Brett Halliday: Too Friendly, Too Dead

“Right now I don’t remember… wait a minute,” said Rourke with rising excitement. “I think there was such a one, Mike. I’ll have to check it out, but…”

“You check and have all the dope for me when I get there. They’re calling my plane right now. See you at the airport, Tim.”

Back at the Miami airport Shayne found Timothy Rourke, as expected, waiting for him at a small table just inside the bar. The reporter had a drink in front of him, and he was alert and eager as Shayne sat down and ordered a drink. “What’s this fast trip to New York about? Damn it, Mike. Why don’t you keep me posted?”

Shayne said, “Hold your horses. I’ll bring you up to date fast enough. One thing at a time. Is Linda Fitzgilpin still missing?”

“Right off the face of the earth. And Painter is really gunning for you. He blames you for preventing him from getting her story earlier.”

“At noon today he was thanking me for it. You heard him yourself.”

“Yeh. But that was noon. Level with me, Mike. Did you arrange to have her hide out from Painter?”

“No. In fact the last time I spoke to her… before noon… I extracted a solemn promise from her that she’d tell him the exact truth when he came around. When did he discover she was missing?”

“About five o’clock. After he’d checked out Nourse in L. A. and become convinced the man hadn’t been in Miami last night. You’re sure he was, Mike?”

“No. I’ve only the widow’s word for it. No one else saw him that I know of.”

“Any reason for her to lie about it?”

“I sure as hell can’t see any.” Shayne sipped his drink and frowned. “It was about the worst sort of admission she could make, and I had to drag it out of her piecemeal. Painter went to her place at five?”

“Yeh. With Sergeant Drake from Miami Homicide. They got no answer at her door, and got the super up to let them in… fearing, I guess, that maybe she’d done both herself and the youngsters in. No sign of them. Everything in order. No evidence of packing or hurried departure. He figured, naturally, that you’d spirited her away.”

“Naturally,” Shayne agreed blandly. “After all, she is a good-looking redhead. We’ll find her, Tim. I can’t believe she’s gone very far. What did you pick up on that other? Any unidentified female bodies in the last two months?”

“Just one.”

“That’s all I need. Give.”

“It was just about two months ago.” Rourke got some notes from his pocket and consulted them. “Body of a young woman washed up on the West shore of Biscayne Bay about Eightieth Street. She’d been in the water several days and just wore a slip and underwear. Her face had been bashed in, and several days in the water hadn’t improved her appearance. There was never any identification. Missing Persons put flyers out on her all over the country with no results. And you know something, Mike?” Rourke paused dramatically, pleased as a child with the secret he was about to impart.

“Not very much.”

“Autopsy showed she was full of sodium amytal when she was beaten and thrown in the water. How do you like that?”

“Very much. Rose McNally.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Rutherford Rodman. Remember the photograph I showed you this morning? Together with this menu?” Shayne got them from his pocket and showed Rourke the picture again. “That’s Rose McNally when she got married over a year ago. The man is Rutherford Rodman. Jerome Fitzgilpin was a witness at their wedding.”

“How do you know all this?” Rourke asked helplessly.

“That’s why I flew to New York. Rose disappeared from there headed for Miami about two months ago. She told a girl friend she was excited about getting her hands on a big wad of money. How does that figure to you?”

“Attempted blackmail?”

Shayne shrugged. “She wouldn’t be the first blackmailer who ever turned up floating in the water.”

“But who, Mike? Where would blackmail come in? And how does that connect with Fitzgilpin’s murder last night?”

“The sodium amytal connects the two. It worked successfully once two months ago, why wouldn’t it work again? Murderers aren’t too imaginative.”

“But why?”

“That’s for us to figure out.”

“The way I get it, Fitzgilpin did the couple a favor purely out of the goodness of his heart. Why should someone kill him for that?”

“What reason did anyone have for killing him? That’s what we’ve been up against from the beginning. Friendliest man in the world without a single known enemy. Yet someone fed him poison. That’s been the stumbling block. Now it begins to look as though he was killed because he was so friendly.”

“Hell of a note,” muttered Rourke, turning up his glass. “Generally when you dig back into a man’s life you discover scads of people who wanted him dead the worst way.”

“That’s right. So you trace down a few alibis and find one that doesn’t stand up, and that’s it.” Shayne sighed and rubbed his angular jaw reflectively. “That’s not the way it comes out this time.”

“There is the widow. She admitted having an affair and asking him for a divorce.”

“Yeh,” Shayne agreed noncommittally, “we’ve still got the widow.”

“Only, we haven’t got her. She did take a run-out powder, damn it. If you’ve got any idea where to find her…”

“Let Painter find her,” said Shayne grimly. “Right now, I believe Linda’s story: That she and her husband were reconciled and she hadn’t seen or heard from Nourse until he turned up unexpectedly last night. Women don’t normally kill a husband who has been good enough to take them back after an affair like that.”

“Then who…?”

“There’s that goddamned telephone call. Kelly!” Shayne ran knobby fingers through his bristly red hair. “If we could only tie someone named Kelly into the picture. A woman looking for an insurance broker who is willing to disregard the rules and sell her a quarter-million dollar insurance policy on her husband’s life without his knowledge. Just the first premium on that policy would be a hunk of money. I wonder if she went elsewhere after Fitzgilpin turned her down. I suppose there are plenty of crooked brokers who would arrange a deal like that.”

“No doubt.”

“If she did succeed in putting it over, we’d be doing the husband a favor by telling him. How many Kellys do you suppose there are in Miami?”

“Several hundred. It’s a damned common name. Almost like Smith or Jones, I think.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne slowly. “Almost as common as Smith or Jones. I wonder, by God, if we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

“How?” asked Rourke alertly.

“It just occurred to me that if you wanted to choose a common name as an alias you’d be smart to choose one like Kelly instead of Smith or Jones.”

“So?”

Shayne shrugged. “It’s an idea, that’s all.”

Rourke looked disapprovingly at his empty glass, then glanced down at the picture of the newly-married couple still lying face up on the table. He picked it up and turned it to get a better light, and frowned angrily. “I’ve still got that sneaking hunch I had when I first saw this picture. That I should know the guy. That I’ve seen him somewhere recently. Rodman, you say?”

“Rutherford G. Rodman. At least that’s the name he gave the New York license bureau.”

“Rodman?” Rourke closed his eyes tightly and savored the name while Shayne watched him hopefully, knowing the reporter’s uncanny ability to remember faces he had seen maybe only once or twice in the sometime distant past.

Slowly a change came over Rourke’s tight-drawn features. They relaxed and he opened his eyes wide. “I think I’ve got it, Mike. Hold onto your horses, but by God, I think I have. Let’s get the hell over to the News morgue.”