here? I’ve seen enough cops for one night.”
“Sure… Mike,” Tim told him soothingly. He started the motor and pulled away from the curb. “Home, James?” he asked cheerfully.
“Wait a minute. No. Drop me at the Encanto Hotel, Tim. And then forget you did.”
“You’re not running out on me, Mike? Not without telling me what this is all about?”
“No. I’ve got to pick my car up at the Encanto. About forgetting it… I just mean if anything comes up later. Look. I’m confused, Tim. I’ve got thinking to do. Save your questions, huh?”
“Sure,” said Timothy Rourke easily. “Will you be at the Encanto long?”
“Just long enough to get my car. Then I’ll meet you back at my place.”
The two men had been close friends for a great many years, and Timothy Rourke knew when it was not the time to ask questions.
He drove to the Encanto without speaking again, pulled up under the canopy, and said, “I’ll be waiting for you, Mike.”
“Sure. You’ve got a key. Use it.” Shayne got out and fumbled in his pocket for his parking stub to give to the doorman, and the reporter pulled away into the night.
9
While Shayne waited at the hotel entrance for his car to be brought around, he glanced inside and saw two house phones just inside the door. He hesitated, scowling uncertainly. Should he call Carla and warn her what had happened? He wondered whether Vicky had checked back with her mother, and whether she had returned safely to the hotel.
He stepped inside quickly and lifted one of the phones, but replaced it before giving the room number. Why worry Carla at this point? What the hell could he tell her? Simply that he had bungled the job and that her dead husband might turn up anywhere, at any time.
There would still be the matter of identifying the man, he realized. There was nothing about him at this point to connect him with Carla. Just the blanket that had the name of the hotel on it. But there was nothing to show what room it came from. No, he told himself. Carla and Vicky were safe enough at this point, if they just kept quiet and went on as though nothing had happened.
If the body were discovered in the trunk of the Ford a certain private detective named Michael Shayne was the only person who could be tied directly to it. Finding the blanket, the police would check the Encanto Hotel, of course, looking for a missing guest who answered the dead man’s description. They wouldn’t find one. It would take days to check every room in the hotel for a missing blanket… if they bothered to go so far.
There was no reason to worry about Carla and Vicky at this point. He was the only one who had things to worry about. He strolled back outside as his car was driven up by the attendant, gave the lad a half-dollar and got in.
He turned south on Biscayne Boulevard, drove to Southeast First Street and then west. He found Rourke’s car parked at the curb beside his hotel on the north bank of the Miami River, and he pulled up close behind it and shut off the lights and ignition. He hadn’t formulated any definite plans for the remaining hours of the night, but he was positive that he wouldn’t be going to bed and let matters take their natural course.
He went in a side door with a stairway leading up that by-passed the lobby, climbed to the second floor and went down the hall to his door which was standing ajar and showing a light inside.
Timothy Rourke was comfortably relaxed in a deep chair with a bourbon highball in his hand. He had set out a cognac bottle for his host, with an empty four-ounce glass beside it, and a tall glass of ice water for a chaser. His deep-set eyes were hooded, and they glittered with happy curiosity as the redhead strode into the room. He lifted his glass in wordless greeting and sipped from it as Shayne crossed to the table and poured himself a healthy drink. Still standing, he drank it in three swallows, automatically chased it down with a sip of ice water and said feelingly, “By God, I needed that!” He poured more liquor into the glass and then sat down and lit a cigarette.
“Just about two hours ago,” Rourke reminded him, “you tore yourself away from my scintillating company and refused another drink… which I offered to buy, by God, and swore you were coming straight home and to bed and ten hours sleep. What the devil have you been up to in those two hours?”
“What did you pick up at headquarters?”
“Not a whole lot. Just that you’d been arrested driving a stolen car and tried to bribe the two cops to let you go. And that you deliberately ran over some honest citizen who tried to stop you. Nothing really world-shaking for Mike Shayne spending a quiet evening in bed.”
Shayne grinned mirthlessly and clawed fingers through his hair, “Things do have a way of happening. Tonight it was a friend of Brett Halliday’s in town from Hollywood.”
“Good looking?” asked Rourke alertly.
“You know Brett.” Shayne made a gesture. “She had a run-in with a dead man, so who the hell should she call on but Brett’s old friend Mike Shayne?”
“It figures. Where else would tomorrow’s headlines come from?”
“This is going to be one hell of a headline,” growled Shayne. “If things don’t break right.” He took another drink and then got up from his chair and began to prowl up and down the room.
Rourke watched his friend for a moment, then asked, “Are you going to tell me about it?”
“I’m trying to decide how much to tell you,” Shayne confessed angrily. “It’s going to sound like hell when I put it into plain words. You’re going to sit back in judgment and ask why in hell I let myself get pulled into it. All I had to do was say no, God damn it. All I had to do was turn my back and walk out of the hotel room. Which is what any sensible human being would have done,” he added in a tone of deep disgust.
“But she was a friend of Brett’s,” Rourke reminded him.
“Yeh. God protect us from the friends of our friends. All right, Tim. Right now I’m not going to try and explain why I’m in this up to my neck. Take my word for it that it seemed like the least I could do at the time. If we get in a real jam and you’re questioned, the less you know the better it’ll be all around.”
“What kind of jam are we headed for?” Rourke asked him calmly, but with lively curiosity.
“We’ve got to steal a car for one thing.”
“My God! Haven’t you stolen enough cars for one night?”
“The same car,” Shayne told him. “Did you talk to that man, Duclos, at headquarters?”
“Owner of the stolen Ford? Yeh. I got the dope from him on his car.”
“Address and all?”
“Sure. I’ve got my notes right here. But he’ll be careful after it was stolen once. He won’t leave it parked in front of his house with the keys in it again. What the hell’s so important about that car, Mike?”
“It’s something I left in it,” Shayne hedged. “We’ve got to get it back before morning.”
Timothy Rourke stiffened in his chair and put a thin hand up over his eyes. “Oh, no,” he groaned sepulchrally. “Don’t tell me that. Not a dead man, Mike. You didn’t go off and leave a corpse in that stolen car. Locked in the trunk, huh?”
“Whatever would give you an idea like that?” demanded Shayne, looking at his old friend incredulously and laughing, although not very heartily.
“Because I know you, damn it. Because I can put two and two together and it always comes out four where Mike Shayne is concerned. There’s this dame who blows into town and has a run-in with a dead man. There’s you who could have said no and turned your back and walked out of her bedroom… but didn’t. That’s two and two… see? And it adds up to a corpse floating around town in a stolen car. Right?”
“You have the damnedest imagination,” Shayne chuckled. “I wouldn’t tell you if you were right, Tim. What you don’t know, you may not have to perjure yourself about later. Let’s just leave it that we’ve got to steal that Ford back tonight and get something out of it that I mislaid.”
“We got to do that?” asked Rourke gently.
“We,” said Shayne firmly. “It’s a two-man caper, Tim. You’re elected.”
“Do you know what the penalty is for moving corpses around?”
“No one has said it is a corpse,” Shayne reminded him. “Even so… do you remember ever asking me that
