Fully clothed and freshly shaven, with his sparse hair combed smoothly and his glasses firmly settled on the bridge of his nose, the man looked as though he might actually be named Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third when Shayne walked into Gentry’s office twenty minutes later and found him seated there in earnest conference with Miami’s chief of police.
Will Gentry still hadn’t been to bed, and he looked it. His heavy body sagged behind the big desk and his florid face was grayer than usual. He looked up at Shayne disapprovingly and said, “From what Rexforth here has been telling me, Mike, I think you’ve got yourself into a hell of a tight spot this time.”
“Forget that for a moment, Will.” Shayne’s gray eyes were very bright although he hadn’t been to bed for more than twenty-four hours either. He disregarded Rexforth entirely, and told Gentry, “I think I can clean this whole thing up fast. Just get that woman in here. Elsa Cornell. I think I know the right sort of questions to ask her now.”
Gentry rolled his rumpled eyelids down like tiny Venetian blinds to shut out Shayne’s piercing glance. “I’d be glad to,” he muttered, “if we had her. All right, goddamn it,” he added angrily, rolling his eyelids back up again to meet Shayne’s gaze squarely. “I don’t need any remarks about the efficiency of my police department. She got away from Ed Corby and Jim Greene while they were bringing her in from the morgue. She was sitting in front with Greene and he stopped for a stop sign. When he pulled into the intersection with traffic coming from both ways, she calmly opened the front door and stepped out. He couldn’t stop, damn it, without causing a couple of wrecks. And by the time they got clear and went back for her, she’d vanished.”
Shayne simply said, “My God, Will,” and sank into a chair on the other side of the chief’s desk from Rexforth. “She was the only link we had. Driving back from that motel…” He stretched his big hands out in front of him and closed the fingers slowly into fists. “… I decided I was going to get the truth out of her if I had to choke it out of her lovely throat.” He paused. “All right, Will. So we haven’t got her. What have we got?”
“In the first place, Mike, I’ve got two witnesses who place you square in Miami yesterday noon and at five o’clock,” Gentry told him heavily. “Want to comment on that?”
Shayne looked across at Rexforth and said, “The five o’clock thing is his, of course. Why doesn’t he produce his man named Brenner who’s supposed to have tailed me out to the Orange Palms Motel?”
“I will, Mr. Shayne,” said Rexforth happily. “He should be on his way here now.”
Shayne said, “Fine. I’d like to hear him tell his own story. What’s this noon deal, Will?”
“It’s a lad who works for the lunchroom down the street on Flagler where Lucy often orders lunch delivered up to the office. He knows her well, Mike, and says he knows you by sight. He’s prepared to swear that you met him down in the lobby of the building about twelve-thirty yesterday when he was taking a tray up to Lucy, and you gave him a dollar tip and told him you were going tip and you’d take it to her.”
“So that’s how they pulled it?” muttered Shayne. “That adds up. Anyone who bothered to check carefully would know that Lucy always orders lunch sent up from that lunchroom, if I’m not in the office.”
“He says he can identify you, Mike,” Gentry pressed him. “That he’s seen you in the office with Lucy several times.”
Shayne nodded disinterestedly. “I’ve probably seen him a couple of times when he delivered lunches. If we’re tied up, Lucy orders something for both of us. Is that all you’ve got?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“No, by God, it isn’t!” Shayne exploded, leaping up from his chair angrily. “Where are these witnesses who are supposed to identify me? Jesus Christ, Will! You’ve listened to Rexforth’s story. Don’t you get the implications?”
“The implications I get,” Gentry told him coldly, “is that there was a hundred thousand dollars floating around loose in Miami and you figured to grab it. I’m not saying what happened in your office yesterday afternoon, Mike. I’m not saying either you or Lucy killed the guy. But I think both of you know a hell of a lot more about it than I do… and I’m waiting for you to let me in on it.”
Shayne let out a long breath and said, “I’ll agree there probably was a hundred grand floating around Miami yesterday waiting for somebody to grab it. And someone did… or made a hell of a good try. But it wasn’t I, Will. And it sure as hell wasn’t Lucy. Did you send a man out to the Orange Palms Motel?”
