Die Like a Dog ms-35

by Brett Halliday

  They pointed out, however, that this did not necessarily mean they were guilty of anything more than possibly having had some sort of affair under the old man’s nose. Certainly, it was nothing on which to base a suspicion of murder.

  Also, while trying to interview Marvin Dale in his drunken condition, he had openly admitted his pleasure in Rogell’s death, muttering that things would be different around the house now, and strongly intimating that his sister’s millionaire husband had disapproved of his sponging on her and had practically ordered her to cease providing him with funds.

  And, of course, there was Henrietta. But you could see that her nose was completely out of joint and that she deeply resented Anita and would stop at nothing to harm her.

  So there you were, the detectives said, and how in hell can you make murder out of any of that?

  They had turned in a shorter report on the death of Daffy. Again, they had been sent to the Rogell house after an almost hysterical call from Henrietta insisting that this time someone had tried to murder her. Again, they had found exactly the same group of people present, with Marvin a little more sober and slightly more coherent this time, and all of them somewhat drawn together and somewhat on the defensive, as they related Henrietta’s impassioned harangue shortly before dinner, during which she had accused them all, singly or in unholy conspiracy, of having poisoned her brother. She had warned them flatly that she was going to demand an autopsy on John’s body, and was prepared to take whatever legal measures were necessary to force such action.

  Then they had sat down at the dining table for dinner together and Henrietta had been served her special plate of creamed chicken from a chafing dish that had stood on the sideboard for half an hour, the others all sharing a dish of curried shrimp because Henrietta’s allergy to seafood was well-known to all.

  None of them at the table, it appeared, had noticed Henrietta when she surreptitiously removed some of her chicken to a saucer and put it down on the floor beside her for Daffy. Indeed, Anita had insisted that she had done no such thing, and Peabody was quietly dubious as to whether she could have done so without being noticed… but anyhow the little dog had had convulsions and died almost at once… and Henrietta insisted she hadn’t eaten any of her chicken.

  But the last scrap of it had vanished by the time the officers arrived, and even the chafing dish and Henrietta’s plate and the dog’s saucer had been washed clean.

  Sure, that looked suspicious, they both agreed, but you had to blame Mrs. Blair for it because it appeared no one had ordered her to do so, and it was pretty hard to suspect the plump and pleasant housekeeper of murder and attempted murder.

  But the swift burial of Daffy was a somewhat different matter. All of the witnesses agreed that Anita had become hysterical after her pet’s death, and called Charles in and ordered him to take Daffy’s dead body away from her sight and bury the bitch at once. Her explanation of this somewhat suspicious action was that she had a deep-rooted phobia about death and corpses and could not stand the sight or thought of them.

  But when the detectives pointed out that it would clarify matters and either prove or disprove Henrietta’s contention that her chicken had been poisoned if they could take the dog’s body for analysis, Anita had arrogantly denied the need to disprove Henrietta’s absurd charge, and had flatly ordered Charles not to show the detectives where Daffy was buried.

  “So, there you have it,” Petrie summed up the situation with a shrug. “Sure, it looked suspicious but we couldn’t force them to show us the dog’s grave. Maybe we could have taken it into court and got a search warrant, but Will Gentry didn’t think so.”

  Shayne nodded thoughtfully and said, “Let’s go back to Rogell’s death. Check your report and read me exactly what Peabody said about his leaving the couple together upstairs.”

  Petrie shuffled some typewritten pages clipped together and said, “Let’s see. Here it is.” He cleared his throat and began reading:

  “Mr. Rogell and I concluded our business shortly before midnight and were smoking a final cigar when Mrs. Rogell came in from the bathroom, carrying a thermos jug and a cup, and a bottle containing her husband’s heart medicine which I knew he took every night. She was dressed in a negligee, and was very sweet, but wifely and firm, when she insisted it was time for John’s medicine and I would have to go. She put the cup and jug on a bedside table, and measured out his medicine with an eye-dropper into the cup. I said good night to them both and went out while she was pouring hot chocolate into the cup.”

