Die Like a Dog

7

It was almost two hours and three drinks later when the door opened and Timothy Rourke shambled inside with his trench-coat belted tightly about his thin waist, eyes glittering balefully at the tranquil picture Shayne made, sitting at ease in a deep chair with smoke curling up from a cigarette and a drink beside him.

He said, “By God, Mike! You’re one who’d come up covered with diamonds if you fell into a sewage pit.”

Shayne grinned amiably and asked, “Had rough going?”

“Look at my goddamned hands.” Rourke strode forward, holding the palms up for Shayne’s inspection. They were puffed with blisters, some of which had broken and the red flesh beneath was cracked and bleeding. “Been rowing around in circles on that lousy bay for two hours,” grated Rourke, turning aside to a wall liquor cabinet and lifting down a bottle of straight bourbon with the ease of long familiarity. He pulled the cork as he returned to the center table, tilted the bottle over a tumbler containing two half-melted ice cubes and a small quantity of water that Shayne had been using for a chaser. He poured four fingers into the glass, sloshed it about for a moment, and then drank it off in four gulps.

He smacked his lips expressively, draped his knobby body into a chair across the table and grated, “The things I do for you, Mike Shayne! By God, that dog had better have poison in her belly.”

“She has,” Shayne said flatly. “You got her, huh?”

“Sure I got her,” said Rourke belligerently. “While you were inside getting cozy with the widow. I got a peek through the bushes after the shotgun blasted. I figured I’d take one look at you with your fool head blown off so I could give Lucy the morbid details. And what did I see? You standing there under the floodlight with that unconscious lug in your arms, and that babe fawning up at you like she’d never seen a man before in her life.”

“It was a diversionary tactic,” said Shayne cheerfully, “to give you an opportunity to do your stuff with the shovel.” He reached in his pocket for a small address book and began thumbing through it.

“How was she, Mike? After you got her in the house and dumped the chauffeur?”

“There were too many people around to really find out. Some other time, maybe, I’ll give you a detailed report. Where’s the dog?”

“Downstairs in my car.” Rourke sighed and pulled himself to his feet with a grimace of pain from long unused muscles. He went out to the kitchen to get a fresh glass and more ice cubes for himself while Shayne found the number of Miami’s most noted toxicologist, lifted the phone and gave it to the switchboard downstairs.

Shayne spoke into the mouthpiece as Rourke sauntered back and sloshed whiskey into the glass: “Is that Bud Tolliver? Mike Shayne, Bud. Can you do a fast job for me tonight?”

He listened a moment and said, “I don’t think this will take long. You should be able to handle it right there in your basement lab. Analysis of the stomach contents of a dead dog for poison.”

He lifted one eyebrow at Rourke and grinned slightly, holding the receiver inches from his ear as a torrent of protest poured out.

Then he cut in persuasively, “I don’t blame you a bit, Bud, but this is a hell of a lot bigger than just a pooch. If I’m right, we’re going to get a P.M. ordered on a corpse who’s due to be cremated tomorrow. That’s why it’s got to be fast.”

He listened a moment longer and nodded. “I’ll bring it right over to your place.” He hung up and told Rourke, “Tolliver feels his professional status is being impugned by working on a dog. Coming along, Tim?”

Rourke had sunk back into his chair with tall glass clamped tightly in both hands. He shook his head, got a leather key-case from his pocket and dropped it on the table. “Take my car. It’s parked in front with the dog locked in the luggage compartment. Drop Daffy off at Bud’s and then come back here, huh? I’m trying to remember something about Henrietta Rogell. If it comes through, I think we can stand a trip to the News morgue. If it doesn’t, at least I’ll be catching up with you.” He lifted his glass significantly.

Shayne took the keys and said, “Try to make it come through, Tim.”

He went out the door and down on the elevator, through a deserted lobby to Rourke’s battered sedan in front.

Bud Tolliver was a bachelor who lived in a five-room stucco house in the northeast section of the city. The porch light was on when Shayne pulled up in front of the house, and the redhead got out and unlocked the luggage compartment and opened it. The tiny body of a Pekinese lay stiff-legged on the floor, its formerly shiny coat matted with dirt, its mouth half open in what appeared to be a derisive grin.

Shayne lifted the light body out by a front and rear paw, carried it up the walk held stiffly out in front of him, and the front door opened as he stepped onto the porch, and Tolliver motioned him inside.

The toxicologist was as tall as Shayne, and a few years younger. His head was completely bald, and he had an intelligent, bony face that puckered thoughtfully as he drew aside and looked at the detective’s burden. “How long has the pooch been buried?”

“Just about twenty-four hours.” Shayne paused inside the neat living room while his host closed the front door and led the way toward the back where he opened a door off the kitchen and switched on a light leading down to his basement laboratory.

