In a Deadly Vein

by Brett Halliday

“What else are we supposed to think? Overcome with remorse—”

  Joe Meade began laughing wildly. “I didn’t shoot myself. I got shot. I was worried about Nora. I went out looking for her. I saw a light in the cabin I knew her father had lived in, and thought she might be there. But I pulled the door open and saw a man on the floor with a flashlight. He turned the light out and jumped me. I heard a gun go off in my face—and woke up in a bed upstairs.”

  Shayne rubbed his jaw. “Could be,” he commented drily. It was growing quite dark in the east room. Over his shoulder, he said, “I wish you’d turn on the lights, Sheriff.” Then, to Meade, “If you’ll tell us who shot you, we’ll be glad to ask him what he was doing out there.”

  Brilliant light glowed from an overhead chandelier.

  It lighted the wounded man’s frightened eyes, his tight-drawn mouth. He shook his head helplessly.

  “That’s just it. I don’t know who it was. He was squatting down with his back turned—then the light went out—”

  The front legs of Cal Strenk’s chair thumped to the floor. He pointed a trembling hand at the window, ejaculating, “Who in tarnation is that out there?”

  A whiskery old face was pressed against the pane, peering into the lighted room. The upturned collar of a sheepskin coat framed his seamed features.

  Phyllis shrieked, “Mike! It’s that same face—”

  Shayne leaped forward as the face disappeared in the darkness. He jerked the screen loose and thrust his head out, called back sharply, “There he goes. Around the corner of the house.” He turned back, glancing at his watch.

  Mark Raton was standing up near the door. His firm voice crackled in the hushed silence:

  “That was Pete Dalcor. If he got killed last night, that was his ghost. I’ll take my oath on it.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE BAFFLED LOOK on Sheriff Fleming’s face showed that he didn’t understand any of it, but he whirled out of the room and down the rear hall in the hopes of intercepting the bearded man who had reappeared so mysteriously.

  Everyone else in the room was staring at the editor from Telluride. Phyllis Shayne spoke first:

  “You must be mistaken, Mr. Raton. That’s the same man we saw at the window last night. I know it is. Didn’t you recognize him, Mike?”

  Shayne nodded slowly. “Looked like the same face to me.”

  “Can’t help that,” Raton grumbled. “Maybe you did see Pete Dalcor last night. But I saw him just now.”

  Two-Deck Bryant spoke up in a voice that trembled with wrath. “This is your doing, Shayne. I knew, by God, you had something up your sleeve. You had that old coot planted out there waiting for dark. I saw you look at your watch while you were driveling on—killing time until you could turn on the lights. You’re fixing it to try and prove the man who was killed last night wasn’t Peter Dalcor.”

  “Why,” said Shayne agreeably, “that seems self-evident. We all know Screwloose Pete is dead. But Mr. Raton knew Dalcor intimately years ago, and you just heard him positively identify a live man as his old friend.”

  “And I suppose he’ll now conveniently disappear again,” sneered Bryant. “And nobody will be able to prove he isn’t Dalcor. How much did you pay Raton to come here and pull a phony identification?”

  Shayne said, “I think Mr. Raton’s reputation will make him a credible witness if the question arises in court.” He moved slowly toward Bryant. “I wonder why you’re sticking your oar in. What stake do you have in proving Dalcor dead?”

  Bryant met his gaze steadily. “You insisted that I attend this conference, God knows why. I just want to warn these people that you’ve got a rep for pulling stunts like this. Ten to one, you’ve twisted it around so you stand to make something by proving the dead man wasn’t named Dalcor.”

  “That must be it,” Frank Carson put in angrily from behind Shayne. “He and his wife are in it together with this imported expert witness.” He gestured angrily toward Raton.

  “But you won’t get away with this one, Shamus,” Bryant broke in. “You’ll have a tough time getting around those clippings and things the murdered man had stashed away in his cabin.”

  “What clippings and things?” Shayne asked coldly.

  “The ones you dug up from under the hearth last night. These two men were there when you found them.” The gambler indicated Windrow and Strenk.