  Petrie stopped and looked up. “Want me to go on?”

  Shayne said, “No. But I do want to get it straight in my mind about that thermos jug. The way I understand it, Mrs. Blair fixed the chocolate drink in the kitchen as was her custom, and left it on the dining table about eleven o’clock before she retired.”

  “That’s the way she told it,” Donovan said. “They all said she did it that way every night, and that it was understood Anita would take it up at midnight and give the old man his daily dose of medicine… and from some other things that was said we got the idea she was maybe gonna give him his daily dose of something else along with it.” He snickered. “Isn’t that right, Jim?”

  “Yeh. She’d be the one to do that little thing… just in case the chauffeur didn’t give her all she wanted.” Petrie looked at Shayne, “You’re thinking there might have been something else in his cup of hot milk besides medicine?”

  Shayne said, “He died half an hour after drinking it. It would have been smart to grab the jug and the cup he drank from and have them analyzed.”

  “But that doctor swore there was nothing to indicate poisoning. Said it was exactly the way he had expected the old boy to kick off.”

  “But you did have Henrietta screaming murder,” Shayne reminded him mildly.

  “That old biddy,” snorted Donovan. “You could see she plumb hated Anita’s guts, and you don’t pay much heed to that kind of raving.”

  Shayne said, “I’m not blaming you boys. But it’s different with me. I’ve got a big fat fee riding on the off-chance I can prove it was murder. And the way it stacks up… anybody in the house that evening had the opportunity to put something in the thermos jug while it was sitting on the dining table downstairs.”

  “Except maybe Henrietta, the way I remember it,” said Petrie doubtfully. “And Peabody, too. I don’t remember whether he mentioned leaving the old man’s room during that hour or not. Do you, Terance?”

  “I don’t think he mentioned it one way or the other. But he wouldn’t of, of course, if he had slipped out of Rogell’s room and downstairs to poison his milk.”

  Petrie was flipping through the pages of the typewritten report again, pausing to glance at a paragraph, and then turning on.

  “Right here, Peabody says, ‘I was with Mr. Rogell in his upstairs sitting room from ten o’clock until midnight when Mrs. Rogell came in, and we were undisturbed during that period.’”

  “So that don’t prove nothing,” Donovan pointed out again. “Rogell ain’t alive to say it ain’t so.”

  “Here’s Henrietta,” said Petrie, reading, “‘I retired to my own suite about ten-thirty. Mrs. Blair and Charles were in the kitchen where she was warming John’s midnight milk. I heard Mrs. Blair come up about half an hour later, and I stepped out in the hallway to intercept her and ask if I might accompany her up to the third floor to get a book which she had promised to lend me. We went up together, and I remained with her, talking, until we heard Anita screeching that John was dying. We hurried down together and found John…’”

  Petrie broke off. “That takes care of her during the hour the jug sat on the dining table. And the housekeeper, too, because Mrs. Blair corroborated Henrietta’s story exactly.”

  “But she could have put something in the milk when she fixed it. Before she went up at eleven,” Timothy Rourke pointed out.

  Shayne said, “Right. And so could Charles have slipped something in the jug while he was in
the kitchen and Mrs. Blair was busy. And Anita and Marvin were downstairs together during the hour before midnight. Counting Peabody, who could have left Rogell for a time, we have five people who had access to the jug of hot milk before Rogell drank it.”

  “What’s the use kicking it around now?” demanded Petrie. “The old boy is going to be burned to a crisp at noon, and if there ever was any evidence of murder inside him, it’ll be destroyed.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to move fast,” said Shayne with a driving intensity behind his words. He glanced at his watch and calculated swiftly that it was just a few minutes before eight o’clock in Denver, Colorado. He dragged a worn address book from his pocket and checked an old entry, then told the others, “Sit tight right here. I’m going to make a fast phone call from Gentry’s office, and then we’ll all get on our horses.”

