When Michael Shayne swam back to consciousness, he was lying flat on his back on the bar-room floor with his head pillowed in Lucy’s lap and with her tears streaming down into his face.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her face just a few inches above his and twisted his mouth in a crooked grin. “It’s okay, angel. I’ll live… I think.”
He winced painfully as he turned his head a trifle, then he flattened both hands out on the floor and forced his body up to a sitting position.
A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them he saw a burly uniformed figure standing at his feet looking down at him composedly. Lucy still sat on the floor beside him with her head bowed and sobbing gently. He touched her shoulder and said urgently, “It’s all right, Lucy. Let’s get out of here.”
He looked up at the officer and held up his hand, “Give me a lift, huh?”
The policeman took his hand and helped pull him to his feet, asking disbelievingly, “Is it a fact what she says… that you’re Mike Shayne?”
Lucy got up shakily to stand beside him, blinking back her tears and cutting in angrily, “Of course it’s true.” She stamped her foot. “Don’t just stand there like an oaf. Arrest that man who clubbed him from behind.”
Shayne looked past the cop into the booth where Lucy and Ralph had been sitting. Another policeman leaned over Ralph and was trying to pull him up. The younger man was still only half-conscious, with head lolling back and eyes closed.
Shayne turned his head slowly and looked toward the front of the room. All of the customers had mysteriously vanished, leaving only the two bartenders who stood behind the mahogany and surveyed the scene with stony gravity.
Shayne patted Lucy’s shoulder and said, “The bartender got me, huh? Don’t blame him, angel.” He told the officer, “We’re perfectly content to let it lie without preferring any charges.”
“He says it was you started the ruckus.” The policeman jerked his thumb back at the bartender. “Says this couple was sitting here having a quiet drink when you barged in and threw a mug of beer in his face. How about that?”
“I tried to tell you,” said Lucy angrily. “I’m Michael Shayne’s secretary, and he probably saved my life. That hoodlum was threatening to kill me with a conch shell in his pocket.”
The other policeman had Ralph Billiter sitting up at the table, slumped forward and still dazed and half-conscious. He was efficiently shaking him down, and he came up with the sharpened conch shell which he held up for his partner to see. “He’s loaded all right, like the lady says. I heard of these things, but it’s the first one I ever did see.”
“It’s a beaut,” the first officer agreed. “All right, Shayne. Let’s straighten this out at headquarters. Put the cuffs on that one,” he ordered his companion, “soon as you get him on his feet. You got a car here, Shayne?”
Shayne nodded.
“All right. I’ll ride along with you. Bring your man in, Baxter, soon as you can drag him out.”
He turned and stalked toward the door, and Shayne took Lucy’s arm and led her behind him. As they passed the two bartenders, the one who had slugged Shayne said with gruff cordiality, “Drop back some time, huh, and have a cognac on the house? If I’d known who you was…”
Shayne said, “I’ll wash my face next time.” He and Lucy went out through the swinging doors where the cop was leaning inside a patrol car at the curb, talking into his microphone.
Suddenly, hysterically, as the night air struck her, Lucy turned and buried her face against Shayne’s chest, and sobbed out almost incoherently, “Oh, God, Michael! I’ve been so frightened. It’s been like a nightmare. I’ve got to tell you…”
He shook her gently and led her to his car parked in front of the prowl car. “Save all the explanations until we get to headquarters. Will Gentry is going to want to hear it too, and there’s no use going over it twice.”
“I was such a fool, Michael. I walked right into it, thinking I was being so smart and helpful.”
“Relax now and save it till later.” Shayne put her in the front seat and turned to the officer who was coming up behind him. “You want me to drive?”
“Sure. I’ll get in the back.” There was belligerent respect tinged with awe in his voice as he opened the door and got in. “My God, I never thought I’d see Mike Shayne laid out on the floor like that. That’s why I couldn’t hardly believe the lady when she said who you was.”
Shayne said, “I hardly believed it myself when I first opened my eyes.” He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
“Where did you get that awful costume so fast, Michael?” Lucy asked in a subdued voice. “It was such a short time after you answered McTige’s phone.”
“Passed a bum on the street and gave him ten bucks for his hat and coat. I didn’t want to cause too much notice when I walked into the Dolphin. But let’s save all this for Gentry,” he counseled her. “God knows I want to know what you’ve been up to, but I want this officer to be able to swear to Gentry that we didn’t fix up our stories on the way in.”
Miami’s chief of police sat solidly behind his desk and glared at the couple when they were ushered into his office. “What have you two been up to now? My God, Mike, what do you think you’re impersonating?”
