“The slobbier the better, if the object was to get you to leave her alone. We need a recent photograph. Do you have any?”
“A couple. I took some Polaroid shots a few weeks ago, and one of them made her look just the way she used to.”
“I want one of the way she looks now. Has she ever attempted suicide?”
“Several times. Once she came pretty close. I know she thinks about it whenever she gets depressed. The last few days just before she menstruates are the bad ones. I try to keep track, so I’ll be available. When she feels really low she calls me and sometimes we stay on the phone all night. But one time last year I had to go out of town and I couldn’t reach her before I left. I kept getting a busy signal when I called. I caught an earlier flight back and got her to the hospital. Just in time, they told me.”
“What medical treatment has she been getting?”
“Various doctors. Different pills. Sometimes she’ll be almost normal for a few weeks at a time, and then all of a sudden-”
“Did she show you any of the letters she wrote Crowther?”
“No, but I heard enough about them. Did she actually mail them?”
“Apparently.”
“Part of the time I thought she was joking. She claimed she was shortening Crowther’s life by keeping him in a continual state of terror, which I tried to tell her was absurd.”
“Where is she in the menstrual cycle now, do you know?”
“That’s just it-she’s due.” He added grimly, “Unless she’s pregnant.”
Shayne stubbed out his cigarette. “OK, Paul, I want you to listen to a theory. If you collected everybody who has a reason for killing Crowther, you could fill the Orange Bowl. What if somebody else found out about these letters, and also knew she’d been thinking about killing herself? What if he offered to arrange an assassination? She wouldn’t have to know who he was. He could do it by phone. One way to get her the gun would be to put it in a suitcase and check it on a flight into International Airport, and send her the claims check.”
“You mean the phone rang and she picked it up and a voice said, Do you want to-”
“Something like that,” Shayne said. “‘You’ve been threatening to murder this man. God knows he deserves it. Put up or shut up.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m asking your opinion. You know her. I don’t. You say these letters were partly a joke. Now here comes a genuine offer-someone who’s willing to work out all the details and tell her exactly what to do. It coincides with one of her low points, when she’s thinking about suicide anyway. This would be a much more interesting way to kill herself than swallowing pills, and she’d take Crowther with her.”
London was staring at him. “Do you know anything you haven’t told me?”
“I’m speculating. Would that kind of proposition appeal to her?”
“It might, but she wouldn’t do it.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure! You see I know her. We used to make love in high school. We stopped for a few years, and then we started again after her husband was condemned to death, and we’ve been doing it ever since. That doesn’t make me any kind of an expert on what she’s really like.”
Shayne didn’t comment.
After a moment London went on reluctantly, “But if that call came in at just the right moment, if he didn’t make any mistakes, she might decide-oh, that if she didn’t agree, it would mean admitting that she hadn’t ever been serious about anything, just fooling around. One thing would happen, then another, and before she knew it she’d be committed. But she wouldn’t go through with it! At the last minute-”
He thought about it, and then said helplessly, “No, I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 10
Will Gentry, in his office in police headquarters on NW 11th Street, opened a can of ginger ale and laid out a game of solitaire. At this stage in the evening, there was nothing to do but conserve energy, and wait for something to happen.
Shayne brought Paul London in with a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. London had several ideas about where Camilla might be spending the night.
Leaving them conferring, Shayne looked up the phone number of Dr. Irving Miller, the psychiatrist whose unpaid bill for $950 Shayne had found on Camilla’s bureau. An answering service gave him another number, where the doctor was spending the evening. Twenty minutes later, Shayne dropped off the Venetian Causeway onto one of the Venetian Islands and found the house, an expensive modern dwelling belonging to another psychiatrist. Most of the guests that evening drove Cadillacs, Shayne noted. After giving a maid his name and telling her that he wanted to talk to Dr. Miller, he walked around the house to a terrace overlooking the bay. The moon was in its final quarter.
Dr. Miller proved to be a sharp-nosed, nearsighted man in a white dinner jacket. He had been drinking. For obvious professional reasons, he explained to Shayne, he found it impossible to discuss his patients, ever. Shayne told him bluntly that this particular patient was involved, in some unexplained fashion, in a conspiracy to assassinate a high government official, and unless he discussed her now, he would find himself discussing her in front of a grand jury.
Dr. Miller’s breath came out as though Shayne had hit him in the stomach. He threw his cigar into the bay and sat down on the flagstone railing. Shayne explained the situation. Presently Dr. Miller went back into the house and returned with drinks. His training had conditioned him to attach labels to people, to divide them into categories according to the symptoms they had in common, but behind the bristling manner and professional jargon, Shayne thought he saw concern and a genuine liking for Camilla as a human being. They talked for more than an hour.
From there Shayne continued to Miami Beach.
At the St. Albans, as he expected, he found Johnny Cheyfitz, the head security officer, awake and worrying. He was glad to get an outsider’s opinion of the security arrangements, which had been worked out jointly with Peter Painter and the army, and okayed by Berger before he flew back to Washington. Cheyfitz had an uneasy feeling that they had overlooked something. Though it was no longer really his responsibility, he didn’t want any blood to be shed in his hotel.
“That’s the one thing you can’t get out of carpets,” he said. “You have to take them up and burn them.”
He turned on all the lights on the ballroom floor. After a time Shayne told him to go to bed. But if Cheyfitz didn’t mind, Mike would hang around a little longer.
“Glad to have somebody else involved, Mike. This I’m not possessive about.”
He said good night. Soon afterward a room service waiter brought up a bottle of cognac, a glass and a pitcher of ice water.
“Compliments of Mr. Cheyfitz.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Shayne said absently, dropping a bill onto the tray.
He poured a slug of cognac and went on prowling about the ballroom and the corridor between the ballroom and the elevators. There was a ten-foot gap between the raised dais and the nearest tables. Secret Service men would line up shoulder to shoulder in the interval, facing outward. Shayne checked the sight-lines from the front tables and the low television platform, which was placed at the ballroom entrance, where the cameras could cover Crowther’s arrival, and then swivel around to follow him to his place on the dais.
Half an hour later, Shayne called the Three Deuces, where he had told Tim Rourke to wait.
“Hey, Mike,” Rourke said genially, “what happened? I’m three quarters smashed. I’ve been drinking bar bourbon and whispering to a chick who pretends I’m slurring my words so she can’t understand me. She understands me, all right. I just watched the news. This is a hell of a story, and do you realize I don’t know anything more about it than I saw on that tiny screen? I shouldn’t be sitting here. I ought to be out talking to people.”