As he long-legged it toward the rear door of the house, the redhead reflected with amusement that he was over fourteen hours early for his midnight date. It was only nine thirty A.M.
Even though Mabel had said she lived alone and had no servants, Shayne took the precaution of knocking on the back door. When there was no answer, he unlocked it with the key she had given him, stepped into the kitchen and locked it behind him.
There were five rooms in the house, all on one floor: a kitchen, dining-room, front room, bedroom and study. Starting with the study, he methodically searched each room.
The only thing of interest he found was a half dozen pornographic books beneath some lingerie in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the bedroom. He flipped through them rapidly, made a face and replaced them where he had found them.
Starting over in the study, he removed every desk drawer and examined it for false bottoms. None had any, but as he started to replace them, he noticed that the upper drawers on each side were about eight inches shorter than their lower companions. Groping into the righthand cavity, he felt another knob. When he pulled out the small inner drawer, there was nothing in it but a coffee can.
Prying off the lid, he examined the white powder in the can, pinched a bit between forefinger and thumb and cautiously touched his tongue to it. He grimaced at the bitter taste, brushed off his fingers and touched a handkerchief to the tip of his tongue. It was pure heroin.
Hefting the can, Shayne estimated that there was somewhat less than a pound of the fluffy white powder, as it would weigh less by volume than the can’s original coffee contents. Possibly about twelve ounces, he judged. He did some mental arithmetic and worked out the answer that, cut ten to one with powdered milk, more than five thousand individual fixes could be packaged up from the can’s contents — with a retail take of over fifteen thousand dollars, if Will Gentry’s quote of the going price as three dollars a pop was right.
He pressed the lid back on the can, replaced it in the secret drawer, shoved the drawer home and pushed the outer drawer in after it.
Then he turned to the secret drawer on the left.
This proved to contain some things as interesting as the other. There were three small notebooks in it, and it took only cursory examination to decide they were the records of the narcotics ring. Having glanced through them once, Shayne went back over each for a more detailed study.
One was simply a list of names, dates and amounts. Most of the names were Spanish, and none were familiar to the detective. From the size of the amounts, Shayne deduced that this was the record of payments for bulk heroin smuggled into the country. The Spanish origin of the recipient’s names bore this out, as most illegal narcotics would come by water from South American countries.
There was a regular recurrence of each name, indicating that it was a large, organized ring, and not merely a one-shot arrangement of tourists trying to pick up a few easy bucks. The last amount entered, two thousand dollars, was only a few days back, and Shayne guessed that it represented payment for the shipment he had just examined.
He was frowning heavily now.
There was a large margin of profit in the racket, he thought grimly, as it would retail after cutting for seven to eight times that.
The second book was apparently an account of deliveries to retailers. Each page was headed by a name, and the space below was filled with a series of dates followed by numbers. It wasn’t hard to deduce that the numbers represented the number of individual papers of cut heroin delivered on each date.
One of the pages was headed by the name Hank Goodrich, the detective noted.
The third book was simply a ledger. Apparently Mabel Lake was a methodical businesswoman, for she had carefully entered expenses and receipts for all transactions. The account went back four years, and the annual take was staggering.
Shayne dropped the three notebooks into a side pocket of his coat. He had left the heroin where he found it so that it could be seized on the premises by the narcotics boys when they acted on his tip and raided the house. If he had carried it away to deliver to the police, it would simply be his word against Mabel Lake’s that it had ever been in the house. But the written records were different. They would be incriminating evidence no matter where they were found.
Glancing at his watch, the redhead saw that he had been in the house over two and a half hours. It was just past noon. While it was unlikely that Mabel Lake made a habit of coming home for lunch from all the way downtown, he decided it was time to leave.
He reached the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen when the back doorknob rattled. He halted in the doorway and his eyes narrowed when he saw the outline of a figure through the curtain hanging in front of the back door’s glass pane. The curtain was too thick to make out whether it was a man or woman.
Shayne faded back through the dining room toward the front room, with the intention of easing himself out the front door. He reached the doorway between the two rooms just as the front door slammed open.
Mabel Lake, followed by the thin Marshall Tarbox, stepped inside. The woman had a small, nickle-plated automatic in her hand. The man carried a businesslike forty-five caliber automatic.
Tarbox pushed the door shut behind him without taking his gun off Shayne. Mabel’s was centered unerringly on his belt buckle too, and her expression was one of barely controlled rage. Shayne slowly raised his hands to shoulder height.
“Let the others in the back door,” the woman snapped at her companion. “I can manage this—” She stopped because she couldn’t think of an epithet strong enough.
With his gun Tarbox waved Shayne out of the doorway and to one side of the room. Then, with a final look at Mabel to make sure she had the situation under control, he moved through the dining room into the kitchen. They could hear him unlocking the back door.
Mabel hissed at Shayne, “Just try something, lover boy. Give me an excuse to pull the trigger.”
The redhead gave her a deliberately infuriating smile. “Upset because I arrived early?” he asked.
Her face turned dead white with rage. “You thought you were clever,” she spat at him. “You think I didn’t know what you were planning to do? I gave you the key and pretended to go along just to catch you in the act.”
Marshall Tarbox came back into the room trailed by Hank Goodrich and Charlie Velk.
Shayne said to Mabel in a sarcastic voice, “Sure you did.” Then he cocked an eye at Hank Goodrich. “Let me guess,” he said. “You got out of Rose what we talked about, and phoned Mabel that I probably tailed Tarbox from your joint last night. She put two-and-two together and decided it wasn’t her charm that got me interested in her house.”
The nightclub manager growled, “It was a cinch, Shayne. We just locked Rose up last night until she got the shakes, then held a needle under her nose as a bribe to talk. She came across like a little lamb.”
“Shut up!” Mabel screamed at Goodrich, nearly as enraged at the blond man for letting Shayne know she’d been originally taken in as she was at the detective.
Goodrich stared at her. In a cold voice he said, “Don’t order me around, sister. I’m a customer, not an employee.”
Mabel glared back at him, finally controlled herself with obvious effort.
Charlie Velk said, “What are we going to do with this shamus?”
“Kill him,” Mabel said viciously. “He knows too much.”
“How do you know?” Goodrich objected. “I’m not taking a murder rap just because you’re sore at the guy. What’ve you got out here he could find anyway? You didn’t make it very clear on the phone.”