Brett Halliday - Never Kill a Client

“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?”

“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?”

“Sure, I deny it. That is, not to my knowledge. I may have passed him on the street some time.”

“You visited him in the penitentiary twice in the last three months.”

“I didn’t. I haven’t been to the pen for a year.”

“The records say different, Mike.”

Shayne hesitated, savoring the shock of Gentry’s accusation, trying to adjust his thoughts… see where all this was leading.

“This means you know who the dead man is, Will?”

“Oh, sure. We got a fast make on his fingerprints. He’s an ex-con named Julius O’Keefe… as if you didn’t know. Pardoned yesterday morning, and it looks as though he came straight to Miami and went to your office where he got himself stabbed to death.”

“And I’m supposed to have visited a prisoner named O’Keefe in the pen twice in the last three months?” Shayne demanded incredulously.

“That’s what their records show.”

“Then their records lie,” Shayne told him hotly. “Maybe someone claiming to be Mike Shayne visited a man named O’Keefe, but it wasn’t me, Will.”

“Then why did he go straight to your office after being released yesterday?”

“I don’t know, but I’m beginning to get the glimmer of an idea. If you’ll listen to me for a minute instead of trying to pin a murder rap on me, maybe you’ll get the glimmer of an idea, too.”

He reached in his pocket for the scented envelope with the message signed Elsa Cornell still inside, and tossed it in front of the police chief. He also got out his wallet and removed the two halves of the thousand-dollar bill which he placed in front of Gentry while the chief removed the letter and read it, with Rourke peering down over his shoulder to read it also.

“That was delivered to my office by Special Delivery yesterday morning,” Shayne told the two of them harshly. “One of these torn pieces of currency was inside, along with a roundtrip first-class ticket to Los Angeles by United Airlines. I got that other half of the bill when I finally caught up with Elsa Cornell at the Cock and Bull at five o’clock. I also got a completely incredible story from her supposedly explaining why she needed my help in LA., and finally a different story which was slightly more credible, but not much. Let me tell you the way it happened and you can judge for yourself.” He swiftly sketched in the salient details of his experiences on the West Coast the preceding day, ending with, “When I finally got hold of Tim on the phone about seven o’clock and he told me about the dead man and Lucy being missing, it suddenly came to me that I’d been hoaxed. That the letter and all was a device to get me out of town and away from my office. I still hadn’t the slightest idea why, of course. I accused Elsa of it, and she finally broke down and told me a different story, saying she thought it was a practical joke.”

He related her tale of being hired by a television producer to lure him away from Miami and keep him away at least overnight. “Then she made the mistake of telling me she hadn’t been in Miami for years, and I found Lincoln Road labels in all her clothes. To top it off, in her purse she had the return half of a round-trip airplane ticket that had been issued in Miami two days previously. That clinched it, so I brought her back with me to see how she fitted in.”