Counterfeit Wife (15 page)

“I don’t think they are,” said Shayne slowly. “In fact, I think it’s just the opposite and they’re as worried as you are about this stuff getting into circulation too soon.”

Marsten lifted his black and tufted brows. “So? What do
you
know about it, Mike?”

“Not much. I’m guessing. Just fifty grand of the stuff I ran into,” he admitted. “What’s it worth?” he ended abruptly.

“To whom?”

“Anyone who might get their hands on it. Me, for instance.”

Marsten studied the detective’s face thoughtfully, then said, “Someone with the right contacts could probably get forty cents on the dollar without too much trouble.” He frowned and added quietly, “You haven’t given me much, Mike.”

Shayne looked squarely into the keen dark eyes of the counterfeit expert and said, “I’ll give you this, Marsten. Your hunch about their preparing to hit Miami with the queer stuff this season is probably right. Do some checking on ex-Senator Irvin, for one. He’s got a gunman named Perry, and until early this morning he had a Negro razor expert named Getchie and a place on Thirty-eighth Street that might have been headquarters. There was a fire there, and the
Herald
carried the story. I think one of Irvin’s passing contacts might have been the Fun Club on Thirty-sixth. A man named Bates runs it, and there’s a bookie joint in the back during the season.”

Marsten was making notes while Shayne talked. When the detective stopped, he looked up and asked, “Is that where you got the two bills?”

Shayne shook his red head and said absently, “I don’t believe they’re ready to start shoving it yet. The gang may be breaking up, with one faction trying to jump the gun on the other. That’s all I can give you right now.”

“It’s a good start, Mike,” Marsten said, looking straight into Shayne’s eyes. “Later, maybe?”

“Later,” said Shayne. “And thanks.”

Marsten was reaching for the telephone when Shayne got up, waved his hand in farewell, and went out.

ADD THEM UP TO MURDER

THERE WERE FLABBY, liver-colored pouches under Chief Gentry’s eyes when Shayne entered his office after leaving the bank. He was chewing on the soggy butt of a black cigar, and he rumbled, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you ever since I came down this morning.”

Shayne pulled up a chair and dropped into it. “You look as though you’ve been out on a binge, Will.”

Gentry rubbed a big hand wearily over his ruddy face and growled. “Damned little chance I have for binges when you’re in town. Where did you get your
hunch
about Fred Gurney last night?”

“Gurney?” Shayne looked innocently puzzled. “Did I have a hunch about him?”

“Over the phone,” Gentry rumbled. “When you gave me the tip-off on the fire on Thirty-eighth that hadn’t started yet.”

“I didn’t say there was going to be a fire.”

“You told me about the body in the basement. I’ve got a report on that. He was dead before the fire caught him. Bled to death from a ripped jugular. Doc says it looks as though somebody had deliberately shoved a jagged broken whisky bottle in the man’s neck and twisted it.”

“People do the damnedest things nowadays,” marveled Shayne.

Gentry took the sodden cigar butt from his mouth, looked at it with extreme distaste, then tossed it over his shoulder toward a cuspidor in the corner. His aim had not improved with years of practice.

“You mentioned Gurney in connection with the Deland kidnaping.”

“I believe I did say something about having a lead that pointed to Gurney,” Shayne admitted.

“Sure you did. Where’d you get the lead, Mike?”

“You know how it is, Will.” Shayne made a negligible gesture. “A guy overhears something here and something else there. He adds them up—”

“And they make another murder,” Gentry interrupted in a deep rumble that held a grim significance.

“Another murder?” Shayne tried to look genuinely surprised, but Gentry had known him too long and too intimately.

“Tim Rourke got another one of those anonymous tips over the phone about daylight. Someone who wanted him to have a break on the story of Gurney’s murder—and the capture of Gerta Ross.”

“Tim has lots of friends around town,” murmured Shayne.

“Sure. Tim’s a very friendly guy,” agreed Gentry. “Could be the man who made the call was a big redheaded bozo who inquired at the Tower Cottage Camp for a Mr. and Mrs. Fred Smith about the time the murder was committed. The proprietor says he can identify that man, Mike.”

“After
the murder was committed,” Shayne corrected equably. “Fred Gurney had a knife in his back, and the Ross woman had passed out in bed when I got there.”

“She says not. Says she guesses you killed Freddie so you could have her without a showdown with him.”

