thinking and reasoning. There were certain facts that pointed toward certain conclusions.

The two men who had visited the pawnbroker and left him dead had been described by the widow as a tall man and a short man.

The two hoods whom he had glimpsed in the front seat of the car coming from the captain’s house without headlights were known as Bull and Dixie. Bull was short, heavy and bowlegged; Dixie, tall, slender and fair-haired. The timing was about right for them to have gone directly to Captain Ruffer’s house after leaving the pawn-shop… which they would almost certainly have done if they had succeeded in getting his address from Wilshinskis before the man died.

Then, some forty minutes later a tall man and a short one had turned up at the Park Plaza Hotel and escorted Molly Morgan out into the night.

How could Bull and Dixie have known where to find Molly?

More important, why did those two hoods want to find her? Who knew that she was mixed up in the affair at all? Shayne had met her for the first time at Tony’s at noon, and she’d been waiting for him in his room later where she had taken the telephone call from Papa Gonzalez.

They had gone directly to the pawn-shop together, arriving after the killers had left… and had gone directly to the captain’s house from there.

Then back to Shayne’s hotel, where Molly had slipped out the back door and down the fire escape to avoid an interview with Chief Gentry.

Where, in any of those events, was there anything to have sent Armin Lasher’s men to the Park Plaza to pick Molly up immediately after her return?

There was one faint possibility, Shayne realized. If Lasher were aware of Shayne’s interest in the Lenski guns, and if Bull and Dixie had seen and recognized Shayne in the car they almost ran down, it was possible that Lasher had sent them to stake out Shayne’s hotel when they returned without having got the information they wanted from Captain Ruffer.

In that case they might have arrived in time to see Molly coming down the fire escape and followed her to her hotel.

It was very thin reasoning and based on a lot of “ifs,” but it was the best answer Shayne could come up with at the moment.

And, whether or not they were the two who had taken Molly away, Shayne still had some questions to ask them and their boss. Without positive identification from Mrs. Wilshinskis (who hadn’t seen their faces) there was no proof that they had killed the pawnbroker, of course.

Shayne got up abruptly and started for the door.

12

Armin Lasher was a product of the Prohibition days and had first turned up in Miami as one of Al Capone’s bodyguards. Later, he disappeared for a time, or at least made himself inconspicuous for a period following Capone’s conviction in Federal court, but in the early forties his power began to be increasingly felt in the backwash of Miami’s turbulent underworld, and within a decade he was reputed to be the largest individual vice operator in the area outside of members of the Organization.

He was a ruthless man with a small army of Enforcers on his pay-roll, and competitors who tried to horn in on his territory had a way of disappearing without a trace. Even the Organization had evidently decided to leave him strictly alone after a couple of bloody gun-fights.

He had his fingers in gambling and prostitution and narcotics, and he managed his small empire efficiently from his headquarters in a perfectly legitimate and well-run night club on the western outskirts of Miami, just beyond the city limits. There was no gambling and no vice or rough stuff tolerated at the Little Revue, and you could rub elbows there with bankers and their wives as well as with known killers who parked their shoulder holsters before entering.

When Shayne turned into the floodlighted parking lot there were at least a hundred cars in orderly rows, and he was waved into an open slot far removed from the entrance by a uniformed parking attendant.

He got out and walked back through the lighted area toward the big two-story building, entered a tastefully decorated lounging-waiting room with a dim cocktail bar on the right and the main dining room on the left. He shook his red head at an alert maitre d’ at the entrance to the dining room, crossed to a well-lighted hallway leading toward the rear, and went down it to a carpeted stairway at the back.

There were restrooms on the right and left at the top of the stairs, and closed doors on both sides of the corridor in front of him.

Shayne went to the second door on the left which was marked PRIVATE, turned the knob and stepped inside. There was a small anteroom with a desk in the center of it and a man behind the desk. He was a big man with steely eyes and a crew-cut, and he wore a well-cut sport jacket of Italian silk. He looked at the redhead speculatively and asked in a grating voice, “Looking for someone?” He didn’t add “Buster” but somehow the appellation was implied.

Shayne said, “Lasher.”

“He expecting you?”

“No. But he’ll see me.”

“What makes you think so?” This time the implied “Buster” was more pronounced.

Shayne said, “Nuts,” and started past the desk toward an unmarked, closed door behind the big man.

He was on his feet instantly and in front of the redhead, growling deep in his throat, “Hold it, Bud. I say who sees the boss and who don’t.”

His eyes were level with Shayne’s, and big biceps muscles bulged inside his imported jacket.

Shayne half-turned to the right as though he were backing away, dropped his left shoulder and drove it hard against the man’s solid chest.

He stumbled backward, struggling to maintain his footing, and Shayne kept on moving and put his hand on the knob of the inner door.

The man was six feet away when he straightened himself and his hand darted under the left lapel of his carefully fitted jacket where a very faint bulge was visible.

Shayne looked at him over his shoulder and shook his red head half an inch from right to left, and said reprovingly, “No rough stuff, Buster. You know the boss doesn’t like it.” He opened the door and stepped inside and closed it tightly behind him.

The inner office was large, at least twenty by thirty feet, and was luxuriously furnished and decorated to fit a television producer’s dream of what a big-shot gangster’s office should look like. The desk in the center was an eight by ten foot expanse of gleaming mahogany with three telephones ranged in front of the man who sat erect behind it. There was wall-to-wall carpeting a couple of inches thick with foam rubber beneath that, and soft, indirect lighting, and cushioned settees ranged along two sides of the room. There were ostentatiously framed and individually-lighted paintings of reclining nudes in the center of each of the four walls, and the final, perfect, decorator’s touch was the four shining brass spittoons which stood in each corner.

Armin Lasher was in his middle-sixties and appeared to be at least twenty years younger. If you didn’t know better you might have suspected it was due to clean living on his part. He had high cheekbones and bronzed hard features, liquid black eyes that were alert and intelligent, a firm mouth and strong chin.

He looked across the shining surface of his desk at the redhead with his left eyebrow quirked, and then at the door which Shayne had closed behind him.

It was jerked open as he looked at it, and Crew-cut from the outer office came lunging in with a.380 automatic in his right hand which he flourished at Shayne while he said rapidly, “This bastid shoved right on in, Chief. I didn’t get no chance to ring you.”

Lasher said coldly, “Beat it, Tiny. Try to do better next time.” He moved his gaze to Shayne and a faint smile flickered over his hard mouth. “Still doing things the hard way, Shamus? Last time you were in my office it cost me ten grand.”

Shayne shrugged and moved forward to a deep chair upholstered in green leather in front of the desk, and sank down into it. He said, “I’m not taking up a collection for a widow this time, Lasher.” He paused to consider his words with a frown. “Or… maybe I am at that. I hadn’t thought about that angle.”

“What is your angle?” Lasher asked easily.

“Russian hand-guns. Lenski twelve-oh-sevens, to be explicit.”

“Oh.” Armin Lasher’s expression and voice betrayed only mild interest. “What the devil are they, Shamus?”

Shayne got out a cigarette and lit it. “I think you know as much about them as I do.”

Lasher said, “Maybe. How much do you know?”

Shayne said, “I know they pack one hell of a wallop. And I know that two men have been murdered in the last couple of hours on account of them. By two of your boys, Lasher.”

“Is that so?” he murmured. “My boys do get around, don’t they? Can you prove that, Shayne?”

“I can prove enough to make it damned hot for them in Miami.”

“Why come to me?” asked Lasher indifferently. “If some of my boys have been getting out of line… and if you can prove it… they’ll have to take the consequences.”

Shayne said, “I’m really here to make a trade, Lasher. How many Lenskis for a woman named Molly Morgan… delivered all in one piece?”

This time, Shayne saw, he did get through to the gangster. Lasher’s head jerked and his eyes became hard and probing. “Come again,” he ejaculated.

“I’m suggesting a trade,” Shayne told him evenly. “You’ve got Molly… I’ve got the Lenskis.”

Lasher said, “I don’t know any Molly. Never heard of a dame by that name. What’s eating you, Shayne?”

The detective shrugged and leaned back to take a deep drag on his cigarette. “All right. I’ll settle for Dixie and Bull. I’m taking them in, Lasher, on a charge of murder. And I think I can prove they were acting on direct orders from you.”

