After Helen had left the apartment Shayne sat in the same position for a long time. Then he got up and went over to Rourke. The reporter was still breathing with the even cadence of the unconscious.
Shayne sighed and lifted the limp body in his arms. He carried Rourke into the bedroom and stretched him out on the bed, got a roll of adhesive tape from the bathroom, and taped his mouth shut firmly. He then bound his wrists tightly to his sides, fastened his feet together to one of the bed posts, and carefully moved the telephone table away from the bed as far as the cord allowed.
When the job was completed to his satisfaction, Shayne took a belted trench coat from the closet, tugged a hat down over his unruly red hair, and went out of the apartment.
He walked down one flight of stairs and unlocked the door of his office. Everything was in order, as he and Phyllis had left it that afternoon.
He closed the door and went to his wife’s desk, lifted a corner of the typewriter pad. The piece of claim check lay where he had placed it.
He picked it up and studied it with furrowed brow. Torn irregularly on both sides, this was the center portion of a baggage receipt. But he saw, now, that it was no more than half of a center portion. If it had been torn into three pieces as Pearson said, Lacy’s third should have been twice as long as this piece.
Still, he saw at once this was the most important half. It had been torn directly below the row of identifying figures making up the serial number which was the only means by which a piece of baggage could be claimed by its owner.
He closed his eyes for a moment, bringing back into focus that first scene in his office which had started the case off with a bang. He had withdrawn Lacy’s left hand from his coat pocket, discovered this small piece of cardboard tightly clenched in the dead man’s fingers. No portion of it had showed until he spread Lacy’s fingers apart.
Shayne nodded his head with satisfaction. That doubtless explained the missing bottom part, and explained, too, why Leroy and Joe had permitted Lacy to escape from them on the causeway without getting what they were after. They must have snatched the strip from Lacy’s fingers, but only succeeded in tearing off the bottom half. In their hurry, they did not realize that Lacy had retained the portion with the all-important serial numbers, and allowed him to drive on-thinking he was so badly wounded he would surely die before he got very far.
That was guesswork, but it fitted the facts as Shayne knew them. And it cleared up a point that had been puzzling him all evening-why a pair of tough killers like Leroy and Joe had let Lacy remain alive without finishing their obvious assignment.
He put the piece of cardboard back where it had been. That seemed as good a hiding-place as any for the moment.
Outside, Shayne rolled both front windows of his car down when he got behind the wheel. The air of the new-born day was soothing, almost soporific, as he rolled slowly north through the deserted business section of the city. It swept the maggots of worry from his mind, pleasantly eased the tension inside him. Even the fact that Phyllis was helpless in the hands of ruthless killers seemed not nearly so oppressive as it had a couple of hours previously. He was beginning to get his finger on the pulse of the baffling case and there was no action he could take until he received the answer to his advertisement in the morning Herald.
He lolled back against the cushion and welcomed the feeling of relaxation, yet at the same time he sensed an inner revolt against it. It was dangerous, this lulling of a man’s faculties. It was an insidious component of the drowsy tropical night, a virus that got into a man’s blood if he was long exposed to the deadly surface placidity of life in the resort city.
Shayne knew it was an unhealthy state of mind, yet he was as guilty as any of the other residents who refused to face the reality of war. Tonight, while listening to Pearson’s story of spies and secret weapons, it had all seemed a little absurd and fantastic. Rourke’s impassioned pleading that he forget the danger to Phyllis and serve a larger cause had left him untouched.
Shayne didn’t enjoy admitting that accusation against himself, but he could not deny it was true. It was the lethargic state of mind that the semitropics induced in a man, he told himself, and he was no better than the others who came to bask in the sun and the sea and escape the grim responsibilities of citizenship.
He was scowling darkly when he parked in front of the News Tower on Biscayne Boulevard. It was up to him, now, to justify the course of action he had chosen for himself in the face of terrific pressure from Will Gentry and Tim Rourke.
Nominally an evening paper, the News put out a noon edition, and when Shayne got off the elevator on the floor housing the city desk and editorial staff, it was already beginning to hum with a new day’s activity.
