Will Gentry tried to break in impatiently by demanding to know why he cared to know what some woman had been wearing, but Shayne silenced him with a savage gesture.
“This Jenkins! What did he look like?”
“Nothing particular. Sort of heavy-built and fiftyish. Wearing a gray suit and gray hat pulled down so you couldn’t see his face so good. Almighty worried, he was, about seeing whether she was his girl or not.”
“Wait a minute, Will.” Shayne’s voice was like a whiplash as he prevented the chief from speaking again. “Tell me this one thing. Any report from Miami Beach tonight about a man that might have been picked up on the Causeway after the car went over the edge?”
Will Gentry studied him curiously for a moment. “You mean the car that had the woman in the trunk? The one where you and Lucy just happened to be rowing out on the bay near by when it occurred?”
“That one,” said Shayne with savage intensity.
“The one,” Gentry went on stolidly, “that showed signs of some sort of explosive having gone off in the front seat? Just about the same amount of damage that might have been caused by that gas bomb you got Pete Fairwell to make up for you earlier this evening?”
“All right,” agreed Shayne grimly. “That one. Though I didn’t know about the signs of an explosion.”
“Why, yes,” said Gentry, rocking back on his heels and taking a thick black cigar from his pocket while he studied the redhead intently. “My men did get a report that some passing motorist maybe picked up the driver and took him away from the scene before they got there. But we haven’t been able to locate either one of them yet. No one has come forward to verify the story. Can you?” He shot the two final words out like two rocks.
“Not personally. Tim Rourke got the story from his paper. I want to know one more thing, Will. Any slugging or anything like that reported on the Beach in the last hour?”
Will Gentry rolled the cigar slowly back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other, his shrewd eyes hooded by wrinkled brows.
“Funny you should ask that. As a matter of fact a man was picked up unconscious just beyond the end of the Causeway about fifteen minutes after the sedan went over. Apparently slugged over the head and tossed out of a moving car. He was a respectable citizen of Miami Beach who is supposed to have been driving home from Miami about that time. Any more questions you feel like asking right now, Mike? Or, is it my turn?” His voice was deceptively even and calm, but there was a note of iron in it that warned his patience was exhausted.
“I don’t think I need to ask any more questions,” said Shayne. He started out of the morgue fast. “Be seeing you around, Will.”
“Stop!” Gentry’s voice rang out loudly.
Shayne hunched his shoulders forward stubbornly and increased his pace toward the exit.
Will Gentry jerked his coat open and drew a .38 from his shoulder holster. His voice was like ice as he ordered, “Halt, Shayne. I’ll shoot if you go through that door.”
Shayne heard and recognized the note of stolid determination in Chief Gentry’s voice. He had heard it once or twice before, but never directed at him. He was still three strides from the door, and common sense told him this wasn’t the way to handle the situation.
He slammed to a halt and whirled to face the gun in the police chief’s hand. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Will. While we’re standing here talking, Lucy Hamilton is being held by a killer. A two- or three-time killer, by my guess. Put your gun away, Will.”
The gun remained steady in Gentry’s hand. He jerked his head in a curt negative. “You’re going to headquarters with me, Shayne. You and Tim Rourke both. When you’ve told me everything you know about this, the police will take over. Before God, Mike, I mean it.”
“But Lucy—”
“Lucy Hamilton is a woman exactly like the one downstairs. Exactly like the one strangled on Eighteenth Street tonight. We’ll do exactly the same to protect her as we did to protect them.”
“A fine goddamn job you did for them,” raged Shayne. “If you think I’m going to sit on my hands until Lucy’s corpse turns up, you’re crazy.”
“You’ll sit behind bars if you want it that way.” Will Gentry’s voice was inflexible and he made no move to holster his gun. “It’s my own hunch that one or both of those other women would still be alive if you hadn’t tried to play God tonight. If you hold out on us now, it’ll be Lucy you’re holding out on. I’m Chief of Police in Miami, and I’m still running my department the best I can with all the interference I get from smart private dicks.”
Shayne hesitated a long moment, glancing from the Police Positive in Gentry’s big hand to the look of iron determination on the chief’s beefy face.
Lucy was the one who needed help now. His personal reputation in Miami, his license to practice his profession didn’t matter so much any more.
He nodded and said thickly, “All right, Will. For God’s sake, let’s get going before we have a couple more murders to really hang up a record in Miami for one night.”
Chapter Fifteen
“It all began,” said Michael Shayne evenly, “when that blundering Cossack of yours tried to force his way into Lucy’s apartment while I was visiting her, without any real explanation of what he wanted, and with a couple of insults tossed in for good measure when he thought she was alone.
“Wait a minute, Will.” Shayne held up a big hand to shut off the chief’s protest. The two men, together with Timothy Rourke and a police stenographer were seated in Gentry’s private office at headquarters.
“I’m going to tell the whole thing straight and fast without too many excuses for Lucy and me. Tim, you’ll see, got pulled into it inadvertently and played ball with us for pure friendship. So, I got sore and socked your cop there in Lucy’s doorway, and that started the whole train of events.”
He hurried on to relate concisely how Lucy had admitted to him there was a wounded young man in her bedroom at the very moment the police came searching for him.
“I hurried out at once to find Sergeant Loftus, but he had left the premises. Then I broke down the bedroom door to take the guy myself, but found the screen ripped away from in front of the fire escape, and heard a man running away in the dark alley below.
“So — there it was.” He spread out his palms. “It was done. Through no fault of anybody’s really. Jack was an old friend of Lucy’s and had sworn to her he’d committed no crime. She didn’t know about Eighteenth Street or the strangled girl. I did get on a phone fast, Will, and make an anonymous call to headquarters giving Bristow’s name and description. It seemed the only thing to do. Then I beat it to the rooming-house on Eighteenth to see what I could find out.”
He briefly related his conversation with the police detective, and how the woman had stopped him with questions as he was getting into his car.
“She was scared to hell of cops, and wouldn’t have talked to any of you,” he argued. “I did manage to get some dope out of her, and got a hunch she was mixed up with Bristow and the killing somehow. So, I put her on ice at the motel. That license number you’ve got belongs to my Hudson, Will.”
Will Gentry was seated stolidly across from Shayne at his desk, mangling the saliva-soaked butt of his cigar between strong teeth. He nodded noncommittally and rumbled, “I recognized the license number soon as I saw it, Mike. Go on from there.”
“You and Rourke turned up at Lucy’s right after I got back.” Shayne shrugged. “You know what happened. Can you say, now, that it would have helped any if I’d come clean at that point?”
“The woman from the motel would probably still be alive.”