Shayne said thoughtfully, “You’re sure you left a little before eleven?”
“Minerva will tell you that,” Wilsson assured him eagerly. “Like I told you before, it was a little after eleven when I got home and she was watching the news on TeeVee. So whatever happened to Ellie must’ve happened after eleven o’clock.”
“If you’re telling the truth,” said Shayne.
“Well, I am. Like I say, I can prove I was home a few minutes after eleven.”
“But you haven’t proved that Ellie Blake was still alive when you left her bedroom,” Shayne pointed out grimly.
Harry Wilsson stared at him in consternation and horror, his jaw drooping open slackly. “Why would I hurt her?” he cried out. “My Lord, she’d just… well, you know.” He swallowed hard and appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what else I can say,” he quavered.
“I don’t either,” Shayne said uncompromisingly. He looked at his watch and got up. “For the moment I’m going to keep this confidential, Wilsson. But you’re not in the clear. I’ll be talking to you again.” He turned and strode out of the office hurriedly.
12
Marvin Blake awoke that day slowly and unwillingly. He had a terrible, splitting headache and his mouth tasted of dry cow manure (the way he imagined dry cow manure tasted). He was enveloped in a grayish fog of semi-consciousness which he hugged about him gratefully and into which he retreated each time his mind threatened to pierce the barrier into full awareness.
Mercifully, memory was anesthetized for a long period of drugged half-wakefulness during which he fought back against the horror of fully realizing where he was and why he was there.
Slowly, inexorably, consciousness came to him, and with it the horrible phantasms of memory which had been floating, wraithlike, beyond the barrier; which he had sensed, but refused to give credence to.
It came back to him with a sickening, savage onrush of reality and with stark clarity. His body trembled violently and then stiffened, and tears flowed from his eyes, and he knew an awful sense of desolation and of self-pity.
He knew where he was and why he was there. He recalled planning to kill himself last night, and he was filled with bitter self-revulsion for having failed to carry out his plan.
He opened his eyes wide and discovered that he was lying on his back, fully clothed, on top of the spread on a hotel bed. Overhead, an unshaded electric bulb cast a sickly yellow light over the bare room with its drawn shade and tightly closed window. Beyond the faded shade, bright sunlight told him it was well into the next day, but he had not the faintest idea what time it was.
He had passed out, of course, he realized bitterly and with self-loathing. He was a weakling who had sought strength from a whiskey bottle to bolster up his resolution and had, instead, brought himself to this miserable state where time must go on and the galling future must be faced.
He closed his eyes tightly for a long moment, and then gritted his teeth and forced himself to turn on his side so he could see his wristwatch.
It was almost two-thirty. In the afternoon. The train from Miami was due to come through about three o’clock! The same train that he had happily planned to come home on when he departed for the convention a few days ago.
He was expected on that train. Sissy would be at the station to greet him and throw her sweet arms about his neck and press her face against him. Oh, God. Sissy!
With sudden sure clarity he knew it was Sissy who mattered now. He mustn’t fail Sissy. Her mother and Harry Wilsson!
He forced the memory to the back of his mind at the same time as he forced his rebellious body to sit up in bed and his legs to swing over the side.
A flooding wave of nausea engulfed him and he bent forward retching, and then vomited on the floor between his wide-spread feet. Some of the vomit splashed up onto to his shoes, and he stared at the stains dully and reminded himself that he must wash them off before Sissy saw them.
Because Sissy must never know. She must never suspect. He did have something to live for. He was grateful, now, that God had intervened last night and caused him to take that second drink from the bottle before he took his own life.
His senses were spinning and his head was splitting wide open as he shambled to his feet and made his way unsteadily into the bathroom. The physical effort caused him to vomit again, and he hung laxly over the toilet seat, trembling and white-faced, retching again and again until it seemed that his very guts would be wrenched loose and would have to come up.
And suddenly he felt better. He was still weak and shaking, but the sharp, screaming pain in his head had subsided to a dull, endurable ache.
He loosened his collar and removed his tie, and ran cold water in the basin and soaked a hand-towel in it to slosh over his face and neck. He found a glass in the cabinet above the lavatory and washed the taste of dry manure out of his mouth and drank two glassfuls of the wonderful stuff, and then dried his face and consulted his watch again.
Miraculously, less than ten minutes had passed since he had looked at it before. He went back into the bedroom and grimaced when he saw the whiskey bottle on the bureau, less than half full now, and the water glass sitting beside it. His suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, opened, and he knelt down and groped for his razor. He started to search for fresh blades, and then he remembered clearly. The new packet he had taken out the night before still lay unopened on the bed.
