Too Friendly, Too Dead

2

Michael Shayne’s telephone wakened him ten minutes later on that same Saturday morning. He came suddenly out of the depths of sound sleep, blinked at the early morning light streaming in his window, and let the instrument ring five times before stretching out a long arm to bring it to his ear.

He said, “Shayne,” in a gruff and non-committal voice, but came fully awake when his secretary’s voice came incisively over the wire:

“Michael. Please come over here right away.”

“Sure, Angel. Where’s here? What’s up?”

“My place, Michael. That is, the apartment above me. Three-B. The Fitzgilpins. It’s terrible. Her husband. He didn’t come home last night and the Beach police just called. She has to go to the morgue to… identify him. I thought if you’d go with her…” Lucy Hamilton’s voice trailed off, and Shayne said swiftly:

“Right away. Hold the fort.”

He threw back the covers and stood up, unbuttoning his pajama top with one hand while he rumpled his bristly red hair with the other. He dressed in a hurry, splashed water in his face and on his hair so he could comb it into some semblance of order, then strode into the living room and glanced longingly into the kitchen and the dripolator standing on the drainboard. But he had told Lucy “right away,” so he compromised by hastily downing a couple of ounces of cognac to fortify him, then hurried out to get his car from the hotel garage.

Driving north on Biscayne Boulevard through the cool pre-sunlight of the spring morning, Shayne scowled as he recalled everything he could about the Fitzgilpins, who occupied an apartment on the floor above Lucy.

He had met both of them once, he recalled vaguely, having a drink with Lucy in her apartment. There were children, he thought, and he knew Lucy liked the family… particularly the wife. What was her name? He couldn’t bring it to mind, but he did remember that she was red headed and lissome, and a good ten years younger than her husband. A nice, quiet, inoffensive guy. Some sort of small business on the Beach, Shayne thought.

So, now he was in the morgue; and there was a sorrowing, red-headed widow and a couple of fatherless children. His scowl deepened. Why did such things happen to nice, quiet, inoffensive people? There were thousands of no-goods infesting Miami and the Beach who wouldn’t be missed by anybody if they suddenly kicked the bucket. But they were still alive this morning, and a nice, little guy like Jerome Fitzgilpin (yeh, that was his name… Jerome. And his wife’s name was Linda) wasn’t around any more.

Lucy Hamilton opened the door of apartment 3-B when he rang the bell. She had no makeup on, and her curly brown hair was a mess, and she had been crying. She wore bedroom slippers and a fluffy chenille robe over a pair of white silk pajamas, and she put out her hands to him and said, “Oh, Michael,” in a stifled voice as he came through the doorway.

He put his arms around her and held her closely and understandingly while she pressed her face against his shoulder and cried some more. She drew back after a moment and looked up into his face with tear-wet eyes and said simply, “I don’t know why. But when something like this happens… so close to home… it makes you want to… be sure you still have someone.”

Shayne patted her shoulder and said gruffly, “I know, Angel.” And he did know. He had been close to violent death so often, had seen the reactions of so many people suddenly confronted with the fact of death. There was an instinctive groping toward someone close… someone whom you cared for… who cared for you.

He closed his big hand on Lucy’s shoulder and squeezed it hard, then pulled the door shut and glanced about the living room with ragged red eyebrows lifted inquiringly.

“Linda is in the bedroom getting dressed,” Lucy told him. “The two children are still asleep. I thought if you’d drive her to the Beach, I could stay here with them. They know me and won’t be frightened if they wake up and Linda is gone.”

He said, “Of course. What happened?”

“Linda doesn’t know. Except Jerome didn’t come home last night, and they phoned her this morning to say they’d found his body close to his parked automobile and they wanted her to come and identify him. He always keeps his office open late on Friday nights. It’s an insurance business, you know, and the majority of his clients are salaried people who carry small policies and pay premiums weekly in cash. He stays open on Friday nights to accommodate them, and brings the cash home. Several hundred dollars generally. He often stops off at a tavern for a beer or two… that’s all he ever drinks when he’s away from home… and doesn’t get home until about midnight. So Linda thought nothing of it last night when she took a sleeping pill and went to bed at eleven. And she didn’t wake up until the phone rang this morning. The police told her that Jerome’s wallet was missing, and they had to check the car registration to get his name. He was such a nice little man, Michael. So gentle and friendly. I never knew a friendlier, nicer man.”

The tears came into Lucy’s eyes again. “Who would do a thing like that? Just for a few hundred dollars. You’ve got to find out, Michael.”

He patted her shoulder again and said absently, “Sure, Angel. We’ll get the bastard that did it,” his gaze going past her to the bedroom door that was opening to admit Jerome Fitzgilpin’s widow.

She looked ten years younger and a hell of a lot prettier than he remembered her from that one brief encounter in Lucy’s apartment. She was tall and slender, with softly waved, copperish red hair, and there was a fine-drawn look about her face which betrayed an emotional tension which she otherwise concealed admirably. She wore a simple black sheath dress belted tightly at the waist, with no adornment. Her lips were lightly rouged and her voice was muted and composed as she advanced with a faint smile on her lips and with hand outstretched, saying, “Mr. Shayne. It was good of you to come.”

