She shrugged and said, “I doubt whether this redheaded man gives a damn one way or the other how I feel. And if he does, he can lump it. Can’t you, Mister?”
Shayne nodded impassively. “I certainly can, Mrs. Ames. It’s a pleasure to meet a forthright female.”
“Hear that, Mark? He’s not a sniveling hypocrite. He must have known my dear departed husband because to know him was to hate him. Did you hate him, Mr. Shayne?”
“I didn’t know him that well.” Shayne turned away from the murdered man’s brother and his widow to the secretary. “I’d like a word with you, Conroy.”
Victor Conroy shrugged and said, “Okay by me. We’ve already told the police all we know.”
“Shall we go in your office?” Without waiting for Conroy’s acquiescence, Shayne led the way into the room that Griggs had used earlier. He waited by the double doors until Conroy was inside, then closed them saying, “I’ve got a hunch those two in the living room would just as leave be alone with their grief.”
Conroy allowed himself to smile reluctantly at this. “My former boss had a way about him,” he admitted wryly. “Helena shouldn’t get tanked up like this… not while Mark’s around. Not that it matters much I guess,” he went on sourly. “Ralph Larson did them both a favor by knocking Ames off the way he did. You can’t put a woman in jail for admitting she’s glad her husband has been murdered.”
“How about you?” demanded Shayne. “Are you joining in the general rejoicing?”
Conroy shrugged his shoulders and met the detective’s gaze squarely. “I’ve lost a job. Wesley Ames was a son-of-a-bitch to work for, but he paid well.”
“What will become of the column now?”
“It’ll automatically be canceled. He was a few weeks ahead and the papers will run those, I suppose. But the column was Wesley Ames. No one can step into his shoes.”
“What I’m wondering,” said Shayne softly, “is who will inherit his files? The bits of nasty gossip he’s collected but has never printed about a lot of important people.”
Conroy seemed not to understand what Shayne was driving at. “I suppose it’s all part of his estate,” he said indifferently. “His widow inherits so far as I know.”
“Will she be likely to keep you on the job for a time? To sort things out and catalog them?”
“I doubt it.” Victor Conroy scowled darkly. “More likely she’ll just consign everything to the incinerator without even looking at the files. She hated his column,” he explained. “She hated the sort of man it had turned him into. She liked the money it brought him, but that’s all she did like about it.”
Shayne lit a cigarette and looked inquiringly about the secretary’s office, letting his gaze come to rest on the filing cabinets along the wall. “Did he keep all his material in here? Did you file it all?”
“All that he trusted out of his own sight. He had personal stuff in his desk upstairs that he considered too explosive for even my eyes. He went to a lot of trouble to explain that to me one day,” Conroy went on angrily. “He was guarding me against temptation, he told me. There was stuff that couldn’t be printed because it would ruin people’s lives if it were, and he was afraid I might use it for blackmail if I got my hands on it.” Conroy shrugged. “To hell with it. He’s dead now and I won’t say I’m sorry.”
“So far,” said Shayne flatly, “I haven’t found anyone who is. Did he have a telephone in his study?”
“No. It was one of his idiosyncrasies. That was the Master’s Sanctum Sanctorum. When he closed that outer door and hung the Do Not Disturb sign out he was alone with his conscience. Which means he was pretty damned well alone,” Conroy interpolated with a contemptuous smile. “Anyhow, he wouldn’t stand for any interruption except for special visitors who had definite appointments and whom I was supposed to send around to the outside stairway where he would unbolt the door to let them in and bolt it when they left.”
“Like Ralph Larson this evening?”
“Yes. Ralph had a seven-fifteen appointment and he arrived promptly.”
“Did you take any telephone calls for Ames this evening?”
Conroy hesitated, thinking back. “No,” he finally said decisively.
“Did Ames have any other appointments except the one with Larson?”
Conroy said, “No,” without hesitation.
Shayne thought a moment and said, “That’s about it, I guess. I’m going up to check one thing in the study, and then I guess you people will be left alone.”
He turned to open the door into the living room and Conroy told him, “There’s a policeman on guard outside the study with orders not to admit anyone. God knows why. The murder is all solved, isn’t it? They’ve got their killer.”
“It’s just a police regulation,” Shayne told him vaguely. “According to the rule-book, you seal off the scene of death for a certain period to make sure no clues are disturbed.”
He went out and crossed the living room toward the stairway, noting out of the corner of his eye that Mark Ames and Helena were seated very close together on the sofa and the widow appeared to be getting all the comforting she needed.
At the top of the stairs he saw Patrolman Powers comfortably settled in a chair opposite the sagging door into the study, with a small table beside him that held a coffee cup and saucer and an ashtray. The young patrolman had his nose buried in a paperback, but he looked up alertly when Shayne reached the top of the stairs, and put down his book and got up slowly, saying uncertainly, “Hello, Mr. Shayne. You’re back, huh?”
Shayne said, “Griggs was tied up at headquarters and he asked me to stop by and check one point for him in the study.” He casually started past Powers inside the room, but the uniformed youngster said earnestly, “Wait a minute. No one is supposed to enter that room. Those are my orders.”
Shayne paused in front of the door and turned with a grin. “Griggs didn’t tell you to keep me out, did he?”
“Well, no. Not specifically you, no, sir. But on the other hand…”
Shayne sighed. “I know how it is. An order is an order. You haven’t been on the Force very long have you, Powers?”
“No, sir. Only three months since I finished probation. But I…”
Shayne nodded indulgently. “You’d better run down and call Griggs on the phone and check. He’s not going to like it, but… look,” he said brightly. “Instead of bothering the sergeant and getting him sore at you, why don’t you call the chief? Will Gentry. Get him to vouch for me. If he isn’t still in his office I’ll give you his private telephone number at home. Tell him Mike Shayne wants an official okay to go into the murder room and look for a piece of evidence that Sergeant Griggs asked me to look for.”
“Well, hell,” said Powers. “I wouldn’t want to bother Chief Gentry, I guess.” He knew Shayne’s reputation, of course, and that he was a close personal friend of the police chief, and he had seen Griggs apparently take the redhead into his confidence that evening, and he decided, “You go ahead. Just don’t take anything out without showing me, huh?”
Shayne said, “Certainly not,” as though that was positively the last thing in the world he would think of doing, and he pushed the unlatched door inward on its sagging hinges and stepped inside and closed it firmly behind him against Power’s curious eyes.
The study looked exactly as it had before except the dead body of Wesley Ames had been removed. Shayne went to the desk swiftly and began opening the drawers and examining them expertly. There was printed stationery in one, envelopes and stamps; and two others held thin Manila folders, each marked with a name and carefully arranged in alphabetical order.
Shayne looked for Murchinson at once without finding the name. He checked back carefully to see he had made no mistake, and then opened a couple of the folders at random and glanced at the material they held. There were penciled jottings and notations, dates and names which were meaningless to Shayne, but there were three photographic negatives in one of them which Shayne held up to the light and then dropped back into the folder. He replaced them with no doubt in his mind that this was the “explosive” stuff which Conroy had mentioned, raw material for blackmail.