Shayne looked down at the dirty, undersized corduroy jacket he was wearing as though he just recalled he had it on. He shrugged out of it and let it drop to the floor, squaring his wide shoulders in relief. He said, “You’d better get a stenographer in to take it all down, Will. I’m waiting to hear Lucy’s story myself. But before we get started… do you know about McTige yet?”
“What do you know about him?” demanded Gentry suspiciously.
“I know he’s dead, Will. I phoned in the report.”
“You phoned it in,” fumed Gentry, “Anonymously. And then ducked out before the cops got there. That’s enough for me to lift your license, and by God…”
Shayne held up a big hand, “The stenographer, Will. I want this down in black and white if I’m going to lose my license over it.”
He pulled up a chair and settled Lucy in it while Gentry pushed a button on his desk and growled, “Send Richardson in.” Shayne drew another chair close to Lucy’s and sat beside her, getting himself a cigarette lit while a young, smooth-faced plainclothesman came in and settled himself at a desk in the corner with a shorthand notebook open.
Shayne settled back and took a long drag on his cigarette and said evenly: “A brief statement from Michael Shayne. I went to my office after you left me at the Bright Spot, Will, and found Mrs. Renshaw’s address in Lucy’s notes. Her hotel room was empty when I entered it, but I found a telephone message beside her bed that she was to call McTige at the Yardley Hotel. I went there, and entered his room and found his dead body. Before I could report it, his phone rang and I answered. It was Mrs. Renshaw. She seemed to immediately realize it wasn’t McTige speaking, and hung up.
“A moment later the phone rang again. It was Lucy Hamilton, calling McTige. She gave her name as Mrs. Renshaw and instructed me to meet her at the Dolphin Bar with ‘the money’ at once. I had a feeling she had recognized my voice, and was carrying on her end of the conversation under duress. I went there and found Lucy seated in a booth with a man I had never seen before, but who looked dangerous to me. I played drunk and manoeuvered him far enough away from Lucy so I could slug him, and I got slugged from behind by the bartender. That’s all I know. Lucy, you take it from the time I dashed out of the Bright Spot leaving you and Tim behind.”
Lucy Hamilton said in a small voice, “It’s all going to sound terribly confused, because it’s still all very confusing to me. All right, Michael. Tim and I went right out behind you and Tim told the doorman I wanted a cab. He said there’d probably be one any minute discharging passengers, and he got Tim’s car for him while I waited. Tim refused to go off and leave me there until a cab came. It seemed a long wait, but probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. The minute a cab pulled in, Tim jumped in his car and took off. I got into the cab, and just as we were pulling away I saw a woman hurrying, almost running, around the side of the club from the rear. I recognized her under the floodlight as Mrs. Renshaw… the woman who came to our office today and begged Michael to find her husband in Miami before the Syndicate found him and killed him.”
She hesitated a moment, and turned her head to explain to Shayne: “I knew you’d gone off looking for her husband… the man Sloe Burn called Fred Tucker… and I jumped out of the cab and went over and intercepted Mrs. Renshaw just as she was starting in the front door. She recognized me from this afternoon at the office, and she was terribly distraught. She said she’d had a phone call from the Chicago detective, Baron McTige, saying that her husband was at the Bright Spot hiding in Sloe Burn’s dressing room.
“She had been back to the dressing room where Sloe Burn angrily denied the accusation and went into a rage and chased her out the back way. She wanted to know what I was doing there, and I didn’t know what to tell her. I knew that Sloe Burn had just sent you off to a motel looking for Mr. Renshaw, and I wondered if maybe that was a ruse to get you away, and that he was hiding in Sloe Burn’s dressing room.
“Anyhow, I told Mrs. Renshaw that we were checking out the same rumor that he was at the Bright Spot, and I suggested that she wait there in front while I went back to see if I could find him.
“She seemed awfully thankful, and worried about her husband, and I left her there and went back around the side of the building to the stage-door. There was an old man there and he asked me what I wanted and I just started to say that Mrs. Renshaw said… and suddenly there was this hulking brute of a crazy man that came from somewhere and grabbed me and pulled me away. He was babbling all kinds of things and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said Essie had told him I was hanging around, and he knew my name wasn’t Renshaw anyhow, but Mrs. Shephard, and why was I pretending I thought my husband was there, and why did I care.
“He was all excited and I thought he was drunk, but later I decided he wasn’t. But he had this conch shell with a long sharp point that he kept brandishing in my face and threatening me with, and I kept trying to tell him that I wasn’t Mrs. Renshaw or Shephard either one, and to prove it I told him to come around in front with me and I’d show him Mrs. Renshaw waiting for me.
“So he finally did, holding onto me tight and keeping that sharp shell in his hand pressed up against my side and threatening to cut me with it if I tried to get away.
