Murder and the Wanton Bride

10

The stone steps leading up to the wide-open doors of the courthouse were well-worn, and the smell of disinfectant and sweeping compound inside the aged building was exactly the same as Shayne had encountered in scores of such public buildings in the past.

A large black-lettered sign with an arrow pointing down a corridor to the left said, COUNTY CLERK, and the detective followed it to a big room at the end with a breast-high counter behind which a pleasant and plump woman sat on a high stool looking exactly like every assistant county clerk Shayne had ever seen.

She was making meticulous entries in ink in a large ledger spread open on the counter in front of her, and she finished making a notation before looking up at him with eyebrows arched questioningly.

“Do you keep a file of applications for marriage licenses?’ Shayne asked.

“Yes, we do.”

“Would it be possible for me to have a look at one from two or three years back?”

“Yes. If you can give me the name and year.”

“Carson,” Shayne told her, “and Brand. I’m not sure just what year it was.”

“Carson? Would that be Banker Carson from Denham?”

“Yes,” said Shayne thankfully. “W. D. Carson.”

She nodded, pursing her lips and tapping them with the end of her pen. “Nineteen fifty-five or fifty-six.” She slid off her stool with a nod, and went back through a door into an inner room.

Shayne lit a cigarette and leaned an elbow on the counter and waited patiently. The cigarette was not more than half-consumed when she came back with a large printed form which she placed in front of him. “December nineteen fifty-five,” she told him in a tone of pleased triumph. “I knew it was about that time because I remember when Mr. Carson came in just as well as if it was yesterday.”

Shayne glanced at the form swiftly and saw it was signed by both applicants for the license; Walter D. Carson and Belle Brand. But he was disappointed to learn that the State of Florida did not require a great deal of personal information about people who wanted to get married. The groom’s age was noted as 43, and the bride gave her age as 32. Both disclaimed any former marital experience, and both gave their addresses as Denham and their birthplaces as the USA. He studied it carefully, then courteously thanked the lady for her trouble and hurried out. He still had the photograph as a possible jumping-off place if the Atlanta directories didn’t help.

Less than an hour later he reached the outskirts of Tampa where he turned off the main route and drove directly to the airport without encountering heavy city traffic.

There, he got a real break. There was an Eastern Airlines plane due to depart for Atlanta in twenty minutes, and there was a vacant seat. He bought a round-trip ticket, learned that a return flight was scheduled to leave Atlanta at 5:58, and made a tentative reservation to return on it. That didn’t give him much time in the city, but he knew he could cancel by telephone if he saw he couldn’t make that flight.

The plane was loading passengers by the time he had his ticket in order, and not more than ten minutes later they were airborne.

Shayne settled back comfortably and unstrapped his seat-belt when the warning light went out, stretched his long legs out in front of him and lit a cigarette, and began a careful study of the photograph he had taken from the Carson mantelpiece.

His first quick look at it back in Belle’s presence had shown the name of the photographer in almost indecipherable script, though the words “Atlanta, Georgia” were in plain print.

He frowned as he studied the script, turning the picture to catch the afternoon light from the window beside him. It was a short name of six letters, and the capital D was obvious. It looked like an e after the D, and then the rest of it might be lain. Or, tair. Or, perhaps tam.

But that was good enough for his needs. Certainly there would not be many commercial photographers listed in the Atlanta Classified Directory beginning with De.

He settled back comfortably and closed his eyes and let the smooth droning of the plane’s engines lull him close to sleep as he thought back over the sequence of events since receiving the telephone call at Lucy Hamilton’s apartment late the previous night.

He went over each tiny bit of information he possessed, neatly cataloguing every item in his mind, searching for the truth, for some basic theme in the maze of irrelevancies had accumulated about the dead man.

Why had Carson been killed? Had it been to prevent him from keeping his morning appointment with Shayne? To whom did that appointment present enough danger that he was willing to commit murder to prevent it?

Harvey Barstow? Could he be so infatuated with the banker’s wife that he would shoot a man to prevent his affair with her from being investigated by a private detective? He didn’t look the type, but with a woman like Belle you couldn’t be sure.

But the actual circumstances of Carson’s death appeared to rule Barstow out. It had all the earmarks of a carefully planned and meticulously timed encounter. He had been shot on the street by a person whose car was parked half a block away for a quick getaway.

That argued a definite ambush or someone who had followed him about the streets of Miami Beach waiting for a chance to strike unobserved.

Who could have known where Carson would be at a certain moment last night? Someone with whom he had an appointment? Someone whom he had contacted after reaching Miami?

There was that one telephone call Carson had made from his hotel room to the Park Plaza. Of course, he could have made any number of other calls from public phones during the course of the evening. And he could have received several calls in his room of which there would be no record.

The answer, Shayne was convinced, lay in the character of the banker’s wife, in the secret of her past that had been buried in Atlanta until some enterprising and unscrupulous private detective hired by Mrs. Barstow had ferreted it out and used it for purposes of his own.

