“Ten years ago?” he asked in the same confidential tone.
She nodded slightly and a faint smile curved her full, red lips that were only inches away from his. “Mary Devon.”
He repeated the name to himself, frowning and halfclosing his eyes, mentally going back over the years as he had done on the airplane earlier that day. Ten years back? She would have been in her early twenties… and she must have been beautiful even then to have matured into this improbably lush woman whose body was so warm against him.
Mary Devon? Damn it, there was a nagging memory, but he could not grasp it. He shook his head slowly and said, “Sorry, but you’ll have to help me out.”
“I was afraid I didn’t make much impression on you, Mr. Shayne. Why should I after all? You only saw me for a few minutes that one time. And you were pretty well preoccupied with my room-mate’s suicide which later turned out to be murder.”
Cogs clicked in Michael Shayne’s mind. “Helen Taylor,” he said. “The Wanda Weatherby case. You were Helen’s room-mate. A television actress.”
“It was radio in those days. I never saw you again, but I never forgot you, of course, and I kept reading about you in the papers. So, when I got into this… horrible mess… you were the only person I could think of to turn to. I’ve been so… utterly alone. I feel as though I’m just beginning to come alive again, to emerge from a frightful nightmare.”
She kept her voice low, but it pulsed warmly and with a new vibrancy.
The taxi had switched over to Hollywood Boulevard and was approaching the Roosevelt Hotel on the right. Mary drew away from him and sat up a little straighter, and he leaned forward to look at the meter and got out his wallet.
She took his arm as they went in the brightly lighted entrance, and pressed it tightly against her side while they moved toward the elevators and the desk.
Just in front of the desk she turned him away from the elevators to the left, past the desk and entrance to the dining room, and out the side entrance.
He looked down at her in utter astonishment as she paused there at his side. “Where are we headed now?”
“To my hotel,” she told him triumphantly. “Isn’t that the way a detective does it? I’ve got so careful these last few days that I never take a cab that’s waiting in front of a place directly to my hotel. I always change at least once and then take one that’s just pulling up. Like this,” she added as a taxi drew up in front of the side entrance to let out a passenger. “You see, he can’t possibly be waiting here for me to come out.”
Shayne said wryly, “I see,” without seeing at all. She looked and acted sane enough, but she either had one hell of a persecution complex or he was right smack in the middle of one hell of a case.
He helped her into the cab and she told him, “The Perriepont Hotel this time. I’m almost sure it’s safe for us to go there,” she added cheerfully. “I just checked in there this afternoon after ditching my tail at the Hilton as I explained in my note. That’s why I was so long getting to the Brown Derby… and that I don’t understand at all. Did you tell anyone you were meeting me there? But you couldn’t have because then you didn’t even know my real name… just Elsa Cornell… and I made that up when I decided to write to you.”
“It must have been that taxi driver that brought you the note,” she decided suddenly. “It wasn’t even sealed and he must have read it before he gave it to you. I thought there was something funny about him… the way he pretended he couldn’t tell whether we were being followed or not. Oh, dear God,” she added feelingly, reaching for his hand and squeezing it, “I’m so sick of ducking around corners and being suspicious of everyone I see even looking at me. From now on, you can take over and do the worrying.”
Shayne squeezed her fingers back reassuringly, although he didn’t know what the devil he was reassuring her about.
6
She had a very comfortable, but not ostentatious, two-room suite on the fourth floor of the Perriepont Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
She closed the door behind the two of them with a long exhalation of relief and exclaimed, “Now I feel I can breathe easily for the first time in days. Sit down and I’ll order up a drink. You can see I haven’t even unpacked yet.” She gestured toward a closed suitcase and hatbox standing side by side just inside the door of a bedroom.
Shayne sat in a comfortable chair beside a smoking stand and ran clawed fingers through his red hair while he appreciatively watched her sway across the room to the telephone. There was a pleasing air of exuberance about her now that was quite at variance with the first impression of taut strain she had given when she entered the Cock and Bull.
She lifted the telephone and asked for room service, then glanced over her shoulder at him and asked, “A bottle? If they have it?”
He nodded comfortably and lit a cigarette. She gave her room number and asked, “Is it possible to have a bottle sent up? Cognac, if you have it. Martel? That’s fine. With lots of ice and two glasses.” She hung up and turned slowly to look at him, nodding her head soberly. “You’re just the way I remembered you, Michael Shayne, only more so. God, if you knew how good it makes me feel just to have you here.” She made a little face at him. “I could kiss you… just out of sheer gratitude.”
“I haven’t done anything,” he protested. “Later, perhaps. After I’ve earned it. Right now I feel like Alice on the other side of the Looking Glass.”
He reached in his pocket for the torn half of the bill she had passed to him surreptitiously at the bar, and spread it out on his knee. Then he got her envelope from another pocket and extracted the other half from it, and gravely placed the torn edges together to make sure they matched.
She seated herself at the end of a sofa a few feet from him and leaned forward to watch him with her chin cupped in her palm. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Whew. I really poured the perfume on that first half, didn’t I?”
Shayne said, “You really did. Were you wearing that stuff ten years ago when I met you?”
She smiled and said, “Probably not. I don’t think I could afford it in those days. I just hoped it would bring into your mind the memory of some entrancing femme fatale you’d known long ago, and you wouldn’t be able to resist it.”
“It was that half of a one-grand bill that I couldn’t resist,” Shayne informed her. He folded the two halves together and carefully placed them inside his wallet. “Now, what’s your problem and what’s this foolishness about little men chasing you all over the metropolitan area of Los Angeles? Taxi drivers, and one of them who scared you away from the Brown Derby? I suppose that fatso who stood so close behind me at the Cock and Bull was another one of them,” he went on sarcastically, “and that’s why you insisted on the cloak and dagger stuff there?”
“I know it sounds fantastic,” she told him calmly. “I’ll admit I have got the jitters, and I may be seeing them on every street corner when they’re not there at all, but so many crazy things have happened that I just don’t know any more. It’s a long story, and please don’t decide I’m insane before I finish telling it.” She hesitated. “I don’t know just where to start.”
He stretched out his long legs and blew a contemplative cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Why not try the beginning?”
“That’s the trouble. Where does it begin? Oh well, you don’t need a lot of background stuff: It really began about six months ago when I first met Fidel Castro in Havana.”
There was a knock on the door and she jumped up to admit a bellboy carrying a tray. She had him set it on a table across the room and signed the check and tipped him although Shayne was waving a dollar bill in the air.
She put ice cubes in the two tall glasses the boy had brought, and poured cognac in one, and Shayne stopped her before she could repeat it with the second glass, telling her, “I’d like mine straight with water on the side if you’ve got an extra glass.”