One Night with Nora Page 7

  “Why?” Gentry thundered.

  “I was curious to see the signature. Damn it, Will,” he burst out, “don’t try to make something out of it that isn’t there. If I were lying and trying to cover my tracks in this thing, it wouldn’t do me any good to get hold of that particular letter. The Wilmington lawyer claims he has others signed the same way. If I were going to destroy hers, I’d have to get hold of his, too.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking,” the chief said ominously, “for the past fifteen minutes or so, at least. I just got a call from Bates in Wilmington. His office has been burglarized and the entire file of correspondence with you has been stolen. So right now I’m wondering where you were between four and nine o’clock this morning.” He fixed his agate eyes on Shayne’s purplish wound and fished a cigar from his breast pocket.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Shayne moved around the desk, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, sat down in the swivel chair, and leaned forward with his arms folded on the desk. He said, “Sit down, Will, and let me get this straight. You say this lawyer in Wilmington claims his office was robbed last night of the file on me?”

  “That’s right. Broken into early this morning. Nothing else taken that he can see. Just your letters to him and his carbons to you.” He pulled a chair nearer and sat down opposite Shayne, turned to Detective Sturgis and said curtly, “You and Benton may as well beat it. You’re not going to find anything here.”

  Sturgis left the room to the accompaniment of Shayne’s blunt fingers drumming on the desk. He said absently, “So Bates’s alleged documentary evidence has disappeared.”

  “Conveniently for your denial. Did you go to all the trouble of flying up to Wilmington to steal that file?” the chief asked heavily.

  “I swear to God, Will, I can’t get it through my head you’re serious. From the very beginning when that woman came to my room, it stunk of a frame-up between her and this Wilmington shyster. Don’t ask me what kind of a frame,” he went on angrily. “I don’t pretend to even guess what they thought they were gaining by that story.”

  “Trouble is, Bates doesn’t appear to be a shyster at all. I’ve checked on him, and the Wilmington police give him a clean bill. One of the most respected attorneys in town. On top of that, there’s every evidence that his office was broken into early this morning, around six-thirty or seven o’clock. So, you can clarify things a lot by proving you couldn’t have flown up there and pulled the job. Just tell me where you were between four and nine.”

  “You’re not going to like it,” Shayne warned him.

  “Probably not. Don’t tell me you were with a dame whose name you can’t divulge on account of her husband’s the jealous type.” Gentry pursed his lips over the cigar and struck a match to it.

  “No.” Shayne turned his head to grin at Lucy Hamilton who was tidying the files and listening earnestly. “I wish it were,” the redhead said candidly. “You’d like it better than this. I was parked out on Biscayne Bay, north of Seventy-Ninth Street, all that time, Will. All by myself.”

  “That’s just fine,” Gentry grunted. “That fixes everything up just dandy.”

  Shayne put a finger tip near the raw wound. “A bullet did this. A forty-five, I’d guess, from the size of the hole in the top of my car. Will it make things any better if I get a doctor’s affidavit that a wound like that could knock me out cold-for five hours?”

  Lucy Hamilton hurried to him. “Michael!” she cried out. “I thought you’d just been in a fight and somebody had hit you! What is this all about? Who’s the man in Wilmington, and who is the woman you say was in your room last night? Who shot you? And why, Michael?” She examined the wound gravely and anxiously. “I’m going right out and get some bandage.”

  “Sit down while I give this part of it to Will,” he told her gruffly. “I’ll fill you in on the rest of it later.”

  Timothy Rourke, who had transferred his emaciated body from the edge of the desk to a chair, sprang up from his sprawled position, and dragged up a chair for Lucy. She sat down on the edge of it, and the reporter resumed his seat.

  “There was that telephone call just as you were leaving my apartment with Mrs. Carrol,” Shayne reminded the chief. “The guy sounded drunk or frightened or both, and wanted to know if we could keep Mrs. Carrol’s name out of her husband’s murder investigation. I figured I’d learn more by playing him along, and agreed to meet him. I was in a hurry to keep the date. I called Lucy and told her to get over to the Commodore and find that alleged letter from me before Mrs. Carrol got there.” He paused, turned to Lucy, and suggested, “You give your end of it, angel. What was that junk in the Herald?”

