“He made out a fair case,” said Shayne reflectively. “I checked around afterward and got a slightly different slant.” Without mentioning Ann Margrave’s name or her statements about the personal relationships between herself, her father, and Nora Carrol, he outlined the possibility that Carrol might have been planning to drop his defense of the lawsuit and thus leave his partner out of the picture.
“If this were true and Margrave knew it,” he pointed out, “it gives him a much stronger motive for murder than Vulcan. Actually, Carrol’s death will have produced exactly the opposite result from the one Margrave tried to hand us. The suit will probably drag along for months or years, while he continues to manufacture his plastic. I’d check Margrave’s alibi carefully if I were you.”
The waiter brought a plate of cold cuts and a bottle of beer and set them before Gentry. “We’ll check, all right,” he told Shayne. “What still bothers me is the crazy hookup with you last night. The woman being given the key to your room by mistake or design, and Bates’s insistence that you were working for him. Tied with your flat denial, and the removal of Bates’s correspondence with you from his files; what in hell does it add up to, Mike?”
“I’m beginning to swing around to the belief that somehow or other Mrs. Carrol and Bates are telling the truth and that they believed they were dealing with me.”
“A while ago you were working hard to prove it would have been impossible for anyone to impersonate you.”
“Yeh,” he muttered absently. “I still don’t see how it was worked. Suppose somebody finds out that Bates is thinking of hiring a private detective in Miami for a job, and that he is inclined toward me. Suppose this man simply has a letterhead printed, gives his own address instead of mine, and writes Bates a letter saying he’s heard about the job and is willing to take it on. Bates would naturally reply to the printed address and I would never know a damned thing about it.”
“A pretty elaborate hoax just to collect a small fee,” said the chief.
“I agree. If that were the only thing that came out of the impersonation. But don’t forget that the setup actually culminated in murder.”
“You mean it was planned that way in the beginning?”
“I don’t know.” Shayne spread out his big hands. “I don’t know a damned thing more than you do. Carrol was murdered at just about the time his wife was supposed to be with him. The only reason she didn’t discover his body is that she had been sent to my room instead of to his.”