Brett Halliday

Never Kill a Client

1

Michael Shayne was in a cheery frame of mind when he entered his office shortly after eleven o’clock that morning. He was clear-eyed and smiling, and Lucy Hamilton studied him with approval from the other side of the low railing separating her secretarial desk from the rest of the small anteroom.

She wrinkled her nice nose at him and made a production of consulting the watch on her wrist. “You don’t have any appointment until eleven-thirty. What brings you out at the crack of dawn?”

“Sheer zest of life, Angel.” He tossed his Panama on a hook near the door and rumpled coarse red hair with a big-knuckled hand. “It’s almost summer and the tourists are going home in droves, and crime is quiescent in Miami, and I’ve got a hunch the fish are biting down on the Keys. I just dropped by to tell you… hey! What do I think I heard you say about an eleven-thirty appointment?”

“Exactly what you think you heard. I told you yesterday afternoon, Michael, but you were sopping up cognac and probably didn’t listen.” She glanced down at an appointment pad beside her typewriter and read from it: “Mr. Reginald Dawes Rexforth, Third. Very important. Practically a matter of life and death if the third Mr. Reginald Dawes Rexforth can be believed.”

“Which he can’t, of course,” snorted Shayne. “You know what, Angel? There just isn’t any more life and death stuff in Miami any more. The old town is slowed down to a standstill. I’ll bet you ten to one either Reggie has been cheating and he wants me to buy off some gold-digger, or else he suspects that Mrs. Rexforth Third has been cheating and he hopes to throw the hooks to her. When he comes in, you inform him very sweetly and regretfully that your boss has been called out of town on an extremely important case… and refer him to one of my grubby competitors who handle such marital mishaps.”

“I’ll do no such thing, Michael,” she warned him as he swung away from her to the closed door of his private office. “I’ll tell him you’ve gone fishing, darn it, and then I’ll probably close up the office and go fishing myself.”

“That’s a wonderful idea.” Michael Shayne paused with a hand on the knob of his door and grinned over his shoulder at her happily. “We’ll leave a sign on the door: ‘Gone fishing’ and you take off with me. You could stand a little fresh air and sunshine. Get that prison pallor off your face. You make up a sign while I call Luigi down at the wharf and see if his boat’s free.”

Before Lucy could frame a disapproving refusal, there was a tap on the outer door, and then it opened. Shayne heard it and stopped with one foot over the threshold, still glancing back over his shoulder. He was relieved to see that it wasn’t a client barging in so early, but only a mailman with a Special Delivery letter.

He crossed to Lucy, holding it out and intoning, “Special for Michael Shayne.”

Lucy nodded and took the square white envelope, signed for it and glanced down dubiously at the airmail and special delivery stamps on the front of it.

Shayne said hastily, “I never got it, Angel. Why bother to open it? Go ahead and fix that sign while I make a phone call.”

He went inside and closed the door firmly behind him, wincing as he did so at the sound of Lucy’s paper-knife slitting the envelope open.

She was too damned efficient, he told himself glumly as he crossed the office to peer out one of the wide windows down at the bright sunshine on the leisurely traffic flowing along Flagler Street. And downright insubordinate, too. That was a direct order he had given her about closing up the office to go fishing. But no woman, he knew sourly, could resist opening a special delivery envelope.

He kept his back stubbornly turned when he heard the door open behind him, and then Lucy’s voice told him sweetly, “You’ll have to move fast, Michael, if I’m to tell Mr. Rexforth the truth about your being called out of town unexpectedly.”

He turned away from the window, slowly and unwillingly, and saw her laying out a number of objects in a row on the flat top of his desk.

“One envelope,” she said briskly, “addressed to Mr. Michael Shayne in a flowing, feminine hand. Postmarked Los Angeles, California, at four-fifteen yesterday afternoon… no return address. One sheet of heavy and fairly expensive notepaper containing an anguished appeal in the same flowing handwriting and liberally doused with an exotic scent unfamiliar to these plebian nostrils. This is an honest-to-God life and death appeal, Michael, with two intriguing enclosures.” She held them up, one after the other, between thumb and forefinger. “The torn half of a thousand dollar bill. And a round-trip, first-class airplane ticket from Miami to Los Angeles. You also have a confirmed reservation on United nonstop jet flight number…” She paused to glance at the sheet of notepaper. “Two-sixteen,” she read briskly, “which leaves the airport here at twelve twenty-seven. That’s in exactly one hour and six minutes, Michael, unless you’d still rather go fishing.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Shayne crossed the room in three long strides to stand beside her and look down at the sheet of heavy notepaper which she held spread flat for his inspection.

There was no date and no address at the top. He read wonderingly:

Dear Michael Shayne:

You will not recognize the name signed below, and I dare not risk saying more than I do, but please, please, please believe me when I say that if you disregard this appeal it will be, literally, my death sentence.

Do I sound hysterical? I am. With fear.

The other half of the enclosed bill will await you at the Plaza Terrace Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills when you arrive between two-thirty and three o’clock in the afternoon on the non-stop United jet Flight Number Two-sixteen, leaving Miami tomorrow morning at twelve twenty-seven.

Ask for me at the hotel desk. I will be registered under the name signed below. If you refuse to help me after we meet and I explain the circumstances to you in person, you will still have a thousand dollars and a return ticket.

If you have not changed greatly from the Mike Shayne I knew ten years ago, you will knock on my door before three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

At this point I can only pray to God that you will come.

Elsa Cornell

Shayne tugged at his left earlobe with a frown and exhaled deeply as he read the name aloud. “I never heard of a woman named Elsa Cornell.”

“She starts out by saying you won’t recognize the name signed to this. Doesn’t that indicate that it is not her real name?”

“God knows what it indicates or doesn’t,” growled Shayne. “The whole thing is phony from the word go. Utterly absurd.”

“This isn’t phony, is it?” Lucy held up the torn half of the bill in front of his eyes. “And that perfume isn’t either. Sure you don’t recognize that, Michael, even if the name doesn’t ring a chord?”

He shook his head definitely. “After ten years, Lucy? You expect me to recognize a perfume?”

“I have an idea she hoped you would. It’s the sort of thing a certain type of woman might hope.”

“What type of woman?” Shayne looked at his secretary wonderingly.

“I don’t think we should waste time trying to psychoanalyze her from three thousand miles away,” Lucy told him briskly, looking at her watch. “You’ve got just an hour, Michael, to pack a bag and get to the airport.”

“Good Lord, Angel! Do you expect me to hop on a plane for Los Angeles on the strength of this?” Shayne pointed down to the desk disdainfully.

“I know you will, Mr. Shayne,” she replied sweetly. “Unless you’ve changed more in the last ten years than I think you have. Of course you’re going. Wild horses couldn’t keep you off that plane, and you know it as well as I do.”

“But it has all the earmarks of a hoax. You said the half of the bill wasn’t phony. How do we know it isn’t? The whole thing smells to high heaven.”

“It’s a mighty expensive smell.” Lucy put her fingertip on the round-trip ticket. “This looks genuine enough.” She moved competently around the desk to the telephone. “I’ll check that flight with United.”

She dialed a number and Shayne reread the baffling appeal while she waited, trying to make some sort of sense out of it, seeking for some clue that he felt must be hidden in the wording, but which stubbornly eluded him.

He heard Lucy speaking briskly into the telephone, and lifted his head to listen to her. She was nodding, and she said, “So you are holding space on Flight Two-sixteen for Michael Shayne? Yes. He will be there to check in at twelve-fifteen at the very latest.”

She replaced the telephone and said, “If it’s a hoax, it’s a fairly expensive one. Your reservation was made in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon.”

He began striding up and down the room, shaking his head and clawing at his unruly red hair. “What about your Mr. Rexforth?” he demanded. “You were hell-bent on my keeping that appointment less than half an hour ago.”

“Oh, Michael.” Lucy smiled and made three lilting syllables out of his name. “You’re so like a little boy sometimes. Go to the hotel and pack an overnight bag. You know I can take care of Mr. Rexforth… even to recommending one of your grubby competitors if necessary. Telephone me as soon as you know whether you’re staying or not.” She had moved around the desk and was stowing the contents of the square white envelope back into it, wrinkling up her nose again at the heavy scent that arose from it.

Shayne grinned and stopped beside her to put an arm tightly about her shoulders. “Just don’t get jealous while I’m gone. And when I find out what the perfume is, I’ll bring you back a bottle.”

“I don’t care about the perfume.” She turned inside the circle of his arm and pressed her face against his chest. In a nearly inaudible voice, she said, “Just bring yourself back, Michael… all in one piece.”

He laughed lightly and put a fingertip under her rounded chin to turn her face up to his. He kissed her lips and said gruffly, “I’ll come back, Angel. And I’ll try to phone you here at the office before five. If not, at home some time this evening.” He released her with a little, affectionate shove, and strode out the door, stuffing the square envelope into his pocket.

Lucy turned and watched his rangy form disappear, blinking a mist of tears from her brown eyes. Then she followed him out, closing the door of the inner office firmly behind her.

Shayne parked his car at the side entrance to his apartment hotel, and hurried in and up the single flight of stairs with springy steps.

He did feel buoyant, by God. This sort of thing had been coming his way too seldom of late. For the past few years he’d been turning down more cases than he accepted, and life was becoming just too damned cut and dried. In fact, he’d been toying with the idea of closing up his office and taking a long vacation… maybe just wander around the country to see if he couldn’t find another spot to set up in business where life would have more of the old verve and impact that Miami had imparted to it in the earlier days when it was a roiling, moiling, hustling young city on the make and the majority of Shayne’s cases had been a challenge and had swept him along on a wave of personal excitement.

He grinned somewhat ruefully as he unlocked the door of his small apartment and strode inside. An hour earlier he had left this room with nothing more exciting to anticipate than playing hookey from the office for a day on the water in Luigi’s fishing boat. Now he had half a thousand-dollar bill and a ticket to Los Angeles in his pocket, and less than half an hour in which to pack a bag and reach the airport.

He whistled tunelessly as he went to a bedroom closet and started to get down a small suitcase, then hesitated and picked up a shabby leather briefcase from the floor instead. Some airlines were stuffy about allowing passengers to carry hand luggage onto the plane, but none of them objected to a briefcase which could be carried off the plane on arrival, thus saving a wait of fifteen or twenty minutes at the baggage counter.

He set it open on the bed, crammed in underwear, socks, pajamas, and a couple of clean shirts, got shaving things and toothbrush from the bathroom, and a full bottle of cognac from the wall cabinet in the living room.

With those essentials in the briefcase, he started to close it up, hesitated and then hurried back into the living room to open the drawer of a center table and take out a snub-nosed.38. He seldom traveled with a gun these days, but… he couldn’t disregard the note of desperation that sounded in the woman’s letter. Elsa Cornell?

The name still didn’t strike a chord. Ten years ago? So far as he could recall, he had never known a woman named Elsa. Still, there had been lots of women. Ten years ago? Damn it, some memory was trying to nag at him, but it wouldn’t come through.

He dropped the gun in the gaping bag, latched it shut, and went out of the bedroom in long strides. He took the elevator down and went to the desk where Pete grinned at sight of the case and asked cheerfully, “You headed some place, Mr. Shayne?”

The detective looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got about thirty minutes to catch a plane to Los Angeles. I don’t know when I’ll be back, Pete, but I’ll be in touch with Miss Hamilton. Any messages or mail that looks important… call her at the office or at her home number.”

“Sure. I know, Mr. Shayne. Gosh! Los Angeles, huh? Your TeeVee show coming back on the air?”

“Nothing like that, Pete,” Shayne told him happily. “Matter of fact, I’ve got a date with a doll I haven’t seen for ten years.”

He turned away with a wave of his big hand to go out the side door, and heard Pete call out cheerfully behind him, “That’s one thing you can bet your life I won’t tell Miss Hamilton.”

By fast and skillful driving, Shayne pulled into a vacant spot in the airport parking lot at just twelve minutes after noon. He reached the United check-in counter four minutes later, and slid the briefcase onto the weighing platform, saying, “That’s all I have and I want to carry it on board.”

He got the square white envelope from his pocket and extracted the round-trip ticket which he laid on the counter, half-expecting the clerk to refuse to accept it for passage at this last moment.

But nothing like that happened. The clerk scribbled some notations, tore part of the ticket off and placed the remainder in an envelope which he handed back to Shayne with a gate pass, said, “They are loading now at Gate Five. Have a pleasant trip, Mr. Shayne.” And that was it.

As Lucy had said: Even if his half of the thousand-dollar bill did turn out to be phony, the airline ticket was genuine enough.

He found a short line of people moving through Gate Five, and followed them out to the waiting jet-liner.

2

Two trim and pretty stewardesses greeted him with professionally cheery smiles at the top of the steps to the forward section. One of them checked his ticket perfunctorily while the other asked, “Would you like me to take care of your briefcase, sir?”

Shayne said, “Please,” and she took it and stowed it in a small compartment for first-class passengers.

The other stewardess handed him back his ticket and said, “Choose any seat you wish, Mr. Shayne. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything that will make your trip more pleasant.”

Shayne gravely promised her he wouldn’t, and moved into the forward section reserved for first-class ticket-holders. It was less than half-filled even this close to departure time, mostly with singles who had taken window seats; well-dressed, important-appearing men, ninety percent of whom Shayne knew must be traveling on expense accounts… or else they’d be in the cheaper rear section.

Just as he would be if he’d paid for his own ticket. He found a pair of unoccupied seats on the right near the center of the section, and settled himself comfortably in the seat by the window. He fastened his seat belt and checked his hand as it involuntarily moved toward a cigarette in his shirt pocket, glanced at his watch and saw it was only five minutes until scheduled departure time.

There were still a few late passengers boarding the plane, and he watched incuriously as they moved hesitantly down the aisle, appraising their fellow passengers and attempting to make a fast decision as to which one of those already seated might make a pleasant seat-mate for the trip.

There was one tall, luscious and very smartly-gowned female who moved along very slowly, holding up the last two or three behind her, turning her head from left to right to study the face of each seated person as she passed. She either expected to recognize someone, Shayne decided, or she had very definite ideas about the sort of person she was going to share a seat with, and he grinned at her welcomingly and hopefully as she paused beside him.

All he got for his effort was a haughty lift of her chin and a disdainful tightening of her lips which closer inspection proved much too thin to suit Shayne’s taste.

She passed on and a curious thing happened. He was ready to swear that he caught a faint whiff of the same perfume that permeated the square envelope in his pocket. He turned his head quickly to inhale a deep breath and see if he caught it again, and at that moment a dumpy, middle-aged woman dropped into the aisle seat beside him.

He turned back with a frown, telling himself that he had an overheated imagination, or that, hell! any woman on the plane might be wearing that same perfume without the fact having the slightest significance.

His seat-mate had strong, pleasant features, and she adjusted her seat and fastened her belt competently, giving him a little nod and a tentative half-smile as he glanced in her direction.

He returned her smile with a wry grimace, because, now damn it, he could swear the scent of the perfume came from her. Or, was it just that he was smelling the stuff as an emanation from the envelope in his pocket? It was quite warm in the plane standing in the Miami sun, and the air vents wouldn’t begin working until the jet was in flight. He knew that was the sensible answer, and he relaxed, looking out the window to see them trundling the loading steps away from the plane, and then giving his attention to a voice from the loudspeaker welcoming them aboard United’s Flight Two-sixteen, non-stop to Los Angeles.

The plane taxied away to the end of a long runway, hesitated there almost imperceptibly and then moved forward with a whoosh and was swiftly airborne.

When the NO-SMOKING sign winked out, Shayne got a cigarette from his pocket and hesitated with it halfway to his lips, turning his head to say, “I hope you don’t mind if I smoke.”

The woman seated beside him chuckled heartily and said, “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard that question for at least ten years. Of course not. I’ll join you.”

She opened a large black leather handbag in her lap and took out a pack of king-size filtered cigarettes, and Shayne struck another match for her.

Ten years! Her casual words reminded him of the letter in his pocket signed Elsa Cornell. He adjusted his seat so it reclined a little more, leaned back and half-closed his eyes, consciously concentrating for the first time since reading the letter on going back over a period of ten years and trying to dredge up some memory out of his subconscious.

Ten years ago? That was well after the New Orleans period. The actual years were blurred in his memory, but he ticked them off more or less after his return to Miami by recalling the most important cases he had handled during that period.

Ten years ago? That would have been about the year that Brett Halliday made his trip to New York and got tangled up in a murder case of his own and had to call Shayne by long distance to fly up and extricate him from it. When Halliday chronicled that case in a book he had titled it She Woke to Darkness.

Working back from that date (probably no more than nine years ago, Shayne thought) there had been the murder of Ralph Carrol by his wife Nora. Nora who had awakened Shayne so unconventionally in his bedroom that night, calmly disrobing herself as though she intended to crawl into bed with him.

Then a sudden thought struck him and sent a queer tingle through his body. That was just about the time of the Sara Morton case, the one Halliday had called This is It, Michael Shayne.

It, too, had opened with a Special Delivery letter addressed to him and containing the torn half of a bill. Only, that had been a five-hundred-dollar bill, he recalled. Well, that was inflation.

That time, he had discovered the other half of the bill clutched in the dead woman’s hand.

Now, ten or twelve years later, was history repeating itself? Was that how he would get the other half of the bill that now reposed in his pocket?

It was mixed-up and crazy, but maybe it wasn’t so crazy. If the woman who signed herself Elsa Cornell had been around when the Morton case broke, the circumstances surrounding the case might have impressed themselves so much upon her that she had used the same device, now that she needed his help.

That was the period he should concentrate on. From the time of Sara Morton’s death to his flying trip to New York to get Halliday out of a jam. Shayne sucked slowly on his cigarette, keeping his eyes closed while he sought to relive those couple of years, to conjure up the memory of some woman he had met at that time who might have written the letter in his pocket.

Nothing of importance came to him. He mashed out his cigarette and breathed in deeply, trying to catch a hint of the scent from his pocket, remembering what Lucy had suggested about a woman hoping he might remember her perfume for ten years, but fresh air was circulating in the plane now and all trace of the odor had vanished.

He sighed and opened his eyes, sat up a little straighter and got out another cigarette. He glanced aside as he did so, and saw that the woman was intently reading a pocket book.

He froze with the cigarette between his lips and match held ready to strike when he read the title of the book his seatmate was reading.

It was She Woke to Darkness by Brett Halliday. His friend’s account of the case in New York which had occurred approximately ten years ago.

Pure coincidence? Quite possibly. Sure. It wasn’t a rare occurrence for Shayne to see some complete stranger reading one of Halliday’s books. With thirty million copies of them sold in soft cover editions, it would have been queerer if you didn’t run onto one of them now and then. And Shayne also knew that She Woke to Darkness had recently been reissued in a new cover and there were probably several hundred thousand copies of it in the hands of readers throughout the country.

So it wasn’t such an impossible coincidence after all. But, damn it! That first scent of perfume as the woman sat beside him. Her use of the two words “ten years” when she answered his first question.

Were those coincidences too? Why not? Shayne asked himself grimly. What else did they add up to?

Well, let’s see. Someone knew he was due to be on this plane. If that someone wanted to contact him before he reached Los Angeles…?

Nuts! Why all this hocus-pocus? Anyone who wanted to contact him on the plane would have a picture to identify him by. It was sheer E. Phillips Oppenheim stuff to think that this quiet and practical woman who sat beside him had any connection with the torn and perfumed half of a thousand-dollar bill.

And yet, he had an uneasy feeling that the whole thing had come straight out of Oppenheim.

He struck his match and put flame to the tip of his cigarette and inhaled deeply. He heard a lighter click beside him, and turned to see that his companion had turned the book down in her lap and lit a cigarette of her own. With the title staring up at him boldly, Shayne lifted a ragged red eyebrow at it and asked, “Do you read a lot of those?”

She nodded. “They’ve been my chief source of relaxation for years. Certain authors…” She hesitated. “Are you familiar with the Mike Shayne stories?”

“Some of them,” he said cautiously. “Written by a fellow named Brett Halliday, aren’t they?”

“Yes. I’ve read every one I could find. They’re laid in Miami, you know?”

Shayne said, “I know.”

“That’s why I find this one just a trifle disappointing. The story opens in New York, and Mike Shayne isn’t even there. I’m almost half through and still waiting for Mike to come in. I like the stories that start with a mysterious client coming into his office to consult him, and then going straight on with Mike all the way.”

Shayne nodded gravely. “I think I remember some of them opening up with his getting a phone call… or a letter… asking him to go some place.”

“It’s the same thing. But I want Mike in right from the start. He’s the one we’re interested in, and the author should realize it.”

Shayne sucked moodily on his cigarette and didn’t reply to this. Either she knew who he was, or she didn’t. Either she was needling him, or she was just a fatuous mystery fan who would likely faint if he told her who he was.

“Did you see that atrocious TeeVee series they had on the air for awhile? On Friday nights.”

“I saw a couple of them,” he admitted uncomfortably. “Don’t watch TeeVee very much.”

“I don’t either as a rule. But when I saw it announced they were making a series based on the Michael Shayne books, I just couldn’t wait. But they were terrible. Not like the books at all. They changed the characters around. Made Tim Rourke, the reporter you know, into a young whippersnapper. And they dreamed up a kid brother for his secretary. And then the actor who played Shayne! No more like him than anything. You know how Mike Shayne is described in the books. Big and tough and redheaded. Sort of like you, really. Well, I don’t mean you look tough,” she amended. “But I don’t think of Mike as looking tough either, not outwardly.”

She was turned toward him now, studying him frankly with sparkling eyes. His left hand was going up subconsciously to tug at his left earlobe in a characteristic gesture which Halliday had often described in his books, and he caught himself just in time to refrain from doing it.

He said, “Yeh. The TeeVee shows were pretty bad, all right. I guess that’s why they went off the air. Do you live in Los Angeles?”

“No. Detroit. But I’ve got a sister in Los Angeles.” She went on to tell him about her sister and her sister’s children, and Shayne was relieved when the stewardess came down the aisle taking orders for complimentary preluncheon drinks. They had no cognac, of course, and Shayne settled for Scotch and water, and after luncheon his seat-mate yawned prettily and slipped her unfinished paperback into her purse and napped the rest of the trip leaving Shayne still wondering what the strange interchange had meant, if anything.

He had no further clue by the time they reached their destination. The stewardess nudged her awake when it was time to fasten her seat belt, and she did not resume the conversation.

Neither did Shayne. He decided the whole thing was preposterous and promptly forgot about her when she disappeared ahead of him in the crowded terminal and he looked for a taxi.

It was a little after two o’clock Los Angeles time when he got in a taxi and asked the driver if he knew the Plaza Terrace Hotel in Beverly Hills. The driver hesitated and then said, “On Sunset, isn’t it?”

Shayne said, “Yeh,” and settled back to enjoy his first taxi ride in Los Angeles traffic for many years. He did enjoy it too. As he always enjoyed riding in a taxi in a strange city. This driver knew his business, by God. He had to know his business to make any sort of time through the honking, tumultuous melee that was Los Angeles.

Thus, it was two-fifty when he deposited the redhead and his briefcase in front of a quiet hotel set well back in a palm-shaded lawn off Sunset Boulevard. Shayne paid an exorbitant taxi bill and went out of the brilliant sunlight into a dimly cool lobby that looked old fashioned and genteel with a sprinkling of elderly ladies ensconced in soft-cushioned chairs.

The clerk behind the desk looked dapper and genteel. He had thin lips, a sharp nose and a beautifully tanned bald head which he shook regretfully from side to side when Shayne inquired for Elsa Cornell.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said positively. “We have no one named Cornell.”

Shayne put his big hands flat on the counter. “I think it will be a recent registration. Possibly last night or this morning. Please check it carefully.”

