He figured he was in a living room. On an opposite wall were what seemed to be drapes. He went to them, parted the material and found french doors. The doors were locked. He fiddled with the handles, snapped a button and the doors opened. Warm night air bathed him.
Shayne ran through the night, the carbine at high port as he angled across what turned out to be a massive front lawn. He spotted a hedge and curved into its shadow. Then he squatted again and looked back on the house. He could not find light.
Suddenly there was action at the house. No light. But he saw three figures dash from the house to the black heap of a car. There was another flurry of quick movement and then the car motor came to life, purred briefly. Headlights popped on and the car moved fast.
Shayne trained the muzzle of the carbine on the moving car, following it down a long curving drive. But he resisted squeezing off a shot. All a shot would get him was a shootout or a chase.
The detective forced himself to wait five minutes before he dug up turf at the base of the hedge with clawed fingers. He buried the carbine. A man with carbine in hand, walking down a street in the middle of the night, could get nothing but trouble or cops. And he had decided he didn’t need either. The cops could come later. Will Gentry would be interested in the carbine. He might be able to trace it.
Shayne went through the hedge to the sidewalk and walked. He had no idea where he was. He inventoried minutely. It was a plush neighborhood, out where there was long distance between mansions. And the green things, walls and hedges across the front of the mansions, were plentiful, yards filled with what would be lush palms in daylight.
He finally hit a main thoroughfare and he grunted. He suddenly knew where he was. Traffic buzzed, even at midnight. He loped along a sidewalk, found a public phone booth, called a cab. Then he lolled beside the booth, smoking and waiting, headache pounding, but his mind was filled with images of Foxy, Gold Shoes and Jack. Who were they?
When the cab arrived, Shayne gave the driver Tim Rourke’s address over near Flamingo Park.
VI
Will Gentry was back in town. The Chief was in a sour mood. For one thing, he had found a Senate subcommittee a pain. Washington was a damn good place to be from — a long ways from. For another thing, he didn’t like bombers. And for a third, he had listened to Mike Shayne tell a tale about having a stolen cadaver stashed in an ice factory and hoods landing on the private detective from every direction.
Gentry jammed the stub of a black cigar into the comer of his mouth, leaned back in the swivel chair and stared out a window on another brilliant Wednesday Miami morning. Shayne shuffled feet, waited. Across the room Timothy Rourke cocked an eyebrow at the redhead but remained silent. Then Gentry growled, “Let’s have it, Mike.”
“The stiff is valuable. I don’t know why. And a funeral home is playing cute about not losing a corpse out of the back end of its hearse. There’s one gang against the other. Each wants the corpse. One has a chief honcho who seems willing to pay for goods received, the other: no pay. I’m saying No Pay is tied to Palm Acres.”
“And the stiff came in from Lima, huh?”
Gentry continued to stare on the morning, the cigar stub bobbing in the comer of his mouth. He was a rumpled, bulky man with grizzled eyebrows and blunt features, an incorruptible chief of police who would use all of the help he could get — from any source.
He swung the chair around and stared hard at Shayne, grizzled eyebrows low. “I’ve got a citizen named Dan Simpson who claims Palm Acres Funeral Home is giving him the run-around. Dan Simpson claims he had a twin brother, Delbert Simpson, who was touring South America and dropped dead of a heart attack four days ago. Delbert died in Lima, according to Dan, who also claims that he made arrangements with Palm Acres to have the body brought back to Miami. The problem is Dan hasn’t seen Delbert’s body and the people at Palm Acres say they never heard of either Simpson.”
“When did this live Simpson show?” Shayne asked.
“Early this morning,” Gentry growled.
“Where’s he been the last couple of nights?”
“Says he went out to Palm Acres Monday night, but was told there had been a delay in the shipment of his brother’s body. Says he talked to those people again yesterday and got the same answer. He tried again this morning, same reply. Then he got angry. Things didn’t smell right to him, so he came to us. We checked with Palm Acres and got this business about them never having heard of anyone named Dan or Delbert Simpson.”
“It’s adding up, Will,” Shayne said. “Body coming into International from Lima and picked up by a hearse from Palm Acres, then—”
“I want the stiff, Mike.”
Shayne shot a glance at Rourke. The newspaperman pushed from the wall and went to Gentry’s desk, picked up the phone receiver. “I better call or we might have two stiffs on our hands. My friend Jerry Smith doesn’t like surprises, especially cops descending on his place.”
“An ice factory!” Gentry snorted, shaking his head.
The cadaver was transferred from the blocks of ice to a slab in the morgue. And two hours later the value of the stiff had been established.
Gentry put the phone together. He looked grim. “That was the morgue. They found a slice across the stiff’s chest. He’d been hollowed out. Inside was a large package of cocaine.”
Dan Simpson was picked up and taken to the morgue, where he identified his twin brother. He also was enraged but after a long talk with Gentry agreed to delay raising public hell with Palm Acres Funeral Home.
Then a man named Arthur Hodge appeared in Gentry’s office. He was a well-constructed man, conservative in dress, manner and voice. He thanked Gentry for calling, then settled in a chair and listened as Gentry and Shayne talked. As the associate director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he had learned there were few surprises when it came to moving narcotics into the United States. Cocaine inside a cadaver was novel but did not make Hodge demonstrative. He merely shifted slightly in the chair, uncrossed and recrossed long legs.
Then he said, “We know cocaine is being produced in hidden laboratories in Chili and Peru, then smuggled into this country. It looks as if we might have funeral homes on each end of the line tied into the operation. I’m guessing these boys Shayne encountered were hijackers. Somebody got wind that a shipment was coming into Miami, found out how it was coming, and attempted to lift it. We’ll check out the Simpson brothers, but I think we’ll find they had nothing to do with the shipment other than the deceased brother becoming a carrier. Meanwhile, I’d like to have Bird picked up, Gentry. He seems to be the lone link to the hijackers. Shayne, I want you to take me to the mansion where you were worked over. I think we’ll find everyone has cleared out, but I want to take a look.”
The mansion sparkled in the brilliant sunshine and from the U-shaped driveway the grounds looked freshly manicured. No one was in sight on the grounds and the house had a vacant air about it.
“What do you think, Mike?” Rourke asked from the back seat of Hodge’s sedan.
Shayne grunted and rolled from the car seat. He was joined by Hodge and Rourke. No one opened the front door as the detective stood with his thumb jammed against a button. Hodge walked to a comer of the house, looked around it.
“There’s french doors down this way.”