Counterfeit Wife

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne didn’t think so. It would have been a foolish move and wholly unnecessary. If the affair had been planned by Deland and Dawson together, the obvious thing was to have Dawson simply meet Gurney, pay the man his price, and get the Deland girl from him.

  No, if it was that way, Shayne decided, Dawson had been pulling a neat double-cross on both his partner in business and on Gurney by slipping away on the midnight plane.

  But how in hell did that counterfeit money enter into any of those possibilities? That was the discordant note in the entire affair. No portion of the puzzle could be properly evaluated until the counterfeit money was explained.

  Feeling completely checkmated, Shayne jerked the car into gear and drove back to the boulevard and then southward until he reached a drugstore with a pay phone. He went in and found the address of Deland and Dawson, General Plumbers, on N.E. 6th Street.

  Ten minutes later he entered the drab ground floor display room of the company. A railed-off portion at the back apparently protected a stringy female office girl from customers. Shayne wondered what sort of customers a plumbing business attracted that she needed protection.

  She had a sharp nose and a sallow complexion. Her lifeless blonde hair was cut in page-boy style, the irregular bangs beginning just above her glasses. She was wiping tears from her unrouged cheeks when Shayne came up to the railing.

  The girl got up, took off her glasses as she approached him, and dabbed at her pale blue eyes with a wadded piece of tissue. The tip of her nose was red, and it quivered when she moved her lips.

  “What can I do for you?” The tone of her voice indicated that she wished he would go away and leave her alone.

  Shayne ran knobby fingers through his stubble of red hair and said, “It’s a very sad day for you, I’m sure, Miss—”

  “M-Morrison,” she replied. “I h-hope you’ll forgive my c-crying like this. It’s horrible, that’s what it is. I can’t believe it’s true. She used to come in here, perch herself on this railing, and laugh and chat with me just like I was one of her young friends. She was so sweet and thoughtful of everybody. I don’t see how I can stand it.” She looked at the wet ball of tissue that was wadded in her hand and turned back to her desk, saying, “Excuse me.”

  She came back with a couple of fresh tissues, after blowing her sharp nose lustily. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Shayne sat with one hip on the railing. He said, “Kathleen seems to have affected you as she did a lot of other people. Have you worked here long?”

  “To know her was to love her,” Miss Morrison said reverently, ignoring Shayne’s leading question. “Last Christmas she brought me a hanky. Real Irish lace, with such a beautiful card. I’ll always remember the verse on it.” She closed her eyes, squeezing out the tears, and wiping them with a fold of tissue.

  “How long have you been with Mr. Deland and Mr. Dawson?” he asked again.

  “Three years now, come December.”

  “I understand that Mr. Dawson did most of the office work and storeroom work, while Mr. Deland went out on repair jobs?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Morrison with a deep sigh. “Mr. Dawson took care of the inside mostly. If you’ve come to see him, I’m afraid you’ll have to come back in a few days. Poor man. He’s prostrated with grief. Don’t you think it was noble of him to fight off that gang the way he did?”

  “I certainly do,” said Shayne seriously. “Is Dawson married?”

  “Oh, no. He’s a widower.” She fluttered her wrinkled eyelids coyly. “I was always telling him that a state of single blessedness was no way for a man to live, and sometimes he’d agree with me.”

  “He and Deland seem to have had a very nice business here,” said Shayne. “I’d say Dawson should be able to support a wife.”

  “Mr. Dawson wasn’t what you’d call wealthy, but the business brought in a nice income. He was thinking some of taking it over, buying Mr. Deland out, you know. I used to urge him to. Seemed like it wasn’t fair for him to get only half, for all the hard work and long hours he put in.”

  “Deland didn’t do his part, eh?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. He was difficult at times, but he was a hard worker, spending half a day on a repair job that wouldn’t stand for more than three hours’ charge, and even then forgetting to enter the charge in the books at all—things like that. Mr. Deland was careless, but Mr. Dawson was always one for exact detail. Sometimes it seemed to me Mr. Deland was rather bored with the business. Maybe that’s why Mr. Dawson wanted to buy him out.”

