Die Like a Dog

13

In Shayne’s car, he and Rourke followed the screaming siren of Chief Gentry’s limousine through downtown traffic and out Brickel Boulevard to the Rogell estate. There were no other cars parked in front of the house, and the two men trotted up the stairs and across the porch behind the chief and his two detectives.

A white-faced maid opened the door for them immediately, and Mrs. Blair hovered in the wide hallway behind her, wringing her hands and with tear streaks on her broad face.

“This way,” she directed them. “Up the stairs here. I just can’t believe it. Poor Mr. Dale. Who’d ever have thought he’d do a terrible thing like this.”

The five men trooped beside her silently up the curving stairway where she turned to the right to an open doorway with Charles standing in front of it. He was in his shirtsleeves and without a tie, his hair uncombed and a heavy growth of dark stubble on his square face. There was a bluish bruise on his cheekbone and a pad of gauze on the side of his mouth under a piece of surgical tape. He kept his lips pressed tightly together and his eyes had a sullen glare when he saw Shayne with the others. He stepped aside from the doorway without speaking, and they entered a medium-sized bedroom with the body of Marvin Dale sprawled on the floor in front of a drop-leaf table with an overturned straight chair beside him.

The young man’s face was twisted and ghastly in death, his body stiffly contorted, indicating that he had writhed agonizingly on the floor before death mercifully ended his suffering.

There was a bottle of whiskey standing on the table, with a highball glass beside it. The glass held a small residue of brownish liquid. Off to one side was a small, round, squat bottle with the warning skull and crossbones plainly imprinted on it. It was labeled “Strychnine” and there was also the word “Poison” in large type.

Beside the bottle of strychnine were two torn pieces of note-paper that had been crumpled up and then smoothed and carefully placed one above the other, with torn edges in juxtaposition so that a superficial glance indicated that they were the torn top and bottom pieces of the same sheet of notepaper. A square box of the same notepaper and a ballpoint pen were on the extreme left-hand side of the table.

While Gentry and the two detectives knelt beside Marvin Dale’s body, Shayne leaned over the table to read the scrawled handwriting on the sheet of torn notepaper:

Shayne read the torn note through without touching either half of it. Gentry got to his feet from beside the body with a sigh and said, “All the signs of typical strychnine poisoning. He’s been dead for hours.” He stood beside Shayne and looked down at the note, mumbling the words half aloud as he read them. Then he turned to the doorway and ordered the chauffeur curtly, “Come in here.”

Charles walked in with his chin up and shoulders squared.

“Who are you?”

“Charles Morton. The chauffeur.”

“What do you know about this?”

“He hasn’t been touched,” Charles said stolidly. “Nothing has been touched…” He paused and his gaze flickered down to the table and the torn note. “…except that piece of paper. Mrs. Rogell discovered her brother’s body about nine o’clock. The note was lying on the table… all in one piece. She called me in from my rooms over the garage and showed it to me. She wanted to tear it up before she called the police. I told her we couldn’t destroy suicide evidence and tried to snatch it from her. It got torn and crumpled as you see it, but I insisted the police had to see it… no matter what interpretation you put on what Marvin said.”

“Very cooperative and law-abiding of you,” said Gentry harshly. He turned his gaze back to the torn paper and read aloud, “‘She is a sweet girl and after seeing her with Charles tonight I am utterly revolted.’ How do you expect me to interpret that?”

“In the very nastiest way possible, I’m sure,” said Charles steadily.

“How do you explain it?”

“Marvin was drunk last night. No drunker than usual, but… staggering. After I had returned with a couple of pills Dr. Evans gave me, Mrs. Rogell became worried about my injuries and came out to the garage wearing her gown and robe just to be sure I needed no further medical attention. In his drunken state, Marvin saw her going out the back door and followed her up to my bedroom. He burst in on us and made a nasty scene… accusing his sister of all sorts of wild things. I chased him out, and then sent Mrs. Rogell back to the house. That’s why she wanted to destroy the note before anyone read it.”

“Because it might be misinterpreted?” sneered Gentry. “Because other people might have the same idea about her presence in your bedroom late at night wearing a nightgown?”

Charles said, “People do have nasty minds.”

“What does he mean by saying…” Gentry turned to look down and read again: “‘John and Henrietta were old and mean and deserved to die.’”

Charles said, “I don’t know. That’s for you to decide, isn’t it? He didn’t confide in me.”

“Do you think it’s a confession that he killed Rogell and tried to poison Henrietta?”

“I think that’s for you to decide. Personally, I don’t know that Mr. Rogell was killed or that anyone tried to poison Miss Henrietta.”

“Where did the strychnine come from?”

“I think it’s a bottle from the garage that the gardener keeps for killing moles. It looks exactly like one that was always kept in the garage, and I checked after I saw it, and that bottle is gone.”

“Then you want us to believe that Marvin was so upset by surprising his sister in your bed that he got this bottle of poison from the garage, brought it in and wrote that note, and then drank a dose of it?”

“I don’t particularly want you to believe anything,” countered Charles doggedly. “There he is and there’s the note. I convinced Mrs. Rogell that it would be better to give you the note and tell you the exact truth instead of destroying it as she wanted to do.”

“Because then we might have suspected his death wasn’t suicide?”