  He strode through the connecting door and found Gentry talking to a young patrolman who stood stiffly at attention beside the chief’s desk. Shayne said, “I’ve got to make a call, Will,” picked up a telephone from his desk and got the police operator. He said crisply, “Person-to-person in Denver, Colorado. Felix Ritter. Here’s an old telephone number I have for him.” He read the number from his book and lowered one hip to the corner of Gentry’s desk while he waited. Impersonally, and with only a tiny part of his mind, he listened to Chief Gentry chewing out the patrolman for some minor infraction of regulations while the long distance connection was being made, and when he heard Ritter’s voice on the other end, he said incisively:

  “Mike Shayne in Miami, Felix. Can you get out to Central City fast?”

  “Mike? Sure I can. There’s a new road since you were here, and…”

  “Fast as you can make it,” interrupted Shayne. “Write this down. I want any gossip or scandal from the natives about a Mrs. Betty Blair who used to run a rooming house there where the millionaire miner, John Rogell, hung out while he was making his fortune. Find out how friendly they were in the old days… and what people thought when Mr. Blair died and the widow came to Miami to work as John Rogell’s housekeeper. Got it? Here’s an angle. He left her fifty thousand bucks in his will.”

  “Sure, Mike. Rogell just died, huh? In Miami? Remember reading how he got his start in Central City.”

  “Fast as you can make it, Felix. I need any damned thing you can pick up and relay to me by twelve o’clock. Make a collect call to the Chief of Police here. Will Gentry. Before noon.”

  Felix Ritter in Denver said, “Will do,” and Shayne hung up. The patrolman was on his way out, and Shayne told Gentry, “You’ll be getting a call about Mrs. Blair from Central City before noon. I’ll be checking with you…”

  Another telephone on Gentry’s desk interrupted him. The chief scooped it up and said, “Yes?” He listened a moment, lifting a beefy hand at Shayne, his rumpled eyelids moving up and down slowly. He hung up and told Shayne, “Let’s get out to the Rogell place with Petrie and Donovan. Marvin Dale committed suicide out there last night. And left a suicide note addressed to you.”

  13

  In Shayne’s car, he and Rourke followed the screaming siren of Chief Gentry’s limousine through downtown traffic and out Brickel Boulevard to the Rogell estate. There were no other cars parked in front of the house, and the two men trotted up the stairs and across the porch behind the chief and his two detectives.

  A white-faced maid opened the door for them immediately, and Mrs. Blair hovered in the wide hallway behind her, wringing her hands and with tear streaks on her broad face.

  “This way,” she directed them. “Up the stairs here. I just can’t believe it. Poor Mr. Dale. Who’d ever have thought he’d do a terrible thing like this.”

  The five men trooped beside her silently up the curving stairway where she turned to the right to an open doorway with Charles standing in front of it. He was in his shirtsleeves and without a tie, his hair uncombed and a heavy growth of dark stubble on his square face. There was a bluish bruise on his cheekbone and a pad of gauze on the side of his mouth under a piece of surgical tape. He kept his lips pressed tightly together and his eyes had a sullen glare when he saw Shayne with the others. He stepped aside from the doorway without speaking, and they entered a medium-sized bedroom with the body of Marvin Dale sprawled on the floor in front of a drop-leaf table with an overturned straight chair beside him.

  The young man’s face was twisted and ghastly in death, his body stiffly contorted, indicating that he had writhed agonizingly on the floor before death mercifully ended his suffering.

  There was a bottle of whiskey standing on the table, with a highball glass beside it. The glass held a small residue of brownish liquid. Off to one side was a small, round, squat bottle with the warning skull and crossbones plainly imprinted on it. It was labeled “Strychnine” and there was also the word “Poison” in large type.

  Beside the bottle of strychnine were two torn pieces of note-paper that had been crumpled up and then smoothed and carefully placed one above the other, with torn edges in juxtaposition so that a superficial glance indicated that they were the torn top and bottom pieces of the same sheet of notepaper. A square box of the same notepaper and a ballpoint pen were on the extreme left-hand side of the table.