The clerk shrugged to indicate that the most careful checking in the world couldn’t possibly turn up a guest named Cornell in his hotel, but he turned about and went through the obvious motions of checking an alphabetical guest list before turning back with another shake of his head. “No Cornell, sir.”

Shayne said, “Possibly she has left a message for me. I’ve just flown in from Miami and was to meet her here between two-thirty and three o’clock. My name is Shayne. Michael Shayne. It’s extremely important,” he added.

The clerk thumbed through some messages in a box behind the desk, and then lifted a house phone and spoke into it. Again, he turned back with a shake of his head. “There is no record of any call or message, Mr. Shayne.”

A muscle jumped in Shayne’s cheek. He pulled the envelope from his pocket, extracted the letter and checked it. “This is the Plaza Terrace Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills?”

“It certainly is that.”

“There’s no other Plaza Terrace Hotel?”

“Not in Beverly Hills, I’m positive. Nor in the entire metropolitan area of Los Angeles to my knowledge.” Shayne drummed his knuckles lightly on the desk and glanced at his watch. He still had Miami time, slightly past six o’clock. He glanced at an electric clock on the wall to reassure himself that there was three hours difference. It said two minutes past three.

A woman came up to stand hesitantly beside him, and the clerk said. “Excuse me, sir.” And brightly, to her, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Somerset?”

The feeling of doubt and unease that had been building up inside Michael Shayne for several hours became stronger and stronger as he waited for the clerk to take care of Mrs. Somerset. When she turned away, he asked abruptly, “Do you have a house detective on duty?”

“Security Office is around the corner. Second door on your right. But I’m afraid I don’t quite see…”

Shayne lifted his briefcase and strode around the corner without waiting to find out what the clerk didn’t quite see. He rapped on the second door on his right, then turned the knob and went in.

A small man sat behind a large desk in the center of the office with a hand of solitaire spread out in front of him. He was in the act of dropping a red ten on a black jack, and he started guiltily when he saw his visitor was a stranger. He straightened up and blinked at the redhead and said aggrievedly, “I didn’t hear you knock.”

Shayne said, “Sorry.” He closed the door and advanced to the desk, dropped his briefcase beside it. “I’ve got a funny thing… wish you’d check for me.”

“You a guest?”

Shayne shook his head. “I just flew in from Miami, Florida. My name is Shayne. I had a very important appointment with a woman client who was supposed to register here under the name of Elsa Cornell and be waiting for me between two-thirty and three. The guy at the desk claims he never heard of her.”

“Claims? Why should he lie about it?”

“I don’t know.” Shayne dragged off his hat and clawed at his hair. He pulled a straight chair closer to the desk and sat down. “It’s a screwy business all around. I’ll tell you, but first how about lighting a fire under the clerk and the switchboard? Make them be damn sure there’s no message for Michael Shayne from anybody… particularly Elsa Cornell.”

“Michael Shayne? From Miami? Sa-ay. You had a TeeVee show, didn’t you?”

“Don’t hold it against me. Light that fire, huh?”

“You bet I will. My name’s Pat Ryan.” He lifted a phone on his desk, pressed a button and spoke into it. He listened and spoke again, then pressed another button and did the same. He hung up, shaking his head. “They swear there’s nothing. I told them to put it through in here if anything came. Well, whaddayou know? Mike Shayne, huh? Just in from Miami?”

“Straight from the airport.” Shayne shrugged and got a cigarette going. “First time I’ve been this far west for God knows how many years.”

“You haven’t missed much. It’s a real rat race out here now. Little early in the day for a drink, I guess,” he said hopefully.

Shayne grinned and reminded him, “Hell, it’s past six in Miami.”

“How right you are,” chuckled Pat Ryan. He pulled a desk drawer open, apologizing, “Sorry we don’t stock cognac in this dump. If I’d known Mike Shayne was dropping in…”

He lifted out a pint bottle of rye and some paper cups. Shayne looked at the label on the bottle in distaste, and reached down to pull his briefcase closer and open it. “Cognac coming up.” He set the full fifth on the desk with a flourish and tore the foil around the cork with his thumbnail.

“By God, you’re a real boy scout,” beamed Ryan. “Be prepared, huh? Say, you like water on the side don’t you?”

“If it’s handy.”

Ryan got to his feet and hurried out with two cups which he brought back filled with water just as his telephone rang.

He picked it up while Shayne poured cognac, listened a moment and said, “Send him into my office. Shayne is right here.”

He hung up and told the redhead, “Taxi driver at the desk asking for you.”

Shayne said, “Swell,” and took an appreciative sip of cognac. Ryan went to the door and opened it as the taxi driver came around the corner. He was a thin-faced young man, wearing a peaked cap jauntily. He looked inquiringly at Ryan and asked, “Your name Mike Shayne?”

“Inside.” Ryan stood aside for him to enter the small office. He grinned when he saw the rangy redhead at the desk with the bottle of cognac and paper cups on it.

“That’s more like what I expected. She said you was that famous shamus from Miami. My name’s Joe Pelter, Shayne.” He held out a sinewy, freckled hand and Shayne grasped it heartily. He said, “Glad to meet you, Joe. Who is she?”

“Fare I just had in my cab. A knockout, by God.” He widened his eyes and whistled expressively. “Real class, but jittery and scared to death if you ask me. She gives me this to deliver to you. In person, she says. Be sure Mike Shayne gets it. It’s a matter of life and death, she says, and by God the way she says it, I believe her.” From his shirt pocket he took out two folded sheets of paper torn from a small memo pad that were covered with words shakily written with a thin lead pencil.

Shayne took it from him and said to Ryan, “Why don’t you pour Joe a drink, Pat, while I read this?”

Ryan said, “Sure,” and got out another cup, and Shayne wrinkled his nose at the faint scent that came up from the two small sheets of paper, and read the message:

Mr. Shayne:

I’m in a taxi on my way to meet you but am being followed. I know I am. I will have the driver drop me at the Beverly Hilton where there are several exits and I should be able to escape from him.

Please go direct to the Brown Derby and get a table for lunch or drinks and leave your name with the head-waiter. I will join you there as soon as it is safe.

Elsa

Some of the words were hard to make out and Shayne frowned at it thoughtfully, comparing it in his mind with the flowing script of the note in his pocket, and decided it was the same, having been written in a moving car. He held it close to his nose and sniffed, and knew that the scent was certainly the same.

He looked to see Ryan and the cab driver regarding him curiously, and Joe grinned and said, “Smells good, huh? Just the way that dame looked.”

Shayne said, “Tell me about her, Joe. Where did you pick her up?”

“On Hollywood near Vine. I figure she’s an actress, you know. Real class. She gets in and tells me the Plaza Terrace, and I’m driving along taking some ganders at her in the mirror, you know, because you don’t get something like that in a cab very often, not in Los Angeles, you don’t. And I notice her twisting and looking worried out the back, and after a minute she asks if I think we’re being followed, and I check the best I can, but it’s hard to tell for sure in heavy traffic. Then she gets a little pad out of her bag and starts writing on it, and suddenly she tells me to drop her off at the Beverly Hilton instead of here, and asks if I’ll come on here and deliver this note to you. That’s when she did the life-and-death piece, and I told her sure I would. So she had it folded up with a five-dollar bill and she passed it over the back of the seat just as we pulled up at the Hilton, and jumped out and went inside fast. Say, this here is damn good drinking liquor. Cognac, huh?” He drained his cup and looked thirstily at the bottle.

“Have another,” Shayne said absently, drumming his fingertips on the desk. “Describe her to me, Joe. Blonde or brunette? How old? How was she dressed?”

“Blonde,” said Joe enthusiastically. “Real, sure-enough honey-colored blonde, that’s for sure. How old? Gosh, I don’t know. No spring chicken, if you know what I mean, but no hag either. Thirty, maybe. Thirty-five. But plenty juice left in her. God, I don’t know what she was wearing. A dress, I guess. Who looks at a doll’s clothes when she’s got that kind of stuff inside of them? But don’t get me wrong,” he added hastily. “She don’t sling it around for you to look at. It’s there, and she knows you know it’s there, but that’s all.”

Shayne said to Ryan, “She wants me to meet her at the Brown Derby. Is that far from here?”

“On Wilshire? That’s the one she probably means, if she didn’t say which. There’s another one on Vine…”

“I’ll run you over,” Joe Pelter offered eagerly. “My hack’s right in front waiting.”

“Sure.” Shayne drained his cup and got up. He hesitated a moment and told Ryan, “My secretary has the name of this hotel, it’s the only place she can reach me in L.A. If she should try to call in the next half hour or so, you could have me paged at the Brown Derby. Or take a message, and I’ll try to check back with you.”

“Glad to do it,” Ryan told him heartily. “Don’t forget your bottle.”

Shayne shook his head with a grin. “Stash it away. You never know, I may be back for another drink out of it.”

“Any time,” Ryan told him, following him to the door. “Good luck with your juicy blonde.”

3

Shayne found the Original Brown Derby Restaurant practically empty when he walked into it at about four o’clock. There was only a residue of hard-drinkers from the long business lunches that had filled the place earlier and a smattering of tourists who had dropped in early to order cocktails and establish beachheads at strategic tables where they would hopefully dawdle over their drinks and wait for Hollywood celebrities to arrive during the next two or three hours preceding dinner.

A captain of waiters bustled up to Shayne when he paused at the entrance to check his briefcase with a discerning glance at the redhead which failed to categorize the detective as either a celebrity or a celebrity-smitten tourist.

“Would you like a table, sir?”

Shayne nodded, “I’m expecting a lady to meet me. The name is Shayne. Michael Shayne.”

“Of course.” The captain made a notation on his pad and started toward a row of small tables against the wall. Shayne looked at his watch and said, “I think I’ll make a telephone call first.” It was a little after seven o’clock in Miami, and he had promised Lucy he would call her either at the office or at home. He still had nothing definite to report on the length of his anticipated stay in Los Angeles, but it would be pleasant to hear her voice and her comments when he told her about Elsa’s second note and relayed the taxi driver’s description of his mysterious female client.

The captain paused in front of Shayne and looked over his shoulder to say, “Certainly, sir. I’ll have a telephone brought to your table.”

He was being a trifle gauche, Shayne realized with inner amusement, hesitating in the Brown Derby and looking about for a public telephone from which to make his call. A telephone at his table, of course. This was Hollywood, he reminded himself. Where fabulous million-dollar deals were constantly being consummated by habituees of the Brown Derby by private telephones plugged in at their elbows for convenience, so there would be no interruption in the sipping of drinks.

He followed the captain to a table for two, was seated with a flourish, and noted with amusement that he was being covertly observed with a craning of necks by some of the tourists while a waiter hurried up with a telephone which was placed by his right hand and plugged into a jack in the wall beside him.

Shayne lit a cigarette and ordered a sidecar, telling the waiter firmly, “With Martel and a shade light on the Cointreau. And no sugar on the rim of the glass if your bartender here has that atrocious idea for serving a sidecar.”

“Indeed not, sir.” The waiter looked properly aghast at the thought, and scurried away.

Shayne lifted the telephone and wondered if he looked like a movie mogul offering joint contracts to Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Curtis to co-star in an adaptation of Darwin’s Origin Of Species written especially for the screen by Harper Lee. A happy feminine voice came bouncing over the wire, “May I help you, please?”

He grinned, thinking how unhappy the Brown Derby operator would be when he didn’t ask for either Liz Taylor or Tony Curtis, and told her, “I’d like to make a collect call to Miami, Florida. Michael Shayne speaking.” He gave Lucy Hamilton’s home telephone number, and was utterly amazed when the same feminine voice, sounding just as happy as before, gurgled over the telephone, “Certainly, Mr. Shayne,” and added sotto voce, “tall, tough and red-headed.”

He held the telephone away from him, looking at it in consternation, and then put it back to his ear, reminding himself that this was, after all, the Brown Derby in Hollywood, where anything might happen.

He heard diallings and pingings over the line, and then a telephone began ringing in Lucy’s apartment some three thousand miles away, and the waiter came back and deftly set a cocktail in front of him while Shayne counted the rings, knowing after the third one that Lucy was not going to answer.

After he counted eight rings, a dulcet voice broke in and informed him, “That number does not answer. Do you wish me to try again in twenty minutes, Mr. Shayne?”

He said, “Mike, to you,” and got a little gurgle in reply. “Shall I keep trying?”

Shayne said, “Thanks. We’ll skip it for this time,” and hung up before his worse instincts got the better of him and he tried to make a date with the soft-voiced operator who had whispered, “tall, tough and red-headed,” into the telephone.

The sidecar was perfect, clean-tasting and crisp, and Shayne sipped it pleasurably while he leaned back and watched people being escorted to tables about him, tightening up a little each time an unescorted woman between twenty and forty came in his direction behind a captain, relaxing happily when each one passed by his table, because none whom he saw fitted the description the cab driver had given him of Elsa.

He was working on his third sidecar, at least forty-five minutes after he had entered the restaurant when he saw the captain to whom he had given his name hurrying toward his table.

He stopped beside him with a worried frown and leaned over deferentially to say, “A most curious thing has just happened, Mr. Shayne. You did tell me you were expecting a lady to join you, no?”

“Yes,” said Shayne.

“A few minutes ago one came and asked for you. Mr. Michael Shayne. That is correct, no?”

“Yes,” said Shayne again.

“I told her yes and asked her to follow me. I started toward your table and became suddenly aware that she was not behind me. I turned and she had stopped and was looking elsewhere to the center of the room, pale and shaken, with an expression of deathly fear on her face, Mr. Shayne.

“She turned abruptly and ran out. Ran, Mr. Shayne.” The captain glanced about him and lowered his voice discreetly. “Although no one moved to pursue her. Indeed, I could discover no one who appeared to have noticed her at all. It was as though she fled from a phantom.”

Shayne sighed and asked matter-of-factly, “Was she a beautiful juicy blonde?”

“A blonde, yes. Beautiful, yes. Concerning the juiciness, Mr. Shayne…” The captain of waiters paused helplessly.

Shayne grinned at him. He said reassuringly, “It’s just that you’re not a taxi driver, Captain. You don’t know about the juices.” He drained his cocktail glass happily and held it out to the captain. “Could you get me another of these while I continue my vigil? With just a smidgen… I repeat… just a smidgen more of cognac?”

“Certainly, sir.” The man hurried away with Shayne’s empty cocktail glass, and the redhead shrugged and wondered what in hell was going to happen next.

He felt a little bit like Alice on the other side of the Looking Glass, and he reminded himself happily that this was Hollywood… it wasn’t Miami, where all the juices were long ago dried up. Wasn’t it just this morning, by God, when he had realized how juiceless Miami had become? He hadn’t used that word, of course, but it was a good one. Very descriptive. It took a taxi driver, he mused, to glom onto a word like that.

His fourth sidecar arrived and he tasted it happily and decided it did have a smidgen more of cognac in it.

And then his own private telephone rang at his elbow. He looked around the room distrustfully, and allowed it to ring a second and a third time before he could accept the fact that it was a call for him, at his own table in the Original Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood.

He picked it up and wondered vaguely whether it would be Liz Taylor or Tony Curtis calling him. Or, maybe Harper Lee, insisting that Somerset Maugham collaborate with her on the screenplay of Darwin’s book.

He said, “Hello.”

A husky, voluptuous, bedroom-sort-of-voice came pulsing warmly over the wire: “Mr. Shayne! I’m calling from around the corner. The most dreadful thing has happened. One of them is in there watching you. I don’t know how. I just don’t understand… but I can’t meet you there. I don’t think he saw me. I truly don’t. But we can’t take any chances, can we? You’re a detective and know all about such things, so don’t let him follow you when you leave. Be sure you ditch him. You know. Like detectives do in books. Jump into the subway just before the doors close behind you. Only, there aren’t any subways in L.A., are there? Well then… you still can ditch him, can’t you? Of course you can. You must, because it is a matter of life and death.

“Look! I’ll meet you in half an hour or so at the cocktail bar in the Cock and Bull on the Strip. Just you ditch him on the way. I’m so frightened. I’m going to run now. I’ll switch taxis two or three times on my way to the Cock and Bull, and that way I don’t see how there’ll be any danger. Don’t fail me.” There was a click at the other end and the line went silent.

Shayne replaced it slowly, tugging at his left earlobe irritatedly. He turned slowly to survey the entire room that was slowly filling up now, and he could not detect a single person who appeared to be taking the slightest interest in him or what he was doing.

He finished his drink meditatively, and signalled to the waiter for his check.

The Cock and Bull on the Strip! That would be Sunset Strip, he assumed. What a delightful name for a place of assignation under melodramatic circumstances.

He paid his check and got up and went out without looking behind him to see whether he was followed out or not. It would be such a disappointment if he weren’t. It was a lot more intriguing to assume he was being followed… and to use his wits to lose his “tail” and avoid leading him to the elusive Elsa who waited for him on “The Strip.”

4

Shayne’s cab driver this time was a thick-bodied, hard-faced individual who appeared to have a grudge against the world in general and particularly against anyone who got in his hack for a ride.

He turned back to sneer insolently at Shayne when the redhead settled himself in the rear seat and asked, “Do you know the Cock and Bull on the Strip?”

“Sure. Anybody knows that, Mister. You want to go there?”

“Well,” said Shayne, a trifle irked, “I’d like to end up there eventually. However, let’s take a circuitous route. Pick out some street where there won’t be very much traffic.”

“You crazy, Mister? In L.A.? You find me a street where there ain’t much traffic five o’clock in the afternoon in this man’s town and I’ll give it to you. You want to go to the Cock and Bull or don’t you?”

Shayne said evenly, “Just get going, huh? Down this street the way you’re headed. I’ll tell you when I want to get out.”

The driver muttered something about people that couldn’t make up their minds and pulled out into the heavy traffic on Wilshire.

Shayne watched the meter and got a dollar bill out of his pocket. It clicked upward swiftly the way taxi meters do in Los Angeles, and when it said an even dollar, he leaned forward and said brusquely, “Pull in to the curb right here.”

The driver did so and Shayne dropped the bill on the seat beside the surly fellow and stepped out. He was near a busy crosswalk and there were a lot of pedestrians moving in all directions. Shayne moved in with them and rounded a corner, saw another cab just in front of him discharging a passenger. He stepped out and caught the handle of the open door, swung inside and said, “Get going fast.”

This driver was a slender, elderly man wearing glasses. He got going fast without asking any questions. Shayne let him continue three blocks in that direction, watching through the rear window without seeing anything that gave him reason to think he was being followed. Actually, he felt the whole thing was pretty silly by this time, and he settled back and told the driver, “I’d like to go to the Cock and Bull, if you don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind?” the driver asked cheerfully, “That’s what I’m here for… to take people where they want to go. It’s my pleasure, sir. And the way I make a living. The way I look at it,” he went on earnestly, weaving expertly in and out of traffic, “I’m here to serve the people that honor me by riding in my cab. Don’t you agree to that?”

Shayne lit a cigarette and chuckled aloud. “Some drivers don’t feel that way.”

“Then they shouldn’t be driving cabs. If they don’t enjoy meeting the public and making the day pleasanter for everyone, they shouldn’t be granted a hacker’s license. Don’t you agree?”

Shayne said that he did agree, and all the way up Sunset Strip he was treated to a homily on the very fine class of people who rode cabs in Los Angeles, and how freehearted and generous they were with their tips.

Consequently, he tipped the man a dollar when he was finally deposited in front of the Cock and Bull, and got and affable, “God bless you, Mister,” in return for his money.

The interior of the restaurant was dark and cool and quiet, decorated to resemble a better-class English pub. Shayne checked his briefcase, strolled into the bar and looked carefully around the small, pleasantly masculine room. There were three couples seated at tables, along with groups of men in twos and threes, and there were half a dozen men on bar stools. No honey-blondes, and no unescorted women at all.

He started for the bar, then changed his mind and searched out the men’s room instead. There was a comfortable lounge equipped with a public telephone, and he tried Lucy Hamilton’s number again without success. He was a little surprised when she still didn’t answer. It was well after eight o’clock in Miami, and he had an irrational feeling of annoyance with Lucy because she wasn’t sitting at home waiting for him to call. She would be, he knew morosely, if she hadn’t gone out to dinner.

And she never went out to dinner alone. She much preferred fixing a simple meal in her own apartment.

So, she had a dinner date. No reason she shouldn’t, of course, but he was disappointed in her none the less. He had promised her that he would call. Granted that he had nothing to report as yet, but she had no way of knowing that. Suppose there were something important…?

He broke off that train of thought, grinning at himself ruefully as he went back to the bar. He was jealous, goddamn it. Just a little bit jealous of that unknown guy who had taken Lucy out to dinner as soon as his back was turned.

More tables were occupied now, and there were only a few vacant stools at the bar. One of those was beside a woman who appeared to be alone.

She was a blonde, even if her hair was not authentically honey-colored. Approaching her from the rear, Shayne wondered if a taxi driver would describe her as juicy.

Could be, he decided. There was a nice lushness about her figure that couldn’t quite be called plump. He sat beside her and drew in a deep breath. She was wearing a faint scent that he didn’t think was the same as Elsa’s. But he wasn’t really a connoisseur of feminine perfume, and he couldn’t be sure.

He ordered a sidecar and glanced down at her right hand that negligently held an old-fashioned glass. It was a firm, smooth hand with tapering fingers that ended in nicely-manicured but garishly red nails.

There was no mirror behind the bar in which he could see her reflection, so when his drink was served he turned his head to glance aside at her as he lifted it, and caught her looking at him with disconcerting frankness. She had pleasant features, but she was hardly the knockout that Joe Pelter had described with such enthusiasm.

She colored slightly when his eyes met hers, and turned her head hastily to look straight ahead.

Her profile was better than full face, and he took his time studying it over the rim of his glass. She was in her thirties, all right, but she didn’t remind him of anyone he had known ten years before.

She glanced back and found him still looking at her, frowned slightly and said in a low, melodious voice, “I don’t know you, do I?”

It could be the same voice he had recently heard over the telephone at the Brown Derby but, like the scent she was wearing he couldn’t be sure.

He said, “I don’t know. I was wondering the same thing myself. I’m from out of town.” He paused to take a sip of his drink. It was good, but not quite as good as those he had been served at the Brown Derby. “From Miami,” he added deliberately.

She looked away with a little shrug, as though to indicate the subject did not interest her… and probably to convince him that she wasn’t an easy bar pick-up.

Shayne lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, wondering, now, how well Elsa Cornell knew him… whether she would recognize him at first glance or whether she had only an illusive ten-year-old memory to guide her.

He thought back over what the captain had told him. Had she seen him at his table when she came into the Brown Derby and was frightened by the sight of another man? One of them, she had said over the phone. It was quite possible that she hadn’t seen Shayne at all back there. The captain would have had no reason to point him out… unless she had asked him to. And he hadn’t mentioned that.

But if it was Elsa seated beside him, the word “Miami” should have identified him to her.

She finished her drink and slid off the stool and sauntered toward the door. Shayne turned his head and watched her depart, again recalling more of Joe Pelter’s words: “She don’t sling it around for you to look at. It’s there, and she knows you know it’s there, but that’s all.”

Well, it could be, Shayne decided judiciously. There was something quite ladylike about her erect posture, her walk. But what kind of cat and mouse game was she playing? If she expected him to follow her…

Then a real honey-blonde entered the room in a sort of breathless rush, and stopped very still to look about hopefully.

This, Shayne knew with a sudden, unmistakable conviction, was the woman who had brought him out to Los Angeles. His luck was holding good. She was a real knockout. He mentally apologized to Joe Pelter for ever having thought the woman who had just left the stool beside him could possibly be Elsa Cornell.

She was quite tall and she held herself proudly just inside the doorway as she openly and coolly inventoried the male occupants of the room. She wore a clinging black sheath dress with a crimson sash and a crimson silk scarf at her throat. She was about thirty-five, and she had full, bold features. Even at that distance Shayne could almost swear that he smelled her distinctive perfume.

