Shayne turned Molly about and led her down the hallway to the front door before Gentry could change his mind. Will Gentry’s driver was there, and he gave him the chief’s message, and then hurried her down the walk and past Chief Gentry’s car to his own which was parked against the stone barrier.
He let go of her arm so she could go around and get in by herself, got under the wheel and started the motor and waited in stony silence until she was settled in the front seat. Then he backed around and headed out grimly, and when they were on the boulevard and moving toward the city at a moderate pace, she finally asked in a small voice:
“Are you angry at me, Mike?”
“Why should I be angry? You practically saved my life back there, didn’t you?”
“You are angry,” she said wonderingly. “Why? I thought I was helpful. You didn’t want to tell Chief Gentry why you were there, did you? About the guns and the Lithuanian pawnbroker and all?”
“No,” Shayne conceded gruffly. “I had no intention of telling Will any of that. But for a good many years now I’ve been in the habit of telling my own lies and getting out of my own messes without any help from female reporters.”
“Oh, Mike,” she said sadly. “The truth of the matter is that it’s all because I’m a woman, isn’t it? You’re one of those excessively masculine individuals with a penis complex a yard long who thinks a woman’s place is in the home and nowhere else, by gum and by God.”
Shayne said stiffly, “I thought it was women who had penis complexes.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care one damned bit for your cheap psychoanalysis.” His voice rose explosively. “How the living hell did you get out to that house in the first place?”
“I thought you knew.” There was the warmth of laughter in her voice. “I told Chief Gentry that we went there together.”
“Which was a flat lie.”
“Oh no, Mike. I don’t lie. At least not flatly. I did ride out with you. Hunkered down in the back seat. When you shoved me aside in the pawnshop and stamped out, I suddenly realized I had your car keys and you couldn’t take off without them. So I put them on the counter where you’d see them and slipped out the back door and around to your car while you were inside getting them. What on earth happened when you turned off the highway?” she added pensively. “It felt like you went in the ditch and I thought we were going to turn over. I think I squealed, but you didn’t even hear me.”
Shayne suddenly exploded into laughter as the ridiculousness of it all came to him. “Then you came into the house behind me?”
“Around by a side door that opened into the captain’s bedroom. I kept listening for conversation, but I couldn’t hear anything until your friend the police chief came in, and then I realized he was dead and you were in sort of a spot explaining how you had got there. I thought I came up with a very convincing story.”
Shayne said, “You did fine, Molly.” They were nearing Flagler Street and he turned toward her with a grin. “I guess you’re right. I’m just not used to hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. But what was that yarn you told him about the captain having been shipwrecked? I thought you’d never heard of the guy until we got his name in the pawn-shop?”
“I hadn’t. But I looked around in his bedroom while I was deciding whether to come out or not, and I found an old clipping he’d saved which I glanced at. It was hidden in a built-in cubby-hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed along with some other things that I thought might be important because they were so carefully hidden.”
Shayne turned off the boulevard onto Third Street and said feelingly, “My God! You took time to burgle the joint during those few minutes before Gentry arrived?”
“I was lucky,” she told him complacently. “It looked as though there had been a struggle in the bedroom, and the bed had got shoved away from the wall so the hiding place was visible.”
Shayne had circled around from the boulevard and he drew up in front of his hotel behind her rented automobile which still waited there. He turned off his lights and ignition, but didn’t get out immediately. He put both hands on the steering wheel instead, and turned a long, inquiring look at Molly Morgan.
“You said there were some other things hidden with the clipping. What sort of things?”
“Well, there was an old heavy brass-bound book that seems to be a sort of personal record dating back forty years. I just had time to glance at the first couple of entries. And along with that was a box containing a set of practically new skin-diving equipment. You know… flippers, mask and oxygen tank. And that seemed a funny thing to be hidden there.” She paused with a frown. “He didn’t look like a skin-diver, did he? But then he was a sailor, and I suppose all of them do maybe.”
Shayne drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel and said thoughtfully, “About that clipping you mentioned. What sort of ship was wrecked? Where and when?”
“It was a few years back. In a Caribbean hurricane. The captain was the only survivor. That’s as far as I got with it before Chief Gentry came in.”
“I’d like to know more about that shipwreck,” muttered Shayne. “It could have an important bearing on the whole situation. Those Russian guns he sold the pawnbroker last week…”
She said sweetly, “So why don’t we go up to your place and have a drink and see? Maybe we can figure out the whole story before the police connect up the two murders tonight. Because he was tortured and killed by someone trying to find out about the guns, don’t you think?”
“Probably by the same two men who killed your Lithuanian friend. Have you got that clipping, Molly?”
“Yes. I automatically stuck it in my handbag when I heard the police car stop outside. At that point I didn’t know he had been murdered, Mike, and didn’t realize those things hidden there might be important evidence. I guess… it’s a felony or something to take anything away from the scene of a murder?”
“You’ll get ten years at least,” Shayne told her cheerfully. “One nice thing about it is that they’ll send us up together. I’ve got a clipping of my own that I forgot to mention to Will Gentry. Let’s go up and compare notes.”
11
In the second-floor hotel sitting room, Shayne went toward the kitchen waving a big hand at the two wineglasses they had upended less than an hour before, and said, “Pour us a drink, Molly. I’ll get some ice water.”
He came back with two glasses with ice cubes floating in them, and nodded approvingly at the glasses she had filled to the rim. He said abruptly, “I feel like hell, Molly. Two guys are dead just because I didn’t get to them in time.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You got to both of them just as fast as you could.”
“It’s always my fault,” he muttered angrily. “If I’d done things differently… if I’d been home when Papa Gonzalez called, for instance.” He shrugged and drank deeply of the cognac she had poured. “What I’m trying to say is… it’s my job to be on time. All right. Forget it.” He dropped into a chair and reached into his pocket to bring out the crumpled newspaper clipping he had found in Captain Ruffer’s pocket.
“I don’t know what significance this has… if any. It was neatly folded in the Captain’s breast pocket, and it must have meant something to him.”
He smoothed it out on the table between them and Molly Morgan leaned over with her red head close to his and they read it together.
It was a local item and not datelined. It said, briefly, that Roy Enders had been granted a parole from the state penitentiary after serving six years of a seven-year term for statutory rape, and had arrived in Miami that morning to be met by his attorney, John Mason Boyd, who had defended him originally and who (the paper stated) had worked tirelessly for his release on parole ever since his incarceration.