He drove moodily back to his apartment hotel, secretly ashamed of himself for the disappointment he felt. Of course, it had been merely a wild surmise that the body would be Lucile’s, but, by God, how he’d like to hang something like that around Stallings’s stiff neck.
It left him without a lead to work on, and it was only a few hours until dawn when Helen Stallings’s body would be found on the lawn where he had left it.
After it was found, the whole thing was bound to come crashing down around him. He would be lucky if he could stay out of jail and avoid a murder charge. And the election would be lost, along with his two thousand dollars.
His jaw tightened grimly as he parked by the side entrance to his hotel apartment. He had to locate Lucile. He would rout out Tim Rourke and make the newspaperman get to work on it with him. Lucile must be listed with some employment agency. The staffing of homes in Miami was a specialty with only two or three local agencies. If he could find the one that supplied the Stallings mansion when they moved in a short time ago—
Shayne was going down the corridor to his corner apartment. He had his key out and inserted it in the lock. When the door swung open he blinked in surprise at the bright light from a ceiling chandelier. He recalled that he had left only a shaded floor lamp burning.
Then he saw Timothy Rourke lying outstretched on the carpet near the bedroom door. The lanky reporter’s head was bathed in a pool of blood, and his thin, bare shanks were drawn up to his chest in an attitude of agonized repose.
TEN
SHAYNE LEAPED FORWARD and bent over the reporter’s unconscious body. Blood was still seeping slowly from an ugly gash on the side of Rourke’s head. He was breathing feebly, and his muscles reacted with an involuntary jerk when Shayne roughly explored the gaping cut on his head.
Shayne swore an oath that was like a prayer when he found that the bone structure was intact. The scalp was ripped loose along the line of an ugly three-inch gash. He hurried to the kitchen and dumped a quantity of salt into a boiler, filled it with hot water, and grabbed up one of Phyllis’s crisp embroidered tea towels on the way out.
Sliding a folded blanket under Rourke’s head, he squatted beside him cross-legged and doused the salt water liberally on the wound.