Three other men were seated in the private office with Chief Boyle. At the chief’s right, Will Gentry held a burning stogie six inches from his mouth while he studied Shayne with a look of frank perplexity on his stolid face. Shayne caught his eye and quirked a bushy red brow at his old friend, but Gentry did not respond. Behind the look of perplexity there was a hint of grim resolution that refused to be easily diverted.
Albert Payson was uneasily huddled in a chair directly in front of Boyle’s desk. The village banker appeared shriveled, and his normally ruddy countenance held an expression of shocked horror, of inner disbelief that struggled unsuccessfully against outward acceptance.
Only Grant MacFarlane appeared wholly at ease and happy about the whole thing. He lounged in a chair tilted back against the wall, still wearing his well-cut evening clothes and a look of insolent approval on his finely chiseled features.
Chief Boyle spoke first. He no longer appeared blusteringly aware of his own unimportance and incompetence. Here, in his private office behind his own desk, he was in full command of the situation, and he immediately made it clear that he intended to retain command. He said, “I don’t think we need you any more, Shayne. Everything is cleared up.”
Shayne said, “That’s fine.” He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Timothy Rourke and that veteran of many such conferences sidled away unobtrusively, settling himself in a corner with copy paper on his knee, where he could listen and not be noticed.
Shayne took the editor’s arm and led him closer to the desk. “I’ve been having a talk with Mr. Matrix,” he explained mildly, “and I think you may be interested in what I’ve learned.”
Chief Boyle cleared his throat and rattled the typewritten sheet in his hands. “I’m afraid you’re a little late,” he said tolerantly. “I don’t know where you’ve been this last half hour, but you evidently don’t know what has happened.”
“That’s right.” Mr. Payson spoke up squeakily. “It looks as though the case has solved itself, Mr. Shayne. I fear you won’t be able to take the credit, and-”
“And won’t be able to collect my fee?” Shayne finished for him sardonically. “I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with you. I figure I’ve got the whole thing in the palm of my hand.” He glanced from Payson to Gentry, met that same disapproving, unyielding glance.
“I doubt it, Shayne.” Chief Boyle was not to be denied. He laid the paper down in front of him and thumped it loudly with his fist. “I guess you don’t know, for instance, that Mr. Hardeman has just committed suicide.”
Shayne echoed, “Suicide?” in a loud unbelieving tone to cover a gasp of astonishment from Matrix by his side. His fingers tightened warningly on the editor’s arm. He frowned and shook his head. “Why, that’s unbelievable. That-changes everything.”
“Exactly.” Chief Boyle’s voice held the exultant ring of triumph.
“Look here,” Shayne growled. “That’s too damn many suicides to swallow in one gulp. Don’t forget that Mayme Martin and Ben Edwards were both murdered and fixed up to look like suicides. How do you know?”
“Hardeman’s death is definitely suicide,” Boyle snapped. “Mr. Gentry and I made a thorough investigation.”
“Is that so?” Shayne glanced at Will Gentry.
The Miami detective chief nodded soberly. “There doesn’t seem to be any doubt. Shot with his own gun-and I checked it for prints myself. Hardeman’s are all over it-no one else has handled it.”
“And he left a note,” Boyle put in, tapping the sheet in front of him. “It explains everything.”
Gil Matrix cleared his throat. He moved back a step, his eyes warily darting from one of the group to another.
Shayne shrugged his big shoulders. “All right. If you gentlemen are certain Hardeman committed suicide, that’s enough for me. But it doesn’t change things any. Matrix has a confession to make.”
The little editor drew himself up to his full height as five pairs of eyes turned to him.
Mr. Payson leaned forward in his chair, shaking his head. “A confession?” he breathed. “But I don’t understand. Mr. Hardeman left a full and complete confession.”
“One thing at a time,” Shayne growled. He turned to address Chief Boyle directly. “Florida has a state law providing that any man with a prison record must register with the authorities as an ex-felon when he settles here. Mr. Matrix-or Theodore Ross, to be more exact-neglected that detail when he came to Cocopalm.”
Albert Payson wet his lips and spread his hands out in a distracted gesture. “Ross?” he muttered. “Then, it is true-”
“He’s ready to take his medicine,” Shayne said shortly. “Ben Edwards was guilty of the same mistake, but he’s already paid a heavier penalty than will be assessed against Matrix.”
The thud of Grant MacFarlane’s front chair legs striking the floor was loud in the office. He lounged to his feet and spoke to Boyle: “I don’t know why I have to be here. Everything seems to be all cleared up.”
