Brett Halliday: Murder by Proxy

“She can’t,” he told them flatly. “It just isn’t in the books. So, what is the answer? I give you two possibilities. Either it wasn’t Mrs. Harris who flew to Miami Monday afternoon… or she drew attention to herself intentionally and with malice aforethought… for reasons which are at present unknown to us.”

He calmly sipped cognac and beamed at Rourke as the reporter objected. “But we know it was Mrs. Harris, Mike. A dozen people identified that picture. And the fingerprint report was positive.”

Shayne nodded agreeably. “We all know that fingerprints don’t lie and the New York police are infallible. All right, we’ll have to accept the fact that the dead woman is Mrs. Harris. We’ll come back to that later. If she was going around drawing attention to herself, giving men the impression that she could be had easily, why? What possible reason could she have had?” Neither of them answered him. He took a sip of cognac and declared, “That’s the crux of the problem. Let’s crack the crux. Come on, Tim. You need more inspiration. Hell’s bells, man, you and I have cracked more difficult crux’s than this in the past.” He leaned forward and poured fine old cognac into Rourke’s cup. “You, too, angel?”

Lucy put her hand over her cup and shook her head absently. “One answer is that she was deliberately creating this image of herself, knowing that she was going to be away from her hotel room for several days and fixing it so too much fuss wouldn’t be made about it. I’m not saying it very well, I’m afraid. But she would know the hotel would check around, if her room remained vacant, and, if they got reports from the hotel clerk and bellboy and bartender indicating that she was the sort of woman who probably would, be sleeping around, then they’d be inclined to sit back and let matters take their course.”

“Which is exactly what happened,” Shayne pointed out, happily. “Go to the head of the class, Lucy. Bob Merrill did get those reports about her, and since her room was on a credit card and her luggage still there, he did nothing about reporting her. So now we have a logical reason for the way she acted. And that brings us to another crux. Why did she plan to be away from her hotel for several days? Disregarding the obvious reason which doesn’t seem in character… what other reason could she have?”

Again, he received no answer. He sighed deeply and took another drink.

“Let’s not at this point disregard a strange coincidence. I correct myself. Seeming coincidence. I don’t believe in coincidences. Not in murder cases. I refer to the fact that Ruth Collins disappeared from New York on Monday… the same day that Mrs. Harris flew to Miami and checked into the Beachhaven. She told her room-mate she was going to the Catskills on Monday to stay for two weeks, and she ostensibly did so. But she had cancelled her reservation the Friday before, and didn’t turn up. So far as we know, no one has seen her since. Where did she go? Where is she now?”

Timothy Rourke sat erect excitedly. “Didn’t you tell me that Gifford mentioned a strong resemblance between her and Mrs. Harris? Both blondes and beautiful and well-stacked?”

Shayne nodded with a grin. “I wondered when you were going to think about that.”

“But, hell, it’s impossible,” Rourke objected, slumping back and taking a sip of cognac. “Too many people definitely identified this picture. If there was that close a resemblance, Gifford would have told you.”

Shayne nodded. “Yeh. I don’t think they were identical twins or anything like that. I still wonder where Ruth Collins has disappeared to.”

Lucy Hamilton hesitated and then murmured, “If all those people could be mistaken about the picture… but, no.” She shook her head decisively. “We know the dead woman is Mrs. Harris.”

“We keep coming back to that,” agreed Shayne. “And that brings us to another major question. Why was she beaten so as to be unidentifiable after she was shot? Everyone knows about fingerprints these days. If you really want to render a body unidentifiable, you have to cut off or mutilate the fingers.”

“A stupid murderer might not realize this,” Rourke suggested. “If he knew that her fingerprints weren’t on record, he might think there’d be no way of checking… without realizing how simple it would be for police to get comparison prints from the apartment in New York.”

“Sorry, Tim. I don’t think Herbert Harris is stupid. In fact, I’m beginning to believe he came awful damn close to committing a perfect crime.”

“You think he did it?”

“His wife is dead,” Shayne said flatly. “He stands to collect a hundred thousand dollars from an insurance policy. He isn’t too solvent, and he has another woman on the string. That’s just too damned many coincidences for me to stomach. Yes. I think Herbert Harris is our boy. And, by God, I’m beginning to get a faint glimmering of how he pulled it off.”

“How?” Lucy and Rourke spoke the word simultaneously. Shayne emptied his cup of cognac, marshaling his thoughts. He spoke very slowly, as though testing each word as he went along.

“Let’s suppose Mrs. Harris didn’t get on that plane at all in New York Monday afternoon. Suppose she was already dead in the New York apartment when the plane took off with Ruth Collins aboard, using Mrs. Harris’ ticket, carrying her luggage and handbag complete with credit card, and even wearing her rather distinctive wedding ring.

“When Harris gets back from the airport, after seeing Ruth off, it would be about time for him to put her in the trunk of his automobile, before rigor mortis set in. Ruth would make his alibi perfect. She plans to disappear Monday night, and he takes great care in New York to appear in the right places at the right times to make it impossible for him to have been in Miami either of those two crucial nights… as Gifford reported. He’s a partner in the brokerage firm, so it wouldn’t be too difficult for him to arrange the trip on Thursday night to Charleston. And it would appear perfectly natural for him to decide on the spur of the moment to drive on to Miami to spend the weekend with his wife.

“Wait a minute, Tim.” Shayne raised a big hand to still the reporter. “I know what you’re going to say, but let me think this out my own way. Ruth Collins had disappeared from the Beachhaven Monday night in a manner that makes two things pretty certain. One is, that no one will seriously look for her until Harris turns up and raises the alarm Saturday morning. The other is that when the body is found in the rented car, she has cleverly laid several false trails that Monday evening, and the police won’t really be surprised that she got herself murdered.

“Safest place to leave the rented car for a few days is in the hotel parking lot with a guest sticker on it. So we have Harris driving in from Charleston early Saturday morning, meeting his secretary with the convertible at a prearranged spot and transferring his wife’s body from his car to the convertible. She drives it back to the hotel lot and parks it again, and then goes back to wherever she’s been in hiding since Monday night. So, now we know why the face was beaten. To keep people who had seen Ruth Collins from failing to recognize the corpse. Harris knew damned well that fingerprints would prove the dead woman his wife. He had to have that in order to collect the insurance. How’s that for inspiration?” He beamed at them happily and refilled his cup, splashing cognac on his desk in the process.

“It’s a hell of an inspiration,” Rourke said sourly.

“Everything fits,” Shayne insisted. “Remember, there wasn’t any blood in the trunk of the convertible. And remember that the people at the hotel, who might get a look at the body, had only seen the supposed Mrs. Harris briefly a few days before. Gifford describes Ruth Collins as similar in coloring and size, so they would accept the dead body as the woman they had seen.”