“Baruch has four films he hasn’t released yet. If these Los Angeles guys grab them and put on new titles—”
“Sure!” Rourke said. “It’d make a very nice rip-off, and what could Baruch do about it? Not a hell of a lot.”
Shayne saw the motel sign ahead, the Vacancy light on. He ended the conversation with Rourke as he turned in and followed arrows to the office. Leaving his car standing with its lights on, he looked for Room 14. He found it on the second floor. Its windows were dark.
He returned to the office. A woman who had been dozing on a cot with the television on snapped awake and patted her hair.
“Can I help you?”
Shayne gave her a quick look at the card that entitled him to ask questions. “I’m trying to catch up with a runaway. Fourteen. She’s traveling with an older man in a green Chevy.” He reached across the counter to pick the registration cards out of an open file. “Just a routine check — I’m hitting all the motels.”
The woman came off the cot, picking at the air with both hands. “Nobody like that here! Those records are in confidence unless you happen to be a police officer or the FBI.”
“I’m neither,” Shayne said, continuing to flip through the cards. “They wouldn’t be up this late. What’s the problem? Nobody else has given me any arguments.”
“I’ve had some unfortunate experiences with private detectives, that’s the problem. I don’t hold with any of it. A person who pays for a room is entitled not to be bothered, is my policy.”
Shayne found the card he wanted. Maureen Neal, from Los Angeles, had arrived in a Thunderbird with the two letters on its license plate that identified it as a rented car.
He racked the cards and returned them. “That’s it. I’m calling it a night. How much are your singles?”
“I do have a few vacancies,” she admitted, “but don’t think renting a room will entitle you to look at my cards, because it won’t.”
Shayne proved to be exceptionally fussy about where he slept. After the long day he’d put in, he wanted to be as far as possible from traffic. He wanted a second floor room so the people overhead wouldn’t wake him at dawn. He settled on Room 15 and registered.
All the rooms in that wing had minuscule terraces, looking down on the swimming pool. There was no Thunderbird in the line of cars. Before leaving his own car, Shayne had his operator dial the motel, and when the woman answered he altered his voice and asked for Maureen Neal, in 14. There was no answer in that room, he was told a moment later.
Shayne went up to 15. Rooms 14 and 15 had a common door, so they could be rented together. He unbolted the door on his side.
Turning off the lights, he opened the sliding door onto the terrace. This proved to be a strip of concrete, just deep enough to accommodate two tubular deck chairs, closed on each side by a lattice covered with climbing vines. He swung over the railing and around onto the terrace of Room 14.
He opened the door with a knife blade. Inside, he turned on a single light.
Maureen Neal was an untidy girl. Two suitcases lay open on one of the big beds, but no real effort had been made to subdue the mess in the room and transfer it to the suitcases. Following his usual procedure, Shayne started with the bathroom.
The medicine cabinet was open. Maureen was a pill taker. There were pills to wake up, to sleep, to remain unpregnant, pills against pain, depression, anxiety, tooth decay. She believed in vitamins, and left wet towels on the floor. She used cocaine and vibrators, various cosmetic aids, hair conditioners, shampoos and coloring agents. Bottles and tubes covered every flat surface.
In the bedroom, Shayne continued his inventory. She read paperback Gothics. She had been rubbed recently; there was a massage book and a bowl of coconut oil, and the bedspread was slightly oily. He found two phone numbers scribbled on the back of an envelope. One was Capp’s. The other was preceded by 213, the area code for Los Angeles. A half-dozen new dresses from an expensive Lincoln Road shop hung in the closet, still carrying their sales tags. The interesting thing about these dresses was their label — the shop had been burglarized recently.
He began to get a picture of the girl and the disorganized life she had led in Miami. When the phone rang, he ignored it. An instant later, hearing a car pull into the parking area, he stabbed off the light and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.
A black Thunderbird was wheeling around to park.
He returned to his own room through the party door, and was at the front window in time to see the Thunderbird’s lights go off. A girl’s elbow withdrew from the window and the glass came up.
Then a second car pulled in: Shayne recognized it at once. It was the Dodge with dealer’s plates and the telltale fenders, that had been parked earlier outside Nick Tucker’s condominium in Bal Harbour.
A young man got out after rolling up the windows. He was tall and angular, wearing only Bermuda shorts, and his back and shoulders were sunburned. The girl was partway out of the Thunderbird by the time he reached her. He waved her back. Shayne, from above, could see only her bare arm and part of one leg.
The young man tried to get her to move over. Instead, her other arm came out and embraced him. He seemed to resist, bracing himself against the car. She must have said something to persuade him, because he moved aside to let her out.
She was wearing a bikini, her black hair pulled back in a knot. Shayne heard her laugh through the sealed window, but not what she was saying. She managed to unfasten the young man’s belt, and as he went in under the overhang, she pulled it out of its loops and began whipping him with it. He leaped away.
Shayne didn’t see them again until they came out at the top of the steps. She had changed the game and was trying to pull his shorts down over his narrow hips. He was responding now. Her bikini top came away in his hand.
She whirled. He caught her and they kissed against the railing. It was a deep kiss, and when she let him go her hands had left white marks on his sunburned back. They broke apart and ran toward the room.
Shayne lowered the slat quietly.
He heard the door of the next room open and close. The girl stumbled against something in the dark and giggled, and a strip of light showed beneath the common door.
“Naked at last,” she announced. “I don’t know why people are so hung-up about clothes.”
“Not everybody looks like you, kid.”
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s beautiful, big like that. I think there’s some coke left. Do you want it?”
“I could force myself.”
There were sounds of moving around.
“Half for you, half for me.”
Shayne looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Something about the scene being played in the next room bothered him. There was some kind of undercurrent running. Why had they come in two cars?
“Now where’s that nice warm glow?” The girl’s voice. “What did somebody do, switch some bicarbonate of soda in on me? There it is. There it is. Lovely. And the nice thing is, it’s habit forming.”
The TV sound came on, too loud at first. One of them throttled it down.
“Umm,” the girl said. “Now how shall we do it? Tonight I decide.”
“You’re getting to be sort of bossy, you know?”