Shayne ground out his cigarette in the small ash tray he held in his left hand. “What happened next?”
She took her hands from her eyes and her slender body went lax in the chair. “A telephone call. A man whose voice sounded thick-and fuzzy-as though he might be drunk. He asked me if I had read the photostats and whether it was worth ten thousand dollars to me to keep the originals out of my husband’s hands. I told him I didn’t have any money, that it would take me some time to raise it. You see, I’d thought about the pearls and knew I needed time to have a duplicate made, and I also thought about somehow proving the letters were forgeries. So I asked him for a little time.
“He agreed as soon as I convinced him I didn’t have any large sum of cash. But he said, just to show my good faith and to put the transaction on more of a business basis, I should make out an IOU for ten thousand and mail it at once to Arnold Barbizon at the Play-Mor Club. Then, he said if I wanted to I could tell my husband I’d lost the money gambling and Leslie would pay it without realizing it was blackmail.”
Shayne’s jaw was set hard, the muscles in his lean jaw were quivering. “Smart,” he said angrily. “As soon as they had your IOU you could never prove it had been obtained by blackmail. And that’s also why Barbizon didn’t mind too much giving up the IOU last night. They still have the letters to fall back on. If I’d known the truth last night-”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I was ashamed to tell you. I thought no one would need to know. As soon as the money was paid I was to receive the original letters by special delivery.”
“You’d never have gotten them so easily,” Shayne told her. “A blackmailer is never satisfied with his first bite. You should know that. It would have gone on and on until you were drained absolutely dry.”
“I guess so,” she agreed tonelessly. “I didn’t think about it that way. I had no one I could turn to.”
“If you’re telling the whole truth,” said Shayne, “the letters are probably forgeries. We can prove that easily enough if we can get a sample of Morrison’s handwriting.”
“I’ve told you the truth,” she said, “but they aren’t forgeries.”
“How do you know?”
“I took them to a handwriting expert, a man named Bernard Holloway who is supposed to be very good. I had a note of Mr. Morrison’s for comparison. One he sent with a wedding present. Mr. Holloway made a long report listing a number of similarities, and concluded with a definite statement that there was no doubt that the letters were written by the same person.”
“Holloway is good,” he told her. “One of the best in the country. His testimony has a lot of weight in any court. Now why is your ex-employer trying to frame you? Would he be interested in ten grand?”
“Mr. Morrison? Why, he’s several times a millionaire.”
“Then why?”
“Do you think he-arranged it? On purpose?”
“What else am I supposed to think?” Shayne asked angrily. “If he actually wrote the letters, though you claim there was nothing between you-”
“There wasn’t,” she interrupted desperately. “Ever. He was kind and generous and quite friendly, but there was never anything like that. I swear there wasn’t.”
Shayne was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then asked, “Could he have harbored a secret passion for you? Perhaps he wrote the letters to let off steam and someone got hold of them and realized how they could be used after you married a wealthy man.”
“Oh no!” she exclaimed, her cheeks flaming again. “I’m very sure Mr. Morrison never had a single thought like that about me. He’s quite happily married.”
“To a wife he’s planning to get rid of?” Shayne said sardonically. “All right-what do you make of it?”
“I don’t. What can I think? It’s utterly incomprehensible.”
“We’ll have to get in touch with him at once,” Shayne said with sudden decision. “With his denial, and with the testimony of people who knew you both that you weren’t having an affair, we should be able to tell your husband everything and squelch the blackmailer.”
“I’ve tried to get in touch with Mr. Morrison,” Christine admitted through trembling lips. “I’ve called him twice and left my number both times. When he didn’t call back as I requested, I didn’t know what to think.”
“Perhaps the long distance operator made a mistake.”
“Not long distance,” she told him. “Mr. Morrison is here.”
“In Miami? Wait a minute.” Shayne stared hard at her. “What’s he doing here?”
“Why, he and Mrs. Morrison are down for the season. They have a winter home here, but they haven’t opened it for several years.”
“How long have they been here?”
“A couple of weeks,” she faltered.
Shayne’s lean face hardened. “So, he followed you down here a couple of weeks after your marriage.”
“No. It wasn’t that. I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“It may look like that to your husband,” Shayne said with disgust. “All we need to make things perfect is someone to testify that he was in the habit of visiting you in your apartment while those letters were supposedly being written.”
Christine looked frightened and forlorn as she breathed, “I was going to tell you about that. You see, he did take me out to dinner twice, and I asked him up for a drink afterward-once. He was just being kind to me,” she went on desperately. “It isn’t what you think. His wife knew about it. In fact, he told me that she urged him to keep me from being too lonely.”
“He told you she did,” Shayne raged. “If you’re telling the truth this begins to look like one of the goddamndest frame-ups I ever ran into.” He got up and began striding up and down the room, ruffling his bristly red hair. “He must have planned the whole thing,” he growled. “Arranged to have those notes planted here and then sent the men to find them. The new maid explains that very neatly. Natalie. She’d been with you only a couple of weeks. And it supplies a motive for her death. She knew too much and may have threatened to blab.”
“I can’t believe it. Mr. Morrison was always a perfect gentleman in my presence.”
Shayne disregarded her, continuing to stride up and down while he filled out his vague theory. “Morrison wouldn’t be interested in blackmail, but that’s unimportant. One of his stooges could have had the photostats made on the side for his own purposes. It’s likely Morrison knows nothing about that angle.”
“But if the man was going to return the originals-”
“What makes you think he was going to?”
She looked up at him, wide-eyed. “He promised. Just as soon as I paid the ten thousand dollars.”
Shayne made a derisive gesture and snorted, “So, he promised.” He stopped beside her chair and asked, “Do you have those photostats?”
“Yes.”
“Get them for me.”
She hesitated, then asked miserably, “Do you have to see them? They’re so-I hate to have anyone read them.”
“Get them,” he commanded. His eyes were bleak. “I’m in this deeper than you are already. And call Mrs. Morgan up here,” he added. “I want to know more about those three men who found the letters.”
Christine got up and walked across the room and pressed a button. Then she disappeared through the door into her bedroom.
Shayne lit another cigarette and stood in the center of the floor scowling meditatively. He didn’t know whether to believe Christine or not. He wanted to believe her. For her husband’s sake if for no other reason. There had been adoration in Leslie Hudson’s eyes while he was kneeling beside his wife trying to revive her from unconsciousness. And there was another angle he hadn’t covered, Shayne remembered.