Brett Halliday - Shoot to Kill

Shayne said, “He was like that when Tim and I busted in not more than sixty seconds after the shot was fired, and he wasn’t moving a muscle. I guess he didn’t know what hit him.”

Griggs straightened up and looked around the room alertly. “This the only entrance?”

“I don’t know anything about the set-up and I haven’t asked any questions. I’m just an innocent bystander on this one, Sergeant.” Shayne looked around the room with Griggs. “That door in the back must open out onto a balcony.”

There was a door at the rear of the room on the left that had a wooden bottom and the top half of glass. To the right of the door there were two wide windows, evenly spaced, and both of them were tightly closed and latched on the inside.

Griggs and Shayne walked over to the door together while Rourke watched and listened alertly and made an occasional note. The door had a heavy brass bolt on the inside similar to the one that was fitted to the other door. The bolt was securely pushed inside the hasp. There was an outside light turned on over the door, and peering through the glass they could see a narrow balcony with a wrought iron railing, and a stone stairway leading down to the ground at the side of the house. It was pseudo-Moorish architecture, such as had been much the vogue in Miami in the early twenties.

Sergeant Griggs turned back and investigated the locked windows and muttered, “Everything locked up tight as a drum, with a don’t disturb sign on his door.” He went back and glanced at the flat top of the big desk. Wesley Ames had evidently been a very orderly man. There was no ashtray, no evidence that he had smoked. A chromium electric coffee percolator stood on a round, heat-resistant pad near the right side of the desk. It had an electric cord plugged into the base that dropped off the side of the desk and was plugged into an extension cord leading to a wall socket. It was the automatic type with a built-in thermostat that shuts it off when it has finished percolating and keeps the contents just below boiling for as long as it is left connected.

Beside the pot was a coffee cup in a saucer, and it contained a slight residue of very black coffee. At the left of the arm-chair in which Ames had been sitting were two wire mail baskets. The one on the left held a dozen or more unopened letters addressed to Wesley Ames. Between the two baskets was a stack of neatly arranged empty envelopes, each one carefully slit open the long way, and the other basket held a pile of letters which had evidently been removed from the empty envelopes.

Directly in front of the dead man was a very modern and very expensive Dictaphone with a gleaming chromium microphone set upright in a holder placed close to the edge of the desk so it could take dictation easily from a person seated behind the desk.

Nothing was out of place and nothing was disarranged in the smallest degree. It gave the impression that the dead man was methodical and orderly, who believed in a place for everything and everything in its place.

Their silent survey of the death scene was interrupted by Griffin announcing loudly from the hall, “Here come your smart laboratory boys now, Sergeant. Not much for them to do this time, I guess. You want me to hold ’em outside here ’til you’re through?”

Sergeant Griggs said, “I’m through in here.” He went to the door with Rourke and Shayne behind him and met the technicians of his squad coming down the hall. There was a cameraman with his tripod, the fingerprint expert with his kit, a man carrying a powerful portable vacuum cleaner, with an assistant M. E. bringing up the rear. Griggs waved them into the room saying pleasantly, “Give it a fast once-over, boys. Pictures and prints for the record. And you tell us when and how he died, eh, Doc? Watch it, because this time we’ve got a pretty good check on your guesswork.”

He waited until they passed him into the room and then went toward the head of the stairway, saying over his shoulder to Shayne and Rourke, “Come on with me and let’s get some statements on this thing. Then we can all go home and to bed… or wherever you two bachelors are going to bed these days.”

Downstairs, Ralph Larson was still seated on the settee where they had left him, bent forward with elbows resting on his knees and face buried in his hands.

The attorney from New York was slumped back comfortably in an overstuffed chair with a fat cigar clenched between his teeth and the remnants of what Shayne suspected was his second drink in his hand, and the brother of the murdered man sat bolt upright in a straight chair near the door, nervously smoking a cigarette in a long holder and darting worried glances around the room while he obviously waited for something to happen which he also obviously hoped wouldn’t happen.

Sergeant Griggs stopped at the foot of the stairs and said bluntly, “I don’t know who’s who around here. Can anyone suggest a private room I can use to talk to some of you people?”

Mark Ames came to his feet lithely. He said, “I’m Wesley Ames’ brother, Sergeant. This is Mr. Sutter from New York, an overnight guest. Both Mrs. Ames and Wesley’s secretary are out somewhere. The secretary, Victor Conroy, has an office fitted up over here through these double doors in what used to be the library. Is that what you want?”

“Do you live here with your brother?” asked Griggs.

“Certainly not.” Mark Ames looked appalled at the idea. “He hated my guts… and I his,” he went on frankly. “Tonight is the first time I’ve darkened his doors for months.”

“All right,” snapped Griggs. “I’ll get to you in a minute, Mr. Ames.”

He strode toward the double doors indicated by Mark, calling over his shoulder to his uniformed chauffeur who stood by the front door with Powers, “Come in, Jimmy, with your notebook. I’ll want some shorthand.”

He opened one of the doors leading off the living room and reached inside to switch on an overhead light. Then he turned back and said gruffly, “You first, I guess, Mike. And you come in, too, Tim. We’ll get this over as fast as we can.”

Two walls of the library were still lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books, the third wall had a row of businesslike filing cases against it. There was a long refectory table along one side that was littered with newspapers and typed manuscripts and manila folders and with half a dozen leather-seated chairs lined up against the wall behind it, and there was a large typewriter desk in the opposite corner with an electric typewriter and a Dictaphone playback machine on a stand beside it. Griggs chose the only comfortable chair in the room, upholstered in green leather, and motioned the patrolman toward the desk. There were two straight chairs on either side of Griggs, and Shayne and Rourke sat in those.

“Now then,” said Griggs. “Michael Shayne being interviewed, Jimmy. Tell us what you’re doing here and what you know about this, Mike. Just the simple facts.”

Shayne started with Rourke’s appeal to him on Larson’s behalf that afternoon, said he’d gone out to see Dorothy Larson and got her agreement to break off her affair with Ames, and mentioned dinner at Lucio’s.

“We got to my place a little before eight. Tim and Lucy Hamilton and I. The phone rang and it was Dorothy Larson saying her husband had a gun and was on his way to kill Wesley Ames. I hung up and told Lucy to call the cops, and Tim and I came out as fast as we could. Not more than ten minutes, I guess, but Larson’s car was already parked in front behind that black Cadillac. We saw the front door open and him run in… or somebody run in… just as we pulled up. The door slammed shut and there was a shout from inside and then a sort of crash. We ran in and saw Mark Ames lying on his back on the floor and a silver tray with broken glass near the stairs. A man wearing a white coat was just disappearing up the stairs shouting something in Spanish. We ran up, and Alfred… in the white coat… was pounding on that locked door with the Do Not Disturb sign on it.