One Night with Nora

by Brett Halliday

  “Reckon he’s dead?” the old man asked impassively.

  Shayne brushed past him to the bed. He touched the man’s bare shoulders and, finding the flesh warm, flopped him over on his back. He stood looking down at a thin, sallow, unshaven face sparsely whiskered, wide-open mouth, and closed eyes.

  “Dead drunk,” Shayne told him shortly. “Thanks. I’ll take care of him.”

  “Well, I do declare,” the old man said. “So that’s how come he didn’t answer.”

  Shayne caught the clerk’s arm, propelled him out the door, closed and locked it after him, then turned to look swiftly around the room. A corked fifth of cheap whisky, about one-fourth full, lay on the floor beside a pair of shoes and socks. A brown suit and white shirt were piled on a chair.

  When he lifted the coat to examine it he saw the Argus flash camera in a leather case. He found a shabby billfold in the inner coat pocket. It contained John P. Ludlow’s business card, and he didn’t look further. He went to the window and raised the shade to the top, opened the window as wide as it would go, then stalked into the bathroom and turned cold water into the tub.

  Returning to the bed, he leaned over and shook Ludlow vigorously, but all he got was a slobbery mumble. The eyes stayed shut and the body limp.

  He stepped back and surveyed the photographer with a frown of disgust. He was thin to the point of scrawniness, with sharp elbows and big-boned wrists, lean shanks, knobby knees, and splayed feet. Cords stood out on either side of his sunken throat, and his open mouth showed yellowed teeth with two lowers missing in front.

  Shayne lit a cigarette and went to the bathroom door to watch the level of water slowly rise in the tub. When it was half full he returned to the bed, lifted the limp figure in his arms, carried it into the bathroom, and dumped it into the tub.

  Ludlow thrashed and shivered in the cold water. His eyes came open and he stared about wildly, mumbling curses. He tried to grab the edge of the tub to pull himself up.

  Shayne shoved him back each time he tried to get out, and finally held him down until his lips began to turn blue. Then he caught Ludlow’s arm and lifted him to his feet. He helped the shaking man to remove his sodden shorts, steadied him when he stepped onto the bath mat, handed him a towel, and said curtly, “Rub yourself down with this.”

  In the bedroom, Shayne retrieved the whisky bottle and a glass that had rolled under the bed, poured a good two inches of liquor into the glass, and returned to the bathroom. The photographer was sitting on the toilet seat with his head lolling back against the tank.

  “Snap out of it,” Shayne demanded sharply. “Here, drink this if you think you can hold it down.”

  Ludlow looked up, his teeth chattering, and tears streaming down his cheeks. He tried to take the glass, but his hands trembled too violently to hold it. Shayne put an arm around his shoulders, pressed the glass to his lips, and ordered, “Swallow.”

  Ludlow gulped half the whisky down, shuddered, and sputtered. “God! ’S horrible.”

  “Finish it.” He held one hand at the back of Ludlow’s head and pressed the glass against his lips again. The photographer swallowed mechanically. His trembling gradually subsided, and color came into his face.

  Hauling him roughly to his feet, Shayne took a towel and began rubbing his body vigorously, pummeling any fleshy spot he could find with his fingers. He wondered how, in the name of God, a buxom blonde could fall for a guy like this!

  When Ludlow started howling with pain from the redhead’s rough treatment, Shayne shoved him into the bedroom and onto the bed, pulled the sheet over him, and growled, “Stay there and relax. When you’re over the shakes we’ll talk.”

  The photographer blinked watery eyes at him and said, “You’re Mike Shayne,” in a feeble, fearful voice. “What’s happened? What went wrong last night?” His teeth started chattering again.

  Shayne poured the rest of the whisky in the glass and held it out to Ludlow, who shuddered and said, “God, no!” Then he dragged himself to a sitting position, took the glass, and drained it. After a period of gagging and screwing his thin face into a grimace of distaste, he asked, “How’d you find me here? What do you want with me now?”

  “I want some information.” Shayne tossed the man’s clothes on the foot of the bed and sat down on the chair. “How did you recognize me just now?”

