“Come up and have a drink with me, Tim.” Lucy impulsively put her hand on his arm as he stopped outside her door. “I just don’t want to be alone. And I’m sure Michael will call here the moment he can get away from there. I know you want to know what happened.”
“And I can use a drink of your good bourbon, honey child.” Rourke swung his long-legged body out and followed her to the foyer where she unlocked an inner door and preceded him up one flight of stairs.
While Lucy hurried into the kitchen for glasses and liquor, Rourke went to the telephone and dialed a number. He asked for the city desk when he got an answer, then asked casually, “Got anything yet on a car that went over the County Causeway into the drink about half an hour ago? This is Tim Rourke.”
He listened, nodding his head without much interest until he jerked to attention suddenly just as Lucy entered the room behind him.
“Are you sure about that?” he demanded incredulously. “I drove by shortly after it happened and didn’t hear about that.”
He listened again, then said tensely, “This may be a hell of an important story, Ed. Put every man you can roust out into checking that story and trying to get hold of the fellow. Look! I’m at this telephone number.” He read Lucy’s number out loud. “Call me here the moment you get a single thing on it.”
He hung up slowly, turned to Lucy with an odd expression on his face. “Just called the paper.” He tried to keep his voice calm, but couldn’t conceal the racing excitement that filled him. “They’ve got a tip that the driver of the car didn’t go over in it at all. That he was thrown clear in the roadway and the first motorist at the scene picked him up unconscious and rushed him off to a hospital.”
“Thank heavens for that,” said Lucy thinly. “I feel less like a murderer.”
“Maybe it’d be better if you were. If the cops get to him before we do—” He shook his head angrily and strode forward to snatch the bottle from Lucy’s tray.
Chapter Ten
Using one oar as a scull, Michael Shayne maneuvered the rowboat in the deep channel near the foot of the Causeway while Patrolman Roberts knelt in the bow and probed over the side with the second oar attempting to locate the submerged automobile.
“Don’t know how deep it is here,” Shayne warned him. “At least twenty feet, I’d guess. I don’t believe you have a chance in the world of finding anything with that oar.”
“I don’t think so, either. Right here should be about it. I can’t touch anything. They’ll have ropes with grappling hooks in a minute.”
“Not much hurry now,” Shayne commented grimly, resting his oar in a lock and getting out a cigarette. “Anybody know how it happened? More than one car involved?”
“No. I don’t think so. We happened to be cruising by and saw the other cars pulling up. No one actually saw it, I guess. Speeding probably, and lost control. Hell, there’s no use keeping this up.”
He settled back disgustedly, and Shayne lifted his oar to scull back to shore as two more searchlights were suddenly switched on above and a voice shouted down, “Bring that rowboat back, Roberts. We’ve got a crew here to do the job right.”
Shayne stepped out of the boat onto the sand when it nudged in close, relinquishing his place to a trio of firemen equipped with long iron rods for probing deep in the water, and steel hooks attached to heavy Manila ropes to drag beneath the surface.
He drew back toward a group of officers, from both Miami and Miami Beach and watched with interest as the boat set out again.
There was little talk among the group. Two or three of them who knew Michael Shayne well made bantering remarks about his propensity for being on the spot when tragedies occurred, and speculated lightly on how the devil he had managed to wreck a car on the Causeway while rowing with his secretary on the surface of the bay.
Shayne grinned and explained he had been experimenting with a new sort of ray by remote control, and promised that when the victim was recovered from the submerged car he would prove to be none other than Nicolai Simonovith, personal representative of the U.S.S.R. with secret plans for blowing up the entire United States with one bomb.
There was a shout from the men in the rowboat, a great deal of activity as they maneuvered around one spot, letting their hooks down carefully until two of them appeared to be firmly caught by some object below. Then they rowed back a short distance as the ropes were tightened by a winch truck securely anchored on the edge of the Causeway above, and the heavy motor roared loudly in the night as the strain on the ropes became intense.
One of the hooks broke loose, but the second held fast as the rope was reeled in, and under the bright lights the front wheels and engine hood of the gray sedan suddenly broke the surface of the water.
Shayne hurried forward with the others as the sedan was dragged up on the sand on its side, was one of the first to peer into the interior and discover there was no body inside.
Both front windows were rolled all the way down, and it was the immediate consensus that the body of the driver had drifted out through one of the open windows while the sedan rested on the bottom, and probably wouldn’t be recovered until gases gave the corpse enough buoyancy to bring it to the surface.
With no official reason for staying around any longer, Shayne retrieved his boat and left them dragging the sedan up to the top, rowing strongly back the half mile to the dock where he had borrowed the craft earlier from a friend.
All he could do now was wait for something to happen. It was midnight, and the man on the telephone had set one o’clock as the time the woman he called Mrs. Allerdice would tell her story to the police unless he had received $70,000 first.
At the moment, Michael Shayne saw nothing in the world he could do to prevent that from happening on schedule. He had hoped, of course, to capture the man on the Causeway and get the truth from him and perhaps have the case settled by the one-o’clock deadline.
But now the man was almost certainly dead and all chance of getting his story was over. Michael Shayne had blundered again. The police were going to take a very dim view of the entire affair when they had the full story of Shayne’s actions during the evening.
From first to last, he had erred in judgment. From the first moment he had started withholding information from the authorities, he had been inexorably forced into new deceptions which had dug the pit deeper and deeper for him.
Not only for him, he thought ruefully, but for Lucy Hamilton and Timothy Rourke, also. Lucy Hamilton deserved to share the responsibility with him, but Rourke was a completely innocent bystander who had become enmeshed in the affair through his long-time friendship with them both and his absolute conviction that Michael Shayne would always come out on top no matter what the odds.
So Rourke had backed the wrong horse tonight, Shayne told himself grimly. There seemed no possible way to hide the full truth any longer. Within an hour the three of them were destined to be in very bad trouble indeed. Will Gentry was a good friend and a fair man, but he was also a sternly just man. In the past he had overlooked many minor deviations from the strict line of legality on Shayne’s part, but the things that had occurred tonight were much too much for even Will Gentry to stomach.