“I didn’t tell you, Nat,” Kitty put in. “Florida-American is interested.”
Natalie looked surprised. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. They don’t know I know it. Dear Barbara has given them an option, contingent on getting the rest of us to agree. Everybody else has agreed. Not me.”
“What kind of money?”
“Don’t ask me. I haven’t let them get that far. I’ll be damned if I’ll sell! In the first place, and this may seem very cold and calculating, I’m the junior tenant. Barbara’s forty-four. Judge Shanahan’s in his fifties. I don’t know how old Brad is, but he’s been around a long time.”
“He’s sixty-three, if I remember,” Rourke said.
“There! Mike, I can show you a copy of Cal’s letter. He talks about how he hopes Gaspar will still be unchanged fifty years from now. In fifty years Barbara would be ninety-four! That must mean he wanted it to end up with me. Everybody’s been telling me all my life to stop being romantic and to be practical for a change. I’d be foolish to sell, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I, Mike?”
“If everybody dies a natural death,” Shayne said gravely, “the odds are on you.”
“Of course they are. I knew you’d agree with me. Legally I only own twenty-five percent. As a practical matter it’s a good deal more.” She stopped short, catching Shayne’s eye. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”
“You asked me for advice.” He finished his drink and crumpled the paper cup. “Here it is. Sell.”
“Sell!” she cried. “For one quarter, when I have every expectation of-You couldn’t have been listening. All my life I’ve wanted a place of my own. You should see some of the holes I lived in with Hank. I had to go without lunches for a year to save up for the down payment on that house, and the mortgage won’t be paid off for another nineteen years. If they knock it down with a bulldozer, I’ll still be stuck with the mortgage payments. Over my dead body!”
She said that fiercely, but then clapped her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t like the way that sounded.”
Shayne said, “Just because an old rumrunner was sentimental about this particular Key doesn’t mean you have to be, too. You didn’t play cops and robbers here. If Natalie’s right, this land-company offer’s a fluke and it may never happen again. Your co-tenants don’t want to sit around waiting to see who dies last. Put yourself in their position. I take it there wasn’t much of a cash residue in the estate. I don’t know about the other two, but I know Shanahan. You can tell by the bags under his eyes that he owes money. This may be his only chance of ever raising any money out of his inheritance from Cal.”
“I’m sure they all want to sell,” she said miserably, “but doesn’t it make any difference what Cal wanted?”
“Cal’s dead and buried. Listen to me. It’s like the Ten Little Indians rhyme-you started with five and now there are four. Seventy-five acres sounds like a lot, but most of it’s swampland. You’re on pretty close quarters. It’s nice to have a place on the ocean to spend your weekends, but they’re going to be nervous weekends. When people start cutting cats’ throats, it’s a sign that it’s serious. Which one has been talking to you about selling?”
“Brad. I didn’t let him get very far. He said something about fifty thousand, I said go to hell and that was that.”
“Did he bring it up again after your cat was killed?”
She nodded. “The next day. He said they’d raise their offer to fifty thousand and one-I don’t mean fifty-one thousand, but fifty thousand plus one dollar. I had a real case of hysterics after he left.”
Shayne continued, “And the next step was the aqualung. That came pretty close, Kitty. They’ll keep on trying, and one of these days you’ll stop being lucky.”
“Mike, how can I just lie down and let them walk all over me? I thought if I explained things, you could-”
Shayne shook his head shortly. “You can’t buy around-the-clock protection for the rest of your life. It’s too expensive. After they murder you, I might be able to pin it on one of them, but how would that help?”
Natalie burst out, “But it’s monstrous! This is the United States, after all.”
“It’s a fairly remote part of the United States,” Shayne remarked. “These Tuttles have a point. Kitty’s an outsider. I’ve been given two possible reasons why Cal put her in his will-either to break up her marriage or to keep the Key from being sold. The rest of them can’t be pleased about either reason. If there was no actual cash in prospect, I don’t think they’d do anything but talk about it. Even with Kitty out of the way, there would still be three horses in the race, and the purse isn’t that big. Think of Brad for a minute. A smalltime collector all his life, and here all of a sudden he has a chance to pick up twenty-five percent of a purchase price of three or four hundred grand. No, make that thirty-three and a third percent-with Kitty dead of carbon monoxide poisoning there’d be only three survivors. Be realistic, Kitty. Turn it over to a lawyer and tell him to make sure you get your one fourth, plus full assumption of your mortgage. Figure that as your legacy, and buy some ocean-front property somewhere else. Then you can sleep nights.”
“I hate to say it,” Natalie said slowly, “but Mike’s right, you know. That Brad is a real Charles Addams character. If I had to spend weekends on the same seventy-five acres, I’d want him to think we were good friends.”
“It’s so humiliating,” Kitty wailed. “The Florida-American option expires Wednesday. I thought if I could only stick it out-”
Shayne’s eyebrows knotted. “Wait a minute. That might make a difference. What happens after Wednesday?”
“It’s back to the status quo, I guess. This isn’t the only area they’re interested in, and Barbara can’t keep them dangling forever. If she can’t deliver a clear title, they’ll look somewhere else.”
Shayne thought a moment. “I still think you ought to deal yourself out. It’s too touchy. But if you want to take a chance on the long run, the thing to do is leave town. They’ll be mad, but maybe not quite mad enough to kill you. Stay away a couple of weeks and give it time to die down. I’ll talk to Brad in the meantime. Maybe I can scare him a little.”
Her hands together, she was glowing at Mike. “Mike, I knew you could help! I don’t want a house somewhere else. I put too much blood and sweat into this one.”
“I think you’re out of your mind, dear,” Natalie said. “Mike knows about these things. Brad’s older than you, granted. But he can easily live another ten or fifteen years.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about Brad after Wednesday. Right now he’s taken with the idea of being a landowner, but it won’t last. He’s a city type. In another few months I predict he won’t be coming down at all.” She looked at Shayne. “I’ll go to New York, I think. I can call the paper from there-I’ve still got some vacation coming. I’ll get the first plane in the morning.” She tightened the towel with an abstracted gesture, without looking at the detective. “I don’t suppose anything more is likely to happen tonight.”
Shayne sighed. “You did save me from drowning. I’ll keep an eye on you until you get on the plane.”
chapter 4
After returning to shore, Shayne checked the padlocked closet where Kitty stored her diving gear. The top of the padlock, at the point where the shank fitted into the socket, was deeply scored.
Kitty’s beach house was a simple rectangle of glass and vertical cedar siding, at the edge of a dense hardwood hummock. Rourke was trying to start a driftwood fire on the sand beach above the highwater mark. Shayne took over and in a matter of moments had it blazing.
When the flames died down, they broiled the thick steaks Rourke had brought from the city. Kitty changed out of the striped towel into another bathing suit, a fragile affair of cloth and net, nearly as arresting as the one she had taken off underwater. There was a well-stocked portable bar, a battery-powered record player and a stack of jazz records, some of which Shayne hadn’t run across in years.