Shayne opened the door as two burly, uniformed men got purposefully out of the radio car. “This way,” he called cheerfully, and was pleased to recognize the one in the lead as an officer whom he knew slightly.
He held the door open and stood aside and said, “Hi, Thompson. That was quick work.”
“They said Mike Shayne over the radio,” Thompson said guardedly, peering inside the motel room. “What’s going on here? Vice charge?”
“I’ve got a murder suspect for Sergeant Griggs on the Ames killing,” Shayne told him. “That’s Victor Conroy. Take him in, Tommy, and hold him on an open charge until I get there. I have to take Mrs. Larson home and I’ll be right in. If Griggs is at headquarters tell him to stay put until I get there.”
Conroy went with the two officers silently and sullenly. He had kept his eyes averted from Dorothy Larson and had not exchanged a word with her since she had waked up. She, in turn, appeared too stunned and shocked to comprehend exactly what was going on, and after the patrol car drove away with her lover, Shayne took her arm to draw her up from the bed and said gently, “I’ve got a taxi outside, Mrs. Larson. I’ll take you home now.”
“Yes,” she agreed falteringly, clinging to him. “It’s like a bad dream. Ralph running in to get his gun, and then I telephoned you, didn’t I? And then Victor came and said… that Ralph had murdered Wesley Ames…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly and Shayne helped her into the back seat and got under the wheel and drove out of the courtyard.
“Just sit back and relax now,” he said over his shoulder. “Ralph did fire a bullet into Ames, but it now develops that he was dead before the shot was fired.”
“Then… he didn’t actually murder him?” she asked wonderingly. “I’m glad. It would be my fault if he had.”
Shayne said, “Don’t think about it now. When we get to your place I want you to tell me briefly just what you remember. If you confirm Conroy’s story… well, we’ll see.”
When they climbed the stairway to her apartment Shayne fully expected to see a policeman guarding her door. But the hallway was empty and the door opened when he turned the knob. He was surprised to find Griggs standing in the center of the room talking to his driver, and from the expression on the sergeant’s face when he saw Shayne and Dorothy, he realized that Griggs knew nothing about her being found or Conroy’s arrest.
He held her arm and said, “This is Dorothy Larson, Sergeant Griggs. The sergeant is in charge of the case,” he explained to her, and went on to Griggs, “She’s been through a lot tonight. I think she’s eager to make a brief statement that will clarify a lot of things. Why don’t you get that first and then we can leave her alone and I’ll fill you in with the rest of it.”
Griggs nodded and gestured toward a comfortable chair. “Sit down, Mrs. Larson. You had us pretty badly worried about you… with blood all over and you mysteriously missing.”
She sank into the chair and smiled wanly, her face very white and strained, but in control of herself. “I didn’t know… what to do. I was so upset and frightened when Ralph ran out with his gun saying he was going to kill Mr. Ames. And then Victor came and told me Ralph had killed him…” She paused, twisting her hands together in her lap and blinking back tears.
Griggs looked at Shayne with raised eyebrows and a scowl of utter bafflement. “Victor? How the devil did he know…?”
“Conroy is being held at headquarters waiting for us to question him,” Shayne explained. “The way he tells it: He discovered Ames’ dead body in the study and thought Ralph had done it on his first trip, and he panicked and rushed over here to Mrs. Larson because he was actually her lover instead of Ames and he was afraid she would get hysterical and blurt out the truth to Ralph if he wasn’t here to prevent it.”
“Is that true, Mrs. Larson? Were you and Victor Conroy lovers?”
“It’s true enough. It just happened… and Ralph got the idea somehow that it was Wesley Ames I was seeing. That’s why it was so utterly horrible when he ran out with his gun to kill Wesley. It was the wrong man, don’t you see? I tried to stop him… I tried to tell him… but he didn’t hear a word I said.”
Sergeant Griggs drew in a deep breath, pondering and evaluating this information. “What did Conroy say and do when he came here?”
“He was excited and he asked where Ralph was and I told him he’d gone out threatening to kill Wesley, and he said he’d already done it and it wasn’t safe for me to stay here, and for me to pack a bag and come with him to hide some place where Ralph couldn’t find me until he was safely under arrest.
“I hardly knew what I was doing. I started to pack a bag and go with him, and then I suddenly thought how it was all my fault and I couldn’t run away and desert Ralph like that. But Victor got furious and insisted and tried to force me to go on packing my bag, and we wrestled in the bedroom and that’s when I got a nose-bleed. And then I just hardly know,” she ended helplessly. “I gave in and said all right, and he washed my face and gave me a drink, and helped me down the stairs to his car and we drove off.
“Things got fuzzy while we were driving and I dimly remember going into a room and lying down on a bed. And then I didn’t know anything until Mr. Shayne was standing over me and shaking me awake.”
“He doped her with some of her own sleeping powders,” Shayne told Griggs. “He said he gave her two of them, but it must have been more to have acted so fast. I don’t believe he meant her any harm. He just wanted her out of the way and incommunicado until he could get back to the house and brazen it out when Ames’ body was found.”
“Not knowing at that point that Ralph had come back with a gun to shoot a dead man?”
“He couldn’t have known anything about that, according to the timing. Naturally, he kept his mouth tightly shut when he did walk in and learn that Ralph had been arrested for murder.”
“Naturally,” agreed Griggs grimly. “He must have felt pretty damn good and smug about things at that point.”
He turned to Mrs. Larson and said in a curiously gentle voice: “I think that’s all we need from you for now. Will you be all right alone here? I could leave a man, if you like.”
“Why shouldn’t I be all right? You… you think Victor did it, don’t you?”
“I don’t rightly know what we think at this point,” Griggs told her. “You got some more sleeping pills if you need them?”
Dorothy Larson shuddered. “I’m sure there are some, though I don’t think I’ll ever take another one. Why don’t you go on? I’d like to be alone.”
As the three men went down the stairs together, Shayne asked the sergeant, “Did you latch onto anything new after I left the Ames house?”
“Nothing worth a damn. Going over their stories a second time just left things in the same mess. They all denied hearing anything from the study during the crucial half hour. I didn’t tell them about the stab wound, of course. Theoretically the only person who knows about that is the one who stabbed him. Now you tell me Conroy knew all the time he’d been stabbed. Why didn’t he tell us in the beginning if he was innocent?”
“I guess he thought it was better just to let well enough alone when he found Larson charged with the crime anyhow. His story is that he was convinced that Larson was the knife-slayer.”
“How could he be when that back door was bolted on the inside?”
“Conroy didn’t know about that… he says.” Shayne paused, “What are you doing about Sutter?”
“Nothing yet,” fumed Griggs. “He seems to be missing too. Checked in at a hotel all right, but he still hadn’t turned up in his room the last I heard from the man I sent to bring him in.”
Shayne said casually, “I doubt that he’ll have anything useful to contribute.” They had stopped at the curb beside the sergeant’s car, and the taxi Shayne had been using was parked three cars behind it. Not wishing to draw Griggs’ attention to his unorthodox conveyance, Shayne opened the door for the sergeant and suggested, “You go ahead on in. I’ll follow right along because I want to sit in when you question Conroy.”