“You’re nuts, Mister. I wasn’t near Brockton that night and I can prove it. I didn’t even know anything about it until I saw it in a paper two days later. Sure, I dated her sometimes even if her old man did treat me like dirt under his feet, but I hadn’t seen her for a week before she had the accident.”
“Were you waiting for her to join you some place that night?”
“I sure wasn’t.” Will’s upper lip curled away from his teeth and his voice had a note of jeering triumph. “I was in R.O.T.C. camp at Gainesville when it happened. You can check on it easy enough. Bed-check at nine every night and not a damned pass from camp for two whole weeks. I don’t know what kind of bee you got in your bonnet. We were both sore because I had to go for spring training the same time as her vacation, and she was going to visit with a girl in Diston. Name of Lois Dongan. You can ask her.”
Shayne didn’t bother to tell him he had already asked Lois. Will’s voice and manner bore the strong stamp of truth. It would be a simple matter to check his statement, of course. He’d be a fool to make it if it weren’t true.
“If you weren’t the one she was going off with,” said Shayne harshly. “Who was it? Who else was she playing around with while you were in camp?”
“Damn you,” Will snarled angrily, and braced himself to swing an ineffectual fist at Shayne’s face. “There wasn’t nobody else. Jeanie and me were…” He stopped and swallowed hard. “We were in love, damn it. She never looked at another man. I don’t know who in hell you are, but you sure ain’t going around fouling up her memory with such stories. You do that and I’ll get you, by God, if it’s the last thing on earth I do.”
“What about Randy Harris?” Shayne demanded.
“Harris?” The youth’s jaw fell open slackly. “Never heard of him. Wait a minute. You mean that lawyer over in Orlando that got burned up in his car last week? What about him?”
“You sure Jeanette wasn’t two-timing you with him?”
“Sure I’m sure, Mister.” Will’s voice was sullenly dogged. “She wasn’t two-timing me, period. She was my girl and we were going to get married as soon as she was eighteen.” He took on a sort of youthful dignity as he said this, and his hand reached out to unlatch the door.
Shayne made no move to stop him as he got out. He stood beside the open door and said, “I’m going back inside now. Some of the fellows are going to be pretty sore about the way you barged in on us and threw your weight around. Tough as you may be, I wouldn’t stick around Winter Park after dark if I was you.”
He held his head high and walked stiffly away toward the farmhouse. Shayne sighed and started his motor and backed out the driveway.
Despite his disinclination to do so, he couldn’t help believing Will Lomax. But the hell of it was, he also believed Lois Dongan. She hadn’t, he realized, stated flatly that Will Lomax was the man Jeanette had planned to stay with during the period she was supposed to be visiting Lois. In fact, Lois had admitted that Jeanette had not told her who she was going with. Knowing that Jeanette and Will were supposed to be in love and engaged, Lois had assumed Will was to be her companion. But it might have been anyone else at all. Jeanette probably wouldn’t have told her closest friend the truth, Shayne decided as he drove morosely back to Winter Park. Lois was young and sentimental, and it had seemed perfectly all right and romantic to her to help Jeanette go away with the man she was engaged to marry, whereas she might have refused to lend herself to the scheme had she known the man was someone other than Jeanette’s fiance.
Discovering his identity now would take a lot of digging, Shayne told himself uneasily. And he didn’t want to waste any more time away from Brockton where Jean Henderson had last been seen. She was more important now than her younger sister who had been dead for a month.
14
On a sudden impulse, Michael Shayne braked his car and swung in to the gas pumps at the Squaredeal Filling Station just outside of Brockton. His gas tank was three-quarters empty, and he got out and said, “Fill it up, please,” to the brisk young man who trotted out from the office to wait on him.
He waited until the gasoline was running before asking casually, “Your name John Agnolo?”
“That’s right, Mister.” The young man’s voice was cheerful, his face was intelligent and showed a certain amount of curiosity as he regarded the stranger.
“I’m doing some checking on the man who was burned up in his car last week-end,” Shayne explained. “I understand you thought he stopped here for gas Thursday evening before it happened.”
“Yeh. I did think it was him at first. Same make and color of car. And when they showed me his picture at the police station I was ’most ready to swear it was him that asked me how to get to the Sanitarium, but if it was I guess he changed his mind and turned off on the other fork instead because they said he didn’t go there.”
Shayne frowned. “According to the paper, you gave him a pencil sketch showing how to get there, and it wasn’t a difficult route.”
“That’s right. I sure did. Drew it out for him. ‘You just turn left at the next light,’ I told him, ‘and keep going straight till the road forks where there’s a sign. You take the left fork,’ I told him, ‘and you can’t miss it.”
“But his car was wrecked on the other fork?”
“That’s right. About a mile from where he should have turned left.” Gasoline gurgled up from the tank, and Agnolo shut off the pump. He hung up the hose and replaced the tank cap and asked Shayne, “Want me to check your oil and water?”
“They’re okay. You might give the windshield a swipe.” Shayne followed him around to the front and went on, “You’re not sure whether the man was alone or not?”
“I was pretty sure at first there was someone with him, but I could be wrong. I just didn’t notice particularly. They said at the Sanitarium that a fellow who looked like him was there about the right time that night to see his sister, so I reckon I must of been mistaken. It wasn’t anything I could swear to, you see.”
Shayne gave him a five-dollar bill as he finished cleaning the windshield. He took his change and got in, pulled out onto the highway again and followed it to the first traffic light. He turned left and was on East Avenue, and glanced at his speedometer. It registered almost exactly two miles from the light when the road forked in front of him.
He slowed and clearly saw the neat sign on a post directly ahead in the Y of the fork where a car’s headlights could not fail to pick it up at night. It said, BROCKTON SANITARIUM, and there was an arrow pointing to the left.
Shayne followed the arrow up a winding, black-topped road a half mile to a high fence of meshed wire with swinging gates closed across the road barring the way. Beyond the gates, landscaped grounds sloped upward to a large, sprawling white building almost concealed from view by a row of gnarled magnolia trees.
There was a small brick shelter beside the gate, and a man stepped out of it as Shayne pulled up with his bumper against the steel gates. He was a small, spry man of about sixty, wearing a faded gray smock and gray trousers that had the look of a uniform. He unlatched a narrow gate that was a part of the bigger one, and came around to Shayne’s side of the car. His face was brown and wrinkled and his eyes a wintry blue. He leaned ah elbow on the door and extended his hand. “Let’s see your card.”
Shayne said, “I haven’t any card. I want to see Dr. Winestock.”
The old man shook his head. “Can’t let you through ’less’n you got a card.”
“It’s personal,” Shayne told him.
“Can’t help what it is. You don’t get in without a card. Them’s my orders.”
“It’s police business,” Shayne said.
He continued to shake his head obstinately. “I got no orders to admit a policeman.”
“What kind of place is this?” demanded Shayne angrily. “Why are you afraid of visitors?”