Shoot to Kill (8 page)

Rourke looked at his watch and grunted his satisfaction. “Time for half a dozen. I want to check with Griggs again and maybe have another talk with Ralph before I write my story.”

MICHAEL SHAYNE STOPPED IN FRONT OF A SMALL BAR around the corner from the newspaper office where he often met Rourke for a drink, and they went inside together, past a line of men at the bar and with a greeting for the bartender, and back to an unoccupied booth near the rear.

A waiter came also immediately with drinks which the bartender had automatically started making as soon as they walked in, a tall, very brownish bourbon and water for the reporter, and a brimming shot-glass of cognac for Shayne with a tall glass of ice water on the side.

Shayne nodded and said absently to the waiter, “Keep them coming, pal. As fast as we get low.” He took a cigarette out of a crumpled pack from his shirt pocket, lit it reflectively and let twin spirals of thin gray smoke trail from his nostrils. “What do you make of it, Tim?”

“I don’t.” The gangling reporter took a long slow drink, lowering the contents of his glass halfway. “I don’t get that picture in the apartment at all, Mike. Where could Dorothy Larson be? Suppose she did take out after Ralph after phoning you, with some crazy idea of trying to stop him?”

“After spilling blood all over the bathroom?”

“It could be nosebleed. We still don’t even know it’s her blood. A neighbor kid might have cut his finger and she bandaged it for him,”

“That’s right,” Shayne took a long sip of cognac and chased it down with a swallow of ice water. “We do know she never got to Ames’ house if she started there.” He paused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “They don’t have a second car, do they?”

“No. That is… no, they don’t. I remember Ralph mentioning that recently. It’s one of the reasons he needed the extra money he was earning from Ames.”

“What did he actually do for Ames? I don’t know much about the man except that his gossip column was widely syndicated and he was regarded as Miami’s Walter Winchell.”

“What did Ralph do?” Rourke shrugged. “Sort of legman, I guess. Went around to night spots and gathered items for Ames’ column, or checked on rumors of gossip that are the stock-in-trade of a scavenger like Ames. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a couple of others on his payroll doing the same sort of thing. God knows he earned enough from his column to afford as much help as he needed.”

“How much?” Shayne asked with interest.

“How much did he pay?”

“How much do you suppose his column earned him?”

Timothy Rourke emptied his highball glass while he considered the question. Shayne drank from his glass again, and the waiter reappeared with refills for each. “Hard to say,” Rourke admitted finally. “I never had a syndicated column but I do know something about prices. At a rough guess: Thirty to fifty thousand a year. Maybe more.”

“Then he wasn’t what you’d call hard up?”

“Not exactly. That would be gross, of course, but he didn’t have much overhead. Whatever pittances he handed out to boys like Ralph. And his secretary, of course. He was full-time, I understand.”

“I was thinking,” Shayne said, “about a couple of remarks made by Mark Ames. One was to the effect that a lot of people were going to sleep more soundly tonight after they heard that Ames was dead. Would he be implying that his brother, who he quite evidently detested, was not above a spot of blackmail?”

“Not necessarily blackmail. Wesley Ames was certainly feared and hated by a lot of people. He couldn’t help picking up stray bits of very damaging information about many celebrities during his night club rounds which might even ruin a career if printed in his column. In other words, he was certainly in a good position to do some discreet extorting, but I never heard him charged with that. I think he enjoyed the power it gave him over many important people, and it probably gave him sadistic pleasure to watch them writhe while they waited for his columns to appear and see what he printed about them.”

“So a lot of people will sleep easier tonight after they hear the good news,” muttered Shayne.

“Not much doubt about that. What does this have to do with Dorothy Larson’s disappearance?”

