Shayne said, “I’d be expected to visit Flora Ann Perkins sooner or later. She and Melody Deans were pals.”
Flora Ann Perkins lived in the first floor middle of a squat apartment building. She did not answer the summons produced by Shayne’s thumb against a small door button. He rapped hard. The door remained closed. The only sounds were muted voices that came from behind the door.
“Sounds like a television program,” Wallace said. He paused, then added. “She could be working.” He shot Shayne a side glance.
The redhead scowled. A crawly feeling in his gut made him shift his feet and open his coat so that he had quick access to the holstered .45. The last time he’d experienced the same feeling Melody Deans had come crashing down almost on top of him from a seventeenth floor hotel balcony.
“Something stinks,” Shayne said.
Wallace stroked his goatee and looked around. “What makes you say that?”
Shayne tried the door knob. It didn’t turn. “Let’s hustle a manager. I want to see inside.”
“Hey, hold it a sec,” Wallace said. “Flora Ann might not want to be disturbed. She could be—”
Shayne found the manager in a front apartment. He was a young guy with long sideburns and a bushy mustache. He wasn’t interested in opening Flora Ann Perkins’ apartment until Shayne edged back his coat and allowed him a glimpse of the holstered gun.
“Okay, okay,” he said.
He picked up a large ring of keys from a table near the door and went ahead of Shayne and Wallace down the corridor. At Flora Ann Perkins’ door, he said, “I’m going to open up, and then I’m going to fade, okay? I’ve got no beef with anyone.”
Shayne smelled death the instant the door swung open. He also heard the sound of shower water above the television voices.
He pounded into the small bath. The shower curtain was closed. He swept it aside and looked down on the naked crumpled figure of the woman who was curled in the bottom of the bathtub, luke warm shower water splattering her hip.
“If you figure McKeever is waiting outside, get him,” the redhead snapped.
VIII
McKeever was a lanky, loose-jointed man, coldly efficient. He called in help, supervised the preliminary investigation and then talked to the building manager before finally motioning Mike Shayne and Max Wallace outside. They stood at an unmarked police sedan under a street lamp light.
McKeever looked down the street. “Benjie’s still with us, I see,” he said.
Shayne spotted the car braked at the curbing about a block away as Wallace said, “She was strangled, McKeever.”
The cop shook his head. “Benjie’s been on you two since Shayne got to town. He didn’t kill her. Right now I halve to figure it was some john.” He shrugged. “Which isn’t too unusual. Johns get angry, hustlers get killed. It’s mostly always like that.
“Crumford, the manager, says she came in alone around five-thirty this afternoon. He knows because he was working out back in the parking lot when she drove in. She parked her VW, spoke to him, and went inside to her apartment. She didn’t leave again in her car. He knows that too because he was working out there in the lot until about twenty minutes before you two showed at his apartment. So right now I have to figure some john came to her place early this evening, probably some client she hustled at the law office. She worked for a law firm by day. I’ll check out the office in the morning.”
“McKeever,” Shayne said flatly, “you know why I’m in town?”
“I’d have to be blind not to. Everybody in Las Vegas reads Max Wallace. I had a call from a detective named Painter this morning. Among other things, he said there was the possibility you’d show.”
“Did Painter give you Flora Ann Perkins?”
“The passport and airline ticket business? Yes, it was the main reason he called.”
“So you can write her murder off to a john? You can’t tie it to—”
McKeever sounded as if he was thinning on patience, as he said, “I’m not writing off anything. There damn well might be a tie between the death of Melody Deans and what you just discovered. But the killing here could be a simple thing, too, and totally unrelated. It could be a john killed her. I have to consider that.”
“So consider it, then forget it. This woman was killed because she knew something about Melody Deans!”
“Maybe.” McKeever shrugged.
“You know a character named Renfro Bastone?”
McKeever fixed Shayne with a hard look. “We talk to him every so often, yeah, pull him in for questioning. About a stickup here, a stickup there. What about him?”
“Is he in town right now?”
“No,” McKeever said slowly, frowning.
“Know where he is?”
“He still could be down your way, I suppose. Miami, Miami Beach...”
McKeever let it hang and Shayne pressed. He knew he had the cop thinking in the right direction now. “You figure Bastone could’ve known Melody Deans was carrying a half million, trailed her, hit her?”
“It’s a possibility, I suppose.”
“What’s more probable?”
“That he was sent after her.”
“By whom?”
“By somebody who has a beef with Cordova, or by somebody in the know who is greedy.”
“Any ideas?”
“The beef doesn’t fit, as far as I know. Things have been quiet here, nobody angry with anybody else. But the greed, now that could fit. We have plenty of greedy people around.”
Shayne said, “I get the picture that Bastone is a cheap punk, not trustworthy. Who’d take a chance on him in a half million dollar caper?”
McKeever waved a hand. “Bastone isn’t known for smarts, that’s, true. But somebody could’ve talked him into the dead with a promise of a few thousand, then killed him at the time of the payoff.”
“You figure Bastone is dead?”
“He could be.”
“Know anything about his brother?”
“I didn’t know he had a brother,” McKeever said slowly.
“He does. Okay, if Bastone is still walking, could he have slipped in here today, and killed the Perkins woman? The passport and the air ticket made out in the name of Flora Ann Perkins could have scared him. No smarts again. He spots both, knows something isn’t right, becomes confused, then scared. He doesn’t understand the Perkins woman’s role in all of this so he heads back here and strangles her.”
“Maybe,” McKeever said, tugging his lower lip in thought. “But I’m more inclined to think that Bastone pulled off the heist, then told his silent partner about the passport and ticket. Partner kills Bastone, takes the haul, returns here, hits the woman.”
“Okay, who are the candidates?”
McKeever looked almost startled. Then he permitted himself a tight smile. “Shayne, you’ve got to be kidding. This town is loaded with greedy characters.”
“But how many would know Melody Deans was being sent on a journey with that kind of bread?”
McKeever moved. He went around the front end of the sedan and got inside. He stuck a key in the ignition switch. Shayne hung in the open door window. McKeever said, “Get a good night’s sleep, Shayne. I’ll be in touch.”
He started the motor and drove away.
Shayne watched the tail-lights disappear and then rejoined Max Wallace on the sidewalk.
“I don’t like the way your friend operates,” he snapped. “But at least he’s forgot that assinine theory about a john.”
Wallace dropped the redhead at the Trout.
“It’s been an interesting evening,” he said. “And I’ve got work to do.”