comes up. That remind you of anything, Mike?'
'Nothing except the description we had from the Jacksonville police tonight on Bert Paulson.' Shayne's gray eyes were very bright. 'Let's go down for a look.'
The attendant got up hastily and preceded the three men to a heavy door in the rear opening onto a flight of stairs leading down into the concrete-lined coldroom. A dank chillness came up the stairs to meet them as they started down. Though air-conditioned, the square room seemed to hold an indefinable odor of all the corpses that had been stored there for varying lengths of time over the years.
There were two white enamel tables under a glaring light in the center of the room, a bank of white, over- sized filing cabinets along one wall. Each cabinet had three drawers about six feet long and three feet square.
The attendant went to the lower drawer at one end, and pulled It out Its full length on ball-bearing rollers. He flipped back a white sheet to show the naked body lying on its back in the drawer.
The face was chalk-white, paler by far than any dead person Shayne had ever seen before. The eyes were closed, mouth sagging open in a macabre sort of grin. The features were even, and had probably been handsome when the young man was alive. There was a wide, gaping wound in his throat, edges of the flesh cut cleanly as though at one stroke, shriveled now by exposure to bay water.
The three men stood together, silently looking down at the corpse. Gentry said heavily, 'Charles Barnes from New York? I wonder.'
'Yeh,' said Rourke quickly. 'Why not Bert Paulson from Jacksonville? Description fits. It all adds up to the girl's story. If scar-face slit his throat and switched wallets — there's your complete explanation, Mike. So she did see her brother lying there murdered. Didn't you say she told you his coat was folded up under his head? It could have been used to staunch the blood as you suggested upstairs.'
Shayne didn't reply. His eyes were narrowed and very bright behind slitted lids as he stared down at the dead man. His left hand went up absently to tug at the lobe of his ear.
He had a disquieting sense of recognition as he stood there. It had hit him hard but fleetingly at first glance. It went away when he strove to pin it down in his mind, but the feeling remained, elusive and tantalizing.
Without taking his gaze from the white face, he muttered, 'I've seen him some place. Recently. I swear it.' He closed his eyes tightly and his rugged features hardened in a mask of concentration.
Gentry and Rourke waited without speaking. He shook his head slowly, still not opening his eyes. He muttered, 'It runs away from me. Like quicksilver. I know I've seen him. Probably just once and briefly. It isn't real familiarity. But it's there. Just beyond'my goddamned conscious grasp of it.'
He opened his eyes suddenly for another long look at the pallid face. He shook his head disgustedly and turned away. 'I have to put it out of my mind. It'll pop up unexpectedly. I know I should recognize him, and I know it's important. 'Way down deep beyond reason, something tells me it's damned important. That we'll know some answers when it comes back to me.'
The others turned away behind him and the attendant closed the drawer with a soft thud.
Shayne had reached the stairway and started up when he whirled about abruptly, his face lighting with satisfaction. 'Got iti And it messes up our nice little theory all to hell. That guy couldn't possibly have been murdered in the Hibiscus Hotel at nine-thirty tonight. At ten o'clock he was alive in the Silver Glade.'
He was fumbling in the side pocket of his jacket, and he pulled out the photo the girl had thrust into it in the lobby of his hotel while she was importuning him to accept a retainer from her.
He thrust the photograph at Will Gentry. 'Take it back and compare the two. You'll see it's the same man.'
FOURTEEN: 11:12 PM
Michael Shayne dropped Timothy Rourke at the News Tower on his way back from the morgue to police headquarters. The reporter was anxious to get out a preliminary story on the 'Body in the Bay' as he was already calling it in headlines, and he promised Shayne to withhold most of the other stuff the detective had given him, merely mentioning the curious incident that had happened at a local hotel earlier, without naming the Hibiscus and without using the Paulson name in connection with the dead man.
Back in Will Gentry's office at headquarters, Shayne found the chief about to interrogate a quiet-faced bronzed man who was clad only in skin-tight swimming trunks and whom Gentry introduced as Norman Raine.
'Mr. Raine brought the body in from the bay,' he told Shayne. 'I've got wires out to New York and to Jacksonville. Let's hear what Mr. Raine has to tell us.'
'It isn't much and I'm afraid it won't be very helpful,' Raine said in a resonant baritone. 'I've a boat anchored in the yacht basin and I sleep aboard-alone. Only tonight I couldn't sleep.' He showed even, white teeth in a smile and nodded thankfully as he leaned forward to accept a cigarette from the redhead, averting his eyes from the black cigar Gentry puffed on.
He drew in smoke and expelled it, leaned back comfortably and went on, 'That's what brought me ashore in my skiff. I was out of cigarettes, and about ten-thirty I got to the point where I just had to have a smoke. So I started rowing in.'
'You're anchored off Tenth Street?' asked Gentry.
'Just about opposite the end of Tenth. The tide was running out, but there was a nice breeze behind me and I was pulling along steadily, about half-way to shore I guess, when suddenly my bow struck something in the water.
'It gave me quite a start. It was a funny, solid, dead sort of thud. You know, I was rowing along thinking about nothing at all except about a cigarette and how good the first puff was going to taste, and then-pow! Like that.
'Well, the poor devil was floating face down in the water. I saw he must be a goner right away. Face down and all. I had a little trouble getting him aboard, and then went on in as fast as I could. I tied up and ran to the nearest place I saw a light, and telephoned the police. That's absolutely all I know about it'
'How far out are you anchored?' Shayne asked him.
'About-oh-a half mile. It's the Marjie J. You can check it easily enough. She's a forty-foot single- master.'
'Then you'd say you were about a quarter mile off-shore when you struck the body?'
'Something like that. It's purely a guess, of course, but the best I can do under the circumstances.'
Will Gentry removed his cigar from between his teeth and nodded. 'Anything else occur to you, Mike?'
Shayne shook his head. 'I don't see how Mr. Raine can help us any more than that. You didn't search the body?' he added.
'Naturally not.' Raine was quite properly indignant. 'I could see it was murder right away and I didn't touch him.'
Gentry got up to shake his hand. 'Thanks for being so co-operative, Mr. Raine. You're not pulling out right away?'
'Not for ten days at least.'
'A man outside will drive you back to the pier,' Gen try told him. 'Have him stop some place for you to buy cigarettes.' He shrugged when the door closed behind the man. 'Without getting technical with tide and current tables, I'd say it matches up with the Hibiscus pretty well.'
'I know.' Shayne scowled angrily. 'But you can't get away from the gal who tried to force a hundred and forty bucks on me at ten o'clock to pick the guy up at the Silver Glade.'
'I'm not trying to get away from her. Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she just thought he was there at that time. Maybe she was lying like heU.'
'Why?'
'I don't know why. Why does any woman lie?'
'If I'd taken the assignment, I was bound to find out at once that he wasn't there,' Shayne pointed out.
'But you didn't take it. I wish to God you had. Then we wouldn't have all these other unanswered questions.'
'Any report from your boys at the Hibiscus yet?'
