Brett Halliday

Weep for a Blonde

CHAPTER ONE

The upstairs sitting room had a wide picture window on the east looking out over a magnificent expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Built directly on the edge of a cliff overlooking the beach, there was a sheer drop of some sixty feet from the upstairs window to the white sand below. It was early twilight, and westward from the window was an endless expanse of nothingness, the gray, restless surging of the ocean stretching on and on into the haze of the horizon.

It was a period of half-tide, and the smooth swells rolling in from the Atlantic onto Miami Beach broke on the gently sloping shore a hundred feet out from the base of the cliff, swishing up softly on the white sand, curling back and receding to meet the next onrush of salt water.

Lydia Kane stood in front of the picture window with her back to the room, gazing out over the gray expanse of gently heaving ocean. A little above medium height, her figure was very slender and there was a tragic sort of passivity about her stance as she stood there looking far beyond the horizon. This was evidenced by the downward slope of too-bony shoulders exposed by her evening gown, in the submissive quietude of her posture, the bowed head above a too-thin neck that looked curiously taut and strained with corded muscles showing faintly on each side in silhouette.

There was a look of questing, of waiting, in the outline of her figure. A feeling of suspension in space and in time as she stood there.

On her left from the window could be seen a flight of steep wooden stairs leading down beside the stone wall marking the northern boundary of the Kane property to the private beach below, and two hundred feet to her right was another high wall of coral rock to the edge of the cliff confining the property on the south.

This was her domain. Two hundred feet of beachfront confined between high walls of weathered coral extending three hundred yards eastward from the paved street to the edge of the sheer cliff.

The sound of a car came to her as she stood there, and a tremor tensed Lydia’s body. She swung about to gaze out one of the three windows on the south, and her features tightened as she saw her husband’s automobile turn in between the high gateposts and come up the winding drive to disappear from sight as it circled into position beneath the porte-cochère at the front door.

In her mid-thirties, Lydia Kane’s features showed every evidence that she had been a surpassingly beautiful woman a few years before. The bone structure was good, with a classical nose and cleanly defined chin, smooth planes of cheeks and a wide brow above blue eyes that were startling in their clarity and roundness beneath heavy dark brows in contrast to the glistening gold of her hair piled in soft ringlets high on her head.

Today, she was clearly a woman who had been beautiful, and who continued to fight a losing spiritual fight to retain her physical beauty. It was clearly much more an emanation from within than any outward retrogression that had robbed her of her youthful beauty. Somehow, there was a lack of vitality, a brooding sense of inner defeat, a drawing back from the determination to be beautiful. The clear blue of her eyes was shadowed by something very close to fear, and there was the pinched tightness of indecision on her face as she heard Richard Kane’s car slither to a halt beneath the window, the slam of his car door and solid footsteps on the gravel circling the car to mount the four shallow stone steps leading up to the front door.

Lydia drew in a deep breath and plaited her thin fingers tightly together in front of her. Her shoulders straightened a trifle, and the look of questioning waiting went away from her. She turned from the window and moved across the rich Oriental rug out of the doorway and to the head of the winding stairway leading downward. As she hesitated there momentarily, unclasping her fingers and tightening her jaw muscles, she heard the front door open and the sound of her husband entering the living room below.

She moved down the stairs with the fingertips of her right hand trailing lightly on the mahogany balustrade, adjusting her facial muscles into a tentatively welcoming smile.

She reached the foot of the stairway and turned into the wide hall running the length of the house as his bulky figure loomed in the archway from the softly-lit front room.

Richard Kane was only two inches taller than his wife, but he was heavily and solidly built so he had the appearance of being grossly oversized. He had a bullet-head without much discernible neck, and affected a modified crewcut of his shock of black hair that gave him a pugnacious look. Heavy-lidded eyes, a square face and jutting jaw added to the initial impression.

Ten years ago when Lydia had married Richard she had regarded him as epitomizing the very height of virile masculinity. Even then his beard was so heavy that he was forced to shave in the evening if he wished to make a good appearance in public, and his deep, harsh voice had the qualities of cavemannish dominance to which the somewhat ethereal Lydia had responded with sweet and quivering submissiveness.

But that was ten years ago. Ten years of existence as Mrs. Richard Kane added up to one hundred and twenty months—three thousand six hundred and fifty days!

She paused at the foot of the steps as he moved toward her in the hallway. Her hands were tightly clenched at her sides so her fingernails cut into the soft flesh of her palms, and she tried to make her voice gushing and glad as she said brightly:

“Hi, Rich. I’ve been watching upstairs for you to drive in. Shall I make martinis while you change?”

He continued to move toward the foot of the stairs and she was forced to step aside at the last moment to avoid him. She knew he had been drinking again when he said with faintly slurred brutality, “Martinis will be all right if you’ll just for God’s sake remember to go light on the vermouth.”

She put out her hand to touch his shoulder as he set his foot on the first step.

Her voice was faint with longing as she said, “Is that all you’ve got to say to me, Rich?”

He paused, turning to regard her with glittering animosity from low-lidded eyes. “What else do you want me to say? We’ve got a table reserved for seven o’clock, haven’t we?”

She said in a thin voice, “We are married. Remember? Can’t you even say hello decently?”

He said, “Hello,” and turned to start up the stairs. Lydia’s thin fingers tightened on his upper arm with surprising strength. “Richard! How long do you think I’m going to stand your treating me like this?”

He hesitated with his bulky back uncompromisingly toward her. “This is the way we decided it was going to be, isn’t it?”

“It’s the way you decided,” she panted. “I’m going insane. Cooped up here in this house like a prisoner day after day. What do you expect?”

“I expect you to live with it and like it,” he told her brutally. He lifted his right hand to brush her clenching fingers off his arm.

She said in a low voice, “Haven’t I suffered enough, Rich?”

He said, “No,” keeping his back to her. Then, in a different tone, with a sadistic undertone of gladness, “Suffering, Lydia? I’d be happy to believe it, but I wonder. Do you really know how to suffer? Are you capable of that sort of emotion?”

Her shoulders sagged. “You are a beast, Richard.”

“No, my dear.” He turned on the first step and smiled down at her. “I’m your husband. Remember? I’m the man you promised to love and honor and obey for the rest of your life… forsaking all others. Remember? Who was it that smashed our marriage and dragged it down into the filth? Not I, Lydia. It was your free choice.”

“Please, Rich.” She swayed toward him, her hands held out imploringly, her thin face upturned in the dim light from the living room looking haggard and old. “You promised you’d forgive me. You promised that if I went on living with you, you’d never mention it again.”

“It’s you who persist in mentioning it. I don’t recall saying a single word this evening until you brought it up.”

“That’s just it,” she cried despairingly. “You don’t say a single word. You treat me as though I don’t exist… or as though I’m just a servant who lives in your house for your convenience.”

“Do you think I’m being unfair?”

“I think you’re being inhuman,” she cried out wildly, dropping on her knees and reaching her hands toward him. “Why don’t you divorce me? That would be much kinder.”

“Were you kind to me, Lydia?”

She choked off a sob and sank back on her heels, her head drooping. “I think I will go mad, Richard. Stark, staring insane.”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders and turned away from her to climb the stairs. “Because I’ve deprived you of your lover? For a woman like you, I realize that must be a very serious deprivation. But you made a bargain with me, Lydia, and I expect you to live up to it. Get some martinis working while I change.”

She remained on her knees, lifting her chin to watch his heavy body mount the stairs and turn to the left at the top to go into his bedroom which he had occupied for the past three months.

She caught hold of the railing and dragged herself to her feet, went drearily into the kitchen and got out ice cubes to make martinis the way Richard liked them.

CHAPTER TWO

Michael Shayne was in a relaxed and expansive mood. Seated across the small, secluded dining table from his secretary, the redhead was suddenly glad that he had gone to all the trouble of changing into a dinner jacket for this evening date with her.

It was hard for a man to realize how much a small thing like that mattered to a woman, Shayne mused as he looked across at Lucy’s happy face. Men and women just didn’t think alike about such things.

Not that Lucy would have been surprised or dismayed if he had turned up at her apartment earlier wearing the same business suit and four-in-hand tie that he had worn at the office all day. She was used to him and his ways, he thought comfortably. But, on the other hand, there wouldn’t be the same glow in the brown eyes across the table from him.

It was funny, but it was a fact. If a man just wanted to take the least bit of trouble, it was the simplest thing in the world to make a woman inordinately happy. Trouble with him was, Shayne told himself somewhat disgustedly, he too often didn’t bother to take that least bit of trouble.

So, he was glad he had tonight. Lucy Hamilton was beautiful in the soft glow of candlelight across from him. He didn’t appreciate her properly. She was wearing the new dress she had told him about that afternoon. Very carefully explaining that it was one of the modern fifty-fifty deals that was perfectly correct for afternoon cocktails or evening wear. Giving him an out if he didn’t want to dress for dinner, but at the same time subtly assuring him that he would not be ashamed of her appearance if he did bother to change.

The new gown had everything that Lucy had enthusiastically claimed for it. The material was a deep, rich red, with a sort of iridescent sheen to it. It had a collar that stood up behind the nape of her neck, off-the-shoulder enough to show a pleasing expanse of bare flesh on each side, yet not cut low enough to be incorrect for afternoon wear.

Shayne didn’t, of course, analyze the cut of the dress or the effect it had on Lucy’s appearance in such detail. He simply looked at her across the thin-stemmed cocktail glasses in front of them and knew that he was glad that he had pleased her so much by dressing for this date.

His basic reaction at the moment was that this was destined to be one of their good evenings together. The sidecars, for instance, were superb. He was working on his second while Lucy still dawdled with her first. A really fine cognac went into them, with the best imported Cointreau. And sufficient freshly-squeezed lemon juice to cut the sweetness and give it the clean taste of three perfectly married ingredients.

As Shayne drained the last drop from his glass, he admitted to himself wryly that he was getting soft of late. He wondered if it was good for a man to let himself enjoy this sort of thing too much. The luxurious decor and the perfect service of a joint like La Martinique on the Beach. The cloth on their table was snowy damask and the room was lighted by individual candles on each table. Each table was far enough from its neighbors that the diners could talk together in normal voices without fear of being overheard. The service was discreetly perfect, with a white-coated waiter hovering unobtrusively, but never unaware for more than a few moments of each patron’s wants.

As he set his empty glass down on the white cloth, a waiter appeared at his elbow with a faintly questioning though not servile smile on his face. Shayne nodded toward his glass and looked across at Lucy. “Ready for a refill, angel?”

She smiled happily and nodded her brown head. “One more, Michael. Then can we have dinner?”

He told the waiter. “Make mine a double in that case. And you’d better chill the champagne.” He lifted a ragged red eyebrow at Lucy and asked with an unabashed grin, “How’m I doing tonight? You really go for this set-up, don’t you?”

She smiled across at him happily, the soft glow of happiness still shining in the depths of her brown eyes. “No more than you do, Mr. Shayne. You’re sitting there guzzling it all up just the same as I am.”

“The quail probably won’t be as good as a hamburger steak with a slice of raw onion in Joe’s Diner.”

Lucy Hamilton laughed softly and leaned forward with both elbows on the table, her chin cupped in her palms. “You don’t fool me for one little moment, Michael.”

He took a cigarette from a pack on the table in front of him and leaned forward to pull flame from the candle. “Joe’s hamburgers are out of this world,” he protested.

She said, “We’ll go there next time you take me out for dinner.”

“It’s a date.” He drew smoke in and exhaled it thoughtfully. “I’ve just figured out one of the nicest things about you.”

“Tell me.”

The waiter came with a double sidecar for Shayne, a single for Lucy. Behind him was busboy wheeling a large silver ice-bucket with the napkin-clad neck of a bottle protruding from a nest of shaved ice.

“You fit perfectly in either environment.” The redhead took an appreciative sip from his large glass. “In fact, angel, you’re a very comfortable person to be with.”

She said, “I’m glad.” Her gaze slid away from his, went past him over his right shoulder, and her eyes narrowed a trifle. “I wish I could say the same thing about you.”

“What?”

“That you’re a completely comfortable person to be with.” Her gaze was still fixed at some point beyond him and her voice had a slightly deeper timbre than before.

Shayne quirked an incredulous eyebrow at her. “You’re hinting that I’m not?”

Lucy Hamilton sighed and looked back at him. “Not exactly comfortable, Michael. I think exciting is the word.”

He took another drink and his voice was teasing. “Now, angel. Don’t tell me that at your age…”

She tossed her head back and laughed lightly but with a faint undertone of bitterness. “Not you, Michael. Wait a minute. You’re getting me confused. It is you, of course. You’re a sort of catalyst… that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s exciting to go out with you because things are always so damned unpredictable when you’re around. Or, maybe I should say predictable.” The undertone of bitterness came through more strongly and her eyes were worried as she looked past his right shoulder again.

He asked quietly, “What brings that on, Lucy?”

“Just another blonde.” She kept her voice carefully light. “There’s always a blonde, isn’t there?”

“The world’s full of them,” he agreed.

“This one looks so damned possessive.” Lucy’s voice trembled a little as she withdrew her gaze and looked down at her drink. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank half of it. She said slowly, “She’s scarcely taken her eyes off you since they came in. Don’t look now, but it’s the second table back at your right. Her husband doesn’t like it either. If it is her husband… and he must be. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but it isn’t good, Michael.”

Shayne grinned across at her. “I believe you’re jealous. Can I help it if my red hair attracts blondes?”

“I’m not jealous. I just don’t want this evening to be spoiled. Damn it, I wish now we had gone to Joe’s Diner.”

“Blondes go there, too.”

“They’re quarrelling, Michael.” Lucy’s voice was low and her eyes were hooded beneath long lashes as she darted brief glances past him. “She’s so obviously interested in you.” She paused and then added unsteadily, “He’s leaving in a huff. At least he’s going away. I wish he’d drag her out with him by that blonde hair of hers,” she added fiercely.

Michael Shayne chuckled and emptied his glass. He turned slowly in the direction of her gaze and saw the broad back of a man in a tuxedo striding away from the table Lucy had indicated. The woman remaining alone had her head half-turned to watch the man’s back also, and Shayne studied her profile briefly. She was in her mid-thirties, with sharp, thin features that disquietingly reminded him of someone he had once known. Tight blonde curls were swept up on her head, giving her a clean neckline and almost a regal appearance, and when she turned her head back slowly he saw blue eyes that widened tremulously as they met his, and thin lips that relaxed from a tight into a hopeful smile.

He kept his own features coldly unsmiling and looked on past her to where her male companion had disappeared, then turned back to Lucy with a faint shrug of his wide shoulders. “No competition there, angel. She probably…”

“She’s getting up and coming over here,” Lucy told him stiffly. “Do you want me to disappear as conveniently as he did?”

Shayne grimaced at her and turned, pushing back his chair and rising as a cultivated and incongruously husky voice spoke excitedly beside him:

“Michael Shayne! It is, Michael, isn’t it? I know it is. I’d recognize you anywhere. After all these years. What a wonderful surprise, Michael. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

Close up and full face, she was beautiful. The blue eyes sparkled intensely and the short upper lip came back a trifle to show a line of white teeth. Both her hands were spontaneously outstretched and Shayne could not decently ignore them.

He took them both in his, studying the flushed, excited face and shaking his red head slowly. “I may as well be brutally frank and admit I have forgotten.”

“How could you?” Her slender fingers tightened on his with a sort of desperate strength and the gladness of her smile slowly faded. “Has it been such a very long time, Michael? I knew Phyllis so well. Don’t you remember now?”

Shayne’s grip answered the pressure of her fingers. His features tightened and hollows appeared, in both cheeks. “Lydia,” he said slowly. “Lydia… Cornwall?”

“You do remember?” Her voice was throaty and seductive again. She stood very close to him, looking up into his face with blue eyes that were big and round again. She continued to hold his hands tightly, but glanced over her shoulder almost fearfully and breathed in a low voice, “It’s Lydia Kane, now. I’m married. My husband…”

“Doesn’t approve,” Shayne put in equably, “of your renewing old friendships?”

“He…” She bit her full underlip and turned back slowly, gently releasing her hands from Shayne’s and looking past him at Lucy. “He knows who you are, of course, but I guess I never happened to mention to him that I knew you before when you were married to Phyllis. So tonight, when I saw you here and I just knew it was you and I tried to explain to him, he got fearfully angry and pretended he didn’t believe me. I… I’m so terribly unhappy, Michael.” Her eyes came back to him and she swayed forward a little. “I’ve thought of phoning you, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know whether you would… well, I just didn’t know how to say it. Then when I saw you tonight I knew I had to… Oh, Michael! Help me. I’m so frightened.” Tears came into her eyes and she swayed closer, convulsively clutching both his upper arms and burying her face against his chest.

“Perhaps,” said Lucy Hamilton in a light, brittle voice, “Mrs. Kane would like a chair, Michael.”

He turned his head to grin down at her while Lydia clung to him, sobbing. He said, “I think she’d be better at her own table,’” and put his big hands firmly on her shoulders to push her away, conscious of a couple of hovering waiters and of the amused attention of other diners nearby.

She drew away from him slowly, lifting a tear-stained face that looked almost haggard in the dim light. “Promise you’ll help me, Michael. I don’t know what else to do. I just don’t know.” Her fingers still gripped his arms and her voice trembled. “I’m so terribly alone.”

He said, “Of course I’ll help you. But this isn’t exactly the time or place…” He was turning her slowly, disengaging her hands, when a harsh voice spoke from directly behind Lucy’s chair:

“But Lydia doesn’t mind what the time or place is, do you, my dear? Just so there’s a man around to fling herself at. Get back to your table, slut!”

Shayne thrust her away and whirled to confront a short, stocky man circling around Lucy’s chair toward him. He was breathing hard and his broad face was suffused with anger, black eyes glinting murderously. He lurched a trifle and Shayne realized he was quite drunk.

Lydia Kane wailed, “Richard,” in a high, keening voice, but Shayne moved in front of her and told her husband disgustedly, “Knock it off. You’re slightly out of order.”

“Out of order, am I?” Kane’s voice was harshly slurred and he crouched a little with big hands clenched into fists. “Maybe you’d like to put me back in order, huh? Necking my wife right here in public when you thought my back was turned.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Shayne saw the head-waiter bustling up fast followed by half a dozen white-coated volunteers. He turned toward his chair, saying disgustedly, “We’ll discuss this some other time. Take your wife and beat it.”

He started to sit down opposite Lucy again, but Kane moved in suddenly with flailing fists. One of them caught Shayne high on the side of the head as he was half-seated, and the force of the blow sent him sprawling on the floor.

A flash-bulb in the camera of one of the girls who circulated among the tables taking snapshots of the diners went off at that instant, and several women screamed.

Shayne was on his feet as several waiters closed in around Kane. Black rage gripped him, and he strode in, flinging two of them aside to plant himself for a solid swing at Kane’s exposed jaw.

Lucy Hamilton was on her feet and caught his arm at the moment his fist went forward, deflecting it so it struck her shoulder, and another flash-bulb went off at the same moment.

Then she was sobbing and dragging him back, and other white-coats closed in to separate the two men, and excited voices arose all about them, and Shayne shook his head violently and unclenched his fists and stepped back, grinning down wryly at his secretary while Richard Kane was efficiently hustled away.

“Sorry, angel,” he said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t plan it this way.”

She said bitterly, “I’m not blaming you. It was that blonde. I guess it’ll always be a blonde, won’t it?” She released his arm and went around to her chair with slumped shoulders.

Shayne turned to see that the Kanes’ table was unoccupied, and to frown at the small group headed out the doorway. The other diners had reseated themselves and avoided his truculent gaze as it swept the room, and he started to pull back his own chair when the headwaiter in tails stepped up from behind and unobtrusively touched him on the shoulder.

“If you don’t mind, sir, ah, we do definitely frown at this sort of thing here at the Martinique and if you and the young lady would just leave quietly, sir, it would be, ah, much appreciated by the management.”

Shayne ruffled his coarse red hair and glared down at him. “We haven’t had our dinner yet.”

“I understand, sir. Very, ah, regrettable. If you’d just depart quietly there will be no charge whatsoever, sir.”

Shayne said, “That’s damned white of you, but we’re staying.” He pulled back his chair and sat down solidly as Lucy jumped up on the other side of the table and leaned forward to appeal to him. “Please let’s go, Michael. I couldn’t eat a bite now.”

“I like it here,” he told her stubbornly and much more loudly than was necessary.

“I trust you won’t force me to call the police,” said the headwaiter in a taut, warning voice behind him.

Shayne swung about in his chair and glared at the frock-coated man. “Call anybody you damn please, but have the waiter bring me another drink in the meantime.”

“Please, Michael!” Lucy was beside him now, leaning over, touching his cheek with her knuckles. “Everyone is looking at us. You know what I’d like right now? To try out one of those hamburgers with a slice of raw onion at Joe’s Diner.”

Shayne looked up into her worried face and beseeching eyes, and suddenly he grinned widely, reached up to catch hold of her hand and squeeze it reassuringly. “For you, angel, I’ll go. After this joint, Joe’s Diner will look good.”

He got up and put his arm about her slim waist, shouldered the hovering headwaiter aside and led her toward the door between tables where the diners kept their faces carefully averted as they went past.

CHAPTER THREE

Michael Shayne awoke at eight-thirty the next morning, feeling cheerful and rested. He lay on his back for a few minutes, reaching out for a cigarette and matches from the table beside his pillow, grinning faintly as he recalled the absurd scene at La Martinique the preceding evening.

As he drew the first pull of smoke deeply and thankfully into his lungs he was conscious of a warm feeling of well-being that pervaded him as he recalled the meek and submissive manner in which he had allowed himself to be practically thrown out of the night-club after the altercation with Richard Kane. In the past, he reflected idly, he would have been thoroughly ashamed of such a memory. It would have been much more in keeping with his instincts and temperament to have stubbornly remained at the table and called the headwaiter’s bluff—forced the man to call in the police and then probably have ended up in night court on the charge of resisting an officer.

But he was a changed man, now, he told himself with a chuckle as he mashed out his half-smoked cigarette and threw the covers back. An older and a wiser man. There was something to be said, after all, for passive, non-resistance. Lucy’s great pride in him for one thing. The way she had clung gratefully to his arm as they went out together. And that first moment after they had settled themselves in the front seal of his car when she turned without a word and put her arms tightly about his neck and pulled his face down to hers and he felt the warm tears on her cheeks. She hadn’t said anything. Just held him tightly while her body trembled against his and the trembling slowly subsided.

He swung his body out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen in his pajamas to run hot water into a teakettle and put it on a gas burner to boil, measured generous tablespoons of coffee into a dripolator.

What an utterly ridiculous thing it would have been if Lucy hadn’t grabbed his arm to prevent him from clobbering Lydia Kane’s drunken husband in front of all those people in the night-club. Fighting over a woman he hadn’t seen for at least ten years, and scarcely remembered from back in that shadowy past when Phyllis had been his wife.

Alone in his own apartment last night with a midnight drink of cognac after dropping Lucy off at her place, Shayne had worked hard to recall everything he could about Lydia Cornwall. It was all quite vague. She had been much younger, of course, and without that pinched look on her face. He had a vague impression she had been some sort of actress or showgirl, though Phyllis hadn’t been particularly inclined to mingle with a theatrical crowd. Try as he would, he couldn’t single Lydia out from among a dozen or more females he had encountered occasionally with Phyllis.

The water boiled and he poured it into the top of the dripolator, went out of the kitchen and shed his pajamas on the way to the bathroom for a fast shower. He couldn’t help wondering, of course, what her cryptic utterances of the previous evening had meant. Broken phrases kept running through his mind while he showered and shaved, moved back into the bedroom to dress.

“I’m so terribly unhappy, Michael… I didn’t know whether you would… when I saw you tonight I knew I had to… I’m so frightened…”

What woman wouldn’t be unhappy married to a jealous lug like Richard Kane? But why the devil did women stay married if they were unhappy with their husbands? Divorce was a fairly simple matter. Particularly in Florida.

She didn’t know whether he would—what? What else was it she said before Kane broke in? “Promise you’ll help me… I’m so terribly alone…”

He grinned wryly as he buttoned up a white shirt and tucked the tails inside the waistband of gray slacks. Alone? Not for very long, she wasn’t. Not with Richard Kane lurking around jealously.

Well, he hadn’t promised her a damned thing. Maybe he would have if Kane hadn’t intervened just then—but Kane had intervened—and so?

Shayne shrugged off the incident and went back to the kitchen to pour out a preliminary cup of coffee and slice a generous hunk of butter into an iron skillet.

He sipped the hot black coffee and scrambled three eggs in the melted butter over a low heat while toast popped up and got itself buttered, poured a second cup of coffee and ate with gusto at the white table in the kitchen.

He heated the remaining coffee to a boil while he rinsed the few dishes in steaming water and put them to dry in a rack on the sink, poured a cup three-quarters full and carried it into the living room, stopping by a wall cabinet to uncork a cognac bottle and fill the cup to the brim.

With the second cigarette of the morning and the best part of his regular breakfast in the cup beside him, he settled comfortably into a deep chair and contemplated Life with solid pleasure.

He was an exceedingly lucky guy. No doubt in the world about that. Here it was practically mid-morning and he sat lazing comfortably with a coffee-royal beside him and not a care in the world. There was nothing pressing waiting for him at the office. Lucy Hamilton would telephone him if anything important came up. Efficient Lucy! She would have been there since nine o’clock. Nine o’clock on the dot. Come hell or high water, the office was open at nine with Lucy on hand to cope with whatever needed coping with. Well, it was her own idea. It was she who insisted that he open a regular office on Flagler Street and that she should keep regular office hours whether he did or not.

He sighed and dragged deep on his cigarette and tested the liquid mixture in the cup to see if it had cooled sufficiently for a deep draught. It hadn’t. Not quite.

He was a lazy bastard, he told himself amiably. By all the rules of American get-up-and-go he should be down at the office eagerly waiting for a client to show up with a sizable retainer. But he always had been a lazy bastard, he countered his own argument. Phyllis had tried to change him, too, but she hadn’t succeeded any better than Lucy had.

Memory of Phyllis took his thoughts inevitably back to Lydia Kane, and he sternly put those thoughts away from him. One of the last things in the world he wanted was to mix into the marital strife between a husband and wife.

The mixture of coffee and cognac in his cup had cooled just enough so a large gulp burned pleasantly on its way down his throat, and he emptied the cup in four man-sized swallows. A warm glow tingled through his rangy body as he stood up and stretched. He sauntered into the bedroom and negligently knotted a tie about his neck, slid into a light jacket and paused by the door on the way out to pull down a snap-brim hat from the rack and tug it down over his bristly red hair.

