“No, no!” she cried in a strangled voice. “It was Charles. He told me…”
She was interrupted by a shout from Charles, a muttered oath from Donovan and the solid clunk of a revolver barrel against flesh and bone. This was followed by the heavy thump of a solid body against the floor, and Shayne turned his head to see Donovan kneeling over Charles’ recumbent figure and snapping handcuffs on the man’s lax wrists.
Shayne turned back to the widow dispassionately, “He won’t make any further trouble. Tell us what happened.”
“I want to,” she sobbed. “I wanted to all the time, but he frightened me. He showed me Marvin’s two notes and they did sound like he thought I’d killed John and tried to poison Henrietta. And he showed me how it’d work if we tore them apart in just the right place and put the two wrong halves together. And we made up that story about Marvin catching us together in his room so the note would make sense that way. And Marvin was already dead,” she wept on, hanging her head piteously. “I guess I really knew Charles had done it after frightening him into writing those two notes, but I was so scared and upset after what happened to Daffy and all that I hardly knew what I was doing.”
“You say there were two notes originally. Addressed to whom?”
“One was written to you and one to me,” she told him faintly. “He meant to hide them some place in the hope that one of them would be found, I guess.”
“But Charles got hold of them before he had a chance to hide them?” put in Shayne harshly.
“Yes. I guess so.”
“What did the original notes say?”
“I remember every word of the one written to me.” Anita shuddered and hung her head.
“What did he say?”
“He started out: ‘Dear Sis’.” She lifted her chin and recited tonelessly:
“‘If Charles kills me tonight as I expect him to, I hope this note or one I’m writing to Mike Shayne and hiding in a different place will be found. I kept quiet after I suspected you and Charles of murdering your husband, but after he kidnapped that nice secretary of Shayne’s tonight and boasted to me that he plans to kill her after the funeral tomorrow, I can’t remain silent any longer. She is a sweet girl and after seeing her with Charles tonight, I am revolted. Death holds no fears for me. John and Henrietta were old and mean and deserved to die. But this thing tonight is the last straw and I don’t want to go on living.’ And his name was signed to it,” she ended, tears running down her cheeks.
Shayne said, “And my note began: ‘I will write this note while I can. I love my sister and have always forgiven her anything she did because I was too weak to protest, but I can’t go on…’”
He broke off, nodding his head understandingly. “That was the end of a line.” He took the note from his pocket and looked at it.
“Fortuitously, the first two words of a line down in the middle of your note were, ‘any longer’. By tearing the two notes across between those two lines, the final note read as though the same thought was being carried on… with the implication that Marvin intended to kill himself instead of voicing his fear that Charles planned to kill him. Very neat. And so you went along with the deception?”
“What else could I do?” she sobbed frantically. “Charles practically admitted he had killed Marvin, and he threatened to kill me, too, unless I…”
“You damned lying bitch!” Charles was sitting upright on the floor with his wrists handcuffed behind him. His eyes were wild and there were bubbles of gray froth on his lips. “I did it all for you, goddamnit, after they dug up your lousy dog and I knew they’d find your strychnine in her belly that you’d meant for Henrietta. I told you last night why I grabbed the girl. Because I found the strychnine in your own handbag after you’d put it in Henrietta’s chicken to shut her up.”
“And I told you I didn’t do it,” she screamed at him, thrusting herself up from the depths of her chair. “I never saw the strychnine and I didn’t do anything to John.”
Shayne thrust her back into the chair savagely and said, “To hell with all that. You were talking about Lucy Hamilton. What did Charles do to her? Where is she?”
“In the boathouse. She was in the boathouse last night. But he said…”
Shayne whirled away from her and shot out at Petrie and Donovan, “Hold everything as it is.” He pounded down the hallway and out through the kitchen door, across the parking lot and past the garage to the path leading to the boathouse at the foot of the cliff.
He plunged recklessly down the wooden stairs, taking them three at a time, and when he reached the wooden dock at the bottom where he and Rourke had disembarked the preceding night, he saw a padlock on the door of the boathouse.
