Date with a Dead Man (17 page)

“Then it musta been him,” smirked Peter Cunningham, pointing a blunt finger at Cross. “I was with Mrs. Meredith in the Biscayne Hotel when you left her suite to go meet Mrs. Meany. She was dead when you got there from what I heard. You ask Mrs. Meredith and she’ll tell you I was right there with her.”

“We will ask Mrs. Meredith presently,” Shayne assured him, “but first I want to settle one thing once and for all. Yesterday while I was questioning Cross about Beatrice’s death, I asked him pointblank if Leon Wallace’s name was mentioned in Groat’s diary. He denied that it was, but refused to let me read the diary myself to check. Well, I have read it… and Joel Cross is right. Wallace’s name is not mentioned once.”

Shayne reached into his hip pocket and pulled out Groat’s leather-bound journal and tossed it onto his desk in front of Will Gentry. “Any of you want to see for yourselves?”

Jake Sims popped to his feet with a squeak of outrage as Shayne produced the diary. Matie Meredith sat as still as though she were carved from stone, only her eyes betraying the emotion that was boiling up inside her.

Shayne grinned across at Sims as Lawyer Hastings’ dignity deserted him and he made a snatch for the diary which Gentry covered with a heavy hand.

“That’s the evidence, Chief,” Hastings exclaimed frantically. “Don’t you understand what Mr. Shayne has been saying? A two-million-dollar estate is dependent on whether Albert Hawley died on the fourth or fifth day.”

“Why don’t you just ask Cunningham?” suggested Shayne as his grin widened. “I understand he’s prepared to swear it was the fifth day… thereby throwing the estate to Mrs. Meredith.”

Cunningham made strangled sounds in his throat and glared at the diary. “That was when…” He glared accusingly at Sims. “I thought you said Shayne was gonna…”

“Shut up,” roared Sims. “This is some kind of trick. Don’t let Shayne…”

“Let him say it, Jake,” admonished Shayne. “He agreed to testify that way after you assured him the diary wouldn’t be produced as evidence to prove him a liar. Shame on you, Jake, for thinking you could bribe an upright citizen like me to withhold evidence.

“Go ahead and glance through it, Will,” he added to the chief. “It’s a little past the middle, Mr. Hastings will be delighted to know that death occurred on the fourth night…
before
Ezra Hawley died.

“And now I’ve got one more little experiment to make before we wind this thing up,” he added as Gentry began turning the pages of the diary with Hastings breathing down his neck. “Give me that copy of the
Herald,
Tim.”

Rourke stopped scribbling furiously long enough to produce a folded newspaper from his pocket and pass it to the redhead. Shayne opened it out to the frontpage story of the rescue and held it in front of Cunningham, pointing out the picture of Albert Hawley which the
Herald
had dug out of their morgue for the occasion.

“Do you recognize that man, Cunningham?”

The airplane steward wet his lips nervously, looking at the picture and caption beneath it. “Sure,” he croaked. “That’s Albert Hawley. Can’t you see it says so right there?”

“I know what it says. But I want you to tell us whether that’s a picture of the soldier who died on the life raft with you and Groat.”

“Of course it is,” he stammered. “Albert Hawley. Why shouldn’t I recognize him after being with him four days on a lousy raft?”

“No reason you shouldn’t,” agreed Shayne smoothly. “If it weren’t for the fact that Albert Hawley had his photograph snapped in Chicago last night posing as Theodore Meredith.” He produced the glossy print of Meredith that Ben Ames had sent him, and laid it in front of Gentry. “Albert Hawley didn’t die on the life raft, Will. A soldier who was masquerading as Hawley died. His real name was Leon Wallace. And here’s
his
picture.” He laid the wedding picture of the Wallace’s beside the recent one of Hawley. “See if that doesn’t look a little more like the man who died,” he said to Cunningham.

