Shoot to Kill (11 page)

“How about you?” demanded Shayne. “Are you joining in the general rejoicing?”

Conroy shrugged his shoulders and met the detective’s gaze squarely. “I’ve lost a job. Wesley Ames was a son-of-a-bitch to work for, but he paid well.”

“What will become of the column now?”

“It’ll automatically be canceled. He was a few weeks ahead and the papers will run those, I suppose. But the column
was
Wesley Ames. No one can step into his shoes.”

“What I’m wondering,” said Shayne softly, “is who will inherit his files? The bits of nasty gossip he’s collected but has never printed about a lot of important people.”

Conroy seemed not to understand what Shayne was driving at. “I suppose it’s all part of his estate,” he said indifferently. “His widow inherits so far as I know.”

“Will she be likely to keep you on the job for a time? To sort things out and catalog them?”

“I doubt it.” Victor Conroy scowled darkly. “More likely she’ll just consign everything to the incinerator without even looking at the files. She hated his column,” he explained. “She hated the sort of man it had turned him into. She liked the money it brought him, but that’s all she did like about it.”

Shayne lit a cigarette and looked inquiringly about the secretary’s office, letting his gaze come to rest on the filing cabinets along the wall. “Did he keep all his material in here? Did you file it all?”

“All that he trusted out of his own sight. He had personal stuff in his desk upstairs that he considered too explosive for even my eyes. He went to a lot of trouble to explain that to me one day,” Conroy went on angrily. “He was guarding me against temptation, he told me. There was stuff that couldn’t be printed because it would ruin people’s lives if it were, and he was afraid I might use it for blackmail if I got my hands on it.” Conroy shrugged. “To hell with it. He’s dead now and I won’t say I’m sorry.”

“So far,” said Shayne flatly, “I haven’t found anyone who is. Did he have a telephone in his study?”

“No. It was one of his idiosyncrasies. That was the Master’s Sanctum Sanctorum. When he closed that outer door and hung the Do Not Disturb sign out he was alone with his conscience. Which means he was pretty damned well alone,” Conroy interpolated with a contemptuous smile. “Anyhow, he wouldn’t stand for any interruption except for special visitors who had definite appointments and whom I was supposed to send around to the outside stairway where he would unbolt the door to let them in and bolt it when they left.”

“Like Ralph Larson this evening?”

“Yes. Ralph had a seven-fifteen appointment and he arrived promptly.”

“Did you take any telephone calls for Ames this evening?”

Conroy hesitated, thinking back. “No,” he finally said decisively.

“Did Ames have any other appointments except the one with Larson?”

Conroy said, “No,” without hesitation.

Shayne thought a moment and said, “That’s about it, I guess. I’m going up to check one thing in the study, and then I guess you people will be left alone.”

He turned to open the door into the living room and Conroy told him, “There’s a policeman on guard outside the study with orders not to admit anyone. God knows why. The murder is all solved, isn’t it? They’ve got their killer.”

“It’s just a police regulation,” Shayne told him vaguely. “According to the rule-book, you seal off the scene of death for a certain period to make sure no clues are disturbed.”

He went out and crossed the living room toward the stairway, noting out of the corner of his eye that Mark Ames and Helena were seated very close together on the sofa and the widow appeared to be getting all the comforting she needed.

At the top of the stairs he saw Patrolman Powers comfortably settled in a chair opposite the sagging door into the study, with a small table beside him that held a coffee cup and saucer and an ashtray. The young patrolman had his nose buried in a paperback, but he looked up alertly when Shayne reached the top of the stairs, and put down his book and got up slowly, saying uncertainly, “Hello, Mr. Shayne. You’re back, huh?”

Shayne said, “Griggs was tied up at headquarters and he asked me to stop by and check one point for him in the study.” He casually started past Powers inside the room, but the uniformed youngster said earnestly, “Wait a minute. No one is supposed to enter that room. Those are my orders.”

Shayne paused in front of the door and turned with a grin. “Griggs didn’t tell you to keep me out, did he?”

“Well, no. Not specifically you, no, sir. But on the other hand…”

Shayne sighed. “I know how it is. An order is an order. You haven’t been on the Force very long have you, Powers?”