  Shayne raised his eyebrows at the two local men. “Do either of you know what this man is talking about? Did you see me dig up anything in Pete’s cabin?”

  They both shook their heads stoutly. “First we heard of it,” they vowed.

  Bryant began to curse Shayne in a low metallic voice. The redhead slouched closer and hit him in the mouth. Bryant was slammed back against the wall. Blood trickled down his chin. He licked at it and stopped swearing.

  “This is what I’ve been waiting for,” Shayne told him softly. “I thought you’d draw cards when you saw the way things were beginning to stack up.”

  Sheriff Fleming strode back into the room before Bryant could answer. He announced in a baffled tone: “Dogged if I know where he went to. Up in the air, seems like. Maybe,” he added in a hushed tone, “it was Old Pete’s ghost.”

  “There you are,” Carson cried. “Just as Bryant prophesied. It’s a trick to beat me out of my rightful share of the mine. But we’ll get a court order to make you produce that tobacco can. You can’t hold out evidence.”

  “What tobacco can?” Shayne asked slowly.

  “Why—the one you found in Pete’s cabin,” Carson faltered.

  “What do you know about it?” Shayne pivoted away from Bryant to face the younger man.

  “Bryant just said he was there when you dug it up.”

  “He didn’t mention a tobacco can.”

  “Well he—he had told me about it before,” stammered Carson, suddenly conscious that everyone in the room was eyeing him suspiciously.

  A young man entered the room quietly. He was approximately the same build as Frank Carson, with wavy brown hair and intelligent dark eyes. He asked Shayne, “How did I do?”

  Shayne glanced at his watch and grinned. “Exactly six minutes to get that old-man make-up off and reappear dressed in your own clothes. You’re an accomplished actor, Steele. As good, I’d say, as Carson. And I have a hunch you’re going to prove it when you play his role at the opera house tonight.”

  To the others, he said, “Let me present Philip Steele, Exhibit A. Peter Dalcor, if you please, without the whiskers and sheepskin coat.”

  To Mark Raton, he said, “Sorry to hoax you, but I had to convince myself it was possible for an actor to make himself up to resemble an old photograph closely enough to fool someone who had known the man in the photograph ten years ago. You see,” he added, “that’s the way Nora Carson was fooled last night.” Frank Carson slumped back on to the settee. His face was white and his left eyelid twitched spasmodically. He kept opening and closing his mouth, but no words came out.

  Two-Deck Bryant was edging along the wall toward the door. Shayne jerked his head at Casey. The New York detective got up and blocked the exit with a cheerful grin.

  Shayne said thoughtfully, “I’m not positive what the exact charge will be, Casey, but I imagine Colorado has some statute to cover the crime of incitement to murder. For Two-Deck is morally just as guilty as Carson. He drove Frank to put his fantastic plan into execution by threatening him with death if he didn’t pay up in a hurry. And we can charge him with attempted murder. He shot Joe Meade last night.”

  Bryant stopped with a snarl that drew his lips away from his teeth. “What do you think I was doing out there?”

  “Burying a Prince Albert can under the hearth. You overplayed your hand later when you were afraid I might overlook the cache. You drew my attention to the loose brick by stepping on it—and then suggested that I keep on digging under the first can which poor old Screwloose had showed you previously. Didn’t he plant the stuff, Carson, after you gave him th
e clippings and picture from your wife’s scrapbook?”

  The actor had gotten hold of himself. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and clamped his lips together tightly.

  Shayne said, “The beginning of the whole thing was the gambling debt Bryant came out to collect. First, you planned to get the money from Mrs. Mattson. But you would have to marry her, and Nora wouldn’t divorce easily, and Bryant wanted his money in a hurry. Then you read in the local paper about a simple-minded, nameless old prospector who’d just made a rich strike. You knew all about Nora’s missing father, and you worked out a plan to get Pete identified as your father-in-law and then get rid of him immediately afterward.”

  “He was her father,” Frank insisted. “She recognized him. She said so. After he was dead.”

