Counterfeit Wife

by Brett Halliday

  “She’ll have a lot more to live for than if he hadn’t gone out that window,” Shayne told him. “She need never know he wasn’t driven crazy by grief unless someone in this room talks out of turn. Gurney’s dead,” he pointed out, “and Gerta Ross doesn’t know who hired him for the job. She’ll do a short stretch for her part in the affair, and that’ll end it. Nothing would be gained by dragging the Deland name through the dirt.”

  Hale looked around at the two officers and the reporter, moistened his lips, and said, “Is that the way—Are you gentlemen willing?”

  “I don’t see why we have to do any talking,” said Gentry gruffly. “Of course, Tim is a newspaper reporter.”

  “Count me in,” said Rourke quickly. “God, what a story it is this way!”

  “His jump out the window may have cost you fifty grand,” Shayne told the New Yorker. “He’ll never be able to tell you where he hid your fifty thousand after handing Dawson the fake ransom money last night. The phony stuff is in a paper bag in my hotel safe right now,” he added to Gentry. “It will have to be turned over to the government.”

  “Damn the money,” said Hale. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “On the other hand,” said Shayne, “if you recovered the fifty thousand you might feel a little more like paying the ten grand you offered last night for the arrest of the kidnapers.”

  “I might, at that,” Hale conceded reluctantly. “But I understand the finding of the Ross woman and of Gurney’s corpse was due to an anonymous telephone call received by Mr. Rourke this morning. If the reward is to be paid at all it should go to that man.”

  Shayne looked at Rourke and grinned. “I think Tim will be able to identify the caller for you. Let’s make a deal, Hale. Suppose you agree to pay the reward if you recover the money your brother-in-law tried to hold out when he switched the phony stuff for yours.”

  “Fair enough,” Hale agreed. “But you just pointed out that we’d probably never find it now that poor Arthur can’t tell us where to look.”

  Shayne said, “He told us before he jumped.”

  All the men in the room were looking at him queerly.

  “That telephone call,” Shayne said, “was from one of the boys in your office, Will. Before we started over here from Miami I asked him to call Dawson’s hospital room at a certain time.”

  It was Emory Hale who first understood what telephone call he meant. “You mean Arthur’s house isn’t burning down?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Shayne cheerfully. “Remember he wasn’t particularly interested in the fate of his house. Only in his wife and—the garage. If that fifty grand you brought down from New York isn’t hidden in the garage, I don’t want any reward,” he ended quietly.

  “Damn the money,” Hale repeated. “I still don’t understand this. Where on earth did a man like Arthur get hold of fifty grand in queer stuff to give to Dawson?”

  “We’ve been talking that over with Dawson while you were downstairs,” Shayne told him. “Of course, we may never know the exact truth, but here’s the way it looks:

  “Some time ago, Deland was called out on a plumbing job at a certain house on Thirty-eighth Street. That house was the headquarters of a gang of counterfeiters, and that’s where they mussed the new bills up getting them ready to put into circulation.

  “While working there, Deland apparently came across a packet of five hundred hundred-dollar bills, and the temptation was too much for him. He snatched the money, though he must have realized it was counterfeit, and made off with it. He never finished the repair job. He was afraid to go back, of course, and he had a row with Dawson later because he refused to bill the counterfeiter for the work he’d done.

  “All this is theory,” Shayne added to Hale. “But it fits the facts as we know them. Fifty grand did disappear, and last night Deland handed that exact amount to Dawson instead of the money you had brought down by plane. It was a simple method of extorting money from you, and Deland didn’t think his daughter would be harmed, since he had made all arrangements with the kidnaper himself.”

  “But why go through all that falderal with counterfeit money?” exclaimed Hale. “He could have accomplished the same end by hiring the kidnaping done, arrange to have himself deliver the money, and then simply keep most of it.”

  “It was possession of that counterfeit money that gave him the idea in the first place,” Shayne pointed out. “And he probably thought you might suspect the truth if he tried to make the pay-off himself. To avoid any faint possibility of suspicion that it was prearranged, he asked his partner to act as go-between, so that Dawson would always be able to swear that the fifty thousand dollars had actually changed hands. Then Dawson ruined everything by trying to skip out with the money. Deland killed Gurney both to avenge himself for his daughter’s murder and to keep his mouth shut.”

  Later, when Timothy Rourke and Michael Shayne went down in the hospital elevator together, Rourke said, “There are still two things I want to know about, Mike.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When did you learn that the blood and hairs on the vase in your apartment matched Dawson’s?”

  “I didn’t. No one has yet taken the trouble to compare them, as far as I know. I don’t even know whether there were any hairs on the vase. But I was morally certain they would match if there were any, so I jumped the gun a little in order to jolt a confession out of Dawson.”

  “And once again,” said Rourke reverently, “a hunch inherited from your Dutch grandmother brought home the bacon. All right You may not want to answer my next question on account of it might tend to incriminate you.”

  “Then I won’t,” Shayne promised him as they got out of the elevator and strolled down the long, silent corridor.

  “How does it feel to be responsible for the death of a fellow human being?”

  “I’ve forgotten,” said Shayne. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “Deland. You deliberately put the idea of suicide in his mind, Mike. I realize now that’s what you did. When you pulled him back from the window and away from me you planted the idea in his mind so he’d react later when you drove him into a corner.”

  Shayne rubbed his angular chin meditatively. “You told me a story last night. About a sweet-faced mother who was grieving over her daughter’s death, and had only her husband to cling to. That story stuck in my craw, Tim. Go home and write a follow-up that’ll give Minerva Deland a heroic memory to cling to.”

  “I’m headed for a typewriter right now,” Rourke assured him. “What about you?”

  “I,” said Michael Shayne with a grimace, “am headed for a long distance telephone and a talk with a certain gal in New Orleans. If she still insists on a vacation I’ll sell her the idea that Miami’s the place to take it.”