It took Shayne ten minutes to drive to Lucy Hamilton’s apartment building near the Bay in the Northeast section of Miami. In the small entryway his face was deeply trenched with worry as he buzzed his customary signal on her button. The trenches deepened while he waited for her to press the button in her second-floor apartment that would release the front-door lock. When it didn’t come, he got out his key-ring and found the key she had given him long ago for such an emergency, and unlocked the outer door. As he went up the stairs, he selected the other key that opened her apartment, and had it ready in his hand when he reached her door.
It opened onto a dark and silent apartment. He flipped the light switch beside the door and strode in, stopped just inside the long and pleasantly furnished sitting room for a comprehensive look.
He had stopped by the apartment to pick up Lucy for dinner some four hours previously, and they had had one drink together before going out.
The sitting room was now exactly as he remembered they had left it. The cognac bottle and an empty wineglass beside it on the low coffee table. Farther over, a tumbler half-full of water and melted ice cubes; Lucy’s own glass with the dregs of her drink on the nearer side of the table, and lying over the back of a chair where he remembered her tossing it as they went out, was a light wrap which she had decided she didn’t need at the last moment.
With this evidence that Lucy had not been back to her apartment after she went out with him, Shayne strode across the room to the telephone and dialled a number.
A curt voice said, “City desk,” and he said, “Tim Rourke.”
He waited, listening to the background clatter of teletype machines and typewriters, until his friend’s voice came over the wire. “Rourke.”
“Tim. I’m at Lucy’s place and she hasn’t come home yet.”
Timothy Rourke chuckled evilly. “I’ve been warning you for a long time, Mike… you better marry the gal if you want her to stay home waiting for you. Listen. You know that picture I grabbed in Tucker’s cabin…?”
“I’m worried about Lucy,” Shayne cut in. “I thought you were going to see her home.”
“I put her in a cab at the Bright Spot,” Rourke defended himself. “Maybe she decided it was too early and stopped off some place. About that picture… come on down and I’ll show you something.”
“You didn’t get the number of Lucy’s cab… the driver’s name or anything?”
“For Chrissake, Mike! When did you ever take the number of a cab or the driver’s name? Act your age.”
Shayne slammed the telephone down in a burst of futile rage. He knew Tim was right, and that added to his rage. It was foolish to worry about Lucy. She had been making her way around in Miami in cabs for a good many years, and there were dozens of reasonable explanations for her not being home yet. A lot of his anger was directed at himself for neglecting to get Mrs. Renshaw’s local address that afternoon. Will Gentry had been perfectly right in bawling him out at the Bright Spot for having got things in a mess.
He turned away from the telephone with a shrug of his wide shoulders, crossed the room to pour cognac into the wine-glass nearly to the brim.
No matter how many reasonable explanations there were for Lucy’s absence, he was worried, damn it. She knew he was working on a case. She knew his hurried departure from the Bright Spot meant that things were breaking. She knew he might need her for something at any moment. It wasn’t like her to make herself unavailable.
Too many people were missing at the same time, he told himself angrily as he tossed off the drink. Sloe Burn and her dancing partner… probably Fred Tucker, or Renshaw (if his hunch was right about the dead man), and Mrs. Renshaw and Lucy… and he didn’t even know where to look for Baron McTige, he realized dismally.
He emptied the glass and set it down, took one last look around the room, and then strode back to the telephone table and scrawled a note on the pad beside the instrument:
“Check with me or Tim or Will Gentry the minute you come in.” He signed it and carried the pad back with him to drop it on the floor inside the door where Lucy couldn’t possibly fail to see it as she entered. Then he hurried out and down the stairs to his car.
Timothy Rourke was at his desk in the City Room, tapping out copy with one finger on his battered typewriter when Shayne came up to him. The reporter swivelled around in his chair, deep-set eyes gleaming happily. “This time, 7 hit the jackpot, Mike. I knew there was something damned familiar about that picture on the bureau in the Pink Flamingo cabin. Thanks, by the way, for helping to cover up for me when I snatched it. Gentry’s going to be plenty sore at both of us.”
“Not at me. I didn’t do anything.”
“You knew I was grabbing it. Thanks anyhow. Look here, Mike,” Rourke exulted. He turned back to his desk and hunted through some clippings, came up with a newspaper reproduction of the same photograph of Mrs. Renshaw and the two children that had been in Tucker’s cabin.
