The clerk moistened his thin lips, hesitated, glanced up at Shayne’s eyes, and hurried to get the slip of paper from the pigeonhole.
Shayne read: Received at 5:40. Call Miss Morton at once. He laid the message on the desk as a uniformed officer and a plainclothesman hurried into the lobby and over to the desk.
“Do you boys know what you’re looking for?” Shayne asked.
“Only to co-operate with you.”
“A young lady got out of a cab at Twelfth and Second about twelve-thirty,” Shayne told them wearily. “She was probably meeting Sara Morton’s murderer. Sara Morton’s fiance is registered here, but apparently hasn’t been in the hotel since five-forty. Edwin Paisly in four-nineteen. The boys can take it from there. If you can locate Paisly-if anyone in the neighborhood saw him meet a woman on the street about twelve-thirty-” He ran his hand across his forehead, then clenched it into a tight fist. “The woman is Beatrice Lally, Sara Morton’s secretary,” he went on, his arm falling futilely to his side. “She’s wearing a gray two-piece suit with a blue blouse-blond hair, about five-five and plump. Might be wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses. If she’s still alive she probably knows who killed her employer.” He strode past them and went out to his car and pulled away.
There was a radio patrol car at the next corner. He could hear two or three sirens converging on the spot as he drove on to the Boulevard and turned north. There was nothing more he could do there to help find Beatrice Lally. The local police were much better equipped than he to search the neighborhood and make inquiries, and to trace Edwin Paisly.
His eyes were bleak as he turned east at 14th Street to cross Biscayne Bay for the second time that evening. Whatever had happened to the girl was essentially his fault, and he accepted the blame, but regrets were never any good. The thing now was to repair the damage that might have been done by her disappearance, to make sure the murderer did not profit by his cunning in luring her away from Lucy’s apartment before she could be questioned by the police.
Both car windows were down, and the clean salt air blew some of the cobwebs from his mind as he drove across the County Causeway at a moderate speed. He relaxed at the wheel and mentally reviewed everything that had happened since he stepped inside his office at 8:30 and found the special-delivery letter from Sara Morton.
There wasn’t much. Nothing he could really put his finger on. A lot of elusive things that melted away when he tried to put on the heat. Burton Harsh’s story. Damn it, the man didn’t act like a murderer. Yet, by his own confession he had murdered at least once. Or had been suspected so strongly that he had been indicted for the crime.
From the beginning he had been inclined to sympathize with the financier who was writhing in the net cast about him by an unscrupulous blackmailer. Of all the crimes in the book he detested blackmail most, and it had been difficult to work up any real feeling about Sara Morton’s death since learning of her attempted extortion scheme.
True, blackmail didn’t excuse murder in the eyes of the law, but in Harsh’s case, considering his enormous loss if she exposed him, it was a pretty fair excuse.
If Harsh had lured Beatrice away and murdered again in order to conceal his first crime, that was a far different matter. Insofar as he could see now, Harsh was the only person involved who could possibly have guessed where Miss Lally was. There was no way, with his present knowledge, of tying Harsh and Paisly together, yet whoever telephoned her had instructed her to leave the cab a block from Paisly’s hotel.
This might be a mere coincidence, but he didn’t believe in coincidences when they involved several people mixed up in murder. There could be strong connections between the two men which weren’t apparent on the surface. He would not be surprised at anything he found if he should dig into Paisly’s background.
He shrugged off all the questions puzzling him when he reached the peninsula and stayed on Fifth Street until he arrived at an all-night bar.
He parked and went in, consulted the telephone directory, and found Burton Harsh listed with a business and residence address. The residence was far up the beach, just south of 79th Street, evidently one of the large estates in that vicinity fronting on the ocean.
Shayne drove faster going north. He hoped the financier had already delivered the money to his hotel as promised, but whether he had or not there would have to be an immediate showdown.
Clouds covered the stars now, and a sharp inshore wind lashed the dark waves that thundered against the bulkheads and the shore on his right. The speeding car carried him swiftly beyond the closely built section, past huge resort hotels on the ocean front, and on to the residential section where metal plates on stone archway entrances bore the names of the owners.
The Harsh estate was spacious and surrounded by a low wall of limestone rock. Shayne stopped beyond high gateposts with a chain stretched between them. He cut his headlights and got out, walked back, and ducked under the heavy chain.
A wide oiled driveway curved toward the house between boxed hedges of Australian pines, and beyond, the palms and formal shrubbery and a three-story mansion seemed blended in one dark mass. As he made his way, the wind in the palms and the crash of the waves drowned his footsteps.
The windows of the house were dark except for a streak of light below a drawn shade in a ground-floor room. Shayne stopped before the window and looked around. The drive circled to the left and led to a four-car garage with living-quarters above.
Not more than ten feet away he saw a car parked in the drive. He went toward it, noting with tingling excitement that it was a shabby coupe in the lower price range, at least five years old and not at all the sort of automobile likely to belong to anyone living in the Harsh mansion. The tingle spread through his whole body when he touched the hood and found it warm.
Without hesitation he went back to the path leading to the lighted window. The shade was up about four inches. The window sill was some four feet from the ground, and Shayne bent down and peered into what appeared to be a small library.
Burton Harsh sat in a deep, brightly cushioned wicker chair and smoke curled lazily upward from a cigar in his left hand. He held a highball glass in his right. His profile was toward the window, and he was apparently listening to someone who stood at the far corner of the room.
Moving to the extreme end of the window, Shayne saw the beginning of a fireplace and mantel. Then he saw a man’s hand reach out and set a drink on the mantel. The hand was white and slender and shaky, and glancing back to Harsh, he gathered from his look of worried concentration that the visitor was relating unpleasant news.
With the roar of wind and ocean it was impossible to hear a word that was spoken through the tightly closed window. Shayne straightened up, retraced his steps, and turned the corner where a flagstone path led to the front door.
He found the electric button, put his finger on it, pushed, and waited.
Chapter Eleven
He waited several minutes before anything happened. A faint glow finally showed through leaded panes of glass in the door. He took his finger off the button. The ceiling porch light came on and the front door was opened a few inches to allow Harsh to peer through.
The opening widened immediately and the financier greeted him with a disapproving frown. “Shayne! Why are you disturbing me here at this hour? I delivered the money to your hotel as agreed.”
“Have much trouble getting that amount of cash?” Shayne asked pleasantly.
“Not a great deal. I had to stop at three places before accumulating the full sum.”
“What three places?”
Burton Harsh’s frown deepened. “What possible reason can you have for asking a question like that? I’ve met your demand, Shayne, and I fail to understand-”
“I have a good reason,” Shayne interrupted him. “Have you any special reason for not telling me?”