“No, sir. Only three months since I finished probation. But I…”

Shayne nodded indulgently. “You’d better run down and call Griggs on the phone and check. He’s not going to like it, but… look,” he said brightly. “Instead of bothering the sergeant and getting him sore at you, why don’t you call the chief? Will Gentry. Get him to vouch for me. If he isn’t still in his office I’ll give you his private telephone number at home. Tell him Mike Shayne wants an official okay to go into the murder room and look for a piece of evidence that Sergeant Griggs asked me to look for.”

“Well, hell,” said Powers. “I wouldn’t want to bother Chief Gentry, I guess.” He knew Shayne’s reputation, of course, and that he
was
a close personal friend of the police chief, and he had seen Griggs apparently take the redhead into his confidence that evening, and he decided, “You go ahead. Just don’t take anything out without showing me, huh?”

Shayne said, “Certainly
not,”
as though that was positively the last thing in the world he would think of doing, and he pushed the unlatched door inward on its sagging hinges and stepped inside and closed it firmly behind him against Power’s curious eyes.

The study looked exactly as it had before except the dead body of Wesley Ames had been removed. Shayne went to the desk swiftly and began opening the drawers and examining them expertly. There was printed stationery in one, envelopes and stamps; and two others held thin Manila folders, each marked with a name and carefully arranged in alphabetical order.

Shayne looked for Murchinson at once without finding the name. He checked back carefully to see he had made no mistake, and then opened a couple of the folders at random and glanced at the material they held. There were penciled jottings and notations, dates and names which were meaningless to Shayne, but there were three photographic negatives in one of them which Shayne held up to the light and then dropped back into the folder. He replaced them with no doubt in his mind that this was the “explosive” stuff which Conroy had mentioned, raw material for blackmail.

But there was nothing with Alex Murchinson’s name on it. Shayne hastily went through all the other drawers in the desk without finding anything interesting, and he straightened up to look around the room for some more secreted hiding place, a wall safe or some such, when the door suddenly swung inward without warning and Sergeant Griggs plowed over the threshold and confronted him angrily.

“All right, Shamus,” he growled. “If you’ve found whatever it is I sent you up here looking for, you can hand it over to me.”

MICHAEL SHAYNE HESITATED A MOMENT, SEEKING TO gauge the sergeant’s temper and to decide how to handle the situation.

He said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find it, Sarge.”

“What
couldn’t you find?”

It came to Shayne then, in a sudden flash of intuition. The thing that had bothered him about the locked death room to make the picture complete.

“His paper-knife,” he told Griggs. “Whatever it was that he used for slitting open his envelopes so neatly.” He gestured toward the stack of empty envelopes between the two mail baskets on the desk, each one of which had been carefully slit open the long way.

“Do you remember what Ralph Larson said about his earlier visit to Ames? He said something like: ‘… he sat there in his chair slitting open his goddamned letters and he laughed at me.’ What was he slitting them open with? I can’t find any letter-opener here, and I’ve looked in all the drawers. I got to thinking about it and it bothered me so I came out to check my recollection.”

There was a curious baffled look of mingled exasperation and pleasure on Griggs’ face as he listened to Shayne’s bland explanation.

He said, “You’re sure about that, huh? No paper-knife.”

“Not unless he had a special hiding place for it that I haven’t found.”

Griggs nodded and turned to call through the open door behind him, “Powers. Get that secretary up here.”

Powers said, “Yes, sir,” and they heard him going toward the head of the stairs.

“It’s a funny thing you thought about that,” Griggs said heavily. “What would a missing paper-knife have to do with Larson shooting the guy?”

Shayne replied honestly, “I haven’t figured that out either. That’s why it didn’t impinge in the beginning, I guess. Because it didn’t seem to matter. But when I started wondering about Mrs. Larson and thought about Ames just sitting there and making no effort to defend himself when Larson broke in…” He stopped in mid-sentence and shrugged as Victor Conroy came in and said, “You wanted me, Sergeant?”

“Yeh. We’re wondering what sort of implement Ames used for opening his mail.” Griggs pointed a blunt finger at the stack of empty envelopes. “Those are all cut open.”

