She Woke to Darkness (11 page)

“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pell of Greenwich, Connecticut. No street address. No luggage. They paid cash for the room. Woman was described by clerk as medium height and sort of dark. Under thirty and nice-looking. She appeared tight but able to navigate. No one saw her leave the hotel, but she had disappeared when the body was found. That’s all in the first clipping.”

Ed Radin laid it aside with satisfaction. “Does it begin to add up?”

“Wait a minute,” objected Shayne. “Your clipping says the Beloit Hotel on 23rd Street. The script calls it the Halcyon on upper Madison. And Elsie Murray had her man’s throat slashed. This one was slugged to death. Yet she told Halliday that her story was factual except for changing names and descriptions of the people involved.”

“I’d say it is still factual,” argued Radin. “Naturally, she’d change the name and location of the hotel. And the actual manner of the man’s death. A knife or a blunt instrument? That isn’t a change of fact. Not really. You’ve got to realize she hoped to have this story published, and she couldn’t afford to describe the scene so definitely that readers would remember the case from their newspapers.”

“How will we know how much else she may have changed to suit herself?”

“We won’t, for sure. But I’d guess she changed only the facts that appeared in the newspaper accounts. My interpretation of what she told Brett would be that she used the truth wherever it was possible without pointing the finger at her or any other real person. Let’s go on with it and see. Here’s the next day’s follow-up.”

He smoothed the second clipping out and glanced down it, nodding slowly:

“The body was identified that afternoon by the man’s room-mate, Alfred Hayes, who read a description and checked on it because his friend was missing. A man named Elbert Green. Shipping clerk in a publishing house. Unmarried, thirty-five and a quiet, studious type. Green and Hayes had been to a party the preceding evening… name of host considerately not mentioned… and Hayes told the police he was under the impression that Green might have left the party with one of the female guests, identity unknown to him (he claims).

“There isn’t much more on it,” Radin ended dolefully. “The principals weren’t important and nothing sensational developed. The next story simply says that police interrogated all the guests at the party and were given the name of one girl who several of them thought might have left with the murdered man. But she was able to produce an alibi in the person of another man who had actually driven her home, and that was that. Doesn’t say so here,” Radin went on, “but you can be sure the cops tried to get her identified by the people at the Beloit and failed. That doesn’t mean much either way, but with nothing more to go on, they’d have to drop her.”

He paused and laid the clippings aside. “What do you make of it?”

“I’d still think,” said Shayne, “it was just a jump-off for a purely fictional story except for one thing.”

“Her murder last night and the missing manuscript?”

“Exactly. That may be important. If Elsie Murray was the mystery woman in Elbert Green’s death, and if she wrote it up pretty much as it happened to her…” Shayne paused to frown and take a drink of his watered whiskey.

“That’s the crux,” said Radin emphatically. “Elsie’s death just as she was presumably on the eve of showing her script to Brett… a professional mystery writer who
might
come on an unpleasant truth which had eluded Elsie… that, and now Brett’s own disappearance. Those are two tangibles we can’t disregard.”

“We need a lot more information about Elsie herself,” said Shayne decisively, “and about all the people involved in the investigation of Elbert Green’s death three months ago. The room-mate, for instance. She describes him as an author. Was he? How close is her physical description of him to what he was?”

“It doesn’t say in the paper,” Ed Radin admitted. “I can follow that line up with my pipelines into the police files. Shall I mention the possibility that it may tie in with Elsie’s death?”

“I don’t see how you can unless you give them this script to read for themselves. Think you want to do that?”

“I don’t see how in hell I can without telling the whole story of how Brett came by it and how I advised him last night to sit tight and not stick his neck out. It’s a mess,” Radin ended ruefully.

“Not too much of one. Hell, if I know cops they wouldn’t have the brains to see anything in the script anyhow. If you’d given them Brett last night, they’d be spending all their time trying to sweat something out of him right now and the script would be disregarded. As it is, we can work on it.”

