Brett Halliday - Killers from the Keys

Will Gentry said, “Mike’s just about to tell me. Go ahead, Mike. How’d you get here?”

“From the Bright Spot. I got a tip that this Renshaw, from Chicago that I told you about this afternoon, has been hanging around the Bright Spot seeing a dancer there. So Lucy and Tim and I dropped in to see the show. The girl told us that Fred Tucker, the name Renshaw is using here, had been in earlier, and ducked out when those two goons showed up… the ones I described to you. He told her he was staying at the Pink Flamingo, so I came here fast. That guy was inside the cabin just as he is now.”

“How is he now?” interjected Rourke.

“Dead thirty minutes to an hour.” Gentry told him.

“Is it Renshaw, Mike?”

“I’ve never seen the guy… nor a picture of him. In general details he fits the description his wife gave me this afternoon.” Since Mrs. Renshaw had not mentioned a mustache, this statement was true enough, and Shayne didn’t amplify it.

“Yager tells me the manager appears to have ducked out. Did you see him, Mike?”

“He was in the office when I got here.” Shayne gave him a description of the manager, and briefly related how he had come to No. 3 and found the dead man, and seen a car take off fast from behind the cabins… which might have been the manager.

Gentry said, “We’ll get out a pick-up,” and strode away to talk to the lieutenant.

“You don’t think the stiff is Tucker, Mike? Or Renshaw, if that’s his real name.”

Shayne said flatly, “I don’t know what to think yet. No identification on the body that I could find. Let’s see what the boys have made out of it.”

He and Rourke went together to the floodlighted front of the cabin where the technicians were reporting their findings to Lieutenant Yager.

“… one set of prints all over the cabin from the past few days don’t match the dead man’s prints. Same prints on the death bottle, with some fresh blurred ones on the neck… probably made by the killer… that can’t be identified. No wallet or identification of any kind on the body.”

Yager said, “Might as well get him to the morgue,” and they all moved back out of the way while two ambulance attendants went inside with a stretcher and emerged a few minutes later with a sheet-swathed body on top of it. Gentry stopped them as they moved to the back of the ambulance, and said gruffly, “Let’s have a look.”

They had turned the corpse over on its back, and when the sheet was pulled down under the bright light, the man’s thin and sallow face showed unmarred by the savage blows that had crushed the back of his head. They had wiped the blood from his face and his eyes were peacefully closed. There was a somber look of sadness on the flaccid features that brought sharply to Shayne’s memory Sloe Burn’s words that afternoon: “… the other was thin an’ sorta sad… dressed up in a black suit like a preacher… ” and he asked sharply, “Is there a matching suit coat or jacket in the cabin to match those dark trousers?”

“Just one light suit hanging in the closet as it came from the cleaners,” a young officer told him.

“Mean something to you, Mike?” Gentry rolled an unlighted cigar from one corner of his mouth to another, motioning for the body to be placed in the ambulance.

“It might. That description I gave you this afternoon… one of the two men who were looking for Tucker at the Bright Spot tonight… remember it?”

“The Preacher?”

“Except it can’t be The Preacher if Little Joe Hoffman was squaring with us. Mind if Tim and I look inside, Will?”

“Go ahead. Before we seal it up.” Gentry and Yager turned away toward the motel office where a couple of men were checking the records and going through the missing manager’s living quarters.

Shayne and Rourke stepped inside the cabin and the detective said, “He was lying face down in that blood with the back of his head bashed in, and a bloody whiskey bottle beside him. The refrigerator door was standing open as it is now, and the only other thing that isn’t here now is two halves of a long loaf of French bread lying on the floor right there. Gentry tells me the loaf had been hollowed out with maybe a wad of money stashed inside. They found three hundred-dollar bills still crammed in one end.”

Timothy Rourke stood beside him with his hands thrust deep into trouser pockets, his tall thin body hunched forward and his nose seeming to sniff the air while his deep-set eyes roved slowly about the room, taking in everything there was to see, and coming to rest finally on the framed photograph on the bureau.

Watching him carefully, as he had often before watched the reporter view a murder scene, Shayne thought he noted a sudden intensification of interest in the glittering eyes as they studied the photograph.

“That’s Renshaw’s wife, all right,” he told Rourke. “Makes the Fred Tucker alias pretty certain. Same woman was in my office this afternoon.”

Rourke glanced over his shoulder at a plainclothesman standing just outside, and said, “Nice looking pair of kids. It always gets your goat, goddamit, when you think about the wives and the innocent kids left behind…” He paused in his generalization to turn on Shayne abruptly as he appeared to do a double-take. “You said three hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside a loaf of bread?”

“I didn’t see them myself. The loaf was broken in half and was lying on the floor. You know how I never touch anything at a murder scene until the cops get here,” he went on righteously.

“About an eight-buck a day room,” muttered Rourke. He slouched forward, stepping over the pool of drying blood, and leaned over the bureau, peering out through the dirty pane of glass at the darkened window in the next cabin about ten feet away. “Was anybody in Number Two when it happened?”

“I don’t think so. No car in front.” Shayne moved to one side slightly, to more effectually block the interior of the cabin from the detective’s view outside.

The reporter continued to lean forward and peer out the window, and now his hands were out of his pockets and were hidden from Shayne’s view in front of him. Long association with Rourke on many cases in the past gave Shayne an instinctive warning that the reporter was up to something which he didn’t want discussed in front of the police.

The look of bland satisfaction on Rourke’s face when he turned back, and the fact that all three front buttons of his jacket were tightly fastened were all Shayne needed to verify his suspicion, and it didn’t really require a fleeting glance at the bare top of the bureau to tell him that Rourke was boldly walking off with the photograph that had been there.

“I guess there’s nothing here for us,” Rourke made his voice dissatisfied as he reached Shayne’s side. “Let’s get out and let ’em lock it up.”

They stepped out with a nod to the detective who was on duty outside, and saw Gentry coming toward them from the office.

“Any dope I can print on the missing manager that might help you find him?” Rourke asked loudly.

“Some you can print and some maybe you better not,” Gentry told them. “Name seems to be Peterson, and one of my men remembers a couple of Peeping Tom complaints from out here the past two months. So our man’s got a photographic darkroom fixed up in the back with pictures that look like they’ve been snapped through the windows of these cabins at night. Camera with infra-red attachment that caught poor devils when they thought they were safe in the dark inside. That could be his reason for taking off… if he had reason to believe something had happened in Number Three to bring the police around.”

Shayne said honestly, “Could be, Will. I didn’t know Tucker’s cabin number when I got here, and I asked at the office. Told him it was police business to get it out of him fast.”