“There was no evidence to tie her to what had happened. Just my hunch. I doubt whether you’d even bothered to question her at that time. If you had, I doubt seriously you’d have put a guard over her,” protested Shayne, the trenches showing very deep in his cheeks. “Later, I made a bad mistake leading the killer to her, but I don’t believe keeping still at that time made any real difference.”
“I don’t suppose it matters to her now,” said Gentry. He took the soggy cigar butt from his mouth, looked at it distastefully and in surprise as though wondering how the devil it had got in his mouth, and threw it toward a spittoon in a corner. “What comes next?”
“Next,” said Shayne carefully, “was after you had gone, Will.” He drew in a deep breath and leaned forward. “I found Jack Bristow’s body shoved underneath Lucy’s bed with his throat slit. It hadn’t been he escaping down the fire escape after all, but his murderer whom I almost caught.”
“Now, by God!” thundered Chief Gentry. “You were in on that, too, Tim? Both of you covered up? How did Bristow get out on the street where we found him later?”
“Tim knew nothing about it,” said Shayne swiftly. “I managed to get him out before I moved the body. You can’t blame him—”
“Wait a minute, Mike,” interrupted the lanky reporter. “Don’t lie for me. If Will Gentry doesn’t like what I did tonight he can prefer any sort of charges he wants.” He turned fiercely glowering eyes on the chief and struck the table with his clenched fist.
“Mike and Lucy were in a hell of a spot with that body in her bedroom. Through no fault of their own, damn it. But would a cop look at it that way? You know he wouldn’t. I knew they were telling the truth. They were caught in a lousy web of circumstances. But cops have to go by rules. That’s the way they exist. That’s the way they get to be chiefs.” His fist thudded the table again. “Once we reported the truth to you, there were certain things you would have to do. You couldn’t help yourself. You’d have arrested Mike and Lucy then and there and the official investigation would have blundered on and probably got nowhere. It was my own decision to help Mike move the body.”
“And because you made that decision, we’ve got a dead woman in the morgue waiting to be identified,” said Gentry inflexibly.
“Not exactly.” Timothy Rourke’s eyes were fever-bright. “You’ve got a dead woman in the morgue, but we can identify her for you simply because Mike stayed out of your jail long enough to do the job.”
“You can identify the woman?”
“Sure,” said Rourke casually. “She’s Beatrice Allerdice from New Orleans. Wife, or widow, of one Hugh Allerdice, convicted bank robber who supposedly died in a car accident three days ago. You tell him, Mike.”
“I’ll tell it the way it happened,” said Shayne stubbornly. “Jack Bristow was dead, Will. Nothing could change that. His murderer had escaped and no one knew who he was or what he looked like. He’d been shot outside the rooming-house where the woman claimed she was to meet her husband. They’re both young, and it seemed to me at least reasonable to suppose he might be the missing husband. So I bundled him up in one of Lucy’s blankets and took him out to the motel to see if she could identify him.”
Will Gentry had gotten out a fresh cigar and was angrily biting the end off it. “Like a one-man police force,” he said bitterly. “All right, goddamn it, what laws did you break next?”
Shayne related Mrs. Allerdice’s reaction to the sight of Bristow’s corpse, how he’d had the feeling she recognized him though he wasn’t her husband, and how he’d warned her of possible danger to her if she didn’t tell the truth.
“Then we ditched Bristow in the street where he was sure to be found soon, and went to my place for a drink. The telephone rang while we were kicking things around — and that was the real payoff.”
In a flat, unemotional tone, he told Gentry exactly what he had been told over the telephone.
“So, there we were,” he ended. “Stop a minute, Will, and consider the situation. What would you and your entire police force have done at that moment if I’d taken the story to you?”
“We could have saved the woman’s life and gotten the whole story from her by sitting tight and doing nothing,” blustered Gentry. “He told you he had her hid out with arrangements for us to find her if you didn’t come across with the money in a certain length of time. You caused her death by forcing the issue.”
“He told us he had her hid out,” Shayne reminded him. “But he didn’t in fact. We know now that he had her tied up and locked in the trunk of the stolen car all the time. Tell me one thing truthfully, Will.” Michael Shayne’s voice had an unaccustomed note of pleading in it. “Do you have Doc Martin’s preliminary report on her?”
“Yeh.”
“Tell me this. Did she die of drowning — or suffocation?”
Will Gentry hesitated, then he conceded gruffly, “Doc didn’t find a trace of salt water in her lungs. She must have been dead before the sedan went over. Suffocated in the trunk.”
“How long before the car went over, Will?”
“At least half an hour,” said Gentry grudgingly. “But that doesn’t absolve you, Mike. If you had come to me in the beginning—”
“I know, I know,” said Shayne wearily. “If you’d had a jackass for a father, you’d be out in a field braying right now instead of sitting at this desk. So, I made a fast decision. There was one way we might trap the guy. By sending Lucy out with a decoy package under her arm — and don’t blame Pete Fairwell for helping me make up that bomb. I gave him a good story for why I wanted it, and he simply co-operated the way you’ve always had your men co-operate with me before.”
“I’m not blaming Fairwell,” said Gentry shortly. “I blame you for bungling the deal.”
“Fair enough. I did bungle it. By about two minutes. There again, we have a whole batch of ifs. If he hadn’t gunned the motor so fast before the bomb went off. If the guard fence hadn’t been down at exactly that point. If an officious motorist hadn’t picked up the unconscious man and carried him away before the police or I got there. Those are ifs no one can anticipate. I took a gamble on catching him and lost. If I’d succeeded, you’d be pinning a medal on me instead of having me on the carpet.”
“But you didn’t succeed. Go on with your wild story about a bank robber named Hugh Allerdice.”
“Tim and I went through back issues of the paper and found the whole story.”
Shayne went back to the time of the payroll theft and related the sequence of events leading up to the automobile tragedy while Allerdice was being taken to prison.
“So Tim and I hurried to the morgue to see if the woman has had a recent appendectomy. She has. Not positive identification, but a pretty good lead. What the devil did you mean, Will, by saying you wanted Lucy to come down and see if she was Arlene Bristow? What gave you that idea?”
“Arlene Bristow is missing from her home. Supposed to have left for Miami a couple days ago under somewhat mysterious circumstances. With her brother dead here, I naturally wondered if it was she in the luggage compartment of the sedan. Particularly when Pete Fairwell told me about the bomb he fixed for you, and I tied you to the sedan, also.”
“Arlene in Miami!” exclaimed Shayne. “Lucy must have learned that after we left her somehow. And that’s what took her down to the morgue. I wondered why the devil—”
“From what you said there, I gathered you thought Lucy was the woman whom the man recognized as he came out, and who took her away with him. Some man named Jenkins from Twelfth Street, who was afraid she was his daughter. Could he be Arlene’s father?”