It was a flimsy-looking door, and he paused in front of it only momentarily before drawing back and lowering his left shoulder, then driving forward with all his strength to hit the door just beside the padlocked hasp.
The weathered wood splintered and gave way, and Shayne stepped through a gaping hole to see a neat Chris-Craft tied fore and aft in front of him with enough slack in the ropes so it could rise and fall with the bay tide.
He found an electric switch beside the smashed door and thumbed it, and an overhead light came on and he saw the figure of a girl huddled forlornly in one corner with a ragged blanket thrown over her.
He took two strides and snatched the blanket away from Lucy Hamilton’s body, saw that she was fully clothed, lying on her side with her body drawn into a bow with wrists tied tightly to her ankles, wide strips of adhesive tape tightly over her mouth.
Her eyes were wide open and unblinking, staring up at him, and he dropped to his knees beside her, choking back an oath and telling her cheerfully, “The marines have landed, angel.”
He cut the rope binding her wrists to her ankles and eased her back gently onto the rough boards, rubbing the constricted leg muscles and straightening one and then the other slowly and gently so normal circulation would be restored.
Then he crouched over her and grinned down into the wide-open brown eyes while he worked a thumbnail carefully under one end of the overlapping strips of adhesive across her mouth and told her, “This is going to hurt, angel.” He placed the wide palm of his other hand firmly on her forehead to hold her head solidly against the floor, got a good grip on the loosened ends of tape and pulled it loose with one strong jerk.
She moaned agonizingly and he felt hot tears against his palm, and he gathered her up in his arms like a little child and pressed her face tightly against his chest and pressed his lips gently against her disarranged curls and murmured crazy things to her which both of them remembered a long time afterward.
When she was through trembling and through crying and was able to speak in a small voice that was still somewhat distorted by pain, he continued to hold her tightly in his arms and she answered the few questions he needed answers to.
“Are you all right, Lucy? You know what I mean?”
She whispered, “Yes.”
“Who put you here?”
“Charles. He telephoned…”
“I don’t care how he worked it,” Shayne told her brusquely. “Save your breath for important things. Did Charles kill Rogell?”
“I don’t think so. He and Marvin… talked. He told Marvin Anita did it, and he was doing this to save her.”
“Did Marvin believe it?”
“I… think so. He was good, Michael. Don’t blame Marvin. He was… drunk, but decent. He argued with Charles about me. He threatened to tell you. Even after… Charles offered me to him. Do you understand? My body. Charles said… it wouldn’t matter to me because I’d have to die anyway as soon as I’d served my purpose. Oh, my God, Michael!” She shuddered violently and gave way in the circle of his arms to the hysteria which she had been fighting back.
“I’ve been so frightened,” she moaned through strangled sobs against his chest. “Lying here hour after hour. Wondering and waiting…”
Shayne’s arms tightened around h
er so her voice was smothered against his body.
Still holding her closely, he got to his feet and carried her out through the smashed wooden door into the sunlight. One arm crept around his neck tightly as he carried her up the stairs and around to the front of the house and his parked car. He opened the rear door and slid her inside gently onto the cushion and said, “Stretch out and try to relax. I’ll send the maid out with a glass of water which you should sip on… and I’ll be ready to drive you home in a few minutes. Think you can hold out?”
She opened her eyes and smiled tremulously up into his concerned face. “I can stand anything now.” She let out a little sigh of contentment and her eyelids fluttered shut again.
19
The tableau hadn’t changed much when Shayne came back into the study. Petrie and Donovan stood on guard in the archway, Anita was still huddled in the same chair, and Charles sat on the floor with his wrists handcuffed behind him. Peabody had moved to the bar and was mixing a drink, and Henrietta had taken advantage of his absence to make herself a stiff highball. The lawyer still sat stiffly in his chair, looking as though he very much wished he were some place else.