“Dixie and Bull?” Lasher leaned back and laughed easily. “They’re real nice boys. Wouldn’t either one of them hurt a fly. What’s this murder you’re talking about?”

“Not one. Two, Lasher. Tonight. And a kidnapping on top of that.” He leaned forward angrily. “You can’t cover this up. Play ball with me or by God they’re both going to fry… and when they fry they’ll squeal like stuck pigs, and I think maybe you’ll fry with them, Lasher. Think that over very carefully before you try to brush it off.”

“You scare hell out of me,” Lasher told him indifferently. “Bull and Dixie, you say? Those two boys have been playing penny ante in a back room here since six o’clock this evening. There’s five witnesses that’ll swear to that in any court.”

Shayne said bitterly, “I’ll bet.”

“You’d better bet.” Lasher leaned forward and his black eyes glittered. “Now. Maybe you better tell me what the hell this is all about… now we got it settled that my boys have got alibis.”

Shayne said carefully, “Their alibis won’t stand up, Lasher. They were seen driving away from Captain Ruffer’s house a little over an hour ago… and not more than five minutes before he was found lying dead with three of his fingernails torn out by the roots. They played too rough with the old captain,” he went on dispassionately. “He wasn’t in any physical condition to take that kind of treatment, and so you didn’t get the information you wanted from him. You still don’t know where to find that shipment of Russian guns.”

Lasher said flatly, “I’ve got five witnesses that’ll say they been playing poker steady since six o’clock. Who’s your witness that’ll say different?”

“Me.” Shayne tapped his own chest. “The name is Mike Shayne, Lasher. It was my car they damned near ran down without any lights making their get-away. I don’t know who your five witnesses are, but I’ll enjoy calling them liars in court when Dixie and Bull are on trial for murdering Captain Ruffer.”

Lasher shook his head. “They didn’t kill him, Shayne. He was already dead by the time they got to him. They felt real bad about that because they figure that whoever killed him got the info they were after.”

Shayne said, “Even if they can prove that… which I doubt… they still have to answer for the death of the old pawnbroker.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because they were seen going into the store by his wife who was looking out an upstairs window. And the only way they could possibly have got Ruffer’s name and address was from Wilshinskis.”

“I don’t know anything about anybody with a name like that,” Lasher told him drily. “Neither do the boys. I sent them to Ruffer, Shayne. I admit I am interested in the Lenskis floating around Miami and hoped to get a line on them. But you beat my boys to Ruffer, huh, and got the dope for yourself? Maybe we can make a deal at that.”

“I didn’t see Ruffer until after Dixie and Bull left him dead. Did you send them to my hotel after they reported back from Ruffer?”

“Why would I do a thing like that? I got witnesses to prove they’ve been playing poker the last hour at least.”

“The same witnesses who were going to swear they hadn’t left here since six o’clock until you discovered I could place them at the captain’s house?”

“That’s right.” Lasher leaned back comfortably. “I wouldn’t want them to go into court and call you a liar.”

Shayne said roughly, “Get them in here. I want to know what they did with Molly Morgan.”

“They won’t like being pushed around by a private dick,” Lasher warned him. “I don’t care much for it either,” he added dispassionately. “You got guns for sale… maybe we can talk business. But leave Dixie and Bull out of it, huh?”

“I want to talk to those bastards,” Shayne said violently. “If they didn’t pull Molly out of her hotel, I want to know who did. Get them in here, Lasher, or I’ll start breaking down doors in this joint until I find their goddamned poker game.”

He got to his feet and glared down at the gangster who remained relaxed behind his desk.

Standing like that he didn’t see a side door open behind him, and his first intimation that they were no longer alone came when Lasher said evenly, “You boys been listening in since I opened the intercom circuit?”

Shayne turned slowly and saw Dixie and Bull advancing toward him across the deep carpet. Dixie was young and fair-haired and looked almost fragile beside Bull who was at least a head shorter and a good hundred pounds heavier. Bull had cauliflower ears and a permanently disjointed nose, and he had small, hot eyes set close together beneath a low, flat forehead. A leather blackjack swung from his right hand, and the pleased look on his face suggested that he hopefully anticipated using it on the redhead.

But of the two of them, Shayne knew that Dixie was the more dangerous. His eyes were wide and staring and had the hypnotic glaze of a sleep-walker. He was, Shayne realized instantly, loaded to the gills with dope and ready to explode like a firecracker at any moment. He had his right hand bunched inside the pocket of his jacket, and he said in a listless voice, “We been listening to this son-of-a-bitch speak his piece, Boss. We’ll take him, huh? We’ll blast his guts…”

“Hold it,” Lasher said sharply. “I want to know about this dame he keeps harping on. If you two lugs pulled something on your own…”

“Honest to God, Boss,” protested Bull in hurt protest. “We don’t know nothin’ about no dame. You know what?” he went on eagerly. “We told you ’bout seein’ a guy leave the captain’s house when we went in an’ found him dead. A big guy like this redhead. What’s he accusin’ us about?”

They had stopped two feet in front of Shayne. Bull flat-footed and menacing with the blackjack swinging in short arcs by his side, Dixie poised as lithe as a cat on the balls of his feet with his head cocked a little to one side and a seraphic smile on his bland features as though he were listening to the strains of sweet music which none of the others could hear.

Lasher looked from the pair of them to Michael Shayne with a thin smile, and asked, “You still feel like taking them in, Shamus, and charging them with murder and kidnapping?”

Shayne shifted his gaze away from them to the man behind the desk, and said evenly, “You’d better tell your hophead to be good, Lasher. He’s going out of control in a moment, and I don’t think you want your nice office messed up with my blood.”

“Why, no,” Armin Lasher agreed pleasantly. “No need for anybody to get hurt, I guess. You want to talk any more about Russian guns, Shayne? You suggested some kind of deal when you first walked in here.”

Shayne reminded him, “That was when I thought you could give me Molly Morgan. Now these two gunsels claim they didn’t grab Molly.”

“Don’t be calling me no gunsel,” growled Bull, taking a step closer. “Lemme slug him, Boss. It won’t make no mess.”

“No rough stuff,” Lasher told him. “You heard him asking about a dame named Molly Morgan. Either one of you ever hear of her before this?”

They both shook their heads solemnly, like schoolboys denying that they had written dirty words on outhouse walls.

“Sorry I can’t help you, Shayne. If I get any word on your missing twitch I’ll be glad to talk a deal with you.”

“Aren’t you taking one thing too much for granted, Lasher?” Shayne turned more away from the hoods and leaned forward with both hands resting on the desk.

“What’s that?”

“All you’ve got is their word for it that Ruffer was dead when they reached him. Maybe you don’t know how much money is involved in the gun deal, but if you had any idea you might well suspect that they’re holding out information on you. How the hell do you know they didn’t pull out his fingernails until he talked… and are clamming up in the hopes of cashing in without you?”

“Because I know my boys,” Lasher told him patiently.

Shayne said, “Nuts! I wouldn’t trust your hophead or that stupid ape if they swore on a stack of Bibles. I suggest you’d do well to…”

“I suggest you shut your big mouth,” Lasher told him. He jerked his head toward the men behind the detective. “Take him down… the back way. Put him in his car and see that he gets out of here.”

Shayne straightened up with a sigh. “If that’s the way you want it…”

“That’s the way it’s going to be.”

Shayne stood stiffly with his hands at his sides while Dixie and Bull moved in on each side of him and each took hold on an arm and turned him away to the door through which they had entered.

He went with them without protest and without looking back, through a small, unoccupied room and out to a narrow hallway that led along the back of the building.

There was a heavily-barred door at the end of the hall, and Bull unbarred and opened it to disclose wooden steps leading down to a small, unlighted private parking lot at the rear of the night club.

Each of them held an arm as they went down the stairs, and when they reached the bottom, Shayne stopped and said, “Okay. I can make it from here.”

“I guess not,” Dixie demurred in his flat voice. “Boss said we was to see you into your car. That right, Bull?”

“That’s right. We go around this way an’ avoid the front entrance. You show us where you’re parked, Shamus.”

They hustled him forward along the back of the building and along the other side toward the lighted parking lot, holding both of his arms tightly, and Shayne made no resistance.

He knew how high Dixie was wound up, and that Bull would enjoy nothing better than working him over with his sap if he gave them the slightest excuse for doing so.

