16
Getting off the elevator, Michael Shayne strode across the hall and mechanically reached for the knob of the door lettered:
MICHAEL SHAYNE
Investigations
The knob turned but the door refused to open. He cursed himself methodically and in a low voice because he had forgotten momentarily that Lucy Hamilton would not be inside the office waiting for him, and he unlocked the door and flung it open with savage force.
The small anteroom was empty and silent. Lucy’s chair in front of the typewriter desk beyond the low railing was empty, and the silence was oppressive.
There were deep trenches in Shayne’s cheeks and his jaws were set together tightly as he turned away after one fleeting glance at Lucy’s desk and walked through the door into his private office. He circled the big desk to a filing cabinet against the wall, pulled out a drawer on its ball-bearings and lifted a half-full bottle of cognac from it. He thumped the bottle down on the desk in front of his swivel chair, turned to a water cabinet and got down two paper cups which he fitted one inside the other. He filled the inner cup to the brim with amber liquid from the bottle and settled his rangy figure into the swivel chair. With a lighted cigarette dangling between the first two fingers of his left hand, he took a long drink of brandy and closed his eyes.
Distorted images danced before his eyes as he fought to concentrate on the problem at hand. Lucy Hamilton seated at her desk in the outer room. Henrietta Rogell in her mannish bathrobe last night pouring a heavy slug of whiskey into her glass. Lucy seated across from him at a white-clothed table, her brown eyes dancing with life and gaiety as she lifted a champagne glass to her lips. Anita Rogell standing against him last night and her warmly-timbred voice telling him wantonly, “I want you, Michael Shayne”. Lucy Hamilton seated sedately at one end of the sofa in her own apartment with bottles and glasses on the low coffee table in front of her, shaking the brown curls back from her animated face while she leaned forward to pour him a final goodnight drink before shooing him out so she could go to bed. The stiffened body of a tiny Pekinese that appeared to be grinning at him. Lucy Hamilton…
Shayne jerked his eyes open angrily and glared across the silent office. His right hand instinctively strayed out to grasp the nested paper cups, and he had them halfway to his mouth when he grated, “Goddamn it to hell!” and set them down again without drinking.
Thus far he had done nothing about Lucy. Nothing at all. He was relying on the kidnapper to keep her alive as a hostage until the remains of John Rogell were consumed by fire and his murderer was positive that all evidence of murder had been consumed with the body.
After that—what?
Michael Shayne didn’t know.
He was no closer to a solution now than he had been when Henrietta first came to him more than twenty-four hours ago.
Marvin Dale? There was his suicide and the ambiguous note he had left behind. But if Marvin Dale had put the digitalis in Rogell’s milk—what about Lucy? Was it conceivable that Dale had snatched her and hidden her away, and then swallowed strychnine without mentioning a word about her in his farewell note?
No! Shayne told himself savagely. It wasn’t conceivable. Yet only Rogell’s killer would have a motive for snatching Lucy.
So Dale wasn’t the murderer.
Yet the man had committed suicide.
Or, had he?
Michael Shayne sat at his desk tensely, his eyes narrowed and burning across the room while he pondered every word and phrase of the suicide note which he had memorized. Somewhere, somehow, there was a clue in those scribbled words that eluded him. The answer was there. Some tiny portion of his subconscious mind had glimpsed that fact when he first read the words, but it refused to come through to him.
He growled another oath deep in his throat and forced himself to relax. To cease concentrating. To stop trying to force it out of his subconscious. If he could divert his thoughts into other channels—blank his mind away from the problem entirely—
He stretched out his arm and lifted the telephone and dialled Chief Will Gentry’s private number at police headquarters.
When Gentry answered, he asked briskly, “Any long distance calls for me, Will? From Colorado particularly?”