No one spoke as Shayne walked in between Petrie and Donovan. The big redhead’s face was impassive as he strode across the room and stopped directly in front of Charles and looked down at him. The chauffeur tilted back his head to look up with a snarl of defiance, and Shayne leaned down slightly to hit him a full-swinging open-handed blow on the left cheek.
The sound of the impact was loud in the room, and the force of it knocked Charles sprawling onto his side. Still without speaking, Shayne leaned down farther and savagely jerked him back up to a sitting position, set himself solidly and swung another full-arm blow with his left hand. Charles went over in the other direction like a nine-pin and stayed there, and Anita began sobbing wildly in her chair.
Shayne jerked the chauffeur roughly erect again and said happily, “This is real good fun, Charles. I can keep it up all day without getting tired. You want to start talking?”
“I did it for her,” he mumbled. “I knew if you found the strychnine in Daffy you’d be onto her for feeding the same stuff to the old man. I wasn’t going to hurt the girl. All I wanted was to scare you off from an autopsy.”
“But Marvin messed things up by catching you with Lucy and threatening to turn you in for kidnapping,” said Shayne conversationally.
“Even when I told him it was just to protect his sister,” complained Charles with every appearance of righteous anger. “I couldn’t afford that… not right then… so I tried to scare him out of it. How was I to know the fool was drunk enough to kill himself?”
Shayne said, “I don’t believe he was. You had the strychnine. Remember? You admitted finding it in Anita’s pocketbook after you buried Daffy.”
“That’s a lousy lie,” cried out Anita viciously. “I didn’t either. I didn’t touch any strychnine. Why would I? If it was in my pocketbook, somebody put it there just to throw suspicion on me.”
Shayne paid no attention to her. “But you did have it,” he reminded Charles. “How did Marvin get hold of it to commit suicide?”
“I gave it to him, that’s why,” Charles glared up at him sullenly. “To prove to him that his own sister had tried to poison Henrietta to shut her up. So the fool would get some sense in his head and let me handle it my own way.”
Shayne said, “We won’t worry too much about whether you fed the stuff to Marvin or he took it himself. Kidnapping is a capital offense and they can only burn you once.” He turned away from Charles and went over to the bar where he was pleased to find a bottle of cognac. He poured two inches in a highball glass and drank half of it, smiled pleasantly at the lawyer and told him, “I know you’d like to read that will and get out of here. There’s just one small matter to clear up.”
He transferred his bland gaze to Henrietta who sat bolt upright in a straight chair, gripping her highball glass tightly in both bony hands.
“You hired me to do a certain job for you yesterday, Miss Rogell. I did it, so I have no further intention of returning the retainer you paid me. An autopsy was performed secretly on your brother last night.” He held her gaze impassively. “All of you here will be interested to know that John Rogell died of heart failure… exactly as Dr. Evans stated on the death certificate.”
A long-drawn sigh came from Anita’s lips. She sat up straight and her eyes flamed contemptuously at Charles on the floor. “I told you so.” Her voice was thin with rage. “But you wouldn’t believe me. Your lousy ego made you think I’d done something to John… when I loved him all the time.”
“See here, young man.” Henrietta’s heavy voice cut in unexpectedly. “What sort of nincompoop performed that autopsy on my brother?”
“The regular police surgeon. A very competent man.”
“Competent, my foot! He’s a bungling fool. Didn’t he have brains enough to check for digitalis?”
“But it was common knowledge that your brother had been taking digitalis for years,” protested Shayne. “He would naturally expect to find that in his system.”
“Of course, he would. And that’s exactly why he should have measured the quantity he swallowed the night he died. Didn’t he realize that’s exactly what his wife would use to kill him? Instead of strychnine or something obvious like that. Mrs. Blair will bear me out that she knew exactly what effect an overdose would have. Dr. Evans warned her carefully enough. I could have told that fool doctor what to look for.”
Shayne nodded and tugged thoughtfully at his left earlobe. “Yes, I’m sure you could, Miss Rogell. Because you put that extra teaspoonful in his milk yourself, didn’t you?”
