Mr. Enders’ only statement to the press, the item concluded briefly, was that it was good to be back in the Miami sunshine and that he asked only to be left strictly alone and in privacy to go to his fishing lodge on the Keys south of Miami and relax in seclusion.
Shayne looked up at Molly as they both finished reading it, shaking his head dubiously. “There’s no date on it but it looks recent. We can check, of course. The name strikes a vague chord in my memory. Six years ago… Roy Enders?” He narrowed his eyes and tugged at his left ear-lobe. “Seven years for statutory rape is a mighty stiff term,” he muttered. “Seems to me there were other circumstances surrounding that case I should remember… but I don’t. Again, we can check. But here’s one thing.” He put his blunt forefinger on the name of the lawyer mentioned in the story.
“John Mason Boyd. That just happens, Molly, to be the name of the white-haired gentleman who followed Will Gentry in tonight, and the man who evidently brought the police into it. I gathered he’d had an earlier appointment with the captain, and got worried and called on Will when Ruffer didn’t show up.”
Molly Morgan looked back at him steadily, her eyes interested and alert. “We’ll have to find out more about Roy Enders,” she murmured. “All right. Here’s my contribution to the puzzle.”
She reached down beside her chair and lifted the big black leather handbag into her lap, unzipped it and reached inside.
Her newspaper clipping was yellowed slightly, and brittle with age. It had a date on it, October 16, 1958, and it had a photograph of a serious-faced Captain Samuel Ruffer above the caption, DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE.
It was a feature story, by-lined by Timothy Rourke, Shayne noted with quirked eyebrows, and Rourke had pulled out all the stops in relating the incredible saga of the master of the fishing sloop Mermaid which had been sunk in a tropical storm fifty miles off the Florida Keys on October 13th, and related the miraculous survival of Captain Samuel Ruffer who had managed to say afloat in the angry seas for three days supported only by a life preserver until he had been sighted by a private fishing cruiser some twenty miles off the coast and taken aboard.
The two crew members of the Mermaid had been washed overboard during the storm and vanished, and Rourke had made much in his story of the rugged constitution of the captain which had survived three days of burning heat and thirst and hunger which should have killed any ordinary man.
Michael Shayne shook his red head dubiously a second time after he finished reading the story. “I suppose this is the sort of thing a man might keep for his memoirs, but I don’t see that it adds much to our knowledge of the situation. He was a tough old sea-dog in those days, and he survived the elements six years ago only to succumb tonight when some bloodthirsty bastards pulled three of his fingernails out by the roots. Why, Molly?”
“You know why,” she told him quietly. “They wanted the rest of those Russian Lenskis which he had promised Mr. Wilshinskis.”
“What’s that got to do with him being shipwrecked six years ago?”
“I don’t know. But you do think that was why he was tortured and killed tonight, don’t you?”
“It adds up,” Shayne agreed cautiously. “You asked about my going into the ditch when I turned onto the captain’s street tonight. I did it to avoid a car coming from his house without lights. There were two men in the front seat that my headlights picked out momentarily. A couple of well-known hoods around town on the payroll of a bigshot named Armin Lasher. One of them happens to be a tall stringy guy, and the other is short and dumpy.”
“The way Mrs. Wilshinskis described the two men who visited her husband.”
Shayne nodded. “This Lithuanian bit,” he probed. “You say it’s your native language?”
“My mother was Lithuanian,” she told him.
“That’s Russian, isn’t it?”
“Since nineteen forty-six. And the Lithuanians still don’t like it. Any more than the Poles or the Hungarians do. So don’t get any funny ideas, Mike. I’m an American citizen even if I do speak Lithuanian and recognize a Russian Lenski pistol when I see one.”
“Yeh,” he said drily. “I recall that you read me a lecture on patriotism this afternoon.”
“All right. I thought we had agreed to by-pass that. Where do we go from here?”
Shayne leaned back comfortably and lifted his cognac glass to sip from it. “Do we have to go anywhere? There’s another bottle where this one came from.”
“You pointed out, yourself, that two men have already been brutally murdered tonight… because you didn’t get to them in time. And you pretended you felt responsible. Right now you’re sitting on top of some very important information that the police should have if they’re to catch the two killers. If you’re not going to use it, I’ll take it to Chief Gentry myself.”
Shayne took another sip of cognac and asked equably, “Are all Lithuanians beautiful when they get mad?”
“Don’t flatter me,” she stormed. “I’m serious about this, Mike. If you’re not going to do something, I am. You can’t solve two murders just by sitting here.”
She got to her feet defiantly and turned toward the door. Shayne swung to his feet and moved in front of her. “We’ve still got things to talk about, Molly. I’m still not completely convinced…”
She drew back suddenly and tried to dart past him. He caught her right forearm and pulled her back roughly, and her big leather handbag clutched in her right hand swung in an arc and struck him solidly on the thigh.
His grip tightened on her arm and he demanded, “What in hell are you carrying in that handbag? A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, for Christ sake?”
“It’s none of your business,” she said bitterly. “Just let me out of here, Mike Shayne. That’s all you can think about,” she gibed at him. “A Lenski twelve-oh-seven, and getting your hands on a shipment of them. You don’t care how many people die in the meantime. Take your hands off me.”
Instead of releasing her, he pulled her to him roughly and reached down with his right hand to wrest the heavy handbag from her grip. He shoved her back from him saying coldly, “You can beat it if you want to. But I’m going to have a look inside this outsized bag you’re toting.”
She bit her underlip angrily and said, “I realize, now, it should go to the police… and that’s where I was going to take it.”
Shayne turned his back on her and stalked to the center table and opened her bag.
She walked back slowly and stood beside him while he lifted out a heavy brass-bound book, about four by six inches in size and at least two inches thick, held shut by a brass clasp.
He turned it over slowly in his hands and looked sidewise at her. “Captain Ruffer’s personal record of forty years at sea,” he muttered. “My God, you went whole hog when you started stealing evidence, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think about that at first… in all the excitement. Then as we began talking I realized it might be important. If he’s been mixed up in gun-running for the Communists in Cuba this last year or so, it may have a record of a shipment that included a number of Lenski pistols.”
“And when you did realize that, you decided to keep it to yourself?”
“Well, I… you’ve been acting so funny, Mike. Ever since this noon when you talked about getting hold of those guns for yourself… for the money they might bring. And those two men murdered tonight. You didn’t call the police in. You didn’t mention the Russian guns to Chief Gentry. What am I supposed to think?”