“Damned if I know.” Shayne sipped his cognac morosely. “It’s just that the whole thing is thrown wide open by what we found at the Larson apartment. It may be pure coincidence, of course, and have nothing whatever to do with Ames’ death. But if she doesn’t turn up pretty soon with a logical explanation of where she’s been, we’ll have to assume otherwise and start looking in the cracks for things that aren’t apparent on the surface. If Ralph, for instance, was trying some private blackmail on the side… and Ames got wind of it…? Don’t you see? Maybe it wasn’t just a cut-and-dried case of sexual jealousy after all, and Ralph had some other impelling motive that no one knows about… except maybe his wife. Hell, I don’t know,” he went on disgustedly. “At this point it’s just a matter of pure theorizing. Maybe Dorothy Larson just went home to mama for the night. Does she have a mama in town?”

“I don’t know. I suppose Griggs will check out all the relatives and close friends with Ralph.”

“Yeh. Griggs is a careful and thorough cop.” Shayne emptied his cognac glass and scowled down into it. “There’s something bugging me,” he muttered. “Something about that locked room murder set-up that smells just slightly. But it smells, Tim. I can’t put my finger on it. It was there for me from the very beginning… even when I accepted all the surface indications. With Dorothy Larson inexplicably missing, and that bloody bathroom staring us in the face, I’m getting a stronger and stronger hunch that everything isn’t exactly as it seems.” He shrugged his wide shoulders and angrily tugged at his left ear lobe.

Timothy Rourke sat very erect and peered across the table at him with bright, alert attention. During the years that he had followed Michael Shayne around on his cases he had learned to have a profound respect for the redhead’s hunches. “What is it?” he urged. “What is it that smells, Mike?”

“I wish I knew. There’s something that keeps eating at the back of my mind. Something in Ames’ study that was out of place. Or something should have been there that wasn’t.” He shrugged and looked up at the waiter who was approaching the booth inquiringly, and shook his red head firmly. “No more for me.” He got out his wallet and gave the man a bill, and Timothy Rourke finished his drink and sighed and said reluctantly, “I’d better get into the office myself and see what’s on tap. Are you calling it a night?”

Shayne said, “Lucy will be sitting on the edge of her chair and chewing her fingernails waiting to hear what happened after we dashed off.”

But after they parted outside the bar and Rourke swung around the corner to the newspaper, Shayne sat in the front seat of his car for at least sixty seconds before turning on the ignition.

And then he didn’t drive to his hotel to satisfy his secretary’s curiosity. Instead, he stopped in front of the Miami Police Headquarters and parked in a space that was plainly marked “Reserved For Official Cars Only.” He went in a side entrance and down a hall to the left and climbed one flight of stairs and entered an open door into a small office that held a littered desk with Sergeant Griggs sitting behind it. The sergeant was studying a sheaf of reports and he glanced up with a thoroughly unwelcoming frown at the redhead who pulled up the only other chair in the office and sat down. He grunted sourly, “I thought you were bedded down for the night. That barefoot gal in the apartment across from Larson’s looked drunk enough not to mind
who
she slept with.”

Shayne shook his head and said cheerfully, “You’re a liar, Sarge. You know damned well you went into her apartment to try and question her about the Larsons, and you found her quietly passed out in her own bed all by her own sweet self. What did your boys turn up after I left?”

“Nothing,” growled Griggs wearily. “Not one damned thing that’s any good to us. No fingerprints of any significance. Nothing. Best we can make out of it… she started frenziedly packing a suitcase as though she were in a hell of a hurry and got interrupted or changed her mind for some reason. No one in the building saw her leave. No one, goddamn it, saw Ralph Larson come back this evening to get his gun and go out to kill Wesley Ames. Nobody saw nothing,” he ended disgustedly.

“What about relatives or close friends she might have gone to?”

“Larson says they haven’t got either one in town. The guy’s either a hell of an actor or he’s just about off his nut with worry about her. He appears to be a hundred times more concerned about her than he is about a little thing like murder,” Griggs went on bitterly. “It just hasn’t got through to him that he faces the chair for killing Ames. The young fool is proud of it.”

“You got the M.E.’s report on Ames?” Shayne asked abruptly.