“Yes. He always used a paper-knife. It should be right there on his desk. It always was.” Conroy moved past the sergeant, frowning at the bare top of the desk. “It was a fancy one of brass or copper. Sort of a Florentine dagger thing. An antique, I guess. It had a long thin pointed blade that was honed to razor sharpness on both edges. That’s funny.” Victor Conroy shook his head and frowned. “It was always right here in plain sight. Maybe one of the drawers?”

Griggs shook his bald head. “We’ve looked in the drawers. Do you remember the last time you saw it?”

Conroy shrugged and shook his head. “It’s not the sort of thing one notices. You know, it’s always lying there day after day. It looks as though he used it to open his mail this evening.”

Griggs agreed flatly, “Yeh. It does look that way. All right, Conroy. I want to talk to all of you a little later. No one is to leave the house.”

The man hesitated as though about to protest the order, but checked himself and went out of the room.

Griggs moved about restively for a moment, clasping his hands behind his back and disregarding Shayne. Suddenly he swung on him and demanded bitterly, “Why don’t you ask me what the P. M. turned up?”

Shayne asked obediently, “What did the P. M. turn up?”

“Wesley Ames was dead before the bullet went into his heart. He had been stabbed in the heart with a knife that had a long thin pointed blade sharp as a razor on both edges.”

“Something like an antique Florentine dagger,” Shayne said interestedly.

“Damn it, you don’t act surprised. What sort of prior knowledge did you have? If you’ve been holding out information on me, Shayne…”

“I haven’t been holding out anything,” the detective assured him earnestly. “It just all falls into place suddenly. We can even see how we were all mistaken, thinking Larson’s bullet killed him. It must have gone through his vest about the same place as the stab wound. It wouldn’t bleed a great deal, and the blood would be soaked up inside the vest. No one opened it up to notice that the blood was already congealed until the M. E. got here twenty minutes later, and by that time he couldn’t tell without making extensive tests. My God!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Larson didn’t commit murder after all. All he did was fire a bullet into the body of a corpse. What irony.”

“Shooting with intent to kill,” muttered Griggs. “We can hold him on that.”

“What a terrific stroke of luck for the real murderer. The wildest sort of coincidence. He couldn’t possibly have planned it that way even if he had
known
Larson was coming back here with a gun to kill Ames. It was one chance in a million that Larson would actually fire without realizing Ames was dead, and that the bullet would go in the same wound and destroy evidence of the stabbing.”

“Yeh. Whoever did it must be shaking hands with himself right now and figuring he’s in the clear with Larson ready-made to take the rap for him.”

“One of the four people downstairs,” Shayne pointed out to him thoughtfully. “We know he was alive when Larson stormed out the back way. Ames bolted the door behind him. They all say no one else came up the drive and in the back way after Larson. It has to be one of those four, Sergeant.”

“Wait a minute. We don’t know that Ames was still alive when Larson went out. Suppose he did it then? Picked up the knife and stabbed him.”

“And then came back half an hour later to do the job openly with a gun?” scoffed Shayne.

“Well, he might have figured that would give him an alibi for the real killing,” argued Griggs stubbornly. “He wouldn’t expect his bullet to go in the same hole, and would expect the stab wound to be discovered immediately. By God, that would be smart,” Griggs went on, warming up to the idea. “If he did work it like that, he must be sitting in his jail cell right now sweating blood and waiting for us to discover the truth. The poor bastard can’t
tell
us to have an autopsy and look for a stab wound. Talk about your ironic situations. By God, Mike,” the sergeant went on wonderingly. “It
could
be that way. If it hadn’t been for his wife being missing and you getting suspicious and wanting a P. M., he could have gone to the chair for shooting a dead man. And maybe it would be justice because maybe he stabbed him in the first place.”

“But Dorothy Larson is missing,” Shayne reminded him. “I hardly see how that ties in with your theory. And don’t forget that back door bolted on the inside. Ames couldn’t have done that with a knife wound in his heart.”

“How’s this? Maybe Ames didn’t bolt the door. Maybe one of the others in the house came in here after Larson left and found him stabbed. So they bolted the door and just walked out the other one without saying anything.”