“Pete did,” Shayne said angrily. “Clerk at my hotel. I told him I was leaving.”
“Probably gone off duty by the time they got to him. Anyhow, Mike, they started looking for Lucy then. Her phone didn’t answer. I went up to her place with Will Gentry to check. Nothing disturbed. Everything spick and span there… just the way Lucy always leaves her place so meticulously in the morning. You know… you and I have kidded her…”
“I know,” Shayne said impatiently. “How about the office, Tim? Anything out of the way there?”
“No sign of a struggle at all. Nothing. Just a dead man lying on the floor… boss and secretary both inexplicably vanished.” Timothy Rourke paused to draw in a deep breath. “They’ve got an All Points out for both of you, Mike. Gentry couldn’t afford not to. I’ll have to report this call, Mike, as soon as I hang up. Right now you’re a Wanted Man.”
“Sure, report it,” Shayne told him harshly. “Tell Will exactly what I’ve told you. And tell him I’ll be back on the first jet I can get out of here. I’ll wire him as soon as I get a reservation.” He put the receiver down and stood up, his eyes bleak and unseeing, his jaw set hard and cheeks deeply trenched.
“Mike,” cried Mary in fright from across the room. “What is it? You look so… strange. You don’t have to leave tonight, do you?”
He blinked his eyes and he saw her reclining there on the sofa; voluptuous, beautiful… and available. “Yeh,” he said slowly. “I’ve got to get back.” He looked at his watch and saw it was almost eight o’clock, Los Angeles time.
“But what about me?” wailed Mary. “You promised you’d help me.”
“I promised I’d listen to you,” Shayne said shortly. “I have. To a pack of lies.” He paused, looking at her coldly and appraisingly. “Now, I wonder, by God…?”
She squirmed under his gaze. “At least take time to let me tell you the truth. There can’t anything so terrible have happened in Miami that you have to rush back at a moment’s notice. Tomorrow morning will certainly be time enough…”
He turned his back on her and her voice trailed off into troubled silence. He lifted the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with United Airlines Reservations. When he got a connection he asked about the next flight to Miami and was told there was a jet flight leaving forty minutes after nine o’clock.
“I want space on it,” he said. “First-class. I have a return ticket. Michael Shayne.”
“One moment, Mr. Shayne.” He waited, and thirty seconds later was assured that space was available and would be held for him on Flight Seventeen, scheduled to reach Miami at six o’clock the next morning, Eastern Standard Time.
He hadn’t heard her movements or the rustle of her robe, but the smell of her perfume and the woman smell of her body was strong and close to him when he put the receiver down. He turned slowly and Mary pressed herself against him hungrily, twining her arms about his neck and looking up into his face beseechingly with parted lips and imploring eyes.
“Don’t leave me, Mike,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I need you so. I can make you… need me, too.”
The length of her well-fleshed body pressed against him warmly, and he knew she wore nothing beneath the silken robe. He looked down at her broodingly and agreed, “Yeh. I think you could do that all right… if things were different. But the way things are…” He sighed deeply, reached up and caught hold of both her wrists at the back of his neck, pulled them apart and pressed them down against her sides, put pressure on both of them so pain showed on her face.
“No, Mike,” she whimpered. “Don’t do this to me. I’ve been so alone and frightened. You don’t know…”
Looking bleakly down into her eyes, he said brutally, “Now is a good time for you to get frightened again. I’m going to have the truth out of you this time… if I have to slap it out of you.” His voice turned into a snarl on the last words, and he thrust her away from him so she almost fell.
She recovered her balance and lowered her long lashes while she rubbed her bruised wrists. “I don’t know what’s happened,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t understand. I promised to tell you the truth this time, and I’m just waiting for you to let me do it.”
“No more carefully rehearsed stories,” he warned her angrily, turning aside to splash cognac into his glass. “I think I’ve been taken, goddamn it. I think you’ve made a Patsy of me. Trailing you around all over this town like a tame puppy while all hell was breaking loose back in Miami.
“You know what I think right now?” He swung around on his heel to glare at her. “I think this whole thing from the cute Special Delivery letter was a carefully calculated plan to get me out of Miami and away from my office today. That’s the way it looks right now. And, by God, I fell for it,” he added wonderingly.
“Oh no, Mike!” She shrank away from him, moved back across the rug on her bare feet to the sofa where she dropped down again and covered her face for a moment. Her features were composed and set when she looked at him again and said quietly, “Please sit down with your drink and listen to me. I admit I made up the Cuban and communist part of it, but if you’ll just help me get that dispatch case back from Tijuana…”
He said, “Nuts on Tijuana. I’m interested in Miami, Mary… if you are Mary Devon, which I’m beginning to doubt.”
“What about Miami? I haven’t been there for years.”
“There’s this about Miami.” He strode across to stand over her, holding his glass of cognac in his left hand with the big palm of his right hand held open and swung back menacingly to indicate that he had meant his former threat. “My secretary has vanished. She’s been missing for hours, and there’s the body of a dead man in my office.”
“A dead man?” She shrank back, aghast. “Who?”
“They don’t know yet, but the theory right now is that Lucy Hamilton murdered him.”
“But what has the body of a dead man got to do with you, Mike? You can prove you’ve been here all day.”
“That’s right,” he said bitterly. “Being diddled all over Los Angeles on a wild goose chase that would stink like hell even to a rookie cop while a murder is being committed in my office and God knows what has happened to my secretary while I’m out here playing games with you.
“That’s why you’re going to start talking, and tell the truth this time,” he told her implacably. “Let’s not have any more crap about a dispatch case in Tijuana and taxi drivers spying on you all over the city. I tell you this: If anything happens to Lucy from now on because you keep lying to me, I’ll…” He paused and dropped his voice. “I’ll see that you regret it. Now start talking. It was a hoax from the beginning, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t know anything about murder, Mike. Or your secretary. I swear I didn’t. I still don’t see…” She shuddered and shrank farther away from the anger in his eyes, “You’ve got to believe me. It was just a job. They said it was a practical joke and it sounded like fun. I still can’t believe…”
“Who said it was a practical joke?”
“Joe did. Joe… Morrison,” she babbled. “He’s a producer here that I do some work for. Bit parts. I just can’t think that he… that your being here has anything to do with what happened in Miami today.”
Shayne dropped into the chair close to the sofa and said, “Give it to me, Mary. The whole thing… and straight.”
“In the first place,” she admitted, biting her full lower lip, “my name isn’t Mary Devon. Joe suggested I tell you that. He gave me a copy of that book your friend wrote about the Wanda Weatherby case so I could read up on it and pretend I was Helen Taylor’s room-mate and met you briefly that one time ten years ago. He said you’d never remember what Mary Devon looked like and it would make the whole thing sound that much more convincing… a logical reason for me to call on you for help now that I was supposed to be in trouble ten years later.”
“All right,” said Shayne. “I don’t give a damn what your name is. You say a producer named Joe Morrison suggested this to you… hired you to do it. When was this?”