“Where are we headed?” Timothy Rourke demanded breathlessly as Shayne gunned his car away from the police station.
“To visit a guy named Dirkson Boal,” Shayne grated. “Lives out north, I think. Miami Shores, maybe. Do you know without stopping to look up the address?”
“The lawyer? Yeh. I interviewed him at home a couple of months ago. Big place off the Boulevard… north of Hundredth Street.”
Shayne nodded, pushing through traffic as fast as he could east to Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s still twenty minutes before most business places open up. If we’re lucky we’ll catch Boal at home.”
“What’s he got to do with it, Mike?” Rourke asked helplessly. “Fill me in a little.”
“He’s got everything to do with it. He and Mrs. Robert Long… O’Keefe’s ex-wife. They’re in it together. There are a couple others, but I imagine they’re just hired hands. You were right about the money O’Keefe stole. I don’t think he did spend it. It looks like he and Long were in it together and put it away in a safe place… probably in Miami… until he got out of jail to claim it with Long.”
He had to stop for a signal light at the Boulevard, and waited impatiently until he could cross the intersection and swing into the outer lane of northbound traffic where he began passing every car in sight.
“It started four months ago when Long died and I was with him. The story was in the papers and it evidently gave various people ideas about the money.”
He swiftly outlined the theory Rexforth had formed independently, and ended flatly, “He was wrong, of course. Long told me nothing and didn’t turn over any half of a claim check to me. His wife held it, of course, and she evidently got the same bright idea that Rexforth had… that O’Keefe would be willing to split with me, although he’d never in the world split with her.
“I suppose she went to Boal with her bright idea about that time, and they worked it out together. Get hold of some guy who could be made up to look enough like me to pass casual inspection… send him to the pen to gain O’Keefe’s confidence… pull strings to get the man pardoned… then arrange to get Lucy and me out of the office on the crucial day of O’Keefe’s release.”
“Why rush out to Boal’s house like this?” asked Rourke. “You’ve got Mrs. Long under arrest. Why not…?”
“That’s the point. We haven’t got her. She got away on her way from the morgue to the station this morning. It’s my bet that she went straight to Boal. Remember, she knows it’s turned into a murder now. She stood there beside me in the morgue looking down at the man she used to be married to and never turned a hair.
“She and Boal are worried,” he added grimly. “The whole thing blew up in their faces when O’Keefe got himself killed in my office by their two hired hands. If they did get what they needed to recover the money off the body of O’Keefe, it’s my guess they’ll try to pick it up from wherever it is as soon as the place opens for business this morning, and get out of town.”
“What about Lucy all this time. You figure Boal has got her?”
“That’s the only way it does figure,” Shayne told him, hoping to God he was right. “I’m pretty sure the pair in my office panicked yesterday after killing O’Keefe, and rushed out to get Lucy from a motel room where they had put her for safe-keeping. They’d go straight to the boss with her… I hope. And dump her in his lap.
“Boal isn’t the type to panic,” he went on slowly. “He wouldn’t take it on the lam without sitting tight until this morning to make a last try at the dough. So far as he knew I was still cuddled up cozily with Mrs. Long in Los Angeles, and even when O’Keefe’s body was found he didn’t see anything to tie him into it.
“That’s what he must have thought, at least, until she turned up here in Miami this morning after eluding Gentry’s dumb cops.”
He slowed down to sixty for a changing traffic light at 79th Street.
“That was less than two hours ago.” He slammed through the intersection and added, “You said north of Hundredth?”
“Yeh. Not far. Just a few blocks, then it’s a turn to the right. Better get over in that lane and slow down a little.”
Rourke leaned out the window on his side to peer ahead, said sharply, “Next turn beyond that filling station. I remember…”
Shayne braked hard as he went past the filling station indicated by Rourke, moved into the right-hand lane and made the turn onto a side street with screeching tires.
Still leaning out the window, Rourke told him, “It’s along here. Big stone gateposts on this side. There. Up ahead.”
Shayne slowed still more and swung in between the stone gateposts on a macadam driveway that curved up a slight slope toward a modest stucco house surrounded by tropical shrubbery.
He was just beyond the gate when the front end of a gray Cadillac nosed around the curve in front of them headed downward.