He took her slender hand and received a firm pressure from it, and told her, “I’m very happy…” He paused awkwardly and corrected himself in a gruff voice, “I’m very glad to do anything I can.”

Linda nodded her head slightly and turned to Lucy. “The children will probably sleep for another hour. You’re sure you don’t mind staying with them?”

“Of course not.” Lucy’s voice was warm and reassuring. “What else are friends for?” She hesitated, glancing down at her robe and slippers. “Why don’t you and Michael sit down for a minute while I slip downstairs and change?”

Linda nodded again and said abstractedly, “Of course. I’m sure there’s no… hurry. The sergeant said… to come any time.”

She moved back to seat herself carefully on the sofa while Lucy went out. All her movements were somewhat mechanical, as though she were consciously thinking them out in advance, consciously willing each muscle to act.

Shayne got out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose, advanced toward her with the pack held out. “Will you have a cigarette, Mrs. Fitzgilpin?”

“Thanks.” She accepted it and glanced briefly up into his face with haunted, gray eyes. “Please call me Linda. I don’t feel like Mrs. Fitzgilpin this morning.”

Shayne struck a match and held it for her. Then he lit one of his own and moved back to a chair by the window. “I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish or anything like that, Linda, but Lucy tells me there’s no positive identification yet. Just the fact that your husband’s car was found near a body. There may be a dozen other explanations.”

“No.” Her voice was strong and positive. “Jerome would never stay away from home all night. He never has in all the years we’ve been married. He was very considerate and always phoned me even if he was only going to be half an hour later than I expected him.”

“He didn’t phone last night?”

“No. Fridays he stays late at the office. Until nine usually. Then he usually stops off at some bar for a beer or two, and he often gets interested talking to people and doesn’t get home until midnight. Friday night was… was sort of his night to do that, you see, and I didn’t object. I urged him to stay out one night a week. He’d never drink more than two or three beers,” she went on strongly, as though feeling a deep need to establish this fact, “no matter how late he stayed out. So I never worried about him. He loved people. Different kinds of people. The sort he’d meet on Friday nights in a neighborhood bar.” Her voice was musing now, her eyes lowered as though she were talking to herself. “He was so friendly and interested, he’d draw them out to talk about themselves. Tell him all sorts of personal things.

“Why… why?” she cried out suddenly, lifting tragic eyes to stare at him. “Why would anyone hurt him, Mr. Shayne? He never hurt anyone in his life. He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

Shayne said, “If it’s going to be Linda, you’d better start calling me Mike.” He shook his head angrily and rumpled his red hair with knobby fingers.

The buzzer sounded and he got up to admit Lucy who had changed into a light print dress. Linda got up too, mashing out her cigarette. “If the children wake up before I get back, Lucy, tell them… oh God, I don’t know what you should tell them.”

“Better not tell them anything until we know for sure,” Lucy said briskly. “Just that something came up and you both had to go out. Luckily, I’ve babysat before, so they won’t be surprised to find me here.” Lucy met Linda in the middle of the room and squeezed her arm tightly. “Go along with Michael and don’t worry about the children.”

Linda nodded and compressed her lips tightly and hurried out of the apartment in front of Shayne.

He followed her down the two flights of stairs, admiring the set of her shoulders, the proud lift of her head. At least, he wasn’t going to have an hysterical female on his hands. Not for a time at least. Not until the initial shock had worn off and she was confronted with the inescapable fact of widowhood.

She sat in the front seat of Shayne’s car beside him and composedly folded her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead through the windshield while he drove across the Causeway to Miami Beach. Neither of them spoke during the drive, but her shoulder touched his lightly on occasion as he sped around a curve, and he felt a warm sense of understanding and communion between them which he believed she shared and which was gratifying under the circumstances. She was Lucy’s friend, he reminded himself, and this made him want to be her friend also.

She sat very still in the car and breathed a deep sigh when he pulled into the parking lot behind police headquarters where one room of the building was arranged as a temporary morgue until bodies could be removed to the County Morgue on the mainland.

He got out and went around to open her door and helped her out, and held onto her arm tightly as he led her through a side door and down a short corridor to an unmarked closed door which he opened without knocking. There was a small anteroom with a desk and a shirt-sleeved police officer sitting behind it. He grinned recognition at the redhead and greeted him heartily, “Hi there, Shamus. What brings you…?” and stopped abruptly when he saw the pale-faced woman beside the detective.

Shayne said, “I’ve brought Mrs. Fitzgilpin, Dexter. Shall we… go in?”

“Yeh… good… sure.” The patrolman arose hastily, grabbed his uniform coat from a hook and shrugged into it. He pressed an intercom button on his desk, explaining over his shoulder to Shayne, “Chief wanted to know when she got here.” He leaned down and spoke into the intercom, “Mrs. Fitzgilpin is here to make that identification, Chief.”

