“Saw your picture in the papers often enough. I tried to phone you last night after I found Carrol dead. Somebody answered your phone but he didn’t sound like you.”
“Start back at the beginning,” Shayne ordered. “The whole Carrol deal. So that we won’t be at cross-purposes, I should explain that I never even heard of Carrol until after he was dead.”
“Hold on,” Ludlow protested. “When you called me yesterday—”
“I didn’t call you,” Shayne cut in sharply. “But I gather that somebody did — someone who claimed to be me.”
“Sure. Said it was Mike Shayne calling, and he had a job for last night.” He paused, squinted at the redhead, asked, “Is this straight? It wasn’t you?”
“No. That’s why I want to know all about it. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
“There isn’t much,” he mumbled. “I thought ’twas you, naturally. I didn’t ask any questions. He said there was fifty bucks in it for one picture — a bedroom picture in the dark — so I figured a divorce setup. Number two-sixteen at that hotel, he said, at exactly two-twenty in the morning. The door to the sitting-room was to be standing open, and I was to walk in and go straight back to the bedroom, as quiet as possible, and get my one shot and beat it.”
“Wait a minute,” Shayne interjected. “Are you positive of the apartment number? Two-sixteen? Could it have been one-sixteen and you made a mistake?”
“Not a chance. I can’t afford to make mistakes in my business. I wrote down the number and repeated it back to you — him. I got there early and cased the joint. I found a side entrance and stairway where I could get up and down without anybody seeing me from the lobby. Then I went and had a drink and came back at two-fifteen and went up. It was exactly two-twenty when I went in.”
“You didn’t meet anybody going up or down the stairs?”
“Not a soul.”
“And the door of two-sixteen was open?”
“That’s right. Standing ajar like I was told it would be. I had my camera ready and went in. Couldn’t hear a sound from the bedroom, but that wasn’t any of my business. I figured maybe they was busy — you know. So I went to the doorway and set off my flash. My God! I was scared stiff when I saw him in the flashlight. Alone, and dead on the bed with blood all over.
“I beat it fast,” he continued after a brief pause during which he covered his face with both hands and pressed his eyes with his finger tips. “All I could think about was staying in the clear by phoning the police. Then, if they did find out, they couldn’t say I covered up. Later, I got to thinking, and tried to call you at a number I got from Information. Somebody answered and said it was you but the voice didn’t sound right. I thought it was the cops and hung up.” He paused again and regarded Shayne with puzzled eyes. “Say, it was you that time. It was your voice.”
“That’s right. You mean my voice sounded different from the one who first called you. How was it different?”
“I dunno,” he said, his bloodshot eyes reflective. “Sort of heavier, yours was. Not so much rasp in it. Anyhow, I got scared and hung up and thought maybe I’d better hide out. So I checked in here. If it wasn’t you that called me yesterday, who was it?”
“That,” said Shayne with a frown, “is one of half a dozen sixty-four-dollar questions. Exactly what did the man say?”
“Just what I told you. That it was Mike Shayne calling and he had this job for last night.”
“How were you supposed to contact him?”
“I wasn’t. He didn’t give me any number or any way to contact him. I asked him about it, and he said I wasn’t, on any account, to try and call him or anything. That his part in it was strictly on the Q.T.”
“Where were you to deliver your picture?”
“To a lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware. I’ve got the name and address written down.”
“Bates?”
“That’s it. Bates. He said the lawyer would pay me for the job. Most jobs like that I’d want cash before doing it, but knowing Mike Shayne’s reputation I wasn’t worried. You know who killed Carrol?”
“I don’t know one goddamned thing about it,” Shayne growled. He stood up and looked at his watch. It was noon. “Here’s what you’d better do,” he continued after a moment’s thought. “Relax for a while and get rid of that hang-over. Then go straight to police headquarters with your camera and the picture you got last night. See Will Gentry, the chief, and tell him exactly what you told me. Leave out the part about phoning me last night and about this talk we’ve had. Just tell him you got frightened and holed up with a quart of whisky and passed out. As soon as you woke up sober, you realized it was best to go to the police and get it off your chest. He’ll ask you if you can recognize my voice over the phone and stuff like that, and if he makes a test I hope you’ll tell him the other voice was different. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Ludlow weakly. “Say, how did you find me here?”
“Don’t blame your blonde at the studio,” Shayne told him pleasantly. “She did her best to cover up for you. I outsmarted her, that’s all.”
Ludlow sighed and lay back on the pillow, and Shayne went out, leaving him staring up at the grimy ceiling.
Chapter twelve
Chief Will Gentry was seated alone in a rear booth of a small restaurant a block from police headquarters when Shayne entered a short time later. He looked up from a cup of jellied beef broth and frowned as the redhead slid into the seat opposite him.
“Doc Meeker tells me you dodged out on having that head wound examined, Mike,” Gentry rumbled.
Shayne picked up the menu. “I had a hot lead that had to be followed up fast,” he answered. “I did leave my car in the lot for you.”
“What was the lead?” Gentry demanded.
“Margrave. Ralph Carrol’s business partner.”
“Oh? Trying to sick you onto the Vulcan angle, eh?” he asked with distaste and disinterest.
“Yeh,” he muttered, running his eye over the menu. He beckoned the waiter, ordered lamb stew and coffee, then continued to the chief, “Did you talk to Margrave?”
“He called me early this morning and talked a blue streak about soulless corporations who keep an army of gunmen on the payroll to wipe out small competitors. I sent Lieutenant Hanson over to see him, but it sounds like hogwash to me. You go for it?”
“He made out a fair case,” said Shayne reflectively. “I checked around afterward and got a slightly different slant.” Without mentioning Ann Margrave’s name or her statements about the personal relationships between herself, her father, and Nora Carrol, he outlined the possibility that Carrol might have been planning to drop his defense of the lawsuit and thus leave his partner out of the picture.
“If this were true and Margrave knew it,” he pointed out, “it gives him a much stronger motive for murder than Vulcan. Actually, Carrol’s death will have produced exactly the opposite result from the one Margrave tried to hand us. The suit will probably drag along for months or years, while he continues to manufacture his plastic. I’d check Margrave’s alibi carefully if I were you.”
The waiter brought a plate of cold cuts and a bottle of beer and set them before Gentry. “We’ll check, all right,” he told Shayne. “What still bothers me is the crazy hookup with you last night. The woman being given the key to your room by mistake or design, and Bates’s insistence that you were working for him. Tied with your flat denial, and the removal of Bates’s correspondence with you from his files; what in hell does it add up to, Mike?”
“I’m beginning to swing around to the belief that somehow or other Mrs. Carrol and Bates are telling the truth and that they believed they were dealing with me.”