So he walked stiffly and circumspectly between the two men to the front of the building, jerked his head toward the right-hand rear of the rows of parked cars, and said, “It’s over that way… if you boys still insist.”

“Boss wouldn’t like you to get lost on your way out,” Bull told him gruffly. “Which one is yours?”

Shayne led them to it and the three of them stopped beside the left-hand front door. Half a dozen other cars had pulled up since Shayne had parked there, and filled up that row, and the attendant was now busy down at the other end of the line directing late-comers into parking places.

They let go of his arms and stepped back and he reached for the door handle, and Dixie’s venom-laden voice hissed, “Sap him good, Bull. We’ll put him in his car like the Boss said.”

The blackjack whistled through the night air and took him cunningly on the side of the neck just below his right jaw-line, and as he went down he felt Dixie’s sharp fingernails raking the other side of his face while laughter happily gurgled out of the hophead’s mouth.

“That’ll learn him,” Bull said virtuously. “He’p me lift him up now and shove him in the front seat.”

Shayne had enough sense and consciousness remaining to keep his body perfectly limp as the two hoods lifted and wrestled him into the car beneath the steering wheel. He slumped back against the cushion and waggled his head gingerly to be sure it was still set solidly on his shoulders, and then put his left hand up to his face wonderingly and took it away sticky with blood.

Bull slammed the door shut and peered inside, snickering happily, “You sure marked him up good, Dixie. If he does find that dame tonight, he ain’t gonna be much use to her. Get that heap movin’,” he went on harshly to Shayne. “Next time you come around with a pack of lies, Dixie an’ me’ll work you over good.”

Shayne straightened himself behind the wheel and turned on the headlights and ignition. He was trembling with rage and there was a red mist before his eyes, but he had managed to stay alive a lot of years by knowing when discretion was the better part of valor.

This was one of those times, he told himself grimly, and he devoted all his energy and attention to the task of getting his car backed out and headed out of the parking lot and away from the Little Revue.

13

It was midnight when Shayne pulled up in front of his hotel again and got out. His legs were shaky and there was a lump the size of a duck’s egg on the right side of his neck and his entire head throbbed painfully, but the three diagonal scratches on his cheek had stopped bleeding while he drove back, and he decided he was in pretty fair shape considering everything.

The lobby was dimly-lit and deserted except for Dick, who stared at him with his thin face screwed up in an expression that was a peculiar mixture of awed sympathy and poorly-concealed mirth.

“Gee whiz!” he exclaimed, “You look like…”

“Like what?” demanded Shayne.

“Well, like… doggone it, did she do that, Mr. Shayne? I wouldn’t have believed it. When you two came in together that second time and went up to your room she looked like… well… like you weren’t headed for that restful evening with a bottle of cognac you’d mentioned earlier. But that was before your cop friend barged in, wasn’t it? Say, I’m all confused. I never did see her come back down. You went out a little later by yourself, didn’t you? Then how come…?” He broke off, looking embarrassed and turning his gaze away from the scratches on Shayne’s face. “It’s none of my business. You in for the night this time, Mr. Shayne?”

The redhead managed a lopsided smile. “I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet on it… the way things have been going around in circles tonight. Looks pretty bad, does it?” He touched the dried blood on his cheek gingerly.

“Not too bad,” Dick told him judicially. “I mean… I’ve seen you when you looked worse. But, gosh! That’s some lump you got on the side of your neck.”

Shayne nodded slightly, wincing and keeping his head tilted a little to the left. “Nothing a few drinks and a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

He went on to the elevator with Dick staring after him open-mouthed, and he knew the clerk must believe Molly was still up in his room waiting for his return, and that he must be wondering how she would react to the scratches which looked as though they had been inflicted by another woman while he was gone.

Well, he was grateful he didn’t have that to worry about, he told himself ruefully as he unlocked his door on the second floor.

He strode inside purposefully, and the first thing he saw as he crossed the room was the center drawer of the table pulled wide open. He stopped in front of the table and looked down at the open drawer. Captain Ruffer’s journal was gone. The two newspaper clippings were still there, but the heavy, brassbound book had vanished.

He turned on his heel and went into the kitchen where he tried the back door from the fire escape and found it unlocked. He distinctly recalled that it had been locked and the key was missing after Molly had gone out that way.

He returned slowly and went into the bathroom where he examined his face in the mirror and found the scratches were quite shallow. He daubed iodine on them and then got out a roll of adhesive tape and tore off three strips which he affixed to cover most of the damage. The big lump from Bull’s sap was extremely painful and it had turned an ugly greenish blue, but he knew from experience that there was nothing to do about it except wait for it to go away.

He went back and sat down and poured himself a drink, and tried to sort out possibilities from probabilities. There wasn’t any doubt that his apartment had been entered from the back way by use of the key Molly had taken with her.

He had no proof, he reminded himself, that she had not gone out of the Park Plaza Hotel with her two escorts voluntarily. He had jumped to the original conclusion that Bull and Dixie had taken her away, but after the session at the Little Revue he was inclined to doubt that they even knew of her existence.

So, what did it add up to? His head ached too badly to do much thinking. Besides, there were too many gaps in his knowledge.

He drank half a glass of cognac and his head began to feel better, and then he took the two newspaper clippings out and reread them both carefully. He particularly noted the date of the clipping about the captain’s sea rescue, October 16, 1958, and then turned to the more recent news story on the parole of Roy Enders. It stated he had been released after serving six years of a seven-year term. That would set the date of his conviction in 1958, if this clipping was as recent as he believed it to be.

He sat back and closed his eyes to slits and sipped the rest of his drink while he thought about that. His mind was alert now, his thoughts racing. He knew there was not going to be any sleep for him that night until he found out exactly what had happened back in 1958. His previous reading of the final items in the captain’s journal explained what had really happened to the Mermaid at that time, but it didn’t explain a lot of other things.

His thoughts of the book jolted him into the realization that someone else was reading those pages right now. Molly Morgan? Would she have returned on her own initiative to get the journal?

What about the C.I.A.? Could those two men who had taken her from her hotel have been agents of the Central Intelligence Agency where Molly had a buddy named Eddie Byron?

Shayne knew it was useless to sit there speculating. The News was an afternoon newspaper and the hours between midnight and dawn were the busiest ones for the reporters and editorial staff. Timothy Rourke was almost sure to be at work in the City Room.

Shayne got up and went out again, grinned crookedly at Dick and waved a big hand at him as he crossed the lobby, got in his car and drove to the newspaper office.

As he had anticipated, the City Room of the News was smoke-hazed and filled with the clatter of typewriters. Shayne threaded his way back to a far corner where Timothy Rourke was hunched over a machine batting out copy with one-fingered precision that did the job almost as fast as a professional typist could do it with ten fingers.

The reporter looked up at Shayne, stared disbelievingly at the adhesive strips on his face and then shook his head and said seriously, “You’re in the wrong pew, fellow. Beauty editor is down that way.”

Shayne said, “Go to hell,” and dropped one hip down onto a corner of the reporter’s desk and lit a cigarette. “Didn’t you tell me at noon that you only met Molly Morgan this morning? So you don’t know much about her personally?”

“That’s right. Did she do that to you? You must have used the wrong approach.”

“Did Will Gentry call you for her address this evening?”

“Yeh. He refused to say why he wanted it. I’d introduced her to him in his office this morning.”

“Anybody else call for the same information?” Shayne asked.

“No. What’s up, Mike? You got a lump below your right ear that could only have come from a real heavy sap. What kind of company you been keeping?”

Shayne said, “A couple of Lasher’s boys decided it would be fun to rough me up.” He looked at the sheet of paper in Rourke’s typewriter. “Are you real busy?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.” Rourke’s eyes glittered with interest. “Armin Lasher, huh? What sort of angle…?”

“Tell you about it later,” Shayne said, standing up. “Right now I’d like to check your morgue. Files for six years ago.”

“Sure.” Rourke sprang up and led the way back to a large filing room. “Six years?” Rourke said. “Nineteen fifty-eight?”

“October.” Shayne had the two clippings in his hand and he consulted them. “First. Take a look at this recent one, Tim.”

He showed it to the reporter, explaining, “It doesn’t have any date on it.”

Rourke glanced at it and grunted, “Roy Enders. About two weeks ago. I was one of the welcoming committee when he got off the bus from Raiford. Along with his attorney and a couple of friends from the old days.”

