“I don’t either,” Shayne interrupted him much more calmly than he felt. “I’m coming over, Will. I can’t just sit here…”
He dropped the receiver and slowly got to his feet. His glance fell on the half-filled cup on his desk and he reached for it, checked his big hand before he touched it and hesitated a long moment.
Then his lips came back from his teeth in a terrifying sort of grin, and he swept up the twin cups and downed the liquor in two gulps. He was getting childish, by God. Or senile, maybe. Any time Mike Shayne walked out of his office and left a half-finished drink on his desk it would be time for him to turn in his license.
And maybe it was at that.
But not quite yet. Not until three o’clock.
Not until he was convinced that Lucy-
17
Chief Will Gentry was seated alone at his desk stolidly munching on a ham sandwich and sipping from a container of black coffee when the detective walked in. There were some typewritten sheets shoved back carelessly in front of him, and beside his right hand lay Marvin Dale’s suicide note. Back from that was the box of notepaper and the ballpoint pen with which the note had been written.
Gentry looked up from studying the note with an impatient shrug of his broad shoulders. “Can’t keep my eyes off this thing,” he muttered. “Keep reading it over and over with the feeling it’s trying to say something to me that I don’t get.”
Shayne nodded, hooking his toe under the rung of a straight chair and dragging it close to the side of the chief’s desk. “I know. It’s a hunch that won’t break through.” He closed his eyes and recited the contents of the note, spacing the words carefully and avoiding giving any one of them special emphasis:
“I will write this note while I can. I love my sister and have always forgiven her anything she did because I was too weak to protest, but I can’t go on any longer. She is a sweet girl and after seeing her with Charles tonight I am revolted. Death holds no fears for me. John and Henrietta were old and mean and deserved to die. But this thing tonight is the last straw and I don’t want to go on living. Marvin Dale.”
He stopped speaking and the words hung in the silent air between the two men. Gentry took a gulp of coffee and wiped his thick lips with the back of his hand.
“Boil it right down, Mike, it doesn’t say anything. You keep thinking it must make sense and each sentence seems like it does, but when you add it up… what you got?”
Shayne said somberly, “A drunken rigmarole.”
“Sure, the guy was tight. But, like I say, you take each single sentence and it doesn’t sound so drunk. It’s when you put them all together…” Gentry wolfed the last bite of his lunch and spread out beefy hands in a helpless gesture.
Shayne said, “I know.” He lit a cigarette and leaned forward, narrowing his eyes at the note, the torn halves placed in perfect juxtaposition and fastened with scotch tape. His right hand reached out and toyed with the octagonal ballpoint pen which the experts declared had written the note. “No fingerprints on this thing, I suppose.”
“You know better’n that, Mike. Sure, there was a whorl or two. But what the hell? You know all the chemical tests they got. That pen wrote the note… and it’s Marvin Dale’s handwriting.”
“On a sheet of paper out of this box.” Shayne idly lifted a sheet between thumb and forefinger and weighed it thoughtfully. It was thick, and somewhat creamy in color, a single unfolded sheet about five by eight inches in size, obviously expensive, but with no monogram or engraved heading.
He stared at it for a long time, with blue smoke curling up from the tip of his cigarette past his narrowed eyes. A curiously blank expression spread over his rugged features, much as though a sort of self-hypnosis gripped him, and then very carefully, very deliberately, he placed the blank sheet of paper exactly beside the mended note, meticulously lining up the two sides so they touched, and putting the top edges in perfect alignment.
In an absolutely flat voice, he said, “Got it, Will. We should both have our heads examined.”
“What you got?” Gentry craned his neck to look.
Shayne’s forefinger stabbed down decisively to the bottom edges of the two sheets, mutely pointing out the fact that the sheet on which the note was written was a good quarter inch shorter than the unused sheet he had placed beside it.
“But they can’t be different!” exploded Gentry. “Same watermark and same thickness and color. They ran all sorts of tests…”
“But not the same size sheet,” Shayne pointed out. “That’s the one simple test your experts didn’t think about making, Will.”
“Even if it didn’t come from that same box, I don’t see what it gets us,” grumbled Gentry. “It’s still in Dale’s handwriting, and so…”
“I think I know exactly where it gets us.” Shayne’s voice was harsh with assurance. “Don’t you get it yet? It is the same paper, but… when the torn halves were pasted back together it doesn’t come out the same length.”
“You mean there’s one line missing out of the middle? One line that might change the whole meaning, if it was there? Yeah, but… but… Wait, Mike, Goddamnit! That can’t be right either. Those rough edges absolutely coincide. Even under a microscope. If they’d been torn twice in order to eliminate one line, they couldn’t still match up.”
Shayne said quietly, “Watch this, Will.” He took two fresh sheets from the box and lined them up meticulously on the desk so one lay exactly on top of the other. Then he gently moved the top sheet down a quarter of an inch, keeping the edges in alignment. Placing the palm of his left hand solidly across the lower portion of the two sheets so neither one could move, he took hold of the double edge between right thumb and forefinger and ripped the two sheets across just above the side of his hand.
Then he discarded the lower half of the top sheet and put it aside with the upper half of the bottom sheet. He asked, “Got any scotch tape?” and fitted the upper half of the top sheet exactly together with the torn edge of the lower half of the bottom sheet.
Gentry jerked open a drawer and got out a spool of tape, ripped off a small piece and fastened the two halves of the different sheets together while Shayne held them carefully.
Shayne said grimly, “There we are. Two torn halves that fit together so perfectly that a microscope couldn’t detect anything. But just about a quarter inch shorter than the original size.”
“The top and bottom parts of two different notes… torn across like you did so they match. But how in hell did the wording ever match up?” Gentry shifted his gaze to the note. “The top part doesn’t even end with a period. The sentence goes right on to the next part.”
“Looking just as though it was intended to be that way,” agreed Shayne. “That must have been pure coincidence. One that somebody noticed and was smart enough to take advantage of after he read both notes and realized the two parts could be made to sound like the same one, if no one suspected differently.”
“Why two notes? Both in Dale’s handwriting…?”
Shayne shrugged. “Two drafts of the same note, maybe. The guy was drunk and under a lot of stress. Maybe he had some reason to write two notes. The second one might even have been addressed to someone else.”
“Then we’ll never know what they really said when placed in the right order.”
“Maybe not. But we do know damned well that both Charles and Anita were lying when they told us how the note got torn.” Shayne glanced at his watch, his eyes glittering with excitement. “That funeral ought to be about over. I want to be out there at the house when they get back.” He drummed the tips of his fingers on the desk, thinking hard.
“Have you got Harold Peabody’s office number?”
“It’s here some place in some notes.” Gentry scrabbled among the papers, found a list of names and addresses and read off the number to Shayne.
The detective dialled it, and when a woman’s voice answered, he asked for Mr. Peabody.
“I’m sorry he isn’t in just now. Could someone else be of help?”
