Brett Halliday - Shoot to Kill

Griggs looked at Shayne with raised eyebrows and a scowl of utter bafflement. “Victor? How the devil did he know…?”

“Conroy is being held at headquarters waiting for us to question him,” Shayne explained. “The way he tells it: He discovered Ames’ dead body in the study and thought Ralph had done it on his first trip, and he panicked and rushed over here to Mrs. Larson because he was actually her lover instead of Ames and he was afraid she would get hysterical and blurt out the truth to Ralph if he wasn’t here to prevent it.”

“Is that true, Mrs. Larson? Were you and Victor Conroy lovers?”

“It’s true enough. It just happened… and Ralph got the idea somehow that it was Wesley Ames I was seeing. That’s why it was so utterly horrible when he ran out with his gun to kill Wesley. It was the wrong man, don’t you see? I tried to stop him… I tried to tell him… but he didn’t hear a word I said.”

Sergeant Griggs drew in a deep breath, pondering and evaluating this information. “What did Conroy say and do when he came here?”

“He was excited and he asked where Ralph was and I told him he’d gone out threatening to kill Wesley, and he said he’d already done it and it wasn’t safe for me to stay here, and for me to pack a bag and come with him to hide some place where Ralph couldn’t find me until he was safely under arrest.

“I hardly knew what I was doing. I started to pack a bag and go with him, and then I suddenly thought how it was all my fault and I couldn’t run away and desert Ralph like that. But Victor got furious and insisted and tried to force me to go on packing my bag, and we wrestled in the bedroom and that’s when I got a nose-bleed. And then I just hardly know,” she ended helplessly. “I gave in and said all right, and he washed my face and gave me a drink, and helped me down the stairs to his car and we drove off.

“Things got fuzzy while we were driving and I dimly remember going into a room and lying down on a bed. And then I didn’t know anything until Mr. Shayne was standing over me and shaking me awake.”

“He doped her with some of her own sleeping powders,” Shayne told Griggs. “He said he gave her two of them, but it must have been more to have acted so fast. I don’t believe he meant her any harm. He just wanted her out of the way and incommunicado until he could get back to the house and brazen it out when Ames’ body was found.”

“Not knowing at that point that Ralph had come back with a gun to shoot a dead man?”

“He couldn’t have known anything about that, according to the timing. Naturally, he kept his mouth tightly shut when he did walk in and learn that Ralph had been arrested for murder.”

“Naturally,” agreed Griggs grimly. “He must have felt pretty damn good and smug about things at that point.”

He turned to Mrs. Larson and said in a curiously gentle voice: “I think that’s all we need from you for now. Will you be all right alone here? I could leave a man, if you like.”

“Why shouldn’t I be all right? You… you think Victor did it, don’t you?”

“I don’t rightly know what we think at this point,” Griggs told her. “You got some more sleeping pills if you need them?”

Dorothy Larson shuddered. “I’m sure there are some, though I don’t think I’ll ever take another one. Why don’t you go on? I’d like to be alone.”

As the three men went down the stairs together, Shayne asked the sergeant, “Did you latch onto anything new after I left the Ames house?”

“Nothing worth a damn. Going over their stories a second time just left things in the same mess. They all denied hearing anything from the study during the crucial half hour. I didn’t tell them about the stab wound, of course. Theoretically the only person who knows about that is the one who stabbed him. Now you tell me Conroy knew all the time he’d been stabbed. Why didn’t he tell us in the beginning if he was innocent?”

“I guess he thought it was better just to let well enough alone when he found Larson charged with the crime anyhow. His story is that he was convinced that Larson was the knife-slayer.”

“How could he be when that back door was bolted on the inside?”

“Conroy didn’t know about that… he says.” Shayne paused, “What are you doing about Sutter?”

“Nothing yet,” fumed Griggs. “He seems to be missing too. Checked in at a hotel all right, but he still hadn’t turned up in his room the last I heard from the man I sent to bring him in.”

Shayne said casually, “I doubt that he’ll have anything useful to contribute.” They had stopped at the curb beside the sergeant’s car, and the taxi Shayne had been using was parked three cars behind it. Not wishing to draw Griggs’ attention to his unorthodox conveyance, Shayne opened the door for the sergeant and suggested, “You go ahead on in. I’ll follow right along because I want to sit in when you question Conroy.”

Griggs said reluctantly, “I guess you earned that.” He stooped to enter his car and paused in that position, “You haven’t told me how you got onto him… and his having Mrs. Larson stashed away in a motel room.”

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” Shayne told him breezily, striding away. “Pure coincidence. Just one of my lucky hunches.”

He walked past the taxi slowly, turned and came back to it as the Homicide car pulled away. He followed at a moderate pace and parked the cab unobtrusively around the corner from the police station in front of an all night short order joint, and walked back to climb the one flight of stairs to Griggs’ office.

He found the sergeant seated alone at his desk, and he almost beamed as he told the redhead, “I think maybe we got some kind of break, though I’m damned if I see how it adds up right now. But it’s sure as hell a tie-in between Sutter and Victor Conroy. You know I had a man waiting at Sutter’s hotel for him to show up. I sent Powers because he knew him by sight. I just had a call from Powers when I walked in a minute ago. He was waiting outside the hotel when a Pontiac pulled up and Sutter got out of it. He refused to tell Powers where he’d been the last hour, and you know what?”

With a sinking heart Shayne realized that he did, indeed, “know what.” But he concealed his knowledge and asked weakly, “What, Sergeant?”

“It was Victor Conroy’s car that Sutter was driving. I knew there was something fishy about that lawyer all along. I’ll get the truth out of him now. What he was really doing in Miami and what his business was with Ames.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne, suddenly very conscious of the fact that he had twenty-five thousand dollars of blackmail money wadded into his right-hand pants pocket.

“While we’re waiting for him,” he said desperately, “how about having Conroy and Larson in?”

“They’re both on their way right now. One thing I want to ask Conroy before Sutter gets here is what the lawyer was doing driving his car.”

“As a matter of fact, I can explain that,” Shayne said quickly. “Remember asking me how I found Conroy and Mrs. Larson in the motel room? It was this way…”

He paused, cudgeling his brain for a plausible explanation that would satisfy the sergeant and sidetrack him from his present line of inquiry which was bound to expose the blackmail angle and his questionable part in it.

Before he was able to think of anything the door opened and a policeman ushered Ralph Larson into the room. He was still sullen-faced and defiant, and he looked at Griggs curiously as the sergeant leaned back in his chair and smiled benignly.

“You’re a lucky son-of-a-gun, Larson!”

“I am?” He looked bewildered. “Why?”

“Because we’ve got a damned efficient police department in Miami, and we leave no stones unturned in seeking the solution of a crime.” Griggs spoke sonorously and Shayne realized he must have memorized his little speech carefully. “First though,” Griggs went on, thoroughly enjoying himself, “if you’re still worried about your wife… forget it. She’s safely back at home. I left her there myself not more than fifteen minutes ago.”