“Sit down,” Shayne ordered. “You’re not in the clear by a long shot.” He waited while MacFarlane slowly sank back into his chair, then went on harshly: “Don’t bank on that picture Jake Liverdink took of me tonight. There won’t be any prints made of it.” He turned his attention back to Chief Boyle. “You say Hardeman made a confession?”
“He certainly did. Just before he shot himself.” Boyle rustled the sheet of paper. “The damnedest thing you ever read.”
“Wait a minute.” Shayne held up one hand and eased a hip down on the corner of Boyle’s desk so he directly faced Gentry and Payson. “I’m about to be gypped out of my fee,” he protested. “I was hired on a contingent basis to solve this counterfeiting case. Now, you birds are trying to prove it solved itself-just because Hardeman was a weakling who couldn’t stand the gaff when I put the pressure on. That’s not fair to me. Hell, I had it all tied up in a knot before Hardeman killed himself. How about it, Will? Won’t you help me get a square deal?”
Will Gentry sighed through pursed lips. His eyes rested on Shayne’s gaunt face, narrowed and speculative. He nodded slowly in response to his friend’s appeal. “I imagine Mr. Payson will be fair about it. If you can prove you actually had the solution and were ready to crack down, I’d say the track is legally responsible for your fee. Don’t you agree, Payson?”
“Well-er-yes, I would say so. If Mr. Shayne can prove to us that he was in possession of the salient facts.”
“I’ll do better than that,” Shayne boasted. “I’ll undertake to tell you just what was in Hardeman’s confession, though you all know I haven’t read a word of it.”
He lit a cigarette, glancing across at Tim Rourke, who was furiously taking notes. Rourke grinned and nodded encouragement. Shayne glanced from him to Matrix, who still stood aside awkwardly, his shoulders hunched in a defensive attitude, his gaze flickering suspiciously about as though he refused to believe anything he heard. “Take the weight off your feet, Gil,” Shayne advised, “while I try to earn seventeen thousand bucks. That’s the correct amount, isn’t it, Payson?”
“Approximately, yes. Since it appears the track will sustain no further loss after tonight.”
“All right,” Shayne began slowly, “here’s the story. Just for the record, let me say that I first began to suspect Mr. Hardeman at seven o’clock tonight.”
He paused, glancing at MacFarlane with an ironic grin. “Though I did also think you might easily be mixed up in the deal. That’s what you get for harboring crooks out at the Rendezvous.”
“At seven o’clock?” Gentry asked. “You mean that shooting in Hardeman’s hotel room?”
“Yep. It stank,” Shayne asserted cheerily. “In the first place, I don’t believe those birds intended to kill me. They didn’t have their guns out when I barged in-else I wouldn’t have come out of it alive. If they just planned to slug me-what object would be accomplished? No one would be fool enough to think I’d scare off a case that easy.
“That was the first thing that looked phony,” Shayne went on, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “Then there was Hardeman all tied up in the clothes closet. But the closet door had been left ajar so he wouldn’t smother in there. Why? Why were they being careful of Hardeman’s health-unless he was the one who had hired them to pull the attack on me?”
“By God,” Boyle broke in excitedly, “Hardeman mentions that right here. He realized leaving the closet door cracked was a mistake.”
“The only reason I could see for any of it was that Hardeman had fixed that scene to put himself wholly in the clear before the investigation started. By faking an attack on himself he hoped to divert suspicion from himself entirely. His own guilty conscience made him do it, of course, and it served to point suspicion at him instead.”
“Why didn’t you say something right then?” Payson interpolated with genuine regret. “Ben Edwards might still be alive if you had.”
“Hell,” Shayne snapped, “that wouldn’t have done any good. Where would my proof be? I just had a hunch. I’m sorry about Ben Edwards, but I’m not sure it isn’t better this way. If he had lived he would have gone back to Joliet to serve an unexpired sentence. He escaped after serving five years of a twenty- to fifty-year rap.”
“That’s right, too.” Boyle’s tone was full of awe. He tapped a forefinger on Hardeman’s confession and nodded. “It’s all written down here.”
Shayne directed his next explanation to Will Gentry, who had subsided and slumped to a restful position in his chair. “I wanted to talk to Mayme Martin before I started on the case, and made a flying trip back to Miami to see her. I didn’t have time before leaving.” He paused and grinned sardonically. “I had an important engagement with Mr. Hardeman at exactly seven o’clock.” Shayne caught Gentry’s eye. Gentry nodded approval. His gaze shifted to Tim Rourke. Rourke’s nostrils flared and his eyes twinkled.
