At three o’clock that afternoon Harry Wilsson’s secretary entered the private office at the rear of his insurance agency and informed her employer that a Mr. Shayne was in the outer office and wanted to see him.
The name meant nothing to Wilsson, and he asked somewhat irritably, “Is he selling something?”
Miss Andrews said she didn’t think so. “He doesn’t look like a salesman, and he said it’s a personal matter of some importance.”
Wilsson nodded and said, “All right,” and she went out, and he picked up one of the papers scattered on the desk in front of him and was pretending to read it when a tall, wide-shouldered man with rumpled, red hair and cold, gray eyes came quietly through the door and closed it behind him. Wilsson put the paper down and looked at his visitor with a questioning frown. He was certain he had never seen the man before, and he said somewhat brusquely, “Shayne, is it? What can I do for you?”
“Just answer a few questions,” Shayne told him, pulling a chair close to the desk and sitting down without waiting for an invitation. “I’m a private investigator from Miami helping your local police on the Blake murder case.”
“Oh, you’re that Shayne? Michael Shayne. Well, I’ve heard about you, all right. I didn’t know Ollie would have the gumption to call someone like you in, but I’m mighty glad he did. Maybe we’ll get somewhere now.”
Shayne said briskly, “I hope so. Right now I’m gathering a little background, and I understand you may have been the last person to see the victim alive.”
“That’s possible. My wife and I, that is. Ellie Blake stopped by our house about four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“And that’s the last time you saw her?”
Wilsson nodded. “She stayed fifteen or twenty minutes, I guess.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about her, Mr. Wilsson? Was she nervous or upset? Anything at all to indicate that she had any reason to expect anything out of the ordinary to occur last night?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure I know just what you’re getting at.”
“I’m wondering,” said Shayne blandly, “if she might have had a date for later on in the evening. With some man, perhaps. I understand it was the last night her husband planned to be away from home and that Mrs. Blake was, well…” Shayne spread out his hands and shrugged. “An attractive woman to say the least.”
“There wouldn’t be anything like that.” Wilsson looked properly shocked. “Not with Ellie Blake. No. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there, Mr. Shayne. It was some stranger in town. Some sex maniac.”
Shayne said, “You’re probably right, and that’s going to make it the most difficult sort of case there is. What did you do last evening?”
“Me? Do you mean you want me to give you an alibi?”
“It wouldn’t do any harm,” Shayne told him cheerfully. “What I would like to do is get a picture of what the people closest to Ellie Blake were doing last night. Every alibi I can clinch eliminates one more possibility. Nothing personal about it. Just tell me where you were.”
“Well, let’s see. As a matter of fact I drove over to Turner’s Junction right after dinner, to try and see a man and sign him up for life insurance. That’s about forty miles each way on a back country road. I got home around eleven, I guess. I remember it was just after eleven. Minerva, that’s my wife, was sitting up watching the eleven o’clock news, and we went to bed right after it ended.”
“Did you sell the policy?”
“As a matter of fact, he wasn’t home when I got there,” Wilsson said disgustedly. “Jed Turner. He’s got a farm the other side of the Junction and I telephoned when I got there. No answer. I was pretty sore after making that long drive out to see him, and I hung around for about an hour and called twice more. Then I gave it up as a bad job and came home. I remember telling Minerva when I got back that that was a wasted evening if there ever was one. But that’s the way it goes in the insurance business.”
“Did you see anyone you know while you were waiting in Turner’s Junction?”
“No. It’s hardly more than a crossroads. There’s a beer joint and poolhall, but I didn’t feel like going in. I just sat in my car and smoked. Made my calls from a public telephone booth beside the road.”
“Then you actually have no proof you were there last night?”
“Good Lord, man! Do I have to prove where I was? I remember telling Minerva when I left that I was going over to see Jed Turner.”
Michael Shayne settled back in his chair and said bleakly, “You’re lying, Wilsson.”
“Now see here,” sputtered the insurance broker. “You can’t come in here and start saying…”
“I am in here and I am saying,” Shayne interrupted him calmly. “Do you want to talk to me here in the privacy of your own office, or shall we go down to police headquarters? You see, Wilsson, right now my friend Tim Rourke, and I are the only ones who know you dropped in at the Blake house last evening and had a drink with your best friend’s wife while he was in Miami. I don’t want to pillory any man unnecessarily, but I’m working on a murder case and we’ll spread it all over town if you want it that way.” His voice was even and cold and utterly uncompromising.
“But you’re all wrong.” Wilsson stared across the desk at him aghast. “I wasn’t near Ellie Blake last night. It’s a made-up lie if anybody says different.”
“You left your fingerprints on a highball glass sitting in her living room beside the glass she drank out of. The police have those prints on file, but they haven’t got around yet to checking them against yours. When they do, everyone in town will know where you were last night.”
Harry Wilsson crumpled up in front of his cold gaze and put his hands over his face and moaned softly.
Shayne got out a cigarette and lighted it and smoked thoughtfully. When Wilsson took his hands away from his face it was a sick, gray color and he kept wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue as he poured out his story in a low, hoarse voice that trembled with self-pity.
“I just stopped in for a drink. It was early, just past eight and I saw her light was on as I drove past and I thought I’d just go in and say good night and cheer her up maybe. And that’s what I did. We had one little drink in the living room and you can’t make anything wrong out of that. How could I know some murdering bastard would break in and kill her after I left?”
Shayne said disbelievingly, “If it was so completely innocent, why didn’t you mention it to your wife when you got home? Wouldn’t that have been the natural thing to do?”
