Murder by Proxy by Brett Halliday Read Free Book Online Page B

afternoon’s deadline, I’ll see that it’s on the front page of tonight’s News. Now, I need some facts about yourself and your wife. I’ll have my secretary come in.” He pressed a button on his desk, leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Could you do with a drink?”
    “No, I… thank you, I think not. I had two drinks at the hotel earlier.”
    Lucy Hamilton came in with her notebook. Shayne said, “Take some notes, Lucy.” And to Harris, “I want all the facts I can get.” He waited until Lucy was settled with pencil poised above her open book, and then said, “Your full name and New York address?”
    “Herbert Harris.” He gave the residence address in the East Seventies, and slid a business card out of his wallet. “My business address.”
    Shayne glanced at it before sliding it across to Lucy. “You’re a partner in this brokerage firm?”
    “It’s a relatively small firm, but moderately successful. Most of our accounts are out-of-town clients whose business we handle on an annual basis.”
    Shayne nodded. “You live in an apartment? Have a maid?”
    “Part-time. She comes in twice a week. Her first name is Rose. I don’t know her last name, but she does work part-time for other tenants in the building. She hasn’t been in since my wife left. They gave the place a thorough cleaning on Sunday, and Ellen had arranged for her to come in next Saturday…” He broke off with a frown. “Is our maid important?”
    “I don’t know what’s important at this point. Your wife’s maiden name?”
    “Ellen Terry. She was a professional model and a very successful one when I met her about a year and a half ago.”
    Shayne nodded. It was very easy to believe that the original of the snapshot had been a successful model. “What agency did she work for?”
    “It was one of the big ones… located in Rockefeller Center.” Harris knitted his forehead in thought. “Noble,” he announced. “Noble and Elliot. But she stopped working when we were married.”
    “That was just a year ago?” Shayne said. “Let’s have a physical description.”
    “She’s thirty-one years old. Rather tall, five-eight, I believe, and weighed just under a hundred and forty. She wore a size fourteen dress, I believe, sometimes a twelve. Her hair is blond and she carries herself beautifully. Every movement she makes is grace personified. She… was a woman people looked at when she entered a room.”
    Shayne nodded, glancing over at Lucy whose pencil was racing over her pad. He leaned back and tugged at his left earlobe, and said, “Fine. Now give us the names and addresses, if you can, of her closest friends… male and female.”
    Harris looked at him sharply. “See here, Shayne. I’ve told you she had no men friends. And anyhow, I fail to see how her friends in New York have any bearing on what has happened here.”
    Shayne said flatly, “If I came into your brokerage office, a complete novice about stocks and bonds, I don’t believe you would welcome my advice on how you should do your job. I have to do my job my way. Now, start giving Miss Hamilton a list of your wife’s closest friends. Going back to her modeling days, if you can.”
    Harris said, “I think I could use that drink now, if you don’t mind.”
    Shayne nodded and pushed back his chair to get up. Harris turned to Lucy and thoughtfully began giving her a list of names, mostly feminine, some married couples, with addresses or partial addresses as he recalled them.
    On the other side of the room, Shayne busied himself getting a cognac bottle from the second drawer of the filing cabinet, fitting two pairs of paper cups into each other and filling each to the brim with liquor and carrying them to the desk, then getting cups of ice water from the cooler which he brought back and set beside the nested cups.
    He pushed cognac and ice water toward Herbert Harris as the New Yorker concluded earnestly to Lucy, “That’s all the names I can think of at the