“I certainly did not,” sniffed Mrs. Blair. “For my money, I don’t believe she ever did it. I think it was just something that came to her when the poor little thing got sick like she did. Accusing me of serving her with poisoned food!”
“Who suggested that you dispose of the remaining chicken and wash out the dishes before the detectives got here?”
“Nobody. I was that upset and mad when she started screaming her chicken was poisoned that I snatched up the plate and dish and carried them out and dumped them.” She glared at him angrily. “Make something out of that if you want to. Like those other detectives tried to. But suppose you’d been cooking for other folks for thirty years and suddenly got accused of putting poison in a dish. Wouldn’t you be mad and upset?”
“I probably would,” Shayne soothed her. “If someone around this house wanted strychnine, Mrs. Blair, where would he go for it?”
“The same place Marvin went last night, I guess. Right out in the garage where gardener kept it for moles.”
“And I suppose everyone here knew about that, too,” sighed Shayne.
“Except, maybe, Mr. Peabody. And I wouldn’t have been sure Marvin knew either because he was generally so soaked in alcohol he didn’t know much that was going on right around him.”
Mrs. Blair glanced up at the electric clock on the wall behind him and gasped, “Mercy me! I only got twenty minutes to get ready for the funeral.”
Shayne left the kitchen and was striding down the wide hallway toward the front door when he heard his name spoken faintly and hesitantly from behind him. He turned and saw Anita posed on the winding stairway, about half-way down. A black-gloved hand rested lightly on the railing, and she wore a simple black suit unrelieved by any ornaments or jewelry whatsoever. She had very little make-up on, and beneath a black, velvet beret her golden-silk hair was tucked in carefully, giving her a wanly appealing little-girl look.
Shayne stood in the hallway and watched her come down the rest of the stairs. She glided sedately from one step to the next, as befitted a grieving widow on the way to her husband’s funeral-and a woman whose brother had just committed suicide, Shayne reminded himself cynically, because he believed her to be unchaste.
Anita came close to him, her head tilted slightly, lips parted wistfully. “I wanted to see you again, Michael. I couldn’t let you go away thinking…” She paused and demurely lowered her lashes. A faint breath of her perfume came into his nostrils and her parted lips were no more than a foot from his.
“… the same awful things about me that Marvin thought,” she hurried on breathlessly. “You don’t, do you?”
He said, “Does it matter what I think, Anita? I assure you I wouldn’t go off and swallow strychnine if I did.”
A little stricken cry issued from her lips, and she swayed toward him, keeping her eyes closed.
“It does matter. Terribly. I couldn’t stand to think that after… after what happened between us last night I could have deliberately gone out to Charles and… and…”
Shayne laughed.
She jerked erect and her eyelids flew open and he saw naked hate in the depths of her glorious eyes.
“How can you stand there and sneer at me?”
Shayne said brutally, “It’s easy, Anita. Simplest thing in the world. All I have to do is think about how your husband died… and then a little dog… and Marvin.”
He turned on his heel and went to the front door without looking back.
16
Getting off the elevator, Michael Shayne strode across the hall and mechanically reached for the knob of the door lettered:
MICHAEL SHAYNE
Investigations
The knob turned but the door refused to open. He cursed himself methodically and in a low voice because he had forgotten momentarily that Lucy Hamilton would not be inside the office waiting for him, and he unlocked the door and flung it open with savage force.
The small anteroom was empty and silent. Lucy’s chair in front of the typewriter desk beyond the low railing was empty, and the silence was oppressive.
There were deep trenches in Shayne’s cheeks and his jaws were set together tightly as he turned away after one fleeting glance at Lucy’s desk and walked through the door into his private office. He circled the big desk to a filing cabinet against the wall, pulled out a drawer on its ball-bearings and lifted a half-full bottle of cognac from it. He thumped the bottle down on the desk in front of his swivel chair, turned to a water cabinet and got down two paper cups which he fitted one inside the other. He filled the inner cup to the brim with amber liquid from the bottle and settled his rangy figure into the swivel chair. With a lighted cigarette dangling between the first two fingers of his left hand, he took a long drink of brandy and closed his eyes.
Distorted images danced before his eyes as he fought to concentrate on the problem at hand. Lucy Hamilton seated at her desk in the outer room. Henrietta Rogell in her mannish bathrobe last night pouring a heavy slug of whiskey into her glass. Lucy seated across from him at a white-clothed table, her brown eyes dancing with life and gaiety as she lifted a champagne glass to her lips. Anita Rogell standing against him last night and her warmly-timbred voice telling him wantonly, “I want you, Michael Shayne”. Lucy Hamilton seated sedately at one end of the sofa in her own apartment with bottles and glasses on the low coffee table in front of her, shaking the brown curls back from her animated face while she leaned forward to pour him a final goodnight drink before shooing him out so she could go to bed. The stiffened body of a tiny Pekinese that appeared to be grinning at him. Lucy Hamilton…
Shayne jerked his eyes open angrily and glared across the silent office. His right hand instinctively strayed out to grasp the nested paper cups, and he had them halfway to his mouth when he grated, “Goddamn it to hell!” and set them down again without drinking.
Thus far he had done nothing about Lucy. Nothing at all. He was relying on the kidnapper to keep her alive as a hostage until the remains of John Rogell were consumed by fire and his murderer was positive that all evidence of murder had been consumed with the body.
After that-what?
Michael Shayne didn’t know.
He was no closer to a solution now than he had been when Henrietta first came to him more than twenty-four hours ago.
Marvin Dale? There was his suicide and the ambiguous note he had left behind. But if Marvin Dale had put the digitalis in Rogell’s milk-what about Lucy? Was it conceivable that Dale had snatched her and hidden her away, and then swallowed strychnine without mentioning a word about her in his farewell note?
No! Shayne told himself savagely. It wasn’t conceivable. Yet only Rogell’s killer would have a motive for snatching Lucy.
So Dale wasn’t the murderer.
Yet the man had committed suicide.
Or, had he?
Michael Shayne sat at his desk tensely, his eyes narrowed and burning across the room while he pondered every word and phrase of the suicide note which he had memorized. Somewhere, somehow, there was a clue in those scribbled words that eluded him. The answer was there. Some tiny portion of his subconscious mind had glimpsed that fact when he first read the words, but it refused to come through to him.
He growled another oath deep in his throat and forced himself to relax. To cease concentrating. To stop trying to force it out of his subconscious. If he could divert his thoughts into other channels-blank his mind away from the problem entirely-
He stretched out his arm and lifted the telephone and dialled Chief Will Gentry’s private number at police headquarters.
When Gentry answered, he asked briskly, “Any long distance calls for me, Will? From Colorado particularly?”
“Your man called here a little before twelve. He got hold of nothing positive in Central City except ancient gossip and strong suspicions among the townfolk that John Rogell and Betty Blair did have an affair in the old days. It was revived when he hired her to come to Miami as his housekeeper, and the town is buzzing again now that he’s left her that hunk of cash in his will. One other small thing, Mike. A lot of oldtimers agree that Henrietta was the aggressive, strong one in the early days, and that it was her vigor and drive that laid the groundwork for the Rogell fortune.”