“About a week ago. Joe said they needed an actress to pull a practical joke on the private detective in Miami. Michael Shayne. Of course, I knew all about you from watching the TeeVee series.”
“Who is ‘they’?” demanded Shayne. “The ones Joe said needed an actress?”
“I don’t know,” she faltered. “He never said. I just assumed it was some friends of yours that had planned it for a joke. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but they offered me five hundred dollars and I didn’t see what harm it could do. In fact… well, I guess I might as well admit I was intrigued by the idea of spending the night with you.”
She lifted her chin defiantly. “And if you’re interested, I still am… only more so now that I’ve met you. If you’ll cancel that damned airplane reservation…”
Shayne said wearily, “Get back onto the subject. Who dreamed up all the hocus-pocus about Castro and so forth?”
“Joe did. He dictated the letter I wrote you, and gave me the torn thousand-dollar bill and all. Spilling the perfume on it was my idea. He had a script all written out that I memorized. I told him it sounded pretty silly and I didn’t believe you’d fall for it, and so he fixed up a second story for me to tell to get you to go to Tijuana with me tomorrow if you didn’t fall for the first one. The whole idea was that I was to keep you here at least until tomorrow noon and then it wouldn’t matter if you caught on and went back.”
“Then someone wanted me out of Miami for at least two days,” Shayne muttered. “That’s why you went through all that silly business at the Plaza Terrace and the Brown Derby and the other restaurant on Sunset Strip?”
She nodded, smiling weakly. “The Cock and Bull. That was Joe’s idea of a gimmick, what some of the TeeVee people call a bubble when they stick it into a script. He said a cock-and-bull story like that should have its climax at a place of the same name.”
Shayne said angrily, “It was worth a pretty good hunk of money for someone to get me away from my office. Assuming those two halves of the bill in my pocket aren’t counterfeit, and adding in my airplane fare and your five-hundred-dollar fee for the job… that’s close to two grand altogether.”
She said, “I asked Joe who was putting out that kind of dough on a practical joke, and he just grinned and said airily that it was going to be worth every penny of it when you found out how easy it had been to fool you.”
Shayne said, “I’d like to have a little talk with your Joe Morrison. Where can I find him?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Not in the evening like this. He’s a producer and you can get him at his studio mostly in the daytime, but I don’t know where he lives. He’s got an unlisted telephone number in Beverly Hills that he never did give to me. Not that I wanted it, but I did try to call him one night and couldn’t reach him by phone. If you do stay over tonight, I’ll take you out to the lot and introduce you to him tomorrow.”
Shayne looked at his watch and said grimly, “I’m boarding a plane for Miami in just a little over an hour from now.” He emptied his glass of cognac, stared at the glass for a moment, then drew back his arm and threw it across the room with all his strength.
He laughed unpleasantly at the expression on the blonde’s face as the glass shattered in fragments against the wall. “You’re still lying to me,” he told her flatly. “This isn’t any goddamned practical joke. This is for real. In place of your commies in the FBI and the CIA, you’ve substituted a television producer named Joe Morrison who conveniently has an unlisted telephone and can’t be reached for confirmation until some time tomorrow. Let’s have the truth now. What in hell went on in Miami today and is going on in Miami tomorrow that made it worth two grand to somebody to keep me out of town?”
“I don’t know.” She shuddered and drew her robe tightly about her body. “Go on and catch your jet-liner and get back there and find out,” she advised him thinly. “What have I got to do with missing secretaries and dead men?”
“That’s what I intend to find out.” Shayne got to his feet, his nostrils flaring widely. She remained crouched back on the sofa and watched fearfully as he strode into the bedroom where she had opened her suitcase on the bed to take out the robe she had changed into while he watched her in the mirror.
From where she sat, she couldn’t see him through the bedroom door as he picked up the open suitcase and dumped the contents onto the bed. He pawed through the dresses, blouses and skirts, picking out half a dozen which he draped over his arm and carried back into the sitting room and dropped on a heap on the floor in front of her.
“Now, let’s talk turkey, whatever-the-hell-your-name-is. Every article of clothing on the floor here carries a label from an expensive Lincoln Road shop in Miami Beach. You said you hadn’t been there for years. So you lied. So what?”
“I didn’t lie. I… those aren’t even my own clothes,” she told him glibly. “They belong to a girl I know. I’m married to a very jealous man and I couldn’t pack a bag to bring with me today and so I borrowed a suitcase of clothes from her…”
“Shut up!” said Shayne in a voice that shut her up. “You’re going back to Miami with me.”
“No, I… I can’t, Mike. My husband…”
“To hell with your husband,” he said deliberately. “I don’t think you’ve got one in the first place. In the second place, I don’t give a damn whether you have or not. I’m catching that nine-forty plane and you’re going with me. You’ve lied to me from the word go, and you’re coming back with me to straighten this thing out.”
“I won’t,” she said desperately. “You can’t force me to go. I’ll scream and call the police if you try to force me.”
He laughed at her happily. “That, I want to see. You screaming and calling the police. You’ve got two choices: Either come back to Miami with me or by God I’ll call the police and have them come up here to get you.”
“You can’t. You don’t dare.” She lay back on the sofa panting. “What would you tell them?”
Again he laughed happily. “Plenty. I can think up all sorts of charges that will keep you safely in jail for a few days. Remember, baby. I’m Michael Shayne.” He bared his teeth at her wolfishly. “I’ve got connections with the L.A. police department.” He didn’t have, but she had no way of knowing that. “We’ll start out with simple prostitution and work our way up from there. Look at you. Half-undressed in your own hotel room with a man! Christ, I can think of a dozen charges that’ll stick for a few days at least while they check you out. I don’t think you want any of them, because I don’t believe any of your story will check out. You’re on the hot-seat, and you know it. You’re coming back to Miami with me or you’re going to rot in a jail cell right here in L.A.”
He whirled about and strode to the telephone and again asked the operator for United Airlines. When he got them, he said curtly, “Michael Shayne, with a reservation to Miami on Flight Seventeen. Can you make that for two? I have a friend who wants to go to Miami with me.”
When he was assured that there would be space held for two of them to Miami on Flight Seventeen, he swung about and consulted his watch.
“We’ve got about an hour to reach the airport. Make up your mind. Get some clothes on and come back to Miami with me, or stay the way you are and I’ll have the Los Angeles vice squad up here in five minutes. You’ve got just thirty seconds to make up your mind which you want it to be.”
She looked up at him from the sofa for a long moment, calculatingly, obviously trying to read his mind, to determine whether he was bluffing of whether he actually meant what he said.
She appeared to make up her mind, and she stood up slowly and reached down to fumble with the knotted cord at her waist.
She loosened it and let the robe fall apart, and then shrugged herself out of it while it fell to the floor at her feet.
Naked and white-bodied, and unashamedly offering herself to him, she said, “We don’t have to go, Mike. I’d rather stay here with you. Let the airplane go to hell. Let Miami go to hell. The two of us…? Mike!” She swayed toward him, sobbing.