“If they were trying to sweat something out of him, we’d at least know he was alive and safe. Goddamn it, Mike! I wish to God…”

“No regrets,” said Shayne savagely, draining off his drink and swinging to his feet. “Never waste time on regrets. Maybe you did make a mistake. All right.” His voice was hard, the lines in his rugged face deepening to trenches as he glared down at the despondent writer. “Everybody makes mistakes. The man who’s worth a damn is the one who goes forward from each mistake he makes. Never look back. Right now, we’ve got to find Brett Halliday. Get off your dead butt and let’s move. You take the police angle on the Green case. I’ll pick up the Murray angle myself. If we can pull any threads of the two together, we may have something to work on. Will two hours be enough for you?”

The driving urgency in the redhead’s voice automatically brought Radin to his feet. He saw it for himself now. What Halliday had tried to describe in his accounts of Michael Shayne’s past cases. There was something in the man that wouldn’t let him fail. It was much more than conscious determination. Something from deep within that drove him on and on in the face of the most impossible odds. At this moment, with his best friend probably dead or in danger of death and with the man before him who might well be responsible for it, Michael Shayne wasted no moment nor one iota of energy on recriminations. When things went wrong, you picked up the pieces and went on.

Between his teeth, Ed Radin responded grimly, “Two hours will be plenty for me. Shall I meet you here?”

“Yes. We’ll leave the script and maybe it’ll mean more to us when we get back.” Michael Shayne grinned briefly and held out his hand.

“Don’t worry too much about Brett.” His voice was warm now, assured and vibrant. “I’ve known that guy for fifteen years and I’m not going to worry. We’ve got other things to do. Let’s roll. Where do I start getting background on Elsie Murray?”

“Gosh, I hardly know. The police hadn’t picked up much by this morning.”

“What about her job?”

“I don’t think she had one. I believe she told Brett she’d quit work a couple of months ago when she moved into the Johnson apartment and started writing this book. I’ve seen her around MWA meetings recently, but I don’t know any particular friends.”

“What about the fellow who turned Brett in this morning?”

“Avery Birk?” Ed Radin brightened. “He’d be one to ask. He’s hot on the tail of every gal who shows up at MWA without an escort carrying a sap. He wouldn’t get to first base with a girl like Elsie, but God how he would have tried. Seeing a perfect stranger like Brett walk off with her last night must have soured him plenty.”

“So he calls the cops quick when he hears about her,” agreed Shayne. “Where do I find him?”

“Some place in the Village, I think. I’ll call MWA headquarters and ask for his address.”

Radin turned to his telephone and dialed a number. He asked a question after identifying himself, and scribbled down the reply after waiting little over a minute. He handed the notation to Shayne, saying, “No telephone, but you’ll likely find him in this time of morning.”

Shayne pocketed it and they went out of the office together.

13.

A congenitally frustrated Lothario, Avery Birk was feeling exceedingly well pleased with himself on this particular morning. He lay on his back on a wrinkled and soiled sheet covering a double bed on the third floor of a Village walk-up and contemplated the florid and erotic painting that covered the entire ceiling of the bedroom while he made little sucking sounds of satisfaction with thick lips and briefly considered the pleasures of sex.

Avery Birk never failed to find voluptuous pleasure in contemplating the painting over his bed. It reminded him of the one complete and undiluted sexual triumph in his life. The artist had been a horsy female from the midwest who was, if possible, even more sexually frustrated than he. He had met her, luckily, only a few days after her arrival in New York from some village in Indiana where she had spent forty-two drab years waiting for her widowed mother to die and leave her a small legacy with which she could storm the artistic citadels of New York.

A barren virgin, and bewildered by the wonder of it all, Avery Birk was the first male person in New York to appreciate her potentialities and to invite her to be seduced.

She showed her appreciation by living with him for two weeks and then committing suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. During those two weeks she painted the mural above the bed where she had first discovered sexual pleasure.

This morning Avery was contemplating one of the shadowy nudes above him and thinking with pleasure how much she resembled Elsie Murray. A large part of the pleasure flowed from the degrading perversion being practiced by the nude. Elsie had been revolted by the painting the one time Avery had cunningly plied her with enough strongly spiked drinks to overcome her natural aversion of him and get her into his apartment.

