A Redhead for Mike Shayne Page 7

  He lay on his right side, and the left side of his head and face was crushed, a bloody mess of splintered bone and smashed flesh.

  Shayne dropped to his knees beside the body and touched a thin, outflung wrist. The flesh was still warm to the touch, and the blood seeping out of his body and along the floor had not yet congealed.

  Shayne heard the faint sound of light footsteps on the stairway beyond the open door, and he rose to his feet slowly as the figure of a stooped little old lady materialized in the doorway. She stood very still for a long and agonizing instant with the unshaded light bright on her seamed face, reflecting from rounded and frightened marble-like eyes which stared into his for a moment before dropping to the corpse at his feet.

  Then she screamed. A high-pitched, keening scream, and Shayne took one step forward involuntarily, pressing the palm of his big hand against her mouth to cut off the sound, putting his other arm tightly about her frail body and drawing her against him, holding her strongly as she twisted and writhed while he repeated soothingly in her ear:

  “Don’t be frightened. Relax and I’ll let you go. It wasn’t I, you understand. I found him. I am the police. Do you understand that?”

  He started to release her but she clawed and struck at him viciously, and guttural moaning sounds escaped her lips from behind his palm.

  He realized she was completely in shock and probably hadn’t heard a word he said to her, and he kept on holding her tightly while he unhappily tried to decide how to handle the situation, and the tinkle of the entry-bell sounded eerily in the silence, and he turned his head and looked over his shoulder through the lattice-work to see Molly hurrying toward the back of the shop.

  “What on earth, Mike? I thought I heard a scream.…” She stopped outside the window, breathing hard, and her eyes rounded at sight of the old woman struggling futilely in his arms.

  “Come around and help me,” he snapped. “Try to talk to her. There’s been a murder and she walked in on me kneeling over the body. We don’t want the whole neighborhood on our necks.”

  Molly took in the situation instantly and she acted with singular competence and clear-headedness. She stepped swiftly through the rear door and around to Shayne’s side, put her arms gently about the shaking old body, crooning softly to her without words like a mother to a frightened child, and Shayne gladly released the woman to her ministrations, watching carefully and vastly relieved when she didn’t start screaming again as soon as he took his hand away from her mouth.

  Instead, she began sobbing violently, and a stream of foreign words spilled swiftly from her thin lips.

  Molly continued to hold her gently, but she bent her head to listen to the babble of words, and then spoke gently in reply in what sounded like the same language to Shayne.

  This brought more sobs and a further surge of incomprehensible words, and Molly backed away slowly toward the door, drawing the old woman with her and keeping her head turned away from the dead man on the floor. Over her bent head, Molly explained in a wondering tone to Shayne. “She’s Lithuanian, Mike. Poor thing. She either doesn’t know any English or else the shock has knocked it all out of her. Yah, yah,” she crooned, bending her head close to the other’s ear, and then spoke on swiftly in cadenced syllables that had the sound of a mountain stream rippling swiftly over pebbles.

  “And you just happen to speak Lithuanian?” Shayne demanded incredulously.

  “Along with four other languages,” she told him calmly. “But Lithuanian, I learned at my mother’s breast if you’re interested. You call the police. I’m going to take her upstairs now.”

  He said quickly, “We’re ahead of the police, Molly. Let’s stay ahead. The old man is dead. Nothing can change that. Tell her that I’m a detective and we’re her friends and want to help avenge her husband’s death. Get her to tell you everything. Ask about the Russian guns. She’ll talk to you. Right now, she’ll spill everything to anyone who talks her own language.”

  “I’ll see, Mike.” Molly Morgan’s voice was cold. “But if you don’t call the police, I shall.”

  “I’ll call them in good time,” he grated. “But take her upstairs and talk to her. If the police come barging in now you and I’ll spend the rest of the night at the police station making statements. As it is, we just might get a jump on her husband’s murderer if she’ll talk to you fast.”

  “About the Lenskis … or about murder?” asked Molly coldly.

  “Both … I think. Don’t you see there must be a connection? It can’t be sheer coincidence that he was knocked off tonight while we were on our way here to ask him about the pistols. Get the chip off your shoulder and start putting your Lithuanian to use while she’s in a mood to talk to you.”

  He turned his back angrily on her, and stared down at the dead man, trying to visualize how the killing had occurred.

  It was clearly evident that the murderer had been in the small cage with the proprietor when he struck him down. There was no death weapon in sight. The bloody wounds indicated that several blows had been struck with a heavy instrument … quite possibly the butt or the barrel of a revolver.

  Shayne got a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over his fingertips, then cautiously touched the inner edge of the safe door that was standing ajar, and drew it open. He squatted down in front of it to study the contents without touching anything.

  There wasn’t very much inside the safe. It appeared that the Liberty Loan Shop did not deal with a great many objects that were valuable enough to deserve locking up inside a safe. There were several small metal lockboxes which probably held precious or semi-precious jewelry, but there were no Russian handguns such as he had hoped to find. He didn’t know, of course, whether such merchandise would deserve a place in the safe, but he had a hunch that is where they would have been found if there were any left in the shop. Not so much because of the intrinsic value, but because of their nature. They weren’t the sort of thing, Shayne thought, that the proprietor of the Liberty Loan Shop would have been likely to keep out on open display.