“Your man called here a little before twelve. He got hold of nothing positive in Central City except ancient gossip and strong suspicions among the townfolk that John Rogell and Betty Blair did have an affair in the old days. It was revived when he hired her to come to Miami as his housekeeper, and the town is buzzing again now that he’s left her that hunk of cash in his will. One other small thing, Mike. A lot of oldtimers agree that Henrietta was the aggressive, strong one in the early days, and that it was her vigor and drive that laid the groundwork for the Rogell fortune.”
“Not much there that we didn’t already know or suspect,” grumbled Shayne. “Anything else?”
“Nothing important. A preliminary report indicates that Dale swallowed a big batch of strychnine on top of one hell of a lot of liquor some time between midnight and dawn.”
“What do you make of the suicide note?”
“It bothers me. But, goddamn it, Mike, it’s undoubtedly genuine. It’s been examined microscopically by our expert. Same pen as was lying there, same notepaper. Handwriting is positively Dale’s, indicating great mental stress and probable alcoholic haze at the time of writing. Exactly what you would expect under the circumstances. What are you doing about Lucy?” Gentry ended abruptly.
“Funeral going off all right?” countered the redhead.
“So far as I know. I’ve got four men covering it and they haven’t reported anything. Goddamn it, Mike! I think it’s time we stepped in. If Lucy is…”
“You promised me until three o’clock.” Beads of sweat had formed on Shayne’s forehead and were coursing down the trenches in his cheeks.
“I know I did, you stubborn Mick. But I don’t see…”
“I don’t either,” Shayne interrupted him much more calmly than he felt. “I’m coming over, Will. I can’t just sit here…”
He dropped the receiver and slowly got to his feet. His glance fell on the half-filled cup on his desk and he reached for it, checked his big hand before he touched it and hesitated a long moment.
Then his lips came back from his teeth in a terrifying sort of grin, and he swept up the twin cups and downed the liquor in two gulps. He was getting childish, by God. Or senile, maybe. Any time Mike Shayne walked out of his office and left a half-finished drink on his desk it would be time for him to turn in his license.
And maybe it was at that.
But not quite yet. Not until three o’clock.
Not until he was convinced that Lucy—
17
Chief Will Gentry was seated alone at his desk stolidly munching on a ham sandwich and sipping from a container of black coffee when the detective walked in. There were some typewritten sheets shoved back carelessly in front of him, and beside his right hand lay Marvin Dale’s suicide note. Back from that was the box of notepaper and the ballpoint pen with which the note had been written.
Gentry looked up from studying the note with an impatient shrug of his broad shoulders. “Can’t keep my eyes off this thing,” he muttered. “Keep reading it over and over with the feeling it’s trying to say something to me that I don’t get.”
Shayne nodded, hooking his toe under the rung of a straight chair and dragging it close to the side of the chief’s desk. “I know. It’s a hunch that won’t break through.” He closed his eyes and recited the contents of the note, spacing the words carefully and avoiding giving any one of them special emphasis:
“I will write this note while I can. I love my sister and have always forgiven her anything she did because I was too weak to protest, but I can’t go on any longer. She is a sweet girl and after seeing her with Charles tonight I am revolted. Death holds no fears for me. John and Henrietta were old and mean and deserved to die. But this thing tonight is the last str
aw and I don’t want to go on living. Marvin Dale.”
He stopped speaking and the words hung in the silent air between the two men. Gentry took a gulp of coffee and wiped his thick lips with the back of his hand.
“Boil it right down, Mike, it doesn’t say anything. You keep thinking it must make sense and each sentence seems like it does, but when you add it up… what you got?”
Shayne said somberly, “A drunken rigmarole.”
“Sure, the guy was tight. But, like I say, you take each single sentence and it doesn’t sound so drunk. It’s when you put them all together…” Gentry wolfed the last bite of his lunch and spread out beefy hands in a helpless gesture.
Shayne said, “I know.” He lit a cigarette and leaned forward, narrowing his eyes at the note, the torn halves placed in perfect juxtaposition and fastened with scotch tape. His right hand reached out and toyed with the octagonal ballpoint pen which the experts declared had written the note. “No fingerprints on this thing, I suppose.”