  “They didn’t get on well?” asked Shayne. “Is that why Mr. Deland was thinking of selling out?”

  “I didn’t say Mr. Deland wanted to sell out,” she corrected him. “It’s something Mr. Dawson and I discussed privately.” Miss Morrison’s eyes looked down at the balled tissue in her hand, and Shayne wondered if she was going to wipe the drippings from her pointed nose; but she said curtly, “Why are you asking all these questions, and who are you?”

  “I’m from the United States Treasury Department,” he told her. “Last year’s income tax.”

  Her pallid eyelids lifted and her strange eyes were startled. “I was afraid there’d be trouble about that on account of Mr. Deland’s carelessness,” she stammered. “I told Mr. Dawson, ‘Just you mark my words—no telling how many jobs like that Greerson job don’t show on the books.’ That was this year, of course, but I told Mr. Dawson, ‘You just can’t tell how many like it never showed on the books.’”

  Shayne said, “Suppose you tell me more about the—ah—Greerson job. It may help to explain some of the discrepancies in last year’s report.”

  Miss Morrison’s eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. “Mr. Dawson is a keen business man, and I don’t understand why he wasn’t more strict with Mr. Deland. Of course, they were equal business partners and, as Mr. Dawson said, it really wasn’t his place to put his foot down. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t run our office on a businesslike basis, and I told him so.”

  “About the Greerson job,” Shayne said again.

  She didn’t answer for a time, looking away from him with her head lifted and staring into space. Then she turned toward Shayne, her eyes filled with unshed tears.

  “It wasn’t anything, really. Not compared with her death.”

  Shayne said, “Business is never important to children, but it is to men who have to work to support them.”

  Miss Morrison sighed deeply. “What I was going to say is that the Greerson job didn’t matter. It just showed how carelessness makes trouble. We never billed him on it. When I asked Mr. Deland about it after the first of the month, he got angry and irritable. First he said he couldn’t remember, and then he said he had had trouble getting the parts. Anyway, he never did fix it the way it should be, and he didn’t feel it was honest to collect a bill like that.

  “I told him we couldn’t run the business that way. I insisted that his time was worth something. That was the first time Mr. Dawson ever spoke sharp to me, and he apologized afterward. He said I wasn’t to question Mr. Deland.

  “Later, he told me privately that he agreed with me,” she went on, her colorless eyes looking at the dirty ceiling as though it were studded with stars. “But after all, Mr. Deland was a partner and was in charge of the outside work. That’s when he spoke of buying out Deland’s share of the business a little later on when he expected to come into a small legacy.

  “But now all this terrible thing has come up, and I don’t know what the outcome will be, with Mr. Dawson lying there in the hospital fighting for his life, and with the tragedy in the Deland home and all.”

  She ran out of breath and began sobbing again.

  Shayne stood up and patted her shoulder and told her he would come back some other time when things were a little more normal. He left hurriedly with another small item of information tucked away in his mind, though he didn’t see, at the moment, how it could help him.

  It did establish a slim connection be
tween ex-Senator Irvin, alias Greerson, and Deland; but he couldn’t see how that connection fitted into the kidnap picture.

  Dawson, too, it appeared, had also acted strangely about the Greerson job, refusing to urge his partner to press what appeared to be a legitimate repair bill.

  But he was making progress, Shayne reassured himself; and somewhere in the complex pattern lay the answer to four deaths within the space of four hours.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SUMMING IT UP

  SHAYNE FOUND TIMOTHY ROURKE in his apartment on the Beach. The neat condition of the living-room, Shayne noted, was further evidence that his reporter friend had undergone a change since fighting for weeks for his life in a hospital bed with a bullet in his abdomen.

  Rourke was at his typewriter. He said, “Sit down, Mike. Thank God I’ve got an excuse to quit this and pour myself the drink I’ve been wanting. You’ll drink rye and like it, or you won’t drink.”

