“I don’t know from nothing, Mike,” Corby told him uncomfortably. “I suppose the reason Gentry wants you at the morgue is to see can you identify him. I didn’t come on duty until midnight, and I don’t know anything about the case except what I picked up from the boys. All sorts of rumors flying around, but damn few facts.”
“What sort of rumors?”
“You know how it is. There’s this guy dead in your office with your secretary’s filing spindle in his heart, and it looks like both of you have taken a run-out powder. What’s the natural thing to think under the circumstances?”
“Yeh,” Shayne agreed with a sour grunt, and made a left-hand turn to draw up in front of the County Morgue where Detective Jim Greene was just getting out of the driver’s seat of a dark sedan. Shayne pulled in behind the police car and he and Corby got out and the four of them went in together so it wasn’t necessary for Corby to admit to his superior that they had driven in different cars from the airport.
Chief Will Gentry and Timothy Rourke were waiting together in the outer room. Neither man looked as though he had been to sleep that night. There were pouches under Gentry’s eyes, and his eyelids looked heavier and more rumpled than usual. Rourke’s eyes glittered feverishly in his emaciated face, and he stopped his pacing and came forward jerkily as the quartet entered.
“Mike! Has Lucy contacted you?”
Shayne shook his red head and refrained from asking the question which Rourke had already answered so obviously. He looked past the gangling reporter at Will Gentry who was getting up heavily from a wooden chair, and asked, “Have you identified the body yet?”
“We’re waiting for you to do that, Mike.” Gentry came forward stolidly sucking the soggy butt of a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, rolling his rumpled lids upward to peer at the blonde who stood stiffly beside the redhead.
“This your witness?”
Shayne nodded. “You can call her Elsa Cornell until she decides to give us her real monicker. I don’t know how she fits into all this, Will, but she’s been giving me one hell of a runaround.”
Gentry nodded and rumbled, “Come on back, the two of you. You and Greene wait here, Ed,” he added to the two detectives, then turned and led the way through a plain door into a white-walled corridor leading to the cold room.
Rourke fell into step beside Shayne, with Elsa on the other side, and muttered enviously out of the side of his mouth, “You can still pick ’em, Mike.”
“She picked me,” Shayne said with a tired grin. “They still got nothing on Lucy?”
Timothy Rourke shook his head lugubriously and sighed, seemed on the point of saying something, but checked himself.
Silently, they followed Gentry through a side door into a thick-walled room with a temperature well below freezing. There were built-in metal drawers along one wall, like oversized filing cabinets, and a white-coated attendant stepped briskly to one of them at a nod from Gentry, and pulled out a bottom drawer.
Elsa was pressed close against Shayne, and he felt her hesitate and stiffen. He took her arm and drew her forward, muttering, “Whoever he is, he can’t hurt you now.” He was looking down at her lovely face, watching her expression very carefully as she looked down at the waxen pallor of the corpse’s face.
If there was any expression at all, he thought it was one of relief, but he couldn’t be sure of that.
“Look at him, Mike,” Gentry ordered gruffly. “Take a long, hard look.”
Shayne did, releasing Elsa’s arm and allowing her to step back a pace. The man looked middle-aged, with thin, pinched features. He was clean-shaven and had sparse, brown hair. A sheet covered his body up to his neck. Shayne shook his head and said flatly, “I never saw him in my life before.”
He heard Rourke shuffle his feet uneasily just behind him, and Gentry took the cigar butt from between his lips and frowned down at it as though it suddenly tasted bad. “Don’t go off half-cocked, Mike. Take another good look and see if it doesn’t refresh your memory.” Shayne thought he detected a note of warning in the chief’s voice. They had been friends a long time, and Gentry always played it square with him.
To be absolutely positive, he took another long look and could find nothing familiar in the flaccid face. He shook his head more definitely this time and stated more flatly, “Sorry, Will. I can’t help you.”
“How about you, Miss?” Gentry put the cigar back into his mouth and nodded to the attendant who pushed the drawer shut.
She shook her honey-colored head just as decidedly as Shayne had shaken his red one, and said just as positively, “I have no idea in the world who he is. May I go now?”
Gentry gave an ambiguous grunt, and they all went out of the cold room and back up the corridor to a side door on the right which Gentry opened to reveal a small office, containing a desk with a swivel chair behind it and three other straight chairs.
Gentry went behind the desk and sat down. He said, “Close the door, Tim. Now then, Mike. Stop stalling and tell me the truth. This is murder and you and Lucy are into it right up to your necks. Where have you got her hidden?”
10
“Where have I got her hidden?” Michael Shayne looked as though he would choke over the words. “I haven’t seen Lucy or heard a word from her since eleven o’clock yesterday morning. Can’t you get it through your thick head that I caught a noon plane to Los Angeles and just got back?”
“Can you prove it?”
“Do I have to?” Shayne’s eyes were hot. “I’ve never lied to you, Will.”
“Yes, you have,” Gentry told him coldly. “When you felt the end justified the means… and were pretty sure you could get away with it. Yeh. I think you’d better try to prove where you were yesterday afternoon.”
Shayne drew in a deep breath and fought back his anger. “I reached L.A. about two o’clock… their time. I had an appointment with Miss Cornell here between two-thirty and three. She didn’t show up for it. Let her tell you why. Actually, it was a little after five o’clock when we finally made contact at a restaurant named the Cock and Bull in Hollywood. That’s eight o’clock here, Will. About the time you were finding a corpse in my office.”
“Is that true, Miss Cornell?”
She had not seated herself, but still stood near the door. She shook her head and said, “I will not answer any questions. I demand that I be allowed to see a lawyer.”
Shayne said angrily, “Come off your high horse, Elsa. All you have to do is tell the man you finally met me at five o’clock… after keeping me chasing my tail around town for a couple of hours.”
The expression on her lovely face hardened. She repeated, “I demand that I be allowed to see a lawyer. I have a right to counsel before I answer any questions.”
Gentry said curtly to Rourke, “Go outside and ask Ed Corby to come in.” When the reporter went out, he studied the blonde appraisingly and said, “So you won’t verify Mr. Shayne’s story? Any of it?”
She clamped her lips together and lifted her chin in reply.
Rourke came back, followed by the detective sergeant. “You and Greene take this woman to headquarters. Hold her for questioning without booking her.”
He waited until the door was closed behind them, then settled back and said, “Now there’s just the three of us, Mike. Suppose you start out by telling us what the dead man was doing in your office yesterday.”
“How do I know?” Shayne began bitterly. “I’ve told you…”
“I know what you’ve told us, and I happen to know it’s not the truth. Not the full truth, at least. He was a client of yours, Mike. Stop denying it.”
“He was no client of mine, Will. You know that Lucy and I practically never kill a client.”
His attempt at levity didn’t get a smile from Gentry. He demanded, “And you still deny you ever saw him before?”