She looked at him, frowning slightly, her lips parted. “You didn’t know...? No wonder you were so convincing about not having it. You must have thought I was crazy.”
“I never thought that!” he told her drily. “The tip off came this evening, when I told the Malcolms to go home, and Seton, very much the butler, picked up Malcolm’s hat and handed it to him. You see, he handed me my hat this morning, when I first went to Ferrell’s cottage. He must have been scared the cops would find it on him and nail him as the Duke’s killer, so he took advantage of the opportunity to unload it on me. He planned to contact me later and make some sort of a deal.”
Shayne paused, but green eyes begged him silently to continue. He said, “When I got back from my visit to Malcolm, I hung my hat on the hanger in the outer office, came in here and found you. There was no opportunity to reclaim my hat when you ushered Lucy and me out to — tea.”
“I’m sorry about that,” she said but there was no apology in her manner.
Shayne said, “You aren’t the type to feel sorry for anything you do. You’re... but to hell with it! Anyway, when I got back here, Seton was waiting for me in the corridor. He’d been given a going over by the police, and, when he saw me come up without a hat, it was too much for him. He keeled over.”
Shayne paused, then added, “You know the rest. I made a crack to Seton, once I caught on, about his having other hats to take care of to-night, and he jumped — not much, just enough to show me I was right.”
“One thing I like about you, Mike,” said A. E., stirring lazily in the big chair, “is your assurance. You’re going to look pretty silly if that paper isn’t in the hat. Suppose my boys and I worked it out the same way. Suppose...”
“There’s one way to settle it,” said Shayne.
He strode into the outer office, took his hat from the rack, returned to the other room and opened up the band. It was there — in the form of a handwritten letter to Henry Waldemar from Donald Malcolm, written on thin paper and folded lengthwise, to slip under the hatband without notice.
Shayne read it, then looked down at A. E., who regarded him impassively, with the faintest of smiles. Then, deliberately, he turned his back on her, went to the window, lit a match, fired the letter and held it outside until it was consumed to fluttering ash in the night. When he turned around, he say that A. E. had risen and was standing over his steel waste container, performing a function similar to that he had just completed.
“What are you burning?” he asked suspiciously.
“Just a piece of paper,” she said, quite seriously. “A cheque for fifty thousand dollars.”
Shayne looked at A. E., then at the remains of the cheque, then at the window. “Move over,” he told her, “so I can get at the desk drawers. I think this calls for a drink.”
To Anita — With Murder
by Vic Rodell
Kingston was dead. It was up to Private Eye Cory Andrews, his best friend, to find his killer and clear his name, for the wife he left behind him.
I
The coffee tasted bitter, and the grey rain drilling down outside the drugstore window looked just the way I felt. The big black headlines on the morning papers, spread out on the table before me, didn’t help my mood, either.
I looked up at the pretty, dark-haired girl who sat across from me in the booth. I said, “It smells — the whole thing smells — phoney. But why, Muriel? Why?”
Her slim fingers tightened on the coffee mug, as though she wanted desperately to hang on to something real and solid. Something that would drag her back from the nightmare she had just been through.
“I wish to goodness I knew, Cory. Anything, no matter how bad it was, would be better than... than this.” She spread her hands.
The accounts in the papers were very brief, since the story broke just before press-time. Ralph Kingston was dead. Not a noble death — not even an honourable death, like being struck down by a car, or killed in the line of duty. He had been shot down, ignominiously, in a gambler’s apartment during an attempted hold-up.
Muriel Kingston, the dead man’s widow, had walked into my office barely an hour before. I had known her three years, which was seven years short of the time I had known Ralph. She had given me the facts, the words tumbling out in a voice that was choked with hysteria.
“Ralph left home about eight o’clock last night, Cory. He acted perfectly normal. I knew he was working on a case, so I didn’t think anything about it — even when he didn’t tell me where he was going. That was the last I saw of him. The police called me about four this morning, and told me he was dead!”
“Do you know whether Ralph knew Anthony Lorio?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cory. I never heard him mention him. I don’t know much about Lorio, except that he owns the Peacock Club. But it isn’t true...” She leaned forward and her hands clutched the arms of her chair. “Cory, you knew Ralph a long time. That’s why I’ve come here. You know he wasn’t a common thief!”
“Did the police give you many details, Muriel?”
“It happened at Lorio’s place. They said he was in an apartment over the club. Lorio says he left the club about two forty-five and went up to the apartment. He says he always takes the cash receipts from the club and puts them in a safe in the apartment.” Her tongue flicked over her lips. “Anyway, he says, when he got upstairs, two men were waiting inside the front hall.
“It was dark — they had unscrewed the light bulbs in the room, so, when he flicked the switch, nothing happened. One of the men jumped him and hit him with a blackjack, so Lorio pulled a gun and shot three times. One of the men got away down the back stairway, but, when he got the lights on, Lorio discovered he had hit one of them. The man was already dead — and it was Ralph!”
The note of hysteria had crept back into her voice, and suddenly she sprang from her chair.
“Cory, that just can’t be true! It’s some sort of a frame, or Ralph was dragged into something he didn’t know about. You knew him well — would you believe it?”
That’s when I’d brought her downstairs for coffee.
I couldn’t believe it about Ralph, either. Sure, I knew him well. I knew he was a full-grown 33-year-old man — and that he was a tough cop. He knew the facts of life, he knew how to take care of himself. I had always judged him to be honest and incorruptible, and I didn’t think I had judged him wrong on that point.
On the other hand, I hadn’t seen much of him in the past year, since I was booted off the police force. I had stepped on the Chief’s fingers in a case I was working on, when I knew an innocent man was being made the goat in an underworld gang killing, but couldn’t prove it.
I hadn’t blamed the Chief. After all, second-grade detectives don’t go around shooting off their mouths against the Chief. Besides, he had had his axes to grind. So I had been forced to continue waging my one-man war against crime from other quarters, and opened my own private agency.
My thoughts went back to Ralph Kingston. Perhaps the very fact that he was an incorruptible cop had led to his downfall. Lorio might have had very good reason for wanting to get rid of him. I agreed with Muriel that it was most unlikely Ralph had turned to grand larceny on the side. It just didn’t fit what I knew about the guy.
“How far have the police gone in their investigation?” I asked. “Do they have any actual proof, other than Lorio’s statement, that Ralph was trying to rob him?”