gushing from his nose and a look of wild hatred on his twisted face.
“Get wise to yourselves, punks,” Shayne advised them shortly. “Push me just a little bit more and I’ll take all of you in.” He strode toward them contemptuously and they sidled backward, glancing uncertainly at each other, bereft of leadership with Lomax ungallantly sitting on the floor holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose.
Shayne stooped over him and caught the lapels of his leather jacket in his left hand and lifted him to his feet. He held him at arm’s length and told the others, “We’re going out to sit in my car and have a talk. First one of you comes through the door, I’m driving in with Will. Stay inside, and he may come back all in one piece.” He turned and went through the open door, dragging Will Lomax behind him. He heeled the door shut, pulled the dark-featured youth upright and shoved him across the porch toward his car. “Just forget about how tough you are, Sonny,” he advised him coldly. “I’m going to get some answers if I have to beat them out of you.” Lomax shambled ahead a few steps and then whirled about with clenched fists, sobbing, “Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell! You goddamn smart bastard. Just because you’re bigger’n me…”
“That’s it exactly,” said Shayne coldly. “Just because I am bigger, you’ll take it. Get in the front seat there and tell me about you and Jeanette.”
He gave him another shove and the young man’s defiance crumpled. He walked slowly to the car and got in, sat bolt upright on the far side of the seat with handkerchief still pressed to his nose as Shayne got in beside him. “Who are you,” he asked sullenly, “and what you want to know?”
“I’m a friend of Professor Henderson’s for one thing. I want to know all about that trip you were taking with Jeanette when she was killed a month ago. She was under-age, you know, and there’s a legal phrase for it. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I don’t want to hurt the professor by having it come out in the open, but that’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?” mumbled Lomax. “Jeanette and I never… you got no right to say that. What trip you talking about?”
“The pre-marital honeymoon you and she had all planned. Don’t waste time denying it,” Shayne went on wearily. “I know you were in her car with her that night near Brockton. I want to know exactly what happened.” Will Lomax turned incredulously as he spoke, and slowly took the handkerchief away from his nose where the bleeding was reduced to a mere trickle. Shayne had a definite impression that there was gladness and relief in the black eyes. That this wasn’t the question he had expected and feared, and the boy’s voice confirmed that impression as he spoke.
“You’re nuts, Mister. I wasn’t near Brockton that night and I can prove it. I didn’t even know anything about it until I saw it in a paper two days later. Sure, I dated her sometimes even if her old man did treat me like dirt under his feet, but I hadn’t seen her for a week before she had the accident.”
“Were you waiting for her to join you some place that night?”
“I sure wasn’t.” Will’s upper lip curled away from his teeth and his voice had a note of jeering triumph. “I was in R.O.T.C. camp at Gainesville when it happened. You can check on it easy enough. Bed-check at nine every night and not a damned pass from camp for two whole weeks. I don’t know what kind of bee you got in your bonnet. We were both sore because I had to go for spring training the same time as her vacation, and she was going to visit with a girl in Diston. Name of Lois Dongan. You can ask her.”
Shayne didn’t bother to tell him he had already asked Lois. Will’s voice and manner bore the strong stamp of truth. It would be a simple matter to check his statement, of course. He’d be a fool to make it if it weren’t true.
“If you weren’t the one she was going off with,” said Shayne harshly. “Who was it? Who else was she playing around with while you were in camp?”
“Damn you,” Will snarled angrily, and braced himself to swing an ineffectual fist at Shayne’s face. “There wasn’t nobody else. Jeanie and me were…” He stopped and swallowed hard. “We were in love, damn it. She never looked at another man. I don’t know who in hell you are, but you sure ain’t going around fouling up her memory with such stories. You do that and I’ll get you, by God, if it’s the last thing on earth I do.”
“What about Randy Harris?” Shayne demanded.
“Harris?” The youth’s jaw fell open slackly. “Never heard of him. Wait a minute. You mean that lawyer over in Orlando that got burned up in his car last week? What about him?”
“You sure Jeanette wasn’t two-timing you with him?”
“Sure I’m sure, Mister.” Will’s voice was sullenly dogged. “She wasn’t two-timing me, period. She was my girl and we were going to get married as soon as she was eighteen.” He took on a sort of youthful dignity as he said this, and his hand reached out to unlatch the door.
Shayne made no move to stop him as he got out. He stood beside the open door and said, “I’m going back inside now. Some of the fellows are going to be pretty sore about the way you barged in on us and threw your weight around. Tough as you may be, I wouldn’t stick around Winter Park after dark if I was you.”
He held his head high and walked stiffly away toward the farmhouse. Shayne sighed and started his motor and backed out the driveway.
Despite his disinclination to do so, he couldn’t help believing Will Lomax. But the hell of it was, he also believed Lois Dongan. She hadn’t, he realized, stated flatly that Will Lomax was the man Jeanette had planned to stay with during the period she was supposed to be visiting Lois. In fact, Lois had admitted that Jeanette had not told her who she was going with. Knowing that Jeanette and Will were supposed to be in love and engaged, Lois had assumed Will was to be her companion. But it might have been anyone else at all. Jeanette probably wouldn’t have told her closest friend the truth, Shayne decided as he drove morosely back to Winter Park. Lois was young and sentimental, and it had seemed perfectly all right and romantic to her to help Jeanette go away with the man she was engaged to marry, whereas she might have refused to lend herself to the scheme had she known the man was someone other than Jeanette’s fiance.
Discovering his identity now would take a lot of digging, Shayne told himself uneasily. And he didn’t want to waste any more time away from Brockton where Jean Henderson had last been seen. She was more important now than her younger sister who had been dead for a month.
14
On a sudden impulse, Michael Shayne braked his car and swung in to the gas pumps at the Squaredeal Filling Station just outside of Brockton. His gas tank was three-quarters empty, and he got out and said, “Fill it up, please,” to the brisk young man who trotted out from the office to wait on him.
He waited until the gasoline was running before asking casually, “Your name John Agnolo?”
“That’s right, Mister.” The young man’s voice was cheerful, his face was intelligent and showed a certain amount of curiosity as he regarded the stranger.
“I’m doing some checking on the man who was burned up in his car last week-end,” Shayne explained. “I understand you thought he stopped here for gas Thursday evening before it happened.”
“Yeh. I did think it was him at first. Same make and color of car. And when they showed me his picture at the police station I was ’most ready to swear it was him that asked me how to get to the Sanitarium, but if it was I guess he changed his mind and turned off on the other fork instead because they said he didn’t go there.”
Shayne frowned. “According to the paper, you gave him a pencil sketch showing how to get there, and it wasn’t a difficult route.”
“That’s right. I sure did. Drew it out for him. ‘You just turn left at the next light,’ I told him, ‘and keep going straight till the road forks where there’s a sign. You take the left fork,’ I told him, ‘and you can’t miss it.”
“But his car was wrecked on the other fork?”
“That’s right. About a mile from where he should have turned left.” Gasoline gurgled up from the tank, and Agnolo shut off the pump. He hung up the hose and replaced the tank cap and asked Shayne, “Want me to check your oil and water?”
“They’re okay. You might give the windshield a swipe.” Shayne followed him around to the front and went on, “You’re not sure whether the man was alone or not?”
“I was pretty sure at first there was someone with him, but I could be wrong. I just didn’t notice particularly. They said at the Sanitarium that a fellow who looked like him was there about the right time that night to see his