“Yeh. It’s here some place along with the typed statements from the witnesses.” Griggs shuffled listlessly through the papers in front of him. “There’s nothing in it. What the hell do you expect? Wesley Ames is dead. Shot through the heart with a steel-jacketed thirty-eight that came out through his back and embedded in the chair. Ballistics says it was fired from the gun Larson handed you when you busted in. Death was instantaneous and occurred between half an hour and an hour before the body was examined. No unusual fingerprints in the room. Nothing. What the hell should there be? Everything was tied up in an absolutely perfect neat knot with premeditation and every other damned thing tied tight around Ralph Larson’s neck and not a single unanswered question about the case until his damned wife turns up missing with blood all over the place.”

“Her blood?” asked Shayne interestedly. “

“How the hell do I know?” snarled Griggs. “When we find her we’ll take a sample and find out. Just like a woman to complicate an open-and-shut case. First she incites her husband to commit murder, and then she disappears and throws a monkey-wrench into the proceedings.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne sympathetically. “Women are like that. Jezebels, that’s what they are. I don’t see why men put up with them. It would be a simpler world without them.”

“Simpler, maybe, but I don’t know, Mike. Where’d the kids come from?”

“There is that,” Shayne agreed. He switched back abruptly to business. “Did you say you have the typed statements of the witnesses there?”

“Yes. Not that there’s anything in them you haven’t already heard.”

Shayne said, “Could I see Sutter’s statement? I want to check one point.”

“Sutter? That lawyer from New York. It’s here.” Griggs fumbled through the papers, extracted two typed sheets stapled together and slid them across the desk to the detective.

Shayne took it and glanced down the first page swiftly, turned to the second page and stopped near the end to read the final paragraph carefully.

He handed it back, narrowing his eyes and rubbing his blunt chin thoughtfully. He nodded his head slowly, his eyes bleak and questioning, while Griggs watched him, puzzled but interested.

They had never been closely associated on a case before, and Griggs had the professional policeman’s innate distrust for private detectives and their methods of operation, but he was fully aware of Shayne’s long record of brilliant successes in the solution of cases, many of which had been bungled by his own police department, and he was not one to pass up any help no matter where it came from.

He asked gruffly, “You find anything there that I missed?”

Shayne said, “I don’t know. I’m beginning to get an inkling of something that’s been bothering me. Let’s see Ralph Larson’s statement.”

Silently, Griggs sorted it out from the others and passed it over.

Again, Shayne glanced swiftly down the typed lines to a point near the end where he paused and read the confessed killer’s words carefully. He put it down in front of him and looked across at Griggs and said flatly, “I think we both missed something. Where is Ames’ body now?”

“In the morgue for the time being. Pending funeral arrangements.”

Shayne leaned forward and said, “If you’re a smart cop you’ll order a P. M. on him, Sergeant.”

“A post mortem? What the hell for? We know exactly when and how he died.”

“Do we?”

“Are you completely nuts? You were there. You’re one of the main witnesses.”

Shayne leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes.

“We know that Ralph Larson shot him through the heart with a thirty-eight caliber bullet about sixty seconds before I broke the door down. Your medical examiner says the bullet passed through his heart and that the wound would have caused instant death. How much time elapsed between the firing of the shot and the medical examination?”

“You were there through it all,” growled Griggs. “Say twenty minutes. Thirty at the outside. You were the one who said he was dead by the time you broke the door down and got inside.”

Shayne said evenly, “Check my statement if you like, but I think this is what I said: That he looked pretty dead to me. But before I could check him, the radio cops got there and Griffin took over.’” He stopped to think a moment and added, “The way it was, Griffin was so busy holding a gun on me that he had Powers check to see if Ames was dead. Powers is nothing but a rookie, Griggs. If we reconstruct everything carefully, we’ll discover that Powers is the only person who touched Ames or even went close to him during all that time until the M. E. got there. I’m sure Powers is a smart lad, but I don’t believe he’s had much experience with dead bodies. No one else can testify with certainty concerning Ames’ condition.”