Brett Halliday - Blood on Biscayne Bay

“Perhaps they were letters you’d put away and forgotten,” Shayne suggested.

Her eyes flared angrily. “Do you think I’d bring any silly love letters here when I married Leslie? How could I forget? Besides, I never had any letters such as Mrs. Morgan described.”

“How did she describe them?”

“Written in ink on one side of a sheet of folded note paper. When she initialed them,” Christine went on steadily, “she caught a glimpse of the superscriptions. They were addressed to ‘My sweetest love’ and things like that. I was bowled over. I didn’t know what to think. I never received any letters like that in my life.”

“So you told your husband about it when he got home?”

“N-o-o,” she confessed reluctantly. “Don’t you see? I didn’t know what to do. We’d been married only two weeks. It was all so strange and terrifying. I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me if I told him the truth. You have to admit it sounds utterly mad.”

Shayne nodded gravely. Looking into her pale face and distracted eyes he didn’t dare tell her how implausible it did sound.

“The next morning a special delivery letter came after Leslie had gone to the office. It contained photostats of four letters, each one with four sets of initials on the margin which Mrs. Morgan identified as the ones placed on the letters in her presence. That was all there was in the envelope. Just those photostatic copies.” She paused, biting her underlip and looking at Shayne imploringly. “Now comes the most awful part. You’ve got to believe me. I’ll die if you don’t.”

“I’ll do my best,” Shayne promised.

“None of the letters were dated. Just the day of the week. They each began with some mushy phrase. They were all signed “Vicky” and I recognized the handwriting, Michael.”

“Whose?”

“Victor Morrison’s, my former employer in New York. I recognized it at once. It’s quite distinctive and I’ve seen it often enough during the years I was his private secretary. The letters were the most awful things. And they sounded exactly as though they had been written to me during the month after I resigned and was getting ready to be married. They mentioned the terrible emptiness of the office since I’d left; they spoke of nights he’d spent in my apartment, with violent phrases of love. They begged me to reconsider and not do anything hasty while he arranged to get rid of his wife so we could be married.” When she stopped talking there were two red spots in her cheeks.

“And then-?” Shayne prompted her.

“I thought I was going crazy. I read the notes over several times, trying to see what they meant. The more I read them the more I realized how horribly I was trapped. No one would ever believe either Mr. Morrison or myself if we both swore he hadn’t written those letters to me. No one could ever think anything except that we’d been lovers. Don’t you see how fiendish the thing is? The position I would be in if Leslie ever saw those letters?”

“Forgeries?” Shayne muttered with a deep scowl.

She said hopelessly, “I thought of that at once. But I didn’t know why anyone would do a terrible thing like that. Nor who possibly could. They were his phrases. The way he thought and wrote. As I read them over and over I got the strangest feeling that they were written to me; that they couldn’t possibly have been written to anyone else. There were little intimate things about office routine; about the way he gave dictation-” She broke off with a shudder and covered her face with her hands. “I began to think nothing was real. That I was living in some sort of dream and had actually forgotten the truth.”

Shayne ground out his cigarette in the small ash tray he held in his left hand. “What happened next?”

She took her hands from her eyes and her slender body went lax in the chair. “A telephone call. A man whose voice sounded thick-and fuzzy-as though he might be drunk. He asked me if I had read the photostats and whether it was worth ten thousand dollars to me to keep the originals out of my husband’s hands. I told him I didn’t have any money, that it would take me some time to raise it. You see, I’d thought about the pearls and knew I needed time to have a duplicate made, and I also thought about somehow proving the letters were forgeries. So I asked him for a little time.

“He agreed as soon as I convinced him I didn’t have any large sum of cash. But he said, just to show my good faith and to put the transaction on more of a business basis, I should make out an IOU for ten thousand and mail it at once to Arnold Barbizon at the Play-Mor Club. Then, he said if I wanted to I could tell my husband I’d lost the money gambling and Leslie would pay it without realizing it was blackmail.”

Shayne’s jaw was set hard, the muscles in his lean jaw were quivering. “Smart,” he said angrily. “As soon as they had your IOU you could never prove it had been obtained by blackmail. And that’s also why Barbizon didn’t mind too much giving up the IOU last night. They still have the letters to fall back on. If I’d known the truth last night-”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I was ashamed to tell you. I thought no one would need to know. As soon as the money was paid I was to receive the original letters by special delivery.”

“You’d never have gotten them so easily,” Shayne told her. “A blackmailer is never satisfied with his first bite. You should know that. It would have gone on and on until you were drained absolutely dry.”

“I guess so,” she agreed tonelessly. “I didn’t think about it that way. I had no one I could turn to.”

“If you’re telling the whole truth,” said Shayne, “the letters are probably forgeries. We can prove that easily enough if we can get a sample of Morrison’s handwriting.”

“I’ve told you the truth,” she said, “but they aren’t forgeries.”

“How do you know?”

“I took them to a handwriting expert, a man named Bernard Holloway who is supposed to be very good. I had a note of Mr. Morrison’s for comparison. One he sent with a wedding present. Mr. Holloway made a long report listing a number of similarities, and concluded with a definite statement that there was no doubt that the letters were written by the same person.”

“Holloway is good,” he told her. “One of the best in the country. His testimony has a lot of weight in any court. Now why is your ex-employer trying to frame you? Would he be interested in ten grand?”

“Mr. Morrison? Why, he’s several times a millionaire.”

“Then why?”

“Do you think he-arranged it? On purpose?”

“What else am I supposed to think?” Shayne asked angrily. “If he actually wrote the letters, though you claim there was nothing between you-”

“There wasn’t,” she interrupted desperately. “Ever. He was kind and generous and quite friendly, but there was never anything like that. I swear there wasn’t.”

Shayne was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then asked, “Could he have harbored a secret passion for you? Perhaps he wrote the letters to let off steam and someone got hold of them and realized how they could be used after you married a wealthy man.”

“Oh no!” she exclaimed, her cheeks flaming again. “I’m very sure Mr. Morrison never had a single thought like that about me. He’s quite happily married.”

“To a wife he’s planning to get rid of?” Shayne said sardonically. “All right-what do you make of it?”

“I don’t. What can I think? It’s utterly incomprehensible.”

“We’ll have to get in touch with him at once,” Shayne said with sudden decision. “With his denial, and with the testimony of people who knew you both that you weren’t having an affair, we should be able to tell your husband everything and squelch the blackmailer.”