Blood on Biscayne Bay by Brett Halliday Page B

the principal suspect in the murder of your maid. I’ve got to find the murderer before Painter puts me in jail.”
    She drew in a quick, sharp breath. “You? A suspect?”
    He nodded. “By the merest chance I let Natalie share my cab when she left the Play-Mor last night. I followed her in and came to the front door while she went around to the rear—and was murdered.”
    She was listening with awe-struck attention. “Mrs. Morgan said you called about eleven. That is, from her description I imagined it was you. But she didn’t say anything about you bringing Natalie home.”
    “She didn’t know anything about it. From all indications, Natalie was being attacked while I was at the front door. As soon as they establish the exact time of her death—and the taxi driver puts the finger on me—I’ll be nominated for the hot seat. That’s why you’ve got to tell me the truth. All of it—in a hurry.”
    Christine nodded slowly. “I see. Though I don’t know what connection it can possibly have with her death.”
    “I’ll worry about that. You’re going to start at the beginning.”
    “That was a little over a week ago,” she began softly. “One afternoon when I was in Miami shopping. Three men came to the door and asked for me. When Mrs. Morgan said I wasn’t at home, one of them showed her his police badge and demanded to search the house.”
    “Cops?”
    “I suppose so,” she nodded drearily. “At least one of them was. Mrs. Morgan was frightened and didn’t know what to do. She let them in and they snooped around downstairs a little, asked to see my writing desk, and then came up here. She followed them, protesting, but they didn’t pay any attention to her.
    “They came in here, and then went into my bedroom.” She gestured toward a closed door in the upstairs living-room. “My bedroom is in there. That other door leads to Leslie’s room. They forced Mrs. Morgan to come in and witness that they didn’t take anything, and they searched my vanity and bureau drawers.
    “They refused to tell Mrs. Morgan what they were looking for, but one of them suddenly found a packet of letters far back in the bottom drawer of my vanity, hidden under some of my things.
    “If Mrs. Morgan hadn’t been watching every move, I would have sworn he just pretended to find them,” Christine went on. “But she swears they were there. That he couldn’t have put them there.”
    “Was it the cop who found the letters?” Shayne interrupted.
    “No. One of the others. From something that was said, Mrs. Morgan thinks he is a reporter. There were four letters—or rather notes. Just one page each. They were tied with a pink ribbon. They cut the ribbon and each man put his initials on the margin of each note, and they made Mrs. Morgan write her initials, too, so she could be forced to swear in court that they were the letters actually found in my room. They told her to keep quiet about it and went away.”
    “What sort of letters were they?” Shayne asked.
    “Wait a minute. I’ll come to that. Mrs. Morgan was terribly distressed when I came home. She was crying when she told me what had happened. I simply didn’t understand it. I kept telling her there must be some horrible mistake. You see, I didn’t have any letters hidden in my vanity. I simply couldn’t understand what it was all about.”
    “Perhaps they were letters you’d put away and forgotten,” Shayne suggested.
    Her eyes flared angrily. “Do you think I’d bring any silly love letters here when I married Leslie? How could I forget? Besides, I never had any letters such as Mrs. Morgan described.”
    “How did she describe them?”
    “Written in ink on one side of a sheet of folded note paper. When she initialed them,” Christine went on steadily, “she caught a glimpse of the superscriptions. They were addressed to ‘My sweetest love’ and things like that. I was bowled over. I didn’t know what to think. I never received any letters like that