“We’re guessing,” Shayne interjected, “that your first letter to me was intercepted somehow. That the person who got hold of it had a letterhead printed, using his own address and telephone number instead of mine. Naturally, you would have no reason to suspect you weren’t dealing with me.”
“How could my letter have been intercepted?” Bates asked with incredulity, his pale eyes shifting from Shayne to Gentry.
“I won’t even try to answer that,” Shayne growled. “The most likely place, I should think, is before it ever reached the mail. In Wilmington. In your own office, perhaps. Could your secretary have been careless and showed it to someone?”
“Certainly not. It’s quite impossible. Miss Evans is completely trustworthy.”
“Perhaps she gave it to someone to mail for her,” Shayne suggested casually. “Think back over the routine in your office. You dictated the letter, no doubt, and she typed it. It was probably given to you to sign. There were, doubtless, clients in and out of your office while this was going on. When did Margrave come to Miami?” he threw at the lawyer abruptly.
“Why, a week or so ago. Certainly you don’t suspect—”
“Someone got hold of that letter and prevented it reaching me. Someone who was able to write you on forged stationery, a day or so later, from Miami, exactly as though I were replying. Someone,” he went on harshly, “who supplied Mrs. Carrol with a key that ostensibly would open her husband’s door. But it was a key to my apartment instead of Carrol’s, and she was sent to my room just about the time her husband was being murdered on the floor above.”
“Why?” demanded Bates in bewilderment. “What possible reason could anyone have for doing those things?”
“It must tie up with Carrol’s death,” Shayne told him. “When we know how, we’ll probably know who.”
Gentry’s telephone rang. He answered it, listened a moment, then said, “You’d better pick him up and bring him in for questioning on suspicion,” and hung up.