Killers from the Keys Page 8

  10

  THE PINK FLAMINGO MOTEL was less than two miles from the Bright Spot, and Shayne remembered having seen the sign on the highway pointing off to it. When he arrived minutes later, there were not more than ten cars parked in front of cabins, indicating occupancy. Only three cabins showed lights inside. In the exact center of the half-moon of cabins was a red neon light that said OFFICE, and the word VACANCY beneath it.

  Shayne braked to a fast stop in front of the light and jumped out. Inside was a small room with a breast-high counter across it. There was a man behind the counter with bushy hair and a wizened face. His eyes looked slyly evasive as he held his head cocked slightly on one side with only the top of his shoulders showing above the counter. Shayne strode up to him and demanded, “Where is Fred Tucker?”

  “Tucker? Why you asking?” The eyes glittered with more than ordinary interest and the manager’s tongue flicked out to wet his thin lips.

  “Police business.” Shayne made his voice harsh and authoritative. He flipped open his wallet to flash his private license, and Peterson glanced down at it and then slyly upward to Shayne’s face. “Number Three.”

  Shayne started to turn, paused to demand over his shoulder, “Why did you deny he was here over the phone half an hour ago.”

  “Because he asked me to when he checked in.” Peterson made his voice a servile whine. “No law against that, is there, if a man wants privacy?”

  Shayne went outside and glanced at the numbers on the cabin doors. No. 9 was next to the office on the right, and No. 8 beyond it. Shayne strode around the arc to Number 3. A late model, light sedan stood in front of the cabin. Light streamed out through an unshaded window. Shayne knocked loudly on the door.

  He twisted the knob when there was no response. The door opened and he stepped over the threshold and saw the body of a man lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. He wore a white shirt and dark trousers, and lay face down in a pool of blood. The back of his head was smashed in like an eggshell. A blood-smeared whiskey bottle lay on the floor a couple of feet from his head.

  Shayne’s experienced first glance told him the man couldn’t possibly still be alive, but he instinctively leaped forward and knelt beside the body. He touched his shoulders first, and then put his knuckles against the flesh of his cheek. There was body warmth still beneath the surface, but not the warmth of life. The man had been dead for half an hour perhaps.

  Shayne sank back on his haunches and looked down broodingly at the corpse. He looked to be above medium height, and thin for his age. His dark brown hair was matted with blood in the back. Shayne didn’t attempt to move the man’s head so he could see his features clearly, but without doing so it was plainly evident that he was clean-shaven.

  Where then, was the newly-grown mustache that Sloe Burn had mentioned as a characteristic of her Freddie?

  Still kneeling beside the body, Shayne patted both hip pockets without finding a wallet, and wormed his hand successively into each side pants pocket and found them empty. He got to his feet slowly and looked about the room without seeing a discarded jacket. There was a light tan summer suit on a hanger inside the open closet beyond the end of the bed, with a closed brown suitcase sitting beneath it.

  His brooding gaze went on around the room and was arrested by a framed photograph on the bureau. It was a picture of Mrs. Renshaw and two small children. A younger Mrs. Renshaw than the woman who had visited his office that afternoon, but unmistakably the same woman. He studied it for a long moment, and then turned his head slowly to look all about the rest of the room.

  There was no sign of a struggle. The faucet dripped monotonously in a sink in the far corner, and there was a two-burner gas plate on an oilcloth-covered table to the right of it, and on the left the door of a refrigerator stood open. It was an old refrigerator, and the open door was causing it to run loudly. From where he stood, Shayne could see a carton of eggs and a bottle of milk on the top shelf. Below were two avocados and a quarter pound of butter in a chipped saucer, and there were half a dozen oranges on the bottom.

  On the floor, halfway between the dead man and the refrigerator, were the two halves of a long loaf of French bread that had been roughly torn apart.

  Outside, Shayne heard a car start up and pull away hastily. He strode to the open door and stepped out. The car had come from behind the arc of cabins, and it swung around the side of No. 1 as he stood there, and into the winding road leading out to the Trail.