“John Mason Boyd?” Shayne asked.

“That’s right. And two characters named Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. They look respectable now, but they were pals of Enders before he was sent up and I doubt they’ve changed much. What’s your interest in Enders, Mike?”

“Where is he right now?”

“Down at his fishing lodge on the Keys, I guess. When he got off the bus he said all he wanted to do was get back there and lie in the sun and relax. Claims he holds no grudges, and had nothing to say for publication.”

“Grudges?”

“It goes back to his phony conviction for statutory rape in fifty-eight. It’s a long, involved story. Interested?”

Shayne said slowly, “I might be. Here’s this other one, Tim. You wrote this one yourself. Remember it?”

Rourke took the clipping headed DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE and glanced down it swiftly. His brow contracted and he muttered, “That’s the old boy who got knocked off tonight. When I heard about it, I remembered this incident and told the rewrite man to check on it for human interest. Sure, I remember the old geezer. He was quite a man back in those days. Survived three days and nights at sea with just a life preserver after his boat went down in a hurricane off the coast. What’s his connection with Roy Enders?”

“That’s what I want to find out. You got a file on Enders?”

“There should be.” Rourke went to another part of the morgue where individual files were classified alphabetically, and returned in a moment with a thin cardboard folder which he opened on a counter under a bright light. “Not as much as I would have thought,” he muttered. “But now I recall it didn’t get much publicity at the time. One of those cases that we got our own Iron Curtain clamped down on. Pressure from the government to soft-pedal it for reasons of national interest.” Rourke spat out the words disgustedly as any good newspaperman would after he has had a story killed.

“Here’s the report of his arrest. A bare few lines, you see. October twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-eight. He’s described as a wealthy sportsman with a luxurious fishing lodge on the coast below Homestead, and it’s written in a way to give the impression that sex orgies among the rich were a commonplace there. Roy Enders was arrested on the complaint of a sixteen-year-old Cuban girl who had been his mistress for at least a year. It was cut-and-dried. Hell, he’d been living with her and she was under the age of consent. Normally, a man would get about one year suspended sentence for that offense. Enders got seven years.” Rourke thumped his fist down on the file and looked up disgustedly. “John Mason Boyd was the defense attorney, but what could he do except plead his man guilty? He never expected a wallop like that… and he’s been fighting behind the scenes ever since to get a pardon or parole for Enders.”

“What was the background?” Shayne demanded.

“It was all pretty damn well mixed up and we weren’t allowed to print a word of it.” Rourke scowled angrily. “First, you have to know who Roy Enders was. An American citizen who had gone over to Cuba in the early fifties and made his pile in sugar refineries. But he got disgusted with Batista and his police state, and he pulled out in about nineteen fifty-six. With a couple of million in cash, it was rumored, leaving lots more behind him in the hands of Batista. And he began backing any rebel group seeking to overthrow the regime. Not openly, of course, because our government frowns upon private citizens entering into that sort of political activity, but quietly and behind the scenes. He had this big estate down on the Keys, and it was supposed to be a sort of clearing house for rebel intrigues at that time. Then Fidel Castro began emerging as a leader and as the real hope of the Cuban revolutionaries. Nobody knows to what extent Enders financed him in the beginning, but it was probably pretty extensive.

“Anyhow, by the summer of nineteen fifty-eight, Castro was becoming a real menace to Batista, and our State Department just didn’t seem to know which way to jump. Half the time they were proclaiming that there was no Castro menace, and the other half they were admitting that he was scaring the pants off them. Our industrialists, with big financial stakes in Cuba and in Batista’s regime, put all sorts of pressure on Washington to suppress Castro.

“Of course, he was still just a bearded revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and few people thought he was a real menace. But Roy Enders had a private radio broadcasting station down on the Keys that was rumored to keep in direct contact with Castro’s group, and he was known to maintain a couple of helicopters that flew back and forth across the Caribbean landing supplies and reinforcements to Castro in his mountain hideout.

“Well, that’s the way things were in the fall of fifty-eight,” Rourke went on briskly. “Castro had control of no seaports, and about the only way he could receive munitions was by helicopter to his mountain hideouts. And pressure was brought to bear from Washington on our State authorities to halt Enders’ activities on Castro’s behalf any way they could. There was this under-age Cuban girl who gave them the lever they needed. He was solemnly arrested on a charge of statutory rape, and railroaded through to seven years in the state penitentiary. His fishing lodge below Homestead was closed up, his broadcasting station closed down, and I suppose his helicopters (which may or may not have been supplying arms to Castro) were grounded. Does any of that do you any good?” Rourke ended abruptly.

“I think it answers a lot of questions,” Shayne told him promptly. He paused, furrowing his brow in deep thought. “You don’t recall anything back in those days linking Captain Ruffer and his fishing boat, Mermaid, with Roy Enders… or with Cuba?”

Timothy Rourke hesitated for a moment, deep in concentrated thought. “N-o-o,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t think it ever… came up. I see what you mean,” he added. “The dates are about the same. But what has the loss of a fishing boat in a hurricane got to do with the arrest of Roy Enders a week or so later?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about that fishing lodge on the Keys and the helicopters that were supposed to be in contact with Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. What would be their source of the munitions they were supposed to fly to Castro?”

Timothy Rourke shrugged. “If there’s enough money involved, I guess you can find arms for sale without too much trouble.”

Unconvinced, Shayne said, “Yeh. There’s one more thing bothering me, Tim. This story of yours about Captain Samuel Ruffer surviving for three days at sea after the loss of his boat with all hands. Did you believe that story when you wrote it?”

Rourke paused to consider this question a long moment before he replied with a shrug. “It made good human-interest stuff. The tough old sea-captain in his late sixties emerged as a sort of Superman. Where the hell else do you think he had been during those three days following the hurricane if he wasn’t floating around on a life preserver?”

Shayne grinned and said, “I think maybe that’s something we ought to think about.” He paused thoughtfully. “That pair you named, who met Enders at the bus station with Boyd. Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. Haven’t I seen their names in the papers the last few years?”

“They’ve been in and out of the news. At one time reputed to be mercenary pilots flying for Castro, and later they were both kicked out of Cuba, and they made some claims to being American agents employed by the C.I.A. Nobody knows who’s hiring whom in this whole mess,” Rourke went on bitterly. “Our government has half a dozen counter-intelligence outfits working out of Miami right now, with none of them knowing who the others are. All you have to do is whisper ‘Russia’ and all of them go into an internal tizzy. Slezar and Yancy were Roy Enders’ two helicopter pilots before he was arrested. They’ve never gone on the witness stand and testified exactly what they did for him. A couple of very hard-boiled yeggs,” Rourke ended wryly. “If they smelled an illegal buck I wouldn’t trust either of them as far as I could toss a cow by the tail.”

“What about John Mason Boyd, the lawyer?” asked Shayne.

“Him, I don’t know much about. He’s managed to stay out of the newspapers mostly. On the edges of some shady stuff, maybe, but what practicing attorney isn’t? He keeps his nose clean in public. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a fairly close personal friend of your old buddy, Will Gentry.”

Shayne said, “Yeh. Well, thanks, Tim. This has all been very helpful.”

“Wait a minute” Rourke grabbed his arm as he turned away. “For all this inside information, what do I get in return? What sort of track are you on, Mike? Has this got anything to do with that Russian pistol you were excited about this morning? What was it Molly Morgan called it… Lenski something-or-other?”

“There’s a tie-in,” Shayne admitted cautiously. “I think it’s going to start hatching some eggs by tomorrow morning, but right now I’m going home to sleep on it. You know you’ll be in on it, Tim, the moment anything starts to break. Hang around home tomorrow until I give you a ring one way or the other.”

“Okay,” Rourke said doubtfully. “It’s a date.”

And with that Michael Shayne left him, headed for his hotel as he told the reporter… and what he hoped would be a solid night’s sleep.

14

The insistent ringing of his telephone awakened Michael Shayne from sound sleep the next morning. He instinctively rolled toward the edge of the bed, groaned and put his hand up to his neck when the pain struck him. The lump under his ear was half the size it had been the night before, but was just as painful to the touch.

