He went on to the elevator with Dick staring after him open-mouthed, and he knew the clerk must believe Molly was still up in his room waiting for his return, and that he must be wondering how she would react to the scratches which looked as though they had been inflicted by another woman while he was gone.
Well, he was grateful he didn’t have that to worry about, he told himself ruefully as he unlocked his door on the second floor.
He strode inside purposefully, and the first thing he saw as he crossed the room was the center drawer of the table pulled wide open. He stopped in front of the table and looked down at the open drawer. Captain Ruffer’s journal was gone. The two newspaper clippings were still there, but the heavy, brassbound book had vanished.
He turned on his heel and went into the kitchen where he tried the back door from the fire escape and found it unlocked. He distinctly recalled that it had been locked and the key was missing after Molly had gone out that way.
He returned slowly and went into the bathroom where he examined his face in the mirror and found the scratches were quite shallow. He daubed iodine on them and then got out a roll of adhesive tape and tore off three strips which he affixed to cover most of the damage. The big lump from Bull’s sap was extremely painful and it had turned an ugly greenish blue, but he knew from experience that there was nothing to do about it except wait for it to go away.
He went back and sat down and poured himself a drink, and tried to sort out possibilities from probabilities. There wasn’t any doubt that his apartment had been entered from the back way by use of the key Molly had taken with her.
He had no proof, he reminded himself, that she had not gone out of the Park Plaza Hotel with her two escorts voluntarily. He had jumped to the original conclusion that Bull and Dixie had taken her away, but after the session at the Little Revue he was inclined to doubt that they even knew of her existence.
So, what did it add up to? His head ached too badly to do much thinking. Besides, there were too many gaps in his knowledge.
He drank half a glass of cognac and his head began to feel better, and then he took the two newspaper clippings out and reread them both carefully. He particularly noted the date of the clipping about the captain’s sea rescue, October 16, 1958, and then turned to the more recent news story on the parole of Roy Enders. It stated he had been released after serving six years of a seven-year term. That would set the date of his conviction in 1958, if this clipping was as recent as he believed it to be.
He sat back and closed his eyes to slits and sipped the rest of his drink while he thought about that. His mind was alert now, his thoughts racing. He knew there was not going to be any sleep for him that night until he found out exactly what had happened back in 1958. His previous reading of the final items in the captain’s journal explained what had really happened to the Mermaid at that time, but it didn’t explain a lot of other things.
His thoughts of the book jolted him into the realization that someone else was reading those pages right now. Molly Morgan? Would she have returned on her own initiative to get the journal?
What about the C.I.A.? Could those two men who had taken her from her hotel have been agents of the Central Intelligence Agency where Molly had a buddy named Eddie Byron?
Shayne knew it was useless to sit there speculating. The News was an afternoon newspaper and the hours between midnight and dawn were the busiest ones for the reporters and editorial staff. Timothy Rourke was almost sure to be at work in the City Room.
Shayne got up and went out again, grinned crookedly at Dick and waved a big hand at him as he crossed the lobby, got in his car and drove to the newspaper office.
As he had anticipated, the City Room of the News was smoke-hazed and filled with the clatter of typewriters. Shayne threaded his way back to a far corner where Timothy Rourke was hunched over a machine batting out copy with one-fingered precision that did the job almost as fast as a professional typist could do it with ten fingers.
The reporter looked up at Shayne, stared disbelievingly at the adhesive strips on his face and then shook his head and said seriously, “You’re in the wrong pew, fellow. Beauty editor is down that way.”
Shayne said, “Go to hell,” and dropped one hip down onto a corner of the reporter’s desk and lit a cigarette. “Didn’t you tell me at noon that you only met Molly Morgan this morning? So you don’t know much about her personally?”
“That’s right. Did she do that to you? You must have used the wrong approach.”
“Did Will Gentry call you for her address this evening?”
“Yeh. He refused to say why he wanted it. I’d introduced her to him in his office this morning.”
“Anybody else call for the same information?” Shayne asked.
“No. What’s up, Mike? You got a lump below your right ear that could only have come from a real heavy sap. What kind of company you been keeping?”
Shayne said, “A couple of Lasher’s boys decided it would be fun to rough me up.” He looked at the sheet of paper in Rourke’s typewriter. “Are you real busy?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.” Rourke’s eyes glittered with interest. “Armin Lasher, huh? What sort of angle…?”
“Tell you about it later,” Shayne said, standing up. “Right now I’d like to check your morgue. Files for six years ago.”
“Sure.” Rourke sprang up and led the way back to a large filing room. “Six years?” Rourke said. “Nineteen fifty-eight?”
“October.” Shayne had the two clippings in his hand and he consulted them. “First. Take a look at this recent one, Tim.”
He showed it to the reporter, explaining, “It doesn’t have any date on it.”
Rourke glanced at it and grunted, “Roy Enders. About two weeks ago. I was one of the welcoming committee when he got off the bus from Raiford. Along with his attorney and a couple of friends from the old days.”
“John Mason Boyd?” Shayne asked.
“That’s right. And two characters named Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. They look respectable now, but they were pals of Enders before he was sent up and I doubt they’ve changed much. What’s your interest in Enders, Mike?”
“Where is he right now?”
“Down at his fishing lodge on the Keys, I guess. When he got off the bus he said all he wanted to do was get back there and lie in the sun and relax. Claims he holds no grudges, and had nothing to say for publication.”
“Grudges?”
“It goes back to his phony conviction for statutory rape in fifty-eight. It’s a long, involved story. Interested?”
Shayne said slowly, “I might be. Here’s this other one, Tim. You wrote this one yourself. Remember it?”
Rourke took the clipping headed DRAMATIC SEA RESCUE and glanced down it swiftly. His brow contracted and he muttered, “That’s the old boy who got knocked off tonight. When I heard about it, I remembered this incident and told the rewrite man to check on it for human interest. Sure, I remember the old geezer. He was quite a man back in those days. Survived three days and nights at sea with just a life preserver after his boat went down in a hurricane off the coast. What’s his connection with Roy Enders?”
“That’s what I want to find out. You got a file on Enders?”
“There should be.” Rourke went to another part of the morgue where individual files were classified alphabetically, and returned in a moment with a thin cardboard folder which he opened on a counter under a bright light. “Not as much as I would have thought,” he muttered. “But now I recall it didn’t get much publicity at the time. One of those cases that we got our own Iron Curtain clamped down on. Pressure from the government to soft-pedal it for reasons of national interest.” Rourke spat out the words disgustedly as any good newspaperman would after he has had a story killed.