Brett Halliday: Too Friendly, Too Dead

“Who is it?”

“Don’t push me.” Rourke pushed back his chair. “Don’t kill the image. It’s tenuous right now. I’ve got to hold onto it. See you at the office.”

He hurried out of the room almost at a trot, head thrust forward and thin shoulders hunched as though he were a hunting dog following an almost indefinable scent.

Shayne paid the bill and left almost immediately behind him. He got his car from the parking lot where he had left it a few hours earlier and drove at a moderate pace toward the News office.

Driving through the balmy hush of the Miami night he was conscious of the beginning of a driving excitement that welled up inside of him. He was coming close to an answer. He knew he was. All his past experience told him he was on the edge of it. Somehow the tangled threads were beginning to untangle. He didn’t know how it would happen, nor where the various threads would lead, but he knew it wouldn’t be long now. He had all the various pieces of the puzzle in his hands and it was only a matter of time before they fitted themselves together into a clear pattern.

As yet, there certainly was no discernible pattern, clear or otherwise. He discovered he was in no hurry to reach the newspaper office. The answer would be there. He had no real doubt of that. He had seen Timothy Rourke in action too often in the past to doubt the veracity of the reporter’s hunch this time.

In the meantime, Shayne enjoyed seeking the answer in his own mind, and he refused to be annoyed when he did not find it. Somewhere at the end of the line was a two-time murderer who had employed sodium amytal twice to kill his victims. It was a vicious, cold-blooded method of killing, and he wouldn’t regret tracking the murderer down.

He felt wholly calm and impersonal about it as he parked outside the News and went in to see if Rourke was at his accustomed desk in the City Room. The reporter was there waiting for him. Slouched back in his chair with two cardboard files he had gotten from the morgue in front of him, and with a satisfied smile on his thin face.

One of the files was fat and bulging with newspaper clippings, and the other was thin. The fat one was labeled “Durand,” the thin one bore the name, “Rodman.”

Rourke patted the Rodman file as Shayne sat down beside him. “This just goes back a little over two months, but I think it’s what you want.” He opened it to display the first clipping, a brief story with a New York dateline, headed: ROMANTIC OCEAN INTERLUDE.

Shayne leaned forward to read the story which began: “When the S.S. Alexander docked at pier 14 this afternoon, reporters were given the details of a moonlit-studded and tropical nights romance which culminated in a seagoing wedding three nights ago performed by Captain Jesse Bergstrom, Commander of the Bermuda vacation liner.

“The happy couple are Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford G. Rodman who became acquainted on the cruise and plighted their troth in Bermuda before the return trip began.

“The radiant bride is the former Betsy Ann Durand of Miami, Florida, daughter of land-developer and real-estate tycoon, G. A. Durand of Miami, and the couple plan to set up residence at the Durand estate on Miami Beach.

“The personable groom is clubman and industrialist Rutherford G. Rodman from Cincinnati, Ohio, who told this reporter he plans to liquidate his holdings in the mid-west and devote his future energies to managing the Durand properties in Florida.

“It was the first venture into marriage for both bride and groom…”

Shayne read the newspaper clipping no further. He pushed it aside, his forehead furrowed in thought. “If it’s the same Rutherford G. Rodman…”

“It is,” Rourke assured him happily. “Here’s a story from our society section five days later. Betsy Ann Durand is headline news in Miami, and we had a photographer out to meet their plane.”

He showed Shayne a second clipping, much longer than the dispatch from New York, featuring a somewhat cloudy shot of a man and woman poised at the top of the steps leading off a jet plane with their arms around each other.

The picture of the man was quite clear, and was unmistakably that of the same Rutherford G. Rodman whose photograph Shayne had been carrying around inside a folded menu all day. The bride was wearing a wide, floppy-brimmed hat which obscured her features somewhat; she was as tall as her husband and stood very straight and gracious beside him.

Shayne studied the picture briefly without bothering to read the text. “That’s our boy,” he muttered. “This Betsy Ann Durand, Tim?”

“One of the important catches in Miami society,” Rourke told him. “You’ve heard of Durand. An associate of Flagler in the old days. Left a lot of millions when he kicked off ten years ago. Betsy Ann was the only child and inherited most of it. Rodman did all right for himself this time.”

He opened the bulging folder marked Durand, and began leafing through it. “Here’s Betsy Ann at Hialeah last year. And another one of her opening the Flower Show at the Woman’s Club.” He slid two glossy portraits out to show Shayne, and the detective studied them with at first a bewildered and then a growing and more positive sense of recognition.

He said, “It’s Mrs. Kelly, Tim. Goddamn it, it has to be Mrs. Kelly!”

“Mrs. Kelly?” echoed Timothy Rourke.

“That’s right. The woman who tried to take out a quarter-million dollar policy on her husband. This Betsy Ann Durand fits Fitzgilpin’s secretary’s description of her to a T.” Shayne closed his eyes and brought to his mind a vivid memory of Mrs. Perkins’ voice that morning. He quoted aloud: “She was pathetic with all her jewelry and mink. She was a woman who looked dowdy no matter what she wore. She was tall and awkward, with big hands and feet, and a great big nose and a thin mouth. You could just imagine her, as a young debutante, sitting on the sidelines and never getting asked to dance no matter how much money her family had.” He opened his eyes to look down at the pictures of Betsy Ann Durand again. “How’s that for a description of the heiress?”

“Absolutely perfect. The secretary was right, you know, about no man ever paying her attention. She must be in her mid-thirties now, and everyone figured her for a confirmed spinster.”

“So she was ready and ripe for a good-looking no-good like Rodman on a tropical cruise. Are they in Miami now?”

“I’m sure they are. They reopened the big house on the Beach. But, Mike. Why in hell would she want to take out a big policy on her new husband? She’s the one with the money. Millions of it.”

“Who knows why a woman does anything? Maybe she figures he’s worth that to her. Sort of coppering her bet.”

“Why would she use an alias?”

“That’s easier to understand. Probably she did know her proposal was illegal, and she was trying Fitzgilpin out. If he’d responded, she would have given her real name. As it was, she left no trail behind her.”

Both men were silent for a moment, staring down at the pictures and clippings and trying to see how this new development fitted into Fitzgilpin’s death.

“We’ve got several things,” Shayne said slowly. “We know he concealed his first wedding from his new wife. The clipping says it was the first marriage for both of them. That story was in a New York paper two months ago. If Rose read it she might well have been tempted to try a little blackmail.”

“Just because he hadn’t told his wife he’d been married before?”

“Well… that. And we don’t even know if he’d gotten a divorce, Tim. Rose hadn’t mentioned it to her best friend if there had been a divorce. Bigamy would make a nice juicy blackmail item. With him married to a millionairess this time. If that were true, you can’t blame Rose for thinking she was in a position to come down to Miami and collect a wad of cash.”