When her slowly moving gaze met his she hesitated momently, but she did not smile or give any sign of recognition. Her eyes moved on along the backs of the other men at the bar, and she completed a full circuit of the room before moving.

Then she did not look at Shayne, although he continued to stare at her openly. She dropped long, dark lashes demurely over her eyes and walked with sinuous grace directly to the empty stool beside him.

He did smell her distinctive perfume now with certainty. It was not too strong. Thank God she had not doused herself with it as she had her letter.

She sat beside him and glanced fleetingly at his cocktail glass, and then told the bartender, “I will have a sidecar, please,” and she had the sort of warmly intimate voice that made the request sound as though she were inviting the man into bed with her… and Shayne knew happily that this was going to be quite an evening.

5

“Do you like them too?” asked Shayne in a tone of politely surprised interest. “That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

She glanced at him obliquely, as though she wasn’t quite certain what he meant, and he wondered if she supposed for a moment that he hadn’t got a full description of her from the taxi driver… had not recognized the perfume she was wearing.

Then she said, “Oh? Sidecars, you mean? Is that what you’re drinking? It is a coincidence.” She opened her handbag on the bar and groped inside for a thin gold cigarette case, opened it and extracted a cigarette. Watching her with interest, Shayne caught a glimpse of green that came out with the cigarette.

He struck a match and held it for her, asking politely, “May I?”

She cupped her hands, touching his fingers to move the flame to the end of her cigarette. He felt something being pressed between his fingers, and she drew in smoke and moved her hand away from his and said composedly, “Thank you.”

He shook out the match as the bartender set her cocktail in front of her. When the man moved away, Shayne dropped both hands into his lap beneath the bar and unfolded the tightly creased and minutely folded half of a thousand dollar bill which she had pressed between his fingers. He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down at the piece of currency in his hands, that she knew he had received it safely and must now know definitely who she was.

He had no idea why she was playing it this way, but he went along with the act, making it appear that they were complete strangers, drawn together by the coincidence of both liking sidecars.

He drained his glass and motioned to the bartender for a refill, asking her, “Have you ever tried one at the Brown Derby? They’re pretty special.”

She murmured, “I’ve heard that.” There was a tightness in her voice and Shayne felt she was trying desperately to convey something to him without saying it aloud.

He glanced up and down the bar, wondering what she was afraid of here, why she insisted on carrying out the rather absurd pretence to such lengths.

He became conscious then that someone was standing very close behind him and just to his left, close enough, Shayne realized, to be able to overhear anything they said to each other.

He said, “I’m a stranger in town… just trying to see some of the sights. I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but… can you suggest a good place to go for dinner… where some of the stars might be hanging out?”

She chuckled throatily, as though genuinely amused, but behind the sound Shayne thought he sensed overwhelming fear, incipient hysteria.

“You would not be… making a proposition, I trust?”

Shayne said lamely, “Well, I…” Then he turned to her with a wide grin, glancing out of the side of his eyes at the man who stood so close behind them and declaring, “A perfectly honorable one. If you happen to be free for dinner…?”

He turned his head farther to the left and glanced balefully at the man who stood there and told him harshly, “If you’re trying to order a drink, there’s an empty stool right down there.”

He was a fat man with pale, innocuous features. He looked as embarrassed as though he had been caught in the act of peeking through a keyhole, and muttered, “I’m sorry, I… Of course. I had no intention…” He turned and moved to the empty stool Shayne had indicated.

Elsa’s voice was low and strained, very close to his ear. “Let’s get out of here.” She slid off the stool and turned toward the outer door.

He dropped a five-dollar bill on the bar and followed her, noticing that the fat man craned his head around to watch them go out together, exactly as a voyeur might avidly watch a sexual act being performed in front of him.

Shayne went out the door into the Hollywood night behind Elsa and saw the doorman holding the door of a taxicab open while she stepped inside. He strode across the sidewalk and dropped half a dollar into the man’s hand and got in beside her.

The door closed softly and the taxi pulled forward. She pressed warmly against him and put her head against his shoulder and began sobbing like a frightened child.

Shayne put his arm tightly about her shoulders and held her very close, and spoke soothingly with his mouth against her ear:

“It’s all right now. Relax.”

“I’ve been so damn scared… so long.” She whispered the words against him, stopped sobbing and held her breath for a long moment, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.

He began, “Now tell me for God’s sake…” but she hushed him with two fingers pressed against his lips, and murmured, “Just hold me without talking now. That driver…?”

Shayne repressed a snort of derision. She had a bad case of the willies, all right. Did she think that every taxi driver in town was in league against her?

Instead of arguing the point at that moment, he asked her in a low voice, “Where to?”

“Tell him… the Roosevelt Hotel.”

They were headed east on Sunset, and when Shayne told the driver, “The Roosevelt, please,” he nodded his head and continued in the same direction.

The blonde stirred against him and moved away slightly, but not out of the circle of his arm. She turned her head to look up steadily into his eyes, and in the bright lights of the boulevard he saw that her dark eyelashes were wet.

“Michael Shayne.” She pronounced his name softly, almost disbelievingly, in a voice too low for the driver to hear. “You don’t remember me, do you? But I would have recognized you anywhere.”

“Ten years ago?” he asked in the same confidential tone.

She nodded slightly and a faint smile curved her full, red lips that were only inches away from his. “Mary Devon.”

He repeated the name to himself, frowning and halfclosing his eyes, mentally going back over the years as he had done on the airplane earlier that day. Ten years back? She would have been in her early twenties… and she must have been beautiful even then to have matured into this improbably lush woman whose body was so warm against him.

Mary Devon? Damn it, there was a nagging memory, but he could not grasp it. He shook his head slowly and said, “Sorry, but you’ll have to help me out.”

“I was afraid I didn’t make much impression on you, Mr. Shayne. Why should I after all? You only saw me for a few minutes that one time. And you were pretty well preoccupied with my room-mate’s suicide which later turned out to be murder.”

Cogs clicked in Michael Shayne’s mind. “Helen Taylor,” he said. “The Wanda Weatherby case. You were Helen’s room-mate. A television actress.”

“It was radio in those days. I never saw you again, but I never forgot you, of course, and I kept reading about you in the papers. So, when I got into this… horrible mess… you were the only person I could think of to turn to. I’ve been so… utterly alone. I feel as though I’m just beginning to come alive again, to emerge from a frightful nightmare.”

She kept her voice low, but it pulsed warmly and with a new vibrancy.

The taxi had switched over to Hollywood Boulevard and was approaching the Roosevelt Hotel on the right. Mary drew away from him and sat up a little straighter, and he leaned forward to look at the meter and got out his wallet.

She took his arm as they went in the brightly lighted entrance, and pressed it tightly against her side while they moved toward the elevators and the desk.

Just in front of the desk she turned him away from the elevators to the left, past the desk and entrance to the dining room, and out the side entrance.

He looked down at her in utter astonishment as she paused there at his side. “Where are we headed now?”

“To my hotel,” she told him triumphantly. “Isn’t that the way a detective does it? I’ve got so careful these last few days that I never take a cab that’s waiting in front of a place directly to my hotel. I always change at least once and then take one that’s just pulling up. Like this,” she added as a taxi drew up in front of the side entrance to let out a passenger. “You see, he can’t possibly be waiting here for me to come out.”

Shayne said wryly, “I see,” without seeing at all. She looked and acted sane enough, but she either had one hell of a persecution complex or he was right smack in the middle of one hell of a case.

He helped her into the cab and she told him, “The Perriepont Hotel this time. I’m almost sure it’s safe for us to go there,” she added cheerfully. “I just checked in there this afternoon after ditching my tail at the Hilton as I explained in my note. That’s why I was so long getting to the Brown Derby… and that I don’t understand at all. Did you tell anyone you were meeting me there? But you couldn’t have because then you didn’t even know my real name… just Elsa Cornell… and I made that up when I decided to write to you.”

“It must have been that taxi driver that brought you the note,” she decided suddenly. “It wasn’t even sealed and he must have read it before he gave it to you. I thought there was something funny about him… the way he pretended he couldn’t tell whether we were being followed or not. Oh, dear God,” she added feelingly, reaching for his hand and squeezing it, “I’m so sick of ducking around corners and being suspicious of everyone I see even looking at me. From now on, you can take over and do the worrying.”

Shayne squeezed her fingers back reassuringly, although he didn’t know what the devil he was reassuring her about.

6

She had a very comfortable, but not ostentatious, two-room suite on the fourth floor of the Perriepont Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

She closed the door behind the two of them with a long exhalation of relief and exclaimed, “Now I feel I can breathe easily for the first time in days. Sit down and I’ll order up a drink. You can see I haven’t even unpacked yet.” She gestured toward a closed suitcase and hatbox standing side by side just inside the door of a bedroom.

Shayne sat in a comfortable chair beside a smoking stand and ran clawed fingers through his red hair while he appreciatively watched her sway across the room to the telephone. There was a pleasing air of exuberance about her now that was quite at variance with the first impression of taut strain she had given when she entered the Cock and Bull.

She lifted the telephone and asked for room service, then glanced over her shoulder at him and asked, “A bottle? If they have it?”

He nodded comfortably and lit a cigarette. She gave her room number and asked, “Is it possible to have a bottle sent up? Cognac, if you have it. Martel? That’s fine. With lots of ice and two glasses.” She hung up and turned slowly to look at him, nodding her head soberly. “You’re just the way I remembered you, Michael Shayne, only more so. God, if you knew how good it makes me feel just to have you here.” She made a little face at him. “I could kiss you… just out of sheer gratitude.”

“I haven’t done anything,” he protested. “Later, perhaps. After I’ve earned it. Right now I feel like Alice on the other side of the Looking Glass.”

He reached in his pocket for the torn half of the bill she had passed to him surreptitiously at the bar, and spread it out on his knee. Then he got her envelope from another pocket and extracted the other half from it, and gravely placed the torn edges together to make sure they matched.

She seated herself at the end of a sofa a few feet from him and leaned forward to watch him with her chin cupped in her palm. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Whew. I really poured the perfume on that first half, didn’t I?”

Shayne said, “You really did. Were you wearing that stuff ten years ago when I met you?”

She smiled and said, “Probably not. I don’t think I could afford it in those days. I just hoped it would bring into your mind the memory of some entrancing femme fatale you’d known long ago, and you wouldn’t be able to resist it.”

“It was that half of a one-grand bill that I couldn’t resist,” Shayne informed her. He folded the two halves together and carefully placed them inside his wallet. “Now, what’s your problem and what’s this foolishness about little men chasing you all over the metropolitan area of Los Angeles? Taxi drivers, and one of them who scared you away from the Brown Derby? I suppose that fatso who stood so close behind me at the Cock and Bull was another one of them,” he went on sarcastically, “and that’s why you insisted on the cloak and dagger stuff there?”

“I know it sounds fantastic,” she told him calmly. “I’ll admit I have got the jitters, and I may be seeing them on every street corner when they’re not there at all, but so many crazy things have happened that I just don’t know any more. It’s a long story, and please don’t decide I’m insane before I finish telling it.” She hesitated. “I don’t know just where to start.”

He stretched out his long legs and blew a contemplative cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Why not try the beginning?”

“That’s the trouble. Where does it begin? Oh well, you don’t need a lot of background stuff: It really began about six months ago when I first met Fidel Castro in Havana.”

There was a knock on the door and she jumped up to admit a bellboy carrying a tray. She had him set it on a table across the room and signed the check and tipped him although Shayne was waving a dollar bill in the air.

She put ice cubes in the two tall glasses the boy had brought, and poured cognac in one, and Shayne stopped her before she could repeat it with the second glass, telling her, “I’d like mine straight with water on the side if you’ve got an extra glass.”

“Of course.” She gave him a dismayed smile. “Forgive me for forgetting your well-publicized drinking habits.” She went in the bathroom for another glass, poured it half full of cognac and brought it to him with a glass of ice water.

She settled herself at the end of the sofa again and said uncomfortably, “I guess I can’t put it off any longer. I not only met Fidel but I fell for him. I don’t know how much Cuban stuff they’ve been printing in the Miami papers recently, but you may have read stories about an American actress who has been going around with him a lot. Her stage name is… was… Marianne Devlin.” Her voice hardened. “That was me, in case you haven’t guessed. There was a… an unpleasant bit of publicity in Hollywood a few years ago about a television actress named Mary Devon. It has nothing to do with this except as my reason for changing my name.”

She paused, looking at him defiantly, and Shayne shrugged and said, “Go on with the Cuban bit. I don’t recall reading about Marianne Devlin and Castro. In fact, my impression of the man is that he doesn’t have anything to do with women.”

“A gross misrepresentation,” she told him dryly. “You know how Cubans are about blondes? Well, I was at one of the luxury hotels in Havana in a floor show and he saw me and… liked me. All right,” she went on angrily, “I liked him, too. I was flattered that he wanted me for his mistress. He’s quite a guy. He’s still quite a guy,” she added, glaring at Shayne as though daring him to contradict her, “although he’s changed one hell of a lot since it’s come out in the open that he’s a communist.

“Look…” She spread out her hands unhappily. “I don’t think you’re interested in the intimate details of my life with Fidel. It was flattering and exciting in the beginning… all the intrigue and the back-stage goings-on. I was in on it. You had a feeling that he was a man of destiny. That he was sincerely interested in doing a wonderful job in Cuba… and God knows those poor peons who suffered under Batista deserved a new deal.

“But things got different. He’s a sour, embittered man. The communists have moved in and taken control. And he hates it because he was the movement in the beginning. He was the revolution. Of course he’s a megalomaniac,” she went on bitterly. “That’s why it’s so hard for him now. I’m not making excuses for him, but I did see a lot of it happen. I realized I had to get out, but I also realized they weren’t going to let me just walk out. I knew too much. I’d been too close to so many things. They didn’t trust me.

“Oh, not Fidel,” she went on swiftly. “He’s really quite naive about politics. But he’s not in charge any more.” She put down her drink abruptly and got up and began striding up and down the room like a caged animal.

“I’m not saying this well,” she burst out. “I don’t know whether he ever actually loved me. I’m not sure he’s capable of loving anyone but himself… and Cuba. At any rate, little Mary Devon saw the handwriting on the wall. I made plans to get out of there while the going was good. I found a pilot… an American… who agreed to fly me secretly to Mexico. For a price.”

She stopped in the middle of the floor with her hands on her hips and regarded Shayne belligerently. “It was a high price,” she told him in a subdued voice, “but well worth it. I got out of Cuba with some clothes, a few thousand dollars in American currency… and a small dispatch case. Right now I wish to God I’d had the good sense to leave the dispatch case behind, but I didn’t. I’m still an American. And I hate the communists and what they’ve done to Fidel. Do you know what is inside that dispatch case, Mr. Shayne?”

He said, “I haven’t the faintest idea… and why don’t you call me Mike at this point?”

“All right, Mike. It’s a complete and detailed plan for the take-over of Guantanamo. They’ve got key men infiltrated into our Navy personnel there. It’s all worked out, and I flew into Mexico with it.”

“Where is it?” he asked curiously, looking around the room as though he expected to see a dispatch case standing there.

“It’s hidden on the other side of the Border… where you and I are going to get it tomorrow and you’re going to take it to Washington and see that it gets into the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, or the top man of the CIA… whichever. I guess they’re not a part of the Communist Conspiracy,” she added tautly. “Although right now I’m not too sure about that. I’ve been through hell with that damned dispatch case.”

Her composure broke suddenly and she twisted her hands together in front of her and tears appeared on her cheeks. “Who can you trust today? I had a contact in Mexico City. He was murdered before I could reach him and there was a trap laid for me that I just escaped by the skin of my teeth. I miraculously escaped death twice more before I managed to reach the Border. I didn’t dare try to bring it across with me. I didn’t dare try to turn it over to anyone, because how do you know whom you can trust today? They’ve got their agents everywhere. That’s one of the things I learned in Cuba. What do you suppose went wrong with our carefully planned invasion a year ago? They knew all about it beforehand from trusted and high-up agents of the CIA. I’ve heard them boasting about how stupid and complacent Americans are.”

She stalked back to her end of the sofa and dropped down, lifted her glass of watered cognac and took a long drink. “All right, Mike. You didn’t come all the way to Los Angeles to listen to a lecture on the danger of communist infiltration here. But I’ve been hounded and deviled ever since I crossed the border from Mexico. My hotel room and bags have been searched twice. I can’t make a move on the streets without one of them right behind me. You may think I’m imagining all of it, and I don’t care what you think if you’ll just go down to Tijuana tomorrow and recover that dispatch case and see it gets into the right hands in Washington. That’s all I ask. Then let me go back to being Mary Devon and forget there ever was a woman named Marianne Devlin.”

He sucked the last drops of cognac from his glass, got up and went across to pour out some more. With his back to her, he observed mildly, “I think you’ll do all right as Mary Devon. You impress me as being quite a competent actress.” He turned back with an approving smile. “How much rehearsing did you do on that story before you tried it out on me?”

“Mike!” she cried in a stricken voice. “Don’t say that! You’ve got to believe me and help me. You’re the one person in the world I could think of whom I could call on.”

“I may be willing to help you,” he told her, reseating himself and pleasurably taking a sip of cognac, “after you tell me the truth. There may be a dispatch case hidden in Tijuana,” he agreed judicially. “Perhaps I’ll help you get hold of it… after you tell me what’s in it. But all this other stuff, Mary. For God’s sake!” He shook his head in disgust.

“If any of this wild story were true why the devil haven’t you gone to the police here in L.A.? Or the local office of the FBI? You didn’t have to send for a private detective from Miami to help you prevent a communist takeover of a Naval base in Cuba.”

“But I’ve told you,” she appealed to him tremulously. “How do you know whom you can trust these days? Even Mr. Hoover boasts publicly that about half his agents are members of the Communist Party. He thinks they are spying for him, of course, but how does he know which side they’re really on? I’ve just gotten to the point where I don’t trust anybody.”

“I know,” said Shayne with withering sarcasm. “Not even the local taxi drivers. A guy like Joe Pelter, for instance, who delivered your note to me today. You think he’s a commie and read your note and sent a cable to Moscow warning them that you planned to meet me at the Brown Derby. Nuts! What kind of a simpleton do you take me for?”

Mary Devon put her hands over her face and began crying quietly. “What am I going to do?” she sobbed. What am I going to do?”

“Start telling the truth,” he advised her coldly. “I don’t know what you’ve got yourself into, but it’s evidently something you can’t go to the police with. Maybe you have been sleeping with Fidel Castro. I wouldn’t blame you… and I certainly wouldn’t blame him. If you come clean with me and it’s something I can touch without losing my Florida license, I’ll be glad to consider it. Otherwise, I’ll finish up this glass of excellent cognac and be on my way.”

He raised the glass to his lips and grinned over the top of it at her.

She pulled her hands away from her tear-stained face and regarded him with a strange look of near-exaltation. “Will you, Mike?” she breathed hopefully. “Will you truly promise to help me if I tell you the real truth?” She got to her feet and glided toward him as though in a sort of trance.

He said gruffly, “If I can. Practically anything short of murder.”

She dropped to her knees beside his chair and clutched his thigh with both hands while she looked up at him imploringly. “I’m going to trust you, Mike. I’ll tell you the real truth this time. But it is a long story, and we might as well be relaxed. Do you mind if I… slip into the bedroom and get into something more comfortable?”

He said, “I don’t mind at all,” and pretended to hide a yawn while he glanced at his watch. “As a matter of fact, I’ll use your phone to make a collect call to my secretary in Miami while you’re doing that.”

She got up and said simply, “You won’t be disappointed, I promise you,” and he watched her go toward the bedroom and wondered fleetingly just what he was getting himself into.

He shrugged the question away, got up and carried his cognac over to the telephone stand where he sat down and put in his call to Lucy.

While the operator repeated the Miami telephone number, he glanced across the room and noticed that Mary had carelessly neglected to close the bedroom door all the way and that a full-length mirror set in a closet door inside the room afforded him an excellent view of the juicy body of the honey-haired blonde emerging from a black sheath dress.

She didn’t face the mirror directly so he wasn’t sure whether she was aware that he could see her in the glass or not, and he struggled with his gentlemanly instincts while he waited for Lucy to come on the line.

His baser instincts won the struggle without much difficulty. Actually, he thought, a woman who had been Castro’s mistress… or who had calmly claimed to be his mistress for purposes of her own, would think it pretty childish of him if he called out to warn her to close the bedroom door.

And he wondered with a grin how Lucy would react in Miami if he told her he was sitting up in a woman’s hotel room watching a disrobing act being put on for his special benefit.

Then he realized, suddenly, that Lucy still wasn’t answering her phone. He had been too absorbed in other things to count the number of rings, but now the operator was announcing crisply, “That number does not answer, sir. Do you wish me to try again in…”

He growled, “Cancel the call,” and hung up. When he looked up at the bedroom door with a scowl, Mary was walking through it placidly, bare-footed and wearing a long, full-skirted silken robe of pale yellow that was belted tightly at the waist and rustled suggestively against her limbs.

She stopped short at sight of his scowling countenance. “Don’t you like it?” she asked anxiously. “I thought…”

“I like it fine,” he told her shortly. “I’m just worried about my secretary. Her telephone doesn’t answer.”

“But, goodness, what’s that to worry about?” She glided sinuously to the sofa and patted the cushion beside her. “Why don’t you bring your drink over and relax?”

“But it’s after ten o’clock in Miami. Lucy wouldn’t normally be out so late.”

“Pooh! What’s ten o’clock? I bet she’s an attractive doll, isn’t she? I can’t imagine Mike Shayne having a secretary who isn’t. You know the old saying: When the boss is away the secretaries play. Come on, darling, and this time I’ll tell you the real truth about that old dispatch case.”

Shayne shook his head stubbornly. “You don’t know Lucy Hamilton. She was expecting me to call. She just wouldn’t do this.”

He picked up the telephone book and ruffled through it, found the number for the Plaza Terrace Hotel and gave it to the switchboard.

When it answered, he said, “Pat Ryan, please. Security,” hoping that Ryan would still be on duty.

The operator said, “Certainly,” and a moment later a voice said, “Ryan speaking.”

“Mike Shayne, Pat.”

“Hey. How you doing, Mike? Caught up with that juicy blonde yet?”

“I’m just about to.” Shayne lifted his eyebrows at Mary, who reclined on the sofa with her robe carefully arranged to show the smooth line of long, well-fleshed legs. “What I wondered, Pats” he went on hastily. “Has there been any call for me? I haven’t been able to get hold of my secretary.”

“Not a thing, Mike.” Pat Ryan chuckled lewdly. “Why worry about a secretary in Miami when you’re about to catch up with something juicy out here?”

Shayne said, “Thanks,” and hung up. His scowl deepened and he drummed blunt fingertips on the telephone table beside him.

Why, indeed? But none of these people knew Lucy. That was why. He didn’t even bother to look at Mary when her voice floated to him provocatively from the sofa, “For goodness sake, you can call her later, Mike. After she gets home from her date. Remember that kiss I promised you.”

Shayne said coldly, “I still haven’t earned it.” He lifted the telephone again and directed the operator to put through a collect, person-to-person call to Timothy Rourke in Miami, giving her both the Daily News number and Rourke’s home number.

It was some time before they succeeded in locating the reporter, and his voice sounded queer when it finally came over three thousand miles of telephone wire: “Mike? The operator said Los Angeles. Is that right?”

“Yeh. I’m in L.A. Tim, I’m beginning to get worried about Lucy. I can’t locate her, and…”

“You’re getting worried about Lucy?” Tim Rourke seemed about to choke over the words. “You can’t locate her? Neither can the whole goddamned Miami police department… or you either for that matter. What are you doing…?”

“What are you talking about, Tim?”

