This Is It, Michael Shayne ms-19

by Brett Halliday

“It might be interesting to kiss a murderess,” he said in a calm, speculative tone, “but I think I’ll skip it if you don’t mind.”

  She relaxed and closed her eyes, squeezing a tear from under each lid. “That’s a horrible word, Michael,” she said drearily. “Is it really murder-what I did?”

  “It’s murder when you go to a man’s room of your own volition with a gun in your handbag and the determination to kill in your mind.”

  “But I’ve told you-”

  “A lot of lies mixed in with a few grains of truth,” he said brutally, pushing her away from him. He stood up and took his empty glass from the table, went to the desk and refilled it. Returning, he toed a light occasional chair along, stopped on the opposite side of the serving-table, and sat down.

  “You had every intention of killing Morton when you went to the Ricardo Hotel,” he resumed, “after covering yourself carefully with a story about a fake telephone call.”

  “But it wasn’t a fake. Lucy can tell you.” There was naked fear in her eyes.

  “Lucy didn’t hear the phone ring at all,” he snapped. “You waited until she was under the shower and couldn’t know whether it rang or not. Then you called Morton to tell him you were coming over. When Lucy came out of the bathroom and caught the tag-end of the conversation you gave her the story about me calling.”

  “Have you lost your mind, Michael? It wasn’t that way at all. Lucy will tell you-”

  “I say it was,” he cut in sharply. “And so does the switchboard operator at the Ricardo,” he added untruthfully.

  “That horrid old man-” She burst out angrily.

  “Heard every word you said,” he supplied. “No call went out from three-oh-nine tonight, but your call came in about twelve-fifteen.”

  “Suppose I did go over to see Ralph,” she jerked out viciously. “But the rest of it happened just as I told you. He misinterpreted my reason for going there at that time of night.”

  “I’ll grant some of it did happen as you’ve told it,” Shayne said wearily, “but I don’t believe there was any struggle. You warmed up to him just as you’ve been doing to me, and then you let him have it. Carl Garvin messed up your plan by knocking on the door and opening it. I imagine you planned to write some sort of scrawled suicide note, didn’t you, after slipping those magazine pages you’d clipped the words out of into Ralph Morton’s wastebasket. You knew the police would find them-and assume that he sent those threatening notes to his wife.”

  “Michael!” she exclaimed. “I don’t understand-”

  “Oh, yes you do,” he burst out savagely. “You felt yourself pretty much of an expert at murder by that time-after the beautiful job of improvisation you did after killing Sara Morton.”

  “Michael!” she wailed. “You can’t seriously think-” Her voice broke and she was weeping again.

  “Save your tears,” he snapped. “You knew you had to kill Ralph Morton when you heard the midnight newscast saying he was seen outside her door pounding for admittance about six-thirty. No one saw him go in, and no one knew he didn’t get in because she was dead. But he knew. And your whole complex alibi depended on us believing she was alive at six-thirty. That’s why you double-locked the door, as an insurance against someone, a maid, for instance, opening the door and discovering the body before six-thirty.”

  “You are insane, Michael Shayne. Do you think I’d have locked myself in that closet where I almost suffocated on purpose?” She blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

  “I’m pretty sure you didn’t lock yourself in with any intention of suffocating. Where were you when Garvin opened the door? Behind it? When he ran away after seeing Morton’s body you thought he was hurrying to report it to the police. You figured you didn’t have time to get out of the hotel, so you smashed your glasses on the floor in front of the door, then locked yourself in the closet, thinking you’d be found within a very few minutes. That minor bump on your head was easily self-administered.”

  She stared at him in helpless amazement. “I don’t see how you can think such things,” she said weakly.

  “Your glasses were not on the floor when Garvin opened it,” he stated flatly. “But they were there when he and I arrived together an hour later. What does that do to your story?”

  She drew in a long quivering breath and said wildly, “It’s all so preposterous! Have you forgot that special-delivery letter you got from Miss Morton! If you’ll check the pick-up times for mail at the Tidehaven you’ll see it had to be mailed between six-ten and seven-fourteen. Mr. Rourke will tell you I met him at six o’clock downstairs. If she mailed it after I met him-”

  “That’s what made a damn near perfect alibi,” Shayne agreed. “If she had written and mailed the letter, you’d be in the clear. But I can prove she didn’t do either. You wrote the letter on her typewriter. I imagine you’ve pretty well perfected copying her signature, but not so well as to fool an expert. You had already shoved those fancy shears in her throat some minutes before six o’clock. After writing the note, you hastily concocted a series of three threatening messages to serve as a blind for mailing the letter-and to make me believe that was the reason she was so eager to contact me all day. It was a simple matter from then on. You didn’t have time to go up to the fourteenth floor and murder Sara Morton in those three or four minutes you left Rourke in the cocktail lounge. But it was plenty of time to drop the letter in the mail box.”