Shayne slammed on his brakes hard and threw his car into reverse. It lurched backward and he swung the steering wheel hard to settle his car firmly between the gateposts, crosswise of the driveway, so the other car could not possibly get past it. He set the hand-brake and jerked his keys from the ignition and leaped out on his side as the big Cad ground to a halt with its grillwork almost touching the side of his car.
Shayne trotted around the back of his car, noting that a man and a woman occupied the front seat of the other car. The man was Dirkson Boal and the woman beside him was Mrs. Robert Long.
“Take her, Tim,” Shayne panted, heading for the left side of the Cad where Boal had his door open and was stepping out.
Dirkson Boal was a big man, broader than Shayne, but not so tall. He was immaculately clad in a cream-colored suit, a yellow polo shirt open at the throat, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat.
He was heavily tanned and looked physically fit, and his normally pleasant features were contorted with rage as he squared off in front of the detective and sputtered, “What’s the meaning of this?”
Shayne hit him in the mouth before he could get his guard up. Blood spattered and he staggered backward on the dew-wet grass beside the road with arms flailing wildly.
Shayne followed him coldly and methodically, his gray eyes blazing with all the accumulated fury that had been building up inside him for the past twelve hours. He drove a short left to the lawyer’s hard guts and then a swinging right to the side of his jaw that drove him to the ground.
He lay there gasping, looking up fearfully at the detective with blood running out the side of his mouth. He turned his head from side to side in denial when Shayne demanded, “Where’s Lucy Hamilton? My secretary.”
“Don… know,” he croaked between split lips. Shayne drew back a heavy foot and kicked him solidly in the ribs, and Boal grunted and doubled up in pain.
“I’m going to stomp your head in,” Shayne told him implacably. “Where’s Lucy Hamilton?”
“In cellar,” the attorney gasped, covering his bloody face with both hands. “Don’t…”
Shayne turned away from him in disgust, the anger suddenly drained from his body. He grinned at what he saw on the other side of the Cadillac. Timothy Rourke was having a wrestling match with the blonde, and seemingly enjoying it tremendously. They were rolling over and over on the turf and her dress was all the way up to her waist with her long white limbs fully exposed to the sunlight. She was twisting and snarling beneath him as Shayne hurried around the car to see if he required assistance, but the reporter had her lithe body pinioned beneath him and he looked up with a grin, showing three parallel scratches on his cheek where her fingernails had raked him.
“She’s all mine, Mike,” he panted happily. “You tend to your own knitting and I’ll tend to mine. Bite me, would you?” he exclaimed suddenly, turning all his attention back to her. “Try that again and I’ll bite you right back.”
On the Boulevard a block and a half away, Shayne heard the shrill keening of a siren as he hesitated there.
He waited a moment, listening, heard another siren behind the first one, and the protesting screech of rubber as the leading squad car made the turn into the side street leading to the stone gateposts of Boal’s estate.
He waited just long enough to see it pull up beside his parked car and uniformed men piling out of it, and he knew that Will Gentry had quickly guessed where he was going when he slammed out of the chief’s office.
Boal was sitting up on the grass, moaning and holding his head in both hands when Shayne trotted past him, and he left him there for the cops to take care of.
Another car was parked out of sight around the curve headed down the drive. It was a 196 °Chevy with Dade County license plates. The motor was running and there was a couple in the front seat peering anxiously through the windshield down the drive as though they didn’t know what to do next.
Shayne kept on running past them toward the house with only a sideward glance. The man was big and rangy and had red hair. That’s all Shayne saw as he went by, leaving them there like sitting ducks for Will Gentry’s policemen to take care of.
He pounded up to the front door of the house, found it locked, drew back five feet and then drove his shoulder into it like a battering ram.
The lock gave under the impact and he staggered into a hallway which ran through the length of the house, regained his balance and trotted back to the kitchen where he found a door opening onto stairs leading down to the basement.
There was a light switch at the head of the stairs and he switched it on and plunged down, calling, “Lucy,” as he went to keep from frightening her further if she were really down there and could hear him coming.
She was there all right. Huddled up on the concrete floor near the foot of the stairs with her wrists bound tightly to her ankles and wide strips of adhesive tape over her mouth.
Her eyes were open and they looked up at him as he bent over her, and the message they conveyed was more eloquent than her lips could have spoken if they had been free to speak.
He squatted down beside her and got out a pocketknife to cut the hard-knotted clothesline binding her wrists and ankles, and said quietly, “It’s all over but the shouting, Angel. Miami’s Finest has got the whole gang corralled.”