“When I got back to her apartment, Mayme Martin was dead,” Shayne resumed. “I made the mistake of first thinking she was murdered to prevent her from talking. Then-when Gentry showed me a slip of paper with my name and phone number on it, I began to see it differently. It looked as though she had been sent to tell me something that someone wanted me to know. You understand, gentlemen, I knew nothing about the case when I talked to Miss Martin. The only name she mentioned was Payson’s. She knew, somehow, that Payson intended calling me in on the case.”
By way of interruption, Mr. Payson coughed delicately.
“Then I realized,” Shayne continued, “what had actually happened. Whoever sent her to me knew that I had been to see her. They didn’t know she had demanded money from me for herself and I had refused. Anyone who knows me would know that I would, naturally, refuse.” He paused and grinned, catching Will Gentry’s eye. “Right here, I would like to exonerate Mr. Payson. Miss Martin’s deal was entirely with Hardeman.
“When Hardeman murdered her he was positive that she had told whatever she was supposed to tell-and her usefulness was ended. Not only that, but she was safer out of the way so she couldn’t keep on talking and ball up the deal. So-” Shayne drew his hand across his throat, intimating the manner in which Mayme Martin had died.
“When I learned that Miss Martin and Gil Matrix were old friends and that she had broken with him, it looked like a good bet that her information dealt with Matrix’s past-which eliminated Matrix as the man who had sent her to me. He had gone to certain extremes to keep his past a secret.”
Shayne sought out Will Gentry’s eyes, found them, and winked.
Chief Boyle took advantage of the quiet and said in a loud voice, “Damned if all that isn’t right here in Hardeman’s confession.”
“Now, we come to the part Ben Edwards and his camera played in the case. While I was in Miss Martin’s apartment, she called Max Samuelson on the phone and told him she knew for a fact that the invention was perfected and knew where the model and the plans were. This was confusing, as you can readily understand, gentlemen, but the name Ben Edwards stuck in my mind. Remember, I hadn’t the faintest idea what anything was about at the time.
“After I arrived here and started working on the case, both Mr. Matrix and Mrs. Edwards tried to convince me that the invention of the camera was not perfected. They gave this reason for Ben’s refusal to patent it. I thought he must have another reason, after talking with John Hardeman who assured me that it was perfected. Naturally, I began to bore into that reason. I deduced that there was something in his past which he was afraid would come to light if he applied to Washington for a patent. I know Max Samuelson, and had an idea that he knew what it was.
“I know now what that reason was-Edwards was afraid his real name would come out when the patent office investigated, and he would have to go back to prison.”
“Yes, sir,” Boyle interjected. “Hardeman knew all that a month ago. He says here that that was when-”
“Wait.” Shayne held up his hand with a pained expression on his face. “I’ve got to convince Mr. Payson I have earned my fee.”
“This is all most amazing,” Mr. Payson said quickly. “So far as the fee is concerned, I am convinced, but-”
“That was when Hardeman saw what a slick chance he had to put over a counterfeiting deal,” Shayne interrupted, “with a perfect frame-up to hang the rap on Matrix and Edwards when the going got tough. I don’t know what salary you were paying Hardeman for managing the track,” he went on, turning to Mr. Payson, “but it evidently was not enough. He saw the stockholders earning huge dividends while he did all the work.”
“That is not true-” Mr. Payson began, but Shayne cut him off.
“The camera and Ben’s refusal to patent it must have given Hardeman the idea. It was simple enough for him to arrange with a printer in Miami to print the forgeries. Hardeman was the man who decided what the new design would be each day. He could have his forgeries printed ahead, distributed to the stooges who cashed them for him before the genuine ones were even printed at the Elite shop. And he could get out from under any time he wanted to by letting the truth about Matrix and Edwards’s past records leak out. It had to leak out, though, in a way so it wouldn’t seem to come from Hardeman-because if it ever became known that he had been in possession of that knowledge all the time he would have had to explain why he hadn’t told the authorities at once. Thus, the elaborate precautions to have Mayme Martin tell me-and her death afterward so she couldn’t spill the beans about his sending her to me.”
“I’ll be eternally damned,” Gil Matrix rasped out. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, as if to himself alone, when Shayne paused. “And I thought all the time it was MacFarlane.”