  Beatrice Lally was crumpled on the couch with both hands over her face. There was no tearful weeping now. Her body shook with dry, convulsive sobs.

  Shayne had his chair tilted back and his head rested against his clasped hands. His eyes stared thoughtfully at the ceiling and his voice was calm as he continued his inexorable summing up:

  “I thought there was something fishy about those enclosures from the beginning. Will Gentry put his finger on it when he wondered why the devil Sara Morton waited behind a locked door for death to come without even asking for police protection after giving up hope of contacting me. You overplayed your hand-as most murderers do.”

  He thumped the front legs of the chair down and unclasped his hands from the back of his head, took the two letters he’d brought from Gentry’s office and selected the special-delivery one.

  “This letter to me is evidently typed on Miss Morton’s personal typewriter as distinguished from yours by comparing it with this script of the Harsh story I brought along. But the same person typed both notes and the script. Don’t you know that a person’s typing is as distinctive as handwriting? Any expert will testify that you typed the letter. You’ve probably signed her letters for years, as well as opening and sorting all mail, as you told me yourself.”

  The girl on the couch writhed and moaned, but she didn’t take her hands from her face.

  “That’s where you made your first big mistake,” he went on. “As soon as I read the blackmail note to Burton Harsh, I knew you wrote it. You told him to mail the money directly to Miss Morton. It would have been insane for her to tell him that, because you open all her mail before she sees it. But it was perfectly safe for you to try it-after learning three days before that she was killing the story on her own initiative.

  “And that’s why you had to kill her,” he continued, disgust and contempt rising in his voice. “Because Harsh got tight and came to her room and angrily protested the note. She realized immediately that you were trying to extort money from him by using her name-and that’s what the violent quarrel was about.”

  Miss Lally’s moans had gradually subsided. She sat up and her eyes blazed at him. “If you’re so damned smart and knew I killed her, why did you make a fool of yourself stirring up a mess with Mr. Harsh and Carl Garvin-and Paisly?”

  “I didn’t say I knew you killed her,” he said mildly. “I only stated that I knew you had written the letter. But Harsh didn’t know you wrote it. Nor Garvin.”

  “And you don’t know it either,” she screamed in wild anger.

  “Wait till I fi
nish,” said Shayne. “I’m giving you credit for being plenty smart. You brooded about things all day while she tried to get in touch with me to tell me what you’d been doing. She probably wanted me to check back for several years and find out how often you’d done the same thing successfully in other big cities. Just before six o’clock, when you found out she hadn’t been able to reach me and there was still time to save yourself, you grabbed up the shears and killed her.

  “The crowning touch,” he went on angrily, “was that torn half of a bill enclosed in my letter and the other half dramatically clenched in her dead hand. By God, I fell for that. The perfect macabre touch to convince me the letter and the enclosures were genuine. It screamed out: This is it, Michael Shayne. At the moment of death this is my way of saying to you what I left unsaid in my hasty note.

  “Sure. I fell for it. I stood over her dead body and thought just that. That was a nice touch, too, when you built up the story about her not being able to face the disgrace of being exposed as a blackmailer, and insisted on having it handled privately.”

  “You can’t prove it!” she screamed. Beatrice Lally had her bag in her lap and was digging into it frantically. “No one else suspects a word of it, and you’ll never-”

  “Michael! Look out!” Lucy Hamilton was shouting from the open doorway of the darkened bedroom.

  Beatrice dropped the bag and soft light gleamed on the silvered barrel of a twin to the automatic she had used to kill Ralph Morton.

  Shayne acted the same moment Lucy screamed. He ducked low and came up with the serving-table turned sideways and rammed it forward, knocking Beatrice off balance. The gun dropped to the floor and she was pinned against the couch.

  Lucy Hamilton ran in, dropped to her knees in front of the girl, and came up with the gun.

  “Good girl,” Shayne said. “I hope you got all this down.”

  “Every word of it,” she panted. “If I can read the pothooks I made in the dark. When you told me Miss Lally was coming here replete with toothbrush, I knew you wanted me to come here for some reason. But why did you insist on doing it this way, Michael? Couldn’t you have just told Chief Gentry.”

  Shayne was getting the service table back on four legs. When he took the top away from Miss Lally’s body she fell on the couch and lay quiescent and exhausted, with the hot fires of hatred flickering in her naked eyes.

  “I could have jumped the gun,” he said cheerfully, picking up the articles that had clattered to the floor from the upturned table. “But I wanted to get hold of this manuscript first.” He had just picked it up from the floor and handed it to Lucy. “Burton Harsh owes me a balance of five grand on it. And I might have been wrong,” he added, “if Beatrice could have talked herself out of it. Who knows but what having the toothbrush on tap might have come in handy after all?”

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