Peter Painter turned to him, bristling angrily. “See here, Shayne. You’ve been doing a lot of talking about counterfeit money. It’s the first I’ve heard of any such thing. What are you trying to prove against Mr. Hale?”
Shayne silenced him with a gesture. “Keep on listening and you’ll learn lots of things about this case.” He turned to Dawson and said, “Though I don’t see how Hale could have profited by the kidnaping, you stood to make thirty grand if you promised Gurney twenty thousand for his part. You still didn’t know that money was counterfeit when you came back to my hotel looking for it and ran into Slocum, did you?”
Dawson moved his head feebly, but didn’t answer. Sweat stood on his pallid brow, and his eyes were dull through the wetness covering them.
Gentry pushed himself up ponderously from his chair and joined the others standing around the bed.
Shayne went on. “We know you murdered Slocum, Dawson. It had to be you. At the airport I mentioned that I’d try to get my old apartment back, and you found a paid-up hotel receipt in my luggage that gave my apartment number. We had you lined up for it all the time,” he added contemptuously, “but we didn’t have any proof until they compared the blood and some hairs on the vase with your blood and hair. You murdered Slocum in cold blood. He was just an innocent man wanting an apartment, and never harmed anyone.”
“It wasn’t murder,” panted Dawson. “I swear it wasn’t. It was self-defense.”
“Self-defense against me” said Shayne. “Not against Slocum.”
“Yes.” Dawson turned away wearily. “I expected you to open the door when I knocked, and I had a gun in my hand. The guy went berserk when he saw the gun. Before I could explain, he snatched up something and struck me. I hit him in self-defense. He wouldn’t go down. He fought back. I had to keep on hitting him.” Dawson covered his face and began to sob. “I had to,” he cried hysterically. “Don’t you understand? I had to fight him all the way back to the bedroom and keep on hitting him until he lay quiet.”
Shayne turned to Gentry and said moodily, “I knew it had to be Dawson as soon as I learned Slocum had been attacked at the front door instead of in the bedroom.”
Gentry rumbled, “It was premeditated murder, Mike, even if the victim was an innocent bystander.”
“Yeah,” said Shayne absently. “The other party I suspected, Senator Irvin, had my keys and would have unlocked the door and walked in without knocking.”
“Some day,” said Gentry, “your Dutch grandmother may take a holiday from you and the wee folk.”
“Some day, maybe,” Shayne agreed.
Timothy Rourke made his way to Shayne’s side and said in a low voice, “So it was Dawson all the way. He planned the whole damned job and had himself appointed go-between so he’d handle the money. Then he tried to double-cross Gurney by jumping town with the dough, and inadvertently caused Kathleen’s death by the delay.”
“Not quite all the way.” Shayne spoke reluctantly, with a note of genuine sadness in his voice that none of his friends had ever heard before. “The man who arranged the kidnaping of Kathleen Deland had fifty grand in queer money to get rid of. Using it for a ransom pay-off seemed like an easy way of exchanging it for good money. If Dawson had planned it, he would have been careful to have the kidnaper name him as the go-between. But the kidnaper didn’t do that, Tim. You told me yourself that Arthur Deland named the go-between. So-”
There was a strangled gasp behind him as Arthur Deland whirled away from the group and sprang toward the open window nine stories above the ground. Painter leaped to intercept him, but somehow Shayne’s big body was in his way.
Deland dived through the flimsy screen headfirst, and those in the room stood rigid, listening for the dull thud that drifted up to the hospital room an instant later.
Chapter Twenty
“It’s still utterly inconceivable to me,” muttered Emory Hale. “Fantastically unreal. Arthur idolized that child and his wife. You realize, of course, that she’ll never live down the shame of this.”
It was ten minutes later. Painter and Rourke and Hale had just returned to the hospital room after ascertaining that Arthur Deland’s neck was broken, and after arranging for the removal of the body.
“She’ll have a lot more to live for than if he hadn’t gone out that window,” Shayne told him. “She need never know he wasn’t driven crazy by grief unless someone in this room talks out of turn. Gurney’s dead,” he pointed out, “and Gerta Ross doesn’t know who hired him for the job. She’ll do a short stretch for her part in the affair, and that’ll end it. Nothing would be gained by dragging the Deland name through the dirt.”
Hale looked around at the two officers and the reporter, moistened his lips, and said, “Is that the way-Are you gentlemen willing?”
“I don’t see why we have to do any talking,” said Gentry gruffly. “Of course, Tim is a newspaper reporter.”
“Count me in,” said Rourke quickly. “God, what a story it is this way!”
“His jump out the window may have cost you fifty grand,” Shayne told the New Yorker. “He’ll never be able to tell you where he hid your fifty thousand after handing Dawson the fake ransom money last night. The phony stuff is in a paper bag in my hotel safe right now,” he added to Gentry. “It will have to be turned over to the government.”
“Damn the money,” said Hale. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“On the other hand,” said Shayne, “if you recovered the fifty thousand you might feel a little more like paying the ten grand you offered last night for the arrest of the kidnapers.”
“I might, at that,” Hale conceded reluctantly. “But I understand the finding of the Ross woman and of Gurney’s corpse was due to an anonymous telephone call received by Mr. Rourke this morning. If the reward is to be paid at all it should go to that man.”
Shayne looked at Rourke and grinned. “I think Tim will be able to identify the caller for you. Let’s make a deal, Hale. Suppose you agree to pay the reward if you recover the money your brother-in-law tried to hold out when he switched the phony stuff for yours.”
“Fair enough,” Hale agreed. “But you just pointed out that we’d probably never find it now that poor Arthur can’t tell us where to look.”
Shayne said, “He told us before he jumped.”
All the men in the room were looking at him queerly.
“That telephone call,” Shayne said, “was from one of the boys in your office, Will. Before we started over here from Miami I asked him to call Dawson’s hospital room at a certain time.”
It was Emory Hale who first understood what telephone call he meant. “You mean Arthur’s house isn’t burning down?”
“Not that I know of,” said Shayne cheerfully. “Remember he wasn’t particularly interested in the fate of his house. Only in his wife and-the garage. If that fifty grand you brought down from New York isn’t hidden in the garage, I don’t want any reward,” he ended quietly.
“Damn the money,” Hale repeated. “I still don’t understand this. Where on earth did a man like Arthur get hold of fifty grand in queer stuff to give to Dawson?”
“We’ve been talking that over with Dawson while you were downstairs,” Shayne told him. “Of course, we may never know the exact truth, but here’s the way it looks:
“Some time ago, Deland was called out on a plumbing job at a certain house on Thirty-eighth Street. That house was the headquarters of a gang of counterfeiters, and that’s where they mussed the new bills up getting them ready to put into circulation.
“While working there, Deland apparently came across a packet of five hundred hundred-dollar bills, and the temptation was too much for him. He snatched the money, though he must have realized it was counterfeit, and made off with it. He never finished the repair job. He was afraid to go back, of course, and he had a row with Dawson later because he refused to bill the counterfeiter for the work he’d done.