“How much of that is gin and laudanum?”

“Most of it, I guess.” Gentry grinned briefly. “They are pumping the stuff out of her stomach now. Look, Mike. Sometimes I do some adding up, too. You knew Gerta Ross was a blonde and was driving the death car. You mentioned Fred Gurney as soon as I told you about the kidnaping.” He meticulously ticked the two items off on blunt fingertips. “You knew there was a dead Negro in the Thirty-eighth Street house. There was a dead man in your old apartment. You got to Fred Gurney and Gerta Ross while the whole police force was looking for them.” He held up the five fingers of his left hand when he finished. “Add all those things up and it looks like you’re mixed up in the kidnaping all the way up to your neck.”

“I admitted that several hours ago over the phone,” Shayne reminded him.

“How, Mike? You’ve got to come clean. We’ve had four murders already.”

“Three,” Shayne corrected him. “The Negro’s death was justifiable homicide. Gurney’s may have been the same. I wasn’t there.”

Gentry let the obvious retort pass. He got out a fresh cigar, looked at its wrapper, scowled, and put it in his mouth. “From what we’ve been able to get out of Gerta Ross, it looks as though she and Gurney were the kidnapers, all right. But she swears she didn’t know the girl was kidnaped until she’d kept her drugged for a day at her place. By the time Gurney told her the truth, she was in it too deep to back out.”

Shayne nodded soberly. “That’s approximately what she told me between drinks last night.”

“Did she kill Gurney? And Slocum? Is Slocum mixed up in it somehow, or was it simply his hard luck that he was sleeping in the wrong bed? And if that house on Thirty-eighth Street was occupied by ex-Senator Irvin like you said, why did he call himself Mr. Greerson and pretend he was running an auto repair shop in the basement when we know he wasn’t? There was no equipment there.” Gentry paused for breath and added, “And why did Greerson—or Irvin—disappear just before the fire and fail to show up again?”

“I think,” said Shayne, “that the answer to all of your involved and pointed questions lies in the Deland kidnaping.” He looked levelly into Gentry’s eyes as he spoke.

“How, Mike? In the name of God, how?” Gentry pounded his desk angrily, and his face, normally ruddy, now became the deep color of the purple patches beneath his eyes.

“I think you’ll begin to get an inkling of the truth if you sit back and recall everything you know about Gurney and his past record.”

“Fred Gurney has never been anything but a cheap two-bit hustler,” said Gentry, leaning back in his swivel chair and sending a cloud of smoke from his cigar toward the ceiling, as though his sudden outburst relieved the tension of many long hours.

“He started snatching ladies’ purses when he was about twelve,” the chief went on calmly, “and graduated to rolling drunks and pimping—and what-have-you.”

Shayne relaxed and lit a cigarette. “Yeh. All cheap, small-time stuff,” he pointed out.

“Sure. Gurney’s always been a sniveling coward,” Gentry said. “He never had the guts for any big stuff.”

Shayne slid down in the straight chair, let his head fall back to rest on its back, stretched his long legs out comfortably, and said, “Doesn’t it strike you as queer, Will, that he suddenly pulled a job like the Deland kidnaping? A kidnaper really sticks his neck out since the F.B.I. took it over. There’s a difference between hustling for whore houses and gambling joints—and kidnaping and murder.”

Gentry said, “Keep on talking.”

Shayne said, “That’s it, Will. It’s a big jump for Gurney.” He jerked himself erect and spread out his big hands.

Gentry’s swivel chair moved forward and he sat with his elbows on the desk. The small rumpled awnings that were his eyelids went up, and he looked sternly at Shayne.

“What jump?”

“Add this in and see what you get, Will. Gurney called Gerta Ross last night
after
Dawson had been hijacked, and told her everything was all okay—that they’d get the pay-off anyhow. She was to meet him at the Tower Cottages to get her share.”

“How do you know that?”

“I wheedled it out of Gerta,” Shayne told him. “She happened to be in the mood to talk.”

There was a hint of humor in Gentry’s bloodshot eyes. “Seems to me,” he said, “you’re hinting that Gurney wasn’t the actual kidnaper. That he was fronting for someone else.”

“Let’s put it like this, Will,” said Shayne eagerly. “When Gurney told Gerta about the Deland girl, he assured her it was a cinch. That they had nothing to worry about. I suggest it was a hell of a lot more than a simple kidnaping. Gurney was being used by someone.”

