Brett Halliday: The Body Came Back

Rourke shook his head helplessly, took a sip of hot coffee and sputtered over it. “It’s the damnedest story. I guess we’ll never get the whole straight of it.”

“Relax and tell us all about it,” Shayne urged him. “You have my curiosity aroused.”

Rourke said, “Yeh,” and lit a cigarette while he composed his thoughts. “It began about three o’clock this morning when I got a tip there was a dead man in a room at the Encanto Hotel. I called a couple of homicide cops and we went up to room eight-ten. There was a woman having hysterics all over the place and there was a corpse on the floor. Very dead from five small caliber bullets. Stiff as a board. He’d been dead for hours. I recognized his ugly face right away from a newspaper picture. Name of Al Newman. Wanted for bank robbery and murder in Alabama a couple of days ago. You know,” he said to Shayne, raised his eyebrows. “That Eureka bank job. Shot one of the bank officials in cold blood and got away with forty grand… only the woman get-away driver snatched the loot and drove off leaving her two male companions behind.”

Shayne said thoughtfully, “I remember reading something about it. Didn’t she drive off with a hostage who was later released? One of the bank tellers?”

“That’s right. So here was this Al Newman dead in the woman’s hotel room, and her in a tizzy swearing she had no idea how he’d got there and that she’d been out drinking with Mike Shayne all evening, and to get him and ask him about it.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Shayne in great surprise. “Who was she?”

“She was registered at the hotel under the name of Mrs. Rose Hughes. Turned out her name is actually Vergie Powers. An actress. Used to do bit parts in Hollywood movies. In fact, she played in some of your shows, Mike. We figured later that’s how she knew your name and used it in a pinch.”

“Such is fame,” marveled Shayne. “You tell Lucy I wasn’t out drinking with an actress all evening, Tim. You can vouch for me until at least two o’clock.”

“That’s right. Well, it appeared later that she was just making up the first wild story that came into her mind. Because she was actually Al Newman’s girl-friend. Had been shacked up with him in Alabama while they cased the bank job… and she was the driver of the get-away car that snatched the bank loot and left Al to face the consequences behind her. She admitted she thought he had been killed in the chase that followed, and was completely surprised when he turned up in Miami tonight demanding his share of the money.”

“So she killed him?”

“She hasn’t actually admitted it, but she triggered him, all right. Funny thing. I found a confession in the room on hotel stationery signed ‘Vicky.’ But it was written in her handwriting. She tried to explain that with another fantastic story about her daughter named Vicky being there and doing the actual shooting, but she couldn’t produce any daughter or evidence of one, so that didn’t come off.”

Shayne said gravely, “You did have yourself quite a time.”

“That’s not half of it. Another thing I recognized about Al Newman was that he has a married sister in Miami named Duclos.”

“Duclos?” Shayne sat up and stared at Rourke as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “Not George Duclos?” he pleaded. “Not the guy who accused me of stealing his Ford earlier in the night?”

“What on earth, Michael?” demanded Lucy, wide-eyed and excited. “You stole a car?”

“It was all a mistake,” he told her. “A comedy of errors. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Yeh. That same guy,” Tim Rourke told him. “So there was another funny thing. Just before we found the body the police had investigated an anonymous tip and found Duclos locked up in the trunk of his own car out in the Northeast section. He’d been knocked out, and said a couple of strange men had assaulted him and locked him in his own trunk.

“They had him at Headquarters when we brought the Powers woman in, and while neither of them appeared to know the other, when he was questioned about Newman he admitted the fellow had turned up yesterday, told him he was hot and that he had to contact a woman registered at the Encanto as Mrs. Rose Hughes and collect forty grand from her. And he gave Duclos the torn half of a baggage check which he claimed he had got from the bank teller in Eureka who was in on the robbery with the gang and who admitted under torture that he and Vergie had planned all along to ditch the other two in front of the bank and take off with the loot.

“She was frantically denying everything at that point, but a search of her handbag turned up two halves of a railroad-baggage claim check at the FEC station. It reclaimed a suitcase that held approximately forty thousand dollars of the bank money… and she broke down and admitted everything when confronted with that.”

“How had she gotten hold of the second half of the claim check if Newman had left it with Duclos for safekeeping when he went to see her?” asked Lucy.

“That’s another part of the whole mixed-up story,” admitted Rourke with a glance at Shayne. “You see, when Duclos first came into the picture… and with Mike’s name having been mentioned by Vergie in the beginning as her drinking companion… the cops remembered that Mike had been picked up driving Duclos’s stolen Ford earlier in the night, and that’s when Will Gentry began trying to find Mike to ask him what he knew about all this.” Rourke paused in his recital to draw a long breath and get his thoughts in order.

“As I said, when they found the suitcase with the money in it, Vergie admitted she and the bank teller had driven straight into Montgomery that day and transferred the money into a suitcase, then she bought a ticket to Miami and they checked the suitcase on her ticket. Neither of them wholly trusting the other, they tore the claim check in two and he went back to Eureka to brazen it out, planning to meet her in Miami Saturday night at the Encanto where she would be registered as Mrs. Hughes, and they’d get the money and split it.

“It was the bank teller, Harvey Giles, who she was expecting to turn up at her room last night. She didn’t know that Al Newman had stayed alive in Alabama, that he had got back to Giles, tortured the poor guy and got his half of the baggage check and then killed him.

“So she was totally surprised when Duclos called her up and offered to sell half of the check for ten thousand dollars, and she claimed she went to Mike Shayne and propositioned him to accept one thousand in cash and her IOU for the other nine… to meet Duclos and pick up the check.

“Duclos confirmed her story to a certain extent. He admitted phoning her and asking for ten thousand, and arranged to meet a certain Mr. Jones to close the deal. He claimed he did meet Mr. Jones out there where he parked his car… that Jones knocked him unconscious and stole half of the claim check and locked him up in the trunk of his own car.”

Rourke paused and shrugged his shoulders cynically. “By that time, no one knew exactly what was what. Mike wasn’t available to answer any questions. And, actually, it didn’t seem to matter a hell of a lot.

“We had a dead bank robber who had murdered twice. And we had his woman accomplice who’d burned him. And Duclos, who’ll draw a prison term as accessory after the fact. Under the circumstances…” He turned in his chair and addressed Shayne directly, “I think Will Gentry is inclined to doubt whether you had anything to do with the whole deal at all. There’s no positive evidence to tie you into any of it. Unless you want to come in voluntarily and explain what in hell you were doing last night.”

Michael Shayne shook his head calmly at the question in Rourke’s voice. “It seems to me you and the cops did a good job without any assist from me at all. Let’s leave it that way.”