“Two men murdered,” he said. “They were hit, staked out in a swamp. It’s got a definite odor, hasn’t it?”
“Gangland, yeah.” Shayne nodded, hooking a hip on a corner of the chiefs desk. He thumbed back his hat and lit a cigaret. “But it isn’t.”
“We’ve had feelers out all morning, Mike. Nothing. Nobody in the mob ever heard of Singleton and/or Burns. The hierarchy is as curious as we are. If unknowns from out of town are drifting in, they want to know pronto.”
Shayne picked a strand of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “Ray Zoner down at the morgue tells me the heads were packed in mud.”
“According to the autopsy reports, Singleton died from a skull blow — probably a sap of some kind — while Burns suffocated. Both had swamp mud packed in their throats and nostrils. We’re figuring Singleton was dead before the staking. Bums also had a skull wound, but it didn’t kill him. He probably was unconscious while being packed.”
The victims had been dead approximately five days, give or take a few hours. Pinning the exact time of death was difficult for the medical boys, because the bodies were not in the best of shape after such a long period of exposure to hot sun, dampness, snakes, insects and other parasites. Each victim was fully clothed. Pockets had not been rifled. Wallets had been found on each body. Singleton was carrying $248 in cash and a string of credit cards. Bums was carrying $89 and credit cards. No packets in the credit card folders were empty.
Mugging, robbery as a motive, were out. Their money made that certain.
No vehicles or tire tracks had been found at the death site. Cops had immediately fanned out, searched the police car pound, looked around town for automobiles that had been parked in one spot for days.
Then it had been determined that Singleton was a non-driver and that Bums had called a cab to take him to work last Friday morning. His wife had needed a car to keep a hairdresser appointment that morning and her Vega was in a garage having a muffler replaced.
“The staking, Will,” said Shayne, leaving the desk. “That’s cold-blooded stuff.” He paced the confines of the office, trailing smoke behind him.
“New stakes, fashioned like tent stakes. Hell, you wouldn’t figure there’s that many places a man could get stakes these days — until you start nosing around. There’s the lumber yards, the discount stores with lumber departments, home builders, carpenters — big outfits or individuals — all over the city. Then maybe the killer is a Handy Dan himself who has the saw to make his own stakes.
“The rope — also new, cut in short lengths. It could have been purchased anywhere. All a guy needs is three or four bucks and a sharp pocketknife.
“So, from the materials? No clues. The stakeouts themselves? We get an insight into the killer. He’s a mean goon. He can sap two guys, dig two holes, dump ’em in, cover them. Job done. He doesn’t. He goes to the trouble of spread-eagling them, flat on spines on top of the ground, staking, then packing the air passages.”
Shayne continued to pace. “The alligator man?”
“For now, we make him clean.”
“The Bums woman says she never heard of Singleton,” said the redhead. “I buy that to mean her father and Singleton didn’t bend elbows together. She’d know. She’s a sharp dame, Will, close to the family circle.”
“We’ve got Burns walking out of the Brooks place around two last Friday afternoon. He was mum about destination but that wasn’t unusual, according to his secretary. In one way, he was a loner around there, kept busy but never talked about what might be on the stove until it was cooking.
“So the secretary didn’t even stop typing with the departure. Burns could’ve been going to the water well, home or out to meet a prospective client. When he had something for her, he’d tell her. And that’s when he disappeared, Mike. We haven’t turned up anyone yet who laid eyes on him after he walked out of his secretary’s sight.”
“Phone calls?” Shayne asked.
Gentry shrugged. “The secretary says he probably had a dozen or so on Friday, most of them from inside the building. But there is an hour and a half period — noon to one-thirty — when she wasn’t in. Bums was. He was a brown-bagger, never went out to lunch. He could have had calls in that period.”
Shayne again parked on a comer of Gentry’s desk, took a last drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out. “Okay. What about Singleton?”
Singleton also had been a land expert — but with Tiener South, the conglomerate. Where Brooks and Associates concentrated on land buying, selling and development, Tiener South had many ventures — mining, oil, transportation, the movie industry — and land.
Singleton’s pew had been land. He was considered one of Tiener South’s experts. He had been with Tiener 30 years, was a bulwark, but not irreplaceable. In fact, the replacement prospect was in Tiener South’s immediate future. Singleton had announced plans to retire on July 1.
His wife had died five months earlier, there were no children, and Singleton had informed the people at Tiener’s that it was time for him to pack it in, sit in a chair in the sunshine for the remainder of his years. Tiener people agreed with him. The death of his wife had taken the steam out of Singleton. He was a prime candidate for chair and sunshine.
But he had not been a candidate for murder.
Singleton had been Mr. Straight. He could push, pull, maneuver, be tenacious, but always with a slight smile on his face, always quietly. And he was fair. Secretaries said he was fair. Too, he was careful — he liked things recorded, indexed on cards. For instance, there was a daily record of telephone conversations. They were categorized by the hour and a P for placed, or R for received.
His office routine also included remaining at his desk one to two hours after everyone else had left the building each evening. He reviewed the day’s recordings in this uninterrupted time slot, removed the chaff and put the wheat in proper order for the next day’s attention.
On the other hand, there had been a definite change in Mr. Singleton’s personality and office routine in recent weeks. Mr. Singleton had been down. He no longer smiled, had occasionally had displayed flashes of previously unknown anger, even shouted at a secretary. And the daily record of work moves was no longer complete.
For instance, Mr. Singleton sometimes took and sometimes made phone calls, dictating that the calls not be recorded. He had received one such call early last Friday afternoon. It had come in from a man who had identified himself as a Mr. Jerry Warner. Mr. Warner had asked to speak to Mr. Singleton, stating that Mr. Singleton would recognize his name.
Mr. Singleton had. He also had immediately informed his secretary not to record the call. She had not. But she remembered it for two reasons — it had come in between 2:28 and 2:30 p.m. — because she always took a fifteen-minute coffee break at 2:15 p.m. and she always left the snack bar at exactly 2:25 p.m. At normal pace, it took her three minutes to return to her desk. She also remembered the name because she had once been married to a sailor named Jerry Warner.
No, this was not the same Jerry Warner. She would have recognized the voice.
Yes, the phone call had excited or angered or frightened or done something to Mr. Singleton. After receiving it, he had shot out of the office without a word and no one had seen him since.
Shayne used thumb and forefinger on an earlobe. “Singleton was lured?”
“Sounds like it,” grunted Gentry. “And the timing could fit. We’ve checked it. Burns walks out of Brooks around two. It’s about a twenty-minute haul over to the Tiener headquarters. So knock off ten minutes for a phone call from a pay booth.”
“Whap, whap with a sap,” Shayne mused thoughtfully. “Two guys hauled away in a car?”