The Corpse That Never Was

on right under your nose. My goodness! If I’d ever guessed. And when I heard that shotgun go off last night…”

“No one ever does know,” Shayne agreed, getting to his feet thankfully and taking out a cigarette as he heard the elevator stop at that floor and the tramp of feet down the hall toward them. “I think that will be my men now. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Conrad. You’ve cleared up a lot of confusing points.”

“Glad to do it,” she assured him, hurrying to the door behind him and peering out like a bright-eyed magpie at the two men from headquarters and the gangling reporter from the News as they stopped to greet Shayne in front of the other door. “What are you going to do in there now?” she asked avidly. “If you want I should come in, maybe I could…”

“I think not, Mrs. Conrad,” Shayne told her firmly, opening the door and motioning the others in. “This room will have to remain sealed until the police are completely through with it.” He followed the trio in and shut the door behind him, not exactly slamming it, he thought to himself with a grin, but unmistakably closing it very firmly in her face.

Sergeant Deitch and Garroway both carried their kits with them, looking like doctors’ emergency bags, and Rourke strolled forward into the living room with his hands in his pockets. Deitch was a middle-aged stubby man, with a cheerful, unlined face. He set his bag down and faced Shayne with a shade of truculence in his manner. “I still don’t know exactly what you want us to do here, Shayne. Like I said over the phone…”

Shayne said quickly, “What we’re going to do right now is to pretend there weren’t any suicide notes to conveniently solve the case for us. Both of you were here last night and saw the two bodies. Naturally, all of us reconstructed the events leading up to death in the light of what the notes told us. But suppose we’d come on them cold. There are a lot of things you two would have done that the lieutenant didn’t bother to do last night.

“Sergeant, I want you to check everything in this entire apartment for prints. The place was vacant for a week before Lambert moved into it, and probably had a thorough cleaning during that vacancy. He hasn’t had any maid so far as I know. So any prints other than those of the two corpses may be important.”

“There were half a dozen of us milling around in here last night,” Deitch pointed out stiffly.

“That’s why I wanted you for the job. You were here and know just about what they may have handled. Besides, you’ve got a record of all their prints right at headquarters. It shouldn’t be difficult to check them out. I want to know if anyone else has been in here during the past three weeks… particularly last night. That window in the bedroom for instance, that was open last night when I broke in. And the fire escape outside.”

“It rained about two o’clock this morning,” Deitch reminded him. “We won’t get anything from the fire escape.”

Rourke chuckled from where he stood a few feet away, listening. “Mike figures there was somebody in here with them who persuaded the woman to drink poison and then rammed the shotgun barrel into Lambert’s mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“Listen,” said Deitch hotly. “I checked that gun last night. Fingerprints on the barrel. Angle it was held at. Even to a smidgen of a big toe print on the trigger. You can’t tell me…”

“No one is trying to tell you anything,” said Shayne patiently. “Just get me what I want, Sarge. And you, Garroway. There are a dozen things they taught you to do in police school that you didn’t waste time on last night. I mentioned that stain on the rug where Lambert evidently spilled his drink. I want to be sure it had the same amount of cyanide in it as the drink she swallowed. And the bedroom. Make every test in the book on the bedding and the clothes Lambert left behind. Those he was wearing before he got into his pajamas, and everything in the drawers and the closet. Lint and dust in the pockets and cuffs. Anything that will tell us who and what Lambert was. Where he came from. What he did for a living. You know what I want better than I do.”

Both technicians nodded without further discussion, opened their kits and set to work.

Standing beside Rourke, Shayne noted that the black hat and the silk gloves still lay on the table near the door where he had first seen them the night before.

He turned away and wandered into the bedroom which he hadn’t entered before, noted that the window was now tightly closed, and the double bed was neatly made up. Lying across the foot of it and neatly folded was a dark suit, white shirt and bow tie and a man’s underwear, evidently discarded by the dead man when he donned his pajamas. He turned away to the open closet door and peered inside as Rourke joined him. The only articles of wearing apparel in the closet were a woman’s nightgown of very sheer material, flame-red in color, with a matching peignoir on a hanger beside it. On the floor beneath was a pair of flimsy bedroom slippers of the same color; the type that can be folded up in a small plastic bag into a parcel not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes and carried in a woman’s handbag.

Rourke whistled expressively as he looked at them with Shayne. “That wasn’t in the police report. Would have been a nice touch of color for my story. I understand the guy was practically stripped for action. Why not her?”

Shayne shrugged. “He was waiting for her in pajamas and robe… and probably with the drinks already mixed. How the hell does anybody know how the mind of a suicide works?”

He went out of the bedroom and into the living room where he skirted around Garroway kneeling in front of the stain on the rug, hesitated and then went to the telephone table at the end of the sofa, leaned over and flipped open the directory to the Miami Beach section of the book. He turned to the N’s and found, “Nathan, Paul,” with a pencil mark in front of it. His frown deepened as he took a slip of paper from his pocket and compared the telephone number with one of those Miss Mayhew had given him in her office downstairs.

It was the Miami Beach number that had been called three times. There was no doubt that the occupant of this room had telephoned the Nathan residence on the Beach each Friday evening since Robert Lambert had rented the place… just about half an hour before Elsa Nathan had been observed arriving at his door. Old Eli, Shayne thought with a grimace, wasn’t going to like any of this one little bit. If the flaming nightgown and the slippers in the closet were identified as hers…

But, who the hell else did he think they belonged to? Eli’s theory that she had been lured here last night to be murdered by her husband, somehow, had been screwy on the face of it. Too bad because it meant kissing goodbye to fifty grand, but there it was.

Timothy Rourke sauntered out of the bedroom as Shayne straightened up and closed the telephone book. He asked sardonically, “What progress is the great sleuth making?” and Shayne shrugged his shoulders without replying.

Sergeant Deitch came out of the kitchen as they stood there, and said pleasantly, “Nothing worth a damn in there. That guy Lambert was either one hell of a meticulous housekeeper, or else he didn’t do any housekeeping here. No sign that a pot or pan, or a dish or piece of silverware has been touched. Some old prints… month or so… presumably female… probably the former maid.”

Shayne said absently, “I don’t think Lambert rented this apartment with any idea of setting up housekeeping. Best bet right now is that he only came here for Friday nights.”

“And for a lot more interesting reason than cooking dinner,” observed Rourke with a leer. “You going to keep on sticking around, Mike?”

“For a little while. You go ahead if you want to.”

“Yeh,” said Rourke. “I could use a drink right about now. Come out and grab one with me?”

“Some stuff in the kitchen,” Sergeant Deitch informed them with a grin. “Dark rum and creme de menthe.”

Rourke repressed a shudder. “Any cyanide to make it interesting?”

“No cyanide,” the sergeant told him gravely. “But there is a bottle of bonded bourbon with a couple of good slugs left in it.”

Rourke said, “Ah,” and headed happily for the kitchen. Shayne started to follow him, checked himself and asked Garroway, “Did you analyze the liquor in the bottles last night?”

“Yeh. All three of them. They’re okay. The cyanide was added after the stuff was mixed in the glasses.”

In the kitchen, Shayne found the reporter breaking ice cubes from a container and dropping them into a tall glass. The refrigerator door stood wide open and a glance inside showed the shelves to be completely bare.

On the drainboard at the left of the sink stood a fifth of dark rum and a squat tenth of creme de menthe.

Only a little liquor was gone from each bottle. In contrast, the bottle of bourbon on the other side of the drainboard which Rourke was uncorking held no more than six ounces of liquor.

Rourke splashed half of that on top of the ice cubes, and held the bottle out to his redheaded friend. “It’s on the house.”