She had insulted him, by God, right here in his own bedroom when he tried to induce her to lie down just for a little rest.

All right. So she’d made her bed and he hoped she liked it. Walking out of the banquet with that one-eyed bastard, Brett Halliday, last night. Where was she this morning? Dead, by God, and good enough for her.

It had been disgusting, that’s what. Utterly disgusting to see how she fawned on the guy. What did he have that all the others in MWA who have tried to make her didn’t have? It wasn’t only himself, Avery told himself with sly pleasure. There had been plenty others to whom she’d given the brush-off. She was too good for all of them, though she’d never had a story published in her life.

Until Halliday came along. Who in hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who’d written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

God! He must be almost forty, Avery Birk ruminated. Maybe that was one explanation for a girl like Elsie taking up with him. A man of that age couldn’t be very dangerous. With him, a girl might have her cake and eat it, too. That’s why she picked on him in the first place when there were so many younger and more virile men around to choose from.

A loud knocking on the outer door interrupted Avery’s pleased musings. He scowled and lumbered out of bed, stood for a moment in faded cerise pajamas before going into the small stuffy living room to open the door.

It would be the cops. They’d said for him to stay home and they’d be around to get a statement from him though he’d insisted over the phone he knew absolutely nothing about the case except that he’d seen the two of them go out together.

He supposed he should have dressed more formally for their visit, but what did it matter? He was a writer, wasn’t he? A Bohemian. He had to live up to the Village’s reputation. The police expected this sort of thing. They’d suspect he wasn’t a real author if they found him all spruced up like a businessman.

In his bare feet and with tousled hair, Avery Birk pulled the door open and was confronted by a tall man with a deeply lined face and wearing a Palm Beach suit and Panama hat.

At least they had sent a detective to interview him, not some dumb cluck in uniform with no understanding of the artistic temperament.

He stepped aside and said, “Come on in. I’m sort of hung over this morning, so I hope you’ll take me as I am.”

“That’s all right,” said Shayne curtly. “I just want a little information.” He wrinkled his nose against the stench of stale cigarette butts, the musty, almost fetid odor of a small apartment whose windows were seldom opened and where fresh air was regarded as unwholesome.

“I can’t tell you very much,” said Avery importantly. “Just what I reported over the telephone. Here. Sit down.” He pulled a pair of slacks and a sweated undershirt from the room’s only chair, and padded backward to a sofa covered with a garish pseudo-Navajo blanket. “Care for a drink? I think there’s some gin. And I know there’s a jug of muscatel.”

Shayne said, “Thanks, no. We want everything you know about Elsie Murray.”

“It isn’t much. I used to see her around. She was one of those girls who longed to be a writer but didn’t have much talent. They hang around us professionals. You get used to it when you’re well-known.” He yawned and smiled lasciviously. “It’s pleasant at first. Feeds one’s ego. Then you have to beat them off with a broom and they get to be a frightful bore.”

“Where was she from?” demanded Shayne impatiently. “Who were her folks? What was her background?”

“Christ, I don’t really know. Did she have folks… a background? One gets to thinking, you know, that girls like Elsie just spring out from under a rock. Sort of parthenogenesis, if that’s the word I want.”

“All right.” Shayne concealed his rising irritation as best he could. “So you don’t really know anything about her. Tell me about last night. You claim you saw her leave with a man named Brett Halliday.”

“That’s right. A fellow from out of town who horned in on our annual banquet. Oh, he had a right to be there, I guess. I believe he is a writer of sorts, though not a really big name in the field. Wears a black eyepatch, though they do say there’s nothing wrong with his eye and he simply does it to attract attention. That type.”

“We know all about Halliday,” said Shayne impatiently. “We want information about Elsie Murray.”

“Have they arrested Halliday?” asked Birk eagerly. “Does he deny being on the make for her all evening and buying the poor kid more drinks than she could handle? She does pass out sometimes, they say, and I presume…”