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Brett Halliday: Too Friendly, Too Dead

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Brett Halliday Too Friendly, Too Dead

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“There wasn’t any difficulty recently? Nothing to upset him?” probed Shayne.

“Nothing at all. Well, there was a funny thing happened about a week ago at the office, and we laughed about it. Some woman wanted to insure her husband’s life for a quarter of a million dollars without him knowing about it… the husband, I mean. That’s absolutely against the rules, you know, and Jerome told her so point-blank. He didn’t know her from Eve, and didn’t know why she came to him with such a proposition, but he suspected it was because he has such a small business and she hoped he’d be tempted by the fee. Because it would be huge, you know, on such a yearly premium. And that made him angry. Because she had the effrontery to think he’d do something like that just for the money involved. He told her off flatly, I guess. It was funny,” she added wistfully. “For one whole evening, we both felt rich. You see, she called one day to make an appointment to see him the next day and discuss the policy and he told me about it that night. Naturally, she didn’t tell him she wanted to take out the policy without her husband’s knowledge, so it was a shock the next day when he came home and told me it was all off.”

Shayne was driving westward quite slowly over the Causeway, staying in the right-hand lane and letting other cars scoot past on the left, letting the widow talk herself out because he realized that was the best possible therapy under the circumstances and also because these were exactly the sort of things he needed to know about Jerome Fitzgilpin if he was going to investigate his death.

“This woman,” he asked, “didn’t come back?”

“No. I’m sure she didn’t or Jerome would have mentioned it. I’m sure he made her understand emphatically that he would have no part of such a scheme.”

“Was he attractive to women?” Shayne asked abruptly. “Did he ever give you reason for jealousy?”

“Jerome?” She laughed with the happy indulgence of a woman who knew herself well-loved. “They liked him, of course. Everybody did. A lot of his clients were widows or spinsters who had to earn their own livings, and they trusted him and asked for business advice. But we’ve been married fifteen years and I don’t believe he ever as much as looked at another woman.”

“I can believe that,” Shayne told her sincerely with a sidelong glance. “You’re a very beautiful woman. And a lot younger than Jerome, I’d guess. How much? Fifteen years?”

“Eleven,” she replied promptly. “I was only nineteen when I married him and I’ve never regretted it.” She sighed deeply and relapsed into silence, and despite his procrastination they were approaching the mainland.

Then she laid her hand on his forearm and asked timidly, “Will you work on the case, Mike? I can afford to pay you. Jerome left quite a lot of insurance, and I’d feel so much better if I knew you were working on it. That little man at the Beach! Ugh.” She shuddered. “He gave me the creeps somehow. Lucy Hamilton talks about you and your cases a lot and I know how successful you are. I suppose you know Lucy is hopelessly in love with you,” she confided.

Shayne laughed. “Not hopelessly. Sometimes she hates me. Right now, for instance, I’m sure she’d hate me if I didn’t take your case… or if I accepted a fee for solving it.” He had turned north a few blocks off the Causeway, and now drew up in front of Linda’s apartment house.

“I’ll go up with you,” he suggested, “and see if I can induce Lucy to invite me down to her place for a cup of coffee and a slug of cognac.”

“I can make coffee,” she offered. “And there’s whiskey, but I’m afraid no cognac.”

“Lucy always keeps a bottle on hand,” he assured her, “and I think you’ll want a few minutes alone with the children.”

He took her arm as they climbed the stairs together, and released it when Lucy opened the door of the Fitzgilpin apartment and he saw a boy of nine and a little girl of six clinging to his secretary’s two hands.

They both started talking at once when they saw their mother in the doorway, “Mommy… Mom… Lucy’s gonna make a picnic… take us to the park… to have a picnic lunch,” little Sara explained soberly, and then Ralph pulled away from Lucy and straightened his shoulders manfully and asked, “Where’s daddy, Mom? Lucy said there’d been an accident…?”

“… cident,” echoed Sara, and Linda dropped to her knees on the floor and held out both her arms, and the two children crowded into them.

Looking over their heads into Lucy’s mutely questioning eyes, Shayne shook his head and said, “Have you got a drink downstairs, Angel? I need one.” She understood at once, and circled the little family trio to go out the door with him. Shayne pulled it shut firmly, and told her, “Linda will be okay. She’s got what it takes. Right now she doesn’t need us.”

“It was Jerome?” she breathed as she went down the stairs with him to her apartment

He nodded absently. “Not only that, Angel, but it’s not as cut and dried as we thought. He was rolled, all right. Even a fairly inexpensive ring taken off his finger, but it wasn’t just a conventional mugging. He died of poison.”

Lucy had unlocked her door and pushed it open. She turned to him with exactly the same exclamatory words with which Linda had greeted the same announcement. “Poisoned? Oh no!”

Shayne nodded, walking past her into the familiar, pleasantly cool living room. “It’s just a preliminary report, but the M. E. on the Beach doesn’t make mistakes. Painter tried to take Linda over the hurdles, of course, on account of that, but I put my oar in and shut him up for the time being.”

Having worked with Shayne for a lot of years on a lot of cases, Lucy Hamilton knew exactly what he meant without any further explanation. A poisoning almost positively indicated premeditation. Very few poisoners act on the spur of the moment. It also, in a large majority of cases, meant a woman murderer… particularly if the victim were a male. More than that, it was (too often) the preferred method for wives to get rid of unwanted husbands.

Lucy came to him in the middle of the room and clutched his arm fiercely. “Not Linda, Michael. I know her. I’ve seen them together a lot. She’s a lovely mother… crazy about those two kids. And they were nuts about their daddy. She’d never in the world…”

Shayne grinned down tiredly into Lucy’s intense face. “All right. So I’ve got a job cut out for me. A cup of your coffee might help.”

“I’ve got the percolator ready to plug in.” She released his arm and hurried into the kitchen. He dropped his angular frame on the sofa and lit a cigarette, and Lucy called out to him, “Could you stand a drink first?”

“First and with,” he told her firmly, and settled back on the sofa and drew deeply on his cigarette until she came in with a four-ounce glass of cognac in one hand and a tall glass of ice water in the other.

He accepted the drink with muttered thanks, a thoughtful scowl on his face. “Right now, I don’t know what the poison is or how taken, though Petey intimated he was well loaded with alcohol also. Any chance of suicide, Lucy?”

“No. I don’t think so. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles, no, Michael. He just… well… Lucy spread out her hands helplessly. “He wasn’t the suicidal type, Michael.”

“If there is such a thing,” growled Shayne, taking a long and thankful pull at the cognac glass and washing it down with ice water. “All right. We skip that for the moment. Any more ideas in that pretty head of yours?”

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