The body, on its side, lay huddled against the refrigerating unit. It was male. An open newspaper covered his face, to keep off flies.
Standing on the sidewalk, Rourke described the scene and what Shayne was doing. The newspaper was stuck to the face. Shayne picked it off. He looked at Rourke. “Nobody I know,” Rourke said.
Shayne used a flashlight, and moved the upper part of the body to let the beam illuminate the face. The bluish hole in the temple had been made by a small-caliber weapon, and there were marks indicating that the gun had been in contact when the trigger was pulled. It was the most common suicide wound. Shayne moved the beam until it picked up a.25 automatic. He left it where it was.
“Strange place to commit suicide,” Rourke said.
“If that’s what it is.”
Shayne moved into the front seat. Using his car phone, he reported their find, with Rourke extending the hand-mike into the car to pick up Shayne’s end of the conversation. Then Shayne returned to the back seat and felt the pockets carefully, finding loose change and a key, but no wallet or identification.
A car arrived. A girl dismounted and started into the building. Recognizing Rourke, she stopped and came over.
“I’m Joanne Stewart, Meri’s roommate. I don’t know if there’s anything I can—”
Shayne straightened, and she saw the body.
She took a step forward, shaking her head. Then she cried, “That’s Scotch! That’s Scotch! He’s dead!”
Chapter 15
She was a small, olive-skinned girl with her hair in bangs, too plump, wearing glasses. She had skipped a buttonhole when buttoning her shirt. The strap of one sandal was flapping.
“Scotch,” she said again, vaguely. “I don’t understand it.”
“And this is Mike Shayne’s automobile,” Rourke said, “the back seat of which, I’ll repeat, is a funny place for a body to turn up in.”
“It’s something to do with that damn mask!” Joanne said accusingly.
“Probably,” Shayne said.
She pushed her fingers through her bangs. “This is the first dead person I’ve ever — Can we sit down somewhere? I’d like a glass of water.”
“We have to stay here until the cops can take over,” Shayne said.
He put ice in a tall glass and filled it with soda. Rourke turned her so she could sit in the front seat, her feet on the sidewalk. She took her head in both hands, pressing hard. Then she accepted the glass from Shayne and drank thirstily.
“I still don’t have the faintest idea. Did Meri — has Meri been—”
“Meri’s been found.” Shayne said gently. “Whoever did that is still out and around. We’re going to have to waste some time after the cops get here. That can’t be helped. But we have a few minutes now for some fast questions and answers. Can you put these two deaths to one side and react to them later? Are you listening, Joanne?”
“I don’t know what you want.”
“How much have you seen of Meri lately?”
She looked at the sidewalk, then at Shayne, at Rourke, and then back at the sidewalk. Only then did she answer. “Not very much. I didn’t care for her professor.”
“Did she break up with Scotch before he went to Mexico with Holloway?”
“No, after they got back. He was miserable down there. He wrote her almost every day. Digging? That wasn’t Scotch’s usual kind of thing. Then they had an argument, arguments, and she shifted to Holloway — not much of an improvement, in at least one person’s opinion.”
She made a helpless sound suddenly and tears ran from her eyes. “There was nothing improper between Meri and myself! If that’s what you’re implying. We liked the same things. We really leveled with each other. She had such wonderful dreams for the future. Scotch!” she said with scorn, gesturing toward the body in the back seat. “He only cared about one single thing, himself, and I don’t see how she stood spending evenings with him, let alone nights. He’s been back lately, sniffing around. He was there in the house one night when I stopped by to take her to the movies. Holloway was away somewhere — Chicago, Indiana. Scotch gave me an extremely sour look and left. The world’s biggest ego combined with the world’s worst disposition.”
“What’s he been doing this last year?”
“Living in Fort Myers with his mother. Smoking, no doubt. Perfectly well satisfied with himself.”
“What did Meri say to you about the mask?”
“We talked about it a lot. I never saw it, but I understand it’s really something. She wasn’t too happy about the idea of selling it to some American museum. She had a thing about museums, but if it had to be in a museum at all, she thought it ought to be in a Mexican one. But that’s not the way the world is organized, according to her crooked employer.”
“Crooked?”
“The phoniest phony who ever pulled on a pair of pants, Mr. Shayne. If he was the one who was dead, I’d be sitting here drinking black velvets.”
“We haven’t heard from him lately,” Shayne said dryly. “Everybody’s been waving guns around, and we may end up with a casualty list longer than two.”
With sirens and lights, the police arrived.
Rourke kept moving with his microphone, letting his audience overhear the asides, grunts, and obscenities of night-shift policemen handling a corpse with a gunshot wound in the head. From time to time Rourke asked a question or dropped in a clarifying remark. After being photographed and dusted, the dead youth was pulled out on the sidewalk. His hair was receding, and this had probably bothered him, for it was layer-cut and sprayed. His slacks were almost too tight. As the cops put him down, one arm flopped out, and Shayne saw an irregularly shaped purple splotch, like an ink-blot, on the back of his hand.
Rourke was watching. “Something to say about that, Mike? Our listeners have been very patient, if we’re still plugged in after all this moving around.”
“One minute,” Shayne told him, and asked the girl, “Koch. What kind of accent did he have?”
“New York. But he was a great impersonator, in his own view. Sidney Greenstreet, James Cagney. French, Russian, Spanish, always performing, always a pain in the ass.”
“O.K.,” Shayne said. “Here’s one circuit I can finally close. Scotch, García, two others. They raided Maxine’s house this morning and Holloway’s tonight. They wore ski masks. Scotch had work-gloves on this morning, to hide that birthmark. At Holloway’s he stayed outside as lookout and he didn’t think he needed them. You notice the bruise on the side of his jaw. I put that there. I’ll give you details when we’re inside.”
Sandy St. John had been trying new names. Her old one was Hungarian. It didn’t fit her personality and was a drag to pronounce. Sandy St. John sounded a little fake, as though a press agent had thought it up, but wanting to sound like a girl with a press agent, she tried it, and so far it was holding up well.
She had fallen asleep as though hit in the face with a shovel. She had been doing that lately, going off in an instant like a doused light. Usually she stayed off, but tonight the switch flicked back on and she sat up abruptly.
There were two men and another girl in bed with her. One of the men opened his eyes when the bed shifted.
“Some more?”
She shook her head slowly. “I can’t remember who I am.”
He accepted that with a nod. “Kid, you and me both.”
She left the bed. The TV was running without sound. Horses galloped soundlessly. The guns were equipped with silencers.