“About a dead man in your office, Mike. Stabbed in the heart with that filing spindle off Lucy’s desk. And she seems to have vanished into thin air.”

7

“Wait a minute, Tim,” Shayne implored his old friend. “What’s all this…?”

“Did Lucy go out there with you, Mike?” interrupted Rourke in Miami.

“No. She was in the office when I left about noon. I’ve been trying to call her apartment and getting no answer. Start from the beginning and make sense, Tim. Remember, I’ve had no contact with Miami since eleven o’clock this morning.”

“I’ll start at the beginning, but I don’t know how much sense I’ll make,” Rourke told him gloomily. “Here’s the way it stacks up. About eight o’clock this evening your cleaning woman unlocked the door of your office and found a dead man lying on the floor right in front of Lucy’s desk… with that long, steel spindle, off Lucy’s desk, rammed all the way into his heart.”

“Who is he?”

“No identification on the body. Middle-aged. Sort of nondescript. They’ve found no one who saw him go in or out of the building. They figure he got it between four and five this afternoon.”

“Go on,” grated Shayne. “What about Lucy?”

“Nothing. That’s the hell of it. Of course they tried to reach you first, but they couldn’t get any line on you. No one knew where the hell you were.”

“Pete did,” Shayne said angrily. “Clerk at my hotel. I told him I was leaving.”

“Probably gone off duty by the time they got to him. Anyhow, Mike, they started looking for Lucy then. Her phone didn’t answer. I went up to her place with Will Gentry to check. Nothing disturbed. Everything spick and span there… just the way Lucy always leaves her place so meticulously in the morning. You know… you and I have kidded her…”

“I know,” Shayne said impatiently. “How about the office, Tim? Anything out of the way there?”

“No sign of a struggle at all. Nothing. Just a dead man lying on the floor… boss and secretary both inexplicably vanished.” Timothy Rourke paused to draw in a deep breath. “They’ve got an All Points out for both of you, Mike. Gentry couldn’t afford not to. I’ll have to report this call, Mike, as soon as I hang up. Right now you’re a Wanted Man.”

“Sure, report it,” Shayne told him harshly. “Tell Will exactly what I’ve told you. And tell him I’ll be back on the first jet I can get out of here. I’ll wire him as soon as I get a reservation.” He put the receiver down and stood up, his eyes bleak and unseeing, his jaw set hard and cheeks deeply trenched.

“Mike,” cried Mary in fright from across the room. “What is it? You look so… strange. You don’t have to leave tonight, do you?”

He blinked his eyes and he saw her reclining there on the sofa; voluptuous, beautiful… and available. “Yeh,” he said slowly. “I’ve got to get back.” He looked at his watch and saw it was almost eight o’clock, Los Angeles time.

“But what about me?” wailed Mary. “You promised you’d help me.”

“I promised I’d listen to you,” Shayne said shortly. “I have. To a pack of lies.” He paused, looking at her coldly and appraisingly. “Now, I wonder, by God…?”

She squirmed under his gaze. “At least take time to let me tell you the truth. There can’t anything so terrible have happened in Miami that you have to rush back at a moment’s notice. Tomorrow morning will certainly be time enough…”

He turned his back on her and her voice trailed off into troubled silence. He lifted the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with United Airlines Reservations. When he got a connection he asked about the next flight to Miami and was told there was a jet flight leaving forty minutes after nine o’clock.

“I want space on it,” he said. “First-class. I have a return ticket. Michael Shayne.”

“One moment, Mr. Shayne.” He waited, and thirty seconds later was assured that space was available and would be held for him on Flight Seventeen, scheduled to reach Miami at six o’clock the next morning, Eastern Standard Time.

He hadn’t heard her movements or the rustle of her robe, but the smell of her perfume and the woman smell of her body was strong and close to him when he put the receiver down. He turned slowly and Mary pressed herself against him hungrily, twining her arms about his neck and looking up into his face beseechingly with parted lips and imploring eyes.

“Don’t leave me, Mike,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I need you so. I can make you… need me, too.”

The length of her well-fleshed body pressed against him warmly, and he knew she wore nothing beneath the silken robe. He looked down at her broodingly and agreed, “Yeh. I think you could do that all right… if things were different. But the way things are…” He sighed deeply, reached up and caught hold of both her wrists at the back of his neck, pulled them apart and pressed them down against her sides, put pressure on both of them so pain showed on her face.

“No, Mike,” she whimpered. “Don’t do this to me. I’ve been so alone and frightened. You don’t know…”

Looking bleakly down into her eyes, he said brutally, “Now is a good time for you to get frightened again. I’m going to have the truth out of you this time… if I have to slap it out of you.” His voice turned into a snarl on the last words, and he thrust her away from him so she almost fell.

She recovered her balance and lowered her long lashes while she rubbed her bruised wrists. “I don’t know what’s happened,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t understand. I promised to tell you the truth this time, and I’m just waiting for you to let me do it.”

“No more carefully rehearsed stories,” he warned her angrily, turning aside to splash cognac into his glass. “I think I’ve been taken, goddamn it. I think you’ve made a Patsy of me. Trailing you around all over this town like a tame puppy while all hell was breaking loose back in Miami.

“You know what I think right now?” He swung around on his heel to glare at her. “I think this whole thing from the cute Special Delivery letter was a carefully calculated plan to get me out of Miami and away from my office today. That’s the way it looks right now. And, by God, I fell for it,” he added wonderingly.

“Oh no, Mike!” She shrank away from him, moved back across the rug on her bare feet to the sofa where she dropped down again and covered her face for a moment. Her features were composed and set when she looked at him again and said quietly, “Please sit down with your drink and listen to me. I admit I made up the Cuban and communist part of it, but if you’ll just help me get that dispatch case back from Tijuana…”

He said, “Nuts on Tijuana. I’m interested in Miami, Mary… if you are Mary Devon, which I’m beginning to doubt.”

“What about Miami? I haven’t been there for years.”

“There’s this about Miami.” He strode across to stand over her, holding his glass of cognac in his left hand with the big palm of his right hand held open and swung back menacingly to indicate that he had meant his former threat. “My secretary has vanished. She’s been missing for hours, and there’s the body of a dead man in my office.”

“A dead man?” She shrank back, aghast. “Who?”

“They don’t know yet, but the theory right now is that Lucy Hamilton murdered him.”

“But what has the body of a dead man got to do with you, Mike? You can prove you’ve been here all day.”

“That’s right,” he said bitterly. “Being diddled all over Los Angeles on a wild goose chase that would stink like hell even to a rookie cop while a murder is being committed in my office and God knows what has happened to my secretary while I’m out here playing games with you.

“That’s why you’re going to start talking, and tell the truth this time,” he told her implacably. “Let’s not have any more crap about a dispatch case in Tijuana and taxi drivers spying on you all over the city. I tell you this: If anything happens to Lucy from now on because you keep lying to me, I’ll…” He paused and dropped his voice. “I’ll see that you regret it. Now start talking. It was a hoax from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t know anything about murder, Mike. Or your secretary. I swear I didn’t. I still don’t see…” She shuddered and shrank farther away from the anger in his eyes, “You’ve got to believe me. It was just a job. They said it was a practical joke and it sounded like fun. I still can’t believe…”

“Who said it was a practical joke?”

“Joe did. Joe… Morrison,” she babbled. “He’s a producer here that I do some work for. Bit parts. I just can’t think that he… that your being here has anything to do with what happened in Miami today.”

Shayne dropped into the chair close to the sofa and said, “Give it to me, Mary. The whole thing… and straight.”

“In the first place,” she admitted, biting her full lower lip, “my name isn’t Mary Devon. Joe suggested I tell you that. He gave me a copy of that book your friend wrote about the Wanda Weatherby case so I could read up on it and pretend I was Helen Taylor’s room-mate and met you briefly that one time ten years ago. He said you’d never remember what Mary Devon looked like and it would make the whole thing sound that much more convincing… a logical reason for me to call on you for help now that I was supposed to be in trouble ten years later.”

“All right,” said Shayne. “I don’t give a damn what your name is. You say a producer named Joe Morrison suggested this to you… hired you to do it. When was this?”

“About a week ago. Joe said they needed an actress to pull a practical joke on the private detective in Miami. Michael Shayne. Of course, I knew all about you from watching the TeeVee series.”

“Who is ‘they’?” demanded Shayne. “The ones Joe said needed an actress?”

“I don’t know,” she faltered. “He never said. I just assumed it was some friends of yours that had planned it for a joke. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but they offered me five hundred dollars and I didn’t see what harm it could do. In fact… well, I guess I might as well admit I was intrigued by the idea of spending the night with you.”

She lifted her chin defiantly. “And if you’re interested, I still am… only more so now that I’ve met you. If you’ll cancel that damned airplane reservation…”

Shayne said wearily, “Get back onto the subject. Who dreamed up all the hocus-pocus about Castro and so forth?”

“Joe did. He dictated the letter I wrote you, and gave me the torn thousand-dollar bill and all. Spilling the perfume on it was my idea. He had a script all written out that I memorized. I told him it sounded pretty silly and I didn’t believe you’d fall for it, and so he fixed up a second story for me to tell to get you to go to Tijuana with me tomorrow if you didn’t fall for the first one. The whole idea was that I was to keep you here at least until tomorrow noon and then it wouldn’t matter if you caught on and went back.”

“Then someone wanted me out of Miami for at least two days,” Shayne muttered. “That’s why you went through all that silly business at the Plaza Terrace and the Brown Derby and the other restaurant on Sunset Strip?”

She nodded, smiling weakly. “The Cock and Bull. That was Joe’s idea of a gimmick, what some of the TeeVee people call a bubble when they stick it into a script. He said a cock-and-bull story like that should have its climax at a place of the same name.”

Shayne said angrily, “It was worth a pretty good hunk of money for someone to get me away from my office. Assuming those two halves of the bill in my pocket aren’t counterfeit, and adding in my airplane fare and your five-hundred-dollar fee for the job… that’s close to two grand altogether.”

She said, “I asked Joe who was putting out that kind of dough on a practical joke, and he just grinned and said airily that it was going to be worth every penny of it when you found out how easy it had been to fool you.”

Shayne said, “I’d like to have a little talk with your Joe Morrison. Where can I find him?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. Not in the evening like this. He’s a producer and you can get him at his studio mostly in the daytime, but I don’t know where he lives. He’s got an unlisted telephone number in Beverly Hills that he never did give to me. Not that I wanted it, but I did try to call him one night and couldn’t reach him by phone. If you do stay over tonight, I’ll take you out to the lot and introduce you to him tomorrow.”

Shayne looked at his watch and said grimly, “I’m boarding a plane for Miami in just a little over an hour from now.” He emptied his glass of cognac, stared at the glass for a moment, then drew back his arm and threw it across the room with all his strength.

He laughed unpleasantly at the expression on the blonde’s face as the glass shattered in fragments against the wall. “You’re still lying to me,” he told her flatly. “This isn’t any goddamned practical joke. This is for real. In place of your commies in the FBI and the CIA, you’ve substituted a television producer named Joe Morrison who conveniently has an unlisted telephone and can’t be reached for confirmation until some time tomorrow. Let’s have the truth now. What in hell went on in Miami today and is going on in Miami tomorrow that made it worth two grand to somebody to keep me out of town?”

“I don’t know.” She shuddered and drew her robe tightly about her body. “Go on and catch your jet-liner and get back there and find out,” she advised him thinly. “What have I got to do with missing secretaries and dead men?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.” Shayne got to his feet, his nostrils flaring widely. She remained crouched back on the sofa and watched fearfully as he strode into the bedroom where she had opened her suitcase on the bed to take out the robe she had changed into while he watched her in the mirror.

From where she sat, she couldn’t see him through the bedroom door as he picked up the open suitcase and dumped the contents onto the bed. He pawed through the dresses, blouses and skirts, picking out half a dozen which he draped over his arm and carried back into the sitting room and dropped on a heap on the floor in front of her.

“Now, let’s talk turkey, whatever-the-hell-your-name-is. Every article of clothing on the floor here carries a label from an expensive Lincoln Road shop in Miami Beach. You said you hadn’t been there for years. So you lied. So what?”

“I didn’t lie. I… those aren’t even my own clothes,” she told him glibly. “They belong to a girl I know. I’m married to a very jealous man and I couldn’t pack a bag to bring with me today and so I borrowed a suitcase of clothes from her…”

“Shut up!” said Shayne in a voice that shut her up. “You’re going back to Miami with me.”

“No, I… I can’t, Mike. My husband…”

“To hell with your husband,” he said deliberately. “I don’t think you’ve got one in the first place. In the second place, I don’t give a damn whether you have or not. I’m catching that nine-forty plane and you’re going with me. You’ve lied to me from the word go, and you’re coming back with me to straighten this thing out.”

“I won’t,” she said desperately. “You can’t force me to go. I’ll scream and call the police if you try to force me.”

He laughed at her happily. “That, I want to see. You screaming and calling the police. You’ve got two choices: Either come back to Miami with me or by God I’ll call the police and have them come up here to get you.”

“You can’t. You don’t dare.” She lay back on the sofa panting. “What would you tell them?”

Again he laughed happily. “Plenty. I can think up all sorts of charges that will keep you safely in jail for a few days. Remember, baby. I’m Michael Shayne.” He bared his teeth at her wolfishly. “I’ve got connections with the L.A. police department.” He didn’t have, but she had no way of knowing that. “We’ll start out with simple prostitution and work our way up from there. Look at you. Half-undressed in your own hotel room with a man! Christ, I can think of a dozen charges that’ll stick for a few days at least while they check you out. I don’t think you want any of them, because I don’t believe any of your story will check out. You’re on the hot-seat, and you know it. You’re coming back to Miami with me or you’re going to rot in a jail cell right here in L.A.”

He whirled about and strode to the telephone and again asked the operator for United Airlines. When he got them, he said curtly, “Michael Shayne, with a reservation to Miami on Flight Seventeen. Can you make that for two? I have a friend who wants to go to Miami with me.”

When he was assured that there would be space held for two of them to Miami on Flight Seventeen, he swung about and consulted his watch.

“We’ve got about an hour to reach the airport. Make up your mind. Get some clothes on and come back to Miami with me, or stay the way you are and I’ll have the Los Angeles vice squad up here in five minutes. You’ve got just thirty seconds to make up your mind which you want it to be.”

She looked up at him from the sofa for a long moment, calculatingly, obviously trying to read his mind, to determine whether he was bluffing of whether he actually meant what he said.

She appeared to make up her mind, and she stood up slowly and reached down to fumble with the knotted cord at her waist.

She loosened it and let the robe fall apart, and then shrugged herself out of it while it fell to the floor at her feet.

Naked and white-bodied, and unashamedly offering herself to him, she said, “We don’t have to go, Mike. I’d rather stay here with you. Let the airplane go to hell. Let Miami go to hell. The two of us…? Mike!” She swayed toward him, sobbing.

Michael Shayne stepped to one side, away from her, caught her shoulder and swung her about toward the bedroom.

“Get some clothes on and we’ll catch that plane. After we get things straightened out in Miami…?”

She stood naked and tall in front of him, and said over her shoulder with a queer sort of dignity, “It will be too late then, Mike. Don’t throw this away.”

He turned aside and fumbled for a cigarette. “Get your clothes on. We haven’t got any time to waste.”

8

When Shayne got his cigarette going, she had gathered up the clothes he had thrown on the floor and was disappearing through the open door into the bedroom. He called after her, “In just five minutes I’m taking you downstairs to check out and catch a cab. Don’t get any cute ideas about stalling so we’ll miss the plane.” She kept on going into the bedroom without answering him or looking back.

He stared after her balefully, then glanced at the uncorked bottle of cognac and across the room at the broken pieces of his glass on the floor. Her glass stood empty on the table in front of the sofa. He stepped over to pick it up, and saw her handbag pushed partly down between the cushion and the end of the sofa. He reached down to pull it out, unsnapped the clasp and turned it upside down to spill the contents out on the table.

There was a cigarette case he had seen before, a compact and lipstick and small comb, a folded handkerchief which proved to have no monogram or initials on it when he shook it out, but did exude a strong whiff of her perfume. There was also a bulging coin purse which came out and dangled at the end of a silk cord attached to the inside of the bag.

He unsnapped the purse and found a wad of bills and some silver. There were two fifties and other, smaller bills, making up a total of about three hundred dollars. But there was no clue at all to the woman’s real identity.

Shayne put the money back in the purse and snapped it shut, then felt inside the bag and found a pocket in the lining that yielded a folded United Airlines ticket envelope. Inside the envelope was the return half of a round-trip ticket from Miami to Los Angeles. It had been issued in Miami two days previously to Elsa Cornell.

He dropped the handbag on the table and strode to the bedroom door carrying the ticket. She had quickly donned a serviceable dark gray dress (which he recognized as one of those he had found that bore a Miami label… part of the wardrobe which she had claimed belonged to a friend… and which fit her perfectly) and she was leaning over the bed packing the other things back into her suitcase with perfect self-possession.

“What sort of story have you got to explain this, Elsa?” He held the ticket up for her to see. “I found it tucked into a pocket in your handbag.”

She glanced at it and said coldly, “I don’t intend to explain anything more to you, Mike Shayne. From here on out, make your own smart deductions. I’m going back with you and you should be satisfied. Did you steal the money from my handbag, too?” she added scornfully.

“No. I’m going to leave you that to pay your hotel bill with.” He glanced at his watch and said, “We’re walking out of this room in exactly three minutes.”

“Then get out and let me finish packing.”

He raised his eyebrows at the gray dress she had changed into, and said, “Aren’t you lucky that your friend’s clothes fit you so well? Okay, Elsa. Make it snappy or we’ll miss our plane.”

He went back and snatched up her empty glass, poured a couple of fingers of cognac into it and recapped the bottle which was still half full. He opened his briefcase and dropped it inside to replace the one he had left with Pat Ryan at the Plaza Terrace, and was moodily sipping his drink when she came marching out of the bedroom with her head held high, and went to pick up her handbag and replace her meager belongings in it, saying over her shoulder, “If you want to bring my bags, I’m ready to get out of this joint.”

He grinned sourly and tossed the rest of the liquor down. In spite of himself, he had to admit she was quite a gal. Nothing seemed to faze her, by God. Under other circumstances, Elsa Cornell was decidedly the sort of female who appealed to Michael Shayne.

She was waiting composedly for him at the door with her handbag tucked under her arm when he came out of the bedroom with her bags. She opened the door and held it for him while he paused and awkwardly picked up his briefcase also, and she followed him out and walked down the corridor to the elevator beside him with all the aplomb of a married woman checking out of a hotel room with her husband to whom she has been married for twenty years.

Nor did her aplomb desert her in the lobby. She went directly to the cashier’s desk with her room key in her hand, said icily, “I have to leave town unexpectedly. May I have my bill? There was a room-service charge about half an hour ago,” she added.

Shayne handed the three bags over to a bellboy who hurried up to him, and said, “We need a cab to catch a plane.”

The boy told him, “I’ll have one waiting,” and took the bags out the front door. Shayne stood behind Elsa and sardonically watched her pay her bill with cash. He didn’t know what the exact amount was, but observed that she received a few ones and some silver back from a fifty and twenty which she pushed under the grille. Her suite at a hotel like the Perriepont would run between twenty-five and thirty dollars a day, Shayne guessed, which meant that she was paying for two days’ occupancy and must have checked in on her arrival from Miami the day before yesterday.

Just one more lie to chalk up against her, he thought with grim amusement, remembering the unpacked bags standing so revealingly inside the bedroom when they entered the suite earlier. She must have packed them and set them there that day when she started out to find Joe Pelter’s cab and write the note that was to be delivered to him at the Plaza Terrace and start him out following a will-of-the-wisp.

The whole caper had been planned thoroughly and carefully. There was no question about that. But why? And by whom?

Who was the dead man in his office?

And where was Lucy Hamilton?

Elsa rejoined him and they went out together and found the bellboy had a taxi waiting. He gave the boy a dollar and got in beside Elsa, and told the driver, “The airport. We’re catching a nine-forty plane.”

The driver said cheerfully, “Plenty of time… just about,” and Shayne sat back in his corner of the seat and lighted a cigarette.

Elsa sat stiffly, well-removed from him, without speaking for several blocks. Then she sighed audibly and opened her bag, took a cigarette from her case and put it between her lips. “Will you light it for me, please?”

Shayne said, “Sure,” and struck a match and held it for her and asked banteringly, “Don’t I get a tip this time… something like the torn half of a thousand-buck bill?” She leaned her head back against the seat, inhaled deeply and expelled smoke. “Tell me about the dead man in your office, Mike. Was he murdered?”

“Aside from the fact that I have a hunch you know a hell of a lot more about it than I do, I don’t mind telling you the damn little I know about it. Yeh. I told you back in the hotel that the police think my secretary did it.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re a bunch of incompetent damned fools,” he growled. “They can’t find Lucy and their first assumption is that she must have murdered the guy and taken it on the lam. He was stabbed in the heart with a filing spindle off her desk,” he added gruffly.

“Who is the man?”

“They haven’t identified him yet. Why don’t you tell me? You know the truth is bound to come out.”

“But I don’t know what the truth is,” she told him evenly. “I’m as anxious to know as you are, Mike. I had no thought of getting mixed up in… murder.” She brought the word out shudderingly.

“Then why don’t you tell me the whole story?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe me. I have already told you how I was hired…”

“I know. By a guy named Joe Morrison. But we’ve already kicked that story full of half a dozen holes. I’ve got an airplane ticket in my pocket that proves you flew in from Miami two days ago… just in time to mail that phony letter to me. You paid a hotel bill tonight for two days at the Perriepont. Good God, woman, how long do you think you can keep this up?”

“You have a ticket in your pocket,” she told him evenly, “that proves some woman named Elsa Cornell flew to Los Angeles from Miami two days ago. Can you prove my name is Elsa Cornell?”

“At this point, no. What the hell is your name?” he demanded suddenly.

“Perhaps you will find out in Miami… where you are the great detective.” She drew back into her own corner of the seat and told him with finality, “I will not talk about it any more. I am not ashamed of anything I have done except that you made me feel like a cheap whore when you refused me in my hotel room tonight. I know nothing about any murdered men in your office, and less about your secretary.”

And that was that, Shayne realized, for the time being at least. She didn’t seem to mind returning to Miami with him. Maybe there was some innocent explanation for her part in the affair, but he was certain he hadn’t got it from her yet.

At the United Terminal he checked their three bags together and exchanged the two return tickets for gate passes while Elsa stood calmly beside him without speaking. They still had a few minutes before departure, and Shayne utilized those to dispatch a telegram to Will Gentry, chief of the Miami police force.

He said: “Arriving Miami United Flight Seventeen six tomorrow morning with possible homicide witness.” Then they went out through the departure gate together to board their plane.

9

The sun was a red ball of fire over the Atlantic ocean when the huge jet-liner settled down smoothly on the runway at Miami and taxied in to the terminal. Elsa had slept in the window seat beside Shayne most of the trip, or had pretended to sleep, turned partially on her side away from him with two pillows underneath her blonde head, and she had not spoken a single word during the entire trip.

Now she stirred and sat up, peering out the window at the airport, glistening and clean in the early morning sunlight, and she opened her bag and got out her comb and the compact with a small mirror.

She peered into the mirror with a slight frown, shook her honey-colored hair and ran the comb through it with a few practiced strokes, and without looking at Shayne, said, “So we’re here. What now?”

Shayne said, “I suspect we’ll be met by an official delegation.”

“I mean… what about me after we get off? Do I have to… do you expect me just to trail along with you while you solve a murder case and go hunting for your precious secretary?”

“That will depend a whole lot on what’s happened here since I talked to Tim Rourke. If we’re lucky, the case will already be solved and Lucy will be waiting to greet me at the gate. If not…?” He shrugged. “It will be up to Will Gentry to decide about you after I tell him how you got me out of town yesterday. Consider yourself under arrest at this point,” he added casually as the plane came to a stop and the unloading platform came out to meet it.

