Brett Halliday - The Private Practice of Michael Shayne

Carefully polishing his fingerprints from the clean Marco barrel, he inserted it in his pistol and locked the carriage on it. Ejecting one cartridge from the full Marco magazine, he put that and the other loose bullet in his magazine and slid it back into his pistol.

Laying that gun aside, he put the dirty barrel of his pistol into the Marco framework after cleaning it of fingerprints, polished the magazine with its one missing cartridge and put it back where it belonged. He then went over the entire Marco pistol with cleaning fluid, polishing it off with an oiled rag, and dropped it into the drawer.

Putting his pistol in beside the other, he looked upon his work with satisfaction. His own weapon was clean and fully loaded. The Marco pistol had a barrel which had been recently fouled by one shot, and one bullet was missing from the magazine.

He was closing the drawer when he remembered a small detail he had overlooked. Every time an automatic is fired, it ejects the empty shell and throws another one into the firing chamber under the hammer. Leaving the Marco pistol this way, with the chamber empty and seven cartridges in the magazine, would be immediate proof to anyone familiar with firearms that it had been tampered with after being fired.

Fervently thanking the gods who control the destinies of private detectives, Shayne got out a handkerchief and lifted the pistol out, pulled the carriage back and threw a loaded shell under the hammer. He pushed the safety on, but left it cocked, as it should properly be.

He closed the drawer on the two weapons and took another short drink, then went into his bedroom and pulled the shades, slid out of his jacket and stretched out full length on the bed.

In five minutes he was asleep.

The telephone wakened him late in the afternoon.

John Marco was on the wire. He sounded worn out, harassed.

“I’ve been thinking it over, Shayne. I’m ready to do business with you. How soon can you have Marsha back home?”

“Wait a minute,” Shayne protested. “You sound as though I had the girl on tap. I’m not holding her for ransom. I’m not even sure I can find her. I simply offered to go to work on the case if you want to retain me.”

There was a long pause.

Then, Marco said harshly, “All right. Put it that way. How much is it going to cost?”

“More than your daughter’s worth,” Shayne assured him cheerfully. “Ten grand should be about right.”

“Ten grand? My God, Shayne-” Marco’s voice trailed off into shocked silence.

Shayne held the receiver to his ear and listened with a sardonic gleam of amusement in his eyes.

“All right.” Marco sounded utterly defeated. “C.O.D., eh?”

“Listen,” Shayne warned sharply. “You’re trying to make this sound too damned much like extortion. Here’s the way it’ll be handled-or not at all. Bring a certified check or the cash over to the First National Bank first thing in the morning and put it in escrow for me. Leave a signed affidavit that the money is payment for services rendered in returning your daughter who left home voluntarily-with definite instructions that it shall be paid over to me when the girl is safely back. That’s the only way I’ll lift my finger to find her.”

“You’re getting awful legal all at once,” Marco complained.

“I trust you just as far as I could throw a bull by the tail,” Shayne told him pleasantly.

There was another long pause, and Shayne wondered who Marco was consulting with. Painter, maybe.

Finally, the gambler asked, “Will you personally guarantee her safety until I can get the money in the bank?”

“How the hell can I do that? I don’t know where she is. I’m not even going to start looking until you put that money in escrow.”

He hung up the receiver and went to the table to pour himself a drink. Sipping it, he spread out the sheet of paper bearing the eleven questions he had written out that morning. His gaze slid down the list morosely until it reached number eleven. His eyes brightened, and he ran a line through it with a pencil. After all, the most important question was answered.

He finished his drink and went out to the kitchen where he made a pot of coffee and a huge stack of whole-wheat toast, scrambled five eggs, and sat down at the kitchenette table to eat with the gusto of a man virtuously hungered by his labors.

He had finished every crumb and was carrying a final cup of coffee into the living-room when his telephone rang again.

It was Will Gentry.

“Nothing on the accident car or victims, Mike. I’ve wired the license number of the car to New York, and sent prints to Washington. No identification numbers on the guns. It’s a cinch they either haven’t been in Miami long, or have been laying low.”

“How about the handkerchief?”

“Nothing stirring on the one you gave me this morning. Our chemist put it through every known test and some that he made up as he went along. It’s nothing but a handkerchief. The one you left on my desk at noon is identical, though.”

“Keep a tight hold on them,” Shayne cautioned. “They’re exhibits A and B in the Grange murder case. The bodies you dug out of the canal are exhibits C and D.”

He hung up and slouched over to the light switch to dispel the gloom of evening, went back to the table and distastefully drank half his cup of cool coffee.

He sat there sprawled out in a chair for a long time, mulling over and over the meager facts in his possession. A lot of little things. Unimportant items. Each one insignificant in itself.

Tied together, they had to mean something. As yet, he hadn’t found anything to tie them with. The most important findings did not lift his spirits any.

His gun-evidently stolen by his best friend, Larry Kincaid. The gun which had almost certainly killed Harry Grange.

He welcomed the ringing of the telephone. It was Tony, very excited.

“Say, Mike, you ast me this mornin’ did I know where Chuck Evans hangs out.”

“Yeh. He’s moved from Mamma Julie’s.”

“I can tell you where his dame is right now if you wanta know.”

“Belle? You bet I want to know, Tony.”

“She’s stewed to the gills out in a little dump on Seventy-ninth Street. The Round-up. It’s a lousy joint-”

“I know where it is,” Shayne interrupted. “How do you know she’s there?”

“I just met a lug that come from there. He says she’s singin’ the blues about Chuck takin’ a runout powder. She gets on a tear ever so often and-”

“I’ll go see if I can locate her.”

“Listen, boss. You better let me go along. Bernie’s gang hangs out there mostly, and you know how Bernie don’t love you none.”

“That hophead?” Shayne laughed scornfully. “Who told you I was slipping?”

He hung up and got his coat and jacket, went down to the lobby and said to the night clerk, “I’m going out for a little while. If my sister should come by-just let her in my room and ask her to wait.”

“Which one of your sisters?”

“Any of them,” Shayne said blithely.

He went out to his car and drove north toward Seventy-ninth Street.

West on Seventy-ninth Street, past the Little River business section, stores and residences gave way to small truck farms and long, sheltered stands with artistic arrangements of golden citrus fruits. Here, stretches of native pines and thickets of semitropical shrubs have not been reached by the long arm of the ever-developing city, though bisected by paved crossroads leading to the airport, Opa-Locka, Hialeah, and other outlying developments which sprang into being during the hectic boom days.

The moon had not yet risen, and stars studded the dark velvety blue of the tropical sky, casting an illusively perceptible sheen through the still night. Yet there was that peculiar quality of humid coolness characteristic of a spring night in Miami.