One Night with Nora

by Brett Halliday

  “Indeed?” Margrave looked surprised, but not unduly so. “Poor child. I imagine she came down to plead with Ralph again not to go through with his contemplated divorce. He was making a grave mistake, as I told him more than once.”

  “I have it on good authority that Carrol had unquestionable grounds for his divorce.”

  Margrave’s heavy face clouded, and he made a gesture with a big hand, as though brushing aside an annoying insect. “Legally, yes,” he admitted with a sigh. “I believe Nora did—ah—commit an indiscretion. While under the influence; you understand. But who are we to sit in judgment on a fellow being? ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ I said that to Ralph. I talked to him like a father about Nora. ‘How sinless are you?’ I asked him. ‘Did you come to marriage with clean hands? Have you never given way to temptation?’” He sighed again and shook his tousled head. “But Ralph was young and passionately jealous. He seemed determined to humiliate Nora publicly.”

  “Who was the man in the case?” Shayne asked.

  “Eh? Oh, I see. The entire subject is distasteful to me,” said Margrave reluctantly, “but it is a matter of public record. Young Ted Granger was named corespondent by Ralph. His own cousin, by the way. A harmless but foolish young man. It’s my impression that he was wholly to blame for the entire affair, and that he was hopelessly in love with Nora, and I think worked hard to break up her marriage with Ralph.”

  Shayne took another long swallow of his drink and made a grimace of distaste. “Who recommended me to you, Mr. Margrave?” he demanded abruptly.

  “What’s that? No one directly recommended you. I’ve heard of your reputation, naturally, and some months ago, in connection with another affair entirely, I happen to know that my attorney had you discreetly investigated with a view to retaining your services. It was later decided to drop the matter, but your name stuck in my mind. So, when I realized the local police could not be trusted to follow the only actual lead in Ralph’s murder, I thought of you at once.”

  “What’s the name of your attorney?”

  “Mr. Bates in Wilmington.”

  “Was he also Carrol’s lawyer?”

  “Bates handles all the legal affairs of our firm.”

  “What was the nature of the other affair when I was considered and investigated?” Shayne persisted.

  “It was a personal matter,” Margrave told him curtly. “It can have no possible bearing on Ralph’s death.”

  “I’ll have to be the judge of that.”

  “Very well,” the big man agreed reluctantly. “Ralph received some nasty anonymous letters. He was furious and wanted a detective brought in, but I was able to persuade him to drop the matter.”

  Ann Margrave re-entered the room as her father spoke. She was stunning in a clinging white sport frock, the wide belt, pert little hat, and two-toned shoes matched the scarlet rouge on her full mouth. She carried a small white purse in one white-gloved hand. She said in a flat voice, “I’m going out. By, Pops. Good-by, Mike.”

  Shayne came to his feet holding his almost empty glass up in a salute. “Good-by, and thanks for the breakfast.”

  She said, “You’re very welcome,” in the same flat tone, and went out.

  “These modern children,” said Margrave heavily. “I won’t see Ann again until she comes reeling home this evening.”

  Shayne set his glass on the table and remained standing. “What sort of anonymous letters were they?”

  “What’s that? Oh, the ones Ralph received. Nasty, scurrilous things. That was months ago and there can be no possible connection.”

  “Having to do with his wife?”

  “Yes. Accusations against Nora. Will you take the case, Shayne?”

  “Gladly. I’ll want to see Bates and learn all I can about the Vulcan lawsuit.”

  “Of course. I assure you, that is the crux of the matter. Mr. Bates is coming down today, I believe. He telephoned me early this morning as soon as he was informed of Ralph’s death. I’ll let you know as soon as he arrives. I’ll be glad to give you a retainer. Any reasonable amount. I want you to spare no expense whatever in pinning this murder where it belongs.”

  Shayne said, “Mail a check for a thousand to my office. I’ll be in touch with you.” He turned away, suddenly impatient to be away from the hotel suite and from Mr. Margrave.

