She said hastily, “I just meant I’d cooperate!”
She pulled the coarse cotton mattress cover around her shoulders and brought it together in front. “Boy, is this ever unsexy.”
She tried it another way, bringing it over one shoulder and across like a sari, leaving an arm and a shoulder bare. This she considered slightly better, and she glanced at Shayne’s face to verify it. She still didn’t like what she saw there.
“Mr. Shayne,” she said, trying to sound younger, “if you knew what I went through before I said I would-”
Shayne made a slight gesture with the coiled whip. “Answer my questions. Is Jake’s last name Fitch?”
She nodded.
“What does he do for a living?”
“Different things. Right now he tends bar.”
“Who paid him for setting this up?”
“You know-those people. Some snooty girl.”
“Candida Morse?”
“That’s her name. One of those very snooty blondes.”
“How much are you getting?”
“Jake said a grand. I think more. I’ll find out, don’t worry.”
“Do you know anything about a report on a paint called T-239’?”
She shook her head. He slapped her again, using the whip handle and the coiled whip but not hitting her really hard. She fell on the bed, her hand to her face.
“I never heard anybody mention it, even! Mr. Shayne, I’m a junior in high school! I’ll tell you how much I got out of this so far-a couple of hundred skins. What paint? Jake never tells me why, he just says do it.”
“Do you know anybody named Hallam?”
She shook her head.
“Walter Langhorne?”
“No.”
“Who’s Josie?”
“My guy! I mean, on top of Jake. He pays the rent for this place. We come here every Wednesday night when his wife plays bridge with her mother. He’s kind of cute, really. Jake took a couple of shots of us, you know-”
A key turned in the lock. Shayne and the girl looked into each other’s eyes, feeling a common emotion at last. The detective whirled. When the door opened, he was standing behind it, his cast part of the way out of the sling, ready to pivot. There would be two of them, and he didn’t really think he could take care of them both.
The door closed. Shayne’s swing was already underway. He checked it by catching the cast with his right arm. It wasn’t Vince Camilli, the vice cop. It was Jose Despard.
His tailoring was impeccable, as usual. He had a bedside table in one hand, a small lamp in the other.
“Deedee!” he said, pleased. “You’re here! What a perfectly delightful-”
Shayne’s figure caught the tail of his eye, and he was given a different kind of surprise as he swung around. “Shayne!”
That was all Shayne let him say. He knocked the door out of his grasp and threw the bolt. When the raid began, he and the girl had to be somewhere else. He jerked Despard around with the hook. “Do what I tell you. We’re going to have cops in a minute.”
“Cops!”
Despard made an involuntary movement toward the door.
“They’re between you and the elevator,” Shayne snapped.
“They’ll want to know who signed the lease. Tell them. Don’t say anything else. Pull some rank. Don’t choke up and you’ll be O.K.”
He snatched up the long whip he had dropped when the door opened.
“A whip!” Despard exclaimed. “Shayne, I want an explanation.”
“A black Buick parked on Sycamore Lane,” Shayne said. “Across the canal. Drive off in your own car and come back. I’ll meet you there.” He waved the whip at the girl, as though giving directions to a lion who knew no other language. “O.K., Deedee.”
The girl was frozen on the bed. Shayne stuck the coiled whip in his sling, took her by the back of the neck and marched her to the terrace. Her improvised garment came apart as she moved and Despard saw the streak of fresh blood across her thighs.
“You’ve been whipping her! You think you can get away with this?”
He rushed the detective, who met him with an upward movement of the loaded cast. The hidden knuckles clunked against the side of his jaw and he went down.
Shayne kept his hard grip on the girl’s neck. She was whimpering. They were outside on the terrace by the time he heard the first noises at the door.
One long continuous terrace had been cast for each floor. It had then been partitioned by light metal panels, providing a separate terrace for each tiny apartment. Shayne had hoped to swing around the partition to an adjoining apartment, reaching the elevator or the fire stairs while the cops were occupied in 9-C. But lights were on in the apartments on either side. He looked over the rail. The apartment directly beneath them was dark.
He thrust the girl against the railing. Without hesitation he uncoiled the whip and ran it around one of the concrete uprights, pulling the shank through the loop on the handle. When Deedee saw what he meant to do, she tried to pull away.
“You can’t make me.”
“Grab me around the neck and hang on, unless you want me to throw you over.”
“You wouldn’t!”
Shayne grinned at her.
“Oh, God,” she said in a trembling voice. “I just can’t.”
He swung over the flat balustrade. A quick jerk of the head commanded her to follow. She was making frightened noises. Shayne tangled the hook in her long hair and yanked her toward him. She seized his neck with both thin arms. Her legs fastened themselves compulsively around his waist.
He was already letting himself down, the thin end of the whip looped around his fist. With a splintering crash, the door in the apartment sprang open as Shayne’s lithe, rangy body disappeared below the balustrade. He crooked his right arm around the concrete upright, putting no weight on the whip. His feet probed out blindly. The ceilings were as low as the builder had been able to make them, and Shayne figured on a drop of no more than six feet to the railing.
The girl had a stranglehold on him. Her bare knees scraped against the rough concrete as he let himself down another few inches, still not entrusting their combined weight to the whip.
He shifted his hold. For one instant before his toes touched the concrete railing, only the stretched leather thong kept them from dropping eight floors to the embankment along the edge of the bay.
Then he was balancing lightly on the railing, his cast pressed against the terrace ceiling. He revolved so the girl was over the terrace and pried her fingers loose from his neck. He jerked at the whip handle. As soon as it came free, he threw it straight out and, without waiting to see it fall, jumped down to the girl’s side.
The mattress cover had dropped at her feet. She was shuddering, her face in her hands. Shayne threw the mattress cover around her shoulders and pulled her to the door.
She started to speak, but he stopped her with a harsh whisper. Inside, he saw the looming shapes of furniture and banged his shin painfully on a low table. There was a faint hissing sound in the room. Discerning the oval outline of a lampshade, be let go of her hand and felt for the switch.
Another light came on before he could find it. This was a tiny tensor lamp beside the bed, with a concentrated beam. The beam found Shayne.
A woman’s voice said, “Stand still.”
Enough light leaked out of the intense beam to show Shayne something else-a Colt. 45 automatic. He said easily, “Let me turn on this other lamp. Then you can hold the gun with both hands.”
His hand continued its slow movement toward the lamp. When she didn’t tell him to stop, he snapped the switch, flooding the room with rosy light. This apartment was a duplicate of the one overhead in shape and size, but it contained enough furniture to crowd a much larger place. The woman in bed was wearing a cold-cream disguise and her head was a mass of exploding curlers.
She said with surprise, “You’re the man with the broken arm in the elevator.”
The hissing, Shayne saw, came from a vaporizer on the table by the bed.