“By whom? And for what?”

Shayne worried his ear lobe with a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. How does Emory Hale strike you, Will?”

“I only saw him for a few minutes last night.”

“What time?”

“It must have been between two-thirty and three. After I talked to you on the phone, and before Tim called me about the body up in your apartment. He came into my office raving about wanting justice done and how he had put up reward money himself. He threatened to tear the town wide open with his bare hands if the kidnapers weren’t caught and properly dealt with. He’d been drinking some, but he isn’t the type that liquor affects much.”

Shayne nodded absently. “I understand both Hale and Deland left the house soon after they got the report on Kathleen’s death. Do you know where either of them went?”

“Damn it, Mike, how should I know? Why do you always get me involved in these Beach cases with Painter? Slocum and Gurney—and the Negro over here in my territory—and the kidnap-murder on Painter’s side of the causeway?”

“But you did see Hale,” Shayne said.

“I guess he was making the rounds with some fool idea of picking up a clue on his own. Maybe Deland was trying to catch up with him like the newspaper said—to keep him out of trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Hale didn’t talk much to me. But I got the impression he knows, or has known, his way around with the tough boys. Maybe not in Miami, but he knows the ropes.”

“Is he legitimate now?”

“That’s hard to say. He’s smooth. I’d guess he came up the hard way. I wouldn’t want to buck him in a business deal.”

“What is his business?” Shayne’s gray eyes were alert.

“I don’t know.” Gentry waved a pudgy hand vaguely. “The newspapers call him a financier and sportsman.”

“Sure,” Shayne scoffed. “Any punk who pays income tax and lays a few bucks on the fillies is a financier and sportsman. I’d like to know how he makes his money. The sort of gang he runs with. Everything about him.”

“You don’t think he engineered the kidnaping of his own niece?” protested Gentry.

“Somebody did. Have you a list of the serial numbers on the ransom money Hale gave Painter?”

“Right here.” Gentry produced a mimeographed list and handed it across the table. “Painter had hundreds of copies knocked out last night.”

Shayne took the list and scowled over it, running his gaze swiftly down the list of numbers. It looked exactly like what it was purported to be—a list of five hundred bills picked at random out of the vaults of any bank. He asked, “Do you know the name of Emory Hale’s New York bank?”

“No, I don’t. But what does it matter?”

Shayne said slowly, “I don’t know, Will. I wish you’d find out. Then wire the bank and learn whether they gave him the money and this list.”

Gentry leaned back unsmiling. He moved his head slowly from side to side. “I’m not stooging for you unless you come clean, Mike. How did you get in the middle of it?”

“Remember what I told you this morning on the phone?”

“You told me lots of things,” Gentry growled.

“One of them was that if I told you the truth you’d have no recourse except to turn me over to Painter for free lodging.”

Gentry leaned forward and asked, “Were you riding with Gerta Ross when she crashed her car last night?”

“Painter himself proved I was in Palm Beach while that was going on,” Shayne answered evenly.

Gentry nodded. “And while the black boy was getting himself killed in a basement garage on Thirty-eighth Street.”

“One piece of advice I’ll hand you on a platter,” Shayne told him, dragging himself to a straight position. “Don’t waste any time looking for the hijackers who held Dawson up.”

“Like that, huh? What would you advise me to concentrate on, Mike?”

“Checking any connection Dawson or Deland or Hale might ever have had with counterfeit money, with Fred Gurney, with the Fun Club on Thirty-sixth Street, or with ex-Senator Irvin, alias Greerson, who lived on Thirty-eighth Street until the house burned down last night.”

Gentry was jotting notations on a sheet of paper. “It would help a lot,” he complained, “if I knew why you want to know those things.”

Shayne said, “Fred Gurney didn’t plan and carry out that kidnaping all by himself.”

“There’s another queer angle to that kidnaping you haven’t mentioned,” grumbled Gentry.

“Do you mean why Kathleen Deland was chosen as the victim?”

“Sure. Anyone who knew anything about the Delands would know it was preposterous to expect them to pay a fifty grand ransom for the girl.”

“Unless it was someone who knew them intimately enough to know about the rich brother-in-law and uncle in New York.”

“Even a rich uncle,” Gentry dissented, “isn’t always the type to shell out that kind of money.”