Bodies Are Where You Find Them (14 page)

Shayne smiled. “I get the angle without your drawing me a picture. Marsh is going to stay in and he’s going to win. And my five grand will be that much sweeter coming from him on his double cross.” He stood up. “Want me to sign something?”

“You know that ain’t necessary.” Joe looked up at him reproachfully. “I was just trying—”

“And I appreciate it,” Shayne told him. The smile on his gaunt features grew broader. “You’ve cleaned up the last angle that had me worried. So long. Just hold my winnings for me. But—do this, Joe. Call Marsh right away and tell him I’ve increased my bet to five grand and tell him I said I’d break his neck if he withdrew and caused me to lose—and that I mean it. He still has time to cover some of his money.”

On his way out Shayne stopped at a telephone booth and called Timothy Rourke at the Miami
News.

Rourke sounded worried. “I was just starting down to headquarters to sign the complaint against Marlow. They picked him up a little while ago.”

“Good. How about the Stallings maid?”

“Nothing on her, Mike. I’ve tried every agency. None of them supplied servants for the Stallings ménage. That looks like a blind alley.”

“Okay, Tim,” Shayne told him cheerfully. “The accusation against me hasn’t broken yet, eh?”

“Guess not. We’re ready with another extra as soon as Stallings and Painter make the kidnap note public.”

“Meet me at the Miami Beach police station as fast as you can make it,” Shayne suggested casually.

“What’s up?”

“Fireworks,” Shayne told him succinctly. “I’m about to give myself up.”

“What the hell? Are you kidding?”

“I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.” Shayne hung up before Rourke could ask any more questions and strolled out of the booth. He killed ten minutes drinking two beers.

Timothy Rourke was just jumping out of his car in front of the Beach headquarters when Shayne rolled up in his rented car. The lean-faced reporter hurried to meet him, panting.

“Is this a gag, Mike?”

“Not at all. As a reputable citizen my conscience forces me to appear voluntarily.” Shayne grinned and got out. He took Rourke’s arm and led him into the outer office, where he leaned on the counter and asked the desk sergeant, “Painter in?”

“Yeh, but he’s busy right now. Mr. Stallings is in his office.”

“Okay. We’ll make it a foursome,” Shayne answered and strolled back to a private office in the rear. He pushed the door open, and the two men entered.

Painter was sitting behind his desk and Burt Stallings sat in a chair near him. A plain-clothes man was using a typewriter in the rear of the office.

Painter and Stallings came to their feet when Shayne and Rourke entered. There was an expression of loathing on Stallings’s face, a look of exuberant triumph on Painter’s.

“This is pretty nice,” the chief of detectives crowed. “Mr. Stallings is just swearing out a warrant for your arrest. Sit down until he signs it and we’ll serve it right here.”

Shayne said, “Sure,” and sat down. The typist rolled a printed form from his machine and laid it in front of the chief. Painter glanced at it, then passed it to Stallings. “Sign right here,” he directed.

Stallings shot a glance at Shayne, then affixed his signature.

Peter Painter leaned back with his black eyes snapping happily. In a formal tone, he pronounced, “You’re under arrest, Michael Shayne—charged with the murder of one Helen Stallings.”

Shayne looked at Rourke. “I want you to witness this. False arrest on a fraudulent charge made knowingly and maliciously.”

“Fraudulent charge?” Painter choked. “You’ll have a hard time making that stick. We’ve got enough evidence to hang you.”

“For the murder of Helen Stallings?” Shayne asked gently.

“Of course. You know damned well—”

Shayne turned to Tim Rourke who was sniffing in the conversation with a look of dazed incredulity on his face. “What the hell are you waiting for?” Shayne demanded. “There’s one of the headlines I’ve been promising you.”

Rourke sprang past Painter to a telephone on the rear desk. He snatched it up and gave the number of his office, got the city desk, and ordered, “Let that extra go. Michael Shayne arrested for murder of Helen Stallings on warrant sworn out by her stepfather. I just saw it happen. Shayne gave himself up in the office of Peter Painter. And keep the presses open. I’ve got a hunch there’s another story making.”

Rourke pronged the instrument and came back to stand beside Shayne. The detective grinned up into his concerned face.

“How long will that be hitting the streets?”

“Two minutes. They were printed and loaded on trucks waiting for the word.”