And on the rug lay the pad of yellow paper with lined pages. He stared down at the words: “To whom it may concern ” and underneath that, the scrawled, “I, Marvin Blake, wish to state… That was as far as he’d got last night. And now he was glad that was as far as he’d got. Now, when he got off the train at Sunray there must be nothing to indicate that he had not spent the night in Miami as previously planned. He must be shaved and look reasonably neat. A hangover didn’t matter. It would be accepted as a natural result of cutting loose at the last night of the convention. There was no reason in the world for anyone to suspect anything else, he told himself. No one had actually seen him leave the hotel yesterday afternoon. None of the fellows would really have missed him last night… not enough to make any queries, certainly. He doubted whether any of the other delegates would have been taking the train today. Practically all of them had driven their cars to the city. After all, it was an auto dealers’ convention, and he remembered that Harry had kidded him about taking the train instead of driving his own car.
Harry!
Oh, God. Harry. Would he ever again in the future be able to think of that name without a sudden tightening of his heart, an awful sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, a traumatic trembling.
He hurried into the bathroom and shaved himself sketchily. Then he forced himself to take time to comb his hair carefully, replace his tie, and scrub the vomit off his shoes with the wet hand-towel.
He left the whiskey bottle sitting just as it was on the bureau, replaced his razor and closed his bag, and still had fifteen minutes until train-time when he went out of the hotel room and locked the door behind him.
Downstairs, he found a pimply-faced young man at the desk in place of the rheumy-eyed old man who had checked him in last night, and he slid his room-key across with a ten-dollar bill, muttering, “I’m checking out,” and averted his face while the young man yawned and checked his registration and languidly counted out his change.
Outside the hotel was bright, hot sunlight, and Marvin Blake sweated from every pore of his body as he walked toward the railroad station carrying his heavy bag. He felt faint, and he thought surely he would have to stop and set the bag down and be sick right there in public on the sidewalk, but somehow he managed to keep moving along at a steady pace, and he reached the station five minutes before the train was due, but he went straight on to the platform to board it without buying a ticket to Sunray from the office inside.
It would be smarter and safer, he thought, to pay cash for a ticket to the conductor on the train. Then t
here wouldn’t be any record made of the transaction, and no chance that the local stationmaster would remember having sold a ticket between the two towns if the question ever arose.
Not that there was any chance it would ever arise, Marvin assured himself while the train from Miami thundered in and he waited for one of the coaches to stop in front of him so he could get aboard. No one in the world, he thought, had any reason to suspect he hadn’t stayed for the final night of the convention in Miami last night as he had planned.
No one in the whole world would ever know that he had been in Sunray Beach last night and what had happened there. If only it hadn’t ever happened, he thought desperately as he settled himself into an empty coach seat and waited for the train to hurry. If only it were possible to turn back the clock, efface last night and its horror.
He settled himself down on the seat and tried to make himself feel as though none of it had happened, as though he were just plain Marvin Blake returning from the convention and looking forward eagerly to greeting his wife and his child when he got off the train at Sunray.
Because that’s the way he should be feeling, he told himself. That’s the way he had to act when he got off the train. As though nothing had happened. As though last night had not been.
The conductor came through and uninterestedly accepted his cash fare for the short run to Sunray Beach, and passed on forward through the train, and Marvin closed his eyes and wished his head would stop aching and tried to pretend that everything was just the way it had always been, and the clacking of the wheels almost put him to sleep for a moment, and it all began to seem like a dream, and suddenly he was uneasily aware of a sort of pressure against his chest, and he put his hand up there, half in a dream-state, and he felt that hard lump of the gift box in his breast pocket containing the pretty earrings he had bought as a gift for Ellie in Miami, and a fierce anger took possession of him and he took the box out of his pocket and glared at it.
He ought to throw it away, he thought. He ought to destroy it. What an utter damned fool he had been! To give up his last night in Miami to save enough money to afford the earrings to take home to a bitch of a wife who was already planning to spend the evening in the arms of his best friend.
Tears came into his eyes again, but he blinked them away angrily and put the square gift box back in his pocket. He’d better hang onto it, he thought. It would look better that way. Him bringing a special present home to Ellie, all wrapped up and with a card in it. It would go to show how much he loved Ellie and trusted her.
That was very important, now. Much more important than it had ever been in the past when he had loved and trusted her, and never had any reason to be otherwise. He couldn’t say why it was more important now. Obscurely, though, he knew it was on account of Sissy. Sissy must never know. She must never be allowed to guess. Nothing else was important from this time onward in life. He must keep that always in mind. He must guard every word henceforth, every inflection.
Marvin Blake’s heart pounded and his hands were clammy as the afternoon train lunged on down the tracks closer and closer to home.
Who would be at the station to meet him? How would he carry it off? Suppose Harry Wilsson were to be there? He and Minerva. It would be the most natural thing in the world, they being his and Ellie’s closest friends. But would Harry have the guts to face him after last night?
How could a man do that? Of course, Harry didn’t have an inkling that Marvin knew. He’d probably be afraid not to come to the station to meet his train, Marvin decided contemptuously after a bit of thought. It would be like Harry to brazen it out. Hell, maybe he had been brazening it out for a long time and was used to it. Maybe last night hadn’t been the first time for him and Ellie… not by a long shot.
