He ran through the hall and shoved Freed aside at the front door, pushing Timothy Rourke out onto the porch in front of him. His own car was parked there, but he led the reporter past it and down the driveway, saying urgently, “We’ve only got a few minutes, Tim. Talk while we’re moving.”
“That’s what I came out to tell you. There isn’t any rush. Painter refused to move until tomorrow morning.”
“Good for Painter.” Still holding Rourke’s arm tightly, Shayne pulled him impatiently down the street past the reporter’s own coupe parked in front of the iron gates.
“Will had quite an argument with him,” panted Rourke as he was rushed along, “but Painter absolutely refused to do anything until he could get hold of Erskine and give the State Department a chance to step in first if they want. Neither Will nor Painter knows you’re on the personal rampage, Mike. Though I think Will suspects it all right.”
They rounded the corner of the stone wall toward the service entrance, and Shayne looked at his watch. It was one minute until twelve-thirty. From the rear of the estate came the muffled sound of a gasoline-powered launch approaching on the canal.
“I don’t know what you’re up to, Mike,” Rourke said desperately as they stopped in front of the locked wooden gates under the archway, “but I wish to God you’d hold off.”
Shayne said, “It’s too late for that.” He let go of Rourke’s arm and said calmly, “I’m going over the gate and I’ll try to unlock it from the inside to let you in. Go back to your car and get out of here if you want,” he continued roughly, “but you’ll pass up a headline story if you do.”
He reached up with both hands and got a firm grip on the top of the gate, swung his body up and scrambled over, dropping to the ground on the inside.
He fumbled with the lock in the darkness, found a knurled knob which released the catch, and shoved the door outward just as the sounds of a melee came from the boathouse at the rear.
Rourke moved in, muttering hoarsely, “What the hell?” and lights came on in the rear and suddenly they were bathed in the beams of a bright searchlight mounted on the big house in front of them.
Shayne darted forward toward the dark hulk of the house with Rourke following a few paces behind. There were shouts from the rear and the loud sound of splintering wood, and they were suddenly at the kitchen door which opened when Shayne turned the knob.
The floodlight from outside gave enough light through the windows for Shayne to cross the floor and locate a switch on the opposite wall. He pushed it and ran through a butler’s pantry into a wide hallway beyond where he found another light switch that showed a curving stairway leading to the second floor.
Shayne pounded up the stairway with Rourke panting at his heels. From outside and to the rear there came the sound of a single pistol shot, no louder than the popping of a champagne cork inside the thick walls of the house.
At the top of the stairs, Shayne hesitated a moment, facing three closed doors on the side toward the Peralta house.
He tried the center door first and it was securely locked.
He drew back two steps and lunged forward, lowering his left shoulder and hitting the door like a battering ram. It crashed inward and Shayne went to his hands and knees on a thickly carpeted floor, dazed by the force of the impact.
A bright light came on over his head, and from the doorway behind him he vaguely heard a loud exclamation of astonishment from Rourke.
Then the reporter hurried past him and Shayne slowly pushed himself up and saw the big double bed in front of the windows with Rourke leaning over the figure of Lucy Hamilton securely bound and gagged on top of the bedspread.
Shayne swayed a little and shook his red head to clear it, and then stumbled forward to the side of the bed as Rourke released the gag.
There were tears in Lucy’s eyes as she stared up at him imploringly, and she cried out softly, “I thought you’d never come, Michael. It seemed like years and years…”
Shayne dropped to his knees beside the bed and put a big hand comfortingly on her face. Rourke had his pocket-knife out and was cutting through the strips of torn sheet which bound her wrists and her ankles tightly together behind her back.
Shayne said hoarsely, “It’s all right, Lucy. Just relax. Can you tell me who did it?”
A convulsive shudder traversed her body as her arms came free and she was able to straighten her cramped legs. In a blurred voice, she whispered, “I never saw him before, Michael. He came to the office with a gun. Thick glasses and a dark suit. He didn’t hurt me, Michael. Just brought me here and there was another man waiting inside the gate…”
Shayne pressed his fingertips against her bruised lips. Rourke had her ankles loosened and was gently kneading the muscles in her lower legs to restore circulation.
