Brett Halliday - Call for Michael Shayne

“I can find it without any trouble,” said the sergeant confidently. “I’ve flown over Mattewan lots of times.”

“Let’s go then.” Shayne stepped forward and gingerly eased his long frame into the open cockpit, hunched forward with his knees drawn up almost to his chin.

Sergeant Pepper gave the bobbing craft a shove away from the dock as he stepped lightly inside. He gunned the motor and they darted forward on the surface of the water for a couple of hundred yards, then rose smoothly, climbing in a slow spiral above the Devil’s Punchbowl.

The deafening noise of the motor subsided somewhat when they were high enough so the sound was not reflected back from a solid surface. Pepper checked his compass and made some adjustments of the controls, leveling off at about a thousand feet and then settling back to shout at Shayne, “Chief Gentry said I was to take orders from you. Do you want to tell me what we’re after, or is that a secret?”

Shayne shouted back, “How fast are we flying?”

“We’ll cruise at about ninety. I don’t like to push her too much.”

“Ninety is all right,” yelled Shayne. “I don’t think we could overtake them even if you pushed this thing to the limit. Three men in an express cruiser,” he went on to explain, “headed for a fishing-lodge on Marlin Key owned by one of them. They’re probably there by this time.”

“Will there be trouble?”

“One of them is a murderer,” Shayne told him as unemotionally as a man can speak while shouting to be heard. “I think he plans to kill the other two tonight and try to make a getaway in the boat tomorrow morning.”

Sergeant Pepper nodded gravely. “If there’s going to be shooting when we land, maybe you’d better tell me which one is the murderer.”

“Frankly,” said Shayne, “I don’t know myself. I think I know, but it could be any one of them. You’ll be more help if you don’t know what I suspect. Just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut and your gun ready. I’ll be putting the pressure on and we can’t trust any one of the three not to make a sudden play.”

Pepper nodded again to indicate that he understood, and Shayne continued in explanation: “One of the men is Arthur Devlin, wanted in connection with the Munroe and Brice murders. The others are a couple of friends of his who ostensibly believe him a victim of circumstances and are helping him avoid arrest. It’s my hunch that two of the trio don’t even know about Janet Brice’s murder, or they wouldn’t be trusting themselves on this trip with her murderer.”

As they droned steadily southwestward he went on to name and describe the other two men and to give Pepper a brief outline of the background for two murders, being very careful to keep his own theories about the case to himself so that the sergeant wouldn’t be any more suspicious of one man than of the others. This was imperative because he, himself, didn’t actually know. He thought he knew, but there was a gnawing doubt which wouldn’t let his belief develop into a certainty.

When he finished, he gave himself over to his own grim thoughts, which seemed to pound through his brain like the roar of the engine. Devlin was the obvious suspect if one accepted his entire amnesia story as a tissue of lies. Yet there was the evidence gathered at the Argonne House indicating that his client had been living with Marge Jerome and pretending to be her husband since the very next day after he was supposed to have sailed on the cruise ship.

But someone had been aboard the Belle impersonating him. Someone who had gained Janet Brice’s confidence and sent a radiogram to Doctor Thompson the next day signed with Devlin’s name. Whoever had done that could easily have sent the radiogram to Janet in Key West that lured her to her death.

Roger Morgan? Without his glasses Morgan would fit the description of Devlin obtained from the ship’s steward. Yet, so would Thompson fit the description — except for his mustache.

Morgan was the best bet for having passed as Devlin. Morgan had gone on a week’s vacation the next day, which would have given him an opportunity to jump ship in Havana and return to Miami without having to explain his absence — something a busy doctor could hardly accomplish.

Or had Devlin and Morgan connived in the imposture together? If so, why? So that Devlin could contrive to spend a couple of weeks with Marge Jerome, passing himself off as her husband? That didn’t seem feasible — yet there was the roll of bills. How did that enter into the plot? And the felt hat Devlin claimed he found in the death room which had not been worn there by either Devlin or Munroe!

And now there was the established fact that Thompson’s nurse was in reality Marge Jerome, a dope addict, wife of a jailbird, and ex-girl-friend of Skid Munroe, dope peddler.

Sergeant Pepper interrupted his musings by joggling his arm and pointing downward and ahead. “That’s Mattewan Key,” he yelled. “Over on the left — that tiny spot — that must be Marlin.”

The sun hung just above the horizon, free for a moment of the clouds, casting a red-gold sheen over the earth. Shayne nodded and leaned close to Pepper to shout, “Will you have any trouble setting this doodlebug down?”

Pepper shook his head and grinned. “Any place you say.”

“Stay about this altitude,” Shayne directed, “and fly directly over Marlin Key. If we see a boat there, go right on over as though the place didn’t interest us at all. If it’s possible, I’d like to land without them seeing us.”

Pepper nodded and turned his attention to piloting the small plane directly over the tiny spot of land in the vast immensity of water. Marlin Key swiftly took on form beneath them, a rock formation some two miles long and half a mile wide, curved somewhat to form a small lagoon near the center, close to which they could see the only building on the Key, a sprawling structure on the edge of the beach with what appeared to be a wooden pier extending out into the water.

Sergeant Pepper nodded excitedly when they were nearly overhead. “There’s a launch tied up at the dock. About a thirty-footer. It’s a good thing the sun came out from behind those clouds.”

“Keep right on going,” Shayne told him.

“It shouldn’t be too difficult to turn back and come up on the edge from the other side of the Key unobserved. The breeze is from the southwest, and if I make a wide circle to come back from the other direction and set her down a mile or more offshore, we’ll be down-wind and should be able to taxi ashore with a throttled engine they can’t hear.”

Shayne said, “It’s up to you. Make as wide a swing as you like, just so you get this thing down before it’s really dark.”

Pepper nodded confidently, glanced over his shoulder to be certain the Key was far enough behind them so the maneuver would be unnoticed, then began a slow, sweeping circle to his left.

The sun was gone by the time the arc was completed and the curtain of clouds which had lifted for the brief glow of sunset floated in again, closing out the spectacle. They were headed back toward the Key and about three miles due east of it. Pepper cut his motor and put the nose down in a long smooth descent into the wind, and darkness covered them when the pontoons touched water lightly, skipped into the air as though repelled, touched again and clung.

They were at least a mile off-shore, on the far side of the Key from the lodge. The motor made little more noise than an automobile as Pepper taxied in carefully, guided by the lights of the lodge windows, to the smooth beach, losing speed gradually and expertly until he was able to leap over the side in a foot of water and turn the light craft so Shayne could step ashore on damp sand.