Brett Halliday: A Redhead for Mike Shayne

“What makes you think…?”

“That Enders is dead?” said Shayne impatiently. “Hell, he has to be, Will. Nothing else makes sense. He’s been dead for at least a week.”

“You talked to him on the telephone this morning,” snapped Gentry.

Shayne shook his head. “Nuh-uh. Your man on the switchboard recorded the conversation correctly, but that wasn’t Enders talking.”

“Who was it then?”

“Your pal, John Mason Boyd,” Shayne told him harshly. “It had to be him, Will. He was the only one who made sense. With Pug and Slim, he’d knocked off Enders two weeks ago when the guy finally got paroled. That’s when Captain Ruffer decided he might as well start cashing in on the cache. Then, Boyd killed him last night when he put on too much pressure.

“Wait a minute.” Shayne held up a big hand warningly when Will Gentry started to explode. “It had to be that way, Will. Just answer one question before you blow up. Think back to last night. You and Boyd stopped at the Park Plaza looking for Miss Morgan here.” He indicated her with a wave of his big hand. “She wasn’t in her room… and you came to my place looking for her… right?”

“That’s right,” growled Gentry. “Though I don’t see…”

“After you were at the Park Plaza and before you came to my place… did Boyd make a telephone call?”

Gentry hesitated, rumpling his eyebrows. “As we were leaving the Park Plaza,” he admitted. “He said he wanted to call his wife and explain why he would be late.”

Shayne said, “He actually called Slim and Pug and told them to hurry over to the hotel and grab Miss Morgan when she came in. That’s the way it had to be, Will.”

Gentry turned his head as one of his men hurried into the room and reported excitedly, “There was fresh-turned earth in the basement, Chief. We dug in it and… found Roy Enders with his head caved in.”

Shayne said, “There it is, Will. Dumped into your lap. Have Boyd picked up for murdering Enders and Ruffer, and I’ll tell you exactly which lagoon you’re going to find the rest of this shipment of Russian guns still resting in.”

Timothy Rourke and Molly rode back to Miami with Shayne, the three of them in the front seat after the sheriff’s men had removed the two bodies from the back.

Shayne turned in at the first likely looking tavern they came to on Number One and said, “I can stand a double cognac. Bourbon for you, Miss Morgan?”

She laughed lightly. “No. Cognac for me, too. On account of you’re still my favorite de tective. Even though you still haven’t told me how you got those three beautiful scratches on your face.”

Following them into the bar-room, Rourke said meaningfully, “You haven’t met his secretary yet, have you?”

“No.” Molly turned to look at the reporter, shocked. “Do you mean that she…?”

“Mike hasn’t explained those scratches to me either,” Rourke said easily as they sat in an empty booth with him across from them. “But I do know Lucy Hamilton, and…”

“And you’re ’way off the track,” Shayne assured him. He asked the waiter for cognac and found they had Courvoisier, and ordered doubles for himself and Molly, and a double bourbon for Rourke. He leaned back and touched the strips of adhesive still on his face, and said, “These are paid for in full. Let’s forget them. You haven’t told us much about last night,” he reminded Molly. “Tim needs it to round out his story.”

“There isn’t much to tell. Those two men were waiting upstairs outside my hotel room when I got there, and they seemed to know all about the captain’s logbook and thought I had it. They both had guns and searched my purse, and then took me out of the hotel between them and to a shabby apartment some place in town where they tied me up and made a phone call… I guess to that lawyer… and then they said I must have left it in your hotel room. And they found your back door key and the tall one took it and was gone half an hour. Mr. Boyd came back with him and they had the book and they read the part about the Mermaid being wrecked in the hurricane in a lagoon about three miles from Enders’ lodge with a big shipment of Russian small arms that had been destined for Castro, and they tried to make me tell them whether you had read it or not, and I swore you hadn’t, but I don’t think they believed me.”

The waiter brought their drinks and she stopped talking until he went away, and then went on. “You heard me tell Chief Gentry about them driving out to the lodge this morning with the diving outfits, and tying me up and going out to come back with those boxes. Then they waited for you to come, Mike. And they talked about killing you and how they’d have the whole boatload of guns for themselves… with Boyd, of course. Actually, it was he who killed the captain last night while torturing him.”

“All that is pretty clear,” said Rourke, “but what I can’t understand is why Captain Ruffer left that stuff in the lagoon all these years when he actually didn’t have enough to eat part of the time.”

“I think it was because Captain Ruffer was an honorable man,” Shayne said slowly. “The cargo didn’t belong to him, you see. He had collected insurance on his boat without admitting it was sunk in a lagoon where it could have been salvaged, and he had no claim on the cargo. So he didn’t touch a single gun until Enders was paroled and then murdered by Boyd and his two former pals. With Enders dead, they thought the captain would throw in with them, but the stubborn old coot refused. Instead, he slipped out to the lagoon on his own and got a case of the pistols up to the surface and sold six of them to Wilshinskis, promising him more if he wanted them.

“When they realized the Lenskis were getting into circulation in Miami, they knew it had to be the captain selling them.”

“But why did they kill Roy Enders as soon as they got him out of jail?” asked Molly. “I understood that Boyd was instrumental in getting his parole.”

“You’ve got to remember that Enders was a fanatical Castro man. Those guns were meant for Castro in the beginning, and I’m sure he was determined that’s where they should go today. There wouldn’t have been any loot for Boyd and Pug and Slim to split up if Enders stayed alive. And things aren’t the same now, with Russia openly sending arms to Castro. Six years ago it was different. Think what a stink we would have made if it had been proved Castro was being supplied arms by Russia while he was still just a bearded revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Roy Enders had to keep that secret as long as he was in the penitentiary.”

“There’s just one more thing puzzles me,” Rourke said. “We were talking about it last night, Mike, when we read that story I wrote about the captain’s rescue at sea three days after the hurricane was supposed to have sunk his boat out in the Caribbean. It wasn’t sunk out at sea. Instead, it appears he ran his cargo aground in a lagoon at the height of the storm. So, how did he get miles out to sea on a life preserver three days later?”

“That’s in his logbook, too. He took the bottom out of his boat on the reef going into that lagoon in the storm. The insurance company would have tried to salvage it, and there it was loaded to the gunwales with illicit arms. He stayed at the lodge with Enders until the storm died away, and they took him offshore at night in a power launch and dumped him where he was bound to be spotted the next day.”

Timothy Rourke had been industriously scribbling notes while Shayne talked. Now he looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to phone the rest of this stuff in to rewrite. Take your drinks slow, you two.” He slid out and went to a telephone booth at the rear of the bar. Molly sipped her drink and moved closer to Shayne, and again he felt her body warmth and he smelled her.