“Damn right, cash. In the form of a capital investment in one of his real-estate promotions. You’d think Cal would bring somebody in from out of town, wouldn’t you, to tie them up and drop them in a swamp?” He shook his head. “No, he forgave her. He went on sleeping with her to the day he died. He looked into Hank’s promotion and put a hundred grand in it. He came out with an eighty-percent capital gain, and Hank never made a penny. That’s the way everybody should handle the badger game.”
He belched slightly. “Excuse me.”
He downed more whiskey and suppressed another bubble as it rose to his lips. “One way I’ve gone downhill, in the old days I never had hangovers. It hits me like this, all of a sudden.” He hiked up his robes to get at a handkerchief, with which he dried his forehead. “What about Quarrels, will he go by your recommendations?”
“I may have to persuade him. He’d like to believe in that buried treasure.”
“Mike, for Christ’s sake-if it’s a con, who’s behind it? Tick them off. Brad? He’s dead. Ev? Dead. Babs? Now Babs has a college degree, but you don’t think she’s got the brain power to swing something like this, do you? Kitty? I’ll tell you another thing about Kitty. She was with Ev the night he died. That’s established. The point is, if there’s no gold in that swamp, if there never was any gold in that swamp, what’s everybody getting worked up about?”
He put the handkerchief to his mouth. “I’m going to lose my breakfast, goddamn it. There’s just too damn much tension, and it’s been building up. One million bucks-it’s the sound of it that gets everybody, Mike. I defended a burglar once. Never mind his name. His specialty’s hanging around bars and seeing who gets plastered. Then he follows them home, waits fifteen minutes and walks in. Most of the time they’re passed out cold. He takes his time and cleans out the place. All right. Ev died in a fire in a southside hotel. This guy I’m telling you about was picked up for pulling a job that same night in that same hotel. I talked to him. If one of my fellow heirs murdered another of my fellow heirs, I thought I’d better find out about it. And it paid off. He was in the bar with Ev. A blonde with a sexy shape gave him some dough. He followed Ev when he staggered back to the hotel. He waited fifteen minutes. He went up the fire stairs. When he came out on Ev’s floor a woman was coming out of Ev’s room. Blonde. Very sexy ass.”
His whiskey glass fell. Shanahan clutched his stomach with both hands, a look of pained amazement on his face, and he pitched forward to the floor.
chapter 18
The bailiff opened the door.
“Chief of Police wants to talk to you, Judge. Judge? Where’d he go?” he asked Shayne. “Oh, my God!”
Will Gentry pushed past. The police chief was an old friend of Shayne’s, a red-faced, scrupulously honest cop who had seen too much violence and heard too many lies and alibis. Shayne was on his knees beside the unconscious judge. He let Gentry check Shanahan’s breathing and make the necessary phone call.
“He was telling me something when he collapsed,” Shayne said thoughtfully. He touched the drawn flesh at the corner of Shanahan’s mouth. “He’s been under a strain. I’d say he was the cardiac type, but it seemed to me it hit him in the belly.”
Suddenly Shayne’s face changed. He stood up and strode to the courtroom.
Except for the bailiff and one old man asleep on a bench, the big room was empty. The bailiff, at the judge’s bench, was shaking two aspirins into his hand, his face the color of dirty snow. He popped the aspirins into his mouth and raised a glass of water.
“Drop that!” Shayne commanded.
The bailiff’s hand jerked and the glass fell and shattered. He gulped down the aspirins dry and cried, “Look what you’ve done! I was going to get a clean glass for the judge. Who do you think’s going to clean it up?”
The big double doors burst open to admit a compact group, including Tim Rourke and two courtroom reporters. Rourke signalled to Shayne as he passed, then went through into Shanahan’s chambers with the others. Shayne took a paper tissue out of the soggy box of Kleenex on the bench, wrapped it carefully around the water carafe and carried it down to a table in the well of the court.
He heard a hum of excited voices from Shanahan’s chambers. More officials arrived, including a short preoccupied man he recognized as the medical examiner. Rourke and a reporter for the rival paper ran out to the phones.
Shayne was frowning at the burning end of his cigarette. Will Gentry appeared in the doorway. Seeing the private detective, he came over and sat down across from him.
“He’s dead. I don’t suppose you’re surprised.”
“That makes three,” Shayne said. “Two more to go.” He pushed the carafe across the table. “Better have this analyzed.”
“You think he was poisoned?”
“I know damn well he was poisoned. Shanahan’s a Monday-morning hangover man. Listening to lawyers argue is thirsty work. If the water bottle was full when court convened, he must have drunk at least two glasses.”
Gentry called an assistant, who listened to Shayne’s theory and picked up the carafe.
Rourke came in and dropped into the chair beside Shayne. “‘Jurist Collapses, Dies,’” he said. “They’ll be satisfied with that for the time being, but when they find out he was part of the Gaspar set-up they’ll scream for an explanation. I can’t play it coy much longer, Mike. I’ll have to give them what I have if I want to go on working there.”
“Yeah.” Shayne turned to Gentry. “I gave you five people, Will. We can cross off Shanahan. Now where the hell are the other four?”
Gentry flushed angrily. “Mike, there are five hundred thousand people in greater Miami, two hundred thousand cars. If you have any suggestions on how to narrow it down I’ll be delighted to hear them. I’ve got the head of security at Kennedy Airport checking to see if Kitty Sims, or anybody who looks like Kitty Sims, got on a Miami plane this morning. We’ve found out quite a bit about Barbara Lemoyne, who her friends are, where she has her hair done. So far we haven’t found her. She never showed at the hospital. A woman answering to the description of Eda Lou Parchman took a cab from Watson Park to the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. Needless to say, she is no longer at the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. I have two men watching Hank Sims’s office. It’s one room and a darkroom. He’s been sleeping there on a cot. He doesn’t make his bed, so we don’t know if he was there last night or not. Give us time, Mike. We’ll collect them for you.”
“Time is the one thing we don’t have.”
“Mike,” Rourke said pleadingly. “You don’t want the TV boys to beat me on a Mike Shayne story. Talk.”
Shayne rubbed his hand wearily across his face. “There doesn’t seem to be much else to do but talk.”
Rourke put the names of the five joint tenants of Key Gaspar at the top of a folded sheet of yellow copy paper. While Shayne talked, he made aimless doodles up and down the page, and by the time his friend had finished he had put little checks after the names of three of the five. As for Shayne, he had a helpless feeling, a rarity at this stage of a case. He had most of the facts he needed, but none of the people.
The detective who had been talking to the bailiff came over to the table.
“We don’t have the lab report, Chief, but everything else fits. Want to talk to him?”
When Gentry nodded, the detective called the bailiff over. He was still pale, shaken by the narrowness of his escape from the same fate that had overtaken Shanahan. Prodded by the detective, he repeated his story.
He unlocked the doors at nine-thirty. In the next half hour a dozen people had drifted in, the usual courthouse loungers. He had remained in the courtroom continuously until court convened at ten-thirty, except for one short period when he was called to the press-room phone. That had been sometime around ten. No one was on the line by the time he got there.
Shayne listened intently. “Where do you keep your cleaning equipment?”
“You mean mops and pails and so on? In a closet down the hall. Why? Because the funny thing is, I found a wet mop right outside the door. I don’t know who left it there.”
“All right,” Shayne said slowly. “Here’s how it was worked, Will. It would have to be a woman. She called the press room from one of the dial phones, to get the bailiff out of the way. All she’d need would be a mop and a scarf
