Date with a Dead Man (10 page)

“We had a long and private talk in her bedroom this morning,” Shayne told her, straight-faced. “Chaperoned only by a bottle of whisky she had hidden up there.”

“That must have been something.”

“It was.”

“Enough so you’d rather go to her than stay with me?”

“She’s the one who invited Jasper Groat out to the house to be murdered last night.”

“Did she murder him?”

“I don’t know. If she didn’t, I think she knows who did. If I can keep her sober long enough I think she will tell me. So I’d better get over there before she drinks up all my liquor and passes out.”

He turned away from the divan and started for the door. Someone rapped on it from the other side. Shayne stopped in mid-stride and turned to frown at Matie, one ragged eyebrow lifted inquiringly.

She shrugged resignedly and shook her head and mouthed the words, “I don’t know. Open it.”

Shayne went to the door and opened it. He said, “Well, well,” and stepped back when he saw Cunningham on the threshold.

The steward’s eyes glittered with surprise when he recognized Shayne. He jerked his gaze to Matie and muttered, “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

Shayne said, “I manage to get around.” He stood aside, holding the door wide open and motioned for Cunningham to enter. “Mrs. Meredith is looking for another mint julep customer. I’m on my way out.”

Cunningham squared his shoulders self-consciously and stepped into the room. His gaze remained fixed on Matie’s face as though he waited to receive some signal from her, some hint as to what she wanted him to do.

She said smoothly, “It was nice of you to drop in, Mr. Cunningham. I would like to mix you one of my juleps since Mr. Shayne scorns them. Besides, he’s in a hurry to lay my charming ex-sister-in-law who’s waiting impatiently for him.”

Shayne said, “I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about,” starting through the door. “Just as I have with Mrs. Meany.”

Cunningham’s voice stopped him. “I’ve got some things to talk to you about. I just heard Jasper was murdered last night.”

Shayne turned with his hand on the knob. “Did it surprise you?”

“Not much.” Cunningham shook his head doggedly. “Like I told you last night, I figured something had happened to keep him from our dinner together. What about his diary?”

“You still have the diary to worry about. You and Mrs. Meredith and the Hawley clan, and Hastings and Sims… and maybe Joel Cross.” Shayne turned again to go out, but hesitated for some reason he could not fathom when he heard the telephone ring in the room behind him.

With his back turned and while holding the door slightly ajar, he heard Matie answer the phone: “Yes? Mr. Shayne? Just a moment and I’ll see…”

He went back into the room and Matie held the telephone out to him with a shrug. “I
think
it’s your delightful little brown-haired secretary.”

He took the instrument and said, “Yes?”

“Michael.” It was Lucy’s voice. “A woman who says her name is Beatrice Meany just telephoned. She didn’t giggle this time, but said to tell you she was waiting in your hotel room… and how soon could you get there.”

Shayne said cheerfully, “Call Mrs. Meany back, Lucy, and tell her to keep her lace panties on and the corks in my liquor bottles. Tell her I’m just leaving here but have one stop to make on my way back to the hotel. If she can stay sober for twenty minutes, I’ll be seeing her.”

He hung up before Lucy could offer any acid comments, said, “Thanks,” to Matie and strode out of the room, closing the door firmly behind him this time.

Downstairs in the lobby, he turned to the left from the desk and went down the corridor to a door marked
Private.
He knocked and then opened the door and went in. Kurt Davis was lounging in a chair behind a wide, clean desk, smoking a cigarette in a long holder. He didn’t look the way a hotel detective is supposed to look, but none of them in better-class hostelries do. He said, “Hi, Mike. Are you working?”

“Sort of.” Shayne pulled up a chair and sat down. “Can you get me the home address of Mrs. Meredith in twelve hundred A?”

“I can get you the address she wrote down when she registered.”

Shayne nodded. “I don’t expect an affidavit with it.”

Davis pressed a button on his desk and spoke into a metal box in front of him. He looked up at Shayne and asked, “Anything we ought to know about her?”

“I don’t think so.” Shayne hesitated. “You might keep an eye on the men she entertains in her suite. Excluding one Mike Shayne, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Kurt Davis gravely. “A floozy?”

“Nothing like that. The worst she’s likely to do is knock some guy cold with one of her mint juleps. She’s mixed up in a case I’m working on, but I don’t know just how. I’ll let you know if anything develops.”