The more he thought about Belle Carson in that context, the more puzzled Shayne became. There had been something exceedingly queer about the way she had received him at her home today. Painter’s statement that he labored under the delusion that he was “God’s gift to womankind” wasn’t quite true, though Shayne was perfectly aware that many women were physically attracted to him.

But he wasn’t that good, he told himself sourly. Strange women, and particularly women as attractive as Belle Carson didn’t make a practice of throwing themselves at him at first sight the way she had done. There had been something decidedly queer about her manner today. Almost as though she had expected him to show up when he did. As though she had known her husband would not come home unexpectedly and find them together.

She had claimed, of course, that she knew nothing about her husband’s reason for making the trip to Miami, and had denied to Painter any knowledge of Michael Shayne.

Yet, who was a husband more likely to confide in than his own wife? Who was more likely to know his personal habits and his plans for the evening than his own wife? Who, in short, had a better chance of fingering him for death on the street in Miami Beach than Belle?

Suppose Mrs. Barstow’s detective were blackmailing her for some secret he had learned about her past in Atlanta? Suppose Mr. Carson had learned about the blackmail, though not the exact reason for it? Might that not well be the “extremely confidential matter of the utmost importance” that Carson had mentioned in his letter asking Shayne for an appointment?

If she did know that was why her husband was going to Shayne and if her secret was so horrible she couldn’t let her husband learn the truth, she would definitely have a motive for arranging his death before he could consult Shayne. Coupled with the strong possibility that she had some way of placing him on a certain street corner at a certain time, Mrs. Carson became a heavy favorite in Shayne’s calculations as his plane neared Atlanta.

Of course, all such speculation was useless at the moment, and Shayne generally left this sort of abstract theorizing to people like Painter while he was working on a case, but it had served to pass the time and it definitely added a certain piquancy to his relationship with the banker’s widow.

The redhead was the first one off the plane when it landed at the Atlanta airport, and without any baggage to delay him, he caught a taxi immediately and asked for the main public library.

There he sought out a reference room that had back issues of city directories. He first thumbed through the telephone book for 1955, and checked the list of “Brands” without finding a “Belle” among them.

He then turned from the telephone book to the City Directory for that year with the same negative result, sighed and scowled as he began a painstaking study of all the “Brand” families listed, seeking one with a daughter named “Belle.”

Again, he was unsuccessful, and he turned to the Classified Section for 1955 in the telephone book and turned to “Photographers, Commercial.”

There he struck his first pay-dirt. There had been a “Delain Studio” in business in 1955. To avoid possible waste of time he checked the current Classified Section and found the studio still listed.

He wrote down the address and hurried out, caught another taxi and gave the driver the number.

It was a ten-minute drive out from the business section of the city to a block of small shops built around a large super-market with a common parking center for all.

Shayne got out of the taxi in front of a small shop with a plate-glass window across the front filled with a display of photographs and with the sign “Delain Studio” over the door.

A bell rang in the rear as he entered a small, empty reception room, and as he hesitated there a young moppet of a girl emerged from behind a curtain with a welcoming smile on her big mouth.

She wore a shapeless smock that came down to her ankles, had attractively dishevelled ringlets of brown hair, and a thin face that was liberally sprinkled with attractive freckles.

The welcoming smile faded slightly from her wide mouth as she surveyed him, and Shayne realized he wasn’t the most promising sort of prospect for a portrait photographer. But her voice was liltingly pleasant as she advanced and asked impishly, “You want your pitcher took, Mister?”

Shayne grinned in response and asked, “Miss Delain?”

She shook her head and ran fingers through her curls. “I’m Marge Monroe.” She looked at him with open curiosity. “There never was a Miss Delain. I bought this shop from Mr. Delain a year ago.”

Shayne showed her the picture of Belle Carson, pointing to the signature at the bottom. “I’m trying to locate this woman, and this picture is all I have to go on. I imagine it was taken several years ago, and her name at that time would have been Belle Brand. Can you help me at all? Are there back files on previous customers?”

“Sure thing.” She was studying the picture absently, and the impish smile crossed her face again as she lifted her eyes to Shayne’s face. “Can’t say I blame a man for wanting to find that doll... if he was foolish enough to lose her. Sit down a moment and I’ll check the card index. Delain opened this studio in Fifty-three so there shouldn’t be many Brands. Belle, you say?”

Shayne nodded and said, “I’ll appreciate it a lot... Marge.”

Her smile was not so impish as she dropped him a tiny curtsey and went behind the curtain again.

There were two comfortable chairs in the waiting room, and Shayne sank into one of them and lit a cigarette.

Marge was back in less than five minutes. She shook her head as he got to his feet hopefully. “Sorry. No Brands in the file.”

“No Brands?” Shayne echoed.

“Nope. And every customer is card-indexed from the day Delain opened up for business.”