“Nonsense. It’s just that I happen to be the only one around here with a brain in my head.”
Shayne shook his red head soberly. “I’m going to arrest you for poisoning your brother, Miss Rogell. And for attempting to frame Anita for your crime by putting strychnine in your own creamed chicken and feeding it to Daffy in a last-ditch effort to draw attention to your first crime.”
“Of all the fantastic nonsense I ever heard!” she exclaimed crisply. “And then, I suppose, I came to the best private detective in Miami and hired him to make a case against me?”
“That’s exactly what you did. After your scheme to kill Daffy fell flat on its face and she was safely buried with the strychnine inside her. It must have been quite a blow to you when these two detectives who investigated that night didn’t even look into Anita’s handbag and find the strychnine where you’d put it. Instead, Charles found it there, and unfortunately jumped to the conclusion you’d hoped the detectives would reach.”
Henrietta’s lips were tightly compressed and she shook her gray head wonderingly from side to side. “And what possible motive would I have for doing all those things, Mr. Michael Shayne? You know the provisions of John’s will. I’m cut off without a penny of my own. She gets it all.” She jerked her head indignantly toward Anita. “I was the last person in the world to want to see John in his grave.”
“Correction,” said Shayne gravely. “You were the only person in this entire household with any motive at all. The others knew they were provided for in his will and could well afford to wait. Even Marvin Dale. Even though Rogell might have kicked him out of his soft spot here, his sister would have continued to provide for him until she came into a lot of millions on her husband’s natural death. You were the only one who couldn’t afford to wait for that. Your only chance of ever getting your hands on the money you felt was rightfully yours was to arrange it so Anita would be convicted of murdering him. In that case, the will would be set aside because a murderer cannot legally profit by her crime. If you waited for John to die normally, you were sunk. So… you didn’t wait, Miss Rogell.”
“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?” she asked sarcastically. “The one thing you can’t show is opportunity. Haven’t you brains enough in that red head of yours to realize that I’m the on
ly person here who couldn’t have dosed John’s milk the night he died? All the others had a chance at it. I didn’t.”
“That,” said Shayne heavily, “is why I suspected you from the first. The night it happened was the one night when you had a perfect alibi. That’s why you weren’t afraid to come to me and hire me to reopen the case. You figured you were perfectly safe. No matter who else might be suspected, it couldn’t be you.”
“Of all the Alice in Wonderland logic I ever heard,” said Henrietta with a sniff, “that takes the cake. Is that the way you solve all your cases, young man? By finding the one person who has a perfect alibi and then suspecting him?”
Shayne grinned ruefully. “It isn’t always that easy. But from the beginning in this one, it looked as though you might have carefully built yourself an alibi. As though you knew what was going to happen to John that night, and provided yourself with witnesses to prove you couldn’t have tampered with the chocolate milk.”
“And you’ll have to admit I couldn’t have,” she pointed out with dry satisfaction. “I was in my own room while Mrs. Blair was fixing it. She came straight upstairs after leaving it on the dining table, and I stopped her on the way up and went up to her room with her where I stayed every minute until after he had his attack. You can ask Mrs. Blair.”
“I’ve already asked Mrs. Blair,” Shayne countered easily. “She told me the same thing… along with some other interesting bits of information.”
He turned from Henrietta to the housekeeper who had not spoken a word since he first entered the room. “Do you remember telling me how Charles was in the kitchen that evening and poured out the last glass of milk to drink it with some cookies before you noticed it was the last and had to take it away from him so there’d be the regular cupful for Mr. Rogell?”
“I remember that, Mr. Shayne.”
“And you were surprised to discover it was the last glass in the refrigerator?” Shayne pressed on. “You’d thought there was another full bottle, but suddenly discovered there wasn’t and that you had to have Charles’ glass for Mr. Rogell? Do you remember that, too?”
Die Like a Dog Page 15
