Brett Halliday - The Corpse Came Calling

He took time to set it down carefully, then answered the call. “Well?”

The same voice sounded less certain. “All right. I guess you know what that piece of cardboard is worth.”

“I have a fair idea-enough to know that a grand is damned little to ask.”

“Oke. You get Mrs. Shayne and one G. We get the piece of cardboard you lifted from Lacy.”

Shayne said, “Right. But before we do any more talking I’ve got to know that my wife is still in one piece. Put her on so she can tell me she’s all right.”

“I can’t do that, Shayne. Do you think I’d be fool enough to call you from where she is?”

“You’re more of a fool if you think I’ll make a deal without having her tell me herself that you bastards haven’t touched her.”

“I swear she’s all right.”

Shayne laughed harshly into the mouthpiece. “I’ll believe it when she tells me so.”

“But I haven’t got her here.”

“Then get her.” Shayne waited, the lines of strain deepening on his face.

After a long pause, he heard, “It’ll take ten or fifteen minutes.”

Shayne said, “I’ll be waiting,” and hung up. He went back to his coffee.

He smoked a cigarette and finished the second mug of coffee before the telephone rang again. He hurried in and snatched it up. Phyllis’s voice lilted over the wire.

“Darling-I’m all right. They treated me fine.”

“I suppose you’re talking with a gun in your back,” Shayne growled. “Just answer yes if you’re lying to me.”

She said, “No,” promptly. “Everything’s all right, but I feel terrible about them coercing you by threatening me. Don’t do anything-”

Her voice was cut off sharply. In a moment the original speaker asked, “Are you satisfied?”

“That was all I wanted to hear. Now the only thing is to arrange how the exchange is to be made.”

“Right.”

“As soon as you deliver Phyllis here safely, you can have what you want.”

His suggestion was met with derisive laughter. “I’d be a sucker to fall for that.”

“And I,” said Shayne, “would be a sucker to let go of it before my wife is home safely.”

“Neither of us is going to trust the other,” the voice on the wire agreed. “So, we meet some place. Me with your wife and you with your end. That’s the only way to do it.”

“And you with your two gunsels,” Shayne scoffed. “No soap, Gorstmann.”

“What did you call me?”

“Your name. The one you’re using here in Miami, at any rate.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Hell,” said Shayne wearily, “we’re wasting a lot of time talking in circles. Here’s the way it’s going to be. You set a time when you can deliver Phyl here to the apartment. I’ll leave here fifteen minutes before the time you say-”

“With the piece of cardboard?” Gorstmann asked.

“Yes. It’ll be in my pocket. But I’ll be in the open with lots of people around and it won’t be healthy for you to get any funny ideas about taking it off me.”

He paused for a moment, then went on persuasively. “Suppose I go down to the F.E.C. depot? That’ll be handy for you after I turn the piece of claim check over to you. I’ll leave a note in the apartment for Phyl giving her the number of one of the station pay telephones. I’ll be waiting at that booth, and the moment she phones to say she’s here, safe, with one grand in hand-then I’ll hand over what you want. You can have me covered while I wait at the depot for her call.”

“That’s giving you all the breaks. How do I know you’ll come across after she calls?”

“You don’t,” Shayne agreed promptly. “You’ve got to take that chance. But I’ll be where you can blast me if I don’t play ball.”

He waited tensely while Gorstmann considered his proposition. Finally, the headwaiter said, “Don’t think you’ll keep on living if you try to pull anything. There’ll be a gun on you all the time.”

“Sure. I expect that. Set your time.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“I’ll leave here on my way to the East Coast depot at nine forty-five.” Shayne dropped the receiver on its prongs and sat for a long moment without moving. His hand shook as he lit a cigarette. His belly muscles were drawn up in a tight knot. He had expected more trouble from Gorstmann. Still, the man had little choice in the matter. As Helen had pointed out, Phyllis was actually worth nothing to her captors. On the other hand, Gorstmann knew that if he forced Shayne’s hand and the detective went to the authorities he would lose everything.

He called Information after a time and got the telephone number of a pay phone at the station-the one nearest the baggage room.

He jotted down the number and went into the living-room, intercepting a look of loathing on Rourke’s face as he passed the foot of the bed.

Shayne got a sheet of paper and wrote:

Phyl: Call this number as soon as you read this. I’ll be at the other end. Call me BEFORE you untie Tim Rourke or untape his mouth. Let him go as soon as you’ve called me.

He signed the note and set it up in a conspicuous place on the table where it would be the first thing she would see upon entering the door.

He still had a long time to wait before the curtain went up on the last act. He paced back and forth restlessly, filled with torturing doubts, now that the die was cast.

If he was wrong-but he couldn’t be. There was only one definite pattern into which all the facts fitted. True, there were still a few facts missing. He could fill most of them in by guesswork. But there was one point he didn’t like to guess about. He needed a telegram from the fingerprint division of the FBI to reassure him on the one point of conjecture upon which his entire course of action was based.

His tension increased minute by minute. He went in the kitchen and started another pot of water boiling. He then dropped six eggs into it and timed them for four minutes. He cracked them into a cereal bowl, dropped in a hunk of butter, then crumbled two slices of bread into them.

Food eased some of the tension, but as the hands of his watch crawled toward 9:45, he was still pacing the floor and rumpling his hair fiercely. At 9:35 he grabbed his hat and went out. He couldn’t wait for the telegram any longer. There was no telling what Gorstmann might do if Shayne didn’t leave his hotel at the appointed time.

He hurried down to his office on the next floor and took the small piece of cardboard from its hiding-place. It was 9:42 when he reached the lobby.

He was striding toward the door when a Western Union messenger entered with a yellow envelope in his hand. Shayne stopped him and asked, “Could that be for Michael Shayne?”

The boy said it was. Collect from Washington. Shayne told him to collect the charges from the desk, seized the envelope, and ripped it open. A glance at the message sent him out to his car fast. He couldn’t afford to mess things up now by being late.

The fingerprints on Phyllis’s note which was handed to him by the headwaiter at the Danube Restaurant were identified by the FBI as those of Harry Houseman, wanted by the New York police. He didn’t have to depend on guesswork any longer.

A coupe was parked across the street and up near the drawbridge when Shayne wheeled his car in a U-turn to go north. He saw two men in the coupe, slouched low in the seat with hatbrims pulled over their faces. As he straightened out after making the turn, a glance in the rearview mirror showed the coupe pulling away from the curb behind him.

He drove north across Flagler Street at a moderate pace, then left on Northeast 3rd Street. The coupe trailed him a discreet half block away, made the turn behind him. He drove on to the Florida East Coast railway station and parked. The coupe stopped behind him, and the two men were getting out as he went into the station.