“Is it any good?”
Cross’s eyes glittered behind the thick glasses. “It’s a terrific documentary. Raw, elemental emotion torn from the very heart of an unlettered man. Groat had no thought of writing for publication, and that’s why it’s so gripping. We’ll publish it exactly as is… with no editing whatsoever. What’s your interest, Shayne?”
“Is the diary in your possession?”
A curious light flickered momentarily in the reporter’s pale eyes. He hesitated, obviously choosing his words carefully: “Naturally, I had to check it out to see if it was worth what Groat wanted.”
“How much was that?”
“I can’t conceive how that could be any of your business,” Cross parried. “Once more, I’ll have to insist on knowing exactly why you’re interested before I discuss it with you.”
Shayne said grimly, “I have a hunch that several people are going to be interested after reading your announcement in the News today.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “Frankly, I’d like to know precisely how much money it would take to prevent its publication.”
Cross became even stiffer than before. “I’m afraid you don’t know very much about the newspaper business, Shayne. That diary is a scoop of the first magnitude. You can’t measure the intrinsic value of a thing like that to a newspaper… not in dollars and cents.”
“I’m talking to you… not to a newspaper.” Shayne’s voice was challenging.
“The News pays my salary and my first duty is to them,” Cross told him pompously.
Shayne said, “I’d like to have a look at it.”
“You can read it in the News. Beginning tomorrow.”
“I mean a preview.”
Cross shook his head emphatically. “Not a chance.”
“You say you’re starting to print it tomorrow. Does that mean you’ve made final financial arrangements with Groat?”
“We could hardly print it if we hadn’t.”
“That,” said Shayne, “is what I was thinking.”
“So?”
“It boils down to this,” Shayne explained flatly. “If Groat should disappear suddenly… if he should die before you contact him again… has your paper the absolute legal right to publish his diary?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Cross, shaken out of his smug stiffness for the first time. “Where is Groat?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Do you know where he is right now?”
“I have no intention of answering it, Shayne. But I am interested to know why Jake Sims asked me exactly the same question half an hour ago. Perhaps you can tell me.”
Shayne said, “There’s never any telling what a man like Sims will be up to. Did he make you an offer for the diary?” he added casually.
Cross shook his head with a suggestion of a smirk on his broad face. “I don’t think that’s any of your business either.”
“Probably not,” agreed Shayne. He got up and said, “I’ll be seeing you around,” and sauntered back to the bar as a waiter came to the booth with a loaded luncheon tray which he placed in front of Cross.
Timothy Rourke grinned wickedly as Shayne stopped beside him and slopped liquor into a glass from the open cognac bottle which still stood beside Rourke.
“How’d you make out with friend Cross?”
Shayne shook his red head in angry disgust. “I didn’t.”
“Nobody does,” Rourke assured him happily. “He’s the kind of cold-blooded bastard who’d stash a tape recorder under his bed on a honeymoon and sell the result to a true confession magazine.”
Shayne twirled his glass between his big fingers and asked, “Where does he live?”
“The Corona Arms. Does most of his stuff at home on account he’s too highbrow to pound a typewriter in the City Room with the rest of us.”
Shayne tilted his glass to his mouth and emptied it. He laid a five-dollar bill on the counter and lifted one hand to the bartender, told Rourke, “I wish you’d interview Mrs. Groat about her murdered husband and try to find out for sure whether the payoff for the diary was ever completed. With Groat dead, your paper will have to go to her for the publishing rights to it unless the deal was completed with him. And tell her to get in touch with me before signing anything if it does stand that way.”
“Sure,” said Rourke. “Any more errands I can run for you?”
Shayne grinned widely and promised, “I’ll let you know if any occur to me.” He glanced back at the rear booth to see that Joel Cross was just beginning to eat his lunch, and then went out briskly.
10
The Corona Arms was a quiet residential hotel near the bay. Shayne drove there and parked his car half a block away, went into the telephone booth in a drugstore and looked up the hotel’s number. He dialed it, and when a pleasant female voice answered he asked for Joel Cross. She said, “Of course,” and he listened to the phone ring five times in Cross’s empty room before she said regretfully, “Number four-seventeen doesn’t answer. Would you care to leave a message?”
Shayne said, “Thanks,” and hung up. He walked down the street to the Corona Arms and entered a quiet, air-conditioned lobby and walked briskly past the desk to a waiting elevator at the rear. It was operated by a trim youth in a crisp blue and white uniform who let him off at the fourth floor. He went down a wide, carpeted hall to a door numbered 417, getting out a crowded key-ring as he approached. He studied the keyhole for a moment, selected a key without haste, and tried it.
The first key refused to enter the lock, the second one went in smoothly but would not turn, the third unlocked the door. Shayne turned the knob and pushed it open, stepped over the threshold, catching a momentary glimpse of a disordered sitting room at the same moment that he sensed a blur of movement on his left and felt excruciating pain at the base of his skull below and slightly behind his left ear.
He pitched forward onto the floor in a fog of grayness, unable to move, unable to see or to think clearly. It was a heavy blow, shrewdly delivered, and there was a black void invitingly in front of him as he lay supine on the floor; but he fought to remain on this side of the black curtain, and the gray fog remained heavy and impenetrable, blacking out sound or movement though he grimly clung to consciousness, knowing where he was and what had happened, but unable to move a muscle or do a damned thing about it.
He didn’t know how long he lay like that. He didn’t think it was very long, but in that semicomatose state there was no measurement of time.
The grayness thinned somewhat and he was vaguely conscious that someone knelt on the floor beside him. He felt a lax arm being lifted and fingertips lightly on his wrist searching for a pulse. The arm was lowered to the floor again and he heard footsteps moving away from him into the interior of the room. He opened his eyes and the grayness became a light haze. He could feel the roughness of a carpet beneath his right cheek, and was abruptly conscious of thundering pain in his skull. He used all his strength to draw his arms in close to his body and get his palms flat on the carpet, and pushed himself up slowly, twisting to one side and achieving a sitting position.
There were drawn shades at two windows of the hotel sitting room, but his vision cleared as he blinked his eyes, and his first fleeting impression as he had stepped inside the room was verified. It was in complete disorder. Cushions pulled from chairs and sofa and thrown on the floor, papers scattered from a desk in the far corner of the room, drawers pulled out and dumped on the floor.
Strength flowed back into his body as he sat there, and the thudding pain in his head slowly subsided and became localized below his left ear.
He lifted one hand to touch the spot gingerly, and was surprised to find no swelling and no pain at the touch. A sandbag, he thought disgustedly, artfully swung by someone who knew how to handle one of the things.