Shayne stood up and told Rourke, “Take care of her, Tim. As soon as she can walk, take her out the side way and put her in your car parked in front. Then come on back to the boathouse if you want to pick up the pieces.” Rourke straightened up and yelled, “Wait a minute, Mike!” but Shayne was already out of the bedroom and on his way down the stairs.
The floodlight still bathed the side of the house and the backyard with bright light as the detective ran out the kitchen door, and brilliant lights were shining from the upper and lower windows of the two-story boathouse at the rear. But there were no more sounds indicative of a struggle. He had heard the one shot and that was all.
He ran back along a concrete walk to a door leading into the boathouse, and jerked it open. The first person he saw was Alvarez standing in the middle of the floor with a pistol in his hand. The Cuban whirled and leveled the gun as Shayne came through the door, then lowered it and smiled pleasantly. Beyond him were twin slips opening out into the canal, and a power cruiser bobbed gently in each slip. At least one half of the interior of the boathouse was piled almost to the ceiling with stout wooden crates of various sizes and shapes, and half a dozen men were busily engaged in loading the crates into the two launches. There were two men on the other side of the boathouse against the wall, one seated on the floor and the other lying beside him.
The seated man was Mr. Erskine. His glasses were missing and his hands were handcuffed in front of him. He sat bolt upright, facing Alvarez’s pistol, and he glared malevolently at Michael Shayne, but did not speak.
Sprawled on his back on the floor beside him was Julio Peralta. There was an ugly wound on his forehead and blood streamed down his face, and he was breathing stertorously.
On Shayne’s left a stairway with a wooden railing led up to the caretaker’s living quarters on the second floor. The caretaker, himself, lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs. His sawed-off shotgun was on the floor a foot beyond his body, and there was a neat round bullet-hole drilled in the center of his forehead.
Shayne drew in a deep breath as he completed his survey of the place and lifted his gaze from Brad’s corpse to meet Alvarez’s eyes which were fixed steadily on him.
“It was unfortunate,” said the Cuban, “that he attempted to use his weapon. I was forced to shoot quickly.”
Shayne said, “I don’t think it’s too important. Unless I’m all wrong, he strangled a woman this evening.”
“So?” Alvarez turned his head to glance at the men working behind him. He spoke swiftly in Spanish, and they grunted, “Si, si,” and began moving faster. He turned back to Shayne and said questioningly, “If we are given time to load these two launches? There is a larger boat anchored in the bay which can be well out to sea before daylight with most of these arms… which were destined to bring death to my countrymen, Mr. Shayne.”
Shayne said, “I think you’ll have time. If the neighbors took that pistol shot for a back-fire…” He shrugged. “What about Peralta?”
“He will live,” said Alvarez grimly, “to be given a fair trial by his own people.”
“And Erskine?”
“Who, Mr. Shayne?”
The detective nodded toward the handcuffed man.
“You mean Mr. Albert Tatum. Him we will have to leave to the good graces of your own government, Mr. Shayne. He is an American citizen with a price on his head if he ever returns to Cuba voluntarily, but I will not be a party to his illegal seizure.”
Shayne studied the seated man with interest. “A price on his head? For what?”
“For crimes against my country extending back over a period of twenty years. He and Peralta have been business partners that long, and they plundered and pillaged under the Batista regime. Since the revolution, they have been plotting to overthrow it.”
“Have you any proof he isn’t a Communist?”
“That one?” Alvarez snorted his contempt.
Shayne said, “All right,” mildly. “At the very least, I think I can promise you he’ll get a long jail term for kidnaping.”
He turned aside and looked down speculatively at Brad. “Do you mind if I check something on this guy?”
Alvarez said, “I have no interest in carrion.”
Shayne squatted down beside the dead caretaker and found a wallet in his right-hand hip pocket. There were bills in the money compartment which he didn’t count and left undisturbed, but he emptied the card compartment in the center and sorted through old business cards, scrawled notations and telephone numbers, and receipted bills with interest.
