“I can believe that,” Shayne told her sincerely with a sidelong glance. “You’re a very beautiful woman. And a lot younger than Jerome, I’d guess. How much? Fifteen years?”
“Eleven,” she replied promptly. “I was only nineteen when I married him and I’ve never regretted it.” She sighed deeply and relapsed into silence, and despite his procrastination they were approaching the mainland.
Then she laid her hand on his forearm and asked timidly, “Will you work on the case, Mike? I can afford to pay you. Jerome left quite a lot of insurance, and I’d feel so much better if I knew you were working on it. That little man at the Beach! Ugh.” She shuddered. “He gave me the creeps somehow. Lucy Hamilton talks about you and your cases a lot and I know how successful you are. I suppose you know Lucy is hopelessly in love with you,” she confided.
Shayne laughed. “Not hopelessly. Sometimes she hates me. Right now, for instance, I’m sure she’d hate me if I didn’t take your case… or if I accepted a fee for solving it.” He had turned north a few blocks off the Causeway, and now drew up in front of Linda’s apartment house.
“I’ll go up with you,” he suggested, “and see if I can induce Lucy to invite me down to her place for a cup of coffee and a slug of cognac.”
“I can make coffee,” she offered. “And there’s whiskey, but I’m afraid no cognac.”
“Lucy always keeps a bottle on hand,” he assured her, “and I think you’ll want a few minutes alone with the children.”
He took her arm as they climbed the stairs together, and released it when Lucy opened the door of the Fitzgilpin apartment and he saw a boy of nine and a little girl of six clinging to his secretary’s two hands.
They both started talking at once when they saw their mother in the doorway, “Mommy… Mom… Lucy’s gonna make a picnic… take us to the park… to have a picnic lunch,” little Sara explained soberly, and then Ralph pulled away from Lucy and straightened his shoulders manfully and asked, “Where’s daddy, Mom? Lucy said there’d been an accident…?”
“… cident,” echoed Sara, and Linda dropped to her knees on the floor and held out both her arms, and the two children crowded into them.
Looking over their heads into Lucy’s mutely questioning eyes, Shayne shook his head and said, “Have you got a drink downstairs, Angel? I need one.” She understood at once, and circled the little family trio to go out the door with him. Shayne pulled it shut firmly, and told her, “Linda will be okay. She’s got what it takes. Right now she doesn’t need us.”
“It was Jerome?” she breathed as she went down the stairs with him to her apartment
He nodded absently. “Not only that, Angel, but it’s not as cut and dried as we thought. He was rolled, all right. Even a fairly inexpensive ring taken off his finger, but it wasn’t just a conventional mugging. He died of poison.”
Lucy had unlocked her door and pushed it open. She turned to him with exactly the same exclamatory words with which Linda had greeted the same announcement. “Poisoned? Oh no!”
Shayne nodded, walking past her into the familiar, pleasantly cool living room. “It’s just a preliminary report, but the M. E. on the Beach doesn’t make mistakes. Painter tried to take Linda over the hurdles, of course, on account of that, but I put my oar in and shut him up for the time being.”
Having worked with Shayne for a lot of years on a lot of cases, Lucy Hamilton knew exactly what he meant without any further explanation. A poisoning almost positively indicated premeditation. Very few poisoners act on the spur of the moment. It also, in a large majority of cases, meant a woman murderer… particularly if the victim were a male. More than that, it was (too often) the preferred method for wives to get rid of unwanted husbands.
Lucy came to him in the middle of the room and clutched his arm fiercely. “Not Linda, Michael. I know her. I’ve seen them together a lot. She’s a lovely mother… crazy about those two kids. And they were nuts about their daddy. She’d never in the world…”
Shayne grinned down tiredly into Lucy’s intense face. “All right. So I’ve got a job cut out for me. A cup of your coffee might help.”
“I’ve got the percolator ready to plug in.” She released his arm and hurried into the kitchen. He dropped his angular frame on the sofa and lit a cigarette, and Lucy called out to him, “Could you stand a drink first?”
“First and with,” he told her firmly, and settled back on the sofa and drew deeply on his cigarette until she came in with a four-ounce glass of cognac in one hand and a tall glass of ice water in the other.
He accepted the drink with muttered thanks, a thoughtful scowl on his face. “Right now, I don’t know what the poison is or how taken, though Petey intimated he was well loaded with alcohol also. Any chance of suicide, Lucy?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles, no, Michael. He just… well… Lucy spread out her hands helplessly. “He wasn’t the suicidal type, Michael.”
“If there is such a thing,” growled Shayne, taking a long and thankful pull at the cognac glass and washing it down with ice water. “All right. We skip that for the moment. Any more ideas in that pretty head of yours?”
With the electric percolator making proper noises in the kitchen, Lucy sank down on the sofa close beside him and rested her brown head on his shoulder. “At the moment… none,” she told him firmly. “A poisoner means, to me, an implacable and vicious enemy. This, I cannot visualize for Jerome Fitzgilpin. I’ve told you, Michael, he was the sweetest, friendliest little man you ever saw. I never knew a man more eager to do favors for people, not fawning or servile, but with real generosity and a great big heart. That’s why they didn’t have too much money, I think. I suspect he was always carrying his poorer clients over bad times… paying their insurance premiums for them himself rather than allowing them to lapse.”
“Did Linda object to this generosity on his part? Did it gripe her that they had to live cooped up with two kids in an apartment like theirs?”
“Never,” said Lucy sturdily. “She loved him for being what he was, and didn’t try to make him over.”
Shayne drained his cognac glass and set it down on the coffee table in front of him with a thump. “You know what you’re handing me, Lucy? An impossible case. A man whom nobody wanted dead. Yet, he is dead. Someone fed him poison last night.”
“And then stole his ring and wallet with several hundred dollars in it,” Lucy reminded him spiritedly. “Why couldn’t it be that way, Michael? He often stopped in a bar for a few beers after he kept his office open late on Friday night. Many of his clients might have known this. Even a few hundred is a temptation to a lot of the sort of people who dealt with Jerome. Not professional muggers, of course,” she added eagerly. “Some person who would shrink from actual physical violence, but who wouldn’t be too squeamish to put some poison in his beer and then steal his wallet when it took effect.”
Shayne nodded unhappily. “This I shall attempt to sell Painter. But he’s a confirmed cynic, and he operates according to rules. In his experience, a poisoning is a close-to-home job. I’m afraid your friend Linda is in for a pretty rough going-over when Petey gets around to her.”
“She has nothing to hide,” Lucy told him strongly.
“I sincerely hope not.” Shayne turned his head toward the kitchen and sniffed pleasurably. “Hasn’t your coffee-pot stopped perking?”
“I think so.” Lucy jumped to her feet and gathered up the two glasses she had brought in previously. “With, Michael?”
“With,” he told her firmly, and when she returned shortly with a mug of strong black coffee giving forth the aroma of cognac, he accepted it from her gratefully and settled back on the sofa, saying, “Let me relax here alone with your heavenly brew, Angel. I think you’d better go back upstairs and take those two youngsters off Linda’s hands. By this time she must have told them whatever she’s decided to tell them, and she can probably use a respite.”
“Of course. What are you going to do, Michael?”