  Lucy Hamilton’s face flushed. “It wasn’t junk. It happened exactly the way I told Officer Hagen. Just as I opened the door and turned on the light. Somebody had evidently searched the room. Things from her suitcase were all scattered around. I just didn’t know what kind of trouble you were in and I tried to play it safe.” She looked at the chief, but his protuberant eyes were half-hidden by a puff of smoke.

  Shayne gave Lucy a crooked grin and said, “You get a whole row of A’s for effort, angel. And when we get this mess cleaned up, Tim’ll make you ‘Heroine for a Day’ in a Daily News scoop.”

  Rourke stopped to pat her shoulder on his way back to his chair. “And we’ll have a celebration. Just you and me.”

  Gentry interrupted him with an angry snort, and Shayne resumed. “This man on the phone wouldn’t give his name, but he offered me ten grand if I could make certain Mrs. Carrol’s name would be kept out of the investigation. You can’t blame me for rushing out to check on him, Will.”

  “And now you’re going to claim you sat in your car while he took pot shots at you?” growled Gentry.

  “Just about,” Shayne conceded morosely. He settled back and related exactly what had happened. “It was nine o’clock when I woke up. I took time to clean the dried blood off my face with bay water and examine the car for a bullet hole, then headed toward town. I stopped on the boulevard for breakfast, and saw the Herald extra. That was the first I knew about Lucy. I called my lawyer from the roadside restaurant, then came on to my office and found two goons waiting at the door with a search warrant.”

  “Honest to Christ, Mike, do you expect me to believe that story?” Gentry asked in a wondering voice.

  “Take a look at the evidence, the bullet hole in my car. Get a doctor to look at my head, and tell you what else beside a bullet could have done it. Analyze the blood on the cushion where I lay passed out for five hours. You don’t think I held a gun to my own head and pulled the trigger, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Gentry told him, somberly considering his cigar butt before discarding it. “This fellow you claim you met at Seventy-Ninth, he wouldn’t be the one who jumped Lucy at the Commodore, I suppose.”

  “That’s out,” Shayne stated flatly. “He couldn’t be. I started as soon as I finished talking to Lucy. By the time she got dressed and to the Commodore, I must have been halfway out there. He was waiting at the filling-station, after having parked his car by the bay, and he had walked back to meet me.”

  “So that makes two little men who no one can prove were there,” Gentry growled. “Plus another one in Wilmington who broke into a lawyer’s office to remove incriminating letters you claim weren’t there. How can you expect me to believe any of this, Mike?”

  Shayne said soberly, “I don’t. But you can try.”

  “I am trying.”

  “Keep on working on it,” Shayne urged. “It’ll come easier after a while. Once you make up your mind that I’m telling the truth, you’ll be on the right track.”

  “But you can’t prove a damned thing you say, Mike.”

  “And you can’t disprove anything I say.”

  “I’ve got the statements of Mrs. Carrol and Bates,” Gentry reminded him, “and they’re in direct contradiction to yours.”

  “Okay. Let’s analyze those statements. Take Bat
es’s story. He claims I replied to his first letter by demanding five hundred dollars in cash before taking the case. You know damned well that’s not the way I run my business. If I were going to accept the job, I’d do it and bill the client later.

  “Wait a minute!” Shayne held up a big hand to ward off Gentry’s protest. “That’s not all. Bates claims he suggested I get a key to Carrol’s room for his wife’s use in ending a divorce action. No matter what you believe about anything else I’ve told you, you know goddamned well I’d have turned an assignment like that down flat. I don’t fool around with that sort of thing at any price, not even when it’s offered in advance.”

  Gentry’s broad, ruddy face was impassive. He shifted his weight wearily in the straight chair. “But for a promise of ten thousand—” he began.

  “And if I were going to take a job like that,” Shayne cut in, as though completely absorbed in his own thoughts and unaware of the chief’s words, “I sure as hell wouldn’t spot the guy in my own hotel to do the job.”