He sauntered in and nodded to a couple of rewrite men, was nearing an arched doorway marked Library when an irritated voice hailed him from behind. “Hey. Mike! Shayne.”
He turned and lifted a hand in greeting to a dyspeptic-looking man in his shirt sleeves. He said, “Hi, Grange,” and went toward the desk in response to a beckoning finger.
Grange wore a perpetual scowl that was the dual derivative of chronic indigestion and having to depend upon irresponsible reporters to help him get the paper out. His scowl was more pronounced than usual when Shayne rested an elbow on his belittered desk and inquired solicitously, “Something you et, Grange?”
“No, I feel fine. Never felt better in my life. Where’s Rourke? What’s he doing? Who the hell does he think he is?”
Shayne turned to survey the room in mock surprise. “You mean Tim isn’t here?”
“What else do you think I mean? Gentry told me Tim was with you. Maybe I’d better call headquarters again and-”
“I wouldn’t bother Gentry,” Shayne interposed. “That is, it wouldn’t get you anywhere. I happen to know Tim’s on the trail of a story. Something really hot. I wouldn’t worry if he doesn’t call in. You know how Tim is.”
“Yeh. I know how Tim is.” He pounded an authoritative fist on a pile of papers. “Are you covering for him, Mike? If he’s drunk again-”
“He’s not drunk. He was pretty well tied up when I left him, and he’s likely to stay that way until the story breaks.”
“Working with you?” Grange asked suspiciously.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. This is big stuff, and it ties in with the death of Jim Lacy yesterday.”
“The bird that kicked off on your threshold?” Grange grabbed a pencil and wad of copy paper. “Give.”
“Nix.” Shayne backed away, shaking his head. “It’s strictly off-the-record right now. You can trust Rourke to cover it as fast as it breaks.”
Grange grunted sourly. “The only thing I can trust Rourke to cover is any female who stumbles in his path.” He continued to regard the redhead with suspicion. “Give me enough of it so I’ll know you’re on the level.”
Shayne kept on backing away and shaking his head. “It’s a military secret right now. Honest to God, Grange. Ask Gentry if you don’t want to believe me.”
He swung around and went into the file-room, said cheerfully, “The top of a fine mornin’ to you, mom,” to a stout middle-aged woman who sat in a rocking-chair plying a pair of steel needles to a ball of wool.
She glanced up without slowing her knitting and snapped, “Don’t think I’m going to put my knitting down just to look up something for the likes of you, Michael Shayne. I drop a stitch every time I let go of the needles, and if I drop many more stitches I’ll end up with a sweater to fit one of those Japs instead of our own boys.”
Shayne grinned and said, “Maybe that’s the secret weapon I’ve been hearing about. Get enough of you women knitting sweaters with freeze holes for the Japs-”
He stopped and backed away as her black eyes flashed angrily. “’Tis a great kidder I am, mom. Pay no heed to me. Where do you keep your current New York file?”
“At the end of the third counter-to three months back.”
“That’s far enough.” He went to the end of the third counter and found the files of the Herald-Tribune and Times bound in monthly batches between stiff paper-covers. He pulled up a stool and selected the Herald-Tribune, turned back two months, and began scanning the daily headlines.
He went through four issues before coming on the headline he was looking for: Daring Daylight Robbery.
He hunched forward and ran over the account of the holdup. Jim Lacy, bank messenger for a well-known brokerage firm-attacked in broad daylight by a lone gunman-knocked to the pavement by a single blow that rendered him groggy-Lacy could give the police only a hazy description of his assailant.
There was nothing in the account to either prove or disprove Shayne’s half-formed suspicion of collusion. The gunman had been resourceful and well prepared, equipped with a pair of heavy steel shears with which he snipped the chain handcuffing the money bag to Lacy’s wrist. Then, menacing onlookers with a gun, he commandeered a taxicab and disappeared in the afternoon traffic.
Shayne turned to the next issue. A photograph of Mace Morgan confronted him on the front page. The cutline read, Identified as Holdup.
Shayne read the account of Mace Morgan’s capture carefully. He had been arrested in a rooming-house a few hours after the robbery as the result of a tip from an anonymous telephone call. He had vehemently denied any knowledge of the crime and attempted to prove an alibi, but it was checked and disproved by the police. None of the loot nor any physical evidence to connect him with the crime was found, but he was positively identified in a police line-up by three eyewitnesses. Lacy, confronted by Morgan, thought it might be the right man.
A lot of newspaper space was devoted to the large sum of cash and unregistered securities Lacy had been carrying when he was robbed. The total was slightly over one hundred thousand dollars according to figures furnished by his employers. The junior member of the firm had been hastily recalled by telegraph while en route to a vacation cruise in the Caribbean, and it was reported that his wife was bearing up well under the disappointment of having her trip canceled. The wife was a prominent member of the Junior League, and her reactions had made a good human interest story. There were printed reassurances from the brokerage firm that the loss was fully covered by Lacy’s bond, and that none of their clients need worry about the firm’s solvency.
Shayne lit a cigarette after reading the concurrent stories. There was nothing at all to indicate definitely whether Lacy had or had not been in cahoots with Morgan. Yet someone had fingered the job for Morgan. A hundred grand was an extraordinary sum for a bank messenger to be carrying. It was hardly coincidence that Morgan had chosen that particular afternoon for his daring robbery.
Yet that wasn’t a definite clue to Lacy’s participation either, for Shayne knew it was often a firm’s policy to keep its messengers in ignorance of the value of the parcels they carried, simply to prevent what he suspected in this case.
He turned the bound pages back slowly to an issue several days earlier than the robbery. Pearson had said the government plans were stolen two days before Morgan committed the holdup. To be on the safe side, Shayne went back four issues. He read through the complete papers carefully without finding any mention of any such loss in a government plant.
He cursed himself with mild exasperation when he finished wading through the many pages of newsprint. He knew damned well he wouldn’t find anything. With the country at war, there would be strict censorship over such news. The government couldn’t be expected to publicize the loss of an important military secret.
He hesitated for a time, sucking smoke into his lungs and weighing one angle against another in his mind.
After careful consideration of the known facts, he turned to the issue of the preceding week and began a careful study of less important local news items, quite sure that the story he sought had not been important enough to make front-page headlines at a time when American ships were being torpedoed up and down both coastlines.
He paused to glance through half a dozen accounts of burglaries and allied crimes in the great city before he found the one he was looking for: a two-column story on the second page, dated six days previously.
At 11:00 p.m., when returning to their Fifth Avenue apartment from the theater, the socially prominent Mr. and Mrs. J. Winthrop Barton had been accosted at the door by an armed thug wearing a handkerchief over the lower part of his face as a mask. He gruffly ordered them inside, promptly disposed of the lady with a handkerchief doused in chloroform, and threatened her husband with death unless he opened the small wall safe and gave up his valuables.
Mr. Barton had complied with proper celerity, explaining to the police later that the safe held only a moderate amount of cash, which the masked intruder had seized, departing immediately and without causing further trouble.
A set of fingerprints had been conveniently left on the doorknob, and from them the thief had been identified as one Harry Houseman, possessor of a long police record under many aliases, lately a guest of the State of New York at Ossining. Police promised an early arrest of Houseman, and there the affair ended as far as its publicity value was concerned.
After glancing through the next few issues to assure himself that the promise of “an early arrest” had borne no further fruit, Shayne closed the file and went out past the lady with her knitting, leaving a cheerful, “Thanks, mom,” behind him.
As he strolled out, he asked Grange, “Any report from Tim yet?” and received a blasphemous negative reply.
“And if you see that double-jointed no-good,” Grange bellowed, “tell him he’d better turn in a story before we go to press-and not one about pink elephants and mauve lizards.”
“I’ll probably run into him,” Shayne said with a wide grin. “And I’ll deliver your message if he’s in any condition to listen to it.”
He went out, took the elevator to the ground floor, and got into his car as the first faint streaks of crimson on the horizon preceded the rising sun.