Shayne nodded.
“All right. I’ll ride along with you. Bring your man in, Baxter, soon as you can drag him out.”
He turned and stalked toward the door, and Shayne took Lucy’s arm and led her behind him. As they passed the two bartenders, the one who had slugged Shayne said with gruff cordiality, “Drop back some time, huh, and have a cognac on the house? If I’d known who you was…”
Shayne said, “I’ll wash my face next time.” He and Lucy went out through the swinging doors where the cop was leaning inside a patrol car at the curb, talking into his microphone.
Suddenly, hysterically, as the night air struck her, Lucy turned and buried her face against Shayne’s chest, and sobbed out almost incoherently, “Oh, God, Michael! I’ve been so frightened. It’s been like a nightmare. I’ve got to tell you…”
He shook her gently and led her to his car parked in front of the prowl car. “Save all the explanations until we get to headquarters. Will Gentry is going to want to hear it too, and there’s no use going over it twice.”
“I was such a fool, Michael. I walked right into it, thinking I was being so smart and helpful.”
“Relax now and save it till later.” Shayne put her in the front seat and turned to the officer who was coming up behind him. “You want me to drive?”
“Sure. I’ll get in the back.” There was belligerent respect tinged with awe in his voice as he opened the door and got in. “My God, I never thought I’d see Mike Shayne laid out on the floor like that. That’s why I couldn’t hardly believe the lady when she said who you was.”
Shayne said, “I hardly believed it myself when I first opened my eyes.” He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
“Where did you get that awful costume so fast, Michael?” Lucy asked in a subdued voice. “It was such a short time after you answered McTige’s phone.”
“Passed a bum on the street and gave him ten bucks for his hat and coat. I didn’t want to cause too much notice when I walked into the Dolphin. But let’s save all this for Gentry,” he counseled her. “God knows I want to know what you’ve been up to, but I want this officer to be able to swear to Gentry that we didn’t fix up our stories on the way in.”
Miami’s chief of police sat solidly behind his desk and glared at the couple when they were ushered into his office. “What have you two been up to now? My God, Mike, what do you think you’re impersonating?”
Shayne looked down at the dirty, undersized corduroy jacket he was wearing as though he just recalled he had it on. He shrugged out of it and let it drop to the floor, squaring his wide shoulders in relief. He said, “You’d better get a stenographer in to take it all down, Will. I’m waiting to hear Lucy’s story myself. But before we get started… do you know about McTige yet?”
“What do you know about him?” demanded Gentry suspiciously.
“I know he’s dead, Will. I phoned in the report.”
“You phoned it in,” fumed Gentry, “Anonymously. And then ducked out before the cops got there. That’s enough for me to lift your license, and by God…”
Shayne held up a big hand, “The stenographer, Will. I want this down in black and white if I’m going to lose my license over it.”
He pulled up a chair and settled Lucy in it while Gentry pushed a button on his desk and growled, “Send Richardson in.” Shayne drew another chair close to Lucy’s and sat beside her, getting himself a cigarette lit while a young, smooth-faced plainclothesman came in and settled himself at a desk in the corner with a shorthand notebook open.
Shayne settled back and took a long drag on his cigarette and said evenly: “A brief statement from Michael Shayne. I went to my office after you left me at the Bright Spot, Will, and found Mrs. Renshaw’s address in Lucy’s notes. Her hotel room was empty when I entered it, but I found a telephone message beside her bed that she was to call McTige at the Yardley Hotel. I went there, and entered his room and found his dead body. Before I could report it, his phone rang and I answered. It was Mrs. Renshaw. She seemed to immediately realize it wasn’t McTige speaking, and hung up.
“A moment later the phone rang again. It was Lucy Hamilton, calling McTige. She gave her name as Mrs. Renshaw and instructed me to meet her at the Dolphin Bar with ‘the money’ at once. I had a feeling she had recognized my voice, and was carrying on her end of the conversation under duress. I went there and found Lucy seated in a booth with a man I had never seen before, but who looked dangerous to me. I played drunk and manoeuvered him far enough away from Lucy so I could slug him, and I got slugged from behind by the bartender. That’s all I know. Lucy, you take it from the time I dashed out of the Bright Spot leaving you and Tim behind.”
