“We’ll get rid of her quick,” Shayne promised. “But we don’t want to leave her too close to where my car was wrecked. Why don’t you cut back across the boulevard and drive out into the residential section? We’ll find a nice quiet lawn where corpses are a novelty and deposit her there.”
Rourke turned east across the boulevard, forcing himself to hold the car to a speed within traffic restrictions.
After he had driven some twenty blocks Shayne suggested, “This looks like a respectable neighborhood where people have sense enough to go to bed early. There’s not a single light showing and not a car in sight.”
“Sure,” Rourke grunted sourly. “These people lead drab lives. Everybody is entitled to some excitement.” He slowed in the middle of the next block at a point where the corner street lamps did not interfere, edged to the curb, and stopped in front of a row of small stucco houses.
Shayne leaped out and took the mortal remains of Helen Stallings from the rear seat and deposited her gently on a damp green lawn.
When he returned to the car Timothy Rourke had moved out of the driver’s seat. “You take over, Mike. I’ll come unhinged if I try to drive another foot.”
“We could both use a drink and some quiet meditation,” Shayne decided. “Home is just the place for that, and we’ll hope no more bodies have popped up during our absence.”
EIGHT
“WHY,” ASKED TIMOTHY ROURKE for the fifth time, “did the killer first snatch the body out of your possession and then stage a public wreck to give it back to you?”
“When we know the answer to that we’ll have something.” Mike sat relaxed in a deep chair in the luxurious corner apartment which he had taken after his marriage to Phyllis. Rourke was sprawled out on the lounge across from him. A low coffee table was between them, bearing up under an array of ash trays, a cognac bottle, a heavily depleted quart of Scotch, a siphon bottle, and a large bowl of ice cubes. They had been sitting thus for more than an hour, and Rourke had put a lot of Scotch inside of him. Shayne, tormented by his two-o’clock appointment with Lucile, had been more sparing with the cognac.