  Shayne said, “Even rye will taste good to me right now.” He dropped down on the couch and looked around the room. There was a wastebasket beside Rourke’s desk and the trash was in it instead of around it. The ash tray on the desk held ashes and cigarette butts. Heretofore both had been strewn over the rug. Shayne grinned. “You’re getting to be a goddamned old maid about your housekeeping.”

  “Yeah. I got used to having things clean at the hospital. I sort of like it.” His cadaverous face was sallow and his eyes bloodshot and weary. He shoved his chair back, went to the kitchenette, and returned with an unopened bottle of rye and two glasses. He handed the bottle to Shayne to open and went back to the kitchenette to get two glasses of ice water.

  Shayne poured four fingers of rye in each glass and passed one to Rourke in exchange for a glass of water.

  They touched glasses before drinking, and Rourke said, “Skoal” absently.

  Shayne drank half of the rye and said, “I wish you’d get yourself a job so you could afford some decent liquor.”

  “Three sixty-five a fifth,” said Rourke moodily. He walked to his typewriter, stared at the sheet of yellow paper half covered with typing, then pulled it from the roller.

  “Another chapter of the Great American Novel?” asked Shayne idly.

  “I’ve turned detective,” Rourke told him. “With you and Painter and Gentry going around in circles, I sat down and did some straight thinking.” He paused, then added, “Thanks for the tip on the Tower angle.”

  “I figured you were the only person I could trust not to recognize my voice,” Shayne told him.

  “Not that my denial did you much good,” said Rourke with disgust. “It didn’t take Gentry’s boys long to figure, from the old man’s description, that you were the visitor to Cabin Sixteen. They place you there about four-thirty.”

  Shayne nodded equably. “Gurney was dead and Gerta Ross passed out when I arrived.”

  Rourke slumped down in a chair with the sheet of paper in his hand. He emptied his glass of rye, took a big swallow of water, and said, “Dawson had time to rub Gurney out before he reported in at the Beach.”

  “So did Hale and Deland,” Shayne suggested.

  Rourke frowned incredulously. “So did thousands of other honest citizens. Why pick on those two?”

  Shayne told him what he had learned at the Fun Club, about the call Gurney had received there, and the appointment he made with Gerta Ross to meet him at the Tower Cottages to get her share of the pay-off.

  “Gerta practically corroborated that last night, as well as she could corroborate anything in her condition,” Shayne went on. “That makes it look as if someone had hired Gurney to snatch Kathleen Deland—and had to kill him after things went wrong to make sure he wouldn’t talk.”

  “Dawson? He fits, Mike,” Rourke pointed out excitedly. “He was in a position to know that Emory Hale would pay off. By having himself appointed go-between, he was in a perfect position to glom onto the money without ever being suspected.”

  “Then why did he try to jump town with it?”

  Rourke thought for a moment. “To avoid paying Gurney his share,” he guessed. “Then, when he reached Palm Beach and discovered the switched suitcases, he was desperate. So, he hurried back to silence Gurney and turn up with that story of the hijackers.”

  “Could be,” Shayne agreed. “That doesn’t explain the fifty grand in counterfeit bills.”

  “Counterfeit? The stuff looked good to me.”

  Shayne briefly described his interview with Marsten at the First National Bank that morning.

  Rourke whistled softly. “Then Emory Hale must have tried to slip over the queer stuff. Maybe he’s one of the counterfeit gang himself. We ought to check on him, Mike—find out where he got the money.”

  “Will Gentry is doing that right now,” Shayne cut in. “I’d like to know where Hale went last night when he left the Deland house after hearing Kathleen’s body had been found.”

  “He acted pretty badly cut up,” Rourke said, frowning deeply. “I was there when it happened, you know.”

  Shayne nodded. “I read Nora Fitzgerald’s account of it in the morning paper. Sounded like you’d dictated it,” he added, repressing a grin.

  “Now look here, Mike, my story wasn’t—”

  Shayne waved a big hand, and asked, “What was your impression of Hale’s departure?”

  Rourke screwed his thin face into a grimace. “At the time, his grief and anger seemed genuine enough. He gave the impression of having to do something, of being unable to just sit there and wait. I know that Mrs. Deland was worried about him and sent her husband to be with him.”

