Dead Man's Diary & A Taste for Cognac (14 page)

Shayne rasped, “Where are your two gunmen?”

“Blackie and Lennie? How should I know?”

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

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

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

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

Shayne narrowed his eyes. Renaldo sounded truthful. Shayne said, “I’ll search this dump anyhow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renaldo said, “Hold it, Lennie. We don’t want any trouble here.”

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

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

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

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

Shayne saw the kick coming but he couldn’t move to avoid it. He closed his eyes and lay inert.

Blackie kicked him again in the face, and the pain brought knots in his belly. It also drove away the paralysis that had numbed him.

He sat up with blood streaming from his face and pulled his lips away from his teeth in a wolfish grin. He asked thickly, “Didn’t you bring your pliers along this time, Blackie? I’ve got ten fingernails to work on.”

Blackie hit him viciously with the blackjack again. Shayne toppled over and he heard Lennie laughing thinly as though from a far distance.

When he came to, water was being poured over his face. He lay quiescent and listened to Renaldo and Blackie arguing fiercely about him. Renaldo gave Blackie hell for knocking him out so that he couldn’t talk, and Blackie angrily reminded Renaldo of Shayne’s reputation for being tough. Lennie put in an aggrieved voice now and then, begging for permission to finish him off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shayne tried to call back, but his throat muscles were queerly knotted and he couldn’t utter a sound. He shambled down the alley to the street where he had left his car and got in. He started the motor and drove away, made a circle back to Miami Avenue and drove to his apartment hotel. He didn’t feel like tackling the side stairway, so he went in through the lobby to the elevator.

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

Shayne put his arm gratefully around the clerk’s shoulder and croaked, “It’s okay, Dick. More blood than anything else.”

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

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

Shayne looked around the room with dazed and bleary eyes that refused to focus on any object. Things seemed to be in a sort of jumble but he didn’t understand why the clerk was so excited. He let go of the clerk’s steadying arm and staggered past him toward the center table and stared stupidly at the drawer that was pulled all the way out. He remembered having left it closed—with the things he and Myrna Hastings had brought from Captain Samuels’s house.

His fingers closed around the neck of the brandy bottle which was still sitting where he had left it. He used both hands raising it to his mouth. He let the Monnet gurgle down his throat and felt his muscles relax and his eyes clear a little. He looked around the disordered room, and then at the clerk.

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

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

Shayne took another slow drink of cognac. It brought warmth and relaxation to his tight belly muscles. “Was he up here long enough to do all this?” He motioned around the room.

Dick wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t think so, but it would be hard to say for sure. You know how it is. Unless you watch, it’s hard to judge time. Naturally I thought he was a friend of yours. It didn’t seem as if he were up here more than a few minutes.”

Shayne started to nod, but his sore neck muscles stopped him. He said, “Thanks for coming up with me,” in a tone of dismissal.

“But couldn’t I help—get you washed up—the blood off?” the clerk asked.

“No thanks, Dick.”

He stood with the bottle in his hands until Dick went out and closed the door. Then he held it to his lips and drained it. He went out to the kitchen and set the empty bottle carefully on the sink beside the two glasses Myrna had put there on her way out. He tried the back door and found it unlocked.

He remembered distinctly that it had been locked and Myrna had had the key when he went away a short time before.

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

He grimaced at his reflection in the mirror, testing two teeth that felt sore and a little loose. All in all, he was in pretty fair shape, considering the way he’d been knocked around.

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

When he sank into the tub of hot water to soak his long frame, he continued the ministrations with the washcloth. He then let the water run cold on the cloth and splashed it over his face and neck. He stepped out of the tub and swabbed his face freely with peroxide, then dusted it with antiseptic powder. Carefully wiping around the worst cut, he put a Band-Aid over it, then vigorously toweled himself and put on clean clothes.

His neck throbbed with pain where the blackjack had struck. He went to a wall cabinet in the living room and got out a bottle of Portuguese brandy guaranteed to be at least five years old. He filled the wine glass on the table and got a fresh tumbler of ice water from the kitchen, then sank into a chair and lit a cigarette, letting it droop from an uninjured corner of his mouth.

He took a sip of brandy and began to go slowly over the events of the evening, dwelling upon each incident as he came to it in the light of later occurrences. It started with his entering Renaldo’s saloon expecting to meet Timothy Rourke. Myrna Hastings had been there instead. She had accosted him, and he had only her word for it that she was what she claimed to be and had been sent by Rourke. Yet Gentry had phoned Rourke to get her address, but at the Captain’s house she had said Rourke introduced her to Will Gentry that afternoon.

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

Had Myrna Hastings stepped out of character?

He took another long drink of brandy. It was difficult to say. Who could predict what a young girl feature writer from New York was likely to do? She had left his apartment willingly enough and had gone directly to her hotel room as he had told her to. Then she had been immediately escorted away by two men vaguely described as being short and tall. Had she gone willingly? Or had she been coerced, threatened?

He had immediately suspected Black and Lennie of her abduction, but after listening to them at Renaldo’s house he was inclined to believe they were not responsible. It didn’t quite add up. Now that he was thinking along logical lines, he realized they would have to have trailed him back to his hotel and somehow learned of her departure via the fire escape in order to have followed her to the Crestwood.

It was necessary to determine whether the two men who had accompanied her out had been there waiting for her return, or whether they had followed her in and up to her room. If they had been waiting, it could not have been Blackie and Lennie, unless Myrna was involved in some way he knew nothing about.

That left the whole business of the missing murder clues up in the air. When she left his apartment, the clues had been lying on the table. If she had come back to get them she wouldn’t have known to look in the drawer. She might have searched the rest of the room first. The table drawer was too obvious. She didn’t, in fact, know the table had a drawer.

Shayne took another sip of brandy and settled more comfortably in his chair. The pain was gradually going away from his neck muscles. He switched his thoughts from Myrna to Guildford.

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

What about the paroled convict, John Grossman? This seemed to Shayne the crux of the affair. He was certainly mixed up in the possession of smuggled cognac somehow. Had Captain Samuels worked with him, or for him, in prohibition days? Did both men have knowledge of a cache of illicit cognac undisposed of at the time of Grossman’s arrest? If so, why had Captain Samuels waited so many years to put a case of it on the market? Waited until he was weak from hunger and malnutrition?

It seemed likely that the Captain couldn’t get his hands on it while Grossman was in prison, since the first case appeared soon after Grossman had supposedly returned to Miami.

Shayne’s eyes were heavy with the swollen condition of his face. The throb in his neck was subsiding, but his mind was alert.

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

Shayne finished his glass of brandy and closed his mind against his musings. He needed more facts before he could do more than ask himself a lot of questions that, as yet, had no answers.