  Shayne watched its taillights disappear among the palmettos, and then stalked back to the motel office. It was empty when he entered this time. There was a bell on the counter with a card in front of it that said, “Ring for Manager.” Shayne hit the top of it sharply with his palm three times, and it made a loud, pinging noise, but nothing else happened.

  There was a hinged wooden flap at the end of the counter. Shayne lifted it and went around behind where there was a telephone on a shelf. He lifted the receiver and dialed Chief Will Gentry’s home telephone number.

  The chief, himself, answered.

  “Mike Shayne, Will. Got a pencil?”

  “Sure, Mike.”

  “I’m at the Pink Flamingo Motel… off the Trail, west.”

  After a pause, Gentry said, “And…?”

  “I’ve got a dead man in Cabin Number Three. The occupant of the cabin is registered as Fred Tucker, Will.”

  “Hell. That goddamned Syndicate…?”

  Shayne said, “Maybe. But it doesn’t look like a Syndicate kill. Also… there’s a couple other things.” He sighed unhappily. “I thought you’d want to look at it yourself, Will.”

  “Stay right there.”

  “Of course. Don’t I always when I turn up a body for you? See you.”

  Shayne hung up the telephone. He hesitated and then opened a door leading into a corridor behind the office. It was lighted by a ceiling bulb, and he followed it back to a door opening into what was evidently the manager’s living quarters. The room was lighted, and Shayne stood in the doorway without entering. There was an open suitcase on the bed with some shirts and underwear in it, which looked as though it had been abandoned by the owner in his haste to get away. The top bureau drawer sagged open, and from where Shayne stood he could see it was empty.

  He turned away from the open door and followed the corridor back to a rear exit with a carport. It was empty now, and tire tracks through the sand led around the rear of the cabins. Shayne pulled the door shut behind him and trudged through the sand, following the tracks around to the side of Cabin No. 1, where they circled to join the paved road leading out through the palmetto hummocks to the main highway. He stopped at this point, convinced that the car he had seen round the row of cabins and disappear had been driven by the bushy-haired motel manager.

  The wail of a siren came faintly through the night from the Tamiami Trail, and then it lingered away to silence as the patrol car turned off on the side road toward the motel.

  Shayne turned and walked slowly back to No. 3. He stood outside the open door, his rangy figure bathed in the light from inside as a radio car came up fast from the palmettos and braked to a stop in front of him. A uniformed policeman leaped out of the far side of the car and came around through the headlights toward him. The driver got out more slowly.

  The first officer was young and appeared excited. He stopped in front of Shayne and asked truculently, “You report a murder?”

  Shayne jerked his head toward the open door and said, “Inside.”

  The driver was older and more phlegmatic. He said, “Hold it, Johnny,” as the other started to rush inside the cabin. He stopped beside the redhead, sighing gustily. “Mike Shayne, huh? We got it over the radio. Don’t mess anything up, son,” he advised his younger partner mildly. “Leave that for the dicks.”

  “I just wanted to see for sure.” Johnny stood outside the door peering inside curiously.

  “If Mike Shayne says there’s a stiff, there’s pretty sure to be a stiff. In fact it’s
a pretty good bet there’ll always be a stiff where this guy turns up. That right, Shamus?”

  Shayne said, “Somebody has to find your bodies for you.”

  “Sure. Or make ’em for us? Ha-ha.” The officer told his younger colleague, “If you’re through gawkin’, Johnny-boy, get on the radio and confirm it. What’s his name and who killed him?” he asked Shayne offhandedly.

  “The cabin is rented by a Fred Tucker,” Shayne told him. “Don’t bother taking any notes. I’ll tell the rest of it to Will Gentry when he gets here.”

  “What makes you think the chief will bother with this one personally?”

