“What you’re trying to tell me,” she said, confronting him again, “is that you don’t think I’m worth helping. In that case, Mike, I don’t blame you — but think of my husband.”
“Damn it!” he said. “I used to like you as a kid, Lois...”
“I’m not a kid any more, Mike,” she said quietly. “I’m a woman... a woman in a jam, and I need help.”
Reluctantly, he agreed to do what he could. Before leaving, he paid a visit to a small washroom, to which she directed him, immediately off the front hall. On the back of the basin was a cellophane cigar wrapper, bearing an orange-and-blue emblem. The detective flushed it down the toilet.
II
Shayne was frowning as he drove away from Lois Malcolm’s winter residence. The bathroom he had visited, like the front hall and the living room, showed every sign of spotless servicing — with fresh towels and soap, even a fresh flower in a tiny vase, set in a wall-niche. Somebody had unwrapped a cigar there that very morning. It seemed highly unlikely that Lois Malcolm smoked cigars — just as it seemed unlikely that she would often use a bathroom obviously designed for visitors to the pseudo-Spanish mansion. Her own bathroom would adjoin her bedroom, elsewhere in the house.
There was another element in the cellophane wrapper that troubled the detective. He knew that orange-and-blue label — one of his New York clients had smoked cigars bearing a similar device and had presented Mike with a box of them at the conclusion of a case. Cigars with that label were custom-made, of the finest Havana and Connecticut leaf, for the exclusive New York Racquets Club.
He stopped in one of the great, white, modern hotels that make a wedding-cake festival of Miami Beach in the sunshine and visited the office of the manager, whom he knew, for a look at a copy of the New York Social Register.
Donald Malcolm was listed, as was Lois Craig Malcolm. There were, he noted, no children of their marriage. Malcolm’s clubs included the University, the Metropolitan, the Union League, and the New York Racquets. The detective scowled and tugged at the lobe of his left ear.
Shayne had lunch with an old friend — long, lanky, sardonic Timothy Rourke, crack crime reporter for the Miami News. Over a fine mess of pompano at a restaurant across the Bay, he learned that the late Duke Ferrell had been, by repute, one of the most successful all-round ladies’ men, gigolos and heels to operate in Dade County of recent years.
“There won’t be many tears shed over his demise this morning,” said the reporter, “unless he’s still got some dames on the hook he didn’t finish milking. He could really turn it on when there was a buck in view. The word is, Duke Ferrell put his heart into his work.”
“What’s the latest on it from Headquarters?” the detective asked.
Tim Rourke shrugged. “Who knows?” he countered. “Probably nothing, since Sturgis isn’t issuing any statements yet. They gave that houseman of the Duke’s a sweating, I hear. Seems he had a record out West — petty larceny, a spot of blackmail. This was before he went to work for the Duke. They’re still working him over.”
“Thanks,” said Shayne. He was relieved to discover that, apparently, the reporter didn’t yet know he was professionally interested in the murder. Over the coffee, he said casually, “Tim, I’ve been reading about this proxy fight that’s coming up over Waldex. Can you fill me in on any of it?”
Rourke put down his coffee cup, mopped his lips, then cocked his long head on one side. “Mike,” he said, “it’s one of those things that happens in business ever so often — like the Robert R. Young-Grand Central thing a few years back, or the Louis Wolf son tussle with Montgomery-Ward. Waldex is a solid, established industrial complex of manufacturing concerns, dealing mostly with timber and plastic by-products. It has enough tax assets and goodwill, to say nothing of cash reserves, to make hungry people’s mouths water.”
“Hmmph!” said Shayne. “What about the management?”
Again Tim Rourke shrugged knobby shoulders. He said, “I don’t know why you’re interested, but it’s interesting stuff, all right. I’ve been boning up on it for a feature series on crimes in business. There have been no complaints against the Waldex management — at least, there were none I knew of until the Borden group opened fire last year and got the old propaganda mills grinding. The employees got regular raises and fat Christmas bonuses, and all the retirement and health benefits and services the law allows. The stock-holders got their dividends every quarter, like clockwork. So, no complaints.”
“Then what’s the beef now?” the redhead asked.
“The usual,” replied Rourke. “This mob that wants in claims the management is ‘unprogressive’ — whatever that means. They claim they’ll offer a stock split with no decrease in dividends per share, along with an efficiency programme that will cut costs and produce a higher corporative profit. It’s a straight play to win the stockholders’ support — ‘we’ll double your dough, kids’ — that’s all.”
“Have they got a chance?” Shayne inquired.
“A programme like that always has a chance, the mental processes of stockholders being what they are,” said the reporter. “I’d say it looked like a dead heat to date. Of course, the payoff won’t come until next month, when they hold the annual stockholders’ meeting.”
“Where are they holding it?” Shayne asked.
“You are a square!” said the reporter, shaking his head sadly. “They’re holding it right here in Miami, two days after Christmas. That’s when you’ll see the fireworks. But why the interest, Mike? I should think you’d be hotter on to-day’s corpse — this Duke Ferrell. There’s one that may blossom angles in all directions — to say nothing of curves.” He made the eternal, hour glass gesture. “Right down your alley, Mike, if you can latch on to a payday.”
“It sounds unsavoury,” said Shayne, beckoning the waiter for the check. Tim Rourke regarded him with open disbelief.
“I must have gone deaf,” said the reporter. “Anyway, my ears are deceiving me. Mike Shayne finds a murder unsavoury? It can’t be!”
“Shut up, you large goon,” said the redhead good-naturedly, as he opened his wallet to pay for the meal. “But keep me briefed on what happens.” He got rid of the reporter outside the restaurant. By his wristwatch, it was past two o’clock, and time to be on his own way.
For the pending stockholders’ meeting, the Waldex Corporation had reserved quarters on two floors of one of the larger and newer Miami Beach hotels. Shayne walked in, examined the panorama of dignified hustle in which he found himself and pushed his fedora, irreverently, far back on his red head. If he was thrown out, as he rather expected to be, there was a certain reassurance in the prospect of being given the heave in gentlemanly fashion.
Thus morally fortified, the detective approached a young goddess whose serene sunbronsed perfection was well revealed by her white sunback dress, whose hair was a dark blonde, streaked with gold.
He asked to see Donald Malcolm and was informed, charmingly, “Mr. Malcolm is in New York.”
Shayne said, leaning closer to her over the bloated wooden kidney that served the goddess as an altar, “Honey, you get word to him that Mr. Ferrell — Mr. Harlan Ferrell — wants to see him right away. I’ll wait.”
He sat down on a sofa and began whistling tunelessly through his bridgework. He knew he was taking the risk of making a fool of himself. The cigar wrapper on the basin in Lois Malcolm’s guest lavatory could have been left there in any number of ways. But the redhead felt certain Lois had lied to him lavishly — save in the matter of the Duke’s murder.