Lucy Hamilton said in a small voice, “It’s all going to sound terribly confused, because it’s still all very confusing to me. All right, Michael. Tim and I went right out behind you and Tim told the doorman I wanted a cab. He said there’d probably be one any minute discharging passengers, and he got Tim’s car for him while I waited. Tim refused to go off and leave me there until a cab came. It seemed a long wait, but probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. The minute a cab pulled in, Tim jumped in his car and took off. I got into the cab, and just as we were pulling away I saw a woman hurrying, almost running, around the side of the club from the rear. I recognized her under the floodlight as Mrs. Renshaw… the woman who came to our office today and begged Michael to find her husband in Miami before the Syndicate found him and killed him.”
She hesitated a moment, and turned her head to explain to Shayne: “I knew you’d gone off looking for her husband… the man Sloe Burn called Fred Tucker… and I jumped out of the cab and went over and intercepted Mrs. Renshaw just as she was starting in the front door. She recognized me from this afternoon at the office, and she was terribly distraught. She said she’d had a phone call from the Chicago detective, Baron McTige, saying that her husband was at the Bright Spot hiding in Sloe Burn’s dressing room.
“She had been back to the dressing room where Sloe Burn angrily denied the accusation and went into a rage and chased her out the back way. She wanted to know what I was doing there, and I didn’t know what to tell her. I knew that Sloe Burn had just sent you off to a motel looking for Mr. Renshaw, and I wondered if maybe that was a ruse to get you away, and that he was hiding in Sloe Burn’s dressing room.
“Anyhow, I told Mrs. Renshaw that we were checking out the same rumor that he was at the Bright Spot, and I suggested that she wait there in front while I went back to see if I could find him.
“She seemed awfully thankful, and worried about her husband, and I left her there and went back around the side of the building to the stage-door. There was an old man there and he asked me what I wanted and I just started to say that Mrs. Renshaw said… and suddenly there was this hulking brute of a crazy man that came from somewhere and grabbed me and pulled me away. He was babbling all kinds of things and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said Essie had told him I was hanging around, and he knew my name wasn’t Renshaw anyhow, but Mrs. Shephard, and why was I pretending I thought my husband was there, and why did I care.
“He was all excited and I thought he was drunk, but later I decided he wasn’t. But he had this conch shell with a long sharp point that he kept brandishing in my face and threatening me with, and I kept trying to tell him that I wasn’t Mrs. Renshaw or Shephard either one, and to prove it I told him to come around in front with me and I’d show him Mrs. Renshaw waiting for me.
“So he finally did, holding onto me tight and keeping that sharp shell in his hand pressed up against my side and threatening to cut me with it if I tried to get away.
“And when we got around in front, she wasn’t there. Mrs. Renshaw just wasn’t there. And Ralph asked the doorman… because that was his name, I found out… Ralph Billiter… he’s Sloe Burn’s dancing partner, Michael… from the Keys… where they grow up from babies learning to use those sharpened conch shells instead of knives to fight with… and kill each other, too, the way he talked about it… well, he asked the doorman if there was any woman waiting and where she had gone, and he denied it… the doorman, I mean… and so then Ralph was convinced I’d lied to him and I was Mrs. Shephard… and he wouldn’t have it any different.
“And I’d never even heard of any Mrs. Shephard, and I told him so, and he kept calling me a liar with a lot of four-letter words mixed in, and asking where was the money and where was Baron McTige. I didn’t understand anything about it, or what to do. He just seemed frothing at the mouth crazy, and he waved that conch shell around and kept saying how he’d purely love to cut my throat with it and would except he knew I could get the money from McTige and that’s what he wanted me to do.
“I thought it would settle things if I could get hold of Mr. McTige and have him tell that crazy boy that I wasn’t Mrs. Renshaw or Mrs. Shephard, or whatever, and I offered to call him at his hotel and ask him to come out, but he got suspicious and said, ‘Oh, no you don’t. Not out here, you don’t. We’ll go some place I pick out and you