He pulled the door shut behind him and strode down the hallway to the elevators, gave a cordial good morning to the uniformed boy who stopped for him on the way down, paused by the desk on his way out to glance with lifted red brows at his empty mail cubicle over the clerk’s head and to grin ruefully when the wizened little man said eagerly,

“Gosh, Mr. Shayne! You see this morning’s Herald? That’s a lousy picture, huh? I sure bet he caught you when you wasn’t looking.”

Shayne’s grin widened. “I haven’t seen it, but I’ve got a hunch what it is. Could be I’m getting old, Pete.”

“A-h-h-h!” The clerk’s hero-worshiping tone dismissed the suggestion as did an airy wave of his hand. “I’m not swallowing that guff in the paper—not for one minute. Anybody could tell he must of sneaked in that punch.”

Shayne said, “We’ve all got to slip some time, Pete,” and went on across the lobby into the sunlight of Second Avenue and north toward Flagler Street.

He reached his office fifteen minutes later without having given way to curiosity and glanced at a Miami Herald on any of the newsstands on the way, but Pete had fully prepared him for the gleam in Lucy’s eyes and the tight-lipped anger on her face as he strode into the small anteroom.

Seated in front of her typewriter beyond the low railing, she stormed at him, “It’s about time you were getting here, Michael. Have you seen the Herald?”

Shayne stopped just inside the door and dragged off his hat, roughing up his coarse red hair. “I haven’t bothered,” he said mildly. “I was sure you’d have a copy.”

“Look at it, Michael!” She lifted the offending newspaper from her lap to display the front page with a headline: MIAMI DETECTIVE IN NITE-CLUB BRAWL, and a prominently displayed picture of the redhead sprawling ungracefully on the floor with Richard Kane standing pugnaciously over him with doubled fists and Lucy seated across the table in the background.

Shayne crossed to the railing with a chuckle and took the paper to study the picture with interest. “What are you fussed about, angel? It’s very good of you. Of course,” he added judiciously, “your mouth is gaping open a little and it doesn’t really show off your new gown to the best advantage. Aside from that…”

“Oh, Michael! What do you think I care what I look like?” wailed Lucy. “They ought to be sued for printing that picture of you. Isn’t it against the law for a newspaper to use a picture like that without your permission?”

“We’ve still got freedom of the press in this country,” he told her with a shrug. “After all, the guy did knock me down.”

“When you had your back turned and were already half sitting in your chair. But that isn’t half of it, Michael. It’s the way the reporter wrote up the story. Full of innuendos and half-truths. Reading it cold, anyone will get the idea you had arranged to meet that woman there on an assignation. And that her husband caught you in the act and was protecting his wife and the sanctity of marriage by attacking you.”

Shayne nodded gravely and handed the paper back to Lucy. “It makes a better story that way.”

“But, Michael! Don’t you care? Don’t you realize what people will think. It’s pure libel. It… it besmirches your reputation.”

Shayne lowered one hip onto the railing and tugged at the lobe of his left ear, asking incredulously, “It does what to my what?”

“Besmirches your reputation, that’s what.”

“I’ve had worse than that printed about me,” he told her mildly. “There’s very little that can be done to besmirch my reputation in Miami.”

“But it’s so damnably unfair. They didn’t make any effort to get your side of it. Reading between the lines, you’d think Mr. Richard Kane went out triumphantly with his wife after rescuing her from a fate worse than death and that you slunk out of the place like a whipped dog to avoid being arrested for God knows what.”

Shayne got out a cigarette and lit it. “Well, it was something like that,” he reminded her. “Remember, it was your idea that we end up with a hamburger and beer instead of quail and champagne.”

“I’m sorry, Michael. I was a coward. I should have insisted that we stay and face it out. You hadn’t done anything wrong, and if they had called in the police as they threatened, the truth would have had to come out.”

He said quietly, “Don’t blame yourself, angel. Let’s face it. If I’d stuck around, there really would have been hell to pay. I probably would have socked a cop and ended up in Petey Painter’s clink. And you would have had a real juicy headline to worry about.” He grinned sardonically and leaned over to pat her cheek.

“Ever since I woke up this morning, I’ve been congratulating myself on having a secretary who knows how to handle me when I lose my head. Don’t spoil it by turning regretful now.”

She breathed, “Do you really mean it? You’re not hating me for getting you to leave?” Her brown eyes glowed and her lips parted tremulously beneath his gaze.

He leaned closer to kiss them lightly. “I’m a long way from hating you, angel.” He straightened and rose to his feet. “Anything important this morning?”

“Not very. Except…” At that moment her telephone rang. Lucy Hamilton put the receiver to her ear and said musically, “Michael Shayne’s office. Good morning.”

She listened a moment and a look of acute distaste tightened her nice features. She said into the mouthpiece, “Hold on one moment, please,” and to Shayne, after cupping her palm over the phone, “You’d better take it in your office. It’s that… Mrs. Kane.”

He hesitated, looking down into her brown eyes, and then turned away to cross the anteroom in long strides to the closed door marked “PRIVATE.”

He opened the door and entered an empty room with a large, uncluttered desk in the center, a swivel chair behind it and filing cabinets ranged along both sides.

He lowered himself into the chair, lifted the French phone and settled back comfortably, saying “Hello?” into the mouthpiece.

“Michael?” It was unmistakably Lydia Kane’s throaty voice, excited and sounding a trifle self-conscious this morning. “I’ve been dying to call you, but Richard just left and I didn’t dare while he was here. I’m so ashamed of last night. I just don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you think…”

Shayne pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket with his right hand and said wearily, “No harm done. I hope your husband sobered up.”

“Oh, Michael!” There was a sob in Lydia’s voice. “He was absolutely horrible last night. Suggesting the most awful things. And he simply wouldn’t listen to reason no matter how much I tried to argue with him. I have to talk with you, Michael. I just can’t go on this way.”

“What way?” asked Shayne casually, putting his left elbow on a book of matches to hold it firmly on the desk so he could light one of them.

“Well… the way things are. I’m afraid… oh, God, Michael, I’m just terribly afraid…”

“But not too afraid, my sweet,” broke in a harshly jeering masculine voice, “to call up your paramour the moment you think my back is safely turned. Are you listening, Shayne?”

Shayne said grimly, “I’m listening.”

“Oh, God in heaven,” moaned Lydia. “Is that you on the upstairs extension, Rich? I thought…”

“I know good goddamn well what you thought,” her husband cut in, his voice stridently triumphant. “You thought I’d left the house and it was perfectly safe for you to telephone your lover. That’s what I wanted you to think. Look. I don’t want to waste any time talking to you, but you’d better hang on to hear what I’m going to tell Mr. Shayne… the guy you claim you haven’t even seen or talked to for ten years… you listening, Shayne?”

“I’m listening. And it’s getting damned monotonous.”

“Get this straight. Stay away from my wife. If I ever catch you sneaking around her again, what I gave you last night won’t be a smidgeon to what you’ll get next time. You hear me?”

Shayne said, “I hear you,” in a flat monotone. Then, in a different tone, he asked, “Lydia? Are you still there?”

“Y-y-yes.” Her voice was tremulous with fear.

“You listen to this, too, Kane.” Shayne’s voice became grimly matter-of-fact. “I gather that Mrs. Kane wants to consult me professionally… and that’s her privilege. I’ll be available… any time and any place that suits her.”

“I’ve told you what will happen if I ever catch her with you again.”

Shayne said, “I know. Lydia?”

His only reply was a light click at the other end of the line. Then Kane’s voice came over the wire again, grating and harsh, “I’ll be consulting you first, Shayne. And it won’t be professionally. Right now I’m going downstairs to slap hell out of her for trying to put one over on me. And I’ll settle with you later.”

There was a second and more decisive click at the other end of the line. Shayne held the instrument away from his ear for a moment, frowning at it indecisively, and then replaced it on its prongs.

Lucy came hurrying into the office on clacking high heels as he did so. Her brown eyes were stormy, her voice worried.

“This is just awful, Michael. Why didn’t you tell that man…?”

Shayne clucked and waggled an admonishing forefinger at her. “Listening in again, Lucy?”

“You’re darned right I listened in,” she snapped. “And a good thing I did. That man’s dangerous. Michael.”

He rubbed his square chin reflectively with his left hand, and said, “For once, I think you’re right. Look up Richard Kane’s number in the book. On the Beach, I think.”

Lucy hesitated a moment, studying his gaunt face gravely. Then she went out and Shayne was alone for sixty seconds. Her face was perturbed when she returned to the threshold of the open door between his office and the anteroom. “There’s no Richard Kane listed either in the Miami or Miami Beach book.”

Shayne said, “Try information.”

He settled back in his swivel chair and took a deep drag on his cigarette, three vertical lines creasing his forehead, and the hollows in his cheeks deepening as he waited.

“There is a Richard Kane on the Beach,” she announced breathlessly from the doorway a short time later. “But it’s an unlisted number. Information refuses to give it out.”

Shayne shrugged and then grinned crookedly. “All right. That seems to take care of that. If he slaps enough hell out of her, maybe she won’t bother me any more. Bring in your pad for a couple of letters,” he added, “and the file on Ryerson Moore.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The long living room was light and pleasant with the morning sun streaming in from the east. It was a restful and welcoming sort of room, with hues of dull gold in the rug picked up by cheerful wallpaper with autumnal tints, by light draperies and almost daffodil yellow slip-covers on the comfortable chairs and the long couch along the north wall beneath a row of low windows.

In a shimmering housecoat of brocaded material and yellow slippers only a few shades lighter than her hair, Lydia Kane was curled up in a deep, overstuffed chair in the bright sunlight flowing in from above the ocean, fitting unobtrusively and perfectly into the setting she had chosen with such loving care when they had moved into the house just a year before.

But this morning her thin face showed the ravages of an almost sleepless night, and she sat there tensely while she listened to vague sounds from overhead that indicated her husband was dressing to leave the house.

Last night had been awful. First that completely absurd and childish display of jealousy at La Martinique, then the drive home in angry silence and the long and bitter argument that had raged for hours while Richard used every method of persuasion short of physical force to make her confess that she had been seeing much of Michael Shayne during the past ten years, and that their meeting at the night-club had not been accidental at all.

Nothing Lydia could say would dissuade him from his belief that she had been carrying on an affair with the red-headed private detective behind his back. All her denials and her pleading were useless. In the end he had stamped off angrily to go upstairs and slam the door of his own bedroom, leaving her sitting alone downstairs with the frightening realization that their marriage was, indeed, utterly smashed; that it was useless to struggle further and attempt to pick up the pieces that were the result of her one silly indiscretion a few months ago.

This morning they had not spoken to each other. She had gotten up at her usual hour and prepared his breakfast, set it out nicely for him in the dinette off the kitchen and brought her own coffee into the livingroom to drink it in brooding silence while he ate alone in the dinette.

It was an impossible situation. She faced the facts calmly this morning and knew the truth. Richard would never be able to forgive her. He was constitutionally unable to do so. If they went on together there would inevitably be more scenes like last night. He would sulk in silence for a few days and then they might again achieve a footing of cool politeness for a time, but there would be another explosion like last night the next time she dared to speak to another man in Richard’s presence.

She knew, now, that she couldn’t go on that way. She had tried so desperately to patch things up, to go along as though nothing had happened, to pretend to herself that Richard still loved her and would eventually come to understand that her silly and brief-lived infatuation for Roger had not really changed anything between them. If Richard would only understand that she still loved him—that she had never ceased loving him!

But she knew now that he wouldn’t. After last night, she told herself sternly, she had to face that fact. There was nothing she could do to change his mind. It was his masculine ego, she supposed drearily. She wondered if any man could truly understand how a loving and basically faithful wife could step over the traces and enjoy having another man make love to her.

It was all right for men to do it, she told herself bitterly. They condoned it in each other, and shrugged and said it didn’t mean anything, really, if a man did it. But women were different, they argued. No woman stepped outside of marriage if she had one iota of self-respect or one trace of love for her husband.

At least, that was the way Richard Kane argued. Lydia didn’t know about other men. Richard was the only man she had ever been married to. He was the only man she had ever wanted to be married to, she told herself bitterly as she sat curled up in the deep chair waiting for him to leave the house. Even with all his jealousy and all his faults, he was the only man she had ever loved—or ever could love.

So what was the answer? She couldn’t go on married to him this way, but she didn’t feel she wanted to go on living without him. If there were only some way of making him understand. Some way of wiping out the past and getting back to six months ago. If he could only be made to understand that she was exactly the same Lydia she had been before she met Roger—that it was Richard who had changed rather than she…

Her muscles tightened spasmodically and she turned her head slightly as she heard muffled footsteps descending the stairs. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps he had reconsidered this morning. If he would just step inside the room to give her some sort of goodbye before leaving the house!

She uncurled her legs and swallowed hard and composed her features into the happiest expression she could muster, setting herself to get to her feet and rush into his arms if he gave her the slightest opportunity to do so.

But the smile was slowly erased from her face and the light of hope died miserably in her eyes when she heard him reach the foot of the stairs and turn without even the least vestige of a pause to the rear where he went through the kitchen and opened the side door into the adjoining garage.

She sat back hopelessly, biting her underlip hard and blinking rapidly to hold back a rush of tears. She heard the whir of the electrically-operated overhead garage door, and then the roar of a motor as he started it. That subsided to a low murmur of hushed power, and she blinked tears from her eyes to watch the white top of his convertible slide past the window and disappear from sight down the winding driveway.

Then there was silence and she was alone in the house on top of the cliff overlooking the ocean. Alone and a prisoner in the house between two high walls of coral rock extending from the edge of the cliff to the roadway three hundred yards distant.

She stirred herself and angrily wiped away her tears and resolutely set herself to considering the future. A tiny wave of hope came to her as she thought about the tall, rangy redhead she had seen at the adjoining table last night. She hadn’t really become well acquainted with Michael Shayne when he was married to Phyllis, but she had been quite close to Phyllis and she recalled all the nice things Phyllis had told her about him. And from newspaper accounts over the years, she knew vaguely about his career as a private detective in Miami. If there was any man on earth who could advise her in this situation, it seemed to her it would be Michael Shayne. One thing for sure—he wouldn’t be afraid to see her and give advice. No matter how Richard had flexed his muscles last night and drunkenly boasted about knocking the redhead flat on his face, Lydia knew it was because he had caught Shayne unexpectedly and off balance with his blow.

She wondered who the quiet, brown-haired girl was who had been with him at dinner. She didn’t believe he had remarried after Phyllis’ death. The girl had seemed nice in the brief chance Lydia had to observe her, and for Shayne’s sake she found herself hoping he had found someone to take Phyllis’ place.

Because she still believed in marriage, she told herself resolutely as she got up from her chair and went across to the far corner of the room to the telephone stand. No matter what had happened to hers and Richard’s.

And because she still did believe in marriage, she riffled through the pages of the Miami directory until she found the number she wanted. She had a feeling that if anything could save hers, Michael Shayne would have the answer. She sat in the straight chair before the telephone and called his number.

When Lucy’s pleasant voice answered and she asked for Shayne, she wondered momentarily if his secretary was the girl he had been dining with at La Martinique. The telephone voice seemed to fit her, Lydia thought. How wonderful it would be if two people in love could work together in an office…

Then Shayne’s voice came over the wire, and she said self-consciously, “Michael? I’ve been dying to call you, but Richard just left and I didn’t dare while he was here. I’m so ashamed…”

His voice was just right in response to her apology. Calmly matter-of-fact and reassuring, encouraging her to go on and ask for his help—try to explain to him…

When Richard’s harsh voice broke in on the line she almost dropped the receiver in her astonishment and fright. It couldn’t be he. It must be some sort of crazy hallucination. Richard couldn’t be eavesdropping on the wire. She had seen him drive off with her own eyes. He must be miles away…

But it was Richard. Asking Shayne jeeringly if he was listening, and Shayne grimly assuring him that he was.

So he had to be on the upstairs extension. There was no other way. But how? She had been so sure…

She sat with the receiver glued to her ear, petrified with shame and with fright as she listened to the interchange between the two men. When Shayne delivered his ultimatum to Richard, she sighed feebly and removed the receiver from her ear to replace it on its prongs.

She sat there for a moment without moving, and then heard the unmistakable tread of footsteps overhead, the paralyzing sound of Richard solidly and inexorably descending the stairs toward her.

She stood up slowly and turned to face the archway leading out to the hall. He reached the bottom of the stairs and came through the archway and stopped. His broad face was darkly suffused and his eyes glittered as the sunlight behind her was reflected from them.

He spoke slowly and distinctly. “You bitch. You utter, goddamned bitch.”

She said, “No, Richard. It isn’t what you think. You’re insane with jealousy. I called Michael Shayne…”

“As soon as my back was turned.” He moved across the dull gold of the rug toward her very slowly, in a sort of shuffle, his glittering eyes holding hers. “As soon as you thought I was safely out of the way. Yes, my dear. So, you think I’m insane with jealousy. That isn’t quite true. I don’t think you’re worth jealousy, Lydia. I simply don’t take kindly to having my nest fouled.”

He continued to shuffle slowly toward her. It was sheer melodrama, but her breath caught in her throat queerly and she thrust both hands out toward him, crying:

“How could you be so petty? Sneaking back into the house to listen in on the upstairs phone on a private conversation?”

“Very ungentlemanly of me, I confess.” His voice was cruelly mocking. “I’ve wondered what goes on in this house behind my back while I’m out earning the money that buys the clothes you flaunt on your back. So, you think your Michael Shayne is the only one who can play detective, do you? You are fearfully transparent, my dear. I could see this morning that you were just panting with eagerness to get rid of me. And I wondered why. So I simply parked my car down the drive, came back through the garage and side door after removing my shoes and carrying them with me, and… ergo… so now I know. Are you still going to insist that you haven’t seen Mike Shayne or had any communication with him for ten years?”

He was very close to her now. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a terrifying grin, and for perhaps the first time in her life Lydia had a sensation of actual, physical fear.

With all the strength she could muster, she kept her voice steady to say, “I do insist that very thing. Yes. After the way you acted last night, I realized we can’t go on as we are. I decided to telephone Mr. Shayne at his office this morning to seek his professional advice. If you want to twist that into something else entirely…”

Richard Kane did not reply to her. Lydia scarcely saw the blow coming. He had stopped close in front of her with both hands hanging limply at his sides. He swung his right hand in a swift, wide arc that she instinctively tried to duck away from, but failed.

His open palm struck the side of her face with jarring force and she went to her knees in front of him. Great racking sobs tore out of her throat as her hand went up to her cheek.

He stepped back and looked down at her, studying her coolly as though he were a scientist and she a bug impaled on a pin. “I don’t believe I’m twisting anything into anything,” he told her. “What I gave Shayne last night, and what you got just now, is merely a small sample of what I’ll hand out if I ever catch you two together. Is that perfectly clear?”

Lydia slowly got hack to her feet. Her left cheek was an ugly red. She said, “Yes. I think you are making everything quite clear now.”

He said, “I’m glad I am. I think I’ll kill you, Lydia… and Shayne, too, if you keep on trying to pull the wool over my eyes. Is that thoroughly understood?”

She said, “Yes, Richard.” She turned away from him and picked up her empty coffee cup and went past him into the kitchen without another glance.

Richard Kane had gone when she came back into the room. She was alone in the house again. She sat down quietly in the deep chair by the sunlit window to contemplate her aloneness.

CHAPTER FIVE

The front bartender at The Beef House on Miami Avenue was middle-aged and bald-headed and smoothly-paunched. He was a fixture at the popular luncheon place for Miami businessmen, knew all the regular customers intimately and was regarded as quite a card by them. An unsuccessful contender for the welterweight championship in his youth, he was a local oracle on all matters of sport, and his opinion was eagerly sought and highly-regarded on all sporting events.

The long bar was crowded with customers waiting for tables when he glanced up from stirring a martini and saw a familiar, red-headed figure step inside from the street.

He deftly poured the martini in a chilled glass and caught Michael Shayne’s eye with a welcoming nod, slid the brimming glass in front of a customer and turned mechanically to reach behind him on a shelf for a bottle of Shayne’s favorite cognac.

With his fingers touching the bottle, he hesitated and then jerked his hand back as though the glass were hot. He moved a few steps to his right instead, opened a small refrigerator and removed a quart bottle of milk.

Holding it beneath the level of the bar so it couldn’t be seen, he strolled back and blandly greeted Shayne who had found an empty space at the end:

“Afternoon, Mr. Shayne.” He cocked his head critically on one side to study the rugged features of the redhead. “You’re looking remarkably well, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. That is to say… everything being considered.”

Shayne leaned both elbows on the bar and said, “I don’t mind your saying so at all, Pat. So maybe you’ll oblige me with a drink.”

“Right you are, sir. Just what the doctor ordered.” With his left hand the bartender set a highball glass on the mahogany, uncapped the milk bottle and poured the glass full in front of Shayne’s horrified gaze.

“Finest Grade A in Miami,” Pat assured him blandly. “You just drink that straight down, Mr. Shayne, and you can be assured, it’s myself, that’s telling you…”

Shayne said helplessly, “Milk? For God’s sake, Pat…”

“Milk it is, Mr. Shayne.” Pat’s voice was brisk and unnecessarily loud, causing faces to turn toward them from all down the bar. “As soon as I saw that thing in the paper this morning, I says to myself: ‘If I know Mike Shayne, he’ll be in strict training for a return bout from this minute on,’ and I up and ordered this here ’specially for you, knowing you’d be likely to drop in today for lunch.” He held up the quart bottle proudly so everyone could see it.

Shayne grimaced and said wearily, “You’re a real comedian, Pat, but I’ll do my training out of the same bottle I’ve always used… if you don’t mind.”

Pat shrugged elaborately, his face expressing sad concern. “Whatever you say, Mr. Shayne. It’s your own interests I’ve got at heart and you can lay to that. Well do I remember when Dully laid down the law to me in my younger days. Dan Duffy, that was. Trainer of Champions they called him when I was a broth of a boy with my own two fists.” At this point, Pat danced back from the bar and assumed a fighter’s stance with his doubled fists in front of him. “I remember Dully saying to me…”

There were appreciative chuckles along the bar, and Shayne interrupted him to say, “All right, Pat. So I got myself clouted last night, and I agree it’s funny as hell. You can set out the bottle of Monnet now.”

“If you insist, Mr. Shayne.” Pat looked genuinely downcast, and turned to wink down the length of the bar at his grinning audience. “Cognac it is, though if you’d take my advice…”

“The advice he needs,” a chuckling voice broke in behind Shayne as a hand descended on his shoulder, “is to lay off the blondes when they’re squired by jealous husbands.”

Shayne didn’t bother to turn his head, but said out of the side of his mouth, “You and Pat should work up an act together, Tim.” He hunched his rangy body aside to allow Timothy Rourke to squeeze in beside him, glowered down at the glass of milk while Pat ceremoniously set out a four-ounce wineglass and poured it nearly full of cognac, then placed a tall glass of ice water beside it.

Rourke’s figure was bony and almost scarecrow thin. He was a top reporter on the Daily News and Shayne’s closest friend in Miami. He wrinkled his nose delightedly at Pat and nodded when the bartender set out a double shot-glass and reached for a bottle of rye, and told Shayne joyfully, “We’re running a real spread in the News. Complete with statements from Lucy and a report from the ringside doctor, and we’re angling for an exclusive comment from Dr. Kinsey on the comparative merits in American males of sexual and physical prowess.”

Shayne growled, “Dr. Kinsey has been dead for quite a while, so that’s going to be a trifle difficult.” He drank deeply from his cognac glass and followed it with a sip of ice water. “You got a booth for us, Pat?”

“Mr. Rourke’s regular one.” Pat nodded his bald head and added in a tone of blandishment, “All in good fun, Mr. Shayne. If there is a return bout I’d like to be in your corner… even if you do train on Monnet.”

Shayne grinned and gathered up his two glasses to follow Rourke back to a vacant booth with a RESERVED sign on the table.

They settled themselves opposite each other with Rourke facing the front, and the reporter leaned forward to demand seriously, “What in hell is the dope on the Martinique thing, Mike? I slashed our story to a brief item on page four.”

Shayne shrugged and said, “The guy was tight, and when his wife came to our table he blew his top. Lydia Cornwall,” he added slowly. “A friend of Phyllis’, Tim. Do you remember her?”

“Cornwall? Lydia Cornwall?” Timothy Rourke blinked his deep-socketed eyes and his almost-emaciated features grew thoughtful. He shook his head. “I don’t tie it up. I didn’t know too many of Phyllis’ friends, Mike.”

“I know. Actually, I didn’t either.” Shayne frowned, twisting his wineglass in circles on the table. “What about Richard Kane? He strike any note with you?”

The reporter had covered every major news break in Miami for almost two decades, and his memory for names and people who had been in the news was phenomenal, but now he frowned and shook his head again. “I read the Herald story about last night. Seems he’s a fairly wealthy contractor with a place on the Beach.”

“Work on it a little,” Shayne urged him. “Anything to do with his marriage. Wife-trouble. Stuff like that.”

Rourke continued to shake his head. “I can check the morgue after lunch.” His eyes glittered brightly as they studied the detective across from him. “What aren’t you telling me? Have you been playing around with the blonde?”

Shayne drained his glass and looked around for a waiter to refill it. He said disgustedly, “Hell, no. That’s just it. I took a sock last night for nothing at all.” He rubbed his bony jaw reflectively. “Kane was in such a hurry to jump me, that I just wondered…” He shrugged and gave up his glass to a waiter who stood beside them while Rourke emptied his also.

Then he said, “I had a phone call at the office this morning.” He went on to relate how Lydia had telephoned him thinking her husband was safely away from the house, and how Kane had broken in on them from the upstairs extension. He ended by spreading out his big hands, “So Kane is now thoroughly convinced that I’m his wife’s lover, and he probably thinks she calls me every day as soon as his back is turned. Which makes me think maybe he has some good reason for believing the worst of her, and I wondered if there had been any previous record of discord between them.” The waiter brought their second drinks and took their luncheon order.

Rourke said, “It sounds like something I’d stay the hell away from, Mike. What the devil? If there’s nothing personal between you and Lydia…”

“She was one of Phyllis’ friends,” Shayne reminded him.

“Someone Phyllis knew. You don’t know how well. No reason why she should presume on that after all these years.”

“But she’s in trouble, Tim. Damn it, she’s really frightened.”

“Probably with good reason,” the reporter said sourly. “If I were playing around and married to a guy with enough moxie to flatten Mike Shayne with one swing, by God, I’d be frightened, too. He probably beats her up every night before they turn in. And maybe she deserves it. You stay out of it, Mike. What will Lucy think if you go meddling between a man and his wife? You’ve never fooled professionally with stuff like that.” Shayne drank half his cognac, his gray eyes bleak and the muscles in his face tightening so the hollows in his cheeks deepened. He said somberly, “The son-of-a-bitch shouldn’t have warned me off, Tim. That’s the one thing I can’t stomach. How long would I last in my business if I let threats decide which cases I’d take or turn down?”

