told him about the diary in the first place. When I bumped into him last night, he was drunk and talkative. I don’t know how much of what he told me was true. He said he’d sold the maid’s address to Wall, for example, for a sum in excess of two thousand bucks. True or false? Who knows?”
“And of course you can’t give him a lie-detector test because he’s dead,” Wall commented.
Shayne nodded somberly. “The same thing goes for my other big piece of evidence. Bixler was killed near an after-hours bar on Larue Place, and I know where I can put my hands on a witness who saw him getting out of a black and white hardtop. If this witness was sober and churchgoing and a good credit risk, I’d be in clover, but he’s actually a neighborhood drunk, and I’d hate to think how a defense lawyer could cut him up on cross- examination.”
“I own a black and white hardtop,” Wall said, “as I’m sure you know, Shayne. There must be thousands in the city. Anything else?”
“Well, you fit most of the requirements I’ve been looking for, Senator. You could have found out what Bixler was up to last year, and it wouldn’t be hard for you to get him shifted to that Civil Service job. You’re ambitious and tough and you’re willing to cut corners and you like money. Your National Aviation connection would give you the ideal cover. I asked Redpath what he thought of you in this role, and he said it was impossible because you were such a loyal National man. But Henry Clark tells me he’s suddenly beginning to have doubts about your loyalty. You were out till God knows when last night, and if you thought Bixler was a real threat to that million dollars and your job in the Senate, I think you’re capable of killing him. But there’s only one way we could ever prove anything against you, and that’s by finding those ten thousand shares of Manners’ stock.” His eyes were boring into Wall’s. “I have a man going through your rooms at the Park Plaza. Don’t be alarmed-he won’t harm anything. If he doesn’t find anything there, he’ll try a couple of others. Mrs. Redpath, Sam Toby, Trina Hitchcock. Somebody has that stock, and whoever has it is the murderer. Now, I think Maggie Smith has something she wants to say.”
Maggie smiled brightly as the faces turned toward her. She was holding her bag too tightly, Shayne noticed, but that was her only sign of stage fright.
“It’s not really conclusive,” she said. “Two weeks ago I was called into the office of a certain investigative agency. Well, I suppose I can tell you-it was the FBI. I was told that Senator Wall’s financial affairs were under investigation.”
Wall walked up to her and gave her a piercing look. She met it without flinching.
“I’ll go on, Senator, if you’ll back away. I’m not at my best when people are breathing on me.”
He moved off with an angry exclamation.
She continued, “They knew that he and Trina Hitchcock were having an affair. I was asked-quite forcibly, I may say-to take advantage of my occasional presence in the Hitchcock house and plant a small electronic transmitting device, to pick up their conversations. The assumption was, I believe, that Senator Wall might be using Miss Hitchcock to control or influence her father.”
“You filthy-” Trina began.
Wall’s face was puzzled. “I’d like to hear the rest of this, Trina.”
“The thing was,” Maggie said, “it was very much of a longshot, and you couldn’t expect them to put their own agents on twenty-four-hour duty, on the off chance that something important might come over. They thought I’d know when Trina and Senator Wall were together. They were wrong, actually; I wasn’t that much of an intimate of the Hitchcock household. However, last night I gathered from Mike Shayne that various extraordinary things were taking place, and I kept the receiver open. And suddenly, sure enough, I heard Senator Wall. Well, what I was supposed to do was tape what he said, but I couldn’t get the miserable recorder to function. I’m so stupid about anything mechanical. So I took notes.”
Opening her bag, she took out a folded sheaf of pages torn from a stenographer’s notebook. “I got as much as I could, but my shorthand is terrible rusty.” She put on her glasses. “Trina Hitchcock’s voice-now you understand this isn’t verbatim, by any means-Trina said, ‘What are we going to do, Tom?’ And his voice said, ‘I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Let nature take its course. Nobody’s been hurt so far. The profit, my God, it’s fantastic. There’s only one stumbling block, and that’s Bixler. Something’s going to have to be done about him. There’s danger in trying to buy him off. He’ll have an exaggerated idea about how much he deserves. And could we trust him?’” Suddenly Trina sprang out of her chair and raked Maggie’s glasses off her face.
“You’re lying, you dirty tramp! The whole thing is a damn dirty lie!”
She snatched the notes and thrust them at Wall. “Here, Tom!”
Her eyes shining, Maggie clipped her with an awkward right. As Trina staggered, one of her heels broke. She tore off her other shoe and came back at Maggie, who seized a newspaper from the table and flung it in her face. It came apart, blinding her for a moment.
Then they were grabbed from behind.
Trina screamed, “Let go! I’m going to kill that bitch! I swear I’m going to kill her!”
“I’d like to see you try,” Maggie said.
“OK, girls,” Shayne said, stepping between them. “War’s over.”
“Of course she’s been lying,” Senator Wall said. “What interests me is who put her up to it?”
Sam Toby exclaimed, “Hitchcock!”
Everybody looked at the chair near the door, where Senator Hitchcock had been sitting. He was gone.
CHAPTER 20
11:25 A.M.
“What did you think this ruckus was all about?” Shayne asked. “Trina wanted to give him a chance to get away.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Trina said icily after divesting herself of the newspaper. “He must have gone to talk to the TV people.”
“Does anybody else think so?” Shayne said.
Senator Wall blustered, “If you’re hoping to convince anybody that Emory Hitchcock had any part in the theft of that diary-”
“It’s hard to tell what people will do before they do it,” Shayne said. “Yeah-there’s no question that Hitchcock is the one who stole the diary and milked it for just about a million bucks, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. He also killed Bixler, not because he’s a homicidal maniac, but because he had to. Bixler was too flighty and unstable, and it wouldn’t have been safe to cut him in.”
“I only started believing it myself at about five o’clock this morning. He made his big mistake when he didn’t take his daughter into his confidence. He misjudged the girl. He thought she’d be shocked.”
“Shayne,” Senator Redpath said, “we don’t want to be too leisurely, do we? When you said you were sending a man to look for the Manners stock at Trina Hitchcock’s, wasn’t the object of that to alarm Emory?”
“Sure,” Shayne agreed. “And the fireworks started a minute later, which probably means that the stock is hidden somewhere in the house. But let’s give him another couple of minutes.”
“Will you explain something, Mike?” Maggie Smith said. “What was the point of that whole business with me, or wasn’t it connected?”
“Of course it was connected,” Shayne said. “Wall, for his friends in National Aviation, had begun to look into the old investigation of Toby. Probably Hitchcock had pulled everything out of the files, but he couldn’t keep Bixler out of town indefinitely without calling attention to his interest in the jerk. Sooner or later Wall was going to add everything up and decide that one of his colleagues had been up to some dirty work, and had taken over the theft of the diary after sending Bixler out of town. But he couldn’t conceivably suspect Hitchcock, because the old man had arranged something very clever. Maggie Smith did a job once for Toby. We can skip the details. Just because somebody does a certain kind of thing once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again. I’ve known that for years, but it slipped my mind. Toby, you understand, was the only person who had to know that Hitchcock was pulling the strings. Manners didn’t know it, Oulihan didn’t know it, Mrs. Redpath didn’t know it. Hitchcock got Toby to suggest a woman who could be linked to some one of Toby’s operations in the past, and Toby arranged the dinner where Maggie and
