Brett Halliday - The Uncomplaining Corpses

“Alone?”

She bobbed her head. “I was undressing.”

“Was Carl Meldrum with you?” Shayne asked the question casually and she seemed wholly unaware that it held any significance.

“No. Carl had gone.”

“Don’t you generally undress before he leaves?” Shayne asked gently.

She blinked her eyelids down tightly and it was as though a shutter had been drawn over two amber lights.

Ernst lurched to his feet and snarled, “Damn you! What do you think you’re doing? Carl and Dorothy don’t-”

“Don’t they?” Shayne didn’t look at him.

Dorothy’s mouth was twisted in a tight smile of cunning. She let her eyelids slide up slowly. “How did you know about Carl? The other cops didn’t”

“I told you I wasn’t a cop. I’m the guy who knows a lot of things and who intends to find out a hell of a lot more.”

Ernst sank back onto the divan. His haggard face had an ineffectual scowl and his eyes were hot with suppressed fury. Dorothy put her hands down on the divan beside her and let her head lie back. Her round eyes looked down her nose at the detective, challenging him.

“Carl said good night to me at the door fifteen or twenty minutes before Dad caught the man in Leora’s room. Ernst was just reaching the top of the stairs when it happened. That’s all either of us know.”

“Neither of you is taking it very hard,” Shayne said.

“Why should we? She was so damned holier-than-thou-always prissing around-doling out a few dollars now and then when she had millions-”

“Which you’ll get now,” Shayne cut in sharply.

“Sure. Why not? God knows we deserve it for putting up with her hypocritical ways all these years. Believe me, mister, if I wanted to cut loose I could tell you plenty.”

“No,” Ernst panted. His mouth worked in that strange way and he finally yelled, “No, Dot! For God’s sake, do you want to-?”

“I’m not going to.” Dorothy tossed him a disdainful glance. It was stifling hot in the room. The burning log was dying down to smoking embers and furtive shadows danced in the corners.

Shayne lifted his gaze and saw Dorothy studying his face with a calculating look. He got up and turned his back to the divan, walked to the fireplace, and lit a cigarette. When he turned back Dorothy looked vaguely disappointed.

“I’ll leave you two to your own devices,” he said in a flat voice. “After I talk to your father and Carl Meldrum and find out how much you’ve both lied, I’ll be back for the truth.”

He stalked across the room to the door, turned the knob silently, and went out.

The policeman was still slumped against the wall in an attitude of peaceful repose.

Shayne went briskly down the hall, nodded to two cops on guard at the head of the stairs, strode down and out into the pale, washed daylight.

He got in his roadster and drove to the Palace Hotel on the beach, went in, and asked for Carl Meldrum.

The clerk told him 614, and he went up. Loud knocking brought no response. He tried three keys on a well-loaded ring before the door opened.

Enough of the day’s first light came in an east window to show him a bulky figure lying face down on the bed. He closed the door and stepped to the side of the bed. He was relieved to hear heavy breathing and to smell the stale odor of liquor roiling up as Meldrum breathed.

The room was in perfect order, the bed made and smooth except for the rumples around the inert body. The windows were closed and the sodden air somehow managed to give the room an atmosphere of disorder.

Shayne opened a window and stood for a moment looking down at Carl Meldrum. His eyelids were wrinkled and unhealthy-looking. His cheeks were puffed and florid. He wore a tuxedo and black tie, and his blunt chin rested against the bow.

Carl Meldrum groaned fretfully and tried to get his face out of the way of Shayne’s hard palm the first time Shayne slapped him. Shayne slapped him on the other cheek, cursing in a low monotone. He dragged Meldrum from the bed and placed him in a deep hotel chair where he slumped laxly. He began to whimper and little bubbles oozed out between his lips.

He seemed to be trying to open his eyes but wasn’t quite able to make it. A large vein throbbed in his forehead and the bubbles continued to form at the corners of his lax mouth.

Shayne tried slapping him again, with no result. His condition was evidently not altogether alcoholic. Shayne was familiar with all the symptoms of an alcoholic stupor and was frankly puzzled by Meldrum’s sodden condition. He knew that if he could get the slightest response from a drunk he would be able to slap him into some semblance of sensibility, but Meldrum had been whimpering and jerking ever since Shayne began working on him and he was no nearer consciousness than before. Shayne shook his head worriedly and wiped sweat from his forehead. It was hot work trying to slap life back into this senseless hulk. There was no doubt of Meldrum’s being drugged in addition to being drunk. He went to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill, looking out over the shimmering blue of the Atlantic Ocean, which was now touched with a red glow from the rising sun.

The Herald would be on the streets with Painter’s story by this time. Early risers were rubbing their eyes and reading the headlines-many with astonishment and others with satisfaction. Ten years in Miami had made him many enemies and few friends. A lot of people were going to nod sagely this morning and say to each other, “I see they got Shayne at last. He’s had it coming for a long time.”

He didn’t mind so much except for Phyllis. It was going to be tough on her.

He turned from the window with his face grim. Meldrum’s eyes were open. They focused imperfectly but there was life in them. They shifted in red sockets, bulging a little, as if the swollen sockets shoved them outward.

Shayne said, “Okay, Meldrum, come out of your fog.”

Meldrum’s thick lips moved in and out against his teeth but he didn’t speak. He lifted his right hand in a limp, despairing gesture, then let it drop. Wrinkled lids closed over his eyes again.

Breathing heavily through flaring nostrils, Shayne tangled his fingers in Meldrum’s hair. He crooked his elbow and lifted the man’s dead weight by a handful of hair. He dragged him into the bathroom and slid him to a sitting position in the tub. He turned the cold-water tap for the shower and stepped back, a frown creasing three vertical lines in his forehead.

Meldrum remained supine, lolling against the edge of the tub. Shayne tried the hot-water tap, holding his hand under the shower until it was too hot for him to endure.

Muscles twitched in Meldrum’s thick calves but he made no other movement. Convinced that the man wasn’t faking, Shayne turned off the water and left him bent over the tub.

He went into the bedroom and began ransacking it. At the end of half an hour he had a tiny address book for his work. The book had been lying in plain sight in the top bureau drawer on top of a pile of clean handkerchiefs. He took another look in the bathroom and grunted with disgust when he saw that Meldrum had not moved, then went back and sat down on the edge of the bed to thumb through the address book.

It seemed innocuous enough. There was nothing more incriminating than two or three dozen names and addresses scattered through it in alphabetical order. They were all feminine names, which was natural enough for a man of Meldrum’s type. Dorothy Thrip’s was next to the last name in the book. He slid the book into his breast pocket and his gray eyes roamed disconsolately around the room. An avid light gleamed in them when he espied a bottle of whisky on the bedside table. The top of it showed above the telephone.