“You haven’t got a case yet. Just an hysterical wife looking for a broad shoulder to weep on, it seems to me. You’ve always steered a wide course away from hysterical wives in the past.”

“Sure. But this woman is frightened, Tim. I’ve a feeling she really needs help.”

“Let the police help her,” said Rourke callously. “Admit the truth, Mike. The only trouble is that you’re faced with a challenge. If Kane had kept his mouth out of the affair, you would have given the gal some fatherly advice and gone on your way. As it stands now, you’re constitutionally unable… oh, oh!” His voice changed abruptly as he looked past Shayne’s left shoulder toward the front of the restaurant. He continued in a lower tone: “Don’t look now, but I’ve got a feeling that all my good advice is wholly academic. Keep hold of your crazy, goddamned temper, Mike. Unless I’m nuts, Pat is going to have his hopes for a return bout realized long before he expected it.”

Shayne didn’t bother to turn his head. He asked, “Kane?”

“Yep. From his picture in the Herald. Breathing fire from both nostrils. He’s talking to Pat now, and you know that crazy Mick isn’t going to pass up a chance to see some action. Who knew you were lunching here?”

“Only Lucy.”

“She wouldn’t pass the word to him. Oh, oh! Pat’s given him the word and here he comes, Mike.”

“Not if she knew who he was,” Shayne agreed casually. “But I always tell her I’ll be here if anything comes up.” Shayne hunched his wide shoulders forward over the table and lifted his cognac glass to his mouth. He drained it and set it down as a familiar, harsh voice spoke from the aisle beside him:

“I want to talk to you, Shayne.”

Timothy Rourke was on his feet and leaning forward over the table before. Shayne turned his head to look at Kane. The reporter said explosively:

“If you have the faintest idea what’s good for you, you’ll turn around and get out of here fast.”

“Suppose I haven’t the faintest idea of what’s good for me?”

“Then you’ll stick your neck out and get clobbered,” snapped Rourke. “For God’s sake, Mike, let me handle this goon,” he went on angrily with a side glance at the red-headed detective who was turned to look at Kane now, with his hands flat on the table in front of him, half-supporting his weight.

Michael Shayne said easily, “Why, no, Tim. I think he came here looking for me. So, he’s found me. So, let him have his say.”

“You bet I’ll have my say, Mike Shayne.” Richard Kane rocked back and forward on his heels, both hands thrust deep into the patch pockets of a tweed sport jacket, his black eyes narrowed down at the detective.

“I gave you fair warning last night, and I repeated it this morning. Stay away from my wife, Shayne.” His voice was loud and it carried through the unnatural silence gripping the restaurant.

Shayne said disgustedly, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” and he straightened up abruptly, his thighs pushing the table forward so Rourke was pinioned between it and the seat.

“Get out,” Shayne told Kane in a low, intense voice.

Kane took his hands out of the pockets of his jacket and doubled them into big fists. He thrust his jaw forward pugnaciously and said, “Maybe you’d like to put me out?”

Shayne came unleashed. He twisted in the constricting space between table and seat, drove his right fist solidly to the aggressively outthrust chin of Richard Kane.

As the bulky figure staggered back and started to go down, Shayne watched him through a red haze while he twisted out of the narrow space and smashed his left fist into the other side of the falling man’s jaw.

Kane went to the floor heavily, and Shayne stood over him with doubled fists for a moment, breathing hard and glaring downward, until Rourke’s thin fingers dug into his arm and pulled him back, while the reporter moaned:

“Mother of God, Mike! Sit down and take it easy. I’ll have to write this story for the News.”

Shayne turned his back on the sprawled figure of Kane, and sat down, pulling the table toward him to make more space for Rourke.

He said conversationally, “The crazy son-of-a-bastard doesn’t know when he’s well off. When you do write it up, Tim, be very sure you make it clear that his wife is a client of mine… and I don’t let anybody come between me and my clients.”

He picked up his cognac glass and sucked the last drop from it while employees of The Beef House helped Richard Kane from the floor and hustled him out, then he turned to call happily to a waiter:

“Tell Pat I want another and this one is on the house. I’m really going into training now.”

CHAPTER SIX

The telephone was ringing when Shayne opened the door of his hotel apartment at eight o’clock that evening. He tossed his hat on a rack near the door and crossed the room in unhurried strides to scoop up the instrument from a center table and say, “Shayne speaking.”

He frowned morosely when Lydia’s voice came over the wire: “Michael! Your phone has been ringing and ringing…”

He said, “I just came in. Hold it a minute.” He laid the telephone on the table, pulled off his jacket and dropped it on the back of a chair, crossed to the liquor cabinet while loosening his tie. He took down a bottle and a four-ounce glass, carried them into the kitchenette where he turned on the cold water tap, got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and set it in the sink under the running water. He filled the glass nearly to the brim with cognac, then put partially melted cubes in a taller glass, filled it with cold water. His movements were unhurried, smoothly mechanical without a single wasted motion, and the morose frown stayed on his face as he carried the two glasses back and set them on the table beside the unpronged telephone. He settled himself comfortably and lit a cigarette, took an appreciative sip of cognac and chased it with a little ice water before finally lifting the phone and saying, “Are you still there, Lydia?”

She said, “Of course I am. I have to talk to you. Are you… alone, Michael?”

He said, “Yes. Are you?”

“I don’t blame you for asking after what happened this morning. I was so humiliated, Michael.”

“I did ask,” he reminded her mildly.

“What? Oh… am I alone? Yes. I certainly wouldn’t have called otherwise. I’m on the upstairs phone this time and I just watched Richard drive away. From the window here I can see all the way down our drive to the street and he can’t possibly sneak back without my knowing it. So it’s perfectly safe this time.”

Shayne grimaced and said, “It’s not that I give much of a damn for myself. Did your husband tell you what happened today?”

“He hasn’t spoken a word to me since he stalked out of the house this morning. He came home half-tight about six and sat around and sulked and drank some more, and went slamming out a few minutes ago without saying a word. I know how he is, Michael. He won’t be back until midnight or later, and then he’ll be blind drunk. What did happen today?”

Shayne said, “Get a late edition of the News.”

“Did you see Richard, Michael?”

“I saw him,” Shayne said grimly. He took a sip of cognac and went on, “I have no idea what your personal set-up is, but the way your husband is acting I think you’d better get out from under fast.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about, Michael. Right now. Tonight. I’ve just about reached the end of my rope.”

“Would you like to meet me some place?”

“I can’t. I don’t even have a car any more.”

Shayne said, “There are still taxis running.”

“But if he ever found out I’d left the house at night, he’d… I don’t know what he might do. Can’t you come here? I swear it will be perfectly safe. He never comes home until after midnight when he’s drinking like this.”

Shayne’s expression hardened. He said, “That’s not why I’m hesitating. If you want to consult me professionally I’m at your service.”

“That’s exactly what I do want, Michael. I want to pay you a retainer and all. I’ve got sort of an idea that you can advise me about. Will you come out?”

Shayne said, “Sure.” He glanced at his watch. “On the Beach, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Lydia Kane gave him an address a little south of 79th Street. “There’s a stone wall with high gateposts leading off to the right. Our house is right on the ocean.”

Shayne jotted the address down and said, “I know about where it is. Look for me in half an hour or so.” He hung up and took another drink, glowering down at the telephone. He didn’t look forward to the assignment. Under almost any other circumstances he would have left the Kanes strictly alone to settle their own marital difficulties between themselves. But various things had conspired to push him into this. He had been suckered into a position from which he couldn’t gracefully withdraw. He didn’t like it, but there it was. Might as well get it over with tonight, and then forget the Kanes. He owed that much to the memory of Phyllis.

He drained his smaller glass and topped the cognac with two big swallows of ice water, got up and adjusted his tie and put his jacket on again. He patted his pockets to make sure he had extra cigarettes, then grabbed his hat and turned out the light on his way out. Driving across the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach, Shayne held the big sedan at a moderate speed and forced himself to relax behind the steering wheel. The moon was a little past full and it hung in the sky directly in front of him just above the lacy tops of palms lining the causeway. Huge and almost round, impossibly golden, it gave a feeling of serenity to the night that made the tawdry sexual affairs of human beings like the Kanes seem completely unimportant and certainly not worthy of all the attention they were getting.

Clean night air, scented by the salt spume of the Atlantic came through the open windows of the car, and Shayne pulled off his hat and dropped it on the seat beside him to let the breeze ruffle his coarse red hair.

He refused to look ahead to the interview with Lydia. He had very little sympathy with husbands or wives who didn’t get along with their spouses, and he was in a mood to do some very plain talking to Lydia if she tried to weep on his shoulder tonight. From his two brief encounters with Richard Kane, Shayne felt it was little wonder that their marriage was on the rocks, and he had little desire to help keep it going. Very definitely, it was not the sort of situation that aroused his professional interest. For Phyllis’ sake, he would listen to Lydia and give her the best advice of which he was capable, though he knew beforehand she was unlikely to take the sort of advice he would offer.

He reached the end of the causeway and drove onto the peninsula, continuing eastward to the main thoroughfare that ran north past the large private estates bordering the ocean.

He checked a street number occasionally, slowing as he approached the one Lydia had given him, and had no difficulty finding the high gateposts that led in to the walled property. The driveway curved upward on a slight grade through a well-kept lawn dotted with tropical shrubbery to the two-story house on the edge of the cliff. Light streamed from the lower windows though the upper floor was dark. There was a wide circle that swung past the garage adjoining the house, and Shayne’s headlights showed the doors open and the two-car garage empty.

He stopped under the porte-cochère at the front door and turned off his motor and lights. There was the cheerful sound of tree-frogs from the landscaped area in front of him, and the dull pound of surf at the base of the cliff beyond the house as it approached full tide, and he sat behind the wheel for a moment while he pulled his hat down over bristly hair, loath to go inside and listen to a recital of Lydia’s difficulties.

But he had promised her, and the sooner he went in the sooner it would be over. He unlatched the door and got out, circled the front of his car to the stone steps with a night light above the closed double doors.

He pressed an electric button and almost immediately the right-hand door opened inward and Lydia Kane was outlined in the rectangle of bright light.

She wore a simple blouse of white silk and a full peasant skirt of brightly variegated colors, and she held both her hands out eagerly to draw him inside, saying throatily, “I’m so glad you came, Michael. I just couldn’t stand being alone again tonight.”

He let her take both his hands, and she stepped back to shut the door behind him, then moved close so the tips of her breasts touched his chest lightly and her eyes looked up pleadingly into his.

He put his arm about her shoulders in a brotherly sort of embrace and said gruffly, “Sure. It’ll do you good to get it off your chest, Lydia.”

Tears started in her eyes and she dropped her lids quickly to hide them. Then she pressed the length of her body against him fiercely with her forehead just touching his chin while sobs shook her, and Shayne stared somberly over the bright blonde curls atop her head at the long, pleasant sitting room and angrily considered what a hell of a thing it was that marriage did to some people.

She clung to him for a long moment and he held his arm tightly about her shoulders. Then she drew away and laughed shakily and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, telling him, “And I swore I wasn’t going to break down and weep tonight. Forgive me, Michael. I’m all right now that you’re actually here.” She turned away, holding one of his hands tightly and drawing him toward the long sofa with a glass coffee table in front of it holding an assortment of bottles and glasses.

“I’ve got the cognac set out and ready for you. And I know you used to take it with ice water on the side.”

Shayne said, “I still do.” He sat on the couch and she busied herself pouring him a drink of straight cognac and liberally splashing bourbon into a tall glass that already held three partially melted ice cubes and the residue of a former drink. She sat beside him, not too close, and lifted her glass to make her blue eyes round over the rim of it at him.

“Let’s drink to my finding you again, Michael. You don’t know how wonderful it is to just have you here.”

Shayne lifted his glass and drank with her, settled back against the cushions and got out a pack of cigarettes. She shook her head when he offered her one, curling one leg up beneath her and saying pensively, “I can’t apologize enough for Richard last night. And then that awful thing this morning when he sneaked back and listened in when I phoned you. The horrible things he said. He just isn’t right, Michael. He’s got a complex about me and other men. And it’s getting worse all the time. Just eating him up with jealousy. In the beginning I thought it was proof he loved me, and I didn’t mind so much. But how can a man love anyone when he suspects such awful things about her? It’s getting to be a mania with him. I don’t know what he might do. This morning… after I hung up… he came downstairs and struck me after saying the most awful things. It’s the first time he… ever did anything like that I’m actually afraid he may… kill me some time if he doesn’t get straightened out.”

Shayne lit his cigarette and sucked smoke deep into his lungs, expelled a thin column of bluish vapor. He said flatly, “You’ll have to leave him, Lydia.”

“But then he will go over the line. I can’t do that to him. I’d feel like a murderer.”

“Better you than he,” said Shayne grimly.

Lydia shuddered and drank deeply from her glass and set it down on the table with a slight clatter. “You don’t understand, Michael.” Her voice was low and tremulous. “I still love him. Can you understand that?”

“All the more reason why you shouldn’t stay here and turn him into a murderer,” Shayne told her brutally. “That’s not going to help anyone.” He got up to stride to the end of the room where he stood for a moment looking out at the moonlit surge of waves below the window. He turned and went on wearily, “And you’d better begin thinking about the innocent bystanders you’re getting tangled up into the deal with you. One of these days you’re going to speak to an old friend as you did to me last night and it’ll end up in something nastier than just a night-club brawl. Did I tell you,” he went on harshly, “that the fool hunted me up at luncheon today and I had to slap him down?” She hung her head before his accusing eyes, shaking it slowly from side to side. “You didn’t tell me over the phone. Just that I could read about it in the afternoon paper. We don’t get the News,” she ended drearily.

Shayne shrugged and said, “It simply doesn’t make sense, Lydia. You admit he’s becoming psychopathic. Get away from him while you can. If he’s determined to go to hell… let him go to hell by himself.”

“I told you I still love him.”

“Nuts!” said Shayne violently. “Maybe you still love the guy he was when you married him. But you admit he’s turning into a different person. You’re just kidding yourself, my sweet. You’ve got some sort of complex of your own if you keep on closing your eyes to the truth.”

She lifted her head, biting her underlip in agony. “I guess I have,” she said faintly. “I guess that’s it. I have got a complex. A guilt complex. I can’t run away from it. Don’t you see I can’t? I’m to blame for what’s happening. I was such a fool, Michael. I loathe and despise myself. I’ve got to stay with him and pay for my own damned foolishness.”

“Even if it ends up with you a corpse and him in the electric chair?”

“No matter how it ends,” she cried wildly. “But you’ve got to help me prevent that, Michael. Don’t you see? You’ve got to help me convince hint that other thing didn’t mean anything. That I still love him just as much as ever, and that I am faithful. That’s his only salvation now. If I leave him, he’ll be convinced that he was right all along.”

Shayne shrugged and turned to throw his cigarette butt into the fireplace. “A lot of help I’ll be. He’s already thoroughly convinced I’m your lover.”

“I know. And it’s so silly. I had thought you could do it, but now I know he’d never believe you. But you can advise me, Michael. Give me the name of another detective in town who’s absolutely trustworthy. Because you see, that’s what Richard did. Got some local detective to follow me before and make reports to him. And now I thought if I’d get another one to do the same thing… and turn over his reports to Richard, don’t you see, that it would counterbalance the other.”

Shayne said, “I’m afraid I don’t see.” He went back to the sofa and reseated himself, took a small sip of cognac and leaned back comfortably. “You’d better start at the beginning and give it all to me in plain words.”

“I don’t know just when it began. Richard has been fearfully jealous and possessive all during the ten years we’ve been married. And I didn’t mind in the beginning. He had no reason at all for it. But he kept suspecting things and accusing me until it finally seemed to me it would just pay him back in his own coin if I did have an… well a sort of an affair. It never was serious, just exciting, sort of.

“I met this man at a party and he was extremely attractive and we flirted a little and then got to slipping off alone for lunches and dinners and things. And that was absolutely all, but Richard caught on somehow and he didn’t say a word about it to warn me. Instead, he hired a detective to watch me. This was just a few months ago. And he finally came home raving one night and had a whole list of places where I’d met Roger and he threatened all sorts of things. And he took my car away and sold it and told me he was having a watch kept at the gate and he’d have a record of every car that drove in here day or night.

“It made me awfully mad at the time because there hadn’t been anything between Roger and me… not really. But he believed the very worst and accused me of committing adultery and said he’d have to keep me locked up here like a prisoner in a harem… and I just wanted to see Roger one last time to tell him goodbye, and so we fixed it on the phone to have him come on a night when Richard was going to be out, and slip along the beach down below where it’s dry at low tide and come up the stairs in the back way through the kitchen.

“But Richard caught on some way, I never did know how… whether he had his dreadful detective tap our telephone or what… and he came back while Roger was here and chased him out and down the back stairs with a pistol. And that was the first I realized how big a fool I was, and how bad Richard was getting… and it’s just been hell ever since then.

“Richard doesn’t even speak to me for days at a time and I stay cooped up here afraid to even call a taxi to take me out any place for fear Richard will find out and misconstrue it.”

“So you think he’s still having you watched by a detective?” Shayne asked quietly.

“I don’t think so. He swears he isn’t. I begged him to, you see, because I pointed out that would prove to him that I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t, and then he got nasty and refused to do it just because I wanted him to.”

“But you don’t know for sure?” persisted Shayne.

“I just don’t know what goes on in his mind any more.”

“Women?” said Shayne wonderingly. “With all that background, you invite me up here tonight. Knowing the place may be watched… and after he’s twice publicly accused me of having an affair with you. How in hell do you think he’ll react if he comes home and finds me here?”

“But I’m sure he won’t. He’s out some place getting sodden drunk. And I didn’t think you’d be afraid anyhow, Michael. You’re not like Roger. Just running with his tail between his legs.” She looked at the detective with admiringly rounded eyes. “You’d know how to handle Richard if he did come. And you could explain everything and make him feel ashamed of himself…”

Shayne continued to shake his head wonderingly, a look of disbelief on his face. He said, “You are a bitch, Lydia. I’ll be damned if I don’t believe you hope he will come home while I’m here, just for the excitement of it.”

“Michael! How can you believe such a horrid thing?”

“Because it’s the only thing that makes sense,” he told her angrily. “By your own account, you’ve practically driven your husband insane with jealousy, yet you refuse to leave him. You stay on here and after getting your former lover almost killed, by God you make a pass at me last night while your husband’s back is turned, and then talk me into coming out here tonight. And I fell for it just because you were once a friend of Phyllis’ and because I didn’t like your husband’s jumping on me, and felt sorry for you.

“Sorry, by God.” He laughed shortly and got up from the sofa. “And all the time you were setting me up like a sitting duck so your husband’s suspicions would be confirmed. You’re the one who needs a psychiatrist, rather than your husband.”

Lydia came out of the sofa fast as he started to turn away. She flung herself on him, weeping wildly. “It wasn’t like that. I swear it wasn’t. Maybe it was foolish to ask you here, but I was at my wit’s end. Don’t go, Michael. I know Richard won’t come back. He absolutely refused weeks ago to have the detective go back to watching me when I begged him to.”

Shayne pushed the sobbing woman aside, his features as hard as granite. “I’ve given you the only advice I can. Get out of this house and give your husband a chance to recover. Stop playing with fire, you little fool.”

He was striding toward the door when the telephone rang from the other end of the room.

“That’s probably Richard now,” Lydia said brokenly. “Wait while I answer it and find out where he is. Then you’ll know it’s all right to stay awhile and…” While she spoke, she hurried frantically to the telephone and scooped it up. Shayne stopped with his hand on the door-knob, waiting to have a final word before walking out of the house and leaving her to her own devices.

She lifted the telephone and said tremulously, “Hello. Oh yes, Richard…” and then pressed the mouthpiece tightly between her breasts to tell Shayne before he could halt her:

“It is Richard, Michael. Wait until…”

From where he stood at least twenty feet away, Shayne heard the grating interruption from the telephone receiver: “Yes, Michael. It is Richard, sure enough. Please do wait until I can get there…”

The color drained from Lydia’s face and she held the telephone out in front of her, recoiling from it as though it were a deadly snake. Then she dropped it on its prongs, crying out, “How could he hear me, Michael. I held it just as tight as I could…”

“With the mouthpiece pressed right against your breastbone,” Shayne finished for her grimly. “If you didn’t know it before, and I’ll be damned if I know now whether you did it intentionally or not, that has exactly the same effect as talking directly into it. The vibrations of your voice are transmitted through the bone directly to the diaphragm and he heard you speak my name as clearly as I did.”

“But I didn’t ever dream that, Michael,” she cried in a stricken voice. “I always thought it was perfectly safe…”

“It doesn’t matter now what you thought,” he told her wearily. “From what I know about your husband, he’ll be helling back here in a few minutes with blood in his eye. You’d better come with me and give him a chance to cool off.”

“No! You go, Michael. Hurry, please. I don’t know where he was, but you’ll have time to get out of the driveway and away safely before he can get here.”

“And leave you to martyrdom?” asked Shayne in disgust. “Don’t be an utter fool. Come on, damn it. This is no time for mock heroics.”

“I shan’t run away from him,” Lydia said quietly, a desperate sort of dignity taking possession of her. She drew herself up tautly. “I’m still his wife. If he finds me alone he won’t hurt me. Please go at once while there’s still time.”

Shayne hesitated with his hand on the door-knob, carefully studying the situation. The worst thing that could possibly happen would be for Kane to come tearing back and find them in the house together. Lydia had mentioned his use of a gun in similar circumstances. Someone was bound to get badly hurt if he stayed until Kane had time to get back.

On the other hand, it would be madness to leave Lydia behind to face her enraged husband alone. But if he wasted time trying to take her with him by force, it might be too late.

He made a fast decision and jerked the front door open, slammed it shut behind him and trotted down the steps and around in front of his car to the driver’s seat. By pulling away fast and getting his car down to the narrow gateway, he could stop there to effectually block the driveway and prevent Kane from reaching the house. If he could disarm the man and talk to him…

Shayne switched on his motor and lights, and at the same instant there was the unmistakable sound of a gunshot from inside the house. Shayne straightened in the seat and listened intently for a few seconds, but there was no other sound. With a curse deep in his throat, he slid across the seat, jerking open the glove compartment and grabbing a .38 that was there.

He lunged out and up the steps, shoved the door open and ran into the silent sitting room that now held the acrid smell of burned gunpowder.

Lydia Kane lay on the rug not more than ten feet from the front door. There was a bullet-hole high on her right temple and she was manifestly dead.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Michael Shayne stood very still a few feet in front of Lydia’s crumpled body, staring down at her grimly. His first instinctive thought was that she had shot herself rather than face her husband’s wrath. Only moments had elapsed between his hurried exit and the shot. So far as he knew, she had been alone in the house…

But there was no weapon in sight. She lay partially on her side with both hands flung out in front of her. Of course, she might have fallen on the gun…

He stepped closer and leaned down to study the small, round wound in her temple. There were powder burns, and it was placed at an angle that made it impossible for her to have fired the shot.

As Shayne leaned over her he became conscious of a change in the temperature of the room since he had left it. There was a chill breeze blowing in from the back, and he whirled away from her in that direction with gun in hand, ran down the wide hallway past the stairway to the open door of the kitchen from which the breeze was coming.

The room was dark and he hesitated on the threshold, finding a wall switch that lighted the kitchen brilliantly. Directly in front of him, a back door stood wide open and the wind swept through it from the ocean.

Three strides carried Shayne across the room and he flipped another switch beside the rear door that turned on an outside spotlight focussed on a steep, narrow stairway leading down to the beach.

Shayne leaped through the open door and plunged down the stairway, recalling Lydia’s story of how her lover had once sneaked in this way when the tide was low and the strip of the beach below the house was dry.

Now the tide was full, and the floodlight behind him showed small waves breaking over the bottom step. That’s all the light did show, and Shayne stepped down into eight inches of water, turned to his right to follow the base of the cliff southward.

In two long strides he was out of range of the floodlight, but the moonlight was bright enough to show that the beach in front of him was deserted.

But Shayne trotted on with the waves sloshing up to his knees, convinced that this was the route by which Lydia’s killer had escaped. And he was only moments behind him. He had no idea how far it would be before there was another stairway leading up to the top of the cliff.

He increased his strides to top speed, staying as close to the cliff as possible where the water was shallowest, striving to pierce the moonlit haze in front of him for sight of a fleeing figure.

Then his left foot struck a hole in the sand or a submerged piece of driftwood and he sprawled full-length in the water, his gun flying out of his hand as his grip instinctively relaxed on it.

He struggled to his feet instantly, blinking salt water out of his eyes and spitting sand from his mouth. He realized at once that if he wasted time now searching for his gun under the surface of the water he would surely give the killer time to escape, so he ran on again, slowed down somewhat by watersoaked clothing.

He had almost reached the southern boundary of the Kanes’ private beach when he heard the sound of an automobile motor starting on the cliff above him, and it roared loudly and then faded into the other night sounds. He continued on doggedly another ten paces to the bottom of another wooden stairway leading up the face of the cliff just south of the Kanes’ wall. Moonlight clearly showed the dripping wetness of footprints leading upward. He hesitated a moment, looking up grimly and hearing nothing, decided against following up the stairs and ruining the wet footprints that might be a clue to the murderer’s identity.

He turned back instead, trotted along through the water again without wasting time to search for his gun, and wearily climbed the dry flood-lighted stairs to the kitchen door which he had left open. He left a trail of water behind him on the stairs, entered the lighted kitchen and strode directly through the hall to the front room.

Everything was exactly as it had been a few moments before. The front door still stood open as he had left it, and Lydia’s body lay on the floor as it had been.

He went past her with only a brief downward glance, to the telephone beyond the sofa, lifted it to his ear and dialed a number.

Salt water dripped down from his soaked figure and spread out on the thick rug beside his feet as he waited; and when a voice said, “Homicide,” he spoke sharply into the instrument:

“Michael Shayne speaking. Murder on the Richard Kane property.” He gave the address and went on swiftly, “The killer escaped in a car a few minutes ago. Get out a radio alarm to stop all cars in the vicinity. Look for a man with wet shoes and trouser legs. I’ll hold on while you get that on the air.”

The official voice at the other end wasted no time with questions, but said efficiently, “Right, Shayne. Back to you in a minute.”

Shayne waited, holding the receiver to his ear with his left hand, his right mechanically going up to his shirt pocket to pull out a pack of water-logged cigarettes. He glared down at them distastefully and dropped the useless pack into a coat pocket, and stiffened when the brisk voice said, “All right now, Shayne. Let’s have all of it.”