  “But she hadn’t recognized his picture in the paper,” Shayne reminded him. “She didn’t until you made yourself up to look like her father had looked, and showed your face to her briefly through the hotel window. Then, like Mr. Raton just now, she was convinced she had seen Peter Dalcor. You ran away, met Pete up on the hillside where you had him planted, and smashed in the old man’s head with a rock so he was scarcely recognizable.

  “Your psychology was perfect,” Shayne went on swiftly. “And your timing of the whole affair was also perfect. She ran out of the hotel looking for her father. She was overwrought, and when she saw the body of an old man superficially resembling her father, dressed exactly as she had just seen him, with his face smashed and bloody, she naturally leaped to the conclusion that he was the same man she’d just seen out the window.”

  Carson laughed hollowly. “You should be writing mystery stories instead of trying to solve them. You saw me there yourself a few minutes after he died.”

  “Philip Steele just duplicated the stunt in exactly six minutes,” Shayne reminded him. “A dentist and his wife saw a bearded man in miner’s clothing run away from the body. That was you, in your disguise.

  “And you had timed it so Nora had only a few minutes with the body before you rushed her off to the opera house. She was weeping and torn with grief, in no condition to make a close examination of the corpse. Then, of course, she had to die, too—to prevent her from later discovering Pete wasn’t actually her father—and to make sure that the legacy went directly to you.”

  Carson laughed again. “Of all the goddam fairy tales,” he marveled.

  “It’s the way it has to be,” Shayne argued. “I showed Raton that recent picture of Screwloose and he couldn’t identify the man as Dalcor either. Just as Nora couldn’t. Why, then, did she suddenly do so through the window last night?”

  “How do I know?” snarled Carson. “Just the right light—a familiar expression on his face—”

  Shayne shook his head. “You made a half a dozen other mistakes. After you killed Nora, you knew there was no further need to keep on with Mrs. Mattson to get the money, so you told her off. And those clippings you supplied Bryant to hide under the hearth were from Nora’s scrapbook—with the exception of the one of Pete himself which he had torn out of the paper. The others were neatly clipped with scissors to show the date and source—as every actor clips his notices.”

  “All that adds up to exactly nothing,” Carson cried scornfully. “You admit Nora was dead before the play ended. I can easily prove I couldn’t have been absent from the theater for as much as five minutes. And it takes longer than that to get to the end of the flume where her body could be thrown in the creek.”

  “Yes,” Shayne agreed. “I timed it this afternoon. It takes fifteen minutes to reach the nearest end of the flume. And that gives you a swell alibi, Carson. Except for the trap-door into the flume from the old cellar under the opera house. Until I saw that opening into the flume this afternoon, I confess I didn’t see how you’d managed it. You didn’t have to leave the building to kill her. You got her into the cellar during the first act, killed her and dropped her body through the trap-door into the rushing water that carried her into the creek below town.”

  Carson’s face was a ghastly yellow, but he still managed a sneer of bravado. “You’re forgetting that Meade admits leaving a note to lure her away.”

  “He left a note in her dressing-room, all right, but Nora never saw Joe’s note. She was already dead. He didn’t know that, of course. He really supposed she’d gone to her death on account of his note.”

  “You’re crazy,” Carson insisted strongly. “According to your insane theory, I killed her inside the opera house. But she was in her hotel room after the play started. She left that note for me—”

  Shayne laughed. “That note was your first and most flagrant blunder. I was quite sure it hadn’t been written by Nora as soon as I read it. That’s why I asked you to identify the writing. When you said, positively, that it was Nora’s writing, I knew you must have forged it and left it there yourself—which meant you had planned she would be dead and couldn’t deny authorship.”

  Carson’s defenses were crumbling under the impact of Shayne’s remorseless logic. In a stricken voice, he asked, “What makes you think she didn’t write it?”

  “Because I’m an egoist, Carson. Just before Nora went to the opera house, she begged me to take the case, showing a lot of faith in my reputation and ability. If she’d had a clue, I felt reasonably certain she would have gone looking for me, not for the sheriff as the note stated. You also explained the presence of the note by saying one of her heavy coats was missing. There was no coat on her body, nor was one found any place in the vicinity. You haven’t a leg to stand on, Carson. I believe they use cyanide eggs in Colorado. That’s a quick, painless death—the same as you gave Nora and Screwloose Pete.”

