Shayne looked at him for a long moment. Then he asked quietly, “Can you tell me how long Kathleen had been dead?”
“Not more than an hour, Mike. About midnight. They had provided her with plenty of air,” he went on bitterly, “by boring three half-inch holes in the bottom of the luggage compartment. But the kid didn’t have a chance. The holes were right over the exhaust pipe-by accident or design-and the exhaust pipe had a big hole in it just beneath the air holes. She had been breathing carbon monoxide as she lay there bound and gagged. At least,” he ended sorrowfully, “she couldn’t have suffered too much.”
“What happened to the woman who was driving?”
Rourke looked longingly at the bottle of cognac, now no more than a quarter full, then propped his bony elbows on his knees and said, “She was gone by the time the cops went looking for her. It seems she ran a sort of private nursing home, an ideal place to keep a kidnaped child. As nearly as has been learned, she hasn’t had any patients for the past few days. No one knows enough about former patients to get a line on her.”
Shayne said absently, “Fifty grand in C-notes.”
“That’s right. Done up in five bundles of ten grand each. Mind if I take a look in that suitcase, Mike?”
“It’s in the bathroom,” said Shayne indifferently.
Rourke went into the bathroom and brought out the suitcase. He set it on the floor and opened it, lifted the top half and looked inside, then turned it over to dump the contents on the floor.
The five bundles of bills, held together by wide rubber bands, tumbled out. Rourke picked one of them up and moved back to sit on the couch. Shayne smoked a cigarette and watched him while he carefully counted the bills.
“I make it a hundred,” he said, looking at Shayne.
“Uh-huh?”
Rourke tossed the bundle back with the others. “Five times a hundred makes five hundred. Fifty thousand bucks in all.”
“I think you’ll find a few missing,” Shayne offered casually, “if you want to bother to count all the bundles.”
“Do you mind telling me where you got them?”
“I wish you’d tell me one thing before we get started on that angle. Was the ransom money marked?”
“No. Emory Hale swears it wasn’t. And Deland says he looked it over, too, before giving it to Dawson to make sure it wasn’t marked in any way to make the kidnapers suspicious and queer the pay-off.”
Shayne was sitting erect now, listening intently.
“Painter gave Hale hell about that,” Rourke went on. “He told him it was completely dumb not to have at least taken the serial numbers of the money to be used in a kidnap pay-off, and, under pressure, Hale admitted he did have the numbers. He gave Painter a typed list he said the bank had given him.”
“Were the bills in sequence?” Shayne asked sharply.
“No. They were all mixed up. I looked over the list with Painter. Hale explained that he had demanded bills that had been in circulation for some time.”
“What time was it when Painter got this list?”
“About twelve-thirty.”
Shayne shook his head and muttered, “I don’t see how in hell Bates could have had a list of the numbers not more than fifteen minutes later. Bates and Irvin. Or how they could have picked any one bill out of a jumbled list except by accident.”
“What are you mumbling about?”
“We’ll come to that later. Describe Deland’s partner to me. The pay-off guy.”
“Dawson? I didn’t see him, but Deland described him to Painter. A neat dresser, in his mid-forties, and a little on the stout side with a puffy, pallid face. Seems he ran the office end of the plumbing business, mostly.”
Shayne nodded decisively. His steel-gray eyes were very bright. “Dawson gave me that money, Tim. About two minutes before midnight.”
“Dawson! Good God, Mike! Were you really mixed up in that kidnaping?” Rourke’s voice was shaking and his tone incredulous and horrified.
“By accident,” Shayne told him. “Sit back and take a drink while I tell you all about it. And I swear to God I’ll wring your scrawny neck if you don’t believe every word I tell you.”
Chapter Ten
Rourke’s eyes blazed venomously into Shayne’s for a moment. He started to push himself up from the couch, but the bleakness in Shayne’s eyes and the muscles moving in his gaunt face brought back memories of times when the detective had bound and gagged him to force him to listen to reason before spouting off and rushing headlines to his newspaper.
He settled back wearily after pouring a drink. “Okay, Mike. But this time it’s got to be good. Understand?”
Shayne nodded. He gave a brief account of his experience at the airport, dwelling upon the meeting with Dawson.
“When the porter brought me a Gladstone from the plane I didn’t realize he’d brought me the wrong one,” he explained. “I didn’t know I had Dawson’s bag until I discovered it was locked. You were very helpful in opening it for me right in Painter’s presence,” he added with a dry grin.
“Then Dawson is using your ticket and your name,” he exclaimed. “It’s actually Dawson who jumped the plane in Palm Beach.”
Shayne nodded and then related the story of the lush blonde with much less enthusiasm than he had felt at the time it happened. “I trailed her out,” he resumed, “because I didn’t know whether to tell her the truth about her supposed husband or not. She got in a gray sedan with Fred Gurney.”
“Gurney? He’s one of the cons there was such a stink about a few years ago. I covered that story. Bought a pardon from Raiford. There was a state-wide scandal afterward, involving a lot of other high-ups.”
Shayne nodded. “Senator Irvin was the central figure. They hushed it up somehow.”
“Yeah, I remember,” said Rourke sadly.
“I trailed the blonde and Gurney to a joint on Thirty-sixth street,” Shayne continued. “The Fun Club. Run by a guy named Bates. Ever heard of him?”
Rourke shook his head.
Shayne then told him about trying to pay for some drinks with one of the bills given him by Dawson, of the phone call Bates had made, and of his escape with Gerta Ross in the sedan.
“My God,” breathed Rourke. “Then you were the passenger in the wreck. Chick Farrel did recognize you. Why did you run away, Mike?” he went on excitedly. “Did you know the girl was in the trunk?”
“I didn’t run away,” Shayne told him. “I walked away with a gun in my back.” He gave a quick summary of his interview with ex-Senator Irvin and his escape from the house on 38th Street. “I stopped in a joint on Miami Avenue and called Gentry,” he explained. “He told me Farrel had spotted me in the wreck. That was the first time I knew there had been a kidnaping. I asked him to pick up Irvin, and that’s why he told me about the fire and the dead Negro in the basement. A broken glass bottle is a hell of a thing to shove into anyone’s face,” he added.
“I don’t get that stuff about the bills.” Rourke picked up the ten-grand bundle he had discarded and studied one of the bills carefully. “I don’t see anything out of the way about this.”
“That’s why I asked whether the ransom money was marked. Don’t forget what Bates told Irvin over the phone-‘I got a C-note from that batch of fifty G’s you been hunting.’ That couldn’t have been later than twelve-forty-five, Tim. Even if the money was marked, how could Bates and Irvin know?”
“Emory Hale is the only one who could have known that,” Rourke agreed. “Maybe he told them.”
“Hale wouldn’t have turned that information over to a bunch of crooks,” Shayne protested. “There’s a possibility he may have lied to his brother-in-law and Painter. He might have played smart by having some secret marking on the bills, and he might even have turned that information over to the F.B.I., in New York and didn’t want to admit it after the pay-off went sour. But suppose he did? How did Irvin get it? And suppose Irvin did have a list he’d circulated to stooges like Bates? Would he gain anything by chasing down the ransom money after it had been paid?”