  Timothy Rourke came to his feet when Shayne stepped from the elevator. He hurried to the detective, his eyes burning with curiosity in their deep sockets. “What goes, Mike?”

  Shayne paused to confess, “I forgot to mention that the Press was waiting downstairs. But go on up, Tim. You’ll get plenty of dynamite for a headline, if you have the guts to print it.”

  He brushed past the reporter and was halfway across the lobby when Ann Margrave came up to him. She caught his arm with desperate fingers and said intensely, “I’ve got to talk to you. How about you buying me a drink?”

  Shayne said, “Fine. Here? Or some place else?”

  “Some place else,” she said with decision. “If Father saw us together he’d kill me.”

  “I’ve got a car outside. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  They were both silent as Shayne wheeled the borrowed car out of the Roney driveway onto Collins Avenue and turned north. Ann Margrave sat tense and still beside him, staring ahead, her gloved hands gripping the small purse in her lap.

  He drove north a few blocks, turned west on a side street, and pulled up in front of a small restaurant and bar where he knew the drinks were good and there would be few customers at this hour.

  They went into a long, air-conditioned room with a small bar near the entrance.

  Shayne took Ann’s arm and led her to the rear, peering into empty booths. He selected the last one. When they were settled, she looked at him with an odd intensity in her light-blue eyes, and for the first time since meeting her, Shayne saw a tinge of color in her cheeks.

  “I’m not a drunkard,” she denied vehemently, as though Shayne himself had just accused her. “It’s just that—oh—damn it, I like to get Pops’s goat. When he starts pontificating, I want to scream. So, I take a drink instead.”

  “Does that help?” Shayne asked gravely.

  “Enough of them do.”

  Shayne held up a warning hand for silence when he saw the waiter approaching. “Now, what’ll you have?”

  “What would you suggest?” she said, taking the cue.

  “Black coffee.”

  “That will be fine,” Ann Margrave told the waiter. “With a double slug of cognac in it, please. Croizet, if you have it.”

  Shayne lifted his ragged red brows and grinned appreciatively. “The same for me, but plain, with a glass of iced water on the side instead of coffee.”

  When the waiter went away, Ann said, “I simply had to talk to you. I thought I’d retch back there when you asked Pops if he knew Nora and he said she was wonderful—loyal to the core!” Venom dripped from her voice.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “She’s a bitch on wheels.” Her eyes were as cold as blue ice, but after a moment the angry curl of her lips relaxed, and she went on in a tired, flat tone. “She ruined Ralph’s life. She’s as much to blame for his death as though she stabbed him in the heart herself, which she was perfectly capable of doing, and probably would have if she’d been around last night.”

  Shayne settled back, took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and held them across to her. She took one and leaned forward to light it from his match. He lit one for himself, and said, “So you disagree with your father about Mrs. Carrol’s true character?”

  “I disagree with Pops about practically everything,” she answered listlessly. “Did he happen to mention, for instance, that Nora was his mistress before she hooked Ralph?”

  “No. He didn’t mention that.”

  The waiter brought their drinks, and at a signal from Ann poured the cognac into her coffee, then went away.

  “Well, she was,”
she assured him. “For several months. Then she suddenly went after Ralph.”

  “Was this before your father and Ralph Carrol became partners?”

  “Oh, yes. While Ralph still had his job with Vulcan. While he was still perfectly satisfied and happy with his work,” she went on with gathering bitterness, “when he could still call his soul his own and wasn’t ashamed to look the world in the face.”

  Shayne warmed the brandy glass in his hands. “Tell me about Ralph. Have you known him long?”

  “I’ve been in love with him ever since I was fourteen. That’s nine years. And don’t laugh.”

  Shayne said, “I’m not laughing, Ann.” He took a sip of brandy and waited for her to continue.

  “Most people do. They started laughing nine years ago when I first started chasing after him. Maybe it was a silly girl crush in the beginning, but it turned into love, as soon as I was old enough to know what love really is.”

