Brett Halliday: Blue Murder

Gentry interjected, “Maybe you guys know what you’re talking about, but I sure as hell don’t. If we aren’t going to run off to the Everglades to look for a body, wouldn’t this be a good time to bring me up to date?”

“I’m not working on you, Will,” Shayne said. “I’m working on Baruch. I think he’s about to decide to start telling the truth.”

Baruch was chewing another fingernail. “But if Gretchen was the one who staged that scene at the shopping center…” He nodded slowly. “The guy came in and looked for the van, and then he parked in the worst possible place, so he’d be driving into the sun on the way out. They waited for a car to go by so I couldn’t be sure exactly what happened. He had the sunscreen down—”

“Now you’re thinking,” Shayne said. “Or else you and Gretchen worked it together. I like that one better.”

“And then what do you think, I went out in the Glades and played the Indian? I’m not the one who travels in helicopters. All right, I’ll give you the possibility that I was conned on that one. But why?”

“To be sure you didn’t sell the film to a Congressman named Barnett Pomeroy and let him suppress it. That would leave Nick Tucker in the race for governor, and you’ve told us this was the main thing his wife was trying to prevent. But if you had reason to suppose that Nick had killed her, that would force your hand, and blast everything out in the open. Murder’s a serious thing. You couldn’t afford to fool with it.”

“Mike,” Gentry said, “are you really saying what I think you’re saying, that that whole schmear with the Indian—”

“She had the key to her husband’s car,” Shayne said. “Obviously the Tuckers are a two-car family. So that was no problem. When she called him to set the time, Armand was close enough to hear her end of the call. ‘The shopping center, nine thirty.’ But she’d told Tucker a different shopping center. He went there and waited. This is a busy day for him, but I think we’ll find that nobody knows where he was at nine thirty.”

“And they picked that Glades road,” Gentry said, “because they knew somebody would hear the shot and report it. I begin to get the idea. When the car came out, she was lying on the floor of the back seat. Who was the guy driving?”

“It could be someone she hired, but you still aren’t understanding me, Will. We don’t know the woman was the real Mrs. Tucker. Could it have been Maureen Neal? Was Maureen the girl who was kidnapped at the airport this morning? Did somebody else dress up in a head bandage to look like Frankie Capp? As a matter of fact, did that whole episode happen at all?”

When Gentry started to object, Shayne said, “All we have is one anonymous phone call. Let’s wait till we get some corroboration. Any number of people could have stolen her typewriter and used it to write that letter. The point of that whole thing was to implicate Capp. Baruch’s name was hardly mentioned. Blame it on the Mafia. That’s topical.”

Baruch threw up his hands. “You’re wasted in the private detective business, Shayne. You ought to be a screen writer.”

“How many other things didn’t happen?” Gentry demanded. “I suppose they didn’t really shoot up this place last night? Those were actors? Pomeroy isn’t a real congressman, a bomb didn’t go off and break his ankles, and certain very important people from the political world aren’t going to be calling me to ask questions I don’t know the answers to?”

“All we can do now is wait for a real event, and see which theory fits. Unless somebody has a better suggestion?”

He looked around. Nobody had.

And then a lieutenant from Gentry’s office came in, in a hurry. “The park rangers have come up with a body, Chief.”

Shayne swung around. “A woman?” he said sharply.

“They didn’t specify. They want to know what to do now.”

“There’s your real event, Mike,” Gentry said. “I seem to remember some mention of a bet. You owe me a steak. But I suppose we’d better go out and see if this body is real flesh or plastic.”

The helicopter’s racket made conversation impossible. Shayne sat at the window, drinking. The fact that he’d been wrong didn’t bother him; he’d been wrong before. But he had the strong feeling that there was something else he ought to be doing now. He ran down the list of names: Capp, Tucker, Pomeroy, Rizzo, Baruch, Maureen Neal, the missing Peter. He rearranged the sequence, and rearranged it again, trying combinations. There was always at least one element that didn’t fit.

Gentry pointed to the ground. The outside world came back into focus for Shayne, and he saw a cluster of vehicles and men at the end of a dirt road winding southward into low scrub from the ruled precision of the Tamiami Trail. A boat was beached at the end of the road. To the south and west lay an intricate landscape of slowly moving water and hummocks and saw grass.

Men looked up and waved. The helicopter settled slowly onto the Trail, and two of Gentry’s people jumped out, to run off in different directions to stop traffic. The rest of the passengers dismounted. The helicopter lifted, to wait in the air until it was needed again. A Land Rover came out to take them to the water.

The dead woman lay face up in the back of a park pickup. She had been shot in the head, at close range. Her face was muddy and unrecognizable. The hook that had brought her up had torn a gash in her thigh. She was wearing green slacks and a sweater. Baruch, at the shopping center, had been shooting black-and-white film that didn’t show the color of her clothes. She wore a wedding ring and a good diamond.

“All right, who is it?” Shayne said.

“Gretchen Tucker,” Baruch said, and turned away, his mouth a tight line.

“Tim, who is it?”

Rourke had gone very pale, and the many lines of his face seemed more deeply etched. Stooping, he brought up a double handful of water and dashed it in the dead woman’s face. He reached out, hesitated, then went through with the necessary gesture, smoothing the blonde hair back from the forehead. The bullet, entering from behind, had blown a large exit hole through a cheekbone and the fleshy part of the nose.

“Gretchen Tucker,” he said in a low voice. “No doubt about it.”

He moved aside and let Shayne take his place. Shayne took out his knife; the long blade snicked open.

Beside him, Rourke sucked in his breath. “Mike—”

But Shayne had to be sure. He slipped the knife inside the sweater, between the woman’s breasts, and sliced it all the way down. There was no bra. He looked closely at the upper body. He opened the side zipper and worked the tight slacks and underpants down to her knees.

He stepped back. “As far as I’m concerned, this is Maureen Neal.”

The head ranger was watching with distaste, through narrowed eyes.

“Don’t stop dredging,” Shayne told him. “I think you’ll need heavier equipment. I don’t know about the currents here, but it could be out a fair way. If you don’t bring up anything with the hook, we’ll have to get divers. There’s another body out there, with weights on it. That one wasn’t meant to be found.”

The ranger looked at Gentry for confirmation. Gentry, after a long look at Shayne, shrugged slightly and nodded.

Two cops stayed behind. Gentry waved down the helicopter, and the Land Rover took them out to the highway to be picked up.

“Will you tell me one thing?” Gentry said. “Don’t tell me who killed her and put her in the water if that would betray a confidence. But is that Mrs. Tucker’s body back there, or somebody else’s?”

“It’s Mrs. Tucker. Tim and Baruch both identified her.” He spoke abstractedly, because there were still things he had to work out. “We ought to be at Jackson Memorial right now. There isn’t time to explain. I’ve been telling people that it’s Pomeroy who has access to the important money, but I haven’t followed through on that idea myself. Now we’ve got to hurry, and do it right.”