“Under arrest?” Now she did look at him, long and searchingly. “Are you kidding?”

“Not at all. Come on.” He moved out into the aisle and waited politely for her to precede him off the plane.

“But what for?” She seemed utterly perplexed. “What right have you got to arrest me?”

“I’m a licensed private detective… authorized to make arrests just as any police officer.”

“What charge have you got against me?” They were moving slowly to the front of the plane behind other passengers and she spoke back to him over her shoulder.

“Material witness in a murder case will do for the time being,” he told her. “If you decide to come clean and tell Will Gentry a story he believes, and one that clears you of any complicity in a crime… then he’ll release you.” They were off the plane and going down the steps, and he took her firmly by the arm and led her forward, searching anxiously for someone he recognized among those waiting to greet the passengers from United Flight Seventeen.

He expected Timothy Rourke to be there, and desperately hoped to find Lucy Hamilton beside the reporter, but he saw neither of them as he pushed a way through the milling crowd. Then a stocky, pleasant-faced man confronted them and said, “Mr. Shayne. The chief sent me to pick you up.”

He was a sergeant of the homicide squad whom Shayne knew slightly, named Ed Corby. Shayne stopped and said, “Sergeant Corby, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. This is my partner, Jim Greene.” He indicated a tall, unsmiling young man, also in plain clothes, who had moved in close beside Elsa.

Shayne nodded and asked, “What gives, Ed? Have they turned up my secretary yet?”

“Not up to half an hour ago. This your witness, Mike?”

Shayne muttered, “Yeh. Miss Cornell, until she decides to tell us her real name. What is the story, Ed?”

“I think the chief is saving that to tell you himself, Mike. My orders are to bring you both straight from the airport to the morgue where Gentry’s waiting. You got luggage to pick up?”

Shayne nodded, “Three pieces.” He added formally, “I’m turning Miss Cornell over to you, Ed. She returned to Miami with me voluntarily, but I want her held as a material witness until this thing is straightened out.”

The sergeant nodded and said to his partner, “Bring her along, Jim, and we’ll pick up their bags.” The four of them moved into the terminal and went to the Incoming Baggage counter where Shayne claimed their bags a few minutes later. Corby took Elsa’s suitcase and hatbox and said gruffly, “We’ve got a car right outside, Mike. This way.”

“My car’s in the parking lot where I left it yesterday,” objected Shayne, lifting his briefcase and starting to turn away. “Take her along and I’ll meet you at the morgue.”

“I’m sorry, Mike.” Corby kept his voice pleasant, but he dropped the hatbox and caught Shayne by the arm to turn him back. “I’ve got orders to pick you two up and bring you to the morgue. You know how Gentry is about orders.”

“What the hell do you mean, Ed? I’ll follow you down.”

“I’m taking you, Mike. You can pick your car up later. What the hell’s the difference? You get a free ride…”

Shayne’s eyes blazed and he struck the detective sergeant’s restraining hand from his arm. “Is this a pinch? “

“Not unless you make it one.” Corby looked acutely uncomfortable, but went on doggedly, “I got my orders to bring you in with your witness.”

Shayne said angrily. “You’ll have to put the cuffs on me, Corby, to make me leave my car here. I’m going to be needing transportation, goddamnit, if you nitwits haven’t been able to find Lucy Hamilton in twelve hours, and I’m not going to waste time driving back out here for my car.” He turned and strode toward the parking lot, and a moment later Corby came panting after him and fell into stride, muttering, “Take it easy for Christ’s sake. I’ll ride down with you. Gentry can’t kick about that.”

Shayne continued to stride ahead, his jaw set. He said, “You’re welcome to ride along, and if Will Gentry doesn’t like the way I get to the morgue he can damn well lump it.”

When he had found his car and got free of the airport parking lot and was headed down town with Corby in the front seat beside him, he relaxed and threw a rueful grin at his companion.

“Sorry I threw my weight around, but you know damned well I want to clear this up as much as Will does. I’ve been in Los Angeles, damn it. I didn’t kill that guy they found in my office. They know who he is yet?”

“I don’t know from nothing, Mike,” Corby told him uncomfortably. “I suppose the reason Gentry wants you at the morgue is to see can you identify him. I didn’t come on duty until midnight, and I don’t know anything about the case except what I picked up from the boys. All sorts of rumors flying around, but damn few facts.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“You know how it is. There’s this guy dead in your office with your secretary’s filing spindle in his heart, and it looks like both of you have taken a run-out powder. What’s the natural thing to think under the circumstances?”

“Yeh,” Shayne agreed with a sour grunt, and made a left-hand turn to draw up in front of the County Morgue where Detective Jim Greene was just getting out of the driver’s seat of a dark sedan. Shayne pulled in behind the police car and he and Corby got out and the four of them went in together so it wasn’t necessary for Corby to admit to his superior that they had driven in different cars from the airport.

Chief Will Gentry and Timothy Rourke were waiting together in the outer room. Neither man looked as though he had been to sleep that night. There were pouches under Gentry’s eyes, and his eyelids looked heavier and more rumpled than usual. Rourke’s eyes glittered feverishly in his emaciated face, and he stopped his pacing and came forward jerkily as the quartet entered.

“Mike! Has Lucy contacted you?”

Shayne shook his red head and refrained from asking the question which Rourke had already answered so obviously. He looked past the gangling reporter at Will Gentry who was getting up heavily from a wooden chair, and asked, “Have you identified the body yet?”

“We’re waiting for you to do that, Mike.” Gentry came forward stolidly sucking the soggy butt of a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, rolling his rumpled lids upward to peer at the blonde who stood stiffly beside the redhead.

“This your witness?”

Shayne nodded. “You can call her Elsa Cornell until she decides to give us her real monicker. I don’t know how she fits into all this, Will, but she’s been giving me one hell of a runaround.”

Gentry nodded and rumbled, “Come on back, the two of you. You and Greene wait here, Ed,” he added to the two detectives, then turned and led the way through a plain door into a white-walled corridor leading to the cold room.

Rourke fell into step beside Shayne, with Elsa on the other side, and muttered enviously out of the side of his mouth, “You can still pick ’em, Mike.”

“She picked me,” Shayne said with a tired grin. “They still got nothing on Lucy?”

Timothy Rourke shook his head lugubriously and sighed, seemed on the point of saying something, but checked himself.

Silently, they followed Gentry through a side door into a thick-walled room with a temperature well below freezing. There were built-in metal drawers along one wall, like oversized filing cabinets, and a white-coated attendant stepped briskly to one of them at a nod from Gentry, and pulled out a bottom drawer.

Elsa was pressed close against Shayne, and he felt her hesitate and stiffen. He took her arm and drew her forward, muttering, “Whoever he is, he can’t hurt you now.” He was looking down at her lovely face, watching her expression very carefully as she looked down at the waxen pallor of the corpse’s face.

If there was any expression at all, he thought it was one of relief, but he couldn’t be sure of that.

“Look at him, Mike,” Gentry ordered gruffly. “Take a long, hard look.”

Shayne did, releasing Elsa’s arm and allowing her to step back a pace. The man looked middle-aged, with thin, pinched features. He was clean-shaven and had sparse, brown hair. A sheet covered his body up to his neck. Shayne shook his head and said flatly, “I never saw him in my life before.”

He heard Rourke shuffle his feet uneasily just behind him, and Gentry took the cigar butt from between his lips and frowned down at it as though it suddenly tasted bad. “Don’t go off half-cocked, Mike. Take another good look and see if it doesn’t refresh your memory.” Shayne thought he detected a note of warning in the chief’s voice. They had been friends a long time, and Gentry always played it square with him.

To be absolutely positive, he took another long look and could find nothing familiar in the flaccid face. He shook his head more definitely this time and stated more flatly, “Sorry, Will. I can’t help you.”

“How about you, Miss?” Gentry put the cigar back into his mouth and nodded to the attendant who pushed the drawer shut.

She shook her honey-colored head just as decidedly as Shayne had shaken his red one, and said just as positively, “I have no idea in the world who he is. May I go now?”

Gentry gave an ambiguous grunt, and they all went out of the cold room and back up the corridor to a side door on the right which Gentry opened to reveal a small office, containing a desk with a swivel chair behind it and three other straight chairs.

Gentry went behind the desk and sat down. He said, “Close the door, Tim. Now then, Mike. Stop stalling and tell me the truth. This is murder and you and Lucy are into it right up to your necks. Where have you got her hidden?”

10

“Where have I got her hidden?” Michael Shayne looked as though he would choke over the words. “I haven’t seen Lucy or heard a word from her since eleven o’clock yesterday morning. Can’t you get it through your thick head that I caught a noon plane to Los Angeles and just got back?”

“Can you prove it?”

“Do I have to?” Shayne’s eyes were hot. “I’ve never lied to you, Will.”

“Yes, you have,” Gentry told him coldly. “When you felt the end justified the means… and were pretty sure you could get away with it. Yeh. I think you’d better try to prove where you were yesterday afternoon.”

Shayne drew in a deep breath and fought back his anger. “I reached L.A. about two o’clock… their time. I had an appointment with Miss Cornell here between two-thirty and three. She didn’t show up for it. Let her tell you why. Actually, it was a little after five o’clock when we finally made contact at a restaurant named the Cock and Bull in Hollywood. That’s eight o’clock here, Will. About the time you were finding a corpse in my office.”

“Is that true, Miss Cornell?”

She had not seated herself, but still stood near the door. She shook her head and said, “I will not answer any questions. I demand that I be allowed to see a lawyer.”

Shayne said angrily, “Come off your high horse, Elsa. All you have to do is tell the man you finally met me at five o’clock… after keeping me chasing my tail around town for a couple of hours.”

The expression on her lovely face hardened. She repeated, “I demand that I be allowed to see a lawyer. I have a right to counsel before I answer any questions.”

Gentry said curtly to Rourke, “Go outside and ask Ed Corby to come in.” When the reporter went out, he studied the blonde appraisingly and said, “So you won’t verify Mr. Shayne’s story? Any of it?”

She clamped her lips together and lifted her chin in reply.

Rourke came back, followed by the detective sergeant. “You and Greene take this woman to headquarters. Hold her for questioning without booking her.”

He waited until the door was closed behind them, then settled back and said, “Now there’s just the three of us, Mike. Suppose you start out by telling us what the dead man was doing in your office yesterday.”

“How do I know?” Shayne began bitterly. “I’ve told you…”

“I know what you’ve told us, and I happen to know it’s not the truth. Not the full truth, at least. He was a client of yours, Mike. Stop denying it.”

“He was no client of mine, Will. You know that Lucy and I practically never kill a client.”

His attempt at levity didn’t get a smile from Gentry. He demanded, “And you still deny you ever saw him before?”

“Sure, I deny it. That is, not to my knowledge. I may have passed him on the street some time.”

“You visited him in the penitentiary twice in the last three months.”

“I didn’t. I haven’t been to the pen for a year.”

“The records say different, Mike.”

Shayne hesitated, savoring the shock of Gentry’s accusation, trying to adjust his thoughts… see where all this was leading.

“This means you know who the dead man is, Will?”

“Oh, sure. We got a fast make on his fingerprints. He’s an ex-con named Julius O’Keefe… as if you didn’t know. Pardoned yesterday morning, and it looks as though he came straight to Miami and went to your office where he got himself stabbed to death.”

“And I’m supposed to have visited a prisoner named O’Keefe in the pen twice in the last three months?” Shayne demanded incredulously.

“That’s what their records show.”

“Then their records lie,” Shayne told him hotly. “Maybe someone claiming to be Mike Shayne visited a man named O’Keefe, but it wasn’t me, Will.”

“Then why did he go straight to your office after being released yesterday?”

“I don’t know, but I’m beginning to get the glimmer of an idea. If you’ll listen to me for a minute instead of trying to pin a murder rap on me, maybe you’ll get the glimmer of an idea, too.”

He reached in his pocket for the scented envelope with the message signed Elsa Cornell still inside, and tossed it in front of the police chief. He also got out his wallet and removed the two halves of the thousand-dollar bill which he placed in front of Gentry while the chief removed the letter and read it, with Rourke peering down over his shoulder to read it also.

“That was delivered to my office by Special Delivery yesterday morning,” Shayne told the two of them harshly. “One of these torn pieces of currency was inside, along with a roundtrip first-class ticket to Los Angeles by United Airlines. I got that other half of the bill when I finally caught up with Elsa Cornell at the Cock and Bull at five o’clock. I also got a completely incredible story from her supposedly explaining why she needed my help in LA., and finally a different story which was slightly more credible, but not much. Let me tell you the way it happened and you can judge for yourself.” He swiftly sketched in the salient details of his experiences on the West Coast the preceding day, ending with, “When I finally got hold of Tim on the phone about seven o’clock and he told me about the dead man and Lucy being missing, it suddenly came to me that I’d been hoaxed. That the letter and all was a device to get me out of town and away from my office. I still hadn’t the slightest idea why, of course. I accused Elsa of it, and she finally broke down and told me a different story, saying she thought it was a practical joke.”

He related her tale of being hired by a television producer to lure him away from Miami and keep him away at least overnight. “Then she made the mistake of telling me she hadn’t been in Miami for years, and I found Lincoln Road labels in all her clothes. To top it off, in her purse she had the return half of a round-trip airplane ticket that had been issued in Miami two days previously. That clinched it, so I brought her back with me to see how she fitted in.”

“But why, Mike?” protested Gentry. “Why the devil would anyone go to all that trouble and expense to get you out of town for a couple of days?”

“Adding up both plane fares, it must have set somebody back a couple of grand,” Rourke put in.

Shayne spread out his big hands. “Doesn’t it begin to explain the penitentiary records showing that Mike Shayne visited this guy twice recently? Someone impersonating me visited him,” he went on angrily. “From where I sit right now it looks as though that same someone wanted to set things up to be in my office when O’Keefe was released, still impersonating me… and where in hell does that put Lucy?”

“Right behind the eight-ball,” Rourke exclaimed feelingly. “They had to use some ruse to get her away from the office, too. Probably put another woman in at her desk to pretend to be your secretary.”

“But why in the name of God?” demanded Gentry again.

“That’s what we’ve got to figure out. This O’Keefe? What was he in for? Was he mixed up with a mob? Was he a danger to somebody important as soon as he got out of jail?”

“Nothing like that. He was doing time on an embezzling rap from four or five years back. In Jacksonville, wasn’t it, Tim?”

“Yeh. It was a one-man job the way I remember it. O’Keefe was a bookkeeper or something, and he confessed. It was a big hunk of money, I think, and he’d wasted it all on wine, women and the bangtails. I don’t see how that could make him a danger to anybody after he was pardoned.”

“Hell of a long way around just to knock a guy off anyhow,” protested Gentry. “Why would anyone plan to pull the job in your office?”

Shayne shrugged and admitted, “I don’t say that’s the answer. It was just an idea.”

“To get you blamed for the job,” suggested Rourke. “You and Lucy both. Who hates you enough to go to all that trouble and expense?”

“A lot of people hate me,” Shayne growled. “None I know to that extent.”

“How about another case you’re working on?” Rourke guessed again. “To prevent you from getting on with it and maybe turning up some information somebody doesn’t want turned up?”

“I haven’t any other case at present. Not a single thing pending. In fact I had thought about going fishing yesterday until that Special arrived and I got sucked into a trip west.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting sucked into something by that gal,” said Rourke pensively.

Shayne disregarded that, and asked, “Haven’t you got any leads, Will? Nobody that saw him go into my office, or Lucy leave?”

“Everything negative so far. He wasn’t discovered until after eight, and by that time all the offices in the building were empty. Elevator man doesn’t particularly remember Lucy leaving… or you either for that matter. We’ll go through the full routine as soon as people begin reaching their offices. In the meantime we’re checking O’Keefe’s background, pals in the pen and so on. And we’re trying to trace his movements after he was released to see if he came direct here or contacted somebody outside.”

“Does the name Rexforth mean anything to either one of you?” Shayne hesitated, searching his memory. “Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third?”

They both shook their heads and Gentry asked, “Should it?”

“Tim asking about other cases we had on hand reminded me that there was a new client supposed to be coming in yesterday morning. Lucy had made the appointment the day before. He’d been very insistent that he see me. Life and death, he told Lucy.”

“So you just walked out without keeping the appointment?” Gentry demanded disbelievingly.

Shayne shrugged. “Half my clients think their cases are matters of life and death. Let’s see if we can find Rexforth listed in the phone book.” He reached for a directory on the desk and thumbed through it with a frown. “Six Rexforths. None of them with the right initials. Lucy didn’t mention whether he was local or not.” He hid a yawn behind his big hand and stood up. “I haven’t been to bed.”

“Neither have I,” said Gentry. “Where do you think you’re going, Mike?”

Shayne looked at his watch. “Not much to be done until about nine o’clock. I figure you’ll want to take a crack at Elsa’s story, and I’ve a strong hunch you may get more out of her without me around. She hates my guts,” he confided, “because I turned down her pure white body last night.”

“My God,” breathed Rourke. “That pure white body? I bet it’s something.”

“Juicy,” Shayne told him with a tired grin. “You don’t want any more from me right now, do you, Will?” he added innocently, turning toward the door.

“Wait a minute, Mike,” Gentry said sternly. “Don’t think I’m buying your story whole hog. Visitors to the penitentiary have to sign the register, and I’ll have those signatures of yours checked. I’ll also check the flight personnel on United’s noon flight yesterday. Just don’t do one thing.” His voice remained friendly, but it had the bite of steel in it. “Don’t walk out of this door leaving any lies behind you that can be disproved by the facts. Right now is the time to come clean if you’re covering anything up.”

Shayne said mildly, “You know I never tell a lie that can be disproved.”

He opened the door and started out, and Rourke said hastily, “I’ll go with you, Mike. Grab an eye-opener of cognac, huh?”

He hurried out after the redhead and caught his arm as he went into the empty waiting room. “Where are you headed?”

“How do you know I’m headed anywhere special?”

“Because I’ve been on too damned many cases with you not to know when you’ve suddenly thought of something and want to check it on your own.” Rourke went down the steps with him. “That your car at the curb?”

“Yeh. Where’s yours?”

“Headquarters. I rode up with Will.”

Shayne got under the steering wheel and said, “I’ll drop you there.”

“After you’ve checked whatever’s on your mind.” Rourke settled himself firmly in the seat beside the redhead.

Shayne said, “Okay. We’ll have that eye-opener at the office. I think there’s still a bottle of Cordon Bleu left over from my last case.”

11

“Yeh, there is,” Rourke agreed as Shayne pulled away from in front of the morgue. “Couple of snorts lighter than it was yesterday.”

“You and Will hit it?”

“Just a couple of small ones last night while the boys were checking the office. I knew you’d want me to act the gracious host… with you away and all.”

“He went over everything carefully, huh?”

“With a fine-tooth comb. I don’t know what you hope to find there that they didn’t.”

“There happen to be one or two very small things about my business that you and Gentry don’t know,” Shayne told him acidly. “What about fingerprints?”

“Mostly inconclusive, I guess. They dusted everything. O’Keefe’s prints were plainly inside your office… in the right place for him to have left them while he sat in the client’s chair and talked to you.”

Shayne nodded and muttered, “Which makes it look more and more as though someone was there pretending to be me. No prints to indicate that fact?”

“I wouldn’t say a positive no.” Timothy Rourke hesitated. “You know how it is. Prints get messed up and blurred. And they weren’t looking for proof of anything like that at the time, Mike. We all supposed you and Lucy had been there all day. No reason to think otherwise.”

Shayne grunted a surly acknowledgement of this. He turned into the light early-morning traffic of Flagler Street and drove a block and a half to pull up in front of the office building that had housed his business for many years.

Only one elevator was in operation this early in the morning. The operator was a wizened, little, garrulous man who knew all the tenants in the building and greeted most of them by name when they entered his car.

He exclaimed, “Mister Michael Shayne in person. And it’s Mister Rourke, isn’t it? All kinds of excitement around here last night, huh? Never a dull moment when Mike Shayne’s around.”

“Were you on duty last night?” Shayne asked as the doors closed on the two of them.

“No, I went off at four. But they disrupted a cribbage game me and the old woman was having about ten o’clock when they came around asking their questions.” He stopped at the second floor and opened the doors, but Shayne didn’t get out at once.

He said, “I understand neither you nor the other man were able to say when either Miss Hamilton or I went in or out yesterday.”

“I guess that’s a fact. You know how it is… hundreds going up and down, in and out, all day. I can swear both of you were here, and probably went in and out about your regular times, but that’s about all. Today, now, you see, I’ll remember this trip all right if anybody comes around asking next week even, because I never seen you up and around so bright and early before. But on just a regular day…”

“I know. And you didn’t notice anything else funny? Any other people going to my office?”

“I’m sure sorry, but I didn’t. You know how it is.” He gestured out to the hallway. “You let a man out… you don’t wait to watch and see what office he goes to. And nobody asked for your number yesterday, the way they’ll do sometimes.”

Shayne nodded absently and got out. Rourke followed him down the hall to a doorway with his name on it, which he unlocked and thrust open.

He stepped inside slowly, flipping the wall switch that turned on the ceiling light in the small reception room, and he stood there for a long moment with his gaze going somberly over the room that was Lucy Hamilton’s domain, a curious questing, questioning look on his gaunt features as though he hoped there might be some aura or emanation from this familiar room where violent death had taken place that would trigger off something for him.

Watching him very closely and curiously, Rourke could have sworn that the redheaded detective was unconsciously sniffing the air as though he hoped to get some clue there, and for a moment he seriously wondered (as he had a few other times in the past) if Michael Shayne did actually possess some sort of extrasensory perception that helped make him one of the most successful detectives in the country.

The moment passed quickly and (Rourke sensed) unsatisfactorily. Shayne relaxed with a sigh and moved across to the low railing behind which Lucy normally sat. He stood with his hands on his hips looking down broodingly at her desk and chair and typewriter, unable to note anything out of place, anything different, except the fact that the heavy steel filing spindle that generally stood near the railing at the left of her typewriter was not there this morning.

Behind him, Rourke cleared his throat and said, “If they found any fingerprints around Lucy’s desk that didn’t belong to her, nobody mentioned it. Of course, they weren’t looking for that sort of thing…”

Shayne nodded his head slightly. He opened the gate that let him behind the railing, went to the other side of Lucy’s chair and leaned down to open the middle drawer of her desk on that side. He picked up a ten-cent-store ruled tablet with a blue cover, opened it and glanced inside. Then he turned with it in his hand and told Rourke pleasantly, “This is one of those few little things that you and Will don’t know about my business.”

He came out and closed the gate behind him. “For a couple of years, Lucy has made a habit of jotting down notes about anything important or interesting that happens while I’m out of the office. If I don’t return before she leaves, she types them up and leaves a copy on my desk for me to see if I should drop in later. I take it you and Will didn’t find anything like that on my desk last night.”

Rourke said, “No. I was with Will when he went into your office the first time after the body was found. Your desk was clean.”

Shayne said, “That means Lucy wasn’t here at five o’clock, or else she was prevented from doing the job.” He led the way in long strides toward the inner office, snapped on the light and circled the big desk to sit down and open up the tablet in front of him.

“Break out the cognac,” he told the reporter. “Whatever you and Will left of it, and we’ll see if we can make sense out of Lucy’s notes on her interview with a Mr. Rexforth at eleven-thirty yesterday morning. Thank God she doesn’t use shorthand for stuff like this, but her personal abbreviations are just about as bad.”

The sheet was headed cryptically:

“11:30 A. Rex N. A. Bond Jax”

Shayne pondered over that briefly while Rourke nested paper cups together, got a bottle of cognac from the second drawer of a filing cabinet behind Shayne and poured drinks. Shayne read aloud, “Rex. N. A. Bond. Jax. There’s a North American Bonding Company with state headquarters in Jacksonville, I think.”