His telephone kept on ringing and he swung his legs out of bed cautiously, stood up and padded into the sitting room, barefooted and in pajamas. He lifted the telephone and growled, “Mike Shayne.” A thick voice answered, “This is Roy Enders.” Shayne looked at a clock across the room and saw it was a little after eight o’clock. He said, “I’ve been expecting a call from you.”

There was a brief silence as though the caller were taken aback by the reply. Then, “Well, I’m calling now to warn you to keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you.”

“Murder always concerns me,” Shayne said placidly.

Another brief pause. Then, “Yeh? How much talking did Captain Ruffer do last night before he died?”

“You know more about that than I do.”

“Look here, I wasn’t near his place last night. You were.”

Shayne didn’t bother to reply to this. He kept the receiver to his ear while he leaned over for a pack of cigarettes on the table and shook one out.

“Let’s don’t beat around the bush,” the thick voice said finally. “I know you stole the captain’s logbook.”

“But you’ve got it now,” Shayne said.

“All right. But what I’m wondering is how much you read before you lost it.”

Shayne said, “Keep on worrying.”

“Yeh.” The gruff voice became resigned. “Maybe we can make a deal, huh?”

“What kind of deal?” Shayne got a crumpled cigarette between his lips and struck a match.

“I hear you’re interested in fancy Russian pistols. How would you like to have a gross… delivered anywhere you say within a week? Factory-fresh and in the original packing cases.”

Shayne said, “A gross is peanuts.”

“Peanuts?” The voice thickened incredulously. “I thought you were hep. Know what they would bring? Spread around the country quietly with the kind of outlets you’re in a position to contact?”

Shayne said, “Fifty grand, maybe.”

“You call fifty grand peanuts?”

“In this case, sure. An even split should be worth five times that.”

“An even split?” The heavy voice was outraged. “What the devil makes you think…?”

“You’d better do some thinking,” Shayne said evenly.

He put the receiver down and went out into the kitchen in his bare feet and put hot water on the stove to boil for coffee. He was measuring ground coffee into the top of the dripolator when his telephone began ringing again. He disregarded it while he finished measuring out coffee. He fitted the top on the pot, and the water was beginning to boil, and he poured it in.

The telephone was still ringing when he strolled back into the sitting room and picked it up and asked with a scowl, “Have you done your homework?”

The same voice was somewhat plaintive now, “What makes you think you deserve an even split?”

“It’s not a matter of deserving,” Shayne told him happily. “I’m sitting in the driver’s seat. One call to the C.I.A. and you’re through. Kaput.”

“You’d never do it, Shayne. Because you’d be out in the cold, too. I know your reputation for never passing up a buck.”

Shayne said, “Don’t push me into something I’d rather not do. Fifty-fifty is one hell of a lot better than nothing.”

“Yeh.” For the first time the voice sounded uncertain. “Come out and we’ll talk it over, huh? Fifty-fifty is too much, but maybe we can make a sensible deal.”

“Where?”

“I’m holed up in my old lodge on the Keys. Take Number One seventeen miles past Florida City, and there’s an old paved road to your left. Follow that six and eight-tenths miles and turn right on a dirt road. There’s a sign.”

Shayne said, “I’ll find it.”

“Come alone in your own car. There’ll be guys watching after you make the last turn-off. If you try to pull anything we’ll both regret it.”

“Why should I try to pull anything?” Shayne asked amiably. “If I’d wanted to cut you out I would have started the ball rolling last night.”

“All right. Can you make it in an hour?”

“Hell, I haven’t had breakfast,” Shayne said irritably. “And I’ve got a couple of things to do. Make it eleven o’clock.”

“Come alone and unarmed.”

Shayne said, “I figure I’d be a fool to come any other way.” He hung up and went out to the kitchen for a mug of coffee.

After his coffee he showered and used an electric razor on his face, gingerly going around the strips of adhesive which he left in place, and glowering at his reflection as he did so.

When he was dressed he looked in the telephone book for Armin Lasher’s telephone number and found a listing in the swank Miami Shores district. He lifted the telephone to call the number, and scowled at the instrument in surprise when a brisk masculine voice answered from the hotel switchboard, “Good morning.”

Shayne hesitated, and instead of giving Lasher’s number, he asked, “Can you give me the time?”

He was told, “It is eight fifty-two.”

He hung up thoughtfully, got his Panama from a hook near the door and went down to the lobby. He crossed to the desk and leaned one elbow on it and looked past the day clerk at the switchboard where a brown-suited, middle-aged man was alertly handling the plugs, and asked, “Where’s Mabel today?”

The clerk glanced back with him, and said, “Mabel was ill today and the employment agency sent him for a substitute.”

Shayne nodded and went out to the hotel garage for his car, drove to a drugstore on Flagler that was open, and went in and called Lasher’s number.

A feminine voice with a Swedish accent answered, “Mr. Lasher’s residence,” and Shayne told her urgently, “Get Mr. Lasher on the phone at once. It’s very important.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said nervously. “He’s having breakfast and won’t like being disturbed.”

“Disturb him,” Shayne told her. “He’ll like it. Tell him it’s Mike Shayne.”

After a short wait, Lasher’s voice answered questioningly, “Shayne? Did the girl get it right?”

“She got it right. I want to see you… and Bull and Dixie. Can you have the two of them at your office in an hour?”

“Look. I told you last night, Mike…”

“I know what you told me last night,” grated Shayne. “Things have changed since then. This is a damned big deal and I need help. The kind of help your boys can give me. Have them there at ten o’clock and I’ll make you a proposition worth maybe a couple of hundred grand. But it’s got to be settled fast and it’s got to be those two. I’ll be there at ten.”

He hung up before Lasher could ask any questions, looked in the directory hanging on a chain and discovered that John Mason Boyd’s office was on Flagler only a few doors from where he stood.

He went out and found the office building with Boyd listed on the building directory on the 6th floor.

He went up and found a door chastely lettered: JOHN MASON BOYD — ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, and entered a small reception room. A tightmouthed, middle-aged woman seated at a desk looked up at Shayne inquiringly and then with unconcealed disapproval at the strips of adhesive on his face and the lump on his neck.

“Mr. Boyd is not in,” she informed him before he could ask her. “I don’t except him before ten.”

Shayne said, “Perhaps you can help me. I’m from the police,” he lied blandly, giving her a glimpse of his private detective’s badge.

“From the police?” Her thin lips tightened. “I’m sure I don’t know how I can help you.”

“It’s about one of Mr. Boyd’s clients who was murdered last night. Mr. Boyd told us something about him last night, but there are a few details we need to have filled in.”

“You mean poor Captain Ruffer. Such a terrible way to die. He was such a nice man. So alone and… helpless.”

“Did you know him?”

“Only through seeing him here at the office occasionally. Is it true that he was actually tortured to death last night? Why would anyone do such a thing? Of course, I guess he had come into some money finally because I know he called Mr. Boyd yesterday and said he was going to be able to do something about the mortgage on his little house which was about to be foreclosed.”

“In what capacity did Boyd act for him as an attorney?”

“There wasn’t much… really,” she said vaguely. “He first came to us five or six years ago for help in collecting insurance on his boat that had been lost at sea. He put all of that, I believe, in his little house, and I actually believe he’s been almost destitute this last year or so. Behind on his mortgage payments and like that. I know Mr. Boyd worried about him, and I think he actually gave him small sums of money sometimes, just so the old captain wouldn’t go hungry. But he was independent… you know how stubborn old people get? What was it you wanted to ask me about him?”

Shayne said, “Just what you’ve told me. Thanks,” and lifted his hat to her and went out.

Downstairs there was a telephone booth in the lobby, and he dialled Timothy Rourke’s home number.

After the fifth ring, the reporter’s sleepy voice came over the wire and Shayne told him briskly, “Things are getting ready to pop, Tim. If you want one hell of a story, get on Will Gentry’s tail and don’t get off it.”

“What’s that? Mike? What the hell time of night is it?”

“Time you were on your horse and riding. Get down to Will Gentry’s office, Tim, and stick to him like a leech. Don’t ask him any questions and don’t, for God’s sake, let him know that I tipped you off. Just stay close to him this morning, and I promise you fireworks.”

Shayne hung up and went out onto the sidewalk. It lacked eighteen minutes of ten o’clock. Just time enough for a leisurely drive out to the Little Revue and a confrontation with the two hoods who had treated him so cavalierly the night before.

