Brett Halliday - Date with a Dead Man

“Then it musta been him,” smirked Peter Cunningham, pointing a blunt finger at Cross. “I was with Mrs. Meredith in the Biscayne Hotel when you left her suite to go meet Mrs. Meany. She was dead when you got there from what I heard. You ask Mrs. Meredith and she’ll tell you I was right there with her.”

“We will ask Mrs. Meredith presently,” Shayne assured him, “but first I want to settle one thing once and for all. Yesterday while I was questioning Cross about Beatrice’s death, I asked him pointblank if Leon Wallace’s name was mentioned in Groat’s diary. He denied that it was, but refused to let me read the diary myself to check. Well, I have read it… and Joel Cross is right. Wallace’s name is not mentioned once.”

Shayne reached into his hip pocket and pulled out Groat’s leather-bound journal and tossed it onto his desk in front of Will Gentry. “Any of you want to see for yourselves?”

Jake Sims popped to his feet with a squeak of outrage as Shayne produced the diary. Matie Meredith sat as still as though she were carved from stone, only her eyes betraying the emotion that was boiling up inside her.

Shayne grinned across at Sims as Lawyer Hastings’ dignity deserted him and he made a snatch for the diary which Gentry covered with a heavy hand.

“That’s the evidence, Chief,” Hastings exclaimed frantically. “Don’t you understand what Mr. Shayne has been saying? A two-million-dollar estate is dependent on whether Albert Hawley died on the fourth or fifth day.”

“Why don’t you just ask Cunningham?” suggested Shayne as his grin widened. “I understand he’s prepared to swear it was the fifth day… thereby throwing the estate to Mrs. Meredith.”

Cunningham made strangled sounds in his throat and glared at the diary. “That was when…” He glared accusingly at Sims. “I thought you said Shayne was gonna…”

“Shut up,” roared Sims. “This is some kind of trick. Don’t let Shayne…”

“Let him say it, Jake,” admonished Shayne. “He agreed to testify that way after you assured him the diary wouldn’t be produced as evidence to prove him a liar. Shame on you, Jake, for thinking you could bribe an upright citizen like me to withhold evidence.

“Go ahead and glance through it, Will,” he added to the chief. “It’s a little past the middle, Mr. Hastings will be delighted to know that death occurred on the fourth night… before Ezra Hawley died.

“And now I’ve got one more little experiment to make before we wind this thing up,” he added as Gentry began turning the pages of the diary with Hastings breathing down his neck. “Give me that copy of the Herald, Tim.”

Rourke stopped scribbling furiously long enough to produce a folded newspaper from his pocket and pass it to the redhead. Shayne opened it out to the frontpage story of the rescue and held it in front of Cunningham, pointing out the picture of Albert Hawley which the Herald had dug out of their morgue for the occasion.

“Do you recognize that man, Cunningham?”

The airplane steward wet his lips nervously, looking at the picture and caption beneath it. “Sure,” he croaked. “That’s Albert Hawley. Can’t you see it says so right there?”

“I know what it says. But I want you to tell us whether that’s a picture of the soldier who died on the life raft with you and Groat.”

“Of course it is,” he stammered. “Albert Hawley. Why shouldn’t I recognize him after being with him four days on a lousy raft?”

“No reason you shouldn’t,” agreed Shayne smoothly. “If it weren’t for the fact that Albert Hawley had his photograph snapped in Chicago last night posing as Theodore Meredith.” He produced the glossy print of Meredith that Ben Ames had sent him, and laid it in front of Gentry. “Albert Hawley didn’t die on the life raft, Will. A soldier who was masquerading as Hawley died. His real name was Leon Wallace. And here’s his picture.” He laid the wedding picture of the Wallace’s beside the recent one of Hawley. “See if that doesn’t look a little more like the man who died,” he said to Cunningham.

“That is the secret the dying soldier confided to Groat,” he went on to Gentry. “You’ll notice Groat didn’t call him Hawley after he died. He referred to him merely as ‘the soldier.’ Old Lady Hawley didn’t want her precious boy drafted into the army,” he went on sardonically, “so she arranged with the gardener to take his place in the draft and serve in his name, sending Mrs. Wallace ten grand to keep her quiet, and another thousand every three months in envelopes pre-addressed by Wallace. And Matie helped out by getting a Reno divorce from Hawley and then remarrying him under the name of Meredith. Which I should have guessed just as soon as I learned that Albert Hawley had obligingly remade his will after his divorce still leaving everything to his ex-wife. It was the only way he could be sure of inheriting Ezra’s money without admitting the truth and being indicted as a draft dodger. That stuck in my craw from the beginning… the fact that a divorced husband left everything to his ex-wife, but I didn’t have brains enough to realize the significance of it.”

There was silence in the office and every eye in the room was on Mrs. Meredith. She squared her shoulders and broke the silence with an incisive voice:

“All right. I never did think Albert could get away with it. His mother planned the whole thing and used up her own money hiring Leon Wallace to go into the army in Albert’s place. I was against the plan from the beginning, but I loved Albert and finally agreed to get the divorce and remarry him under a different name.” She shrugged her shapely shoulders and smiled coldly. “I don’t think that’s against the law.”

“This is all very interesting,” said Will Gentry heavily. “There’ll be a federal charge against Hawley for evading the draft. But we’ve still got two murders here in Miami. Let’s get back to them. A while ago, Mike, you said it was between Cross and Cunningham. I’ve already established that Cross has no alibi for the time of either killing. If Cunningham can produce one…”

“Sure I can,” Cunningham cut in eagerly. “I told you I was right in Mrs. Meredith’s hotel room while the Meany dame was getting bumped off. Shayne will tell you so himself. I was sitting right there when he left to meet her at his place.”

“That’s right,” Shayne agreed amiably. “But the question is: How long did you stay with Mrs. Meredith after I left?”

“Half an hour at least. She’ll tell you.” He appealed to Matie. “We talked about it last night and you mentioned how you fixed me a drink and…”

“Let her tell it,” said Shayne sharply. “I think Mrs. Meredith might have been willing to perjure herself by giving Cunningham an alibi… last night,” Shayne explained to Gentry. “At that time she thought she needed his testimony to prove that her ex-husband didn’t die until the fifth day on the raft. But that doesn’t make any difference now because we know it was Wallace who actually died on the raft. I wonder if she is as willing to perjure herself this morning to save Cunningham’s neck.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Meredith coldly. “There has never been any question of perjury or of alibis. But Mr. Shayne himself can’t deny that Mr. Cunningham was in my hotel suite when he left to meet Beatrice. That seems to me all the alibi that’s needed.”

“It would be,” said Shayne, “if I’d gone direct to my hotel from the Biscayne. But I didn’t. I wasted fifteen or twenty minutes getting your Chicago address from the house dick at the Biscayne and sending a telegram to your husband signed with your name. Plenty of time for Cunningham to get to my place ahead of me and strangle Beatrice… unless he did stay with you for half an hour.”