He paused to take a sip of liquor, frowning at the penciled notes. “Read it with me and see if you follow.” Rourke leaned over his shoulder and read what Lucy had scribbled down for her own guidance:

“Angry M. not in. Disblevs out town. Prac accsed me lie when tell. Asks O’Keef appt today. Insist O’K to come amp; thnks M. here for him. $20 me to call if O’K show. No promis.” At the end Lucy had written with a heavy pencil, “Nasty little man.”

“Seems fairly clear,” said Rourke slowly. “This Rexforth was sore you weren’t here to keep the appointment and refuses to believe Lucy when she tells him you’ve left town. Accuses her of lying about it when she tells him, and asks about your appointment with O’Keefe today. I’d guess Lucy hadn’t heard about O’Keefe up to that point and told him so, but he insists the guy is coming and thinks you’ll be here. Then he offered her twenty bucks to give him a ring if O’Keefe showed up, which she naturally refused to take.”

Shayne nodded, his gaze glued to the sheet. “That’s about the way it adds up. So we know a man named Rexforth expected O’Keefe to visit me yesterday and. that I would be here to meet him. We also know that Rexforth is a nasty little man in Lucy’s expert opinion, and can guess that he may be connected with North American Bonding in Jacksonville. You said Julius O’Keefe was from Jax originally, didn’t you?”

Rourke nodded. “I’m sure that’s where he embezzled the money some years ago.”

Shayne lifted the first sheet, shaking his head in disappointment when he found the next one blank. “No more notations. Either O’Keefe didn’t show while Lucy was still on the job, or she had no opportunity to jot anything down.”

He closed the pad carefully on his desk, leaned back in the swivel chair and half-closed his eyes in concentration while he let a good portion of cognac flow smoothly down his throat.

Rourke said eagerly, “If we could get hold of Rexforth…”

Shayne said, “Yeh.” He looked at his watch. “It’s still an hour too early to raise anybody in an office in Jacksonville. He must have given her a telephone number, damn it. But she didn’t bother to put it down because she had no intention of calling him. Probably a hotel, if he’s in town from Jax.” He drummed his fingertips irritably on the desk. “At least we’ve got someone to start looking for. Someone who knew O’Keefe was headed for my office from the pen.”

“If he is from the bonding company, it probably ties in with the embezzlement.”

Shayne nodded and emptied his paper cup. He sat erect, crumpling the empty cups in a big fist and throwing them toward a wastebasket in a corner.

“You said there was a lot of money involved?”

“Quite a hunk of dough as I recall the case.” Rourke shrugged. “Fifty or a hundred grand? Something in that neighborhood.”

“Much of it recovered?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t think so. As I recall he was offered a lighter sentence if he returned the money, but he stubbornly insisted he’d spent it all.”

Shayne got to his feet and suggested, “Why don’t you check your old file on the case? Nothing else we can do here. I’ll drop you off at headquarters to pick up your car, huh?”

“Where are you headed all in a hurry?” Rourke demanded suspiciously as he followed him out.

“Home and a shower and lots of coffee,” Shayne told him. “Until nine o’clock when I’ll call Jacksonville and see if I can get any dope on Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third.”

“Want me to tell Will about him?” Rourke asked while they waited for an elevator to take them down.

“Keep it under your hat,” Shayne growled. “If it gave us any real lead in Lucy’s direction, sure. I’d hand it to Will on a platter. But all it does is point up more strongly that Julius O’Keefe was headed straight for my office as soon as he was released, and Will already halfway suspects I’m lying about that. Damn it! He should know by this time that he can trust me.”

Timothy Rourke grinned, crookedly as the elevator stopped for them and they got in. “You’ve given him some bad times in the past, Mike.”

“But I’ve never told him an outright lie… not in a murder case,” Shayne defended himself morosely.

“Maybe not outright, but I’ve sure as hell seen you skirt the truth… particularly if there was a buck involved. Or a lot of bucks,” he added hastily.

12

Michael Shayne stopped in front of police headquarters to let Rourke out so he could get his own car, and the reporter hesitated with his hand on the door handle.

“You want me to call you after I’ve checked our old file on the O’Keefe case?”

“Sure. Do that. I won’t be asleep,” Shayne assured him with a wry smile. “While you’re at it, see if any mention of a bonding company is made in connection with the case.”

Rourke got out and Shayne drove away, headed for his hotel which was only a few blocks distant. He had driven about three blocks eastward when, on a sudden impulse he decided to continue on to Biscayne Boulevard and take a look at Lucy Hamilton’s apartment himself.

True, Rourke had told him over the telephone in Los Angeles that he and Will Gentry had already checked her apartment and found nothing amiss there, but they didn’t know Lucy and her habits as well as he did… and he had at least an hour to kill before he could check on Rexforth.

He continued eastward and drove directly to Lucy Hamilton’s apartment house on a side street between Biscayne Boulevard and the bay.

He stopped inside the small foyer to pick out the key which Lucy had given him many years before and which he had used only a couple of times in somewhat similar circumstances, went in and climbed one flight to her door where the same key admitted him.

He switched on the overhead living-room light and stood at the entrance to the familiar room and looked searchingly about.

Everything appeared to be in perfect order. Every ashtray and the glass top to the coffee table was clean and polished. Shayne walked across the room slowly, pausing at the telephone desk to glance at the scratch pad beside it, then turning to look into the immaculate bathroom, and thence into the bedroom where the bed was neatly made, the closet door closed, and everything in perfect order.

It was exactly as Lucy left it every morning in the world when she departed for work. He knew because he had dropped by from the office often enough for a drink or to relax while she freshened up to go out to dinner with him.

He went slowly back into the living room with a preoccupied, almost a listening look on his gaunt face, moved on automatically to the kitchen where he switched on another light and found it in the same perfect order as the rest of the apartment.

Still moving with a peculiar, automatic sort of precision, Shayne reached up to open a cupboard door on his right and take down a bottle that was a little more than half full of cognac. He pulled the cork and set it on the drainboard, got a tray of ice cubes and put two in a tall glass which he filled from the water tap. He poured cognac into a four-ounce wineglass to the brim, and carried the two glasses into the living room and set them on one end of the coffee table. He sat on the sofa in front of them and deliberately lit a cigarette, then slowly drank half the cognac and held the clean, biting taste in his mouth for thirty seconds before taking a sip of ice water.

He was deliberately slowing himself down, forcing himself not to think, swallowing back the sour taste of fear that was in his stomach.

He smoked the cigarette down deliberately until it began to burn his fingers, crushed it out in an ashtray, emptied the wineglass and took a big drink of cold water. Then he got up and crossed to the telephone stand, wrote the date and “8:30 A. M.” on the clean pad, added below it, “I’m back in town. Mike,” tore off the top sheet and took it over to the coffee table where he placed it beneath the empty wineglass. Then he turned out all the lights and went out, moving deliberately but not slowly.

It was only a few minutes’ drive to his hotel. He stopped in front and went into the lobby carrying his briefcase. Fritz, the night man, was on duty behind the desk and Pete stood beside him, evidently just coming on duty.

They both looked up in surprise to see Shayne striding toward them, and Pete exclaimed, “Jeez, you made a fast trip out to Hollywood and back, Mr. Shayne. I was just telling Fritz…”

Shayne dropped his briefcase in front of the desk and demanded, “Why didn’t you tell Fritz last night when you went off duty, Pete? I understand the police were here looking for me and no one could tell them where I was.”

“They sure were,” Fritz said feelingly. “All over the place. Made me unlock your room like they thought you might be hiding up there.”

“I just didn’t mention it to Fritz when I went off,” Pete said unhappily. “I didn’t know there was any special reason to say anything.”

“There wasn’t,” Shayne relented. “I don’t blame you, Pete. But I’m surprised they didn’t roust you out at home to ask you questions.”

Pete had a shamefaced smile for that. “They tried to all right. Trouble was, I wasn’t home when they came around looking for me. I was out on a hell of a toot, and boy have I got a head this morning.”

“What was it all about somebody getting himself killed in your office, and them looking for Miss Hamilton, too, and not being able to find her either?” asked Fritz eagerly. “Gee, I hope she’s okay.”

Shayne said, “I do, too. No word from her since I left, huh?”

Both men shook their heads lugubriously. Both were long-time employees of the hotel where Shayne had maintained a suite for many years, both knew Lucy Hamilton personally and admired her extravagantly.

Then Fritz said, “But there is this man’s been trying to reach you ever since early last evening.” He turned to reach into a cubbyhole behind the desk and pulled out three telephone messages. He glanced at one of them and said, “Name of Rexforth. First one’s marked six-fifteen…”

Shayne reached out his hand for the three slips. The first one said merely, “Mr. Shayne. Call Mr. Rexforth at once,” and gave a local telephone number and an extension.

The second one was marked ten-thirty, and as Shayne looked at it, Fritz told him importantly, “I took that one myself. Switchboard operator goes off at ten, you know. He sounded mad and wanted to know why you hadn’t answered his other call, and made me look in your box to see if the message was still there, then said it was important you should call him the minute you got in.

“Then he called again at one o’clock and said you was to telephone him no matter how late you got in… three or four o’clock, or whatever.”

Shayne fingered the slips a moment and then said, “Call that number. It’s probably a hotel in town. Don’t ask for him or the extension,” he added harshly. “Just find out which hotel.” Pete, who was evidently now officially on duty at the desk, took one of the slips and turned to a telephone behind him.

He turned back in a moment and said, “It’s the Atlantic Arms, Mr. Shayne. On Fourth Street just off Biscayne.”

Shayne nodded and turned away from the desk leaving his briefcase sitting forgotten on the floor in front of it.

13

Shayne wasted no time inquiring for Mr. Rexforth downstairs in the Atlantic Arms Hotel when he reached it. He crossed the old-fashioned lobby in long strides and stepped into an elevator that was waiting to go up. He glanced down at one of the telephone slips in his hand and saw the extension 718. He told the operator, “Seven,” when he closed the doors, got out on the seventh floor and found the room number.

He knocked loudly and waited. It was a solid oak door without a transom and he could hear no movement inside the room. He knocked again, impatiently, and the door finally opened a few inches with the rattle of an inside chain that was still in place.

A sleepy and irritable voice said, “Yes? What is it?”

“Michael Shayne. Open up.”

Something like a gasp sounded through the crack. Then the door closed enough so the chain could be loosened, and swung open again.

Shayne pushed in and confronted the scrawny figure of a man wearing rumpled pajamas and with grayish hair standing wildly on end. He was bare-footed and thin-faced, and he retreated hastily toward the bed as though in acute embarrassment, blinking his eyes nearsightedly and swallowing a prominent Adam’s Apple while he quavered, “I was sleeping very soundly. I’ll get a robe and… and my glasses.”

He snatched up a bathrobe that hung over the foot of the bed and thrust his arms into the sleeves, then padded nervously to the head of the bed where he picked up a pair of rimless glasses from the table and settled them firmly on his nose.

Thus properly attired, he lost his embarrassment and seated himself on the edge of the bed and said severely, “I’ve been expecting you to telephone me, Mr. Shayne. I sat up very late waiting for you to return my calls.”

Shayne said, “I just now returned to my hotel and found them.”

“Indeed? And may I inquire where and how you spent the night? And please, Mr. Shayne, don’t expect me to believe the implausible story your secretary gave me yesterday that you had flown unexpectedly to the West Coast.”

Shayne stood flat-footed on the floor in front of the man and glared down at him with his hands knotted into fists. “Where is she, Rexforth? Where is Lucy Hamilton? If she’s come to any harm…”

“Your secretary, Mr. Shayne? I’m sure I have no idea. I saw her only once, briefly, yesterday morning. If you’ve mislaid the young lady, it is scarcely my affair.”

Shayne stood looking down at him for a long moment while he battled with the irrational anger that had possession of him. This man knew something… but what? He was altogether too calm, too sure of himself. The important thing was to find out what he knew about the whole affair as fast as he could get it out of him.

He moved back to sit in a chair, and began by asking, “What makes you so sure I haven’t been to the Coast?”

Rexforth’s brown eyes glittered behind their glasses and his tight lips smiled thinly. “Because I have been certain that Julius O’Keefe would make a bee-line for Miami and you as soon as he was released from prison. And, Mr. Shayne, because I know he did visit you in your office yesterday afternoon… and remained closeted with you for a good period of time.”

“What do you know about O’Keefe?” Shayne demanded.

“What do I know about him?” Rexforth permitted himself a little, cackling laugh. “Everything, I assure you. I don’t think we understand each other, Mr. Shayne. Perhaps your secretary misunderstood me or neglected to inform you. I represent the North American Bonding Company. Manager of our branch office in Jacksonville, to be exact. Does that answer your question?”

Shayne said, “No.”

Rexforth sighed and placed the tips of five fingers precisely against the tips of his other five. “Perhaps it doesn’t,” he conceded. “I tend to forget that you entered the affair only recently and may not be fully cognizant of its past history. My company had bonded O’Keefe, of course, when he embezzled the hundred thousand dollars. We paid the loss. The full amount. I consider that case one of my failures, Mr. Shayne. One of my few failures. Now do you understand?”

Shayne said again, “No.”

“Oh, come now. Let’s not spar with each other. I am wholly and completely convinced in my own mind that Robert Long confided the entire story to you… or at least the salient points of it… when he died some four months ago.”

“Robert Long?” Shayne repeated the name slowly. It came as a complete surprise to him and he actually had to force himself to think over the past months to bring the incident into focus in his mind.

Of course! Long was the gambler who was reputed to have welshed on some large bets and incurred the anger of the Syndicate. Their enforcers had gone after the man and gunned him down in his automobile on a remote section of the Tamiami Trail, and by the merest chance Shayne had been present at the time of his death. He’d had no interest in Long himself, hadn’t known the man or even met him before that night.

Shayne, on another case entirely, had been on the trail of one of the trigger-men who went after Long, and it was quite by accident that he had come upon Long’s wrecked car that night and found the gun-shot, dying man inside the wreckage. Robert Long had continued to live for at least twenty minutes while Shayne remained alone with him by the roadside, but during that period he had been delirious and babbled only senseless nothings.

The newspapers hadn’t got or printed the full story, of course. There had been intimations that he had been Shayne’s client and the detective had tried to save his life from the gunman, which Shayne hadn’t bothered to deny publicly.

“What has Robert Long got to do with this matter?” he asked slowly.

Rexforth snorted sarcastically. “You were alone with him for half an hour when the man knew he was dying, Shayne. He had a burden of guilt on his conscience, and inside him was the bitter knowledge that all of it had been for naught. That all his careful plans and the subsequent wreckage of his business had been for nothing and now the money would never be recovered. Because even if Long’s wife knew the secret… and I am convinced she did… he knew O’Keefe would never in this world be willing to share it with her.

“How fortuitous it must have appeared to Robert Long that you were there to hear his dying confession and listen to his secret. Not the police. Not some crook who would try to take it all. But Mike Shayne. A tough private detective with a reputation for flouting the law when it served his own ends, yet with a certain reputation as a square-shooter withal. Of course he made an arrangement with you to approach O’Keefe in prison and induce him to cooperate with you, on your promise, I assume, that it was strictly a private matter between the two of you and that O’Keefe’s former wife would not share a cent.

“Without flattering myself unduly, Mr. Shayne,” Rexforth went on complacently, “as soon as I read the newspaper story about Long’s death, some such possibility of an arrangement flashed through my mind. It was so obvious… if one has dealt with thieves and crooks as long as I and know how their minds work. And so I waited, continuing the same careful surveillance over O’Keefe in prison that I have maintained ever since he was sentenced. And when I was informed of your first visit to him shortly after Long’s death, I knew my deductions were correct. I knew I had only to wait for you to conclude your careful arrangements to recover the money, and be ready to claim it for my company.”

He stopped talking abruptly, took off his glasses and polished them carefully with a corner of the sheet from the bed.

“It seems to me,” Shayne protested mildly, “that you’re making a lot of wild assumptions based on very few facts… or no facts at all. I’m not admitting anything at this point, you understand? Since I don’t know any of the background on the case, I simply don’t see how you arrived at any of these conclusions.”

Rexforth replaced his glasses firmly on his nose and smiled boastfully. “The embezzlement stunk to me from the beginning,” he announced. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you get a feeling about such things. There was Julius O’Keefe, a six-thousand a year bookkeeper completely bonded by our company, and there was Robert Long, owner of the brokerage firm and consequently not bonded at all. O’Keefe did not impress me as the type of mentality to work out the details of a theft on such a grand scale. He was a little man, driven to distraction by a young, avaricious and very beautiful wife, who might pilfer a few hundreds or a few thousands from his employer, but would never think beyond that.

“So I looked for a master-mind who had planned and guided the operation, and there was only Robert Long who could possibly fit into the picture. He was in the perfect position to have conspired with O’Keefe, and I was convinced almost from the first that he had done so.”

“But you say he was owner of the business,” Shayne protested. “How could he profit by stealing from it?”

“It is not at all new in my experience,” said Rexforth didactically, as though delivering a lecture on economics in a classroom. “Consider first: He had absolutely nothing to lose. O’Keefe was fully bonded and North American would make good every penny of the loss if O’Keefe were convicted. He had only to confess and accept full blame, and we had no alternative. We did pay that loss, Mr. Shayne. The full hundred thousand. Not a penny of it was ever recovered. O’Keefe’s story was that he had spent it all over a period of time… on gambling and women. It was a manifest absurdity when you explored the man’s past life, but there was no proof. It is almost impossible to prove a negative.”

Shayne said slowly, “I see. So you think they split the proceeds and O’Keefe went to jail while Long remained a free man. Why would he do a crazy thing like that?”

“It wasn’t so crazy. It would have been planned that way from the beginning. He had to assume full responsibility if North American were to refund the loss. Why did he do it? Look at it from O’Keefe’s viewpoint. Here’s a man earning six thousand a year with very little prospect of advancement. He has an extravagant young wife, tries to keep up with the Joneses, lives in a heavily mortgaged house and never has a penny he can call his own.

“Why wouldn’t such an arrangement appeal to a man like that? Prison sentences for embezzlers are notoriously short. By pleading guilty and throwing himself on the mercy of the court, he can anticipate spending a few years in the penitentiary as a guest of the taxpayers, and emerge a free man… and with a bankroll of fifty thousand dollars. How else could a man like that hope to ever amass such a sum even as a result of a lifetime of hard, honest work? Of course he would jump at the opportunity if properly presented to him.”

“I can see it from O’Keefe’s viewpoint,” Shayne conceded. “But why should Long take a risk of that sort? You say he was owner of a brokerage firm large enough to sustain a loss of a hundred grand. He wasn’t living in middle-class poverty. And if I understand you rightly in discussing the recovery of the full hundred thousand, it must be your opinion that he didn’t even get his half at the time.”

“I’m positive he didn’t, Mr. Shayne. I’m certain in my own mind that the two men agreed beforehand to put the money in a safe place where neither of them could touch any of it until O’Keefe had paid his debt to the State and was free to enjoy his portion of it. Several things lead me to that conclusion,” he went on precisely.

“His brokerage firm went bankrupt within a year after the affair, indicating that it was not as firmly solvent as appeared on the surface, and certainly that he had not an extra fifty thousand to pour into it. From that point, he went downhill. I have kept very careful track of him, Mr. Shayne. The case has been almost a personal obsession with me. Long was connected with a couple of shady ventures, which were not successful, and he eventually ended up in Miami as a cheap gangster, who was murdered because he welshed on a bet.”

“That may all be true,” agreed Shayne. “But I still don’t see enough motive for a man to take such a chance in the first place.”

“There was another motive, Shayne, as I am sure you know already. In fact,” he went on fussily, “I’m sure you must be at least partially aware of everything I’ve told you here. The only reason I go over it is to convince you how perfect my case is… to show you beyond the shadow of a doubt that I can go into court and prove that the money is legally the property of my company.”

“You’re doing pretty well,” Shayne commented sourly. “But you still haven’t convinced me that Long had enough motive back in those days to take the risk you think he took.”

“You’re forgetting O’Keefe’s wife. A lovely young woman.” Rexforth’s eyes glinted behind the glasses, and he smacked his thin lips. “You know, of course, that she divorced O’Keefe a few months after he was jailed as a felon… and promptly remarried, taking Long as her second husband. That clinched the case in my own mind,” he went on solemnly. “They had kept their interest in each other completely hidden up to that point, and, like you, I had wondered about Long’s motive.

“But there it was, out in the open at last. He coveted his bookkeeper’s wife and he acquired her soon after O’Keefe was put away safely in prison. Indeed I have often wondered if he didn’t hope that O’Keefe had foolishly entrusted his secret to his wife in the beginning before he went to prison… give her, perhaps, whatever portion of documentary proof he held that would be required to recover the stolen money in collaboration with Long.

“If that was Long’s hope, I am certain it was in vain. O’Keefe was a fool, but evidently not enough of a fool to trust his wife to that extent.”

“Documentary proof?” Shayne frowned as though he did not understand. “What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, come now, Shayne. You’re not precisely a novice in these matters yourself. If you had been in O’Keefe’s position what precautions would you have taken to be certain the money would be intact when you completed your prison term?”

“I would have taken my half right then,” Shayne told him promptly, “and put it away in a safe place. And let Long have his half to do with as he wished.”

“You have a point,” Rexforth conceded. “Under certain circumstances that would be the easiest and most sensible procedure. But consider this: Let us assume that the original agreement between the two men was that Long would use his position and his influence… yes, and even some money in the right places… to obtain a parole for O’Keefe as soon as he was eligible. And if you didn’t trust your partner in crime implicitly, wouldn’t you plan to retain a hold over him that would make it advisable for him to carry out his part of the agreement? Give him a strong reason… to state it plainly… to do all he could to get you freed as soon as possible?

“You see?” Rexforth took off his glasses and practically beamed at the detective exactly like a schoolteacher who has just solved a difficult equation on the blackboard. “That’s why O’Keefe must have insisted that all of the money remain intact until he was free to enjoy his share. That’s why,” he added sharply, replacing his glasses, “I have no intention of compromising with you and accepting half the sum at this point. I am certain that you and O’Keefe have recovered… or are prepared to recover… the entire amount my company was defrauded of. I shall not settle for less,” he warned with thin-lipped sternness.

“You’re making a pretty strong demand without very much to back it up,” Shayne told him easily. “Since you’ve got everything else figured out meticulously, just where do you think the money is… and how was it placed in escrow until O’Keefe was in a position to get his share?”

“I imagine it is some place in Miami. Robert Long and Julius O’Keefe made a trip to Miami together from Jacksonville a few days before an audit of the company’s books disclosed the embezzlement. They knew the audit had been ordered and that disclosure was near, so it is reasonable to presume that they made their final arrangements at that time right here in Miami. Add the known fact that O’Keefe came directly here after his release yesterday, and I think that clinches it.

“As to the ‘how’… and I like your usage of the word ‘escrow’ in that connection… most appropriate… I am sure you know the ‘how’ of it much better than I. A safe deposit box is the first and most obvious answer, but there is the matter of identification and other legal difficulties involved in dealing with a bank. No, I think the most obvious answer would be an object placed in storage. An ordinary-looking trunk or suitcase, perhaps.” He leaned forward on the edge of the bed and peered at Shayne with glittering eyes as though he were solving a difficult problem at chess.

“Was that it? With a numbered storage receipt simply torn in half so that neither half would be acceptable without it’s matching counterpart. That would seem the simplest solution to such a problem.”

Shayne objected, “Couldn’t a man holding one of those halves go to the company and claim the suitcase by saying it had been torn in half accidentally?”