Shayne said, “Good. Then I don’t need to hold out any longer. I wanted to be sure people actually had a chance to read the charges against me. Defamation of character and so forth.”

“What are you kidding about?” Painter demanded. “We’ve got you dead to rights.”

“First you’ll have to prove that Helen Stallings is dead,” said Shayne. “The corpus delicti, you know.”

Stallings’s face suddenly went ashen. He sank back into his chair breathing heavily.

“You’re crazy,” Painter snapped. “The body was found this morning where you’d ditched it. We’ve got her safe enough. And if you’re figuring on pulling a fast one by snatching the body, you’d better start thinking again.”

“Why, no,” Shayne disclaimed pleasantly, “I wouldn’t snatch the body for anything. That corpse will bust your case wide open. It just happens that the body is not that of Helen Stallings at all.”

MICHAEL SHAYNE’S FLAT STATEMENT that the body of the murdered girl was not that of Helen Stallings brought a moment of stunned silence to Peter Painter’s private office.

Then Burt Stallings blustered, “The man is mad. Stark, raving insane. Of course the girl is Helen. There can’t be the slightest doubt.”

Timothy Rourke also was staring at his friend with a dazed look of incomprehension on his hard-bitten face.

Painter, however, reacted differently. His slender body shivered with wrath. He caressed his tiny black mustache with a trembling forefinger, and baffled fear spread over his features. His voice held a squeaky note of hysteria when he counseled, “Wait, Stallings. Shayne may be up to one of his hellish tricks again. He has a way of pulling elephants out of a thimble when you least expect it. If she isn’t Helen Stallings—”

“But she is. God, man! Don’t you think I can identify my own stepdaughter?”

Painter shook his head dubiously, darting a shaken look at Shayne’s placid self-assurance. He muttered, “You don’t know him like I do. This sort of stunt is right down his alley.” He paused reflectively, then pounded his desk with a small fist. “If he has managed to switch corpses—”

A look of comprehension crept over Rourke’s face. He breathed a soft, ecstatic “Oh, my sweet grandmother” and began scribbling rapidly on a batch of folded sheets drawn from his pocket.

Burt Stallings shook his head decisively. “There’s no chance of anything like that. I came directly from the mortuary here. The girl is my stepdaughter. I can’t be mistaken. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on when she disappeared from home yesterday. A bluish-green silk dress. The same garment described in the
News
story of her discovery this morning,” he ended triumphantly.

Rourke stopped scribbling. He cocked a worried eye at Shayne, but the redheaded detective was wholly unperturbed.

“That’s right. You described the dress when you reported the kidnap note.” Painter was beginning to breathe more easily, and his manner began to assume its normal aggressiveness. His slim padded shoulders strutted as he whirled upon Shayne. “How about it, Shamus? How are you going to get around Mr. Stallings’s positive identification of her?”

Shayne lit a cigarette before replying. He said calmly, “If you would stop trying to hang something on me you might solve a case one of these days without a blueprint from me. I still say the corpse of the murdered girl isn’t Helen Stallings. I can prove it.”

“But you’ve just heard Mr. Stallings—”

Shayne waved the interruption aside. “Mr. Stallings can prove she is the girl who left his home after lunch yesterday, angry at him and at Arch Bugler. The girl who has been masquerading for a month as Helen Stallings. I don’t deny that. I haven’t looked at the body, but from Rourke’s description in the newspaper this morning I’m assuming that’s who she is. She came to my office yesterday afternoon just before I took my wife to the train.”

Burt Stallings’s tall, handsome body was rigidly upright and tense. Only his lips moved when he said bitterly, “I repeat—the man is insane. Someone masquerading as Helen? Bah! Utter nonsense.”

Rourke’s nose quivered on the scent of headlines. His head was slightly cocked toward Stallings as his pencil again raced over the notebook on his knee.

“You admit she came to you yesterday?” Painter again pounded the desk. “Last night you denied knowing anything about her disappearance.”

“Barking up a tree again,” Shayne said. “I denied knowing anything about Helen Stallings’s disappearance. I didn’t at that time, though I’ve doped it out since. Also, I didn’t even know where the girl was. She was snatched from my office while I was at the depot.”

Painter’s delicate mustache quivered upward in a sneer. “A likely story. By God, Shayne, I don’t know what you’ve cooked up to cover yourself this time, but we’re not going to swallow any preposterous tissue of lies.”

