There was a faint moon overhead and the night air of early autumn had a sensuously somnolent feel about it. There was a strongly lingering warmth from the earth after the heat of the day's sun, rising to mingle languidly with a faint inshore breeze from the Atlantic.
Driving southward at a moderate pace on the right-hand lane of Biscayne Boulevard as it entered the city, Michael Shayne glanced sideways and downward, approvingly, at the brown head of Lucy Hamilton pressed lightly against the shoulder of his white linen jacket.
He was bare-headed, and his coarse red hair was ruffled pleasantly by the night breeze. His big hands were loosely on the wheel and a feeling of contentment and relaxation gripped him.
This was the really good time of the year in Miami, he reflected. The worst heat of the summer had passed, yet the vanguard of sun-seekers from the North had not yet arrived to take over the Magic City. He hadn't a single case in his files, and probably wouldn't have for a month or more-until the quick-money boys and the suckers arrived in droves and his particular talents would become much in demand.
Lucy rubbed her cheek unashamedly against his right bicep, and said in a muffled voice, "Wake me when we get home, Michael. I'm afraid that last glass of champagne knocked me for a loop."
He chuckled indulgently. "I like you when you're looped, angel."
"What a horrible thing to say." She lifted her head momentarily in order to be properly indignant, and then snuggled it back again.
"Not at all," he protested cheerfully. "You sort of take your hair down and forget about being the prim and proper secretary."
"As if I were ever that," she scoffed,
"Of course you are. You never make a semblance of a pass at me during office hours. I have to take you out, buy you an expensive dinner and ply you with Pol Roger before you act properly human."
"Pol Roger? You know darned well that champagne came from California."
"Anyhow, it looped you. And we'll be home pretty soon and I'm going to take advantage of your condition and kiss you."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why bother?" Her voice remained muffled and sleepy, but an underlying note of intensity crept into it.
"Why bother kissing you?" he asked in perplexity.
"Exactly."
He drove on down the Boulevard, maintaining the same steady, relaxed pace, as he pondered her question and his reply. Basically, he knew what she meant. And it was difficult to find an intelligent answer to her question. Because he liked kissing her, of course. But that wasn't enough. Not enough to really answer the question she had posed.
What she was really asking was-where did it get them?
And the only honest answer to that was-nowhere, really. She didn't ask that sort of question often. Mostly, she seemed perfectly content with "things as they were." To drift along through the days as a cheerful and most efficient secretary in his office-to accept without question as many evenings like this as he could contrive for her (or wanted to contrive for her).
He stirred uneasily and lifted one hand in an unconscious gesture to tug at the lobe of his ear. Very quietly, he asked, "Would you change things if you could, Lucy?"
She sat up then, and moved slightly away from him as though this tack in the discussion required a little more formality between them. "I don't know." Her voice was grave and honestly dubious. "I just don't know, Michael."
They were below 79th Street now, rapidly approaching the side street that led to her apartment.
He turned his head briefly to study her profile in the street lights, and she met his gaze intently. For a moment there was a queer sense of strain between them. He broke it by turning his attention back to driving and saying lightly:
"Maybe time has caught up with us, angel. I feel this is a matter for serious discussion over a drink. Any cognac at your place?"
"You know there is. Whatever was left in the bottle the last time you were there."
"I never feel sure. Can't get it out of my thick head that one of these days you'll start feeding some other guy the stuff."
"Maybe I will. One of these days."
He slowed, approaching her comer, slanting over into the left-hand lane, gauging approaching trafi amp;c to cut through it without coming to a full stop.
Neither of them said anything more until he drew up to the curb in front of her apartment building and got out. He went around to open the door for her, took her elbow to help her out, then put his other hand under her other elbow and held her a moment looking down into her lightly flushed face. She made no move to push closer or to draw back. She stood quiescent, waiting.
His fingers tightened on the soft flesh of her arms and his voice was unaccountably husky as he said, "Lucy?" i
She said, 'Tes, Michael?"
