Call for Michael Shayne [= Case of the Missing Twelve Days]

Chapter twelve No suicide note

Shayne’s next stop was in front of the Miami News Building on Biscayne Boulevard. He went up to the morgue and checked back through the files to the story of Lily Masters’s death. There were front-page headlines, a picture of the deceased and her husband standing together in an affectionate embrace, a picture of the maid who had summoned help after finding her mistress’s door bolted on the inside that fateful morning, and one of Bert Masters’s confidential secretary who had responded by breaking down the bedroom door and entering the room to find Mrs. Masters lying dead in her bed.

Shayne studied the three pictures carefully before reading the story. Knowing Masters, Shayne was positive the picture of the couple had been taken years before her death. They had evidently been in love with each other at the time. Lily Masters looked delicate, almost ethereal, with enormous eyes, turned-up nose and short upper lip, and a weak chin. Even at that age the fragile beauty of her features held a suggestion of petulance, a hint of childishness which had developed in later years into the hypochondria that Doctor Thompson had mentioned.

He passed over the likeness of the stout, dull-eyed maid, but the picture of Roger Morgan held Shayne’s interest for several moments. His was a broad, arrogant face, and Shayne wondered how a man like that had managed to hold his position as confidential secretary to Masters for so many years. Knowing Masters’s reputation as a domineering bully, it seemed reasonable to expect his secretary to be a weak-kneed yes-man, a sycophant.

Roger Morgan was certainly neither of these, judging from his looks and from Arthur Devlin’s own description of him. He wore rimless nose-glasses which gave a scholarly appearance to his blunt features. Even with the photographic handicap of the glasses his eyes were piercing and shrewd and fearless.

Here were two of the men who had attended Arthur Devlin’s farewell party, Shayne recalled as he studied the two faces, and he had an uneasy feeling of being on the verge of some important discovery. There was something queer about the set-up, he thought. It simply didn’t add up right. Now, if their roles were reversed—

He shrugged his wide shoulders and dismissed the thought, turned to the story of Lily Masters’s death, and skimmed through it swiftly.

She had her own suite in the seventeen-room Beach mansion, and had retired early the preceding night apparently in good spirits and giving no hint to anyone that she intended taking her own life during the night. Yet the evidence pointing to suicide appeared irrefutable.

The two doors entering her suite, one of which led into her husband’s bedroom, were found barred on the inside the next morning. The windows were of steel sash with built-in screens, making it impossible for anyone to enter without leaving incriminating evidence. She had visited Doctor Myron Spencer that afternoon and received from him a prescription for two dozen sleeping-capsules, a prescription which she was in the habit of having filled every thirty or forty days. The bottle was empty when Roger Morgan found her. There had been no autopsy, but Doctor Spencer had been called immediately, and stated that certain tests proved conclusively that she had swallowed the entire two dozen tablets shortly before midnight, an hour after retiring to her room.

The doctor stated further that since the contents of the capsules were extremely bitter it would have been impossible for anyone to have given her an overdose in any liquid without the drug being detected by her. He stated flatly that suicide was the only possible answer, and his professional standing was such that his statement was not seriously questioned by the authorities.

Lack of any known motive and the absence of a farewell note were the only two reasons for suspecting it might not have been suicide. Bert Masters did much to clarify the first point by informing the investigating officers that his wife had often privately threatened to take her own life and had suffered increasingly frequent spells of melancholia during the preceding months. Although there was no one to verify this statement, neither was there reason for doubting his veracity, and thus the case had been closed with a verdict of suicide.

From the newspaper Shayne jotted down the names of the two Miami Beach officers who had been first on the scene and conducted the preliminary investigation. With this information he went back to his car and drove across the bay to the Beach police headquarters.

He inquired of the officer at the information desk, “Is Sergeant Henly around this morning?”

“Stepped out for a cup of coffee few minutes ago. Be right back.”

Shayne said “Thanks” and sauntered across the street to the nearest bar. Sergeant Henly was at the far end of the long bar talking to another officer whom Shayne did not know.

“That beer’ll rust in your guts, Herman,” said Shayne.

Henly grinned when he recognized the redhead and said ruefully, “If I had your kind of dough I’d be drinking something else.”

“Just what I was going to suggest — if you’ve got a minute.” He jerked his head toward an empty booth. “Order your friend something on me and come on back. I’ll get you a double bourbon to wash the beer taste out of your mouth.” He laid a big hand on the officer’s shoulder and pressed it significantly, then wandered back to a booth, where he was presently joined by Henly.

The waiter brought a double bourbon and a cognac. Shayne paid for them and told him to take out for the drink Henly’s friend had ordered at the bar.

They touched glasses, drank, and Shayne asked, “Do you remember the Bert Masters thing a few months ago?”

“Sure. His wife bumped herself. Me and Clarkson were cruising and took the call.”

“Is that so?” Shayne showed surprise, as though he had not learned this from the newspaper. “Anything funny about it?”

“It’s always crazy to me when a good-looking dame can’t find enough fun in life to keep on living,” he said.

“Good-looker, eh?”