“That
is the secret the dying soldier confided to Groat,” he went on to Gentry. “You’ll notice Groat didn’t call him Hawley after he died. He referred to him merely as ‘the soldier.’ Old Lady Hawley didn’t want her precious boy drafted into the army,” he went on sardonically, “so she arranged with the gardener to take his place in the draft and serve in his name, sending Mrs. Wallace ten grand to keep her quiet, and another thousand every three months in envelopes pre-addressed by Wallace. And Matie helped out by getting a Reno divorce from Hawley and then remarrying him under the name of Meredith. Which I should have guessed just as soon as I learned that Albert Hawley had obligingly remade his will after his divorce still leaving everything to his ex-wife. It was the only way he could be sure of inheriting Ezra’s money without admitting the truth and being indicted as a draft dodger. That stuck in my craw from the beginning… the fact that a divorced husband left everything to his ex-wife, but I didn’t have brains enough to realize the significance of it.”

There was silence in the office and every eye in the room was on Mrs. Meredith. She squared her shoulders and broke the silence with an incisive voice:

“All right. I never did think Albert could get away with it. His mother planned the whole thing and used up her own money hiring Leon Wallace to go into the army in Albert’s place. I was against the plan from the beginning, but I loved Albert and finally agreed to get the divorce and remarry him under a different name.” She shrugged her shapely shoulders and smiled coldly. “I don’t think that’s against the law.”

“This is all very interesting,” said Will Gentry heavily. “There’ll be a federal charge against Hawley for evading the draft. But we’ve still got two murders here in Miami. Let’s get back to them. A while ago, Mike, you said it was between Cross and Cunningham. I’ve already established that Cross has no alibi for the time of either killing. If Cunningham can produce one…”

“Sure I can,” Cunningham cut in eagerly. “I told you I was right in Mrs. Meredith’s hotel room while the Meany dame was getting bumped off. Shayne will tell you so himself. I was sitting right there when he left to meet her at his place.”

“That’s right,” Shayne agreed amiably. “But the question is: How long did you stay with Mrs. Meredith after I left?”

“Half an hour at least. She’ll tell you.” He appealed to Matie. “We talked about it last night and you mentioned how you fixed me a drink and…”

“Let her tell it,” said Shayne sharply. “I think Mrs. Meredith
might
have been willing to perjure herself by giving Cunningham an alibi… last night,” Shayne explained to Gentry. “At that time she thought she needed his testimony to prove that her ex-husband didn’t die until the fifth day on the raft. But that doesn’t make any difference now because we know it was Wallace who actually died on the raft. I wonder if she is as willing to perjure herself this morning to save Cunningham’s neck.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Meredith coldly. “There has never been any question of perjury or of alibis. But Mr. Shayne himself can’t deny that Mr. Cunningham was in my hotel suite when he left to meet Beatrice. That seems to me all the alibi that’s needed.”

“It would be,” said Shayne, “if I’d gone direct to my hotel from the Biscayne. But I didn’t. I wasted fifteen or twenty minutes getting your Chicago address from the house dick at the Biscayne and sending a telegram to your husband signed with your name. Plenty of time for Cunningham to get to my place ahead of me and strangle Beatrice… unless he did stay with you for half an hour.”

“But he didn’t,” she said calmly. “As soon as you left the room he muttered something about another appointment and hurried out. I had no idea that he had done anything to Beatrice,” she went on virtuously, “because I thought you’d gone directly to her and that he couldn’t possibly have done it. But I have no intention of lying to protect a murderer.”

Peter Cunningham made a strangled sound in his throat and whirled on her with big hands opened menacingly. “It’s all a pack of lies. Jasper Groat was my best friend, and I didn’t have nothing against the Meany dame.”

Shayne said, “He’s the only possible one, Will. Cross had no motive for Groat’s murder. Hell, he was tickled to death to buy the diary for his paper. But Cunningham
had
to kill Groat to cash in on the Leon Wallace story. And then he
had
to kill Beatrice when he learned she was waiting for me in my apartment. I practically handed her to him on a silver platter,” he ended moodily. “I’d given him my address the night before, and then he heard me tell Lucy over the telephone that I had a stop to make before I saw Beatrice… I even mentioned twenty minutes. That gave him all the time he needed to get to her and break her silly neck. Look at him carefully, Will. Don’t you see he fits Matthew’s description of the killer better than either Cross or Meany? No wonder Matthew got balled up this morning and couldn’t positively identify either of them. Put Cunningham in a line-up and see what happens.”

