Michael Shayne found chief painter interrogating one of the elevator operators when he reached the Dustin suite at the Sunlux Hotel. Painter looked worried and his black eyes flashed angrily as he disposed of the man with a scathing: “If you birds had eyes to see with or minds to remember with, a police officer’s job would be easier. Go on back to your elevator.”
Harry Jessup was seated comfortably in a deep chair across the room. He was a paunchy man with gray hair and a placid face. He rolled out his thick lips in a grimace at Shayne as Painter whirled on the Miami detective and demanded, “What’s all this about?”
Shayne said, “Suppose you bring me up-to-date. Have you found Mrs. Dustin?”
“Not a trace of her. She’s vanished completely. Flown out the window as near as I can make out from what I can learn around here.” He gestured savagely toward one of the wide-open windows. “Jessup says you sent him up here to investigate. Why? How did you know anything about it?”
“You should realize by this time that I generally know quite a lot about what’s going on.” Shayne looked over Painter’s head and asked Jessup, “Has her husband had anything to say yet?”
“The doctor’s in there trying to bring him out of it,” snapped Painter. He thrust himself forward aggressively as Shayne walked over toward Jessup.
“According to Jessup,” Painter went on, “you suspected something was wrong because Mrs. Dustin had tried to get in touch with you earlier and then didn’t answer her phone when you called back.”
“I didn’t waste time telling Jessup the whole story. Some bird entered my apartment while I was out, tried to kill my secretary, and answered the telephone, impersonating me and promising Mrs. Dustin he would see her at once.”
Shayne went on to give both men a swift resume of Lucy Hamilton’s condition and the fragmentary story she had told. He left out all reference to his encounter with the two men in Mickey’s Garage basement, and spread out his big hands when he added, “That’s everything I’ve got. I don’t know any more than you do why Mrs. Dustin called me. I don’t know who knocked Lucy out and answered my phone.”
“Where did you go after you left here earlier?” Painter demanded, eyeing the bruise on Shayne’s face. “Who did you tangle with?”
“Too much liquor,” Shayne said ruefully. “I dropped in a couple of bars and overestimated my capacity. Ended up ramming a culvert on Delaware Road and knocking myself out. What have you found out about Dustin tonight?” he asked Jessup.
“Nothing that’s worth a damn. They went to the hospital to get his hand X-rayed and bandaged. They returned a little before twelve and came right up. A few minutes later Mrs. Dustin phoned for the house physician who had temporarily bandaged her husband’s hand and asked for some sleeping-tablets. Said Dustin was suffering considerably. The doctor himself came up and gave her a vial with six tablets, prescribing one tablet immediately and another within half an hour if necessary, but she was positively instructed to call him again if two of the tablets didn’t give him relief. She and her husband were together in the bedroom when he gave the instructions, and he is sure both had understood. Yet when I entered the room with a passkey after you called, Mike, I found Dustin alone in bed in a deep sleep from which he couldn’t be roused. Half a glass of water stood on the bedside table, and four of the six tablets were gone. In the doctor’s opinion, four of the tablets were sufficient to produce Dustin’s present stupor, though the wounded man is in no danger, and in all probability will be able to tell his story soon.
“The only other telephone call from this apartment,” Jessup continued, “was about fifteen or twenty minutes after the doctor was here. To your number, Mike. Unfortunately, the operator didn’t listen in. That’s all. The rest is a blank. No one saw Mrs. Dustin go out-nor anyone visit her here. Their car is still parked where the doorman left it after the hold-up this evening.”
“Any back stairs where she could go without being noticed?”
“Sure. Right down the hall there’s an exit stairway for bathers. It leads down to the foot of the bathing-pier and anyone might go up or down it at night without being seen by any of the hotel attendants.”
“It’s quite evident that’s the way she left the hotel,” said Painter. “It’s also quite evident that she slipped her husband four of the pills, or induced him to take the overdose before she called you-or before she went out. Presumably to be sure he didn’t waken and catch her at it. Why?” He pounded a small fist in his palm for emphasis.
Shayne said, “You heard every word that passed between us tonight. I haven’t the faintest idea why she called me. As for doping her husband, that doesn’t necessarily carry all the implications you suggest. He was in bad shape and she wouldn’t want to worry him if she had discovered some lead she wanted to follow up on the robbery. It’d be just like a woman to decide to go out detecting on her own and slip her husband a Mickey so he wouldn’t worry.”
“It could also easily mean she had an inside track on the robbery which she had concealed from her husband,” Painter broke in. “He seemed a very decent sort to me. Just the sort of fool to be taken for a ride by a woman who soft-talked him into buying a bracelet worth a fortune which she then arranged to have stolen from him.”
“Why would she call me if she was in on the robbery?”
“Why wouldn’t she? Maybe-things were getting out of hand. Maybe her accomplices decided to keep the stuff and tell her to go fly a kite. She couldn’t turn to her husband for help. You’d be the logical one to call on.”
Shayne shrugged and said, “Maybe.”
“The whole thing seems rather clear now,” Painter insisted. “It all ties together. The careful way the robbery was planned-Dustin’s resistance, which shows he had no foreknowledge of it-the man who answered your phone and immediately pretended to be you when he recognized Mrs. Dustin’s voice.”
“Mr. X,” mused Shayne. “Who is he and how does he fit in the picture?”
“It’s as plain as the lump on your jaw,” scoffed Painter. “He was her accomplice. The guy who actually snatched the bracelet. He was coming to you to arrange a fix. Maybe she’d decided to double-cross him. As soon as he heard her voice on the telephone, he knew what was tip and arranged to meet her outside somewhere.”
Shayne said again, “Maybe.” He rubbed the uninjured side of his jaw, wandered across the living-room to look out the window at the layout two floors below. At his left was the white strip of beach and the lazy rolling whitecaps of the Atlantic Ocean, shimmering and phosphorescent beneath the tropical moon. Like a long finger projecting seaward lay the long wooden bathing-pier for the convenience of hotel guests. Directly beneath the window a concrete walk led along the back of the hotel from the street to the pier. All the lights, normally turned out this late at night, had been turned on again, and Shayne could see two men, presumably from the police force, strolling about aimlessly as though they were searching for clues and didn’t know where to begin looking.
The inner door of the suite opened as Shayne turned back from the window. The resident physician at the Sunlux announced with professional solemnity, “You may come in now. When you question the patient, try not to excite him with news of his wife’s disappearance,” after closing the door.
“How much have you told him?” Painter asked.
“Nothing except that I feared the sedative had been too strong for him and that I would cut the prescription in the future.” He opened the door and stood aside for the three men to enter the bedroom.
Mark Dustin was propped up in bed on two pillows. His normally ruddy face was sallow and had the drawn look of violent nausea. His injured hand was in a plaster cast and lay stiffly extended on the coverlet. He wet his lips nervously when he recognized Painter and Shayne, and burst out:
“What’s all this rumpus about? Where’s Celia? Has something happened to her?”
“What makes you think anything like that, Mr. Dustin?” Painter asked.
“You’re concealing something from me. That doctor’s been giving me a lot of double-talk. If Celia’s all right, where is she?”
“We thought you might be able to tell us that.” Painter’s voice was silky.
“So something has happened! What, in the name of God?” Dustin panted. “What time is it? How long have I been passed out? What did that damned sawbones put in that pill he gave me?”
“It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, Mr. Dustin,” Painter told him. “What time did you take the-sleeping- tablet?”
“A little after midnight. As soon as the doctor left. Celia fixed it for me.”