“Plenty. Me and Clarkson had to go all over her to see if there were any bruises or wounds. For her to take a load of sleeping-pills and just lie down and die don’t make sense.”

“No reason for it?”

“None we could figure out. No suicide note. No nothing,” Henly told him.

“And the doors were both locked?”

“Bolted tight on the inside. When we got there — that secretary guy had busted down one of ’em.”

Henly’s slight hesitance in making the statement gave Shayne a clue he had been groping for. He didn’t startle Henly by pouncing on it, but said idly, “Other door led into Bert’s room, didn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Henly swallowed the rest of his drink and rubbed the hairy back of his hand across his mouth. “Any reason to be stirring it up now, Mike?”

“I don’t know,” said Shayne truthfully. “It’s a long hunch.”

“Because if there is,” said Henly in a hoarse whisper, “don’t let it get around to Painter.”

“Think he covered up on it?”

“If there was anything to cover — which I’m not saying. But you know how Petey is with a big-shot like Masters,” Henly went on, lowering his voice and glancing around to see whether anyone appeared to be listening. “Clarkson and me got kicked off fast when one of us said maybe, just maybe, that secretary could’ve fixed everything up the way he wanted it before we got there.”

“What made you think that?” Shayne asked casually.

“We didn’t think it.” Henly shrugged. “Looked funny, though. You know how it is — how you get to watching out for little things. There wasn’t any suicide note. Masters didn’t even pretend to give a damn about her dying, and that locked door into his room gave him a nice alibi.”

“The doctor said she must have swallowed the capsules of her own accord,” Shayne reminded him.

“Maybe. But I still can’t figure how a good-looker like her—” Henly’s voice trailed off and he was broodingly silent.

Shayne ordered another double whisky for Henly. “The way you and Clarkson saw it then — Roger Morgan had plenty of time in the death room alone to lock his boss’s door or destroy a suicide note if he had wanted to.”

“Morgan — yeh. That’s the guy’s name. Now he’s the one I’d pick if I was picking.”

“For what?”

“For whatever,” said Henly. “Know what I mean? Living there in the same house with her and Bert. Must of got his goat plenty for a slobby fat-gut like Masters to be in there with her while he slept in a room at the end of the hall. The unfairness of it, see? Just because Bert’s got the jack and is married to her — when Morgan knows he’s got a lot more on the ball than Masters. Know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” said Shayne slowly. “You’re guessing Morgan might have finally decided that if he couldn’t have her he’d fix it so Bert couldn’t either.”

The waiter brought Henly’s drink. He swallowed half of it and said, “When you’ve been on as many cases as I have you get a feeling about things like that, Mike. You take a good-looking young man and mix him up with a hot-lipped dame married to a pot-belly old enough to be her father — and you got trouble every time.”

“You think Morgan was in love with her?”

“I dunno much about love. I’m plenty sure he was hot after her. I saw the look in his eye when Clarkson and me was stripping her. Yeh,” he went on, the influence of the liquor moody in his voice, “there was something funny about the way he looked and acted — and like he was trying to hide the way he felt.”

“You’re telling me you don’t think it was suicide,” Shayne said bluntly.

“There wasn’t any note. Never knew a dame to bump herself off without putting something down on paper. It just don’t stand to reason. Not with a dame it don’t.”

“But there were just the two doors into her room,” Shayne said musingly.

“That’s right. The outside door was barred all night. He couldn’t have faked that — not even if the maid was in cahoots with him and lied about it being locked. The way it was smashed you could tell it was smashed against the bolt on the inside.”

“And that leaves the door into Masters’s room.”

“Right you are. Which leaves the Morgan boy in the clear, because Masters went to bed the same time his wife did.” Henly finished off his drink.

“Have another one?” Shayne asked.

“Not now. I got to get back. Mind telling me why you’re interested?”

“It wouldn’t mean a thing if you knew,” Shayne assured him. “If I run into Petey on this, the less you know about what I want, the better.”

“You’ll run into him if you go fooling around with Bert Masters,” said Henly flatly. “Bert won’t like any of that old stuff dug up, and he’ll yell for Petey to get you out of his hair.”

Shayne smiled thinly. “Are you on duty now?”

“Clarkie and I’ll start in about fifteen minutes.”

“If you get down around the docks,” said Shayne slowly, “see what you can pick up for me about the water taxi service that takes passengers out to ships anchored off the breakwater.”

Henly nodded. “I know Cap’n John pretty well. What, in particular, you want me to pick up?”

“Damned if I know, actually,” Shayne confessed. “Anything at all on a midnight trip about two weeks ago to a cruise ship named the Belle of the Caribbean. A man named Arthur Devlin boarded her that night. Anything about him. Whether he was on the ship’s taxi — anything that happened. And buy a few drinks around while you’re asking,” he added, sliding his hand casually across the table with a folded bill in his palm.

“Sure, Mike. It’ll be a real pleasure.” When Shayne lifted his hand Henly’s palm covered the bill and he pushed himself up from the table and went out.

Shayne sat where he was for a time, then got up and went out to his car and drove up the Beach toward Bert Masters’s oceanside estate.