Rourke sat on the floor and watched him speculatively. He didn’t say anything, and Painter didn’t turn around until Shayne reached the bedroom door and opened it.
Shayne reached inside, turned on the light, and hesitated an almost imperceptible second before stepping in and pulling the door shut. He stood looking down with blank amazement at the bloody and battered face of a man he had never seen before.
Chapter Eight
The man lay on his back, half on and half off the bed. Both arms trailed on the floor, the stiff fingers of one hand just touching a heavy ornamental vase which had stood on a shelf just inside the front door of the apartment ever since Shayne could remember. The vase lay in a pool of blood.
The man’s features were a pulp. He wore yellow silk pajamas which were blood-spattered. His face and the front portion of his head had been smashed by several heavy blows, and death must have come slowly and with great agony.
“Slocum. He did come back to sleep in the apartment after all,” Shayne muttered to himself.
The muscles in his gaunt cheeks quivered involuntarily. He was probably responsible for the man’s murder. He recalled the lie he had told Irvin and Perry about the source of the hundred-dollar bills they were interested in. It had seemed an innocent enough lie when he was desperately fighting for time, the best he could evolve on the spur of the moment. He hadn’t expected them to come to the hotel before morning, especially since the clerk had said Slocum hadn’t yet moved in. Even then, he thought they would only question the man, not murder him.
Yet there was mute evidence all about the bedroom that it had been one of the senator’s crowd looking for more of the same kind of bank notes. There was an overturned Gladstone on the floor, and clothing and toilet articles were scattered all about the floor and on the bed. There was no doubt that it had been done by someone looking for the rest of the fifty grand mentioned by Bates over the telephone from the Fun Club.
And Shayne suddenly realized that the money the murderer had been looking for was almost surely in the Gladstone he still held in his hand-the one the porter had given him at the airport. More precisely, Dawson’s Gladstone, for Shayne was convinced that the porter had got the two suitcases mixed up, somehow, while he was supposed to be changing one for the other at the last moment before Flight Sixty-two took off.
Shayne turned, opened the door, and went out, carrying the closed suitcase. He set it down near the bathroom door. Rourke and Painter looked at his stony features and naked body with questioning interest.
Shayne said, “One of you had better call the police.”
“Police?” Painter bristled and strutted forward. “If you’ve anything to say to the police, you can talk to me.”
Shayne gestured wearily, as though to brush the little man aside, and said to Rourke, “This is a job for the local boys. Homicide. And see if you can catch Will Gentry at his office.”
Rourke whistled shrilly, studying Shayne’s face, then went obediently to the telephone to make the call.
Painter echoed, “Homicide?” planting himself solidly on his small feet and thrusting out his chin.
Shayne nodded. “There’s a dead man in the bedroom.” He went over to pour himself a stiff slug of cognac.
Rourke was speaking rapidly into the telephone. Painter’s narrowed black eyes followed Shayne’s naked body to the center of the room, then he swung around to the closed bedroom door. He went toward it slowly, as though afraid of being hoaxed; as though he strove to convince himself this was another sample of Shayne’s morbid sense of, humor but he couldn’t quite succeed in doing so.
Rourke hung up and walked swiftly to Shayne just as Painter hesitantly opened the bedroom door and went inside.
“What goes?” whispered Rourke. “I saw that dough in the bag.”
Shayne held his glass to his lips, glancing over his shoulder at Painter’s stiff back just inside the bedroom.
“The stuff’s still there,” Shayne told him in a monotone that didn’t carry more than four feet, then added in a louder voice, “Damned if I know who the stiff is, Tim. The man who rented this apartment out from under me, for a guess.”
Rourke said, “That’s one way to get an apartment, Mike.” His voice was steady and he laughed at his own wit, but his hand trembled as he took the glass away from Shayne and put it to his own mouth.
Painter whirled and came back to stand accusingly in front of Shayne. “Do you intend to sit around here naked all day? And I thought you said that the man who had rented your apartment hadn’t moved in yet.”
“That’s what the clerk told me. It may be someone else entirely,” Shayne went on with a shrug of his naked wide shoulders. “Why don’t you have Henry come up to identify him?”
“I will.” Painter thumbnailed his little black mustache and his eyes were full of suspicion. “How long had you been in this room before we arrived? It’s my guess that man hasn’t been dead more than fifteen minutes.”
“For my sake, I hope the M.E. makes that at least thirty.” Shayne picked up the suitcase and went into the bathroom while Painter went officiously to the telephone and curtly ordered the desk clerk to come up to the apartment.
Shayne closed the bathroom door and quickly opened the Gladstone. He picked up one of the bundles of hundred-dollar bills and riffled through them, scowling deeply. They looked like ordinary bills, not new and not too old. Just like the two Dawson had given him at the airport. He couldn’t see anything wrong with them.
He judged there were about a hundred bills in each flat packet. There were five such bundles in the suitcase. That added up to the amount Bates had mentioned over the telephone to ex-Senator Irvin.
He didn’t have time to worry about the money now. He pushed it down under the neatly folded clothing out of sight, then pawed through Dawson’s belongings to find something he could put on without making it too apparent that the clothing was not his own.
The dough-faced man was a lot shorter than Shayne, and heavy around the waistline. The detective found a short-sleeved sports shirt that could remain open at the neck, with a short tail designed to hang outside the trousers. He pulled that on over his naked torso, selected a pair of light flannel trousers and stepped into them. Without a belt, they slid down on his hips so that the cuffs were low enough not to be conspicuous, and the sports shirt hid the fact that they weren’t up around his waist.
He knew that shoes would be hopeless, but was lucky enough to discover a pair of heelless beach sandals which clung to his toes and stayed on, though his heels extended a couple of inches beyond the soles.
Attired in this manner, he opened the bathroom door and scuffed out in time to see Henry back out of the bedroom. The night clerk’s face was white and he was wiping it with a handkerchief.
He said to Painter, “That’s Mr. Slocum. I certainly didn’t know he had come back to spend the night when I let Mr. Shayne come up, or I wouldn’t-”
“Or you wouldn’t have let Shayne come up to murder him,” Painter snapped.
“I didn’t mean that at all.” Henry glanced at Shayne. His answer to Peter Painter was voiced in a tone of hopelessness, but the sight of his friend gave him courage. He spoke out boldly when he said, “I’m positive Mr. Shayne didn’t do it. A burglar must have broken in, though I don’t see how.” He became the prim and efficient little man Shayne had known for many years. He examined the windows and the door to the fire escape outside the kitchenette, then came back to stand unobtrusively near the bathroom door.
Timothy Rourke was sitting at one end of the couch on the other side of the room, nursing the cognac bottle between his thin knees. He cocked his head and leered as Shayne came over to him.
“That’s a new outfit isn’t it, Mike? You know, I think I like it on you. Gives you a certain flair.”
Shayne said softly, “Shut up, you fool,” as he sank down beside the reporter. He took the bottle from Rourke, tilted it to his mouth and drank deeply just as the front door opened to admit Chief Will Gentry and members of the Miami homicide squad.
Gentry was a big, slow-moving man with a florid and honest face lined with worry. He looked at the two men sitting on the couch, then advanced stolidly, chewing on the soggy butt of a cigar and pushing his hat back from his
