“I seem to have that effect on Petey,” Shayne said.
“He probably doesn’t like you to call him Petey either, does he?” When Shayne laughed she went on, “The whole thing was over my head. He said you’d crucify him. That was actually the word he used. But I couldn’t change my plans unless he gave me a reason, and that he positively refused to do. He tried to talk me into hiring somebody else, if I insisted on hiring a private detective. The idea being, I suppose, that he wasn’t in danger of being crucified by this other man. Well.” She poured the beaten eggs into a frying pan. “I’ll have to begin by telling you some ancient history.”
“I saw the newspaper clips on it yesterday,” Shayne said, “but I’d better hear it from you.”
She began stirring the eggs with a wooden spoon. “You wouldn’t think I’d still have so much trouble talking about it, after three years. But here goes. My husband George worked in the estates department at the Beach Trust. He worked hard, but except during the tax rush every spring he kept regular hours. And it just so happened that one night he had to meet some kind of filing deadline and he worked late. A day earlier or a day later, and he’d still be alive. For some reason that’s the thing I can’t get out of my mind.”
Shayne sipped his hot, aromatic coffee. “Accidents are like that, Mrs. Heminway. He could have been hit by a taxi on the way home.”
“I know, I know. And I’ve got to stop thinking about it. He heard a noise in another part of the building and went to see what it was. It couldn’t have been much of a noise, because everything else about the robbery was highly professional. All the alarms were blown out. The watchman had been chloroformed. The vault was cut open neatly and efficiently, and when George, who shouldn’t have been in the building at all, suddenly got in the way, the thief shot him, neatly and efficiently.
“I came down to drive George home, and I got there just in time to see somebody walking out of a side entrance with a suitcase. Sam Harris was arrested a few weeks later. He looked like the man I saw. Somebody else saw him as he got into a car, and her identification was more positive than mine. He was convicted. It was terrible, how much I wanted it. And when he was found guilty, I wanted him to be sentenced to death.”
“That’s probably natural,” Shayne said.
“Is it?” she said bitterly. “I’m not sure that it is. I’m only sure of one thing — for a long time, too long, I let it poison my life. It changed everything about me. All I could think of was how much I wanted this man to die for leaving me without a husband. Me. To think that some unfeeling murderer could do such a thing to me! All I knew about this man Harris was what the newspapers printed about him, and I actually wished I could attend his electrocution and watch them clamp the electrodes on his ankles and behind his ear... This is quite a subject for before breakfast.”
She gave a sudden cry and snatched the frying pan off the burner. She said ruefully, “I overdid my reaction then, and I’ve overdone the eggs now. I’ll have to start over.”
“They look fine to me,” Shayne said.
She stirred them doubtfully. “If you’re willing to think of it as an omelet—”
She served the eggs and brought a platter of Canadian bacon and a basket of crescent rolls from the warming oven.
“But I got over it,” she said. “I won’t go into all the stages. I started going to church again, for one thing, and after about a year or so I was able to get to sleep without wishing that some kindly prison official would invite me to throw the switch at Sam Harris’s execution. My father moved in with me, and he helped a lot. I started going out with men, and that helped. I even had one or two mild flirtations. I think I’m more or less normal now. But those execution dates — they keep postponing them and postponing them, and it’s beginning to seem less and less like Sam Harris’s execution and more and more like mine. I don’t suppose that will convince you I’m normal. I can’t sleep without drugs, or did I say that?”
“Eat,” Shayne said gently.
She stared down at her scrambled eggs and picked up her fork. “I think the one thing that kept me sane was that there didn’t seem to be any doubt that Harris was guilty. He was caught with a powerful cutting torch and some of the money. He’d already served a long term in prison for bank robbery, and he was known to carry a gun. He claimed that he hadn’t done it, but he didn’t convince anybody — certainly not me. At the same time, I kept running across stories about cases where eye-witnesses had been positive about an identification, and it turned out later that they had identified the wrong man. And I began to wonder. Could I really be sure I had seen Sam Harris, or did I just want to make certain that somebody was punished? Then Norma Harris came to see me.”
“That’s the wife?”
“Yes. She found a letter that seemed to bear out her husband’s story that he was somewhere else that night. The trouble is that it wasn’t dated, so by itself it wasn’t conclusive. But it was something to start with. Her lawyer’s trying to get a stay of execution with it, but it doesn’t seem to Norma that he’s trying too hard. She took the letter to Painter. He was very hostile and reluctant at first. Then suddenly, for a few days, he seemed to get interested. Then he dropped it again. It seems very strange.
“Norma thinks he’s afraid of probing too deeply for fear of finding out that he was responsible for a miscarriage of justice. He’s a funny man, and I don’t know. Norma asked me to help, and I said I would. And when I went to Painter he acted just as coy with me. Coy’s the wrong word. Strange, certainly. He keeps telling us to leave it to him. And day after day goes by, and we still haven’t the faintest idea what he’s up to, if he’s up to anything. Yesterday he wouldn’t even let Norma in to see him.”
“What’s the letter say?”
“Norma has a copy, and you’d better get it from her.” She gave him a direct look. “Does that mean you’re taking the case?”
“Hell, yes. I’m just as curious as you are about what Petey’s been up to.”
She leaned forward impulsively and pressed his hand. “That’s wonderful. If you’d turned it down, I’d have to go ahead with an idea Norma has. She wants to call a press conference, where we’d stand up in front of a lot of reporters and cameramen and charge Chief-of-Detectives Peter Painter with deliberate sabotage. I’ve been dreading it. I’m not the type for that kind of thing. And Norma. We-el, you’ll meet her. She gets carried away sometimes, and she might do more harm than good. And my father would really hate it. He practically blew the house down around my ears when I told him I was going to Mr. Painter. You probably don’t know — he’s Benjamin Chadwick. Does that name—”
Shayne sipped at his coffee, thinking. “President of the Beach Trust.”
“He retired last year,” she said. “He has a violent aversion to publicity, and it was rather unpleasant in the house for awhile after I put in with Norma Harris. He couldn’t understand that it was something I had to do, because of that horrible year when I was eaten up with thoughts of revenge. He couldn’t see any point in raking everything up all over again. He was afraid I’d go into another tailspin, as bad as the one I’d finally pulled myself out of. I usually take his advice, but this time I couldn’t. Then an awful thing happened. He went to Painter himself, I think to warn him about letting me get too involved. He collapsed on the steps, and he hasn’t been able to speak since. He was totally paralyzed for a few days, and he still can’t move his left side.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, he’s seventy-six. This may sound cruel, but I can’t let him put pressure on me. He lies in bed and stares at me, willing me to do what he wants, but I can’t.”