Counterfeit Wife (20 page)

Shayne turned to Deland and said, “You’d better tell us what your connection was with your daughter’s kidnaper.”

Deland shook his head slowly, like a man in a dream. He appeared utterly mystified by the abrupt question.

“I’m talking about Fred Gurney.” Shayne’s voice was harsh and compelling. “When did you meet him? How well did you know him?”

“But—I didn’t.” He put one hand up feebly, as though to ward off the question.

“You were looking for him at two-thirty last night—before anyone else knew he had any connection with the kidnaping. What made you think of him?”

“Wait a minute, Shayne,” said Emory Hale angrily. “You can’t talk to Arthur like that. Can’t you see he’s in a complete daze? He’s not responsible for anything he did last night. He doesn’t realize what you’re saying just now.”

“I’ll make him realize it,” said Shayne savagely. He addressed Deland again, speaking slowly, spacing his words. “I know you went to Papa La Tour’s last night and asked for Fred Gurney. Why?”

Deland slowly brought up a rough hand and passed it over his face. As it fell limply to his side, comprehension shone in his sunken eyes. “Oh—yes. I thought he—might know the man who would—do such a thing.” His voice was scarcely more than a whisper in the ominous silence.

“Why did you think he’d know?”

“It was just—just an idea,” faltered Deland. “I felt I had to do something. I’m not—acquainted with the criminal element in the city, and I thought of Gurney. I didn’t know then that—that—” his voice trailed off, and he covered his face with his hands.

Tenseness grew in the small hospital room. The men listened silently. They watched Shayne as they would watch a barometer when a hurricane was about to strike—a force which would surely kill or injure someone among them.

Shayne’s voice was sharp when he said, “That’s quite a coincidence that you should go straight to the kidnaper of your beautiful young daughter, just on the off-chance that he might know something about it.”

Tears trickled from Deland’s eyes and ran down the creases in his face. He said, “I remembered what Emory said when he—introduced me to Gurney. Something about Gurney being a good man to know if I ever wanted a dirty job done. Like arson—or—poisoning my wife,” he ended, his body shaking with sobs.

Hale went over and took Deland by the shoulders and shook him soundly. “Get hold of yourself, Arthur. That’s nonsense. You know I wasn’t serious. I just happened to know Gurney was a cheap crook and I just told you that in fun. I’d had a few drinks,” he ended apologetically, and turned away.

Shayne said harshly, “Let him alone.” He asked Deland, “Did you telephone Gurney at the Fun Club last night?”

“Telephone him?” His cavernous eyes bored into Shayne’s, then wavered. “No, I went out there, but they said he’d already gone. So, I didn’t know where to look for him or what to do.” His arms fell limply against his thighs.

Shayne swung away from him and confronted Hale. He said bitterly, “So you knew Gurney. You knew he was a cheap crook who might be hired for a nice safe kidnaping?”

“God!” breathed Hale. “Do you think I’d arrange such a despicable thing as that? My own niece whom I loved like a child of my own?”

“You wouldn’t have thought Kathleen was in any real danger,” Shayne pointed out. “If it was all planned ahead and would mean no more than detaining her from home a day or two.”

Hale burst out furiously, “By God, I won’t stand for such an accusation.” He started toward Shayne with powerful hands doubled into fists.

As he did so the telephone on the bedstand beside Dawson rang. Shayne was standing over it. He scooped up the receiver and said, “Yeah?” He listened for a moment, then said, “He’s right here. How bad is it?” He listened again, then turned to Deland and announced quietly, “It’s the fire department. Your house is burning down.”

Deland hurried toward him, gasping, “Minerva! Is she all right?”

“Your wife is all right,” Shayne soothed him.

“How bad is it? The garage too?” His face was twisted with grief and panic.

“Just the house,” Shayne assured him. “You carry insurance, don’t you?” He spoke again into the instrument, saying, “Okay. If there’s nothing Deland can do about it, what was the use of calling him and piling up more bad news?” He hung up and turned to Emory Hale to answer his last outburst.

“The only reason I’m not accusing you,” he said, “is because I don’t see how you could have profited. Even if you did intend to furnish counterfeit money for the ransom you still wouldn’t make anything on the deal.”

