Closing the connecting door behind them, Shayne said swiftly, “Get smart, Painter. You won’t lose anything by taking good advice from a fellow who’s given you good advice before. Rush a man out to the yacht to search Thomas’s stateroom. If I were doing the searching, I’d pay particular attention to the center drawer of an unlocked writing desk.”
Painter studied him a long time with suspicion actively alive in his black eyes.
“You’re pulling another fast one,” he charged. “I ought to-”
“You’d better do as I say,” Shayne interrupted.
Painter hesitated. “About that pistol of yours-”
Shayne put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder and gave him a good-natured push toward the door.
“I’m right here where you want me. Start a man out to the yacht.”
Shayne went back through the connecting door. Painter went into the hallway and spoke to one of the detectives waiting outside.
Marco was leaning over Thomas when Shayne stepped back into the office without warning. The millionaire was looking up at the gambler with revulsion showing on his face, one hand up as though to ward off what Marco was saying.
The gambler turned away hurriedly when Shayne entered.
Shayne grinned and said, “You’re a hell of a father to be consorting with the man who murdered your daughter.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Marco snarled.
“Don’t believe it-don’t believe she’s dead? You don’t believe Thomas knew she was there?”
Shayne asked the questions in a pleasant voice. He sat on the edge of Painter’s desk and swung one foot. Painter came in and dropped into a chair behind him.
“I don’t believe either one,” Marco rasped. “This is some kind of a plant. With you mixed up in it, I don’t believe anything.”
“Not even your daughter’s farewell note?” Shayne gestured behind him to the articles on the desk. “And those are her clothes, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know whether they are or not. Might be any dame’s clothes that were planted there.”
“It can be proved easily enough.”
Shayne paused to light a cigarette. Staring through the flame, he added casually:
“You seem mighty damned unconcerned about your girl, Marco. Maybe you know she isn’t dead. Maybe you-”
“You know damn well I don’t know where she is,” Marco bellowed. “Do you think I’d have offered to pay you money to find her if I knew?”
Shayne shrugged.
“How can you laugh off this note? It’s her writing, isn’t it?”
“I haven’t examined it closely,” Marco mumbled.
“Look at it again,” Shayne urged. “Study it closely.” He reached behind him for the note and passed it over to Marco who took it with some reluctance.
“If it’s a genuine note, that proves it was suicide,” Elliot Thomas broke out excitedly. “Perhaps she did slip aboard my yacht and plunge over the side. She didn’t like me. In a deranged state, she might have thought to cause me publicity and trouble. But I can’t be blamed if a crazy girl chooses my yacht for a jumping-off place.”
“I don’t think you’ve convinced anyone you didn’t bring her aboard last night and get her so soused up on champagne she maybe didn’t know what she was doing,” Shayne said drily. “You’ve told nothing but lies about the mysterious girl the sailors saw.”
“Lies? Why, you-you Thomas started to his feet, but Shayne’s lips pulled away from his teeth and he started to swing off the desk.
Thomas subsided with a frustrated mutter of fury, and John Marco spoke up from where he sat studying the suicide note, “This looks like Marsha’s writing, all right. But I can’t believe-she wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not Marsha.”
“She was in love with Harry Grange, wasn’t she?” Shayne asked sharply. “Maybe after he died she decided life wasn’t worth while.”
“The report we received didn’t sound like suicide,”
Painter said importantly. “The fisherman who telephoned in said explicitly that she was thrown off the yacht. He testified that she screamed before she was thrown overboard.”
“You can probably tell, all right, when you find her body,” Shayne said cheerfully. “If you ever find it. Those channel tides are tricky as the devil.”
In the intense silence following his words the chant of a newsboy drifted through the open window of Peter Painter’s office. Three of the men in the office stiffened and stared at each other in disbelief as they heard what the newsboy was yelling at the top of his voice. Shayne relaxed with a satisfied grunt of approval.
“ELLIOT THOMAS GRILLED IN DROWNING OF BEACH DEBUTANTE! MILLIONAIRE SUSPECTED IN STRANGE DEATH OF LOCAL SOCIETY GIRL. READ ALL ABOUT IT IN THE ‘NEWS.’ EXCLUSIVE STORY WITH PICTURES OF SUICIDE NOTE THAT MAY BE FORGERY. GET YOUR MIAMI ‘DAILY NEWS’ HERE. EXCLUSIVE.”
Elliot Thomas sprang to his feet, wetting his lips and staring out the window.
“How-how could they have the story? It’s libel, by God. I’ll sue that paper for a million dollars.”
Painter looked at Shayne quizzically. “That’s the first real scoop I ever met face to face. I think I begin to understand-”
Shayne interrupted him, talking fast. “Hadn’t you better get a handwriting expert to look at that suicide note? Her father knows her better than we do, and he finds it hard to believe Marsha would commit suicide. I agree with him. It looks more like a plant to me.”
“We’d have to have a specimen of her handwriting to compare it with,” Painter told him. He was watching Shayne closely, calculatingly. “It appears to me that you-”
“You can’t blame me for being interested in it,” Shayne growled. “I tell you there’s some hook-up between the Grange killing and this drowning affair. Ask Marco why he had Marsha doped and locked in her room the next morning after Grange was killed. Ask him.”
John Marco came to his feet with a bound, a crazed glitter in his eyes. “I’ve listened to you long enough, Shamus. We all know you bumped Grange.”
“You’re going to listen to me some more.” Shayne slid from Painter’s desk to his feet. He moved slowly toward the gambler with bony chin out-thrust.
“You’re going to tell us what you know about Banjo Boy winning the fifth at Hialeah-and about those ex-con friends of Whitey’s who went through Chuck’s room thinking he had the dope, then took me for a ride thinking I’d got it from Grange.”
Marco’s features became hard, masklike. He slid a hand in his coat pocket and said, “Don’t come any nearer, Shayne.”
Shayne stopped a pace in front of him. “I’m close enough to smell the stink of your rotten guts. Thought you could put me on the spot? You’d sacrifice your daughter to do it, wouldn’t you? She was with Grange when he was killed. She knew who did it. Maybe you had a hell of a good reason to keep her locked up. Maybe, by God, you had a hell of a good reason to say that suicide note looks genuine to you. I wouldn’t trust a rat like you not to drown his own daughter.”
A sharp rap on the outer door broke through Marco’s labored breathing. Painter barked, “Come in,” and the door opened to admit an excited detective sergeant with Timothy Rourke squeezing in behind him.
The detective rushed exultantly into the room, waving some crumpled sheets of paper.
“Here you are, sir. I found these in a desk in Mr. Thomas’s stateroom. Proof that the suicide note’s a forgery. Plain as the nose on your face.”
He spread the crumpled sheets of paper out in front of Chief Painter, each one covered with the damning scrawls of an amateur forger practicing Marsha Marco’s handwriting.
Marco moved close to the desk while Painter bent forward and scrutinized the sheets. Shayne winked at Rourke and faced Thomas who appeared frozen to his chair, but quite able to comprehend the meaning of this final blow.
“In your stateroom, eh?” Shayne said sympathetically to the millionaire. “How very careless of you. You might have gotten away with it if you’d been more careful.”
“But I didn’t-I don’t know-” Thomas sprang to life, and to his feet, wildly.