“After spilling blood all over the bathroom?”
“It could be nosebleed. We still don’t even know it’s her blood. A neighbor kid might have cut his finger and she bandaged it for him,”
“That’s right,” Shayne took a long sip of cognac and chased it down with a swallow of ice water. “We do know she never got to Ames’ house if she started there.” He paused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “They don’t have a second car, do they?”
“No. That is… no, they don’t. I remember Ralph mentioning that recently. It’s one of the reasons he needed the extra money he was earning from Ames.”
“What did he actually do for Ames? I don’t know much about the man except that his gossip column was widely syndicated and he was regarded as Miami’s Walter Winchell.”
“What did Ralph do?” Rourke shrugged. “Sort of legman, I guess. Went around to night spots and gathered items for Ames’ column, or checked on rumors of gossip that are the stock-in-trade of a scavenger like Ames. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a couple of others on his payroll doing the same sort of thing. God knows he earned enough from his column to afford as much help as he needed.”
“How much?” Shayne asked with interest.
“How much did he pay?”
“How much do you suppose his column earned him?”
Timothy Rourke emptied his highball glass while he considered the question. Shayne drank from his glass again, and the waiter reappeared with refills for each. “Hard to say,” Rourke admitted finally. “I never had a syndicated column but I do know something about prices. At a rough guess: Thirty to fifty thousand a year. Maybe more.”
“Then he wasn’t what you’d call hard up?”
“Not exactly. That would be gross, of course, but he didn’t have much overhead. Whatever pittances he handed out to boys like Ralph. And his secretary, of course. He was full-time, I understand.”
“I was thinking,” Shayne said, “about a couple of remarks made by Mark Ames. One was to the effect that a lot of people were going to sleep more soundly tonight after they heard that Ames was dead. Would he be implying that his brother, who he quite evidently detested, was not above a spot of blackmail?”
“Not necessarily blackmail. Wesley Ames was certainly feared and hated by a lot of people. He couldn’t help picking up stray bits of very damaging information about many celebrities during his night club rounds which might even ruin a career if printed in his column. In other words, he was certainly in a good position to do some discreet extorting, but I never heard him charged with that. I think he enjoyed the power it gave him over many important people, and it probably gave him sadistic pleasure to watch them writhe while they waited for his columns to appear and see what he printed about them.”
“So a lot of people will sleep easier tonight after they hear the good news,” muttered Shayne.
“Not much doubt about that. What does this have to do with Dorothy Larson’s disappearance?”
“Damned if I know.” Shayne sipped his cognac morosely. “It’s just that the whole thing is thrown wide open by what we found at the Larson apartment. It may be pure coincidence, of course, and have nothing whatever to do with Ames’ death. But if she doesn’t turn up pretty soon with a logical explanation of where she’s been, we’ll have to assume otherwise and start looking in the cracks for things that aren’t apparent on the surface. If Ralph, for instance, was trying some private blackmail on the side… and Ames got wind of it…? Don’t you see? Maybe it wasn’t just a cut-and-dried case of sexual jealousy after all, and Ralph had some other impelling motive that no one knows about… except maybe his wife. Hell, I don’t know,” he went on disgustedly. “At this point it’s just a matter of pure theorizing. Maybe Dorothy Larson just went home to mama for the night. Does she have a mama in town?”
“I don’t know. I suppose Griggs will check out all the relatives and close friends with Ralph.”
“Yeh. Griggs is a careful and thorough cop.” Shayne emptied his cognac glass and scowled down into it. “There’s something bugging me,” he muttered. “Something about that locked room murder set-up that smells just slightly. But it smells, Tim. I can’t put my finger on it. It was there for me from the very beginning… even when I accepted all the surface indications. With Dorothy Larson inexplicably missing, and that bloody bathroom staring us in the face, I’m getting a stronger and stronger hunch that everything isn’t exactly as it seems.” He shrugged his wide shoulders and angrily tugged at his left ear lobe.
Timothy Rourke sat very erect and peered across the table at him with bright, alert attention. During the years that he had followed Michael Shayne around on his cases he had learned to have a profound respect for the redhead’s hunches. “What is it?” he urged. “What is it that smells, Mike?”
“I wish I knew. There’s something that keeps eating at the back of my mind. Something in Ames’ study that was out of place. Or something should have been there that wasn’t.” He shrugged and looked up at the waiter who was approaching the booth inquiringly, and shook his red head firmly. “No more for me.” He got out his wallet and gave the man a bill, and Timothy Rourke finished his drink and sighed and said reluctantly, “I’d better get into the office myself and see what’s on tap. Are you calling it a night?”
Shayne said, “Lucy will be sitting on the edge of her chair and chewing her fingernails waiting to hear what happened after we dashed off.”
But after they parted outside the bar and Rourke swung around the corner to the newspaper, Shayne sat in the front seat of his car for at least sixty seconds before turning on the ignition.
And then he didn’t drive to his hotel to satisfy his secretary’s curiosity. Instead, he stopped in front of the Miami Police Headquarters and parked in a space that was plainly marked “Reserved For Official Cars Only.” He went in a side entrance and down a hall to the left and climbed one flight of stairs and entered an open door into a small office that held a littered desk with Sergeant Griggs sitting behind it. The sergeant was studying a sheaf of reports and he glanced up with a thoroughly unwelcoming frown at the redhead who pulled up the only other chair in the office and sat down. He grunted sourly, “I thought you were bedded down for the night. That barefoot gal in the apartment across from Larson’s looked drunk enough not to mind who she slept with.”
Shayne shook his head and said cheerfully, “You’re a liar, Sarge. You know damned well you went into her apartment to try and question her about the Larsons, and you found her quietly passed out in her own bed all by her own sweet self. What did your boys turn up after I left?”
“Nothing,” growled Griggs wearily. “Not one damned thing that’s any good to us. No fingerprints of any significance. Nothing. Best we can make out of it… she started frenziedly packing a suitcase as though she were in a hell of a hurry and got interrupted or changed her mind for some reason. No one in the building saw her leave. No one, goddamn it, saw Ralph Larson come back this evening to get his gun and go out to kill Wesley Ames. Nobody saw nothing,” he ended disgustedly.
“What about relatives or close friends she might have gone to?”
“Larson says they haven’t got either one in town. The guy’s either a hell of an actor or he’s just about off his nut with worry about her. He appears to be a hundred times more concerned about her than he is about a little thing like murder,” Griggs went on bitterly. “It just hasn’t got through to him that he faces the chair for killing Ames. The young fool is proud of it.”
“You got the M.E.’s report on Ames?” Shayne asked abruptly.
“Yeh. It’s here some place along with the typed statements from the witnesses.” Griggs shuffled listlessly through the papers in front of him. “There’s nothing in it. What the hell do you expect? Wesley Ames is dead. Shot through the heart with a steel-jacketed thirty-eight that came out through his back and embedded in the chair. Ballistics says it was fired from the gun Larson handed you when you busted in. Death was instantaneous and occurred between half an hour and an hour before the body was examined. No unusual fingerprints in the room. Nothing. What the hell should there be? Everything was tied up in an absolutely perfect neat knot with premeditation and every other damned thing tied tight around Ralph Larson’s neck and not a single unanswered question about the case until his damned wife turns up missing with blood all over the place.”