Brett Halliday - One Night with Nora

“I don’t know,” said Shayne absently. “How far is it now?”

The young man was peering ahead uneasily. “The next turn-off, I think. Yeh, that’s it. To your right and down to the bay. That’s where he said to bring you.”

Shayne turned right off the boulevard, drove past a couple of small frame houses, and then along a deserted stretch of paved street that dead-ended against the shore of Biscayne Bay.

The moon was dipping low on the horizon and there the faintest pre-dawn glow was in the sky. His headlights picked out a parked car at the end of the street. Its front bumper touched the steel cable stretched across the road.

Shayne let his car roll up on the right side of the car and looked curiously into the front seat. It appeared to be empty.

As he bent slightly forward and down to cut off his lights and motor, he felt his passenger shift his position on the seat beside him. He started to turn in that direction when a bomb exploded against his head.

The morning sun, in a cloudless sky, slanted through the windshield and one window of the car. Michael Shayne’s body lay uncomfortably sidewise on the front seat, his right leg was bent beneath him, and his left foot drooped against the brake pedal.

Consciousness returned slowly. He tried to shift his numb right leg. The movement brought searing pain to his head. He opened his eyes a crack, and the bright sunlight stabbed his injured nerves like a lance.

He closed his eyes quickly, and lay for a long time trying to remember what had happened. For a while he lay inert, then memory flooded his aching head.

The ride with the young punk, the detours, and finally, their arrival at a spot on the bayfront. The car parked there had been empty. The man who was anxious to pay him ten thousand dollars to keep Nora Carrol’s name out of her husband’s murder had been nowhere in sight. He recalled his mustached companion’s description of the man who had hired him — big, broad-shouldered, and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. And he remembered the explosion.

Vaguely, he wondered what time it was, but dreaded opening his eyes again.

Bit by bit the incidents of the night floated through his mind in confused sequence, and all of a sudden he was possessed by a terrible anger. Anger at himself for being so stupid, and at the punk who had taken a shot at him.

He pulled himself up slowly to a sitting position. His head throbbed violently. He rested it on folded arms atop the steering-wheel, and kept his eyes closed.

After a while he opened them, and, gritting his teeth against the pain, he shifted his position and looked in the rearview mirror. A wave of nausea swept over him. Pain throbbed at the rear of his right temple. His hairline partially concealed the raw wound, an abrasion between the ear and the right temple. There was considerable swelling, and a circle of dried blood surrounded the injury. He turned his head carefully and looked down at the dried blood on the cushion.

There was utter silence on the isolated shore of the bay. Through aching eyes he saw that the sun was well up and shimmering on the smooth surface of the water. The other car was gone, of course, and his watch showed that the time was 9:18, and that he had been out cold for about five hours.

He got out of the car and forced his cramped legs to hold him erect. He staggered to the cable barrier, ducked under it, and made his way down the sloping embankment. Taking a handkerchief from his hip pocket, he wet it in salty bay water and gingerly removed the bloodstains from the wound and the side of his face. He took off his light suit jacket, found bloodstains on the collar, threw it across his left arm, and went up the incline with the damp handkerchief against his face.

He examined his car before getting in, and found a jagged hole in the metal top of the sedan, close to the windshield and almost directly above the steering-wheel. The impact had pushed the jagged edges of metal outward, and he knew the gun had been fired from below, and inside the car.

It was all clear now. The young man, the supposedly innocent bystander who had met him at the filling-station, and told a glib story of being hired for the job of guiding him, had drawn a gun as Shayne drove up to park beside the waiting car, and fired it when he was looking to his left, expecting danger from that direction.

It was a smart trick, he conceded grimly. Had he not turned his head leftward and lowered it a little he would probably still be lying in the front seat of his car with a bullet hole through his brain. As it was, the shot had barely grazed the bone, but the impact had rendered him unconscious.

Again he swore at his stupidity, certain, now, that there had been no other man in the deal.

He got in the car, opened the glove compartment, and took out a pint bottle half filled with cognac. He drew the cork and drank deeply. The warmth of the liquor cleared his mind. He started the motor and drove to the boulevard to join a stream of city-bound cars.

He stopped at the first drive-in he came to, and he went into a small foyer, where a rack of morning papers caught his eye. A Herald extra was inked across the front page in huge letters, and beneath it a headline in bold black type read:

Shayne glared at the headline, picked up the extra, and went into the restaurant with it tucked under his arm.

He was spreading the paper out on the table when a shapely blonde clad in a yellow halter and sky-blue shorts came to his booth.

“A pot of coffee to start with,” said Shayne tersely.

“Coming up,” she said, and whirled away.

It was air-conditioned in the roadside restaurant, but beads of sweat stood on Shayne’s forehead and trickled into the trenches of his cheeks as he began to read.

Petite, brown-haired Lucy Hamilton, long-time secretary and confidant of Private Detective Michael Shayne, was jailed early this morning on orders from Chief of Police Will Gentry. Miss Hamilton was charged with common burglary.

The arresting officer was Patrolman Mark Hanna Hagen, who was personally commended by Chief Gentry for apprehending Miss Hamilton and securing a full confession from her.

According to an exclusive interview granted by Officer Hagen to a representative of this paper, he surprised the prisoner lurking in the bedroom of a local hotel which had been engaged the previous afternoon by another guest.

“She claimed that it was just a natural mistake,” Officer Hagen stated. “That she was a guest in the hotel and the clerks had given her the wrong key. She also tried to cover up with a story of having been attacked by some man immediately upon entering the room, which prevented her from noticing her mistake until she was caught there.”

The story went on to say that due to the early hour of the morning, and the fact that he had seen no one fleeing from the hotel, he correctly assessed Miss Hamilton’s story to be an outright falsehood.

Miss Hamilton tearfully confessed to a long career of petty hotel-room thievery, aided by a male accomplice whose name she steadfastly refused to reveal.

Shayne’s head ached and his nostrils flared with anger. He was interrupted by the waitress with a pot of coffee and cup and saucer which she set before him.

“Three scrambled eggs with crisp bacon and buttered toast,” Shayne ordered curtly. He sipped his coffee as he resumed reading the Herald’s version of Lucy’s arrest.

The next paragraph told of the modus operandi as set forth in Lucy’s confession, of Officer Hagen’s frank admission that he had no idea whatsoever of the real identity of Miss Hamilton, nor of the bombshell that would be exploded by her arrest. Thinking it merely a routine crime, the up-and-coming young officer immediately hustled her to headquarters and booked her on a Jane Doe warrant when she refused to give her name and the name of her accomplice.