Rourke nodded with a grimace. “Bits and pieces left,” he muttered. “How were they able to reconstruct all that, Mike? I gather there weren’t any witnesses.”
“He left two suicide notes,” Shayne explained. “One had been written prior to her arrival.” He took a sip of cognac and a swallow of ice water, and quoted from the first note.
“He evidently had the two drinks prepared when she got there, and he’d used up all his cyanide. He got cold feet and dropped his on the floor while she tossed hers off. He watched her die in front of him, and then wrote another note explaining why he was forced to use the shotgun to keep up his end. The messes people get themselves into,” he ended angrily.
“Who was he, Michael?” asked Lucy. “Do I know him?”
“Robert Lambert. He seems to be a comparatively new tenant in the building and none of the people on his floor know much about him. A medium-sized, pleasant-faced fellow, they say, with a dark mustache and wearing very lightly tinted blue glasses.” He paused, regarding Lucy questioningly, and she said:
“I think… I may have passed him in the hall once or twice. But I never spoke to him.”
“Apparently no one else did either… except one lady directly across the hall. She described him as pleasant, but aloof. It’s her impression that he actually used the apartment only on weekends… to entertain a woman visitor who invariably arrived about ten o’clock and stayed until the lady across the hall gave up her vigil and went to sleep.”
Lucy laughed lightly and said, “That would be Mrs. Conrad. She can be trusted to know pretty much everything that goes on in this building.” Her face tightened momentarily and then she relaxed with a rueful grimace.
“Soon after I moved in here, Mrs. Conrad took it upon herself to admonish me that a single young lady would do her reputation no good by having gentlemen visitors who stayed until midnight or after. Meaning you, Michael. And I was forced to tell Mrs. Conrad that my reputation was my own affair, and none of hers. We haven’t been exactly chummy since that encounter.”
Shayne grinned and said, “Well, she just happened to have her door cracked open tonight at ten o’clock and saw her neighbor across the hall admit his regular weekly woman visitor… at least one wearing the same floppy-brimmed hat she has noted in the past.” He shrugged and took another sip of cognac.
“At the moment that’s all anyone seems to know about Robert Lambert. No wallet or identifying papers of any sort. One small overnight bag in the place, toilet articles and a couple of shirts and changes of underwear. Not even an extra suit or pair of slacks. Just the suit he was wearing… which he had removed incidentally… and put on pajamas and dressing gown to receive his visitor.”
Rourke said, “That sounds very much as though the apartment was just a convenience… to keep weekend dates.”
Shayne nodded. “That’s the way it looks.” He paused. “The woman is a different kettle of fish. Her handbag was there on a table… underneath her hat. I wonder if you’ll recognize her name, Tim. Mrs. Elsa Nathan… from Miami Beach.”
Rourke scowled down into his highball glass, swirling the dark brown contents around and around. “Nathan?” He shook his head slowly. “Seems it should strike a chord, but it doesn’t.”
“Nee Armbruster,” Shayne told him.
“Good God!” Rourke sat up tensely, excitement glittering in his deep-set eyes. “Elsa Armbruster! Only daughter and sole heir of old Eli Armbruster. Been married to a man named Nathan about a year. Society with a capital S. Sneaking off to a dump like this. Sorry, Lucy,” he added quickly. “It’s not really a dump, but… for a woman like Elsa Armbruster…”
Lucy nodded indulgently. “You don’t have to dot your I’s, Tim. Goodness! She could buy and sell every person living in this building fifty times over. What on earth would she be doing here?”
“Take Tim’s capital S and put it in front of e-x,” Shayne suggested with a cynical lift of one red eyebrow, “and I think you’ll have the answer. Society millionairesses are apparently just as susceptible as parlor maids.”
“But… but…” sputtered Lucy. “Think of a woman like that committing suicide. With all the money in the world. Everything to live for. It’s incredible.”
Shayne said somberly, “Apparently there was one thing that all the money in the world couldn’t buy for her. The man she wanted. His note said that his wife had religious convictions which made it impossible for him to get a divorce. Love,” he said angrily, “is a many-barrelled as well as many-splendored thing. The damned mess it can make of some people’s lives! By God, Lucy. Let’s be thankful that you and I have remained sensible and refused to get caught in a trap like that.”
She looked at him wonderingly for a moment, and Timothy Rourke chuckled and said drily, “Yeh. Keep on being sensible, you two.” He finished his bourbon and unfolded his emaciated frame. “I’ll be on my way. Thanks for the drink, Lucy.” He moved toward the door and said softly over his shoulder, “And God bless you, my children.”
They sat very still until the door closed behind him, and then Lucy turned with a soft little cry of, “Oh, Michael,” and threw her arms about his neck and buried her face against his shoulder.
Shayne held her tightly and banished the memory of the upstairs room from his mind.
CHAPTER THREE
Although the next day was Saturday, Shayne had promised Lucy the night before that he would go to the office that morning to sign some checks she had ready, so he was up before nine o’clock.
He put water on to heat for the dripolator, then got the morning paper from in front of his door and opened it out on the center table in the sitting room.
The headline across the front page said: SLEUTH SMASHES DOOR ON SUICIDE PAIR.
He left the paper there and went back into the kitchen to put coffee in the drip pot, pouring boiling water on top of it, and then he scrambled three eggs and made toast while the water dripped through.
Carrying his breakfast in to the table, he ate with relish and sipped strong, black coffee while glancing through the front-page story. Actually, there was less printed about the case than he already knew. Neither of the suicide notes was quoted, and it wasn’t clearly explained why both poison and a shotgun had been used in the two deaths. Robert Lambert was referred to as the “mystery man,” and the identity of his paramour had been handled as discreetly as possible, with the name of “Armbruster” not even appearing, though there was a picture of the dead woman wearing the same floppy black hat Shayne had seen on the table in the death room.
The story was continued on the second page, and there they had a picture of the cuckolded husband as he was leaving the morgue after identifying his wife’s body. He was an open-faced young man, wearing a scowl as he faced the camera, his sport jacket and shirt open at the throat.
Shayne put the paper aside, took his empty plate into the kitchen where he ran hot water over it, poured another cup of coffee and reinforced it with cognac.
He was sitting back and sipping this pleasurably when his telephone rang. Lucy Hamilton answered when he picked it up. “Are you coming in this morning, Boss?”
“Sure. In about half an hour.”
“Mr. Armbruster is here to see you,” she told him briskly, and he knew the man must be standing beside her desk. “Mr. Eli Armbruster. He is very anxious to see you.”
Shayne said, “Tell him fifteen minutes, Angel,” and hung up with a frown. He had never met Eli Armbruster, but the name was well-known to anyone who had lived in Miami for any length of time. In the early twenties he had come to Miami as a young man and bought extensive holdings on the ocean side of Biscayne Bay which was then barren scrubland. Through the boom-and-bust of the twenties, he had simply sat back and held onto his property, neither buying nor selling during the period of frenzied speculation, and by sitting tight and holding on he had eventually become one of the wealthiest men on the peninsula when prosperity returned to the area in the late thirties.