Brett Halliday - Shoot the Works

He reached in his pocket for the switchblade and passed it over to Gentry. “I figured they’d better sleep it off, and left them like that. When I returned fifteen minutes ago, this is what I found.”

The police doctor and two other detectives came in just then and Gentry nodded absently to them and said, “Headquarters had a call to get an address for this telephone number and rush a man up. I understand you made the call.”

Shayne said, “Not I. It was Rutherford Martin who called, but he may have given my name because I told him to make it while I got here as fast as I could. I didn’t know at the time it was her number, but it figured and I didn’t want to waste any time. At that, I was too late.”

Gentry leaned back and rolled a black cigar between his fingers. Curiously rumpled lids moved down to obscure his eyes. “Where’d you get the telephone number?”

Here, Shayne knew he was skating on thin ice, but, while waiting for Gentry’s arrival, he had carefully planned an explanation that would avoid mention of the note he’d found in Wallace’s apartment and save Donovan’s neck for him.

He said, “Martin and I found it written in a private address book in Wallace’s office desk while we were checking through his stuff. Just the first name, Lola, and no address. I didn’t know for sure that this woman’s name was Lola, but Martin had the impression there had been such a woman in his life recently… and like a damned fool I let him dial the number we’d found to try and learn her identity. I say ‘damned fool,’” he went on in disgust, “because I wasn’t quick enough to take the phone from him when she answered. Instead, he blurted out that she was wanted for questioning about Wallace’s murder and she hung up before we could get any more information. So I got here as fast as I could to try and stop a getaway… providing this was the right woman.”

Gentry said, “If you’d given this address to headquarters instead of just the telephone number, our radio car could have beat you here by eight minutes.”

Shayne said, “I realize that now, but I had no proof at all that the number belonged here. It was just a wild hunch. Besides, how could I guess she’d be so quick on the trigger?”

“How about it, Doc?” Gentry asked as the doctor came to them from his examination of the body. “Was she?”

“Was she what?”

“Quick on the trigger.”

“Suicide?” the doctor shook his round head. “I’ll leave that for your smart boys to determine, Will. From the physical evidence, could be, although most suicides prefer the barrel in their mouths.”

“Is it the same gun that killed Wallace last night?” interjected Shayne.

“Same calibre. I’ve got his slug for comparison.”

“How long ago?” asked Gentry.

“Twenty minutes to an hour. I can’t come much closer.”

Gentry looked at Shayne. “Your phone call puts it closer, doesn’t it, Mike? You claim she answered her phone just before Martin called us?”

“Someone did. Some woman, I guess. I didn’t hear her voice, but Martin would have mentioned it if it’d been a man, I’m sure. You can ask Martin.”

“And you got here, say, ten minutes later? It’s not often we can cut it that close. Wait outside in the hall, Mike.”

Shayne got up and sauntered out while Gentry conferred with Linehan.

The young patrolman was standing at attention down the hall and the elderly couple were peering out excitedly from the open door opposite. Their television set was turned off and the fat woman had put a pair of slippers on her bare feet.

Shayne stopped and asked, “Did you folks know the dead woman well?”

The man opened his mouth to answer, but his wife cut in excitedly, “Well enough, I’ll say that. Listen, Mister…”

But Garson came up officiously and said, “Hold it, now. This man isn’t the police,” he warned the couple. “Better not do any talking except to the Chief.”

Shayne grinned and said easily, “Right now, I’m a suspect along with you two. I just wanted…”

Garson took his arm and said firmly, “I said no talking. If Chief Gentry wants you to do the questioning he’ll say so.”

At that moment the elevator stopped at the floor and Timothy Rourke trotted out of it. He hurried forward, exclaiming, “I got a flash you had a murder here, Mike. What gives?”

Shayne ungently twisted his arm from Garson’s grip and muttered, “Ask Dick Tracy here. He seems to be in charge.”

Garson flushed and before he could reply, Chief Gentry appeared in the doorway of 3-A and nodded to Rourke. He said, “Go on in, Tim, and get the dope from Linehan.” He stepped aside and waited stolidly until the reporter went inside, and then crossed the hall to speak pleasantly to the couple standing there, “I’m Chief Gentry and I’d like a statement from you.”

This time the man got in before his wife, “Yes, sir, Chief. Anything we can tell you. Come right on in.”

Gentry entered their apartment and Shayne followed him, disregarding the scowl on Garson’s face. Gentry paid no heed to the redhead standing behind him, but asked, “Did you hear the shot?”

“Not that we’re sure of,” the fat woman said excitedly. “We had our TV on, you see, and we just didn’t…”

“Ida’s a mite hard of hearing,” said the mustached man. “She always turns it on so loud a man can’t hear himself think. It’s Mrs. Berger that’s dead, ain’t it?”

“Good enough for her,” said Ida darkly. “I been telling Peter for months that we had a right to complain. I kept telling him this is a respectable house and a woman like that gives a neighborhood a bad name.”

“A woman like what?” said Gentry mildly.

“Having men up all hours of the night while her poor husband’s away, that’s what,” said Ida indignantly. “He just came home this morning after a week’s absence and what do you think? A great big fight, that’s what. We turned off the TV and listened and they went at it like cats and dogs. And so he walked out on her. And now she’s killed herself, I guess. Well, I must say I’m surprised at her. I never thought she cared that much.”

While Shayne stayed in the background and listened, Gentry’s careful questioning brought out clear facts from a mass of irrelevancies.

Gene Berger was often absent and, during his absences, his wife, Lola, had been given to drunken orgies with different men who slipped in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night. The walls were thick in the apartment house and the neighbors across the hall hadn’t been able to listen in on the goings-on as satisfactorily as they might have wished, but they’d heard enough over the past few months, and seen enough, to thoroughly damn Lola as an immoral woman.

A whole procession of men, Ida, who had done most of the spying and peeking insisted. Gentry finally got her back onto the main track — checking her husband’s return that morning and his hurried departure at noon time, after a real fight between the two, culminating in Mrs. Berger’s standing in the doorway and hurling insults at her husband while he hurried down the hall, carrying the suitcase he had just carried up a couple of hours previously.

Listening to their account of the affair, while remaining strictly in the background, Shayne realized they were wholly unaware that he had been a visitor in the apartment prior to Gene’s arrival and that his presence had precipitated the husband-and-wife quarrel.

Ida had just happened to be going out to the grocery store at the moment Gene Berger returned, and had exchanged a greeting with Berger in the lobby below. Some time later Ida and her husband had heard the quarrel, which had evidently followed Shayne’s departure, and ended in Gene Berger’s leaving shortly after noon.