“But this picture was taken here,” persisted Shayne, holding it out again.

“Definitely. But it does happen sometimes that another person orders a job and pays for it. A girl’s parents or her boy-friend. In that case, the name of the subject wouldn’t be filed.”

Shayne said, “I hadn’t thought of that.” He looked down at Belle’s picture helplessly.

“I don’t know how important this is,” Marge said, flopping down into the other chair and burrowing in a pocket of her smock for a cigarette, “but if it means as much to you as the look on your face says it does... there is one possibility.”

She leaned over to puff on the match Shayne struck for her. “U-m-m. Thanks.”

“What’s that?” Shayne asked eagerly. “It is important. In fact it’s worth...” He hesitated a moment. “... fifty bucks if I can get her former address from you in a hurry.”

She gestured with her cigarette and her eyes glinted merriment as she said, “That’s more than I take in most days. What I was thinking... we do keep a file of negatives, you see. The ones selected by the customer to have printed. That’s because they often come back and order half a dozen more of the same, and we can just print them right up from the same negative.”

“Can you get the name of the purchaser from the negative?”

“Sure. Each one has a job number.” She looked at him curiously through curling blue smoke. “You don’t look like a guy who’d carry a torch for her.”

“I’m a detective,” Shayne said bluntly. “And this woman is mixed up in a murder.”

“Gollee!” she squealed excitedly. “You want to come back and go through one batch of negatives while I try another?”

Shayne told her he’d like nothing better, and followed her back behind the curtain through a large room cluttered with focusing lamps on adjustable stands and three different types of cameras, into a rear office where she led him to three filing cabinets against the wall.

In a slot on the front of each drawer was a slip of cardboard bearing two typewritten numbers with a dash between them. 1–114; 114–202 and so on.

“Those are the job numbers in each drawer.” She indicated the cardboard slips. “Beginning with the summer of Fifty-three up to date. There’s a cross-index so we can get the name from the number when we find it. Where shall we start?”

“At the beginning, I think. And it can’t have been much later than the summer of Fifty-five.”

“That cuts it down a lot.” She drew the first drawer open and gestured toward numbered cardboard folders. “Each folder has a set of all the negatives the customer had printed up. Some of them are different... kids, maybe, or a husband and wife separately, so to be certain you’d better look at each negative.”

She stepped aside and drew out the next top drawer and said, “I’ll start with this which should be early Fifty-five, and work back.”

Shayne began lifting out each folder and opening it, taking out the negatives and holding them up to the light for a quick glance. Some folders had only one negative, others had several poses of the same person, and others had negatives showing two or more different subjects.

It took him twenty minutes to go through the first drawer, and Marge had already finished hers and started on the bottom one in his cabinet when she sank back on her heels with an exclamation and held up a negative for him to look at.

It was Belle all right. The same pose as the framed picture he had brought from Denham.

She checked the number, went to a circular file and spun it competently, sorted the cards for a moment and turned to him, saying, “The name here is Watson. Richard Watson.”

“Any other information about him?” Shayne asked her.

“Not here. This is just a cross-index.” She turned to a larger circular file that was arranged alphabetically, and disengaged a card after a moment which she handed to Shayne.

“WATSON, Richard” was typed at the top, followed by a street address and telephone number, and the date, “August 16, 1954.”

Below was the notation, “Belle, Mrs.” and some figures and hieroglyphics which Shayne did not understand.

As he stood looking at it stupidly, Marge leaned over and put her finger on the card:

“That means six shots were taken of Mrs. Belle Watson. She chose one of them and had half a dozen printed, two of them framed like yours. He paid the bill, twenty-eight fifty, the tenth of the following month.”

“But... Mrs. Belle Watson. I don’t get it. She was Miss Belle Brand before she got married more than a year after this picture was taken.”

Marge Monroe shrugged elaborately. “All I know is what it says there. Mr. Delain was very careful about keeping records as you can see. You can be pretty sure that what’s written down there is what she told him when she had the job done. Naturally, he didn’t ask to see her wedding certificate.”

Shayne was still staring down at the card, trying to readjust his thoughts. He realized now that he hadn’t wasted those ten minutes spent in the Logan courthouse. Because this looked as though she had lied when she took out a license to marry Carson and stated she had never been married before. If she had concealed the truth from Carson...?

He shook his head angrily, putting aside the questions that could not be answered at this point.

He got out his wallet and took out a fifty-dollar bill, telling Marge, “I’d like to copy down this address... and you’ve more than earned this.”

Her eyes danced impishly as she got a sheet of paper and wrote down the information for him. “Is she really a murderer, do you think?”

Shayne said, “I’m not doing any more thinking at this point. But you’ve been swell and I’ll mail you a newspaper clipping when it’s all over.”

He hurried out of the studio to hail a taxi and be driven to the address where Mrs. Belle Watson had lived in August of 1954.