Chief Ollie Jenson sat alone and frightened in his office at police headquarters morosely regarding the bottle of shine sitting on the desk in front of him. He calculated there were about three drinks left in the bottle if he refrained from gulping.
And it was only about seven-thirty in the evening. With that colored boy locked up in his jail charged with the murder-rape of Ellie Blake, Chief Jenson knew he was going to need a lot more than three drinks to get through the night that lay ahead of him. Then he remembered that Alonzo Peters had said something about driving Pristine in to town to make some likker deliveries and that’s how-come he brought him in to jail so easy, so he suddenly figured that the stuff must still be in Peters’ car right now; and it sure enough was subject to confiscation, he reckoned, being the property of a jailed suspect and all.
A knock sounded on Chief Jenson’s door just as he reached this comforting conclusion to his train of thought. He put the quart bottle back in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and closed it. Then he touched the release button on his desk, and the door opened.
Officer Harris poked his head in and reported, “That detective from Miami wants to see you, Chief. Says it’s real important.”
The chief nodded and settled back with his hands folded over his paunch. “Send him right in, Ralph.”
The officer stepped back and opened the door wider and Michael Shayne entered. He said curtly, “They tell me you’ve got the Blake case all wrapped up, Chief.”
Chief Jenson shook his head ponderously and rumbled, “Have a chair, Mr. Shayne. You mean Pristine Gaylord? Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’ve got an open and shut case, but I reckon we got enough to hold him all right.”
“The way I hear it,” said Shayne, “is the only thing you’ve got is the fact that he was supposed to have been in town about midnight last night.”
“That, and the fact that he denies it straight out. Why won’t he say what he was doing in town, if he ain’t guilty?”
Shayne said, “There might be a lot of reasons, Chief. That’s mighty slim evidence to hang a man on.”
“Well, I reckon we’ll get plenty more before he ever comes up for trial,” said Jenson comfortably. “Once we start digging into things…”
Shayne put the palms of his hands flat on the chief’s desk and leaned forward to glare at him. “You know that Negro will never come to trial, Chief.” The words came out harshly. “You know what’s happening out in the streets of this town right now… and you know what will happen here tonight, if you don’t stop it fast. You’ll have a second murder before morning.”
“Not so fast now,” said Jenson uneasily. “I’m the law here in Sunray Beach. I won’t stand for no lynching.”
“What are you doing to prevent it?” demanded Shayne bitterly. “Have you called the State Police? Have you asked the governor to send troops?”
“I got no call to do that,” Jenson argued doggedly. “May be some hotheads talking lynching around town, but shucks! You know how that is. I guess I can handle things in my town without no outside help.”
Shayne said flatly, “You can’t, and you know it. What are the chances of getting the prisoner out of your jail and into a safer place?”
“He’s staying where he is,” Ollie Jenson said stubbornly. “You’re from Miami and you don’t know people up this way. Mighty fine, law-abiding citizens we got here, I can tell you for a fact. It’d be an insult to them and to my police force was I to admit it wasn’t safe for a murder suspect to spend the night right here locked up in the Sunray city jailhouse.”
Shayne said grimly, “Suppose you knew that colored boy was innocent, Chief? Suppose you had absolute proof that he had nothing to do with the Blake murder? Would you feel just as good about leaving him in jail overnight, if that were the case?”
“If I had any way of knowing that,” said Jenson weakly, “I reckon I’d figure he was safer out of town. But shucks, it stands to reason he’s plumb guilty. He’s got a bad reputation around town, and folks’ve seen him watching Ellie the way a nigger does a white woman sometimes. You know how them buck niggers get when they want a piece of white stuff real bad.”
Shayne said coldly, “I know how a lot of damn-fool southern white men think a Negro is about a white woman, but I’ve never encountered it personally. This is no time to argue that point,” he went on harshly. He reached in his pocket and drew out Blake’s confession and pushed it across the desk in front of Sunray’s Chief of Police. “Read that, and then let’s decide how we’re going to get your prisoner out of here without getting somebody killed.”
Chief Jenson’s fat fingers trembled as he unfolded the sheet of paper and read the words that Blake had written under Shayne’s direction. All of the color fled from his cheeks and jowls and he looked up at the detective in utter disbelief.
“Where’d you get hold of this?” he managed to say.
“From Marvin Blake about ten minutes ago. I watched him write it out and sign it.”
“Not Marv,” muttered Jenson brokenly, “He wasn’t even here last night. Him and Ellie…”
“He was here last night and he strangled his wife just as it says there.” Shayne spoke slowly and precisely, giving each word space and impact to strike through to Chief Jenson’s muddled mind. “He came in on the ten- twenty from Miami and walked up to his house without seeing anyone. He found Harry Wilsson upstairs in bed with his wife. He stayed outside the house until Harry left, and then he went up and strangled her. Then he walked back to the station with his suitcase and caught the one o’clock train back to Moonray where he got off and spent the night.”
“Harry Wilsson and… and Ellie?” Jenson’s eyes were round and protruding. “Oh, my God. Poor old Marv. What’ll become of Sissy now? That poor little girl… knowing that her mama… and her daddy…”
Shayne said harshly, “It’s a mess any way you cut it. But right now you’ve got an innocent Negro prisoner to think of. What’s going to happen to him?”
“Yeh.” Jenson looked across the desk at the detective without seeing him, it seemed to Shayne. The police chief narrowed his eyes to slits and said again, unhappily, “Yeh. Sure does look like Pristine’s in the clear, don’t it? Soon’s word gets around town…” He gestured to the sheet of paper in front of him unhappily. “You say Marv just give this to you? Whereabouts is he? Whyn’t you bring him in. According to what he wrote here, he’s a… a…”
“Murderer,” Shayne finished for him coldly. “I felt it was up to you to arrest him, Chief. This is your territory, and your case. He’s at his own house waiting for you to come and pick him up, I think. I left him there just a few minutes ago.”
Chief Jenson said, “Yeh. I guess I… got to.” He paused and then straightened in his chair and squared his shoulders resolutely, reached down to open the whiskey drawer and lift out the quart bottle of uncolored whiskey.
He set it on the desk in front of him and removed the cork, then pushed the bottle toward the redhead detective from Miami and said politely, “You first, sir.”
Shayne reached for the bottle and put it to his mouth. He took a long swallow and his eyes watered. He lowered the bottle from his mouth and ceremoniously wiped the neck of it on his shirt-sleeve, and passed it back across the desk to Jenson. The chief tilted it up to his mouth and gurgled until the bottle was empty. Then he dropped it back into the drawer and got up. He said to Shayne, “I reckon I’ll take my car that’s parked out back. That way we can come and go without nobody noticing us.”
He led the way out of the office and down a corridor to a rear exit where they went out to the chief’s sedan parked in the alley.
Shayne sat beside him in silence while Chief Ollie Jenson drove the winding route to the Blake house. It was just after sunset and the cool of dusk was descending on Sunray Beach when he parked his official car behind the Mercury that was still standing in the driveway.
No lights were visible inside the house as they got out and went up to the front door which stood ajar as Shayne had left it not more than twenty minutes before.
The detective held back and allowed the chief to enter in front of him. Jenson paused just over the threshold and switched on a light in the hallway, and he moved forward very slowly to stand over the body of Marvin Blake that lay in front of the bureau with its drawer still standing open, again as Shayne had left it.
The heavy. 45 automatic was clutched in Blake’s right hand. He had carefully placed the muzzle inside his
