The Body Came Back (14 page)

“Oh, I’m glad. Then you won’t get in any trouble for helping me?”

“I’m absolutely in the clear… I hope,” he told her cheerfully.

He turned into the block in front of the Encanto Hotel, and slowed down in front of the canopied entrance. The doorman still wasn’t on duty, but Shayne saw the gangling figure of Timothy Rourke leaning against the wall inside the foyer just beyond the outer doors.

He leaped out to go around and open the door for her, helped her out and opened the hotel door, avoiding looking at Rourke. He said, “You’d better go up alone. No use us being seen here together,” and she smiled gratefully at him and went into the lobby toward the elevators.

Shayne stepped close to the reporter and asked, “Everything all set?”

“Yep. Couple of dicks inside. Was that…?”

Shayne said swiftly, “Go on in and the three of you follow her up to number Eight-Ten. Be right behind her when she walks into the room, and you can take it from there.”

“What about you, Mike. Where’ll you be?”

“In bed,” said Shayne emphatically. “This is your show, Tim. I don’t know one damned thing about anything that’s happened tonight.”

He went out fast and got in his car, drove to the Boulevard and north to the next hotel on the bay front, where he went in and registered as J. D. Brewster from Sarasota. He got a room-key from the clerk and went up and piled into bed.

He fell into dreamless sleep almost at once.

For many years Michael Shayne had had a standing invitation to have Sunday morning breakfast with his brown-eyed secretary in her Miami apartment.

On this Sunday morning when he turned up at ten o’clock, Lucy Hamilton seemed surprised to see him, and greeted him with a frown and an anxious question that was almost wifely:

“Where have you been all night, Michael? I’ve been worried and wondering what on earth had happened.”

He yawned and dropped a light kiss on the top of her head. “I’ve been sleeping. Is that any crime?”

“But where have you been sleeping? Not in your own bed. That’s certain.”

“Hey, now,” he protested good-naturedly. “Have you started checking up on my sleeping habits, Lucy?”

She stepped back from him, biting her underlip. “Chief Will Gentry woke me up from a sound sleep about four o’clock,” she informed him coldly, “to ask if I knew where you were. He sounded angry and very disturbed when I assured him I had no idea. He made me promise that, if you did contact me, I would let him know at once. Then Tim Rourke called again about seven o’clock to ask the same question. He said your hotel reported you had gone out about midnight and hadn’t returned, and that all hell was popping. What sort of hell, Michael?”

He shrugged and countered lightly, “How should I know? I was sound asleep and know nothing about such Saturday night goings-on. Is the coffee hot?”

“Of course. Even though I didn’t know whether you were in town or not.” She turned toward her kitchenette with pursed lips. “With or without?”

“With… on the first one, Angel.” He yawned mightily again and dropped down on one end of the sofa. He lit a cigarette and sniffed happily when she brought him a mug of strong black coffee heavily laced with cognac.

Her buzzer sounded from the downstairs door of the apartment as she set the coffee royal in front of him, and she murmured, “Who on earth can that be?”

She went to the speaking tube at the door, and in a moment he heard her say, “Of course, Tim. He just showed up and he’s sitting here swilling brandy and coffee.” She pressed the button that released the catch below, opened her own door wide and came back to tell her employer unnecessarily, “That’s Tim. He’s coming up.”

Shayne said, “I wonder what’s bugging him so early this morning,” and took a sip of the hot liquid.

Timothy Rourke came in a moment later, looking dishevelled and sleepy, but with an expression on his face like that of a cat that has swallowed the canary. “Where the devil have you been hiding out, Mike?”

“I haven’t been hiding out. I just thought I’d get a better night’s sleep if I weren’t available for questioning. Sit down, Tim. You look as though you could stand a cup of Lucy’s excellent coffee.”

“My God, can I? With a good slug of bourbon in it, honey?” he appealed to Lucy. “Damn you, Mike. I haven’t been to bed yet. I had to cover up all over the place…”

Shayne shook his head warningly at him as Lucy came back with another mug of steaming coffee for the reporter.

“Neither Lucy nor I have the faintest idea what all this furor is about, except Will Gentry woke her up at four o’clock trying to locate me. What for, Tim? What am I supposed to have done?”

