The waiter came with his order, and when he went away Gentry said, “So you think it was pure accident that she had the wrong key?”
Shayne spooned a portion of stew onto his plate, took a mouthful, and chewed it with relish. “I just don’t know what to think,” he confessed. “I certainly don’t believe it was pure coincidence that Carrol was murdered just a few minutes before she was slated to slip into his bed. Somebody evidently had the right key. I understand he was murdered in his bed. That doesn’t sound as though he got up to let his killer in.” He buttered a hard roll, took a bite, and chewed ruminatively.
“Who is in a position to pull this impersonation of you?”
Shayne shrugged. “Margrave, for one. He must have been aware that Mrs. Carrol was arranging with Bates to hire me to locate her husband. Being Carrol’s partner, he probably knew where Carrol was all the time. He may even have offered to look me up for Bates when he came down here. That would make a letter from me to Bates, on a forged letterhead, perfectly plausible. Margrave was on the ground, and it looks as though he might have had a motive.”
“Maybe you’ve got something there, Mike. But what about the man who got you on the bayfront and tried to kill you? That wasn’t Margrave. You saw him.”
“It certainly wasn’t Margrave,” Shayne agreed. “But he could have hired somebody for that while he was stealing the letter back from Mrs. Carrol’s hotel room. Then, he could have flown to Wilmington, and stolen the rest of the fake letters from Bates’s office so there’d be no way of tracing them to him.”
“Sounds complicated as hell,” Gentry growled, “but I’ll check with the airlines to see if he did make such a trip.”
“He wouldn’t have used his own name. Much more likely, just to complicate matters further, he’d have bought a ticket in my name.”
Gentry laid his knife and fork on his empty plate and said sourly, “I guess that’s out. I checked this morning with the only line flying a schedule that would fit, and they haven’t reported back yet.”
Shayne avoided the chief’s gaze when he asked casually, “What results did your boys get on my car? You willing to accept my story about being creased by a bullet and staying knocked out for five hours?”