But Burt Morgan had been dead for five years...
I was reaching stiffly for the phone when the door opened. Lieutenant George Bailey was already here. His face ash gray, he crossed the room, said heavily: “I got a call not ten minutes ago, Ham. But I didn’t think you’d ever do it.”
“I’d ever do it...!”
Gone now were his comradely insults, his jovial reference to me as a dirty bum. “Folks said Conk was knocking down on you while you were gone. It that the kind of evidence you found?” He indicated the littered floor.
Around the dryness in my throat, I said thickly, “I always knew Conk was as honest...”
“And I guess it hurt like hell when you found he wasn’t,” Bailey said heavily. As he moved closer, the toe of his blocky black shoe bumped the overturned waste-basket. Without taking his eyes off me, George stopped, reached in the receptacle. When his hand came out, he was holding a gun by the tip of the barrel in his fingertips to keep fingerprints intact. I knew the gun was the murder weapon, and it was mine.
Then Bailey pulled his own gun. “I’m sorry as hell, Ham. But friendship can’t count now. I guess... I got to take you in for murder.”
My fingers dug against the top of the desk. “I wouldn’t be this crude, George,” I said hoarsely.
His eyes wavered. Etched on his face were lines of pain and distaste for his task. “I wish I could believe that you’d not mess around the scene of a crime, Ham... if you did commit it. But who knows what a man will do when he’s insane from anger? If you found that Conk, your closest friend, had been rooking you all this lime...” His voice trailed off and after a throbbing moment he added: “I got to take you in, Ham. Or turn in my shield. I must believe what I don’t want to believe — that Conk came back to the office. You’d been going through the files. There was an argument, and you jerked your gun out of your desk drawer.”
That sort of testimony from a cop, no matter how unwillingly given, would cook me — but good. I had returned from the hell of war only to find the blood of my best friend staining my own doorstep.
In a blur of motion I swept up the inkwell in my sweat-slick palm, dropping to one side of the desk. It was an invitation to suicide Biley’s gun blasted and the bullet tore padding from the left shoulder of my coat. Before he could fire again, the inkwell had smashed him between the eyes. Ink blinded him, and blood and ink mixed in swiftly-running ribbons down his heavy face.
As he staggered back, I closed in. My stomach knotted in anticipation of a bullet. I hit him hard on the cheek; his feet tangled; he reeled back toward the window. Twisting his gun with one hand, I hit him again. His head slammed back against the steel window sashing. He went limp, slid slowly to the floor.
It had taken only seconds. I stood breathing hard a moment, dropped Bailey’s gun in my pocket, and dragged him to the closet across the office. The tiny cubicle wasn’t large enough to hold him outstretched, but I made him as comfortable as possible, closed the door on him and locked it.
I left the office. Thinking that someone might have heard Bailey’s shot, I went to the rear of the corridor, down the service stairs. I emerged in the alley hack of the building, walked down it with my shoulders hunched. I had a big night before me, and thinking of it, the skin crawled unpleasantly along my spine. It was as plain as the nose on the face of a transparent ghost — Howard Conklin had discovered something from Burt Morgan’s past which was worth sugar. Conk had tried to cash it in. It had been dynamite.
Morgan had been before my time in St. Pete. Five years ago he had washed off his boat in Boca Ceiga Bay — yet Conk had been hunting him. The rest of the affair was just as crazy. But there was one tangible item I could put my finger on — John Rayfield.
Twilight was turning to darkness as I stepped out of the cab in front of Rayfield’s house. I paid the driver, went up the walk, squinting in the heavy gloom.
I wiped sweat from my palm on my trouser leg, curled my fingers about the front door knob. I turned it slowly.
There was no one in the hallway, no sound in the house, and I eased inside. Rayfield’s study door was open a few inches. A light was on in there. The luxurious pastel carpet deadened the sounds of my footsteps.
He was hunched over his desk, scanning papers, and he didn’t notice me in the doorway for a few seconds. Then as if sensing my presence, his head jerked up. His eyes were startled as he saw me, and he gripped the edge of the desk as if to spring erect.
I stepped in the room, closed the door. My right hand was in my coat pocket, touching the gun I’d taken from Bailey.
“I told the butler you weren’t to come back in here,” he began.
“Don’t blame the butler, Rayfield. I didn’t ring.”
He looked at my hand in my pocket, my face, and his eyes hardened. He sat down slowly. “What do you want?”
I reached in my trousers pocket with my free hand. I tossed the hundred dollar bill he had forced on me on his desk.
“I’m turning down your invitation to stay out of the case, Rayfield.”
He looked at the bill, his lips tightening, then up at me.
“You’re making a mistake. People don’t buck me long.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of tough guys on your payroll. But none of them are here now.” I sat on the edge of his desk. “I’m not here to strong arm you, Rayfield. I just want a friendly talk about Burt Morgan.”
He came alive then, his eyes, the high color in his narrow, sharply-featured face; the skin across his knuckles went white under sudden tension. It made the room suddenly close and unpleasant, reminding me what I was letting myself in for by tangling with Rayfield.
He tried to sound casual. “What do you know about Burt Morgan?”
“Nothing more than common knowledge. I know that he was on his way from Gulfport to Pass-A-Grille, alone in his boat, when a sudden squall blew up and washed him overboard in the middle of Boca Ceiga Bay a little over five years ago.”
John Rayfield rose. At the window he turned to look at me again, caught me watching him warily.
“I know also,” I said, “that you and Burl Morgan were once business partners.”
He nodded slowly. I wondered if he knew that Howard Conklin was lying dead on the floor of my office at this moment unless Bailey had got loose and taken Conk’s body away. I watched anger, indecision flit over Rayfield’s lean face. Then he said abruptly, “I don’t want you picking up hearsay, Frazee.”
“That’s fine.”
“During the land boom,” he went on, “Burt Morgan and I made a pile of money. We dissolved the partnership shortly before the crash. I had sense enough to see the crash coming and pulled out. Morgan didn’t.”
“He went broke?”
“Practically, I didn’t see much of him after that for awhile. Sometime later it looked as though Morgan was getting on his feet again. He sold a chunk of beach property to Roxlin Hotels — the big Northern chain — and made a pile of cash. I don’t know the details, but it seemed he lost the money he made on that deal. Morgan was broke when he was washed off his boat in the bay.”
“You tell a nice tale, Rayfield. But there’s one little hole. Where did Morgan get the money to buy the beach property that he resold to Roxlin Hotels?”
“How the hell should I know?” He leaned across the desk toward me. “You shouldn’t forget that you’re a guest in my house, Frazee.”
“I’m not forgetting — anything. I’m thinking that something smelled in that deal with Roxlin Hotels. I’m thinking that Howard Conklin got a whiff of the odor.”
He controlled his rage with an effort. “Have a drink, Frazee, and be on your way!”