offhandedly.
“The cabin is rented by a Fred Tucker,” Shayne told him. “Don’t bother taking any notes. I’ll tell the rest of it to Will Gentry when he gets here.”
“What makes you think the chief will bother with this one personally?”
Shayne said, “Because I asked him to.” He got out a cigarette and lit it, and he could hear Johnny talking excitedly behind him on the two-way radio in the police car. Then they heard the distant wail of sirens on the Trail eastward again, and Shayne said good-naturedly, “Homicide will be here to take over from you in a few minutes. Here’s a tip. I think the motel manager took off in his car just before I phoned in. If you want to play it smart, check the office and see if I’m right… so you can feed it to the dicks when they get here.”
“Sure. Thanks.” He lumbered away, and Shayne stood where he was, lazily drawing smoke into his lungs and exhaling blue vapor, only half conscious of the wail of approaching sirens, seeking to adjust his thoughts and the meager information in his possession into some sort of order that would make sense to Gentry on his arrival.
Suddenly they were there, one car after another, and the Pink Flamingo Motel was the scene of bustling, floodlighted, official activity.
First there was a squad-car with a Homicide Lieutenant and three plainclothesmen, and an ambulance behind them and another car with the technical crew, and not too many minutes later, Will Gentry in his unmarked car with an officer behind the wheel.
Michael Shayne had drawn back unobtrusively from No. 3 while the others went bustling inside. The lieutenant in charge seemed unaware of the redhead’s presence while he put his technicians to work inside the cabin and sent others around the motel knocking on doors and getting statements from the various occupants, most of whom were registered under false names and frightened out of their wits by the possibility of publicity, and all of whom swore they knew nothing at all about Cabin No. 3 or what had happened there.
Shayne came forward slowly when Gentry got out of his car and conferred with the lieutenant. Gentry saw him. He exchanged a final word with the lieutenant and then turned to Shayne with his solid jaw set squarely. “All right, Mike. What have we got?”
“I don’t know. I swear I don’t. Not even if the dead guy is my man.”
“You said Fred Tucker.”
“I said the cabin he got dead in is rented to a man who registered under the name of Fred Tucker. When you get back to Headquarters do a fast check on The Preacher. Little Joe Hoffman told me flatly this evening that The Preacher has been dead for six months.”
“Little Joe could be lying.” Gentry got out a black cigar and thrust it aggressively between his teeth.
“Could be. Somehow I doubt it. What’s the Loot got out of the death scene this far?”
“Not too much. No identification on the body. Been dead about forty minutes. And there’s those two halves of a hollowed-out loaf of bread, Mike. What’d you make of it?”
“Hollowed-out… loaf of bread?” Shayne asked in surprise.
Gentry had been watching him closely for a reaction. He relaxed a trifle and put the flame of a match to his cigar. “All right, maybe you didn’t case the joint before you phoned in. Lieutenant Yager said they were lying on the floor with the cut-out sides down so you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a complete loaf if you didn’t pick the pieces up and look. But the inside had all been cut out of it, Mike. And what do you reckon?”
“At this point I’m not trying to reckon,” Shayne told him honestly.
“There were three hundred-dollar bills still jammed up in one end of the loaf. Sort of like there’d been a lot more hidden inside there and someone missed those three.”
While Shayne was digesting this bit of information, another car came up hurriedly and Timothy Rourke jumped out of it. “I sent Lucy home okay, Mike. What goes on here?”
11
Will Gentry said, “Mike’s just about to tell me. Go ahead, Mike. How’d you get here?”
“From the Bright Spot. I got a tip that this Renshaw, from Chicago that I told you about this afternoon, has been hanging around the Bright Spot seeing a dancer there. So Lucy and Tim and I dropped in to see the show. The girl told us that Fred Tucker, the name Renshaw is using here, had been in earlier, and ducked out when those two goons showed up… the ones I described to you. He told her he was staying at the Pink Flamingo, so I came here fast. That guy was inside the cabin just as he is now.”
“How is he now?” interjected Rourke.
“Dead thirty minutes to an hour.” Gentry told him.
“Is it Renshaw, Mike?”
“I’ve never seen the guy… nor a picture of him. In general details he fits the description his wife gave me this afternoon.” Since Mrs. Renshaw had not mentioned a mustache, this statement was true enough, and Shayne didn’t amplify it.
“Yager tells me the manager appears to have ducked out. Did you see him, Mike?”
“He was in the office when I got here.” Shayne gave him a description of the manager, and briefly related how he had come to No. 3 and found the dead man, and seen a car take off fast from behind the cabins… which might have been the manager.
Gentry said, “We’ll get out a pick-up,” and strode away to talk to the lieutenant.
“You don’t think the stiff is Tucker, Mike? Or Renshaw, if that’s his real name.”
Shayne said flatly, “I don’t know what to think yet. No identification on the body that I could find. Let’s see what the boys have made out of it.”
He and Rourke went together to the floodlighted front of the cabin where the technicians were reporting their findings to Lieutenant Yager.
“… one set of prints all over the cabin from the past few days don’t match the dead man’s prints. Same prints on the death bottle, with some fresh blurred ones on the neck… probably made by the killer… that can’t be identified. No wallet or identification of any kind on the body.”
Yager said, “Might as well get him to the morgue,” and they all moved back out of the way while two ambulance attendants went inside with a stretcher and emerged a few minutes later with a sheet-swathed body on top of it. Gentry stopped them as they moved to the back of the ambulance, and said gruffly, “Let’s have a look.”
They had turned the corpse over on its back, and when the sheet was pulled down under the bright light, the man’s thin and sallow face showed unmarred by the savage blows that had crushed the back of his head. They had wiped the blood from his face and his eyes were peacefully closed. There was a somber look of sadness on the flaccid features that brought sharply to Shayne’s memory Sloe Burn’s words that afternoon: “… the other was thin an’ sorta sad… dressed up in a black suit like a preacher… ” and he asked sharply, “Is there a matching suit coat or jacket in the cabin to match those dark trousers?”
“Just one light suit hanging in the closet as it came from the cleaners,” a young officer told him.
“Mean something to you, Mike?” Gentry rolled an unlighted cigar from one corner of his mouth to another, motioning for the body to be placed in the ambulance.
“It might. That description I gave you this afternoon… one of the two men who were looking for Tucker at the Bright Spot tonight… remember it?”
“The Preacher?”
“Except it can’t be The Preacher if Little Joe Hoffman was squaring with us. Mind if Tim and I look inside, Will?”
“Go ahead. Before we seal it up.” Gentry and Yager turned away toward the motel office where a couple of men were checking the records and going through the missing manager’s living quarters.
Shayne and Rourke stepped inside the cabin and the detective said, “He was lying face down in that blood with the back of his head bashed in, and a bloody whiskey bottle beside him. The refrigerator door was standing open as it is now, and the only other thing that isn’t here now is two halves of a long loaf of French bread lying on the floor right there. Gentry tells me the loaf had been hollowed out with maybe a wad of money stashed inside. They found three hundred-dollar bills still crammed in one end.”
