The voice paused for a moment, and Shayne held the receiver to his ear in grim silence and waited for it to continue.
“I’ve got a place I’m stashing Beatrice where she’ll stay put for a couple hours. Say one o’clock for the deadline. I’ll fix it so if anything happens to me, the police will find her at one o’clock. You got that straight?”
“I’ve got it.”
“You get to her first if you cough up the dough by eleven-thirty. Seventy thousand. That’s all I want, but, by God, I want that much. You still with me?”
“I’m listening.”
“You do it this way. Go to the Hamilton girl’s apartment and fix up a nice little bundle. Have her walk out the door with it at exactly eleven-thirty. She walks straight to Thirteenth Street and heads across the Causeway. Her being pretty and it being late, several guys may stop to pick her up. She says no and keeps walking. Until one of the cars stops and the door opens and I tell her, “Throw it in, sister.” That’s all. She throws it in and I keep driving. You be waiting at your phone right where you are now. If the money is okay, I’ll call you before midnight to tell you where to find Beatrice and shut her up any way you want to. If not, she’ll be spilling the whole story to the cops at one o’clock. You got all that straight?”
“I’ve got it.”
“You better have.” The telephone clicked decisively at the other end of the line.
Michael Shayne replaced his instrument slowly on its prongs. There was a savage scowl of concentration on his rugged face, and his hand shook as he reached for the cognac bottle and filled his glass to the brim.
Timothy Rourke, who had listened to Shayne’s end of the long conversation with intense interest, could contain his excitement no longer. “Who was it, Mike? What in hell did he want? You look like an atomic bomb had exploded inside your belly.”
“I feel sort of like it had.” Shayne tossed off half his drink, glared morosely down at the glass, then finished it. He said, “Give me one minute, Tim. Then I’ll lay it on the line, and God help us if we can’t figure this one out.”
He lifted the phone and asked the switchboard for Lucy Hamilton’s number. When her voice came over the wire, he said, “Everything all right, Lucy?”
“Yes, Michael. I’ve been wondering—”
“Stop wondering and listen to me. This is dead serious, angel. Did Jack Bristow say one word to you that you didn’t repeat to me?”
“No. That is — of course, maybe I didn’t repeat every word he spoke verbatum, but I left nothing out.”
“Sure about that, Lucy? Not a word about any sizable amount of money?”
“Not a word about money, Michael.”
“All right. Do this fast. Think back to exactly what he did from the moment he came in your door. Search every possible place to which he had access where he might have hidden a small package. Or maybe a money belt. Do it fast, but do it right. Call me back the moment you can say positively he didn’t stash anything there.”
Shayne hung up and told Rourke, “I don’t know who telephoned me. Here’s what he said.”
He went on to relate in terse sentences the gist of the stranger’s statements and threats. Before he finished, Timothy Rourke was pacing the floor excitedly, hands thrust deep in trouser pockets, deep-set eyes glinting feverishly, the familiar mocking smile wholly missing from his lean face.
When Shayne completed his recital, he exclaimed, “My God, Mike. That’s awful. What are we going to do? Who the devil is he and how did he get onto everything so fast?”
“I don’t think that matters so much now. Could be some guy who saw Jack enter Lucy’s building and made some shrewd guesses and hung around to follow us out to the motel and then to where we ditched Jack. A damned professional job of tailing if he did. One of Gentry’s cops, maybe, with sticky fingers.”
“But how would he know about the money Bristow was supposed to be carrying? Eighty thousand dollars! Damn it, Mike. That has a familiar ring to me.” Rourke paused in mid-stride to demand, “What was that name he called your Mrs. Smith?”
“Mrs. Allerdice. And later, Beatrice. And from what he said, I gathered her husband’s name was Hugh. Also dead, according to him, and she believes I killed him.”
“Allerdice?” muttered Rourke, clawing nervously at a lock of black hair that persisted in falling across his forehead. “That strikes a note, too. Damned if I know what.”
“We’ve got less than an hour,” Shayne reminded him. His phone rang as he spoke, and he snatched it up. He grunted into it, then listened a moment and his eyes became more bleak than before.
“All right, angel. I haven’t time to explain right now. Better not go to bed yet. Mix yourself a long drink and be comfortable. I’ll call you or be over.” He hung up and spread both palms out expressively toward Rourke. “No soap. He didn’t ditch any money in her place.”
“That means?”
“Either Bristow didn’t have it when he got there, or the person who came in from the fire escape to kill him relieved him of it before I scared him away.”
“So, what do we do now?”
Shayne said, “God knows, Tim,” and poured himself a small drink.
“Damn it!” exploded Rourke. “This is really a toughie. If the tourist camp woman tells her story to the police, we’ll never talk ourselves out of it. If we’d only called Will Gentry as soon as we found Bristow’s body there. Or, if we’d just gone ahead and ditched him without carrying him out and showing him to Mrs. Allerdice.”
“Yeh,” said Shayne grimly. “Second-guessing is always easy. The question is, what now? Let’s look at it straight from the few things we know. The man who phoned may be Bristow’s killer.”
“But he asked whether you or Lucy used the knife.”
“Could be a coverup. He wouldn’t admit it if he did go up the fire escape.”
“Wait a minute, Mike. You suggested the killer must have got Bristow’s money. This man wouldn’t be demanding it from you if he already had it.”
“No. But we don’t know the killer got it. We don’t know Bristow had anything on him when he entered Lucy’s place.”
“Your man sounded pretty positive on the telephone,” Rourke reminded him.
“I know. But he could be mistaken. Bristow might have passed it to someone before he knocked on Lucy’s door.” Shayne paused a moment, then added flatly, “We’ve got to get this guy, Tim.”
“And let the woman tell her story to the cops?”
“We haven’t much choice,” Shayne pointed out grimly. “The way he set it up over the phone, only way we can prevent her doing that is passing him seventy grand before midnight. Whose money do you suggest we use for the payoff?”
“Yeh,” agreed Rourke dubiously. “And there’s no way we can reach him. We don’t know who he is — what he looks like.”
“There’s one point of contact. Lucy. Walking along the Causeway with a decoy package under her arm.”
“Even that won’t get us anything. Even if you’re willing to risk her neck that way. He’ll discover it’s a decoy mighty soon. You still won’t know where to reach the woman before the cops get to her.”
“That’s a chance we have to take. We can’t pass up this contact. Let’s see how we can figure it. He thinks he’s got us bluffed. That we won’t dare try to cover Lucy and cross him up because of the woman. So we do just that.”
“But how? He figured it smart, Mike. Having her walk on the Causeway late at night. There’s no place for anyone to hide out along the Causeway. You can’t follow along in a car without being conspicuous. Also, at least half the cars that pass her walking along there will stop to offer her a lift. It’s not like a girl walking along a street who may be stopping at the next house. Once anyone starts across the Causeway, it’s three miles to the Beach and most anyone will offer her a ride. Half of them will pull up and open the door on her side as he plans to do. If you get the whole police force out to patrol the Causeway, they’d have to start chasing and stopping every car that paused beside her. All he has to do is drive back and forth a couple of times to observe what happens to others before he makes his play. In fact, if he’s as smart as he sounds, he’ll probably stop and offer her a ride the first time just to see what the lay is. Damn it, Mike, it’s an infernally clever plan for collecting a payoff.”