Rising from the sofa, Shayne picked up his hat. The girl looked up at him.
“You’re leaving?” she asked, her face strained and almost bloodless.
He merely nodded, but there was sympathy in his eyes.
Walking to the door, he pulled it open, looked back at her once and walked out. She was not looking at the door. She was seated with her hands in her lap, sightlessly staring ahead of her.
There was more than just dejection in her attitude. There was fear.
IV
The next night, Wednesday, Shayne was parked in the lot behind Club Swallow at nine o’clock. He placed his car in the lane nearest the building, only a dozen feet from the back door.
Between nine and ten P.M. a large number of cars moved in and out of the lot, but no one at all used the back door. At five minutes past ten a gray Dodge sedan pulled into the lot and parked two lanes away from Shayne. The occupant passed right in front of the detective’s car as he went to the back door and opened it. He was a tall, thin man with deep-set eyes, exactly fitting Rose Henderson’s description of the new leg man.
The man was inside barely ten minutes. When he came out again, Shayne waited until his car drove to the lot exit. Then he followed without lights as far as the street. Finally he switched on his lights and trailed the Dodge from a distance of a half block.
By midnight the thin man had made five more stops. The detective mentally filed each address for later turning over to Will Gentry as heroin outlets. After the last stop, the man drove to an apartment house, parked his car in a lot adjacent and went inside.
Shayne watched the front of the building, and in a few moments saw lights go on in a second-floor apartment. A moment later the thin man appeared at a window and drew the shade.
Entering the building, the redhead quietly ascended to the second floor and located the proper door. He merely glanced at it to see its number, which was 2-C, then went down the stairs again. According to a card on the lobby mailbox for 2-C, the apartment was occupied by a Marshall Tarbox.
Fifteen minutes later the redhead was at Police Headquarters. He had the name run through Criminal Records, but there was nothing on the man.
Shayne gave up for the night and went home to bed.
At seven the next morning the detective was parked across the street from Marshall Tarbox’s apartment building. Noting that the gray Dodge was still on the lot, he settled back to wait.
It was a long wait. The thin man didn’t come from the building until eight thirty. Climbing into the Dodge, he headed toward the downtown district with Shayne again trailing at a half-block interval. Near the center of town Shayne parked on the street when the Dodge turned into a public parking lot. The redhead followed on foot from there.
Marshall Tarbox turned into the front entrance of a small office with a plate-glass front window. There was some gilt lettering on the glass, but Shayne was a quarter block back, and couldn’t make out what it said. He got a mild shock when twenty long strides brought him close enough to read it.
The lettering read: LAKE TRAVEL AGENCY.
Bemused, the detective watched through the plate-glass window as the thin man pushed through a wooden gate, hung his hat on a wall hook and took up a position behind a counter marked: Information.
It struck Shayne as far too much of a coincidence for Bill Whitney’s replacement to be a fellow employee of the same firm. The only sensible explanation was that it wasn’t coincidence.
Which meant, at the very least, that the Lake Travel Agency had some kind of connection with narcotics. And at the very most — might be the “front” — concealed headquarters of the whole narcotics ring. And that in turn led to interesting speculations about Miss Mabel Lake.
He was contemplating this development when a pleased feminine voice said in his ear, “Why, Mr. Shane! How nice to see you.”
Turning, Shayne saw that Mabel Lake had come up beside him. She was dressed in a tailored suit that gave her figure the appearance of a much younger woman. In the bright sunlight her face wasn’t quite as unlined as it had seemed in the more subdued light of his office, but it still struck the detective that she was more attractive than any woman her age had a right, to be.
Shayne said, “Good morning, Miss Lake.”
“You were looking for me?” she asked in the same pleased voice. “We don’t open till nine, but come in anyway.”
He made no attempt to conceal his admiration as he said easily, “Just happened to be passing and noticed the sign on the window.”
She looked disappointed. “Oh. Have you learned anything about Bill yet?”
“Not much. Except that... well, he wasn’t just a user. He was involved in something more serious — the narcotic traffic.”
He watched her expression closely, but she exhibited nothing but shock. “Really?” she said. “How awful. Does Milford know?”
Shayne shook his head. “I haven’t made a report to him yet.” He paused, then said deliberately, “Bill was going to turn himself in to the police. It’s quite possible his associates found it out and killed him to shut him up.”
Her eyes widened in astonishment. Or what could have been simulated astonishment, Shayne told himself cautiously. “How terrible. To think he worked right in the agency, and I never suspected he was also working for gangsters. How did you learn all this?”
“By digging,” Shayne said vaguely. “It’s a long story.”
“Why don’t you come into my office and tell me about it?” she suggested.
He shook his head. “Haven’t time right now.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Some evening would be better.”
He put nothing in his tone to suggest he meant such an evening might develop into more than a friendly talk, but he didn’t have to. She was miles ahead of him.
“I’m free tonight,” she said instantly.
He pretended to reflect. “It would have to be late,” he said finally. “I’m tied up early in the evening.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said eagerly. “Any time is all right.”
“It might be after midnight,” he said.
Instead of looking disappointed, she looked even more eager. Her eagerness might have amused Shayne if it hadn’t been so pathetic. He wondered how long it had been since she had last been able to lure some younger man into calling at a very late hour. If he hadn’t wanted to see the inside of her house, he would have ended the farce right there.
“You haven’t told me the address,” he said.
“How silly of me,” she said in a flustered voice. Fumbling in her purse, she produced a small card and a fountain pen. Quickly she wrote on the card and handed it to him.
Then she did a surprising thing — something he had hardly dared to suggest or hope for. She pressed a key into his hand. “You can return this to me when you call. Sometimes — well, I just don’t hear the doorbell. I’ve been intending to have an electrician look at it. I keep another key, you see, hidden under the door mat, but you may as well take this one. I’ll use the other.”
V
Mabel lake had a one-story house on the outskirts of the city. It was set well back from the road and was surrounded by fifty feet of lawn on all sides. As the houses either side of it had similar broad lawns, it was a full hundred feet from the next nearest house.
Shayne pulled right into the driveway and through the open doors of the double garage. Getting out of the car, he glanced at the houses on either side, when he saw no one, pulled one of the sliding doors of the garage shut to conceal his car.