“I hoped it would be a call about her, at least. We don’t know where she is or what’s become of her.” He swiftly explained the condition of the Larson apartment when he and Rourke went there after the shooting. “What does your woman’s intuition make of that… in view of all the known circumstances?”
“The last we know about her is when she telephoned you to say her husband had run out of their place with a gun and she was afraid he was going to shoot Wesley Ames? Is that right?”
“That’s the last anyone seems to know about her.”
“And there’s a half-packed suitcase on the bed, her clothes scattered around, and blood in the bathroom,” Lucy recapitulated thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Michael. She would naturally be terribly frightened and distressed. Your earlier visit must have worried her frightfully. I wonder…” She paused. “Under the circumstances do you suppose she might have called Mr. Ames to tell him the way things were going?”
“Do you mean after she talked to me and before Ralph came back? Or after Ralph went out with a gun and she called me… to warn Ames?”
“Well, I really meant after you talked to her. While she was sitting there planning what to say to Ralph when he came home. If she was having some sort of affair with Ames, wouldn’t she be likely to call him to break it off?”
“U-m-m,” ruminated Shayne. “And maybe he was serious about her. Maybe he said, ‘To hell with that husband of yours, babe. Pack a bag and get out of there to avoid a violent scene.’ Is that what you’re thinking?”
“I hadn’t gone that far,” Lucy said honestly. “But it might have been that way. And if Ralph came back unexpectedly and caught her packing…”
Shayne slowed and turned off the Boulevard onto Lucy’s side street. He said slowly, “I’m trying to remember whether there was a telephone in Ames’ study. I’d suspect he’d have a private line there, but I don’t recall seeing one. It’s where he closed himself up to do his work, and maybe he didn’t have one. Normally I suppose his secretary would handle his calls. It’s something I’ll have to check on if I can get in there tonight.”
He drew up at the curb opposite Lucy’s apartment, and got out to go across the street with her and wait in the little foyer while she unlocked the outer door of the building. She turned with the door held open and lifted her face to his, and he gave her a gentle goodnight kiss, and she said, “Be careful, Michael. Don’t get into any trouble over a measly twenty-five thousand dollars. I honestly don’t need a mink coat in Miami.”
He grinned and patted her shoulder and promised, “I’ll let you know how it turns out… if it isn’t too late.”
He went across to his car whistling under his breath and telling himself he had a mighty fine secretary and one who deserved mink if any secretary in Miami did.
The driveway and parking area in front of the Ames house were dark when he approached the gateway, but lights showed in both the first and second stories of the house.
The floodlights came on automatically and almost blindingly as he turned in between the gateposts, and there were now two cars parked behind the black Cadillac sedan. The police cars and Larson’s compact were gone, but there was a cream-colored, open, convertible Thunderbird and behind it a late-model Pontiac.
Shayne pulled up behind the Pontiac and got out in the bright glare of the floodlights, and the front door opened and a man stood there looking at him as he approached.
He was a young man with a slender well-knit body, wearing a yellow polo shirt that was molded to his muscled shoulders and a pair of dark tan slacks. He had close-cropped, burnished black hair and a thin black mustache that was shaved to make a straight line across his upper lip, and he had mobile, intelligent features.
He blocked the doorway so that Shayne stopped directly in front of him, and he said with cool aloofness, “I think you must be Mike Shayne, the private eye. I understand you were here once before tonight. What is it this time?”
Shayne said, “Some unfinished business. Are you Conroy?”
“I am… yes. I understood that the police investigation was closed.”
“My private investigation isn’t,” Shayne told the secretary in a tone that matched his. “What’s the protocol here? Do you get out of my way or do I push?”
“For heaven’s sake, let the man in, Vic,” came Mark Ames’ tired voice from the interior of the room. “If he has any further questions let’s get them answered and done with.”
