Brett Halliday - Shoot to Kill

And then he didn’t drive to his hotel to satisfy his secretary’s curiosity. Instead, he stopped in front of the Miami Police Headquarters and parked in a space that was plainly marked “Reserved For Official Cars Only.” He went in a side entrance and down a hall to the left and climbed one flight of stairs and entered an open door into a small office that held a littered desk with Sergeant Griggs sitting behind it. The sergeant was studying a sheaf of reports and he glanced up with a thoroughly unwelcoming frown at the redhead who pulled up the only other chair in the office and sat down. He grunted sourly, “I thought you were bedded down for the night. That barefoot gal in the apartment across from Larson’s looked drunk enough not to mind who she slept with.”

Shayne shook his head and said cheerfully, “You’re a liar, Sarge. You know damned well you went into her apartment to try and question her about the Larsons, and you found her quietly passed out in her own bed all by her own sweet self. What did your boys turn up after I left?”

“Nothing,” growled Griggs wearily. “Not one damned thing that’s any good to us. No fingerprints of any significance. Nothing. Best we can make out of it… she started frenziedly packing a suitcase as though she were in a hell of a hurry and got interrupted or changed her mind for some reason. No one in the building saw her leave. No one, goddamn it, saw Ralph Larson come back this evening to get his gun and go out to kill Wesley Ames. Nobody saw nothing,” he ended disgustedly.

“What about relatives or close friends she might have gone to?”

“Larson says they haven’t got either one in town. The guy’s either a hell of an actor or he’s just about off his nut with worry about her. He appears to be a hundred times more concerned about her than he is about a little thing like murder,” Griggs went on bitterly. “It just hasn’t got through to him that he faces the chair for killing Ames. The young fool is proud of it.”

“You got the M.E.’s report on Ames?” Shayne asked abruptly.

“Yeh. It’s here some place along with the typed statements from the witnesses.” Griggs shuffled listlessly through the papers in front of him. “There’s nothing in it. What the hell do you expect? Wesley Ames is dead. Shot through the heart with a steel-jacketed thirty-eight that came out through his back and embedded in the chair. Ballistics says it was fired from the gun Larson handed you when you busted in. Death was instantaneous and occurred between half an hour and an hour before the body was examined. No unusual fingerprints in the room. Nothing. What the hell should there be? Everything was tied up in an absolutely perfect neat knot with premeditation and every other damned thing tied tight around Ralph Larson’s neck and not a single unanswered question about the case until his damned wife turns up missing with blood all over the place.”

“Her blood?” asked Shayne interestedly. “

“How the hell do I know?” snarled Griggs. “When we find her we’ll take a sample and find out. Just like a woman to complicate an open-and-shut case. First she incites her husband to commit murder, and then she disappears and throws a monkey-wrench into the proceedings.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne sympathetically. “Women are like that. Jezebels, that’s what they are. I don’t see why men put up with them. It would be a simpler world without them.”

“Simpler, maybe, but I don’t know, Mike. Where’d the kids come from?”

“There is that,” Shayne agreed. He switched back abruptly to business. “Did you say you have the typed statements of the witnesses there?”

“Yes. Not that there’s anything in them you haven’t already heard.”

Shayne said, “Could I see Sutter’s statement? I want to check one point.”

“Sutter? That lawyer from New York. It’s here.” Griggs fumbled through the papers, extracted two typed sheets stapled together and slid them across the desk to the detective.

Shayne took it and glanced down the first page swiftly, turned to the second page and stopped near the end to read the final paragraph carefully.

He handed it back, narrowing his eyes and rubbing his blunt chin thoughtfully. He nodded his head slowly, his eyes bleak and questioning, while Griggs watched him, puzzled but interested.

They had never been closely associated on a case before, and Griggs had the professional policeman’s innate distrust for private detectives and their methods of operation, but he was fully aware of Shayne’s long record of brilliant successes in the solution of cases, many of which had been bungled by his own police department, and he was not one to pass up any help no matter where it came from.

He asked gruffly, “You find anything there that I missed?”

Shayne said, “I don’t know. I’m beginning to get an inkling of something that’s been bothering me. Let’s see Ralph Larson’s statement.”

Silently, Griggs sorted it out from the others and passed it over.

Again, Shayne glanced swiftly down the typed lines to a point near the end where he paused and read the confessed killer’s words carefully. He put it down in front of him and looked across at Griggs and said flatly, “I think we both missed something. Where is Ames’ body now?”

“In the morgue for the time being. Pending funeral arrangements.”

Shayne leaned forward and said, “If you’re a smart cop you’ll order a P. M. on him, Sergeant.”

“A post mortem? What the hell for? We know exactly when and how he died.”

“Do we?”

“Are you completely nuts? You were there. You’re one of the main witnesses.”

Shayne leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes.

“We know that Ralph Larson shot him through the heart with a thirty-eight caliber bullet about sixty seconds before I broke the door down. Your medical examiner says the bullet passed through his heart and that the wound would have caused instant death. How much time elapsed between the firing of the shot and the medical examination?”

“You were there through it all,” growled Griggs. “Say twenty minutes. Thirty at the outside. You were the one who said he was dead by the time you broke the door down and got inside.”

Shayne said evenly, “Check my statement if you like, but I think this is what I said: That he looked pretty dead to me. But before I could check him, the radio cops got there and Griffin took over.’” He stopped to think a moment and added, “The way it was, Griffin was so busy holding a gun on me that he had Powers check to see if Ames was dead. Powers is nothing but a rookie, Griggs. If we reconstruct everything carefully, we’ll discover that Powers is the only person who touched Ames or even went close to him during all that time until the M. E. got there. I’m sure Powers is a smart lad, but I don’t believe he’s had much experience with dead bodies. No one else can testify with certainty concerning Ames’ condition.”

“Do you mean to say, goddamn it!” exploded Griggs, “that you’re suggesting the bullet didn’t kill Ames?”

Shayne nodded emphatically. “That’s why I want a P. M.”

“But damn it to hell,” fumed Griggs. “A thirty-eight slug through his heart! You’ve got the M. E.’s report. What more do you want?”

“Thirty minutes after the shooting,” Shayne reminded him. “After a completely superficial examination. There was no reason for it to be more than that,” he went on swiftly and placatingly. “All of us knew… or thought we knew… exactly how and when Ames died. The M. E. had no reason to question the evidence and make anything more than the most superficial examination. But now I think a post mortem is definitely called for.”

“I’d be the laughing-stock of the department.”