But there was nothing with Alex Murchinson’s name on it. Shayne hastily went through all the other drawers in the desk without finding anything interesting, and he straightened up to look around the room for some more secreted hiding place, a wall safe or some such, when the door suddenly swung inward without warning and Sergeant Griggs plowed over the threshold and confronted him angrily.
“All right, Shamus,” he growled. “If you’ve found whatever it is I sent you up here looking for, you can hand it over to me.”
12
Michael Shayne hesitated a moment, seeking to gauge the sergeant’s temper and to decide how to handle the situation.
He said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find it, Sarge.”
“What couldn’t you find?”
It came to Shayne then, in a sudden flash of intuition. The thing that had bothered him about the locked death room to make the picture complete.
“His paper-knife,” he told Griggs. “Whatever it was that he used for slitting open his envelopes so neatly.” He gestured toward the stack of empty envelopes between the two mail baskets on the desk, each one of which had been carefully slit open the long way.
“Do you remember what Ralph Larson said about his earlier visit to Ames? He said something like: ‘… he sat there in his chair slitting open his goddamned letters and he laughed at me.’ What was he slitting them open with? I can’t find any letter-opener here, and I’ve looked in all the drawers. I got to thinking about it and it bothered me so I came out to check my recollection.”
There was a curious baffled look of mingled exasperation and pleasure on Griggs’ face as he listened to Shayne’s bland explanation.
He said, “You’re sure about that, huh? No paper-knife.”
“Not unless he had a special hiding place for it that I haven’t found.”
Griggs nodded and turned to call through the open door behind him, “Powers. Get that secretary up here.”
Powers said, “Yes, sir,” and they heard him going toward the head of the stairs.
“It’s a funny thing you thought about that,” Griggs said heavily. “What would a missing paper-knife have to do with Larson shooting the guy?”
Shayne replied honestly, “I haven’t figured that out either. That’s why it didn’t impinge in the beginning, I guess. Because it didn’t seem to matter. But when I started wondering about Mrs. Larson and thought about Ames just sitting there and making no effort to defend himself when Larson broke in…” He stopped in mid-sentence and shrugged as Victor Conroy came in and said, “You wanted me, Sergeant?”
“Yeh. We’re wondering what sort of implement Ames used for opening his mail.” Griggs pointed a blunt finger at the stack of empty envelopes. “Those are all cut open.”
“Yes. He always used a paper-knife. It should be right there on his desk. It always was.” Conroy moved past the sergeant, frowning at the bare top of the desk. “It was a fancy one of brass or copper. Sort of a Florentine dagger thing. An antique, I guess. It had a long thin pointed blade that was honed to razor sharpness on both edges. That’s funny.” Victor Conroy shook his head and frowned. “It was always right here in plain sight. Maybe one of the drawers?”
Griggs shook his bald head. “We’ve looked in the drawers. Do you remember the last time you saw it?”
Conroy shrugged and shook his head. “It’s not the sort of thing one notices. You know, it’s always lying there day after day. It looks as though he used it to open his mail this evening.”
Griggs agreed flatly, “Yeh. It does look that way. All right, Conroy. I want to talk to all of you a little later. No one is to leave the house.”
The man hesitated as though about to protest the order, but checked himself and went out of the room.
Griggs moved about restively for a moment, clasping his hands behind his back and disregarding Shayne. Suddenly he swung on him and demanded bitterly, “Why don’t you ask me what the P. M. turned up?”
Shayne asked obediently, “What did the P. M. turn up?”
“Wesley Ames was dead before the bullet went into his heart. He had been stabbed in the heart with a knife that had a long thin pointed blade sharp as a razor on both edges.”
“Something like an antique Florentine dagger,” Shayne said interestedly.
“Damn it, you don’t act surprised. What sort of prior knowledge did you have? If you’ve been holding out information on me, Shayne…”
“I haven’t been holding out anything,” the detective assured him earnestly. “It just all falls into place suddenly. We can even see how we were all mistaken, thinking Larson’s bullet killed him. It must have gone through his vest about the same place as the stab wound. It wouldn’t bleed a great deal, and the blood would be soaked up inside the vest. No one opened it up to notice that the blood was already congealed until the M. E. got here twenty minutes later, and by that time he couldn’t tell without making extensive tests. My God!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Larson didn’t commit murder after all. All he did was fire a bullet into the body of a corpse. What irony.”
“Shooting with intent to kill,” muttered Griggs. “We can hold him on that.”
“What a terrific stroke of luck for the real murderer. The wildest sort of coincidence. He couldn’t possibly have planned it that way even if he had known Larson was coming back here with a gun to kill Ames. It was one chance in a million that Larson would actually fire without realizing Ames was dead, and that the bullet would go in the same wound and destroy evidence of the stabbing.”
“Yeh. Whoever did it must be shaking hands with himself right now and figuring he’s in the clear with Larson ready-made to take the rap for him.”
“One of the four people downstairs,” Shayne pointed out to him thoughtfully. “We know he was alive when Larson stormed out the back way. Ames bolted the door behind him. They all say no one else came up the drive and in the back way after Larson. It has to be one of those four, Sergeant.”
“Wait a minute. We don’t know that Ames was still alive when Larson went out. Suppose he did it then? Picked up the knife and stabbed him.”
“And then came back half an hour later to do the job openly with a gun?” scoffed Shayne.
“Well, he might have figured that would give him an alibi for the real killing,” argued Griggs stubbornly. “He wouldn’t expect his bullet to go in the same hole, and would expect the stab wound to be discovered immediately. By God, that would be smart,” Griggs went on, warming up to the idea. “If he did work it like that, he must be sitting in his jail cell right now sweating blood and waiting for us to discover the truth. The poor bastard can’t tell us to have an autopsy and look for a stab wound. Talk about your ironic situations. By God, Mike,” the sergeant went on wonderingly. “It could be that way. If it hadn’t been for his wife being missing and you getting suspicious and wanting a P. M., he could have gone to the chair for shooting a dead man. And maybe it would be justice because maybe he stabbed him in the first place.”
“But Dorothy Larson is missing,” Shayne reminded him. “I hardly see how that ties in with your theory. And don’t forget that back door bolted on the inside. Ames couldn’t have done that with a knife wound in his heart.”
“How’s this? Maybe Ames didn’t bolt the door. Maybe one of the others in the house came in here after Larson left and found him stabbed. So they bolted the door and just walked out the other one without saying anything.”
“If one of the people in this house found him dead and the door unbolted, they’d know Larson was the killer. By bolting the door behind him they would immediately take all suspicion off Larson and make each one of them suspects. It’s the last thing in the world any of them would do.”