He was lying face down in the sand. He had sand in his mouth and sand in his eyes. He rolled painfully and came up on one elbow. Some ten yards away, a familiar-looking car hung on the embankment with its front end pointing toward the highway. An accident, he thought. Then, recognizing the car as his own, he sat up the rest of the way.
Bathers were running up to find out how many people had been killed. Shayne must have been unconscious several minutes, for a police car with a blinking red eye on its roof had already pulled up in the open lane. The big refrigerator truck had been brought to a halt well down the road. A uniformed trooper swung over the slack cable and came toward Shayne.
He wanted to be on his feet by the time the cop reached him, but he had to stop to rest on one knee. Then he clenched his teeth hard and stood up. He grunted when the cop asked if he was hurt, and fumbled out his detective’s license.
“I thought I recognized you,” the cop said. “Wait, I want to talk to you. Where are you going?”
Without answering, his head down, Shayne continued to plod through the sand. The tide was in. At the water’s edge he waded in without taking off his shoes. He nearly pitched head forward when he stooped down. Then he scooped up a double handful of salt water and splashed it in his face. By the time he started back, dripping, he knew that he wouldn’t need the ambulance that had pulled up behind the police car on the highway.
The cop had his notebook out. “Not that I give a damn, but when the lieutenant spots your name, he’ll want to know if this is tied in with something you’re working on. That better be my first question.”
“Give me a minute,” Shayne said. “How many vehicles do you have in this?”
“Just the two, yours and the semi.”
“No black four-door Ford sedan, a couple of years old, Florida plates?”
“No. What did he do, cut in on you?”
“Yeah, he thought he had time to get back, but at the last minute I guess he got rattled. It wasn’t the truck- driver’s fault.”
“In other words,” the cop said carefully, “and I’m only asking because I know what the lieutenant’s going to want to know, nobody tried to pile you up?”
Shayne shrugged. “I never saw the driver before. About fifty, short grayish hair, a nice tan. There won’t be any marks on his car.”
“It’s not much,” the cop said, “but I’d better call it in.
He went up the embankment. A small man with a mustache, carrying a briefcase, edged up to Shayne.
“My name’s Ross Gilmore,” he said. “Attorney-at-law. I happened to see this, and you’ve got a sweet liability action here against that truckdriver for tailgaiting. Now’s the time to line up your witnesses. I’m prepared to-”
“Get lost,” Shayne said.
The man recoiled a step, but he went on trying. “It’s no skin off him, you realize-the insurance company will have to pay it.”
Shayne gave him a look that sent him back up to the highway. An intern from the ambulance was looking around for bodies. A second police cruiser arrived, and the cops who came in it began to get the traffic moving. A phone seemed to be ringing somewhere. Shayne was returning to normal slowly, but he still had a considerable distance to go. After the fifth or sixth ring, he realized that the sound was coming from his wrecked Buick.
His front door was jammed. To reach the phone he had to go in through the back, while the ringing continued. Finally he succeeded in snatching it up.
“Yeah?”
“Michael!” his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, said. “I was about to give up. What does that guarded ‘yeah’ mean? Is somebody with you?”
“Wait a minute.” Shayne’s head was hammering. He sank back into the rear seat, which was canted upward at a sharp angle, and waited till his breathing was more regular. “Go ahead, angel.”
“Do I hear a siren?” she said, alarmed. “Michael Shayne, tell me what’s happening!”
“What makes you think anything is?”
“When I hear a siren and you’re around, nine times out of ten it has something to do with you. Are those waves?”
“Those are waves, and I’ve just been in wading with my shoes on. All right, angel, I’ll stop being mysterious. I just smashed up the Buick. No, I’m OK,” he said as she started to speak. “I landed in some nice soft sand, and so far the cops are being friendly. Nobody’s offered me a drink yet, though,” he added.
“Where are you?” she demanded urgently.
“North of Lauderdale, but I really am OK. A sore shoulder’s about all. A guy knocked me off the highway with a piece of very damn good driving. He had everything figured to the inch. It was like a harness race for a minute. He didn’t wait around to be congratulated, but I think I’ll know him when I see him again. Which I have a feeling I will.”
“Is he the same one who put Tim in the hospital?”
“No, but it’s connected. I don’t know how or why. Tim’s been right about everything so far. He was right about the twin double and right about Joey Dolan. I’m beginning to take more of a personal interest in how this turns out.”
“Michael!” she wailed. “It scares me when you get that note in your voice. I suppose there’s no use asking you to be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” Shayne said, grinning.
“You are? Well, I’ve had two phone calls. Do you want me to tell you about them now, or wait till you recover?”
“I’m recovered. I can’t go anywhere until the cops are finished with me.”
“The first was from the insurance company you’re supposed to be working for. I did what you told me to. I said I didn’t know where you were, which was true, and you’d call them in the morning. I don’t think they liked it.”
“Too bad.”
“And I had a very odd anonymous call, collect from Pompano Beach. Well, anonymous-he gave the operator the name Mr. Jones, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t his real name. I took it down in shorthand, as much as I could get. I’ll give you the high spots first. When I told him you weren’t in, I had a hard time keeping him from hanging up. He was quite skittery. I finally persuaded him to leave a message, and what he wanted to tell you was that he talked to Dolan early this morning, he thought around three.’”
Shayne scraped his chin with his thumbnail, frowning. “That would be after Dolan called Tim.”
“Yes, but he’d been drinking, Michael, both then and when he talked to me. He said Dolan had a half-empty bottle of sherry. It wasn’t very good sherry, naturally, and Jones said it had a funny kind of raw taste. Dolan was very excited. He said-let’s see-he said he’d had a wonderful piece of good fortune, and if it paid off, he’d be rich enough to spend next summer in Ireland. But he was worried about something. He kept saying you had to take chances if you didn’t want to end your life in the gutter. He told Jones to listen carefully, in case anything happened. He was supposed to meet somebody in the Belle Mark Apartments in Miami, and he told Jones to write that down, the Belle Mark Apartments. He stood there while Jones did it.”
“Where did this happen?” Shayne said, still frowning. “He wouldn’t say. He said it was a good thing Joey made him write down the address, because when he woke up this morning he’d forgotten all about it. He had a splitting headache, which he thinks may have been from whatever gave the sherry that funny taste. When he heard Dolan was dead, he felt in his pockets and found the paper. I asked him why he didn’t tell the police, and he gave a strange laugh. From what Tim told me, the police wouldn’t follow it up anyway, would they?”
“Probably not. Why did he call me?”
“He said something about seeing you at Sweeney’s last night. I take it that’s some kind of bar or cafeteria. Maybe he only talked to someone who saw you. Apparently it’s known that you and Tim were supposed to meet Dolan and he didn’t show up. I said I knew you’d want to talk to him. He said, ‘Why?’ very nervously. I tried to convince him that trained investigators are able to see things that ordinary people overlook, and if he wanted to keep it anonymous, he could call back when you were in and go on using the names Jones. He said no, you’d trace the call, and then before I could tell him that calls can’t be traced, he got excited and said he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him that happened to Joey, and bang, he hung up. I’m sorry, Michael. I’ve been thinking of different ways I should have handled him.”
