Brett Halliday: Call for Michael Shayne

As he bent over the body the throbbing pain in his head was intensified, dulling his senses. He felt numbed by a terrible sense of inevitability. It even seemed to him that he had subconscious knowledge of the presence of the corpse all along.

All this had happened within the space of a few hours and Arthur Devlin was no longer an ordinary man. He was a murderer, and he didn’t know the name of the man whom he had murdered. Nor why. The hand that wielded the blackjack must have been his, but in a larger sense it had not been his, for his brain had not willed his hand to strike. Arthur Devlin was a gentle man, incapable of murder. He knew himself for a gentle man even as he painfully lowered his body to sit flat on the floor to go through the dead man’s pockets. Bending over was becoming intolerable.

There were some folded bills in a silver clip in a side pocket of the sharply creased trousers, some change and three keys on a ring in one of the patch pockets of his coat. Nothing else. No wallet or papers, no other clue to his identity. He belonged to the blackness of those vanished hours, and there was nothing to indicate what he was doing in this room nor what possible connection there had been between himself and the dead man.

A wrist-watch was strapped to the bony wrist of the dead man. Devlin lifted the inert arm and looked at the dial. The hands pointed to 1:30, and he could hear the watch ticking.

One-thirty! And his ship sailed at midnight! For the first time since regaining consciousness the full impact of the situation smashed through the fog of unreality. He sat there, cross-legged, beside the corpse, gripped by the sheer horror of it and by the full realization of his position.

What had happened? How could all this have happened within the short time since he passed out at Bert Masters’s party? It was fantastic and incredible and impossible, yet he knew it was true. There was no use hoping that he was still in a drunken stupor or stricken with delirium tremens. The shabby room and the disreputable clothing and the hats and the dead man were hideously real.

His eyes focused on a folded newspaper lying on the floor and under the bed. He reached across the dead man and picked it up. It was the evening edition of the Miami News. He vaguely recalled glancing at the headlines in his apartment just before leaving for the stag party.

But this was not yesterday’s paper. The headlines were different. He stared stupidly at the heavy black print. It had been folded narrowly, the way a man carries a newspaper in his pocket. Devlin never carried a paper in his pocket.

Every muscle in his body stiffened when he looked at the date. He held his breath in consternation while the small black figures danced a rigadoon before his frantically staring eyes.

The date was June 20th.

This was June 8th — the 9th, rather. The early morning of the 9th. The day his vacation began.

He had heard of fake copies of newspapers being printed to trap criminals — usually just the front page. Devlin’s fingers trembled violently as he turned the page to look at the date. His mouth and tongue were dry again, and his breath wheezed audibly as he scrambled through page after page. Each bore the date of June 20th — just two days before the Belle of the Caribbean was scheduled to return to Miami.

The newspaper dropped from his hands. He knew the truth now. There was no room for any doubt in his mind. It was June 20th. Almost two weeks since he should have boarded the Belle of the Caribbean as she lay off Miami beyond the breakwater. Twelve days instead of a few hours. Twelve days of blackness. A blank void. It explained his shabby clothing, the growth of beard.

But how could a man stay passed out for twelve days from drinking even as much as he had drunk at Bert Masters’s party? In the name of God, what had happened! Devlin caught his aching head between his palms and moaned.

A shrill ringing tore at his eardrums and seemed to lift the top of his skull from his head. He jerked his head erect and stared at the old-fashioned wall telephone. It stopped ringing and the world righted itself for an instant, and then it resumed its rasping, nerve-wracking jangling. To Devlin it became a sentient thing with a mind and will of its own. It wouldn’t let him alone. He had to answer it. It would keep on and on until he did answer, and the high-pitched shrilling was certain to arouse every person in the rooms around him, bring them on the run to discover him — to discover Arthur Devlin sitting beside the man he had murdered.

He reached out and got a firm grip on the iron bed rail and dragged himself up. He staggered to the phone and snatched the receiver off, leaning against the wall while the receiver dangled in his right hand near his knee. The abrupt cessation of persistent ringing was soothing and somehow comforting.

He could faintly hear a voice jabbering around his knee. Slowly he lifted the receiver to his ear. It was a woman’s voice, husky-soft, yet harshly compelling, with a timbre of fright and of worry and of gritted-teeth determination. She was saying, “Joey! Is that you, Joey? Who is this? Why don’t you answer me?”

Devlin heard his own voice, strange and hollow, as though echoed from a great distance. “Hello. I don’t know—”

“Joey! Joey, darling!”

“He’s — there’s no one—” Devlin sputtered.

“I was so frightened and worried when you didn’t come, Joey, darling. Is everything all right?” The last words were accompanied by a little gasping intake of breath.

That voice — remote and disembodied — at the other end of the wire was his only contact with the black void of the past twelve days, a tiny hole pierced through the black curtain that separated him from he knew not what. He had to keep her talking. He had to put up a pretense. He couldn’t let her hang up without learning some of the things he had to know.

Thickening his voice to a mumble, he said, “Who is this?”

There was a slight hesitation, then a high, flute-like laugh. “Why, Joey! It’s Marge. Who’d you think it was? Is anything wrong? Is — somebody — there?” she ended softly.

Keeping his voice thick he said, “Things are all wrong. Terribly wrong. Where are you calling from — Marge?”

“Why — Joey. From home, of course. Joey — tell me — what’s wrong?” The anxiety in her voice reached through to an emotion he had forgotten he had.

“I — can’t tell you,” he muttered.

“Didn’t Skid get there?”

It was as though she held her breath to hear his answer. He hesitated, striving desperately for a clue that would tell him what his answer should be. Was the dead man Skid? Or was that Joey lying on the floor and she had mistaken his voice for the dead man’s.

He said, “Skid came all right. But—” He paused, straining his ears to hear some revealing word, every sense alert for an inflection or a sigh or a swiftly caught breath that would tell him how to proceed.

“Listen, Joey.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse and intimate whisper, anxious and caressing and warm.

“Yes — Marge,” he answered.

“Did you kill him?”

Devlin’s hand tightened on the receiver. He turned his head slightly to look at the slender crumpled body lying at the foot of the bed. In a flat monotone he said, “I killed him all right.”

“Oh.” Satisfaction purred in the short word. “You were so long coming home — I was afraid. Did you get the money, Joey?”

“The money?” he asked stupidly. His head was throbbing again, and every nerve in his body quivered as he tried desperately to figure out what to say. He remembered the sheaf of bills in the silver clip in the dead man’s pocket. With a shudder of revulsion he knew they would have to remain there.