A vagrant idea was nagging at the back of Shayne’s mind. It wasn’t clear, yet. He didn’t know exactly what it was or what he hoped it might prove but it was a point that had subconsciously bothered him ever since early in the morning when he and Gentry talked by telephone to Bates in Wilmington.
Upon reaching his car he got in and sat for a moment before starting the motor. In the rush of events since Carrol’s murder, he hadn’t had an opportunity to check at his hotel. This seemed a good time to do it, so instead of driving directly to the Commodore, he stopped off at his hotel.
The clerk on the desk had known the rangy detective for years and greeted him affably. “Bad business in two-sixteen last night, Mr. Shayne. Anything new on the Carrol murder?” His eyes flickered upward to the wound on Shayne’s head and a smile of admiration was forming on his lips when the redhead snapped at him in mock anger.
“Hell of a thing for Dick to be sick last night when it happened. The man you had on the switchboard didn’t even warn me I was trying to call a stiff when I asked for Carrol.”
“We’re all sorry about that, Mr. Shayne,” the clerk told him soberly, lowering his voice and glancing at an elderly couple near the desk. “And that’s something I’ve been wanting to see you about in private. Dick called up this morning and told me to tell you he tried to call you at your office about ten o’clock, but no one answered.”
Shayne’s memory flashed back to the call he had been prevented from taking by the interference of one of Gentry’s men, the burly, surly Gene Benton. He asked, “What did Dick have on his mind?”
“Something that worried him when he heard about Mr. Carrol being murdered. He knew it might be important, but Dick sure wouldn’t spill it to the cops unless you gave him the okay. It’s about your man casing Mr. Carrol’s apartment last week.”
Only a muscle twitching in his left cheek gave an indication of Shayne’s intense interest. This was it. This was what had been nagging at him.
“My man?” he asked quietly. “I thought all of you knew I work alone.”
“Dick didn’t give me too much on the phone,” the clerk said apologetically, “but that’s what he said. You did have an assistant a couple of months ago. Remember? You brought him in and introduced him around and said he was to use your room any time he wanted.”
Shayne’s eyes were very bright, but he said, “Yeh, Nash,” casually. “For a couple of weeks in January. He was around last week asking about Ralph Carrol?”
“Dick didn’t say it was him. Just said he was your man. ’Course we all know you always worked by yourself, but I recollect you did have this man that one time, and—”
“I remember,” Shayne cut in impatiently. “What’s Dick’s home number?”
“Oh, you can’t get him there now, Mr. Shayne. He was taken to the hospital for an operation at noon. He just wanted me to tell you he hadn’t spilled it and wouldn’t unless you said to.”
Shayne took out his wallet and laid a ten-dollar bill on the desk. He said, “Thanks. Send Dick some flowers.” He hurried out and headed for Nora Carrol’s hotel.
He stopped at the desk in the Commodore and asked for Mrs. Carrol’s room number. The clerk gave him the information and indicated the house phones on a counter a few feet away. “If you wish to speak to her,” he suggested delicately, “perhaps you’ll wait. I believe she has a caller now.”
Shayne trotted to the row of phones, lifted one, and said, “Room three-sixty,” and Nora Carrol answered immediately.
He said, “Mike Shayne downstairs. I’ll be right up.” He hung up before she could protest or acquiesce, and stalked to the row of elevators, found one waiting that put him on the third floor within a minute of his call. Thirty seconds later he stopped in front of three-sixty and rapped.
Through the closed door he heard movement inside the room and the blurred murmur of voices. He rapped again, hard and insistent.
A shrill cry of panic responded. “No, Ted! My God! No!” Nora Carrol’s voice echoed in Shayne’s ears followed by a blast of gunfire.
Shayne tried the knob fast. He drew back across the corridor, ready to lunge at the door with his left shoulder, when the door flew open.
Nora Carrol stood just inside, her hair disheveled and her face contorted with fear and horror. Tears streamed down her cheeks. The acrid smell of gunsmoke drifted up from the muzzle of a.45 automatic on the floor, and just beyond the gun a man’s body lay crumpled on its side.
“I tried to stop him! I tried to!” She sobbed the words over and over. “But he went crazy all at once.”
Shayne was beside her with an arm around her. He looked somberly down at the body of the man who had tried to kill him, in the front seat of his car, some nine hours earlier. Blood was gushing from a hole at the base of his throat, just beneath his chin.
Heeling the door shut, he half carried and half dragged the distraught widow to the bed. He let her down gently. “Cry it out while I call the police. But first tell me one thing. Is it Ted Granger?”
“Yes. He— he—” Her voice choked and she turned on her side, covered her face with both hands, and sobbed wildly.
Shayne picked up the telephone on the bedside table, asked for an outside line, and gave Will Gentry’s private number at police headquarters.
When the chief answered, he said, “Shayne, Will. I’m with Mrs. Carrol in three-sixty at the Commodore, and Ted Granger is lying here on the floor — dead.”
