Die Like a Dog

19

The tableau hadn’t changed much when Shayne came back into the study. Petrie and Donovan stood on guard in the archway, Anita was still huddled in the same chair, and Charles sat on the floor with his wrists handcuffed behind him. Peabody had moved to the bar and was mixing a drink, and Henrietta had taken advantage of his absence to make herself a stiff highball. The lawyer still sat stiffly in his chair, looking as though he very much wished he were some place else.

No one spoke as Shayne walked in between Petrie and Donovan. The big redhead’s face was impassive as he strode across the room and stopped directly in front of Charles and looked down at him. The chauffeur tilted back his head to look up with a snarl of defiance, and Shayne leaned down slightly to hit him a full-swinging open-handed blow on the left cheek.

The sound of the impact was loud in the room, and the force of it knocked Charles sprawling onto his side. Still without speaking, Shayne leaned down farther and savagely jerked him back up to a sitting position, set himself solidly and swung another full-arm blow with his left hand. Charles went over in the other direction like a nine-pin and stayed there, and Anita began sobbing wildly in her chair.

Shayne jerked the chauffeur roughly erect again and said happily, “This is real good fun, Charles. I can keep it up all day without getting tired. You want to start talking?”

“I did it for her,” he mumbled. “I knew if you found the strychnine in Daffy you’d be onto her for feeding the same stuff to the old man. I wasn’t going to hurt the girl. All I wanted was to scare you off from an autopsy.”

“But Marvin messed things up by catching you with Lucy and threatening to turn you in for kidnapping,” said Shayne conversationally.

“Even when I told him it was just to protect his sister,” complained Charles with every appearance of righteous anger. “I couldn’t afford that… not right then… so I tried to scare him out of it. How was I to know the fool was drunk enough to kill himself?”

Shayne said, “I don’t believe he was. You had the strychnine. Remember? You admitted finding it in Anita’s pocketbook after you buried Daffy.”

“That’s a lousy lie,” cried out Anita viciously. “I didn’t either. I didn’t touch any strychnine. Why would I? If it was in my pocketbook, somebody put it there just to throw suspicion on me.”

Shayne paid no attention to her. “But you did have it,” he reminded Charles. “How did Marvin get hold of it to commit suicide?”

“I gave it to him, that’s why,” Charles glared up at him sullenly. “To prove to him that his own sister had tried to poison Henrietta to shut her up. So the fool would get some sense in his head and let me handle it my own way.”

Shayne said, “We won’t worry too much about whether you fed the stuff to Marvin or he took it himself. Kidnapping is a capital offense and they can only burn you once.” He turned away from Charles and went over to the bar where he was pleased to find a bottle of cognac. He poured two inches in a highball glass and drank half of it, smiled pleasantly at the lawyer and told him, “I know you’d like to read that will and get out of here. There’s just one small matter to clear up.”

He transferred his bland gaze to Henrietta who sat bolt upright in a straight chair, gripping her highball glass tightly in both bony hands.

“You hired me to do a certain job for you yesterday, Miss Rogell. I did it, so I have no further intention of returning the retainer you paid me. An autopsy was performed secretly on your brother last night.” He held her gaze impassively. “All of you here will be interested to know that John Rogell died of heart failure… exactly as Dr. Evans stated on the death certificate.”

A long-drawn sigh came from Anita’s lips. She sat up straight and her eyes flamed contemptuously at Charles on the floor. “I told you so.” Her voice was thin with rage. “But you wouldn’t believe me. Your lousy ego made you think I’d done something to John… when I loved him all the time.”

“See here, young man.” Henrietta’s heavy voice cut in unexpectedly. “What sort of nincompoop performed that autopsy on my brother?”

“The regular police surgeon. A very competent man.”

“Competent, my foot! He’s a bungling fool. Didn’t he have brains enough to check for digitalis?”

“But it was common knowledge that your brother had been taking digitalis for years,” protested Shayne. “He would naturally expect to find that in his system.”

“Of course, he would. And that’s exactly why he should have measured the quantity he swallowed the night he died. Didn’t he realize that’s exactly what his wife would use to kill him? Instead of strychnine or something obvious like that. Mrs. Blair will bear me out that she knew exactly what effect an overdose would have. Dr. Evans warned her carefully enough. I could have told that fool doctor what to look for.”

Shayne nodded and tugged thoughtfully at his left earlobe. “Yes, I’m sure you could, Miss Rogell. Because you put that extra teaspoonful in his milk yourself, didn’t you?”

“Nonsense. It’s just that I happen to be the only one around here with a brain in my head.”