  “Saw your picture in the papers often enough. I tried to phone you last night after I found Carrol dead. Somebody answered your phone but he didn’t sound like you.”

  “Start back at the beginning,” Shayne ordered. “The whole Carrol deal. So that we won’t be at cross-purposes, I should explain that I never even heard of Carrol until after he was dead.”

  “Hold on,” Ludlow protested. “When you called me yesterday—”

  “I didn’t call you,” Shayne cut in sharply. “But I gather that somebody did—someone who claimed to be me.”

  “Sure. Said it was Mike Shayne calling, and he had a job for last night.” He paused, squinted at the redhead, asked, “Is this straight? It wasn’t you?”

  “No. That’s why I want to know all about it. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”

  “There isn’t much,” he mumbled. “I thought ’twas you, naturally. I didn’t ask any questions. He said there was fifty bucks in it for one picture—a bedroom picture in the dark—so I figured a divorce setup. Number two-sixteen at that hotel, he said, at exactly two-twenty in the morning. The door to the sitting-room was to be standing open, and I was to walk in and go straight back to the bedroom, as quiet as possible, and get my one shot and beat it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shayne interjected. “Are you positive of the apartment number? Two-sixteen? Could it have been one-sixteen and you made a mistake?”

  “Not a chance. I can’t afford to make mistakes in my business. I wrote down the number and repeated it back to you—him. I got there early and cased the joint. I found a side entrance and stairway where I could get up and down without anybody seeing me-from the lobby. Then I went and had a drink and came back at two-fifteen and went up. It was exactly two-twenty when I went in.”

  “You didn’t meet anybody going up or down the stairs?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “And the door of two-sixteen was open?”

  “That’s right. Standing ajar like I was told it would be. I had my camera ready and went in. Couldn’t hear a sound from the bedroom, but that wasn’t any of my business. I figured maybe they was busy—you know. So I went to the doorway and set off my flash. My God! I was scared stiff when I saw him in the flashlight. Alone, and dead on the bed with blood all over.

  “I beat it fast,” he continued after a brief pause during which he covered his face with both hands and pressed his eyes with his finger tips. “All I could think about was staying in the clear by phoning the police. Then, if they did find out, they couldn’t say I covered up. Later, I got to thinking, and tried to call you at a number I got from Information. Somebody answered and said it was you but the voice didn’t sound right. I thought it was the cops and hung up.” He paused again and regarded Shayne with puzzled eyes. “Say, it was you that time. It was your voice.”

  “That’s right. You mean my voice sounded different from the one who first called you. How was it different?”

  “I dunno,” he said, his bloodshot eyes reflective. “Sort of heavier, yours was. Not so much rasp in it. Anyhow, I got scared and hung up and thought maybe I’d better hide out. So I checked in here. If it wasn’t you that called me yesterday, who was it?”

  “That,” said Shayne with a frown, “is one of half a dozen sixty-four-dollar questions. Exactly what did the man say?”

  “Just what I told you. That it was Mike Shayne calling and he had this job for last night.”

  “How were you supposed to contact him?”

  “I wasn’t. He didn’t give me any number or any way to contact him. I asked him about it, and he said I wasn’t, on any account, to try and call him or
anything. That his part in it was strictly on the Q.T.”

  “Where were you to deliver your picture?”

  “To a lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware. I’ve got the name and address written down.”

  “Bates?”

  “That’s it. Bates. He said the lawyer would pay me for the job. Most jobs like that I’d want cash before doing it, but knowing Mike Shayne’s reputation I wasn’t worried. You know who killed Carrol?”

  “I don’t know one goddamned thing about it,” Shayne growled. He stood up and looked at his watch. It was noon. “Here’s what you’d better do,” he continued after a moment’s thought. “Relax for a while and get rid of that hang-over. Then go straight to police headquarters with your camera and the picture you got last night. See Will Gentry, the chief, and tell him exactly what you told me. Leave out the part about phoning me last night and about this talk we’ve had. Just tell him you got frightened and holed up with a quart of whisky and passed out. As soon as you woke up sober, you realized it was best to go to the police and get it off your chest. He’ll ask you if you can recognize my voice over the phone and stuff like that, and if he makes a test I hope you’ll tell him the other voice was different. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Ludlow weakly. “Say, how did you find me here?”