  “Did they leave the house together?”

  “I don’t believe they did. I think Hale had already jumped in a cab—there were a couple loitering outside—and driven off before Arthur Deland came out. I’m pretty sure Deland took the family car. I’m not sure. That must have been shortly after two o’clock,” said Rourke, glancing at the typed notation he had taken from his typewriter.

  “I’ve made up a sort of timetable here to keep the different things straight in my mind. This is the way I’ve got it set down. Deland left his house at ten-thirty with the ransom money. He met Dawson, as directed by the kidnapers, and turned the money over to him, returning home about eleven.

  “We don’t know what Dawson did between eleven and twelve, but a little before midnight he was at the air terminal trying to get a plane out of town. And you obligingly furnished him a ticket on the midnight plane.

  “Gurney and the Ross woman reached the airport a few minutes later. Failing to find Dawson, or any trace of him, they drove on to the Fun Club. Dawson quit the plane in Palm Beach about twelve-forty and made his way back to Miami somehow, after discovering the loss of the money. And the next we know of him is when he turned up at the Beach police station at three-thirty.

  “In the meantime, the manager of the Fun Club, Bates by name, recognized one of the counterfeit bills and called Irvin to send his boys after you. You escaped with Gerta Ross, crashed in her car about one-fifteen, were picked up by Irvin’s gunmen and taken to his place on Thirty-eighth Street. Police discovered the girl’s body in the trunk of the Ross car about one-forty-five. They did some checking, and so forth, sent out a pick-up for the Ross woman some time later, and found her gone. Just about that time you were escaping from Irvin’s gunman and razor expert. Slocum’s body was discovered in your apartment about three o’clock, and the indications are that he was killed between two and two-thirty. In the meantime, Dawson arrived at the Beach at three-thirty-two—I checked that—and he told his story of the hijacking. You reached the Tower Cottages about four-twenty and claim you found Gurney dead. They say he was killed between two and four-thirty, probably between three-thirty and four.”

  Shayne had been puffing on a cigarette, idly watching the smoke drift toward the ceiling. When Rourke stopped talking, he said, “The two murders we’re interested in right now are Slocum’s and Gurney’s. The important periods in those two murde
rs are between two and two-thirty, and between three-thirty and four.”

  “I thought you were convinced that Slocum was accidentally killed by Irvin or his men when they came looking for you after you got away from them,” objected Rourke.

  Shayne sighed and admitted, “I’m not sure of anything any more. It would have been mighty fast work for them to reach my place and kill Slocum and get away before I got there.”

  “Do you think Slocum was mixed up in this?”

  Shayne moved his head negatively and slowly. “That would be too much of a coincidence. No. I think he was killed because he was in the wrong apartment at the wrong time.”

  “In other words, because someone mistook him for you.”

  “Not necessarily that. But at least because someone came there looking for me and ran into him instead.”

  “Dawson?”

  “It could be,” Shayne agreed. “Your timetable doesn’t exclude Emory Hale or Arthur Deland until we have a more positive check on their movements.”

  “Here’s something I’ve been wondering about,” said Rourke thoughtfully. “Why did Dawson jump the plane at Palm Beach? He had your ticket all the way to New Orleans, and we presume he didn’t know anything about the switched suitcases until he got his bag from the plane and opened it. Why didn’t he just keep on going?”

  “That’s something we’ll have to ask Dawson when the time comes, though there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. He knew there’d be a big stink raised as soon as the deadline passed and neither he nor Kathleen Deland showed up. The police would start looking for him, and he didn’t know how soon I might hear his description broadcast and recognize him as the man using my plane ticket. All I had to do was notify the police and they could wire ahead and have him jerked off the plane. He played safe by jumping at the first stop.”

  “That makes sense,” Rourke agreed. “To get back to Hale and Deland. How could either of them have possibly gone up to your apartment and run into Slocum by mistake? As far as we know, neither of them even knew a man named Michael Shayne existed at that time.”