Brett Halliday - One Night with Nora

“That’s right. Broken into early this morning. Nothing else taken that he can see. Just your letters to him and his carbons to you.” He pulled a chair nearer and sat down opposite Shayne, turned to Detective Sturgis and said curtly, “You and Benton may as well beat it. You’re not going to find anything here.”

Sturgis left the room to the accompaniment of Shayne’s blunt fingers drumming on the desk. He said absently, “So Bates’s alleged documentary evidence has disappeared.”

“Conveniently for your denial. Did you go to all the trouble of flying up to Wilmington to steal that file?” the chief asked heavily.

“I swear to God, Will, I can’t get it through my head you’re serious. From the very beginning when that woman came to my room, it stunk of a frame-up between her and this Wilmington shyster. Don’t ask me what kind of a frame,” he went on angrily. “I don’t pretend to even guess what they thought they were gaining by that story.”

“Trouble is, Bates doesn’t appear to be a shyster at all. I’ve checked on him, and the Wilmington police give him a clean bill. One of the most respected attorneys in town. On top of that, there’s every evidence that his office was broken into early this morning, around six-thirty or seven o’clock. So, you can clarify things a lot by proving you couldn’t have flown up there and pulled the job. Just tell me where you were between four and nine.”

“You’re not going to like it,” Shayne warned him.

“Probably not. Don’t tell me you were with a dame whose name you can’t divulge on account of her husband’s the jealous type.” Gentry pursed his lips over the cigar and struck a match to it.

“No.” Shayne turned his head to grin at Lucy Hamilton who was tidying the files and listening earnestly. “I wish it were,” the redhead said candidly. “You’d like it better than this. I was parked out on Biscayne Bay, north of Seventy-Ninth Street, all that time, Will. All by myself.”

“That’s just fine,” Gentry grunted. “That fixes everything up just dandy.”

Shayne put a finger tip near the raw wound. “A bullet did this. A forty-five, I’d guess, from the size of the hole in the top of my car. Will it make things any better if I get a doctor’s affidavit that a wound like that could knock me out cold for five hours?”

Lucy Hamilton hurried to him. “Michael!” she cried out. “I thought you’d just been in a fight and somebody had hit you! What is this all about? Who’s the man in Wilmington, and who is the woman you say was in your room last night? Who shot you? And why, Michael?”

She examined the wound gravely and anxiously. “I’m going right out and get some bandage.”

“Sit down while I give this part of it to Will,” he told her gruffly. “I’ll fill you in on the rest of it later.”

Timothy Rourke, who had transferred his emaciated body from the edge of the desk to a chair, sprang up from his sprawled position, and dragged up a chair for Lucy. She sat down on the edge of it, and the reporter resumed his seat.

“There was that telephone call just as you were leaving my apartment with Mrs. Carrol,” Shayne reminded the chief. “The guy sounded drunk or frightened or both, and wanted to know if we could keep Mrs. Carrol’s name out of her husband’s murder investigation. I figured I’d learn more by playing him along, and agreed to meet him. I was in a hurry to keep the date. I called Lucy and told her to get over to the Commodore and find that alleged letter from me before Mrs. Carrol got there.” He paused, turned to Lucy, and suggested, “You give your end of it, angel. What was that junk in the Herald?”

Lucy Hamilton’s face flushed. “It wasn’t junk. It happened exactly the way I told Officer Hagen. Just as I opened the door and turned on the light. Somebody had evidently searched the room. Things from her suitcase were all scattered around. I just didn’t know what kind of trouble you were in and I tried to play it safe.” She looked at the chief, but his protuberant eyes were half hidden by a puff of smoke.

Shayne gave Lucy a crooked grin and said, “You get a whole row of A’s for effort, angel. And when we get this mess cleaned up, Tim’ll make you ‘Heroine for a Day’ in a Daily News scoop.”

Rourke stopped to pat her shoulder on his way back to his chair. “And we’ll have a celebration. Just you and me.”

Gentry interrupted him with an angry snort, and Shayne resumed. “This man on the phone wouldn’t give his name, but he offered me ten grand if I could make certain Mrs. Carrol’s name would be kept out of the investigation. You can’t blame me for rushing out to check on him, Will.”

“And now you’re going to claim you sat in your car while he took pot shots at you?” growled Gentry.

“Just about,” Shayne conceded morosely. He settled back and related exactly what had happened. “It was nine o’clock when I woke up. I took time to clean the dried blood off my face with bay water and examine the car for a bullet hole, then headed toward town. I stopped on the boulevard for breakfast, and saw the Herald extra. That was the first I knew about Lucy. I called my lawyer from the roadside restaurant, then came on to my office and found two goons waiting at the door with a search warrant.”

“Honest to Christ, Mike, do you expect me to believe that story?” Gentry asked in a wondering voice.

“Take a look at the evidence, the bullet hole in my car. Get a doctor to look at my head, and tell you what else beside a bullet could have done it. Analyze the blood on the cushion where I lay passed out for five hours. You don’t think I held a gun to my own head and pulled the trigger, do you?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Gentry told him, somberly considering his cigar butt before discarding it. “This fellow you claim you met at Seventy-Ninth, he wouldn’t be the one who jumped Lucy at the Commodore, I suppose.”

“That’s out,” Shayne stated flatly. “He couldn’t be. I started as soon as I finished talking to Lucy. By the time she got dressed and to the Commodore, I must have been halfway out there. He was waiting at the filling-station, after having parked his car by the bay, and he had walked back to meet me.”

“So that makes two little men who no one can prove were there,” Gentry growled. “Plus another one in Wilmington who broke into a lawyer’s office to remove incriminating letters you claim weren’t there. How can you expect me to believe any of this, Mike?”

Shayne said soberly, “I don’t. But you can try.”

“I am trying.”

“Keep on working on it,” Shayne urged. “It’ll come easier after a while. Once you make up your mind that I’m telling the truth, you’ll be on the right track.”

“But you can’t prove a damned thing you say, Mike.”

“And you can’t disprove anything I say.”

“I’ve got the statements of Mrs. Carrol and Bates,” Gentry reminded him, “and they’re in direct contradiction to yours.”

“Okay. Let’s analyze those statements. Take Bates’s story. He claims I replied to his first letter by demanding five hundred dollars in cash before taking the case. You know damned well that’s not the way I run my business. If I were going to accept the job, I’d do it and bill the client later.

“Wait a minute!” Shayne held up a big hand to ward off Gentry’s protest. “That’s not all. Bates claims he suggested I get a key to Carrol’s room for his wife’s use in ending a divorce action. No matter what you believe about anything else I’ve told you, you know goddamned well I’d have turned an assignment like that down flat. I don’t fool around with that sort of thing at any price, not even when it’s offered in advance.”