“Why, yes. He offered to take the message over to you, and since he was going anyway-”
Shayne’s fingers closed down on the clerk’s forearm and drew a little yelp of pain from him. “What message are you talking about?”
“Why, the one that came for you by messenger. A plain sealed envelope marked Urgent. It came while Mr. Matrix was standing here at the desk, and I thought-of course-”
“You didn’t think,” Shayne snapped. His nostrils flared and he breathed through them heavily. He dropped the man’s limp forearm with a flat, tired oath, then strode to the switchboard and ordered the girl to connect him with John Hardeman at the race track at once.
He leaned against the railing and lit a cigarette while the operator’s fingers nimbly put plugs in holes and pulled plugs out of holes. She looked up after a time and said brightly, “I’m sorry. Mr. Hardeman does not answer.”
Shayne dragged himself erect. He saw Gentry watching him quizzically but the burly chief made no move to interfere. Shayne went back to the desk and asked the hotel clerk, “Where does Matrix live?”
“One block down.” The clerk gestured southward. “The Magnolia Apartments.”
Shayne surged out of the lobby and across the street to where he had left his roadster parked when he reconnoitered the printing plant and its strange flashes of light. He slammed it down the street in second gear, screeched up in front of the Magnolia Apartments and leaped out.
Four long strides took him into a small foyer with mail slots all around. Matrix’s name was on No. 4.
He found No. 4 at the end of the hall. It was dark and his knock went unanswered. He tried three keys in the lock before finding one that would open it.
He snapped on a ceiling light. The apartment was in a state of complete disorder, with three closed traveling-bags and a briefcase standing in the center of the floor.
Turning off the light and closing the door as he went out, Shayne walked slowly back to his car. Under the wheel, he paused to light a cigarette and draw on it thoughtfully before putting the car in gear. Then he wheeled around and drove to the hotel at slow speed.
Will Gentry looked up with interest when Shayne approached from the doorway. He started to ask a question, but did not after he got a good look at Shayne’s face.
The redheaded detective gripped Gentry’s arm and led him to the door. “Will you do something for me, Will? Without asking questions?”
Gentry said, “Sure,” and waited.
Shayne gave him the address of a cottage on the beach. “Drive out there and park within a block or so. Gil Matrix will be there after a while. Leave him alone-until he tries to leave the cottage with a girl. If he does that before I get out there, stop him-and wait there for me.”
Gentry agreed without asking any questions. He got in his car and drove in the opposite direction while Shayne raced his roadster toward the race track.
A few automobiles were leaving the track parking-lot when Shayne approached, the early-departing vanguard of the rush that would follow the final race, those who liked to avoid the final rush or who had lost all their money through the pari-mutuels and were willing to call it a night.
Shayne drove into the lot, but this time did not affront the attendant by parking for a quick getaway. He slid his roadster into the spot indicated, got out and strode at a swinging pace to the entrance gate, which was open and deserted at an hour when the night’s racing was almost over.
The grandstand appeared as crowded with gay costumes as it had been earlier in the evening, and throngs still surged about the betting-windows as the dogs were paraded for the last race.
Shayne shouldered his way among them, grim-faced and calm, went to the door under the grandstand leading to the offices. The same clattering of calculating machines and typewriters smote his ears as before.
This time he went direct to the door of John Hardeman’s office. He knocked tentatively, with the air of a man who did not expect his knock to be answered.
It was not answered.
The knob refused to turn when he put pressure on it.
He shielded his action with his body while drawing a ring crowded with keys from his pocket. He tried half a dozen without success, but persevered until the right key came to his hand.
It turned grudgingly in the lock. He glanced around the empty corridor before pushing the door open and sliding into the dark office.
He took time to get the key out of the lock and close the door on the night latch before feeling for a light switch. His nostrils twitched with the lingering acrid odor of gun smoke in them as he found the switch and pressed it. He turned slowly and stared with somber eyes at the dead body of John Hardeman slumped sideways in his swivel chair with a small powder-marked hole in his right temple.
Band music came through the open window mingled with the hopeful shouts of the racing throng.
Chapter Eighteen: WHILE THE CROWD ROARS
Shayne stood backed against the door without moving for a full minute. Then he glanced at the open window and went to it, circling the flat desk and the corpse.
The rear of the office abutted almost against the blankness of a high board wall enclosing the track with barely room for a body to squeeze between wall and window. Shayne stepped back, satisfied that no one could look into the office through the aperture.
He stopped a foot from Hardeman’s body, right thumb and forefinger seizing the lobe of his left ear and kneading it absently while his gray eyes studied every minute detail of the death scene before him.
Hardeman’s chair was swiveled to the left, halfway between the flat-topped desk and typewriter stand behind him. His head rested laxly on his left shoulder slumped low in the chair and his left arm hung down over the chair arm with the tips of his fingers almost touching the office floor.
His right hand rested inside the open top drawer of the desk, barely touching the butt of a Police Positive. 38 lying on top of a batch of papers. The forefinger of his right hand still wore the protective rubber covering with which he had been picking out letters on the typewriter when Shayne had entered the office earlier.
A sheet of paper was rolled in the typewriter behind him. It carried the printed letterhead of the race track, with John Hardeman’s name in modest letters in the left-hand corner under the legend Manager.
The date had been typed beneath the letterhead. That was as far as Hardeman had got with whatever communication he had been on the point of typing.
The single bullet which had killed the manager had not come out the back of his head. There was only the wound, pockmarked with powder burns all around, a little above and halfway between his right ear and eye. Blood had run from the wound and made a path down Hardeman’s cheek to the point of his chin, where it dripped off to the rug.
Blood continued to dribble from the wound as Shayne stood there. Single thick drops, widely spaced as the fluid clotted. It fell with a dull plopping sound into the thickening pool directly beneath.
It was a simple matter to reconstruct the exact manner in which John Hardeman had met his death. He had been turned away from his desk typing with the rubber-covered forefinger when someone entered his office. The door had been unlocked, Shayne recalled, on his previous visit.
Swiveling about to face his visitor, the race-track manager had looked into the muzzle of a gun. His instinctive reaction had been to make a desperate reach for his own pistol, which lay conveniently at hand in the open drawer. He had died before his fingers could grasp the weapon.
Everything else in the office was the same as Shayne had seen it before. Apparently nothing had been tampered with in any way. Hardeman’s killer must have fled furtively as soon as the lethal shot was fired. It was entirely practicable to enter and leave the private office via the hallway unnoticed, as Shayne was fully aware.
After a thorough inspection of the dead man, Shayne stopped rolling his earlobe and stepped back. He hooked one thigh over a corner of Hardeman’s desk and considered the situation carefully, in respect to himself, and as it had a bearing on two other murders and the conclusion he had worked out in his mind for the case.
A queer hot light flickered in his gray eyes. They stared unblinkingly at the dead figure before him. A grim
