Brett Halliday - The Corpse That Never Was

It was a two-family, one-story house on a larger corner lot. Three young boys were playing on the sparse grass in the unshaded yard, and they all turned to look at Shayne with unabashed curiosity as he went up the dirt walk and rang the doorbell on the right-hand side.

The door opened and a thin-faced, middle-aged woman looked out at him inquiringly. She wore fresh make-up that looked as though it had been applied hurriedly, and her hair was in frizzy little curls which had evidently just been released from curlers.

She said, “Mr. Shayne?” and he nodded, and she said, “Max hasn’t showed up yet. Won’t you come in?”

He followed her down a hall that was littered with roller skates and a velocipede, and into a cluttered living room where the shades were drawn at the windows.

She snatched a magazine off the most comfortable looking chair in the room, and said uncertainly. “Sit right down. I know Max won’t be long. He always calls me if he can’t make it for lunch. Can I get you a beer… or anything?”

Shayne said, “No, thanks. You’re Mrs. Wentworth?”

She nodded and backed away to a shabby sofa where she seated herself with the magazine in her lap. “Is it something about Max’s work you wanted to see him about?”

“Couple of questions about a case he’s on,” Shayne told her. “He is working, isn’t he?”

“Oh, he manages to stay pretty busy. Not today though. That’s why I don’t understand him being late for lunch. He promised yesterday that he’d be home all day and take me’n the kids to the beach. Then this morning he made a phone call and said he had to go down to the office for a little while, but he’d be back for lunch sure.”

“Anything to do with the job he was doing for Mrs. Nathan?” Shayne asked casually.

“Max hardly ever tells me anything about his cases.” Then the name struck her hard and she drew in her breath and leaned forward intently. “You mean that Mrs. Nathan from the Beach? The one you busted in on last night with her paramour?”

“Wasn’t Max doing some work for her?”

“Not that he ever told me. Not even this morning when it was all on the radio. But he never does,” she added bitterly. “You’d think a private detective would come home with all kinds of interesting stories to tell, wouldn’t you? But not Max. He always says it’s just a job like anything else. From what I read in the paper, you don’t find it like that, Mr. Shayne. Murders and suicides and all. Beautiful blondes. Just like they showed it on TeeVee when your program was running. I used to get Max to watch it and I’d say, ‘Now, why don’t you get cases like that?’ and he’d just sniff and say detecting wasn’t anything like that in real life, and it was just a story they made up, like, out in Hollywood.”

“Did he work last night?” Shayne asked idly.

“Last night… and every Friday for the past month. Out till all hours. Some cheap divorce case, I guess.” Her upper lip curled. “That’s all Max gets mostly.” There was defeat in her voice and Shayne felt obscurely sorry for the woman who had married Max Wentworth expecting to share the glamour and excitement of his work.

He lit a cigarette and assured her, “My cases are pretty humdrum most of the time, too.” He glanced at his watch, aware of an obscure sense of foreboding that was tugging at him.

Every Friday night for the past month, she’d said. Out till all hours.

“How late was he last night?” he asked abruptly, without knowing he was going to ask her until he heard the words come out.

“I don’t know for sure. Midnight I guess, anyhow. I went to sleep about eleven and didn’t hear him come in.”

“And he didn’t say anything to you this morning… after he heard the broadcast about Mrs. Nathan?”

“No. That was at ten o’clock. He’d finished his breakfast and was getting ready to go to the office when we heard it. I hadn’t turned it on before that so he could sleep late. He said he’d just be a little while. I don’t know what’s keeping him.”

Shayne looked at his watch again and got to his feet. “I’m afraid I can’t wait any longer, Mrs. Wentworth. When Max comes in tell him I’d like to have him call me. Either at my office or my hotel.”

“I’ll surely tell him, Mr. Shayne. But I know if you just wait a little minute longer…”

Shayne said, “I’m sorry. I must go.” He went out and she followed him to the door, protesting that Max always came home for lunch when he said he would, and Shayne thanked her again and found himself unconsciously hurrying down the path to his car.

It took him less than five minutes to reach an empty parking space in front of the building on West Flagler Street that housed Wentworth’s office. There was a dingy lobby that was empty on this Saturday afternoon, an air of desolation and decay about the premises. There was an elevator at the rear but it wasn’t in use today, and a directory on the wall listed Wentworth’s office as 212.

Shayne climbed the stairs to the second floor without hearing anything to indicate that any of the offices were occupied. He stopped in front of 212 and knocked on the door perfunctorily, studying the simple lock at the same time and getting a ring of keys from his pocket.

He selected one which entered the lock but refused to turn inside it.

The second key he tried opened the door. He pushed it open directly onto a gloomy, square room with a big desk in the middle of it.

Max Wentworth lay on the floor in front of the desk. His head was smashed in and lay in a pool of thickening blood.

Shayne stood on the threshold and looked down at the dead man in the dim light for a long moment. Then he nudged the door shut with his shoulder, not hard enough to let the latch catch, got a pencil from his pocket and used the end of it to flip the wall switch by the door and flood the room with light.

He knelt beside Wentworth’s body and touched the cool flesh of the man’s wrist and studied the clotted blood that had flowed from a vicious blow that had crushed the detective’s right temple and the side of his head above the ear.

Shayne guessed he had been dead at least a couple of hours.

He got to his feet slowly and thrust his hands deep into his pockets to remind himself not to touch anything inadvertently, and inspected the room slowly and carefully.

There was no sign of a struggle; nothing appeared to be out of place. The desk was bare except for a telephone on one corner of it; a swivel chair was pushed back from behind the desk. There were three straight chairs in an orderly row against the right-hand wall, and two metal filing cabinets against the opposite wall.

Shayne circled the body to stand in front of the filing cabinets. Each one had three drawers, and an oblong of cardboard in a slot at the top of each drawer. They were lettered consecutively, A-D, E-H, etc.

The top drawer of the second cabinet was the M-P file. Shayne put his pencil inside the handle and pulled. The drawer was unlocked and slid out easily on roller bearings. The drawer held two or three dozen cardboard folders, some very thin and some bulging with papers, each with a name tab on it in alphabetical order. The first one was tabbed Mason, J. M. They were held upright by a metal divider inside the drawer, and Shayne flipped through half a dozen M’s to Nederov, P. He hesitated with a frown, checked back on the last M to be certain he had not made a mistake, then went past Nederov to Nelson and to Nestiger.

There was no file tabbed Nathan in the drawer. Either Wentworth had not got around to starting a Nathan file, or else the folder had been removed from its proper place.