Before starting out to look for answers, Michael Shayne telephoned Lucy.
Her voice was acidly sweet as she replied in mock surprise, "Not finished with the blonde so soon, Michael?"
"All finished," he told her cheerfully, "so I decided to sick her onto you. She's not there yet?"
There was a tiny pause, during which he knew Lucy was trying to decide whether he was kidding or serious. Then she said, "Not yet."
"She should be showing shortly. Be nice to her, angeL She's really in a state."
"Because you got rid of her so fast?"
Shayne growled, "This is serious, Lucy. Her name is Nellie Paulson-at least, I guess maybe it is. I don't know whether she's actually nuts or not, but she's on the fringe. Scared out of her wits. There's a guy out on the town hunting her with a gun who claims he's her brother and wants to take care of her. But she claims this guy murdered her brother and is after her now."
Lucy said pleasantly, "What interesting people you do meet, Mr. Shayne. Just what am I supposed to do with this damsel who doesn't know whether her brother is a murderer or murderee?"
"Just keep her quiet there and take care of her," growled Shayne. "Put her to bed if you can. And don't let anyone get to her. Call me as soon as she gets there," he added hastily. "I'll be at police headquarters. In Gentry's office, if he's still there; if not, check with Sergeant Jenkins."
Luqr said, "Yes, Michael," in a subdued tone. Then, "And-Michael?"
"Yes?"
"Your glass of brandy is still sitting here and it's-still an hour and twenty-five minutes until midnight."
"Save it," he said blithely. "Our date is still on."
He hung up and got his hat, went down to drive directly to Miami police headquarters.
Will Gentry was still in his private office. He was closeted there with Timothy Rourke, reporter on the News and one of Shayne's oldest friends in the city.
Will Gentry was a big, square man, with a florid, open countenance. He sat behind a wide, bare desk, chewing vigorously on the short butt of a black cigar; while Rourke was tilted back in a straight chair against the wall, just finishing what he considered an extremely funny story, as Shayne walked in.
"— And so the gink said, 'What cow are you talking about?' " concluded Rourke, and began laughing uproariously.
Chief Gentry said, "Ha-ha," while looking at Shayne. "Anything up, Mike?"
"He is, damn it," said Rourke. "Just in time to spoil the point of my story. Thought you had a date with Lucy tonight?"
"1 did. A blonde came between us." Shayne grinned at him and pulled a chair close to Gentry's desk. "Had any unexplained corpses tonight, Will?"
"No corpses of any sort. You?"
"I'll be damned if I know," said Shayne, feelingly. "Had any sort of report of trouble at the Hibiscus Hotel?"
"I don't think so." Gentry looked at the reporter. "You had anything, Tim?"
"Not a thing all evening to make the Night Edition." Rourke tilted his chair forward so all four legs were on the floor, leaned his cadaverous body forward eagerly.
"Got something, Mike?"
"I'll still be damned if I know. Let's see what you two master-minds make out of this. Lucy and I had just settled down at her place for a night-cap when the clerk at my hotel phoned me-"
Shayne went on to tell about his return to the hotel, his first brief encounter with the young woman in the lobby who was so eager for him to take on an immediate tailing job, and his interview with the other girl upstairs. He omitted only the fact that he had given the girl a note to Lucy and told her to go there, ending the first part of his story with her locking herself in the kitchen while he admitted the man with the scar on his face.
"So, what do you make of it thus far?" he demanded.
Chief Gentry took the soggy cigar butt from his mouth and regarded it with intense distaste. With the easy and unthinking accuracy of a major-league shortstop throwing to first, he tossed it aside into a brass spittoon in one corner. "The Hibiscus should have notified us," he growled, reaching for a button on his desk. "I'll get Patton in and-"
"Wait a minute. Will. You know Ollie. He's okay. But he's got a job. If your damned pensions were big enough to support a man, he wouldn't have, but they aren't and so he gets paid a salary to keep things as quiet as he can for the hotel. You know that," remonstrated Shayne. "What was there for him to report? He found no evidence of murder."
"All right," said Gentry. "Sure, Ollie's okay, but these hotel dicks are always covering up. Was the girl drunk or nuts?"
"Not drunk," said Shayne. "Nuts, maybe. How do you tell? Her story sounded straight enough when she was telling it."
"Yeh? Then how did her scarred face friend follow her to your place? According to her, she left him standing in the street while she went off in a taxi without knowing where she was headed,"
"He explained to me that he caught the number of her taxi, went to the company's office and got her destination from the driver over their radio system."
"Could be," said Gentry shortly. "What sort of story did he tell? Cut out this continued-in-our-next stuff."
Shayne grinned cheerily and said, "That's what you call a cliff-hanger. All right. He claims he's her brother. And that she's half nuts and screamed and ran away from him the moment she saw him in the hotel corridor."
"Was this scar a fresh one, by any chance?" asked Tim Rourke with interest. "One that just healed up this evening?"
"It looks more like one from Korea," Shayne said briefly. He went on to relate everything Bert Paulson had told him about the inexplicable affair, ending at the point where he had pulled an ex-Army gun on Shayne and gone storming out into the Miami night to search for his sister.
"And you let him walk out just like that?" demanded Rourke incredulously. "Knowing how terrified she was of him?"
Without revealing that he felt she would be perfectly safe with Lucy Hamilton, Shayne scowled at the reporter and asked, "How many slap-happy ex-G.I.'s have you gone — up against while they had forty-fives in their fists?"
Rourke shrugged his thin shoulders. "That's why I'm a reporter instead of pretending to be a detective. Look, Mike." His voice became reflective. "Did you say Paulson? Bert Paulson? From Jacksonville, huh?"
"That's what he said. Offered identification cards to prove it."
