Brett Halliday: The Homicidal Virgin

He heard it ringing far away in Denton, Illinois, and then it stopped and a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Is Roy at home?” asked Shayne gruffly.

“No. He won’t be back until a little after lunch. Is that Pete?”

Shayne said, “No,” and hung up. He told Lucy, “Get me a seat on the first jet flight to Chicago. Round trip. With a return reservation this afternoon if you can.”

It was less than a half-hour drive by taxi from the O’Hara Airport to the small town of Denton. Shayne had the driver stop at a filling station on the outskirts of the village, where he consulted a telephone book and got the street address of Roy Combs. The station attendant told him to continue as they were to the first traffic light, then turn left for a block and a half.

They did so, and drew up in front of a small sunbathed house in a row of similar small, frame houses, each with its neat rectangle of front yard and attached one-car garage.

There were small children playing in some of the other yards, but none in front of the Combs’ residence. Shayne got out and told the driver to wait with his flag down, and strode up the cinder walk to the front door framed by trellised roses. There was no electric button, so he knocked and waited.

The door opened and a young girl stood in the dimly cool interior looking out at him questioningly. She wore tight, black Toreador pants and a fresh white cotton blouse, and was barefooted. Smooth black hair with curling tips hung down on each side of her face to frame the piquant features.

Shayne took off his hat and said gravely, “Hello, Jane Smith.”

A little cry of terror and of recognition escaped her lips. Her black eyes widened and she put her right hand impulsively up to her mouth, gnawing at the knuckles with sharp white teeth like a small child in the face of catastrophe.

Otherwise, neither of them moved for a long moment. Then she wrenched her gaze away from Shayne’s and turned partly aside with a half-sob, bending her head abjectly so the long black hair swung forward and formed a curtain to hide her face.

Shayne stepped inside the square living room and closed the front door behind him. As his eyes adjusted themselves from the bright sunlight, he gazed somberly about at the worn rug on the floor, shabby cretonne slipcovers on the furniture and two Grant Wood reproductions on the walls. The sitting room was clean and tidy, and spoke of lower-middle-class poverty.

His gaze went back to the slender figure of the girl whose head was still bowed and turned away from him, and then it lifted and went beyond her to the figure of a young man standing in the open doorway beyond her. He wore cotton slacks and a Tee-shirt, and his sandy hair was damp and freshly brushed.

Shayne said sardonically, “And Paul Winterbottom. Last time I saw you was in a Miami bar, Paul. Or do you prefer to be called Roy?”

“It’s Mike Wayne!” The young man’s tight features fell apart suddenly. He blinked his eyes vacuously and his mouth drooped open. Then he got hold of himself and darted forward fiercely to put his arm tightly about his wife’s slender waist, and he exclaimed too loudly… for Shayne’s benefit rather than hers: “Don’t you worry, Hon. We haven’t done anything… no matter what he says.”

She turned into his encircling arms and clung to him, sobbing. He wet his lips and glared defiantly over the top of her head at the Miami detective.

Shayne dropped his hat on a low table and lowered his rangy body into a deep chair near the door. He said dryly, “I have a seat reserved on a four-o’clock plane back to Miami. Let’s get some talking done.”

“All right,” said the young man fiercely. “So you chased us down. So what? You can’t pin anything on us. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Have you seen today’s paper?”

“No.”

“Your father shot and killed a man in Miami last night,” Shayne informed him bleakly.

Roy Combs staggered back, releasing his wife. He stuttered, “My… father?”

Free of his arms, the girl straightened and tossed her head back, then whirled to face Shayne, advancing toward him soundlessly on bare feet, hands outstretched, curved and clawlike.

“Don’t call him that.” Her voice and face were dangerously calm. “Don’t ever call him that.”

“Wait, Beth.” Roy stumbled forward and caught her arm, pulled her back. “Who did he kill, Mr. Wayne?”

“Harry Gleason.”

They stood close together in front of him, trembling and looking at each other.

Shayne kept his voice hard and impersonal. He said, “Sit down on the sofa, you two, and answer some questions.” He got out a cigarette and lit it while the frightened young couple moved back and sat down side by side on the sofa, holding hands tightly and with their eyes fixed on Shayne as though he were a bomb with a short fuse that was burning down fast.

“How much do you know about what happened in Endore, Colorado, more than twenty years ago?”

“Everything,” said Roy Combs bitterly. “When Harry Gleason finished his stretch in the penitentiary, he took me out of the State Home where I’d been since birth and put me with a private family where he paid my room and board until I finished high school. Then he showed me the old clippings and told me the whole story about my father and mother. And now you say Harry’s dead. Henderson killed him? Just like he killed my mother…” He broke off into dry sobs.

Shayne said, “I’m afraid it was self-defense. Gleason came to his house with a gun at midnight, and Henderson shot first.”

“I don’t believe it. He just fixed it to look that way. Harry wouldn’t have ever done that. He was hell-bent on peace. He made us promise we wouldn’t do anything to Henderson after he saw him on television that time and knew he was still alive.”

Shayne shook his head. “There’s evidence that Gleason made one previous attempt with the same gun he threatened Henderson with last night. And whoever you hired to plant the bomb on Henderson’s boat didn’t help matters either,” he went on deliberately. “With two unsuccessful attempts on his life in the last few days, he had every legal right to shoot first without asking questions when Gleason turned up on his doorstep last night.”

“We don’t know anything about a bomb,” said Roy fiercely. “We didn’t hire anybody to do anything. You tell him, Beth.”

“I couldn’t find anybody who’d do it,” she said listlessly. “Even with that wonderful story I thought up and offering them all the money in the world. They still wouldn’t do it. Just like you,” she ended with a faint curl of her upper lip. “All I got was good advice like you gave me.”

“It was a crazy idea from the word go,” put in her husband vehemently. “My God! if I’d had the faintest idea what Beth was up to, I’d never have let her go to Miami. But she claimed she just wanted to find out what kind of man he was… to spy out the situation for Harry and help him put the clamps on him later.”

“To blackmail him?” asked Shayne harshly.

“Call it blackmail if you want to. I don’t. I didn’t blame Harry one bit. God in heaven! think what he’d been through on account of him.”

“What,” asked Shayne, “had he been through?”

Then the whole story of perfidy and cowardice and near-murder almost a quarter of a century before poured out of the young man’s eager lips while Shayne sat very quiet in the small living room and listened to it.

In mid-depression years, Ernest Combs and Harry Gleason were equal partners in a wholesale business in a suburban community near Denver, Colorado. With slack times and a succession of bad breaks, they faced the prospect of losing their business and everything they had invested. With a large stock of heavily mortgaged and completely insured goods in an isolated warehouse, the two desperate men had hit upon the expedient of selling off the stock secretly and at a high discount, and salting away the proceeds in cash-then burning the empty warehouse to the ground and collecting insurance on the non-existent contents.