Rourke shook his head helplessly, took a sip of hot coffee and sputtered over it. “It’s the damnedest story. I guess we’ll never get the whole straight of it.”

“Relax and tell us all about it,” Shayne urged him. “You have my curiosity aroused.”

Rourke said, “Yeh,” and lit a cigarette while he composed his thoughts. “It began about three o’clock this morning when I got a tip there was a dead man in a room at the Encanto Hotel. I called a couple of homicide cops and we went up to room eight-ten. There was a woman having hysterics all over the place and there was a corpse on the floor. Very dead from five small caliber bullets. Stiff as a board. He’d been dead for hours. I recognized his ugly face right away from a newspaper picture. Name of Al Newman. Wanted for bank robbery and murder in Alabama a couple of days ago. You know,” he said to Shayne, raised his eyebrows. “That Eureka bank job. Shot one of the bank officials in cold blood and got away with forty grand… only the woman get-away driver snatched the loot and drove off leaving her two male companions behind.”

Shayne said thoughtfully, “I remember reading something about it. Didn’t she drive off with a hostage who was later released? One of the bank tellers?”

“That’s right. So here was this Al Newman dead in the woman’s hotel room, and her in a tizzy swearing she had no idea how he’d got there and that she’d been out drinking with Mike Shayne all evening, and to get him and ask
him
about it.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Shayne in great surprise. “Who was she?”

“She was registered at the hotel under the name of Mrs. Rose Hughes. Turned out her name is actually Vergie Powers. An actress. Used to do bit parts in Hollywood movies. In fact, she played in some of your shows, Mike. We figured later that’s how she knew your name and used it in a pinch.”

“Such is fame,” marveled Shayne. “You tell Lucy I wasn’t out drinking with an actress all evening, Tim. You can vouch for me until at least two o’clock.”

“That’s right. Well, it appeared later that she was just making up the first wild story that came into her mind. Because she was actually Al Newman’s girl-friend. Had been shacked up with him in Alabama while they cased the bank job… and she was the driver of the get-away car that snatched the bank loot and left Al to face the consequences behind her. She admitted she thought he had been killed in the chase that followed, and was completely surprised when he turned up in Miami tonight demanding his share of the money.”

“So she killed him?”

“She hasn’t actually admitted it, but she triggered him, all right. Funny thing. I found a confession in the room on hotel stationery signed ‘Vicky.’ But it was written in her handwriting. She tried to explain that with another fantastic story about her daughter named Vicky being there and doing the actual shooting, but she couldn’t produce any daughter or evidence of one, so that didn’t come off.”

Shayne said gravely, “You did have yourself quite a time.”

“That’s not half of it. Another thing I recognized about Al Newman was that he has a married sister in Miami named Duclos.”

“Duclos?” Shayne sat up and stared at Rourke as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “Not George Duclos?” he pleaded. “Not the guy who accused me of stealing his Ford earlier in the night?”

“What on earth, Michael?” demanded Lucy, wide-eyed and excited. “You stole a car?”

“It was all a mistake,” he told her. “A comedy of errors. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Yeh. That same guy,” Tim Rourke told him. “So there was another funny thing. Just before we found the body the police had investigated an anonymous tip and found Duclos locked up in the trunk of his own car out in the Northeast section. He’d been knocked out, and said a couple of strange men had assaulted him and locked him in his own trunk.

“They had him at Headquarters when we brought the Powers woman in, and while neither of them appeared to know the other, when he was questioned about Newman he admitted the fellow had turned up yesterday, told him he was hot and that he had to contact a woman registered at the Encanto as Mrs. Rose Hughes and collect forty grand from her. And he gave Duclos the torn half of a baggage check which he claimed he had got from the bank teller in Eureka who was in on the robbery with the gang and who admitted under torture that he and Vergie had planned all along to ditch the other two in front of the bank and take off with the loot.

“She was frantically denying everything at that point, but a search of her handbag turned up two halves of a railroad-baggage claim check at the FEC station. It reclaimed a suitcase that held approximately forty thousand dollars of the bank money… and she broke down and admitted everything when confronted with that.”

“How had she gotten hold of the second half of the claim check if Newman had left it with Duclos for safekeeping when he went to see her?” asked Lucy.

