Brett Halliday - Shoot the Works

Neither Ida nor her husband had seen or heard another visitor to the Berger apartment, until their attention had been attracted by the police siren outside and Garson’s hard-heeled arrival.

And that was really all that Ida and Peter could contribute to Gentry’s investigation of the affair. They were both quite vague about describing any of the various men whom they insisted Lola had entertained in her husband’s absence, and, when Gentry specifically described Jim Wallace, they were unable to say whether or not he had been one of her admirers.

As to the events of the preceding night, they were almost equally vague. They had both been watching TV until midnight when they retired, and they agreed that Lola had been in… at least certainly during the latter part of the evening, and they had the distinct impression that one of her orgiastic drinking parties had still been going on when they turned off the TV set and retired, but they couldn’t say who had been present, or how many, or how long the party had lasted.

Gentry thanked them, after he had extracted all the information he could, explained that he would like to have them come to Headquarters later to make a formal statement and sign it, and then turned with a shrug of his burly shoulders and followed Shayne out into the hall.

Shayne said quietly, “Thanks for letting me listen in, Will. Keep me informed, will you?”

He turned hurriedly toward the elevator, but Gentry removed the soggy cigar from his mouth and threw it with unexpected violence at the opposite wall.

He said, “You’re under arrest, Mike,” and he nodded curtly to Garson, who was hovering between them and the elevator. “Take him in, son. Hold him without charge until I get there.”

He turned his back on Shayne and reentered apartment 3-A.

Michael Shayne waited patiently for half an hour in a small room, just off Chief Gentry’s private office, with Officer Garson sitting erectly across from him, on guard. During that period, the redhead viciously smoked eight cigarettes down to short butts, alternately rumpled his coarse hair and tugged at his ear-lobe, while he went over and over the meagre assortment of facts in his possession directly bearing on the deaths of Wallace and Lola Berger.

Three of those definite facts had been withheld from Gentry thus far, and Shayne didn’t know how much longer he would be justified in withholding them. They were the airline tickets to South America, the theft of cash and securities from the brokerage safe, the note signed Lola which he had discovered in Wallace’s apartment. He realized that each of them might well be an important clue to the two deaths, although he couldn’t yet see a positive connection between the three of them. But he knew that Gentry strongly suspected he was holding back some such items of information and that he was likely to stay under arrest as long as he continued to hold out. So his problem was whether it would be in the best interests of his clients to give all his information to Gentry in the hope of thus freeing himself to continue his investigation, or to stay clammed up and under arrest where he couldn’t do anything about solving the case.

He hadn’t come to any decision when a side door opened and Gentry said gruffly, “All right, Garson. I’ll have the prisoner in here. You go back on duty.” Shayne got up and sauntered into the chief’s office with more outward nonchalance than he felt. It was empty except for Gentry and Timothy Rourke, who sat in a straight chair against the wall with a worried frown on his face. While Gentry seated himself behind his desk, Shayne protested vigorously, “This is nuts, Will, and you know it is. What possible grounds have you for putting me under arrest?”

Gentry said wearily, “Sit down, Mike. Don’t go legal on me. I can hold you as long as I like as a material witness, and I’m damned sure you’re that, if nothing else… like an accessory, for instance.”

Shayne sighed deeply and summoned a wounded look as he pulled a chair closer to the desk and sat down. “An accessory to what? Mrs. Berger’s suicide?”

“Who says it’s suicide?”

Shayne shrugged elaborately. “So far as there’s any evidence, she was alone in her apartment when the shot was fired. The powder burns are clearly there, and the pistol on the floor where she dropped it. How about fingerprints on the gun?”

“With a corrugated butt?” Gentry shook his head unhappily. “You know the chances on that.” He paused, “I’m going to level with you, Mike, though I’m damned certain you’re not leveling with me. I don’t think she killed herself. Ballistics says the gun on the floor is the same one that killed Wallace last night. What do you make of that?”

Shayne said honestly, “I don’t know. I won’t pretend to be surprised. I assumed there was some connection. So doesn’t that tie it up as suicide? Assume she gunned Wallace last night. We know they knew each other, had met surreptitiously at least once, so we can assume they may have been intimate while Mrs. Wallace was away. He would probably want to break it off on his wife’s return. So you’ve got a woman scorned.” He spread out the palms of his hands. “Happens all the time. She shoots him and goes home and ties on a hell of a drunk. Remember the hangover I mentioned when I visited her this morning.”

Gentry said, “Suppose you remember what the couple across the hall said about the party last night. Do you see her coming back after gunning her lover and getting drunk with some other guy?”

“Why not? It might be exactly what a woman like Lola would do,” argued Shayne persuasively. “Suppose she stopped in a bar and tied one on? More likely she was already drunk when she shot Wallace.”

“And then suddenly gets remorseful today and decides to shoot herself? No soap.” Gentry shook his head decidedly. “Not, as you say, a woman like Lola. I can’t buy it.”

“Wait a minute, Will. I don’t say it was entirely remorse. Remember the phone call Martin made to her… the one I was too late to stop. With her guilty conscience, she must have figured the jig was up. With that and remorse, it’d be the most natural thing in the world for her to turn the same gun on herself.”

“I’ll tell you why it doesn’t add up, Mike. I agree with you that the phone call Martin made was the crux of it, but not the way you see it… or pretend you see it,” he added in an ominous growl. “Because I had another talk with the doc and he agrees that there is every reason to believe that she was dead before that call went through to her apartment.”

“Wait a minute. We checked the timing when I was there. I heard him say twenty minutes to an hour.”

“The twenty minutes was the absolute minimum. You know how careful Doc is. I pinned him down later and he admits he won’t swear in court it couldn’t have happened just twenty minutes earlier, but the medical evidence is strong, if not overpowering, that it was, at least, half an hour before, although he likes forty or fifty minutes better.”

“But we’ve still got Martin’s call that sets the time definitely.”

“Have we?” Gentry got out a cigar and studied it a moment before biting off the end. “I talked to Martin, as you suggested. He never heard Lola Berger’s voice in his life. He doesn’t even claim that the woman who answered the phone said she was Berger. He admits he was excited by his role of playing detective and didn’t give her an opportunity to either confirm or deny her identity before blurting out the fact that she was suspected of murdering Wallace. And she hung up without saying another word except her first hello.”

“You’re assuming it wasn’t Lola Berger who answered Martin’s call?”