“What about the unwritten law?” demanded Rourke. “A man has a right to defend his home… his wife. This is Florida, after all. Temporary insanity, damn it.”
“If he’d done it on the spur of the moment, sure. If he’d just walked in there and shot Ames tonight as we first thought, having worked himself into a state of homicidal jealousy, a jury would probably take a lenient view. If he’d had a gun in his pocket and blasted Ames on his first trip at seven o’clock… okay. But he left that house determined to get a gun and kill Ames according to his own statement. Half an hour is a long time for temporary insanity to prevail. No, Tim. Any way you look at it your young friend is in a very bad spot. You and I are both to blame for not taking his threat more seriously and stepping in faster.”
“Yeh,” muttered Rourke. “I’d rather cut off my right arm than break the news to Dorothy. No matter how it looks, I tell you she was really in love with Ralph. Think what she must have gone through this last hour. Ralph dashing out with a gun. She not hearing a word… not knowing what’s happened.”
“There may have been a flash on TV,” Shayne suggested. “One of the boys at headquarters may have picked it up.” He slid past the traffic light at 79th and eased over into the outer lane to prepare for the turn onto 61st.
“In that case we’ll find her hysterical.”
“Or under sedation,” Shayne suggested hopefully. There were fewer cars parked along the quiet street at this hour than when the detective had stopped by earlier, and he had no difficulty finding a parking place directly in front of the apartment building. He got out with Rourke and they went up the walk together and through the empty entrance hall to the stairway. The doors of both apartments at the top of the stairs were closed and there was silence in the upper hall. Shayne turned to 3-B on the right and pressed the button as he had done on his first visit, but this time he didn’t bother to get a pleasant smile ready to greet the occupant when she opened the door.
As before, there was no response to his ring. Shayne hesitated and glanced aside at Rourke with ragged red eyebrows raised questioningly, and pressed the bell again. Involuntarily he caught himself glancing over his shoulder at 4-B, half-expecting that door to open and reveal May Graham, still bare-footed and still welcoming.
But both doors remained shut and only silence answered his second ring. He hunched down and studied the keyhole and jingled a ring of keys in his pocket, and absently tried the knob as he straightened up.
It turned and the door to the Larson apartment swung open. There were lights inside but only silence greeted the opening of the door. Shayne stepped over the threshold, calling, “Mrs. Larson?” and he hesitated only a moment at the entrance to the empty living room before striding in.
The interior arrangement of the apartment was a replica of the one across the hall, with a closed door directly in front of him which he knew, opened into a bedroom, and an open door on the right through which he could see a small, neat kitchen.
He heard Rourke enter behind him, and the reporter muttered uneasily, “What the hell do you suppose…?”
Shayne crossed the sitting room in four long, fast strides and jerked open the bedroom door. The overhead light was on in this room also and neatly made twin beds stood side by side, but there were articles of feminine clothing tossed in disarray on one of the beds, a half-packed suitcase stood open near the head of it, and bureau drawers were pulled open haphazardly with contents rumpled and dangling over the edges of the drawers.
Shayne took in the scene with one swift glance, then strode to the open door of a bathroom on the right and switched on the light. Rourke saw him straighten and his shoulders stiffen as he looked inside the bathroom.
Fearful of what he might see inside the bathroom, the reporter edged up behind the rangy detective and peered past his shoulder.
There was no body in the bathroom, as he had instinctively feared. But there was blood on the washbasin and on the floor. And a damp handtowel was wadded up on the floor, liberally smeared with blood.
Shayne turned slowly, shaking his head and looking at Rourke with a deep frown of puzzlement. “I don’t get it, Tim. What the hell do you suppose happened here? When she phoned me… it was after Ralph had run out with his gun… so she said.” He paused, thinking deeply. “And Ralph verified that, didn’t he? He said Dorothy was here when he came home, and she tried to stop him. Isn’t that the way it was?”
“That’s what he said. That she tried to tell him there was nothing between Wesley Ames and her. But he also claimed he had pulled sort of a blank and doesn’t remember much until he was suddenly at the Ames’ house. Do you suppose they actually had a fight and he slugged Dorothy, and…?”
“And did away with her somehow?” Shayne shrugged and turned back into the bedroom, tugging at his ear lobe in deep perplexity.
“From the look of things here she had started to pack a bag. Was that before or after Ralph came to get his gun?”
“Pretty messy packing,” suggested Rourke. “Like she was in one hell of a hurry to get out of here.”
“And that suggests it was after Ralph had come and gone. Or, maybe not. After I talked with her maybe she thought it over and decided to pack up and get out before he came home from the office. Then, if he came back from his interview with Ames and caught her packing a bag, he might have suspected the worst and gone berserk. But that won’t work either,” he interjected. “There’s that telephone call to me after Ralph had got his gun and gone back. She must have started packing after she called me. If Ralph then turned around and came back unexpectedly…”
“I don’t think there was time for all that,” objected Rourke. “It must be a fair fifteen-minute drive from here to Ames’ house. Ralph says he first got there about seven-fifteen, had the argument with Ames, drove back to get his gun… and then got back there to kill him about eight o’clock. That doesn’t leave much leeway for him to have spent here.”
“Not if that timetable checks out,” agreed Shayne. “Right at this moment we have only Ralph’s word for any of it. We don’t know he had only half an hour to get here and back to Ames’.”
“But we do know,” argued Rourke, “that not very damned much time elapsed between her phone call and Ralph’s arrival there. You didn’t waste any time getting there, and he made it just about a minute ahead of us. Even if he drove as fast as you did… which I doubt… there wouldn’t have been more than a few minutes for him to come back and do anything here.”
“That’s true. Let’s get out of here and wait for Griggs without touching anything.” Shayne led the way out of the bedroom. “Unless it was some other woman who phoned me pretending to be Dorothy Larson,” he went on with a scowl. “I can’t say I actually recognized her voice after having heard it only once before.”
“What other woman?” demanded Rourke.
“How the hell do I know what other women were involved with the Larsons? There’s blood in the bathroom and she’s missing, damn it. Just at the time when her husband was committing murder on her behalf. It all adds up to a whole lot of question marks. That’ll be Griggs now,” he added moodily at the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairway. “He’s going to love this… just when he had his murder tied up in a neat bundle and was ready to go home and get some sleep.”
Sergeant Griggs definitely did not care for what he found in the Larson apartment. He looked at what there was to see, and he listened to what the two men told him, and he wearily went down to his car to have his driver radio in to headquarters for the technical crew to be sent back out to go over the place, and he roughly brought Ralph Larson back upstairs with him without telling him why his trip to jail was being interrupted by a visit to his home, and he shoved the young man inside the living room and he stood in the doorway and watched him and demanded, “Look all around and tell us if this is the way this place was when you ran out with your gun to kill Ames?”