“You know better’n that, Mike. Sure, there was a whorl or two. But what the hell? You know all the chemical tests they got. That pen wrote the note… and it’s Marvin Dale’s handwriting.”
“On a sheet of paper out of this box.” Shayne idly lifted a sheet between thumb and forefinger and weighed it thoughtfully. It was thick, and somewhat creamy in color, a single unfolded sheet about five by eight inches in size, obviously expensive, but with no monogram or engraved heading.
He stared at it for a long time, with blue smoke curling up from the tip of his cigarette past his narrowed eyes. A curiously blank expression spread over his rugged features, much as though a sort of self-hypnosis gripped him, and then very carefully, very deliberately, he placed the blank sheet of paper exactly beside the mended note, meticulously lining up the two sides so they touched, and putting the top edges in perfect alignment.
In an absolutely flat voice, he said, “Got it, Will. We should both have our heads examined.”
“What you got?” Gentry craned his neck to look.
Shayne’s forefinger stabbed down decisively to the bottom edges of the two sheets, mutely pointing out the fact that the sheet on which the note was written was a good quarter inch shorter than the unused sheet he had placed beside it.
“But they can’t be different!” exploded Gentry. “Same watermark and same thickness and color. They ran all sorts of tests…”
“But not the same size sheet,” Shayne pointed out. “That’s the one simple test your experts didn’t think about making, Will.”
“Even if it didn’t come from that same box, I don’t see what it gets us,” grumbled Gentry. “It’s still in Dale’s handwriting, and so…”
“I think I know exactly where it gets us.” Shayne’s voice was harsh with assurance. “Don’t you get it yet? It is the same paper, but… when the torn halves were pasted back together it doesn’t come out the same length.”
“You mean there’s one line missing out of the middle? One line that might change the whole meaning, if it was there? Yeah, but… but… Wait, Mike, Goddamnit! That can’t be right either. Those rough edges absolutely coincide. Even under a microscope. If they’d been torn twice in order to eliminate one line, they couldn’t still match up.”
Shayne said quietly, “Watch this, Will.” He took two fresh sheets from the box and lined them up meticulously on the desk so one lay exactly on top of the other. Then he gently moved the top sheet down a quarter of an inch, keeping the edges in alignment. Placing the palm of his left hand solidly across the lower portion of the two sheets so neither one could move, he took hold of the double edge between right thumb and forefinger and ripped the two sheets across just above the side of his hand.
Then he discarded the lower half of the top sheet and put it aside with the upper half of the bottom sheet. He asked, “Got any scotch tape?” and fitted the upper half of the top sheet exactly together with the torn edge of the lower half of the bottom sheet.
Gentry jerked open a drawer and got out a spool of tape, ripped off a small piece and fastened the two halves of the different sheets together while Shayne held them carefully.
Shayne said grimly, “There we are. Two torn halves that fit together so perfectly that a microscope couldn’t detect anything. But just about a quarter inch shorter than the original size.”
“The top and bottom parts of two different notes… torn across like you did so they match. But how in hell did the wording ever match up?” Gentry shifted his gaze to the note. “The top part doesn’t even end with a period. The sentence goes right on to the next part.”
“Looking just as though it was intended to be that way,” agreed Shayne. “That must have been pure coincidence. One that somebody noticed and was smart enough to take advantage of after he read both notes and realized the two parts could be made to sound like the same one, if no one suspected differently.”
“Why two notes? Both in Dale’s handwriting… ?”
Shayne shrugged. “Two drafts of the same note, maybe. The guy was drunk and under a lot of stress. Maybe he had some reason to write two notes. The second one might even have been addressed to someone else.”
“Then we’ll never know what they really said when placed in the right order.”
“Maybe not. But we do know damned well that both Charles and Anita were lying when they told us how the note got torn.” Shayne glanced at his watch, his eyes glittering with excitement. “That funeral ought to be about over. I want to be out there at the house when they get back.” He drummed the tips of his fingers on the desk, thinking hard.
