“But they don’t see it that way, Mike. I’ve run into a lot of them in my work over the past twenty years. A buck is a buck, by God! Much more than it is to you or me. Particularly if it’s an inherited buck.”
Shayne muttered, “Yeh. Eli made somewhat the same point this morning. He emphasized that Elsa was an Armbruster. She had a ‘feeling for property,’ he explained to me. She wasn’t about to give up a husband she had bought with her own money. All right. I can understand that under normal circumstances. If she enjoyed being married to the guy. But she evidently didn’t. Here she was, carrying on a passionate love affair with a married man that was building up to suicide. I can’t see even a woman with a strong ‘feeling for property’ continuing to cling to her husband under those circumstances.”
“Didn’t Lambert say in his note that his wife’s religion stood in the way of a divorce?”
“Sure. But once again… enough money can take care of that. Divorce evidence has been framed before… for a lousy thousand bucks or less.”
Timothy Rourke drained his bourbon highball and sighed. “You always run into these unanswerable questions in suicides. There’s never a logical answer, Mike. If they were logical people they wouldn’t do it. Q.E.D.”
Shayne said, “Yeh, I know,” still sounding unconvinced, and looked up with eyebrows raised questioningly as the two officers reentered the room from the bedroom. Garroway carried a bundle of clothing which he put down on the rug, and said, “I’ll take this suit he was wearing into the lab where I can do a thorough job. But I don’t expect to get anything, Shayne. This is all new, department store stuff. Been worn once and never washed. And another thing: I don’t think that bed linen has been disturbed for weeks… since it was made up fresh when he moved in. Certainly not for the purpose that couple were supposed to be using this apartment for. You know, there are always stains and indications you can test for.”
“Maybe they did their romping on top of the bedspread,” Rourke suggested.
“Maybe.” Garroway was a deadly serious young man. “But I ran tests on that, too, without getting anything.”
“How about you, Sarge?” Shayne asked the fingerprint man.
“I got some prints,” he said. “I can’t be positive until I run comparisons with the men who were up here last night, but I have a strong hunch they’ll all check out. One thing I can tell you: I didn’t find any of the woman’s prints to indicate she’d spent any time here. A few faint smudges a week or so old that might or might not be. Only clear prints of hers were on a little plastic slipper bag I found on the shelf in the closet.”
“A container for those red slippers on the floor?”
“They fit into it all right. The nightgown and peignoir have been worn by the way.”
“What about Lambert’s glasses?” Shayne asked suddenly. “He always wore blue tinted ones. I haven’t seen a pair around.”
“They’re at the lab,” Garroway told him. “We got them from on top the dresser in the bedroom last night. Took them in to see if they could be traced.”
“Any luck?”
“No. They aren’t prescription lenses. Could be picked up anywhere.”
“And I suppose you took the shotgun in?”
“Yes. Standard single-shot, twelve gauge. Hasn’t been used a great deal, but it’s ten or twelve years old. No chance to trace it either.”
“That damned gun bothers me,” muttered Shayne. “What in the name of God was it doing here so conveniently? It isn’t exactly the sort of thing a man brings along with him to keep a hot date.”
“But the suicide was planned for last night,” argued Rourke. “I understand the suicide note said so.”
“It also said they’d planned to go out together with cyanide,” Shayne told him caustically. “He lost his nerve and spilled his drink, and had to do the job with the gun. He hadn’t planned that. So what was the gun doing here?”
“That’s another one of those questions for which there is no logical answer,” Rourke told him pleasantly. He stood up and yawned. “Are we all through here?”
“Yeh.” Shayne looked at the men. “When can I have a report?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Call my office,” Shayne directed. “Or my secretary, Lucy Hamilton, if the office doesn’t answer.” He gave them Lucy’s number and got up also, leaving half his drink still in the glass.
Rourke waited and watched him as he went into the bedroom. The reporter grinned when he came back thrusting a small plastic container with the slippers into one side pocket, and ramming the flimsy red nightgown set into the other. “A present for Lucy?” he asked with a leer.
Shayne said coldly, “I’m taking these home where they belong.”
“For the bereaved husband? I’m sure he’ll love to have them as souvenirs.”
Shayne shrugged; they went out together and he snapped the padlock on the outside of the door. “Let’s walk down a flight,” he suggested. “See if Lucy’s back from the office. I could use a decent drink to wash the taste of that stuff out of my mouth.”
They walked down a flight, but a knock on Lucy’s door indicated that she hadn’t returned. They went down to the ground floor where Rourke announced that he was late keeping a date for a free lunch, and drove off hastily.
Shayne drove back to a small restaurant on Eighth Street just off the boulevard where a double cognac washed the cloying taste from his mouth, and he ate a hasty steak sandwich.
His next stop, he decided, should be at the office of Harry Brandt, a nationally known expert on handwriting and the validation of questioned documents. Harry’s office was only three blocks away, and after he left the handwriting samples with him, a trip across the bay to Miami Beach and an interview with Paul Nathan was indicated.
And that would about wind it up, Shayne told himself sourly. Thus far he hadn’t accomplished a damned thing to earn Eli Armbruster’s ten grand retainer. It was an easy way to pick up a hunk of cash, but Shayne didn’t like to earn his money so easily. There was still Nathan’s alibi to be checked, he reminded himself. Not that he expected to prove anything by it because there wasn’t yet a single circumstance that pointed the finger of suspicion at the husband, but it was one more thing to do before he made his final report to his client.
Harry Brandt had the ground floor of an old Stucco residence on Fifth Street near the bay where he kept bachelor quarters and did the work which found its way to him from all over the country.
He was a pleasant-faced tweedy man in his forties, and he took a foul-smelling pipe from his mouth to greet the redhead with a smile at his front door. “Come in, Mike,” he urged. “I see by the paper that you were on the spot again last night. Anything in it for me?”
He led the way down the hall to a pleasant, masculinely-appointed sitting room and waved Shayne to a comfortable chair.
“A very simple thing, but I have to check it out to satisfy a client.” Shayne dug into his pockets and extracted the two suicide notes and the letter that had been found in Elsa’s handbag. He pushed them over to Brandt, together with the rental agreement signed by Lambert.
“I guess there’s no doubt that those first three were written by the same man. I don’t think there’s much doubt that this is also his signature… but that’s the thing I have to know.”
Harry Brandt glanced through the notes and letter alertly. He said, “The man’s left-handed, of course. The second note shows more haste and strain, which is natural, if I understand the circumstances, but there’s enough difference that I’ll have to make a few tests to be positive the same person wrote them both. This signature…” He studied the name at the bottom of the agreement carefully, glanced aside to compare it with the other two “Robert Lambert’s.”