Shoot to Kill by Brett Halliday Read Free Book Online Page B

past him, disregarding the gun. “You hang onto it, Griff. Maybe you’ll get a citation for discovering important evidence.” He stopped and surveyed the sagging door with its DO NOT DISTURB sign still hanging from the knob, then turned his attention to the inner door jamb where a heavy brass socket for a bolt still dangled from one half-withdrawn screw.
    “Looks like we not only got murder, but a breaking and entering rap to boot,” he observed sourly.
    “I’m guilty, Sergeant,” Shayne admitted cheerfully. “It seemed like a good idea with shooting going on inside.”
    Griggs shrugged and walked on into the room, coming to a halt beside the dead man behind the desk and looking down at him fixedly. “He looks dead enough,” he observed without emotion.
    Wesley Ames did look very dead. In life he had had sharp features, and in death they were tight and pinched. He wore a white shirt without a tie and unbuttoned at the throat, and a heavy, fancy waistcoat of garish red that was tightly buttoned up the front with a row of large silver buttons. The center button was missing. In its place was a round hole where the .38 bullet had entered his body. Around the hole was a wide stain of darker red. Slumped sideways out of the chair as he was, the white leather-cushioned back of the arm-chair showed another round hole where the bullet had come out of the body and entered the chair. Griggs said, “Right through the heart, it looks like. He probably died instantly.”
    Shayne said, “He was like that when Tim and I busted in not more than sixty seconds after the shot was fired, and he wasn’t moving a muscle. I guess he didn’t know what hit him.”
    Griggs straightened up and looked around the room alertly. “This the only entrance?”
    “I don’t know anything about the set-up and I haven’t asked any questions. I’m just an innocent bystander on this one, Sergeant.” Shayne looked around the room with Griggs. “That door in the back must open out onto a balcony.”
    There was a door at the rear of the room on the left that had a wooden bottom and the top half of glass. To the right of the door there were two wide windows, evenly spaced, and both of them were tightly closed and latched on the inside.
    Griggs and Shayne walked over to the door together while Rourke watched and listened alertly and made an occasional note. The door had a heavy brass bolt on the inside similar to the one that was fitted to the other door. The bolt was securely pushed inside the hasp. There was an outside light turned on over the door, and peering through the glass they could see a narrow balcony with a wrought iron railing, and a stone stairway leading down to the ground at the side of the house. It was pseudo-Moorish architecture, such as had been much the vogue in Miami in the early twenties.
    Sergeant Griggs turned back and investigated the locked windows and muttered, “Everything locked up tight as a drum, with a don’t disturb sign on his door.” He went back and glanced at the flat top of the big desk. Wesley Ames had evidently been a very orderly man. There was no ashtray, no evidence that he had smoked. A chromium electric coffee percolator stood on a round, heat-resistant pad near the right side of the desk. It had an electric cord plugged into the base that dropped off the side of the desk and was plugged into an extension cord leading to a wall socket. It was the automatic type with a built-in thermostat that shuts it off when it has finished percolating and keeps the contents just below boiling for as long as it is left connected.
    Beside the pot was a coffee cup in a saucer, and it contained a slight residue of very black coffee. At the left of the arm-chair in which Ames had been sitting were two wire mail baskets. The one on the left held a dozen or more unopened letters addressed to Wesley Ames. Between the two baskets was a stack of neatly arranged empty envelopes, each one carefully slit open the long way, and