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?”
“Drink a couple of coffee royals and then hie me over to the Beach to get my teeth into a few facts before doing any more vain theorizing. Tell Linda I’ll be in touch.”
Lucy nodded and hurried out, leaving him alone with his cognac-laced coffee and his thoughts.
4
Twenty minutes and two coffee royals later, Shayne telephoned Timothy Rourke at the News from Lucy’s apartment. When the reporter’s voice came over the wire, he said, “Tim. Have you got anything on the Beach killing… Fitzgilpin?”
“Not much. I’ve just been sitting here thinking about the little guy and what a shame it is. Are you interested, Mike?”
“His widow is a close friend of Lucy’s. I drove her over to make the identification. What do you mean… you’ve been thinking what a shame it is? Did you know Fitzgilpin?”
“Not really. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago and did a piece about him for the paper. Human interest stuff. He got an insurance company award… top ten in the United States for annual increase in number of policies for five thousand bucks and under. He seemed a hell of a nice guy. Knocked off for a few hundred bucks, huh?”
“That’s not too certain,” Shayne told his old friend cautiously. “I guess he was rolled, all right, but he was poisoned first.”
“Poisoned? You sure?”
“Painter is. You better ask him.”
“Damn right I will. How do you stand in it?”
“The widow is officially my client. And Painter isn’t pleased.”
“No. He wouldn’t be.” Rourke’s voice was thoughtful and Shayne could almost hear the wheels spinning around in his head. “He’d like to hang it on her, huh?”
“You know how a cop is when a husband turns up with poison in him. I’m at Lucy’s place, Tim, and she’s upstairs with Mrs. Fitzgilpin. You want to go over to the Beach and nose around? Painter isn’t going to give me
