Shayne said, “I’ve got one faint hunch. It doesn’t help us much, but it does add up to the only possible motive I can see for the doctor’s murder.”
He paused a moment to clarify his thoughts. “The Boss is a professional blackmailer… with some sort of an organization which includes at least Jud and Phil. Maybe Crew-cut, too, who didn’t look like a hood at all, but would fit in better as a liaison man. Suppose he normally handled the pay-offs… the actual collections. So he’d have the stuff ready to trade with Ambrose while the Boss waited in the hotel room to set it up.
“But he jumps the gun, phones Dr. Ambrose on his own and sets it up for nine-thirty. He gets the cash, all right, but now, by God, he’s on the spot. When the deadline passes at midnight and the Boss starts putting further pressure on Ambrose, the doctor will naturally tell him to go to hell. So it behooves Crew-cut to get the stuff back into his own hands, if he wants to go on living. So he follows Ambrose home and kills him and gets the envelope back.” Shayne spread out his hands. “He’s in the clear with twenty grand. The doctor is dead, and all the Boss can do is take out his frustration on the first private detective he can get into his hotel room under a couple of guns. Can you buy that?”
Gentry agreed, “It makes sense that way.” He swung his attention to Timothy Rourke. “That picture you had Bayliss take might be important. Got a print of it with you?”
Rourke shrugged unhappily. “I’m sorry it wasn’t my idea at all. Someone else hired him to do the job.” He repeated the story George Bayliss had told Shayne earlier. “The only person we can figure who had any use for a picture was Dr. Ambrose. The others didn’t need a picture of him. They knew whom they were blackmailing. But, if he did arrange it, certainly the guy who handed the fifty bucks to George would report it to the police after learning that Ambrose had been murdered.”
“Maybe he has… to Painter,” suggested Shayne. “Would you check with him and find out, Will? Without giving it away that I saw the picture being taken?”
Gentry nodded and lifted a telephone on his desk. Both men settled back and lit cigarettes while he conferred with the Chief of Detectives on the other side of Biscayne Bay. He hung up, shaking his bullet head. “Nothing like that has come in. Painter did shake the Seacliff down, of course, and has already got word about a flash-bulb going off at about nine-thirty. He doesn’t know why, and can’t connect it with the pay-off… which he still doubts took place,” he added to Shayne. “I think he’d like to prove you sent Ambrose home from your hotel with the money intact… followed him and killed him for it.”
“He and the Boss both,” muttered Shayne. He shook his head very slowly, because a sudden motion still started bells ringing inside his skull. “How about the gun found beside the body?”
Gentry said, “He didn’t mention it. He did say, though, that he wanted more talk with you this morning, and, if I happened to see you, I was to tell you to call him.”
Shayne said, “So you’ve told me.” He hesitated, and then said slowly, “If Ambrose did arrange to have Bayliss take the picture… as some sort of precaution or insurance against further blackmail… then the only reason I can see why it hasn’t been reported is that the man who paid Bayliss fifty bucks for the plateholder has some idea of cashing in on it. He might figure it’s worth a good hunk of that twenty grand to Crew-cut to keep the picture out of circulation.”
“Would he know how to reach him?” asked Rourke skeptically.
“Probably not. Any more than I do.” Shayne stood up carefully. “I guess that’s it, Will. Right now we’ve got five people mixed up in this thing one way or another… without knowing who they are or exactly how they tie in. I’ll stop for a talk with Sergeant Fillmore, huh, and give him all I’ve got on all five?”
Gentry said, “Do that, Mike. And don’t forget that I passed Painter’s message on to you.”
Shayne said, “I’ll be seeing him before he gets too impatient,” and went out of the chief’s office with Rourke on his heels. In the corridor, the reporter stopped him on his way to the Identification Department. “I’d better get in to the paper and write my story, Mike. Uh? You want anything in on the Bayside Hotel last night?”
“Christ, no! And nothing on Bayliss either… if he’ll keep his mouth shut.”
“He will. I think he’s scared right now… that it’s mixed up with a murder. There’s nothing really wrong with what he did, but the paper is going to take a dim view of the fact that he was on the spot to witness a blackmail pay-off that turned into murder and hasn’t even got a picture for us to print. He’s not going to boast about turning his plateholder over to a possible killer.”
Shayne grinned and agreed, “I guess not. Okay, Tim. Take it from there. I’ll be in touch the minute I’ve got something you can print.”
“Mike.” Rourke’s anxious voice stopped him as he started to move on.
“Yeh?”
“Last night… did you get any inkling of what Doc Ambrose was scared of… what he was being blackmailed about?”
“Not an inkle.”
“Because, damn it, I still say he was a swell guy,” declared Rourke fervently. “Whatever he’d done in the past, don’t forget…”
“I know,” Shayne cut in sardonically, “that he saved your worthless life a few years ago. I’m not forgetting that, Tim.”
He swung away down the corridor, and pushed open a frosted door marked IDENTIFICATION DEPT.
It took him fifteen minutes to give Sgt. Fillmore a careful description of the Boss and his two goons, Crew-cut, and George Bayliss’s rather vague description of the man he had encountered outside the Seacliff.
The Boss and Jud and Phil were the only ones Shayne had any hopes about. Crew-cut, although probably a member of the same group, was less likely to have a police record, and the buyer of the plateholder was a completely unknown quantity at present.
The sergeant promised to go through the M.O. files carefully and pull out anything he could find, which would go straight to Will Gentry’s desk, and Shayne left police headquarters feeling he had done everything he could in that direction.
Rourke had driven him from the hotel, so Shayne walked the short distance back to his office on Flagler Street.
Lucy Hamilton was at her desk behind the low railing across the reception room when he entered a few minutes after nine o’clock. She was reading the morning paper, and looked up with a frown at him. “How did you ever manage to get mixed up in a murder last night, Michael?” she demanded. “When you left here you swore that nothing could stop you from going straight home to bed.”
“Is that what it says in the paper… that I got mixed up in a murder?”
“It says you were questioned by Chief Painter in connection with the murder of a Dr. Ambrose on the Beach… and were released until your story could be checked.”
She wrinkled her nice nose at him, and as he started to walk stiffly past her to the open door of his private office she suddenly caught sight of his head, and wailed, “What happened to your head, Michael? And why are you walking that way?”
Without breaking stride, he said, “That’s what comes of getting mixed up in murder. Come in, Angel. I want to talk to you.”
When she entered his office he was setting a bottle of cognac on his desk. He turned away to fit two sets of paper cups inside each other, and filled one pair from the water cooler. Turning back and setting the other two nested cups on the desk beside the bottle, he said cheerfully, “We haven’t got a damned thing on for today, have we?” He uncorked the bottle and poured out a couple of ounces of cognac.
“One telephone call this morning, Michael. A sweet little old lady who’s worried about her son, Cecil.” Lucy gave it the English pronunciation. “Cecil, to you,” she added, using the long “ee.” “Seems he got mixed up in some sort of unpleasantness last night and you’re to rescue him.”