VIII
Mike Shayne took Tom Rumbo back to the Flagler Street office by the direct route, making certain that the little man had no chance at all to give him the slip.
Rumbo didn’t like it. “I’m a detective too,” he protested. “Didn’t I push you out of the way of that potted plant? Mr. Shayne, I hate to put it this way, but you owe me a chance to be in on the whole of this case. You really do, you know.”
Shayne wouldn’t give an inch. “I hate to put it this way too, Tom, but what I really owe you is protection. I owe it to you to see that you’re safe.”
“I couldn’t be safer than with you.”
“Sure you could. You will be safe with Lucy. I may have to go into some pretty tough places, and you may be a detective — I don’t say you aren’t — but you’re no professional fighter.”
Tom Rumbo gave that some serious thought. “I guess you could be right about that last,” he said finally.
After that he was silent until they had parked the car and were walking the last block to the office. “Mr. Shayne—” he said then.
“Yes.”
“There’s just one more thing. Maybe I should have told you and Chief Gentry, but you know how it is with us detectives. We like an ace in the sleeve — I mean in the hole. Anyway I thought I’d tell you later, and I am telling you now.”
He paused.
“Go on,” Mike Shayne said. “What is it, Tom?”
“Well. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t important. Just something I remembered Sam said once.”
“You let me judge whether it’s important or not,” Shayne said. “Tell me what it was.”
“Only something Sam said. Once when he was talking about being scared he said: ‘Maybe I could handle Big Hans if I could speak Spanish.’ What do you think he meant by that?”
“The only thing that comes to mind right off is that maybe Big Hans spoke Spanish. Only Hans isn’t a Spanish name. It’s German or Scandinavian. I don’t know—”
“It could be important though?” Rumbo asked.
“It could be. We’ll know later. Thanks for telling me.”
By then they were on the stairs leading up to Mike Shayne’s second floor office.
Inside the office Lucy Hamilton greeted them warmly.
“I’m sorry Michael,” she said, indicating Rumbo. “I wasn’t looking for him to go anyplace. He slipped out on me. Anyway you found him.”
“He found me,” Shayne said and told her how the little man had probably saved his life.
“We both owe you for that then, Mr. Rumbo,” Lucy Hamilton said. “Oh, Michael, there was a phone message for you about twenty minutes ago. I think it’s important. The caller said if you want to find Big Hans he can take you to him. He said to meet him at eight o’clock tonight and left directions where.”
“Yes,” Shayne said. “That is important. Who was it called?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t leave any name. The voice sounded muffled or disguised or something. As a matter of fact I’m not even sure whether it was a man or a woman. Anyway I made him repeat the time and place so I could write them down.”
She handed Shayne a slip of paper off her notepad. He put it in his jacket pocket.
“I’ll make the meet anyway,” he told them both. “While I’m waiting for the time we can take it easy and then get something to eat.”
He was as good as his word. During the rest of the afternoon Shayne made phone calls to some of his contacts, both official and unofficial, to try and find out more about the Friendly Rest Retirement Home. He learned nothing that really pointed to a solution of the case he was working on.
The Home had been in operation at the same address for more than twenty years, in which time it had had at least three sets of owners. Amor had bought in about five years back. He was an out-of-town investor from Chicago and not too well known locally. Nobody Shayne talked to even hinted at a knowledge that Nurse Hadley was anything other than that.
There were no scandals connected with the Friendly Rest. As a matter of fact it had apparently a good reputation for a place of the sort.
Shayne called Will Gentry again, but the Chief couldn’t give him much more than he already had. Yes, it did seem that there had been a lot of funerals from Friendly Rest, but wasn’t it a place where people went to die. Most of the guests expected to leave in a hearse and not a limousine. No there wasn’t any evidence of murder. No knifings or poisonings. Various doctors signed the death certificates. Amor never did so.
Some of the guests who died there had carried insurance policies naming the Home as beneficiary. That wasn’t unusual either. It was one way a person on a small pension could make delayed payment for care he otherwise couldn’t have afforded. In itself it wasn’t illegal and none of the bequests on record were in suspiciously large amounts.
All in all it wasn’t much to goon.
Late in the afternoon Shayne gave up calling and took Lucy Hamilton and Tom Rumbo out to dinner at one of his favorite downtown steak houses.
It was obvious Tom Rumbo hadn’t had a meal like that in a place like that for a good many years. He over-ate shamelessly.
After dinner Shayne took Lucy home and Rumbo back to his office and started out to make the meet with his mysterious phone caller of that afternoon.
The place appointed by the caller was on the near North-East side in one of the buildings of the old Florida East Coast Railway freight and loading yards. The yards hadn’t been used since the big strike of the nineteen sixties. New facilities had since been set up in the Hialeah area to take their place. The old buildings had been neglected and were in very poor condition, most of them about to fall down.
Mike Shayne parked his car on Thirty-Sixth Street and walked into the abandoned yards past what was left of the old roundhouse.
Once away from the street there was no direct lighting, but enough reflected light from the streets and buildings of the metropolitan area to let the big man see where he was going. He continued on past office and repair shops in all stages of decay until he found the building to which he’d been directed.
Once it had been an office, but window glass had been broken and boarded over and there was even a sizeable hole in the sagging roof. The front door had once been boarded up too, but someone had recently broken it open. It hung, gaping wide, supported only by the top hinge. Inside was blackness like that of a cave.
Shayne circled the exterior of the building. As far as he could see all other openings were securely boarded. No one could get in or out except by the front door.
Mike Shayne listened carefully outside the front door of the ruined building. Back here the traffic noises of the great city were muted. He figured he could have heard even a mouse moving inside. There was no sound at all.
The big detective loosened his gun in its belt holster back of his right hip and stepped into the darkness. He couldn’t see or hear anything at all.
After a moment he took out the pocket-sized, pencil type flashlight he always carried and flicked on the beam. Right in front of him on the floor where he would have fallen over it in another step was a body.
It was a very dead body indeed.
IX
Mike Shayne swung his flashlight beam swiftly around the rest of the room. He and the body were quite alone there.
Shayne put the light back on the corpse.
The man was lying on his face. He was a small man of slender build and he looked as if he had been either struck by a speeding car or beaten unmercifully by several savage and powerful assailants.
His clothing was soaked with blood and both arms and one leg were so twisted that they must have been broken. The neck was bruised and pulled out of shape. Whoever he was, the man had been strangled in such a way that his neck was broken and the head almost torn off his shoulders.