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.”
“That’s fine,” muttered Ralph. “I’m… glad.”
“Secondly,” said Griggs, “you didn’t shoot Wesley Ames to death tonight even though you did try like hell. Do you know why you didn’t, Larson?”
“He knows why all right,” Shayne said coldly. “Stop toying with him, Sergeant. He’s the one man in Miami who knew that Wesley Ames was dead before he fired that bullet into his heart because he had stabbed him to death half an hour earlier.
“You were damned smart to figure that out so fast, Sergeant,” Shayne hurried on with a chuckle while Griggs regarded him in openmouthed astonishment and Larson scowled blackly and tried to break in with a protest.
“Remember right there in the study when we discovered the paper-knife was missing, you theorized that Ralph had stabbed him on his first trip and then hurried home to get a gun and come back and establish a perfect alibi by pretending to shoot him. It was damned fast and clever thinking, Larson,” Shayne told him, “after you realized you were the only and the perfect suspect for the stabbing. But you almost made a fatal mistake by placing your bullet in the same hole the knife had gone into. That’s what the sergeant meant by the efficiency of the police department. If you’d killed him by shooting it would have shown premeditation and been first degree murder. And that would really have been ironic. Because, as it stands now, a jury will take into consideration the fact that you grabbed up that paper-knife in a jealous rage that brought on temporary insanity, and you’ll probably get only a few years in prison. That’s why you’re a lucky son-of-a-gun. Because Sergeant Griggs refused to take even all the obvious facts for granted and ordered the post mortem that proved Ames was stabbed to death before he was shot.”
Shayne paused to catch his breath, and saw Griggs shaking his bald head at him, sadly and reproachfully.
“You’re forgetting something, Mike. I figured it might be like you say until you reminded me that the back door was bolted on the inside and that proved Ames had to be alive when Larson left.”
“That’s right,” the young man put in shakily. “My God, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. If Ames was stabbed before I shot him, I certainly don’t know anything about it. He was alive when I left, and I heard him bolt that door behind me.”
“Tell him, Sergeant,” said Shayne indulgently.
“Tell him what, Mike?” Griggs looked more baffled than ever.
“That we found his fingerprints on that inside back door bolt… and then we knew exactly how he worked it. You ran to that back door and bolted it before you fired at the dead man,” Shayne told Larson with a shrug.
“It was obvious when we found traces of your fingerprints on it. That’s why you bothered to lock the front door behind you when you ran in. To give yourself a few precious seconds to bolt the back door before you shot him.”
“I didn’t! This is all absolutely haywire. I swear I don’t understand…”
“As soon as Conroy comes in,” Shayne said to Griggs, “ask him how Larson was dressed when he came to see Ames. One will get you ten he was wearing a jacket. He was expecting to go out on an assignment for Ames tonight among the night spots, and even in Miami they require jackets in most places. But he was in his shirt-sleeves when he came back to shoot Ames. Why? Why would he get rid of his jacket in the meantime? I’ll tell you why. Because when he stabbed Ames he unconsciously dropped the paper-knife in his coat pocket and ran out with it. Send a man out to his apartment and have his wife look in the closet for the jacket he wore to work this morning. Ten to one, it’ll be hanging there. It would seem safer to him than trying to throw it away and he was racing against time to get back and shoot Ames before he was discovered dead. And one will get you ten that there’ll be traces of Ames’ blood in the coat pocket. Not the knife, maybe. That would be easy to toss out the car window.”
Ralph Larson was backing away in horror as Shayne spoke, and he cowered against the wall with both hands over his face, Griggs looked at him with a scowl and said softly, “By God, Mike, I swear you hit the nail on the head that time. I wouldn’t give you one against a hundred that there isn’t blood inside that jacket pocket.”
There was a sharp rap on the door and Patrolman Powers opened it and stood on the threshold holding firmly to Sutter’s arm. “Here he is, Sarge.”
“Take him away,” said Griggs absently. “We’re busy in here, son. Let him go. What the hell do I care whose car he was driving tonight? We just solved a murder, Mike Shayne and I. I don’t care what he was doing in Miami just so he wasn’t killing anybody.”
16
Behind the wheel of his borrowed taxicab again, Shayne drove east to Miami Avenue and turned south a block to park directly behind his own car which was at the curb in front of a dingy bar-room. He took the keys out of the ignition and dropped them into his pocket, then withdrew the wad of crumpled bills given to him so unwillingly by Alonzo Sutter, and selected one for five hundred dollars from the others.