Brett Halliday - Killers from the Keys

The reporter was still irritated because Shayne had taken his dope on the absconding Shephard to Gentry, and he told him shortly that Lucy had not called him, and that he was headed for home and bed… and why didn’t Shayne do the same.

Shayne told him another place he could go that was reputedly hotter than Miami, and hung up.

Then he stood up and went out decisively.

The Coronado Arms Hotel was a modest structure in the Northeast section of the city a few blocks from the bayfront. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and potted palms and sturdily upholstered chairs in the lobby, and a scattering of middle-aged, middle-income guests as Shayne strode through it toward the elevators without pausing at the desk.

An elderly man and a middle-aged woman got off in front of him on the third floor. Both appeared to be pleasantly tipsy, and they didn’t look married to Shayne’s worldly gaze. With their arms tightly about each other’s waists, they turned to the right down a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, and Shayne followed an arrow pointing to the left below the numbers: 300–340.

He stopped in front of a door marked 334 and knocked. He expected no reply, and received none. The corridor was vacant, and there was no one to observe him as he got out a well-filled keyring and studied the hotel lock. He tried three keys unsuccessfully before his fourth choice unlocked the door.

He stepped in and turned on the light and pulled the door shut behind him. It was an impersonal and cheerless hotel room, with neatly made twin beds and no outward indications of occupancy. He walked in slowly, noting an open closet door on the right with a neat travelling case on the floor, a pair of bedroom slippers and of spike-heeled shoes beside it. On hangers were a woman’s light coat, a dark tweed suit, and a serviceable wool robe.

He walked around the end of the first bed, and between the two to a telephone on a table. Beside the telephone lay a message from the hotel operator. It carried the number, 334, and the time of receipt, 9:22 P.M. The message said: “Please call Mr. McTige. Ext 826,” with a Miami telephone number.

Michael Shayne stood staring down at it and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Leaving it beside the telephone was exactly the sort of thing anyone is likely to do when returning to a hotel room with a message that requires an immediate call.

He lifted the receiver and asked for the number written on the message. The phone rang twice before a man’s voice said, “Yardley Hotel. Good evening.”

Shayne said, “Good evening,” and hung up. He turned and hurried out of the room, turning out the light and closing the door firmly behind him.

Outside the revolving doors, he walked unhurriedly along the sidewalk to his parked car and got in.

The Yardley was an older more run-down hotel in an older more run-down section of the city. It took Shayne ten minutes to reach it from the Coronado Arms.

The lobby floor was tiled and the furniture was rattan but there were identical potted palms to those in the Coronado Arms. Again, Shayne walked through the lobby briskly as though he belonged there, got in an elevator and went up to the 8th floor alone. There were transoms over all the doors along the corridor, and a bright light showed behind No. 826 when he stopped in front of it.

Again, he knocked, but this time he waited a much longer time for a response that was not forthcoming. He knocked more loudly, and waited another long minute before resorting to his keyring again.

This time, the first key he selected did the trick. He walked in to a brightly lighted, empty room. This one was larger than Mrs. Shephard’s, and looked a lot more lived in. The spreads on both twin beds were pushed back and rumpled, the pillows balled up and showing depressions where they had been lain upon. A pair of discarded socks lay on the floor behind one of the beds, and room-service tray stood on a low table near the door. It held an ice bucket and two large bottles of Club Soda. One was open and almost empty, the other uncapped.

Tossed over a chair near the low table was a rumpled black suit coat with the side pockets turned inside out. From where he stood just inside the door, it looked very much to Shayne as though it might match the dark pants on the corpse he had found at the Pink Flamingo.

The telephone table between the two beds held a large chinaware ashtray that was overflowing with cigarette butts, ashes, and the short ends of two well-chewed cigars, and the stale air in the room was redolent with the stench of burned tobacco. On each side of the ashtray stood an empty highball glass.

Shayne’s bleak gaze slowly wandered over everything in the room while he stood there without moving. Only after he had mentally catalogued everything to be seen, did he move forward and go around the foot of the first rumpled bed.

He stopped there and stared down at Baron McTige’s body lying between the two beds where it couldn’t be seen from the doorway. He lay on his side, and his right cheek rested in a pool of blood that had seeped around a conch shell that was firmly embedded in his left temple. He was dressed exactly as he had been in Shayne’s office that afternoon, and the yellow and green sport shirt on his dead body managed to appear more offensively vulgar than it had when it covered the man’s animal vitality.

In death, his suety-fat face with the blubbery lips and receding hairline was more obscenely babyish than in life. Indeed, he had the look of a bloated and overgrown foetus as he lay between the two beds with his knees drawn up tightly against his chest and his arms hugging them.

Clutched tightly between the fisted fingers of his right hand was a $1,000 bill.

Michael Shayne stood for a long sixty seconds looking down at the dead man. Then he backed slowly around the end of the bed and sat down near the head of it, draped a handkerchief over his hand, stretched out a long arm to pick up the telephone.

Just as he put his hand on it, it rang loudly in the deathlike silence of the room. His hand jerked back instinctively as though the sound were the whirring of a rattlesnake. It rang again and he picked it up, settling the big knuckle of his right forefinger tightly between his teeth to blur his voice a trifle.

He said, “Yeh?” into the mouthpiece.

Mrs. Shephard’s voice came over the wire, the tone anxious but the words precisely enunciated, “Is that Mr. McTige?”

“Yeh.”

“This is Mrs. Renshaw. I… have been trying to reach you ever since I got your message.”

“Where’re you now?” grunted Shayne.

“I… is this really Mr. McTige? Your voice doesn’t sound like his.”

“’Smee awright,” Shayne averred. “Where’re you at?”

“I don’t believe…” There was a long pause laden with suspicious doubt. And then she simply hung up.

Shayne did likewise. He used the handkerchief draped over his left hand to mop sweat from his corrugated brow. Then he carefully covered his palm with it again, and again reached to pick up the telephone.

As though this were a signal that activated the buzzer, it rang once more just as he touched it.

He put his forefinger back between his teeth and said, “Yeh?” again.

He almost dropped the instrument when the well-recognized voice of his secretary came over the wire.

“Baron McTige?”

“Yeh.”

“This is Mrs. Steven Shephard speaking, Mr. McTige. Or Mrs. Renshaw, if you prefer.” Lucy Hamilton was forming her words precisely and clearly, and her voice vibrated with strain. “Do you hear me, Mr. McTige?”

Shayne growled between set teeth, “I hear you.”

“I understand you are holding a large sum of money for me… which you obtained from my husband?”

“Yeh. I…”