paper.”
“Which would make it a simple matter for anyone to forge a duplicate at the bottom.”
“What are you getting at?” Harsh broke in sternly. “Who else could or would wish to write a letter like that and forge her signature?”
“I don’t know,” Shayne admitted absently. He folded the note, replaced it in the envelope, and thrust it into his pocket. “Is the carbon of Morton’s story on you here?” he asked.
“I have it locked in a private safety deposit box.”
“Okay.” Shayne turned to Garvin and said, “Let’s go.”
Outside, the black clouds to the east were cut through with long streaks of lightning at frequent intervals, followed by distant rolls of thunder. They pushed against the sudden gusts of wind to Garvin’s shabby sedan, and Shayne said, “Get in and I’ll ride with you to the entrance.”
Garvin backed around and drove slowly, stopped before the entrance. Shayne leaped out, said, “Hold on a minute,” and ducked under the chain. He hurried to his car, made a U-turn and drove back past the high gateposts, got out and unhooked the chain. “Go ahead,” he yelled. “I’ll follow you.”
Back in his car, he slipped the idling motor into gear, fell in behind the sedan, and followed it a few blocks north, then across the bay on the 79th Street Causeway to the mainland. Here Garvin turned and drove past the Little River section, then south on Miami Avenue, and stopped in front of a dark and dilapidated four-story building on 46th.
Shayne pulled in behind him, parked, and got out to join Garvin, who waited with a key ring in his hand. “We’ll have to walk up two flights,” Garvin said nervously. “The elevator stops at ten o’clock.”
The building was in complete darkness. Garvin unlocked and opened the front door, switched on a dim light that showed a hall leading past a single elevator to a stairway in the rear. Shayne followed him two flights to another door. This he unlocked and reached in to turn on the light.
They entered a small, messy office with a teletype machine in one corner, a large desk littered with clipped news stories and pages of typed script that appeared to have no orderly sequence, and as he walked across the room his big feet stepped on or kicked aside wadded copy paper. He hoped earnestly that Garvin wouldn’t have to hunt through the scrambled papers on his desk for Morton’s address.
But Garvin went confidently to the swivel chair and sat down, began pulling out drawers and pawing through them with a frown of concentration rimming the bulge higher up on his forehead, and muttering to himself as he searched.
The frown went away when he took a scratch pad from the bottom drawer and held it out to Shayne. “Here it is. I remember now. I tossed it in here after Morton left. The bottom drawer was open and I hit my shin on it when I got up.”
Shayne wasn’t listening. The Ricardo Hotel was scribbled on the pad. He asked, “Where is the Ricardo?”
“On Eleventh Street between First and Second Avenues. He didn’t give me the room number.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Shayne’s eyes were very bright. The address was within a block of the corner where Beatrice Lally had dismissed the cab. He whirled and started to the door, kicking balled paper aside, and reached it before realizing he heard no sound behind him.
He turned and saw Garvin settled back in his swivel chair lighting a cigarette. “I said let’s go,” he growled.
“Go on, if you want to. It’s not my business to chase murderers. Particularly one as unpleasant as Ralph Morton.” Garvin’s tone was cold, almost insolent.
Shayne strode back to the desk and leaned over it. A muscle quivered in his lean jaw. “You’re coming with me,” he grated, and his arm shot out toward Garvin’s face, palm open.
Garvin skidded the swivel chair back and took off his glasses a second before Shayne’s hand hit his face. He leaped to his feet and protested angrily:
“See here-you can’t use your high-handed-”
“I haven’t got time to argue.” Shayne started around the desk.
Garvin shrank back before the bleak and driving urgency in Shayne’s gaunt face. He began sidling away toward the door. Shayne backtracked and caught his thin arm in a hard grip and shoved him out the door, waited while he closed and locked it, then impelled him down the stairs and across the sidewalk to his car. “We’ll leave that crate of yours here,” Shayne said flatly. He jerked the door of his own car open just as a gust of wind caught Garvin’s hat and sent it sailing through the air.
“My hat,” panted Garvin. “Have you gone crazy? You can’t-”
Shayne held the door of his car open and leaned against it, half-lifted the slender man, and shoved him into the front seat. The door whipped shut with a bang when he took his weight from it. He hurried around to get under the wheel, gunned the motor savagely, lurched away from the curb, and was doing thirty in second gear before Garvin recovered sufficiently to drag himself erect.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such treatment,” he whimpered. “I’m willing to co-operate, but I certainly don’t intend-”
“Shut up,” Shayne snapped. He was in high gear now and the needle flickered past sixty-five as they roared south on the deserted avenue.
Minutes later he screamed to a stop in front of the Ricardo Hotel on 11th Street. “Get out and come in with me,” he ordered Garvin as he unlatched his door and got out.
He hurried into a small, shabby lobby and his heavy, rapid footsteps on the bare floor roused the drowsing clerk before he reached the desk.
The old man sat up, yawned, and closed his mouth with a click when Shayne leaned across the desk and demanded, “What’s Ralph Morton’s room number?”
“That’ll be-uh-three-oh-nine. Look here, mister-”
Shayne turned away impatiently. Carl Garvin was entering the lobby with stiff dignity in ludicrous contrast to his disheveled appearance. His thin hair was twisted by the wind, his clothes rumpled. He had his glasses in one hand and was rubbing his right eye. He walked a trifle faster when he saw Shayne waiting near the elevator.
“There’s something in my eye,” he complained dismally when he reached Shayne. “It pains me frightfully, and I’m afraid-”
“You forced me to push you around,” Shayne said grimly, pushing Garvin into the elevator. “Three.” The door closed and he went on to Garvin: “If anything has happened to Miss Lally, I’m holding you directly responsible for it.”
“Miss Lally? What has she-?” The elevator stopped. Garvin settled his glasses on his nose and stepped out in stiff, disapproving silence while Shayne said, “Hold the elevator here,” to the operator.
He hurried after Garvin, noting the room numbers, reaching his side just as he stopped in front of 309.
Shayne knocked loudly, then turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The room was dark and silent.
He felt inside for the wall switch and snapped on an overhead light.
A dead man was slumped across the bed, and as Shayne’s gaze slowly circled the room he saw a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles lying on the floor to the left of the door. The massive frame was twisted and one of the thick lenses was shattered.
Shayne knew before he stooped to examine them more closely that they were Beatrice Lally’s.
Chapter Twelve
There was utter silence in the room-and something else Shayne couldn’t quite define as he stared at the broken thing that could rob Beatrice Lally of her girlish prettiness in the brief instant required to slide the arms behind her ears. Then a gust of wind rattled the lone window in the room, and he realized that the stench of stale smoke, the fumes of alcohol, and the sweetish odor of blood were thick and stifling.
He started to the window, remembered Garvin, and whirled around to see him still standing in the door. His