Peter Painter turned to him, bristling angrily. “See here, Shayne. You’ve been doing a lot of talking about counterfeit money. It’s the first I’ve heard of any such thing. What are you trying to prove against Mr. Hale?”

Shayne silenced him with a gesture. “Keep on listening and you’ll learn lots of things about this case.” He turned to Dawson and said, “Though I don’t see how Hale could have profited by the kidnaping, you stood to make thirty grand if you promised Gurney twenty thousand for his part. You still didn’t know that money was counterfeit when you came back to my hotel looking for it and ran into Slocum, did you?”

Dawson moved his head feebly, but didn’t answer. Sweat stood on his pallid brow, and his eyes were dull through the wetness covering them.

Gentry pushed himself up ponderously from his chair and joined the others standing around the bed.

Shayne went on. “We know you murdered Slocum, Dawson. It had to be you. At the airport I mentioned that I’d try to get my old apartment back, and you found a paid-up hotel receipt in my luggage that gave my apartment number. We had you lined up for it all the time,” he added contemptuously, “but we didn’t have any proof until they compared the blood and some hairs on the vase with your blood and hair. You murdered Slocum in cold blood. He was just an innocent man wanting an apartment, and never harmed anyone.”

“It wasn’t murder,” panted Dawson. “I swear it wasn’t. It was self-defense.”

“Self-defense against
me”
said Shayne. “Not against Slocum.”

“Yes.” Dawson turned away wearily. “I expected you to open the door when I knocked, and I had a gun in my hand. The guy went berserk when he saw the gun. Before I could explain, he snatched up something and struck me. I hit him in self-defense. He wouldn’t go down. He fought back. I had to keep on hitting him.” Dawson covered his face and began to sob. “I had to,” he cried hysterically. “Don’t you understand? I had to fight him all the way back to the bedroom and keep on hitting him until he lay quiet.”

Shayne turned to Gentry and said moodily, “I knew it had to be Dawson as soon as I learned Slocum had been attacked at the front door instead of in the bedroom.”

Gentry rumbled, “It was premeditated murder, Mike, even if the victim was an innocent bystander.”

“Yeah,” said Shayne absently. “The other party I suspected, Senator Irvin, had my keys and would have unlocked the door and walked in without knocking.”

“Some day,” said Gentry, “your Dutch grandmother may take a holiday from you and the wee folk.”

“Some day, maybe,” Shayne agreed.

Timothy Rourke made his way to Shayne’s side and said in a low voice, “So it was Dawson all the way. He planned the whole damned job and had himself appointed go-between so he’d handle the money. Then he tried to double-cross Gurney by jumping town with the dough, and inadvertently caused Kathleen’s death by the delay.”

“Not quite all the way.” Shayne spoke reluctantly, with a note of genuine sadness in his voice that none of his friends had ever heard before. “The man who arranged the kidnaping of Kathleen Deland had fifty grand in queer money to get rid of. Using it for a ransom pay-off seemed like an easy way of exchanging it for good money. If Dawson had planned it, he would have been careful to have the kidnaper name him as the go-between. But the kidnaper didn’t do that, Tim. You told me yourself that Arthur Deland named the go-between. So—”

There was a strangled gasp behind him as Arthur Deland whirled away from the group and sprang toward the open window nine stories above the ground. Painter leaped to intercept him, but somehow Shayne’s big body was in his way.

Deland dived through the flimsy screen headfirst, and those in the room stood rigid, listening for the dull thud that drifted up to the hospital room an instant later.

DUTCH GRANDMOTHER PAYS OFF

“IT’S STILL UTTERLY inconceivable to me,” muttered Emory Hale. “Fantastically unreal. Arthur idolized that child and his wife. You realize, of course, that she’ll never live down the shame of this.”

It was ten minutes later. Painter and Rourke and Hale had just returned to the hospital room after ascertaining that Arthur Deland’s neck was broken, and after arranging for the removal of the body.

“She’ll have a lot more to live for than if he hadn’t gone out that window,” Shayne told him. “She need never know he wasn’t driven crazy by grief unless someone in this room talks out of turn. Gurney’s dead,” he pointed out, “and Gerta Ross doesn’t know who hired him for the job. She’ll do a short stretch for her part in the affair, and that’ll end it. Nothing would be gained by dragging the Deland name through the dirt.”