  “It would make it easier for you to pull,” Gentry pointed out with a weary sigh, “as Bates explained to me over the phone.”

  “I’d be a hell of a detective if I couldn’t get a duplicate key from any hotel in town,” Shayne growled.

  “Then who in hell furnished Mrs. Carrol with a key to your room last night?” Gentry exploded.

  “That’s what we’ve got to find out.” His head wound throbbed in a dull, steady pain, and his voice was suddenly weary. “We need to know a lot more about Ralph Carrol and his wife, and Bates, before we can even begin to guess the inside workings of the deal.”

  “I’m getting a full dossier on all of them,” the chief told him in a gentle rumble. “From my preliminary investigation he appears to have been a well-known young businessman. And I told you the Wilmington police gave Bates a clean slate. Damn it, Mike, are you trying to build up a hypothesis that someone impersonated you in this whole affair?”

  “Either that,” said Shayne slowly and thoughtfully, “or Bates, at least, is lying from the word go. Frankly, I see the latter as much more feasible. I don’t see how anyone could impersonate me. There’s a possibility that it might be carried through, of course, after the first contact was made. But we don’t yet know what mail address or telephone number was furnished Bates for contacting a man who might have called himself Michael Shayne for some reason of his own.

  “But Bates claims he wrote directly to me in the beginning. Lucy would have a record of any such letter if it had reached me here.” He paused briefly; glancing aside at Lucy, noting Timothy Rourke’s slaty eyes burning excitedly in their cavernous sockets, then turned back to Gentry’s blank stare. “If Bates’s correspondence reached this office, there is only one thing you can believe, and will have to accept, Will, and that is that Lucy double-crossed me and decided to play detective on her own. Knowing I wouldn’t touch a divorce case, she answered the letter, gave my name and her own apartment address. But I don’t think Lucy is that hard up for five hundred bucks.”

  “Michael! You can’t believe that for a moment!”

  “Of course not,” he assured her. “And if you had pulled such a stunt, I’m sure you wouldn’t have given a dame a key to my apartment after midnight. So you see, Will, there just isn’t any physical explanation for the stunt being pulled. Looks to me like an apparently reputable attorney in Wilmington is lying in his teeth.”

  “That may be,” said Gentry after a brief silence.

  The telephone on Shayne’s desk rang. As he reached for it, Gentry pushed forward in his chair. “That may be for me,” he said. “I’m expecting an important call and left word at my office to transfer it here.”

  Shayne had the receiver to his ear and his palm over the mouthpiece as Gentry spoke. He motioned for silence, removed his palm, and said, “Yes?” After listening for a moment he said, “That’s quite correct. Give it to me slowly while I make a note of it.”

  Lucy was out of her chair, pushing a pad and pencil within reach of his right hand. She stood beside the desk watching and listening and frowning at the notes he made on the pad.

  He said, “Yes, I have all that. Thanks very much for your co-operation. If there’s anything further I’ll contact you.” He hung up and shoved the pad toward his secretary. “On the Mitchell case, Lucy. That was a Mr. Levine, general manager of the Argus Trucking Company. His records show that Mitchell did take a truck out without authorization at ten o’clock yesterday morning.”

  Lucy dutifully took shorthand notes of every word her employer said on the pad beneath his own scribblings, but her expression was one of complete bewilderment. Her back was turned to Gentry, but she looked up to meet the burning curiosity in Timothy Rourke’s eyes. There was a knowing grin on his thin lips.

  “That cleans up the Mitchell thing,” Shayne said briskly. “Suppose you let me know as soon as you get more detailed information from Wilmington, Will. I still think Bates should come down here so we can question him about those letters and phone calls he claims to have had from me.”

  Gentry’s rumpled lids were half lowered, his eyes inscrutable. He said, “Yeh,” wearily, and stood up. “I’ll send the doc over to look at your head and have my boys check your car. If the external evidence checks with your story we’ll have a little more to go on.”

  “Sure. My car is in the parking-lot around the corner. You might try for fingerprints, but I doubt if you’ll find any. After putting me out like a light, he had plenty of time to wipe everything clean.” Shayne pushed his chair back and got up to accompany the chief to the outer office.