“There’s still one important fact of the case which you have failed to clear up, Mr. Shayne,” Albert Payson warned. “Ben Edwards’s death-the murder you accused me of committing.”
Shayne chuckled. “I thought you might have-at the time,” he told the banker cheerfully. “I had most of the angles figured, but even then I wasn’t sure it wasn’t you instead of Hardeman. In a way, you have one of the biggest crooks at large to thank for it. I learned from Max Samuelson that Hardeman was out of his office when Edwards was killed. Edwards had been called to his death by a telephone call from some unknown party. Why? I admit I was stuck for an answer.
“Then it came to me. Samuelson was here for the express purpose of paying cash for Edwards’s invention. A very little cash, I may say, but we all know Edwards would have accepted the offer. Hardeman knew about it. As soon as Samuelson told him over the phone what he intended to do, Hardeman realized that Edwards’s sale of the camera would do away with the mystery it was making of the counterfeiting, and thus discount the value of the camera as evidence against Matrix. Hardeman’s nightly revenue from the track would be at an end.
“By that time Hardeman was frantic. He didn’t know why I was fooling around and hadn’t arrested Matrix-not realizing that Mayme Martin had not told me what she knew. The only out he could see was to kill Edwards before Samuelson got to him with his offer-and to hope the crime would be laid to Matrix when the truth came out-on the assumption that Matrix had killed them both to keep his past a secret and, perhaps, that Matrix could cash in on the camera besides.”
“That’s right.” Chief Boyle nodded wisely. “It’s all down here-just like Mr. Shayne says.” He looked up at Shayne in frank admiration. “By golly, it’s like you had read his mind.”
Shayne’s shoulders suddenly slumped wearily. “That about clears it up,” he said, looking straight at Payson.
The banker wriggled uncomfortably, puffed out his pink cheeks, and nodded. “I see no legal justification for withholding your fee. With Hardeman’s confession, the track officials can sue his estate for the amount of losses.”
Grant MacFarlane got to his feet and yawned. “None of this evidence touches me in the slightest. I don’t know why you insisted upon my presence here. As a matter of fact, I’ve known about Matrix and Edwards for weeks-and I naturally supposed they were doing the counterfeiting. You remember, I offered you information tonight. Mayme Martin had spilled the whole thing to me one night when she was drunk.”
Shayne said, “You can go after I’ve said this to you. You made a mistake when you got panicky and pushed me around tonight. No man has ever pushed me without regretting it. I don’t know what you were panicky about, but I’m going to find out. Pandering to high-school kids is one thing. I’ll be visiting your dump again-with authority from the state’s attorney in Miami, whom you can’t buy off.”
He turned away from MacFarlane and the gambler hesitated, his face ashen, then went from the office without a word.
“Come on,” Shayne said to Matrix. “You’ve got a date with a blonde and she’ll be getting impatient.”
“Now, wait a minute.” Chief Boyle lumbered to his feet. “How about this escaped convict business? I guess maybe Mr. Matrix has a date with the state of Illinois.”
“No.” Shayne shook his head. “Illinois isn’t interested. Matrix was released from Joliet in 1936 after serving his term with time off for good behavior.”
Will Gentry caught Shayne’s arm as he went toward the door. He held him back and Matrix passed them hurriedly, going toward Shayne’s roadster. Gentry’s eyes followed the diminutive figure and he rumbled, “I hope you know what you’re doing Mike.”
Shayne said, “I’m absolutely certain.” He started to say something else, hesitated as Tim Rourke joined them in the doorway.
“Great day in the mountains, what a mess,” the reporter breathed happily. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with all this thrown at me at once.”
“Go back and talk to the chief,” Shayne urged. “He’ll help you straighten it out into headlines-and how he’ll love it.”
“Yeh,” Rourke said, “you’re right.” He thumped Shayne on the back and turned away to corner Chief Boyle at his desk.
When they were alone again, Gentry sighed and spoke in a low tone, “From beginning to end I never saw a more cockeyed case. And tonight, Mike, I saw something I’d never have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
Shayne said, “That so?” and waited.
“A bullet from a Police Positive that had lodged inside a man’s head,” Gentry explained. “In thirty years of police work that’s a new one on me. A thirty-two will do it sometimes-but I never thought a thirty-eight would.”
“It just goes to show,” Shayne told him solemnly, “that there’s always something new under the sun. I’ll buy you a drink when I get back to Miami.”
They shook hands with a hard grip that said more than either would put into words, then Shayne hurried to his roadster where Gil Matrix waited impatiently.