  “Did Ralph reciprocate?”

  “He was beginning to. I was wearing him down, all right. Psychologists say that any normal person will respond to adoration. Ralph was always sweet to me. I’d see him on vacations when he was away at college, and later when he came back to Wilmington to work there. We weren’t actually engaged,” she went on with the appearance of striving to be honest and objective, “but he was coming to it. Then he met Nora, and everything was ruined.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A little more than a year.” Ann sighed and took a drink of black coffee laced with cognac. “Everything was different after that. Ralph changed completely. I don’t know how she managed it.” Her hand trembled as she set the cup down, splashing the contents into the saucer. “She just flung her sex in his face, I guess. He was always so shy and sweet. She just overwhelmed him.” Ann paused to puff on her cigarette. She made a distasteful grimace, and mashed it out. “Nora had had enough experience, God knows, and knew how to get a man she wanted. And she decided she wanted Ralph.”

  Shayne was silent for a moment, thinking hard. “And you say Nora had been having an affair with your father prior to this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t Ralph mind?”

  “I don’t suppose he knew,” she said with contempt. “I tried to tell him what she was, but it only made him fearfully angry. He said people misjudged her and that I was just nasty jealous.”

  “How did your father feel?” Shayne probed.

  “Frankly, I suspected afterward it was something Pops and Nora cooked up together,” she confessed after a brief hesitation, her brooding gaze fixed on Shayne, “to get Ralph away from his job and in partnership with Pops to make this new plastic. Because that’s what happened. She began working on Ralph, giving him delusions of grandeur, and convincing him he was being unfairly exploited by Vulcan. Up to that time he was happy with the arrangement and with his work. They paid him a very good salary and he never thought of complaining until Nora got her hooks into him.”

  “Are you saying you suspect your father sent his mistress to make love to Ralph Carrol,” Shayne asked incredulously, “and marry him, in order to persuade him to quit his job as research chemist for Vulcan and team up with him? He didn’t know about this new plastic at that time. It hadn’t been discovered yet, or invented, or whatever. What you suggest would imply an extraordinary and blind faith in Carrol’s ability to come up with something very valuable.”

  Ann said, “Nuts. If you think, for one moment, Pops ever invested a nickel in blind faith, you just don’t know Pops. He can talk himself blue in the face without convincing me the new plastic wasn’t in the bag before he ever sicked Nora onto Ralph. Don’t you see? That’s why he did it.”

  Shayne tugged at his left ear lobe and studied the girl with narrowed eyes. “Then you think the lawsuit is completely justified? That Ralph did break faith with Vulcan and reserve for his own benefit a discovery actually made while in their employ and while utilizing their research facilities?”

  “Certainly,” she said impatiently. “I’m practically positive of it, even if I can’t prove it. And there’s something else I’m morally certain of, too, even if I can’t prove it, either. That is, that Ralph came to his senses, after finding out what sort of woman Nora was, and, as soon as the divorce was final, he was going to quit Pops and go back to Vulcan and admit he was wrong.”

  “If that were true,” said Shayne absently, “it would remove any motive at all for Vulcan desiring his death. If they were aware of his intention,” he added after a moment’s hesitation.

  “I know. And while you’re being logical about it you can go right ahead and mark that down as a motive for Pops. Now that Ralph is dead, the lawsuit will probably drag along for months or years and probably end in some sort of compromise. Don’t think I haven’t thought about that,” she went on fiercely, a hint of color coming into her white face. “It’s all I have thought about since I heard about Ralph this morning. That, and where Pops was last night when it happened.” She lifted her coffee cup with trembling fingers and drained it, while her eyes met his in a cold blue challenge.

  Shayne took a sip of cognac and didn’t say anything.

  “So I’m an unnatural daughter,” Ann Margrave resumed in a biting voice, and set her empty cup in the saucer with a clatter. “All right, I am. I hate Pops. Do you hear me? I hate his guts. If he did do it I hope they hang him.” She blinked her lids and twin tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away.