“That’s another part of the whole mixed-up story,” admitted Rourke with a glance at Shayne. “You see, when Duclos first came into the picture… and with Mike’s name having been mentioned by Vergie in the beginning as her drinking companion… the cops remembered that Mike had been picked up driving Duclos’s stolen Ford earlier in the night, and that’s when Will Gentry began trying to find Mike to ask him what he knew about all this.” Rourke paused in his recital to draw a long breath and get his thoughts in order.

“As I said, when they found the suitcase with the money in it, Vergie admitted she and the bank teller had driven straight into Montgomery that day and transferred the money into a suitcase, then she bought a ticket to Miami and they checked the suitcase on her ticket. Neither of them wholly trusting the other, they tore the claim check in two and he went back to Eureka to brazen it out, planning to meet her in Miami Saturday night at the Encanto where she would be registered as Mrs. Hughes, and they’d get the money and split it.

“It was the bank teller, Harvey Giles, who she was expecting to turn up at her room last night. She didn’t know that Al Newman had stayed alive in Alabama, that he had got back to Giles, tortured the poor guy and got his half of the baggage check and then killed him.

“So she was totally surprised when Duclos called her up and offered to sell half of the check for ten thousand dollars, and she claimed she went to Mike Shayne and propositioned him to accept one thousand in cash and her IOU for the other nine… to meet Duclos and pick up the check.

“Duclos confirmed her story to a certain extent. He admitted phoning her and asking for ten thousand, and arranged to meet a certain Mr. Jones to close the deal. He claimed he did meet Mr. Jones out there where he parked his car… that Jones knocked him unconscious and stole half of the claim check and locked him up in the trunk of his own car.”

Rourke paused and shrugged his shoulders cynically. “By that time, no one knew exactly what was what. Mike wasn’t available to answer any questions. And, actually, it didn’t seem to matter a hell of a lot.

“We had a dead bank robber who had murdered twice. And we had his woman accomplice who’d burned him. And Duclos, who’ll draw a prison term as accessory after the fact. Under the circumstances…” He turned in his chair and addressed Shayne directly, “I think Will Gentry is inclined to doubt whether you had anything to do with the whole deal at all. There’s no positive evidence to tie you into any of it. Unless you want to come in voluntarily and explain what in hell you
were
doing last night.”

Michael Shayne shook his head calmly at the question in Rourke’s voice. “It seems to me you and the cops did a good job without any assist from me at all. Let’s leave it that way.”

“Michael Shayne!” said Lucy Hamilton fiercely. “You’re the world’s most irritating man. What
were
you doing all last night? Stealing cars and all.”

Shayne grinned at her and held out his empty coffee mug. “How about a straight shot of coffee this time? And then how about whipping up some scrambled eggs… with maybe some sausage poached in wine to start, and then fried that lovely golden brown the way you do them? Sound good to you, Tim?”

“Wonderful. About three eggs for me, Lucy.”

“All right, you two.” She got up with an air of offended dignity which did not fool either of them. She took Shayne’s empty mug and headed for the kitchen with her firm chin uptilted. “Keep your secrets and see if I care.”

While she was refilling Shayne’s mug, Rourke asked him suddenly, “When did you first catch on, Mike?”

“When I saw her IOU and recognized the handwriting as the same as the note she’d given me signed Vicky.”

Lucy Hamilton came back with another mug of coffee for him, and he caught her hand and detained her as she set it down.

“How’d you like to go to a wedding, Lucy?”

“What on earth are you talking about now?”

“A big social affair on the Beach this afternoon.

Maybe you read about it in the society section a couple of days ago. A girl named Vicky Andrews who is marrying a state senator. Her mother is a Hollywood script writer.”

“What
are
you getting at, Michael? It happens I did read about it, but how on earth do you think we can get an invitation?”

“Want to bet?” he asked her confidently.

“No. Not when I see that gleam in your eye.”

“Call the Encanto Hotel,” he suggested, “and ask for Miss Andrews. I’ll take it from there.”

She hesitated, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not, and then released her hand from his and went to the telephone stand where she looked up the telephone number. Timothy Rourke sat there finishing his drink and looking mystified while Lucy dialled the hotel number and said crisply, “Miss Andrews, please.”