Brett Halliday - When Dorinda Dances

Shayne said, “Looks like the one he had in my office. I’m not denying that it is Brewer. In fact, I would be almost willing to go on the stand and swear to the identification. But I’m always suspicious when a man’s face is smashed up like that.” He asked the doctor, “What about it? What did that job on him? And was it necessary to accomplish death? Or just some added stuff?”

“I’d say it was done with some fairly heavy object,” the doctor said. “He probably died after the first couple of blows, and either the murderer continued beating him in a violent burst of rage, or—”

“Or he continued pounding until there wouldn’t be much left to identify when he was taken out of the water,” said Shayne grimly.

“Not even enough teeth left,” the doctor agreed, “for a dentist to do anything with.”

“Yeh.” Shayne nodded his red head slowly, turned to Gentry and said, “Don’t get me wrong on this, Will. I have absolutely no reason to think the man isn’t Milton Brewer. On the other hand, before we get very far with this we need a positive identification. When this guy Gibson,” he went on, as though the attorney were not present, “states that he can positively identify the body as Brewer, I question it. Are there any identifying marks? What’s he got to go on? I admit he has the same build and dyed hair; the same sort of clothes, and maybe there’ll be laundry marks. What about fingerprints?”

“Take a look at his hands,” Gentry rumbled.

Shayne dropped to his knees and turned one of the dead man’s hands over. The fingers were smashed to a pulp. Intentionally? He wondered. Or had he clung desperately to the edge of a railing, refusing to drop into the water, while the killer pounded his hands until he was forced to let go? Both hands were the same.

“Can you get any sort of prints from them?” he asked Gentry.

“The boys are trying for it. They won’t be too good, but if we’re lucky we’ll get enough if we can find prints to check with.”

“You can probably get them at his house,” Shayne suggested. “Do this for me, Will. Make as positive an identification as you can that this body is Milton Brewer.”

Gentry rolled his rumpled eyelids far up and looked at Shayne curiously. “What’s on your mind, Mike?”

Shayne’s eyes were bleak, and he shook his head gravely. “I don’t know. I do know this whole thing is screwy as hell. First we’ve got to know that this man is Brewer. Once we establish that, we’ll have something to go on.” He paused briefly, then asked, “Did you get that call from the Waldorf Towers Hotel?”

“Yeh,” said Gentry sourly. “Olsen called and told me what you found in Mrs. Davis’s room. Looks like she was a phony from the word go. Probably the whole story she told you about the dancer was just as phony as the hotel room.”

“Why? The girl corroborated it in every detail.”

A voice behind them asked with interest, “What’s that? Are you talking about Dorinda? She denied everything at La Roma, Mike.”

Shayne glanced around at Timothy Rourke and said, “This was afterward, Tim. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Let’s get out of here where we can get a drink and see what we can make of it.”

Rourke gunned the press car and drove toward the boulevard. He asked excitedly, “What about your Mrs. Davis turning out to be a phony?”

“That was Will’s word for it,” Shayne reminded him. “My guess is that she was covering up her real identity even from me.” He brought the reporter up to date on developments, then added, “She evidently checked in at the Waldorf just for an address to give me. If she was at La Roma the night before, she must have had a room somewhere else. Probably still has it, and I hope to God that’s where she is now — with nothing more the matter with her than too many sleeping-tablets.”

Rourke wheeled the car onto the boulevard and stepped hard on the accelerator. “I don’t get it, Mike. She could have called up and got your message if—”

“If,” Shayne cut in angrily. “That damned two-letter word has got this whole thing wrapped around it. If Mrs. Davis is Mrs. Davis; if Dorinda is Julia Lansdowne; the corpse on the beach is Milton Brewer; if Elliott Gibson is telling the truth.” He made a savage gesture and added, “Pull in at that tavern ahead and let’s have a drink. I only caught about three hours sleep last night.”

“It was early enough when you dropped me at the poker game.”

Shayne grunted. “I made another trip to La Roma, and a lot of things happened.”

“Besides the thing at the Waldorf Towers?” Rourke asked eagerly. His thin nostrils quivered like a bloodhound’s on the scent. He pulled into the curved driveway and stopped just beyond the door of the rustic tavern.

There were two other cars in the drive, and when they entered the gloomy room, two booths were occupied by couples who had reached the amorous stage of letting their drinks get warm. The tall, rangy bartender was lounging against the bar eating a sandwich and washing it down with beer.

Rourke ordered a double cognac with water on the side for Shayne, gin and bitters for himself, and they found a booth in the rear.

The reporter waited impatiently until the bartender brought the drinks and returned to the bar, then referred back to Shayne’s last statement and asked, “Such as what? Give me a complete fill-in, Mike. I didn’t get to bed until after four, and just reached the office when the Brewer flash came in.”

Shayne’s wide yawn ended in a sardonic grin. “You don’t know about Moran?”

“Moran? The dancer’s manager?”

Shayne took a drink of cognac and chased it with ice water. “The guy you steered me away from at La Roma. Ricky Moran killed himself in my apartment last night.”

“What the hell, Mike? Why didn’t somebody at the office mention it?”

“Will’s keeping it quiet until we find out whether Dorinda actually is the Lansdowne girl — and until we find her.”

“Where is she?”

“I wish I knew. With this Brewer thing, we’ve got two dead men and two missing women.”

“You think there is any connection?”

“I don’t see how,” Shayne told him absently. “But damn it, Tim, I don’t like coincidences. Let me give you all of it, and see what you make of it.” He took another drink of cognac, then settled back to rehash the entire story.

Timothy Rourke listened with quivering nostrils and burning eyes. He shook his head dubiously when Shayne finished. “It looks like two distinct cases to me.”

“Yeh. That’s what it looks like.” Shayne’s gray eyes were bleak. “But there are so damned many angles that don’t make sense.” He drained his glass and thumped it down on the table. “Are Mrs. Davis and Dorinda being cagy and hiding out? Or, are they both — dead?”

“But who could have killed them? And why?” Rourke protested. “Even if your guess about Moran is right and he did trail Mrs. Davis from La Roma and put the bite on her after she hired you, he couldn’t be responsible for whatever happened to Dorinda, too. Who else is there?”

Shayne spread out his big hands in a gesture of futility. “Who did that job on Milton Brewer?” he parried.

“But that’s different. He expected to be murdered last night.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne sourly. “And the guy he was afraid of is the one guy in Miami who has an unimpeachable alibi. Yet, someone did it, just as someone apparently grabbed Dorinda between my place and Lucy’s apartment.”

Rourke’s thin face wrinkled with feverish thought. “And the only line you’ve got so far on a possible connection between the two,” he said slowly, “is the girl telling you that either Godfrey or Brewer was a friend of her father’s.”