Free Stranger in Town by Brett Halliday Page B

Brockton. Nothing at all locally. The second dispatch mentioned your Mr. Buttrell and his daughter as wintering at the Roney, and I checked here in the office since it would be routine for us to send a man to interview him and get a story. Ned Piper pulled the assignment, and ran into the same dead-end. No Buttrell at the Roney for him to interview. It looked funny but he just figured there’d been a mistake in the name and let it drop. That help you out any, Mike?”
    “Damned if I know,” groaned Shayne. “At this point I don’t know what would help out. Did you check with Will Gentry?”
    “Oh, yeh. I called Will and went to look over the lug myself. Here’s the story on it. This guy was waiting outside the office when Lucy opened up this morning. Asked for you, and said he’d wait when she said she thought you’d be in later. So he did. He sat and waited. And made Lucy nervous. She’s a smart gal and she sensed something wrong. That he was dangerous. She’s been around you long enough to get a feel for a thing like that, I guess. And she thought a certain bulge under his coat looked suspicious. I guess she gave you this when you phoned her, huh?”
    “Some of it. Enough to worry me a little after what happened here last night, and I told her to call Gentry to have a couple of boys look the situation over.”
    “Yeh. She did. From the phone in your office, and then went back to her desk and typed until they got there. Well, they frisked this gent, and Lucy was right. A shoulder-holstered gat. But he wasn’t talking. Not a damned word except he was waiting to see Mike Shayne on private business. They took him down to headquarters and shook him down good, but got nothing else. Not a scrap of identification. Clean like any sharp hood gets when he goes out on a job. But there was one funny thing, Mike. It didn’t seem to mean anything until you asked me that question about there being anything to connect him up with Brockton.
    “A newspaper clipping folded up neatly inside his inner coat pocket, Mike,” Rourke went on triumphantly. “I got it here in front of me. Want me to read it to you?”
    “What is it first?”
    “A front-page story clipped from the Brockton Courier. Dated Saturday last. About an assistant State’s Attorney from Orlando whose charred and almost unidentifiable body was discovered inside his wrecked and burned car in the bottom of a ravine near Brockton the preceding afternoon. Name of Randolph Harris. That mean anything to you?”
    “Not yet,” said Shayne harshly. “Not one damned thing.”
    “Want me to read you the story over the phone?”
    “Last Saturday’s Courier? You needn’t bother, Tim. I’ve got a copy of it right here in my hotel room. Gentry’s holding the man, huh?”
    “Sure. Concealed weapon. He’ll pull sixty days if they don’t hang anything else on him. What is happening up there, Mike? Ready to give me a lead for a story?”
    “Not yet,” said Shayne dismally. “A lead is what I need right now. Just so you won’t think I’ve wasted your time, I damn near got killed last night, and spent the night in jail.”
    “Hell, that’s not news when it happens to Michael Shayne,” countered Tim Rourke cynically.
    “I know,” Shayne sighed. “So don’t print it. I’ve walked into the middle of something, but I’ll be damned if I know what. I’ll be in touch if anything breaks.”
    He hung up and turned eagerly to the back issues of the Courier he had brought from the newspaper office. Saturday’s paper was the one that carried the second story about Amy Buttrell… in which her father had arrived to identify her.
    Shayne spread out the front-page and found the story Rourke had described in the center column. It was past noon and he hadn’t had anything to eat since the garbage offered him at the jail that morning, so he poured an inch of brandy in a water glass to assuage his stomach while he settled back to read the story that had been found in the