He listened a moment, then said impatiently, “It looks that way. I’ll try to calm Mrs. Carrol down and have her ready to answer questions when you get here. Better bring Bates along if he’s still around.”
He hung up and stood with his back to the corpse and the hysterical widow on the bed. His wound throbbed like a dull, steady rhythm on a drum, but he scarcely felt it as he turned slowly to make a careful survey of the room.
The dead man was in his shirt sleeves. His hat and jacket lay on a chair near the door. Everything was neat and tidy, and there was no indication of a struggle of any sort.
Shayne lit a cigarette, walked around to the other side of the bed from where Nora lay, and sat down. He studied her moodily, listening to her choking sobs. He took long drags on his cigarette, remembering the first time he had seen her, completely nude, and outlined in the faint light from the open door of his apartment, as she moved toward it to close it on the night latch before getting into his bed.
Suddenly he caught her shaking shoulder in a firm grasp and said curtly, “That’s about enough histrionics. So the guy is dead, and that makes two of your men rubbed out in twelve hours. But there’s still Margrave left.”
Her sobbing subsided slowly, and, for a moment, she lay still. Then she lifted herself on one elbow, glared at him, and said in an outraged voice, “What do you mean by that crack?”
“Don’t forget that Margrave has the invention now,” he said cynically. “That’s why you switched from him to Ralph in the first place, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
Nora Carrol was suddenly stricken again, and tears flowed down her cheeks. “How can you say things like that,” she sobbed, “when Ted is — when he’s l-lying there on the f-floor?”
Shayne said pleasantly, “Skip it if you like. It really doesn’t matter now, I guess.”
At the sound of footsteps hurrying down the hall, he got up and went to the door to admit Will Gentry and Attorney Bates. Officers from the homicide squad, a worried hotel manager, and curious guests pressed in behind him.
“Come in with your notebook, Jervis,” Gentry said to a young officer. “You, too, Bates. Rest of you stay out until I call you.”
He closed the door, looked at Granger’s body, then at Shayne, with lifted brows; and finally at the bed where Bates sat beside Mrs. Carrol, holding both of her hands in his.
Officer Jervis was seated at a table across the room with notebook and pencil ready. “Take this down,” the chief ordered. “Statement from Michael Shayne.” He turned to the redhead and waited.
“I came here straight from your office. Called Mrs. Carrol from the desk and said I was on my way up. I knocked on her door and heard voices, and some sort of movement. Then Mrs. Carrol screamed, ‘No, Ted. My God! No.’” Shayne’s utter lack of inflection on the words gave them a dramatic impact that no emphasis could possibly have done.
“This was instantly followed by one shot inside the room. I was all ready to hit the door with my shoulder, but Mrs. Carrol jerked it open from inside. She was sobbing and hysterical, and this is what I saw.” He gestured toward the dead man and the gun. “A dead man with a gun lying beside him. She told me it was Ted Granger and that she had tried to stop him, but he had suddenly gone crazy. I phoned you and haven’t touched anything except the telephone.”
He paused, then added calmly, “That’s about the size of it, Will. I haven’t tried to question her. There’s one thing more you should know right now. Granger is the man who called me on the telephone a little before four o’clock and offered me ten grand to keep quiet about Mrs. Carrol. He is the man who shot me, as I parked my car on the bayfront, and left me for dead. It’s a fair guess that the gun on the floor is the same one he used on me.”
Will Gentry nodded gravely. “The hole in the roof of your car came from a forty-five slug. We found an ejected cartridge on the floor.” He turned to Nora and said, “Your turn now, Mrs. Carrol. Start at the beginning and tell us everything you know about this.”
She was sitting tensely erect beside Bates, her face strained and white.
“I was surprised when Ted came about half an hour ago. I thought he was still in Wilmington. He had called me from there early this morning, you see, excited and worried about something. He begged me not to admit I knew he was in Miami last night. He swore that he had nothing to do with Ralph’s death — that it was something entirely different. I didn’t exactly promise him, but I did say I wouldn’t tell unless I had to.” She paused, moistened her lips, and hesitated.
“Then he showed up here about half an hour ago,” Gentry prompted her.
“Yes. He begged me, again, to promise I wouldn’t give him away. I said I would unless he told me why. Then he got excited and finally blurted out wildly that he had killed a man in Miami early this morning and had flown back to Wilmington and fixed an alibi that would stand up if I didn’t ruin it for him.
“I was horrified at first because I thought he meant he had killed Ralph, but he swore he hadn’t done that. He said he was frightened when he heard about Ralph and was afraid I had done it, and so he had killed you to protect me.” She looked directly at Shayne as she spoke.
“I was terribly confused and didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t heard you were dead. Of course, I hadn’t seen you since — there at the hotel, and I didn’t know for sure what might have happened. And then there were the two of you, you know. You saying it wasn’t you who’d been working for Mr. Bates, and all that. So, I just didn’t know.
