It was nine o’clock when Shayne awoke. He made a distasteful grimace at the wrinkled clothing in which he had slept, and scowled as he pulled on the tight shoes. His scowl deepened when he looked at his puffed lip in the bathroom mirror. He made a sketchy toilet with cold water splashed over his face and neck.
The day clerk was on duty when he went down to the lobby, and he looked surprised when Shayne strode through to the front door.
Shayne walked two blocks to a restaurant where he bought a morning Herald and ordered a big breakfast.
The Deland kidnap-murder was spread all over the front page. There were pictures of the bereaved parents and the uncle, and three different poses of the sweet-faced girl who was dead. The parents looked about as Rourke described them, weary with long and anxious waiting and broken with grief.
The picture of the uncle interested him more than the others. Emory Hale had a square jaw and a tight mouth and eyes that looked cold and remorseless. The story described him as “A wealthy New York sportsman and financier” and quoted his offer of a $10,000 reward for the person or persons responsible for his beloved niece’s death. It gave a dramatic account of Hale’s hasty airplane flight south with the ransom money to meet the kidnaper’s demands, and painted a pathetic picture of his personal grief and outraged anger over the outcome of his rescue flight.
Rourke’s story covered the front page. Shayne was glad to note that the copy smacked of the old vigorous reporter he’d known for years, and not in the least like the sob story he had told Shayne.
On an inside page, however, a woman reporter described the scene in these words:
There was silence in the little house as Chief Peter Painter turned from the telephone and announced, “I am sorry to inform you that your daughter is dead.” The silence continued, thick and heavy-laden with disbelieving grief while the Miami Beach chief of detectives tersely explained the circumstances under which Kathleen Deland’s body had been discovered.
The tears of the stricken mother coursed down her cheeks and dropped upon the bosom of her simple dress. The hands of the anguished father lay still in his lap while his cavernous eyes were lifted to the framed photograph of his daughter above the mantel.
Mr. Emory Hale’s visage was like that of a statue carved from granite. There was no outward change of expression, yet with such a show of inward suffering and despair that the look upon his face will remain stamped indelibly upon my memory. He sat there, erect in his chair, one hand placed firmly on each knee, leaning forward slightly from the waist, his gaze fixed on Chief Painter’s face.
It was Mr. Hale who broke the silence first-the devoted uncle who had responded so swiftly and without question to his sister’s plea for help across the miles separating them; who had moved heaven and earth to obtain the required ransom money from his New York bank and fly south with it to meet the deadline set by the kidnapers.
Mr. Hale spoke flatly and without emotion, with a machine-like precision that conveyed an impression of dynamic force beneath the surface: “Have they found Dawson yet?”
Chief Painter replied, “Dawson seems to have disappeared into thin air, Mr. Hale. Along with your fifty thousand dollars.”
Mr. Hale made a brief and savage gesture to indicate that the loss of the ransom money meant nothing to him now. “And the man responsible for Kathleen’s death?”
“There have been no arrests as yet,” the detective chief admitted sadly. “However, the owner of the death car is known and I assure you that everything humanly possible is being done to apprehend the kidnapers.”
Emory Hale stood up to his full height. He thrust both hands in his pockets and strode from the room without another word.
Mr. Deland got up and said in a dead and hopeless voice, “I wonder where Emory is going. I wonder if I ought to-”
Mrs. Deland spoke the first words she had uttered since hearing the agonizing truth of her child’s death. She said simply, “Go after him, Arthur, before he does something desperate. You know he loved Kathleen as though she were his own.”
Arthur Deland nodded mutely and left the room, pausing only to lay a rough hand gently upon his wife’s bowed head.
I moved across the room then and sat beside Mrs. Deland. For a long time neither of us spoke. What could I say? What words of mine could assuage the mother’s grief-
The waiter brought Shayne’s breakfast, and he stopped reading the sob story. Following instructions at the end of the article, he turned to page six for more pictures.
There was one of Dawson, Deland’s partner in the plumbing business and go-between in the ransom pay-off. There was an inset showing a faded photograph of Gerta Ross as she had looked a decade or more ago above a caption: Find This Woman. And a diagram showing the spot on the highway northward from Miami where Dawson claimed he had been set upon by armed thugs and forced to give them the ransom money.
Shayne ate his scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three cups of coffee while he carefully read Dawson’s account of his adventures as given to the police at an early hour that morning. It was ingeniously simple and straightforward, and had the ring of truth.
Following instructions (said Dawson) he drove across the causeway after receiving the packet of money from Deland and turned north on Biscayne Boulevard at a moderate pace. He naturally presumed he was being trailed every foot of the way, and he did nothing to arouse suspicion in the minds of the kidnapers or to upset the plan for Kathleen Deland’s exchange for the ransom money.
After passing 79th Street, there was less traffic and he noticed that he was being followed at a distance of about five hundred feet by another car. He was confident then that the contact had been established and that the kidnapers would approach him as soon as they thought it safe to do so.
Fearing to do anything not in strict accordance with instructions, Dawson said he drove on northward at the same steady pace mile after mile, past the Hollywood traffic circle and onto the nearly deserted stretch of highway south of Fort Lauderdale.
The pursuing car came abreast of him suddenly, honked as it passed, and turned in front of him onto a dark side road. Happy in his belief that he was soon to have his partner’s daughter safe in his own car, Dawson followed the other car a quarter of a mile down the side road and stopped behind it
Three men got out of the car and approached him in the dark. All were armed, and one of them demanded the cash.
“I told them it was in the front seat of my car,” Dawson related, “and asked them where the girl was. One of the men laughed and hit me on the head with some heavy object. I presume it was the butt of his gun, though the unexpected blow knocked me unconscious, and I really don’t know what I was hit with.”
He remained unconscious for a couple of hours, Dawson said, and when he finally came to, his car was still there, but the other car, the men, and the money were gone.
The story was simple and had the virtue of strict plausibility. If he didn’t know the truth, Shayne reflected grimly, he himself would be inclined to believe Dawson. It was just the sort of thing kidnapers might be expected to do. The newspaper account added that Dawson was in the hospital receiving treatment for shock and his head injury, prostrated with grief that his mission had turned out so badly.
Shayne’s name was not mentioned in any of the stories. Reference was made to a male passenger in the wrecked kidnap car, and it was hinted that this person had been tentatively identified by a bystander before escaping in the excitement, but Painter had gone no further than that.
Shayne searched for a story on the affair at the Fun Club and the murder of Slocum in Shayne’s apartment, but found nothing.
On another page he did find a brief account of the fire on West 38th Street. He read it with interest while he drank a final cup of coffee. The two-story frame building had been a mass of flame by the time the fire apparatus arrived, and they had confined their efforts to keeping the fire from spreading. A Negro, as yet unidentified, had been found in the basement with injuries which were attributed to the fire, and there was evidence (said the story) that other inhabitants of the dwelling had escaped before the fire gained headway.
