He had almost forgotten the red convertible. It came up behind him very fast and rammed him before he could react.
It was a hard shot, and Zion’s head snapped back against the headrest. His cigar fell to his lap. His dark glasses had been jolted askew, and the road ahead went out of focus alarmingly. The blue scarf, the whipping hair, the red car. He was jarred back in time, to the earlier moment when he and Keko had clashed bumpers. He heard her voice on the stereo. Not knowing exactly where he was for an instant, he did the wrong thing, letting up on the gas. The convertible hit him again.
He was braced for this one, but the neck snap was sudden and painful.
He realized that he was still counting squeezes. He put the exerciser on the seat beside him as the red car slid out of the overhead mirror and moved up alongside. He pushed his shades back into place and brushed the burning cigar to the floor. Action and sound came back into synchronization. In the present again, he prepared to outrun her. If she tried to cut in on him, he would hold the heavy car to the road and tough it out. He owned eighteen percent of the stock in a major motion picture company, and his old luck was coming back.
He turned his head, and his mind jumped again. The likeness was incredible. But Keko Brannon was dead. She had died seven years ago, on the thirteenth day of shooting a picture budgeted at two million five — a picture sure to have slopped over, like all Brannon pictures, because she found it so difficult to show up anywhere at the appointed time. She had drowned in a bathtub in a rented house in Encino, stunned by a lethal mixture of booze and pills. And after that, how the ink had flowed. A stand-in was used to finish the film, and the publicity had been so enormous that in the end the picture had more than recouped. The movie-going public is ninety-five percent ghoul.
As a rational man, Zion knew that this had to be some kook who had heard the legend and thought it would work again, not knowing that those days were gone forever. She had fixed herself up like Brannon and was wearing, he noticed, a typical Brannon dress, with a low scooped neck that showed an extravagant pair of boobs. Her car, a stock Ford or Chevy, seemed to be trying to shed its skin. He decided to pull out in front and keep a safe interval until he spotted a patrol car. They might be able to milk this for a little newspaper space.
He depressed the pedal. In another moment he would be clear.
The girl whipped off her dark glasses. It was Kate Thackera, in a blonde wig. That explained it all. Crazy was the word for this lass. But what did she think it was going to accomplish? Was he supposed to be so guilt ridden and skittery that at the sight of Keko Brannon — a girl masquerading as Keko Brannon — he would go gibbering off the interstate highway at eighty-five miles an hour? True, she had startled him for a moment. But he was over that now.
He muttered and dropped back until they were running even again. He had thought of a way to handle this problem — swing over hard and drive the lighter American car into the center divider. Another highway fatality. They all drive too fast at that age; they haven t learned that they, too, are mortal. He checked the highway. No cars in sight. His name wouldn’t be mentioned, and he would have this demented female off his back for good.
But he hesitated. Was he sure that his luck had actually changed? If a tire blew, for example, at this speed…
Their movement together was dreamy and unnatural, as though the film had been slowed to sixteen frames a second. He had worked too hard to have it all end in a crash on a highway. He had never walked out on a movie in his life.
Still in slow motion, she picked up a pistol from the bucket seat beside her and extended her arm. She aimed at Zion carefully, smiling. His foot started the jump from gas pedal to brake; but before he could change his speed, she fired.
Chapter 2
The hotel suite was a big, corner one overlooking one of the most expensive strips of sand in the world. The young woman who responded to Michael Shayne’s buzz identified herself as Evie Zion. She gave him a pleasant smile and thanked him for coming so promptly.
Her husband, Marcus Zion, broke off a phone call to shake hands. He apologized, waved Shayne to a chair, and returned to the phone. Mrs. Zion went to the sideboard, which was crowded with bottles and glasses.
“What can I give you?”
“Scotch is all right, unless you have cognac,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Shayne, a private detective, was tall and powerfully built, with large freckled hands and scarred knuckles, and a way of seeming entirely at ease in any context. He looked around. The air in the room was heavy with tension and cigar smoke. There were three phones, all in use. A typewriter clacked in the next room.
Zion listened and said little, grunting an occasional question and twirling a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Two other men, tanned and paunchy, in rumpled suits, shouted into the remaining phones, switching from incredulity to angry abuse to wheedling. The atmosphere was that of a political headquarters the night before an important election.
Mrs. Zion brought Shayne a snifter and a bottle of Courvoisier.
“We don’t usually live like this,” she said. “But it’s wartime. One more day and it’s over, and the clocks can’t move fast enough to suit me.”
“Weren’t you in the movies once?” Shayne said.
“Oh, dear, does it show? I’ve aged since then.”
She couldn’t have been older than thirty. She probably considered herself a few pounds overweight. As far as Shayne was concerned, it was distributed well. Her soft voice had an unusual throaty timbre, but it was her smile Shayne remembered from the days when he went to the movies more regularly.
“Now think back,” she said. “Did you ever go to vampire movies? I sometimes lasted into the third reel, and then I made the mistake of going to bed with the window open. For some reason, I’ve never wanted to give any blood to the Red Cross since.”
“Eva Price,” Shayne said.
“You remember,” she said, pleased. “When I graduated to grown-up pictures, they always cast me as the sweet, suffering wife — the one the leading man comes back to when she’s about to have a baby. Then I married Marcus, and I haven’t suffered too much. I haven’t had a baby either, I may add. But these annual proxy fights. They’re getting to be a bit of a drag. I wish we manufactured something simple, like neckties.”
Her husband, his head cocked, continued to listen to the voice on the phone. He retracted his lips as though he tasted something sour.
“Let me know what happens with him.”
He hung up with a thump and came across to Shayne. He was considerably older than his wife, a common practice in his industry. Unlike the others in the room, he had wasted little time in the California sun. The skin was slack below his jawline. He looked as though he had done nothing since early morning except take unpleasant phone calls.
He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. “I’m pressed for time. I have an appointment in half an hour with a trustee from Boston, and he’ll want me to look my best. Keep me company while I shave. Bring your drink.”
A man came out of the bedroom with a sheet of paper, but Marcus shook him off. The phone was ringing.
“Only if it’s a major disaster,” he told Mrs. Zion.
He stopped at the sideboard and dropped ice in a glass. But after picking up a whiskey bottle, he pursed his lips and put it back.