The Corpse That Never Was Page 6

  “You mean because she didn’t try to slip in secretly as she’d done before?”

  “Yes. I can see it now. She didn’t care who saw her. So she just glared right at me and went in.”

  “Back to the first night. You didn’t see her leave?”

  “Not that night nor the next Friday either. The door stayed shut till after midnight both nights when I gave up and went to bed. And I never saw either of them go out the next day on Saturday either, when I was home from work and would have noticed them if they had.”

  “And you didn’t see him come or go during the week?”

  “Just on Friday evenings. It was the same all three times, including last night. He’d show up around nine o’clock or maybe a little after, and she’d turn up about ten on the dot.”

  “Did you speak to him again?”

  “I did not. Not after that first time. I left him strictly alone. I’m like that, Mr. Shayne. I’m not one to push in where I’m not wanted. If he wanted to carry on with a woman across the hall it wasn’t for me to interfere. Of course, If I’d known what I know now, maybe I could’ve… but you just never know, do you? Things like that going on right under your nose. My goodness! If I’d ever guessed. And when I heard that shotgun go off last night…”

  “No one ever does know,” Shayne agreed, getting to his feet thankfully and taking out a cigarette as he heard the elevator stop at that floor and the tramp of feet down the hall toward them. “I think that will be my men now. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Conrad. You’ve cleared up a lot of confusing points.”

  “Glad to do it,” she assured him, hurrying to the door behind him and peering out like a bright-eyed magpie at the two men from headquarters and the gangling reporter from the News as they stopped to greet Shayne in front of the other door. “What are you going to do in there now?” she asked avidly. “If you want I should come in, maybe I could…”

  “I think not, Mrs. Conrad,” Shayne told her firmly, opening the door and motioning the others in. “This room will have to remain sealed until the police are completely through with it.” He followed the trio in and shut the door behind him, not exactly slamming it, he thought to himself with a grin, but unmistakably closing it very firmly in her face.

  Sergeant Deitch and Garroway both carried their kits with them, looking like doctors’ emergency bags, and Rourke strolled forward into the living room with his hands in his pockets. Deitch was a middle-aged stubby man, with a cheerful, unlined face. He set his bag down and faced Shayne with a shade of truculence in his manner. “I still don’t know exactly what you want us to do here, Shayne. Like I said over the phone…”

  Shayne said quickly, “What we’re going to do right now is to pretend there weren’t any suicide notes to conveniently solve the case for us. Both of you were here last night and saw the two bodies. Naturally, all of us reconstructed the events leading up to death in the light of what the notes told us. But suppose we’d come on them cold. There are a lot of things you two would have done that the lieutenant didn’t bother to do last night.

  “Sergeant, I want you to check everything in this entire apartment for prints. The place was vacant for a week before Lambert moved into it, and probably had a thorough cleaning during that vacancy. He hasn’t had any maid so far as I know. So any prints other than those of the two corpses may be important.”

  “There were half a dozen of us milling around in here last night,” Deitch pointed out stiffly.

  “That’s why I wanted you for the job. You were here and know just about what they may have handled. Besides, you’ve got a record of all their prints right at headquarters. It shouldn’t be difficult to check them out. I want to know if anyone else has been in here during the past three weeks… particularly last night. That window in the bedroom for instance, that was open last night when I broke in. And the fire escape outside.”

  “It rained about two o’clock this morning,” Deitch reminded him. “We won’t get anything from the fire escape.”

  Rourke chuckled from where he stood a few feet away, listening. “Mike figures there was somebody in here with them who persuaded the woman to drink poison and then rammed the shotgun barrel into Lambert’s mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “Listen,” said Deitch hotly. “I checked that gun last night. Fingerprints on the barrel. Angle it was held at. Even to a smidgen of a big toe print on the trigger. You can’t tell me…”

  “No one is trying to tell you anything,” said Shayne patiently. “Just get me what I want, Sarge. And you, Garroway. There are a dozen things they taught you to do in police school that you didn’t waste time on last night. I mentioned that stain on the rug where Lambert evidently spilled his drink. I want to be sure it had the same amount of cyanide in it as the drink she swallowed. And the bedroom. Make every test in the book on the bedding and the clothes Lambert left behind. Those he was wearing before he got into his pajamas, and everything in the drawers and the closet. Lint and dust in the pockets and cuffs. Anything that will tell us who and what Lambert was. Where he came from. What he did for a living. You know what I want better than I do.”

  Both technicians nodded without further discussion, opened their kits and set to work.

  Standing beside Rourke, Shayne noted that the black hat and the silk gloves still lay on the table near the door where he had first seen them the night before.

  He turned away and wandered into the bedroom which he hadn’t entered before, noted that the window was now tightly closed, and the double bed was neatly made up. Lying across the foot of it and neatly folded was a dark suit, white shirt and bow tie and a man’s underwear, evidently discarded by the dead man when he donned his pajamas. He turned away to the open closet door and peered inside as Rourke joined him. The only articles of wearing apparel in the closet were a woman’s nightgown of very sheer material, flame-red in color, with a matching peignoir on a hanger beside it. On the floor beneath was a pair of flimsy bedroom slippers of the same color; the type that can be folded up in a small plastic bag into a parcel not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes and carried in a woman’s handbag.

