Andrews didn’t flick a cheek muscle. He stared at the detective from dead eyes. Then he said, “You’re wacky, too, Shayne.”
He turned and walked down the drive. He moved at a steady pace, shoulders squared, spine straight. Shayne stood slightly spread-legged at the Buick, taut, fingers working reflexively. He itched to stop Andrews. The .45 in the shoulder rig was a weighty temptation.
But he dropped inside the Buick, gunned the motor. Andrews had turned from the drive and moved along a street sidewalk. Shayne moved the car into the street, eased along beside the walking man. Andrews didn’t look to right or left, finally reached the high, white stone wall of a mansion.
He moved along the wall to a wide drive, turned in and went up toward a magnificent house that stretched out of the detective’s sight. There was a black plaque on the wall at the entry. Brass colored letters, spaced in three tiers on the plaque, spelled out the name Robert Hume Tiener.
Andrews disappeared from Shayne’s sight. The detective studied the wide entry to the Tiener estate, what he could see of the grounds and house. The entry tempted. What would he find if he wheeled up to the house, banged on the door? Was Robert Hume Tiener holed up somewhere deep inside the house, pulling strings on murder?
Or was Tiener long digested in a fish belly?
Shayne slapped the steering wheel and drove toward downtown Miami. He was floundering in theories, speculations. He needed a sounding board.
He stopped at The Beef House on Miami Avenue. It was eleven-thirty. But Tim Rourke was not camped in his favorite back booth. Shayne called the newspaper office. Rourke was out to lunch. No one knew where, maybe The Beef House.
Shayne scowled and ordered a cup of black coffee laced with two jolts of cognac. He sat in the back booth and attempted to put some order to the speculations tumbling through his skull. A long shadow suddenly loomed over him. He looked up. Rourke’s grin was one-sided and curious.
“Sit and open an ear,” said Shayne.
Rourke ordered a rye and a cottage cheese salad. He nursed both while Shayne talked. When the redhead finally clammed, Rourke grunted and ordered another rye. He twirled the shot glass slowly in his long fingers, making a tiny whirlpool.
Finally he said, “I have an editor who is fond of saying, ‘You’ve got a helluva story here, Rourke. I’d like to print it — if you’ll go out and get me some facts to substantiate it!’ ”
Shayne sat back in the booth and squinted in thought. “You don’t get a smell of anything I’m missing?”
“Nope.” Rourke tossed off half the rye.
“Watching Andrews walk down the driveway out there at the Montgomery place this morning, I know I was watching a cold-blooded killer move out.”
“Could be,” Rourke agreed. “A mercenary, those kind of guys gotta be a special breed. But prove he spread two guys in a swamp, prove he strangled the woman.”
“Is Robert Hume Tiener dead or alive, Tim?” said Shayne. “That’s the key to the whole problem.”
Rourke nodded. “The way you’re putting all of this together, yep.”
Shayne gave him a hard look. “You see another pattern?”
Rourke shrugged. “Nope, but so far you’ve concentrated on Tiener South, their people. What about the Brooks operation? No bad guys over there?”
Shayne pulled an earlobe in thought. “I haven’t looked,” he admitted.
A waiter appeared at the booth with a portable phone in hand. He plugged in the wire, put the phone before Rourke. “Your office.”
Rourke listened, then jerked straight. “Right,” he snapped. “On my way.”
Shayne was alert, curious as Rourke scrambled out of the booth. “Come on, Mike,” said the newspaperman. “Vernon Dobbs has been murdered.”
IX
Vernon Dobbs once had been a real-life version of the affluent, athletic, mod sportsman pictured in men’s magazines, the kind of guy who could turn a feminine eye, cause young housewives to toss caution to the Biscayne winds. When Shayne lifted an edge of the white covering he found a grotesque corpse, jaw slack, mouth open, tongue a glob, the face and neck and bare upper torso splattered with dried blood and foreign matter. Somebody had closed his eyelids. They were the only peaceful things about Dobbs. A strip of his skull — beginning high on the forehead and furrowing back on the right side — was gone.
Dobbs had been shot out of his wheelchair while sunning in the front yard of an expensively modernistic home.
Shayne dropped the covering and stood. “Thanks, Jack.”
Jack Leonard was one of Will Gentry’s best detectives. He stood across the corpse from the redhead, opened a fresh stick of gum and folded it into his mouth. “You and I need to rap, Mike?”
“No.”
Shayne knew Leonard was curious about his presence. He got out a cigaret, lit it, pulled deeply on it. “Gentry already has anything concrete I might offer, Jack.”
“Okay. Saves me time.” Leonard waved to the morgue men and turned away as they approached. He stood staring out toward the street. It was a quiet street, a picturesque combination of green things, sunshine and shade. Directly across it was another testimonial to modern architecture, a sprawling mass of white stone and glistening glass set far back on bright green grass.
“The people who live over there, Mike, are in India,” said the police detective. “And the next homes are a quarter mile down the street in either direction.”
“Un-huh,” grunted the redhead thoughtfully. “No witnesses.” He twisted and looked up at the Dobbs’ home.
“Dobbs’ wife is inside,” Leonard said. “Some friends are with her. She’s pretty well broken up, not much help to us. She says she was in the house alone, the only servant, a combination maid-housekeeper, is out grocery shopping somewhere. I’m waiting for her return.”
“The wife didn’t see or hear anything?”
“She heard the shot,” said Leonard. “It brought her out here where she found her husband. She says she didn’t see anything else, no cars peeling out.”
Shayne looked around, inventorying the entire scene again, sucked a deep breath. “A man has to figure the shot came from the street, and probably from a car. Now, if the killer is a loner, it figures he had to be parked out there somewhere, taken his pop and cut. But if there are two or more persons involved, then the shot could’ve come from a cruising car.”
Leonard nodded, munched hard on the gum. “Yep. That’s how we’re looking at it.”
“This sunning by Dobbs, was it part of his daily routine?”
Leonard continued to nod. “So his wife says. It was his habit to lunch, then come out here for an hour, hour and a half.”
“Pro killers live on habits, Jack.”
The police detective gave the redhead a quick side glance. “Un-huh, and friends know habits.”
Shayne used a thumb and forefinger to tug an earlobe. “Bright day, early afternoon, quiet street, guy sunning in his own front yard — it totals to the least likely time and environment in which to kill. But bang. I’ll take pro, Jack. Amateur killers do their stalking at night.”
“So lay a little motive on me, too, Mike. How come a guy sunning in a wheelchair gets knocked off by a pro?”
“Maybe he was a gambler, maybe he dabbled in narc running, maybe he—”
“Bull!”
“—or maybe an old love affair finally reached up and stiffed him.”
Shayne gave the police detective speculation. Leonard listened intently, his jaw working faster on the gum as the redhead talked. When Shayne had finished, Leonard breathed, “Holy Christ, you’re telling me that a guy who is dead really isn’t dead, that this Tiener finally sent an avenger? Shayne, get the hell out of here! Please? I’m already up to my knees in confusion and now you give me—”