“Not with a reputable company. Not without identifying himself to their satisfaction, and not without describing the contents of the piece before it was opened in the presence of witnesses. Can you imagine a man claiming a suitcase, under those circumstances, making an affidavit that it contained a hundred thousand dollars in United States currency?”

Rexforth chuckled happily and shook his head. “No. I think that would have been just about the most foolproof procedure Long and O’Keefe could have devised under the circumstances… and I think that is what Long passed on to you before he died, Mr. Shayne,” he added, reverting to deadly calm. “His half of the receipt. Either that, or he told you the story, as he was dying, and instructed you to get his half from his wife before going to O’Keefe in prison. I am sure you were to tell O’Keefe that his faithless former wife knew nothing about your having it, and that you were to assure him she would receive no portion of Long’s half.

“Now, Mr. Shayne. Have I thoroughly convinced you that I know whereof I speak and that I hold all the trump cards? I’m sure you realize that I have merely to go to the police with my evidence and the entire sum will be promptly confiscated.”

“What evidence?” scoffed Shayne. “You’ve wasted ten minutes of my time spilling one of the wildest stories of conjecture and suppositions that I’ve heard since a certain blonde recently tried to sell me on the idea that she was Castro’s ex-mistress and had stolen a set of plans for the communists to occupy our naval base at Guantanamo.” He paused, studying Rexforth carefully to see if this brought forth any reaction.

It didn’t.

The little man in the rumpled pajamas merely moistened his lips and said, “There’s more, Shayne. Do you want to hear the rest of it, so you will thoroughly understand how impossible your position is?”

“Sure. Give me the rest of your crap. But make it fast, will you? We’re wasting one hell of a lot of time sitting here doing nothing.”

“I don’t consider it a waste of time, Mr. Shayne. Indeed, I consider it time well spent. I am certain you are now quite well convinced that you hold a losing hand. That I have, as I assured you, all the trumps on my side. I’ve explained to you in full and complete detail how I reached the conclusion that you planned to induce O’Keefe to share the stolen money with you as soon as his release from prison could be managed. I was positive of my facts as soon as I learned of your first visit with him soon after Long’s death.

“Soon after that I received information from reliable underworld connections that a movement was afoot to procure a full pardon for O’Keefe. That political pressure was being brought by persons who have influence with the parole board… and that this was being engineered by a certain attorney in Miami who has a reputation for getting results if he is properly reimbursed for his efforts.

“He is the sort of man, Shayne, to whom I realize you would turn if you were faced with a problem of this sort… the immediate release of a prisoner from the State Penitentiary.

“Then I knew, Shayne. I knew that each one of my various assumptions was correct… and I bided my time. I was informed of your second visit to O’Keefe less than a month ago, and of the subsequent action of the pardon board a few days ago. That is why I made an appointment with your secretary by long distance day before yesterday… to meet you in your office the day O’Keefe was released, but before he could possibly reach you… to ask… no, not to ask, Shayne… to demand your cooperation in the matter. To offer you our standard ten percent recovery fee in a matter of this sort. I felt that was fair. I wanted to be fair. Live and let live is my motto, Mr. Shayne. Indeed, I was prepared to be generous. I realize you must have expended a certain amount of cash, and a great deal of your time and energy on the matter already, and I expected to remunerate you for that expenditure in addition to our standard fee.

“And what happened, Mr. Shayne?” He shook his head sadly. “I found you acting in a shifty manner. Not only were you not in your office to keep a definite appointment with me at eleven-thirty, but your well-rehearsed secretary calmly informed me that you had been called out of town unexpectedly and were not expected back for a day or so at least.

“I did not believe her, of course. Knowing that O’Keefe was being released that morning, I was positive he would come directly to you… and with that amount of money at stake I could not well imagine Michael Shayne taking off into the wild blue yonder instead of waiting for O’Keefe’s arrival. I realized you were pulling what might well be characterized as one of your ‘fast ones’, but I was determined it would not work with me. Now, Mr. Shayne. Are you prepared to turn the money over to me intact… less your recovery fee, of course? Or do you intend to force me to go to the police with my information… in which event I assure you there will not even be one percent coming your way.”

Shayne hesitated a long moment before answering, glaring at Lucy’s “nasty little man” balefully. Finally, he said angrily:

“Go to the police if you like, Rexforth. You haven’t one single bit of proof for any one of your statements. Who is the lawyer who’s supposed to have been my go-between to the pardon board to get O’Keefe freed? You haven’t even named him.”

“I will, Shayne. Boal. Dirkson Boal. You can’t deny that you’ve dealt with him in the past. As soon as he came into the O’Keefe picture, masterfully arranging a pardon for the man, I knew you were behind it.”

Boal? Dirkson Boal? Sure, Shayne knew the man. Half the population of Miami knew him… by reputation, if not personally. He was a shyster, but an important shyster. He represented not only important personages from the underworld, but also had high-reaching connections into the state’s political hierarchy. If Boal had a hand in fixing O’Keefe’s pardon…?

Shayne laughed hollowly. “You call that proof, Rexforth? Sure, I’ve dealt with Boal. So has every other private dick in the city. You still haven’t placed O’Keefe in my office yesterday. Or me, either, for that matter. My secretary told you the truth yesterday morning. I had flown to California. I did not get back until six o’clock this morning, and I came direct to your hotel as soon as I received your messages. What does that do to all your assumptions about collusion between O’Keefe and me?”

“If your statements were true, they would knock my assumptions into a cocked hat,” conceded Rexforth coldly. “I happen to know they aren’t true, Shayne. I can prove they’re not. If you force me to do so, I will… to the police.”

“What can you prove?” Shayne goaded him.

“That you weren’t in California yesterday, but were waiting in your office for Julius O’Keefe’s anticipated arrival a little after four o’clock… when he did arrive.”

“How do you propose to prove a thing like that?”

“Mr. Shayne,” Rexforth protested. “I am not a complete fool. I have had a great deal of experience with affairs of this nature, and I leave very little to chance. Even though I was positive in my own mind that you had made the sort of arrangement with O’Keefe that I have outlined and that he would come straight here from prison to join forces with you to get the stolen money, I did not take anything for granted. Naturally, knowing the time of O’Keefe’s scheduled release, I had him shadowed by a trusted man from the moment he left the gates of the prison.”

Shayne muttered, “Good for you,” recalling that Will Gentry was trying to get exactly that information, and realizing that Will would be willing to give a good deal for what the bonding company man could tell him.

“Then you know where O’Keefe stopped on his way to Miami… whom he contacted?”

“I do.” Rexforth lifted his glasses from his nose and smiled a wintry smile. “No one. Not one single person. He was a single-minded person, Shayne. He didn’t attempt to cover his tracks or mislead anyone. I suppose that both you and he assumed he was completely anonymous after this long period in prison… that no one could possibly be interested in him or his movements after all these years.”

He replaced his glasses and his voice became happily venomous. “Neither of you reckoned on me. I never forget a case. I’ve told you this one had become a personal issue with me. Neither of you realized that, of course. You felt perfectly safe from observation after all these years. So my man hadn’t the slightest difficulty tailing O’Keefe all the way from the prison directly to the door of your office… and he will so testify in court, if necessary… swearing that O’Keefe did not stop on the way or carry on a conversation with anyone.”

Shayne said, through his teeth, “What else is your man ready to testify to in court?”

“Why… that you and your secretary left your office together about five o’clock and proceeded to a rendezvous in a motel room, Mr. Shayne. If you really want that fact testified to in court.”

14

Michael Shayne sat very still and stared at the little man sitting in his rumpled pajamas on the side of the hotel bed while his racing mind sought to assimilate what Rexforth had just said.

He knew, of course, that he had not been in Miami at five o’clock the preceding afternoon… and he had a pretty strong hunch that another man had been in his office impersonating him. In fact, it was a lot more than a hunch, now that he had listened to Rexforth’s story.

Up to this point he hadn’t been able to think of a single plausible reason for anyone to lure him away from his office and plant another man there to pretend to be him. Now, Rexforth had supplied the motive.

With a hundred grand of stolen money at stake, presumably cached in Miami some years ago, there was a perfect motive.

No. He hadn’t left his office at five. But what about Lucy? What had they done about her? Had they managed to convince her somehow, with some wildly preposterous story, to play along with the hoax… to allow O’Keefe to interview another man in Shayne’s private office whom he thought to be Shayne?

That part of the impersonation wouldn’t have been difficult. They would have used the same man who had established his identity in O’Keefe’s mind by two previous visits to the prison.

But again, what about Lucy?

And the murder of O’Keefe with her filing spindle thrust into his heart right in front of her desk?

When his thoughts reached this point, he said to Rexforth slowly, “I think you had better amplify that last statement… with the understanding that I am prepared to prove I was in Los Angeles at that particular time.”

“I don’t know what sort of proof you have cooked up, Mr. Shayne, but I doubt that it will stand up against the direct testimony of a trained observer like my man Brenner. Certainly I will amplify it if you wish. It is one more of the trumps I hold. An ace this time.

“I have stated that Brenner followed O’Keefe directly to your office from the prison gates without losing sight of him once. He was in the elevator with O’Keefe, and got off behind him on the second floor. He followed him down the corridor, watched him enter an office with your name on the door, and passed by behind him in time to catch a glimpse of your secretary seated at her desk and smiling a welcome at O’Keefe. Then the outer door was shut.

“That was shortly after four o’clock, Mr. Shayne. I haven’t the exact time, but it will be carefully noted on Brenner’s written report when he submits it. He loitered on the second floor for a time, keeping the closed door of your office under observation with O’Keefe inside. Then, not wishing to become conspicuous, and quite properly in my opinion, he returned to the ground floor and took up a position where he could observe everyone who came out of either elevator.

“O’Keefe did not show up… nor did you or your secretary. He had a newspaper picture of you and a physical description, of course, which I had supplied him with before sending him on the assignment, and he had seen your secretary through the open door.

“At five o’clock, or shortly thereafter, when none of the three of you had shown in the lobby, he chose a moment when both elevators were going up empty, and rode up to the second floor again to see what the situation was. He had scarcely stepped out of the elevator when the door of your office opened and you emerged, Mr. Shayne, with your secretary directly behind you. He turned his back and pressed the Down button, and rode down in the elevator with the two of you.

“At that moment he didn’t know what had become of O’Keefe, but he knew there were stairs, of course, and he quickly assumed that you had cautiously sent your client down by those stairs before locking up for the night. It was the sort of precaution, he knew, that a smart detective like you might well insist on.

“At the moment, Brenner had no recourse except to follow you. He did so. Out the front door, in the stream of home-going office workers, and around the corner where you and the young lady got into a car that was parked there. Brenner was lucky enough to hail an empty taxi in time to follow you. He trailed you to a motel west of town on the Tamiami Trail, and observed you drive in and go directly into the carport attached to one of the cabins.

“You and she got out, and he was able to observe you unlock the door leading directly in from the carport, and both of you went inside.

“At that point he felt it would be wise to report to me and get further orders. After all, he felt it was quite safe to leave you together in the cabin for a time. A man doesn’t normally take his secretary directly from the office to a motel room, which he has already engaged in advance, without planning to spend, at least, a few minutes inside, alone with her. Not if the secretary is as attractive as yours, Mr. Shayne. Remember, I saw her in the morning.

“No, I don’t blame Brenner for seeking a telephone at that point even though it did prove a mistake. He had the taxi drive on to the motel office, where he found a telephone booth and called me here. I was annoyed that he had lost O’Keefe, but I suspected that he planned to meet you at the motel later, and instructed Brenner to remain unobtrusively in the cab and watch your cabin, with orders to follow you, if you left, or to telephone me immediately, if O’Keefe showed up.

“Five minutes later I received a second, disconsolate call from Brenner. By the time he returned to view of your cabin, your car was gone. He investigated and found both side and front doors locked, and he knocked loudly without getting any response whatsoever. It hadn’t been more than five minutes since you drove up, and both of you had vanished.”

Rexforth stopped talking and sighed deeply. “I assumed that Brenner had bungled the job of tailing you. That you had spotted his cab following you from town… which would not be unlikely for a man of your experience. That is when I made my first telephone call to your hotel, Mr. Shayne.”

Shayne’s cheeks were deeply trenched and his big hands were knotted into fists when Rexforth stopped talking. “What was the name of that motel?”

“The name… of the motel? Surely, you know that, Mr. Shayne. Much better than I. It wasn’t I who…”

“Goddamn it, Rexforth, stop stalling. Give me the name of the motel before I beat it out of you.”

Shayne was rising slowly as he spoke. Rexforth looked up into his implacably gaunt face in consternation, and protested, “I really don’t see…”

Shayne slapped him on the side of his face with his open palm in a swinging blow that knocked the bonding company executive flat on the unmade bed, where he cowered and made whimpering sounds.

Shayne leaned over him and got both big hands on the collarbone on either side of his neck and lifted him up in the air and shook him angrily.

“I don’t care what you see or don’t see,” he raged. “It’s my secretary you’re talking about. What motel was it?” He held the man’s scrawny body in front of him with his bare feet above the floor. “Tell me,” he grated, “or I’ll break your neck.”

“I don’t know the name,” wailed Rexforth. “Brenner didn’t say over the phone. It’ll all be down in his written report. You’re acting like a wild man.”

Shayne shook him in the air again. “Damn the written report. I want it… now. Where is Brenner?”

“He’s… here,” gasped Rexforth. “I had him stay over last night because I didn’t know…”

“In this hotel?”

“No. A cheaper one. The Royalton.”

Shayne threw him sprawling back on the bed. “Get him on the phone. Get the number of the cabin and the name of the motel.”

“Of course.” Rexforth scrabbled across the bed away from Shayne and trotted to the telephone across the room. There he hastily consulted a memorandum pad beside the instrument, then asked the hotel operator for a number in a quavering voice. When he got it, he gave an extension number, and Shayne moved over to stand close behind, as he said tremulously:

“That you, Brenner? Rexforth. I called to ask the name of the motel and the number of the cabin you tailed Shayne and his secretary to yesterday.”

He listened a moment and then wailed, “I know it will be in your report. But I want it now. All right, then, look up your notes. I’ll hold on.”

He turned his head and said unnecessarily, “He has to check his notes to be sure.”

Shayne waited on wide-spread feet, his nostrils still flaring angrily.

Rexforth finally said, “Thank you. No, that’s all for now,” and hung up.

He told Shayne resentfully: “It was the Orange Palms. On Southwest Eighth Street beyond Coral Gables. Cabin number Nineteen. I still don’t understand why on earth…”

Shayne had whirled away and was headed for the door on long legs. Rexforth scuttled after him, crying out in high-pitched exasperation, “Wait. We haven’t settled anything. You can’t just dodge out…”

Shayne was out the hotel door by that time, and he slammed it shut behind him. Rexforth reached it and jerked it open, thrust his tousled head out and called down the corridor at the redhead’s retreating back, “I’m taking this to the police, Shayne. I warn you. Straight to the police.”

Shayne kept on going around a corner to the elevators. He stopped and viciously punched the Down button. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized Rexforth apparently wasn’t aware that O’Keefe had been murdered the day before. He was due for a surprise, if he did go to the police.

15

Michael Shayne’s mind worked feverishly as he headed westward on the Trail at twenty miles above the speed limit on that crowded thoroughfare. It hadn’t been Lucy, of course, who went to the motel room from his office. Not at five o’clock. Not leaving a dead man lying on the floor behind her and in company with another man.

It was the same woman Brenner had seen sitting at Lucy’s desk through the open door when O’Keefe went in. That meant they had managed to replace Lucy with another woman by four o’clock.

How? What had they done with her?

They might have lured her out of the office by some ruse, although Lucy was very reluctant about leaving the office while Shayne was out. She even refused to take time off for lunch, had milk and sandwiches sent in from a nearby lunchroom that specialized in sending out office lunches.

So, even if they had succeeded in luring her away by some ruse, Lucy would not have stayed lured away very long. She could only have been prevented from returning to her post by physical force… held prisoner some place until their business with Julius O’Keefe in Shayne’s office was completed.

A secluded motel room would be a good place for that. You could leave her there bound and gagged, or thoroughly drugged, while you waited for the ex-convict to arrive and unsuspectingly lead you to the money which he and Robert Long had cached together years before.

But evidently O’Keefe had not been quite so obliging after he reached Shayne’s office. Something must have gone sour in the pitch. Shayne doubted that murder had been planned in the beginning. Not right there in his office, at least. They might have planned to dispose of the guy after the money was safely in their hands… or the passport to the money at least.

No. O’Keefe’s death by the filing spindle in front of Lucy’s desk had all the earmarks of hasty improvisation. Suppose something had occurred to make him suspect the impersonator was not actually Michael Shayne? He would have started out… and there would be one hundred grand going out the door with him.

All right. Suppose it had happened that way? There they’d be behind the closed door of another man’s office with a dead man on their hands. A hasty search to snatch his wallet… maybe find what they were after inside it. Maybe not. Either way, what came next?

The corpse on the floor would change everything. Now it wasn’t a simple impersonation and con game. Now it was murder.

Maybe they’d planned just to leave Lucy in the motel cabin to be found eventually… after they’d got the money and left town. But now, they’d panic. Unexpectedly turned into murderers, they’d panic fast.

Lucy must have seen them. At least one of them. They couldn’t afford to leave a witness around who might testify against them later.

Was that why they had driven straight to the motel after leaving a dead man behind them?

They hadn’t stayed in the cabin long. Not more than five minutes according to the bonding company detective.

How had they utilized those five minutes?

Shayne’s foot was grimly heavy on the gas pedal and there was a gnawing knot of fear in his stomach, the sour taste of fear in his throat, as he neared the outskirts of Coral Gables, and began looking for the Orange Palms Motel, which he vaguely remembered having seen in the past.

It was still early in the morning. No one would normally have entered the locked cabin since the preceding afternoon. That was one of the things you got with a motel room. Complete privacy and the absence of prying eyes.

He saw the big sign ahead on the right, and took his foot off the accelerator. There was a row of stunted palms in front, and all the cabins were painted a bright orange color. There were about thirty units built in a semicircle, each with its individual carport separating it from the next unit for maximum privacy.

Shayne skidded to a stop in front of a sign that said, OFFICE, flung himself out and pushed inside a small room with a desk across the middle of it.

A slatternly, fat woman got up from a chair behind the desk and looked at him appraisingly as he stalked in. It was the wrong hour for people to be stopping to register for rooms.

He stopped in front of her and said, “I want the key to Number Nineteen.”

“Do you now?” she countered coldly. “Are you registered here, Mister…?”

“I’m not registered,” he said flatly. “Give me the key or I’ll go out and kick the door down.” He laid his hand flat on the desk with open palm upward.

She looked into his hot eyes and the width of his shoulders and knew he not only meant the threat, but was also physically capable of carrying it out.

Reluctantly, she reached behind her and produced a key with a brass tag attached to it. “If there’s trouble, I’ll have no part of it,” she told him virtuously.

He snatched the key from her fingers and strode out, left his car sitting there while he went down the curving row of cabins to Number Nineteen.

Most of the units had cars still in their ports. Nineteen didn’t. He put the key in the lock of the front door and it turned easily.

He stood for a moment without opening the door, while his guts churned up a storm inside him. Then he set his teeth together, turned the knob and thrust the door open.

The square room with its double bed looked completely empty from where he stood on the threshold. The bedspread had been thrown back and the blanket underneath it was rumpled as though a body… or two bodies… had lain there, but the bed hadn’t been slept in.

There was no other sign of occupancy as Shayne stepped inside. He paused beside the bed, then dropped to his knees beside it and peered underneath.

There was nothing to be seen there. The churning was subsiding inside him when he stood erect again. There was only one closet with the door shut, and a bathroom with the door standing open.

He went around the bed to the closet and jerked it open. There was nothing inside. He strode into the bathroom and saw that all of the towels hung neatly folded on their racks, unused.

He was about to turn and go out when a glimpse of blue caught his attention on the floor between the toilet seat and the wall.

He leaned over and stared down somberly at a dainty pair of blue nylon panties that had been waded down beside the toilet practically out of sight.

He reached down and picked them up between thumb and forefinger, and shook them out in front of his disbelieving eyes.

He recognized them immediately. There was a row of pink hearts embroidered across the front, and beneath them were the embroidered words, also in pink: “For my valentine.”

They were Lucy Hamilton’s panties. He had given them to her himself as a gag last Valentine’s Day. He remembered how charmingly Lucy had blushed when he gravely presented them to her that day in the office, all done up in a big crimson-and-silver heart-shaped box. He didn’t know she had ever worn them. She had sworn that day that she never would, and had given him a mild piece of hell for selecting such a silly gift for her.

He stood very still for at least thirty seconds staring at the wisp of embroidered blue nylon. Then he angrily crumpled it up in one big hand and thrust it into his pocket.

Outside the cabin he paused to close the door and lock it, and then he strode back to the office and entered and the fat woman behind the desk glared at him suspiciously and demanded, “Now, what’s this all about, Mister? We run a decent place here and don’t want any trouble.”

“Police business,” he told her, putting the key down on the desk. “Keep Number Nineteen locked tight until the police get here to check it out. Now get me the registration card for Nineteen.”

“Police business?” she faltered, “I tell you we run a decent place here…”

“If your nose is clean, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he interrupted. “Get that card. Did you check them in?”

“Number Nineteen?” She frowned as her fat fingers flipped through a numbered card index and deftly extracted a registration card which she peered at before placing it in front of Shayne. “No. My husband did. See. It was a little before noon yesterday.”

Shayne studied the card and got just about as much information from it as he expected. It was signed:

“Mr. and Mrs. Ned Jenkins. Asheville, N. C.” and provided the further information that the North Carolina couple were driving a 196 °Chevy sedan with a Dade County license number.

Shayne looked up from it and asked, “Where is your husband?”

“Asleep in back. He was up last night until nigh two o’clock when the last cabin was rented.”

Shayne said brusquely, “Get him out here while I telephone police headquarters.” He turned to a telephone booth in one corner of the room and went in while the fat woman departed, grumbling under her breath, through a passage to the rear.

Shayne put a dime in the slot and dialled a number that was very familiar to him, although not to the general public, because it was a direct line to Will Gentry’s private office.

Gentry answered the telephone himself, and Shayne said briskly, “Mike Shayne, Will. I’m out at the Orange Palms Motel on the Trail. Send a couple of men out to check a cabin, huh? Number Nineteen. Fingerprints and anything else interesting.”

“Listen here, Mike,” Gentry’s voice rumbled over the wire. “What the hell are you up to? There’s a guy in here named Rexforth from North American Bonding, and he’s been telling me…”

“I know exactly what Rexforth has been telling you, Will. Did you get the name of the motel?”

“I got it. Cabin nineteen. Mind telling me why you want it checked, Mike?”

“Because Lucy has been in that cabin,” Shayne exploded. “I want to know when. In what shape she left it. Goddamn it, Will! Do I have to give you a blueprint?”

“Hold your horses, Mike. I’ll have the cabin checked. In the meantime….”

“In the meantime,” grated Shayne, “keep Rexforth there. I’m coming in.”

He hung up and went out of the booth to find a very tall, very thin, baldheaded man behind the desk with his wife hovering suspiciously in the background. He was wearing an undershirt, with a pair of pants which he had evidently pulled on hastily, and there was a worried look on his face. He was fingering the registration card for Number Nineteen, which Shayne had left lying on the desk, and he asked diffidently, “Something wrong about this, Mister? My wife tells me…”

Shayne said, “The police will be here in a few minutes asking you more questions. Keep that cabin locked until they get here. Did you check Jenkins in?”

“I reckon. I been trying to recollect.” The bald man frowned and then looked up at Shayne with renewed interest and said, “It’s comin’ back to me now. Say! He was a big redhead a lot like you. Yeh. That’s right. Younger though, an’ better lookin’. No offense meant,” he added hastily.

“What did his wife look like?”

