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Shayne glared at him angrily and then down at the note in his hand. “I know it’s here, damn it. It’s here in front of our eyes, and we’re all missing it. You both laughed at me when I tried to point out certain things to you. ‘Dearest Boss’” he read aloud harshly. “Lucy never called me either ‘Dearest’ or ‘Boss’ in her life. That’s phony. And: ‘This is the last love letter I shall ever write to you—’ I told you in the beginning, damn it, that Lucy never has written me a love letter before. So, how could this be the last one? She’s trying to tell me something in that phrase! She knows that I know, this can’t be her last love letter since she never wrote me another. So what does it mean?”

“And Will and I both pointed out,” said Rourke soothingly, “that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Take the ‘Boss,’ for instance. Switzer was probably standing over her with a gun when he forced her to write the note. He’d probably say to her: ‘Write your boss a letter telling him just how things are.’ So she addressed it ‘Dearest Boss.’”

“I still think she would have normally written ‘Dear Mike,’” said Shayne stubbornly. “How do you explain that this is her ‘last love letter’ when she never wrote me a love letter before?”

“It’s a question of semantics,” said Rourke easily. “She thinks this may be her last letter to you. She’s scared to death as she writes it, and wants to make it a love letter. You know the gal has been in love with you for years, even if she’s never said so. This is her last chance. If this is a love letter, and if it’s her last letter also, it has to be her last love letter. I simply think you’re driving yourself crazy trying to read something into it that isn’t there, Mike. Consider the circumstances. This was written hurriedly and under the greatest stress and almost surely under Switzer’s eye. She had no chance to work out an elaborate code such as you hypothecate. You say yourself that Lucy knew nothing of formal codes. Seems to me it would take the greatest expert on earth to incorporate a code in a letter like this under the circumstances.”

“I never said Lucy was dumb,” snapped Shayne. “I didn’t say I thought she had used an elaborate or formal code. But I know she is trying to tell me something in this note other than appears on the surface, and her life may depend on my being smart enough to figure it out.” He looked down at the note in Lucy’s handwriting again.

“There are several awkward constructions. Not the way Lucy would phrase the same thought. Nothing you can put your finger on, but there they are. I tell you, she wrote it that way for a purpose. Near the end, she uses the word mazuma. Now, that’s a word Lucy never used in her life. I’d swear to it. Yet she uses it in this note to me. Why? I tell you she had a reason. But instead of helping me figure out the reason and maybe save her from suffocation, you both sit back and shake your heads indulgently and count the bank loot I recovered for you.”

His voice shook with anger as he finished. He sank into a chair and dropped the note on the table before them, finished his drink and threw the empty glass across the room where it shattered into tiny pieces against the wall. Then he buried his face in his hands and drew in a great shuddering breath.

Will Gentry looked over his bowed head at Timothy Rourke, and neither of his two best friends knew what to say to him at the moment. Rourke finally picked Lucy’s note up and studied it again with narrowed eyes, then shook his head helplessly.

“Blessed if I can decipher any secret message in it. Listen, Will. Don’t you have an ex-Army Intelligence officer on your staff who’s supposed to be a whiz at cryptograms and codes? Why not give him a whirl at her note?”

“Why, sure,” agreed Gentry. “He was major or a colonel in the last war. I’ll call him.”

“Nuts to your expert,” said Michael Shayne wearily, lifting his head and reaching for the single sheet of paper again. “I’ve told you Lucy is no expert. Anything in here is meant for me alone. Calling me ‘Dearest Boss’ wouldn’t mean anything to your code expert. He’d have no way of knowing she hadn’t written me hundreds of love letters in the past, any more than Switzer knew it. Don’t you see? Whatever she was trying to say, she had to put so Switzer would accept it as perfectly normal under the circumstances. But she had to trust me to get the nuances and put them together logically. And I’m failing her, God help me. My mind’s a goddamned blank on it.” He got up angrily and went to the wall cupboard for another glass and came back to splash it full of amber liquor.

“Better go easy on the brandy,” cautioned Gentry. “If you are so certain there’s something hidden in her letter, you need a clear head to find it.”

Michael Shayne laughed jarringly and emptied his glass in two fast gulps. “Maybe that’s what’s the matter with us. We’re all too goddamned sober and trying to use our so-called intellects instead of our instincts. The more you apply logic, the less you rely on inner knowledge. On hunches. Time and again in my own life, I’ve suddenly known something was true. I didn’t know how I knew it. It just was.

“Long ago, I would stop and question this inner knowledge,” he went on. “I would try to apply the rules of logic to it, and if they didn’t apply I would begin to question the rightness of my hunch. And, invariably, I’d discover later that my original idea had been right. Don’t ask me why it works that way.” He shrugged and poured himself another drink. “Lots of guys a lot smarter than I am have observed the same thing and wondered why. You get into the realm of metaphysics along that line. All I know right now is that I know there’s some concealed message in Lucy’s note for me. Not for you guys. Not for Mark Switzer. She knew he wouldn’t stand for it if it didn’t sound all right to him.”

Shayne paused to drain his glass of brandy, glaring at Will Gentry in defiance. “It’s here, Will.” He struck the sheet of paper with his fist.

“She calls me ‘Boss,’” he reminded the two men harshly. “She says it’s her last love letter when she never wrote me a love letter before. She ends that sentence: ‘My sweet.’” His harsh voice made a parody of the two words.

“That’s not Lucy Hamilton talking. Not under the greatest stress in the world. She’d never call me that. My sweet! It’s an adolescent phrase. But she used it for some reason. Because she expects me to realize it isn’t the way she would normally write to me, and thus she has used it for a special reason.

“Hell, there are a dozen more examples as you read on,” he continued fiercely. “‘Please don’t do anything to hurt him or we will die.’ And ‘mazuma!’ A word Lucy would never normally use. And then the corny ending, of course. ‘As you read these lines, please realize, Mike dearest, that I shall love you even to the very end. Even to the very end,’” he repeated savagely. “Unh-uh. Not Lucy.”

“All right,” said Gentry patiently. “I’m willing to accept everything you say. But where does it get you? Why did she write down those words and phrases you say she wouldn’t normally use?”

“To tell me something, damn it! Something I’m too dumb or too sober to get hold of.” He put the letter down on the table and emptied the cognac bottle into his glass. “I can’t do anything about my congenital dumbness but, by God, I can get drunk enough to maybe figure what Lucy was trying to say.”

He lifted the glass and started to drink from it, still staring down at Lucy’s letter. His features tightened suddenly in a look of intense concentration. He lowered the glass to the table, slopping some of the liquor out of it because his gaze was fixed on the penned words.