Brett Halliday - The Violent World of Michael Shayne

Wall walked up to her and gave her a piercing look. She met it without flinching.

“I’ll go on, Senator, if you’ll back away. I’m not at my best when people are breathing on me.”

He moved off with an angry exclamation.

She continued, “They knew that he and Trina Hitchcock were having an affair. I was asked-quite forcibly, I may say-to take advantage of my occasional presence in the Hitchcock house and plant a small electronic transmitting device, to pick up their conversations. The assumption was, I believe, that Senator Wall might be using Miss Hitchcock to control or influence her father.”

“You filthy-” Trina began.

Wall’s face was puzzled. “I’d like to hear the rest of this, Trina.”

“The thing was,” Maggie said, “it was very much of a longshot, and you couldn’t expect them to put their own agents on twenty-four-hour duty, on the off chance that something important might come over. They thought I’d know when Trina and Senator Wall were together. They were wrong, actually; I wasn’t that much of an intimate of the Hitchcock household. However, last night I gathered from Mike Shayne that various extraordinary things were taking place, and I kept the receiver open. And suddenly, sure enough, I heard Senator Wall. Well, what I was supposed to do was tape what he said, but I couldn’t get the miserable recorder to function. I’m so stupid about anything mechanical. So I took notes.”

Opening her bag, she took out a folded sheaf of pages torn from a stenographer’s notebook. “I got as much as I could, but my shorthand is terrible rusty.” She put on her glasses. “Trina Hitchcock’s voice-now you understand this isn’t verbatim, by any means-Trina said, ‘What are we going to do, Tom?’ And his voice said, ‘I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Let nature take its course. Nobody’s been hurt so far. The profit, my God, it’s fantastic. There’s only one stumbling block, and that’s Bixler. Something’s going to have to be done about him. There’s danger in trying to buy him off. He’ll have an exaggerated idea about how much he deserves. And could we trust him?’” Suddenly Trina sprang out of her chair and raked Maggie’s glasses off her face.

“You’re lying, you dirty tramp! The whole thing is a damn dirty lie!”

She snatched the notes and thrust them at Wall. “Here, Tom!”

Her eyes shining, Maggie clipped her with an awkward right. As Trina staggered, one of her heels broke. She tore off her other shoe and came back at Maggie, who seized a newspaper from the table and flung it in her face. It came apart, blinding her for a moment.

Then they were grabbed from behind.

Trina screamed, “Let go! I’m going to kill that bitch! I swear I’m going to kill her!”

“I’d like to see you try,” Maggie said.

“OK, girls,” Shayne said, stepping between them. “War’s over.”

“Of course she’s been lying,” Senator Wall said. “What interests me is who put her up to it?”

Sam Toby exclaimed, “Hitchcock!”

Everybody looked at the chair near the door, where Senator Hitchcock had been sitting. He was gone.

11:25 A.M.

“What did you think this ruckus was all about?” Shayne asked. “Trina wanted to give him a chance to get away.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Trina said icily after divesting herself of the newspaper. “He must have gone to talk to the TV people.”

“Does anybody else think so?” Shayne said.

Senator Wall blustered, “If you’re hoping to convince anybody that Emory Hitchcock had any part in the theft of that diary-”

“It’s hard to tell what people will do before they do it,” Shayne said. “Yeah-there’s no question that Hitchcock is the one who stole the diary and milked it for just about a million bucks, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. He also killed Bixler, not because he’s a homicidal maniac, but because he had to. Bixler was too flighty and unstable, and it wouldn’t have been safe to cut him in.”

“Hitchcock,” Senator Redpath said. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe it.”

“I only started believing it myself at about five o’clock this morning. He made his big mistake when he didn’t take his daughter into his confidence. He misjudged the girl. He thought she’d be shocked.”

“Shayne,” Senator Redpath said, “we don’t want to be too leisurely, do we? When you said you were sending a man to look for the Manners stock at Trina Hitchcock’s, wasn’t the object of that to alarm Emory?”

“Sure,” Shayne agreed. “And the fireworks started a minute later, which probably means that the stock is hidden somewhere in the house. But let’s give him another couple of minutes.”

“Will you explain something, Mike?” Maggie Smith said. “What was the point of that whole business with me, or wasn’t it connected?”

“Of course it was connected,” Shayne said. “Wall, for his friends in National Aviation, had begun to look into the old investigation of Toby. Probably Hitchcock had pulled everything out of the files, but he couldn’t keep Bixler out of town indefinitely without calling attention to his interest in the jerk. Sooner or later Wall was going to add everything up and decide that one of his colleagues had been up to some dirty work, and had taken over the theft of the diary after sending Bixler out of town. But he couldn’t conceivably suspect Hitchcock, because the old man had arranged something very clever. Maggie Smith did a job once for Toby. We can skip the details. Just because somebody does a certain kind of thing once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again. I’ve known that for years, but it slipped my mind. Toby, you understand, was the only person who had to know that Hitchcock was pulling the strings. Manners didn’t know it, Oulihan didn’t know it, Mrs. Redpath didn’t know it. Hitchcock got Toby to suggest a woman who could be linked to some one of Toby’s operations in the past, and Toby arranged the dinner where Maggie and Hitchcock met. She wasn’t the aggressor in this, Hitchcock was. It was the perfect red herring, except that it worked too well. It scared Trina into hiring an out-of-town detective to break it up. She tried to fire me when she found out how much money her old man had cleared, but by then it was too late. I was a little rough with Maggie, and it didn’t bother me at all. She denied it, of course. And then it struck me that the whole case against her depended on the say-so of one man, Toby, who isn’t exactly famous for honesty and square-dealing.”

“Now, Shayne,” Toby said.

Senator Redpath said, “The diary, perhaps. Emory’s always been conscious of being the poorest man in the Senate. He couldn’t save anything out of his salary. He tried to get more insurance, and they turned him down because he was a cardiac patient. But murder-”

Shayne looked at his watch. “He didn’t know that was where it would end. Everything else worked like a charm. Then Bixler came back, sold Wall the story of the diary, and stirred everything up again. Wall made certain deductions. We invented that conversation between Trina and Wall, but it probably wasn’t too far off. My guess would be that Wall settled for half, which was more than he could ever expect from National. If he ever married Trina, the other fifty percent would make a nice dowry. But Hitchcock still thought he’d better talk to Bixler. To be on the safe side, he used Wall’s car. And Bixler had had a hunch, which he was happy to share with an important Senator like Hitchcock. Wouldn’t whoever stole the diary put the copy in a safe-deposit box? It probably wouldn’t be his regular box-the diary was too hot. I found a note in Bixler’s wallet. He was going to start checking the banks this morning. And Hitchcock couldn’t allow that, because he himself had rented a box in the Second Federal on June 24th, the day before the diary was stolen.”