Die Like a Dog

18

There were three cars parked in front of the house when Shayne swung into the driveway. He pulled up behind them and leaped out, heard screaming rubber at the estate entrance and turned his head to see Petrie and Donovan on his heels in a radio cruiser.

He lifted one hand in greeting and hurried up the steps and across the porch. The two city detectives came panting up behind him as he put his finger on the electric button and held it there.

“What’s up, Mike?” demanded Donovan. “We got a flash from the chief…”

The door opened and Shayne jerked out, “Come in and clam up.” He shoved forward past the frightened and protesting maid, and they tramped in close behind him.

There were voices coming from the study beyond the archway on the right, and they ceased abruptly as Shayne entered through the open portieres with the two policemen on his heels. He stopped just inside the archway and surveyed the small gathering with bleak eyes.

They were all there to hear John Rogell’s will read, he noted with satisfaction. Anita and Charles and Henrietta and Mrs. Blair. And Harold Peabody hovering behind Anita’s chair, and an elderly man who was a stranger to him, seated apart from the others with a legal-sized folder of papers bound in blue cardboard open on his knees.

They all stared at him in silence and in varying degrees of surprise, apprehension and defiance as he looked from one face to another.

Harold Peabody spoke first. He straightened his body into a sort of strut behind Anita’s chair, and spoke acidly, “This is a private conference, Mr. Shayne.”

“And I’m a private detective,” growled the redhead. He looked toward the elderly man who was obviously a lawyer and said, “Sorry to interrupt your proceedings, but I don’t think this will take very long.” He advanced toward Anita who shrank back from him in the depths of a big chair and looked small and defenceless, and stood towering over her as he said mercilessly, “I want the truth about this note signed by your brother’s name.” His hand came out of his pocket holding the crumpled note and he waved it in front of her face.

“I know you lied about it,” he told her conversationally. “I know you didn’t find it lying beside his body as you said, and I know it didn’t get torn in half the way you told me it did. Hell,” he went on in a tone of utter disgust, “it’s perfectly evident that this is two halves of two different notes. The only thing I don’t know is what each note said when put together correctly, but I’ve got a damned good idea that both of them contained evidence that you murdered your husband, and that’s why you got Charles to lie for you to help you pass this off as a real note.”

“Don’t answer him, Anita.” The chauffeur was on his feet instantly, his voice thick with rage. “He’s trying to trick you. He don’t know…”

Shayne didn’t glance aside. He said sharply, “Shut him up, Donovan.”

The big detective moved behind him swiftly with drawn revolver and Shayne continued to stand over Anita with his eyes boring into hers.

“If the original notes didn’t say that, you’d better tell us what they did say. You’ve covered up for Charles as far as you can,” he went on remorselessly. “Now you’d better start thinking about your own neck. Or maybe it’s too late for that. Was it you who killed your own brother after you realized you could fix a note so it’d look like suicide?”

“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 her 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.