  While Gentry and the two detectives knelt beside Marvin Dale’s body, Shayne leaned over the table to read the scrawled handwriting on the sheet of torn notepaper:

  Shayne read the torn note through without touching either half of it. Gentry got to his feet from beside the body with a sigh and said, “All the signs of typical strychnine poisoning. He’s been dead for hours.” He stood beside Shayne and looked down at the note, mumbling the words half aloud as he read them. Then he turned to the doorway and ordered the chauffeur curtly, “Come in here.”

  Charles walked in with his chin up and shoulders squared.

  “Who are you?”

  “Charles Morton. The chauffeur.”

  “What do you know about this?”

  “He hasn’t been touched,” Charles said stolidly. “Nothing has been touched…” He paused and his gaze flickered down to the table and the torn note. “…except that piece of paper. Mrs. Rogell discovered her brother’s body about nine o’clock. The note was lying on the table… all in one piece. She called me in from my rooms over the garage and showed it to me. She wanted to tear it up before she called the police. I told her we couldn’t destroy suicide evidence and tried to snatch it from her. It got torn and crumpled as you see it, but I insisted the police had to see it… no matter what interpretation you put on what Marvin said.”

  “Very cooperative and law-abiding of you,” said Gentry harshly. He turned his gaze back to the torn paper and read aloud, “‘She is a sweet girl and after seeing her with Charles tonight I am utterly revolted.’ How do you expect me to interpret that?”

  “In the very nastiest way possible, I’m sure,” said Charles steadily.

  “How do you explain it?”

  “Marvin was drunk last night. No drunker than usual, but… staggering. After I had returned with a couple of pills Dr. Evans gave me, Mrs. Rogell became worried about my injuries and came out to the garage wearing her gown and robe just to be sure I needed no further medical attention. In his drunken state, Marvin saw her going out the back door and followed her up to my bedroom. He burst in on us and made a nasty scene… accusing his sister of all sorts of wild things. I chased him out, and then sent Mrs. Rogell back to the house. That’s why she wanted to destroy the note before anyone read it.”

  “Because it might be misinterpreted?” sneered Gentry. “Because other people might have the same idea about her presence in your bedroom late at night wearing a nightgown?”

  Charles said, “People do have nasty minds.”

  “What does he mean by saying…” Gentry turned to look down and read again: “‘John and Henrietta were old and mean and deserved to die.’”

  Charles said, “I don’t know. That’s for you to decide, isn’t it? He didn’t confide
in me.”

  “Do you think it’s a confession that he killed Rogell and tried to poison Henrietta?”

  “I think that’s for you to decide. Personally, I don’t know that Mr. Rogell was killed or that anyone tried to poison Miss Henrietta.”

  “Where did the strychnine come from?”

  “I think it’s a bottle from the garage that the gardener keeps for killing moles. It looks exactly like one that was always kept in the garage, and I checked after I saw it, and that bottle is gone.”

  “Then you want us to believe that Marvin was so upset by surprising his sister in your bed that he got this bottle of poison from the garage, brought it in and wrote that note, and then drank a dose of it?”

  “I don’t particularly want you to believe anything,” countered Charles doggedly. “There he is and there’s the note. I convinced Mrs. Rogell that it would be better to give you the note and tell you the exact truth instead of destroying it as she wanted to do.”

  “Because then we might have suspected his death wasn’t suicide?”

  Charles said sullenly, “I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. There’s already been too much loose talk around here by Miss Henrietta about poisoning and such. I had brains enough to realize that this… on top of all the other talk… would look mighty suspicious if he hadn’t left any note. That’s why I grabbed it away from her and wouldn’t let her tear it up.”

  “What happened to your face… and your two front teeth?” demanded Gentry.

  “Ask him.” Charles jerked his head toward Shayne. “He entered the grounds illegally last night planning to dig up the body of Mrs. Rogell’s pet dog, and he attacked me when I prevented him from doing it.”