  Shayne said, “Because I asked him to.” He got out a cigarette and lit it, and he could hear Johnny talking excitedly behind him on the two-way radio in the police car. Then they heard the distant wail of sirens on the Trail eastward again, and Shayne said good-naturedly, “Homicide will be here to take over from you in a few minutes. Here’s a tip. I think the motel manager took off in his car just before I phoned in. If you want to play it smart, check the office and see if I’m right… so you can feed it to the dicks when they get here.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” He lumbered away, and Shayne stood where he was, lazily drawing smoke into his lungs and exhaling blue vapor, only half conscious of the wail of approaching sirens, seeking to adjust his thoughts and the meager information in his possession into some sort of order that would make sense to Gentry on his arrival.

  Suddenly they were there, one car after another, and the Pink Flamingo Motel was the scene of bustling, floodlighted, official activity.

  First there was a squad-car with a Homicide Lieutenant and three plainclothesmen, and an ambulance behind them and another car with the technical crew, and not too many minutes later, Will Gentry in his unmarked car with an officer behind the wheel.

  Michael Shayne had drawn back unobtrusively from No. 3 while the others went bustling inside. The lieutenant in charge seemed unaware of the redhead’s presence while he put his technicians to work inside the cabin and sent others around the motel knocking on doors and getting statements from the various occupants, most of whom were registered under false names and frightened out of their wits by the possibility of publicity, and all of whom swore they knew nothing at all about Cabin No. 3 or what had happened there.

  Shayne came forward slowly when Gentry got out of his car and conferred with the lieutenant. Gentry saw him. He exchanged a final word with the lieutenant and then turned to Shayne with his solid jaw set squarely. “All right, Mike. What have we got?”

  “I don’t know. I swear I don’t. Not even if the dead guy is my man.”

  “You said Fred Tucker.”

  “I said the cabin he got dead in is rented to a man who registered under the name of Fred Tucker. When you get back to Headquarters do a fast check on The Preacher. Little Joe Hoffman told me flatly this evening that The Preacher has been dead for six months.”

  “Little Joe could be lying.” Gentry got out a black cigar and thrust it aggressively between his teeth.

  “Could be. Somehow I doubt it. What’s the Loot got out of the death scene this far?”

  “Not too much. No identification on the body. Been dead about forty minutes. And there’s those two halves of a hollowed-out loaf of bread, Mike. What’d you make of it?”

  “Hollowed-out… loaf of bread?” Shayne asked in surprise.

  Gentry had been watching him closely for a reaction. He relaxed a trifle and put the flame of a match to his cigar. “All right, maybe you didn’t case the joint before you phoned in. Lieutenant Yager said they were lying on the floor with the cut-out sides down so you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a complete loaf if you didn’t pick the pieces up and look. But the inside had all been cut out of it, Mike. And what do you reckon?”

  “At this point I’m not trying to reckon,” Shayne told him honestly.

  “There were three hundred-dollar bills still jammed up in one end of the loaf. Sort of like there’d been a lot more hidden inside there and someone missed those three.”

  While Shayne was digesting this bit of information, another car came up hurriedly and Timothy Rourke jumped out of it. “I sent Lucy home okay, Mike. What goes on here?”

  11

  WILL GENTRY SAID, “Mike’s just about to tell me. Go ahead, Mike. How’d you get here?”

  “From the Bright Spot. I got a tip that this Renshaw, from Chicago that I told you about this afternoon, has been hanging around the Bright Spot seeing a dancer there. So Lucy and Tim and I dropped in to see the show. The girl told us that Fred Tucker, the name Renshaw is using here, had been in earlier, and ducked out when those two goons showed up… the ones I described to you. He told her he was staying at the Pink Flamingo, so I came here fast. That guy was inside the cabin just as he is now.”

  “How is he now?” interjected Rourke.

  “Dead thirty minutes to an hour.” Gentry told him.

  “Is it Renshaw, Mike?”

  “I’ve never seen the guy… nor a picture of him. In general details he fits the description his wife gave me this afternoon.” Since Mrs. Renshaw had not mentioned a mustache, this statement was true enough, and Shayne didn’t amplify it.

  “Yager tells me the manager appears to have ducked out. Did you see him, Mike?”

  “He was in the office when I got here.” Shayne gave him a description of the manager, and briefly related how he had come to No. 3 and found the dead man, and seen a car take off fast from behind the cabins… which might have been the manager.