Gentry nodded, reaching in his pocket for a thick black cigar which he rolled between his fingers and sniffed gravely. “That’s where Rexforth says you took Lucy yesterday afternoon from the office. And that part doesn’t make sense, I’ll grant you. If you and Lucy suddenly decided to bed down together, I can’t see you shacking up in a motel to do it.”
“I’ve told you a dozen times,” said Shayne tensely, “that I was in California at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. It was some other man, Will, pretending to be me to try and get his hands on that dough.”
“And Lucy went out to a motel with him?” Gentry looked properly incredulous.
“I didn’t say that. I said…”
“When you telephoned in,” Gentry reminded him, “you said you wanted Cabin Nineteen checked because Lucy had been there. Now you say she wasn’t there. You can’t have it both ways, Mike. But you’re never going to make me believe Lucy went out to a motel with another man. Maybe with you, damn it, though I should think you could plan it better than that, but not with some other lug.”
Shayne gritted his teeth and said as patiently as he could manage, “I know Lucy was in that cabin yesterday, Will. I don’t know when she was taken there, or how, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t willingly on her part. Don’t you understand, goddamn it?”
“I don’t understand much of anything,” confessed Gentry. “What makes you so sure Lucy was there at all? She leave you a note or something?”
Shayne hesitated, the wispy bit of embroidered blue nylon in his pocket seeming to burn against his flesh. He couldn’t confess the truth to Will Gentry. Not even to Gentry, damn it. There was something so leeringly sexual about a girl leaving her panties behind her in a motel room. No matter how well you knew Lucy… no matter how much you liked and respected her… a pair of discarded panties were… well, a pair of discarded panties.
He replied stiffly, “Something like that. I’ll bet you a hundred to one they find Lucy’s fingerprints there… left not later than six o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“Just when Rexforth claims she went there with you,” Gentry commented stubbornly, putting light to his cigar and puffing on it with a sour frown as though it tasted worse than it smelled.
Shayne said helplessly, “None of this is helping us find Lucy. If your lousy cops had just kept their hands on Elsa Cornell after I turned her over to you…”
He was interrupted by the breezy entrance of Timothy Rourke into the room. He stopped dead in his tracks at sight of Shayne.
“I’ve been trying to call you, Mike. You know I’ve been checking back in our old files on that O’Keefe embezzlement in Jacksonville and by God, Mike, this may be important. There was a round hundred thousand stolen… and not one penny of it was recovered. North American Bonding Company paid off in full. O’Keefe claimed he had spent it all prior to his arrest, but rumor was rife that ’twasn’t so. That he maybe had it put away until he got out of the pen and could enjoy it. Hey!” Rourke paused in his recital and glanced around uncertainly at the wooden faces about him.
“None of you seem very much excited about this,” he said in a deflated voice. “I thought it might be important as a motive for O’Keefe’s murder.”
Shayne said, “It’s important all right, Tim, but we’ve already got the same dope from Mr. Rexforth here. Remember the nasty little man Lucy mentioned in her notes?”
“Oh. Sure.” Rourke glanced at Rexforth and agreed, “He is sort of a nasty little man at that. All right. Maybe you already know this, too, but I thought you’d be interested. I know who the dame is you had at the morgue, Mike. The one you called Elsa Cornell.”
Shayne swung on him eagerly. “You do? Who is she?”
“I had a kind of funny feeling all along,” Rourke confessed, “that I’d seen her picture in the paper somewhere… sometime. And when I was looking over the O’Keefe file, there it was. Right in front of me. A few years younger, but not a damn bit prettier.”
“Who?” Shayne breathed, his throat constricted.
“Mrs. Julius O’Keefe, that’s who. At least she was when he stole the money. She divorced him later and married his ex-boss. A guy named Robert Long. And you know what’s one of the funniest coincidences of all, Mike? That Robert Long is the same one that got killed here in Miami a few months ago in a shooting scrape you were mixed up in. I don’t know whether you remember…”
“I remember all right,” Shayne said grimly. He grabbed the reporter’s arm and swung him toward the door. “Come on, Tim. Let’s get going.”
“Hold it,” shouted Gentry angrily. “I’ve got two witnesses on their way in here to identify you, Mike. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”
“To find Lucy,” Shayne said over his shoulder as he jerked the door open and shoved Rourke through it in front of him.