“Not if you knew Minerva, you’d know it wouldn’t. She’s got a nasty mind and she’s always been suspicious of Ellie. I never would have heard the last of it, if I’d told her. She’d be forever prying and asking questions. Like: ‘Did you kiss her good night? Did she rub up against you?’ Nasty things like that. And then she would have told Marv as soon as he got home for sure,” he went on bitterly, “and maybe get him thinking Ellie and I’d been carrying on behind his back. No, sir, I certainly didn’t see any good reason to blab it out to Minerva last night.”
“But how about this morning? After you found out what happened in the night. Didn’t you realize you had information that should have been given to the police?”
“This morning?” Harry Wilsson gulped and swallowed hard. “God, I didn’t know what to do. People might think all kinds of things with Ellie dead like that. You know how it is. And I realized it was going to look funny when I told about driving over to Turner’s Junction and hanging around an hour without being able to prove it. Some folks, including Minerva, would be sure to think I’d spent all that time with Ellie.”
“And,” said Shayne quietly, “I, Mr. Wilsson.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“Your story does sound fishy, you know. Look. We’re both grown up, and we both know the facts of life. Right now, we’re talking off the record. I assume you know that a medical examination of Mrs. Blake discloses that some man had intercourse with her at about the time of her death? Possibly slightly before… perhaps soon afterward.”
“I didn’t know that,” muttered Wilsson, his face ashen. “Even so, it has nothing to do with me. I guess everybody assumes that she was raped while she was murdered.”
“There’s one way you can prove it has nothing to do with you,” Shayne told him briskly. “What is your blood group?”
“I don’t know. What has that to do with it?”
“It is a medical fact,” Shayne told him, “that semen, along with most of the other body fluids, such as saliva and perspiration, can be tested for blood-grouping, just as is done with blood itself. If you want to prove you weren’t intimate with Mrs. Blake last night, give us a sample of your blood. If yours is a different group, you’ll be in the clear.”
“But suppose it happens to be the same group?” cried Wilsson in agitation. “That wouldn’t prove it came from me. It’s like a paternity case. You can prove a man can’t be the father… but you can’t prove he is, just because his blood is the right group.”
“That’s true,” Shayne agreed gravely. “However, there is another test, Wilsson, if you’re willing to have it made. Unlike blood, the spermatozoa in the seminal fluid have definite individual characteristics that are much like a man’s fingerprints. In other words, under microscopic examination it is possible to ascertain whether a certain sample of sperm originated in you or did not. Do you follow me? If you’re willing to give me a sample for comparison…”
“Oh, God,” groaned Wilsson. “I didn’t know that. I never heard that before.”
“You know it now,” Shayne told him coldly. “Why don’t you break down and tell me the truth about what happened between you and Ellie Blake last night? If you didn’t kill her, I assure you I’m not a damn bit interested in what else you did. But I need the truth from you at this point.”
“Kill her? Good God! Me? Why would I kill her?”
“Women have been known to resist a man’s advances,” Shayne said bleakly. “And men have been known to strangle a woman to get what they want from her.”
“Good God in heaven, that’s not the way it was. Not that I want to say Ellie was forward, but she… she sure didn’t fight me off. Lord, I guess I better tell you the whole thing just the way it was.”
“I guess you’d better,” said Shayne, “though I make no positive guarantee I’m going to believe you.”
“Yeh… I… Well, it was just one of those things. You know, it had been building up for a long time without either one of us ever actually trying to do anything about it. You can’t, in a small town like this. There just isn’t any opportunity. And then suddenly last night there was an opportunity. Probably the only one there’d ever be, and both of us realized it. I didn’t know when I stopped by her house… I didn’t know whether anything would happen or not… whether she wanted anything to happen. But there we were together suddenly, all alone. With Marv due back today and both of us a little tight on account of, I guess, because she’d made the drinks pretty strong and neither one of us is used to drinking much. And so it just happened. I wish to God it hadn’t. I’d give a million dollars right now if I hadn’t stopped by to see Ellie last night. But I did! And then this morning when I heard what happened… My God, Mr. Shayne, how do you think I felt? Like I was sort of to blame, but… I don’t see how I could be. I swear she was perfectly all right when I left a few minutes before eleven. There wasn’t a sign of anything wrong. I was careful not to even turn on my automobile lights while I coasted down away from the house, and there wasn’t a soul around and I’m sure nobody saw me. So I don’t see what Ellie and I did had to do with what happened to her later, but I’ve still got that awful feeling inside me that if I hadn’t done it everything might be different. And I don’t know I can stand to face Marv when he comes home. Having Sissy there right in the house is bad enough. And if Minerva ever finds out…”
Shayne said thoughtfully, “You’re sure you left a little before eleven?”
“Minerva will tell you that,” Wilsson assured him eagerly. “Like I told you before, it was a little after eleven when I got home and she was watching the news on TeeVee. So whatever happened to Ellie must’ve happened after eleven o’clock.”
“If you’re telling the truth,” said Shayne.
“Well, I am. Like I say, I can prove I was home a few minutes after eleven.”
“But you haven’t proved that Ellie Blake was still alive when you left her bedroom,” Shayne pointed out grimly.
Harry Wilsson stared at him in consternation and horror, his jaw drooping open slackly. “Why would I hurt her?” he cried out. “My Lord, she’d just… well, you know.” He swallowed hard and appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what else I can say,” he quavered.
“I don’t either,” Shayne said uncompromisingly. He looked at his watch and got up. “For the moment I’m going to keep this confidential, Wilsson. But you’re not in the clear. I’ll be talking to you again.” He turned and strode out of the office hurriedly.