“She wasn’t with him when he checked in. I remember it real good now. Lots of ’em don’t, you know? Not when they check in. Not if… well, you know how it is,” he continued hastily. “Nothing wrong about that. I recollect he said his wife was downtown shopping an’ she’d be along later.”

“Then you didn’t actually see her?”

“No. I reckon not. After they’ve registered, they drive in and out without stoppin’. Say! Number Nineteen? Ain’t that the one the other fellow was askin’ about yesterday evening? Kinda thick-set an’ mean-lookin’? He come in first and used the telephone, then went out without saying thank you or go-to-hell, and about five minutes later he was back askin’ who was registered in Nineteen. I didn’t tell him, by golly. Figgered it wasn’t none of his damn business.”

That would have been Brenner, Shayne thought. He tapped the registration card with his fingertip and asked, “Did you check this man’s car and license number when he registered?”

“Well, you know how it is, Mister. Mostly they stop out there about where your car is.” He gestured out the door. “You see the car standin’ there, and if it’s what he says it is you don’t go out to look at the license number. Nothing in the law says I gotta do that, I reckon.”

A whining note crept into his voice, and Shayne agreed, “I guess not.” He turned away, saying over his shoulder, “The police will be here in a few minutes. Don’t let any cleaning woman in that cabin until they get through.” He got in his car and headed back to downtown Miami.

16

Fully clothed and freshly shaven, with his sparse hair combed smoothly and his glasses firmly settled on the bridge of his nose, the man looked as though he might actually be named Reginald Dawes Rexforth Third when Shayne walked into Gentry’s office twenty minutes later and found him seated there in earnest conference with Miami’s chief of police.

Will Gentry still hadn’t been to bed, and he looked it. His heavy body sagged behind the big desk and his florid face was grayer than usual. He looked up at Shayne disapprovingly and said, “From what Rexforth here has been telling me, Mike, I think you’ve got yourself into a hell of a tight spot this time.”

“Forget that for a moment, Will.” Shayne’s gray eyes were very bright although he hadn’t been to bed for more than twenty-four hours either. He disregarded Rexforth entirely, and told Gentry, “I think I can clean this whole thing up fast. Just get that woman in here. Elsa Cornell. I think I know the right sort of questions to ask her now.”

Gentry rolled his rumpled eyelids down like tiny Venetian blinds to shut out Shayne’s piercing glance. “I’d be glad to,” he muttered, “if we had her. All right, goddamn it,” he added angrily, rolling his eyelids back up again to meet Shayne’s gaze squarely. “I don’t need any remarks about the efficiency of my police department. She got away from Ed Corby and Jim Greene while they were bringing her in from the morgue. She was sitting in front with Greene and he stopped for a stop sign. When he pulled into the intersection with traffic coming from both ways, she calmly opened the front door and stepped out. He couldn’t stop, damn it, without causing a couple of wrecks. And by the time they got clear and went back for her, she’d vanished.”

Shayne simply said, “My God, Will,” and sank into a chair on the other side of the chief’s desk from Rexforth. “She was the only link we had. Driving back from that motel…” He stretched his big hands out in front of him and closed the fingers slowly into fists. “… I decided I was going to get the truth out of her if I had to choke it out of her lovely throat.” He paused. “All right, Will. So we haven’t got her. What have we got?”

“In the first place, Mike, I’ve got two witnesses who place you square in Miami yesterday noon and at five o’clock,” Gentry told him heavily. “Want to comment on that?”

Shayne looked across at Rexforth and said, “The five o’clock thing is his, of course. Why doesn’t he produce his man named Brenner who’s supposed to have tailed me out to the Orange Palms Motel?”

“I will, Mr. Shayne,” said Rexforth happily. “He should be on his way here now.”

Shayne said, “Fine. I’d like to hear him tell his own story. What’s this noon deal, Will?”

“It’s a lad who works for the lunchroom down the street on Flagler where Lucy often orders lunch delivered up to the office. He knows her well, Mike, and says he knows you by sight. He’s prepared to swear that you met him down in the lobby of the building about twelve-thirty yesterday when he was taking a tray up to Lucy, and you gave him a dollar tip and told him you were going tip and you’d take it to her.”

“So that’s how they pulled it?” muttered Shayne. “That adds up. Anyone who bothered to check carefully would know that Lucy always orders lunch sent up from that lunchroom, if I’m not in the office.”

“He says he can identify you, Mike,” Gentry pressed him. “That he’s seen you in the office with Lucy several times.”

Shayne nodded disinterestedly. “I’ve probably seen him a couple of times when he delivered lunches. If we’re tied up, Lucy orders something for both of us. Is that all you’ve got?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“No, by God, it isn’t!” Shayne exploded, leaping up from his chair angrily. “Where are these witnesses who are supposed to identify me? Jesus Christ, Will! You’ve listened to Rexforth’s story. Don’t you get the implications?”

“The implications I get,” Gentry told him coldly, “is that there was a hundred thousand dollars floating around loose in Miami and you figured to grab it. I’m not saying what happened in your office yesterday afternoon, Mike. I’m not saying either you or Lucy killed the guy. But I think both of you know a hell of a lot more about it than I do… and I’m waiting for you to let me in on it.”

Shayne let out a long breath and said, “I’ll agree there probably was a hundred grand floating around Miami yesterday waiting for somebody to grab it. And someone did… or made a hell of a good try. But it wasn’t I, Will. And it sure as hell wasn’t Lucy. Did you send a man out to the Orange Palms Motel?”

Gentry nodded, reaching in his pocket for a thick black cigar which he rolled between his fingers and sniffed gravely. “That’s where Rexforth says you took Lucy yesterday afternoon from the office. And that part doesn’t make sense, I’ll grant you. If you and Lucy suddenly decided to bed down together, I can’t see you shacking up in a motel to do it.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times,” said Shayne tensely, “that I was in California at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. It was some other man, Will, pretending to be me to try and get his hands on that dough.”

“And Lucy went out to a motel with him?” Gentry looked properly incredulous.

“I didn’t say that. I said…”

“When you telephoned in,” Gentry reminded him, “you said you wanted Cabin Nineteen checked because Lucy had been there. Now you say she wasn’t there. You can’t have it both ways, Mike. But you’re never going to make me believe Lucy went out to a motel with another man. Maybe with you, damn it, though I should think you could plan it better than that, but not with some other lug.”

Shayne gritted his teeth and said as patiently as he could manage, “I know Lucy was in that cabin yesterday, Will. I don’t know when she was taken there, or how, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t willingly on her part. Don’t you understand, goddamn it?”

“I don’t understand much of anything,” confessed Gentry. “What makes you so sure Lucy was there at all? She leave you a note or something?”

Shayne hesitated, the wispy bit of embroidered blue nylon in his pocket seeming to burn against his flesh. He couldn’t confess the truth to Will Gentry. Not even to Gentry, damn it. There was something so leeringly sexual about a girl leaving her panties behind her in a motel room. No matter how well you knew Lucy… no matter how much you liked and respected her… a pair of discarded panties were… well, a pair of discarded panties.

He replied stiffly, “Something like that. I’ll bet you a hundred to one they find Lucy’s fingerprints there… left not later than six o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“Just when Rexforth claims she went there with you,” Gentry commented stubbornly, putting light to his cigar and puffing on it with a sour frown as though it tasted worse than it smelled.

Shayne said helplessly, “None of this is helping us find Lucy. If your lousy cops had just kept their hands on Elsa Cornell after I turned her over to you…”

He was interrupted by the breezy entrance of Timothy Rourke into the room. He stopped dead in his tracks at sight of Shayne.

“I’ve been trying to call you, Mike. You know I’ve been checking back in our old files on that O’Keefe embezzlement in Jacksonville and by God, Mike, this may be important. There was a round hundred thousand stolen… and not one penny of it was recovered. North American Bonding Company paid off in full. O’Keefe claimed he had spent it all prior to his arrest, but rumor was rife that ’twasn’t so. That he maybe had it put away until he got out of the pen and could enjoy it. Hey!” Rourke paused in his recital and glanced around uncertainly at the wooden faces about him.

“None of you seem very much excited about this,” he said in a deflated voice. “I thought it might be important as a motive for O’Keefe’s murder.”

Shayne said, “It’s important all right, Tim, but we’ve already got the same dope from Mr. Rexforth here. Remember the nasty little man Lucy mentioned in her notes?”

“Oh. Sure.” Rourke glanced at Rexforth and agreed, “He is sort of a nasty little man at that. All right. Maybe you already know this, too, but I thought you’d be interested. I know who the dame is you had at the morgue, Mike. The one you called Elsa Cornell.”

Shayne swung on him eagerly. “You do? Who is she?”

“I had a kind of funny feeling all along,” Rourke confessed, “that I’d seen her picture in the paper somewhere… sometime. And when I was looking over the O’Keefe file, there it was. Right in front of me. A few years younger, but not a damn bit prettier.”

“Who?” Shayne breathed, his throat constricted.

“Mrs. Julius O’Keefe, that’s who. At least she was when he stole the money. She divorced him later and married his ex-boss. A guy named Robert Long. And you know what’s one of the funniest coincidences of all, Mike? That Robert Long is the same one that got killed here in Miami a few months ago in a shooting scrape you were mixed up in. I don’t know whether you remember…”

“I remember all right,” Shayne said grimly. He grabbed the reporter’s arm and swung him toward the door. “Come on, Tim. Let’s get going.”

“Hold it,” shouted Gentry angrily. “I’ve got two witnesses on their way in here to identify you, Mike. Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

“To find Lucy,” Shayne said over his shoulder as he jerked the door open and shoved Rourke through it in front of him.

17

“Where are we headed?” Timothy Rourke demanded breathlessly as Shayne gunned his car away from the police station.

“To visit a guy named Dirkson Boal,” Shayne grated. “Lives out north, I think. Miami Shores, maybe. Do you know without stopping to look up the address?”

“The lawyer? Yeh. I interviewed him at home a couple of months ago. Big place off the Boulevard… north of Hundredth Street.”

Shayne nodded, pushing through traffic as fast as he could east to Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s still twenty minutes before most business places open up. If we’re lucky we’ll catch Boal at home.”

“What’s he got to do with it, Mike?” Rourke asked helplessly. “Fill me in a little.”

“He’s got everything to do with it. He and Mrs. Robert Long… O’Keefe’s ex-wife. They’re in it together. There are a couple others, but I imagine they’re just hired hands. You were right about the money O’Keefe stole. I don’t think he did spend it. It looks like he and Long were in it together and put it away in a safe place… probably in Miami… until he got out of jail to claim it with Long.”

He had to stop for a signal light at the Boulevard, and waited impatiently until he could cross the intersection and swing into the outer lane of northbound traffic where he began passing every car in sight.

“It started four months ago when Long died and I was with him. The story was in the papers and it evidently gave various people ideas about the money.”

He swiftly outlined the theory Rexforth had formed independently, and ended flatly, “He was wrong, of course. Long told me nothing and didn’t turn over any half of a claim check to me. His wife held it, of course, and she evidently got the same bright idea that Rexforth had… that O’Keefe would be willing to split with me, although he’d never in the world split with her.

“I suppose she went to Boal with her bright idea about that time, and they worked it out together. Get hold of some guy who could be made up to look enough like me to pass casual inspection… send him to the pen to gain O’Keefe’s confidence… pull strings to get the man pardoned… then arrange to get Lucy and me out of the office on the crucial day of O’Keefe’s release.”

“Why rush out to Boal’s house like this?” asked Rourke. “You’ve got Mrs. Long under arrest. Why not…?”

“That’s the point. We haven’t got her. She got away on her way from the morgue to the station this morning. It’s my bet that she went straight to Boal. Remember, she knows it’s turned into a murder now. She stood there beside me in the morgue looking down at the man she used to be married to and never turned a hair.

“She and Boal are worried,” he added grimly. “The whole thing blew up in their faces when O’Keefe got himself killed in my office by their two hired hands. If they did get what they needed to recover the money off the body of O’Keefe, it’s my guess they’ll try to pick it up from wherever it is as soon as the place opens for business this morning, and get out of town.”

“What about Lucy all this time. You figure Boal has got her?”

“That’s the only way it does figure,” Shayne told him, hoping to God he was right. “I’m pretty sure the pair in my office panicked yesterday after killing O’Keefe, and rushed out to get Lucy from a motel room where they had put her for safe-keeping. They’d go straight to the boss with her… I hope. And dump her in his lap.

“Boal isn’t the type to panic,” he went on slowly. “He wouldn’t take it on the lam without sitting tight until this morning to make a last try at the dough. So far as he knew I was still cuddled up cozily with Mrs. Long in Los Angeles, and even when O’Keefe’s body was found he didn’t see anything to tie him into it.

“That’s what he must have thought, at least, until she turned up here in Miami this morning after eluding Gentry’s dumb cops.”

He slowed down to sixty for a changing traffic light at 79th Street.

“That was less than two hours ago.” He slammed through the intersection and added, “You said north of Hundredth?”

“Yeh. Not far. Just a few blocks, then it’s a turn to the right. Better get over in that lane and slow down a little.”

Rourke leaned out the window on his side to peer ahead, said sharply, “Next turn beyond that filling station. I remember…”

Shayne braked hard as he went past the filling station indicated by Rourke, moved into the right-hand lane and made the turn onto a side street with screeching tires.

Still leaning out the window, Rourke told him, “It’s along here. Big stone gateposts on this side. There. Up ahead.”

Shayne slowed still more and swung in between the stone gateposts on a macadam driveway that curved up a slight slope toward a modest stucco house surrounded by tropical shrubbery.

He was just beyond the gate when the front end of a gray Cadillac nosed around the curve in front of them headed downward.

Shayne slammed on his brakes hard and threw his car into reverse. It lurched backward and he swung the steering wheel hard to settle his car firmly between the gateposts, crosswise of the driveway, so the other car could not possibly get past it. He set the hand-brake and jerked his keys from the ignition and leaped out on his side as the big Cad ground to a halt with its grillwork almost touching the side of his car.

Shayne trotted around the back of his car, noting that a man and a woman occupied the front seat of the other car. The man was Dirkson Boal and the woman beside him was Mrs. Robert Long.

“Take her, Tim,” Shayne panted, heading for the left side of the Cad where Boal had his door open and was stepping out.

Dirkson Boal was a big man, broader than Shayne, but not so tall. He was immaculately clad in a cream-colored suit, a yellow polo shirt open at the throat, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat.

He was heavily tanned and looked physically fit, and his normally pleasant features were contorted with rage as he squared off in front of the detective and sputtered, “What’s the meaning of this?”

Shayne hit him in the mouth before he could get his guard up. Blood spattered and he staggered backward on the dew-wet grass beside the road with arms flailing wildly.

Shayne followed him coldly and methodically, his gray eyes blazing with all the accumulated fury that had been building up inside him for the past twelve hours. He drove a short left to the lawyer’s hard guts and then a swinging right to the side of his jaw that drove him to the ground.

He lay there gasping, looking up fearfully at the detective with blood running out the side of his mouth. He turned his head from side to side in denial when Shayne demanded, “Where’s Lucy Hamilton? My secretary.”

“Don… know,” he croaked between split lips. Shayne drew back a heavy foot and kicked him solidly in the ribs, and Boal grunted and doubled up in pain.

“I’m going to stomp your head in,” Shayne told him implacably. “Where’s Lucy Hamilton?”

“In cellar,” the attorney gasped, covering his bloody face with both hands. “Don’t…”

Shayne turned away from him in disgust, the anger suddenly drained from his body. He grinned at what he saw on the other side of the Cadillac. Timothy Rourke was having a wrestling match with the blonde, and seemingly enjoying it tremendously. They were rolling over and over on the turf and her dress was all the way up to her waist with her long white limbs fully exposed to the sunlight. She was twisting and snarling beneath him as Shayne hurried around the car to see if he required assistance, but the reporter had her lithe body pinioned beneath him and he looked up with a grin, showing three parallel scratches on his cheek where her fingernails had raked him.

“She’s all mine, Mike,” he panted happily. “You tend to your own knitting and I’ll tend to mine. Bite me, would you?” he exclaimed suddenly, turning all his attention back to her. “Try that again and I’ll bite you right back.”

On the Boulevard a block and a half away, Shayne heard the shrill keening of a siren as he hesitated there.

He waited a moment, listening, heard another siren behind the first one, and the protesting screech of rubber as the leading squad car made the turn into the side street leading to the stone gateposts of Boal’s estate.

He waited just long enough to see it pull up beside his parked car and uniformed men piling out of it, and he knew that Will Gentry had quickly guessed where he was going when he slammed out of the chief’s office.

Boal was sitting up on the grass, moaning and holding his head in both hands when Shayne trotted past him, and he left him there for the cops to take care of.

Another car was parked out of sight around the curve headed down the drive. It was a 196 °Chevy with Dade County license plates. The motor was running and there was a couple in the front seat peering anxiously through the windshield down the drive as though they didn’t know what to do next.

Shayne kept on running past them toward the house with only a sideward glance. The man was big and rangy and had red hair. That’s all Shayne saw as he went by, leaving them there like sitting ducks for Will Gentry’s policemen to take care of.

He pounded up to the front door of the house, found it locked, drew back five feet and then drove his shoulder into it like a battering ram.

The lock gave under the impact and he staggered into a hallway which ran through the length of the house, regained his balance and trotted back to the kitchen where he found a door opening onto stairs leading down to the basement.

There was a light switch at the head of the stairs and he switched it on and plunged down, calling, “Lucy,” as he went to keep from frightening her further if she were really down there and could hear him coming.

She was there all right. Huddled up on the concrete floor near the foot of the stairs with her wrists bound tightly to her ankles and wide strips of adhesive tape over her mouth.

Her eyes were open and they looked up at him as he bent over her, and the message they conveyed was more eloquent than her lips could have spoken if they had been free to speak.

He squatted down beside her and got out a pocketknife to cut the hard-knotted clothesline binding her wrists and ankles, and said quietly, “It’s all over but the shouting, Angel. Miami’s Finest has got the whole gang corralled.”

18

More than an hour later Timothy Rourke was striding impatiently up and down the living room of Lucy Hamilton’s apartment consulting his notes on a wad of copy paper in his hand.

Shayne and Lucy sat side by side on the sofa and watched him indulgently. Shayne had a four-ounce glass of cognac in his left hand, and a glass of ice water sat within easy reach on the coffee table in front of him. The fingers of his right hand were closely entwined with those of Lucy’s left, inconspicuously pressed down between their two bodies where Rourke didn’t notice them. The only outward sign that Lucy’s ordeal had left on her were her bruised and swollen lips where the adhesive tape had been roughly applied as a gag. Otherwise, she was relaxed and tranquil, and obviously very happy indeed to be sitting where she was.

“I’ve only got about fifteen minutes to make my deadline for the first edition,” Rourke complained, studying his notes. “I’ve got just about everything except your side of it, Lucy. And just how you figured the whole thing out, Mike. They even found the money, you know? In a suitcase, in storage. Boal had the torn halves of the receipt in his pocket. Rexforth insists you can’t legally claim a recovery fee on it, Mike, but Will Gentry is going to bat for you on that. It’s his contention that you actually broke the case when you discovered that Lucy had been held a prisoner in that motel room. That was the turning point, says Will. So, how’d you know, Mike? That’s an important part of my story. The man and woman who had her there swear she had no chance of leaving a message for you or anything. They say she was tied up and still groggy from the knockout drops they fed her at lunch when they went there from the office and got her. Why were you so sure Lucy had been in that room?”

Shayne’s fingers squeezed Lucy’s tightly and he turned his head to smile into her eyes. He said lightly, “Let’s just say it this way, Tim. Lucy and I have been working very closely together for years, and we’ve established a very special sort of rapport. Why don’t you just say in your story that I get a lovely sort of tingle down my spine if I walk into a room where Lucy has been within the last twenty-four hours?”

“Michael!” Lucy reproved him in a shocked voice, while her bruised lips tried to smile but couldn’t.

“Well,” he asked her calmly, “what do you want me to say… for publication?”

“I guess,” she agreed in a small voice, “that’s as good as anything.”

“What else, Tim?” asked Shayne blandly, taking an appreciative sip of cognac. “Don’t forget your deadline. As soon as you get out of here, Lucy has something to explain to me!”

“Well, there’s this, Lucy. I don’t understand why in hell you didn’t get suspicious when this fellow brought your tray from the lunchroom made up to impersonate Mike. I understand there was a pretty strong likeness.”

Lucy Hamilton closed her eyes for a moment and leaned her head back against the sofa. A deep, gurgling chuckle came from her throat.

“It was the funniest thing,” she confessed, “when he walked in the door carrying my luncheon tray. I stared at him and for one crazy moment I thought it was Michael. But then I realized he was much younger and…”

“Better looking,” Shayne supplied swiftly, recalling the motel manager’s words.

“Not that, Michael.” She squeezed his fingers tightly. “But I did say to him, ‘My, but you look a whole lot like my boss,’ and he was prepared for that, of course, because he laughed and said the others in the lunchroom had been kidding him about how much he resembled Michael Shayne, and that was why they had sent him up with my lunch instead of the regular delivery boy. So I laughed about it, too, and he went out… and I ate it and suddenly began to feel drowsy and couldn’t keep my eyes open.” She sat erect and smiled wanly. “How did they get me out of the office without anyone noticing, Tim?”

“Took you down the stairway… while you were groggy but still able to navigate. Hustled you out to that motel and left you while they went back to wait for O’Keefe to come to them.”

“What went wrong?” Shayne asked curiously. “Why did they have to kill him?”

“No one seems to know, exactly. I guess no one ever will know, now. According to their confession, he suddenly jumped up and declared he didn’t believe the man sitting behind your desk was actually Michael Shayne. And he started out of the office. The pseudo Mike Shayne shouted out to the gal at Lucy’s desk, ‘Stop him. Don’t let him get away.’ And so she… stopped him. They disagree about which one actually stuck the spindle in his heart,” Rourke went on, “but I guess it doesn’t matter too much. All four of them are going to draw good long prison terms.”

He patted the notes in his hand and thrust the wad of paper in his pocket. “God bless you, my children. I must be off to compose some headlines.” He smiled benignly and hurried out.

Lucy sat very still beside her employer while he cheerfully savored the contents of his glass. Then she said in a small voice, “Michael?”

“What is it, Angel?”

“You did… find them, didn’t you?”

“Why, sure.” He set his glass down, reached in his pocket and withdrew a small handful of blue nylon which he shook out in front of her eyes.

“I couldn’t think what else to do,” she explained swiftly and frantically. “They were excited and frightened when they came there, and I gathered something dreadful had happened. They said they were going to take me away and all I could think of was how I could leave something behind as a signal to you that I’d been there. I was still groggy from the drug at lunch, but somehow I knew you’d trace me that far… and wonder.

“So I told them I had to go to the bathroom before we left, and when I got in there with the door closed I had only a moment to think what I could do. And… well… what else can a girl leave behind that no one can see is missing? I mean…” Her cheeks flamed scarlet under his amused gaze.

“You’ve got to come out wearing all your outer clothes. Shoes, stockings, dress, or they’d notice.”

Shayne squeezed her hand and said, “It was a terrific inspiration, Angel. You knew I’d recognize them at first glance. But there’s one thing I don’t get. By what miracle of coincidence did you have that particular pair on yesterday? When I bought them for you on Valentine’s Day, you were half-way sore and swore you’d never wear them. What on earth possessed you to wear them yesterday?”

She hung her head and sighed, and confessed, “Now you’ve caught me.”

“How have I caught you?”

“After you gave them to me, I loved them and thought they were the cutest things I’d ever seen. I went down to the same store the next day and bought six more pairs… exactly the same. I’ve been wearing them ever since.” Shayne began laughing, and he couldn’t stop. After a time Lucy joined him.

Content

Brett Halliday
Never Kill a Client

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18