Brett Halliday - The Body Came Back

“Me?”

“You’re a reporter,” Shayne reminded him. “You’ve come out to get an interview with Duclos about how his car was stolen and got recovered so quickly. Nothing queer about that. Ask his wife where he is and when she expects him.”

“Suppose he’s there?” Rourke was slowly driving around the block as Shayne directed. “He might have left the car some place… loaned it to a friend or some damn thing.”

“Then find out where it is,” said Shayne. “Tell him you want to examine it for fingerprints to disprove my story that someone else stole it and loaned it to me. He’ll go for that. He was sore at the police station because they didn’t have me locked up in a cell.”

Rourke sighed and turned back into the block where the single lighted house stood out like a beacon in the night. He said wonderingly, “I get sucked into doing the damnedest things.”

“All in a good cause,” Shayne told him heartily. “I’ll slouch down out of sight if a car pulls up.”

Rourke stopped directly in front of the lighted house and shut off his ignition and lights. He got out and went up the walk to the front door with a porch light on, and Shayne watched from the front seat of the car while he rang the bell and waited for at least a full minute before the door opened to admit him.

A woman stood inside the door blinking uncertainly at Timothy Rourke. She had a thin face and straggly brown hair streaked with gray, a sharp nose and faded blue eyes. She wore a cotton print dress and a pair of scuffed blue slippers without any stockings.

He said, “Mrs. Duclos,” and she nodded slowly, considering him without rancor but without apparent interest.

He stepped forward briskly and she moved aside to let him enter a small, steamy, cluttered sitting room, with shabby furniture and a general run-down appearance.

“I’m a reporter from the Miami News,” he told her. “I’d like to talk to your husband if he’s home.”

She said, “He isn’t here right now. But I’m expecting him any minute. I don’t know. They called him about his car being stolen. The police did. And he went down to see about it. That was an hour or so ago. Was that what you wanted to talk to him about?”

Passing close in front of her to get inside, Rourke got a strong whiff of gin and tonic on her breath, and glancing across the room at a low armchair with a faded slipcover on it and pages of the News scattered on the floor around it, he saw a tall glass on a side table with the remnants of a drink in the bottom of it

He said hastily, “Yes. It’s about the stolen car. I’m surprised he isn’t home yet I know he picked his car up at headquarters about an hour ago.”

“George’ll be along I guess,” she said indifferently, closing the door and waving one hand vaguely toward a butt-sprung couch. “You want to wait, he’ll be along, I guess. He was that upset about the car when they telephoned him.” She moved past him toward the armchair, sliding her feet along on the worn carpet carefully, almost shuffling, and giving the impression that she wasn’t entirely too steady on her feet. “He didn’t know it was stolen, you see… until they called him. He’d parked it out front and, when they asked him over the phone, he looked out and then he said, ‘Why, by God! It’s gone.’ You know. You don’t expect something like that to happen. Not in a quiet neighborhood like this, you don’t. And so they had a police car to stop by to pick him up to go down and identify it, and I don’t know why he isn’t back home yet. Won’t you sit down… Mister? Could I offer you something to drink, maybe?” She lifted her own glass and drank the dregs, then looked at him over the rim almost coyly. “There’s gin in the kitchen… and some kind of mixer, I guess.”

Rourke remained standing. He said, “Nothing for me. Thanks just the same.” His gaze wandered around the room, avoiding the somewhat avid look in her pale blue eyes while he mentally cursed himself for allowing Shayne to push him into this sort of situation. “Not much use my waiting, I guess,” he said uncertainly. “If you don’t know what’s holding him up, you don’t know how long he’ll be.”

He paused abruptly, his roving gaze caught by a 4x6 photograph in a cardboard folder on the mantel of an ornamental (though certainly not usable) fireplace at the end of the room. The woman in the picture was quite clearly Mrs. Duclos, taken ten or fifteen years before, and the features of the man standing beside her brought a strong feeling of recognition to the reporter.

It was not a prepossessing face. Thin and ratlike. With shifty eyes that were too close together, and a tight mouth that smirked rather than smiled.

It was definitely not a picture of her husband, whom Rourke had talked to at police headquarters just a short time before. It was just as definitely the picture of a man whom Rourke knew he should recognize… someone whom he had met very recently or whose picture he had seen very recently.

Timothy Rourke had a sixth sense for the memory of faces. Long years of reportorial training had developed that sense to an acute degree, and he often remembered and recognized the picture of someone who had been in the news five or ten years previously-

Now he felt a familiar tingle traveling up his spine as he looked across at the photograph on the mantel. He should recognize it. He knew he had seen that face recently… and under circumstances which he should recall. He didn’t know why, but there was that sixth sense working strongly inside him.

He moved across the room to look at the picture more closely, asking, “Is this your husband, Mrs. Duclos?” knowing, of course, that it wasn’t.

“George? No. ’S my brother Al.”

“Your brother?” Rourke nodded slowly, studying the picture intently. “I can see the family resemblance now, although I must say you’re a lot better looking. Does he live in Miami?”

“Al? No. He just lives all over. You know. I don’t see him or even hear from him for years until he just suddenly shows up. You know. When he’s broke and needs a square meal. Like today.”

“He showed up unexpectedly today?” Rourke kept his voice light and casual, still with that tingle working inside him.

“That’s right. Like I said. You never know with Al. Never a word for years and then he rolls up like a bad penny. I was afraid George’d be sore, but he wasn’t. Seemed like he and Al got on real good.”

“Is he staying here with you?”

“Where else? We got a spare bedroom.”

“I wonder if I could talk to him,” suggested Rourke, “while I’m waiting for your husband? Just fill me in on background material.”

“George and him went down to the corner bar on Miami Avenue for a beer after dinner. George came back about ten and said Al looked like he was headed to make a night of it. I told him he shouldn’t give that no-good brother of mine money to spend on beer, but George just laughed and said he’d only give him two bucks and he guessed that wouldn’t break us. And anyhow he was with some others that was buying, and he guessed Al’d be back after he spent the two bucks. But he ain’t showed up yet, so I guess them others must still be buying.”

She lifted her empty glass and peered at it “Sure you don’t want a drink, Mister?”

“No. But why don’t you fix yours?” Rourke’s thin features were alert with excitement and his deep-set eyes glittered. He was on the verge of it, damn it. It was important that he remember where he had seen that face before. All of the ingrained instincts of a news-hound clamored at him that it was important for him to remember.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he added politely. “I’ll have to be going in a minute anyhow.”