Downstairs, Shayne lowered Daffy’s remains to a gleaming white enamel table, and brushed off his hands.

“You know I haven’t got too much equipment here at home, Mike. Just enough for some simple tests. What am I looking for?”

“She’s supposed to have died last evening in convulsions about ten minutes after eating a dish of creamed chicken fed to her by an old lady who suspected it contained poison. On the other hand it’s reported that she’s been a sickly dog, often subject to stomach upsets.”

“The convulsions in ten minutes sound like a solid dose of strychnine,” said Tolliver absently, lifting a starched surgeon’s garment from a hook on the wall and sliding his arms into the sleeves. “If so, it’ll be easy.”

“It needs to be definitely tied in with the creamed chicken to give us an open and shut case, Bud.”

“Sure,” the toxicologist said cheerfully, turning to a rack of shining surgical instruments and selecting one. “You want to stick around and watch it done?”

“I don’t think so,” said Shayne hastily. “Not tonight. Tim Rourke and I have things to do. Call me at home, huh? About how long?”

“Half an hour or so.”

Shayne said, “Swell,” and went up the stairs quickly while Tolliver bent over the dead dog with professional interest and zeal.

Timothy Rourke got to his feet quickly when Shayne walked into his own apartment ten minutes later. He drained the last of his drink and said triumphantly, “Got it, Mike. Let’s run up to the News and check it out.”

Shayne waited at the door for him to come out, and pulled it shut on the latch, and asked, “Got what?” as they went back to the elevator.

“The thing that’s been nibbling at my so-called memory ever since you sprung this Rogell deal on me this afternoon. Gives a pretty good sidelight on Henrietta. It was about five years ago, Mike, when she made the headlines with a lawsuit against her brother. Demanding an accounting of his estate and claiming a one-half share for herself. The details are hazy in my mind,” he went on as they crossed the lobby. “I forget how it came out. But he made his fortune out west, in mining, I think, and I believe that she claimed she worked in the mines with him and that half his millions were rightfully hers, and she wanted the money legally and in her own name instead of living with him in that big house and having him dole it out to her.”

They reached Rourke’s car and Shayne asked if he wanted to drive.

The reporter shook his head and opened the right-hand door. “Not with these blisters. Not until I have to.”

In the huge file room in the Daily News Tower, Rourke led the way confidently down a long aisle lined with filing cabinets, pulling dangling cords to switch on overhead lights as he went. He slowed and finally stopped in front of a cabinet, pulled out a drawer marked Re-Ro.

He fumbled through cardboard folders, drew a thick one out and opened it on a table under a bright light. “Here’s the last stuff on Rogell. His obit and so on.” He slowly turned clippings over as he spoke, stopped at another batch and looked down with interest at a bridal picture. “And here’s the old boy’s wedding just a few months ago. The April-December wedding that had the sob-sisters gushing all over the society pages.”

Shayne leaned over to study the picture with him. It had been taken on the steps of a local church as the couple left after the ceremony. It was the first picture Shayne remembered seeing of John Rogell. He was tall and lean and leathery-faced like his sister, wearing top hat and cutaway. He looked a sound and vigorous sixty in the picture, not like a doddering old man whose heart might be expected to give way under the importunities of a demanding young bride.

Of course, there was a startling difference between the ages of the couple. In her white bridal dress and clutching her wedding bouquet, Anita was radiantly beautiful, the personification of a virginal young bride on the happiest day of her life.

“Mr. and Mrs. John Rogell as they emerged from the noonday solemnizing of their wedding rites,” Rourke read drily from the text beneath the picture. “Hell, if the old boy had three months of that, I’d guess he died happy.”

He turned the clippings back slowly. “There were scads of feature stories as soon as news of the engagement broke. It was real Cinderella stuff. It can and does happen in Miami. Anita Dale. Small-town girl, from a poor upstate family, coming timidly to seek her fortune in the Magic City of sun, sin and sex with a high school diploma and a six-month secretarial course as her only assets. A filing job at forty bucks a week with the Peabody Brokerage firm… and then the jackpot. Like that.” He snapped bony fingers and grinned wickedly. “Six months later she sits out in that stone mansion heir to a lot of millions of bucks. How’s that for rags-to-riches in one easy installment?”

“Did you say the Peabody Brokerage firm?”

“Sure. Harold Peabody. She was working there when she met Rogell. Peabody is one of Miami’s up-and-coming young financial consultants. Rogell is probably his biggest account, though others have been flocking to him since he got publicity along with one of his secretaries marrying millions. It’s pretty well understood he’ll be executor of Rogell’s estate. But that’s all recent history,” Rourke added as he flipped back through scattered clippings. “Just routine stuff here. Rogell buys another shipping line, invests a million in an Atlanta real estate development. Here’s what I’m looking for.”

He paused at a long front-page story, head-lined, “SPINSTER SUES