“It’s Mrs. Richard Kane,” Shayne said precisely. “Shot in the living room of her house six or eight minutes ago while I was parked outside just leaving. I ran in and found her, chased the killer out the back door and down to the beach where he escaped. He’s got to be wet up to his knees, so concentrate on that.”

“That call is out. Stay there, Shayne, and don’t touch anything.”

Shayne put down the instrument without replying. He went slowly to the coffee table and got a filtertipped cigarette from a small silver urn that had been in front of Lydia while she sat there and talked with him, flipped a lighter beside it and grimaced slightly as the thin-bodied smoke entered his lungs. He replaced the lighter on the table, moved another step to his right to pour cognac into the glass he had emptied earlier. He drank half of it and stood there morosely, shivering in his wet clothing and not wanting to sit down and ruin any of the furniture.

The night breeze continued to blow through strongly from the open back door, and with it was the intensified sound of the sea outside.

Yet, strangely, it seemed more quiet to Shayne as he stood there than it had been previously when Lydia was alive and the back door was shut.

Death had that effect somehow. The presence of a corpse on the floor seemed to spread an aura of stillness in the room that more than counterbalanced the louder sound coming through the open doors.

Basically, Shayne knew there was no physical reason for this phenomenon, but somehow he had never learned to shake off the psychological impact of sudden death. He stood by the table sipping his brandy and morosely looking down at Lydia’s body and blaming himself for what had happened.

He should have insisted that she go with him after the telephone call from her husband. But how the hell could he know that a killer was lurking in the house waiting for him to go out and leave her alone?

Had Lydia known? Not that death was imminent, but that there was someone else in the house waiting for him to leave? He tugged at his earlobe thoughtfully while he considered the question and waited for the police to come. He could remember nothing in her actions to give the slightest indication that she had not thought they were alone in the house. She hadn’t mentioned servants, but he had somehow gotten a strong impression that if they did have servants who slept in, they were out for the evening.

But had she been putting on an act for his benefit?

Could she have had someone concealed in the back or upstairs while she talked to him in the sitting room? A lover, perhaps? The same one whom she had called Roger—who had at least once before (by her own admission) slipped along the beach while it was dry and entered by way of the kitchen stairs?

But why? It didn’t make sense. It was she who had telephoned and begged Shayne to come. Would a woman do that while entertaining a lover—or expecting a lover to visit her?

Of course, he could have arrived unexpectedly between the time she phoned Shayne and the time he got there. In that case she might well have sent him upstairs to stay out of sight while she got rid of Shayne.

But she hadn’t seemed eager to get rid of him, he reminded himself. Quite the contrary. She had the liquor set out for him, and made him as comfortable as she could. Had insisted strongly, in fact, that he stay and talk to her after he had suggested they were running a foolish risk by being together where her husband might return and find them.

No. She had certainly shown no eagerness to be rid of him. So it didn’t seem likely he had interrupted an assignation. Unless it had all been part of some devious plot to involve him in her affairs somehow. Some plot that didn’t make any sense from where he stood.

But he couldn’t help remembering his suspicions of her motive for summoning him. Suppose all of it, beginning with the scene at La Martinique the previous night, were part of some plan that she had worked out in her disordered mind to force her husband and Shayne to clash publicly over her affections? It still didn’t make sense, but neither did anything else.

If that were the answer, what part had another man been supposed to play tonight? And what had gone wrong? Certainly, her plan could not have anticipated that she would end on the floor with a bullet in her brain. Had her husband’s telephone call been the upsetting factor? Had that been an unexpected development that led to her death?

Had it even been totally unexpected? Shayne simply could not be sure. She had acted surprised and frightened, but…? Had she been innocent and unknowing when she pressed the mouthpiece tightly to her bosom and spoke to Shayne? Or had that been planned, too?

Shayne knew many people were unaware that vocal vibrations can be conducted by the chest bones in that manner, and believed they were perfectly safe from being overheard when speaking in an aside with a telephone mouthpiece pressed against their chests. But, had Lydia known the truth?

He leaned down to crush out the filtered butt of his cigarette in an ashtray, and heard the distant keening of a police siren. Either the Beach cops stopping some automobilist to check his shoes and trousers, or Peter Painter rushing to the scene of the crime to see what he could pin on Shayne this time. Shayne grinned mirthlessly as the sound of the siren faded to a moan and then to silence.

So it couldn’t be Painter. Not yet. But the Miami Beach Detective Chief would be along soon enough. This was one murder investigation he would definitely handle in person. As soon as he heard that Michael Shayne had reported the crime.

In the meantime, Shayne wondered why the devil Richard Kane hadn’t shown up? Of course, he didn’t know where his telephone call had been made from, but if he had been anywhere on the Beach when he called, he certainly would have had time to reach his house by now.

Still, it hadn’t actually been very long since the call, Shayne reminded himself. It just seemed like a long time, standing there in his wet clothing with a dead woman on the floor while he waited for someone to come. In elapsed time, probably not more than ten minutes in all. Not more than a minute from the time Lydia hung up the phone until Shayne heard the shot from his car. Another minute for him to rush in and find her dead, realize the back door was open and run down the stairs. Another couple of minutes to dash along the shore and fall flat on his face, to realize the killer had escaped up the other stairway—and two more minutes to return.

Five minutes, maybe, since he had called the police. No more than that—though it seemed more like hours.

Say, eleven or twelve minutes in all, since Kane had telephoned and learned that his wife was entertaining the redhead.

He tensed and drank the rest of his cognac as he heard a car careen into the driveway on protesting rubber. No siren, so it wouldn’t be the police yet. That meant Richard Kane.

An enraged and probably drunken husband dashing back to confront his wife and the man whom he believed to be her lover.

As the car roared up the driveway toward the house, Shayne unhappily recalled that Lydia had mentioned Kane brandishing a pistol to drive another man from the house once before. How would he react this time at sight of his wife lying dead on the floor?

Shayne’s rugged features tightened as he reached down to pick up a stoppered fifth of bourbon a little more than half full. The car slammed to a stop behind his parked sedan in front, and he heard a door jerked open and then shut violently.

Shayne stepped quietly around the coffee table to the end of the sofa against the wall with the whiskey bottle swinging negligently from his right hand. Kane’s feet pounded up the stone steps and his bulky figure slid to a stop inside the front door. Light glittered on a nickel-plated pistol in his right hand, and Shayne poised his weight on the balls of his feet as Kane stared down stupidly at the dead body of his wife on the floor in front of him.

Shayne had a fleeting moment to feel sorry for the man before Kane turned his bullet head slowly to survey the room and catch sight of the detective pressed against the wall.

Shayne said loudly, “Hold it, Kane!” then dropped his rangy body in a lunging dive as Kane’s arm swung up and the pistol barked loudly.

The bullet nicked the right side of Shayne’s neck as his impetus carried him head-on into the stocky figure and they went to the floor together. The gun skittered out of Kane’s hand, and Shayne let go of the whiskey bottle to get hold of Kane’s shoulders and pinion him down while he pantingly rose to his knees and leaned over him.

“Take it easy,” he grated. “Save your strength and your lead for the guy that did that to your wife.”

Richard Kane lay on his back beneath Shayne for a moment, his heavy features contorted, his eyeballs rolling up at him madly. Then with a twist of almost superhuman strength, he balled up his body and rolled away, breaking Shayne’s hold and scrabbling frantically on hands and knees toward the nickel-plated pistol.

Shayne lunged upward and got a big foot firmly on the gun before Kane could reach it. He stood on widespread legs and looked down implacably as Kane’s arms circled his legs and jerked him off balance.

Falling lightly to the floor, Shayne grabbed the gun-butt and swung the barrel of it not lightly against the side of Kane’s head.

He grunted dully and fell back on the floor, his eyes glazing momentarily while froth spurted from his slack mouth.

Shayne got to his feet wearily and pocketed the gun, a short-barrelled .38. Kane muttered something inaudible and shook his head from side to side and groggily tried to sit up. Shayne moved around to retrieve the whiskey bottle from the floor, uncorked it and held the neck of it down to Kane’s mouth, telling him not unkindly, “Take a drink of this and you’ll feel better.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kane grabbed the bottle with both hands and tipped it up to let a quantity gurgle down his throat. Shayne stepped back a few paces and said harshly, “Listen to me, Kane. Your wife is dead. I didn’t kill her. The police will be here any moment. So, relax and stay away from me. I’ll tell my story to them.”

“Who did do it? What in the name of God happened here? I just talked to Lydia a few minutes ago.”

“I know you did. I was standing here by the door when she answered your call. I went out to intercept you, and before I could start my car I heard a shot inside here. I ran in and found her… like that.” Shayne nodded toward Lydia’s body.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Kane said hoarsely. He took another pull at the bottle and then set it on the floor. He hunkered forward onto his knees and stood up groggily. Shayne stepped back another pace, patting the gun in his pocket.

“I don’t give a damn whether you believe it or not. Stand back until the police get here.” His voice softened as Kane turned slowly to look down at his wife. “She’s dead and I’m sorry. Get it through your head that there was nothing personal between us. She asked me out tonight to consult me professionally, and I came because she was an old friend of my former wife’s.”

“I don’t believe a word of it, Shayne. You were here alone with her. Did she try to break off the affair with you? Is that why you killed her?”

The shriek of an approaching siren came faintly through the front door, rose swiftly to peak volume and then died slowly as a police car turned in the driveway.

Shayne said, “I’ll do my talking to the police,” and he turned slowly to face Peter Painter as the Miami Beach Chief of Detectives trotted into the room with two detectives behind him.

Painter was a small, slender man, almost foppishly dressed, with small-boned features and a thread-like black mustache. He drew himself up aggressively and his black eyes glittered with satisfaction as they took in the scene in front of him. “Dead, eh? Which one of you…?”

“I just this moment got here, Officer.” Kane stepped forward. “He killed her. Arrest him. And be careful because he’s armed.”

“With Kane’s gun which I had to take away from him,” Shayne explained, lifting the .38 from his pocket and holding it out to Painter. He put the palm of his other hand up to the side of his neck and took it away to display a smear of blood. “He came running in and threw a bullet at me without asking questions.”

“Why not?” raged Kane. “Why should I listen to your lies? See here, Officer. This man has been molesting my wife. I warned him last night to stay away from her. And again this noon after I caught her telephoning him this morning. I demand that you arrest him for murder.”

“There’s nothing I would enjoy more,” Peter Painter assured him coldly. He took the gun from Shayne’s hand and glanced at it, passed it to one of the detectives. “You admit this is your gun, Kane?”

“Of course I admit it. Ask him where his is. The one he killed her with.”

“All right, Shayne.” Painter seemed to strut as he held out his hand. “Give us your gun, too.”

Shayne lifted his arms and said wearily, “Search me if you like. I haven’t any.”

“Where is it?”

“If you’d settle down and ask a few pertinent questions, you’d find out. I said over the phone that the killer got away in a car after I chased him through the water on the beach below. Any results on the radio pick-up?”

“Not yet,” Painter told him happily. “We had every street in this vicinity cut off within two minutes of your call. Did you dive into the ocean after the guy?”

Shayne looked down at his wet clothing. He said, “I stumbled on the beach.”

“What did he look like?”

“I didn’t see him.” Shayne shrugged and moved back to the sofa to sit down, disregarding the damage he might do to the upholstery. He splashed a small portion of cognac into his glass and Painter watched him for a moment with compressed lips, then motioned to his men and strode with them to examine the corpse. “You go into the other room where I can talk to you privately,” he told Kane. “Don’t worry about getting this straightened out.”

Two other police cars pulled up outside and Shayne sat back on the sofa nursing his drink and watched grimly while technicians bustled in and pictures were shot of the corpse from various angles, chalk marks made on the rug, and Painter withdrew to the dining room beyond the stairs to interview Richard Kane.

He returned happily with a sergeant who had a stenographer’s notebook, and motioned him to sit at a side table while he stood erect in front of the redhead and said, “It looks real bad this time, Shamus. According to Mr. Kane, you slipped out here tonight as soon as his back was turned, and were alone with the lady when she got killed. It looks like a .38 did the job. That’s what you have a license to carry, isn’t it?”

Shayne said, “Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“I grabbed it out of the glove compartment of my car when I heard a shot in here.”

“After Kane had telephoned his wife and heard her tell you that it was her husband on the phone?” demanded Painter.

Shayne said, “That’s right. She was afraid of her husband and wanted me to get out before he got here. Before we get involved with all this,” he went on, “I can prove my story about chasing someone through the water. Send a man around to the other side of the stone wall south of here and they’ll find a stairway leading down to the shore. There’ll still be damp footprints there where he ran up out of the water to get in his car. At least, I hope to God they haven’t dried out yet.”

“You waited long enough to tell us that. Why? So if they are dried now we won’t be able to prove they were never there?”

“Because I didn’t think of it in time,” Shayne said angrily. “And now you’re wasting more time.”

Painter turned his head to order one of the detectives to go around the wall and check the stairs beyond for wet footprints. Then he said, “I’m still asking where your gun is?”

“I lost it when I fell in the water. It’s there in the sand. All we have to do is find it to prove it hasn’t been fired for months.”

“After soaking in salt water for a few hours? Sure you didn’t throw it away so it couldn’t be checked?”

“For God’s sake,” Shayne said roughly. “Ballistics will tell you soon enough that my gun didn’t kill her.”

Painter nodded. “If it is ever found. If you didn’t take care to throw it out so far it can’t be found… after wading out a good distance to make sure,” he added with a significant glance at Shayne’s wet clothing.

“You can’t seriously believe I killed her, Painter. She was a client. I don’t go around killing my clients.”

“How much more than a client was she? My God, Shayne, don’t you realize the spot you’re in? Twice during the last twenty-four hours a woman’s husband has publicly warned you to leave her alone. You admit you sneaked out here tonight to be alone with her and that you knew what he’d do if he caught you here and that she was fool enough to let him hear her speak your name when he called home. Wouldn’t she let you run away in time, Shayne? Is that why you killed her? Did she beg you to stay here like a man and take the consequences?”

Shayne took a sip of cognac and said, “Nuts. You see the back door standing open and the stairs where I ran down after the killer. If I had done it, why would I go to all that trouble?”

“It’s just the sort of thing a smart cookie like you would do, Shayne.” Painter’s thin voice vibrated with anger. “A chance to get rid of the gun before Ballistics got hold of it… a pretense of chasing somebody who was never here at all. Just the sort of thing you would think up fast with a dead woman lying on the floor and her husband likely to pull up any moment. You’ve played it just that smart in the past, Shayne. You’ve been pulling your crooked deals in Miami for a lot of years, but this time you’re really on the spot. You can’t deny you were Lydia Kane’s lover and that her husband knew it and was insanely jealous. Good Lord, both the Miami papers have front-page stories attesting to that.”

Shayne said, “I hadn’t seen her for at least ten years before last night.”

“Can you prove it?”

Shayne shrugged. “Can you prove differently?”

“We’ll have Richard Kane’s testimony in court. Isn’t it a fact that she tried to phone you surreptitiously this morning the instant she thought her husband was safely out of the way? And that you sneaked out here tonight to be alone with her?”

Shayne said, “I couldn’t stop her from phoning me this morning and I drove up tonight in clear view without doing any sneaking. Instead of wasting your time on me, start looking for the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back a few months ago. The one who did use the beach and the back stairs as a way of getting in and out of the house after her husband put a detective on her. He’s the logical one to look for.”

“Kane didn’t mention him to me.”

Painter turned away as the detective whom he had sent to check the other stairway returned. The man shook his head stolidly, not looking at Shayne. “Nothing very definite,” he reported. “It’s a vacant lot there, with a dead-end street ending at a stairway for bathers to get down to the beach. I’d say somebody has maybe been up or down in the last half hour or so. Don’t see how you’d come closer than that.”

Peter Painter turned back to Shayne and demanded, “What do you say to that?”

“I say that about fifteen minutes ago when I ran through the water to the bottom of that stairway there were soaking wet footprints leading up. And I heard a car start up at the top and pull away fast. That had to be the killer.”

“Everything points to you being the only person here with her, Shayne.”

Michael Shayne emptied his cognac glass and sighed and turned to address the sergeant with his stenographic pad. He said, “Here’s my statement for the record. I met Mrs. Kane by chance at La Martinique last night for the first time in more than ten years. I had my secretary to dinner, and Mrs. Kane came to our table and spoke to us. Mr. Kane misinterpreted it, being insanely jealous. Mrs. Kane telephoned my office this morning and my secretary monitored the call. Kane broke in on the line from the upstairs extension, and later he hunted me up where I was having luncheon with Timothy Rourke and repeated his ridiculous accusation. I tried to reason with him and knocked him down.

“When I got home this evening, my phone was ringing and it was Mrs. Kane. She was practically hysterical with fear and asked to consult me professionally. So I came out. I found her here in this room, apparently alone in the house, and she told me she was deathly afraid of her husband’s jealous temper and wanted me to recommend a detective whom she could employ to check up on her to convince her husband she was a faithful wife. She told me she had had a love affair with someone whom she called Roger a few months ago, and that her husband had gotten the goods on them by having them watched by a local detective.

“She further related, as proof of her husband’s dangerous temper, that her lover had come around by the shore one night… at low tide when there’s a dry strip of sand against the cliff… and up the back stairs through the kitchen while her husband was out. Kane returned unexpectedly, flourishing a gun and chased him away. She gave this as reason for her husband’s jealousy of me, and while I was advising her to leave the guy and get a divorce if necessary, the telephone rang. She answered, and it was her husband. She was startled and told me who was calling, and he overheard her telling me. He threatened to come home at once, and she was frightened and begged me to leave. She was practically hysterical and I went out to my car, planning to drive down the driveway and intercept Kane at the gate to try and reason with him.

“Before I could start my motor… not more than sixty seconds, I’d say… after walking out of this room, I heard a single shot from inside. I got my gun from the glove compartment and ran back into the house.”

Painter, who was listening to the recital with patient interest while the sergeant took it down in shorthand, interrupted to ask, “How long did you stay inside here after Kane hung up the phone?”

“Not long. No more than a minute, certainly.”

Painter nodded happily, caressing his thin mustache with a glossy thumbnail. “Then, according to your own testimony, she was shot within two minutes after the telephone connection with her husband was broken?”

Shayne hesitated, thinking back carefully, then nodded. “As closely as I can place the sequence of events, yes. That’s about it.”

“Definitely not enough elapsed time,” Painter pressed him, “for Kane to have got here, slipped inside and gunned her… no matter where he made his call from.”

“Definitely not time enough for that,” Shayne conceded. “In fact… He hesitated again, tugging at his earlobe thoughtfully. “I’ve been a damned fool,” he exploded. “Whoever killed her had to have been right here in the house all the time. There’s that floodlight on the back stairs. When I first turned it on and ran down them, the stairs were dry. No wet footprints… proving the killer had not crossed that strip of beach at high tide to get in. So he must have been concealed in the house all the time I was here with her. As soon as I went out the front door, he shot her and ran out the back.”

“Seems to me you’re making it tougher for us to believe all the time,” said Painter complacently. “You’re suggesting she had another visitor who was here already when she phoned you to come out?”

Shayne growled, “I’m trying to avoid suggesting anything. I’m telling you the facts for the record.”

“All right. Get on with it,” said Painter sharply.

“When you interrupted me,” Shayne thought back, “I told you how I ran back into the house with my gun out. I found her lying like that. My first thought, naturally, was that she had committed suicide. But there was no weapon in sight, and a good look at the wound showed no powder marks. Then I realized the back door was standing open and a breeze blowing in… which hadn’t been when I went out. I ran down the hall to the kitchen and turned on the light, found the back door wide open. I switched on the floodlight and ran down the dry stairs, and through six inches to a foot of water along the base of the cliff, and stumbled as I told you and lost my gun. But I went on to the next stairway up and heard a car pulling away. So I hurried back and telephoned in a report. Then I waited about five minutes before Kane showed up. He ran in with a gun, took one look at his wife and saw me, and threw one slug at me before I jumped him and disarmed him. That’s the whole story,” he ended flatly.

“I see. And you contend she had another man hidden here all the time while you were talking to her?”

Shayne said, “I contend there was someone here, whether she knew it or not. All that strip of beach must be under water for at least two hours at high tide. Maybe he had slipped in through the kitchen unknown to her and was hidden in the back or upstairs all the time.” Shayne shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. From the way Lydia acted, I certainly gathered the impression she thought we were alone.”

“Ah. From the way Lydia acted.” Painter pounced on the phrase triumphantly. “How did Lydia act, Shayne? Tell us exactly what you mean.”

“Not what you suppose with your dirty little mind,” said Shayne disgustedly. “She was frightened half to death and wanted help. Frankly, I don’t believe she suspected the presence of anyone else.”

“And frankly,” said Peter Painter happily, “I don’t suspect anyone else either.” He turned to issue a crisp order to one of the men behind him. “Do a complete job of dusting for fingerprints over the entire house. Top to bottom. You can get samples of Mr. and Mrs. Kane’s prints… and he tells me they have a maid who comes in days. You should be able to segregate her prints from some of the kitchen utensils. If there has been any other person hiding in this house for an hour or more this evening, he must have left his prints some place superimposed on the Kanes’ or the maid’s. I want proof that will stand up in court that there has been no such person here. You agree, don’t you, Mr. Shayne,” he added silkily, turning back with his lips drawn away from his teeth, “that it’s quite unlikely any intruder could stay concealed in the house a couple of hours without leaving some fingerprints?”

“Unless he took the precaution to wear gloves.”

“Then there’ll be smudged indications,” said Painter promptly. “And my men will find them. You know, Shayne? I think you’ve really outsmarted yourself this time.”

Shayne said, “While you’re making so much effort to hang it on me, why not get Kane back in here and ask him the identity of his wife’s friend who used to slip in the back way? The killer had to be someone who was familiar with that way of getting in and out of the house.”

Peter Painter said, “We’ll do just that.” He nodded to another of his men. “Bring Kane in now.”

The man went out the archway from the living room, and returned a few minutes later with Richard Kane. Lydia’s body still lay on the floor, but it had been covered with a silk scarf taken from the piano, and the widower averted his eyes from it as he went by. He carried a highball glass in his hand and his dark features were sullen and brooding, but he appeared more sober than when he had first burst into the room with gun in hand.

“What you fooling around for?” he demanded angrily of Painter. “Why haven’t you got that murdering redhead in jail where he belongs?”

“All in good time,” Painter told him happily. “He’s squeezed out of some tight places in the past, and this time I want it tied up without any loopholes. You can help us head him straight for the chair by giving us the name of the man your wife was too friendly with a few months ago. His testimony is about all we need right now.”

“What man you talking about?” Kane seemed scarcely to have heard Painter’s words as he stood flat-footed glaring at Shayne who was still relaxed on the sofa.

“First name of Roger,” Painter prompted him. “Shayne tells us you had a detective following your wife and him, and caught him here with her practically in flagrante one night.”

“Lydia and a man?” Kane was jarred out of his sullen belligerence. He scowled angrily at Painter. “Never heard of anybody named Roger. Never had any detective follow my wife. What sort of nasty lies is he telling to save his own skin?”

Peter Painter chuckled happily and said, “That’s one you’d better answer, Shamus.”

CHAPTER NINE

Michael Shayne surged to his feet at Painter’s jeering remark. “You know all about it, Kane. Don’t try to hold anything like that back. Who is the man Lydia had an affair with a few months ago?”

“You damned scoundrel.” Kane set his glass on the table and doubled his fists. “Nobody can say a thing like that about my wife.”

Shayne said, “She’s dead now. And this is a police investigation. There aren’t any reporters here. None of this will get out… unless the guy murdered her and the truth comes out at the trial. But you can’t cover up for the man who most likely shot her.”

“I’m not covering up for anybody. I know you killed her as well as the police do. I haven’t any idea what sort of red herring you’re trying to drag in.”

Shayne stood very still, breathing hard and fighting to control his anger. “We’ll get it anyhow, Kane. The local detective you retained will come forward to testify. You can’t hide things in a murder investigation. Give us the man’s name now so Painter can check his alibi fast.”

“There isn’t any man. There hasn’t been any man… until you came along, damn it.” Richard Kane’s voice was hoarse with anger.

Shayne said, “She told me the whole story tonight… though she did deny it was anything more than a flirtation with some man she called Roger. But she explained that was the reason you were so suspicious of her now. Because she had been foolish previously. You can’t deny putting a detective on her trail.”

“I do deny it. Absolutely. Every word of it is an outright lie. Do I have to stand here and listen to him blacken my wife’s reputation?” he demanded of Painter.

The detective chief said, “All we want is the truth about it, Mr. Kane. You see, Shayne is trying to sell us the idea that your wife had another lover who made a habit of slipping in the back way from the beach while you were out at night… and that this was one of his nights.”

“It’s a bare-faced lie he’s thought up to try and save his own skin. There’s not a word of truth in it.”

“Then why in hell,” demanded Shayne, “did your wife tell me the story in such detail tonight? What reason would she have for lying about a thing like that to me?”

“She wouldn’t,” Kane conceded promptly. “I don’t believe she did.”

“But I say she did,” exploded Shayne. “We sat right here on the sofa and she told me how you ran him out the back door one night with a gun.”

“I won’t stand for any more of this,” Kane told Painter flatly. “My wife would never think up that sort of falsehood. She can’t deny it now, and Shayne thinks he’s safe in lying about it.”

“How about it, Shamus?” asked Painter silkily. “Assuming for the moment that you are telling the truth… why would Mrs. Kane have lied to you? What possible motive could she have for something like that?”

“I don’t believe she was lying. She told it in too much detail for that. But Kane’s motive for lying is clear enough. He’s ashamed to admit the truth even if his wife’s murderer does get away because of it.”

“I’m not worried about Lydia’s murderer getting away. Not as long as Chief Painter keeps you in custody where you belong.” Kane picked up his highball glass and drank deeply from it, turned and stalked out of the room.

With narrowed eyes, Shayne watched him go. Was it possible Kane was telling the truth? Why in the name of God would Lydia have lied to him about having had an affair? But, perhaps she wasn’t lying altogether. Perhaps the story had been a cunning mixture of truth and falsehood. Perhaps the existence of a lover was true enough, but her husband didn’t know anything about it.

But Shayne didn’t think so as he went back over the conversation in his mind. Over the years he’d become fairly adept at separating truth from falsehood, and he didn’t believe Lydia had been lying to him. So that left Kane. He told Painter:

“No matter what Kane says, there was someone else in this house tonight who shot Lydia and escaped along the beach to a parked car at the dead-end street south of here.”

“It’s your word against his,” Painter said pleasantly.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re the one who’s trying to beat a murder rap,” Painter went on in the same pleased lone. “Between the two of you, you have a strong motive for lying.”

“He’s trying to protect his dead wife’s reputation.”

