“All this is theory,” Shayne added to Hale. “But it fits the facts as we know them. Fifty grand did disappear, and last night Deland handed that exact amount to Dawson instead of the money you had brought down by plane. It was a simple method of extorting money from you, and Deland didn’t think his daughter would be harmed, since he had made all arrangements with the kidnaper himself.”
“But why go through all that falderal with counterfeit money?” exclaimed Hale. “He could have accomplished the same end by hiring the kidnaping done, arrange to have himself deliver the money, and then simply keep most of it.”
“It was possession of that counterfeit money that gave him the idea in the first place,” Shayne pointed out. “And he probably thought you might suspect the truth if he tried to make the pay-off himself. To avoid any faint possibility of suspicion that it was prearranged, he asked his partner to act as go-between, so that Dawson would always be able to swear that the fifty thousand dollars had actually changed hands. Then Dawson ruined everything by trying to skip out with the money. Deland killed Gurney both to avenge himself for his daughter’s murder and to keep his mouth shut.”
Later, when Timothy Rourke and Michael Shayne went down in the hospital elevator together, Rourke said, “There are still two things I want to know about, Mike.”
“Shoot.”
“When did you learn that the blood and hairs on the vase in your apartment matched Dawson’s?”
“I didn’t. No one has yet taken the trouble to compare them, as far as I know. I don’t even know whether there were any hairs on the vase. But I was morally certain they would match if there were any, so I jumped the gun a little in order to jolt a confession out of Dawson.”
“And once again,” said Rourke reverently, “a hunch inherited from your Dutch grandmother brought home the bacon. All right You may not want to answer my next question on account of it might tend to incriminate you.”
“Then I won’t,” Shayne promised him as they got out of the elevator and strolled down the long, silent corridor.
“How does it feel to be responsible for the death of a fellow human being?”
“I’ve forgotten,” said Shayne. “What in hell are you talking about?”
“Deland. You deliberately put the idea of suicide in his mind, Mike. I realize now that’s what you did. When you pulled him back from the window and away from me you planted the idea in his mind so he’d react later when you drove him into a corner.”
Shayne rubbed his angular chin meditatively. “You told me a story last night. About a sweet-faced mother who was grieving over her daughter’s death, and had only her husband to cling to. That story stuck in my craw, Tim. Go home and write a follow-up that’ll give Minerva Deland a heroic memory to cling to.”
“I’m headed for a typewriter right now,” Rourke assured him. “What about you?”
“I,” said Michael Shayne with a grimace, “am headed for a long distance telephone and a talk with a certain gal in New Orleans. If she still insists on a vacation I’ll sell her the idea that Miami’s the place to take it.”