Charles said sullenly, “I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. There’s already been too much loose talk around here by Miss Henrietta about poisoning and such. I had brains enough to realize that this… on top of all the other talk… would look mighty suspicious if he hadn’t left any note. That’s why I grabbed it away from her and wouldn’t let her tear it up.”

“What happened to your face… and your two front teeth?” demanded Gentry.

“Ask him.” Charles jerked his head toward Shayne. “He entered the grounds illegally last night planning to dig up the body of Mrs. Rogell’s pet dog, and he attacked me when I prevented him from doing it.”

“That so, Mike?”

Shayne said, “I attacked him while he was holding a cocked, double-barreled shotgun on me. Marvin was pretty drunk that early in the evening while I was here, and he seemed determined to get a lot drunker. I don’t see how he stayed sober enough to do this.”

“He’d often drink so much he’d vomit it up and get sort of sober, and then start over,” offered Charles.

There was the thin keening of a siren outside, and Gentry said, “That’ll be the doc and the lab boys. Stay in here, Donovan. Petrie, you take this fellow downstairs and hold him. I want to talk to the servants and Mrs. Rogell.”

Neither the maid nor Mrs. Blair were at all helpful. The maid had been out the preceding evening, returning to the house about midnight and going directly to her room beside Mrs. Blair’s on the third floor without encountering anyone or being aware of any of the evening’s happenings.

Mrs. Blair told them that as soon as Shayne and Dr. Evans had left the house, she insisted that Charles should get to bed, and had gone out with him to be sure he was comfortable and took the pills Dr. Evans had left.

When Shayne questioned her about the pills, she admitted she hadn’t actually seen the chauffeur swallow them, but had seen him go into his bathroom holding them in his palm, had heard water running and seen him emerge without the pills.

Marvin had still been in the downstairs study with its well-stocked bar when she came in, and Mrs. Rogell was retiring when she locked the house and went up to her room. She had slept soundly, except for a telephone call from a policeman who demanded to speak to Charles-which demand she refused. Chief Gentry started to question her further about the call, but Shayne explained that he had made it. Mrs. Blair further stated that she knew nothing about anything that had gone on after she retired, that she had arisen at eight as was her custom and went directly to the kitchen to start preparing breakfast, where she had remained until Charles hurried in the backdoor and said that Mrs. Rogell had wakened him by his telephone extension to say that her brother had killed himself.

“We hurried up the stairs together,” Mrs. Blair said, “and there was Mrs. Rogell in her nightclothes in the hall crying her eyes out. Charles and I both looked in Mr. Marvin’s room and saw him lying on the floor and looking terrible. Then Charles closed the door and told me not to go in until the police came, and he went in Mrs. Rogell’s sitting room with her still crying, and closed the door. I came back to the kitchen and wondered why you were so long getting here,” she ended on a note of accusation.

Gentry asked, “When did you first see the body?”

“It was only a little after nine o’clock. Charles said he would call the police and I kept wondering why you didn’t come.”

Gentry said to Shayne, “It sounds as though he had a difficult time persuading her to give up the note.” And he asked Mrs. Blair, “Did you see the bottle of poison on the table in Marvin’s room?”

“That I did.” She began to cry softly. “Strychnine. With the skull and crossbones plain to see. I told Charles it looked like the one the gardener keeps in the garage for killing moles in the garden and I always knew it was dangerous stuff to have around.”

“When did you see it last?”

“Months, I guess. I don’t have much occasion to go in the garage.”

“Did everyone in the household know there was strychnine there?”

“I guess. It wasn’t any secret,” she said woefully. Gentry shook his head soberly as they climbed the stairs to interview Anita Rogell. “I don’t like any of this, Mike. There’s a stink I can’t get out of my nostrils.” He stopped at the head of the stairs abruptly and suggested, “Let’s see what Doc says before we talk to Mrs. Rogell.”

Doc Higgens had completed his examination and he came out of the death room briskly as they turned toward it. He said, “A massive dose of strychnine… until I do a P. M… taken in a highball about eight hours ago. Send him down to my charnelhouse as soon as you’re through with him.” He went on, and Chief Gentry went into the room to confer with his technicians, and Timothy Rourke sauntered out and rejoined Shayne. He grinned hopefully and said, “I’d like to get a statement from the stiff’s sister giving her ideas on why he killed himself.”

Shayne said, “We’re going to talk to her now. Why don’t you drift in behind us and stay in the background so Will can pretend he doesn’t notice you? What do the boys say about the set-up in there?”

“Nothing much. He sat down and wrote that note about two o’clock, spiked a drink of good whiskey with poison and drank it. Fingerprints all check. Everything’s okay. Except that goddamned suicide note. It doesn’t say anything.”

“They sure it’s his handwriting… and the two torn pieces check?”

“They check perfectly. Couldn’t possibly be faked. And George, the identification man, found a lot of samples of Marvin’s writing and swears it’s the same… though the man was obviously pretty drunk when he wrote the note.”

“He’d have to be to calmly swallow strychnine. Which is probably why the note isn’t more rational. Very few suicide notes are wholly rational,” Shayne went on with a frown, as though arguing a point with himself. “By the time they work themselves up to that point, they’re not making too much sense. On the other hand, I’ve got a strange feeling about the wording of that note…”

He broke off as Gentry came out and lumbered up the hall toward them. He said gruffly, “Let’s go in and see how the lady of the house is holding up after the death of hubby and her brother.”