He found two items that repaid his search. One was the torn half of a yellow claim check which he recognized instantly. He knew it matched the other half in his pocket without putting the two halves together.
The second was a receipted bill from a Miami jewelry shop in the sum of $630.42, which was marked “Paid” three days previously. The charge was for, “Reproduction bracelet.”
Shayne carefully placed both items in his own wallet, returned the rest of the stuff to Brad’s and replaced it in the dead man’s pocket.
As he completed doing so, he heard footsteps outside the door, and got to his feet to see Timothy Rourke and Lucy Hamilton appear in the doorway.
He expostulated to Rourke, “I told you to take Lucy out to your car…”
“Michael!” Lucy stood inside the door staring at the handcuffed man seated on the floor. “That’s the man. He brought me here in his car…”
“Erskine?” Standing beside her, Timothy Rourke said wonderingly, “He’s from Washington, Lucy. The State Department.”
“He’s as much from the State Department as you are,” Shayne said angrily. “My God, Tim, don’t tell me you’re as naive as Peter Painter. He and Peralta were in cahoots all the way along.”
Rourke shook his head from side to side. “I don’t get it. Why would he tell that long, involved story about Communism and all that? Mike, I’m afraid you’re making a hell of a mistake.”
Shayne grinned at him sardonically. “You heard Lucy, didn’t you? Alvarez can fill you in on the rest of it. Don’t you see how it was, Tim? He and Peralta had this operation going, and they needed a little more time without police interference. The theft of the bracelet was a monkey-wrench, and when Painter insisted officiously on pushing the investigation despite Peralta’s protests, Albert Tatum went to Painter with his State Department-Communist story which Petey swallowed hook-line-and-sinker. After all, the one thing no red-blooded, patriotic American can do today is to question the State Department. Oh, hell,” Shayne ended in disgust. “Of course Painter didn’t question the man’s credentials. Will Gentry might have been a little harder to convince, if he’d been approached directly, but you know yourself that Tatum came to Will with Painter’s seal of approval. So Will accepted him at face value.
“They had everything all set until yesterday when Peralta upset the apple-cart by calling me in,” Shayne went on swiftly. “It was a personal thing with him, reflecting on his wife, which he didn’t want to divulge even to Tatum.
“As I say,” Shayne ended up with an angry wave of his hand. “Ask Alvarez who ‘Erskine’ actually is. While he fills you in, I’m going to take a quick look-see upstairs where the caretaker lived.”
He swung on his heel and climbed the stairs to the small, compact, bedroom-sitting-room apartment above the boat-house. It took him less than five minutes to find the emerald bracelet. Brad had been so sure that Tatum and Peralta would forestall any search by the police that Shayne found it thrust carelessly underneath some clean shirts in a top right-hand drawer in a chest in the bedroom.
He held it up for a moment and admired the light reflected by the emerald-green facets, and then dropped it into his pocket and hurried back downstairs.
Timothy Rourke was deep in conversation with Alvarez, and the loading of the crates of munitions into the two power cruisers was continuing methodically. Lucy Hamilton, looking wilted and forlorn, stood drooping by the doorway.
Shayne went to her and put his arm about her waist tightly, and announced in a loud voice, “Lucy and I are getting out of here, Tim. The headlines are all yours.”
“Wait a minute, Mike.” Rourke turned on him with a worried scowl. “What about the emerald bracelet that started the whole thing to cooking?”
With a look at the still-unconscious Julio Peralta, Shayne said blandly, “I never did take a retainer on that case, Tim. I think I’ll just drop the whole thing and forget about it. Let’s go, Lucy. My God, I just remembered I haven’t had any dinner.”
“Neither have I, Michael.” She pressed her head against his shoulder and allowed him to half-carry her out the door. “Do we have to go any place? I’ve got some hamburger at home.”
“And some cognac?” he demanded teasingly.
“You know there’s always cognac, Michael.”
“Come on then.” He led her out the side gate with his arm tightly around her, and toward the street. “We’ll take my car,” he decided. “I don’t believe Mr. Geely or Mr. Harris will get in our way tonight.”
“Who are they?”
“A couple of drunks,” he told her cheerfully.