He came erect and kicked out of the sheet. He looked for blood, and found some along one wall. It might have been his own.
He touched his face. “What did you just say? Did you say I was yelling?”
“You were yelling,” the man told him grimly. “Woke the both of us out of a sound sleep.”
Shayne moved his hand to the side of his head, which was only one of several places where he felt pain.
“Must have hit my head on the wall. What a dream I just had.” He looked around sheepishly. “Sorry, everybody,” he said, slurring his words. “I guess I fell asleep with my clothes on. Shouldn’t have had that last drink. Got tangled in the sheet. God knows how I got out in the corridor. I thought I was wrestling with somebody. Did any of you people see anybody? It seemed so goddamn real...”
He looked from one to another, but the prevailing reaction was suspicion. Only one face was remotely sympathetic.
The fat man blustered, “You ought to do something about yourself. You shouldn’t travel. Stay home with a nurse. I have half a mind—”
“Jasper, come to bed,” his wife told him. “So he walked in his sleep. Be nice.”
“I’m really sorry as hell,” Shayne said, rubbing his face. “I’ll lock myself in and hide the key.”
“And lay off the sauce,” the fat man advised him. “I still think I ought to—”
His wife pulled him into their cabin. Other doors closed, leaving only the one sympathetic woman, her face glistening with cold cream. She eyed Shayne speculatively.
“That’s a bad bruise. If you want to come in for a minute, I’ll put a cold washcloth on it.”
“Thanks, but my wife’s going to wonder what happened to me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, good luck. I hope you sleep through.”
She retreated.
Shayne, left alone in the corridor, examined the sheets. There were two of them, as he had supposed, stapled together at the bottom and along the sides with an ordinary office stapler, to form a large, clumsy shroud. Shayne frowned. It didn’t make sense. The fold of paper money in his pocket was still there. He had taken about four hundred dollars out of the poker game, but a corridor in the first-class space on the Queen Elizabeth II seemed an unlikely spot for a mugging. The hand he had glimpsed briefly through the torn sheet, it seemed to him, had had a ring on it, and it could have been a diamond. Jerry Diamond, his fellow poker player, had been wearing such a ring, but he had seemed perfectly sane. They had parted friends. Why would an American theatrical agent want to throw a sheet over Shayne’s head and knock him unconscious? Shayne was absolutely sure he had never seen the man before that night.
He wadded up the sheets and dropped them into a laundry hamper.
The blows he had received had produced one side effect. His head was clear, and he had no trouble finding his cabin. After unlocking the door he paused for a moment, not wanting to be bushwhacked twice in an evening, and entered cautiously.
The overhead light didn’t come on when he threw the switch. He stepped back quickly and activated his knife.
After another moment he kicked the door open all the way and moved in. He groped for the desk lamp. Again, when he snapped it on, nothing happened.
Keeping close to the wall and moving carefully, he edged around the cabin to the bathroom. This light came on.
Turning, he strode to the bed and stripped back the cover. Anne Blagden lay there looking up at him.
She had decided, after all, to end the evening her way, not Shayne’s. She was naked.
Chapter 3
She was two shades of brown, much paler in the two narrow strips where her bikini shielded her from the sun. One hand was behind her head. Her look was cool, somewhat mocking.
“Do you always come into a room as carefully as that?” she said. “Private detectives — good grief. It must be a strain. And what do you think you’re going to do with that knife?”
Shayne snapped the blade shut and put it away. He looked around for clothes. Finding only a filmy negligee, he swept it up from the chair and held it out.
“Put this on and get the hell back to your own bed.”
“Mr. Shayne, you know you don’t mean that preposterous suggestion.”
“It’s not a suggestion. It’s what’s going to happen.”
“After all that cognac, I thought you wouldn’t know I was here till you got into bed. I wanted to surprise you.”
“You surprised me,” he said. “Now get the hell out.”
“I’ve been known to play poker too, Mr. Shayne. This isn’t a bluff. I have the high hand.”
“How do you make that out?”
“All I wore is that wrapper, and if you try to put it on me I’ll fold my arms and scream like a fire siren. People are going to hear me, I promise. It’s going to embarrass you.”
“I can stand it.”
“I heard what happened in Bermuda. You killed somebody, apparently. You want everybody to leave you alone so the calluses can form. OK! Now I understand why you’ve been behaving like a baboon all day. But I don’t know what to do! Unless you start being human I’ll definitely shatter your peace and quiet, and by God I mean that!”
Shayne swore under his breath. He tightened the bulbs she had loosened, and both lights came on. He closed the door to the corridor.
“You’re bleeding,” the girl said, surprised. “What happened, did you fall downstairs?”
“Something like that.”
He went to the bathroom. Leaving the door open, he put his head under the cold water faucet and turned the water on full. He checked his bumps and abrasions. They seemed to be minor.
He came out toweling himself.
“How many people knew you were here waiting for me?”
“No one. Why?”
He tossed the wet towel back in the bathroom and ran a comb through his hair. “You didn’t get a straight story about Bermuda. I didn’t kill anybody. A woman was killed because I made the mistake of following somebody else’s procedure. An American Foreign Service officer, a real jerk, told me if I wasn’t diplomatic he’d put in a report and have my license lifted. While we were arguing, it happened. Her name was Sally Marquand. We were on sleeping-together terms, and not only that, I liked her. She did a dumb thing, but she shouldn’t have been killed for it. All right, it’s over. Nobody followed me aboard. Nobody knew I’d be taking this ship, because I only made up my mind about ten minutes before we sailed.”
“I don’t see what connection—”
“A couple of people jumped me coming down from the poker game. I’m not carrying enough money to make that worthwhile. But there are only two choices. If they weren’t trying to roll me they didn’t want me to hear what you have to say.”
Alarmed, she swung her legs off the bed. “Who were they?” He sat down.
“I don’t know. They threw a sheet over my face. Either you put some more clothes on or I take some of mine off. Which will it be?”
“Be patient.” She thrust her arms into her negligee and pulled it together.
“A sheet over your head. Were they trying to — you know, just knock you out?”
“I don’t know a damn thing about it,” he said impatiently.
“I suppose by now everybody in first class saw me trying to get you to talk to me, but who in heaven’s name — well, I already knew it was serious. They could have picked on me just as easily, couldn’t they — except no, if they did that, Quentin would—”
She stopped, thinking.
“Let’s start straightening it out,” Shayne said. “Who’s Quentin?”
“You saw me with him in the lounge. He’s a little strange-looking, but what a brain. And he’s in trouble to the tops of his ears. Dr. Quentin Little. He’s just been hired by an American aerospace company, with one of those names made up of initials. Is it Amco? Something like that.”