Mary Devon put her hands over her face and began crying quietly. “What am I going to do?” she sobbed. What am I going to do?”
“Start telling the truth,” he advised her coldly. “I don’t know what you’ve got yourself into, but it’s evidently something you can’t go to the police with. Maybe you have been sleeping with Fidel Castro. I wouldn’t blame you… and I certainly wouldn’t blame him. If you come clean with me and it’s something I can touch without losing my Florida license, I’ll be glad to consider it. Otherwise, I’ll finish up this glass of excellent cognac and be on my way.”
He raised the glass to his lips and grinned over the top of it at her.
She pulled her hands away from her tear-stained face and regarded him with a strange look of near-exaltation. “Will you, Mike?” she breathed hopefully. “Will you truly promise to help me if I tell you the real truth?” She got to her feet and glided toward him as though in a sort of trance.
He said gruffly, “If I can. Practically anything short of murder.”
She dropped to her knees beside his chair and clutched his thigh with both hands while she looked up at him imploringly. “I’m going to trust you, Mike. I’ll tell you the real truth this time. But it is a long story, and we might as well be relaxed. Do you mind if I… slip into the bedroom and get into something more comfortable?”
He said, “I don’t mind at all,” and pretended to hide a yawn while he glanced at his watch. “As a matter of fact, I’ll use your phone to make a collect call to my secretary in Miami while you’re doing that.”
She got up and said simply, “You won’t be disappointed, I promise you,” and he watched her go toward the bedroom and wondered fleetingly just what he was getting himself into.
He shrugged the question away, got up and carried his cognac over to the telephone stand where he sat down and put in his call to Lucy.
While the operator repeated the Miami telephone number, he glanced across the room and noticed that Mary had carelessly neglected to close the bedroom door all the way and that a full-length mirror set in a closet door inside the room afforded him an excellent view of the juicy body of the honey-haired blonde emerging from a black sheath dress.
She didn’t face the mirror directly so he wasn’t sure whether she was aware that he could see her in the glass or not, and he struggled with his gentlemanly instincts while he waited for Lucy to come on the line.
His baser instincts won the struggle without much difficulty. Actually, he thought, a woman who had been Castro’s mistress… or who had calmly claimed to be his mistress for purposes of her own, would think it pretty childish of him if he called out to warn her to close the bedroom door.
And he wondered with a grin how Lucy would react in Miami if he told her he was sitting up in a woman’s hotel room watching a disrobing act being put on for his special benefit.
Then he realized, suddenly, that Lucy still wasn’t answering her phone. He had been too absorbed in other things to count the number of rings, but now the operator was announcing crisply, “That number does not answer, sir. Do you wish me to try again in…”
He growled, “Cancel the call,” and hung up. When he looked up at the bedroom door with a scowl, Mary was walking through it placidly, bare-footed and wearing a long, full-skirted silken robe of pale yellow that was belted tightly at the waist and rustled suggestively against her limbs.
She stopped short at sight of his scowling countenance. “Don’t you like it?” she asked anxiously. “I thought…”
“I like it fine,” he told her shortly. “I’m just worried about my secretary. Her telephone doesn’t answer.”
“But, goodness, what’s that to worry about?” She glided sinuously to the sofa and patted the cushion beside her. “Why don’t you bring your drink over and relax?”
“But it’s after ten o’clock in Miami. Lucy wouldn’t normally be out so late.”
“Pooh! What’s ten o’clock? I bet she’s an attractive doll, isn’t she? I can’t imagine Mike Shayne having a secretary who isn’t. You know the old saying: When the boss is away the secretaries play. Come on, darling, and this time I’ll tell you the real truth about that old dispatch case.”
Shayne shook his head stubbornly. “You don’t know Lucy Hamilton. She was expecting me to call. She just wouldn’t do this.”
He picked up the telephone book and ruffled through it, found the number for the Plaza Terrace Hotel and gave it to the switchboard.
When it answered, he said, “Pat Ryan, please. Security,” hoping that Ryan would still be on duty.
The operator said, “Certainly,” and a moment later a voice said, “Ryan speaking.”
“Mike Shayne, Pat.”
“Hey. How you doing, Mike? Caught up with that juicy blonde yet?”
“I’m just about to.” Shayne lifted his eyebrows at Mary, who reclined on the sofa with her robe carefully arranged to show the smooth line of long, well-fleshed legs. “What I wondered, Pats” he went on hastily. “Has there been any call for me? I haven’t been able to get hold of my secretary.”
“Not a thing, Mike.” Pat Ryan chuckled lewdly. “Why worry about a secretary in Miami when you’re about to catch up with something juicy out here?”
Shayne said, “Thanks,” and hung up. His scowl deepened and he drummed blunt fingertips on the telephone table beside him.
Why, indeed? But none of these people knew Lucy. That was why. He didn’t even bother to look at Mary when her voice floated to him provocatively from the sofa, “For goodness sake, you can call her later, Mike. After she gets home from her date. Remember that kiss I promised you.”
Shayne said coldly, “I still haven’t earned it.” He lifted the telephone again and directed the operator to put through a collect, person-to-person call to Timothy Rourke in Miami, giving her both the Daily News number and Rourke’s home number.
It was some time before they succeeded in locating the reporter, and his voice sounded queer when it finally came over three thousand miles of telephone wire: “Mike? The operator said Los Angeles. Is that right?”
“Yeh. I’m in L.A. Tim, I’m beginning to get worried about Lucy. I can’t locate her, and…”
“You’re getting worried about Lucy?” Tim Rourke seemed about to choke over the words. “You can’t locate her? Neither can the whole goddamned Miami police department… or you either for that matter. What are you doing…?”
“What are you talking about, Tim?”
“About a dead man in your office, Mike. Stabbed in the heart with that filing spindle off Lucy’s desk. And she seems to have vanished into thin air.”
7
“Wait a minute, Tim,” Shayne implored his old friend. “What’s all this…?”
“Did Lucy go out there with you, Mike?” interrupted Rourke in Miami.
“No. She was in the office when I left about noon. I’ve been trying to call her apartment and getting no answer. Start from the beginning and make sense, Tim. Remember, I’ve had no contact with Miami since eleven o’clock this morning.”
“I’ll start at the beginning, but I don’t know how much sense I’ll make,” Rourke told him gloomily. “Here’s the way it stacks up. About eight o’clock this evening your cleaning woman unlocked the door of your office and found a dead man lying on the floor right in front of Lucy’s desk… with that long, steel spindle, off Lucy’s desk, rammed all the way into his heart.”
“Who is he?”
“No identification on the body. Middle-aged. Sort of nondescript. They’ve found no one who saw him go in or out of the building. They figure he got it between four and five this afternoon.”
“Go on,” grated Shayne. “What about Lucy?”
“Nothing. That’s the hell of it. Of course they tried to reach you first, but they couldn’t get any line on you. No one knew where the hell you were.”