Brett Halliday - Never Kill a Client

Shayne gritted his teeth and said as patiently as he could manage, “I know Lucy was in that cabin yesterday, Will. I don’t know when she was taken there, or how, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t willingly on her part. Don’t you understand, goddamn it?”

“I don’t understand much of anything,” confessed Gentry. “What makes you so sure Lucy was there at all? She leave you a note or something?”

Shayne hesitated, the wispy bit of embroidered blue nylon in his pocket seeming to burn against his flesh. He couldn’t confess the truth to Will Gentry. Not even to Gentry, damn it. There was something so leeringly sexual about a girl leaving her panties behind her in a motel room. No matter how well you knew Lucy… no matter how much you liked and respected her… a pair of discarded panties were… well, a pair of discarded panties.

He replied stiffly, “Something like that. I’ll bet you a hundred to one they find Lucy’s fingerprints there… left not later than six o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“Just when Rexforth claims she went there with you,” Gentry commented stubbornly, putting light to his cigar and puffing on it with a sour frown as though it tasted worse than it smelled.

Shayne said helplessly, “None of this is helping us find Lucy. If your lousy cops had just kept their hands on Elsa Cornell after I turned her over to you…”

He was interrupted by the breezy entrance of Timothy Rourke into the room. He stopped dead in his tracks at sight of Shayne.

“I’ve been trying to call you, Mike. You know I’ve been checking back in our old files on that O’Keefe embezzlement in Jacksonville and by God, Mike, this may be important. There was a round hundred thousand stolen… and not one penny of it was recovered. North American Bonding Company paid off in full. O’Keefe claimed he had spent it all prior to his arrest, but rumor was rife that ’twasn’t so. That he maybe had it put away until he got out of the pen and could enjoy it. Hey!” Rourke paused in his recital and glanced around uncertainly at the wooden faces about him.

“None of you seem very much excited about this,” he said in a deflated voice. “I thought it might be important as a motive for O’Keefe’s murder.”

Shayne said, “It’s important all right, Tim, but we’ve already got the same dope from Mr. Rexforth here. Remember the nasty little man Lucy mentioned in her notes?”

“Oh. Sure.” Rourke glanced at Rexforth and agreed, “He is sort of a nasty little man at that. All right. Maybe you already know this, too, but I thought you’d be interested. I know who the dame is you had at the morgue, Mike. The one you called Elsa Cornell.”

Shayne swung on him eagerly. “You do? Who is she?”

“I had a kind of funny feeling all along,” Rourke confessed, “that I’d seen her picture in the paper somewhere… sometime. And when I was looking over the O’Keefe file, there it was. Right in front of me. A few years younger, but not a damn bit prettier.”

“Who?” Shayne breathed, his throat constricted.

“Mrs. Julius O’Keefe, that’s who. At least she was when he stole the money. She divorced him later and married his ex-boss. A guy named Robert Long. And you know what’s one of the funniest coincidences of all, Mike? That Robert Long is the same one that got killed here in Miami a few months ago in a shooting scrape you were mixed up in. I don’t know whether you remember…”

“I remember all right,” Shayne said grimly. He grabbed the reporter’s arm and swung him toward the door. “Come on, Tim. Let’s get going.”

“Hold it,” shouted Gentry angrily. “I’ve got two witnesses on their way in here to identify you, Mike. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

“To find Lucy,” Shayne said over his shoulder as he jerked the door open and shoved Rourke through it in front of him.

“Where are we headed?” Timothy Rourke demanded breathlessly as Shayne gunned his car away from the police station.

“To visit a guy named Dirkson Boal,” Shayne grated. “Lives out north, I think. Miami Shores, maybe. Do you know without stopping to look up the address?”

“The lawyer? Yeh. I interviewed him at home a couple of months ago. Big place off the Boulevard… north of Hundredth Street.”

Shayne nodded, pushing through traffic as fast as he could east to Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s still twenty minutes before most business places open up. If we’re lucky we’ll catch Boal at home.”

“What’s he got to do with it, Mike?” Rourke asked helplessly. “Fill me in a little.”

“He’s got everything to do with it. He and Mrs. Robert Long… O’Keefe’s ex-wife. They’re in it together. There are a couple others, but I imagine they’re just hired hands. You were right about the money O’Keefe stole. I don’t think he did spend it. It looks like he and Long were in it together and put it away in a safe place… probably in Miami… until he got out of jail to claim it with Long.”

He had to stop for a signal light at the Boulevard, and waited impatiently until he could cross the intersection and swing into the outer lane of northbound traffic where he began passing every car in sight.

“It started four months ago when Long died and I was with him. The story was in the papers and it evidently gave various people ideas about the money.”

He swiftly outlined the theory Rexforth had formed independently, and ended flatly, “He was wrong, of course. Long told me nothing and didn’t turn over any half of a claim check to me. His wife held it, of course, and she evidently got the same bright idea that Rexforth had… that O’Keefe would be willing to split with me, although he’d never in the world split with her.

“I suppose she went to Boal with her bright idea about that time, and they worked it out together. Get hold of some guy who could be made up to look enough like me to pass casual inspection… send him to the pen to gain O’Keefe’s confidence… pull strings to get the man pardoned… then arrange to get Lucy and me out of the office on the crucial day of O’Keefe’s release.”

“Why rush out to Boal’s house like this?” asked Rourke. “You’ve got Mrs. Long under arrest. Why not…?”

“That’s the point. We haven’t got her. She got away on her way from the morgue to the station this morning. It’s my bet that she went straight to Boal. Remember, she knows it’s turned into a murder now. She stood there beside me in the morgue looking down at the man she used to be married to and never turned a hair.

“She and Boal are worried,” he added grimly. “The whole thing blew up in their faces when O’Keefe got himself killed in my office by their two hired hands. If they did get what they needed to recover the money off the body of O’Keefe, it’s my guess they’ll try to pick it up from wherever it is as soon as the place opens for business this morning, and get out of town.”

“What about Lucy all this time. You figure Boal has got her?”

“That’s the only way it does figure,” Shayne told him, hoping to God he was right. “I’m pretty sure the pair in my office panicked yesterday after killing O’Keefe, and rushed out to get Lucy from a motel room where they had put her for safe-keeping. They’d go straight to the boss with her… I hope. And dump her in his lap.

“Boal isn’t the type to panic,” he went on slowly. “He wouldn’t take it on the lam without sitting tight until this morning to make a last try at the dough. So far as he knew I was still cuddled up cozily with Mrs. Long in Los Angeles, and even when O’Keefe’s body was found he didn’t see anything to tie him into it.