“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.”