apartment.
Chapter Four
Shayne was humming when he unlocked his apartment door and stepped inside. He heeled the door shut and stopped humming to raise bushy, questioning brows at Timothy Rourke, lolling in a big chair in the middle of the room with a highball glass in his hand.
“What are you doing here, Tim?” Then he registered what he hoped to be both surprise and pleasure when he saw Chief Gentry’s solid figure occupying more than a third of the couch. He was chewing on the frayed butt of a black cigar and nursing a half-filled shot glass.
“And our estimable chief of police. Glad to see you’re making yourselves at home. I know you’ll excuse me-” He started for the bedroom, stripping the polo shirt over his head. Tossing it through the open door, he turned and asked:
“By the way, Tim, did Miss Morton turn up at the hotel?”
“Hold on, Mike,” Gentry rumbled, forestalling Rourke’s reply. “What’s your rush?”
Shayne grinned wryly and rubbed the red bristles on his face. “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, Will, but I’ve got to grab a fast shave and change. There’s more liquor-”
“You’re not going anywhere, Mike. Not right now.” Gentry spoke flatly, not turning his head.
“I thought this was a social call,” said Shayne with pretended consternation. “There’s a dame waiting for me and I promised to make it fast.”
“Miss Morton’s secretary?”
Shayne strode to the couch and faced Gentry, his back toward Rourke. “See here, Will-” He caught the chief’s eye and made frantic gestures to indicate he didn’t want to answer questions in the reporter’s presence.
Gentry was not impressed. He rolled his rumpled eyelids down, studied the soggy, flattened end of the cigar butt, and asked, “Where is she, Mike? What have you and she been up to?”
“Dropping in a few places trying to get a line on Sara Morton,” Shayne told him. He made a half-turn and snapped, “What the hell, Tim? Did you call in the cops because I stole your girl?”
“Cut the clowning,” growled Gentry. “Where is Miss Lally?”
“What’s it to you?” Shayne growled back. “Miss Lally is free, white, and well past the age of consent.”
Gentry leaned forward and dropped the cigar butt in an ash tray, grunted as he leaned back, and said with deceptive mildness, “I want to question her as a murder suspect.”
“Murder? Beatrice a suspect?” Shayne said angrily, rumpling his hair. But Gentry wasn’t looking. He was calmly lighting a cigar. Shayne turned to Rourke and demanded, “What in hell is this about, Tim?”
Rourke’s slaty eyes were on his nearly empty glass. He said quietly, “Sara Morton is dead. She was evidently dead when you and Beatrice and I tried to rouse her around nine o’clock in her hotel room.”
“Suicide?”
“I said murder, Mike,” Gentry reminded him.
“But you didn’t say Sara Morton.”
Gentry glanced up at Shayne with eyes like streaked granite. “Suicides don’t jab a pair of long-bladed shears into the jugular and then go in the bathroom to wash the blood off the weapon, carry it back in the room, and then lie down to die. Not without dripping a little blood along the way, they don’t.”
Shayne swore softly and went to the wall liquor cabinet, got out a bottle of cognac, and poured three ounces in a wine glass. He drank half of it and took the glass with him as he resumed his standing position between Rourke and Gentry.
“How can you suspect Miss Lally, Will? She was in the Tidehaven bar with Tim from the time she came down after talking with Miss Morton through a locked door until I got there. Right, Tim?”
“Every minute-except maybe two minutes when she went to the ladies’ room,” Rourke declared. “I can swear it wasn’t more than two minutes. Not time enough by any stretch of the imagination to get up to the fourteenth floor and back, much less do the job in fourteen-twenty.”
“There you are, Will,” said Shayne. He sat down beside the red-faced, stolid chief of police. “We know she was alive at six when her secretary talked to her?”
“How?”
“Hell, she didn’t talk through the door with her throat cut,” Shayne flared.
“We have only the secretary’s word that she talked. Doc Cantrell says it’s quite possible Sara Morton was killed shortly before six.”
Shayne finished his cognac and thumped the glass down on a table. “Is that your only reason to suspect her-because Cantrell says she could have died before six?”
“There’s lots more.” Gentry took his time blowing a puff of cigar smoke, turned his head to study Shayne suspiciously. “You seem to have fallen hard-and fast, Mike.”
“Take off her glasses and she’s not bad,” he said tersely. “What’s the ‘lots more’?”
“The death-room door was double locked,” Gentry rumbled placidly. “Only exit for the murderer was through the adjoining room, which Miss Lally used for an office. She has the only key.”
“You don’t need a key to get out of a room,” Shayne protested with moody impatience.
“According to Miss Lally’s story, Miss Morton wouldn’t unlock the door even for her at six,” Gentry pointed out. “Said she wasn’t coming out until she received a phone call. Do you think she unlocked the door to let her murderer in?”
“Do you suppose the murderer announced his intention when he knocked on her door?” Shayne countered.
“But it was someone she knew,” the chief stated flatly. “She wasn’t afraid of whoever killed her. Just stood there with her back turned and let her pick up the shears and plunge them in the side of her throat.”
“Or him,” said Shayne.
“It looks like a woman’s job to me. A sudden outburst of rage. Those shears are the sort of thing a woman would grab up to do the job.”
“That’s damned little evidence to support suspicion of murder,” Shayne contended.
“There’s more. And I’d rather hoped you could supply me with the clincher. Why was Miss Morton so anxious to get hold of you all day? We know she phoned your office three times.”
“I was fishing all day. I went straight to my office from the boat and found a memo listing three calls from her. That was eight-thirty-when I called her room and had her paged. Tim must have told you about it. He was with Miss Lally when she took my call in the lobby.”
“Will knows about that,” Rourke said. “But you didn’t tell us you hadn’t talked to her, Mike. I had the impression you had.”
“Too bad you didn’t,” Gentry said. “I’m pretty sure she suspected Miss Lally planned to murder her. She would have told you all about it if you’d been in your office where you belonged. That’s the trouble with you damned private eyes. No system-no regular office hours.”
“What makes you so sure Morton suspected Miss Lally?” Shayne asked. “Where’s your motive?” He sat bent forward with bare forearms on his knees, and he spoke with sharp impatience.
“They had a fight around two o’clock this morning,” Gentry told him calmly. “Around two a.m. Did Lally tell you about that?”
“She had no reason to. If she had known Miss Morton was dead and she was under suspicion-What did they fight about?” he broke off abruptly.
“That’s what I want to ask Miss Lally. It must have been a pretty hot brawl. The party in the adjoining room called down and complained about the noise. He said they were quarreling about money. When the night manager went up, Miss Lally was in the connecting room, crying and packing a bag. Miss Morton had the manager move her secretary to another room. Said she didn’t want her sleeping in fourteen twenty-two any longer.”
Shayne scowled heavily and tugged at his left ear lobe. “I thought the adjoining room was just used as an
