The identity of the man who attacked Lucy in Nora’s hotel room.
The identity of the man who had represented himself as Michael Shayne to Bates, and the method by which he had carried out the impersonation.
Had Nora Carrol been furnished a key to his room by mistake, or for some definite reason?
Shayne swore angrily under his breath when he reached this point in reviewing the unknown quantities.
Everything pointed to some sort of prearrangement. With Ann Margrave’s information of the actual relationship between husband and wife, which was somewhat at variance with Nora’s version, this began to make sense. Ann was positive that Ralph Carrol had ceased to love his wife and that a reconciliation was impossible. If this were true, Nora must have suspected that her husband would refuse to let her stay through the night, and thus the attempt was doomed to failure.
Taking that as a reasonable hypothesis, another way of putting Carrol on the spot must have suggested itself. The exact reverse of the usual divorce setup where a husband is lured into the other woman’s room where he can be discovered by detectives who will testify in court.
If Nora had been desperately determined to hold Carrol as her husband, the redhead reasoned, she might well have arranged such a frame-up with the detective who called himself Shayne. Ludlow, then, might well be the witness who had planned to catch husband and wife together in the bedroom and whose testimony would serve to throw the divorce action out of court.
At this, point in his thinking, Shayne took the classified telephone directory from a desk drawer, opened it at the P’s and found the heading: Photographers: Commercial.
Running his forefinger down the list his eyes glinted with interest when he came to the name Ludlow, John P. in small type. The address was on North Miami Avenue. He pressed a button for an outside line, and dialed the number. A woman’s voice answered, repeating the number. Shayne said, “Mr. Ludlow, please.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice replied, “but Mr. Ludlow is not in.”