He bent to brush his lips across her forehead just below the tendrils of brown hair, then turned to tuck her arm into his and led her toward the entrance.
There was a small foyer, and Lucy unlocked the inner door with a key from her purse. He held the door for her to precede him inside and up the single flight of stairs. Following her closely, Michael Shayne's red head remained level with her slender waist.
There is something peculiarly intimate, he thought fleetingly, about a man following a woman up a flight of stairs. Something almost decisive about it. As though, somehow, a die had been irrevocably cast It was a crazy thought and he tried to brush it aside. He had often followed Lucy up these same stairs for a night-cap after spending a pleasant evening together. But unaccountably it was different tonight, and he felt a surge of gladness within him that it was different.
She turned aside at the first landing to unlock her apartment door. He waited silently until she turned on the light, and then followed her inside. She wore a semi-evening gown of very dark blue silk that had a sort of glitter to it. It was perfectly simple, cut low in front and back and with narrow straps over the shoulders that left a good portion of creamy flesh bare.
He watched her speculatively as she crossed the long pleasant room toward the kitchenette, saying over her shoulder with a faint smile, "Make yourself comfortable while I get out the makings."
It was easy to make oneself comfortable here, he conceded as he dropped into a deep chair beside the sofa and lit a cigarette. The room was uncluttered, but nicely and intelligently furnished.
He stretched his long legs in front of him, leaned his head back and closed his eyes and let smoke come out through both nostrils.
AU right. Why didn't he marry Lucy? Tonight, he decided grimly, he was going to face the question squarely. He was going to ask her to face it squarely with him. Something neither of them had done before, though they had been on the verge of it many times.
He straightened up in the chair as he heard the swish of her full skirt re-entering the room. She carried a tray with a squat bottle of cognac, a four-ounce wine glass, a tumbler with ice cubes in it for herself, another tumbler filled with ice and water for him to sip while he drank cognac from the wine glass.
She set the tray down on a low table in front of the sofa, seated herself in the comer close to Shayne's chair, and filled the four-ounce glass with cognac. Then she poiu-ed an inch in the bottom of her tumbler, and held his glass out to him.
Her telephone rang before he could take the glass.
An extraordinary change came over Lucy's face. The shrill, insistent ring of the phone shattered her placidity as the glassy surface of a still pond is shattered by a stone tossed into the center.
She continued to hold the glass out for him, and said hotly, "I shan't answer it. It'll be for you, of course. No one would be calling me at this hour."
"All the more reason for you to answer it," said Shayne. "It might be important."
"A blonde?" she asked tautly.
He said easily, "Or a brunette." The telephone kept on ringing. With a gesture of impatience, he rose and crossed to it in two strides. He swept it up with his back to her and said, "Miss Hamilton's apartment," into the mouthpiece. Then he said, "That's right," and listened, his right hand going up to rub his jaw absently.
Watching him, Lucy Hamilton compressed her lips tightly and set his untouched glass of cognac back on the tray. It was a limp gesture of surrender.
With his back to her, he said incisively, "All right, Pete. I'll be there in five minutes."
He replaced the phone and turned, shaking his head sadly though his gray eyes were alert and not at all unhappy.
"Sorry as the devil, angel. But that was-"
"A blonde," she supplied for him. "A blonde in distress, no less. Just dying to weep on Mike Shayne's broad shoulder."
"Pete didn't say," he returned absently, looking around for his hat and then remembering he hadn't worn one. He suddenly became conscious of the bitterness in her face, and stepped contritely forward to touch her cheek with his fingertips. "This really sounds important. You know I've told the hotel never to bother calling me here unless it was."
"I know," she said dully, looking down so her eyes would not meet his. "So why don't you get on your white charger and ride? What's keeping you?"
"You know I'm sorry," Shayne said again. His jaw tightened when she still refused to look up. He turned to the door, saying calmly, "Keep that drink for me. I'll be back before midnight."