  “Do you think it possible that Ralph might have dropped the divorce action and gone back to Nora?” Shayne asked.

  “No. She had done her best to persuade him. But Ralph wasn’t having any more. She had managed to twist him around her little finger once before when he was fed up and ready to quit, but this time it was for sure.”

  “This first time you mention, was that on account of the anonymous letters?”

  Ann Margrave didn’t try to hide her surprise at Shayne’s abrupt question, but she parried with one of her own. “So Pops came clean with just everything?” Her tone was one of ironic disgust.

  “Perhaps not everything,” Shayne said easily. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know that Ralph tried to laugh them off, but I think they started him wondering.”

  “What did the letters accuse her of?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things. Probably all true.”

  “Including her previous affair with your father?”

  “Yes. He and Pops had a big row about that, and, of course, Pops swore up and down it was all a big lie. After the way she behaved with Ted Granger, I guess Ralph realized the letters weren’t lies, after all.”

  “And they never discovered who wrote the anonymous letters?”

  “No.” She looked at him steadily, but spots of high color flared in her cheeks. “They never did.”

  “So now we come to Ted Granger. Fill me in on him and exactly what happened.”

  “Ted’s all right,” she said carelessy. “Sort of an innocent bystander and an awful fool. He’s Ralph’s cousin and doesn’t amount to much, and there was this weekend party where Nora got tight and made a terrific play for him. But, when they got caught and Ralph used that as grounds for divorce, Ted went all heroic and noble and took all the blame on himself. Maybe one night with Nora was enough to make a man fall in love with her,” she went on, her scarlet lips curling with contempt. “Ted went mooning around afterward declaring he would marry her if she would have him. But she didn’t want him. She wanted Ralph, or at least a good hunk of Ralph’s money as alimony.”

  “Did Ralph have much money?”

  “Only what he made from his invention. Of course, Pops says it’s worth millions.”

  “But not if Ralph admitted what you think is the truth and turned it back to Vulcan.”

  “No. Though I think there would have been some sort of settlement. They’re always generous about giving a share in a discovery to whoever makes it.”

  “Your father says no
t,” Shayne commented dryly. “According to him, Ralph made several valuable discoveries during the years he worked in the Vulcan laboratories, and received nothing from them.”

  “That’s just a lot of talk,” she stated flatly, “to make it sound as though Ralph had a good excuse for leaving them and going in with him.”

  “Did you know that Nora had planned to make one last effort to get her husband back?”

  “No. But I’m not surprised. I know she came down once before to work on him, but he wasn’t having any.”

  “Then you didn’t realize she was in Miami planning to see her husband last night?”

  One look at Ann’s face was enough to convince him she hadn’t known. “Then Nora must have done it herself,” she burst out excitedly. “Well, if you really want to solve this case, Mike Shayne, you go after her instead of Vulcan.”

  “What would her motive be?”

  “She wouldn’t need a motive,” Ann Margrave told him promptly, “except having Ralph spurn her again. She’s got a vicious temper. You find out where she was when it happened. That’s all.”

  Shayne grimaced and emptied his cognac glass. He didn’t think it would be polite to tell the girl that it looked very much as though Nora Carrol had been in his bedroom at just about the right time. Instead he asked, “Who else might have known about Nora’s plan?”

  “Pops, I guess. And Mr. Bates, the lawyer.”

  “How about Ted Granger?”

  Ann’s eyes had grown dull and her tone was apathetic when she said, “I don’t know why she would have told him. Unless maybe just to stop him from mooning around her.”

  “What sort of man is Bates?”

  “He’s all right Just a lawyer.”

  “Do you think Bates believes Carrol discovered the plastic after leaving Vulcan?” Shayne pressed her.

  “Who knows what a lawyer believes?” she said with disinterest.

  Shayne looked at his watch, caught the waiter’s eye, and beckoned to him, then asked, “Can I take you back to the Roney?”

  “What for?” she demanded. “This is just as good a place to get tight as any.”