15

There were no cars in the public parking lot at the night club when Michael Shayne got there. He pulled up directly in front of the entrance and got out. The doors stood wide open, and inside an old man was industriously mopping the floor of the lounge.

He didn’t even look up from his task as the detective crossed the damp floor and went down the corridor to the stairway at the rear.

It was very still inside the building and he encountered no one else as he climbed the stairs and went toward Lasher’s office.

The outer door into the reception room stood open and it was empty this morning, with the ceiling light on.

The door to the inner office was closed. Shayne strode across to it and knocked lightly and then turned the knob. He had timed his arrival carefully so it was exactly ten o’clock, and as he pushed the door open Armin Lasher called out from inside, “That you, Shayne?”

He said, “Yes,” and stepped inside, confronting the gangster seated behind the big bare desk as he had been the night before, with Dixie and Bull standing stiffly behind his chair.

Lasher’s black eyes narrowed for a moment as he took in Shayne’s appearance, and then a faint smile flickered over his mobile face. “You’re not near as pretty as you were last night,” he observed sardonically. “Like I told you then, you don’t know when to keep your big mouth shut I guess.”

Shayne said evenly, “I guess not.” He glanced from the seated gangster up into the faces of Dixie and Bull, and he sensed real fear in their furtive expressions. He knew, then, that Lasher was not aware they had disobeyed him last night, and that he would have them on his side if he played it right. He touched the strips of adhesive on his cheek and said lightly, “One of the hazards of my job. Sometimes I run up against a guy tougher than I am, and I don’t hold a grudge if I get marked up a little.”

Lasher merely grunted, then he demanded, “What are we here for, Shamus? You got something to say… say it.”

“We were talking about Russian pistols last night,” Shayne reminded him. “The whole thing’s a hell of a lot bigger than I realized, and I need somebody with your connections to swing the deal. I know there are about a dozen well-heeled Cuban refugee groups in town who would be eager cash customers for the kind of goods I can deliver. In my position, I can’t contact them. You can. I know where the stuff is. You handle the selling end and we split fifty-fifty.”

“What is the ‘stuff’?” asked Lasher.

“An assorted shipment of Russian small arms. The Lenski pistols are a sample. There are six gross of them. At a hundred bucks each…” He shrugged his shoulders expressively. “Automatic rifles… machine guns… with ammunition to match. All new and the very latest design. Exactly what the hotheads need to foment half a dozen revolutions in Cuba and the rest of Latin America.”

“Where is it?” demanded Lasher.

“That’s my secret,” Shayne told him evenly. “Are you interested?”

“Why not? Show me the stuff and we’ll deal.”

“There’s one hitch. There’s a mug standing between me and the shipment, and he’s got a couple of torpedoes gunning for me right now. I’ve got to stay alive to make delivery to you. That’s where your two boys come in. I need a couple of real pros like Bull and Dixie to handle that angle.” He raised his gaze and looked from one to the other with cold eyes. “From what I’ve seen of them, I figure they’re just the pair for the job. Give them to me for a couple of hours and we’ll be in.”

Neither of them said anything or moved. They looked back at him dispassionately and he had no idea what they were thinking.

“Right now?” asked Lasher.

“It’s got to be right now. I’m the only one standing in this other guy’s way and he’s putting me on the spot. I’ve got a date to meet him out in the country in about an hour, and I’ve got word he’ll have a couple of quick-trigger boys on hand to blast me out of the picture.

“I’m not handing you anything on a platter,” he went on harshly to Lasher. “It’s my hide I’m worried about. If Bull and Dixie can handle the job, I’ll owe you half the take. But there’s sure as hell going to be shooting, and you boys better shoot first,” he ended raising his eyes to them again. “Don’t throw in with me unless you’re as good as I think you are.”

“They’re good all right,” Lasher assured him. “Two of the best.” He leaned back in his chair with narrowed eyes and considered the proposal. “I don’t see why not. If it’s as big as you say, Shayne.”

“It’s that big. You boys all ironed and ready?” Shayne asked them. “My car’s in front and we’re due south of Homestead for the showdown in less than an hour.”

Dixie said in a tight voice, “We’re ready if you are.”

“Sure,” said Bull with a swagger. “You show us who you want gunned… tha’s all.”

Shayne said, “Let’s go then,” and turned on his heel and walked out.

They followed close behind, and Bull caught up with him at the head of the stairs and said earnestly, “Jeez! It’s real swell you ain’t got no hard feelin’s for last night. Dixie an’ me, we just sorta got carried away.”

Shayne said lightly, “Why should there be any hard feelings? I guess I asked for it when I pushed you in front of Lasher. Important thing is, I knew where to come when I needed a couple of real tough lads. Anybody that can rough me up and get away with it… know what I mean?”

“Hear that, Dix?” said Bull over his shoulder happily. “Just like I tol’ you this mornin’. You take a pro like Mike Shayne… why should he get sore for a little slappin’ around? He’s handed out plenty his ownself, you can bet.”

16

With the two men in the back seat of his car, Shayne got onto the Palmetto Speedway and sped south to its intersection with Highway Number One, and made the 18-mile run to Homestead at high speed. At Florida City, Number One became a two-lane road leading south to Key Largo and eventually to Key West.

He drove through Florida City at exactly 10:30, and made the next seventeen miles in seventeen minutes, leaving the rich and heavily populated country behind him and entering a desolate area of scrub pine and palmetto as the road drew close to the coastline.

At that point he found an old paved road leading off to the left, and he swung onto it at reduced speed, checking his speedometer. It was a narrow, twisting roadway through hummocky wasteland with blazing sunlight overhead, no habitations on either side, and no other cars travelling in either direction.

At the end of six miles of bumpy road, Shayne said over his shoulder in a conversational tone, “You two had better get down on the floor now and have your gats ready. I turn off on a dirt road in about half a mile. Keep your heads damn well down because I promised to come alone and unarmed. It will be somewhere along that dirt road. I expect two of them, and they won’t be amateurs. Keep out of sight until I stop, and I’ll try to get them both around to my side of the car, and I’ll jerk the rear door open. That should give you a jump, but for God’s sake start shooting fast when the door opens. They’re going to be tough cookies, and loaded for bear. Got that clear?”

“Sure. We’ll take ’em,” Bull grunted happily, hunching himself down on the floor of the car directly against the left door.

Dixie got down beside him, and Shayne slowed still more, watching his speedometer and for a dirt road on the right. He saw it, and there was a faded wooden sign, LODGE, nailed to a pine tree at the turn-off.

He glanced swiftly over his shoulder as he turned to see that the hoods were properly hunkered down with drawn guns, and then proceeded along the rutted road between palmetto hummocks at ten miles an hour.

They were very close to the coastline and the smell of salt water was strong in the air. In less than a mile there was a sharp turn around a hummock over a small rise, and the weathered rock walls of a sprawling fishing lodge showed through a thin growth of pines in front of him and not more than a hundred yards away.

Two men stepped into the middle of the road fifty feet in front of him. He braked gently and muttered over his shoulder, “Two of them like I guessed. Wait till I open the door.”

He came to an easy stop with his bumper almost touching the pair who blocked his way. He put his head out the window and asked, “This Enders’ place?” And then stepped out quickly, holding his hands in the open and well away from his body.

One of the men was very tall and thin, with cadaverous, darkly tanned features and very white teeth which showed in a saturnine smile as he surveyed the detective. He wore a pongee suit and had his arms folded across his thin chest with his right inside the lapel where there was a formidable bulge.

Shayne knew that would be Slim Yancy.

His companion was a head shorter than Slim, bald-headed and perspiring. He was coatless and wore a wide leather belt with an open holster on his right hip… a big and curiously designed holster which would just about fit a Lenski twelve-oh-seven. He had his hand on the butt of the weapon and he stood flat-footed on the side of the road facing Shayne.

Shayne slammed the front door shut and surveyed them coolly. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Shayne.”

Pug Slezar said, “Yeah. We know. This here’s Slim.”

Shayne said, “I thought this was a social call. Where’s Roy Enders?”

“He sent us out to see if you were clean before you came in.” Slim’s lips barely moved as he uttered the words. He sauntered happily around the front of the car, bringing his hand out from under his lapel with a big Lenski gripped in it. His deepset eyes were cold, and glittered like polished agate. His head was thrust forward on a long, thin neck.

