He shrugged and knelt beside the body, rolled him over on his back, and nodded somberly as he put his head down to listen for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.
“Dead, all right,” he announced unnecessarily, since half the side of the man’s head was torn off with a soft-nosed slug. “Know who he is, Mike?”
“Never saw him before.” Shayne was breathing heavily, knotting big fists in an effort to control his futile anger at this outcome of his carefully prepared trap. “I think, though,” he went on harshly, “you’ll find out he’s one of your pals from New Orleans. Detective First Class Mark Switzer, to be exact.”
“Yeh,” muttered Loftus defensively, spreading back the gray coat to go through the dead man’s pockets. “Chief said something about a New Orleans cop maybe going bad.”
He rocked back on his heels with a wallet, flipped it open and nodded soberly. “Here’s his identification. God knows, he deserved killing, Mike. When a cop does turn wrong—”
“Sure, he deserved it,” snarled Shayne with lips drawn back from his teeth. “But he’s got Lucy Hamilton somewhere, goddamn it! And probably another innocent girl he kidnaped in New Orleans and brought here. All I wanted, for God’s sake, was two minutes alone with him. That’s why I didn’t tell you cops what I was planning. I knew you’d interfere. And now you did interfere. And now he’ll never talk to me or anybody else.”
“Tough about Lucy,” said Sergeant Loftus gruffly. He began to explore the other pockets in the dead man’s gray suit, came up with a folded sheet of paper which he opened and read carefully in the glare of the searchlight.
He looked up at Shayne with a troubled expression as he finished reading it, hesitated momentarily, then passed it to the angry detective, saying, “Guess this is meant for you.”
Shayne took it and read:
Dearest Boss:
I am sick terribly at heart. I have been a fool, and so — this is the last love letter I shall ever write to you, my sweet.
This is just exactly what happened. I made a fool of myself by going to the morgue. The man I met on the Causeway was there and has me prisoner with Arlene Bristow. We are bound with ropes in a cold damp cellar that is practically airtight, in an unoccupied house where we will suffocate or die of slow starvation unless you or someone else comes to our rescue.
Please, my dearest Mike, don’t do anything to hurt him or we will die. I don’t know where you will find the seventy thousand dollars in cash money that he thinks you have, but unless you do get the mazuma for him we shall both soon be dead.
As you read these lines, please, oh please, realize, Mike dearest, that I shall love you even to the very end.
Chapter Nineteen
There was a depleted bottle of cognac on the table in the middle of Michael Shayne’s living-room, and an almost full glass of ice water beside it. There was also an uncorked bottle-of bourbon and a highball glass with half-melted ice cubes and a watery brownish mixture in the bottom. There was an uncapped beer bottle with a finger or so of fairly flat beer in the bottom.
And there was the money!
Stacks and stacks of new, crisp bills, neatly arranged in piles all over the surface of the table. And a discarded money belt of dark-brown leather lying on the floor with all its compartments open and empty.
And beside the cognac bottle lay the crumpled sheet of paper on which Lucy Hamilton had written her message to Michael Shayne under the direction of the man who was now dead.
Chief of Police Will Gentry and Daily News reporter, Timothy Rourke sat at the table. Rourke’s thin fingers were counting the crisp bills in their stacks of various denominations. Will Gentry was settled solidly in a comfortable chair close to the beer bottle. His glance kept going back casually to the stacks of bills on the table and the counting job that Tim Rourke was doing, but mostly his attention was centered on the restless figure of Michael Shayne, pacing back and forth the length of the room monotonously with a glass of cognac in his hand from which he took a sip every now and then.
For perhaps the tenth time during the half hour that the three of them had been together there, Chief Gentry reminded the redhead patiently, “You can’t blame Loftus and Powell for Switzer getting killed, Mike. I’m not asking you to blame yourself, but if you had trusted us a little more they would have been glad to hold back and let you grab him alive. They didn’t know you were there, damn it.”
“And I didn’t guess they would be there, either,” countered Shayne, also for perhaps the tenth time. “From my experience with the way the average cop’s mind works, I had no reason to believe any of you would realize that Switzer might hear the broadcast and come to the conclusion that Bristow had ditched the money behind the cushion of Agnew’s taxi after he was wounded and being driven to Lucy’s place.”
“Any sensible person who heard the broadcast,” said Gentry, “would immediately think of that as a possibility. The way Bristow made a point of getting Agnew’s name and number. Why else would he do that except that he planned to hide the money there and hoped to recover it later? Then when you and Tim put in that stuff about Agnew being on call any time at night for special trips in his cab, it was a definite invitation for Switzer to use that method of getting at the money.”
“All right,” agreed Shayne savagely. “So, you’ve made the point that you cops were as smart as I. And you sent Loftus and his sidekick out to see if Agnew did get a call. There was still no reason on God’s earth why they had to blow the top of his head off before he could be forced to tell us where he had Lucy and the Bristow girl hidden out.” He stopped beside the table and put his forefinger down hard on the message Lucy had written to him. “Read that again, goddamn it! Right at this moment, two innocent girls may be breathing their last breath in the cellar of a deserted house. Only one man in the world could have saved them, and one of your trigger-happy goons kills him before he can be made to talk.”
“I know how you feel about Lucy, Mike,” Gentry tried to soothe him. “But you’ve got to take it easy. She’ll be rescued all right. You know what we’re doing. Right now I’ve got every available man on the force working over every vacated house in Miami that we have listed in our files. And most people do list them with us if they go away for a time, as you know. Tomorrow morning both daily papers will carry a headline story about Lucy and Arlene, urging every resident of Miami to communicate with us at once the location of any vacant house in their vicinity. Take it easy, damn it. We’ll have Lucy and the Bristow girl safe and sound tomorrow afternoon.”
“If they’re still alive by that time,” said Shayne. He picked up Lucy’s note and read from it: “‘We are bound with ropes in a damp cellar that is practically airtight in an empty house where we will suffocate or die of slow starvation unless you or someone else comes to our rescue.’”
“An airtight cellar, Will. What makes you think they’ll last until tomorrow afternoon?”
“Take it easy, Mike.” Timothy Rourke finished his counting of the bills taken from the money belt Shayne had found hidden behind the rear-seat cushion in Joe Agnew’s taxi. “Roughly seventy-four thousand, I make it. You know no basement is actually airtight, Mike. There’s always enough air seeping in to keep a person alive. If you’re so eager to find them,” the reporter went on caustically, “why don’t you develop and expatiate on the theory you had in the beginning? That Lucy had somehow incorporated a secret message in code in this note to you?”