“And you’re trying to save your own life by building up a story about a non-existent lover. Which one of you do you think a jury will believe?”

Shayne shrugged and said, “If you investigate the whole thing the way you should, it’ll never reach the point for a jury to decide between us. There must be several people who know about the man named Roger. Friends of the Kanes. Women in Lydia’s set whom she was intimate with. A situation like that is always known and whispered about.”

“If there was such a situation,” agreed Painter blandly. “In the meantime, I don’t think even you will blame me for locking you up on suspicion of homicide.”

Shayne rubbed his angular jaw thoughtfully. “You can’t be serious.”

“Can’t I?”

“Of course not,” Shayne said angrily. “You’ve known me a long time, Painter.”

“And for a long time, by God,” said Peter Painter exultantly, “I’ve waited for the day when you’d really put your head in a noose, Shayne. This is it. Look at what we’ve got. A dead woman whose husband has twice in the past twenty-four hours publicly warned you away from her. An admitted secret assignation with her alone in her husband’s house. A bullet fired into her head by the same calibre pistol you admit you carry and which you had with you tonight. A pistol you cannot produce in evidence because you threw it into the ocean before we got here. A story without one scintilla of evidence of chasing someone else down the beach and away from the house. Another story, vehemently denied by the bereaved husband, about another lover whom you’d like to frame for the killing. Look at it objectively, Shamus. I should rightly be kicked out of my job as Chief of Detectives if I didn’t lock you up pending a more complete investigation.”

“During which time the real killer is given time to escape and build up his alibi for the killing,” grated Shayne. “You know that’s the way it will be. Give me a few hours on my own to turn him up. That’s all I ask. Do you want this murder solved, or don’t you?”

“I think it is solved, Shayne.”

“Nuts! You’re too good a cop, Painter, to let personal antagonism get in the way of justice. Every minute we spend sparring around here is wasted. Give me until morning and I’ll hand you your killer on a silver platter.”

“You’re intimating you can accomplish what my men can’t.”

“I have in the past,” Shayne reminded him angrily. “Do you want me to quote chapter and verse?”

“Several times in the past,” said Peter Painter in a strained voice, “you’ve thrown your weight around here on the Beach and messed up cases to a point where you realized a personal profit from them. This time I’m going to put you behind bars where you won’t have an opportunity to destroy evidence and build up a frame against some poor devil who doesn’t know what the score is.”

Shayne hesitated, his right hand balled into a big fist that had an almost irresistible impulse to smash itself into the taunting face in front of him. His voice came out in a low growl as he controlled his anger enough to say, “God help you if you lock me up tonight, Painter. There’s a killer loose in your town, and I’m the one who can pin him down. Give me a few hours. Just until morning. I know this town, Painter. I know how to tear it apart with my two hands and rip the truth out of it. You know I do. As a cop, you go through certain legal motions and you’re hampered by the fact that you are a cop. But I’ve got my own methods.”

“I know all about your methods, Shayne. This is one case that’s going to be handled legally and according to the rules of evidence.” Painter’s voice was concise and cold. He swayed forward on the balls of his feet, thrusting his jaw out aggressively. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt by checking the whole goddamned house from top to bottom to prove or disprove your contention that someone entered before the tide came up and waited to shoot Mrs. Kane as soon as your back was turned. As soon as I get that report, I’m arresting you for murder.”

As though entering on cue in a stage play, the head of Painter’s technical squad entered and said, “We’ve got it for you, Chief. We’ve checked every possible surface on both floors for fingerprints.”

“And?” demanded Painter, wheeling on him.

“And we make those of Mr. and Mrs. Kane and another set that we tentatively identify as those of the maid. No others. Except we didn’t check this room because I understood Mr. Shayne admitted being in here.”

“How do you like that, Shayne?” demanded Painter triumphantly, swinging back to face him.

Shayne said, “I don’t like it.” He tugged at his earlobe and asked the fingerprint man directly, “What about smudges overlaid on other prints in certain places? What you’d expect if an intruder wore gloves?”

“Nothing of that sort,” was the prompt reply. “Of course, certain prints are fragmentary and smudged as is always to be expected. But nothing beyond normal expectations.”

“As an expert witness,” demanded Peter Painter, “are you prepared to swear under oath that no fourth person has been in this house during the past few hours?”

“I couldn’t swear to that, Chief.”

“Why not?” demanded Painter.

The detective shrugged. “Nobody could swear to a thing like that. I’ve tagged every print and made notes on every surface tested and I can swear that in my expert opinion it is beyond reasonable doubt to believe anyone else has been in the house recently. But there would not necessarily be identifiable traces if someone had taken every possible precaution not to leave prints behind.”

“Satisfied, Shayne?” demanded Painter triumphantly.

“I’m satisfied your man has made an honest answer. So now, I think we have to look for someone who entered the house with murder in his heart and with the realization that such a fingerprint check might be made. That indicates definite premeditation instead of a spur-of-the-moment crime, and should make the job lots easier.”

Painter said, “To me it indicates that you’ve used up all your rope.” He turned aside, grating, “Put the cuffs on him.”

“Wait one more minute, Painter,” Shayne interjected harshly as two detectives closed in on him. “You’re forgetting my one ace in the hole. I’ll slap a million-dollar false arrest suit on the Beach if you throw me in your can without checking all the evidence in my favor.”

“What evidence are you talking about?”

“My gun that hasn’t been fired for months.”

“The one you took care to get rid of before we could check it?”

Shayne said steadily, “The gun I grabbed from my glove compartment after I heard the murder shot fired in here. The one I’m licensed to carry, and that I had in my hand when I ran in here and found Mrs. Kane dead. The one I unintentionally lost down on the beach while I was chasing the killer.

“Don’t make an absolute ass out of yourself, Painter,” he ended fiercely. “Don’t you realize that’s proof I didn’t kill Mrs. Kane? Once that pistol is found lying on the sand where it flew out of my hand, without a shot fired from it, your crazy case against me collapses like a punctured balloon. I’m doing you a favor by mentioning it at this time,” he went on angrily. “I should, by God, have let you arrest me while it stayed there to be turned up later for solid proof in a false-arrest case. But I happen to want Lydia Kane’s killer more than I want to win a case against you and the city, so let’s go find the gun and settle this nonsense fast.”

“Maybe there won’t be an empty shell in it,” conceded Painter. “Maybe you took a moment to reload it after firing a bullet into Mrs. Kane’s head. That won’t constitute proof of anything.”

“But goddamn it, a ballistic test with it will be proof,” raged Shayne. “Why not admit you’re afraid to look for it and make a test?”

Peter Painter smiled thinly. “I have no reason to be afraid. In fact, it’s a hell of a good idea to establish once and for all that the gun isn’t where you claim it is. Then you won’t have a chance to plant another one later to upset the apple-cart. Take him down to the beach, Hyams,” he addressed a sergeant. “Take Bolton, Archy, and Deblin with you. Let him show you where he claims he lost his gun. Give him every, by God, chance to find it. And you four make damned sure you do find it, if it’s there to be found. If not, I want all four of you to be ready to swear it isn’t there. Understand that?”

Sergeant Hyams said he understood. He sent Detectives Bolton and Archy ahead out the kitchen door, told Shayne grimly, “You go ahead, with Deblin and me behind you, and don’t try anything funny.”

Shayne said, “Nothing could suit me better.” He moved around from behind the coffee table and through the archway into the wide hall leading to the rear of the house. Richard Kane sat alone in the dining room as he went past, with a bottle of whiskey, an ice-bucket and a half-emptied glass in front of him.

The two leading detectives were half-way down the stairs when Shayne went out the back door. The tide was flowing back now with little swishing noises, and when Shayne reached the bottom of the stairs there was an expanse of wet sand of from one to three feet in width between the edge of the receding water and the base of the cliff.

Each one of the four detectives had powerful flashlights, and the pair in front of Shayne were ten or fifteen feet southward along the shore with their lights circled out on the edge of the water when he stepped away from the floodlighted area into moonlight and the soft sounds of night.

Two other flashlights behind him in the hands of Sergeant Hyams and Detective Deblin made similar circles of light on the wet sand and the edge of receding water as Shayne turned confidently to his right and followed along the base of the cliff while he tried to reconstruct as nearly as possible what had happened less than an hour earlier.

It was extremely important, Shayne knew, to judge the exact point where he had stumbled in his pursuit of the unseen killer and where his gun had flown out of his hand. Without the unfired gun as evidence, he could not honestly blame Peter Painter for charging him with the crime and jailing him until other evidence turned up to prove him not guilty. But with the gun to clinch his story, Painter would have no recourse except to accept his version of the affair and release him to make his own investigation of Lydia Kane’s death.

There were no landmarks to guide him, but Shayne instinctively judged he had covered about half the length of the Kane’s private beach before he had stumbled. Now, with two flashlights in front and two behind him supplementing the light from the moon that had risen higher in the clear sky since his previous foray along the beach, Shayne moved along carefully on the narrow strip of wet sand and stopped when he came to the half-embedded branch of a tree, curving upward in an arc half a foot above the surface which looked perfectly capable of having tripped him as he ran through the water an hour before.

It was situated just about right, Shayne calculated, as he paused in front of it and looked back at the floodlighted area behind him. Just about half-way between the two stairways as he remembered it. The two preceding detectives had gone on about twenty feet ahead of him, and the following pair were not more than a dozen feet behind when Shayne halted and announced confidently in a loud voice:

“Right here, I think. I was running and I tripped and fell forward on my knees. My gun flew out of my hand, and shouldn’t be more than twenty feet from here in any direction.”

The leading pair of flashlights stopped and swung back at sound of his voice.

Sergeant Hyams and his partner moved up closer from the direction of the house and threw circles of bright light on the narrow strip of wet sand and out over the surface of the water as it rippled out on an ebbing tide.

“So where’s the gat?” asked Hyams with interest.

Shayne said, “I’m pretty sure this is the branch I tripped over. It was under a few inches of water at the time, and I was sloshing through it as fast as I could. I fell flat in the water and my gun would have been thrown forward.” He moved past the branch slowly, searching the uncovered strip of sand, walking hard on his heels and finding the sand so hard-packed that it was extremely unlikely a pistol would have sunk out of sight in the short time since he had dropped it.

“Stay back there, fellows, and give him all the light he needs,” the sergeant directed Bolton and Archy. “If that gun is here, Chief Painter wants it.”

“It’s here,” Shayne said confidently. “But we may have to wait a time for the water to recede a good deal more to find it. It could have been flung as much as fifteen or twenty feet out from the cliff.”

“That’s right. It sure could,” said Hyams sardonically. “And if a guy had happened to wade out deep and throw it good and hard it could even be away the hell and gone out in deep water. Most of the beach along here shelves off fast about thirty feet out.”

The four detectives stood back on the wet sand playing their flashlights on the water as Shayne moved back and forth in parallel lanes, shuffling his feet along the surface beneath the water so he wouldn’t step over the weapon and miss it.

The detectives stayed back, keeping their feet dry and watching with silent and skeptical interest while he moved farther and farther from the shore without success, the ocean water deepening as the gap widened between him and shore, lapping over the tops of his shoes and up on his legs to his knees and thighs.

After the first few minutes of shuffling back and forth, Michael Shayne began to have a sickening feeling that his search was going to be useless. There was a lot of oceanfront here, and he couldn’t even be sure that the half-buried branch was what he had tripped over in the darkness. But he kept on doggedly because there was nothing else he could do. Without his gun to prove he had not fired the bullet into Lydia’s head, he knew Painter would lock him in a cell for the night.

Of course, the gun would be found later at low tide. He wasn’t worried about the ultimate result of the charge against him, but with Painter convinced he had Lydia’s murderer in jail, the detective chief would not push a further investigation of the case and the real killer would have time and opportunity to build up an alibi or escape.

Shayne was the only man who knew that Lydia had told him about a former lover named Roger who had kept his trysts by coming along the beach at low tide, and he was the only man who was convinced that close investigation of Lydia’s personal life would provide the clue to her killer. He had to find the gun in order to stay out of jail and carry on the investigation.

But he didn’t find the gun. Wading back and forth doggedly in the deepening water while the four detectives watched him skeptically from the shore, Shayne realized it was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. He was already at least twenty feet out from the base of the cliff, and he was convinced it could not have been thrown out that far as he tripped and fell. He must have missed it on one of his trips back and forth—or else he had miscalculated the spot where he had fallen.

He stopped with the cold water swirling up almost to his waist, and looked hopelessly up and down the coastline. It would be two or three hours before the tide would be low enough to make it certain the gun would be visible. And with Shayne securely locked in jail, Painter would not be eager to press the search for the gun. Indeed, knowing the Chief’s long-standing animosity toward him, Shayne was not at all sure that if he didn’t find the gun himself it would ever be found. All of Painter’s men knew of the ill-feeling between them, and it was actively shared by many of them who were jealous of his long record of solving crimes under their noses. Any search conducted by the Miami Beach police force would be perfunctory at best, and might easily result in intentional failure.

As he stood there alone in the water with the bitter taste of defeat in his mouth, Sergeant Hyams hailed him jeeringly from the shore.

“You better call it a day, Shayne. We’re not hanging around all night while you pretend to look for a gun you know damned well will hang you if you find it.”

Shayne drew in a deep breath to reply, but stiffened as he did so. The moon was bright overhead, glistening welcomingly on the easy billows of the Atlantic sweeping in endlessly from that broad surface eastward. An off-shore oil tanker was passing on the horizon, her running lights showing dim in the distance against nothingness. Most of the shoreline was dark at this time of night, but northward about half a mile were the brightly colored lights of the Penguin Casino and Bathing Club.

Shayne’s decision was not made consciously. It was not the result of logical thought. It came with a sudden rush as his lungs swelled with air in answer to Hyams’ shout, and he acted just as swiftly and instinctively.

He slid sideways into the water beneath the surface and began swimming strongly outward toward the beckoning lights of the tanker on the horizon.

CHAPTER TEN

Shayne was a strong and competent swimmer, but now he was doubly hampered by the constricting weight of waterlogged clothing and the imperative need for staying beneath the surface of the water as long as was humanly possible while he swam outward to get distance between himself and the policemen on shore before coming up for air.

Because he knew they would have itching trigger fingers. This wasn’t a sporting proposition. Sergeant Hyams was a fair man and bore Shayne no particular ill-will, but the redhead was officially under arrest on suspicion of murder and the sergeant had no reason to treat him any differently from any other escaping prisoner.

That meant shoot-to-kill orders, and Shayne had no doubt about what the outcome would be if he gave them a target to shoot at within any reasonable distance.

On the other hand, they were armed only with pistols which did not have great accuracy at long range, and he knew that moonlight on the water made night-shooting a pretty deceptive proposition. With no lights beyond to silhouette him from the shore, he had better than a fair chance of coming out alive if he surfaced briefly for air and went under quickly again.

In the meantime he fought to hold his breath until the last possible moment, driving his body forward underwater with long, powerful strokes with nothing at all to indicate how much distance he was getting.

When his tortured lungs could stand it no longer, he let himself come to the surface. He wasn’t even sure he had remained headed in the right direction until his head broke the surface and he saw the lights of the tanker still directly in front of him. He didn’t make the mistake of turning his head to look back toward shore as he treaded water thankfully for a few moments, drawing in deep drafts of air and expelling them mightily. From the rear, his wet darkened hair just riding the surface would be almost indistinguishable, he thought, but if he turned his head to look back and judge the distance he had covered, he might well give them a target to shoot at.

So, he had made it, he knew, when he took a final deep breath and went below the surface again to swim just as strongly but with slower and more relaxed strokes toward the horizon.

If they hadn’t spotted him the first time out of water, he’d be fairly safe the next time he came up.

Safe from immediate gunfire! But for how long? What future was there in it? he asked himself grimly. He could stay afloat for a couple of hours, perhaps. As soon as he was far enough out to ease up and stay on the surface while he got rid of most of his clothing, he was a good enough swimmer to last a couple of hours. No more than that.

And then he’d simply have to go ashore or drown. So maybe it hadn’t been such a smart move after all. His one thought in attempting to escape had been to gain time for conducting a one-man search for Lydia Kane’s murderer.

A couple of hours of freedom which he spent keeping himself afloat off-shore wasn’t going to help much. He wasn’t going to find her murderer out here paddling around in the Atlantic, he told himself grimly.

He expelled the last bit of air from his lungs and came to the surface again, getting a deep breath and turning his head this time as he treaded water to look back to the shore.

Judging distances by moonlight is deceptive, but he was surprised and gratified to see how far away the shoreline appeared to be. A few hundred yards, he thought. Well beyond pistol range even if he could be seen bobbing around out there. He went to work at once to get out of his coat, shrugged it away from him into the water, and then turned on his side and half-floated, paddling gently with one hand while he got shoe-laces untied and kicked off his shoes.

Then he paused to take stock of the situation as best he could. So long as he remained at this distance from shore, and until they got a police boat to search him down, he knew he would be perfectly safe.

He could clearly see the floodlight on the back-stairs of the Kane house, and the lights of the house itself perched on the cliff to the west. To the left of the floodlight and directly below the house were two dim lights glaring at him that he knew must be flashlights of the sergeant’s men.

As he floated easily on the calm surface, he put himself in Peter Painter’s position and envisioned what steps the detective chief would be taking to recapture him.

In the first place, Painter would be jumping up and down with anger, but that wouldn’t prevent him from acting swiftly and efficiently.

Already a call would be out to concentrate every ounce of man power of the Miami Beach police force on this particular section of ocean front. A good swimmer might, by conserving his strength and not getting panicky, swim along parallel to the shore a couple of miles in either direction. No more than that, certainly. So Painter would have to plan to cover four miles of oceanfront to prevent Shayne from swimming in unnoticed.

But that wasn’t as difficult as it sounded. This stretch of beach was mostly inhabited by large private estates and a few bath clubs, and it wouldn’t take much time or many men to cover every possible exit for two miles in each direction. In the meantime, certainly within fifteen or twenty minutes, there would be a Beach patrol boat on the scene with powerful searchlights to pinpoint a swimmer.

Southward along the beach from the Kane house, Shayne could see half a dozen lighted houses within swimming distance. The rest were dark.

Northward there was an interval of darkness of about five hundred yards, then the dim lights of one or two private homes, and beyond those were the bright lights marking the private beach of the Penguin Casino which Shayne had briefly noted just before he committed himself to the water.

He had to make up his mind, and he made it up with characteristic speed. The more time he wasted floating off-shore from the Kane house, the more time he was giving Painter to gather his forces together and establish an impregnable patrol along the beach.

Shayne turned onto his belly and began swimming smoothly northward, keeping the same approximate distance from shore, concentrating on covering the half mile that would bring him directly opposite the Penguin.

He didn’t know what he would do when he got there, but he did feel that the Bathing Club offered his only possible chance for getting ashore unobserved. He wasn’t a member, but he had visited the club with a friend a few weeks previously and they had stayed until it closed after midnight, so he had a good idea of the general layout. There was a large casino, dancing pavilion and restaurant, with about a hundred yards of private beach backed by a double row of cabanas where swimmers could change from bathing suits and back. The central portion of the beach was brightly lit with colored spotlights, and up to midnight the time Shayne had been there the beach was fairly well populated with swimmers. There were unlighted strips of sand at either end where amorous couples could spread blankets apart from the others and enjoy unnoticed intimacies, and there was a canvas-covered diving raft anchored a couple of hundred feet off-shore out of range of the bright lights.

There would be swimmers in the water between the raft and shore, and Shayne calculated he would have a good chance to swim in and join them without anyone noticing that he had arrived by water instead of by land. By mingling with them and taking care to keep all of his body except his head under water, he should be able to make it ashore on one of the darkened strips of beach.

But, what then? He would be instantly conspicuous in his shirt and slacks among all the other men wearing bathing trunks. And the Penguin was one of the places Painter would surely have well-covered from the first, looking for just such a maneuver on Shayne’s part.

It looked hopeless, and Shayne conceded that it probably was, but he swam on grimly, knowing it was impossible to plan ahead.

The gods had been kind to him in the past. Why shouldn’t they continue to be kind to him tonight? He didn’t ask much. Just an opportunity to get ashore and escape Painter’s patrols for long enough to turn up some concrete evidence on Lydia Kane’s killer. Shayne had an unshakable belief that if a man’s cause was right the gods of chance were always on his side.

And tonight his cause was right. Something would come up to aid him. It always had in the past, so why shouldn’t it tonight? A man needed only to have enough faith.

So Shayne swam on, staying well away from the shoreline, steadily approaching a position directly eastward of the blazing lights of the Penguin Club.

He didn’t ease up on his regular churning strokes until he sighted the flat surface of the club’s diving float directly in line between him and the lighted strip of beach.

Then he stopped to tread water easily and study the set-up. The scene was just what he had expected to see. From his point of vantage in the darkness beyond the float, it was like a well-lighted stage setting. Fifteen or twenty couples reclined on the sand under the lights, resting between dips, and half as many more were cavorting in the surf or bobbing about in the shallow water between the float and the shore.

The float was deserted at the moment, and hope gleamed in Shayne’s eyes as he began to swim carefully toward it. Although from this point it appeared that the shore lights reached the float, Shayne remembered that when you stood on the lighted shore looking outward it was impossible to tell whether anyone was on the float or not. If he could swim in quietly to the outer edge he could rest there unnoticed for as long as he wished, getting his strength back and getting rid of shirt and undershirt so at least his torso would be bare to conform with the appearance of all the other male swimmers. He still didn’t know how he would manage to stride ashore unnoticed wearing his pants—or just his shorts if he stripped down to those—but again all he could do was to put his trust in the gods of chance.

He hadn’t realized how weary he was until he neared the unoccupied diving float with its promise of surcease. His arms and legs began to feel leaden as he dog-paddled in cautiously to avoid any revealing splashes.

And then his gods deserted him and he stopped swimming abruptly not more than twenty feet out from the float, and treaded water angrily while he watched a boy and a girl, their slim figures clearly silhouetted against the beach lights, climb out of the water on the opposite edge of the float and stretch out side by side on the canvas surface as though they hoped to remain there comfortably alone for hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Standing just outside the closed door of a cabana fronting on the brightly lighted beach of the Penguin Club, Allen Garve drew in a deep lungful of smoke and expelled it slowly. Clad only in a pair of tight black trunks that showed off his youthful physique to perfection, Allen was thoroughly pleased with himself and in tune with the night and his surroundings as he waited for Florine to finish changing inside the cabana and join him for a dip.

Women were funny, he mused, looking at the tightly-closed door separating him from Florine and letting himself envision her beyond that door, stripping down to the tanned flesh he knew so well, pulling on the latex suit that molded itself lovingly to her feminine contours.

How silly can you get? There was plenty of room inside the cabana for the two of them to undress and get into their bathing suits together. Married couples did it all the time. And he and Florine were to be married in less than a month. What difference did a few weeks make?

A lot of difference to Florine, he conceded wryly. She had blushed beautifully when he suggested that she go in with him to change. It wouldn’t be proper, she insisted. And when he laughed at her maidenly blush and reminded her of the night two months ago which ended in their engagement, she had become almost angry. It wasn’t the same at all, she told him primly. What would people think? And when he reminded her that there wasn’t a single soul at the Penguin Club who knew whether they were married or gave a damn whether they were or not, she had bridled and told him she knew and she gave a damn.

So now he stood outside waiting for Florine to join him. Two before-dinner cocktails were pleasantly warm in his stomach and the night air was cool on his bare flesh. On the stretch of white sand between Allen and the water’s edge a dozen or more bronzed couples lolled indolently, and there were as many more in the water between the shore and the diving float. From this distance he couldn’t see whether the float was occupied or not. The last time he and Florine had spent an evening at the Penguin, they had had almost an hour together alone on the float. It was funny how most of the swimmers avoided it after dark. When you were on the float looking toward the lighted shore, you had a feeling that everyone could see you distinctly and knew exactly what you were doing. Which wasn’t true at all, though he had a difficult time convincing Florine of that fact.

But when he did manage to convince her, it had been a real nice interval. He looked forward eagerly to the same sort of time tonight, and his heart beat faster as he did so. The funny thing was, he told himself happily, he’d bet ten to one Florine was thinking exactly the same thing inside the cabana as she changed to her bathing suit. And he’d bet her heart was beating just as excitedly as his at the thought. But she’d never admit it out loud. Not Florine. She was a “nice” girl, by God and by jiminey. Well, she was a nice girl. He’d be the last person in the world to deny that. But they were going to be married in a few weeks and he didn’t see what difference there would be after a few words spoken by a preacher. But Florine did. He didn’t blame her, really. He supposed it was the way girls were.

The cabana door opened and Florine stepped out into the colored lights and he spun his final cigarette away while a funny thrill raced down his spine as it always did when he saw Florine in a bathing suit.

She was young and she wore a demure little smile of happiness, and her breasts stood out tight and virginal inside the latex suit. She pulled the door shut with one hand and extended the other toward him. “Here’s the key, Al.” She dropped the numbered cabana key in his hand and he put it in the small pocket of his trunks and buttoned the flap down securely and gripped her smooth upper arm firmly and muttered, “Let’s get out there into the water where the other guys can’t look at you.”

She laughed happily and let him guide her around the lounging couples into the water. “Looks can’t hurt me, Al.”

“A bunch of old goats,” he said gruffly, though none of them were beyond their twenties. “They just lie here waiting for a look at something like you.”

They stepped cautiously into the water which felt icy cold to their bare feet, and when Florine let out a little shriek and tried to hold back, Allen laughed aloud exultantly and splashed ahead, dragging her in with him until they were waist-deep and swimming and the bright lights were behind them.

“Good, isn’t it? Makes you feel alive and zingy all over.”

“C-c-cold,” she shivered beside him.

“Naw, just about perfect,” Allen assured her. “Ten degrees colder than the air so it’s wonderful when you get out. Remember last time on the raft?”

Florine remembered and she swam strongly beside him toward the raft. She wouldn’t admit that she remembered, or that she was as eager as he to get there. These last weeks had been difficult. Everyone knew they were engaged, and they spent every evening together, but it was so damned difficult to get away from friends and the family to have just a few minutes alone together. It had been much easier before their engagement was formally announced. Up to that point they had managed to be alone together just about as much as they wanted, and no one thought anything about it or paid them the slightest heed.

But the moment they were engaged, everyone’s attitude was different. Everyone conspired to preserve the proprieties. As though they couldn’t be trusted alone together now. Oh, it was all good-natured and friendly, but everyone noticed and commented on it openly if they tried to slip off alone together for just a little while. So tonight was sort of adventurous, and she hoped they would be alone on the raft together like last time, and she was resolved she wasn’t going to be prudish in the beginning as she had been before. They had wasted so darned much time because she had been afraid someone would swim out unexpectedly even while Allen pointed out over and over again that it was perfectly safe because they could clearly see any approaching swimmer outlined by the shore lights in plenty of time.