“Well, Ted went all to pieces and simply groveled and begged me not to tell. And about that time you called from downstairs and said you were coming up.
“As soon as I hung up I said to Ted, ‘You see. You didn’t kill Michael Shayne. That was Mr. Shayne on the phone, and he’ll be up here in a minute.’ Then Ted went completely crazy. He raved at me for turning against him, and said he had killed Ralph for my sake; and now it was all over and he was going to kill himself and finish it. He got that pistol from inside his shirt and waved it around. I tried to stop him and just then you knocked. He jerked away from me and — and did it. I never — I just can’t believe it of Ted,” she ended brokenly. “I never suspected him for a moment. I still can’t really believe he killed Ralph.” She leaned against the Wilmington lawyer and began sobbing afresh.
“He did his best to kill me,” Shayne said grimly. “I wonder, now, if for a different reason than the one he gave us. Not to protect you, but to protect himself because of something the pseudo Michael Shayne knew. Did he say anything about how or why he killed your husband?”
“There wasn’t time. It all happened so fast. Just while you were on your way up.”
“You knew all the time he was here in Miami last night,” growled Gentry. “Didn’t you suspect him?”
“No. I didn’t,” she cried vehemently. “I just couldn’t think Ted would kill anyone.”
“You knew that he knew you were supposed to see your husband,” Shayne charged.
“Yes. I told him yesterday afternoon, right here in this room, after he trailed me from Wilmington. He was begging me to let Ralph go ahead and get the divorce so I could marry him, and I told him flatly that I loved Ralph and didn’t intend to give him up. And to make him realize it was final and definite, I told him what I was going to do, and made him go away.”
“You didn’t happen to give him the key to your husband’s room?” asked Shayne cynically, “and then get a duplicate of my key so you could pretend there was a mistake, and put yourself in the clear on whatever happened to your husband?”
“I certainly did not. I don’t know why I was given the wrong key, unless you did it yourself,” she ended with unexpected spirit.
“How do you suppose Granger found out where to locate your husband?”
“I don’t know. I may have told him the name of Ralph’s hotel, but I don’t think so.”
“But not the room number,” Shayne suggested. “Not one-sixteen instead of two-sixteen?”
“No. I’m certain I didn’t give him the number. Just the name of the hotel. I was so angry with him for following me down here—”
“That might begin to add up to something,” Shayne cut in, turning to Gentry. “If Granger went away from here in the afternoon knowing she planned to see her husband last night, and if he was determined to prevent her from doing so, it’s possible that Granger could have gone to the hotel and asked for Carrol, and that he got hold of a duplicate key to two-sixteen somehow, or had one made. But nothing in all this explains why Mrs. Carrol was given the key to my room. And we still don’t know who impersonated me on the job.”
“We can still check Margrave,” said Gentry doubtfully. “They’re bringing him in. We’ve got the ticket seller and the hostess from the four-twenty flight coming in to see if they can identify the man who called himself Michael Shayne. You willing to stand in a line-up with Margrave, Mike?”
“Of course.” Shayne nodded abstractedly, deep in thought. “You’ve also got an ejected forty-five shell from my car to check with this gun of Granger’s.”
Attorney Bates had sat tight-lipped and quietly consoling the widow. Now, he rose from the bed and said firmly, “If you’re through questioning Mrs. Carrol, may I suggest that I take her down and transfer her to another room. Unless you prefer to return to Wilmington immediately,” he added gently to Nora. “In that case I’ll be glad to—”
“Mrs. Carrol had better stick around awhile,” the chief broke in bluntly. “We’ve quite a bit of checking to do yet, and there may be further questions. But put her in another room, by all means, so my men can have a free hand in here.”
Bates took Nora’s arm, assisted her from the bed, and escorted her from the room.
Chief Gentry called the homicide squad in, then said to Shayne, “That’s all for us here, Mike. Margrave is probably at headquarters by this time.”
On their way to the elevator, Gentry asked with interest, “How does it look to you now, Mike? Anything smell about this setup?”
“No,” said Shayne honestly. “Everything Mrs. Carrol said checks with what little I heard outside the door. Of course, we’ve only her word for any of it, but if everything else checks out, I don’t see how we can disprove it.
“But there’s still a guy around Miami who’s been taking my name in vain,” he went on angrily, “who gave her the wrong key and the wrong number last night. He’s the man I want to get my hands on right now.”
Gentry was quiet in the elevator, but when they were in the lobby and moving toward the front door, he said, “I still like Margrave.”
“But why, Will? When I gave you Margrave, I was postulating the whole hoax on the belief it had been a deliberate and carefully premeditated plan to get rid of Carrol. But if Granger is the killer, that knocks Margrave out. He had no motive for impersonating me.”
“We’ll know more about that if the airport employees identify him. Coming along?” he asked when they reached the sidewalk.
“In a few minutes,” Shayne hedged, going to his own car. “I still want to have a go at finding out one thing from Ann Margrave, and I only hope she’s still sober enough to tell me.”