Free The Corpse That Never Was by Brett Halliday Page A

ounces of liquor.
    Rourke splashed half of that on top of the ice cubes, and held the bottle out to his redheaded friend. “It’s on the house.”
    Shayne shook his head, regarding the three bottles thoughtfully. “I think I’ll take Eli’s advice and see what that other combination tastes like.”
    “Rum and crème de menthe? For Christ’s sake,” sputtered Rourke.
    Shayne grinned and put a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured rum on top and then added a dollop of the sweet liqueur. He swirled the cubes around with his forefinger and then tasted it.
    “Not bad,” he reported. “Though I’ve a hunch that a bit of potassium ferricyanide would perk it up a bit.”

 
CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    T he two men carried their drinks into the living room and sat on the couch out of the way of the two officers, and Shayne grimaced over the mixture in his glass and asked Rourke, “What about Paul Nathan? Did you dig up any dirt?”
    “Not exactly. Hell! Let’s be honest. Nothing, really. The only thing is… we don’t have anything that goes back beyond the announcement of his engagement to Elsa Armbruster. He is vaguely described as an insurance executive on the Beach when he met Elsa… and that’s about it. It was a brief engagement and a big society wedding, and they moved into a new home and he went into the Armbruster organization in some minor executive capacity. No rumors. No scandals. They apparently don’t go out a great deal, and hardly ever entertain at home. Mrs. Nathan has remained active in a lot of charitable organizations and fund-raising activities, but her husband has stayed out of the news.”
    Shayne swallowed some more rum and crème de menthe and scowled across the room. “I suppose he’ll inherit her estate.”
    “I suppose. Estimated at a couple of million at least.”
    “Why in hell,” demanded Shayne angrily, “didn’t she just give him the divorce he asked for? It would have been a lot cheaper… even at a quarter of a million.”
    “What’s that?”
    Shayne related what Eli had told him that morning. “Why hold onto her husband if she was in love with another man? It doesn’t make sense.”
    “Haven’t you ever noticed that rich people never do? Not to people like us, Mike. They think differently. They’re conditioned to think differently from childhood. You and I say: What the hell is a quarter of a million? She’d still have one and three-quarters left. More than she can possibly spend in the rest of her life, no matter how she throws it around.
    “But they don’t see it that way, Mike. I’ve run into a lot of them in my work over the past twenty years. A buck is a buck, by God! Much more than it is to you or me. Particularly if it’s an inherited buck.”
    Shayne muttered, “Yeh. Eli made somewhat the same point this morning. He emphasized that Elsa was an Armbruster. She had a ‘feeling for property,’ he explained to me. She wasn’t about to give up a husband she had bought with her own money. All right. I can understand that under normal circumstances. If she enjoyed being married to the guy. But she evidently didn’t. Here she was, carrying on a passionate love affair with a married man that was building up to suicide. I can’t see even a woman with a strong ‘feeling for property’ continuing to cling to her husband under those circumstances.”
    “Didn’t Lambert say in his note that his wife’s religion stood in the way of a divorce?”
    “Sure. But once again… enough money can take care of that. Divorce evidence has been framed before… for a lousy thousand bucks or less.”
    Timothy Rourke drained his bourbon highball and sighed. “You always run into these unanswerable questions in suicides. There’s never a logical answer, Mike. If they were logical people they wouldn’t do it. Q.E.D.”
    Shayne said, “Yeh, I know,” still sounding unconvinced, and looked up with eyebrows raised questioningly as the two officers reentered the room from the