The conductor came walking back through the train, and he called out, “Sunray Beach,” while he was passing Marvin’s seat.
The train swayed a little as it began slowing down for the station, and Marvin got up and pushed his suitcase out into the aisle with his foot, and braced himself for a moment, leaning down to try and peer out the window as they ground into the station, but he couldn’t see anything in the bright sunlight outside the grimy window, and he straightened up and got a firm grip on his bag and walked back to the exit where he was the only passenger to get off.
He stood at the bottom of the steps for a moment on the narrow cindered strip, blinking his eyes and looking up and down the track for a familiar face.
He saw three men walking toward him unhurriedly from the direction of the station. He recognized only one of them, Chief of Police Ollie Jenson. The other two were strangers.
He looked beyond them to the station platform, but saw no one else who appeared to be there to meet him. Not even Harry Wilsson.
Marvin Blake shifted his suitcase from his right hand to his left, and advanced to meet the three men.
13
Chief Jenson stepped forward in front of the two strangers and extended his hand, exclaiming effusively, “Hello there, Marv old boy. Had yourself quite a time in the city, I reckon. You look like you hung one on last night for sure.” He gripped Marvin’s right hand tightly and shook it with more enthusiasm than seemed necessary under the circumstances, and Marvin smiled with an obvious effort and admitted, “I have got a hangover, Ollie. Where is everybody? I thought sure…”
“Well, I got a couple fellows here I want you to meet, Marv. Come up from Miami special to see you. Mr. Timothy Rourke. He’s a reporter on the Miami News, Marv. And Mr. Michael Shayne. Meet Marvin Blake, gentlemen.” Marvin looked confused and somewhat frightened as he allowed his limp hand to be shaken by both men, and he muttered, “From Miami? I just came from there. I don’t see…”
“Tell you what, Marv. It’s like a newspaper interview, see?” said Ollie Jenson, stooping to pick up Blake’s suitcase and taking him firmly by the elbow. “My car’s parked right here in the shade. Let’s all go over and sit down comfortable, huh?”
“Wait a minute now, Ollie.” Marvin resisted the pressure on his elbow and looked toward the station again. “Where’s Ellie and Sissy? I made sure they’d be down to meet the train. What’s going on here anyway? Has something happened that you’re keeping back from me?” His voice rose shrilly, underlaid with panic.
“Now Marv, boy, you just take it easy,” Jenson counseled him with an appealing glance at Rourke and Shayne for assistance. “Don’t you worry about them. You’ll be seeing Sissy all right in just a few minutes. Let’s just get this little business took care of first, then I’ll drive you straight on home.”
He dropped his hand from Marvin’s arm as Shayne and Rourke moved up on either side of the man, and he moved on a few paces ahead of the trio toward his police sedan which waited nearby at the end of the station parking lot.
“Just a few questions, Mr. Blake,” Timothy Rourke said quietly. “First off, where were you last night?”
“Where do you suppose I was?” snapped Marvin. “At the tail-end of the convention getting drunk and making a fool of myself… that’s what. Why is the Miami News interested in that? I don’t get this at all. There’s something wrong, isn’t there? By God, if you don’t tell me…”
“We want you to tell us, Blake,” Shayne interrupted him. “We know you weren’t at the Atlantic Palms Hotel last night. You checked out at four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“So you know that, do you?” demanded Marvin Blake bitterly. “What’s it to you what I did last night? Can’t a man have any privacy? Who are you, anyhow, to be asking questions?” He doggedly stopped in his tracks and looked the big redhead up and down with challenging eyes. “I don’t think I got your name.”
“Mike Shayne,” the detective told him.
“What paper do you work for? What is this anyhow?”
“We’re asking the questions, Blake,” Shayne told him evenly. “Any reason why you don’t want to tell us where you spent last night?”
“Can you give me any good reason why I shou
ld?” Marvin faced the two of them defiantly, and then suddenly turned and hurried away from them toward Jenson who was putting his suitcase in the back seat of the sedan.
“You got to tell me, Ollie,” he jerked out desperately. “We’re friends, aren’t we? What is this all about? Something’s happened, hasn’t it? A minute ago you said I’d see Sissy in just a minute. What about Ellie? You didn’t mention her. What about my wife? Has something happened to Ellie? You got to tell me. I’ve got a right to know.”
“Well now, Marv…” Jenson looked past the distraught auto dealer at the two men from Miami for a signal. Shayne shrugged wide shoulders and nodded.
“I’m sorry, Marv.” The police chief put a fleshy hand on Blake’s shoulder and squeezed it tightly. “I hate to have to tell you like this. Dag-nab it, yes. Something bad has happened to Ellie. She got herself murdered last night, Marv.”
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