The balmy night air felt heavenly and warm when they did reach the deserted raft and climbed out of the water dripping wet onto the canvas surface. They lay back side by side with sighs of contentment, and Florine pillowed her head on Allen’s bare shoulder and let warmth seep into her body and a delicious languor creep over her.

She let her head turn slowly and easily as his fingertips pressed gently against her left cheek, and her mouth came against his, opening warmly and wetly, lips clinging to lips, and retaining contact while lithe young bodies turned slowly to each other so that flesh was fused against flesh, and the moon looked down benignly and there was the low swish of wavelets against the edges of the float, and twenty feet to seaward, unknown to the young couple, a desperate man kept himself afloat by treading water while he inwardly cursed the amorous impulses that drove young people away from the lights of shore to practice dalliance on a deserted diving raft.

Wholly unaware that they were under observation by a man who was wanted for murder, Allen and Florine writhed against each other in a kiss that lasted for minutes and which left both of them breathless and shaken with desire.

When their bodies fell apart they turned onto their backs and lay silently looking up at the moonlit sky. Allen’s left hand played gently with a shoulder-strap of Florine’s suit, sliding it down over the smooth roundness of her shoulder and back again, his fingertips caressing the flesh and leaving a burning trail behind them.

He spoke in a hushed whisper. “Florrie.”

Lying flat on her back and looking straight upward, she whispered back, “Yes, Al?”

“Florrie… didja ever… swim in the moonlight naked?”

“Once,” she said dreamily. “One time I did, Al. It was a long time ago. At summer camp. There were just us three girls…” Her voice lapsed into reminiscent silence.

“Nice, huh?” His whisper had turned unaccountably gruff. He had the shoulder-strap well off her shoulder and was sliding it down on her bicep.

“Real nice. Like… oh, I just don’t know… like nothing else in this world.”

“I know.” His voice was softer now. It caressed her as his fingertips had been doing. “It’s like being born again, huh? Sort of?”

Florine said, “Sort of. I guess.”

His hand slid under her arm and his fingers moved over the uncovered swell of her breast. There was unexpected urgency in his whispered, “Could we now, Florrie? You want to?”

“We daren’t, Al. Out here in plain sight.”

“It’d be something.”

“I know.”

“Something big, Florrie. I dunno why.”

“I don’t either. But it would, Al.”

“There’s no danger, honey.” Allen withdrew his left hand and lifted himself on his elbow to look down at her upturned face in the moonlight. His right hand peeled the other shoulder-strap down, tugging gently, and to her amazement she found herself lifting her body a bit to help him.

He said huskily, “We can leave our suits here on the float. Just swim around a little. That’s all. You know, Florrie, it’d be like… well, like we were married. Like we’d been married a long time. You know? Just to swim like that here together. Nothing else.”

She said, “Yes.” Then, vehemently, “Yes, Al. I know.” She sat up and started to reach behind her back for the zipper, but Allen laughed softly and caught the metal tag and pulled it straight downward, then turned on his side away from her and slipped his own trunks down off slim hips and long legs and left them lying in a heap behind him as he slid into the cool water.

Florrie was in the water beside him before he took two strokes away from the raft. The length of their naked bodies touched momentarily beneath the surface of the water, and her laughter was excited and wanton.

“The water’s like silk and champagne. Oh, Al! let’s swim like this forever. Let’s never come out again.”

He laughed and ducked her so she sputtered wildly, then sank beneath the water and close to her, and she twisted and pushed her bare foot in his face and eluded him for a moment, and then let him come up to her and wrapped her arms tightly about his neck and sank her teeth into the flesh of his shoulder so that a drop of blood mingled with the taste of salt in her mouth, and they sported together like two young seals while the moon looked down with approval and there was the faint sound of distant music in their ears that might have been the hand-clapping of the gods who look after the destinies of private detectives.

CHAPTER TWELVE

From his vantage point in the water beyond the raft, the flat surface was clearly silhouetted for Michael Shayne by the beach lights, and he felt like a lousy Peeping Tom as he kept himself afloat in the darkness and watched the amorous gyrations of the young couple who believed themselves safe from prying eyes.

He would have given a great deal to be able to avert his eyes and swim away and leave Allen and Florrie to their own devices, but it was now practically a matter of life or death to him to be able to reach the raft for a short period of respite and he ruthlessly cast aside all moral and ethical considerations while he waited to see exactly how far they planned to go with their love-making.

When Allen rose on one elbow and leaned over Florrie and slid her shoulder-straps down, Shayne thought it was all over and he might as well give up any idea of reaching the raft to rest himself, but when Florrie sat up, too, and he saw her slide the suit down to her hips and wriggle out of it while Allen got out of his trunks and slid back into the water, Shayne exhaled a great sigh of thankfulness and cautiously edged in toward the farther side of the raft.

He reached it and caught hold of the edge moments after Florrie joined her fiancé in the water. He edged around hand over hand, carefully on the far side from the happy swimmers, listening to their giggling and splashing with intense satisfaction, and drew his body out of the water to stretch full-length on the canvas and get his strength back.

He knew he was safe for the moment. Even if the two nude young people sporting in the water nearby saw him on the raft, modesty would prevent them from swimming back to reclaim their bathing suits. They were the ones in a bad spot now. It was tough, and he honestly felt sorry for the embarrassment he was going to cause them, but that was the way things went and right now Shayne needed a pair of bathing trunks a lot more than Allen did.

He sat upright after a moment and clawed at the buttons of his shirt, stripped it off and dropped it in the water and tossed his undershirt in beside it.

Then he stood up and unbuckled his belt, got his wallet from a hip pocket and stepped out of trousers and shorts, kicking them off into the water too. For just a moment before doing so, he debated whether or not to leave them behind in lieu of the trunks he was about to borrow, to give the lad a chance to get back to shore decently, but he realized this was no time for compromise. His one chance to reach shore safely for a possible getaway was to completely immobilize the unlucky couple to prevent them from giving the alarm too soon.

He stooped and picked up Allen’s trunks, stepped into them and pulled them over his hips. They were uncomfortably tight, but would have to do. He again hesitated momentarily about also consigning Florrie’s discarded suit to the water, but again told himself grimly this was no time to go soft. They were young and could stand a little embarrassment. Let them withdraw in their nudeness to one of the dark ends of the beach until the lights were turned out and they had a chance to get back to their cabana without being seen. They could doubtless find something to do in the darkness to pass the time.

He stooped for his water-soaked wallet and tucked one-half of it inside the tight belt of the black trunks, felt the cabana key in the small buttoned pocket. He had known it would be there.

Without bothering to look for Allen and Florrie in the water, without knowing whether they had seen what was happening on the raft or were happily unaware of the theft that had taken place, he stepped off into the water and swam lazily toward shore, mingling with the other swimmers as he neared the lights, standing up and wading in when he reached the shallow part.

No one paid him the slightest attention as he strode out of the water and got the key out of his pocket. He held it up to the light and saw the number “10”, went directly to the row of cabanas and found the door bearing that number, unlocked it and stepped inside, switched on the light and pulled the door shut behind him.

It was an eight-by-ten cubicle with two canvas lounging chairs, a round metal table, and a folded beach umbrella in one corner. One of the chairs held a neatly folded pair of dark gray slacks, underwear and a yellow sport shirt, with two-toned sport shoes standing beside it and argyle socks stuffed into them. The other chair held Florrie’s clothes, and there was a heavy, folded towel over the back of each chair.

Shayne stripped off the trunks hurriedly, wiped himself dry, and tried on Allen’s underwear. The undershirt was tight across his shoulders and the shorts too small in the waist, but the fit wasn’t too bad and he told himself he was damned lucky his unknown and unknowing benefactor wasn’t a spindly 32.

He got into the sport shirt and pulled on the slacks, buckling the belt tightly and leaving the two top buttons unfastened, slid his wallet into a hip pocket and sat down warily to try on the socks and shoes.

The shoes were a full size too small and would not go on over the thick socks. He discarded them and managed to wriggle bare feet into the shoes, laced them loosely and stepped out fast without a backward glance. He left the key in the door for the couple to use if and when they were able to reach the cabana again, and strolled nonchalantly in front of the cabanas to the boardwalk leading down from the dancing pavilion and parking place.

He felt conspicuous under the lights with his bristly red hair, and wished the guy had worn some sort of hat or cap. He knew there would be cops about with his description, but they wouldn’t be looking for him to be clad in dry clothes. He knew there would be cabs waiting in the parking place, and with any luck at all he should be able to find one and get away from the beach unnoticed.

And just then his luck ran out.

There were two couples ahead of him on the boardwalk, also making their way to the parking lot, and Shayne fell into step behind them. There was a row of dwarf palms on the left, and beyond on the right was the brightly lighted Casino and Pavilion, and the muted sound of the dance music.

Following the two couples up the walk, Shayne did not see the man lurking in the shadow of the palms where he had a perfect view of every person coming from the beach. His first intimation that his luck had run out was the sound of a gruff voice from his left that said happily, “Mike Shayne, by God! Just like shooting fish.”

Shayne stopped on the boardwalk. A burly man stood in the shadow on his left not three feet away. He had a Police Positive in his hand and the muzzle was directed unwaveringly at the redhead’s mid-section. Shayne scowled as he recognized the Miami Beach detective and said, “Hi, Grayson. Late for you, isn’t it?”

“Not too late to earn a promotion for this.” Grayson’s voice was exultant. “Don’t move, Shayne. I’ll jump two grades if I have to blast you.”

Shayne didn’t move. He knew Grayson too well for that. In his twelve years on the Beach force, Grayson had shot and killed three “escaping” prisoners. He said flatly, “All right. It was a good try anyhow.”

“A damned good try,” Grayson congratulated him. “How in hell you come out of the ocean and got in dry clothes and all beats me.”

Shayne said, “It’s a long story. Do we stand here making conversation?”

“Not for very long, we don’t.” Grayson’s voice was cheerful. His gun was steady and he did not move closer to Shayne. Instead, he lifted his voice to call, “Okay, Harry! We got us a red-headed Shamus. Down this way.”

Shayne continued to stand very still with his hands at his sides. Another couple came up the walk behind him, paused curiously as he blocked the way, then passed him on the right in single file.

Another plainclothesman materialized from the direction of the Pavilion. He was tall and hatchet-faced, a stranger to Shayne who knew most of the Beach detectives by sight. He had his coat pushed back and a hand on his gun in a shoulder harness, and he came up quietly, asking Grayson, “You sure you got the right one? I thought…”

“Meet Mike Shayne,” said Grayson exultantly. “Put a cuff on him, Harry, and link it to your wrist while I stay ready to blow his guts out. Don’t forget he’s a murdering bastard and has already got away under four guns tonight.”

“Sure,” said Harry gravely. “But I guess we can handle him okay.” He buttoned his coat over the shoulder holster, removed a pair of handcuffs from a side pocket and locked one steel circlet about his left wrist. Then he moved close, taking care to stay away from Grayson’s line of fire, and snapped the other link tightly over Shayne’s right wrist. Then he exhaled raggedly and said, “Okay, Shamus. We’ll take a ride.”

He started up the walk and Shayne went docilely beside him, unpleasantly conscious that Grayson was a few paces behind with his gun ready.

They reached the crowded parking lot and circled around to the exit where a marked patrol car was parked, headed out. Harry stopped beside the left rear door and said over his shoulder, “We’ll take the back and you drive, huh?”

Grayson said, “Right,” as he came up behind them. “I’ll call in the good news first.”

Harry opened the rear door with his right hand and shoved Shayne toward the opening as Grayson passed behind him. Shayne saw him from the corner of his eye as he leaned forward to enter the police sedan.

He kicked back with his right foot, catching Grayson’s gun-hand against his lower guts to knock him sprawling and winded, and at the same time he straightened and drove his left fist to the point of Harry’s long jaw.

The gangling detective went down like an axed steer. Shayne let his own body slump with him, and his left hand darted inside Harry’s coat to lift the gun from its holster. He spun around on one knee to Grayson who was dragging himself up, hugging his belly with both hands. His gun lay on the ground five feet away.

Shayne said bleakly, “This is it, Grayson. Just keep in mind that I am a murdering bastard, and maybe you’ll live.” He rose to his feet slowly, stooping a little to ease the strain on the circlets of steel chain linking his wrist to Harry’s unconscious body.

“Leave your gun on the ground,” he directed Grayson flatly. “Come here and get your partner’s key and unlock this thing.”

Grayson was groggy and still winded, but he did not hesitate for an instant. He came closer, breathing hard, bent and fumbled in Harry’s pocket for a key-ring. Shayne shoved the gun hard against his ribs and held it there while he selected a small, flat key from the ring and unlocked the manacle from Shayne’s wrist.

Shayne said, “Now snap it on yourself and throw away the keys.”

Grayson did as he was ordered. Shayne stepped back and opened the front door of the car. “Shove him inside and you get under the wheel, Grayson. We’re driving across the County Causeway to Miami, and I’ll be in the back with his gun. When you come to a roadblock talk your way past it. If I don’t get to Miami alive, you won’t either.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Timothy Rourke was alone and relaxed in his bachelor apartment when he got his first flash on the Kane case. In the shabbily comfortable and masculinely disheveled living room, the reporter was sprawled out in a deep chair with a highball glass beside him and a cigarette drooping from the left corner of his mouth. His eyes were half-closed and he was pleasantly bored with the prospect of bed and a long night’s sleep. He had kicked off his shoes and opened the collar of his shirt, and he was scientifically considering the color of the diluted liquor in his glass and wondering whether it was worthwhile to freshen it up once more when his telephone rang.

He scowled at the sound and decided to let it ring. No one knew for sure he was home tonight. He didn’t have to answer the damn thing. There were younger punks on the News eager to handle any late-breaking story that came up. Let them write the headlines this time.

The telephone continued to ring monotonously. Rourke’s scowl took on a baleful quality as he mentally counted the rings. It would stop at four. Anybody with sense would give up after four rings. It kept on without surcease and when it didn’t stop after an even dozen, Rourke growled an unhappy oath and dragged his gangling body up out of the chair to answer it.

More than a dozen rings meant Carl on the City Desk. Carl wouldn’t stop at twice or three times a dozen. Carl knew Rourke too well for that. The damned thing would ring all night if Rourke didn’t do something about it.

He scooped the instrument up and said wearily, “All right, Carl. I’m awake and this is overtime.”

Carl said, “This, you’ll want personally, Tim. Michael Shayne has just murdered a dame on the Beach. Get on your horse, fellow.”

“What’s the gag?”

“No gag, goddamnit. Straight from headquarters.”

“Painter?”

“Sure, it’s Painter. Mrs. Richard Kane. You like those onions?”

Rourke said, “Nuts. You know damn well…”

“I know damn well you’d better get over to the Beach and cover it. Your red-headed pal is not only charged with first degree, but he’s also a fugitive with a shoot-to-kill out on him. Took off into the wide blue Atlantic under the guns of four cops. Get cracking, Tim.” Carl hung up.

Timothy Rourke got cracking. Twenty minutes later he careened into the almost deserted parking lot behind Police Headquarters at Miami Beach. He realized he’d never seen the lot so denuded of official cars as he slid out and trotted across to a side entrance. The hallway was empty, and a quick glance to his right showed him the booking room also deserted except for a green-visored sergeant behind the desk. Rourke turned to the left and four long strides took him to a closed door marked PRIVATE.

He turned the knob and walked in. Peter Painter sat happily alone behind a big bare desk. He was talking explosively into a telephone, his hairline mustache jumping as he spoke:

“… absolutely no exceptions. Every car is to be searched from under the hood through the trunk. I mean it.” He slammed down the receiver and smiled thinly at Timothy Rourke. “He’s had it this time. Finally, he’s had it.”

The reporter perched himself on the edge of a straight chair and got out a cigarette. He asked mildly, “You want to fill me in?”

“Nothing I’d like more. Shayne killed a woman and we’ve got him sewed up tight. Unless he can swim across to England, that is.”

“Mrs. Kane?”

“Mrs. Kane,” Painter said happily. “His paramour. Your story in the News about the fracas at lunch today isn’t going to help him any. Stubborn bastard, isn’t he?”

“Mike?” Rourke leaned back and contemplated a wavering smoke ring above his head.

“Mike Shayne,” agreed Painter grimly. “Why in hell didn’t he have sense enough to leave her alone after her husband warned him off twice like that?”

Rourke said ruefully, “Mike never was very good at listening to warnings. You were going to fill me in.” Peter Painter filled him in while Rourke gravely made notes on a wad of paper he had extracted from his hip pocket. The phone interrupted the detective chief twice, and his intercom buzzer rang three times while he outlined the case against the private detective. He barked curt orders into the phone and intercom, throwing every available man on the Beach force into tightening a cordon against Shayne’s escape from the water, demanding full cooperation from Will Gentry on the mainland and getting the Miami Police Chief’s promise that all the redhead’s known haunts would be covered, and that all exits from the city would be guarded on the faint chance that the wanted man would somehow make his way across Biscayne Bay.

Through it all, Rourke sat brooding and unbelieving in his chair, jotting down meticulous notes as Painter filled in the picture for him between interruptions. When he completed his bitter explanation of the manner by which Shayne had cunningly maneuvered himself out into deep water away from shore while a quartet of Beach policemen watched him disappear beneath the surface and escape into the depths of the ocean, Rourke folded his notes and tapped them thoughtfully with his pencil.

He snorted, “So you really haven’t got a damned thing on Mike. Just that Mrs. Kane was murdered by an unknown person while Mike was outside the house.”

“Nothing on him?” Painter was incredulous with outrage. “It’s a known fact he was her lover… that he was meeting her on the sly, and…”

“Who knows that to be a fact?” demanded Rourke coldly.

“Every, by God, man, woman and child who reads either of the Miami papers. He fought over her with her husband publicly last night and again at noon today. My God, Rourke! You were there yourself and wrote up the story.”

“Sure I was there. I heard an insanely jealous husband accusing Mike of being intimate with his wife. That doesn’t make it a fact.”

“He slipped out to see her behind Kane’s back tonight.”

“Because she was afraid of her husband and wanted protection,” Rourke said coldly. “What about the previous lover she told Mike about? I’d be looking for him if I were chief of detectives.”

“What other man?” sneered Painter. “Kane flatly scotched that lie of Shayne’s. He denies every word of that absurd story.”

Timothy Rourke shook his head sadly. “Honest to God, Painter, I feel real sorry for you. Won’t you ever learn? You’ve gone out on a limb to hang something on Mike before, but this is the farthest you’ve ever gone.”

“His escape is an admission of guilt,” Painter contended stoutly. “No innocent man is afraid to stand up in court and disprove charges against himself.”

Rourke continued to shake his head lugubriously. “You gave him no choice. Since you’re determined not to look for Mrs. Kane’s murderer, Mike knew he had to do it for you. He couldn’t do it locked up in your lousy jail even if it did build up a hell of a case for false arrest.”

“And he can’t do it while he’s swimming around in the Atlantic either,” exulted Painter, a trembling thumbnail brushing the thin line of his mustache.

“He’s a pretty good swimmer,” said Rourke absently.

“He needs to be tonight. Goddamned good. Admit you’ve been mistaken in the man, Rourke. Play it smart this time. Write your story from the facts.”

Rourke stood up slowly and rammed his notes back into a hip pocket. His black eyes glittered in their sockets and his lined face was grayish and drawn.

“I’ll write my story from what I know about Mike Shayne,” he said evenly. “You’re sick inside, Painter, and God help you for it. The worms are gnawing at your guts and working their way up into your brain. If one of your trigger-happy boys in blue guns Mike Shayne tonight on your orders, I’ll crucify you.”

Painter said, “Get out of this office.”

Rourke said, “With pleasure. It stinks in here.” He turned stiffly toward the door.

The buzzer sounded on Painter’s desk. He flipped the intercom open and said hoarsely, “Yeh?”

Timothy Rourke stopped with his hand on the doorknob and his back to the office. There was silence behind him broken only by Painter’s loud breathing. When he finally said, “I got that,” his voice was so thin and shaken that Rourke turned curiously to look back at him.

Painter was slumped forward on his desk with one hand clawing at his throat. His face was white and his eyeballs looked swollen and distended. When Rourke took an instinctive step back toward him, he lifted his head and panted through bared teeth, “Get out of here, I said.”

Rourke went out quietly and closed the door of the private office behind him. Down the hall, in the room in front, he got the story.

Michael Shayne had done it again. Officer Grayson and his partner in a Beach patrol car that had been stationed at the Penguin Club to prevent Shayne’s escape had shamefacedly checked in at Miami Police Headquarters chained together with their own handcuffs and told how the redhead had crouched on the floor in the back of their police car holding one of their own guns on them and forced them to drive through a roadblock on the County Causeway set up by their unsuspecting fellow officers, and on to the mainland where he had stepped out of the car and disappeared into the night just short of Biscayne Boulevard.

Grim-faced and silent, Timothy Rourke absorbed the news, and left the police station to get in his car and drive back to Miami.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Back in Miami, Rourke drove slowly past his apartment building, carefully studying the parked cars in the block and noting there were no police cars among them. He turned the next corner onto a side street and pulled into the curb, thinking it might be just as well if he didn’t advertise his presence by parking in front.

Another car pulled in behind his as the reporter got out, and he glanced at it incuriously as he circled in front of his car to the sidewalk. Its driver was the only occupant, and he slid across the seat and out the right-hand door as Rourke sauntered past. He fell into step a few paces behind Rourke and his hard heels echoed in rhythm on the concrete as Rourke turned the corner toward his building entrance.

The reporter continued on without looking back, turned in at the entrance and was conscious of the man turning in behind him. As he drew open the wide front door, he glanced casually back to see if he recognized one of the building’s tenants.

The man wore a dark business suit and a snap-brim hat tugged low over the forehead of a fleshy face that Rourke had never seen before. He caught the swinging door before it closed behind Rourke, followed him across the small, deserted lobby to a self-service elevator at the rear. An indicator showed the car was standing at the 4th floor. Rourke pressed a button and red light glowed on the dial and the indicator turned back slowly to 1.

As Rourke waited for it he was uncomfortably conscious of the stranger standing close behind him. When he opened the door and stepped inside, the man followed him into the small cage. With his finger hovering over the row of buttons numbered 1 to 6, Rourke turned to look at him and ask, “Which floor do you want?”

The man said, “Whatever you say, Mr. Rourke, is all right with me.”

Rourke’s extended finger stiffened without touching a button. He asked, “Did you tail me from the Beach?”

“That’s right.” The man spread out a beefy hand, palm up. “The Chief figured that with Mike Shayne on the lam he might contact you. I’ll be around if he does.”

Rourke shrugged bony shoulders and pressed the button for 4. He said flatly, “Mike would know better than to come here.”

“Maybe. I’m just carrying out orders.”

Rourke compressed his lips and faced front to open the door when the car slid to a smooth stop. He got out and strode up the hall with a vast sense of relief as he neared his door and saw no telltale strip of light on the threshold underneath. Shayne did have a duplicate key, and Rourke wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find him waiting inside on his return. He got out a key-ring and unlocked the door, opened it so the man behind him could get a good look and see the room was dark, told him coldly over his shoulder, “You can do your waiting outside while I get a night’s sleep.” He closed the door firmly behind him and switched on the ceiling light. He touched a finger warningly to his lips when he saw Michael Shayne’s rangy body lounged comfortably in a deep chair across the room. The redhead wore a pair of old fishing slacks and a disreputable jersey that he had left in Rourke’s apartment a couple of years previously, and on his feet were a battered pair of sneakers a couple of sizes too large for the reporter. An uncorked cognac bottle and a tumbler of ice water stood on a table near Shayne’s right hand, and he was just setting down an empty glass. Smoke curled lazily from a cigarette in a corner of his mouth and he arched ragged red eyebrows as he caught Rourke’s signal for silence.

The reporter crossed the room to stand beside his chair, and said in a low voice, “One of Painter’s dicks trailed me home from the Beach. He’s hanging around outside on the chance you’ll show. Thank God you had sense enough to leave the light off.”

Shayne grinned happily and kept his voice low also. “Sometimes I’m almost smart. How’s Petey?”

“Having kittens.” Rourke pulled his own chair close to Shayne’s so they could talk without being overheard through the closed door, got his highball glass that still held the remnants of ice cubes and a couple of fingers of diluted bourbon. He picked up a bottle from where it had stood beside his chair, splashed whiskey into the glass and drank greedily. He settled his bony body in the chair with his head a couple of feet from Shayne’s and asked, “Been listening to the radio any?” The detective shook his red head. He poured a moderate amount of cognac in his glass and took a sip. “Have I missed anything important?”

“Nothing you don’t already know, I guess. Damn it, Mike. This time you really have torn it!”

“I?” Shayne raised amused eyebrows. “Hell, I didn’t do anything, Tim, except…”

“Except swing the hell out on a limb and let Peter Painter cut it off behind you,” interrupted Rourke bitterly. “This business of knocking out the cops and holding a gun on them while they drove you over the Causeway! Even Will Gentry can’t laugh that off. You’re bullet-bait for every cop’s gun in Miami right now.”

“Not the cops that know me,” Shayne reassured him.

“How many real friends do you think you’ve got on the Force?” Rourke held up his two hands with fingers widely separated. “You can count ’em right there. Why didn’t you sit tight in the Kane house and let nature take its course?”

“You know nature and me.” Shayne grinned engagingly. “I’m sitting here instead of behind Painter’s bars.”

“Lots of damned good that does you. The minute you stick your red head outside you’ll get it blasted off.”

Shayne said consolingly, “Maybe not. I’ve been around Miami a long time, and…”

“That’s just it, Mike. You have been around a long time. I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. Ten years ago it was fun. Now I’m plain damned scared.”

“Want me to get out?”

“You know I don’t,” Rourke said wearily. He dragged a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. “I’m merely suggesting that if you’ve got an ounce of sense in that red head of yours, you’ll call in and give yourself up to Will Gentry personally. That way, you may stay alive.”

“So will Mrs. Kane’s murderer.”

“What can you do about it sitting here? The way I get the picture there’s not a single damned clue to work on. Unless you held something out on Painter.” Rourke’s eyes were bright and he leaned forward hopefully.

Shayne shook his head. “I gave him everything. But he had me and couldn’t see anything else. That’s why I couldn’t afford to rot in his jail while he tightened the frame on me.”

“What have you got, Mike? The only other possible suspect I see is Richard Kane. And the way Painter tells it, he’s the one guy in Florida with a perfect alibi. One that you give him yourself.”

“That’s right, and because I do alibi him and he’s the only other person who seems to be personally involved, Painter is perfectly satisfied to leave it that way.”

Timothy Rourke drank deeply from his highball glass and drew on his cigarette. “Who else is there?”

“Some guy named Roger.”