  Rourke whistled expressively as he looked at them with Shayne. “That wasn’t in the police report. Would have been a nice touch of color for my story. I understand the guy was practically stripped for action. Why not her?”

  Shayne shrugged. “He was waiting for her in pajamas and robe… and probably with the drinks already mixed. How the hell does anybody know how the mind of a suicide works?”

  He went out of the bedroom and into the living room where he skirted around Garroway kneeling in front of the stain on the rug, hesitated and then went to the telephone table at the end of the sofa, leaned over and flipped open the directory to the Miami Beach section of the book. He turned to the N’s and found, “Nathan, Paul,” with a pencil mark in front of it. His frown deepened as he took a slip of paper from his pocket and compared the telephone number with one of those Miss Mayhew had given him in her office downstairs.

  It was the Miami Beach number that had been called three times. There was no doubt that the occupant of this room had telephoned the Nathan residence on the Beach each Friday evening since Robert Lambert had rented the place… just about half an hour before Elsa Nathan had been observed arriving at his door. Old Eli, Shayne thought with a grimace, wasn’t going to like any of this one little bit. If the flaming nightgown and the slippers in the closet were identified as hers…

  But, who the hell else did he think they belonged to? Eli’s theory that she had been lured here last night to be murdered by her husband, somehow, had been screwy on the face of it. Too bad because it meant kissing goodbye to fifty grand, but there it was.

  Timothy Rourke sauntered out of the bedroom as Shayne straightened up and closed the telephone book. He asked sardonically, “What progress is the great sleuth making?” and Shayne shrugged his shoulders without replying.

  Sergeant Deitch came out of the kitchen as they stood there, and said plea
santly, “Nothing worth a damn in there. That guy Lambert was either one hell of a meticulous housekeeper, or else he didn’t do any housekeeping here. No sign that a pot or pan, or a dish or piece of silverware has been touched. Some old prints… month or so… presumably female… probably the former maid.”

  Shayne said absently, “I don’t think Lambert rented this apartment with any idea of setting up housekeeping. Best bet right now is that he only came here for Friday nights.”

  “And for a lot more interesting reason than cooking dinner,” observed Rourke with a leer. “You going to keep on sticking around, Mike?”

  “For a little while. You go ahead if you want to.”

  “Yeh,” said Rourke. “I could use a drink right about now. Come out and grab one with me?”

  “Some stuff in the kitchen,” Sergeant Deitch informed them with a grin. “Dark rum and crème de menthe.”

  Rourke repressed a shudder. “Any cyanide to make it interesting?”

  “No cyanide,” the sergeant told him gravely. “But there is a bottle of bonded bourbon with a couple of good slugs left in it.”

  Rourke said, “Ah,” and headed happily for the kitchen. Shayne started to follow him, checked himself and asked Garroway, “Did you analyze the liquor in the bottles last night?”

  “Yeh. All three of them. They’re okay. The cyanide was added after the stuff was mixed in the glasses.”

  In the kitchen, Shayne found the reporter breaking ice cubes from a container and dropping them into a tall glass. The refrigerator door stood wide open and a glance inside showed the shelves to be completely bare.

  On the drainboard at the left of the sink stood a fifth of dark rum and a squat tenth of crème de menthe.

  Only a little liquor was gone from each bottle. In contrast, the bottle of bourbon on the other side of the drainboard which Rourke was uncorking held no more than six ounces of liquor.

  Rourke splashed half of that on top of the ice cubes, and held the bottle out to his redheaded friend. “It’s on the house.”

  Shayne shook his head, regarding the three bottles thoughtfully. “I think I’ll take Eli’s advice and see what that other combination tastes like.”

  “Rum and crème de menthe? For Christ’s sake,” sputtered Rourke.

  Shayne grinned and put a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured rum on top and then added a dollop of the sweet liqueur. He swirled the cubes around with his forefinger and then tasted it.

  “Not bad,” he reported. “Though I’ve a hunch that a bit of potassium ferricyanide would perk it up a bit.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The two men carried their drinks into the living room and sat on the couch out of the way of the two officers, and Shayne grimaced over the mixture in his glass and asked Rourke, “What about Paul Nathan? Did you dig up any dirt?”

  “Not exactly. Hell! Let’s be honest. Nothing, really. The only thing is… we don’t have anything that goes back beyond the announcement of his engagement to Elsa Armbruster. He is vaguely described as an insurance executive on the Beach when he met Elsa… and that’s about it. It was a brief engagement and a big society wedding, and they moved into a new home and he went into the Armbruster organization in some minor executive capacity. No rumors. No scandals. They apparently don’t go out a great deal, and hardly ever entertain at home. Mrs. Nathan has remained active in a lot of charitable organizations and fund-raising activities, but her husband has stayed out of the news.”

  Shayne swallowed some more rum and crème de menthe and scowled across the room. “I suppose he’ll inherit her estate.”

  “I suppose. Estimated at a couple of million at least.”

