“Neither of them,” Harris said. “Leastwise not in this here room. I painted this one last time it were done and there’s not any hiding places back of them walls. I had to scrape old wallpaper off every inch and I ought to know. Not under the floors neither. Them had to be sanded down and varnished. I’d have located any such places even though I wasn’t looking for them.”
“I guess you would,” said a disappointed Shayne. “So now think hard and try to put yourself in the old man’s place. If you were him, now where would you hide something in here?”
They both sat quietly for several minutes, peering about the cluttered room in the semi-darkness.
That’s how they came to hear the footsteps coming up through the yard toward the windows.
Whoever was walking out there was trying very hard not to make any noise. At times the steps ceased completely as the prowler either stopped moving entirely or hit a patch of soft grass. Unfortunately for the two he stayed away from the windows.
Cal Harris eased himself over very quietly to where Shayne sat. “I can go in the dining room and see out the windows there,” he whispered.
Shayne nodded. “Be careful. Don’t let him see you,” he whispered back.
He himself wanted to stay in the room which probably held the hidden treasure. He figured that would be the room the prowler would most likely head for first and he preferred having Cal Harris out of the way in case of a fight.
Mike Shayne himself got quietly out of the chair where he’d been sitting and eased over to the window. Behind him he was barely able to hear Cal Harris leaving the room. In spite of his two canes, the partly crippled boy moved like a shadow. Once he was in the hall it was impossible to hear him at all.
By the time the big detective got to the window the prowler outside was out of sight behind some flowering bougainvillea vines and hibiscus bushes that grew against the old house to the left of the living room windows.
Shayne strained his ears, but just at that moment one of the big jetliners went roaring overhead. The sound he’d been trying to hear was somehow drowned out. He knew instinctively that it had been important, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
By the time he could hear again the footsteps outside the house had stopped. The prowler might have moved on, or merely be standing still. There was no way he could find out without leaving the house himself, and he didn’t want to do that. Instead he stayed right where he was. He could watch all entrances to this particular room until Cal Harris got back.
That set him to wondering. The crippled young man should have had time to look out the window of the adjoining room and be back by now. He strained his ears again, but it was impossible to hear anything but the muted voice of the city night like a background murmur.
Cal Harris had definitely been gone too long. Shayne wondered if he’d done right to trust his hunch and trust the young man to begin with. Maybe Harris had known where the money was hidden and taken the opportunity when he and Shayne were separated to go and get it.
The big man had a strong conviction that wasn’t so. He liked both Cal and Sally Harris from the start, and his ability to judge character had seldom played him false over the years. Still, he knew he’d be a fool not to check up and find out for sure.
His eyes were by now so accustomed to the dim light that he was able to move about the cluttered living room as silently as a drifting leaf in the wind.
Once he got into the hall he wished he hadn’t left the one small bulb burning on the stair landing. It let him see, but his eyes would have to readjust again when he got into another of the darkened rooms. He found the switch and killed that light, then paused a moment to get used to the dark again.
Another plane was roaring above the house. Shayne wished they’d use another flight pattern for a while. He was beginning to realize he’d need all five senses unobstructed to survive at all in this eerie house. A sense of indefinable but tangible menace was growing in his brain and body.
When the plane had passed he listened again. As far as his still partly deafened ears could detect, nothing was moving anywhere in the big house.
Shayne moved quietly down the hall to the door that led into the dining room. It was closed and no sound came from behind the panel. He touched the doorknob and turned it slowly so as to make no sound at all. Then he pushed the door open, stepped swiftly inside and to the side of the door. Every sense was alert to detect the slightest sign of danger.
There was none.
He looked around the room. It, too, was cluttered with furniture and even objects piled on the floor. The top of the big old dining table of carved Haitian mahogany was so littered that in the semi-dark it was like a bargain counter in one of the cheap tourist-trap stores on south Miami Beach.
Everything was there but the one thing Mike Shayne wanted to see. There wasn’t a sign anywhere of young Cal Harris. There wasn’t even the sound of his breathing, which should have been audible in the intervals when no plane was passing overhead.
Shayne didn’t try to call out. If Harris had been ambushed and killed or taken captive, the killer might still be lurking in this very room.
He would know Mike Shayne was in the house. The big man had gone to enough trouble spreading that word during the afternoon. He hadn’t expected the killer to be one step ahead of him, however.
Or was his first suspicion correct? Had Cal Harris made a bee line for the hidden treasure as soon as he left Shayne?
The redhead started a fast circuit of the room. He was watching for any sign of Cal Harris’ body. He was fully alert to counter any sudden movement within the room which might presage an attack. He was alert and prepared for anything — at least he thought he was.
His right foot came down on something hard that rolled and twisted under his weight. That foot shot out from under him.
He twisted his big body violently and flailed his arms to regain balance. In the dark one fist hit something that fell over with a crash. He twisted again to break his fall and then found himself on the floor half jammed under the big table.
The whole house shook as another climbing jet went out to sea right over its roof.
VIII
Mike Shayne got his gun out in an instant — half groggy as he was. Nothing happened. Nobody attacked him. The rest of the house was still as silent as it had been before his fall.
“Of all the damned fools,” he told himself. “Ready for anything. Bah.”
He groped about on the floor until he located the cause of his downfall. When he saw what it was his heart sank another notch.
He’d stepped on one of Cal Harris’ two heavy canes.
That meant Harris hadn’t deserted him and gone to look for the treasure. The cripple would never have left his cane just lying there on the floor. He needed both of them to move about at all easily.
There was only one conclusion. The killer was already in the house and had ambushed Cal. When Harris came into the room, he’d been bushwhacked and killed or taken prisoner.
Since Shayne couldn’t locate the body, he decided the young man must be a captive. That rearranged the detective’s whole priority list of objectives.
The first thing he had to do now was find and rescue Cal Harris. He was sure the killer would have had only one possible reason for taking the boy away with him, to torture him and force out of him whatever he might know about the hidden money.
If Cal Harris told, it would be the same as signing his own death warrant. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t give out any information to help the killer, it would probably amount to the same thing. This killer wouldn’t be the one to leave behind a live witness who might identify him at some future date.