“M-Morrison,” she replied. “I h-hope you’ll forgive my c-crying like this. It’s horrible, that’s what it is. I can’t believe it’s true. She used to come in here, perch herself on this railing, and laugh and chat with me just like I was one of her young friends. She was so sweet and thoughtful of everybody. I don’t see how I can stand it.” She looked at the wet ball of tissue that was wadded in her hand and turned back to her desk, saying, “Excuse me.”
She came back with a couple of fresh tissues, after blowing her sharp nose lustily. “Now, what can I do for you?”
Shayne sat with one hip on the railing. He said, “Kathleen seems to have affected you as she did a lot of other people. Have you worked here long?”
“To know her was to love her,” Miss Morrison said reverently, ignoring Shayne’s leading question. “Last Christmas she brought me a hanky. Real Irish lace, with such a beautiful card. I’ll always remember the verse on it.” She closed her eyes, squeezing out the tears, and wiping them with a fold of tissue.
“How long have you been with Mr. Deland and Mr. Dawson?” he asked again.
“Three years now, come December.”
“I understand that Mr. Dawson did most of the office work and storeroom work, while Mr. Deland went out on repair jobs?”
“Yes,” said Miss Morrison with a deep sigh. “Mr. Dawson took care of the inside mostly. If you’ve come to see him, I’m afraid you’ll have to come back in a few days. Poor man. He’s prostrated with grief. Don’t you think it was noble of him to fight off that gang the way he did?”
“I certainly do,” said Shayne seriously. “Is Dawson married?”
“Oh, no. He’s a widower.” She fluttered her wrinkled eyelids coyly. “I was always telling him that a state of single blessedness was no way for a man to live, and sometimes he’d agree with me.”
“He and Deland seem to have had a very nice business here,” said Shayne. “I’d say Dawson should be able to support a wife.”
“Mr. Dawson wasn’t what you’d call wealthy, but the business brought in a nice income. He was thinking some of taking it over, buying Mr. Deland out, you know. I used to urge him to. Seemed like it wasn’t fair for him to get only half, for all the hard work and long hours he put in.”
“Deland didn’t do his part, eh?”
“I wouldn’t say that. He was difficult at times, but he was a hard worker, spending half a day on a repair job that wouldn’t stand for more than three hours’ charge, and even then forgetting to enter the charge in the books at all-things like that. Mr. Deland was careless, but Mr. Dawson was always one for exact detail. Sometimes it seemed to me Mr. Deland was rather bored with the business. Maybe that’s why Mr. Dawson wanted to buy him out.”
“They didn’t get on well?” asked Shayne. “Is that why Mr. Deland was thinking of selling out?”
“I didn’t say Mr. Deland wanted to sell out,” she corrected him. “It’s something Mr. Dawson and I discussed privately.” Miss Morrison’s eyes looked down at the balled tissue in her hand, and Shayne wondered if she was going to wipe the drippings from her pointed nose; but she said curtly, “Why are you asking all these questions, and who are you?”
“I’m from the United States Treasury Department,” he told her. “Last year’s income tax.”
Her pallid eyelids lifted and her strange eyes were startled. “I was afraid there’d be trouble about that on account of Mr. Deland’s carelessness,” she stammered. “I told Mr. Dawson, ‘Just you mark my words-no telling how many jobs like that Greerson job don’t show on the books.’ That was this year, of course, but I told Mr. Dawson, ‘You just can’t tell how many like it never showed on the books.’”
Shayne said, “Suppose you tell me more about the-ah-Greerson job. It may help to explain some of the discrepancies in last year’s report.”
Miss Morrison’s eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. “Mr. Dawson is a keen business man, and I don’t understand why he wasn’t more strict with Mr. Deland. Of course, they were equal business partners and, as Mr. Dawson said, it really wasn’t his place to put his foot down. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t run our office on a businesslike basis, and I told him so.”
“About the Greerson job,” Shayne said again.
She didn’t answer for a time, looking away from him with her head lifted and staring into space. Then she turned toward Shayne, her eyes filled with unshed tears.
“It wasn’t anything, really. Not compared with her death.”
Shayne said, “Business is never important to children, but it is to men who have to work to support them.”
Miss Morrison sighed deeply. “What I was going to say is that the Greerson job didn’t matter. It just showed how carelessness makes trouble. We never billed him on it. When I asked Mr. Deland about it after the first of the month, he got angry and irritable. First he said he couldn’t remember, and then he said he had had trouble getting the parts. Anyway, he never did fix it the way it should be, and he didn’t feel it was honest to collect a bill like that.
“I told him we couldn’t run the business that way. I insisted that his time was worth something. That was the first time Mr. Dawson ever spoke sharp to me, and he apologized afterward. He said I wasn’t to question Mr. Deland.
“Later, he told me privately that he agreed with me,” she went on, her colorless eyes looking at the dirty ceiling as though it were studded with stars. “But after all, Mr. Deland was a partner and was in charge of the outside work. That’s when he spoke of buying out Deland’s share of the business a little later on when he expected to come into a small legacy.
“But now all this terrible thing has come up, and I don’t know what the outcome will be, with Mr. Dawson lying there in the hospital fighting for his life, and with the tragedy in the Deland home and all.”
She ran out of breath and began sobbing again.
Shayne stood up and patted her shoulder and told her he would come back some other time when things were a little more normal. He left hurriedly with another small item of information tucked away in his mind, though he didn’t see, at the moment, how it could help him.
It did establish a slim connection between ex-Senator Irvin, alias Greerson, and Deland; but he couldn’t see how that connection fitted into the kidnap picture.
Dawson, too, it appeared, had also acted strangely about the Greerson job, refusing to urge his partner to press what appeared to be a legitimate repair bill.
But he was making progress, Shayne reassured himself; and somewhere in the complex pattern lay the answer to four deaths within the space of four hours.
Chapter Seventeen
Shayne found Timothy Rourke in his apartment on the Beach. The neat condition of the living-room, Shayne noted, was further evidence that his reporter friend had undergone a change since fighting for weeks for his life in a hospital bed with a bullet in his abdomen.
Rourke was at his typewriter. He said, “Sit down, Mike. Thank God I’ve got an excuse to quit this and pour myself the drink I’ve been wanting. You’ll drink rye and like it, or you won’t drink.”
Shayne said, “Even rye will taste good to me right now.” He dropped down on the couch and looked around the room. There was a wastebasket beside Rourke’s desk and the trash was in it instead of around it. The ash tray on the desk held ashes and cigarette butts. Heretofore both had been strewn over the rug. Shayne grinned. “You’re getting to be a goddamned old maid about your housekeeping.”
“Yeah. I got used to having things clean at the hospital. I sort of like it.” His cadaverous face was sallow and his eyes bloodshot and weary. He shoved his chair back, went to the kitchenette, and returned with an unopened bottle of rye and two glasses. He handed the bottle to Shayne to open and went back to the kitchenette to get two glasses of ice water.