  “Why in hell,” demanded Shayne angrily, “didn’t she just give him the divorce he asked for? It would have been a lot cheaper… even at a quarter of a million.”

  “What’s that?”

  Shayne related what Eli had told him that morning. “Why hold onto her husband if she was in love with another man? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Haven’t you ever noticed that rich people never do? Not to people like us, Mike. They think differently. They’re conditioned to think differently from childhood. You and I say: What the hell is a quarter of a million? She’d still have one and three-quarters left. More than she can possibly spend in the rest of her life, no matter how she throws it around.

  “But they don’t see it that way, Mike. I’ve run into a lot of them in my work over the past twenty years. A buck is a buck, by God! Much more than it is to you or me. Particularly if it’s an inherited buck.”

  Shayne muttered, “Yeh. Eli made somewhat the same point this morning. He emphasized that Elsa was an Armbruster. She had a ‘feeling for property,’ he explained to me. She wasn’t about to give up a husband she had bought with her own money. All right. I can understand that under normal circumstances. If she enjoyed being married to the guy. But she evidently didn’t. Here she was, carrying on a passionate love affair with a married man that was building up to suicide. I can’t see even a woman with a strong ‘feeling for property’ continuing to cling to her husband under those circumstances.”

  “Didn’t Lambert say in his note that his wife’s religion stood in the way of a divorce?”

  “Sure. But once again… enough money can take care of that. Divorce evidence has been framed before… for a lousy thousand bucks or less.”

  Timothy Rourke drained his bourbon highball and sighed. “You always run into these unanswerable questions in suicides. There’s never a logical answer, Mike. If they were logical people they wouldn’t do it. Q.E.D.”

  Shayne said, “Yeh, I know,” still sounding unconvinced, and looked up with eyebrows raised questioningly as the two officers reentered the room from the bedroom. Garroway carried a bundle of clothing which he put down on the rug, and said, “I’ll take this suit he was wearing into the lab where I can do a thorough job. But I don’t expect to get anything, Shayne. This is all new, department store stuff. Been worn once and never washed. And another thing: I don’t think that bed linen has been disturbed for weeks… since it was made up fresh when he moved in. Certainly not for the purpose that couple were supposed to be using this apartment for. You know, there are always stains and indications you can test for.”

  “Maybe they did their romping on top of the bedspread,” Rourke suggested.

  “Maybe.” Garroway was a deadly serious young man. “But I ran tests on that, too, without getting anything.”

  “How about you, Sarge?” Shayne asked the fingerprint man.

  “I got some prints,” he said. “I can’t be positive until I run comparisons with the men who were up here last night, but I have a strong hunch they’ll all check out. One thing I can tell you: I didn’t find any of the woman’s prints to indicate she’d spent any time here. A few faint smudges a week or so old that might or might not be. Only clear prints of hers were on a little plastic slipper bag I found on the shelf in the closet.”

  “A container for those red slippers on the floor?”

  “They fit into it all right. The nightgown and peignoir have been worn by the way.”

  “What about Lambert’s glasses?” Shayne asked suddenly. “He always wore blue tinted ones. I haven’t seen a pair around.”

  “They’re at the lab,” Garroway told him. “We got them from on top the dresser in the bedroom last night. Took them in to see if they could be traced.”

  “Any luck?”

  “No. They aren’t prescription lenses. Could be picked up anywhere.”

  “And I suppose you took the shotgun in?”

  “Yes. Standard single-shot, twelve gauge. Hasn’t been used a great deal, but it’s ten or twelve years old. No chance to trace it either.”

  “That damned gun bothers me,” muttered Shayne. “What in the name of God was it doing here so conveniently? It isn’t exactly the sort of thing a man brings along with him to keep a hot date.”

  “But the suicide was planned for last night,” argued
Rourke. “I understand the suicide note said so.”

  “It also said they’d planned to go out together with cyanide,” Shayne told him caustically. “He lost his nerve and spilled his drink, and had to do the job with the gun. He hadn’t planned that. So what was the gun doing here?”

  “That’s another one of those questions for which there is no logical answer,” Rourke told him pleasantly. He stood up and yawned. “Are we all through here?”

  “Yeh.” Shayne looked at the men. “When can I have a report?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “Call my office,” Shayne directed. “Or my secretary, Lucy Hamilton, if the office doesn’t answer.” He gave them Lucy’s number and got up also, leaving half his drink still in the glass.

  Rourke waited and watched him as he went into the bedroom. The reporter grinned when he came back thrusting a small plastic container with the slippers into one side pocket, and ramming the flimsy red nightgown set into the other. “A present for Lucy?” he asked with a leer.

  Shayne said coldly, “I’m taking these home where they belong.”

  “For the bereaved husband? I’m sure he’ll love to have them as souvenirs.”

  Shayne shrugged; they went out together and he snapped the padlock on the outside of the door. “Let’s walk down a flight,” he suggested. “See if Lucy’s back from the office. I could use a decent drink to wash the taste of that stuff out of my mouth.”

  They walked down a flight, but a knock on Lucy’s door indicated that she hadn’t returned. They went down to the ground floor where Rourke announced that he was late keeping a date for a free lunch, and drove off hastily.