Bugler purred, “You’re going to get your nose dirty, Shamus.”
Shayne nodded, his eyes bleak. “It’s one of my failings. Helen Stallings told me just enough before she passed out this afternoon to get me interested.”
Not a flicker of expression changed the stony coldness of Bugler’s swarthy features. He pressed a button on his desk with a blunt forefinger. “You’ve stayed out of my way a long time, Shayne. Better if you kept on being smart.”
Shayne’s gray eyes glowed hotly. “I’ve never stayed out of any man’s way. I’ve been waiting for you to stick your neck out.”
“And you think I have?”
“I know you have.” Shayne touched the bruise on his cheek and his cut lip. “It was a mistake for you to sick your gorillas on me.”
Bugler’s thick lips parted in an amused smile. “You ran into Donk, huh?”
A rear door came open, and Johnny stepped in, followed by Donk. Johnny stopped short and stared at Shayne, muttering in an awed tone, “Jesus God! There he is again,” and Donk blinked happily, moving forward with big fists swinging at the end of long arms. “If it ain’t my sparring partner. You must love to get bounced around and, God, how I love to bounce you!” His wide, flat face wreathed itself in a grin of sadistic anticipation as he moved closer.
FIVE
SHAYNE DIDN’T LOOK AT DONK. He warned Arch Bugler with passionate intensity, “You’d better keep this apple off me. I already owe you for one beating and that’ll cost you plenty.”
Donk stopped beside him, his doltish gaze questioning Bugler.
Bugler studied Shayne a moment, then raised a broad hand toward Donk, motioning him back. “Hold it a minute. You and Johnny have messed things up enough by letting him in here.”
“Jeez, boss,” Johnny exploded, “I don’t know how he done it. Donk hit ’im solid, and I never saw a man get up from that before. Honest to Christ, I thought his jaw was busted.”
“You’re not paid to think,” Bugler purred. “I told you to keep him out.”
Shayne laughed shortly. “They tried,” he told Bugler without rancor. He transferred his gaze to the lax body of the young man on the floor. “Looks like you’re receiving an influx of undesirable visitors tonight.”
“Just a punk who couldn’t hold his liquor. Take him out and dump him, Johnny. You stick around, Donk.”
Shayne watched with a saturnine smile twitching his swollen lips while Johnny got hold of the young man and dragged him out the rear door. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and mashed it out with his toe, lit another one. “You knew I’d be dropping around tonight,” he mused. “What were you afraid I’d find if I nosed around?”
Bugler said, “I don’t like my place stunk up with private dicks.”
“It’ll smell worse,” Shayne told him softly, “if you keep any bodies lying around.”
Bugler stiffened. His opaque, lidless eyes bored across the desk at Shayne. He didn’t say anything for thirty seconds. He finally spoke with no perceptible movement of his lips.
“You’d better get out, Shamus.”
Shayne shrugged. He took a slow drag on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, then let it out of his nostrils. He nodded and got up, went to the door and out without looking back.
Donk was twenty feet behind him when he went into the cocktail bar. He waved to the bald-headed bartender and kept going. Donk followed him to the entrance gates where he stopped and stared after the detective wishfully.
Shayne winced with pain as he got into his car and backed away from the curb. Passing by the entrance gates he leaned out and waved a long arm to Donk, who was still standing there looking unhappy.
He drove south along the ocean drive until he reached a drugstore with a public-telephone sign. He called Timothy Rourke’s home address and, after a long wait, got the reporter on the line. Rourke swore softly when he heard Shayne’s fuzzy enunciation. “You sound like the cat got your tongue.”
“I ran into a fist at Arch Bugler’s,” Shayne explained thickly. “And I picked up a chore for you.”
Rourke’s sigh sounded in Shayne’s ear. “Start checking the hotels for a man named Marlow,” Shayne instructed. “He arrived this afternoon, I imagine, from New York or thereabouts. Call me at my hotel in an hour with the dope.”
“Have you got a line on the corpse?” Rourke asked. “I can’t help wondering where she’ll turn up next.”
“Bodies are where you find them,” said Shayne cheerfully. He hung up and went back to his car, circled east on the peninsula to a private bridge over the inland waterway leading to Burt Stallings’s island estate.
The island was small, containing perhaps an acre of ground, protected by a sea wall of coral rock to prevent the ebbing tides from eating away the edges. The entire area was carefully landscaped to give the careless effect of natural luxuriant growth, and the Stallings mansion was situated in the center, screened from view by lush shrubbery and feathery-fronded palms. A narrow, twisting road led up to an impressive stone frontage with two wings guarding a rear patio.
There were no other automobiles in evidence, but lights glowed through the front window. Shayne parked near the steps on the double concrete driveway which circled around to the narrow road. He went up the steps and tried an ornamental bronze knocker without effect. He then searched for and found an electric button. There was a long interval of silence after he pressed the button.
Leaning against the stone casement, he waited patiently. There was an atmosphere of lassitude in the remoteness of the island, a sense of lethargic detachment which communicated itself to one as soon as the bridge was crossed and the mainland left behind. Moonlight silvered the fronds of graceful coco palms and the stately gray trunks of royal palms towering toward the sky. Fish pools set in the lush green lawn reflected the stars in their still waters, and marble benches gleamed ghostly white.
So this was what money could buy, Shayne reflected idly as he waited. He had thought Stallings a fool to sink so much money in a home. Now he wasn’t so sure, even if this island estate, as was rumored, had swallowed up a sizable portion of the fortune the man had acquired in his career as a building contractor. The rumored cost was probably very much exaggerated, he mused. It stood to reason that a contractor could build his own home at far less cost than he built for others.
The door opened to interrupt his vagrant thoughts. A big-bosomed, militant female challenged him with a coldly suspicious gaze. She wore a plain black silk dress buttoned snugly at the neck, like a uniform. Her upper lip fuzzed with black hair, and a cluster of black bristles surrounded a mole on her chin. She said, “Well?” in a harsh, forbidding voice.
Shayne tried to work up his most disarming smile, but his swollen lips were painful, and his heart was not in the effort. She didn’t look like the type to be impressed by any sort of smile. He stopped trying and said, “I want to see Mr. Burt Stallings.”
“Mr. Stallings is out.” She started to close the door, but Shayne interposed, “Mrs. Stallings, then.”
“Mrs. Stallings is too ill to see anyone.” She was closing the door. Shayne lounged forward and put his shoulder against it. “Miss Helen Stallings, then.”
“Miss Stallings isn’t in.” The woman was beginning to put pressure on the other side of the door. In his weakened condition, Shayne wasn’t at all sure he could hold out against her weight and strength. He resisted the pressure with his weight. “I’ll talk to you, then,” he said. “About Miss Stallings.”
The female guardian of the portal compressed her lips in a straight line. “I don’t know who you are, but this isn’t any time—”
“It’s no time for playing hide-and-seek,” Shayne told her swiftly. “I’m a detective — hired by Stallings to find his daughter. I don’t think he’d like it if you withheld any information from me.”