Downstairs, Shayne lowered Daffy’s remains to a gleaming white enamel table, and brushed off his hands.
“You know I haven’t got too much equipment here at home, Mike. Just enough for some simple tests. What am I looking for?”
“She’s supposed to have died last evening in convulsions about ten minutes after eating a dish of creamed chicken fed to her by an old lady who suspected it contained poison. On the other hand it’s reported that she’s been a sickly dog, often subject to stomach upsets.”
“The convulsions in ten minutes sound like a solid dose of strychnine,” said Tolliver absently, lifting a starched surgeon’s garment from a hook on the wall and sliding his arms into the sleeves. “If so, it’ll be easy.”
“It needs to be definitely tied in with the creamed chicken to give us an open and shut case, Bud.”
“Sure,” the toxicologist said cheerfully, turning to a rack of shining surgical instruments and selecting one. “You want to stick around and watch it done?”
“I don’t think so,” said Shayne hastily. “Not tonight. Tim Rourke and I have things to do. Call me at home, huh? About how long?”
“Half an hour or so.”
Shayne said, “Swell,” and went up the stairs quickly while Tolliver bent over the dead dog with professional interest and zeal.
Timothy Rourke got to his feet quickly when Shayne walked into his own apartment ten minutes later. He drained the last of his drink and said triumphantly, “Got it, Mike. Let’s run up to the News and check it out.”
Shayne waited at the door for him to come out, and pulled it shut on the latch, and asked, “Got what?” as they went back to the elevator.
“The thing that’s been nibbling at my so-called memory ever since you sprung this Rogell deal on me this afternoon. Gives a pretty good sidelight on Henrietta. It was about five years ago, Mike, when she made the headlines with a lawsuit against her brother. Demanding an accounting of his estate and claiming a one-half share for herself. The details are hazy in my mind,” he went on as they crossed the lobby. “I forget how it came out. But he made his fortune out west, in mining, I think, and I believe that she claimed she worked in the mines with him and that half his millions were rightfully hers, and she wanted the money legally and in her own name instead of living with him in that big house and having him dole it out to her.”
They reached Rourke’s car and Shayne asked if he wanted to drive.
The reporter shook his head and opened the right-hand door. “Not with these blisters. Not until I have to.”
In the huge file room in the Daily News Tower, Rourke led the way confidently down a long aisle lined with filing cabinets, pulling dangling cords to switch on overhead lights as he went. He slowed and finally stopped in front of a cabinet, pulled out a drawer marked Re-Ro.
He fumbled through cardboard folders, drew a thick one out and opened it on a table under a bright light. “Here’s the last stuff on Rogell. His obit and so on.” He slowly turned clippings over as he spoke, stopped at another batch and looked down with interest at a bridal picture. “And here’s the old boy’s wedding just a few months ago. The April-December wedding that had the sob-sisters gushing all over the society pages.”
Shayne leaned over to study the picture with him. It had been taken on the steps of a local church as the couple left after the ceremony. It was the first picture Shayne remembered seeing of John Rogell. He was tall and lean and leathery-faced like his sister, wearing top hat and cutaway. He looked a sound and vigorous sixty in the picture, not like a doddering old man whose heart might be expected to give way under the importunities of a demanding young bride.
Of course, there was a startling difference between the ages of the couple. In her white bridal dress and clutching her wedding bouquet, Anita was radiantly beautiful, the personification of a virginal young bride on the happiest day of her life.
“Mr. and Mrs. John Rogell as they emerged from the noonday solemnizing of their wedding rites,” Rourke read drily from the text beneath the picture. “Hell, if the old boy had three months of that, I’d guess he died happy.”
He turned the clippings back slowly. “There were scads of feature stories as soon as news of the engagement broke. It was real Cinderella stuff. It can and does happen in Miami. Anita Dale. Small-town girl, from a poor upstate family, coming timidly to seek her fortune in the Magic City of sun, sin and sex with a high school diploma and a six-month secretarial course as her only assets. A filing job at forty bucks a week with the Peabody Brokerage firm… and then the jackpot. Like that.” He snapped bony fingers and grinned wickedly. “Six months later she sits out in that stone mansion heir to a lot of millions of bucks. How’s that for rags-to-riches in one easy installment?”
“Did you say the Peabody Brokerage firm?”
“Sure. Harold Peabody. She was working there when she met Rogell. Peabody is one of Miami’s up-and-coming young financial consultants. Rogell is probably his biggest account, though others have been flocking to him since he got publicity along with one of his secretaries marrying millions. It’s pretty well understood he’ll be executor of Rogell’s estate. But that’s all recent history,” Rourke added as he flipped back through scattered clippings. “Just routine stuff here. Rogell buys another shipping line, invests a million in an Atlanta real estate development. Here’s what I’m looking for.”
He paused at a long front-page story, head-lined, “SPINSTER SUES
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE BROTHER.”
“This is the day they opened the trial,” he muttered. “I covered that first day myself. Let’s see… if I turn back a few clippings we should find the verdict.”
He began doing so, glancing quickly and expertly at a few words or the heading of each story. He stopped after a moment and said, “Here it is,” and read: “JURY RETURNS VERDICT IN MILLION-DOLLAR SUIT FOR DEFENDANT.”
“She lost it hands-down,” he told Shayne. “I thought I remembered it that way, but I wasn’t sure. The jury felt Henrietta was doing all right as she was… sharing the big house with him as his official hostess with charge accounts all over town and a monthly cash allowance a lot bigger than she could possibly spend. All that was brought out in testimony during the trial,” he explained. “She never complained that her brother was niggardly or that she actually wanted for anything. Her position was simply that half the money should legally be hers and she wanted it in her own hands. Maybe she hankered to buy a few shipping lines of her own.”
Shayne said, “Turn back two or three of those clippings, Tim. During the progress of the trial. There was one story I noticed as you slid by looking for the verdict.”
“Which one?” Rourke turned one clipping after another to face up to the light.
Shayne said, “There it is.” It was a two-column inside-page story, headed “HOUSEKEEPER TESTIFIES”, and beneath it there were two pictures of a woman, side by side. The one on the left was a somewhat blurred cut of a rather pretty and slightly plump young woman standing on the front porch of a weathered frame house with a crudely painted sign over her head that said “BLAIR’S BOARDING HOUSE”. The caption read: “Betty Blair in front of her boarding house in Central City, Colorado.” The other picture showed the same woman some thirty years older, still smooth-faced and comely, but some twenty pounds heavier, and was captioned: “Mrs. Blair as she appeared in court today.”
Rourke nodded and said, “I was in court that day. Henrietta’s attorneys called the Rogell housekeeper to testify for the plaintiff, but she was practically a hostile witness and didn’t help the case much. Seems she ran a boarding house in the mining town where Rogell started his fortune, and she did testify somewhat reluctantly that people in the town still told stories about how Henrietta actually shouldered a pick in the old days right beside her brother in their first prospect tunnel. Seems they both boarded at her place in later days, and, after Mr. Blair died, John Rogell went out to Colorado and brought her back here and installed her as his housekeeper. There were a few attempts by the defense attorney to insinuate that she might have been something more than just his housekeeper, but the judge quashed those fast, ruling that he was incriminating his own witness. In the long run, the Blair testimony helped Rogell, because she was emphatic that he never denied Henrietta anything, never questioned how much money she spent or for what. There were three women on the jury,” Rourke ended with a chuckle, “and you could see them drooling and wishing they were in Henrietta’s shoes.”