Shayne took two backward steps, holding his arms well away from his body, his right hand resting casually on the handle of the rear door as though to steady himself. “I’m clean,” he protested. “I came out to talk business. This is a hell of a way to greet a guy.”

Pug stepped forward in front of Slim, hand still on his holstered gun. He said calmly, over his shoulder, “Why don’t we let him have it right here?”

Slim said, “We do,” and moved up beside his shorter companion.

Shayne jerked the car door wide open and dived for the ground at the rear of the car at the same instant. He hit it rolling, and kept on rolling while the racket of gunfire blasted the silence behind him.

You couldn’t count the shots, but Dixie and Bull got theirs off first before the automatic Lenskis blasted like submachine guns.

Shayne lay flat on his belly with his head pillowed on his arms until the last racketing echo died away. Then he rolled over and sat up and saw Slim lying flat on his back with the hole made by a.45 slug in the middle of his face. Pug was sitting on the ground near him with a look of dazed bewilderment on his broad face and with the fingers of both hands laced tightly together in front of his belly. Blood came out between his fingers and he looked down at it disbelievingly. Then he toppled over on his side, moaning softly.

There was no sound from inside the car.

Shayne got to his feet stiffly. He dimly heard shouts, and looked around to see men running through the pine thicket toward them. He walked around to the right-hand door and opened it and peered inside.

Both men were cramped down on the floor in unnatural positions, and both were quite dead. Somehow, one or both of Enders’ men had managed to get off blasts from their Lenskis before they went down, and the 50-caliber bullets had created terrible havoc inside the car. The top half of Dixie’s head had literally been lifted off, and Bull’s chest was shredded with the heavy slugs.

Shayne closed the door hastily and went around the back of the car to meet Will Gentry who came puffing up followed by half a dozen men dressed like farmers, some of whom Shayne recognized as plain-clothes detectives from Miami. Directly behind Gentry was a tall, black-mustached man wearing a big revolver and a Sheriff’s star, and tumbling along behind him was Timothy Rourke.

Gentry glanced at the two men on the ground and peered inside the back of the car, then turned angrily on the redhead and demanded, “What in hell are you pulling off here, Mike?”

“I?” Shayne arched ragged red eyebrows at the unhappy chief of police. “Am I to blame if some damned hoods choose this place to settle one of their feuds?” He waved toward the rear of his car. “Couple of hitch-hikers I picked up along the way. How the hell was I to know they’d start shooting the minute I stopped the car. Why don’t you ask them?”

“They’re both dead,” Gentry said angrily. “Hitchhikers hell! You set this up, Mike…”

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

Gentry and Shayne went to him. Blood was spreading out behind Pug’s hands still gripped in front of his belly, but his eyelids were flickering.

Gentry bent over him and demanded, “Where’s Enders?”

“Inside. Cellar.” Pug’s reply was faint and strained.

Gentry straightened up and directed two of his men. “Smith and Parks. Stay here and get a statement from this dying man. The rest of you fan out fast and surround the lodge. The real criminal is still inside, Sheriff. I don’t know how many men he may have, but if they’re armed with the same kind of weapons these two were shooting, we don’t want to take any chances.”

Shayne knelt down beside Pug as Gentry and the sheriff moved away to direct the placing of their men around the lodge. He leaned close to the dying man and demanded, “Where’s the girl, Pug? The girl! Where is she?”

“Inside,” muttered Pug without opening his eyes.

Rourke grabbed his arm as he got up and started toward the lodge, and exploded happily, “Sweet God, Mike. When you promise action, you sure deliver. But for God’s sake, tell me…”

Shayne pulled away from him and stalked up the road toward the fishing lodge. Rourke hurried after him, expostulating, “Hold it a minute, Mike. Didn’t you hear the man? Roy Enders is still inside. Let Gentry and the sheriff smoke him out.”

Shayne paid no attention to the reporter. Unarmed, his face set in hard lines, he strode on toward the lodge.

Gentry was spacing his men around to cover all exits, and he saw Shayne and called out gruffly, “No need for anybody else to get hurt, Mike. Stay back and we’ll use tear gas.”

Shayne went steadily forward in the hot sunlight and the silence. He mounted the wide stone steps to the front door, his heels pounding loudly on the flagstones, pushed a sagging screen door open and went in to a wide hallway. There was a stale odor inside the house, and it was cool and very still. A wide arched opening led into a huge living-room on the right with a row of plateglass windows looking out over the ocean.

Molly Morgan was bound rigidly upright in a heavy chair fashioned from mangrove roots across the room beside the ten-foot fireplace. Her legs and arms were fastened to the chair with copper wire, and her mouth was sealed with adhesive tape. Her eyes rolled toward the detective as he stood in the arched doorway.

Against the wall on his right Shayne saw a jumble of water-soaked equipment which he recognized as skin-diving appurtenances… flippers and masks and oxygen tanks. Ranged alongside were several rusted metal packing cases which appeared to be sealed tightly. Three of them were long and slender, about three feet in length by one foot in width and depth; two others were in the shape of two-foot cubes, and one of these had been ripped open and stood with the metal top turned back, exposing the contents to view.

Shayne grinned across the big room at Molly Morgan and waved to her and said, “Hi,” and then he stepped over and looked down at the metal container that had been opened.

There were orderly rows of Lenski pistols inside, each one surrounded by a thick layer of grease in which it had been packed at the factory.

He strode on across to Molly who was bound in the chair, and dropped down beside her and started untwisting the wires holding her wrists and ankles, and he talked to her quietly as he worked.

“It’s okay now, Molly. I’m going to get your arms and legs loose first. There’ll be time enough to talk later. Right now, we’ve got to get your circulation back… those bastards really did a job on you.”

He twisted off the last piece of wire and then stood up and leaned over her. He put his left hand hard against her forehead and forced her head back against the back of the chair, looked deep into her eyes and worked his fingernails underneath the edge of the wide strip of tape over her mouth.

“I’m going to pull it off,” he warned her quietly. “It’ll hurt like hell, but…” As he spoke, he jerked.

The adhesive tape came away from her mouth and she slumped forward against him, moaning softly. He got his arm around her and lifted her from the chair, holding her yielding body tightly against him. Her legs wouldn’t support her as she tried to stand, and he held her upright, rubbing her wrists briskly and telling her, “You’ve just got to get your circulation back. Try moving your legs. Make them move. You’ll be fine. It’s all over now.”

“It’s been so terrible,” she was sobbing with her face pressed tightly against his shoulder. “I sat here and heard them planning to kill you, Mike. And then I heard the shooting outside…”

Shayne continued to move her slowly across the room with one arm tightly about her waist, and she mechanically started to put her weight tentatively first on one foot and then the other and her fingers tightened convulsively and then loosened on his arms, and suddenly Chief Gentry’s voice boomed at them from the archway:

“What the devil is going on in here, Mike?”

Shayne turned his head and grinned over his shoulder at the police chief. “I’m giving a lady a dancing lesson, Will.”

The tall figure of the sheriff loomed in the opening behind Gentry, and Shayne continued pleasantly, “Why don’t you two go down in the cellar and look for Enders? That’s where Pug said he was.”

Will Gentry scowled and crossed the room purposefully. “What kind of run-around are you trying to give me, Mike?”

Shayne held Molly Morgan away from him gently, and smiled down into her face. “All right, now?” he asked her. “I think you can make it on your own.”

She nodded, biting her underlip and moving back from him under her own power. “I’m all right,” she murmured, and she held tightly to one of his hands while she manoeuvered herself around to a rustic bench against the wall where she sank down with a sigh of relief.

“This is Molly Morgan,” Shayne said, stepping back from her and turning to Gentry. “You remember? You were asking me about her last night.”

“I remember all right,” Gentry was beginning to breathe heavily. “What kind of run-around is this, Mike?”

Shayne said innocently, “It was supposed to be a private party, but you invited yourself.”

“Damned lucky for you,” fumed Gentry. “Did you think you could handle this gang by yourself?”

Shayne grinned at him disarmingly. “I’ve done all right thus far. I admit you caught me unawares, Will. Next time you decide I’m holding out on you and decide to monitor the switchboard in my hotel, don’t send a guy with d-i-c-k written all over him.”

Will Gentry swallowed hard. “I wondered who sent Tim Rourke to me with a tip there’d be fireworks out here this morning. All right. You knew I’d cover you. So, why did you bring along a couple of guns to do your shooting for you?”

