Brett Halliday - Never Kill a Client

The second one was marked ten-thirty, and as Shayne looked at it, Fritz told him importantly, “I took that one myself. Switchboard operator goes off at ten, you know. He sounded mad and wanted to know why you hadn’t answered his other call, and made me look in your box to see if the message was still there, then said it was important you should call him the minute you got in.

“Then he called again at one o’clock and said you was to telephone him no matter how late you got in… three or four o’clock, or whatever.”

Shayne fingered the slips a moment and then said, “Call that number. It’s probably a hotel in town. Don’t ask for him or the extension,” he added harshly. “Just find out which hotel.” Pete, who was evidently now officially on duty at the desk, took one of the slips and turned to a telephone behind him.

He turned back in a moment and said, “It’s the Atlantic Arms, Mr. Shayne. On Fourth Street just off Biscayne.”

Shayne nodded and turned away from the desk leaving his briefcase sitting forgotten on the floor in front of it.

Shayne wasted no time inquiring for Mr. Rexforth downstairs in the Atlantic Arms Hotel when he reached it. He crossed the old-fashioned lobby in long strides and stepped into an elevator that was waiting to go up. He glanced down at one of the telephone slips in his hand and saw the extension 718. He told the operator, “Seven,” when he closed the doors, got out on the seventh floor and found the room number.

He knocked loudly and waited. It was a solid oak door without a transom and he could hear no movement inside the room. He knocked again, impatiently, and the door finally opened a few inches with the rattle of an inside chain that was still in place.

A sleepy and irritable voice said, “Yes? What is it?”

“Michael Shayne. Open up.”

Something like a gasp sounded through the crack. Then the door closed enough so the chain could be loosened, and swung open again.

Shayne pushed in and confronted the scrawny figure of a man wearing rumpled pajamas and with grayish hair standing wildly on end. He was bare-footed and thin-faced, and he retreated hastily toward the bed as though in acute embarrassment, blinking his eyes nearsightedly and swallowing a prominent Adam’s Apple while he quavered, “I was sleeping very soundly. I’ll get a robe and… and my glasses.”

He snatched up a bathrobe that hung over the foot of the bed and thrust his arms into the sleeves, then padded nervously to the head of the bed where he picked up a pair of rimless glasses from the table and settled them firmly on his nose.

Thus properly attired, he lost his embarrassment and seated himself on the edge of the bed and said severely, “I’ve been expecting you to telephone me, Mr. Shayne. I sat up very late waiting for you to return my calls.”

Shayne said, “I just now returned to my hotel and found them.”

“Indeed? And may I inquire where and how you spent the night? And please, Mr. Shayne, don’t expect me to believe the implausible story your secretary gave me yesterday that you had flown unexpectedly to the West Coast.”

Shayne stood flat-footed on the floor in front of the man and glared down at him with his hands knotted into fists. “Where is she, Rexforth? Where is Lucy Hamilton? If she’s come to any harm…”

“Your secretary, Mr. Shayne? I’m sure I have no idea. I saw her only once, briefly, yesterday morning. If you’ve mislaid the young lady, it is scarcely my affair.”

Shayne stood looking down at him for a long moment while he battled with the irrational anger that had possession of him. This man knew something … but what? He was altogether too calm, too sure of himself. The important thing was to find out what he knew about the whole affair as fast as he could get it out of him.

He moved back to sit in a chair, and began by asking, “What makes you so sure I haven’t been to the Coast?”

Rexforth’s brown eyes glittered behind their glasses and his tight lips smiled thinly. “Because I have been certain that Julius O’Keefe would make a bee-line for Miami and you as soon as he was released from prison. And, Mr. Shayne, because I know he did visit you in your office yesterday afternoon… and remained closeted with you for a good period of time.”

“What do you know about O’Keefe?” Shayne demanded.

“What do I know about him?” Rexforth permitted himself a little, cackling laugh. “Everything, I assure you. I don’t think we understand each other, Mr. Shayne. Perhaps your secretary misunderstood me or neglected to inform you. I represent the North American Bonding Company. Manager of our branch office in Jacksonville, to be exact. Does that answer your question?”

Shayne said, “No.”

Rexforth sighed and placed the tips of five fingers precisely against the tips of his other five. “Perhaps it doesn’t,” he conceded. “I tend to forget that you entered the affair only recently and may not be fully cognizant of its past history. My company had bonded O’Keefe, of course, when he embezzled the hundred thousand dollars. We paid the loss. The full amount. I consider that case one of my failures, Mr. Shayne. One of my few failures. Now do you understand?”

Shayne said again, “No.”

“Oh, come now. Let’s not spar with each other. I am wholly and completely convinced in my own mind that Robert Long confided the entire story to you… or at least the salient points of it… when he died some four months ago.”

“Robert Long?” Shayne repeated the name slowly. It came as a complete surprise to him and he actually had to force himself to think over the past months to bring the incident into focus in his mind.

Of course! Long was the gambler who was reputed to have welshed on some large bets and incurred the anger of the Syndicate. Their enforcers had gone after the man and gunned him down in his automobile on a remote section of the Tamiami Trail, and by the merest chance Shayne had been present at the time of his death. He’d had no interest in Long himself, hadn’t known the man or even met him before that night.

Shayne, on another case entirely, had been on the trail of one of the trigger-men who went after Long, and it was quite by accident that he had come upon Long’s wrecked car that night and found the gun-shot, dying man inside the wreckage. Robert Long had continued to live for at least twenty minutes while Shayne remained alone with him by the roadside, but during that period he had been delirious and babbled only senseless nothings.

The newspapers hadn’t got or printed the full story, of course. There had been intimations that he had been Shayne’s client and the detective had tried to save his life from the gunman, which Shayne hadn’t bothered to deny publicly.

“What has Robert Long got to do with this matter?” he asked slowly.

Rexforth snorted sarcastically. “You were alone with him for half an hour when the man knew he was dying, Shayne. He had a burden of guilt on his conscience, and inside him was the bitter knowledge that all of it had been for naught. That all his careful plans and the subsequent wreckage of his business had been for nothing and now the money would never be recovered. Because even if Long’s wife knew the secret… and I am convinced she did… he knew O’Keefe would never in this world be willing to share it with her.

“How fortuitous it must have appeared to Robert Long that you were there to hear his dying confession and listen to his secret. Not the police. Not some crook who would try to take it all. But Mike Shayne. A tough private detective with a reputation for flouting the law when it served his own ends, yet with a certain reputation as a square-shooter withal. Of course he made an arrangement with you to approach O’Keefe in prison and induce him to cooperate with you, on your promise, I assume, that it was strictly a private matter between the two of you and that O’Keefe’s former wife would not share a cent.