“Have you got Harold Peabody’s office number?”
“It’s here some place in some notes.” Gentry scrabbled among the papers, found a list of names and addresses and read off the number to Shayne.
The detective dialled it, and when a woman’s voice answered, he asked for Mr. Peabody.
“I’m sorry he isn’t in just now. Could someone else be of help?”
Shayne said, “No. It’s a personal matter. When do you expect him?”
“Well, he’s attending a funeral, and I’m not sure…”
“Rogell. Of course,” said Shayne heartily. “Do you know what Harold planned to do afterward?”
“Why, yes.” The voice was noticeably warmer. “I believe he planned to go straight on out with Mrs. Rogell to hear the will read.”
Shayne breathed, “Thanks, honey,” and hung up. He leaped to his feet and told Gentry:
“Have Petrie and Donovan meet me at Rogell’s fast as they can make it.” He snatched up the note addressed to him and shoved it in his pocket, went out of the office fast.
18
There were three cars parked in front of the house when Shayne swung into the driveway. He pulled up behind them and leaped out, heard screaming rubber at the estate entrance and turned his head to see Petrie and Donovan on his heels in a radio cruiser.
He lifted one hand in greeting and hurried up the steps and across the porch. The two city detectives came panting up behind him as he put his finger on the electric button and held it there.
“What’s up, Mike?” demanded Donovan. “We got a flash from the chief…”
The door opened and Shayne jerked out, “Come in and clam up.” He shoved forward past the frightened and protesting maid, and they tramped in close behind him.
There were voices coming from the study beyond the archway on the right, and they ceased abruptly as Shayne entered through the open portières with the two policemen on his heels. He stopped just inside the archway and surveyed the small gathering with bleak eyes.
They were all there to hear John Rogell’s will read, he noted with satisfaction. Anita and Charles and Henrietta and Mrs. Blair. And Harold Peabody hovering behind Anita’s chair, and an elderly man who was a stranger to him, seated apart from the others with a legal-sized folder of papers bound in blue cardboard open on his knees.
They all stared at him in silence and in varying degrees of su
rprise, apprehension and defiance as he looked from one face to another.
Harold Peabody spoke first. He straightened his body into a sort of strut behind Anita’s chair, and spoke acidly, “This is a private conference, Mr. Shayne.”
“And I’m a private detective,” growled the redhead. He looked toward the elderly man who was obviously a lawyer and said, “Sorry to interrupt your proceedings, but I don’t think this will take very long.” He advanced toward Anita who shrank back from him in the depths of a big chair and looked small and defenceless, and stood towering over her as he said mercilessly, “I want the truth about this note signed by your brother’s name.” His hand came out of his pocket holding the crumpled note and he waved it in front of her face.
“I know you lied about it,” he told her conversationally. “I know you didn’t find it lying beside his body as you said, and I know it didn’t get torn in half the way you told me it did. Hell,” he went on in a tone of utter disgust, “it’s perfectly evident that this is two halves of two different notes. The only thing I don’t know is what each note said when put together correctly, but I’ve got a damned good idea that both of them contained evidence that you murdered your husband, and that’s why you got Charles to lie for you to help you pass this off as a real note.”
“Don’t answer him, Anita.” The chauffeur was on his feet instantly, his voice thick with rage. “He’s trying to trick you. He don’t know…”
Shayne didn’t glance aside. He said sharply, “Shut him up, Donovan.”
The big detective moved behind him swiftly with drawn revolver and Shayne continued to stand over Anita with his eyes boring into hers.
“If the original notes didn’t say that, you’d better tell us what they did say. You’ve covered up for Charles as far as you can,” he went on remorselessly. “Now you’d better start thinking about your own neck. Or maybe it’s too late for that. Was it you who killed your own brother after you realized you could fix a note so it’d look like suicide?”
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