Бретт Холлидей - Murder in Haste

Shayne exchanged a look with Lieutenant Wing.

Wing said, “I’m out of my jurisdiction, Mike. Somebody else is going to be asking the questions.”

“And you’re going to be answering them, too,” the warden told Shayne. “Believe me! This is no goddam joke.” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “Well, let’s break the news to the sheriff.”

The dead man was left lying where he was until the sheriff arrived with two carloads of helpers. Shayne was taken back to the waiting room outside the warden’s office. There he finished his pack of cigarettes, listened to the clacking of the secretary’s typewriter, and went back patiently over everything he had been told by Norma Harris and Rose Heminway. The lines on his face were deeply etched.

The sheriff was a pleasant fat man named Woodrow Wilson Smith, with a politician’s smile which he showed Shayne briefly as he came into the waiting room with the warden and a small crowd of assistants.

“Might as well come in, Mike,” he said. “We’re going to be using the warden’s office. I know you don’t want to hang around any longer than you have to.”

He waved Shayne to the chair he had occupied earlier. He himself took the warden’s chair, and one of the young men with him opened a notebook. The sheriff gave the redhead another friendly smile, apparently not seeing a man but a potential vote.

“I won’t start firing questions at you, Mike,” he said. “You and I have always got along fine, and I hope we can keep it that way. Why don’t you just tell me in your own words how you happened to want to talk to this fellow Milburn, and then we’ll take it from there.”

Shayne went over what was now familiar ground, and the young man wrote it down in shorthand. At the end, the sheriff rewarded him with a smile that was even more brilliant than the one he normally wore.

“I like the way you organize things, Mike,” he said. I wish more people had that gift. A few small points. When Chief Painter was here last week, if Milburn admitted that he and Sam Harris were mixed up in shenanigans up in Alabama the night of the big bank job, well, that’s a terrific piece of news, front-page stuff. Painter’s no recluse, as far as publicity’s concerned. Why didn’t he spring it right away?”

Shayne spread his hands. “I gave up trying to follow Petey’s reasoning about ten minutes after I met him.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance he found out something different? Milburn and Harris were friends. Maybe they were working together on the big one. I always did think it was screwy, one man handling something that size. And then the dough.” His smile disappeared and he leaned forward. “Mrs. Sam Harris found Milburn for you. I don’t like to cast reflections on any lady, but it seems to me she might be thinking more about what happened to that good bread than about what’s going to happen to her husband. So this occurred to me when you were talking, Mike. Maybe she wanted you to lean on Milburn a little, so he’d cut her a slice?”

“There’s nothing to that, Woody,” Shayne said, without showing the irritation he felt. “I wouldn’t be seeing Milburn alone. Joe Wing was going to be with me.”

He was silent while Sheriff Smith studied him, working his lips in and out. The sheriff said, “Now don’t take offense at this, Mike, because as far as I know now we’re all working the same side of the street. But Joe Wing and myself, we’ve been talking this over, and I think we’re in agreement. We think you’re telling the truth as far as you go. But we both have a sneaking suspicion that you don’t go quite far enough.”

Shayne looked around at the Beach lieutenant, who said, “A couple of things don’t add up, Mike.”

The sheriff went on, “The warden here makes a suggestion that’s a little emotional, but it does express one point of view. He thinks we ought to put you in the hole on bread and water and see if we can brainwash you. He doesn’t mean that literally, but I’m vetoing the whole approach. I wouldn’t say that brainwashing Mike Shayne would be one of the easiest jobs in the world. You’re going your own way, regardless, and let’s hope it turns out all right in the end. But I want to say a couple of things.”

“Only a couple, Sheriff?” Shayne said, his eyes narrowing.

“Only a couple, and I think Joe will go along with both of them.” He touched his index finger. “The dough. A recovery fee from the insurance company is legitimate loot, and if regular police officers like us aren’t allowed to collect, that’s our hard luck. But don’t try to hold onto more than the legitimate fee, Mike, or we’ll make some real trouble for you. Point two is Painter.

“You’ve got a grievance there, and I’m not the one to say that it’s not justified. When it was just between the two of you, the rest of us could sit back and enjoy it. But this thing makes a difference. A guy has been killed. If he was actually dumb enough to go robbing with Sam Harris he was due to spend the rest of his natural life in the can. But he was a human being just the same, and somebody murdered him.”

“I appreciate that,” Shayne said crisply. “What were you going to say about Painter?”

“Just don’t let your feelings lead you astray. That’s all. You can go now if you want to. We’re going to check back to the Sam Harris defense and get the details on those Alabama stickups. And we’re going to be working on the stabbing. We’ll take these guys one at a time and hammer them. Between you and me I doubt if we get anything, but we’ve got to try it. That’s what we’ll be doing.” He looked at Shayne sleepily. “What will you be doing, Mike?”

Shayne smiled. “I’ll be making some phone calls.”

“That’s logical. Who are you going to be making these phone calls to?”

“My client, for one. After that I’m not sure. But I’ll check in with you or Wing if I find anything.”

The sheriff started to speak, but he made a disgusted gesture and sat back. “You’d better go now, Mike, before I’m tempted to go back to the warden’s suggestion. Check in promptly. There’s going to be some strong heat on this, and we don’t want to learn about something when we see it in the papers.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Shayne said, standing up. He asked Wing, “Where are you going to be, Joe?”

“Out here, for the time being. I’ll leave word where I go. And I want to second what Woody just said. If Milburn passed any information along to Painter, and it looks as though he did, that makes Painter just as hot. We don’t want to find him with a knife in him.”

“Let’s look on the bright side,” Shayne said. “Maybe they’ll use a gun.”

“Now Mike,” Wing said uneasily.

Shayne’s grin disappeared as he went out through the waiting room. Outside, he stopped on the front steps of the forbidding building, his eyes cold and deadly. This made twice. His unknown adversary had failed with Rose Heminway and succeeded with Milburn. Shayne promised himself that there wouldn’t be a third time.

He drove carefully, making sure that nobody assigned to him by Sheriff Smith was on his tail. Coming into downtown Miami, he found a parking place, ate a hasty sandwich at a drugstore, bought cigarettes, changed a dollar into dimes and shut himself up in an outdoor phone booth. He tried Rose Heminway’s number first. There was no answer. He dialed the other number she had given him — the nursing home. He asked if Mrs. Heminway was there visiting her father.

“I think I saw her come in, sir,” a pleasant voice told him. “I’ll ring the floor nurse.”

He repeated his question to another voice — less pleasant, as nurse’s voices are likely to be — and a moment later Rose was on the line.