“That woman scares me to death,” Lucy told him.
“Me, too,” he admitted. “She’s the most cold-blooded, efficient human being I’ve ever met in my life — I’m not sure ‘human’ is the word for her.”
“That isn’t what scares me most about her,” Lucy told him in a very small voice. “It’s what she said about you. What if she should decide she wanted you?”
“That,” he told her grimly, “would be the second time I disappointed her. I’d as soon tangle with a queen cobra — if there is such an animal.”
“But she’s beautiful!” Lucy sounded close to tears.
“So is a cobra,” the redhead replied. “What did you two talk about while I was playing games in the rumpus room?”
“Mostly about you,” said Lucy. “She’s interested, Mike. That’s what scared me so when she made that last crack.”
“Well,” said Shayne, “perhaps she is human, if only because she can be wrong. She wasted a lot of effort to find out I don’t have that damned piece of paper.”
He dropped her off at her apartment and said, “Better stay put until you hear from me, Angel. This seems to be developing into quite an operation.”
“Mike,” she said, holding him close, “you’ll be careful, won’t you? After all, these people mean nothing to you.”
“Maybe not,” said the redhead, thinking of Lois Malcolm and the spot she was in. “Maybe not, but I’ve taken on a job.” He kissed her good night and waited, there in the car, until he saw her safely inside the building. Then he got the car going again.
The next step, he decided, was his office. He needed it as a head-quarters while he did some telephoning and decided upon the tactics best calculated to recover the missing document and bring the killer of Duke Ferrell into the open. Tim Rourke, he hoped, might have picked up something — and he wanted to see what he could dig out of Len Sturgis and Homicide. Then...
He took the stairs to his office two at a time, seeking physical release for the rage he still felt at the ease with which the green-eyed woman had handled him. Sooner or later, he told himself grimly, he was going to settle the score with A. E. Borden — and not merely by engaging in physical combat with her brood of huskies. The muscle-men involved in high finance might not be underworld types, but they packed plenty of punch.
To his surprise, he found a caller awaiting him in the corridor, outside his office door. It was Seton, the Duke’s manservant. The little man with the immense nose and the double-bags under his eyes looked considerably the worse for wear than he had in the morning. There were signs, evident to the detective’s practiced eye, that he had been given a rough time by the police.
Shayne walked up to him and said, “So they let you go — that’s good. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Seton. Come on ins—”
He broke off. The odd little man was looking at him with an expression of sheer horror on his oddly-shaped, somewhat battered face. He said, “Mr. Shayne — your...” His eyes rolled upward under their lids, he uttered an odd little moaning sound and pitched forward into the detective’s arms.
The detective caught him, wondering briefly what to do with him. His first impulse was to take him into the office and bring him around. But Seton was light as a girl in his arms, and the detective had been planning a thorough look at the late Duke Ferrell’s apartment. Even though the police and A. E. Borden’s aides had already searched it, there was a chance...
He was beginning to wonder if the Borden group was as efficient as it seemed on the surface. After all, they had made one big mistake — in kidnapping Lucy and himself, under the impression that he had the vanished document on his person. They might have made other slipups as well — and the police had not known what to search for that morning.
He carried the little man downstairs and put him carefully in the front seat of his car. He went around it then, and drove him back across the Bay, to the beach cottage where Harlan Ferrell had lived out his last, misspent season. If the police still had a watch on the house, Seton’s condition gave the detective a perfect legitimate reason for returning to the scene of the crime. But there were no legal guardians in evidence when Shayne braked his sedan to a halt
The little man appeared to be in a state of shock — evidently, Shayne thought, Sturgis and his boys had given him quite a going over. From the fact they had let him go, however, it was apparent that Seton had not cracked under the pressure. Evidently, there had been a delayed reaction that sight of the redhead had brought on Shayne wondered why Seton had wanted to talk to him.
The cottage door was locked, and the detective felt around in Seton’s pockets until he found a bunch of keys. The little man stirred and uttered a few meaningless sounds, but did not recover consciousness. Shayne tried the keys until he found the proper one and got the door open. Then he went back to his sedan and carried the little manservant inside.
Not knowing the location of the light switches, but recalling a clear path from the front door to the oyster-white, leather sofa, beside which Duke Ferrell had fallen, the redhead carried his caller in and laid him out upon it, planning to hunt for illumination later.
It was just as he bent over that the blow, from some heavy object, hit the back of his head, well behind the ear, causing him almost to pitch forward on top of Seton. There was no sound of warning, and the detective was caught utterly off guard, absorbed as he was in the man he had been carrying.
But the frustration over his earlier mishandling was still strong, and he swung with a snarl, catching a view, in silhouette, of his attacker, whose arm was just moving upward to deliver a second blow. Shayne moved in quickly. His left arm came upward to fend off further attack, brushed a hat from his unknown assailant’s head, and he felt the man’s downward blow averted by the defensive action.
Before his ambusher could make another aggressive move, the detective was swarming all over him, pumping both fists into his belly. He felt flesh cave beneath the power of his attack. He heard the man grunt, gasp and gurgle, then go into retreat. Shayne lifted his attack, smashing at the man’s face, then crowding and tripping him rolling to the soft carpet with him.
Suddenly, he was caught in a circle of light as a powerful flash-beam discovered him in its glare. The soft, familiar voice of Lois Malcolm said, “All right, get up and put up your hands.” There was a gasp, then, “Mike Shayne!”
The redhead looked at the man he had been trying to batter to a pulp. It was Donald Malcolm, and he was shaking his head and saying, “Lemme up, you big ox, lemme up!”
VII
Shayne straightened and ran his fingers through his red hair, as Lois helped her husband to his feet. He found a wall-switch, flooded the cottage living room with light, then looked at the Malcolms with disgust.
It was Lois who spoke first. “I’m sorry, Mike,” she said. “I didn’t think...”
“You,” said the detective “didn’t think, period! Neither, it seems, did this high-powered genius of a husband of yours. What in hell did you believe you were trying to accomplish by coming here?”
“We had to do something,” said Malcolm, mopping blood from his face with a handkerchief. “We couldn’t just sit home and—”
“Isn’t that what your wife hired me to do?” Shayne asked dourly. “Take care of the action so you could sit home and keep your skirts clean?” The Malcolms were essentially nice people and, in the redheads lexicon, nice people should behave like nice people. He added, “What are you going to do when the company starts coming — because company’s coming, and don’t think it isn’t. You can’t go blundering around in a murder case, like a pair of blind giraffes and not expect to draw attention to yourselves.”