Dolls Are Deadly Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward Sylvester, saying mildly, “He looks like he’s dead.”
    “Livest dead man you ever saw. Put your fingers in his mouth if you don’t believe me. But count them first.”
    Scooping Sylvester up in his arms as though he were a half-grown boy, Shayne carried him down the companionway steps into the cabin and laid him on a bunk. He’d have a talk with Sylvester tomorrow, after the Cuban sobered up.
    He tossed the cigarette butt into the water as he strode up the dock to his car with the young officer. “How’d you find me? I know my office didn’t give out.”
    “Painter put out an alert on your license number. The squad boys covering this area reported your car parked here.”
    Shayne grunted. “The master criminologist at his devious best.”
    By barreling his car all the way between lights, Shayne arrived in a dead heat with the policeman. Except at the near end where a few condemned houses still stood, the street was a pile of rubble where buildings had been razed preparatory to putting up a multiple-unit apartment building. Toward the middle of the block a mound of earth, removed in the process of replacing a water main, covered half the street. Across from it a line of cars was parked—two black police cars, the photographer’s Jaguar and Peter Painter’s lime-green coupe. In front of the mound of dirt two policemen stood guard to deflect the morbidly curious.
    Shayne parked and strode toward the dirt pile. Painter, a small, slender man with sharp eyes and a thin black mustache, scowled and caressed his mustache with his thumbnail.
    The redhead stopped, looking down at the lifeless body of Henny Henlein. Blood had seeped from a wound in his chest, staining his pin-striped coat. Around his neck, incongruously, was a hangman’s noose. A few feet away a snub-nosed pocket gun with a walnut handle lay in the dirt.
    Shayne stooped over the body. There was no question but that the bullet which had killed Henlein had been fired at close range. The hole in his coat was marked with powder burns. The noose around his neck was made out of common clothesline and was tied in the same hangman’s knot as the noose around the neck of the tiny voodoo doll Henlein had brought to Shayne’s office.
    “All right, Shayne,” Painter said, making his voice weary, “what’s your involvement in this?”
    “What makes you think I’ve got any?”
    Painter’s eyes flared. “Because it’s just the kind of cockeyed murder you’d have something to do with. Look at that noose! It didn’t kill him. His neck isn’t even bruised. It was hung on him after he’d been killed. It’s a symbol, or a threat, or a message to someone.”
    Painter was right about this anyway. The noose had probably been put around the hoodlum’s neck to let someone know that he had been murdered by the same person who sent him the voodoo doll. It was like a signed card saying, “I did it.” But who was it meant for? And why had Henlein been shot instead of strangled or stabbed? The other doll had had a pin through its chest. Had two people sent dolls to Henlein?
    “Any other clues on him?” Shayne asked casually, wondering why Painter had not mentioned the voodoo dolls before this.
    “Yes, a good one. Your name and address. What’s your connection? Who killed him?”
    The redhead fastened his gray eyes quizzically on Painter. “I wouldn’t know. Do you? Or is that question too personal?”
    “He had your address,” Painter sputtered.
    “As I told your bright young man when he came crowding me, so do half the people of greater Miami. My newspaper publicity pays off. Maybe he was going to call me, but the guy with the gun interfered.” He gave Painter a wicked grin. “And now, if you’ll excuse me—”
    Shayne turned slowly, expecting Painter to produce the little dolls at any moment for a surprise effect and start his grilling all over again.
    Painter did step in front of him, but not to produce any dolls, merely to sound a belligerent