“Hold it till I get there,” Chief Peter Painter’s voice rasped over the wire, and Patrolman Dexter straightened up and began fastening the buttons of his coat and said officiously, as though they hadn’t heard Painter’s order, “Just a minute, folks. Chief Painter will be right in.”

Linda was standing very close to Shayne, and he felt her body begin to shake as though gripped by a chill. She whispered faintly, “Couldn’t we… couldn’t I see Jerome?”

“Just a second.” He held her arm tightly against his, knowing that Painter was right in wanting to be present to observe her reaction when she viewed the body, but mentally damning him for prolonging her agony just the same.

It was only a couple of minutes before the door opened behind them and the Miami Beach Chief of Detectives strutted in. He was a short, very slender man, and his natural gait was a strut. He was thin-faced and immaculately dressed, and wore a pencil-line black mustache. His expression of grave sympathy changed to one of irritated surprise when he saw Shayne standing close beside the widow. He stiffened and drew himself up and demanded, “How does this concern you, Shayne?”

“I’m a personal friend of Mrs. Fitzgilpin’s,” Shayne told him coldly. “Save any other questions for later. Let’s get this job done.”

Painter hesitated, his black eyes sparkling with hostility. He would have enjoyed ordering the detective to stay outside while they viewed the body, but nothing in the circumstances warranted that, so he nodded shortly and said, “Very well. Dexter,” he snapped at the waiting patrolman.

Dexter saluted briskly and stepped forward to open a door beyond his desk. He held it open and Shayne waited for Painter to enter the small, drab room before following with Linda, slipping his arm about her slim waist as he did so.

The body lay on a wheeled stretcher in the middle of the floor, just as it had been brought in from the ambulance, though it had been stripped of clothing and was now covered by a white sheet.

Painter went forward and circled to the other side of the stretcher and waited with his hand on a corner of the sheet until Shayne and Linda stood opposite him. Then he drew the sheet back to disclose the face of the dead man, who lay on his back with sightless eyes staring upward.

Linda’s body became absolutely rigid inside Shayne’s encircling arm as she looked down at the plump features of her husband, now flaccid and undistinguished in death. She said, “Yes,” sibilantly, and then moaned an anguished, “Oh… Jerome,” and she leaned over him and her tears fell on the waxen flesh and she reached forward a trembling hand to put her fingertips gently on the cold forehead.

Shayne tightened his arm about her waist and drew her back, swallowing down an angry lump in his throat. That little inoffensive man on the stretcher, two fatherless children at home, and a young and vital widow who now faced the future alone! Despite the years he’d been close to violent death, a scene like this still affected Shayne as strongly as though he were just starting out in his profession. He turned Linda away, saying gruffly to Painter, “You’ve got your identification. Now tell us what happened.”

Painter followed them out to the anteroom officiously. “I’ll have to have a statement from you, Mrs. Fitzgilpin. Where you were last night. When you saw your husband last. The state of his personal and business affairs. Anyone who had a motive for doing him harm.”

“Wait a minute, Petey,” Shayne interrupted him angrily. “I gathered this was a straight mugging job. What have all those questions got to do with that? Are you trying to cover up your inefficiency here on the Beach by trying to make it into something else?”

Painter drew himself up angrily. “This isn’t your affair, Shayne. I am conducting this investigation. I must insist that Mrs. Fitzgilpin make a statement.”

“All she knows is that he worked late at his insurance office here on the Beach last night, and was presumably carrying several hundred dollars in his wallet. Was he rolled, or wasn’t he?”

“He was rolled, all right. That is, his wallet is missing and there are indications that a ring was pulled from his finger. Did he wear a valuable ring, Ma’m?”

Linda nodded woodenly. “Not particularly valuable, but he prized it highly. An amethyst. Worth, perhaps, a hundred dollars.”

“There you are,” Shayne said hotly. “Round up some of the petty crooks whom you allow to run free on the Beach, and you’ll have your killer. Mrs. Fitzgilpin’s statement stands. She went to sleep last night expecting her husband to return about midnight as he generally did on Fridays. She was wakened by your phone call this morning and discovered his bed unslept in. I think that’s all you need to know right now.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Shayne.” Peter Painter spoke with smirking satisfaction and caressed his thin mustache with a beautifully manicured thumbnail. “You’ve stupidly neglected a very important point. You haven’t asked the cause of death.”

“All right. What caused his death?”

“We haven’t had time for a P. M. yet, of course. Just a preliminary examination of stomach contents while we were awaiting identification,” Painter purred happily. “But he was poisoned, Shayne. There isn’t the faintest shadow of doubt that death was due to poison… probably administered in alcohol from half an hour to an hour before he died. Do you consider that reason enough for requiring a full statement from the widow without interference from you?”

Linda said falteringly, “Poisoned? Oh no!” She put her hands to her face and swayed against him in a faint and would have slumped to the floor if his arm hadn’t supported her.