  “Don’t blame your blonde at the studio,” Shayne told him pleasantly. “She did her best to cover up for you. I outsmarted her, that’s all.”

  Ludlow sighed and lay back on the pillow, and Shayne went out, leaving him staring up at the grimy ceiling.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chief will Gentry was seated alone in a rear booth of a small restaurant a block from police headquarters when Shayne entered a short time later. He looked up from a cup of jellied beef broth and frowned as the redhead slid into the seat opposite him.

  “Doc Meeker tells me you dodged out on having that head wound examined, Mike,” Gentry rumbled.

  Shayne picked up the menu. “I had a hot lead that had to be followed up fast,” he answered. “I did leave my car in the lot for you.”

  “What was the lead?” Gentry demanded.

  “Margrave. Ralph Carrol’s business partner.”

  “Oh? Trying to sick you onto the Vulcan angle, eh?” he asked with distaste and disinterest.

  “Yeh,” he muttered, running his eye over the menu. He beckoned the waiter, ordered lamb stew and coffee, then continued to the chief. “Did you talk to Margrave?”

  “He called me early this morning and talked a blue streak about soulless corporations who keep an army of gunmen on the payroll to wipe out small competitors. I sent Lieutenant Hanson over to see him, but it sounds like hogwash to me. You go for it?”

  “He made out a fair case,” said Shayne reflectively. “I checked around afterward and got a slightly different slant.” Without mentioning Ann Margrave’s name or her statements about the personal relationships between herself, her father, and Nora Carrol, he outlined the possibility that Carrol might have been planning to drop his defense of the lawsuit and thus leave his partner out of the picture.

  “If this were true and Margrave knew it,” he pointed out, “it gives him a much stronger motive for murder than Vulcan. Actually, Carrol’s death will have produced exactly the opposite result from the one Margrave tried to hand us. The suit will probably drag along for months or years, while he continues to manufacture his plastic. I’d check Margrave’s alibi carefully if I were you.”

  The waiter brought a plate of cold cuts and a bottle of beer and set them before Gentry. “We’ll check, all right,” he told Shayne. “What still bothers me is the crazy hookup with you last night. The woman being given the key to your room by mistake or design, and Bates’s insistence that you were working for him. Tied with your flat denial, and the removal of Bates’s correspondence with you from his files; what in hell does it add up to, Mike?”

  “I’m beginning to swing around to the belief that somehow or other Mrs. Carrol and Bates are telling the truth and that they believed they were dealing with me.”

  “A while ago you were working hard to prove it would have been impossible for anyone to impersonate you.”

  “Yeh,” he muttered absently. “I still don’t see how it was worked. Suppose somebody finds out that Bates is thinking of hiring a private detective in Miami for a job, and that he is inclined toward me. Suppose this man simply has a letterhead printed, gives his own address instead of mine, and writes Bates a letter saying he’s heard about the job and is willing to take it on. Bates would naturally reply to the printed address and I would never know a damned thing about it.”

  “A pretty elaborate hoax just to collect a small fee,” said the chief.

  “I agree. If that were the only thing that came out of the impersonation. But don’t forget that the setup actually culminated in murder.”

  “You mean it was planned that way in the beginning?”

  “I don’t know.” Shayne spread out his big hands. “I don’t know a damned thing more than you do. Carrol was murdered at just about the time his wife was supposed to be with him. The only reason she didn’t discover his body is that she had been sent to my room instead of to his.”

  The waiter came with his order, and when he went away Gentry said, “So you think it was pure accident that she had the wrong key?”

