“Better not tell them anything until we know for sure,” Lucy said briskly. “Just that something came up and you both had to go out. Luckily, I’ve babysat before, so they won’t be surprised to find me here.” Lucy met Linda in the middle of the room and squeezed her arm tightly. “Go along with Michael and don’t worry about the children.”
Linda nodded and compressed her lips tightly and hurried out of the apartment in front of Shayne.
He followed her down the two flights of stairs, admiring the set of her shoulders, the proud lift of her head. At least, he wasn’t going to have an hysterical female on his hands. Not for a time at least. Not until the initial shock had worn off and she was confronted with the inescapable fact of widowhood.
She sat in the front seat of Shayne’s car beside him and composedly folded her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead through the windshield while he drove across the Causeway to Miami Beach. Neither of them spoke during the drive, but her shoulder touched his lightly on occasion as he sped around a curve, and he felt a warm sense of understanding and communion between them which he believed she shared and which was gratifying under the circumstances. She was Lucy’s friend, he reminded himself, and this made him want to be her friend also.
She sat very still in the car and breathed a deep sigh when he pulled into the parking lot behind police headquarters where one room of the building was arranged as a temporary morgue until bodies could be removed to the County Morgue on the mainland.
He got out and went around to open her door and helped her out, and held onto her arm tightly as he led her through a side door and down a short corridor to an unmarked closed door which he opened without knocking. There was a small anteroom with a desk and a shirt-sleeved police officer sitting behind it. He grinned recognition at the redhead and greeted him heartily, “Hi there, Shamus. What brings you…?” and stopped abruptly when he saw the pale-faced woman beside the detective.
Shayne said, “I’ve brought Mrs. Fitzgilpin, Dexter. Shall we… go in?”
“Yeh… good… sure.” The patrolman arose hastily, grabbed his uniform coat from a hook and shrugged into it. He pressed an intercom button on his desk, explaining over his shoulder to Shayne, “Chief wanted to know when she got here.” He leaned down and spoke into the intercom, “Mrs. Fitzgilpin is here to make that identification, Chief.”
“Hold it till I get there,” Chief Peter Painter’s voice rasped over the wire, and Patrolman Dexter straightened up and began fastening the buttons of his coat and said officiously, as though they hadn’t heard Painter’s order, “Just a minute, folks. Chief Painter will be right in.”
Linda was standing very close to Shayne, and he felt her body begin to shake as though gripped by a chill. She whispered faintly, “Couldn’t we… couldn’t I see Jerome?”
“Just a second.” He held her arm tightly against his, knowing that Painter was right in wanting to be present to observe her reaction when she viewed the body, but mentally damning him for prolonging her agony just the same.
It was only a couple of minutes before the door opened behind them and the Miami Beach Chief of Detectives strutted in. He was a short, very slender man, and his natural gait was a strut. He was thin-faced and immaculately dressed, and wore a pencil-line black mustache. His expression of grave sympathy changed to one of irritated surprise when he saw Shayne standing close beside the widow. He stiffened and drew himself up and demanded, “How does this concern you, Shayne?”
“I’m a personal friend of Mrs. Fitzgilpin’s,” Shayne told him coldly. “Save any other questions for later. Let’s get this job done.”
Painter hesitated, his black eyes sparkling with hostility. He would have enjoyed ordering the detective to stay outside while they viewed the body, but nothing in the circumstances warranted that, so he nodded shortly and said, “Very well. Dexter,” he snapped at the waiting patrolman.
Dexter saluted briskly and stepped forward to open a door beyond his desk. He held it open and Shayne waited for Painter to enter the small, drab room before following with Linda, slipping his arm about her slim waist as he did so.
The body lay on a wheeled stretcher in the middle of the floor, just as it had been brought in from the ambulance, though it had been stripped of clothing and was now covered by a white sheet.
Painter went forward and circled to the other side of the stretcher and waited with his hand on a corner of the sheet until Shayne and Linda stood opposite him. Then he drew the sheet back to disclose the face of the dead man, who lay on his back with sightless eyes staring upward.
Linda’s body became absolutely rigid inside Shayne’s encircling arm as she looked down at the plump features of her husband, now flaccid and undistinguished in death. She said, “Yes,” sibilantly, and then moaned an anguished, “Oh… Jerome,” and she leaned over him and her tears fell on the waxen flesh and she reached forward a trembling hand to put her fingertips gently on the cold forehead.
Shayne tightened his arm about her waist and drew her back, swallowing down an angry lump in his throat. That little inoffensive man on the stretcher, two fatherless children at home, and a young and vital widow who now faced the future alone! Despite the years he’d been close to violent death, a scene like this still affected Shayne as strongly as though he were just starting out in his profession. He turned Linda away, saying gruffly to Painter, “You’ve got your identification. Now tell us what happened.”
Painter followed them out to the anteroom officiously. “I’ll have to have a statement from you, Mrs. Fitzgilpin. Where you were last night. When you saw your husband last. The state of his personal and business affairs. Anyone who had a motive for doing him harm.”
“Wait a minute, Petey,” Shayne interrupted him angrily. “I gathered this was a straight mugging job. What have all those questions got to do with that? Are you trying to cover up your inefficiency here on the Beach by trying to make it into something else?”
Painter drew himself up angrily. “This isn’t your affair, Shayne. I am conducting this investigation. I must insist that Mrs. Fitzgilpin make a statement.”
“All she knows is that he worked late at his insurance office here on the Beach last night, and was presumably carrying several hundred dollars in his wallet. Was he rolled, or wasn’t he?”
“He was rolled, all right. That is, his wallet is missing and there are indications that a ring was pulled from his finger. Did he wear a valuable ring, Ma’m?”
Linda nodded woodenly. “Not particularly valuable, but he prized it highly. An amethyst. Worth, perhaps, a hundred dollars.”
“There you are,” Shayne said hotly. “Round up some of the petty crooks whom you allow to run free on the Beach, and you’ll have your killer. Mrs. Fitzgilpin’s statement stands. She went to sleep last night expecting her husband to return about midnight as he generally did on Fridays. She was wakened by your phone call this morning and discovered his bed unslept in. I think that’s all you need to know right now.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Shayne.” Peter Painter spoke with smirking satisfaction and caressed his thin mustache with a beautifully manicured thumbnail. “You’ve stupidly neglected a very important point. You haven’t asked the cause of death.”
“All right. What caused his death?”
“We haven’t had time for a P. M. yet, of course. Just a preliminary examination of stomach contents while we were awaiting identification,” Painter purred happily. “But he was poisoned, Shayne. There isn’t the faintest shadow of doubt that death was due to poison… probably administered in alcohol from half an hour to an hour before he died. Do you consider that reason enough for requiring a full statement from the widow without interference from you?”