  Gentry said, “We’ll get out a pick-up,” and strode away to talk to the lieutenant.

  “You don’t think the stiff is Tucker, Mike? Or Renshaw, if that’s his real name.”

  Shayne said flatly, “I don’t know what to think yet. No identification on the body that I could find. Let’s see what the boys have made out of it.”

  He and Rourke went together to the floodlighted front of the cabin where the technicians were reporting their findings to Lieutenant Yager.

  “… one set of prints all over the cabin from the past few days don’t match the dead man’s prints. Same prints on the death bottle, with some fresh blurred ones on the neck… probably made by the killer… that can’t be identified. No wallet or identification of any kind on the body.”

  Yager said, “Might as well get him to the morgue,” and they all moved back out of the way while two ambulance attendants went inside with a stretcher and emerged a few minutes later with a sheet-swathed body on top of it. Gentry stopped them as they moved to the back of the ambulance, and said gruffly, “Let’s have a look.”

  They had turned the corpse over on its back, and when the sheet was pulled down under the bright light, the man’s thin and sallow face showed unmarred by the savage blows that had crushed the back of his head. They had wiped the blood from his face and his eyes were peacefully closed. There was a somber look of sadness on the flaccid features that brought sharply to Shayne’s memory Sloe Burn’s words that afternoon: “… the other was thin an’ sorta sad… dressed up in a black suit like a preacher…” and he asked sharply, “Is there a matching suit coat or jacket in the cabin to match those dark trousers?”

  “Just one light suit hanging in the closet as it came from the cleaners,” a young officer told him.

  “Mean something to you, Mike?” Gentry rolled an unlighted cigar from one corner of his mouth to another, motioning for the body to be placed in the ambulance.

  “It might. That description I gave you this afternoon… one of the two men who were looking for Tucker at the Bright Spot tonight… remember it?”

  “The Preacher?”

  “Except it can’t be The Preacher if Little Joe Hoffman was squaring with us. Mind if Tim and I look inside, Will?”

  “Go ahead. Before we seal it up.” Gentry and Yager turned away toward the motel office where a couple of men were checking the records and going through the missing manager’s living quarters.

  Shayne and Rour
ke stepped inside the cabin and the detective said, “He was lying face down in that blood with the back of his head bashed in, and a bloody whiskey bottle beside him. The refrigerator door was standing open as it is now, and the only other thing that isn’t here now is two halves of a long loaf of French bread lying on the floor right there. Gentry tells me the loaf had been hollowed out with maybe a wad of money stashed inside. They found three hundred-dollar bills still crammed in one end.”

  Timothy Rourke stood beside him with his hands thrust deep into trouser pockets, his tall thin body hunched forward and his nose seeming to sniff the air while his deep-set eyes roved slowly about the room, taking in everything there was to see, and coming to rest finally on the framed photograph on the bureau.

  Watching him carefully, as he had often before watched the reporter view a murder scene, Shayne thought he noted a sudden intensification of interest in the glittering eyes as they studied the photograph.

  “That’s Renshaw’s wife, all right,” he told Rourke. “Makes the Fred Tucker alias pretty certain. Same woman was in my office this afternoon.”

  Rourke glanced over his shoulder at a plainclothesman standing just outside, and said, “Nice looking pair of kids. It always gets your goat, goddamit, when you think about the wives and the innocent kids left behind…” He paused in his generalization to turn on Shayne abruptly as he appeared to do a double-take. “You said three hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside a loaf of bread?”

  “I didn’t see them myself. The loaf was broken in half and was lying on the floor. You know how I never touch anything at a murder scene until the cops get here,” he went on righteously.

  “About an eight-buck a day room,” muttered Rourke. He slouched forward, stepping over the pool of drying blood, and leaned over the bureau, peering out through the dirty pane of glass at the darkened window in the next cabin about ten feet away. “Was anybody in Number Two when it happened?”

  “I don’t think so. No car in front.” Shayne moved to one side slightly, to more effectually block the interior of the cabin from the detective’s view outside.