  Shayne spooned a portion of stew onto his plate, took a mouthful, and chewed it with relish. “I just don’t know what to think,” he confessed. “I certainly don’t believe it was pure coincidence that Carrol was murdered just a few minutes before she was slated to slip into his bed. Somebody evidently had the right key. I understand he was murdered in his bed. That doesn’t sound as though he got up to let his killer in.” He buttered a hard roll, took a bite, and chewed ruminatively.

  “Who is in a position to pull this impersonation of you?”

  Shayne shrugged. “Margrave, for one. He must have been aware that Mrs. Carrol was arranging with Bates to hire me to locate her husband. Being Carrol’s partner, he probably knew where Carrol was all the time. He may even have offered to look me up for Bates when he came down here. That would make a letter from me to Bates, on a forged letterhead, perfectly plausible. Margrave was on the ground, and it looks as though he might have had a motive.”

  “Maybe you’ve got something there, Mike. But what about the man who got you on the bayfront and tried to kill you? That wasn’t Margrave. You saw him.”

  “It certainly wasn’t Margrave,” Shayne agreed. “But he could have hired somebody for that while he was stealing the letter back from Mrs. Carrol’s hotel room. Then, he could have flown to Wilmington, and stolen the rest of the fake letters from Bates’s office so there’d be no way of tracing them to him.”

  “Sounds complicated as hell,” Gentry growled, “but I’ll check with the airlines to see if he did make such a trip.”

  “He wouldn’t have used his own name. Much more likely, just to complicate matters further, he’d have bought a ticket in my name.”

  Gentry laid his knife and fork on his empty plate and said sourly, “I guess that’s out. I checked this morning with the only line flying a schedule that would fit, and they haven’t reported back yet.”

  Shayne avoided the chief’s gaze when he asked casually, “What results did your boys get on my car? You willing to accept my story about being creased by a bullet and staying knocked out for five hours?”

  “I’ll accept it,” said Gentry, “unless further evidence turns up to disprove it. They didn’t get any fingerprints, but everything else reads the way you told it. If you did arrange the bullet hole and the blood on the cushion, it was a pretty damned elaborate setup, and I don’t know when you had time to do it and get up to Wilmington and back.”

  “Thanks,” said Shayne gravely. “Then I guess you won’t throw me in jail if I tell you that a man using my name did fly to Wilmington and back early this morning.”

  He held up a hand to cut off Gentry’s grunt of surprise. “The ai
rline called my office right after you’d left,” he explained swiftly, changing the facts a little to soften what he had done. “You’d left my number for them to call, you know, and the clerk thought it was you on the phone and gave me the report before I realized what it was. A man who said he was Michael Shayne flew to Wilmington at four-twenty and returned at nine-ten, giving him just about enough time in Wilmington to burglarize Bates’s office and get back.”

  “Damn it, Mike!” Gentry exploded. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Hold it a minute, Will. The thing was dumped into my lap without my asking for it, and you know the mood you were in about then. You would have had to arrest me while you investigated further. And I had already had the call from Margrave that sounded like an important lead. But I’m giving it to you for what it’s worth now.”

  “Margrave,” rumbled Gentry. “He fits like a glove. He is familiar with Bates’s office, probably knows just where his files are kept.”

  “Right. Now if you can get hold of the employee who sold the plane ticket, and the hostesses who flew up and back, and if any of them can identify Margrave, we’ll have a case.”

  “But there’s still one thing that doesn’t make sense,” Gentry protested. “If Margrave had been impersonating you, aren’t you the last person in the world he’d call in to work on the case? He’d stay as far away from you as possible.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a murderer called me in on a case, hoping I’d pin it on somebody else,” Shayne pointed out.

  “We damn sure have some questions to ask him,” said Gentry firmly. “And right now I’d better get back to my office. Bates is due to fly in from Wilmington about now.”

  “That’s one session I want to sit in on.” Shayne hastily finished his lunch, and they went out together.

  At headquarters the chief stopped at Homicide to order an immediate and thorough investigation of Margrave, with particular emphasis on his movements since the preceding midnight. From there, they went back through the corridor to Gentry’s private office where they found Bates waiting for them accompanied by Patrolman Hagen who had been detailed to meet him at the airport.