“Tim, I’ve got a dead guy in the front seat of my car and no one here wants him.”
Rourke arched eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“I saw him hijacked.”
Shayne explained quickly. The reporter yanked at his nose. “Let’s have a look at this boy, Mike.”
“You can look at him all night, friend — after I roll him in the front door.”
“You given any thought to why somebody would snatch a corpse?”
“Not enough to keep him.”
“Hijacked cadavers are an every day occurrence, huh?”
Shayne snorted, looked around for a cop who would take a body.
But Rourke pressed, “Come on, Mike. Let’s have a look. Maybe I’ll recognize the guy.”
“Write about a bombing.”
“I already have,” Rourke said, heading out of the building.
Shayne stared after his friend for a moment, then grumbled resignation. Rourke was waiting for him on the wet sidewalk. They matched strides to the convertible. Rourke inventoried it from the exterior, touched the splintered windshield, fingered the split top. Then he opened the door and stared on the corpse. He stood jackknifed for a long time. Finally he straightened, snapped the door shut.
“I don’t know him. I saw you talking to Piper. What did he say?”
“Told me to go jump.”
“Well, some funeral home should be squealing like a stuck pig. You didn’t get the name of the home, huh?”
“I’m dumping the guy here, Tim.”
“I know a guy, Mike, who I think would put him on ice for us.”
Shayne gave his friend a sharp glance.
“Gentry is supposed to be leaving Washington tonight. Somebody called him home,” Rourke went on. “And you know Gentry will listen to you. How about salting this guy? At least overnight.”
Shayne hesitated, then got into the convertible. Anything to be rid of the stiff. Lucy Hamilton was probably pounding her thighs by now, pacing, heels digging.
Rourke squeezed into the back seat and directed Shayne into the shank of the city, a sea-oriented district stuffed with warehouses, boat repair shops, self-styled boat captains who hauled northerners on fishing excursions for a buck. It was a dreary, dark end of town, a good area in which to store a cadaver. There was only an occasional parked car and the sidewalks seemed deserted. But Shayne was having second thoughts.
Why hadn’t he dumped the stiff at police headquarters as he had threatened?
Rourke said from the back seat, “My friend’s got an ice factory. That’s it straight ahead, on the corner on the right side.”
Shayne braked at the curbing in front of the ice factory and Rourke squeezed out of the car.
“Jerry lives upstairs,” the reporter said. “Let me see if I can roust him.”
Shayne sat in the car with the stiff, staring on it as he drummed fingers against the steering wheel. Who are you, pal? he wondered again and why would anyone want to steal you, especially at the risk of getting killed? Which they had been.
He grunted and turned his thoughts to the three dead men he had left out along the highway. They hadn’t been Miami gunsels. Or if they had been, they were new, three guys who had moved into the city or up in the underworld recently. He knew most of the gunsels in town and those three hadn’t been among the acquaintances.
Had they been operating on their own or working for someone? Obviously, they had known where and when the corpse was due to arrive in the city. They’d been waiting at the airport.
But what was the value of the stiff?
Shayne meditatively massaged the lobe of his left ear between right thumb and forefinger.
Rourke came across the sidewalk through the drizzle with a stumpy, wide man at his side. Rourke opened the car door and displayed the corpse for his friend as he said, “Mike, Jerry Smith. Jerry, Mike Shayne. Jerry’ll take him, Mike. He’s a little goosey — about a hundred dollars worth — but he says he’s got some large cakes of ice out back we can pack around our boy.”
Shayne got out his wallet and fished a hundred dollar bill from it. They spent twenty minutes lifting and heaving and shoving blocks of ice around the dead man. Finally he was packed and out of sight. Shayne stood large and hulking and shivering. “How long you figure he’ll keep in there, Smitty?”
“A guy named Birdseye discovered the value of freezing, Mr. Shayne,” the stumpy man said sagely as they moved outside to the warmth and drizzle of the night.
Shayne flapped his arms as he savored the warm air. “We may leave him a couple of days.”
“No cops coming around?”
“No cops,” Shayne said grimly. “They don’t even know this dude exists.”
“Well, somebody does.”
The detective took another hundred dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it in Jerry Smith’s shirt pocket. “You are goosey, aren’t you, pal?”
“It’s the times, Mr. Shayne,” Jerry Smith said with a lop-sided grin.
“Mike,” Rourke said as the redhead piloted the convertible back toward the downtown lights, “this ‘couple of days’ bit. That means?”
“It means I’ve got a two-hundred-buck investment and I’m going to protect it,” Shayne growled.
“Beautiful,” Rourke said, settling slightly in the seat.
Shayne didn’t look at his friend. He knew what he would see if he did. Rourke would be grinning.
Rourke had left his car at police headquarters. Shayne dropped him there. The newspaperman sat half in and half out of the convertible for a moment before he said, “And now?”
“Lucy may still be waiting,” the redhead replied.
“Tomorrow?”
“Sooner or later, somebody’s got to start yelling about losing a stiff.”
Rourke pondered briefly, nodded and left the car seat. “Gentry should be in his office in the morning.”
Shayne drove to Biscayne Boulevard and then north to the side street where Lucy Hamilton’s apartment was located between the boulevard and the bay.
She snapped open the front door as he kept a thumb on her buzzer. She was as he expected: perky, cute, irritated. But just the sight of her was silent salve for what had turned out to be a rough night. So he turned on a huge grin for her as he moved inside.
When he faced her again, the fire in her brown eyes had turned to curiosity and concern as her gaze swept his rumpled and dirty figure. But all she said was, “The meat loaf has kept this long, it’ll keep another thirty minutes. Is that time enough for a shower and a cognac?”
III
Tuesday morning was brilliant. Sun splashed the city, drying it quickly. Afternoon would be steamy again, but the morning exuded a freshness.
Mike Shayne drove to police headquarters in the rented car. He felt revived as he breathed deeply of the salt-tanged air. Lucy had been filled in. When he had arrived at her apartment, she had heard on television about the police station bombing and she’d thought he had been at the station when the bomber had chucked his missile. But now she knew about the hijacked corpse and she had gone to the Flagler Street office to open a new case folder.
The garage boys had been a little less understanding. It was the third time in four months the redhead had brought in the convertible and the garage boys were beginning to wonder if they had enough windshields in stock to keep the detective operating.
Repair men were at work at police headquarters too when Shayne arrived. They were rebuilding the entry. The detective moved through the workers and headed for Will Gentry’s office. While driving, he had listened to a radio newscast and had heard an item about three men who had been found dead in a wrecked car. But the newscast had been sketchy.