Shayne shook his red head soberly. “I’m going to arrest you for poisoning your brother, Miss Rogell. And for attempting to frame Anita for your crime by putting strychnine in your own creamed chicken and feeding it to Daffy in a last-ditch effort to draw attention to your first crime.”

“Of all the fantastic nonsense I ever heard!” she exclaimed crisply. “And then, I suppose, I came to the best private detective in Miami and hired him to make a case against me?”

“That’s exactly what you did. After your scheme to kill Daffy fell flat on its face and she was safely buried with the strychnine inside her. It must have been quite a blow to you when these two detectives who investigated that night didn’t even look into Anita’s handbag and find the strychnine where you’d put it. Instead, Charles found it there, and unfortunately jumped to the conclusion you’d hoped the detectives would reach.”

Henrietta’s lips were tightly compressed and she shook her gray head wonderingly from side to side. “And what possible motive would I have for doing all those things, Mr. Michael Shayne? You know the provisions of John’s will. I’m cut off without a penny of my own. She gets it all.” She jerked her head indignantly toward Anita. “I was the last person in the world to want to see John in his grave.”

“Correction,” said Shayne gravely. “You were the only person in this entire household with any motive at all. The others knew they were provided for in his will and could well afford to wait. Even Marvin Dale. Even though Rogell might have kicked him out of his soft spot here, his sister would have continued to provide for him until she came into a lot of millions on her husband’s natural death. You were the only one who couldn’t afford to wait for that. Your only chance of ever getting your hands on the money you felt was rightfully yours was to arrange it so Anita would be convicted of murdering him. In that case, the will would be set aside because a murderer cannot legally profit by her crime. If you waited for John to die normally, you were sunk. So… you didn’t wait, Miss Rogell.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?” she asked sarcastically. “The one thing you can’t show is opportunity. Haven’t you brains enough in that red head of yours to realize that I’m the only person here who couldn’t have dosed John’s milk the night he died? All the others had a chance at it. I didn’t.”

“That,” said Shayne heavily, “is why I suspected you from the first. The night it happened was the one night when you had a perfect alibi. That’s why you weren’t afraid to come to me and hire me to reopen the case. You figured you were perfectly safe. No matter who else might be suspected, it couldn’t be you.”

“Of all the Alice in Wonderland logic I ever heard,” said Henrietta with a sniff, “that takes the cake. Is that the way you solve all your cases, young man? By finding the one person who has a perfect alibi and then suspecting him?”

Shayne grinned ruefully. “It isn’t always that easy. But from the beginning in this one, it looked as though you might have carefully built yourself an alibi. As though you knew what was going to happen to John that night, and provided yourself with witnesses to prove you couldn’t have tampered with the chocolate milk.”

“And you’ll have to admit I couldn’t have,” she pointed out with dry satisfaction. “I was in my own room while Mrs. Blair was fixing it. She came straight upstairs after leaving it on the dining table, and I stopped her on the way up and went up to her room with her where I stayed every minute until after he had his attack. You can ask Mrs. Blair.”

“I’ve already asked Mrs. Blair,” Shayne countered easily. “She told me the same thing… along with some other interesting bits of information.”

He turned from Henrietta to the housekeeper who had not spoken a word since he first entered the room. “Do you remember telling me how Charles was in the kitchen that evening and poured out the last glass of milk to drink it with some cookies before you noticed it was the last and had to take it away from him so there’d be the regular cupful for Mr. Rogell?”

“I remember that, Mr. Shayne.”

“And you were surprised to discover it was the last glass in the refrigerator?” Shayne pressed on. “You’d thought there was another full bottle, but suddenly discovered there wasn’t and that you had to have Charles’ glass for Mr. Rogell? Do you remember that, too?”

“Yes, I do. I would have sworn there was another full bottle left after I made dinner.”

“Did you ever stop to wonder what had become of the bottle you thought was there… but wasn’t?”

“I don’t know. I… I guess I didn’t think too hard.”

“Because you had no reason to think about it at the time,” Shayne pointed out soothingly. “You had no reason to suspect that there was going to be a lethal amount of digitalis in his milk that night, so you naturally wouldn’t suspect that Henrietta had poured out the other bottle after dinner and poured digitalis into the last cup that was left… knowing that would be the cup you would put into the thermos for Rogell to drink. But now that you think back, Mrs. Blair, don’t you know there was another bottle that disappeared from the refrigerator before you heated milk for Rogell?”

“You’re putting words in her mouth,” said Henrietta loudly. “No jury will ever believe her.”

Shayne said grimly, “I think they will. Let’s wait and see.”