20

When the inner office was finally emptied, Michael Shayne stood for several minutes at one of the windows overlooking Flagler Street with his back to the open door into the reception room. He was listening intently for some sound from the outer room, but could hear nothing.

After a time he sighed and went to the water cooler where he nested a paper cup inside another and filled it with cognac. He ran cold water into another cup and carried them to his desk where he ranged them carefully in front of the swivel chair and sat down. He lit a cigarette and took a sip of John Exshaw and hesitated a moment with his forefinger poised over a button on the desk. Then he squared his shoulders and pressed the button firmly.

When Lucy appeared in the doorway, her brown curls were disarranged and there was a stricken look on her face. She paused timidly and said in a small voice, “I’m sorry, Michael.”

“Sorry for what?” He grinned expansively.

“For the horrid things I said last night. Because I was a fool not to trust you as you begged me to. Oh, Michael! Can you ever forgive me?” She ran to him suddenly and leaned over his chair and buried her face in his shoulder, her slender body shaken with tearing sobs. He put one arm tightly about her waist and said gruffly, “There’s nothing to cry about, angel. We pulled it off okay.”

“But why didn’t you give me some hint last night?” she sobbed. “Why did you let me go on thinking you planned to destroy the diary just so Mrs. Meredith would get the money instead of the Hawley family?”

“Because you’re a lousy actress. You never would have been able to put it over if you’d known the truth.”

“What do you mean by that?” She pulled back and stood erect, still circled by his comforting arm.

“Don’t you realize that your tantrum was the absolute clincher in getting that agreement signed? I had to make her believe I was going to destroy the diary. She certainly wouldn’t have agreed to pay out a quarter-million bucks for me to prove that Hawley is still alive so he can be jailed as a draft evader. And when you believed it so strongly, you convinced her I was just the rotten sort of heel she could do business with.”

“You knew the truth when you got her to sign that paper, didn’t you?”

“Knew is too strong a word. I had a hunch, let’s say. And I had nothing to lose. If my hunch was wrong, all I had to do was tear up the agreement and forget the quarter-million.”

“When did you first realize it was Leon Wallace who died on the raft and not Hawley?”

“I think it first came to me as a possibility when he replied to my wire signed by his wife… refusing to show his face in Miami. And then when I read the diary… noticed that
after
the death-bed confession Groat no longer called the dead man Hawley, as he had referred to him previously. Instead, he said, ‘The soldier died…’ I wasn’t sure how significant that was, but I realized what it could mean. And then everything fitted. It was the only reasonable explanation for the one thing that had bothered me from the beginning… a divorced man making a new will leaving everything to his ex-wife even though she remarried. Particularly a man divorced under those circumstances… just as he was being drafted. Normally, he’d be plenty sore about that.”

“Do you really think you can collect on that agreement?” Lucy asked in an awed voice.

“It’s absolutely airtight the way it’s worded. No one can deny that I provided…” Shayne paused to grin at Lucy and clear his throat before quoting one of the phrases she had torn out of her notebook “… the necessary evidence to prove in court that her ex-husband was the legal heir to his uncle, Ezra Hawley, on said Ezra Hawley’s death. She’ll pay up all right. But let’s not start spending all of it, angel. If you agree, I thought we might sort of split the take with Albert’s mother. Somehow, I feel sorry for that old lady. All that trouble and expense she went to just to keep her no-good son out of the army. And then there’s Mrs. Wallace with a pair of twins living on a farm in Littleboro. It was her husband’s death that threw Ezra’s estate to Albert and Matie, so it seems only fair that she should get a goodly portion of the proceeds.”

“Oh, Michael, you’re…
wonderful.”
Lucy’s eyes were starry as she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him warmly on the mouth. “You make me so
ashamed
for accusing you of trying to steal money from the Hawley family last night. When all the time you were just doing it for them… and for poor Mrs. Wallace.”

“Well, not exactly
just
for them,” evaded Shayne. “I think we might hold out a few bucks as a reasonable fee. At least enough to buy that mink coat and blue convertible we talked about last night. Unless you still feel you don’t want to be compromised…”

Her arms tightened about his neck and she whispered ecstatically, “Oh, Michael,” and he knew she didn’t in the least mind being compromised that way.