“We don’t know anything about a bomb,” said Roy fiercely. “We didn’t hire anybody to do anything. You tell him, Beth.”
“I couldn’t find anybody who’d do it,” she said listlessly. “Even with that wonderful story I thought up and offering them all the money in the world. They still wouldn’t do it. Just like you,” she ended with a faint curl of her upper lip. “All I got was good advice like you gave me.”
“It was a crazy idea from the word go,” put in her husband vehemently. “My God! if I’d had the faintest idea what Beth was up to, I’d never have let her go to Miami. But she claimed she just wanted to find out what kind of man he was… to spy out the situation for Harry and help him put the clamps on him later.”
“To blackmail him?” asked Shayne harshly.
“Call it blackmail if you want to. I don’t. I didn’t blame Harry one bit. God in heaven! think what he’d been through on account of him.”
“What,” asked Shayne, “had he been through?”
Then the whole story of perfidy and cowardice and near-murder almost a quarter of a century before poured out of the young man’s eager lips while Shayne sat very quiet in the small living room and listened to it.
In mid-depression years, Ernest Combs and Harry Gleason were equal partners in a wholesale business in a suburban community near Denver, Colorado. With slack times and a succession of bad breaks, they faced the prospect of losing their business and everything they had invested. With a large stock of heavily mortgaged and completely insured goods in an isolated warehouse, the two desperate men had hit upon the expedient of selling off the stock secretly and at a high discount, and salting away the proceeds in cash-then burning the empty warehouse to the ground and collecting insurance on the non-existent contents.
The plot had been carefully planned and was put into effect one wintry evening when a heavy snowfall made it difficult for fire engines to operate.
One terrible hitch occurred at the last moment after the fire had been carefully set in several places and the two partners were escaping safely. Combs’ young wife, seven months pregnant, had learned of their plan and gone to the warehouse to stop them, unknown to either of them.
It wasn’t until the incendiary flames were raging and they were both safely outside the building that they became aware that Mrs. Combs was trapped inside and would surely perish unless they took prompt action to save her.
According to young Roy Combs’ bitter story, the two men reacted differently under stress. Combs cursed his wife’s stupidity in putting herself in jeopardy and washed his hands of the whole affair, disappearing into the night without a trace-and taking with him the entire cache of cash the two men had secreted.
Harry Gleason, on the other hand, turned in the other direction to turn in a fire alarm and then sped back into the burning building in an effort to save his partner’s wife.
Due to his prompt action, the fire apparatus arrived in time to save the building from complete destruction (thus baring the arson plot) and to rescue Gleason and Mrs. Combs alive.
The woman, however, suffered such severe burns that she was hospitalized and never recovered, dying two months later because of her weakened condition as a result of her injuries when a son, Roy, was born to her.
Gleason had been promptly sentenced to the penitentiary for his part in the crime, and a nationwide search was instituted for Ernie Combs-without avail. No trace of him had ever been discovered-until one night in Algonquin, Illinois, when his face appeared on the television screen in front of a bartender and his wife, and he was identified as Saul Henderson, wealthy widower of Miami Beach and mayoralty candidate of that city.
“Harry telephoned me that night,” Roy Combs told Shayne stonily. “He was all fired up to notify the police immediately, but I told him to wait. I drove up and talked to him one afternoon. By that time he had quieted down and was talking about threatening Henderson with exposure and making him pay all his money for our silence. We talked it all over and couldn’t agree on anything. Frankly, I wanted to see him suffer for what he had done to my mother, but I couldn’t help thinking about all that money he had inherited from the woman he’d married… and the way Beth and I live here on my salary as a garage mechanic. Much as I hate to admit it, I am his legal son, and can prove it, and I would inherit everything if he died.
“Oh, we talked it over and over and over,” he went on with a bitter twist to his young mouth. “Harry and I, and Beth and I. Beth, I think, hated him worse than I did. I guess it was a female trait… because of what he did to my mother. Anyhow, in the beginning Beth talked wild and crazy about killing him so I’d inherit his money, but I talked her out of it. And I didn’t want Harry to try to blackmail him either… not because I didn’t think he deserved to be blackmailed, you understand, but because I was afraid he’d be too smart for us and the whole thing would backfire. But I couldn’t make up my mind to denounce him to the law either,” he went on helplessly.
“He certainly deserved no better, but what good would that do us? We’d never get a penny of his money… as long as he was alive and knew he had a son who was alive.”
“So you and your wife decided on this Jane Smith deal?” said Shayne as the young man paused.
“Not exactly. That was entirely her own idea, and she didn’t confide a word of it to Harry or me. What she did do was to offer to take what money we had in the savings account and go down to Miami and nose around and find out everything she could about him. Then she promised to come back and we’d put our heads together and decide what to do next. She went up and saw Harry herself late one night, and got him to promise he wouldn’t do anything until she came back and reported. And now you say he went down anyway and Henderson shot him.”
Roy Combs jumped to his feet and clenched his fist angrily. “Damn it! That’s what I was afraid would happen. I told Harry he’d be too smart for us. Well, he won’t get away with it. I’m not going to hold back any longer. Damn all his money to hell! I’ll see he spends the rest of his life in jail.”
Shayne said dryly, “I don’t think you need to worry too much about that aspect of it. But I’m curious about you, young lady.” He turned his attention to Beth. “Where did you get the idea of masquerading as Henderson’s stepdaughter and telling the weird tale you unfolded to me in that hotel room?”
She sat bolt upright on the sofa with her hands clasped primly in front of her. “It seemed like a perfectly wonderful idea. I went down and read all the newspapers and talked to people and found out everything I could about him and his dead wife and Muriel Graham. And then I just made up that story. I tried to think of some good reason for wanting him dead and for offering to pay so much money to hire it done.”
“I told her it was the craziest thing in the world, Mr. Wayne. As soon as I found out what she had done. You see, she didn’t tell me a word about it until you had answered that advertisement and she had made her plans to meet you. Then she wrote me a letter. I hopped on a plane and went right down there to stop her, and got to Miami that evening while she was meeting you.
“When she saw me afterward and told me what you said… about being a friend of that famous detective, Mike Shayne and all, I was scared to death you would tell him, and that’s why I called you next day and pretended to be Paul Winterbottom… so you’d know she wasn’t going to go on with it and try to get anyone else to do the job.”
“But she did,” Shayne said flatly. “She found someone who planted a bomb on his boat and tried to kill him that way.”
“You didn’t, did you, Beth? You promised me…”
“I swear I didn’t, Roy. I did have the name of one other man in New York that I didn’t tell you about, and I tried to get him to do it when I stopped off there on my way home. B-b-but he was just like Mr. Wayne.” Tears streamed down her face and she wiped them away with the back of her hand defiantly.