“Body of unidentified young woman… body of young woman found floating in the bay.”
Stallings’s house fronted on the bay!
He jerked the door of the sedan open and slid in, gunned the motor viciously, and swung away from the bridge in a screeching turn. He sat erect and drove swiftly back to Miami, his big hands gripping the wheel in a tense grasp, his features grim and preoccupied.
Maybe this was the break. If he could identify the body as Lucile he’d have something to put the screws on with. Someone was getting panicky. That was a cinch. Murder always bred more murder. He cursed himself for not having thought about that while he talked to Lucile in the garden. He should have taken her away with him. He had been a fool not to realize the danger she would incur if they learned she had talked to him.
When he reached the mainland he drove swiftly to the Dade County morgue and parked outside. An old man with watery blue eyes was on duty in the outer office. He regretfully laid down a copy of Lurid Stories as the detective surged through the door. He complained, “Dag take it, Mike, they were just about to grab the ghoul of the lowlands that’s been killing babies and eating half their hearts — just half, mind you.”
Shayne said, “It’ll be all the more ghoulish for waiting a few minutes. Can I go down to the cold room, Tom?”
“Sure. I reckon so. We got in a peacherino tonight.” The old man shuffled along with Shayne. “Reckon she’s the one you’re visiting, huh?”
“Yeh. The one they pulled out of the bay.” Shayne led the way down a corridor and a short flight of concrete steps. The old man opened a heavy, insulated door, and a blast of chilled air rushed out from the cold-storage chamber. The dank air was musty with the fetor of human decay which had been accumulating for decades.
Tom clanged the door shut behind Shayne and went to a sheet-covered body on a porcelain slab mounted on rubber rollers. He pulled the sheet off, gesticulating proudly. “Ain’t she a beaut? Don’t see why they don’t kill off the old hags ’stead of goin’ after the young’uns.”
The body was nude except for a pair of wrinkled silk pants and a bedraggled brassiere. The head and face were brutally smashed beyond all possibility of recognition, but the straggly hair, still wet with bay water, was blond, not the black curls of Lucile. The nude body was slender and small-boned, not the stocky figure of the Stallings maid.
Shayne shook his head and turned away after one searching look.
“It’s not the one I expected to see,” he stated with finality.
The old man covered the naked body, chuckling obscenely. “I reckon you’d know, all right, even if her face is smashed up. They tell me all you got to see is a pair of legs to recognize a girl you’ve known a week.”
“Is that the reason they stripped her?” Shayne demanded. “Hoping someone would recognize her easier that way?”
“That’s jest the way they dragged her out of the bay.” Tom closed the door, and they went up the stairs. “I reckon she was in one of them what you might call orgies,” Tom continued; “stripped nekked of all but her pants. They have ’em all the time on them rich guys’ yachts anchored in the bay.”
Shayne said, “Do they?” without pausing as he passed through the office.
“I’ll say. I was readin’ just the other day in a copy of Passion Plus—” but Shayne had gone out the door and didn’t hear the mumbled details of the old man’s explorations into the realm of fictional filth.
He drove moodily back to his apartment hotel, secretly ashamed of himself for the disappointment he felt. Of course, it had been merely a wild surmise that the body would be Lucile’s, but, by God, how he’d like to hang something like that around Stallings’s stiff neck.
It left him without a lead to work on, and it was only a few hours until dawn when Helen Stallings’s body would be found on the lawn where he had left it.
After it was found, the whole thing was bound to come crashing down around him. He would be lucky if he could stay out of jail and avoid a murder charge. And the election would be lost, along with his two thousand dollars.
His jaw tightened grimly as he parked by the side entrance to his hotel apartment. He had to locate Lucile. He would rout out Tim Rourke and make the newspaperman get to work on it with him. Lucile must be listed with some employment agency. The staffing of homes in Miami was a specialty with only two or three local agencies. If he could find the one that supplied the Stallings mansion when they moved in a short time ago—
Shayne was going down the corridor to his corner apartment. He had his key out and inserted it in the lock. When the door swung open he blinked in surprise at the bright light from a ceiling chandelier. He recalled that he had left only a shaded floor lamp burning.
Then he saw Timothy Rourke lying outstretched on the carpet near the bedroom door. The lanky reporter’s head was bathed in a pool of blood, and his thin, bare shanks were drawn up to his chest in an attitude of agonized repose.
TEN
SHAYNE LEAPED FORWARD and bent over the reporter’s unconscious body. Blood was still seeping slowly from an ugly gash on the side of Rourke’s head. He was breathing feebly, and his muscles reacted with an involuntary jerk when Shayne roughly explored the gaping cut on his head.
Shayne swore an oath that was like a prayer when he found that the bone structure was intact. The scalp was ripped loose along the line of an ugly three-inch gash. He hurried to the kitchen and dumped a quantity of salt into a boiler, filled it with hot water, and grabbed up one of Phyllis’s crisp embroidered tea towels on the way out.
Sliding a folded blanket under Rourke’s head, he squatted beside him cross-legged and doused the salt water liberally on the wound.
Rourke twisted his head and moaned when the stinging solution entered the wound. His eyelids flew open and he rolled his eyeballs crazily at Shayne, recognized him, and muttered something unintelligible.
Shayne stopped his ministrations long enough to get the depleted bottle of Scotch from the table where Rourke had left it. Easing him up gently, he tilted the bottle to the wounded man’s lips.
Rourke gulped noisily, and color came into his cheeks. He made an ineffectual grab for the bottle when Shayne removed it from his lips, but the detective set it out of reach, promising cheerily, “You’ll get another swig after I paste some adhesive on your head. Lie back and take it easy.”
“It was that Marlow fellow — from the Parkview Hotel,” Rourke told him after his wound was taped up and he had downed the promised swig. He felt of his head tenderly. “Damned if I know what he hit me with. I saw him swing at me, and that’s all I saw.”
“Looks like a pair of brass knucks. Good thing he hit you in the head instead of a vulnerable spot. How’d he get in here?”
“I let him in. The buzzer kept ringing and I trotted to the door half asleep. Always the perfect host,” he ended irritably.
“And nine-tenths drunk. I told you to lay off. What did the young fool want?”
“We didn’t get that sociable. He thought I was you and started cursing me the minute I opened the door. He acted half crazy and wouldn’t listen to me. Frothing at the mouth, by God. I backed away, trying to tell him my name wasn’t Shayne, but I guess I didn’t sound convincing.”
Shayne looked around the room speculatively. The drawer of the center table was pulled out and its contents dumped on the floor. He went into the bedroom and found bureau drawers rifled, his suits pulled down from hangers and thrown to the floor.
He ruffled his red hair angrily, strode to the phone, and called the Parkview Hotel. Getting Cassidy on the wire, he talked to the house detective briefly and then went back to the living-room.