“That’s what we’ve got to find out.” His head wound throbbed in a dull, steady pain, and his voice was suddenly weary. “We need to know a lot more about Ralph Carrol and his wife, and Bates, before we can even begin to guess the inside workings of the deal.”
“I’m getting a full dossier on all of them,” the chief told him in a gentle rumble. “From my preliminary investigation he appears to have been a well-known young businessman. And I told you the Wilmington police gave Bates a clean slate. Damn it, Mike, are you trying to build up a hypothesis that someone impersonated you in this whole affair?”
“Either that,” said Shayne slowly and thoughtfully, “or Bates, at least, is lying from the word go. Frankly, I see the latter as much more feasible. I don’t see how anyone could impersonate me. There’s a possibility that it might be carried through, of course, after the first contact was made. But we don’t yet know what mail address or telephone number was furnished Bates for contacting a man who might have called himself Michael Shayne for some reason of his own.
“But Bates claims he wrote directly to me in the beginning. Lucy would have a record of any such letter if it had reached me here.” He paused briefly, glancing aside at Lucy, noting Timothy Rourke’s slaty eyes burning excitedly in their cavernous sockets, then turned back to Gentry’s blank stare. “If Bates’s correspondence reached this office, there is only one thing you can believe, and will have to accept, Will, and that is that Lucy double-crossed me and decided to play detective on her own. Knowing I wouldn’t touch a divorce case, she answered the letter, gave my name and her own apartment address. But I don’t think Lucy is that hard up for five hundred bucks.”
“Michael! You can’t believe that for a moment!”
“Of course not,” he assured her. “And if you had pulled such a stunt, I’m sure you wouldn’t have given a dame a key to my apartment after midnight. So you see, Will, there just isn’t any physical explanation for the stunt being pulled. Looks to me like an apparently reputable attorney in Wilmington is lying in his teeth.”
“That may be,” said Gentry after a brief silence.
The telephone on Shayne’s desk rang. As he reached for it, Gentry pushed forward in his chair. “That may be for me,” he said. “I’m expecting an important call and left word at my office to transfer it here.”
Shayne had the receiver to his ear and his palm over the mouthpiece as Gentry spoke. He motioned for silence, removed his palm, and said, “Yes?” After listening for a moment he said, “That’s quite correct. Give it to me slowly while I make a note of it.”
Lucy was out of her chair, pushing a pad and pencil within reach of his right hand. She stood beside the desk watching and listening and frowning at the notes he made on the pad.