  The only other thing inside the safe of any possible interest was a canvas-covered ledger or cashbook about thirteen by six inches in size. It seemed a curious place to keep an ordinary ledger, and Shayne was tempted to take it out and examine it, but he kept sternly reminding himself that this was the scene of a homicide and it was his duty as a licensed private investigator to leave all the evidence intact until the police arrived and took charge.

  He heard the sound of descending footsteps on the stairway outside, and got to his feet hastily and turned from the open safe to face Molly in the doorway.

  She exclaimed, “It was two men, Mike. One very tall and the other quite short, is the best Mrs. Wilshinskis can describe them. She looks out the front window, you see, from upstairs and sees people who come in and out of the shop. About half an hour ago, or a little more. They were the last ones before you came, and must have done that terrible thing. She heard them talking down here with her husband, but the conversation was in English and she didn’t understand it, and then they went out together and got in a car and drove off. She didn’t see their faces and couldn’t identify them. And then she saw you come in the front door about ten minutes later and she listened at the head of the stairs, but didn’t hear any talk this time. And that’s why she got frightened and came down to see … and found you kneeling beside her husband’s corpse. Poor, frightened thing,” Molly ended compassionately. “She just sits up there on the edge of the bed rocking back and forth with her hands over her face and sobbing her heart out. She has a niece out in Coral Gables whom I telephoned and who promised to come down at once.”

  “What about the Lenski pistols?” Shayne demanded. “Did you get any line on them? Are they what the killers were after?”

  “She doesn’t know, of course. I’ve told you all she saw and heard tonight. Oh, your tip was right. There were six of them originally. A man brought them in for sale about a week ago. She realizes it was no
t a strictly legal transaction, of course, but these poor people are accustomed to making a dollar any way they can. Her husband paid twenty-five dollars each for them, and he’d already sold four of the six for a hundred dollars each up to this afternoon. It was a great windfall for Wilshinskis, and there are two of them still in the safe waiting to be sold.”

  Shayne shook his head as she paused for breath. “Not now, there aren’t. It looks as though that’s what the men were after, but why did they kill him in the process? To save two hundred bucks? And then go off leaving boxes of jewels in the open safe?”

  “There’s one thing she did say, Mike, that may be very important,” Molly went on hurriedly. “The man who brought in the first half dozen told Mr. Wilshinskis there was an unlimited supply where those came from and he would be glad to furnish more in the future at the same price. They had visions of building up a steady trade and selling three or four a week, Mike, at a net profit of at least ten times what a store like this normally brings in.”

  “What was their source of supply?” demanded Shayne. “Who brought in the first six guns and promised them more in the future?”

  “She doesn’t really know, except he’s a former customer who has pawned small things here in the past. You see, she gets all the shop business second-hand from her husband, Mike, from what he tells her at night. But she says he was a sailor … a seaman is the way it translates from the Lithuanian … wearing a uniform with brass buttons. She never saw him actually … it’s just her husband’s description. But, Mike! She says there is a special ledger in which he made note of transactions like this … under-the-counter business. If you could find that ledger it might have something written down.”

  Shayne turned back to the open safe and crouched in front of it. He spread his handkerchief over his hand to pull the canvas-covered cashbook out and lay it on the counter. He turned swiftly to the center of the book and the last page on which a transaction was noted, saw the date was the previous day, and turned back a page, muttering, “There are names and dates and prices entered here. Let’ see … a week ago. This must be it: Six Len. 12-0-7 Pd. $150. Cap. Sam Ruffer. And there’s an address out in the northeast section … one of those streets that dead-ends on the Bay. I’m going out there to find Captain Ruffer, Molly. Sounds like it might be a boathouse or a beach cottage. You stay here and call the police as soon as I leave. Tell them everything except about the call from Gonzalez and the reason we came here. Tell them any damned thing except the truth.”

  She shook her head, standing flatfooted in the doorway and barring his exit. “I’m going with you, Mike. Why should I stay here and make statements to the police?”

  “Because this is murder,” he told her savagely, “and I want you out of it. We don’t know what he told those men tonight before they killed him. If I get there in time I may surprise them interviewing Captain Sam Ruffer.”

  He moved in close to her and caught both her wrists in his big hands and swung her aside easily. “You stay here and comfort the old lady with your Lithuanian crooning. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  He hurried out through the front door without looking back, closed it carefully behind him, and then went around his parked car to slide under the steering wheel. He switched on the headlights and reached for the ignition key, and his hand brushed the empty lock.

  He stared down at it stupidly for a moment. He had left the key in the lock when he got out. He knew he had. Molly had been sitting in the car and he hadn’t bothered to lock it.

  Molly! Of course. She must have taken the key from the lock when she heard the old lady scream and hurried inside.

  He jerked the car door open and leaped out, went back inside the pawn-shop and found it empty. He went back to the rear calling as loudly as he dared without arousing the neighbors, “Molly. You’ve got my keys.”

