Brett Halliday - Guilty as Hell

“Are you serious?”

“No, they wouldn’t have the gall. It makes my blood sizzle. I told him, we all told him. When you have a revolutionary product, get it on the market first and ask questions afterward. We didn’t know it then, but we surely do know it now, the United States people were working their balls off all summer, excuse the expression. It’s a textbook case. Ossified management.”

“Despard, did anything particular happen this year on April twenty-third?”

“In what connection? I know Forbes figured the copy went out of the office sometime during the last two weeks in April. I don’t see how you could pin it down.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Walter. He’d get my vote because he’s dead. If we can accept him, maybe everybody can shut up about it. The hell of it is, I can’t really talk myself into it, unless he was some kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The nurse was waiting when Shayne hung up. “Time for your bath, Mr. Shayne,” she said firmly.

He grinned at her. “Let me get a few more phone calls out of the way first.”

He dialed the WTVJ number and arranged for an interview on the subject of the previous night’s altercation. Tim Rourke came in while he was completing the arrangements. The reporter listened open-mouthed.

“Mike,” he said sadly after Shayne put the phone down, “are you giving those TV creeps an interview? After all you and I have been through?”

“I have to tell a few lies,” Shayne told him. “You wouldn’t want me to lie to the News, would you?”

“Maybe not,” his friend said uncertainly, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about, as usual. Could you use a drink?”

Shayne brightened. “Yeah.”

Rourke gave a surreptitious look around and produced a pint of cognac, which he had carried past the front desk in a basket of fruit.

“Booze,” Sparrow said with pleasure.

Rourke closed the door so they wouldn’t be bothered by hospital personnel and poured drinks all around in paper cups.

“I don’t think I’ll ask for ice,” he said. “They might think we were breaching regulations. Now a small explanation, Mike. The last time I saw you, you were sitting down to dinner with a bosomy blonde, and here you are with your arm in a cast. Did it turn out she knew judo?”

Shayne described what had happened, finishing with an account of the puzzling phone call from the girl.

“It sounds kosher to me,” Rourke said. “If you wanted to throw the book at those three baboons, you and Teddy, you could put them away for a year. It gives you something you can use. Tie them to the Begley firm, and you can do some damage. You and I know they use blackmail and muscle, but it might shake up some of their legitimate clients if it came out in the papers. Did you hear what I said?” He repeated, “In the papers! Not on TV. You have to get it in black and white or you don’t feel the impact. On TV it’s some jerk with bags under his eyes passing on gossip.”

“I’m using the TV interview to get a message to the girl,” Shayne said. “I still don’t know. I had the feeling she was reading her lines from cue cards.”

“I’ll go with you,” Rourke offered. “I’ve got both arms.”

Shayne shook his head. “She’s skittish enough as it is. But I think I’ll look the place over before dark. Did you get any leads to people who knew Langhorne?”

Rourke felt in all his pockets and produced an envelope on which he had jotted down a list of names and phone numbers. Replenishing his cup from time to time, Shayne worked his way down the list. The general feeling among Langhorne’s friends was that he had been frugal about things he regarded as unimportant, and lived within his income. He had been well liked, and he would be missed.

A new nurse came in as he hung up after the final call. She was stout and red-faced, with a mustache, muscular forearms and a fierce baritone.

“Miss Manners says you won’t eat, you won’t let yourself be bathed, you’re refusing medication. Very well, Mr. Shayne. You want to be fed intravenously, is that it?”

“As a matter of fact,” Shayne said, swinging his legs out of bed, “I was just checking out”

From the TV studio Shayne drove to Buena Vista. Shifting was his main problem. He had to hold the wheel with his knees while reaching awkwardly across to the gear panel with his right hand.

He was wearing a light yellow pullover. Dr. Baumgartner’s multipurpose cast was surprisingly light, but so bulky that the nurse had had to slit the left sleeve before she could get it on him. He was carrying it in a full sling, with the knot in front where he could reach it in a hurry.

He checked the number written on his cast and found the address the girl had given him. It was one of a line of apartment buildings, concrete and glass slabs. A sign in front announced that a few efficiency apartments were still available, all with terraces. After parking the Buick, Shayne fished in his side pocket for the watch he usually wore on his left wrist. It was ten minutes to six. The news program for which he had taped an exchange of questions and answers would go on in another ten minutes.

There was no doorman. He checked the apartment directory. The 9-C slot was empty.

He was standing at the locked inner door, a key in his hand, when a lady in a flowered dress came in from the court. He gestured ruefully with the key.

“It can’t be done with one hand,” he said. “When you turn the key, you can’t turn the knob. When you turn the knob, you can’t turn the key.”

“Oh, let me!”

She used her own key and held the door for him. He thanked her and they rode up together. She left the elevator at eight. Shayne went on to nine and looked for 9-C. Here, too, there was no name over the buzzer. He checked the time again; it was a minute after six. If a TV set had been on inside the apartment, he would have heard it through the poorly fitted door. He rang the bell.

There was no answer, and he went to work on the door. He had his regular assortment of lock picking equipment, but for most of it he needed two hands. He forced a succession of flexible shims between the latch and the metal strike-plate, building up the pressure slowly until the latch came back. Then he held the shims with the hook, shifted hands carefully and turned the knob. The hook shifted, digging a long splinter out of the wood.

He entered and turned on the light.

He was surprised to see a room with no curtains or carpets. There was a three-quarter bed, but no other furniture. Even the bed, a simple box spring and mattress, had no bedding except for a cotton mattress cover. There were two naked pillows.

There were signs that the room had been used, however-a filled ashtray on the floor by the bed, several crumpled tissues marked with lipstick, a pack of chewing gum, two empty glasses. Shayne picked up one of the glasses and sniffed at it. It smelled of gin.

Bothered by the gouge he had left in the doorframe, Shayne unwrapped a stick of gum. He found the splinter on the floor. After chewing the stiffness out of a small piece of gum, he pressed it into the raw scar, then pressed the splinter on top of that. Hearing sounds farther down the hall, he let the door click shut.

He snapped off the light and faded out to the little terrace. After a wait of several moments, he came back, turned on the light again and continued his inventory of the almost empty apartment. In the kitchen there was a saucepan, a teaspoon, two dime-store mugs, a jar of powdered coffee, in the bathroom medicine cabinet a jar of aspirin, a single toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.

He returned to the main room, his forehead furrowed with concentration. He could kill two hours in a neighborhood bar, or go back to his Buick and do some more phoning. Or he could depart completely from the girl’s instructions and wait here. Making up his mind abruptly, he took one of the pillows from the bed, turned off the ceiling light and went out to the terrace.