“Do that, Mike.” The metal box buzzed and Davis turned to it, pressed the button and said, “Yes?”

Shayne got out a memo book and pencil. He wrote down a street address in Chicago as Davis repeated it aloud. He thanked the house detective and went out of the office to a branch telegraph office in the lobby. There he wrote out a message to Mr. Theodore Meredith in Chicago, Illinois. It read:

Dangerous complications demand you here immediately. Wire me at once but not at this hotel because am watched. Send message to this address.

He completed the message by giving the name of his own hotel, signed it,
Matie,
and paid cash for it to go as a straight message.

It was twenty minutes later on the dot since leaving Mrs. Meredith’s suite when he swung into the lobby of his hotel. The desk clerk motioned to him urgently as he strode toward the elevators, and Shayne swerved aside to stop at the desk and ask, “What’s up, Dick?”

“Thought you’d like to know there’s a girl waiting up in your place, Mr. Shayne,” the clerk told him importantly. “You always told me it was all right to let a client go up and wait.”

“If they were female and passable,” Shayne agreed.

“This one’s that,” the clerk told him. “She put a call through to your office half an hour ago… and Miss Hamilton called her back, so I know it must be okay.”

Shayne said, “Fine.” He started away and then turned back. “Make a note of this, Dick. A telegram may be delivered here from Chicago, addressed to Mrs. Theodore Meredith… or maybe Mrs. Matie Meredith. It will actually be for me. See that it’s accepted and delivered to me.”

“You bet, Mr. Shayne.” Dick was scribbling on a sheet of paper with a conspiratorial grin. “Working on a big case?”

“Could be.” Shayne went on to a waiting elevator and got in.

As it carried him to the second floor, the operator told him, “There was a gentleman inquiring for your room number ten minutes ago, Mister Shayne. I told him I sure didn’t think you was in, but he got off at Two anyhow. I never did see him go back down.”

Shayne said, “Maybe they’re having a ball in my place.” He got out and went down the corridor, getting out his key and whistling cheerfully.

Light showed through his transom, and he knocked on the door and waited for a moment. When there was no response, he inserted the key and opened it.

The crumpled body of Beatrice Meany lay in the middle of the brightly lighted room.

13

Shayne reached the body in two long strides and dropped to his knees beside her though he knew she was dead before he felt for a pulse. He couldn’t detect any trace of a pulse beat but the flesh felt still normally warm to his fingers, and he knew she hadn’t been dead many minutes.

His face was deeply trenched when he stood up and stepped over her body to the telephone on the center table. He gave Will Gentry’s private number and when the chief’s gruff voice answered, said, “I’ve got a murdered woman in my room, Will. Beatrice Meany.”

Gentry wasted no time with questions over the telephone. He said, “Sit on it, Mike,” and hung up.

Shayne replaced the telephone and turned to look down at Beatrice Meany with bleak eyes.

The girl’s eyes were open and glazed, her tongue protruded slightly and looked faintly bluish, her head was twisted in a way to indicate a broken neck. Yet her naturally childish features had taken on a sort of dignity with death. She did not look like an immature dipsomaniac as she lay there. There was a troubled expression on her face as though she did not understand why this had happened to her.

Shayne turned slowly, his brooding gaze searching the familiar room that had seen more than its share of violence and tragedy. Everything was in place and there was no sign of a struggle. A wide-brimmed, floppy leghorn hat lay on the sofa, and there was a handbag beside it. An open cognac bottle stood on the table beside the telephone, and there was an overturned highball glass on the rug halfway between the door and the corpse. There was a wet stain in front of the glass, and a single cube of ice melted in the center of the wetness.

Shayne went to the kitchen door and saw a tray of ice cubes melting in the sink.

He glanced into the bathroom and bedroom, noting that everything was neatly in order as the maid had left it that day.

He turned back into the living room without touching his hands to anything, strode to the wall liquor cabinet and lifted down a sealed bottle of cognac. In the kitchen he opened it, got a clean glass from the cupboard and poured a stiff slug into the bottom of it. There was a knock on his door as he went back into the living room. He opened it and nodded to a young, uniformed officer who stood there. He said, “Mr. Shayne? We got a flash on our radio…”

He paused and gulped as Shayne stepped aside, jerking his head toward Beatrice’s body. “I’m to stay until Homicide gets here,” he said formally. “Don’t touch anything.”

