Never Kill a Client

embezzlement in Jacksonville and by God, Mike, this may be important. There was a round hundred thousand stolen… and not one penny of it was recovered. North American Bonding Company paid off in full. O’Keefe claimed he had spent it all prior to his arrest, but rumor was rife that ’twasn’t so. That he maybe had it put away until he got out of the pen and could enjoy it. Hey!” Rourke paused in his recital and glanced around uncertainly at the wooden faces about him.

“None of you seem very much excited about this,” he said in a deflated voice. “I thought it might be important as a motive for O’Keefe’s murder.”

Shayne said, “It’s important all right, Tim, but we’ve already got the same dope from Mr. Rexforth here. Remember the nasty little man Lucy mentioned in her notes?”

“Oh. Sure.” Rourke glanced at Rexforth and agreed, “He is sort of a nasty little man at that. All right. Maybe you already know this, too, but I thought you’d be interested. I know who the dame is you had at the morgue, Mike. The one you called Elsa Cornell.”

Shayne swung on him eagerly. “You do? Who is she?”

“I had a kind of funny feeling all along,” Rourke confessed, “that I’d seen her picture in the paper somewhere… sometime. And when I was looking over the O’Keefe file, there it was. Right in front of me. A few years younger, but not a damn bit prettier.”

“Who?” Shayne breathed, his throat constricted.

“Mrs. Julius O’Keefe, that’s who. At least she was when he stole the money. She divorced him later and married his ex-boss. A guy named Robert Long. And you know what’s one of the funniest coincidences of all, Mike? That Robert Long is the same one that got killed here in Miami a few months ago in a shooting scrape you were mixed up in. I don’t know whether you remember…”

“I remember all right,” Shayne said grimly. He grabbed the reporter’s arm and swung him toward the door. “Come on, Tim. Let’s get going.”

“Hold it,” shouted Gentry angrily. “I’ve got two witnesses on their way in here to identify you, Mike. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

“To find Lucy,” Shayne said over his shoulder as he jerked the door open and shoved Rourke through it in front of him.

17

“Where are we headed?” Timothy Rourke demanded breathlessly as Shayne gunned his car away from the police station.

“To visit a guy named Dirkson Boal,” Shayne grated. “Lives out north, I think. Miami Shores, maybe. Do you know without stopping to look up the address?”

“The lawyer? Yeh. I interviewed him at home a couple of months ago. Big place off the Boulevard… north of Hundredth Street.”

Shayne nodded, pushing through traffic as fast as he could east to Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s still twenty minutes before most business places open up. If we’re lucky we’ll catch Boal at home.”

“What’s he got to do with it, Mike?” Rourke asked helplessly. “Fill me in a little.”

“He’s got everything to do with it. He and Mrs. Robert Long… O’Keefe’s ex-wife. They’re in it together. There are a couple others, but I imagine they’re just hired hands. You were right about the money O’Keefe stole. I don’t think he did spend it. It looks like he and Long were in it together and put it away in a safe place… probably in Miami… until he got out of jail to claim it with Long.”

He had to stop for a signal light at the Boulevard, and waited impatiently until he could cross the intersection and swing into the outer lane of northbound traffic where he began passing every car in sight.

“It started four months ago when Long died and I was with him. The story was in the papers and it evidently gave various people ideas about the money.”

He swiftly outlined the theory Rexforth had formed independently, and ended flatly, “He was wrong, of course. Long told me nothing and didn’t turn over any half of a claim check to me. His wife held it, of course, and she evidently got the same bright idea that Rexforth had… that O’Keefe would be willing to split with me, although he’d never in the world split with her.

“I suppose she went to Boal with her bright idea about that time, and they worked it out together. Get hold of some guy who could be made up to look enough like me to pass casual inspection… send him to the pen to gain O’Keefe’s confidence… pull strings to get the man pardoned… then arrange to get Lucy and me out of the office on the crucial day of O’Keefe’s release.”

“Why rush out to Boal’s house like this?” asked Rourke. “You’ve got Mrs. Long under arrest. Why not…?”

“That’s the point. We haven’t got her. She got away on her way from the morgue to the station this morning. It’s my bet that she went straight to Boal. Remember, she knows it’s turned into a murder now. She stood there beside me in the morgue looking down at the man she used to be married to and never turned a hair.

“She and Boal are worried,” he added grimly. “The whole thing blew up in their faces when O’Keefe got himself killed in my office by their two hired hands. If they did get what they needed to recover the money off the body of O’Keefe, it’s my guess they’ll try to pick it up from wherever it is as soon as the place opens for business this morning, and get out of town.”

“What about Lucy all this time. You figure Boal has got her?”

“That’s the only way it does figure,” Shayne told him, hoping to God he was right. “I’m pretty sure the pair in my office panicked yesterday after killing O’Keefe, and rushed out to get Lucy from a motel room where they had put her for safe-keeping. They’d go straight to the boss with her… I hope. And dump her in his lap.

“Boal isn’t the type to panic,” he went on slowly. “He wouldn’t take it on the lam without sitting tight until this morning to make a last try at the dough. So far as he knew I was still cuddled up cozily with Mrs. Long in Los Angeles, and even when O’Keefe’s body was found he didn’t see anything to tie him into it.

“That’s what he must have thought, at least, until she turned up here in Miami this morning after eluding Gentry’s dumb cops.”

He slowed down to sixty for a changing traffic light at 79th Street.

“That was less than two hours ago.” He slammed through the intersection and added, “You said north of Hundredth?”

“Yeh. Not far. Just a few blocks, then it’s a turn to the right. Better get over in that lane and slow down a little.”

Rourke leaned out the window on his side to peer ahead, said sharply, “Next turn beyond that filling station. I remember…”

Shayne braked hard as he went past the filling station indicated by Rourke, moved into the right-hand lane and made the turn onto a side street with screeching tires.

Still leaning out the window, Rourke told him, “It’s along here. Big stone gateposts on this side. There. Up ahead.”

Shayne slowed still more and swung in between the stone gateposts on a macadam driveway that curved up a slight slope toward a modest stucco house surrounded by tropical shrubbery.

He was just beyond the gate when the front end of a gray Cadillac nosed around the curve in front of them headed downward.

Shayne slammed on his brakes hard and threw his car into reverse. It lurched backward and he swung the steering wheel hard to settle his car firmly between the gateposts, crosswise of the driveway, so the other car could not possibly get past it. He set the hand-brake and jerked his keys from the ignition and leaped out on his side as the big Cad ground to a halt with its grillwork almost touching the side of his car.

Shayne trotted around the back of his car, noting that a man and a woman occupied the front seat of the other car. The man was Dirkson Boal and the woman beside him was Mrs. Robert Long.

“Take her, Tim,” Shayne panted, heading for the left side of the Cad where Boal had his door open and was stepping out.