“Ask Stallings what actually became of Helen,” Shayne said easily. “He got rid of her a month ago. He and Arch Bugler together.”

Stallings fumed. “Must we listen to this man’s absurd accusations?”

“You’re Goddamned right you’re going to listen.” Shayne swung on him angrily. “I’m not only accusing you of getting rid of your stepdaughter, but of doing away with the girl who was posing as Helen. Baldy, from the Bugle Inn, telephoned you yesterday afternoon that he had doped her and that she was headed to Miami to see me. You were desperate. Your whole house of cards was tumbling down if she talked.”

“I did not. I can prove I didn’t leave the Beach. A bartender did warn me that my daughter was making loose threats against me and was going to you with them. I told all that to Mr. Painter at once. My hands are clean.”

Painter’s black eyes were glistening. They stalked the redheaded detective relentlessly. “Are you fool enough to think you can make anyone believe another girl has been pretending to be Helen Stallings for weeks and the deception has been successful? I suppose you’re going to pull an identical twin out of your sleeve now.”

“It didn’t take an identical twin—nor a twin of any sort. All it took was a girl who looked enough like Helen for a newspaper picture of her to pass for a previously printed picture of the real Helen Stallings. Here’s what I mean.”

Shayne drew some folded sheets of newspaper from his coat pocket and spread them out on Painter’s desk. “Here’s a shot of Helen Stallings at the airport when she arrived from the north—her
first
visit to Miami,” he added significantly. “It isn’t particularly clear, as good as most newspaper photos, and you’ve had your mug in the papers enough, Painter, to know you can’t recognize yourself half the time.

“Now take a look at this close-up. The date is a week later. The day
after
Helen Stallings filed suit against her stepfather for mishandling her father’s estate. Also, the day the Stallings family moved from an apartment into their new home. This picture is very clear. No doubt about it, that’s the girl who thereafter was known around Miami as Helen Stallings. Do you begin to get a glimmering of the truth now?”

Stallings was like a mass of poured concrete except for his lips. He protested, “This is all a fantastic product of Shayne’s imagination. You certainly won’t grant for a moment, Chief Painter, that such a masquerade would be successful, would fool her mother, myself, the servants, her friends.”

Shayne answered for Painter. “It didn’t fool you. You arranged it, with Arch Bugler’s help. Her mother? She’s confined to her bed in the west wing—has been ever since you moved into the new house. A maid told me the girl hadn’t seen her mother since her illness. The servants? They were all new. They’d never seen the real Helen Stallings. Her friends? She had been in the city only a week. Whatever friends she might have made during that week were promptly dropped. She began running around with a tough crowd. Bugler and his gang. That’s one of the things that put me next. Her abrupt transition into a member of the night-club sporting crowd, escorted by Arch Bugler. Somehow that didn’t fit my preconceived idea of the character of a Smith College graduate.”

Stallings moved his shoulders jerkily, then shook his head slowly. “Really, your ability to distort facts to fit your own ends is amazing, Mr. Shayne. All I can suggest is that you read less of Oppenheim or stop hitting the pipe.”

Peter Painter’s face was a curious study of mixed emotions. Again there was that lingering expression of fright in his black eyes as he felt the solid foundations of his case against Shayne crumbling against the assaults of doubt. Blended with his fear and his anger was the inbred determination of a police officer to get at the truth, regardless of consequences.

He said to Shayne, “Granting the remote possibility of your fantastic story that such a switch in identities could have been managed under the circumstances you outline—
why?
Why, in God’s name, would anyone go to such extraordinary lengths?”

“The answer is right here in the newspaper.” Shayne tapped a sheet he had laid on the desk. “The girl comes to Miami and starts a suit against her stepfather for misappropriation of the estate. Suppose he’s guilty and desperate to have the action squelched? Simply killing the girl won’t halt the investigation. Besides, the filing of the suit will look like a motive for murder. So he puts her out of the way and substitutes another girl who looks enough like her to appear in court and withdraw the complaint. It is an established fact that few people are observant enough to remember exact features when meeting a person once, or even twice. A girl of approximately the same build and coloring wearing the identical dress and hat worn by Helen Stallings might easily fool a judge or a lawyer. Maybe the complaint was withdrawn by a written document.”