  He paused at the back door, looking up the stairway and listening, but he could hear nothing from above.

  Damn her! he thought angrily. She’s sore because I refused to take her along, and she’s going to make me come up and get my keys from her.

  A glint of metal on the counter in front of the arched opening in the lattice-work caught his eye just before he started up the stairs.

  It was the set of keys to his car which Molly had evidently placed there after he shoved her aside and hurried out.

  He grabbed them up and called up the stairway, “Okay. I’ve got them. See you tomorrow,” and long-legged it back out of the shop without waiting for her answer.

  10

  Shayne swung back and threaded through traffic as fast as he could make it to Biscayne Boulevard, then straightened out northward in the inside traffic lane and stepped hard on the accelerator. Traffic was heavy in both directions on the boulevard at this hour, and he continued at high speed for only a short distance before he had to start easing off and moving over to the right to be ready to make a right turn onto Captain Ruffer’s dead-end street.

  He watched the street signs tensely, braked to fifteen miles an hour and made a wide sweeping turn onto the narrow, palmetto-lined street, then cursed savagely and jerked his wheel to the right when a car suddenly loomed up directly in front of him, moving toward him in the center of the macadam strip without lights.

  His heavy sedan lurched down into a shallow borrow-pit and Shayne fought the wheel to hold the car upright, then gunned the motor hard and was back on the pavement almost before he had time to realize what had happened. In his mirror he saw the lights of the other car flash on, and it made a fast turn into the boulevard northward.

  He made no attempt to stop and back up and pursue the car, knowing it would be at least a mile from the scene before he could complete the maneuver, and he had seen and recognized the faces of the two men in the front seat in that brief instant while his headlights were full on them. He would know where to find them later if he wanted them. Right now, having recognized the pair, he was more than ever anxious to get to Captain Ruffer fast.

  It was less than a quarter of a mile to the bayfront with no houses on either side of the narrow roadway.

  There was a solid stone barrier and a turn-around at the dead-end where Shayne stopped and turned off his motor and lights. There was a cool breeze from the bay, and night silence broken only by the sound of small waves splashing against the foot of the cliff in front of him.

  On his left a squatty stone structure was perched boldly on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the bay. Light glowed through a round window like a porthole in the front door and a neat shell-lined walk led up to the house.

  Shayne got out and strode up the walk. The driving sense of urgency had deserted him now that he was here. Those two hoods in the unlighted car had been here first and he was strangely reluctant to follow them inside the sea captain’s house.

  The door had a heavy bronze knocker, and the big strap hinges were also of bronze. Shayne looked for an electric bell without finding one, lifted the heavy knocker and dropped it twice. He waited no more than ten seconds before trying the doorknob.

  It turned easily in his hand and the door opened inward. There was a narrow hallway lighted by an electrified ship’s lantern hanging from a hand-hewn beam of cypress. An open door on the right showed the interior of a tiny and tidy kitchen. Inside the thick walls of coral rock it was unnaturally quiet in the captain’s small house. Not even the faint splash of waves from the beach below could be heard.

  Shayne hesitated in the hallway a moment and called loudly, “Captain Ruffer.” His voice echoed back at him from the low-beamed ceiling. He strode to the end of the hall where there were closed doors on the right and left. He opened the door on the right and the room was dark. He fumbled inside the door for a light switch which illuminated two wrought-iron ship’s lanterns in brackets on either side of the sparsely furnished, square sitting room.

  He stood in the doorway and tugged at his left earlobe and looked down somberly at the body of the man lying outstretched on the floor in f
ront of him.

  He was dead.

  He lay on his back and his eyes were open and glazed, bulging from deep sockets in a bony, emaciated face. He was a big-framed man, who now looked curiously shrunken in death. He wore a double-breasted uniform suit of shiny blue serge with a double row of brass buttons down the front of the coat. The buttons were brightly polished and they reflected light from the ship’s lanterns.

  His wrists were fastened together in front of him with a length of copper wire which had cut deeply into the swollen flesh.

  Shayne took two steps forward and knelt beside the body. The tips of three fingers of his right hand were bloody stumps where the fingernails had been torn from them. There was no other mark of violence apparent on his body which was still warm enough to indicate that death had occurred not more than thirty or forty minutes before, and without a complete physical examination Shayne guessed that the shock and pain of torture had brought on a heart attack that had caused his death. He appeared to be in his seventies, and there was no padding of flesh on his big, bony frame.

  Shayne rocked back on his heels and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. For a moment he thought he heard a sound from the other side of the house, and he started to get up, but decided it was a shutter moving in the wind. Whoever had done this job on the old sea captain, he thought angrily, had gotten out of there as soon as he died … either with or without the information they had tried to get by torture.

  He hesitated a moment and then carefully went through the dead man’s pockets. He found nothing except a neatly folded newspaper clipping in the breast pocket of the serge coat. It looked recent and was from the Miami Herald and it was headed, PAROLE GRANTED.

  He stood up slowly and began reading it, and then stiffened as he heard the sound of a car drawing up outside. He crumpled the clipping into a ball and thrust it inside his coat pocket, and stepped back to the side of the room near the door and got out a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.