Brett Halliday - Never Kill a Client

Maybe they’d planned just to leave Lucy in the motel cabin to be found eventually… after they’d got the money and left town. But now, they’d panic. Unexpectedly turned into murderers, they’d panic fast.

Lucy must have seen them. At least one of them. They couldn’t afford to leave a witness around who might testify against them later.

Was that why they had driven straight to the motel after leaving a dead man behind them?

They hadn’t stayed in the cabin long. Not more than five minutes according to the bonding company detective.

How had they utilized those five minutes?

Shayne’s foot was grimly heavy on the gas pedal and there was a gnawing knot of fear in his stomach, the sour taste of fear in his throat, as he neared the outskirts of Coral Gables, and began looking for the Orange Palms Motel, which he vaguely remembered having seen in the past.

It was still early in the morning. No one would normally have entered the locked cabin since the preceding afternoon. That was one of the things you got with a motel room. Complete privacy and the absence of prying eyes.

He saw the big sign ahead on the right, and took his foot off the accelerator. There was a row of stunted palms in front, and all the cabins were painted a bright orange color. There were about thirty units built in a semicircle, each with its individual carport separating it from the next unit for maximum privacy.

Shayne skidded to a stop in front of a sign that said, OFFICE, flung himself out and pushed inside a small room with a desk across the middle of it.

A slatternly, fat woman got up from a chair behind the desk and looked at him appraisingly as he stalked in. It was the wrong hour for people to be stopping to register for rooms.

He stopped in front of her and said, “I want the key to Number Nineteen.”

“Do you now?” she countered coldly. “Are you registered here, Mister…?”

“I’m not registered,” he said flatly. “Give me the key or I’ll go out and kick the door down.” He laid his hand flat on the desk with open palm upward.

She looked into his hot eyes and the width of his shoulders and knew he not only meant the threat, but was also physically capable of carrying it out.

Reluctantly, she reached behind her and produced a key with a brass tag attached to it. “If there’s trouble, I’ll have no part of it,” she told him virtuously.

He snatched the key from her fingers and strode out, left his car sitting there while he went down the curving row of cabins to Number Nineteen.

Most of the units had cars still in their ports. Nineteen didn’t. He put the key in the lock of the front door and it turned easily.

He stood for a moment without opening the door, while his guts churned up a storm inside him. Then he set his teeth together, turned the knob and thrust the door open.

The square room with its double bed looked completely empty from where he stood on the threshold. The bedspread had been thrown back and the blanket underneath it was rumpled as though a body… or two bodies… had lain there, but the bed hadn’t been slept in.

There was no other sign of occupancy as Shayne stepped inside. He paused beside the bed, then dropped to his knees beside it and peered underneath.

There was nothing to be seen there. The churning was subsiding inside him when he stood erect again. There was only one closet with the door shut, and a bathroom with the door standing open.

He went around the bed to the closet and jerked it open. There was nothing inside. He strode into the bathroom and saw that all of the towels hung neatly folded on their racks, unused.

He was about to turn and go out when a glimpse of blue caught his attention on the floor between the toilet seat and the wall.

He leaned over and stared down somberly at a dainty pair of blue nylon panties that had been waded down beside the toilet practically out of sight.

He reached down and picked them up between thumb and forefinger, and shook them out in front of his disbelieving eyes.

He recognized them immediately. There was a row of pink hearts embroidered across the front, and beneath them were the embroidered words, also in pink: “For my valentine.”

They were Lucy Hamilton’s panties. He had given them to her himself as a gag last Valentine’s Day. He remembered how charmingly Lucy had blushed when he gravely presented them to her that day in the office, all done up in a big crimson-and-silver heart-shaped box. He didn’t know she had ever worn them. She had sworn that day that she never would, and had given him a mild piece of hell for selecting such a silly gift for her.

He stood very still for at least thirty seconds staring at the wisp of embroidered blue nylon. Then he angrily crumpled it up in one big hand and thrust it into his pocket.

Outside the cabin he paused to close the door and lock it, and then he strode back to the office and entered and the fat woman behind the desk glared at him suspiciously and demanded, “Now, what’s this all about, Mister? We run a decent place here and don’t want any trouble.”

“Police business,” he told her, putting the key down on the desk. “Keep Number Nineteen locked tight until the police get here to check it out. Now get me the registration card for Nineteen.”

“Police business?” she faltered, “I tell you we run a decent place here…”

“If your nose is clean, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he interrupted. “Get that card. Did you check them in?”

“Number Nineteen?” She frowned as her fat fingers flipped through a numbered card index and deftly extracted a registration card which she peered at before placing it in front of Shayne. “No. My husband did. See. It was a little before noon yesterday.”

Shayne studied the card and got just about as much information from it as he expected. It was signed:

“Mr. and Mrs. Ned Jenkins. Asheville, N. C.” and provided the further information that the North Carolina couple were driving a 196 °Chevy sedan with a Dade County license number.

Shayne looked up from it and asked, “Where is your husband?”

“Asleep in back. He was up last night until nigh two o’clock when the last cabin was rented.”

Shayne said brusquely, “Get him out here while I telephone police headquarters.” He turned to a telephone booth in one corner of the room and went in while the fat woman departed, grumbling under her breath, through a passage to the rear.

Shayne put a dime in the slot and dialled a number that was very familiar to him, although not to the general public, because it was a direct line to Will Gentry’s private office.

Gentry answered the telephone himself, and Shayne said briskly, “Mike Shayne, Will. I’m out at the Orange Palms Motel on the Trail. Send a couple of men out to check a cabin, huh? Number Nineteen. Fingerprints and anything else interesting.”

“Listen here, Mike,” Gentry’s voice rumbled over the wire. “What the hell are you up to? There’s a guy in here named Rexforth from North American Bonding, and he’s been telling me…”

“I know exactly what Rexforth has been telling you, Will. Did you get the name of the motel?”

“I got it. Cabin nineteen. Mind telling me why you want it checked, Mike?”

“Because Lucy has been in that cabin,” Shayne exploded. “I want to know when. In what shape she left it. Goddamn it, Will! Do I have to give you a blueprint?”

“Hold your horses, Mike. I’ll have the cabin checked. In the meantime….”

“In the meantime,” grated Shayne, “keep Rexforth there. I’m coming in.”

He hung up and went out of the booth to find a very tall, very thin, baldheaded man behind the desk with his wife hovering suspiciously in the background. He was wearing an undershirt, with a pair of pants which he had evidently pulled on hastily, and there was a worried look on his face. He was fingering the registration card for Number Nineteen, which Shayne had left lying on the desk, and he asked diffidently, “Something wrong about this, Mister? My wife tells me…”