Shayne said dryly, “I won’t.” He moved to one side and sat down with his drink while the young officer remained stiffly on guard in the doorway.

Less than three minutes later Chief Gentry came trooping down the corridor with a police doctor and three men from Homicide. Gentry nodded to the radio patrolman who saluted sharply and drew away in the hall. Gentry glanced at Shayne who remained seated, nursing his drink, then strode to the body and looked down at Beatrice for a moment. He hunched his heavy shoulders and nodded to the doctor and his men who were already unlimbering their apparatus, then walked back to Shayne and stopped in front of him. “Beatrice Meany, eh?” he said in a tired voice. “The Hawley daughter.”

Shayne nodded. “She came here about an hour ago, Will. After phoning Lucy to get my address. The clerk let her in. About half an hour ago”—he glanced at his watch—“she phoned Lucy from here to ask when I’d be in. Lucy reached me in Mrs. Theodore Meredith’s suite in the Biscayne Hotel. I told Lucy twenty minutes, and I assume she passed that word on to Beatrice. She was like that when I walked in. My door was latched and the lights were on. I didn’t touch anything after getting here except a fresh bottle in the kitchen and this glass.” He held up the cognac and took a sip.

“How soon did you leave the Biscayne Hotel after Lucy phoned you in Mrs. Meredith’s suite?”

“At once. I was on my way out when the call came through. She can verify that, and also a man who was in her suite at the time. A Mr. Cunningham.”

Will Gentry’s rumpled eyelids moved upward like Venetian blinds. “The last survivor of the airplane crash in which the Hawley boy died? Meredith?” Gentry tested the name on his lips, savoring it. “Would she be widow of Albert Hawley… since remarried?”

“She is exactly that,” Shayne told him blandly. “In Miami to claim her ex-husband’s estate.”

Gentry lowered his lids while he considered that. “What claim has she on her ex-husband’s estate? Didn’t she divorce the guy? Seems to me I remember some stink…”

“Your memory is okay,” Shayne agreed. “But she’s still his legal heir. Seems he made a new will after the divorce leaving everything to her.”

“Even though she remarried?”

Shayne nodded, his gray eyes very bright.

“Never heard of that before,” snorted Gentry.

“You never met another Mrs. Meredith either,” Shayne told him with a grin. “That’s it, Will.” He spread out the fingers of his right hand. “I stopped downstairs in the Biscayne to chat with Kurt Davis a minute… then came on home because I knew Beatrice was waiting. As I came up in the elevator,” he went on slowly, “the operator told me a man had asked for my room number about ten minutes before and insisted on getting off at this floor even though the operator told him he didn’t think I was home. He wasn’t seen leaving, so probably he went down the stairs. For my money, he’s your man.”

“Did the operator describe him?”

“I didn’t ask. I wasn’t particularly interested… at the time.”

Gentry turned and went to the door to speak to the patrolman outside. When he turned back, the doctor had completed his examination of the body and was turning away with his bag.

“What have you got, Doc?”

The doctor was young and smooth-faced and had a wispy blond mustache. He said, “Death by strangulation and almost certain fracture of the vertebrae. Not more than half an hour ago, and probably not more than fifteen minutes. There was a lot of strength in the pair of hands that caused those contusions on her throat. That’s all until we do a P.M.”

The photographer had finished with his pictures and was putting away his equipment, and the other two detectives had finished fingerprinting the living room and had moved into the kitchen.

Timothy Rourke came hurrying in from the hall as the doctor went out. “Just got the flash.” He glanced at the body on the floor without much interest, and then confronted Gentry, “What gives, Will?”

“Ask Mike,” grunted Gentry sourly.

“Is it tied up with the Groat kill?”

“She’s the one who invited him out there last night,” Shayne reminded them both. “Ever since talking to her this morning I’ve had a hunch she knew more about his death than she admitted. Now it looks as though Groat’s killer had the same hunch.”

“You think she was killed to prevent her talking?” demanded Rourke, getting out a wad of copy paper.

“It’s evident she came here to tell me
something
important.” Shayne shrugged.