  “It was his fault,” Carson cried wildly, jumping up and pointing a trembling finger at Bryant. “He put me up to it. He planned it all after he got chummy with Pete. I had to do it. That or be killed. He threatened me—” He fell back on the settee sobbing incoherently.

  Shayne nodded curtly to the sheriff. “That ought to mean a good stretch for Two-Deck even if he does escape going to the death-house with Carson.”

  “But, what’s it all about?” Phyllis wailed. “Wasn’t Screwloose Pete Nora’s father?”

  Shayne exclaimed, “By God, Phyl, do you need a blueprint?”

  “Yes, I do,” she asserted stoutly. “If Pete wasn’t Nora’s father, who was he?”

  “I suppose no one will ever know. Just an old prospector who’d lived alone too much.”

  “Then, who is Peter Dalcor?” Phyllis asked helplessly.

  “Good heaven, Phyl, I don’t know that one either. He may have been dead these ten years for all we know. Frank Carson made himself up to look like Dalcor last night—and Philip Steele repeated the performance for us just now.” He shrugged. “Isn’t that clear enough?”

  “Just about,” said Phyllis sweetly, “as clear as mud.”

  And later that evening, when they were back at the hotel and Shayne was having a noggin of cognac while Phyllis took a quick shower, she stuck her head out of the bathroom door, holding a bath towel up in front of her dripping body. “Oh, darling,” she cried breathlessly. “It just came to me like a flash. I understand it all now.”

  A grin quirked Shayne’s mouth. “Such sudden intuition must have been a severe shock to your nervous system.”

  “But, would it have worked?” she asked dubiously. “Frank’s plan, I mean. He couldn’t have proved Pete was his father-in-law.”

  “It won’t be put to the test now. But he and Bryant had laid their plans carefully. No one could have proved Pete wasn’t Nora’s father. She made a public identification of him. And that stuff planted in Pete’s cabin was mighty convincing evidence. The old clipping and a picture of Peter Dalcor and Nora taken years ago—”

  “What happened to that evidence?” Phyllis’s voice was reproachful. She began rubbing her dripping body with the coarse towel. “Why did Mr. Windrow and Strenk deny having seen you dig it up?”

&nb
sp; “I had arranged that with them beforehand,” Shayne explained easily. “I thought I’d get a rise out of Bryant that way. Up to that time I didn’t have any proof that Bryant was interested in seeing Carson inherit the mine.”

  “But, how did you get them to co-operate with you?”

  “That was easy.” Shayne took a meditative sip of his cognac. “I appealed to their greed. You see, they thought Pete was Dalcor and were afraid his third would revert to Frank Carson. So they were anxious to play ball when I suggested that we deny the existence of the evidence.”

  “But that was downright crooked of them, if they didn’t know the truth when they agreed with you.”

  Shayne assented gravely, “That’s right, Phyl. In their greedy desire to keep all of the mine for themselves they played right into my hands.”

  “I didn’t hear either one of them even thank you after it was all over. And if it hadn’t been for you no one would ever have known the truth, and Carson might have gotten Pete’s share of the mine.” Phyllis’s voice held righteous indignation, though slightly muffled as she vigorously toweled her face and neck.

  Shayne said, “One doesn’t expect thanks.” He touched the breast pocket of his coat holding a deed to a tenth interest in the mine. He grinned to himself and continued, “One’s reward comes from a sense of civic duty well performed. You’ve taught me that, Phyl. The—ah—dignity of my profession as opposed to the sordid and mercenary outlook I used to have before you came into my life.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I was just saying—”

  She advanced upon him swiftly, swathed in a heavy robe, and settled herself on his lap. “I heard you,” she laughed. “You’re wonderful and I adore you, but—I don’t want to change you too much, Michael. It wouldn’t be so hot if you let yourself get in the habit of not collecting fees.”

  Shayne pulled her face down and kissed her lips. He promised, “We’ll struggle along somehow. There’s generally a dollar or so to be picked up if a man knows where to look for it.”