transom, “there’s a light in her room.”
Shayne reached past her and rapped sharply on the door. The corridor was quiet as a tomb and they waited without breathing, listening, hearing nothing in the silent room beyond the door.
Beatrice Lally began twisting the knob frantically, calling Miss Morton’s name loudly, begging her to open the door.
“Do you have a key?” Shayne asked.
“No-I-but I have a key to fourteen-twenty,” she stammered.
“What good will that do?” he demanded irritably.
She didn’t answer, but turned toward the next door with Shayne striding behind her. Rourke lifted his spine from the wall he had relaxed against, untangled his crossed feet, and followed them.
Miss Lally had the key in the lock, explaining, “There’s a connecting bathroom. I do my typing in here. Miss Morton always takes two rooms with a connecting bath if she can’t get a suite,” she ended, pushing the door open.
One of the twin beds had been removed to make room for a typewriter desk, a metal file, and two tables that were cluttered with papers, clipped portions of manuscripts, and reams of typing-paper. A chromium ash stand overflowed with cigarette butts, and wadded sheets of discarded script spilled over the top of the wastebasket onto the floor.
Miss Lally nodded toward an open door and said, “That’s the bathroom,” whispering again, her glasses dangling from her fingers, her eyes round and frightened. “She never latches the door on her side. Please, if everything is all right, don’t let her know I had anything to do-with this. She’d be terribly angry with me.”
Shayne looked at her for a moment before going to the door. There was little doubt that she was terrified of her employer’s wrath; and he wondered, vaguely, what sort of woman Sara Morton really was as he stepped into the tiled bathroom and switched on the light.
Rourke was close behind him when he knocked on the closed door leading into the bedroom. There was no answer. Shayne turned the knob and pushed the door open slowly.
Sara Morton lay at the foot of a twin bed that had a rumpled spread and knotted pillow. There was an ugly gash in her throat and blood stained the rich carpeting around a shaggy, soaked white rug under her head and shoulders.
Shayne’s first reaction was, oddly, one of numbing disappointment, for now he would never really know what sort of a person Sara Morton had been.
Chapter Two
Shayne and Rourke stood very still, side by side, blocking the doorway. They heard Beatrice Lally’s whisper from the other door, tense and breathless.
“Is-she isn’t there, is she?”
Shayne’s elbow jabbed Rourke’s fleshless ribs before he started backing out. Rourke turned, half bent, with both hands pressed against his side, and followed him out.
Shayne was saying rapidly, “Take Miss Lally to her room, Tim. We’re going to have to work this fast and make no mistakes. Give her the lowdown when you get her to her room, and for God’s sake keep things quiet. I’ll be along in three minutes.”
Without a word, Rourke took the girl’s arm and led her out. Shayne watched them go, knowing he needed no reply from the reporter who had worked with him for years and who had not fully recovered from a bullet wound he received some three years ago.
Shayne bolted the door on the inside and went back to the death room, stood to the right of the body where less blood had seeped onto the carpet from the shaggy rug, and looked at her for a long moment.
Sara Morton wore a green hostess gown with flowing skirt and plunging neckline. Blood was caked between her firm breasts and over the bodice. The gold belt circling the slender waistline was clean, and the green, red, and blue gems in the buckle twinkled in the light of the ceiling fixture. Below the short puffed sleeves her firm, shapely arms were clear of blood, up-flung in a gesture of defiance.
Following the tapering lines of her right arm he saw a small diamond-rimmed platinum watch circling her wrist. Carefully kneeling outside the circle of congealing blood, he examined it. The tiny hands pointed to two minutes after eight. He frowned and looked at his own watch. The time was 9:05. He bent his ear close to her watch and was surprised to hear the regular ticking.
The frown deepened to a heavy scowl as he tried to evaluate the significance of nearly an hour’s difference. If her watch was slow when she wrote the note it was actually 7:30 instead of 6:30. Could she write it, seal and stamp it, and get it to the post office so fast?
That would have to wait until later, he decided, and studied the wisp of green paper clutched in her hand. He easily read the numerals in the exposed corner, and without touching it to feel the texture, he knew it was the other half of the five-hundred-dollar bill.
He rocked back on his heels with sweat dripping from his face. In death she held out a challenge to him to match it with the half she had enclosed in the special-delivery letter. Sara Morton was speaking to him, and her words seemed to linger there in the silent room.
This is it, Michael Shayne. At the moment of my death this is my way of saying to you what I left unsaid in my hasty note.
He took his handkerchief out and mopped sweat from his eyes and face, then touched his knuckles to her cheek. The flesh was cool. Room temperature. He judged she had been dead at least an hour, probably much longer.
The wound in her throat puzzled him. It was evident from the quantity of blood that the jugular had been severed with one vicious blow, but the cut was jagged, gaping in the center. The killer had either used a dull instrument, or a sharp one had been fiendishly twisted before it was removed.
He stood up abruptly and went to the front door. The inside latch was bolted. That meant that however the killer had entered the room, he had left through the connecting bathroom.
He turned and carefully surveyed the room through bleak, narrowed eyes. Everything was in order except the one rumpled bed where she had probably tried to relax while tensely awaiting his phone call. There was no sign of a struggle. Sara Morton had either been taken unawares by her murderer entering through the bathroom from 1420, or she had unlocked her door and admitted him with no thought of personal danger.
Yet, if her note meant what it seemed to imply, she felt herself to be in the gravest danger when she typed and mailed it, a fact that was borne out by her refusal to unlock her door even for her secretary at six o’clock.
There was a small metal typewriter table with an open portable close to a window across the room. He moved slowly toward it and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, studying the articles on the table. The box of heavy white stationery with the blue signature at the top was open beside the typewriter. On the other side was a folded copy of the previous day’s Miami Herald, and on top of it was a pair of shears with long tapering blades such as editors use for clipping copy.
But these were no ordinary shears. The handles were of gold, ornately designed and chased by a master craftsman. The points of the blades were very sharp, and he shuddered inwardly as he glanced from them to the gaping wound in Sara Morton’s throat. They were clean and shining, but if the murderer had used the shears as a weapon, the homicide boys would determine the fact with chemical tests.
The telephone had been moved from between the twin beds and placed beside the typewriter table. There was a memorandum pad on the stand, and a muscle tightened in Shayne’s cheek when he saw his name written at the top of the pad, and directly underneath it his office telephone number. Below that was a series of jerky pencil marks, but none of them seemed to be more than the unconscious doodling of an extremely nervous person.
He was reaching for the pad to rip the sheet off when he suddenly decided it would be to his advantage to leave it there for the police to see. He glanced at his watch, jerked out his handkerchief, and went out through the bathroom, wiping the doorknobs clean as he passed through on his way to the corridor. The outer door clicked shut
