He turned away angrily and drained his glass and slammed it down on the table.
Mr. Sutter got up behind him and said weakly, “Well I… I was authorized to pay that amount, of course. It’s still extortion,” he went on bitterly, “but…”
“It’s legal extortion this time,” Shayne told him cheerfully. “I’m simply gelling paid for doing a job. Go on back to your hotel and wait for me to call you. If I have any luck it’ll be within an hour.” He stood by the table and watched Sutter turn and go out of the room.
11
When he turned his head the redhead saw Lucy looking at him over the rim of her glass with a smile of tolerant exasperation. “You are the damnedest bundle of contradictions, Michael. That poor little man… it is extortion, you know. Pure and simple.”
“You know what that poor little man had in the back of his mind?” Shayne demanded cynically.
“He was just doing his job, Michael. Trying to save his client money.”
Shayne said, “I wish I had your faith in human nature, angel. Saving his client’s money, hell! If I’m any judge of character he was hoping to go back to New York with the evidence in hand. Mission accomplished. Period. With twenty-four thousand bucks in cash stuck deep into his own pocket while I’m supposed to be grateful for one lousy grand for doing his dirty work for him.”
“Does collecting twenty-five thousand for the job instead of one make it any less dirty?” demanded Lucy with spirit.
“No. Not really. But it sure as hell salves my conscience. How else can I afford to buy you mink coats and things?”
“I haven’t got a mink coat.”
“Just what you need to salve your conscience,” Shayne told her enthusiastically. “We’ll go mink shopping tomorrow if I collect from Sutter tonight.” He glanced at the empty glass in his hand and then at his watch. “Finish your drink and let’s go.”
Lucy Hamilton wrinkled her nose at him and finished her drink. They went out together and down the stairs to his car, and as they drove off she reminded him:
“You never did tell me why you thought that call would be from Dorothy Larson and that you’d be lucky if it was. Why lucky? Why did you expect her to call you?”
“I hoped it would be a call about her, at least. We don’t know where she is or what’s become of her.” He swiftly explained the condition of the Larson apartment when he and Rourke went there after the shooting. “What does your woman’s intuition make of that… in view of all the known circumstances?”
“The last we know about her is when she telephoned you to say her husband had run out of their place with a gun and she was afraid he was going to shoot Wesley Ames? Is that right?”
“That’s the last anyone seems to know about her.”
“And there’s a half-packed suitcase on the bed, her clothes scattered around, and blood in the bathroom,” Lucy recapitulated thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Michael. She would naturally be terribly frightened and distressed. Your earlier visit must have worried her frightfully. I wonder…” She paused. “Under the circumstances do you suppose she might have called Mr. Ames to tell him the way things were going?”
“Do you mean after she talked to me and before Ralph came back? Or after Ralph went out with a gun and she called me… to warn Ames?”
“Well, I really meant after you talked to her. While she was sitting there planning what to say to Ralph when he came home. If she was having some sort of affair with Ames, wouldn’t she be likely to call him to break it off?”
“U-m-m,” ruminated Shayne. “And maybe he was serious about her. Maybe he said, ‘To hell with that husband of yours, babe. Pack a bag and get out of there to avoid a violent scene.’ Is that what you’re thinking?”
“I hadn’t gone that far,” Lucy said honestly. “But it might have been that way. And if Ralph came back unexpectedly and caught her packing…”
Shayne slowed and turned off the Boulevard onto Lucy’s side street. He said slowly, “I’m trying to remember whether there was a telephone in Ames’ study. I’d suspect he’d have a private line there, but I don’t recall seeing one. It’s where he closed himself up to do his work, and maybe he didn’t have one. Normally I suppose his secretary would handle his calls. It’s something I’ll have to check on if I can get in there tonight.”
He drew up at the curb opposite Lucy’s apartment, and got out to go across the street with her and wait in the little foyer while she unlocked the outer door of the building. She turned with the door held open and lifted her face to his, and he gave her a gentle goodnight kiss, and she said, “Be careful, Michael. Don’t get into any trouble over a measly twenty-five thousand dollars. I honestly don’t need a mink coat in Miami.”
He grinned and patted her shoulder and promised, “I’ll let you know how it turns out… if it isn’t too late.”
He went across to his car whistling under his breath and telling himself he had a mighty fine secretary and one who deserved mink if any secretary in Miami did.
The driveway and parking area in front of the Ames house were dark when he approached the gateway, but lights showed in both the first and second stories of the house.
The floodlights came on automatically and almost blindingly as he turned in between the gateposts, and there were now two cars parked behind the black Cadillac sedan. The police cars and Larson’s compact were gone, but there was a cream-colored, open, convertible Thunderbird and behind it a late-model Pontiac.
Shayne pulled up behind the Pontiac and got out in the bright glare of the floodlights, and the front door opened and a man stood there looking at him as he approached.
He was a young man with a slender well-knit body, wearing a yellow polo shirt that was molded to his muscled shoulders and a pair of dark tan slacks. He had close-cropped, burnished black hair and a thin black mustache that was shaved to make a straight line across his upper lip, and he had mobile, intelligent features.
He blocked the doorway so that Shayne stopped directly in front of him, and he said with cool aloofness, “I think you must be Mike Shayne, the private eye. I understand you were here once before tonight. What is it this time?”
Shayne said, “Some unfinished business. Are you Conroy?”
“I am… yes. I understood that the police investigation was closed.”
“My private investigation isn’t,” Shayne told the secretary in a tone that matched his. “What’s the protocol here? Do you get out of my way or do I push?”
“For heaven’s sake, let the man in, Vic,” came Mark Ames’ tired voice from the interior of the room. “If he has any further questions let’s get them answered and done with.”
Victor Conroy shrugged his shoulders with a faint hint of insolence, and stepped backward quietly out of the doorway. Shayne entered and nodded to Mark Ames who stood at the end of a wide brocaded sofa at the right with a highball glass in his hand. A tall, slender, elegantly-gowned woman was slumped back on the sofa beside him with her long legs carelessly crossed to expose a couple of inches of silken-clad thigh, and with a sullen expression on the darkly Semitic beauty of her face. She, too, held a highball glass, and she looked as though she had been belting down drinks in a hurry.
Ames nodded back to Shayne and looked down at the woman, and said, “It’s Mike Shayne, Helena. The detective who tried to get here in time to save Wes’s life but was about sixty seconds too late.”
“Well, thank God for that.” The widow straightened her shoulders and her intensely black eyes were luminous. She spoke concisely, with no slurring of her consonants. “Why did you come back, Mr. Shayne? To collect the medal you so richly deserve for getting here sixty seconds too late?”
“Now, Helena,” said Ames worriedly, dropping the thin fingers of his right hand to touch her shoulder lightly. “It isn’t necessary to be too blatant about the way you feel.”