Brett Halliday - Michael Shayne’s Triple Mystery

Dick wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t think so, but it would be hard to say for sure. You know how it is. Unless you watch, it’s hard to judge time. Naturally I thought he was a friend of yours. It didn’t seem as if he were up here more than a few minutes.”

Shayne started to nod, but his sore neck muscles stopped him. He said, “Thanks for coming up with me,” in a tone of dismissal.

“But couldn’t I help — get you washed up — the blood off?” the clerk asked.

“No thanks, Dick.”

He stood with the bottle in his hands until Dick went out and closed the door. Then he held it to his lips and drained it. He went out to the kitchen and set the empty bottle carefully on the sink beside the two glasses Myrna had put there on her way out. He tried the back door and found it unlocked.

He remembered distinctly that it had been locked and Myrna had had the key when he went away a short time before.

Going back to the bedroom he stripped off his clothes, turned water into the tub as hot as his hand could stand it. His face was pretty much of a mess, with both his lips puffed and bluish, lacerated flesh on his cheekbone clotted with blood, and streaks of dried blood on his chin.

He grimaced at his reflection in the mirror, testing two teeth that felt sore and a little loose. All in all, he was in pretty fair shape, considering the way he’d been knocked around.

He got a soft washcloth steaming hot and held it gently against his face while he waited for the tub to fill, loosened the dried blood, and cleaned the cuts carefully.

When he sank into the tub of hot water to soak his long frame, he continued the ministrations with the washcloth. He then let the water run cold on the cloth and splashed it over his face and neck. He stepped out of the tub and swabbed his face freely with peroxide, then dusted it with antiseptic powder. Carefully wiping around the worst cut, he put a Band-Aid over it, then vigorously toweled himself and put on clean clothes.

His neck throbbed with pain where the blackjack had struck. He went to a wall cabinet in the living room and got out a bottle of Portuguese brandy guaranteed to be at least five years old. He filled the wine glass on the table and got a fresh tumbler of ice water from the kitchen, then sank into a chair and lit a cigarette, letting it droop from an uninjured corner of his mouth.

He took a sip of brandy and began to go slowly over the events of the evening, dwelling upon each incident as he came to it in the light of later occurrences. It started with his entering Renaldo’s saloon expecting to meet Timothy Rourke. Myrna Hastings had been there instead. She had accosted him, and he had only her word for it that she was what she claimed to be and had been sent by Rourke. Yet Gentry had phoned Rourke to get her address, but at the Captain’s house she had said Rourke introduced her to Will Gentry that afternoon.

Shayne went on from his meeting with Myrna Hastings. He carefully studied the scene in Renaldo’s office, then jumped to Captain Samuels’s home on the bay front. In secreting herself in the back of his car, slipping into the house without his knowledge, coming to his aid when Gentry questioned him, and finally stealing the logbook which she claimed to have found in a hiding-place that another searcher had overlooked—

Had Myrna Hastings stepped out of character?

He took another long drink of brandy. It was difficult to say. Who could predict what a young girl feature writer from New York was likely to do? She had left his apartment willingly enough and had gone directly to her hotel room as he had told her to. Then she had been immediately escorted away by two men vaguely described as being short and tall. Had she gone willingly? Or had she been coerced, threatened?

He had immediately suspected Black and Lennie of her abduction, but after listening to them at Renaldo’s house he was inclined to believe they were not responsible. It didn’t quite add up. Now that he was thinking along logical lines, he realized they would have to have trailed him back to his hotel and somehow learned of her departure via the fire escape in order to have followed her to the Crestwood.

It was necessary to determine whether the two men who had accompanied her out had been there waiting for her return, or whether they had followed her in and up to her room. If they had been waiting, it could not have been Blackie and Lennie, unless Myrna was involved in some way he knew nothing about.

That left the whole business of the missing murder clues up in the air. When she left his apartment, the clues had been lying on the table. If she had come back to get them she wouldn’t have known to look in the drawer. She might have searched the rest of the room first. The table drawer was too obvious. She didn’t, in fact, know the table had a drawer.

Shayne took another sip of brandy and settled more comfortably in his chair. The pain was gradually going away from his neck muscles. He switched his thoughts from Myrna to Guildford.

Had Guildford told the truth about waiting for the Captain to return? Or, granting that Blackie and Lennie had told Renaldo the truth about their venture, was Guildford the killer whom they had seen drive away after being closeted with the Captain for half an hour? If Guildford was the killer, why had he drawn attention to himself by calling Will Gentry? It would have been safer and more natural to say nothing about his visit and leave the body to be discovered by chance.

What about the paroled convict, John Grossman? This seemed to Shayne the crux of the affair. He was certainly mixed up in the possession of smuggled cognac somehow. Had Captain Samuels worked with him, or for him, in prohibition days? Did both men have knowledge of a cache of illicit cognac undisposed of at the time of Grossman’s arrest? If so, why had Captain Samuels waited so many years to put a case of it on the market? Waited until he was weak from hunger and malnutrition?

It seemed likely that the Captain couldn’t get his hands on it while Grossman was in prison, since the first case appeared soon after Grossman had supposedly returned to Miami.

Shayne’s eyes were heavy with the swollen condition of his face. The throb in his neck was subsiding, but his mind was alert.

It seemed definitely unlikely that John Grossman was in on the deal with Renaldo. The ridiculously low price accepted by the starving Captain proved that it must have been his own idea. Grossman was smart enough to learn what the vintage stuff was worth in today’s market. It looked more as though the Captain had put over a personal deal — one that for some reason he had been unable to put over while Grossman was in prison. One that Grossman might have resented even to the point of murder.

Shayne finished his glass of brandy and closed his mind against his musings. He needed more facts before he could do more than ask himself a lot of questions that, as yet, had no answers.

He heaved himself up painfully from his chair and gritted his teeth against a wave of physical weakness. He looked around for his hat, then remembered he had lost it in the fracas at Renaldo’s. He went out bareheaded, thinking the cool night air would feel good on his head.

Dick frowned and shook his head, but his eyes showed admiration and amazement when Shayne crossed the lobby. Shayne pushed his swollen lips into the semblance of a grin and he waved a derisive hand at the clerk. He got in his car and drove to Second Avenue.

The Crestwood was a small, moderately priced hotel, and the night clerk was a thin-chested little man who tried to conceal his hostile amazement when Shayne showed his battered face at the desk. He shook a blond and scanty-haired head and said, “I’m afraid—”

“I don’t want a room,” Shayne assured him. He showed his badge and said, “It’s about a guest of yours, Miss Myrna Hastings.”