“Don’t forget the colored man who’s in jail waiting to be lynched for a murder he didn’t commit. That’s going to happen tonight, Blake, unless we do something to stop it.
“You and I are the only two people on earth who know the truth,” he went on, lowering his tone and making his voice flat and even so that each word had equal emphasis. “We’re the only ones who know about Harry Wilsson and your wife, and about your coming home last night. If I had any proof that Harry didn’t kill Ellie… that she was still all right when he left the house… I might be willing to forget that part of it, just for Sissy’s sake.”
“Oh, she was!” Marvin grasped wildly at the straw Shayne offered him. “Harry didn’t hurt her.”
“Because she was still alive when you came back to the house and let yourself in with your key and went up to her room, wasn’t she?” Shayne asked in a conversational tone. “Was she asleep, Blake? Did she ever know it was you who strangled her?”
“No. Oh, God, no! Leave me alone. Can’t you leave me alone? I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s all a blur. And now Sissy will have to know. That her mother is a rotten whore and her father is a murderer. All I could think about today was Sissy. How I could spare her ever knowing.”
“All right,” said Shayne bleakly. “Keep right on thinking about Sissy. She’s the only one that counts now. Sissy and an innocent Negro, who’s locked up in jail and due to be lynched tonight, if you don’t save him. You owe both of them something, Blake. You’re done anyway. Sissy has a whole long life to live. Why don’t you give her the one gift that’s left for you to give your daughter? Faith in both her mother and her father. She’s lost them both anyway. There’s no way you can change that. But you can give her something to live for… something to cling to in the lonely years to come.”
“How? How can I?” begged Marvin Blake.
“Help me save that Negro from being lynched first of all. Write out a confession. Here.” Shayne found a clean pad of scratch paper beside the telephone and gave it to Blake with his fountain pen. “Make it short,” he directed. “Just say, I confess that I murdered my wife and I don’t want anyone else blamed for my act. Sign your name to it. Go on, write,” Shayne ordered sharply as Marvin hesitated. “It’s your one chance to give a decent heritage to your daughter. This will never be made public unless it’s absolutely necessary. And even then, it doesn’t mention your wife and Wilsson.”
Shayne stood over him while Blake carefully wrote out the brief confession and signed it, then took it out of his hands and folded it and put it into his pocket.
He turned away, saying, “If this could go down as an unsolved crime, Sissy would never have to know anything. Except that her father loved her mother so dearly that he could not stand to go on living after she died. You said something about a gun, didn’t you?”
“Yes… I…” Marvin Blake’s voice became choked. In a moment he was able to continue steadily. “In the right top drawer of that bureau in the hall. It’s a souvenir my father brought back from the First World War. I’ve always kept it cleaned and oiled.”
Shayne stepped into the hallway and opened the drawer and looked down somberly at the blued steel of a Colt’s. 45 automatic. He sighed and nodded, and turned away leaving the drawer open.
He said, “I’ll have to go down and see Chief Jenson about that Negro. We’ll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.” He went out the front door, closing it carefully behind him, got in his car and drove away swiftly.
16
Chief Ollie Jenson sat alone and frightened in his office at police headquarters morosely regarding the bottle of shine sitting on the desk in front of him. He calculated there were about three drinks left in the bottle if he refrained from gulping.
And it was only about seven-thirty in the evening. With that colored boy locked up in his jail charged with the murder-rape of Ellie Blake, Chief Jenson knew he was going to need a lot more than three drinks to get through the night that lay ahead of him. Then he remembered that Alonzo Peters had said something about driving Pristine in to town to make some likker deliveries and that’s how-come he brought him in to jail so easy, so he suddenly figured that the stuff must still be in Peters’ car right now; and it sure enough was subject to confiscation, he reckoned, being the property of a jailed suspect and all.
A knock sounded on Chief Jenson’s door just as he reached this comforting conclusion to his train of thought. He put the quart bottle back in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and closed it. Then he touched the release button on his desk, and the door opened.
Officer Harris poked his head in and reported, “That detective from Miami wants to see you, Chief. Says it’s real important.”
The chief nodded and settled back with his hands folded over his paunch. “Send him right in, Ralph.”
The officer stepped back and opened the door wider and Michael Shayne entered. He said curtly, “They tell me you’ve got the Blake case all wrapped up, Chief.”
Chief Jenson shook his head ponderously and rumbled, “Have a chair, Mr. Shayne. You mean Pristine Gaylord? Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’ve got an open and shut case, but I reckon we got enough to hold him all right.”
“The way I hear it,” said Shayne, “is the only thing you’ve got is the fact that he was supposed to have been in town about midnight last night.”
“That, and the fact that he denies it straight out. Why won’t he say what he was doing in town, if he ain’t guilty?”
Shayne said, “There might be a lot of reasons, Chief. That’s mighty slim evidence to hang a man on.”
“Well, I reckon we’ll get plenty more before he ever comes up for trial,” said Jenson comfortably. “Once we start digging into things…”
Shayne put the palms of his hands flat on the chief’s desk and leaned forward to glare at him. “You know that Negro will never come to trial, Chief.” The words came out harshly. “You know what’s happening out in the streets of this town right now… and you know what will happen here tonight, if you don’t stop it fast. You’ll have a second murder before morning.”
“Not so fast now,” said Jenson uneasily. “I’m the law here in Sunray Beach. I won’t stand for no lynching.”
“What are you doing to prevent it?” demanded Shayne bitterly. “Have you called the State Police? Have you asked the governor to send troops?”
“I got no call to do that,” Jenson argued doggedly. “May be some hotheads talking lynching around town, but shucks! You know how that is. I guess I can handle things in my town without no outside help.”
Shayne said flatly, “You can’t, and you know it. What are the chances of getting the prisoner out of your jail and into a safer place?”
“He’s staying where he is,” Ollie Jenson said stubbornly. “You’re from Miami and you don’t know people up this way. Mighty fine, law-abiding citizens we got here, I can tell you for a fact. It’d be an insult to them and to my police force was I to admit it wasn’t safe for a murder suspect to spend the night right here locked up in the Sunray city jailhouse.”
Shayne said grimly, “Suppose you knew that colored boy was innocent, Chief? Suppose you had absolute proof that he had nothing to do with the Blake murder? Would you feel just as good about leaving him in jail overnight, if that were the case?”
“If I had any way of knowing that,” said Jenson weakly, “I reckon I’d figure he was safer out of town. But shucks, it stands to reason he’s plumb guilty. He’s got a bad reputation around town, and folks’ve seen him watching Ellie the way a nigger does a white woman sometimes. You know how them buck niggers get when they want a piece of white stuff real bad.”
Shayne said coldly, “I know how a lot of damn-fool southern white men think a Negro is about a white woman, but I’ve never encountered it personally. This is no time to argue that point,” he went on harshly. He reached in his pocket and drew out Blake’s confession and pushed it across the desk in front of Sunray’s Chief of Police. “Read that, and then let’s decide how we’re going to get your prisoner out of here without getting somebody killed.”