Victor Conroy shrugged his shoulders with a faint hint of insolence, and stepped backward quietly out of the doorway. Shayne entered and nodded to Mark Ames who stood at the end of a wide brocaded sofa at the right with a highball glass in his hand. A tall, slender, elegantly-gowned woman was slumped back on the sofa beside him with her long legs carelessly crossed to expose a couple of inches of silken-clad thigh, and with a sullen expression on the darkly Semitic beauty of her face. She, too, held a highball glass, and she looked as though she had been belting down drinks in a hurry.
Ames nodded back to Shayne and looked down at the woman, and said, “It’s Mike Shayne, Helena. The detective who tried to get here in time to save Wes’s life but was about sixty seconds too late.”
“Well, thank God for that.” The widow straightened her shoulders and her intensely black eyes were luminous. She spoke concisely, with no slurring of her consonants. “Why did you come back, Mr. Shayne? To collect the medal you so richly deserve for getting here sixty seconds too late?”
“Now, Helena,” said Ames worriedly, dropping the thin fingers of his right hand to touch her shoulder lightly. “It isn’t necessary to be too blatant about the way you feel.”
She shrugged and said, “I doubt whether this redheaded man gives a damn one way or the other how I feel. And if he does, he can lump it. Can’t you, Mister?”
Shayne nodded impassively. “I certainly can, Mrs. Ames. It’s a pleasure to meet a forthright female.”
“Hear that, Mark? He’s not a sniveling hypocrite. He must have known my dear departed husband because to know him was to hate him. Did you hate him, Mr. Shayne?”
“I didn’t know him that well.” Shayne turned away from the murdered man’s brother and his widow to the secretary. “I’d like a word with you, Conroy.”
Victor Conroy shrugged and said, “Okay by me. We’ve already told the police all we know.”
“Shall we go in your office?” Without waiting for Conroy’s acquiescence, Shayne led the way into the room that Griggs had used earlier. He waited by the double doors until Conroy was inside, then closed them saying, “I’ve got a hunch those two in the living room would just as leave be alone with their grief.”
Conroy allowed himself to smile reluctantly at this. “My former boss had a way about him,” he admitted wryly. “Helena shouldn’t get tanked up like this… not while Mark’s around. Not that it matters much I guess,” he went on sourly. “Ralph Larson did them both a favor by knocking Ames off the way he did. You can’t put a woman in jail for admitting she’s glad her husband has been murdered.”
“How about you?” demanded Shayne. “Are you joining in the general rejoicing?”
Conroy shrugged his shoulders and met the detective’s gaze squarely. “I’ve lost a job. Wesley Ames was a son-of-a-bitch to work for, but he paid well.”
“What will become of the column now?”
“It’ll automatically be canceled. He was a few weeks ahead and the papers will run those, I suppose. But the column was Wesley Ames. No one can step into his shoes.”
“What I’m wondering,” said Shayne softly, “is who will inherit his files? The bits of nasty gossip he’s collected but has never printed about a lot of important people.”
Conroy seemed not to understand what Shayne was driving at. “I suppose it’s all part of his estate,” he said indifferently. “His widow inherits so far as I know.”
“Will she be likely to keep you on the job for a time? To sort things out and catalog them?”
“I doubt it.” Victor Conroy scowled darkly. “More likely she’ll just consign everything to the incinerator without even looking at the files. She hated his column,” he explained. “She hated the sort of man it had turned him into. She liked the money it brought him, but that’s all she did like about it.”
Shayne lit a cigarette and looked inquiringly about the secretary’s office, letting his gaze come to rest on the filing cabinets along the wall. “Did he keep all his material in here? Did you file it all?”
“All that he trusted out of his own sight. He had personal stuff in his desk upstairs that he considered too explosive for even my eyes. He went to a lot of trouble to explain that to me one day,” Conroy went on angrily. “He was guarding me against temptation, he told me. There was stuff that couldn’t be printed because it would ruin people’s lives if it were, and he was afraid I might use it for blackmail if I got my hands on it.” Conroy shrugged. “To
