Shayne said, “There are a few hairs and skin stuck to the dried blood in the threads. Your smart boys can compare them with samples from the operator. You can also probably get prints from the other end that will match one of two guys you’ll find on the bay sand off the south side of the causeway near the beach.
“One of those two,” he went on sourly, taking the jammed. 32 from his pocket and laying it on the desk beside the pipe, “has got a bullet from this lousy gun between his eyes. His partner may be dead, too. The damned gun jammed before I could shoot twice, so I’m not sure.”
“Who are they, Mike?” Gentry asked in a dangerously low rumble. “What are you giving me?”
“A couple of killers.” He started to shrug out of his coat, winced with pain, then stepped over to Gentry and said, “Help me off, will you? I’m afraid I’ve got a couple of cracked ribs.”
Gentry pushed himself up and helped him ease the coat off. “Give me the rest of it fast,” he demanded gruffly. “How did you come to tangle with them?”
“They tangled with me,” Shayne told him. He limped across to the liquor cabinet, poured four ounces of cognac into a glass, limped back, and eased one hip onto the desk.
“Crossing the causeway in my car,” he continued. “A big black Cadillac came up behind me and forced me into the bay. A driver and a Tommy-gun artist. You can find the place by a hole in the guard fence and my car upside down in the water. I drove the Cad back,” he added casually. “It’s parked downstairs at the side entrance. Tommy gun in the back.” He took a long drink of cognac and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“Why? What were they after?”
Shayne’s sore face muscles rebelled at an attempt at a wry grimace. “I don’t know any more about it than I do about my office and apartment being ransacked. Help me get this shirt off, Will. I’m getting under the shower so I can take a look at what’s left of me.”
Will Gentry eased the shirt off, one sleeve at a time, ejaculating, “My God, Mike,” when he saw the lacerations and bruises on the detective’s torso. He began easing the straps of the undershirt from one shoulder, then the other, and stripped the garment down to the waist.
“Thanks, Will. I can manage the rest.” Shayne went stiffly through the open bedroom door and into the bathroom.
Gentry went to the telephone and barked a number into it. He was sitting in the big chair with a highball glass at his elbow when Shayne returned fifteen minutes later wearing a pair of shorts and a patch of adhesive tape on his ear. Spreading areas of red and purple showed all around his torso, and his jaw was bruised and swollen.
“Nothing broken as near as I can tell,” he announced cheerfully. “In fact, I’d say I’m in damned good shape for the hard life I lead.” He padded across the room barefooted and picked up his drink, again carefully lowering one hip to the desk.
“I got in touch with the Beach police,” Gentry told him. “You must have slugged the second one harder than you thought. They’re both dead, and Peter Painter was getting ready to drag the bay for your body after checking the license plate.”
“Hopefully?” said Shayne.
“When I told him you were here and alive he ordered me to arrest you on a charge of double murder.”
Shayne managed a brief grin. “Let me put on a robe first, Will.” He went into the bedroom and returned tying the belt of a faded blue-striped robe around his lean waist. “Did Painter identify the bodies?”
“Tentatively. Much as he hated to admit it, he acknowledged that both appear to be well-known trigger boys with long records.”
“Any known mob tie-up?”
Gentry moved his graying head slowly from side to side. “No particular tie-up right now.” He settled back and took a drink from his glass. “I think it’s time you and I had a long informative talk,” he suggested moodily.
Shayne said, “Sure. You start while I put on some coffee.” He slid from the desk carefully and on his way to the kitchen asked, “Shall I put your name in the pot?”
“Why not?” The chief’s tone was caustic. “The way you’re passing out information it looks like I’ll be here a long time.”
“You haven’t done too badly for a start,” Shayne remonstrated from the kitchen, and in a couple of minutes he returned to the desk and his drink, lit a cigarette, and resumed. “How many murders do you expect me to solve in one night?”
“There’s still Bert Jackson.”
“Can’t your boys do anything?”
“Let’s not bat it around too much, Mike. Who hired those two hoods to take you on the causeway?”
“I don’t know.” Shayne took a long drink of cognac. “Before God, I don’t,” he went on angrily when Gentry shook his head in disbelief. “When I do find out it’ll probably be something that can’t be proved, so better let me take care of him in my own way.”
“The way you took care of his two men?” Gentry rolled up his rumpled eyelids and fixed his cold gaze on Shayne’s face.
“Isn’t it a pretty good way?” Shayne challenged.
“Are you intimating that the man who searched your office and this place, sent the two hoods after you, also killed Bert Jackson?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. Can you tie things up?”
“I might,” Gentry rumbled, “if I knew what Jackson was doing here yesterday afternoon and why you threw him out.”
“I told you about that,” Shayne reminded him. “He wanted me to get divorce evidence.”
“I know what you told me. But that was before Ned Brooks spilled his guts and Mrs. Jackson’s next-door neighbor Mrs. Peabody gave us a pretty detailed statement on the private lives of Bert and Betty Jackson.”
“Who’s Ned Brooks?” Shayne parried.
“A reporter who’s been teamed up with Bert Jackson on the Tribune recently. Also, a close friend of Bert’s. It’s no use, Mike. From what Brooks and Mrs. Peabody say, Bert knew that Tim Rourke was playing his wife. He wouldn’t have come to you to get divorce evidence that would point to your best friend.”
“My God, Will, do you think I would have made up a story like that if I’d had the faintest idea Tim was involved with Mrs. Jackson?” Shayne burst out angrily. “I swear I didn’t know.”
Gentry took a leisurely sip of his highball, still staring straight at Shayne. “I don’t believe you did, then,” he conceded mildly. “I think you believed it was a safe lead to send us off on the wrong trail. But you know better now. I know you pumped Mrs. Peabody before Sergeant Allen got to her. And when you realized what you’d done you tipped Tim off. Where is he, Mike?”
“Why ask me?”
“He’s disappeared.”
“Why would Tim do that?” marveled Shayne.
“Because you and Ned Brooks and Mrs. Peabody have all put him right in the middle of the Jackson killing,” said Gentry, a warning weariness in his voice. “If he didn’t actually do the shooting himself, he’d better come in and tell us what he knows about it.”
The fragrant odor of fresh coffee brought Shayne to his feet again. He padded into the kitchen and returned with a steaming cup in each hand. He set one on the end table beside Gentry’s chair and the other on the desk, and poured the remaining brandy from his glass into it. Then he settled down, stirred it, and said, “Give me what you’ve got on the Rourke angle, Will. If Tim has killed anyone, I want to know it as much as you do.”
“We’ve got more than I like,” said Gentry gruffly. “Enough to charge him with murder right now. Add these up and see if you still think you’re justified in hiding him out.” The police chief had his fingers ready to tick off the charges when Shayne intervened to protest.
“I haven’t said I’ve got him hidden out.”
“I know you haven’t admitted it. One-Tim’s a friend of both the Jacksons and helped Bert get his first job on the News.”
“Since when did friendship become a motive for murder?” Shayne cut in fiercely.
“Two,” Gentry resumed, unperturbed, “Mrs. Jackson is a beautiful woman who didn’t get along with her husband. Tim’s been seeing her at home when her husband was at work, and not more than a month ago Bert had a big fight with his wife about that. Oh, hell, Mike, let’s face it. Mrs. Peabody’s report is pretty conclusive, and Ned Brooks says it was common knowledge among people who knew them.”