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.”