Hale looked around at the two officers and the reporter, moistened his lips, and said, “Is that the way—Are you gentlemen willing?”

“I don’t see why we have to do any talking,” said Gentry gruffly. “Of course, Tim is a newspaper reporter.”

“Count me in,” said Rourke quickly. “God, what a story it is this way!”

“His jump out the window may have cost you fifty grand,” Shayne told the New Yorker. “He’ll never be able to tell you where he hid your fifty thousand after handing Dawson the fake ransom money last night. The phony stuff is in a paper bag in my hotel safe right now,” he added to Gentry. “It will have to be turned over to the government.”

“Damn the money,” said Hale. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“On the other hand,” said Shayne, “if you recovered the fifty thousand you might feel a little more like paying the ten grand you offered last night for the arrest of the kidnapers.”

“I might, at that,” Hale conceded reluctantly. “But I understand the finding of the Ross woman and of Gurney’s corpse was due to an anonymous telephone call received by Mr. Rourke this morning. If the reward is to be paid at all it should go to that man.”

Shayne looked at Rourke and grinned. “I think Tim will be able to identify the caller for you. Let’s make a deal, Hale. Suppose you agree to pay the reward if you recover the money your brother-in-law tried to hold out when he switched the phony stuff for yours.”

“Fair enough,” Hale agreed. “But you just pointed out that we’d probably never find it now that poor Arthur can’t tell us where to look.”

Shayne said, “He told us before he jumped.”

All the men in the room were looking at him queerly.

“That telephone call,” Shayne said, “was from one of the boys in your office, Will. Before we started over here from Miami I asked him to call Dawson’s hospital room at a certain time.”

It was Emory Hale who first understood what telephone call he meant. “You mean Arthur’s house isn’t burning down?”

“Not that I know of,” said Shayne cheerfully. “Remember he wasn’t particularly interested in the fate of his house. Only in his wife and—the garage. If that fifty grand you brought down from New York isn’t hidden in the garage, I don’t want any reward,” he ended quietly.

“Damn the money,” Hale repeated. “I still don’t understand this. Where on earth did a man like Arthur get hold of fifty grand in queer stuff to give to Dawson?”

“We’ve been talking that over with Dawson while you were downstairs,” Shayne told him. “Of course, we may never know the exact truth, but here’s the way it looks:

“Some time ago, Deland was called out on a plumbing job at a certain house on Thirty-eighth Street. That house was the headquarters of a gang of counterfeiters, and that’s where they mussed the new bills up getting them ready to put into circulation.

“While working there, Deland apparently came across a packet of five hundred hundred-dollar bills, and the temptation was too much for him. He snatched the money, though he must have realized it was counterfeit, and made off with it. He never finished the repair job. He was afraid to go back, of course, and he had a row with Dawson later because he refused to bill the counterfeiter for the work he’d done.

“All this is theory,” Shayne added to Hale. “But it fits the facts as we know them. Fifty grand did disappear, and last night Deland handed that exact amount to Dawson instead of the money you had brought down by plane. It was a simple method of extorting money from you, and Deland didn’t think his daughter would be harmed, since he had made all arrangements with the kidnaper himself.”

“But why go through all that falderal with counterfeit money?” exclaimed Hale. “He could have accomplished the same end by hiring the kidnaping done, arrange to have himself deliver the money, and then simply keep most of it.”

“It was possession of that counterfeit money that gave him the idea in the first place,” Shayne pointed out. “And he probably thought you might suspect the truth if he tried to make the pay-off himself. To avoid any faint possibility of suspicion that it was prearranged, he asked his partner to act as go-between, so that Dawson would always be able to swear that the fifty thousand dollars had actually changed hands. Then Dawson ruined everything by trying to skip out with the money. Deland killed Gurney both to avenge himself for his daughter’s murder and to keep his mouth shut.”

Later, when Timothy Rourke and Michael Shayne went down in the hospital elevator together, Rourke said, “There are still two things I want to know about, Mike.”

“Shoot.”

“When did you learn that the blood and hairs on the vase in your apartment matched Dawson’s?”

“I didn’t. No one has yet taken the trouble to compare them, as far as I know. I don’t even know whether there were any hairs on the vase. But I was morally certain they would match if there were any, so I jumped the gun a little in order to jolt a confession out of Dawson.”