Brett Halliday - This Is It, Michael Shayne

Shayne had the loaded clip out of the gun and in his pocket and was ejecting the cartridge from under the firing-pin when Gannet finally clawed the garment from his head. His face was flushed and his breathing hard. He massaged his thin neck with a thin hand, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

“I-thought he was going to shoot you when you hit that man,” faltered the girl. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did all right,” Shayne told her, grinning. He laid the empty automatic on the desk. “If Miss Lally hadn’t thought fast, you might have plugged me, Gannet.”

“Am I-supposed to thank-her for that?” he gasped.

“You could do worse,” Shayne told him dryly. He turned to look at the recumbent Henry, who was beginning to groan, trying to lift his square, hairy hand to his pulpy face. “Another paper-doll cutter,” he muttered, turning back to Miss Lally, who had retrieved her coat once more and was attempting to smooth out the twisted wrinkles in the sleeves. “What did you find out in the gambling-room? And why did that gorilla jump you?”

“It’s quite evident they reopened the gaming-room only this evening,” she said, ignoring Gannet’s presence, and speaking in her normal low, assured voice. “I was moving about talking to people as you told me to when I ran into Carl Garvin. I tried to avoid him, but he recognized me and asked in a rather loud voice if Miss Morton was with me. I tried to shush him, but he had been drinking. Then that man interfered.” She pointed to Henry, who now had both hands to his face and moaned spasmodically.

“He asked Mr. Garvin if he meant Sara Morton and he said he did, and that I was her secretary. Then that man grabbed my arm and pulled me away. Said Mr. Gannet wanted to see me in his office. He hurt me,” she ended in a hurt, girlish tone, sliding the glasses off and looking up at Shayne with round, naked, and sooty eyes.

Shayne grinned briefly and jerked his red head meaningfully at the groaning man, then asked gravely, “Who is Carl Garvin?”

“He’s the local office manager of the syndicate Miss Morton works for.”

“Is Garvin a regular here?” Shayne demanded of Gannet.

Gannet had stopped massaging his scrawny throat and it was as red as a turkey’s wattle. Venom replaced the soft glow in his eyes, and he snarled, “Ask him yourself.” One hand moved toward a row of buttons on his desk as the other picked up the gun.

“Don’t touch that button, Gannet,” Shayne grated. “And don’t count on the gun. It’s empty.” He was thinking swiftly, deciding that Mart and Henry were the only gorillas on duty, feeling certain of it when Gannet’s fingers stopped short of the buttons.

“Who gave you the go-ahead to reopen this evening?” Shayne demanded.

“Nobody gives me the go-ahead, shamus. No she-reporter from New York can tell me whether I open up or stay closed. The Morton dame can go straight to hell,” he exploded, and the venomous anger he had stored up behind his soft voice and limpid eyes burst out in damning expletives against Miss Morton.

Shayne looked down at him with a grin intended to further infuriate Gannet, who had established a reputation for remaining calm, no matter what the provocation. The gambler’s face was growing dangerously red. Shayne shrugged his wide shoulders and turned to take Miss Lally’s arm.

“We are walking out of here, Leo,” he said. “Down the front stairs. If you’re as smart as I always thought you were, none of your boys will try to stop us.”

Henry pulled himself up on wavering legs as they started to the door. He squinted at Gannet through swollen eyes, staggered aside, and Shayne opened the door. They went out and down the corridor to the wide front stairway.

Shayne glanced down at Miss Lally’s bespectacled face as she moved primly beside him and said, “You act as if this were all in a night’s work. That was a darned good tackle on Gannet.”

“I’ve been Miss Morton’s secretary for ten years,” she told him. “Since I was nineteen. I’ve encountered hoodlums of that type before. Do you think his reopening the gaming-rooms tonight is an indication that he knows she’s dead and can’t bother him any more?”

Shayne squeezed her arm for silence as they reached the bottom step, where entry to the upper floor was blocked by a velvet rope and guarded by a dapper young man with sparkling black eyes and a thin black mustache.

He had been looking up at Shayne’s incongruous apparel with an expression of horrified disbelief. Shayne grinned and lifted his hand airily, saying, “Leo sent me down to show his dame to her car.” He closed one eye in a slow wink and the young man unhooked the rope.

In the foyer others looked at them curiously, but no one interfered. They went past the doorman without a glance and down the driveway to his car, where Shayne left her to open the door for herself and hurried around to make a fast getaway.

When he turned south on Ocean Drive and was speeding toward the Venetian Causeway he referred back to her question.

“It would have been fast work for Gannet to get things opened up and running in the short time that’s elapsed since Morton was murdered. Still, it’s a good bet.”

“But he could have known beforehand,” she pointed out.

“Yeh,” said Shayne absently.

“We know he tried to bribe her to leave town. And then those threatening letters began coming-”

“Which Leo Gannet didn’t send her,” he said irritably. “He’s a businessman and might arrange to have her rubbed out, but he’d never pull that sort of Dick Tracy stunt.”

“Why not? It seems to me that would be the smart way to do it, to make people like you-people who know him-think he didn’t.”

Shayne didn’t answer at once. He was thinking back to Gannet’s behavior. Losing control and showing an outsider his true nature was unprecedented insofar as he knew. “Crooks like Gannet aren’t so devious,” he muttered. They rode swiftly and silently for a while; then he slowed for the toll booth, fished out the right change, and stopped to pay it.

When he had the car going sixty again he said, “I want to hear more about Sara Morton’s husband. And if I don’t show up soon Will Gentry’ll have a radio pickup out for both of us,” he added grimly.

“Oh, I’d forgot about-”

“I’d like to keep you away from the police tonight,” he cut in, “if I can swing it. This place I’m taking you to is my secretary’s apartment. Miss Lucy Hamilton. She’ll give you a drink and bed you down on the studio couch, but I want your promise not to leave her place for anyone or anything until you hear from me.”

“I’ll do whatever you say,” she agreed meekly. “But-why are you going to so much trouble, Mr. Shayne? You didn’t even know Miss Morton.”

“Have you forgotten she retained me to take the case if she was murdered tonight?”

“That torn bill? I wonder what she meant by sending you that. It’s no good without the other half, is it?”

“She had the other half clenched in her hand when she died,” he told her in a tight-jawed mutter that was almost a low growl.

Miss Lally drew in her breath sharply and wilted against him, sliding her glasses off and letting her hand fall laxly in her lap. “I can hardly realize it yet,” she sobbed. “It doesn’t seem real. At first I felt dazed, but now when you speak of her being dead it seems you must be talking about someone else. Some stranger. N-Not M-Miss Morton. She was so vitally alive.”

Shayne put his arm around her shaking shoulders. He had wondered how long her self-control would last, and was surprised that the inevitable reaction had been so long delayed. He drove to the mainland with one hand on the wheel, not saying anything, and when he stopped in front of Lucy’s apartment she sat up, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. “I’m all right now,” she said. “It’s just that all at once I-”