“Roger what?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out. Look, Tim. You know perfectly well there wasn’t anything between me and Mrs. Kane. But she did have a lover on the side. Name of Roger. Didn’t Painter tell you about him?” Rourke got his wad of notes out and glanced over a couple of pages of his scribbling. “He mentioned a man you say she said she’d been friendly with in the past. No name given. And he claims Kane scotched that story completely.”

“So Kane did. But I’m the one she told it to… and I’m the one who says Kane is lying when he denies it.”

“Why, Mike? Why wouldn’t he be as eager as you to turn in any information he has that might lead to his wife’s murderer?”

Shayne shrugged. “I can think of several reasons. Foremost, to give the devil his due, I’ll concede that Kane may really think I shot her. He’s crazy jealous enough to think anything. You saw him at noon today. I think the poor guy actually believes I was two-timing him with his wife.”

Rourke said drily, “He did give that impression.”

“So he goes on from there to accept the fact that I killed her in a lovers’ quarrel,” Shayne argued. “A man has to really love his wife to be as jealous as Kane. That gives him two good reasons for denying a former indiscretion. To save her reputation, and to make damned sure that I don’t get away with murder. I don’t blame Kane for denying it,” Shayne went on harshly. “I do blame Painter for closing his eyes to the truth and taking his word against mine.”

“All right. So maybe there was a Roger in her life. Does that mean he killed her?”

“Somebody did the job,” Shayne reminded him. “An ex-lover… how ex we don’t know. A guy who has visited her surreptitiously in the past by way of the beach at low tide and the kitchen stairs. A guy who maybe has just as much reason to be as jealous as her husband when he read those two stories in the papers about Kane accusing me of having extra-marital fun with her. He’s all I’ve got, Tim.”

“And how do you go about locating him while you’re cooped up here in my place afraid to stick your nose outside the door?”

“A month or so ago, Kane hired a local private op to get the goods on Roger. I find out who did the job and get Roger’s last name. Then I pay a visit to this Roger and find out where he was tonight while Lydia was taking a bullet.”

Rourke said, “You make it sound so simple. With a couple dozen private dicks in Miami…”

“But only five of them,” Shayne interrupted, “that are set up and eager for that kind of tailing job. Two of those are the big national outfits with branches in Miami. Worldwide and Continental. Then there’s Max Sentor, Earl Jenson and Dave Gatsby. That’s all, Tim. Just five. So, why don’t you start telephoning?”

“Me?”

“Not me,” Shayne said. “Hell, even the ones who’re friends of mine are legally obligated to turn in an escaped murder suspect.” He pointed to the telephone directory. “Start with Worldwide and Continental. They both have night men. If we cancel those out, I’ll give you a pitch to use on the other three.”

Timothy Rourke shrugged resignedly, took another drink of bourbon and went over to the telephone to leaf through the directory to the classified section. He found a number and dialed it, said, “This is Tim Rourke on the News. Who is speaking?

“Loomis?” He grinned over at Shayne with a nod. “Hi, Loomis. I’m trying to trace down a rumor. Has Continental had a client named Richard Kane on the Beach in the last couple of months?”

He listened for a short time and said, “The same. Mike Shayne clobbered him today and I want a follow-up on the story. Just confidentially, Loomis, did you people do a job for him tailing his wife recently?” He listened again, shaking out a cigarette and lighting it. “Will you do that for me?” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and told Shayne, “I guess he hasn’t heard tonight’s news. He’s checking the file to make sure, though he doesn’t think so.”

He waited a little longer and said, “Thanks a lot, fellow. Ask me for a favor some time.” He hung up, shaking his head at Shayne and reporting in a low voice. “Not Continental. I’ll try Worldwide.”

He looked up another number and dialed it, said, “Daily News calling. We’re checking a rumor that one of your recent clients is Richard Kane on Miami Beach. I realize that your files are confidential, and I assure you this isn’t for publication but merely to be used as background material for a story on Kane. Can you confirm the rumor?”

He listened, cocking an exasperated eyebrow at Shayne. “Come on, honey,” he pleaded. “Just take a look in the K file. I swear I’ll never tell a soul…” He paused, dragging deeply on his cigarette, then said briskly, “All right. Can you give me his home telephone number?”

He got a pencil from his pocket, scribbled in the open telephone directory and said, “Thanks a million, darling. Remind me to buy you a drink some day.” He hung up and told Shayne glumly, “Some gal that doesn’t know up from down.” He mimicked a feminine voice, “Our files are all locked up at night and anyway I couldn’t possibly give out such information without an okay from our Mr. Gans.”

Shayne got up and crossed over to the reporter. “She give you Gans’ home number?”

“Right here.” Rourke showed his notation.

Shayne nodded and took the phone from him. He dialed the number and listened to it ring five times. A woman’s voice answered. He said, “Mrs. Gans? Is Charlie at home? Tell him Mike Shayne.”

He waited until a deeper voice said excitedly, “Mike! What in hell kind of a mess you in this time?”

He grinned at the phone and said, “Hi, Lou. Don’t believe half what you hear on the radio or TV. I haven’t killed anybody… yet. But I am in just a little bit of a spot. Did Worldwide act for Richard Kane tailing his wife for adultery evidence a couple months ago?”

He listened, tugging at his left earlobe thoughtfully. “Sure of that, huh? Okay, Lou. Thanks a million… and I’d just as soon you didn’t report this conversation.” He hung up, shaking his head. “That leaves Jenson, Gatsby and Sentor. You know any of them personally, Tim?”

“Max Sentor,” Rourke said, “hates my guts and wouldn’t give me the time of day. I think I talked to Jenson once on the phone. Gatsby I never even heard of.”

“You haven’t missed much,” Shayne told him. He frowned down at the page in the classified section in the book. “Sentor and Gatsby both give home numbers where they can be reached after office hours. Try Gatsby first. If you can get him, tell him who you are and ask him to meet you at his office in half an hour. Don’t mention my name or Kane’s, but tell him you’re working on a story that should put him in the headlines. He’ll bite on that.”

Rourke nodded and dialed a number. A woman’s voice answered and he said, “Mr. Gatsby, please.” He listened a moment and said, “I see. Is there anyone else available who might be able to give me certain very important information tonight?”

He listened again, then said politely, “Thank you, Mrs. Gatsby. Sorry to have been a bother.” He replaced the phone and told Shayne:

“Gatsby’s out of town until tomorrow afternoon. He runs a one-man deal and there’s no one can give us any dope.”

Shayne’s lined face remained expressionless. He said, “Try Sentor.”

Rourke checked the book and dialed another number. After a couple of rings, he said, “Sentor? City desk on the Daily News. We’re on the trail of a hot story that involves one of your clients. If you’ll cooperate by meeting one of our reporters in your office in about half an hour for an interview, we can offer you a cash bonus of a hundred dollars and practically guarantee you a big black headline tomorrow. Will you play ball?” Rourke waited while a voice rumbled over the wire, nodded and said curtly, “Half an hour. Our man will meet you at your office.” He hung up and told Shayne. “That bait worked. Now, how do I get the information from him?”

“You don’t,” Shayne said. He doubled his right fist and studied it bleakly. “He’ll open his files for me.”

“Aren’t you forgetting Painter’s boy outside in the hall?”

“Not exactly.” Shayne went back to his chair and his drink. Rourke followed him with a worried frown on his cadaverous face.

“If you were to take off in a hurry,” said Shayne, “would he tail you or stay here to watch for me?”

“I don’t know what his orders are.”

Shayne took a swallow of cognac and chased it down his throat with some ice water. He turned the glass around and around in his hands, said thoughtfully, “I think I remember your phone rings pretty loud.”

Rourke nodded agreement. “I had it set loud so it’d wake me in the bedroom no matter how soundly I’m sleeping.”

“So he’d hear that out in the hall. And if you had a call and hurried out a few minutes after, he’d be very likely to think I’d phoned and you were slipping out to meet me,” Shayne went on.

“He might. If I had a call.”

Shayne said, “That’s simple enough. So, if he does follow you out… okay. Where’s your car parked?”

“Around the corner on Fourth Avenue. His car is right behind mine.”

“Give me your keys.” Shayne extended his hand. “If he does fall for it and follows you down, walk down the street to the corner cab-stand and jump in one fast. He’ll grab another cab if there’s one waiting, or rush around to get in his car and follow you. Either way, pretend you’re trying to get away fast, but give him a chance to stay on your tail. Then all you have to do is drive all over hell and back with him behind you. Have the cabbie make like he’s trying to shake him, but be damned careful he doesn’t. As soon as it’s clear, I’ll drive down to Sentor’s office to meet him, and from then on I’ll be on my own. You can wind up back here in half an hour. If I don’t get what I want from Sentor, I’ll have to go after Jenson and hope he’s it.”

“Jenson doesn’t list a home number,” Rourke objected. Where’ll you find him this time of night?”

“I’ll find him,” Shayne said grimly, “if I have to. Got everything straight?”

“We’ll have someone phone me. I’ll let it ring several times, answer it, and then rush out in a hurry.” Rourke ticked the items off on his fingers. “If Painter’s man plays along, I lead him away in a taxi until you get loose in my car to meet Sentor. Okay. But suppose he doesn’t take the bait and stays on duty outside?”

“Then we’ll have to do it differently,” Shayne growled. “Here’s how. You hurry out after the call. Rush to the elevator and see if he follows. In the meantime, your phone rings again. You hear it ringing, but disregard if he’s going along. If you see he isn’t, you shrug and come back to take the second call instead of going down in the elevator. Act resigned and tell him for Christ’s sake to come in and have a drink while you answer the phone.”

“And?”

“I’ll be standing here against the wall beside the door when he comes in,” Shayne explained. “And I’ll slug him. Okay?”

Rourke sighed and ran long fingers through his thinning hair. “The things I do in the name of friendship,” he muttered. “So, you slug him. Here in my apartment. Where does that put me when he comes to?”

“I’ll slug you, too, to make it look good,” Shayne offered kindly. “You can say later I must have been hiding in the bedroom all the time and you didn’t know it.”

“Who’ll believe that story?” Rourke asked in disgust.

“Nobody. But they can’t prove differently.” Shayne paused, his lined face hardening. “I guess that is too much to ask in the name of friendship. Why don’t you call the guy in right now, and…”

Rourke said, “Why don’t you shut your big mouth? I’ve got it all straight. But who can you depend on to make the two calls to this number just when you want them?”

Michael Shayne said, “That’s the least of our worries.” He drained his glass and set it down. His gray eyes were bright with a hint of moistness and his voice was curiously soft as he said, “So we’re both crazy like hell. You ready to take off?”

Rourke drained his own glass and set it down. He said, “Sure.”

The detective went to the telephone and said over his shoulder, “Maybe you don’t know it, Tim, but every phone has a combination of numbers which, if dialed with the receiver down, causes that phone to start ringing. Repairmen use it for testing. Each exchange has its own special combination of numbers. So I can make your phone ring any time I want.” He stood in front of the instrument with his finger pointed at the dial. “Come over and answer it naturally when it rings. Thirty seconds after you answer it, I’ll start it ringing again. Then I’ll stand by the door and it will keep on ringing until you come back in or I’m sure you’ve led Painter’s man away. All set?”

Rourke nodded to indicate that he understood and was ready. Shayne dialed three numbers and stepped back. The telephone started ringing loudly.

Rourke got up from his chair and crossed to it slowly. He picked it up on the fifth ring and said huskily, “Hello? Mike? My God, fellow. Where are you?” He pretended to listen, though no voice came over the wire. Then he said excitedly, “Sure. Just as soon as I can get there. Wait for me.” He replaced the instrument, hurried past Shayne to the door with a nod, switched off the light at the same instant that he jerked the door open.

Standing back by the phone in the darkened room, Shayne saw the waiting figure of the Miami Beach plainclothesman across the hall through the open door as Rourke went out. He slammed the door shut and Shayne struck a match to lean over the instrument and dial the same combination of numbers he had used before.

The telephone began ringing again.

Shayne moved across the dark room to press himself against the wall beside the closed door and wait to see whether Rourke would disregard this second call or would return and re-enter and lure the Beach detective into the room behind him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The phone rang steadily and monotonously in the dark room behind the tense detective pressed against the wall beside the door. As it rang, he mentally calculated Rourke’s progress down the hall to the elevator. If the car were still waiting on that floor, he would be entering it by now. But if he had to ring for it from another floor…

Still, after the twentieth ring, Shayne felt sure Rourke would have been back at the door had the Beach detective stayed behind instead of following him down, and he flipped on the light, stepped quickly to the phone to lift it and stop its clangor, then replaced it and went back to the door, turned out the light again and went out.

The hallway was empty and Shayne went casually to the elevator, saw the car stood on the first floor and pressed a button to bring it up.

He didn’t hurry down, wishing to give Rourke plenty of time to lure the Beach detective well away from the building before sticking his nose out.

But when he crossed the empty lobby below and saw the sidewalk in front was deserted, he long-legged it down to the corner and was happy to see the reporter’s familiar car standing alone at the curb.

That meant the Beach detective had taken his own car to tail Rourke in a taxi, and the way was definitely clear for Shayne to keep the midnight appointment with Max Sentor.

The private detective had agreed to meet Rourke at his office in half an hour, and twenty minutes of that interval had elapsed by the time Shayne pulled away from the curb in Rourke’s car.

Shayne swung around to Miami Avenue and drove south al a leisurely pace to 2nd Street. He parked on the Avenue between 2nd and 1st, got out and strolled a quarter of a block to the dingy entrance of a small office building crammed between a fruit shop and a lighted bar-room. There was a dim light in the small foyer and the outer door was unlocked. Shayne strode in briskly and paused to consult the directory of tenants, went back to a self-service elevator waiting on the ground floor.

He went up to the 3rd and found another dim light in the empty hallway there. Directly in front of the elevator, frosted glass bore the legend MAX SENTOR—PVT. DETECTIVE. The office was dark, but Shayne tried the door and found it locked. The elevator descended as he stood in front of the locked door.

He stepped back to stand beside the elevator, watched the indicator reach bottom and hesitate there briefly, then start swinging up.

He flattened himself against the wall and stood motionless when the cage stopped beside him and the doors slid back. A short, thick-bodied man stepped out and crossed the corridor without noticing Shayne. He was bare-headed, with glossy black hair pomaded smoothly down to his scalp, wearing a black and yellow checked sport jacket and fawn-colored slacks and tan loafers. He had a key ready in his hand as he stepped from the elevator, and he turned it in the lock of the door opposite and pushed it open.

Shayne crossed silently to stand directly behind him as he hesitated on the threshold to switch on a ceiling light. He said in a conversational tone, “Nice of you to come down, Max.”

Sentor stiffened and paused in mid-stride. He jerked his head around to peer over his right shoulder with beady, black, frightened eyes. His thick lips parted slackly to disclose discolored lower teeth and he breathed, “Mike Shayne! I thought…”

Shayne said, “I know what you thought, Max.” He pulled the door firmly shut behind him. The office was a small, one-room affair, with a littered desk in the center and two steel filing cabinets behind it.

“In fact,” he went on pleasantly, “I know exactly what you’re thinking now, and you’re right, Max. It’d put you in real good with Petey Painter if you were to turn me in single-handed. But don’t try it.”

Beads of perspiration stood on Sentor’s forehead and he smiled weakly, licking his lips. “You got me all wrong, Mike. Hell! we’re in the same racket, ain’t we? Live and let live, I say.” He moved on heavily to the swivel chair behind the desk and sank into it, clasping pudgy hands in front of him. “You took me by surprise is all. I thought some reporter was coming up…”

Shayne said, “I’ve got no time to waste.” He slid one hip onto a corner of the desk and leaned forward to hold Sentor’s flickering gaze with a hard stare. “You know the spot I’m in and I know you’d love to double-cross me, but don’t do it tonight, Max. Just don’t. That’s all. I want the name of the man who’s been playing footsie with Mrs. Richard Kane on Miami Beach.”

“Mrs. Kane?” Max Sentor licked his blubbery lips. “From what I read in the papers…”

Shayne said, “To hell with what you read in the papers. She’s dead and you know it, and Painter’s got the rap set for me. You did a tailing job for Kane a couple of months ago. All I want is the name of her lover. Roger what? Give it to me and you won’t get hurt.”

“Look here, now. You know my clients’ affairs are confi…”

Shayne leaned closer to slam the back of his left hand across Sentor’s cheek. “Give me his name.” His voice was controlled and deadly.

Sentor leaned back, his face ashen, hands gripping the edge of the desk. “You can’t come in my office like this and…”

“I can do any goddamned thing I want tonight,” Shayne interrupted him flatly. He slid off the desk in a half-crouch, doubling a big fist and holding it up for Sentor to look at. “So help me God, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat if you don’t talk fast.”

“I am talking, Mike. I swear I am,” Sentor gabbled. “I didn’t do the job for Kane. You got me wrong. I dunno…”

As he spoke, his left hand dropped to the edge of the partially open middle drawer of the desk, and he jerked it toward him. His right hand reached desperately for a stubby automatic in the drawer and Shayne’s fist smashed full in his face before he could grab it up.

The swivel chair went over backward and he scrabbled on his hands and knees into a corner in desperate haste, making sickening mewing sounds past the blood spurting from thick lips as Shayne strode forward and stood over him.

The redhead stood over him with both fists swinging for a moment, disgust deepening the trenches in his cheeks. Then he muttered, “Nuts,” and turned to look at the steel filing cabinets, jerking open the second drawer of one that had a typewritten label in the slot, “Clients. J-L”.

There were cardboard folders in the file, each with a tab lettered with a client’s name in alphabetical order.

While Sentor crouched in the corner covering his face with both hands and making blubbery noises, Shayne swiftly thumbed through the folders under “K” without finding anything for Kane.

He slammed the drawer shut and addressed the cowering man dispassionately.

“Maybe you’re not lying, Sentor. Maybe. And maybe you think I’m through in Miami and it’ll be safe to throw the hooks to me after I walk out of here. Because that’s what I’m going to do. I’m walking out and going down the elevator, and if you handle the phone real fast you may get a squad car here before I can get away.

“Think it over. Maybe I’m not through in Miami. Just maybe… in the next couple of hours I’ll come up with Mrs. Kane’s killer. Think about that while you’re reaching for the phone, Max.”

He turned on his heel and strode to the door without looking back.

The elevator still stood where Sentor had left it across the aisle. Shayne got in and pressed the down button. He knew he was a stubborn fool. He could have jerked out the telephone wires and assured himself that much leeway. Something had prevented him from taking that precaution. There was a driving pride inside him that refused to admit that a craven soul like Max Sentor could possibly have the guts to turn him in. Somehow, he was proving something to himself by walking out that way, though for the life of him Michael Shayne could not have put into words just what he was proving.

The dim-lit ground-floor lobby was still deserted when he left the elevator. He strode to the door and out, turned left past the darkened fruit shop toward Timothy Rourke’s car a hundred feet away.

He came to an abrupt halt after two long strides in that direction. A police radio car was angled in at the curb in front of Rourke’s car. A uniformed cop was getting out on the far side. An elderly couple on the sidewalk sauntered momentarily between the tall redhead and the police car. Shayne turned on his heel and walked southward past the inviting doors of the barroom toward the brighter lights of Flagler Street a block and a half ahead.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Michael Shayne turned off the Avenue onto 1st Street at the corner without looking back. He was positive there hadn’t been time for Sentor to phone in an alarm and get a radio car to the spot, so it looked as though there must be an alarm out on Rourke’s car and the cops he’d seen were staking it out. It was pure luck that he hadn’t got in it and driven away in time to be pulled in by the alarm.

He drew a deep breath of night air into his lungs and grinned wryly as he strode along the street studying the parked cars for a likely heap that he might drive away without too much trouble. Yeh. The Shayne luck was still holding. And he needed a lot of it now. One more name on his list! One more chance to learn the identity of Mrs. Kane’s lover before it was too late to do him any good.

A bright red and white Chevrolet convertible passed him, and its brakes ground as the driver wavered to the curb down the block in a vacant space just beyond the lights of a bar. Shayne slowed his pace as a girl stepped out on the right side and was followed by a tall youth who obviously needed no more drinks that evening, but who flung an arm about the girl’s shoulders and let her half support him into the bar.

Shayne moved up fast as they disappeared inside, knowing the chances were he was drunk enough to forget his ignition key and that he was unlikely to be coming out of the bar very soon to notice that his car was missing.

He strolled around to the left side and glanced in to see the key in the lock. He slid under the wheel and started the motor, pulled away smoothly to the next corner where he turned right. He drove north at a moderate speed, checking everything he knew or had ever heard about a private detective named Earl Jenson.

There was a girl mixed up with Jenson, he knew. He’d run into the two of them together just a few weeks ago. He remembered a hard face and brassy hair and lots of bust, but no name to go with them. But there had been something about the girl—something lewd or unsavory that had impressed itself on his memory at the time.

He scowled as he drove northward, concentrating on the scene. It had been very late at night. In a dump out toward Coral Gables. They had come to his table just as he was finishing a drink and about to leave, and Jenson introduced the girl with a fatuous smile. And she’d pretended to be impressed by the redhead’s reputation and…

Hell! He had it now. He snapped his fingers in relief. They’d stood there waiting for him to leave the booth so they could sit down, and when he pressed past her to get out, she clung to him for a moment and whispered, “Come see me some time at Mama Ranee’s.”

He looked at the next street sign and speeded up to 23rd Street where he swung left. This was one of the older sections of the city solidly built up with fairly large stucco residences, many of which had been converted into apartments.

A few blocks westward, he pulled into the curb in front of a three-story house with the lower floor completely lighted and most of the upper windows dark. A discreet sign said RANCE APTS, and beneath a smaller sign hung on two hooks told him NO Vacancies.

He went up a short walk to the unlighted front porch and pulled the door open onto a wide hall leading the length of the house. Loud chimes sounded in a big well-lighted room to the right over the sound of voices and dance music, and as Shayne turned to the opening he was met by a tall, elegantly gowned woman with silvery hair and unlined features. She had the genteel appearance of a faded Southern belle, and the mechanical smile of welcome on her face was replaced by one of genuine warmth when she recognized her caller.

“Michael Shayne?” she trilled. “I do declare if it isn’t! You-all come right on in and…”

Shayne said, “Hi, Mama. I’m looking for a girl.”

“Well, now, what other reason would you be coming here this time of night?” she pouted prettily, putting a soft, plump hand on his arm.

“A particular girl,” he amended, drawing her back into the hallway. “I don’t know her name, but she’s a friend of one of your good customers. Earl Jenson. Know the one I mean?” He cupped his hands suggestively far out in front of his chest.

Mama Ranee’s delighted laughter was a girlish trill. “Mistuh Shayne! Would you be meaning Isabelle?”

“I met her with Jenson a couple of weeks ago.”

“And she went for you plenty, I bet.” Mama Rance tilted her head coquettishly. “You know now, I do declare if I were twenty years younger…”

Shayne said, “This is damned important, Mama. Has Jenson been here tonight?”

“Not tonight. But I’m afraid Isabelle is busy right this minute. Why don’t you-all come right in and relax…?”

Shayne shook her hand off his arm impatiently. “Get Isabelle down here.”

“I couldn’t do that, Mistuh Shayne.” She was horrified by the suggestion. “When one of my girls is entertaining…”

“I want to ask her one question,” Shayne said between his teeth. “Get her for me, Mama, or I’ll start opening every door in the joint.”

She fluttered her hands helplessly and started to protest again, but Shayne turned her about roughly toward the stairway leading to the second floor and told her harshly: “I’ll wait here just two minutes, Mama. Then I start tearing the place apart until I find Isabelle.”

She said doubtfully, “I’ll see. You wait here now, and I’ll see if…”

“Two minutes,” Shayne told her. He leaned against the wall and got out a cigarette, drew in a deep lungful of smoke while he watched her climb the stairs hastily.

The two minutes weren’t quite up when she reappeared at the top of the stairs holding tightly to the arm of the girl whom Shayne had met with Jenson. She wore a flowered wrapper that failed to come together in front and her eyes were stormy as she ran down the stairs in front of Mama Rance, raging, “What the hell kinda stunt you and Mama pulling? I don’t care who you are or what the damned hell you want…”

Shayne said, “Where’s Earl Jenson tonight?”

“That cheap no-good?” She stopped on the bottom step, trying without too much effort to pull the wrapper together. “I remember you now. Another dick like Earl. Well, I’m telling you…”

Shayne said, “Just tell me where Earl’s likely to be hanging out.”

“Shootin’ craps, I guess,” she said sullenly. “Big Tim’s game. Either whorin’ around or shootin’ craps… that’s Earl Jenson for you.”

Shayne said, “Thanks.” He spun on his heel and went to a telephone near the door and dialed a number with his back to the stairs. Isabelle started toward him, but Mama called to her urgently from the top of the stairs and with an angry shrug of her shoulders she went back up.

A nasal voice answered the phone on the first ring, and Shayne asked, “Where’s Big Tim tonight?”

“Basement of the Elite Garage on Northeast nineteenth. There’s a parking lot there and Jimmy’ll show you.”

Shayne hung up. Both Mama and Isabelle were out of sight as he let himself out the door. He hurried to the convertible and pulled away fast, circled east and south to 19th Street and the Elite Garage with adjoining parking lot.

The garage was closed and completely dark, but a floodlight showed a dozen or more cars in the parking lot, and, as Shayne turned in the entrance, a small, hunch-backed figure stepped out of a wooden sentry-box in front of his headlights.

Shayne braked and cut off the motor. He got out and asked the hunchback, “Big Tim around tonight?”

“Try the side door right over yonder.” The hunchback pointed with his forefinger. “I’ll park her for you.”

Shayne said, “I’ll park it myself and keep hold of the keys.” He stepped back inside and slammed the door against the man’s protest, wheeled the convertible around into an empty space beside the side door.

He got out again and walked to the wooden door, and it swung open in front of him just as he started to knock. A dim light showed stairs leading downward and a leather-jacketed man blocking the doorway. Both hands were thrust deep into slanting pockets of the leather jacket and he asked suspiciously, “Whatcha want?”

Shayne said, “Some action. Isn’t Big Tim running here tonight?”

The guard for the floating crap game had a jagged scar running from the left corner of his mouth all the way to his ear. The scar tissue showed white against the heavy tan of his skin and it twitched as he surveyed the redhead suspiciously. “Who’s Big Tim?”

Shayne knew he was waiting to receive tonight’s password to the crap game before passing him down the stairs, and Shayne had no time to waste on arguments or discussion.

He moved forward so that his chest was against the front of the leather jacket, saying mildly, “Would I be here if I didn’t know I’d be welcome? Get out of my way, punk.”

