“Oh, God! Heavy, man!”
“Point, honey. Just how heavy was she around Tiener South? How much pressure when she leaned?”
“Well, plenty. I mean she has — had weight. She’s — was, hey, man, it’s tough talking about the Scorn Machine in past tense. Anyway, she is/was Left Arm for T. J. Johnson. And T. J. Johnson is a southpaw, used to pitch for the Giants or somebody. T. J. Johnson also belongs to the Inner Circle. He’s a tribal chief. When Old Man Tiener was still around he called a periodic powwow of his chiefs. T. J. Johnson squatted in that circle, smoked the pipe.”
“How about Tiener and Elizabeth Stewart?” the detective asked.
“Oh, yeah. Close. I don’t know from where. Maybe they once slept together or something. She lays that — laid that closeness bit on us every so often, too.”
“Tiener is dead, huh?”
“Yeah. Fell off his yacht. Some shark fisherman will turn up his dentures someday.”
“I’ve heard some people think that was an act, that Tiener is alive and in hiding.”
“Un-huh. So the music goes here and there, but I don’t happen to be on that wave length.”
“If Tiener is in hiding, might Elizabeth Stewart have had a line to him?”
“Oh, Lordy, I dunno! It’s possible, I suppose. She’d tell you she did have, that’s for sure. But — hey, that’s real far out thinking, man!”
“Get a good night’s sleep, doll. I’ve got a hunch it’s going to be a tough day at Tiener South tomorrow. The joint is gonna be littered with cops.”
“You hanging up on me now, Shayne?”
“Yep.”
“Man, you’re — frustrating!”
He nursed a second cognac. Tiener was the kind of man to have the clout to hire a sniper — if he got the word that somebody was upsetting his applecart.
Question: Was Tiener alive, wielding clout?
Question: What was his applecart?
Question: If Tiener was alive, if he had an applecart, if he had been informed by a secretary that a private detective was pushing on that cart, if he had sent a sniper, if the sniper had failed — why kill the hand that had fed?
Or maybe Elizabeth Stewart’s death was independent reaction to failure. Maybe the sniper had trailed the detective to the secretary after the failure, might have panicked and killed. One mouth closed, one to go.
Shayne was acutely alert as he piloted the Buick back to his apartment building. Headlights occasionally hung in his rearview mirror for several blocks, but all eventually disappeared. He turned down the ramp into the basement garage knowing that he had not been trailed.
Inside his apartment, the gentle breeze continued to flow freely through the shattered window, and the cracks in the opposite wall were mute reminder, but the apartment was empty and he didn’t find any bombs ticking away under his bed.
He catnapped most of the night. During the waking periods he swept the cognac bottle from the table beside the bed, had a slug, then settled against the propped pillows and attempted to put together a mental image of a living Robert Hume Tiener.
His phone jangled at 7:30 in the morning. It was Will Gentry. “Get your tail down here, shamus,” the police chief growled.
Shayne rolled. Not because Gentry had summoned. He knew why Gentry had called — a business card had been passed from desk clerk to cops. He rolled because the cops had had enough time to clean up the preliminaries in their investigation of the murder of Elizabeth Stewart and he could get information from their same reports.
Hell, if the man with the boyish face had been the killer, if he had still been inside the building, maybe the police had the case wrapped up.
They did not. They had a mystery on their hands. Ninety per cent of the violent deaths that occurred were cut and dried — victim and murderer often in the same room when the cops arrived. Ten per-cent were mysteries. And policemen hate mysteries. They have enough work to do just sorting out the details of the open murders.
Gentry was in a dour frame of mind. He snapped, “You weren’t dodging, Mike. You left a calling card. So all I want to know is how come you went to see Elizabeth Stewart and what took you where after you found her dead.”
Shayne put a package together for the police chief. It included his visits to Brooks and Associates, to Tiener South, the shadowing of Elizabeth Stewart, a sniper’s shot and the speculation that had sent him to the Towers.
“She was alive, Will — scared but alive. But when I went back up to her place an hour later she was dead.”
“This man,” scowled Gentry, fingering the open folder on his desk. He rifled pages. “This is everything we’ve put together on the case and I don’t have a single thing in here about him.”
Shayne yanked an earlobe with thumb and forefinger. “He could be a dead end, he could be damned important. I haven’t got him tagged yet.”
“There’s some reason the guy is bothering you, Mike.”
“Hunch, Will. No more.”
“I gotta have more.”
“So you go your way. I’ll go mine.”
Gentry sat back then, his body width spreading beyond the lines of the leather chair. “Two men found dead in a swamp, a woman killed in her apartment. Two of the three victims are employees of Tiener South. You go out to Tiener’s, ask questions, then somebody takes a shot at you. It makes Tiener South a focal point, doesn’t it?”
“Is old man Tiener really dead, Will?”
He looked out from under thick eyebrows. “How the hell would I know? I wasn’t on his yacht. Go ask his sister.”
“Sister?”
“Lisa Hume Montgomery, a widow.”
Lisa Hume Montgomery lived many notches above squalor and maybe six below elegant splendor. The house probably had been constructed within the last ten years but presented a leaning toward English castle architecture.
Behind it, carved out of the expanse of green grass, was a 1976 swimming pool designed after a playing card club symbol. The blue pool water sparkled. So did the fingers of the sunbrowned, leathery looking woman who gazed up curiously at Shayne’s approach from a comer of the house. She wore several diamond rings.
Shayne stopped in his tracks as a young man shot up from a webbed chair near the woman. The young man left her fast and faded into the house. Shayne stared after him.
The woman looked from Shayne to the house door, back at Shayne. “You seem to have startled Tony. Are you two acquainted?”
“In a sense I think we might be,” responded the redhead.
VIII
Lisa Hume Montgomery wore a one-piece pink bathing suit. She was sixty to sixty-five years of age. The leathery look was a product of many hours in the wind and sunshine. She wore it as most other women her age and financial stature flaunted mink on lotion pampered skin.
“Mr. Shayne?” she said curiously from the propped layback chair.
He sat in the chair the young man had vacated at her feet. He was in the shade of a table umbrella. Shayne wasn’t a sun nut.
“I knocked,” he said to her.
She nodded. “I do not have domestics. I prefer to take care of myself and my home.” She paused, frowned slightly. “But who are you? Why are you here? Why did your appearance surprise Tony?”
“How do you know my name, Mrs. Montgomery?” he countered.
“Tony spoke it when you appeared.”
“Who is he?”
She contemplated briefly. “Anthony Andrews. He is in the employ of my brother, Robert Hume Tiener.”
Shayne ran a thumbnail along his jawline, fixed her with a steady look. “I understand your brother is dead.”