  Gentry said to Rourke, “Coming along, Tim?”

  The reporter shook his head lazily. “I’d like more of a fill-in from Mike. I’ll be around for a statement before we go to press, Chief.”

  Gentry moved with his usual solid tread. Shayne strode past him and opened the door to the outer office. As the chief went out, he said, “This is a cockeyed case, Will. I’ll keep in touch with you.”

  “Vice versa,” Gentry supplied in a clipped voice. “Don’t worry, I will, until you come clean with me, Mike.” He caught the doorknob and slammed it shut.

  Shayne stood for a moment listening to his footsteps going toward the elevator, his thumb and forefinger massaging his left ear lobe. Then he turned and strode back to his office.

  Rourke paced the floor, his thin nostrils flaring, and his slaty eyes burning in their deep sockets. He stopped, faced the redhead, and asked, “What is the Mitchell case, Mike?”

  “Oh, that!” Shayne sat down at the desk, glanced at Lucy who looked up from the note pad in her hand with round, questioning eyes. He drew in a deep breath and said, “I may as well give it to you, both of you. I’m going to need all the help I can get from now on.”

  “Did I give myself away when you told me to take notes? I’d never heard of any Mitchell case, but I tried to be calm.”

  “You were perfect, angel,” he assured her. “That call was actually for Gentry, from some clerk at the airport who’d been checking flights to Wilmington for Will. He had been given this number to call, and mistook me for Gentry when I answered.” He poured himself a short drink of cognac and drank it. “Their records show that Michael Shayne bought a round-trip ticket to Wilmington on the four-twenty plane this morning and returned on a flight arriving here at nine-ten. There is going to be hell to pay when Will finds out about this.”

  After a moment of shocked silence, Rourke whirled to face his old friend and said, “Then your story about getting shot was a phony?”

  “No, there was nothing phony about that,” Shayne told him grimly. “But we know now that there is some guy, representing himself as Michael Shayne right here in Miami, impersonating me! It’s dollars to doughnuts he flew up to Wilmington for the express purpose of removing the files on Bates’s correspondence with him from Bates’s office.”

  “Then he mustbe the man who threw the blanket over my head in Mrs. Carrol’s hotel room last night,�
� Lucy said excitedly.

  “Probably,” Shayne interrupted her. “We can assume he was there searching for the same letter I hoped you’d find. Picking up the pieces and destroying all the evidence after he learned that Carrol was dead and there would be an investigation that would surely point to him as an impersonator, if nothing else.”

  “But you just got through proving to Will Gentry that such a thing was physically impossible,” Rourke protested.

  “I only pointed out how improbable it was,” Shayne told him moodily. “But this seems to eliminate the theory that Bates was lying. Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said that after you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, no matter how improbable?”

  Rourke shook his head dubiously. “That’s a pretty important item of information to hold out on Gentry.”

  “What the hell else could I do?” Shayne demanded angrily. “You saw how Will’s mind was working. With that to clinch it, he couldn’t have done anything else except arrest me. This is one time I can’t afford the luxury of going to jail. I’ve got a few hours, maybe, to find out who murdered Carrol, who left me lying for dead in my car this morning, and who is parading around as Mike Shayne.”

  Gloom settled over Rourke’s cadaverous features. “That’s a fair-sized order. It appears no one has actually seen the guy. There are supposed to be those letters from him directing that payment be made in cash, but now they’ve disappeared. Where do you start?”

  “With Ralph Carrol’s murder.” Shayne’s voice was abruptly vigorous and decisive. “In the end, everything must come back to that. You know anybody in Wilmington who can give me a hand getting the inside dope if I fly up there?”

  The reporter thought for a moment, then said, “There’s Ed Smith on AP. He’s run their desk there for years. Want me to call him?”

  “Sure.” The telephone rang as he spoke. He gestured to Lucy to take the call, saying, “Get rid of whoever it is. I think you’d better come with me, angel. Call the airport about planes, but don’t use my name for a reservation.”