“Dixie and Bull?” Shayne shrugged. “They were headed for the electric chair anyhow, for the murder of a Lithuanian pawnbroker last night. And they owed me something too,” he added harshly, his fingertips going up to touch the strips of adhesive on his face. He paused and glanced aside at the gun-cases and skin-diving equipment on the floor. “How much of this have you got figured, Will?” he asked quietly.

“Most of it, I think. From six years back, I figured that Cap Ruffer was running guns to Roy Enders, here, which he was sending on to Cuba by helicopters. Did you know those two dead men down the road were his pilots?”

Shayne nodded. His gray eyes were very alert. They shifted from Gentry to two of his men who came in excitedly, and he listened while they reported, “Nobody in the cellar, Chief. Not a living soul in the house, and we’ve had it covered ever since the shooting started.”

“So?” Gentry swung angrily on Shayne. “Roy Enders has got away. He’s the important one. Damn it, Mike. If you’d kept out of this…”

Shayne said, “I don’t think Roy Enders has got very far. Send your boys back down into the cellar to look for some freshly turned dirt, and have them try digging there.”

“What makes you think…?”

“That Enders is dead?” said Shayne impatiently. “Hell, he has to be, Will. Nothing else makes sense. He’s been dead for at least a week.”

“You talked to him on the telephone this morning,” snapped Gentry.

Shayne shook his head. “Nuh-uh. Your man on the switchboard recorded the conversation correctly, but that wasn’t Enders talking.”

“Who was it then?”

“Your pal, John Mason Boyd,” Shayne told him harshly. “It had to be him, Will. He was the only one who made sense. With Pug and Slim, he’d knocked off Enders two weeks ago when the guy finally got paroled. That’s when Captain Ruffer decided he might as well start cashing in on the cache. Then, Boyd killed him last night when he put on too much pressure.

“Wait a minute.” Shayne held up a big hand warningly when Will Gentry started to explode. “It had to be that way, Will. Just answer one question before you blow up. Think back to last night. You and Boyd stopped at the Park Plaza looking for Miss Morgan here.” He indicated her with a wave of his big hand. “She wasn’t in her room… and you came to my place looking for her… right?”

“That’s right,” growled Gentry. “Though I don’t see…”

“After you were at the Park Plaza and before you came to my place… did Boyd make a telephone call?”

Gentry hesitated, rumpling his eyebrows. “As we were leaving the Park Plaza,” he admitted. “He said he wanted to call his wife and explain why he would be late.”

Shayne said, “He actually called Slim and Pug and told them to hurry over to the hotel and grab Miss Morgan when she came in. That’s the way it had to be, Will.”

Gentry turned his head as one of his men hurried into the room and reported excitedly, “There was fresh-turned earth in the basement, Chief. We dug in it and… found Roy Enders with his head caved in.”

Shayne said, “There it is, Will. Dumped into your lap. Have Boyd picked up for murdering Enders and Ruffer, and I’ll tell you exactly which lagoon you’re going to find the rest of this shipment of Russian guns still resting in.”

17

Timothy Rourke and Molly rode back to Miami with Shayne, the three of them in the front seat after the sheriff’s men had removed the two bodies from the back.

Shayne turned in at the first likely looking tavern they came to on Number One and said, “I can stand a double cognac. Bourbon for you, Miss Morgan?”

She laughed lightly. “No. Cognac for me, too. On account of you’re still my favorite detective. Even though you still haven’t told me how you got those three beautiful scratches on your face.”

Following them into the bar-room, Rourke said meaningfully, “You haven’t met his secretary yet, have you?”

“No.” Molly turned to look at the reporter, shocked. “Do you mean that she…?”

“Mike hasn’t explained those scratches to me either,” Rourke said easily as they sat in an empty booth with him across from them. “But I do know Lucy Hamilton, and…”

“And you’re ’way off the track,” Shayne assured him. He asked the waiter for cognac and found they had Courvoisier, and ordered doubles for himself and Molly, and a double bourbon for Rourke. He leaned back and touched the strips of adhesive still on his face, and said, “These are paid for in full. Let’s forget them. You haven’t told us much about last night,” he reminded Molly. “Tim needs it to round out his story.”

“There isn’t much to tell. Those two men were waiting upstairs outside my hotel room when I got there, and they seemed to know all about the captain’s logbook and thought I had it. They both had guns and searched my purse, and then took me out of the hotel between them and to a shabby apartment some place in town where they tied me up and made a phone call… I guess to that lawyer… and then they said I must have left it in your hotel room. And they found your back door key and the tall one took it and was gone half an hour. Mr. Boyd came back with him and they had the book and they read the part about the Mermaid being wrecked in the hurricane in a lagoon about three miles from Enders’ lodge with a big shipment of Russian small arms that had been destined for Castro, and they tried to make me tell them whether you had read it or not, and I swore you hadn’t, but I don’t think they believed me.”

The waiter brought their drinks and she stopped talking until he went away, and then went on. “You heard me tell Chief Gentry about them driving out to the lodge this morning with the diving outfits, and tying me up and going out to come back with those boxes. Then they waited for you to come, Mike. And they talked about killing you and how they’d have the whole boatload of guns for themselves… with Boyd, of course. Actually, it was he who killed the captain last night while torturing him.”

“All that is pretty clear,” said Rourke, “but what I can’t understand is why Captain Ruffer left that stuff in the lagoon all these years when he actually didn’t have enough to eat part of the time.”

“I think it was because Captain Ruffer was an honorable man,” Shayne said slowly. “The cargo didn’t belong to him, you see. He had collected insurance on his boat without admitting it was sunk in a lagoon where it could have been salvaged, and he had no claim on the cargo. So he didn’t touch a single gun until Enders was paroled and then murdered by Boyd and his two former pals. With Enders dead, they thought the captain would throw in with them, but the stubborn old coot refused. Instead, he slipped out to the lagoon on his own and got a case of the pistols up to the surface and sold six of them to Wilshinskis, promising him more if he wanted them.

“When they realized the Lenskis were getting into circulation in Miami, they knew it had to be the captain selling them.”

“But why did they kill Roy Enders as soon as they got him out of jail?” asked Molly. “I understood that Boyd was instrumental in getting his parole.”

“You’ve got to remember that Enders was a fanatical Castro man. Those guns were meant for Castro in the beginning, and I’m sure he was determined that’s where they should go today. There wouldn’t have been any loot for Boyd and Pug and Slim to split up if Enders stayed alive. And things aren’t the same now, with Russia openly sending arms to Castro. Six years ago it was different. Think what a stink we would have made if it had been proved Castro was being supplied arms by Russia while he was still just a bearded revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Roy Enders had to keep that secret as long as he was in the penitentiary.”

“There’s just one more thing puzzles me,” Rourke said. “We were talking about it last night, Mike, when we read that story I wrote about the captain’s rescue at sea three days after the hurricane was supposed to have sunk his boat out in the Caribbean. It wasn’t sunk out at sea. Instead, it appears he ran his cargo aground in a lagoon at the height of the storm. So, how did he get miles out to sea on a life preserver three days later?”

“That’s in his logbook, too. He took the bottom out of his boat on the reef going into that lagoon in the storm. The insurance company would have tried to salvage it, and there it was loaded to the gunwales with illicit arms. He stayed at the lodge with Enders until the storm died away, and they took him offshore at night in a power launch and dumped him where he was bound to be spotted the next day.”

Timothy Rourke had been industriously scribbling notes while Shayne talked. Now he looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to phone the rest of this stuff in to rewrite. Take your drinks slow, you two.” He slid out and went to a telephone booth at the rear of the bar. Molly sipped her drink and moved closer to Shayne, and again he felt her body warmth and he smelled her.

She said softly, “I’m sorry I lost the key to your back door, Mike. I think I might have been tempted to use it one of these nights.”

He said, “I’ll start leaving my front door unlocked.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. You know something?” She tilted her head and looked sidewise at him, provocatively.

“What?”

“You still haven’t kissed me.”

He said, “We have been pretty busy.” He turned his head to see Timothy Rourke in the phone booth with the door shut, and then he turned to her and kept the promise he had made in his apartment more than sixteen hectic hours previously.

Content

Brett Halliday
A Redhead for Mike Shayne

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