Brett Halliday: Date with a Dead Man

“He’s twenty-four. Just my age. He was a little late graduating because he elected to do his selective service between high school and college. He’s about five-ten, and slender and dark-haired. He…”

She broke down suddenly, bowed her face into her hands and her sobbing was loud in the silent office.

Shayne got up. He lifted one shoulder expressively at Lucy, jerking his head toward Myra Wallace, and, as she closed her notebook and hurried around to the young wife, he said, “Get her address and phone number, Lucy. And be sure she understands she’s to send us those other envelopes and a picture of her husband as soon as she gets home. You see she gets off all right. I think she said something about leaving a pair of twins at home in the care of a neighbor.”

“Of course, Michael. Where will you be?”

“Right now,” said Shayne grimly, “I have several questions to put to the Hawley family.” He walked out of the office angrily, wondering again, as he had so often wondered in the past, how any man could be so utterly obtuse as to suppose that a woman like Myra Wallace would prefer for one moment all the money in Fort Knox to her own husband and the father of her child.

Her children, damn it! Twins. And for a few thousand lousy bucks some goddam fool male human being calmly advised his wife to stop worrying about him and enjoy spending the money.

Shayne’s first stop was police headquarters and the Missing Persons Bureau presided over by Sergeant Piper who had been in charge for twenty years and carried more information in his head than was contained in the filing cases behind him.

Piper was bald-headed and red-faced, and he shook his head when Shayne stopped in front of his chest-high desk. “Nothing on that Jasper Groat you called in about last night, Mike. You ready for us to go to work on it?”

“Not until I do a little more checking and talk to his wife again. But I do want to know if you ever had a Leon Wallace in your files.”

“Leon Wallace?” The sergeant wrinkled his high-domed forehead and shook his head. “Nope. Want I should check?”

Shayne said, “I know you don’t need to check, Piper. It wouldn’t have been more than a year ago.”

“Then it’s positively no,” said Piper.

Shayne hesitated. “The name of Hawley strike any chord?”

Again Piper shook his head positively.

Shayne said, “I’ll let you know the moment we decide Groat goes on your official list.”

He went out and drove to the Daily News Building on Biscayne Boulevard and went up in an elevator to the City Room. With the early edition already coming off the presses, there wasn’t much activity in the room, and Shayne found Timothy Rourke relaxed at his desk in a corner. The reporter leaned back with a wide yawn on his cadaverous face and dropped his feet off another chair so the redhead could sit down. “Got something, Mike?”

“I don’t know. Is Joel Cross around?”

“Not likely.” Rourke glanced across the room at a vacant desk and shook his head. “Since he got a by-line, Joel can’t do much work here in the hurly-burly of working reporters.” Rourke’s tone was distasteful. “He creates better at home is the way I hear it.”

“Has he been in this morning?”

“I think so. Turned in a follow-up on the plane rescue he did yesterday.”

“Heard anything about a diary kept by one of the rescued men that the News may be printing?”

“Plenty,” said Rourke. “Read Cross’s story this morning. Deathless literature, no less. We got us a scoop, my boy.” He yawned again.

Shayne said, “I understand the Hawley family refused to be interviewed about the death of their son on the life raft.”

“Stuck-up society bastards,” said Rourke feelingly. “Don’t want any reporters intruding on their grief.”

“What do you know about them?”

“The Hawley clan? Nothing personally. Rich and exclusive as all get-out because the two brothers, Ezra and Abel, landed here from the Mayflower forty years, ago and established a trading post where they gypped the Indians out of a fortune.”

Shayne said, “Ezra is the one who died a week or so ago?”

“That’s right. Abel kicked off six years ago.” Timothy Rourke gathered his feet under him and sat erect, his sunken eyes studying Shayne’s face keenly. “Why this sudden interest in the Hawleys?”

“Couple of things. There should be a good file on them in the morgue.” Shayne kept his voice carefully casual, but as he stood up, Rourke lounged to his feet with him.

“That’s right. And I’ll go along and help you find whatever the hell you’re looking for.”

Shayne didn’t argue as they went out a side door and down steep stairs to the file room. They were old friends and had worked together on many cases in the past, and Shayne explained.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Tim. Two little things. One that sticks in my craw is that the Hawleys made no effort at all to contact either of the two survivors of the airplane who nursed their son on the life raft for several days. The other is a gardener named Leon Wallace who was working for them about a year ago. That name ring a bell?”

Rourke shook his head as they entered a long, quiet room with rows of filing cabinets stretching away into the dimness from a desk where they were greeted by a gray-haired woman smoking a cigarette in a long holder.

Rourke lifted a thin hand and said, “Don’t disturb your butt, Emmy. We’ll get what we want.” He led the way down an aisle and stopped in front of a file to draw out the second drawer. He lifted out a bulky cardboard folder loaded with an accumulation of press-clippings on the activities of the Hawley family for many years, and pulled the cord of a bright overhead light as he opened it for Shayne. “Where do we start?”

Shayne said, “About a year back. A little more, I guess. Let’s jump off with Albert’s marriage which occurred shortly before he was inducted into the army.”

“Thereby breaking the old lady’s heart and practically bringing on a state of armed insurrection in Florida,” said Rourke cheerfully. “It won’t be recorded in the news columns, but I remember the hell the old lady raised when Uncle Sam crooked his finger at her darling Albert. There were plenty other ordinary citizens who could serve in the army just as well.” He was flipping over the clippings with a practiced hand. “It was common gossip around town that the old dame practically performed a shotgun wedding to get her son married off, hoping he’d beat the draft that way. But the draft board took a dim view of it and yanked him in anyhow. Here’s the bride.”

Shayne leaned forward to look at a wedding picture taken on the steps of a local church. He said, “It wouldn’t take a shotgun to urge me into her bed.”

Rourke said indifferently, “I never did hear which one the old lady used the shotgun on. Here’s a family group if you’re interested.”

It was a picture taken at an outdoor wedding reception at the groom’s home and showed a thin, aquiline-faced matriarch on the lawn under a palm tree, surrounded by the bride and groom, another couple identified as her daughter Beatrice and husband, Gerald Meany, and a tall, hawk-faced old gentleman whom Rourke said was Uncle Ezra.

“The blood was thinned out by the time it reached the younger generation,” Rourke said dryly. “That Beatrice, now. There’s quite a dossier on her if you want to go back further. Quite a nympho before she snagged husband Gerald. Afterward too, maybe. I’ve heard stories…”

Shayne shrugged, turning the clippings. “The hell of it is, I don’t know what I’m looking for. Would a nympho tie in with a disappearing gardener?”