Leather Jacket did not budge. His right hand pressed deeper into the slanting jacket pocket and the muzzle of a gun pressed into Shayne’s ribs. He warned sibilantly, “Don’t start nothin’…”

Shayne’s left hand slammed down against the muzzle of the gun while his right fist swung up in a jolting uppercut that connected solidly with the point of the man’s scarred jaw.

As he grunted and staggered back off balance, Shayne’s left hand drove into the slanting pocket while he smashed him again on the side of the jaw.

Leather Jacket’s eyes became glazed and he sank to the floor in a rubbery heap. Shayne’s hand came out of his pocket gripping the corrugated butt of a .45 automatic. Shayne pulled the door shut behind him and stepped over the pile of unconscious flesh and went down wooden steps to another closed door at the bottom.

He transferred the automatic to his right hand and opened the door onto a big concrete-floored room with cars in various states of repair parked in a circle with headlights gleaming on a dozen men kneeling about the edges of an Army blanket spread on the concrete. There were piles of money in front of each, and a mass of crumpled bills in the center of the blanket.

One of the kneeling men who had his back to Shayne was shaking a pair of dice in his cupped right hand close to his ear and explaining to them in a sing-song voice that all he wanted from them was an “eighter from Decatur”. The rest of the players were leaning forward on their knees or hunched forward on their haunches, waiting for his throw.

One of them directly across the blanket from Shayne looked up as the redhead closed the door silently behind him. He was a huge Negro, his face shiny black with perspiration, with a torso like a silo on a mid-western farm. He showed the whites of his eyes as he looked up at Shayne’s grim face and then down at the big muzzle of the automatic in his hand.

The crap-shooter let the dice go and they rolled across the blanket and there were shouts of glee from the gamblers who had covered his bet and a scramble for their share of the money in the center as the dice stopped rolling with a six and an ace up.

Shayne shook his head expressively at the Negro on the other side of the blanket and announced loudly, “Everybody sit tight. This isn’t a stick-up, but the first wrong move gets a slug.” He looked steadily into the black man’s eyes. “You tell them, Big Tim.”

“Sure, Mister Shayne.” Big Tim rocked back on his heels and his voice was mellifluous. “Sit quiet, ever’body. Mister Mike Shayne an’ a big gun doin’ the talkin’.”

The crap-shooters were like statues, only their heads turning slowly to survey him, keeping their hands very still and in plain sight.

“You, Jenson.” Shayne curtly addressed the man who had just sevened out with the dice. “Leave your money where it lies and get up slow. Come outside with me.” Earl Jenson was an untidy, gaunt-faced man. His face had a yellowish tinge as he got slowly to his feet and faced Shayne. Speaking past him, Shayne told the others, “Some of you probably know I’m on the run from a murder frame tonight… but don’t get any ideas. Go right on shooting craps while I have a talk with Jenson. That way, nobody will get hurt.” He fumbled behind him for the doorknob, turned it and backed out, motioning with the automatic for Jenson to follow him. He pulled the door half-shut and rammed the muzzle of the gun into Jenson’s middle.

“You know Mrs. Kane is dead?” he grated.

Earl Jenson nodded without speaking, wetting his lips, hypnotized by the blued steel of the gun in his belly.

“You did a tailing job for Richard Kane a couple months ago,” Shayne told him flatly. “I want the name and address of the man she was playing with.”

“Look here,” protested Jenson hoarsely. “I have lots of clients. I’d have to check my records at the office…”

Shayne said flatly, “It’s just too goddamned bad for you tonight if you’ve got a bad memory, Jenson. If I go up these stairs without the man’s name… you’ll be carried up them feet first and with a slug in your belly.”

Earl Jenson believed him. There was a madness in the redhead’s eyes that made him believe him. He gasped, “Roger Poole. On the Beach.” And he gave Shayne a street address not more than ten blocks from the Kane residence.

Shayne relaxed his pressure on the gun muzzle and said pleasantly, “Go back inside and piss away the rest of your money on Big Tim’s crooked dice. Forget you saw me tonight… and tell those punks they’d best forget it, too.” He jerked the door open and gave Jenson a shove that sent him sprawling onto the concrete floor, then ran lightly up the stairs and stepped over the still unconscious guard into the night and into the conveniently parked Chevrolet.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The address Earl Jenson had given Shayne was a few blocks west of the oceanfront, just south of the Kane place. Shayne carefully watched the lights and stayed below the maximum speed limits crossing the Causeway and driving north on the Beach. The moon was high overhead now, and the strong breeze of earlier evening had died away so that silvered palm fronds hung lacy and motionless in the night air, giving an effect of unearthly serenity to the scene.

Shayne’s mood did not respond to the serenity of the night. Time was fast running out for him, and this was the last card he had in his hand. Already, a stolen car report might be going out on the convertible he was driving, and any cruising police car that checked his license number might bring an end to his freedom of action.

It wouldn’t matter after he had his talk with Roger Poole. If that failed, he’d be just as well behind bars as chasing his own tail around town on a lost scent.

But he knew in his own mind that it couldn’t fail. Roger Poole was all he had. Roger Poole had to be the answer. Someone had gunned Lydia Kane… and the only someone in the picture other than Michael Shayne was Roger Poole.

It was as simple as that, Shayne told himself as he drove sedately north toward the Poole address. It had to be that simple because that was the only solution likely to save the redhead’s neck.

But way down deep, below the level of consciousness, Shayne knew it didn’t have to be that simple at all. For all he knew, the dead blonde might have had a dozen other jealous lovers in her past. Or a dozen other wholly unknown and unguessed motives might have led to her murder.

But all of them were very likely to remain unknown and unguessed if this hunch tailed and Peter Painter succeeded in putting him behind bars. Because Painter wasn’t going to look for them. Painter was going to be very well-satisfied with one good suspect.

So it had to be Poole—or else.

Shayne slowed and turned to the left on a west-bound street. The residences here were not quite so imposing as those directly on the ocean, though there were only three or four to each block, each set well back from the street beyond well-kept lawns.

Lights showed in only a few of the houses at this late hour, and there were no moving cars on the street. Shayne drove slowly and found the number he sought on the right side with a gravel driveway leading up to an unassuming two-story house that showed a dim light behind curtains in a front, downstairs window.

He relaxed and let out a pent-up sigh of relief as he turned in the driveway. At least he had got the stolen heap off the street where its license could not be seen by a police cruiser if there was a report out on it.

His luck was still holding firm. He was going to have his interview with Roger Poole come hell or high water.

He cut his headlights and the motor as he rolled up the driveway, braked quietly to a stop in front of closed garage doors beside the house.

He felt curiously weary as he stepped out of the car and lifted the .45 from the car seat to ram it into a hip pocket. He wasn’t keyed-up or tense at all as he strode to the front door and pressed the button. A feeling of let-down, almost of lethargy, engulfed him. He was even able to feel faintly sorry for Roger Poole as he waited for the door to open.

It opened and a woman was framed in the doorway with a dim light behind her. She wore shimmery red lounging pajamas and a Mandarin coat buttoned tightly about her throat giving her a sort of little-girl look. She had straight black hair in a Dutch cut with bangs across her forehead. She had a smooth, oval face with a rosebud mouth and wide blue eyes.

She was very drunk.

She swayed against the doorframe with her hands clasped together in front of her and said brightly, “H’lo there. You wanna drink?” She teetered on the threshold and giggled as Shayne put a big hand under her elbow to steady her, and blinked her eyes up at him and said casually, “Don’ know you, do I? Whasit matter? C’mon in an’ hava drink.”

Shayne moved forward and she snuggled against him, moving his arm to press it about her slim waist, rubbing her cheek happily against his bicep. The front door opened directly into a living room with a driftwood fire dying lazily at the far end. A single shaded floorlamp lighted the empty room. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes.

Shayne held his arm tightly around her and looked down at the glossy black head pressed against his arm, and asked, “Mrs. Poole?”

“Course I’m Miz Poole. Who the hell you ’spect? Eleanor Roosevelt?” She giggled again and twisted in his arm to turn her face up to his. “Kiss me, huh?” She pouted her lips at him.

Shayne said, “Where’s your husband?”

“Rog? Don’ you worry ’bout him. ’Sall right. Perfec’ly safe.” She slid a softly rounded arm about his neck and pulled his head down.

Shayne kissed her briefly. Then he held her at arm’s length and demanded, “Where is Roger tonight? I’ve got to see him. Do you understand? It’s very important.”

“Nothin’ ’portant ’cept drink an’ kisses,” she told him. “You jus’ too damn’ sober. Thass all.”

Shayne shook her, not too hard, and spaced his words slowly for emphasis. “Drink and kisses come after you tell me where Roger is. Do you understand that? Lots to drink and plenty of kisses. But… where… is Roger right now?”

“Don’ worry ’bout him. ’Sall right. Le’s us girls hava drinky-winky.” She giggled and tried to draw him into the room.

He shook her harder this time. “Not until you tell me where Roger is.”

“Hospital. I been tellin’ you an tellin’ you. ’S perfec’ly safe. Nobody here but us girls.”

“Is he sick?”

“Course he’s sick,” she responded indignantly. “What you think? You be sick, too, if they sliced half your stomach out.”

“When?” demanded Shayne. “When did they cut his stomach out?”

“Week ’go. Two weeks. Whasit matter?”

“Where?” Sweat was beginning to stream down Shayne’s face. “What hospital?”

She named a local hospital, reeling back against his supporting arm and blinking her round eyes at him coquettishly.

He helped her forward to a chair with a tray containing liquor and glasses on a table beside it. He thrust her down into the chair and put a glass in her hand. “You have a drink,” he told her grimly. “I think I may be needing one in a minute.”

He turned away from her and strode to a telephone, dialed a number and said, “I’m a friend of Roger Poole’s and I just this minute heard about his operation. Can you tell me how he is?”

He waited with the telephone pressed hard against his ear, sweat streaming down the deep trenches in his cheeks while the normal hospital routine was observed at the other end. After checking their records and discovering they did have a patient named Roger Poole, he was blandly informed that his condition was good.

“When was his operation?” Shayne asked doggedly. “Earlier tonight?”

“Oh, no. More than a week ago. And he is making good progress. He sat up for more than an hour today.” Shayne replaced the receiver. He tugged at his earlobe as he went back to stand in front of Mrs. Poole. He reached down and picked up the whiskey bottle beside her chair and began drinking from it in long, satisfying gulps.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Michael Shayne wasn’t exactly reeling when he closed the front door of the Poole house behind him some fifteen minutes later, but neither was he in perfect shape for walking a chalk line. He was a trifle unsteady on his way to the convertible, swayed a little as he got the door open and started to get in.

He stopped and blinked owlishly up at the moon with his hand on the door. First off, with everything kicked out from under him by the disconcerting news that Roger Poole had been confined in a hospital room while Lydia Kane was getting herself killed, Shayne had decided that was definitely the end of the trail for him and that he might as well go ahead and give himself up.

Now, after a few clarifying drinks of Mrs. Poole’s excellent whiskey, he wasn’t so sure. There was one more possibility. It wasn’t a very possible possibility, but it was the only one left to him. By this time there was almost certainly an alarm out on the stolen Chevrolet, and there simply wasn’t any use passing up this last possible possibility.

So instead of getting into the convertible and driving away—and thus risking a quick pick-up—Shayne reached in his hip pocket and drew out the automatic he had taken from the guard at Big Tim’s crap game and tossed it onto the front seat. Then he closed the door quietly and started down the driveway afoot. From now on, he had no need for a gun. Those drinks from the neck of Mrs. Poole’s whiskey bottle had cleared his head to an extraordinary degree.

There was one thing left for him to do if he could manage it before encountering a quick-triggered Beach cop on the lookout for him, and it he did encounter such a cop Shayne knew his chances of staying alive were much better if he didn’t have a gun in his hip pocket when it happened.

He reached the sidewalk and turned left toward the oceanfront. There was only one thought in his mind. To get back to the strip of beach in front of the Kane house and try to locate his own gun on the sand before he was pulled in by one of Painter’s men. That was the last out he had. The only positive evidence in existence that his gun had not fired the bullet that killed Mrs. Kane.

If he didn’t find the gun and turn it in, he had a very strong hunch it would never be found—or, at any rate, would never be introduced as evidence in his favor.

He walked doggedly eastward toward the ocean, stopping and crouching in the shadows of shrubbery when a car drove past, making his way slowly to the main north and south roadway fronting the beach estates, and then turned north to the dead-end street leading to the ocean just south of the coral rock wall marking the limit of the Kane estate.

He turned off on the narrow, empty street, and the sound of the surf was loud in his ears as he approached the dead-end where he knew the murderer’s car had been parked tonight while Shayne was having his interview with Mrs. Kane.

There were white-washed posts at the top of the cliff, and the steep flight of wooden stairs leading down—the same flight of stairs on which Shayne had seen wet footprints leading upward a few hours previously.

He went down the stairs to the damp stretch of sandy beach, now some forty feet wide at low tide. The Kane house loomed darkly above him on the edge of the cliff as he moved slowly in the moonlight, seeking to orient himself by discovering again the half-buried branch that had tripped him the first time.

His unfired gun had to be there. Somewhere within a radius of twenty feet, say, of the spot where he had tripped. Before, when he searched for it under the guns of Painter’s men, the tide had still been high enough to cover most of the beach. Now the water had receded so that the gun should certainly be visible if it hadn’t already been found.

He stumbled over the branch again before he saw it in the shadow cast by the cliff to the westward. He went to his knees and then stood up—and stood stock-still as the entire strip of beach was brilliantly illuminated by twin spotlights on the edge of the cliff above him.

A harsh voice called to him triumphantly from above: “Put your hands in the air, Shayne, and keep them there.”

He put his hands high in the air and kept them there. In the pitiless light of the spots converging on the beach, the wet sand in front of him stretched out smooth and hard—and there was no sign of the gun that had flown out of his hand when he stumbled here earlier. Either it had already been found and secreted by one of Painter’s zealous men, or the falling tide had washed enough sand over it to hide it from view.

Either way, Shayne knew that the last possible possibility was now an impossible hope.

“There are three Tommy-guns on you, Shayne,” the voice told him from above. “Keep your hands in plain sight and walk to the stairs coming up to the Kane kitchen. Or, try to take another swim if you’re still feeling lucky.”

Michael Shayne didn’t feel particularly lucky. He turned with his hands in the air and trudged along the sand to the bottom of the Kane stairway where he was met by two grim-faced men in uniform who spoke not a word while they efficiently snapped a steel cuff on each of his wrists, linking him to both of their wrists by steel links.

Then the three of them climbed the stairs and entered the kitchen where they were confronted by a strutting Peter Painter who preened his thin mustache at the redhead and explained triumphantly, “I knew you’d try to make it back here, Shayne, to plant another gun out there on the sand in place of the one you claimed you lost earlier. It was real sweet of you to walk right into my trap like this.”

Shayne said, “Think nothing of it.” He looked questioningly beyond Painter at Timothy Rourke lounging in the doorway to the hallway from the front. The reporter carefully closed one eye and said rapidly, “Did you drive my car away from where it was parked beside my place, Mike? Painter’s got a crazy idea I’ve been in cahoots with you.”

“Sure, I took your car, Tim. It was parked there where you always leave it, with the keys in it. Sorry if I got you in any trouble.”

Shayne looked from Painter down at the cuffs on his wrists. “How about one last drink before you lock me up, Petey?”

Painter backed away from him, still strutting triumphantly. “It’ll be your last one for a long time, Shamus. Sure, we’ll all have one together while we wait for the paddy-wagon to carry you off.” He nodded to the policeman linked to Shayne on either side, and led the way back to the living room where Lydia Kane had been murdered a few hours previously.

The brandy bottle and the glass Shayne had drunk out of still stood on the low coffee table. Timothy Rourke hurried in front of the others to pour several ounces of amber fluid in the glass and hold it out to Shayne. His cadaverous face was deeply worried as he asked,

“Got nothing new to go on, Mike? Painter’s been telling me how you claimed there was some other guy been playing around with Mrs. Kane. If you could locate him…?”

Shayne took the proffered glass in his handcuffed right hand and ducked his head to drink from it deeply. The liquor bit the interior of his throat and was better in his belly than the whiskey he had drunk with Mrs. Poole. He shook his head bleakly at Rourke and said, “That’s washed up, Tim. Sure, I found him, but the bastard’s got an unbreakable alibi for tonight.”

“So that washes you up, too,” Painter said happily. “Ready to sign a confession, Shayne?”

Shayne shook his head doggedly. “Not quite yet.” He lowered his lips again to the glass and emptied it. He was more than a little drunk, now, and his brain was beginning to work more clearly.

“Two unbreakable alibis,” Painter crowed, “for the only two others even you claim might have had a motive for killing Mrs. Kane. What does that add up to in your lexicon, Mr. Shayne?”

“That’s right, Mike,” said Rourke bitterly. “All you’ve managed to do tonight is dig up alibis for others. Leaving you the one guy without any alibi at all.”

Shayne licked his lips and the chain on his right wrist tinkled as he thrust the empty glass out toward the reporter, “Give me a refill, Tim.” His voice was decidedly fuzzy. “One more good drink and I’ll tell you who killed Lydia Kane.”

“Now we’re getting down to it,” said Painter happily as Rourke refilled the detective’s glass with a shrug. He turned his head to the police stenographer who had taken Shayne’s earlier statement, and ordered crisply, “Get your notebook ready and get every word of this.” Shayne accepted the glass from Rourke. He ducked his head for a small sip, and when he lifted it his eyes were very bright and challenging. His gaze rested for a long moment on the sofa in front of him where a small round hole in the slip-cover showed where the bullet Richard Kane had fired at him had lodged.

A curious expression settled over the detective’s lined face. He ducked his head again, but this time it was to lift his manacled left hand to tug at his earlobe. In a thickened, incredulous voice, he said, “You know, by God, I believe that’s just what I’m going to do.”

“Give us a full confession?” said Painter happily. “Best way to handle it, Shayne. Might cop a second-degree plea, if you make it good.”

Shayne paid no attention to him. He asked, “Have you got that fingerprint report from the going-over you gave the house?”

“You bet we have, Shayne. Signed, sealed and delivered. Not an alien print in the house. My man will swear to that on the stand.”

“That’s just what I need. Did a real job, huh? Made a note of every print he found?”

“Absolutely. This time there’ll be no sliding out from under, Shayne.”

Shayne said flatly, “Can I see that report?”

“Why not?” Painter was in high good humor. He extended his hand to the stenographer. “Let me have it.” The man riffled through sheets of paper and extracted three closely-written pages. Painter presented them triumphantly to Shayne, crowing, “See for yourself how airtight it is. According to your own testimony, if the killer came along the beach he had to have been inside the house at least half an hour before the job was done. But there’s positive negative evidence on that score. No smudges in any likely spot. Just Mr. and Mrs. Kane’s and the maid’s.”

Shayne frowned at the sheets, bringing his hands close together in front of him to shuffle through them while he read the detailed report on the identification of fingerprints that had been found on the various surfaces dusted.

He nodded after a time and said quietly, “This does it. You be a witness to this, Rourke. Among the other clear prints, Richard Kane’s were found on the upstairs telephone extension. Proving beyond any possible doubt that he killed his wife.”

There was complete and protracted silence in the living room after Shayne’s statement. Painter broke it with a chuckle.

“Better finish that brandy before the wagon gets here. Hell! Richard Kane is the one man in the whole damned world who couldn’t have shot his wife. You’re my authority for that.”

Shayne said gravely, “Nevertheless, he did the job. I’ve been a complete fool not to see it.”

“But you alibi him.” Painter’s voice was high and thin. “I’ve got your statement that the shot was fired within a couple of minutes of the time she hung up the phone after her husband called her. Are you going to deny it was Kane on the phone?”

Shayne shook his red head. He said somberly, “I’m not going to deny that. But if you’ll dig that thirty-eight bullet out of the sofa there and make a ballistic test with the death bullet, you’ll know it came from his gun.”

“Wait a minute, Shayne. I’ll quote from your statement again. The backstairs were dry and showed no wet footprints when you ran out. Right?”

Shayne said, “Right.”

“Proving that the killer… if he entered that way… had been hidden in the house for at least half an hour. Right?”

Shayne said, “Right. And he did enter that way. And he was hidden upstairs while I was talking to Mrs. Kane, and slipped down and shot her as soon as I went out the front door… thereby using me, by God, to set up an absolutely unbreakable alibi for him.”

“Who, Shayne? Who?”

Shayne said, “Richard Kane, of course.” He drew in a deep breath and said kindly, “Don’t take it too hard, Petey. I fell for it, too. It was right there in front of my eyes and I didn’t have enough brandy inside me to see it.”

He turned to Timothy Rourke with a warning glint in his gray eyes and said, “Remember, Tim… one time a long time ago when I needed a telephone call to come on a certain phone at a certain time?” He named three digits slowly. “Why don’t you go upstairs and show Painter what I mean?”

Rourke’s pinched face glowed with sudden understanding. He nodded and hurried away and they heard him climbing the stairs.

Painter thumb-nailed his mustache nervously and complained, “I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, Shayne. I swear to God…”

“Go back to my first statement,” Shayne said coldly. “You’ll see I told you that when Mrs. Kane called me tonight she said, ‘I’m phoning from the upstairs extension. I can see my husband’s car going down the drive now.’ Remember that?”

Painter said irritably, “I don’t remember, but it may be there. I still don’t see that matters.”

“Think about it,” urged Shayne. “And try to figure out how-come Richard Kane’s fingerprints were found on the phone upstairs just after Mrs. Kane’s death. He must have used that phone after her last call to me, or his prints wouldn’t overlay hers. But he was right here with me downstairs all the time after he busted in the front door and found her dead and threw a slug at me. So… he must have handled the extension phone upstairs between the time she telephoned me and her death…”

He was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the telephone. Everyone looked at it. Shayne told Painter, “Answer it and then you’ll know how Kane managed to murder his wife one minute after calling her on that telephone.”

Peter Painter’s face was a study in conflicting emotions as he crossed slowly to the shrilling instrument and picked it up. He said, “Hello,” and the look on his face turned to utter bemusement as he listened and then said disbelievingly, “Tim Rourke? How in the name of God…?”

He listened a moment longer, and then tremblingly replaced the receiver. He turned, shaking his head, and said, “I still don’t see…”

Shayne held out his manacled wrists and said, “Unlock these damned things and go upstairs and put them on Kane. Lots of telephone subscribers… excluding detective chiefs, of course… know there is a certain series of numbers they can dial on an extension phone to make all the phones in that house ring. What makes me really sore is that the son-of-a-bitch set it up so I’d be his alibi… and damn near got away with it, too.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The interior of Joe’s Diner was steamy and warm. There was the subdued clatter of heavy silverware from men seated on tall stools at the long counter busily wolfing down solid food, the sound of laughter and of hoarse witticisms, and the occasional thump of a heavy coffee mug on the bare wood.

There were four small tables ranged along the outer wall with red and white checked cloths on them. Lucy Hamilton sat across from Michael Shayne at the rear table. Her face was flushed and happy, and curling tendrils of brown hair clung to her damp forehead. Two round, thick water glasses stood in front of each of them. Two of the glasses held ice water, and the other two that had been empty when Joe placed them ceremoniously in front of them now held a couple of fingers of amber liquid from a flask which Shayne had produced from his coat pocket.

Lucy took a sip of cognac and followed it with a hasty gulp of ice water, and her brown eyes sparkled as she turned her head to survey the length of the diner. “Not a blonde in sight, Michael. Not a single damned blonde. I do like it here.”

“Better than La Martinique?”

“Much better,” she assured him gravely. She turned back to wrinkle her nose at him as he took a deep swallow of his drink. “Without the champagne and without the blondes.”

“And you still haven’t tasted one of Joe’s hamburgers,” he teased her.

“I’m going to. I’m starved. But this is the first chance we’ve had to talk, Michael, with you sleeping practically all day. I still haven’t got it all straight about last night. Did Mr. Kane have it all planned to murder his wife as he did, and use you to fix up his alibi for him?”

Shayne said, “Sure. Down to every detail. He even had an extra pair of shoes, socks and slacks ready in his parked car so he could change out of the wet ones fast after sloshing through the water and running up the stairs. We found out later that he actually had been stopped driving away by a radio car, but they were looking for wet shoes and pants, and let him go on.”

“I still don’t see why he admitted it so easily. After all, there wasn’t any real proof even after you did show Chief Painter about the extension telephone and how he could have done it.”

Shayne grinned across at his brown-haired secretary and said, “You’re forgetting the bullet he fired at me when he first came in and saw Lydia dead. A ballistic comparison with the one in his wife’s head nailed him to the cross. Funny thing was,” Shayne went on, twiddling the round glass in front of him with big fingers, “that was part of his alibi too. He had time to throw out the empty cartridge he used on her, but no time to clean the gun. Throwing a bullet at me made a perfect explanation for the gun having been fired recently.” He lifted his glass and drained it, urging Lucy, “Drink down, angel. Here comes Joe to take our order.” He looked up with a wide grin at the brawny, bare-armed man in an enveloping white apron who had circled the counter and was approaching them. “You know what I want, Joe.”

“Sure, Mr. Shayne. One of your specials. What about the young lady? We’ve got…”

“She’ll take a special, too, Joe. Won’t you, Lucy?”

She said happily, “If it’s a hamburger, you know I will.”

“Wait a minute.” Shayne held up a blunt forefinger as Joe beamed and started to turn back. “Tell her how you make them, Joe.”

“Just like you told me, Mr. Shayne, a long time ago. I grind my own meat special, Miss,” he explained to Lucy. “I use the neck meat because it’s juiciest, and I grind it right here twice with a little piece of bacon for extra flavor. And I make a special kind of gravy spiced with barbecue sauce and seasoned with…”

“Now you wait a minute, Joe.” Lucy’s brown eyes were glowing with a happy memory. “… just a smear of garlic,” she finished for him.

“That’s right, Miss. If you don’t like garlic…”

“I do,” she said emphatically, and when he turned away, she breathed, “Michael! You’ve remembered all these years?”

“Poor-girl steak,” he told her. “Sorry there won’t be any baked yams tonight like the ones you served me in New Orleans that first evening, but…”

“But we can’t have everything, can we?” she finished for him. There was a sheen of dampness in her eyes and she reached across the checked tablecloth to close her fingers convulsively over his. “But we do have this, Michael. It’s… perfect.”

The door opened behind her and a rush of night air brought in a tinkle of feminine laughter. She twisted her head to look at the big-bosomed blonde who had just entered with a meek-looking escort and was surveying the interior with hopeful and predatory eyes.

She said, “Well… it was perfect, Michael. For just a moment there, it was.”

He grinned at her and put his other hand over hers. He said, “This is one night, angel, that I swear…”

“I know, Michael.” Her voice was determinedly cheerful. “I just hope Joe hurries up with those poor-girl specials before we get thrown out of here.”

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN