Murder by Proxy (10 page)

There simply was no way of telling at this point.

Shayne heard running footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Herbert Harris trotting toward them across the parking lot. The New Yorker’s face was ashen and his tie was askew. Shayne breathed an oath deep in his throat and moved to meet the man and slow him down, grasping his arm tightly.

“They found her car?” Harris panted. His frightened gaze was on the open trunk, the half dozen men standing in a semi-circle around it. “My God, Shayne…”

“I’m afraid we’ve found her, too, Mr. Harris.” Shayne’s fingers gripped his arm tightly and he hated his job at that moment. “Take it easy,” he cautioned, leading the man forward. “You can make an identification later. Right now…”

“Oh, my God,” moaned Harris as he saw what was inside the trunk of the convertible. He leaned against Shayne and a small whiff of the smell came to his nostrils, and he was unashamedly sick on the ground while Shayne supported his retching body with a big arm about him.

“Is that Ellen?” He kept his eyes tightly closed and leaned against Shayne. “Is that… my
wife?”
he went on shudderingly.

Shayne turned him aside, saying harshly, “We don’t know yet. Probably. Go ahead and be sick,” he went on in the same harsh voice. “Later on we’ll have to try and get a positive identification.”

“I’m all right,” Harris sobbed, retching again, but straightening himself and drawing away from Shayne.

Peter Painter marched up officiously and demanded, “Is that your wife, Harris? Do you recognize her?”

“Who could… recognize her?” Harris cried out in an anguished voice. “Could you recognize
your
wife if she looked like that?” He covered his face with his hands and his knees buckled beneath him.

Shayne lowered his shaking body gently to the ground and said wonderingly, “For God’s sake, Petey. Let the guy be for now. You can get your identification later.” He jerked his head at Merrill and said, “Help me get him back to his room and get a doctor for him.”

An hour later Michael Shayne and Timothy Rourke sat side by side on the sofa in Lucy Hamilton’s apartment, still waiting for a telephone call from Jim Gifford in New York. Lucy had efficiently served them drinks, and she was warming up some food in the oven in the kitchen, and now she sat across from the pair in a deep chair with her stockinged feet tucked up under her, and asked wonderingly, “Are you telling me, Michael, that they’re still not sure the woman in the automobile trunk is Mrs. Harris?” Shayne clawed at his unruly, red hair, and said, “Sure is a pretty positive word, Lucy. How can they be? Nobody can possibly identify a faceless woman. Of course, everything points to the body being Mrs. Harris. But that’s what bothers me. Whenever I see a corpse beaten up beyond recognition, discovered under circumstances where everything outwardly points to it being a particular person… I wonder if it was planned that way. To make us think it’s Mrs. Harris when it isn’t.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mike,” Rourke warned him. “The rented car had been driven only forty-two miles. We know Mrs. Harris went for a drive before she came back to the Beachhaven at seven to pick up Gene Blake. The car must have been sitting in that lot since late Monday night. You know, the M.E. said she had been placed in the trunk of the car within a few hours after her death… before real rigor mortis had set in. And he placed the time as Monday or Tuesday night at the latest… judging by the amount of decomposition. She’s been missing since then. Who else could it be?”

Shayne growled. “I know all that. But why was her face and head so senselessly beaten into a pulp? I still don’t like it,” he said flatly.

“Can’t they tell by her fingerprints?” Lucy asked brightly.

“Painter will do that,” conceded Shayne. “He’s thorough when it comes to routine police procedure… and he doesn’t jump to conclusions no matter what else you say about him. He questioned Harris about any official record of her prints before we took the poor devil back to the hotel and got him a doctor and a sedative, and when Harris insisted his wife’s prints weren’t on record, he was quick enough to get the address of their New York apartment. If I know Petey as well as I think I do, he’ll have a set of the dead woman’s prints in New York tomorrow morning to be checked against those in the Harris apartment. Then we’ll be sure. But, until then, I’m still going to wonder why she was beaten so as to be unidentifiable.” He emptied his glass of cognac and Lucy jumped up to refill it.

“Somehow,” she said thoughtfully, “thinking about poor Mr. Harris in the office this morning, I think maybe this is easier on him than the other would have been. You know what I mean, Michael… if Painter had been right and it was just a matter of her sleeping out for a few nights.”

Shayne nodded and agreed. “You never know which is worse for the survivor in a case like that. At the same time, now that she’s dead, the whole tawdry story is going to come out. Everything I found out about her today indicates that she was just about the opposite of what her husband believed her to be. Instead of an ever-loving wife, the picture we get of her here in Miami is a sexy floozie who was ready to take up with the first man that looked at her. Herbert Harris is going to have to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.”

Lucy Hamilton’s telephone rang as he finished. She padded across to answer it, and said, “Mr. Shayne is right here waiting for your call, Mr. Gifford.” She held the instrument out to her employer.

Shayne took it and said, “Hi, Jim.”

“Mike. I’m sorry to call so late, but I’ve been getting around. It’s a Saturday, you know, and people are hard to catch up with.”

“What have you got?”

“Just about negative, Mike. Nothing that I assume you hoped I’d get on Ellen Harris. All the dope I can gather here points her up as a plenty beautiful doll, but strictly on the up and up. I contacted a couple of models she knew before she married Harris, and they swear she never played around. Seems like she fell for him hard, and he was her one and only. Same dope from those who knew her after she was married. Strictly a one-man gal, and happy and contented with what she had. Seems they weren’t too social, but in a small circle of friends they were regarded as a veddy, veddy happily married couple. I’ve got a hunch that isn’t what you wanted, but that’s all yours truly turned up with a lot of leg-work today. Is the lady still among the missing?”

Shayne said, “No. We found her about an hour ago, Jim. Dead.”

Jim Gifford said, “Oh?” very thoughtfully.

“So here’s some more leg-work, Jim. I don’t know how much you can accomplish on a Sunday, but this time concentrate on Herbert Harris. His wife reached here by plane Monday afternoon and was probably killed late that night. Find out where
he
was Monday night. Check
his
personal life.”

“Like that, huh?”

Shayne said sharply, “It’s always like that when a married woman gets bumped off. The guy that did this job, by the way, wasn’t satisfied with just killing her. He frenziedly beat her beautiful face into a pulp just for the hell of it. That puts it close to home in my book.”

Gifford said, “Yeh. I’ll dig what I can, Mike.”

“You’ve got my apartment number… and Lucy’s,” Shayne told him. “One of us will be home tomorrow.”

“Yeh. Give Lucy my dearest love.” Gifford chuckled. “What’s she cooking up for dinner tonight?”

Shayne frowned at the telephone. “Whatever gives you that idea?”

Jim Gifford chuckled again. “I can smell it all the way up here over the telephone. Poor Boy Steak, huh? Remember that time she cooked it for us? Must have been five years ago, but I can still taste that garlic sauce. Tell her so, Mike. ’Bye.” And he hung up.

Shayne turned away from the telephone shaking his head. “You did say you were warming something in the oven for dinner, Lucy? What is it?”

“Some left-over porkchops, Michael. I’m going to make a garlic sauce to go with them… whatever
are
you laughing about?” she ended indignantly.

Shayne didn’t tell her. Instead, he relayed to Rourke, “You’ll have to write your story straight, Tim. Gifford didn’t turn up a single thing on Ellen’s past or present love life.”

“And now,” said Lucy indignantly, “you’ve got him digging into Mr. Harris’ personal life. Sometimes, Michael, I wonder how I ever manage to put up with you.”

He chuckled and returned to the sofa and his drink. “Judging from the smells coming from the oven, you’d better get your garlic sauce started. Check with me in the morning, Tim?” he added as the reporter finished his drink and got up to go.

Rourke promised he would and thanked Lucy for the drink.

Michael Shayne didn’t bother to go back to the Beach that night. With a dead woman on his hands, he knew that Painter would have detectives swarming all over the Gray Gull to check every detail of Blake’s story and try to get a line on the man Blake claimed he had last seen her with.

He stayed late at Lucy’s apartment and slept late on Sunday morning before getting up to make coffee and get the morning paper from in front of his door.

It contained a brief account of the discovery of the body in the parked convertible, with a few details that Shayne didn’t already know. No purse had been found with the body, and the entire car was completely clean of fingerprints. Mr. Harris was quoted as saying that a wide wedding ring set with diamonds was missing from the dead woman’s hand, and that she had left New York with about three hundred dollars in cash and her credit card. The lack of positive identification was mentioned, but not stressed.

Painter was quoted as stating that he believed robbery to have been the motive without mentioning why he thought a robber would have beaten her face up beyond possible recognition. It was guardedly stated that she was known to have left her hotel the preceding Monday evening in the company of a strange man, but Gene Blake’s name was not mentioned, nor was the Gray Gull. At the end of the story it was stated that Michael Shayne, well-known private detective from Miami, had been retained by the bereaved husband to help solve the case, and that he was working in close conjunction with the Miami Beach police.

Shayne put the newspaper aside thoughtfully and went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. He added a dollop of cognac to this one, and settled himself comfortably back in the living room.

His telephone rang. He answered it and a nervous voice asked if he was Michael Shayne. He said he was and there was a pause at the other end of the wire, and then the voice went on hurriedly:

“In the morning paper it says you’re working on the Harris murder case. Is that right?”

Shayne said, “Yes.”

“Then I have to see you at once. It’s very important. I… have to tell you something. May I come to your place?”

Shayne gave him his address and apartment number. He hung up more thoughtful than before, and drank his coffee royal, then showered and shaved and was just finished dressing when there was a knock on his door.

Shayne opened it to admit a very worried and frightened man. He was in his forties with a fairly bulky body and a clean-shaven, nondescript sort of face. He was neatly dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and maroon tie.

He said, “Mr. Shayne. I’m sorry to bother you at home like this, but… I have to talk to you. I need your advice desperately.” He carried a brown fedora in his hands which he twisted nervously.

Shayne said, “Come in. Sit down. Care for a cup of coffee?”

“No, I… I had coffee. My name is John J. Benjamin from Detroit. I’m on vacation at the Beach… with my wife. I…” He slumped into a chair and gulped nervously, then raised harried brown eyes to Shayne and confessed, “I have information about Mrs. Harris which I think the police should have. Ever since yesterday afternoon when I saw her picture in the paper, I knew I’d have to come forward. But I kept hoping…”

He paused and shook his head. “But when I read about her being murdered this morning, probably last Monday night, I knew I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. I’ll pay you well, Mr. Shayne, extremely well, if you can arrange to relay my information to the police without my becoming involved.”

“I can’t promise anything until I know what it is.”

“Of course not. I didn’t expect… I saw her Monday night, Mr. Shayne. At the Gray Gull. That’s a gambling casino at the Beach. I’m not really a gambler, but… on vacation like this… and my wife was ill that night. I’m not really one for picking up strange women either,” he added with a self-conscious smile. “But I was alone there and she was extremely attractive. We were playing roulette at the same table… for small stakes… and it was she who actually spoke first. In another type of woman, I might have thought her forward, but she seemed very ladylike, and in the informal atmosphere of a gambling house…” He broke off and looked anxiously at the detective for man-to-man understanding.

Shayne said with a slight smile, “I know how it is. Tell me what happened.”

“Well, we just got to talking and she told me she was Mrs. Harris from New York… I noticed her wedding ring set with diamonds just the way it was described in the paper… and she mentioned, kind of sadly, I thought, but spunky about it, that it was her husband’s idea for her to come down alone and have fun… and, by golly, she was determined to do just that.

“Well, I couldn’t help but remark that if I were married to a looker like her I’d keep her locked up at home… not that Mrs. Benjamin isn’t a fine-looking woman,” he broke in to explain, “but a different type, you might say.

“Anyhow, she confided in me that she had met this man in the cocktail lounge at her hotel that evening and he seemed like a gentleman and she’d come to the Gray Gull with him, but she guessed it was a mistake because he seemed to think that… well, you know… that it was all right for him to be forward with her because she had let him pick her up in a bar. And she asked me real nicely if I’d help her get rid of him and I told her I’d be delighted to help, so the next time he came to the roulette table to speak to her she hardly looked at him, but pretended to snuggle up to me and talked in a low voice that sounded intimate, I guess, and he got the idea and, after a little, we saw him leaving with another woman. And she giggled and said, well, that had taken care of him, all right, and that she was tired of playing roulette and why didn’t we go on somewhere else?”