“And when we got around in front, she wasn’t there. Mrs. Renshaw just wasn’t there. And Ralph asked the doorman… because that was his name, I found out… Ralph Billiter… he’s Sloe Burn’s dancing partner, Michael… from the Keys… where they grow up from babies learning to use those sharpened conch shells instead of knives to fight with… and kill each other, too, the way he talked about it… well, he asked the doorman if there was any woman waiting and where she had gone, and he denied it… the doorman, I mean… and so then Ralph was convinced I’d lied to him and I was Mrs. Shephard… and he wouldn’t have it any different.
“And I’d never even heard of any Mrs. Shephard, and I told him so, and he kept calling me a liar with a lot of four-letter words mixed in, and asking where was the money and where was Baron McTige. I didn’t understand anything about it, or what to do. He just seemed frothing at the mouth crazy, and he waved that conch shell around and kept saying how he’d purely love to cut my throat with it and would except he knew I could get the money from McTige and that’s what he wanted me to do.
“I thought it would settle things if I could get hold of Mr. McTige and have him tell that crazy boy that I wasn’t Mrs. Renshaw or Mrs. Shephard, or whatever, and I offered to call him at his hotel and ask him to come out, but he got suspicious and said, ‘Oh, no you don’t. Not out here, you don’t. We’ll go some place I pick out and you can call him from there.’
“So he dragged me around back to where he had his car parked, still holding that shell up against me all the time, and he made me get in and he drove off, and I kept asking him what he meant by calling me Mrs. Shephard, and what money was he talking about, and then it came out in little bits and pieces which I didn’t understand and still don’t, but maybe it’ll make sense to you.”
Lucy Hamilton paused in her long recital to look anxiously at Shayne. “Does any of this make any sense at all to you, Michael?”
He nodded grimly. “Some of it. Go on and tell us what Ralph told you.”
“You know Sloe Burn told us Fred Tucker had been there and the two men came looking for him… Baron McTige was one of them, I think, Michael… and how she’d slipped him out the back and had Ralph take him away to the Pink Flamingo?”
Shayne nodded when she paused, and she took a deep breath and went on: “Well, Ralph did, I guess. Drive to the motel with him. And when they got there, he claims Fred Tucker offered him a whole fortune in money to take back to Sloe Burn, and there was something about it being hidden in a loaf of bread and Tucker gave it to him, and then those two men came in… the ones Sloe Burn described to us, Michael… and they saw the money and there was a big fight over it, I guess, during which Tucker… or Renshaw… or Shephard, as Ralph insisted was his real name… ducked out of the motel and got away.
“And McTige had a gun and the preacher-looking one got knocked down and hit his head on the leg of the refrigerator and got knocked unconscious, and then McTige told Ralph he was a detective from Chicago and that Tucker’s name was really Shephard, who had stolen the money from his wife and McTige was going to keep it and give it back to her. And he chased Ralph off with his gun, and Ralph had to walk back through the palmettos to the Bright Spot, and with him getting it thoroughly set in his mind that I was Mrs. Shephard, he said I had to call Baron McTige and make him bring the money to me… and then he was going to take it for himself. Except that he did have some other lovely ideas about how we might go off together and share the money… a whole hundred thousand dollars, he kept repeating, and so he drove to the Dolphin Bar and I tried to call Baron McTige from there.
“I tried his number three times without any answer… and the fourth time I called, you answered the phone, Michael. Ralph was standing right over me with that pointed shell in my side, listening to every word I said, and I had to go on and pretend I was talking to Mr. McTige even when I knew it was you after the first word you spoke.”
Lucy Hamilton stopped speaking suddenly, and the stenographer’s pencil ceased racing over his notebook.
Will Gentry was leaning back in his chair studying the tips of his blunt fingers which he had arched together in front of him, and when Lucy was finished, he sighed deeply and asked Shayne, “Any of this mean anything to you, Mike?”
“Some of it. If Ralph Billiter was telling Lucy the truth, it’s the first indication we’ve had of what happened at the Pink Flamingo before I got there. The money in the loaf of bread seems to tie in all right.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Gentry agreed mildly. “And it might, just possibly, tie in with the identity of the dead man, too.”
“Have you identified him, Will?” Shayne asked eagerly.
“Oh, sure. We stodgy police do have our own methods of turning up certain odd bits of information now and then.” He paused and got a cigar out of his pocket and sniffed it happily before biting off the end.
Shayne said resignedly. “All right. Who is he?”
“Name of Brannigan. We’ve got his fingerprints on file. Investigator for the Nationwide Bonding Company. Does that mean anything to you, Mike?”