Only, under the newspaper cut there was a caption that read: “Wife of Illinois Embezzler Distraught and Disbelieving.”
Shayne took the clipping from him with a baffled frown, and swiftly scanned the story, date-lined Springfield, Illinois:
“Mrs. Steven Shephard, pictured above with her two children in a photograph taken during happier days, declared today that she did not believe her husband guilty of the crime of which he is accused.
“Steven simply could not have stolen that money,” she insisted tearfully, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “There is some dreadful mistake. I know there must be. Steven was a loving husband and a devoted father. He has lived an exemplary life in this community for twenty years, and it is utterly absurd to think he is capable of such an act. Someone else must be responsible, and I fear that Steven is the victim of foul play because he may have tried to prevent it.”
The quote from Mrs. Shephard ended there, and the newspaper story went on to briefly rehash the known facts in the case.
Steven Shephard, it appeared, had been an officer and a trusted cashier of a Mutual Savings and Loan Association in Springfield, Illinois, for the past twenty years. A Sunday School teacher and a Boy Scout leader, he had been universally respected by a wide circle of friends and associates, and had been known as a man with no vices, and no bad habits. He owned his own modest home, mortgage-free, paid his bills promptly on the tenth of each month, and over the years had built up a substantial savings account in the Mutual Association with which he was associated.
And then, approximately three weeks ago, Steven Shephard had disappeared and $200,000.00 of the mutual funds had disappeared with him.
Auditors going over the books reported evidence that the theft was the result of careful planning and preparation for at least one year prior to Shephard’s disappearance. During that period, it appeared, he had been secretly diverting cash deposits into his own hands by falsifying the daily records, until a cash reserve of United States currency totalling exactly $200,000.00 was in his possession.
Then Steven Shephard had walked away from his office and his home, leaving no trace behind him. There were indications that he had fled westward, and the account stated that he was being actively sought in Southern California and Mexico at the time of the writing, which was one week previous.
Shayne’s gray eyes were bleak as he put the clipping down. He muttered, “So she really fed me a story, and I swallowed it, hook-line-and-sinker.”
“Want to tell me about it now, Mike?” Rourke asked eagerly.
“Not for publication.” Shayne gave him a wry smile and lit a cigarette. “She told me her name was Mrs. Renshaw when she came to my office this afternoon to retain me to find her husband. From Chicago, where her husband, Steven… she was smart enough to use his first name so she wouldn’t make any slips,” he interpolated, “… had run out on a Syndicate gambling debt and was supposedly hiding in Miami to avoid their vengeance.
“She made it sound real good, Tim. So good that I was sympathetic as hell.”
“Smart woman,” Rourke said admiringly. “She knew Mike Shayne would be a pushover for a story like that. That why you were checking The Preacher out with Joe Hoffman?”
Shayne nodded moodily. “From another source, I got a description of a man on his tail who sounded like The Preacher. Sheer coincidence, I guess… since it appears The Preacher has been dead six months, and the Syndicate isn’t interested in her husband after all.”
“This guy you thought was The Preacher. Could he be the dead man?”
“Could be,” Shayne conceded morosely. “Goddamn it, this knocks everything into a cocked hat… though a lot of things do make more sense this way than they did before. Have you given this to Will, Tim?”
“Hell, no. Let him read about it in the paper tomorrow morning. I’m just about through with my story.”
Shayne said, “No soap, Tim.” He leaned forward and picked up the photograph of Mrs. Shephard and the newspaper clipping he’d just read. “Will gets these right now.”
“For Chrissake, Mike! Let him do his own deducing. Won’t be the first time you and I held out information.”
“Not this time,” Shayne said firmly. He got to his feet, shaking his head sternly as Rourke tried to protest further.
“I helped you walk off with this picture, Tim. It changes everything, and I’m taking it to Will right now. He can check fingerprints and find out who was who in that cabin tonight. Then maybe we can start adding things up. Go ahead and write your story. You’re still ahead of the pack on it. But Will gets this in the meantime.”
He turned and went out of the City Room fast, and Rourke sank back to his desk with a sour look on his face, and went back to typing his story for the early edition of the News.