Shayne said, “No. It’s a personal matter. When do you expect him?”
“Well, he’s attending a funeral, and I’m not sure…”
“Rogell. Of course,” said Shayne heartily. “Do you know what Harold planned to do afterward?”
“Why, yes.” The voice was noticeably warmer. “I believe he planned to go straight on out with Mrs. Rogell to hear the will read.”
Shayne breathed, “Thanks, honey,” and hung up. He leaped to his feet and told Gentry:
“Have Petrie and Donovan meet me at Rogell’s fast as they can make it.” He snatched up the note addressed to him and shoved it in his pocket, went out of the office fast.
18
There were three cars parked in front of the house when Shayne swung into the driveway. He pulled up behind them and leaped out, heard screaming rubber at the estate entrance and turned his head to see Petrie and Donovan on his heels in a radio cruiser.
He lifted one hand in greeting and hurried up the steps and across the porch. The two city detectives came panting up behind him as he put his finger on the electric button and held it there.
“What’s up, Mike?” demanded Donovan. “We got a flash from the chief…”
The door opened and Shayne jerked out, “Come in and clam up.” He shoved forward past the frightened and protesting maid, and they tramped in close behind him.
There were voices coming from the study beyond the archway on the right, and they ceased abruptly as Shayne entered through the open portieres with the two policemen on his heels. He stopped just inside the archway and surveyed the small gathering with bleak eyes.
They were all there to hear John Rogell’s will read, he noted with satisfaction. Anita and Charles and Henrietta and Mrs. Blair. And Harold Peabody hovering behind Anita’s chair, and an elderly man who was a stranger to him, seated apart from the others with a legal-sized folder of papers bound in blue cardboard open on his knees.
They all stared at him in silence and in varying degrees of surprise, apprehension and defiance as he looked from one face to another.
Harold Peabody spoke first. He straightened his body into a sort of strut behind Anita’s chair, and spoke acidly, “This is a private conference, Mr. Shayne.”
“And I’m a private detective,” growled the redhead. He looked toward the elderly man who was obviously a lawyer and said, “Sorry to interrupt your proceedings, but I don’t think this will take very long.” He advanced toward Anita who shrank back from him in the depths of a big chair and looked small and defenceless, and stood towering over her as he said mercilessly, “I want the truth about this note signed by your brother’s name.” His hand came out of his pocket holding the crumpled note and he waved it in front of her face.
“I know you lied about it,” he told her conversationally. “I know you didn’t find it lying beside his body as you said, and I know it didn’t get torn in half the way you told me it did. Hell,” he went on in a tone of utter disgust, “it’s perfectly evident that this is two halves of two different notes. The only thing I don’t know is what each note said when put together correctly, but I’ve got a damned good idea that both of them contained evidence that you murdered your husband, and that’s why you got Charles to lie for you to help you pass this off as a real note.”
“Don’t answer him, Anita.” The chauffeur was on his feet instantly, his voice thick with rage. “He’s trying to trick you. He don’t know…”
Shayne didn’t glance aside. He said sharply, “Shut him up, Donovan.”
The big detective moved behind him swiftly with drawn revolver and Shayne continued to stand over Anita with his eyes boring into hers.
“If the original notes didn’t say that, you’d better tell us what they did say. You’ve covered up for Charles as far as you can,” he went on remorselessly. “Now you’d better start thinking about your own neck. Or maybe it’s too late for that. Was it you who killed your own brother after you realized you could fix a note so it’d look like suicide?”
“No, no!” she cried in a strangled voice. “It was Charles. He told me…”
She was interrupted by a shout from Charles, a muttered oath from Donovan and the solid clunk of a revolver barrel against flesh and bone. This was followed by the heavy thump of a solid body against the floor, and Shayne turned his head to see Donovan kneeling over Charles’ recumbent figure and snapping handcuffs on the man’s lax wrists.
Shayne turned back to the widow dispassionately, “He won’t make any further trouble. Tell us what happened.”
“I want to,” she sobbed. “I wanted to all the time, but he frightened me. He showed me Marvin’s two notes and they did sound like he thought I’d killed John and tried to poison Henrietta. And he showed me how it’d work if we tore them apart in just the right place and put the two wrong halves together. And we made up that story about Marvin catching us together in his room so the note would make sense that way. And Marvin was already dead,” she wept on, hanging her head piteously. “I guess I really knew Charles had done it after frightening him into writing those two notes, but I was so scared and upset after what happened to Daffy and all that I hardly knew what I was doing.”
“You say there were two notes originally. Addressed to whom?”
“One was written to you and one to me,” she told him faintly. “He meant to hide them some place in the hope that one of them would be found, I guess.”
“But Charles got hold of them before he had a chance to hide them?” put in Shayne harshly.
“Yes. I guess so.”
“What did the original notes say?”
“I remember every word of the one written to me.” Anita shuddered and hung her head.
“What did he say?”
“He started out: ‘Dear Sis’.” She lifted her chin and recited tonelessly:
“‘If Charles kills me tonight as I expect him to, I hope this note or one I’m writing to Mike Shayne and hiding in a different place will be found. I kept quiet after I suspected you and Charles of murdering your husband, but after he kidnapped that nice secretary of Shayne’s tonight and boasted to me that he plans to kill her after the funeral tomorrow, I can’t remain silent 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.’ And his name was signed to it,” she ended, tears running down her cheeks.
Shayne said, “And my note began: ‘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…’”
He broke off, nodding his head understandingly. “That was the end of a line.” He took the note from his pocket and looked at it.
“Fortuitously, the first two words of a line down in the middle of your note were, ‘any longer’. By tearing the two notes across between those two lines, the final note read as though the same thought was being carried on… with the implication that Marvin intended to kill himself instead of voicing his fear that Charles planned to kill him. Very neat. And so you went along with the deception?”
“What else could I do?” she sobbed frantically. “Charles practically admitted he had killed Marvin, and he threatened to kill me, too, unless I…”
“You damned lying bitch!” Charles was sitting upright on the floor with his wrists handcuffed behind him. His eyes were wild and there were bubbles of gray froth on his lips. “I did it all for you, goddamnit, after they dug up your lousy dog and I knew they’d find your strychnine in her belly that you’d meant for Henrietta. I told you last night why I grabbed the girl. Because I found the strychnine in your own handbag after you’d put it in Henrietta’s chicken to shut her up.”
“And I told you I didn’t do it,” she screamed at him, thrusting herself up from the depths of her chair. “I never saw the strychnine and I didn’t do anything to John.”
Shayne thrust her back into the chair savagely and said, “To hell with all that. You were talking about Lucy
