her trying to put the bite on me last night. There’s your motive. She was threatening to turn me up as a blackmailer, so I let her have it.” He swayed to his feet and laughed hysterically, his thin lips drawn back from his teeth. “Big shot Shayne.”
Shayne said, “Cut it out, Tim.”
“Like hell I’ll cut it out. Why don’t you jump me right now?” He fell back on the couch and lay limp.
Shayne said again, “If you’ll give me your word-” Timothy Rourke didn’t say anything. He didn’t open his eyes. Shayne stood looking down at him for a moment, his gaunt face set, then went out and closed the door.
Chapter Twelve: PROBING FOR EVIDENCE
Downstairs, Shayne found B. J. Hampstead’s address in the classified section of the directory. He was the only Hampstead listed under Lawyers. He made a note of it and hurried out to his waiting cab. He directed the driver to take him back to Miami.
All the information he had thus far turned up on the case only muddled the waters a little more. Angus Browne, it appeared, had told Rourke he was working for Estelle Morrison; helping her secure divorce evidence against her husband. He knew that Browne was working for Victor Morrison, and that he had received a fat fee for collecting evidence against his wife.
The fact that Angus Browne had known about the letters and approximately where to look for them certainly argued that he had been ordered to turn them up, in the presence of sufficient witnesses, by Mr. Morrison. No one else could possibly have known about them. Whether they were legitimate and had actually been received by Christine Hudson was still a deep puzzle.
If they had been secretly prepared by Morrison and planted by the murdered maid in Christine’s vanity drawer, why? Why would he pay money to have them discovered by four reputable witnesses when they would become evidence against himself instead of his wife? Was Browne doing a double cross and working for both of them? And, added to this, blackmailing Christine? Shayne had no doubt that Browne was unscrupulous enough to do a thing like that, but Browne was not dumb. He had sense enough to know his actions would be revealed in the end.
Shayne tried to break the puzzle down both ways. If genuine, there was the possibility that Morrison was so deeply hurt and angered by Christine’s throwing him over and marrying a younger man, he might have written the letters to hurt her in retaliation. Putting the incriminating notes in his wile’s possession would be one way of accomplishing that purpose, but it was an expensive way of getting revenge.
With the evidence Morrison had acquired against his wife it would be impossible for her to obtain alimony or even a cash settlement from him when he divorced her. But with the letters as evidence in a countersuit, Mrs. Morrison would take him for plenty. Only a completely deranged man would put such a weapon in the hands of a woman whom he intended to divorce.
If the letters were a plant, the same conjecture held good. With one possible exception. If Morrison wanted a job like that done it was reasonable to presume he would arrange with Browne to attend to it. There was a possibility that he had no intention of allowing them to reach his wife-that he was merely laying the groundwork to bring pressure on Christine to leave her husband later, after his divorce had been granted. Browne might well have been lying to Rourke about representing Estelle Morrison just to get him to play along and be a witness to finding the letters. That, too, would explain why Morrison had not let his own firm of lawyers in on the frame-up. He knew that the majority of lawyers had ethics about such things.
He said to the taxi driver, “Let me off here,” just before they reached Miami Avenue where it crossed Flagler Street. He paid the fare and a generous tip and dismissed him. The young and attractive girl at the information desk was horrified that anyone expected to see Mr. Hampstead without an appointment. She asked Shayne to leave his name and telephone number and said she would call him after she had arranged a time suitable to her employer.
“I’m leaving town on the midnight plane, sister,” Shayne told her gruffly. “I’m seeing B. J. Hampstead now. Which is his office?”
She glanced fearfully at the end door of a row of four opening off the anteroom “But it’s impossible,” she exclaimed. “He’s in conference now, and-”
Shayne was already moving away from her toward the door she had looked at. He reached it and turned the knob and walked in. The light gray carpeting was thick, and soft light entered the windows which were wide and hung with oyster-white curtains.
A gray-haired man with a benign face sat at a big flat desk across from two young men. He had a ruddy complexion and the “bit of a stomach” which Mrs. Morgan had described. He looked up, frowning, as Shayne walked in unannounced.
One of the young men had several typed sheets in his hand and was reading aloud from them. He stopped reading when he saw Mr. Hampstead’s frown of displeasure.
Shayne said, “I’m here on police business, Hampstead. A homicide investigation. I think it had better be private.”
“I’m exceedingly busy,” Hampstead said in a clipped voice.
“So am I. Trying to catch a murderer.” Shayne stopped beside the big desk, his gray eyes cold and steady on Hampstead’s face.
The lawyer said to the man who had been reading, “Come back in five minutes,” and dismissed both men with a wave of his hand.
Shayne waited until they disappeared through a side door and closed it. He remained standing, and said flatly, “It’s the Natalie Briggs case. The Hudsons’ maid.”
Hampstead folded his pudgy hands across his stomach, leaned back and said, “Yes?”
“I want to know whom you represented when you went to the Hudson house and entered illegally a couple of weeks ago-with a private detective named Angus Browne and a reporter.”
“Are you with the Miami Police Department?”
“I’m private,” said Shayne. “Michael Shayne.”
The lawyer smiled frostily. “What is your interest in the case?”
“I’ve been retained by Mrs. Hudson.”
“Indeed,” said Hampstead, with a trace of sarcasm. “What has my visit to the Hudson house to do with the death of their maid?”
“That,” said Shayne harshly, “is what I intend to find out.”
Hampstead raised his thin gray brows. “I’d be glad to aid in a murder investigation, of course, but I fail to see the connection.”
“You entered the house illegally and purportedly found some private letters belonging to Mrs. Hudson. You and your accomplices stole them. Stealing private property is illegal.”
Hampstead said, “I’m fully aware of the legal aspects of my conduct, Mr. Shayne.”
“Were you acting for Mrs. Morrison?”
Hampstead smiled slyly, but made no reply. He gave no indication that he intended to answer.
Shayne sat down in the chair vacated by the man who had been reading the document to Hampstead. He said, “You can talk to the police if you’d rather.”
“I’d much rather,” the lawyer assured him.
Shayne said, “All right, I won’t try to bluff you. If I can prove a plausible connection between the letters and the maid’s death, will you talk to me?”
“I prefer to listen first and then make my decision.”
“I think those letters were planted in Mrs. Hudson’s vanity drawer where Timothy Rourke found them. I think it was arranged through Browne and the Hudsons’ maid, Natalie Briggs, with you and Timothy Rourke acting as uninformed spectators. An attempt has been made to blackmail Mrs. Hudson by threatening to send the originals to her husband, and I believe the blackmailer killed Natalie Briggs last night to prevent her from talking.”
Hampstead’s expression remained benign and inscrutable and somewhat insolent. “Those are a lot of assumptions,” he said.
