“Oh, yeh?” Rourke grinned disarmingly. His mind appeared clear.
“She and Marlow probably planned a public wedding later,” Shayne resumed, “without mentioning the one in April under her real name of Devalon.”
“So that’s why Marlow had the document hidden so carefully. But what does it get us, Mike? He wouldn’t have killed her.”
“Husbands have killed their wives for less than that.”
“But he couldn’t blame her so much. She had to pretend she wasn’t married as much for his sake as hers.”
“But not quite so wholeheartedly,” Shayne pointed out. “She could have announced her engagement to him without forfeiting a fortune. No, we can’t count Marlow out. Sex jealousy and greed motivate ninety-nine per cent of our murders. He had plenty of reason to be jealous.”
“He didn’t look like a killer to me — the glimpse I had of him in the hotel tonight.”
“He was a little off par,” Shayne explained. “No man puts his best foot forward when he’s wearing off a Mickey Finn. Bugler fed him a doped drink when he called on him this evening and began laying Bugler out for the way he’s been running around with her.”
Rourke’s head came up and his eyes wavered toward Shayne. “You get around, don’t you? Suppose Arch knew Helen was married to Marlow?”
Shayne tugged at his ear lobe. “I wasn’t in on much of the conference. From what I saw and heard, Marlow was getting nasty and Bugler eased him off with private stock before he could make a scene at the inn.”
Rourke tested his strength once more with his palms flat on the couch, came shakily to a sitting position. He reached for the Scotch bottle and Shayne warned, “You’re hitting the bottle pretty heavy, Tim.”
Rourke nodded cheerfully. “Why not? You’re not one to deliver a temperance lecture.” He took a sight on the cognac bottle and saw that it was more than half full. “You’re not up to par tonight, Mike.”
“I have things to do.”
“Tonight?” Rourke attempted to register astonishment.
“Certain things,” Shayne explained, “are best accomplished under the cloak of darkness.”
Rourke squinted at him suspiciously. “I can think of only one sort of thing.”
“You’ve got a dirty mind,” Shayne accused.
“Need it to cope with you. Blond or brunette?”
“I don’t know. Ask me about her legs. They’re stumpy.”
“Damn it, Mike, it’s after midnight. You’re not going out frailing at this hour?”
“The date,” said Shayne, “is for two o’clock sharp. She has to slip out after the rest of them go to sleep.”
Rourke shook his head sadly. He tilted his glass, and a tear ran down his lean cheek into the Scotch. “It’s not right to kid about something like that, Mike. You had me hating your guts once tonight. Don’t pull another stunt like that.”
Shayne laughed shortly. “This gal’s the kind that has nine lives,” he said lightly. “Throttling wouldn’t kill her.” He got up and paced back and forth, ruffling his coarse red hair. “Thank God my morals are elastic enough to meet an emergency. How is a man to get information out of a frenetic maiden except—”
“Don’t do it, Mike,” Rourke pleaded. He slopped some whisky over his tie as he emptied his glass. “Let me go in your place. I’m not married. Nobody cares what I do.”
“You’re drunk,” Shayne said gravely. “You wouldn’t do either of us any good.”
“Going home,” Rourke said. “Not going to stay and abet adultery.” He swayed to his feet, tested his skinny legs carefully. He started forward and stumbled.
Shayne caught his arm and held on when Rourke tried drunkenly to fight him off. He guided the reporter’s shambling footsteps into the bedroom and pushed him down into a chair. He knelt down to untie his shoelaces, saying, “You’re not going anywhere tonight. Maybe I’ll bring my date back here and let you chaperon us. But you’ll have to sleep off your jag first.”
He got Rourke’s shoes off, then pulled off his trousers. He left him lolling in the chair while he went to the bed and turned down the covers, then hauled him up and shoved him down on the mattress.
Rourke waggled his head from side to side in disapproval, then closed his eyes and breathed heavily in sleep. Shayne drew only the sheet up over him, for the night was warm, and turned away. Rourke was snoring when he went back to the living-room.
Shayne glanced at his watch. It was one-thirty. He took a hat and a belted trench coat from the closet, left a shaded light burning in the living-room, and went out, snapping the night latch to lock the door behind him.
He took his time driving across the causeway in Rourke’s sedan. A lot of things bothered him, turning his normally rational thought processes into a kaleidoscopic blur. It was the screwiest case he had ever tried to unravel. Every time he thought he had a lead it branched out into a lot of unanswered questions. He refrained from thinking about what was going to happen when Helen Stallings’s body was found and identified the next morning. That was going to move the deadline forward a few hours. As soon as she was discovered, Stallings would have no reason for further deferring publication of the threatening note which he and Painter accepted as Shayne’s handiwork.
Shayne knew a lot of other people who were going to accept the same premise if he didn’t have the case solved before Stallings published the note. That was the danger of the sort of reputation he had deliberately allowed to grow up about him. Not only allowed — the popular idea that he would stop at nothing to gain his ends had been encouraged. A legend like that was good for business. It brought him the tough cases that paid big fees. And it was always hanging over his head, like a sword held by a hair, to destroy him if he dared to make a misstep.
Someone had taken that into account, he reasoned, when the kidnap note was sent to Stallings. He didn’t actually fear the final legal consequences. The election was the thing right now. There was no use kidding himself. An aroused citizenry would revolt and vote Stallings into office if the kidnap-murder charge was brought against him in the headlines.
There was that creepy feeling of revulsion under his ribs when he thought of how much depended on the impending interview with the Stallings maid, Lucile. Thus far she was the only person even remotely connected with the case who showed a tendency to talk freely. He was not sure what he hoped to learn from her, but he had an uneasy feeling that the answer to the entire riddle was, somehow, tied up with the Stallings household.
His earlier hunch had been strengthened by the discovery that Helen Stallings was secretly married and that her young husband had just arrived in Miami. What had at first appeared to be a purely political setup with a city election dependent upon the outcome was now revealed to have broader ramifications and far different potentialities — a personal complex — more the sort of thing with which he was prepared to cope.
Nine-tenths of Shayne’s cases had money at the bottom of them; he had come to regard such a will as Helen’s father had left as nothing more than an instrument of murder. Long ago he had learned not to look beyond his nose for a motive when a large sum of money was involved. No wonder he had grown cynical regarding the combination of murder and money. They were inseparable companions.
He didn’t quite see how it worked out this time, but he had a strong hunch that the motive for Helen Stallings’s murder would lie in the human relationship revolving around her rather than in the political struggle between Jim Marsh and Burt Stallings.
The political angle, he reasoned, was more of an effect than a cause, an accidental by-product of murder rather than the primary purpose.
Mrs. Stallings and thus, indirectly, Stallings himself would benefit by Helen’s death before her twenty-first birthday, Shayne mused. Still the ironical fact remained that she had already legally forfeited her inheritance by secretly marrying Whit Marlow in defiance of her father’s will. Anyone cognizant of the marriage would have known that the girl’s death was not necessary to cause her fortune to revert to her mother. That was one of the questions which desperately needed an answer. Did Stallings know about the marriage prior to her death?