Rourke eeled away from his grip. “I didn’t mind helping,” he fumed, “but playing hide-and-seek with a corpse is definitely not my idea of fun.”
“We’ve got to get rid of her now,” Shayne warned hastily. “Every minute she stays in your car is dangerous.”
“She’s not going to be in my car. You brought her this far — you can keep her.”
“I brought her!” Shayne stopped short, staring at the ironical smile twitching Rourke’s thin lips. “Who’s gagging now?”
“By God, I’m not,” Rourke told him with passionate sincerity. “You might’ve told me you’d changed your mind and were taking her away yourself. But, no, you have to be funny.”
Shayne’s hands caught Rourke’s shoulders again and clamped down hard. In a strangled voice he demanded, “What are you getting at, Tim? For God’s sake—”
“You ought to know. She wasn’t there.”
Slowly Shayne’s fingers relaxed. “Do you mean — she wasn’t there when you went back?” he asked hollowly.
“You’re beginning to get it,” Rourke responded. “Didn’t you sneak her out?”
Shayne shook his head dismally. “I was busy decoying a couple of birds who tailed me from the hotel.”
The two men stood and stared at each other for a long moment, then Shayne went into action. He grabbed Rourke’s arm and steered him toward the barroom.
“I’m either drunk or desperately in need of a drink,” he said solemnly. “I’ve got to find out.”
FOUR
THE BOOTHS in the barroom were vacant at this early hour. Shayne led the way to one at the farthest end of the low-ceilinged room, stopping at the bar to order a bottle of cognac and two glasses.
They sat in complete silence for several minutes, sipping the amber fluid and glowering dejectedly at the crude walls and thatched roof. The inexplicable disappearance of Helen Stallings’s corpse disjointed everything. It didn’t make sense. It injected a sinister note of mystery into the affair which had, heretofore, appeared to be nothing more than a frame-up to throw the onus of a kidnap-killing onto Shayne and thus ensure Jim Marsh’s defeat at the Miami Beach polls two days hence.
“Who the hell could have wanted her out of there except you?” Rourke’s voice was a low groan.
Shayne stared, a black frown on his gaunt face. “Someone giving us a friendly lift,” he suggested with heavy irony. “Somebody took the job off our hands. Why should we kick?” He emptied his glass and poured another drink.
“You’re whistling in the dark,” Rourke charged. “As long as we knew where she was we had control — in a nebulous way. Now we don’t know what to expect — what to guard against.”
Shayne sighed and settled both elbows on the table, cupped his lean jaw in rough palms, and cocked one red eyebrow sardonically.
“It does begin to look interesting. For a while I was ready to believe Stallings strangled her himself to shut her mouth and to tie her murder around my neck. But he wouldn’t have taken her away after planting her in my apartment.”
“Who would?”
Shayne shrugged and said mildly, “My theory about a good Samaritan or a helpful elf is as good as any until we have more facts to go on.”
“Yeah — facts.” Rourke downed his third drink and squinted slaty eyes at the detective. “What did you mean when you called me at the paper and said you didn’t need the pictures to identify the girl?”
Shayne told him about the beaded bag gripped in the dead girl’s hand. “I’m positive she didn’t have it with her when she came to my apartment. The murderer might have brought it with him and left it in her hand so she would be quickly identified.” He paused, his frown deepening. “Maybe that’s a lead. Let’s have a look at those back copies you brought along.”
“She’s Helen Stallings, all right,” Rourke said. “Some of these pix are mighty clear for newspaper cuts.” He pulled a batch of newspaper sheets from his coat pocket and began sorting them out on the table. Turning them at a convenient angle for both of them to study, he said, “Here’s the first one I found. Little over a month ago. Snapped at the airport on her arrival from New York. There wasn’t any use looking farther back because this is her first visit to Miami. I suppose you know Stallings met the girl’s mother in New York. They were married there a few months ago, left the girl in college to finish the school term when they came down here, and Stallings built a mansion for his bride.”
Shayne studied a blurred halftone of a girl stepping from an air liner. “This is not too clear of her face,” he complained. “Looks like her, all right, but—”
“There aren’t any buts about this one.” Rourke selected another photograph, a front-page posed shot. “This was taken about a week later, the day after she filed suit against Stallings for alleged misappropriation of estate funds.”
Shayne nodded, disappointment clouding his face. The second picture was very clear in facial detail, unmistakably a picture of the girl who had staggered to his office and was later strangled in his bed.
“And here’s another one that’s just as clear,” Rourke went on. “Our regulars do a better job than the society photogs. This is a few days later, after she withdrew the suit against Stallings. Her mother had had a stroke in the meantime, presumably brought on by the girl’s action against Stallings, and was seriously ill. They had just moved from an apartment to that swanky new home on Swordfish Island.”
Shayne stared somberly at the two pictures. There was not the shadow of doubt as to the identity of the murdered girl. He shook his head slowly and admitted, “I thought for a moment there was a possibility that the handbag was planted for a false clue — so that the body would be identified as Helen Stallings. That’s the way with most neat theories,” he ended with deep disgust.
“Here’s some more.” Tim Rourke continued to spread out sheets of newspaper and pass them over for Shayne’s inspection. “She seems to have jumped into what the cliché boys would call a mad sporting and social whirl after deciding not to sue her stepfather. Surf-riding and golfing, cocktailing and dancing.”
Shayne glanced casually at each succeeding photograph offered for his inspection. “Who’s this lug hanging around her in all these? His face looks familiar, but I can’t quite place him.”
“That’s Arch Bugler. He cuts quite a dashing figure, don’t you think?”
“Arch Bugler?” Shayne snorted. “Hell, I didn’t know he’d stepped into society.”
“And how! He’s out of the slot-machine racket, you know. Ostensibly, at least. He opened a place on the Beach a few months ago. Made quite a flurry with it at first, but the cops clamped down on the back-room gambling, and he’s had to concentrate on selling food and drinks.”
“Sure. I know about his place on the Beach,” Shayne murmured, “but I didn’t know that qualified him for a place in society. Hell, Tim, everybody knows he’s a mobster — and one of the toughest ever to invade Miami and the Beach.”
“Mobsters are the latest social craze.” Rourke pointed out with a wry grin. “The blasé debs have found a new thrill. They get a perverted kick out of stepping with a known killer.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Shayne leaned back and drank deeply from his glass. “Still, I’d think Stallings would put his foot down. Didn’t he and Bugler have a run-in a couple of years ago on a labor-racketeering angle?”
“Yeh, but that’s all patched up now. They’ve been as thick as thieves since then, and Stallings was one of the biggest plungers when there was gambling at Bugler’s new joint.”