blood streamed down his face, and he was breathing stertorously.
On Shayne’s left a stairway with a wooden railing led up to the caretaker’s living quarters on the second floor. The caretaker, himself, lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs. His sawed-off shotgun was on the floor a foot beyond his body, and there was a neat round bullet-hole drilled in the center of his forehead.
Shayne drew in a deep breath as he completed his survey of the place and lifted his gaze from Brad’s corpse to meet Alvarez’s eyes which were fixed steadily on him.
“It was unfortunate,” said the Cuban, “that he attempted to use his weapon. I was forced to shoot quickly.”
Shayne said, “I don’t think it’s too important. Unless I’m all wrong, he strangled a woman this evening.”
“So?” Alvarez turned his head to glance at the men working behind him. He spoke swiftly in Spanish, and they grunted, “Si, si,” and began moving faster. He turned back to Shayne and said questioningly, “If we are given time to load these two launches? There is a larger boat anchored in the bay which can be well out to sea before daylight with most of these arms… which were destined to bring death to my countrymen, Mr. Shayne.”
Shayne said, “I think you’ll have time. If the neighbors took that pistol shot for a back-fire…” He shrugged. “What about Peralta?”
“He will live,” said Alvarez grimly, “to be given a fair trial by his own people.”
“And Erskine?”
“Who, Mr. Shayne?”
The detective nodded toward the handcuffed man.
“You mean Mr. Albert Tatum. Him we will have to leave to the good graces of your own government, Mr. Shayne. He is an American citizen with a price on his head if he ever returns to Cuba voluntarily, but I will not be a party to his illegal seizure.”
Shayne studied the seated man with interest. “A price on his head? For what?”
“For crimes against my country extending back over a period of twenty years. He and Peralta have been business partners that long, and they plundered and pillaged under the Batista regime. Since the revolution, they have been plotting to overthrow it.”
“Have you any proof he isn’t a Communist?”
“That one?” Alvarez snorted his contempt.
Shayne said, “All right,” mildly. “At the very least, I think I can promise you he’ll get a long jail term for kidnaping.”
He turned aside and looked down speculatively at Brad. “Do you mind if I check something on this guy?”
Alvarez said, “I have no interest in carrion.”
Shayne squatted down beside the dead caretaker and found a wallet in his right-hand hip pocket. There were bills in the money compartment which he didn’t count and left undisturbed, but he emptied the card compartment in the center and sorted through old business cards, scrawled notations and telephone numbers, and receipted bills with interest.
He found two items that repaid his search. One was the torn half of a yellow claim check which he recognized instantly. He knew it matched the other half in his pocket without putting the two halves together.
The second was a receipted bill from a Miami jewelry shop in the sum of $630.42, which was marked “Paid” three days previously. The charge was for, “Reproduction bracelet.”
Shayne carefully placed both items in his own wallet, returned the rest of the stuff to Brad’s and replaced it in the dead man’s pocket.
As he completed doing so, he heard footsteps outside the door, and got to his feet to see Timothy Rourke and Lucy Hamilton appear in the doorway.
He expostulated to Rourke, “I told you to take Lucy out to your car…”
“Michael!” Lucy stood inside the door staring at the handcuffed man seated on the floor. “That’s the man. He brought me here in his car…”
“Erskine?” Standing beside her, Timothy Rourke said wonderingly, “He’s from Washington, Lucy. The State Department.”
“He’s as much from the State Department as you are,” Shayne said angrily. “My God, Tim, don’t tell me you’re as naive as Peter Painter. He and Peralta were in cahoots all the way along.”
Rourke shook his head from side to side. “I don’t get it. Why would he tell that long, involved story about Communism and all that? Mike, I’m afraid you’re making a hell of a mistake.”
Shayne grinned at him sardonically. “You heard Lucy, didn’t you? Alvarez can fill you in on the rest of it. Don’t you see how it was, Tim? He and Peralta had this operation going, and they needed a little more time without police interference. The theft of the bracelet was a monkey-wrench, and when Painter insisted officiously on pushing the investigation despite Peralta’s protests, Albert Tatum went to Painter with his State Department-Communist story which Petey swallowed hook-line-and-sinker. After all, the one thing no red-blooded, patriotic American can do today is to question the State Department. Oh, hell,” Shayne ended in disgust. “Of course Painter didn’t question the man’s credentials. Will Gentry might have been a little harder to convince, if he’d been approached directly, but you know yourself that Tatum came to Will with Painter’s seal of approval. So Will accepted him at face value.
“They had everything all set until yesterday when Peralta upset the apple-cart by calling me in,” Shayne went on swiftly. “It was a personal thing with him, reflecting on his wife, which he didn’t want to divulge even to Tatum.
“As I say,” Shayne ended up with an angry wave of his hand. “Ask Alvarez who ‘Erskine’ actually is. While he fills you in, I’m going to take a quick look-see upstairs where the caretaker lived.”
He swung on his heel and climbed the stairs to the small, compact, bedroom-sitting-room apartment above the boat-house. It took him less than five minutes to find the emerald bracelet. Brad had been so sure that Tatum and Peralta would forestall any search by the police that Shayne found it thrust carelessly underneath some clean shirts in a top right-hand drawer in a chest in the bedroom.
He held it up for a moment and admired the light reflected by the emerald-green facets, and then dropped it into his pocket and hurried back downstairs.
Timothy Rourke was deep in conversation with Alvarez, and the loading of the crates of munitions into the two power cruisers was continuing methodically. Lucy Hamilton, looking wilted and forlorn, stood drooping by the doorway.
Shayne went to her and put his arm about her waist tightly, and announced in a loud voice, “Lucy and I are getting out of here, Tim. The headlines are all yours.”
“Wait a minute, Mike.” Rourke turned on him with a worried scowl. “What about the emerald bracelet that started the whole thing to cooking?”
With a look at the still-unconscious Julio Peralta, Shayne said blandly, “I never did take a retainer on that case, Tim. I think I’ll just drop the whole thing and forget about it. Let’s go, Lucy. My God, I just remembered I haven’t had any dinner.”
“Neither have I, Michael.” She pressed her head against his shoulder and allowed him to half-carry her out the door. “Do we have to go any place? I’ve got some hamburger at home.”
“And some cognac?” he demanded teasingly.
“You know there’s always cognac, Michael.”
“Come on then.” He led her out the side gate with his arm tightly around her, and toward the street. “We’ll take my car,” he decided. “I don’t believe Mr. Geely or Mr. Harris will get in our way tonight.”
“Who are they?”
“A couple of drunks,” he told her cheerfully.
SIXTEEN
It was comfortably and cozily homelike in Lucy Hamilton’s apartment. Sprawled on the sofa in a completely relaxed posture with his jacket off and sport shirt open at the throat, Michael Shayne allowed himself to think (as he had often done on other evenings like this) what a thoroughly comfortable person Lucy was to be with.
Close at hand on the low coffee table in front of him was a four-ounce stemmed wine-glass half full of
