Brett Halliday - Murder by Proxy

They all stood well back from the car, grim-faced and staring, while the locked-in odor was absorbed and carried away by the fresh breeze.

The dead woman wore a red cocktail dress, the hem of which was up around her waist, displaying long and well-fleshed legs. She was also a blonde.

That’s about all any of them could tell about her at this point. Her face had been brutally smashed in so that she was totally unrecognizable. Before death, she might well have been as beautiful as the picture of Ellen Harris showed her to be… or she might have been so ugly that no man would look at her twice.

There simply was no way of telling at this point.

Shayne heard running footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Herbert Harris trotting toward them across the parking lot. The New Yorker’s face was ashen and his tie was askew. Shayne breathed an oath deep in his throat and moved to meet the man and slow him down, grasping his arm tightly.

“They found her car?” Harris panted. His frightened gaze was on the open trunk, the half dozen men standing in a semi-circle around it. “My God, Shayne…”

“I’m afraid we’ve found her, too, Mr. Harris.” Shayne’s fingers gripped his arm tightly and he hated his job at that moment. “Take it easy,” he cautioned, leading the man forward. “You can make an identification later. Right now…”

“Oh, my God,” moaned Harris as he saw what was inside the trunk of the convertible. He leaned against Shayne and a small whiff of the smell came to his nostrils, and he was unashamedly sick on the ground while Shayne supported his retching body with a big arm about him.

“Is that Ellen?” He kept his eyes tightly closed and leaned against Shayne. “Is that… my wife?” he went on shudderingly.

Shayne turned him aside, saying harshly, “We don’t know yet. Probably. Go ahead and be sick,” he went on in the same harsh voice. “Later on we’ll have to try and get a positive identification.”

“I’m all right,” Harris sobbed, retching again, but straightening himself and drawing away from Shayne.

Peter Painter marched up officiously and demanded, “Is that your wife, Harris? Do you recognize her?”

“Who could… recognize her?” Harris cried out in an anguished voice. “Could you recognize your wife if she looked like that?” He covered his face with his hands and his knees buckled beneath him.

Shayne lowered his shaking body gently to the ground and said wonderingly, “For God’s sake, Petey. Let the guy be for now. You can get your identification later.” He jerked his head at Merrill and said, “Help me get him back to his room and get a doctor for him.”

An hour later Michael Shayne and Timothy Rourke sat side by side on the sofa in Lucy Hamilton’s apartment, still waiting for a telephone call from Jim Gifford in New York. Lucy had efficiently served them drinks, and she was warming up some food in the oven in the kitchen, and now she sat across from the pair in a deep chair with her stockinged feet tucked up under her, and asked wonderingly, “Are you telling me, Michael, that they’re still not sure the woman in the automobile trunk is Mrs. Harris?” Shayne clawed at his unruly, red hair, and said, “Sure is a pretty positive word, Lucy. How can they be? Nobody can possibly identify a faceless woman. Of course, everything points to the body being Mrs. Harris. But that’s what bothers me. Whenever I see a corpse beaten up beyond recognition, discovered under circumstances where everything outwardly points to it being a particular person… I wonder if it was planned that way. To make us think it’s Mrs. Harris when it isn’t.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mike,” Rourke warned him. “The rented car had been driven only forty-two miles. We know Mrs. Harris went for a drive before she came back to the Beachhaven at seven to pick up Gene Blake. The car must have been sitting in that lot since late Monday night. You know, the M.E. said she had been placed in the trunk of the car within a few hours after her death… before real rigor mortis had set in. And he placed the time as Monday or Tuesday night at the latest… judging by the amount of decomposition. She’s been missing since then. Who else could it be?”

Shayne growled. “I know all that. But why was her face and head so senselessly beaten into a pulp? I still don’t like it,” he said flatly.

“Can’t they tell by her fingerprints?” Lucy asked brightly.

“Painter will do that,” conceded Shayne. “He’s thorough when it comes to routine police procedure… and he doesn’t jump to conclusions no matter what else you say about him. He questioned Harris about any official record of her prints before we took the poor devil back to the hotel and got him a doctor and a sedative, and when Harris insisted his wife’s prints weren’t on record, he was quick enough to get the address of their New York apartment. If I know Petey as well as I think I do, he’ll have a set of the dead woman’s prints in New York tomorrow morning to be checked against those in the Harris apartment. Then we’ll be sure. But, until then, I’m still going to wonder why she was beaten so as to be unidentifiable.” He emptied his glass of cognac and Lucy jumped up to refill it.

“Somehow,” she said thoughtfully, “thinking about poor Mr. Harris in the office this morning, I think maybe this is easier on him than the other would have been. You know what I mean, Michael… if Painter had been right and it was just a matter of her sleeping out for a few nights.”

Shayne nodded and agreed. “You never know which is worse for the survivor in a case like that. At the same time, now that she’s dead, the whole tawdry story is going to come out. Everything I found out about her today indicates that she was just about the opposite of what her husband believed her to be. Instead of an ever-loving wife, the picture we get of her here in Miami is a sexy floozie who was ready to take up with the first man that looked at her. Herbert Harris is going to have to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.”

Lucy Hamilton’s telephone rang as he finished. She padded across to answer it, and said, “Mr. Shayne is right here waiting for your call, Mr. Gifford.” She held the instrument out to her employer.

Shayne took it and said, “Hi, Jim.”

“Mike. I’m sorry to call so late, but I’ve been getting around. It’s a Saturday, you know, and people are hard to catch up with.”

“What have you got?”

“Just about negative, Mike. Nothing that I assume you hoped I’d get on Ellen Harris. All the dope I can gather here points her up as a plenty beautiful doll, but strictly on the up and up. I contacted a couple of models she knew before she married Harris, and they swear she never played around. Seems like she fell for him hard, and he was her one and only. Same dope from those who knew her after she was married. Strictly a one-man gal, and happy and contented with what she had. Seems they weren’t too social, but in a small circle of friends they were regarded as a veddy, veddy happily married couple. I’ve got a hunch that isn’t what you wanted, but that’s all yours truly turned up with a lot of leg-work today. Is the lady still among the missing?”

Shayne said, “No. We found her about an hour ago, Jim. Dead.”

Jim Gifford said, “Oh?” very thoughtfully.

“So here’s some more leg-work, Jim. I don’t know how much you can accomplish on a Sunday, but this time concentrate on Herbert Harris. His wife reached here by plane Monday afternoon and was probably killed late that night. Find out where he was Monday night. Check his personal life.”

“Like that, huh?”

Shayne said sharply, “It’s always like that when a married woman gets bumped off. The guy that did this job, by the way, wasn’t satisfied with just killing her. He frenziedly beat her beautiful face into a pulp just for the hell of it. That puts it close to home in my book.”