thought you knew.”
Gentry’s eyebrows appeared to bristle with anger. Shayne shrugged wearily and said, “That’s about all that’s left to clean up, I guess. Carlton killed Clem Wilson,” he announced without enthusiasm. “Mr. Herbert P. Carlton of Coral Gables… the best witness I have against himself.”
CHAPTER 17
There was a moment of dead silence inside the crowded room after Michael Shayne made his casual announcement. The only sound was the soft lead of Timothy Rourke’s pencil scribbling furiously on a pad of copy paper. He stopped writing to lift his eyebrows at Shayne.
Carlton exclaimed vehemently, “Do you know what you’re saying, Shayne?”
Will Gentry screwed up his face anxiously and asked, “Do you, Mike?”
Shayne dropped into a chair and sprawled his legs out comfortably. He said, “Honest to God, Will, I thought you knew it was Carlton. I thought you were just waiting for me to get the dope on him. Hell, it had to be… from the very first.”
Gentry growled, “What do you mean by ‘the very first’?”
“Last night out at the filling station. I suspected him then, though I wasn’t positive until this morning.”
In a trembling, aggrieved voice, Carlton said, “I demand an explanation for your absurd charge, Shayne.”
“You’ll get it. You thought you were safe from suspicion every time I dragged a dead herring across your path.” To Gentry he said impatiently, “That stall about having a flat and seeing all those things happen sounded goofy. In the first place, look at him. Is he the type to change his own tire when there’s a filling station handy, rubber conservation or not? Not on your life. And didn’t you notice his hands and the knees of his pants? They were clean. And that malarkey about the car almost hitting him. His pants were torn, but there wasn’t any bruise on his leg. He hadn’t been changing any tire. All he had time to do was slide a jack under the wheel. Then he hurried to the station because he was stuck with that flat and had to go through the normal actions of an innocent man.”
Gentry got out a handkerchief to mop his florid face. “You can’t hang a murder rap on a few little things like that.” His words drooled with disappointment and disgust.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty more. Those things just made me suspicious. I saw what they could point to. If Carlton had killed Clem Wilson and then got a flat as he was driving away he would have done just those things. He couldn’t drive on… not in these days of tire rationing… without attracting a lot of attention. And he felt pretty sure Clem Wilson was calling the cops and he was likely to meet up with them. He couldn’t desert his car half a mile from the crime, because that would throw too much suspicion on him. So he had to face it out by acting the innocent bystander.
“He overdid it,” Shayne went on slowly, “with the details he claimed he saw half a mile away which fitted Mrs. Wilson’s story. He was careful to mention two men in a dark sedan, and after I gave him the idea, he realized it might be well to claim he could identify them.”
Carlton broke in angrily, but Shayne raised his voice and continued:
“All that is actually immaterial, though. Carlton made his real mistake early this morning. I knew it had to be him. Hell, Will, you’re the one who pointed it out to me. Before God, I thought you knew.”
“Me?” Gentry scowled heavily.
“Sure. When you pointed out to me how prompt the man with the rifle was after the Herald came out. Remember? You said he checked into the hotel at six twenty-two. Just twenty-two minutes after the first edition was out.”
Gentry sputtered, “I don’t get it. Twenty minutes is plenty of time to read a paper and check in at a hotel.”
“But you’re forgetting the call that came in while I was in your office. About the kid killed near the railroad yards. I told you he had been in my room with a phony message at five forty-five… fifteen minutes before the Herald came out.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It was perfectly clear that the boy was sent to my apartment to learn its exact location. He was just a punk they picked up. They grabbed him as he came out of my hotel, got the information, then bumped him. The rifleman who signed his name B. Antrim knew which hotel room to rent in the hotel opposite… and which window to watch for his try at putting me out of the picture.”
Gentry said glumly, “Come again.”
Shayne lifted his arms and clasped his hands at the back of his head, took a deep, painful breath, and said, “That made it absolutely a cinch that whoever was after me didn’t have to wait to read the paper about the murder. He already knew, and that made it Carlton. He was the only person, other than Mrs. Wilson and the police, who knew that Clem Wilson talked to me before he was shot… the only other person who knew I was keeping the information to myself.”
Gentry subsided, venting his disgust with a half-hearted snort.
Herbert Carlton’s voice was out of control when he said, “It all sounds perfectly absurd. I don’t know what all your gibberish is about. What about that threat I received… these wounds I got while those men were abducting me? What about my car fenders being smashed when they rammed into me? And what about the boss who listened outside the cabin while we were locked inside?”
Shayne let his head loll against the chair. He said, “I have already said you were your own best witness… or worst… in the crime you committed. You wrote an anonymous threat to yourself at the same time you wrote that note to me. A check will show they were written on your typewriter. And as for the wounds on your face, the tape looks mighty clean. People don’t tape up bruises. They tape up scratches where there has been blood.”
He came up from his chair in one movement, stepped forward swiftly, and ripped a strip of adhesive from his cheek. There was no wound underneath. He pinned Carlton’s arms behind him with his two hands, held him with his left while he stripped the last piece of tape from his face. Then he dragged him toward Gentry, saying, “Look, Will. A boy scout would be smarter than Carlton. There’s not a scratch on him.”
He shoved Carlton away from him and continued, “Sure the boss was right there at the cabin. Inside the room with me… trying his goddamnest to get me to spill how much Clem Wilson had told me. Why, you were even afraid of your own gunman… made him check his gun with the other hood outside. That was cute, too, the way you tripped me and gave Gene a chance to get away. And the way you murdered Frazier in cold blood before he had a chance to say anything to incriminate you.”
Carlton kept going backward until he leaned against the wall. He stared at Shayne with the eyes of a hunted and cornered animal. “What makes you think I shot Wilson? What possible motive could I have had?”
“Because you were fool enough to try to sell the wrong man some of those fake gasoline coupons you and Frazier were forging. I don’t know why you decided to go out selling them that night. But you picked Clem Wilson. You should have let Frazier do the dirty work. Murder and racketeering were new to you, and you got panicky and went back and killed Wilson while he was phoning me.”
“So he did tell you?” Carlton moaned and continued frantically, “I knew I shouldn’t have waited…” Appalled by his admission, his knees gave way and he sank to the floor.
Gentry was sending out quick puffs of smoke from a cigar. He turned on Shayne and demanded, “If Wilson did tell you it was Carlton, why the hell did you go through all this hokus-pokus?”
“Wilson didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t have time. And that’s why you had me on the spot every time you got tough and demanded that I tell you.”
“But you said you knew it was Carlton right after six o’clock this morning,” Gentry rumbled. “Why the devil did you go on walking into trouble… nearly getting yourself killed?”
Shayne wearily paced a few steps and back, stood facing the others in the room, letting his cold gray eyes rest upon each before passing to the other. Captain Ott had taken the erring young soldier away, and Kline, Brannigan, and Miss Taylor were huddled together on the couch.
“By that time,” Shayne said, “I was smoking out a lot more skunks. I couldn’t afford to arrest Carlton and call it a day. Besides, I had to have more proof against Carlton. Then, these others kept coming at me as long as they didn’t know exactly who I was after. Except Kline, of course. Manny Markle sent me after him.”