Both Shayne and Gentry remained silent while Tim Rourke rocked back in his chair again, carefully placed the tips of ten fingers against each other in front of his nose and studied them with a frown. They both respected his encyclopedic knowledge of current affairs as reported in the newspapers and his prodigious memory, and they waited to see if he could dredge anything up for them.
"Paulson? Yeh. Hell, it's been quite recent. Last two or three weeks. Jacksonville?" He closed his eyes a moment in fierce concentration, then snapped his fingers excitedly.
"Got itl Badger game. Girl named Nellie Paulson and her brother. Only they tried it on the wrong sucker two weeks ago and he called cops. It wasn't much of a splash. Just a couple of lines in the News here, but there was a description of both of them. They both got clean away," he went on. "Beat it fast when the guy refused to pay off. Jax should have a pick-up out on them," he added to Gentry.
"Doubt if they'd bother," he grunted, leaning forward to open the inter-com on his desk and speak into it. "Those badger games are hard to pin down. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the sucker refuses to prefer charges."
"I don't believe it," Shayne told Rourke flatly.
He shrugged thin shoulders. "Come up to the morgue with me and I'll find the paper. Why do you doubt me?"
"The girl mostly. She may be nuts, but I'll be damned if I can see her playing the badger game. And her brotherl Damn it, have you forgotten he says he was in Detroit until two weeks ago?"
"Maybe he made a special trip back to shake down a sucker she had lined up."
Shayne said, "Maybe. But that sure as hell wasn't the way he told it to me."
"Would you expect a guy to tell you about a badger game he'd been pulling with his sister as decoy?" Rourke demanded acidly.
A voice came over the inter-com and they all listened intently to a report from the records room that no Paulson was currently listed as wanted.
"There you are," said Shayne. "For once, Tim, your vaunted memory-"
"My vaunted memory is exactly what it's vaunted to be," snapped Rourke. "Will is right. The Jax police probably didn't bother to put out a pick-up, knowing there wouldn't be a conviction. But you call them. Chief, if you want to verify it."
Gentry looked inquiringly at Shayne.
He nodded angrily. "Check on it, for God's sake! This thing has got me going around in circles. If the girl and her brother are mixed up in something like that it changes everything."
Chief Gentry spoke into the inter-com again. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair and took another thick, black cigar from his breast pocket, snifiEed it hopefully and bit off the end.
"How does it change everything, Mike?" he asked absently. "You've still got the two of them telling diametrically opposed stories. You've still got a corpse that isn't there-a hysterical girl who doesn't recognize her own brother-"
He struck a match and put flame to the end of his cigar, contentedly puffed out a billow of black smoke.
"If they're mixed up in something like that," said Shayne. "I'd say she might have recognized him in the corridor and that's why she ran. Maybe they had a fight in Jax and he's out to get her. All that other stuff she told me-maybe that was just window-dressing-just to befog the issue because she didn't want to admit it was her own brother whom she was deathly afraid of."
"But you said," Rourke reminded him maliciously, "that she saw her brother's body and reported it over another phone before her brother jumped her. And Patton verified that when you called him."
"Yeh," Shayne agreed sourly. He angrily ran knobby fingers through his coarse hair and demanded, "Why do these screwy things have to happen to me? Why in the goddam hell can't I for just once in my life get a nice. high-priced, clean-cut sort of case like I used to handle back in World-Wide?"
"Because," Rourke told him cheerily, "youVe got all the taxi drivers in town capping for you and steering clients your way. And you'd turn it down cold if you did get one," he continued happily. "Look at tonight for instance. You have this well-stacked babe proposition you on a nice, high-priced, clean-cut sort of tailing case, and what do you do? Turn her down cold, of course. Why? Because you've got a great big black Irish hunch that something more interesting is waiting for you upstairs. So-o-o. Now you're in the middle of it, and here you are complaining."
There was a knock on the door and a uniformed man entered with a sheet of paper. He laid it on the desk in front of Gentry, saying, "The information you wanted from Jacksonville, sir."
Gentry laid his cigar aside and picked it up. He glanced through it and told Shayne placidly, "Tim was correct as usual. Bert and Nellie Paulson. Thirty-one and twenty-two respectively." He glanced on across the typed lines, muttering, "Blonde. Five-feet-four. Hundred eighteen. Brown hair. Five-ten. Hundred-fifty."
He paused a moment, frowned, and then put the sheet down, "Nothing here about a scar on his face, Mike. It's a pretty complete description otherwise."
Shayne's jaw was set and the trenches showed deeply in his cheeks. "Did I hear you read that right? Height five-ten and weight a hundred-fifty?"
Gentry referred to the sheet again. He nodded. "That's right. And no scar."
"So he was lying," Shayne said thickly. "He's not Bert Paulson at all."
"Guess not," said Gentry cheerfully. "Here's something else. It says they have evidence this isn't the first of these stunts the Paulson brother-and-sister team have pulled. Two others in the past three months that didn't get re ported until this was in the papers. Didn't your Bert Paulson tell you he'd been living in Detroit and just came down in answer to a wire from his sister?"
Shayne nodded grimly. "That's what he told me."
"And now he's gone out with a gun looking for her," said Gentry sharply. "Could be he's one of her victims that finally decided to get sore."
The telephone on Chief Gentry's desk rang just then. He answered it, said, "Hi, honey," after a moment, and extended it to Shayne. "Your ever-loving and long-suffering secretary on the wire, Mr. Shayne."
He took it and Lucy said, "She's here, Mike. You told me to call you."
"Swell." He made his voice light and bantering. "You just keep it right there until I get around. Before midnight as I promised."
He hung up and grinned. "Just reminding me she's still got that drink of cognac poured out and waiting for me.