“I have nothing to do with it? I have everything! The bad thing, Mr. Shayne, the way it started, I took the money from Bixler last year, that three thousand dollars. I knew I shouldn’t. But I did. And now see.”
CHAPTER 14
3:55 A.M.
“Olga, you go to bed,” Oscar said. “We’ll handle this.”
“Yes, the way you handle that little man! You only know one thing, you and Pete. Throw him on the sidewalk, beat him. That’s all you know, beat, beat.” She turned to Shayne. “My brother Oskar, he comes out of prison. He got in fist fight about some cheap girl, the other fellow died. He was in three years. Now, who will believe he takes this Bixler out and only just taps?
Oskar raised his hand. “Olga, by the memory of our mother, I’m telling you-”
Olga sniffed. “It was all right when I took his money. That was fine. Now he wants to talk to me, you take him out and kill him.”
Her other brother said warmly, “I was there, for Christ’s sake! I put a newspaper under his head! Oskar didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill him.”
Shayne put in, “Will everybody please stop talking? Personally I think you’re telling the truth, Szep. But if your own sister won’t believe you, don’t be too surprised if a jury won’t. We’ve got a little time before they pick you up. Are you with me so far?”
“I better get in the car and start moving, huh?”
“Not just yet. There’s no identification on the body. No shoes. He’s covered with dirt and blood. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum, and they won’t bother about him much until they take his prints in the morning. They may not hurry with that, but they’re sure to know who he is by noon. I’m beginning to get a few faint ideas, but I need some cooperation, in fact all the cooperation I can get. You can help, Olga. Will you try to remember exactly what Bixler said when he came in?”
She moved a stool out from the bar and sat down, her chin on one hand. “Do we have champagne, and will I drink some with him. I said my brothers don’t allow. Then he said why do I go away from town last year. I said I was scared. He said did anybody else ever ask me about the diary. Then Oskar came over.”
“What did he pay you the three thousand bucks for, a look at Mrs. Masterson’s diary?”
Olga nodded. “That was her name then.”
“What do you mean-she married again?”
“Uh-huh, to that Senator, I forget his name.”
“Redpath?” Shayne said sharply.
“That’s right, Redpath. I saw her picture in the paper.”
Shayne tapped his fingers on the bar and fitted another piece on the puzzle into place. “How long did you work for her?”
“How long, Oskar? Maybe a year. Good pay, but she had so many dinners. Eighteen, twenty people. They never sat down before eight-thirty, it was twelve when you finished the dishes. An hour to go home. Back at eight the next morning. I said to her once, I better sleep at her house the nights she has a party. There’s maid’s room. She said no. I know why-then I might find out who came back to sleep with her after everybody went home.”
“I didn’t want Olga to take that job,” Oskar said, “but try telling Olga.”
“Why did she fire you?” Shayne asked.
“She said I didn’t keep the house clean. Those floors sparkled! The silver, always A-one condition. The bathrooms-perfect.” She gave an indignant sniff. “One night I get home to my house and forget the key. I must go all the way back in a taxicab, or sleep on the sidewalk. You think I try to find out who she has in her bedroom? She can have fifty men if she wants to. I don’t care. I go in by the back door. I know where I leave the key, on the drainboard by the sink. And Mrs. Masterson comes stamping downstairs very mad, in her bathrobe. Oh, she was so mad. What am I doing, spying on her? Some people. She did have a man up there, I see his hat in the hall, one of those army hats.”
Shayne swung around. “Do you remember what color braid? What kind of insignia?”
“What kind of what?”
Oskar explained in Polish, and Olga said, “Some big bird, like an eagle?”
Shayne smiled for the first time since finding Bixler’s body. “Now how about the diary?”
Olga said bitterly, “I wish I never saw that diary.”
Oskar filled Shayne’s glass and poured another shot for himself. “What did you do that was so bad, Olga? He said they were crooks, they were robbing the government, and you had to help so he could stop it.”
“Oh, yes, and I helped him. I turned into a thief myself.”
“You didn’t steal it, you borrowed it! I’ve told you time and again.”
“Steal it, they know it’s gone. Borrow it and put it back, maybe they don’t even know it happened. That’s worse.”
Shayne was pulling at his earlobe. “Bixler told me he didn’t go through with it.”
Olga laughed without humor. “He lied, Mr. Shayne.”
“How did you work it?”
“This diary,” she said, “she kept it locked in a box on the back of a shelf in the bedroom closet. If she didn’t want me to know where she puts the key to the box, the other little key to the diary, she should change her own towels and vacuum-clean and straighten up and make her own beds. In one year, the maid finds out little things. When I tell Bixler I know about the keys, oh, he goes crazy. This was after she fired me, and I had to give her back my key to the house. He got another key for me. He told me what I must do. One day we practiced, to be sure there was time for everything. The day after when she went out to lunch-he knew she was going out to lunch, he had everything worked out-he called the house. The new maid answers, he says it’s the furnace company, go down and get the number off the furnace. There was no number! That was his business, to know how to do those things. So the maid is looking for it in the basement, I unlock the back door very very quietly and walk up to the bedroom, get the keys from the desk, open the box, unlock the diary, put the keys back, the box back, hurry downstairs-one minute, no more.”
“Did you look in the diary?”
“I had no time. Everything was all hurry, hurry.”
“Olga, you know you looked in it. You’re human.”
“I opened it, but it was in this tiny writing, you’d need hours to read one sentence. Every day she put down names for lunch, names for dinner, and numbers, like two hundred dollars, five hundred dollars.”
“You couldn’t make out any of the names?”
“You try reading something that little in a taxi sometime. Bouncing around. And I was
“Wait a minute. How did Bixler get the key to the locker after you left the diary in it?”
“That part I didn’t tell. He sent me the key in the mail the day before. He had another, see? Then he called the maid and talked to her on the phone in the kitchen and I walked in the front door, as bold as you please. All over. Then he said I should move to another house and be careful. I thought, if he says be careful, I’ll be extra careful, so I went to my other brother and sister-in-law in the Bronx, New York. I stayed four months.”
Shayne said slowly, “Are you sure it was Bixler who arranged all this?”
She looked at him as though he had challenged some basic religious belief. “He said he was Bixler, Ronald Bixler.”
“OK,” Shayne said. “This sounds simple because it worked, but it was really pretty complicated. From the depot he’d have to take the diary to an office, and back to the depot. Even with a high-speed copier, say a late- model
