“You certainly have some weird murders in Miami, don’t you?”
“I know. But most of the murderers have only been with us a short time.”
This was a game Shayne didn’t mind playing when he had nothing else to do. Brady came out before he could make the next move.
“Hi, Sally.”
“I borrowed your paper.”
“Keep it.” He picked up his coffee cup. “It’s going to take Mrs. De Rham a few minutes. Bring your coffee around here, Shayne. There’s a breeze.”
Shayne lifted one eyebrow to the girl and followed Brady to the blind side of the boat.
“This is like living in a department store window,” Brady said in a lower voice. He moved a chair so he could sit down and put his feet on the rail. “I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression, the way I fielded your last question. I wasn’t trying to duck anything. I know it looks as though there’s a little adultery going on here. That was what the cops thought. They kept looking for a chaperone. But how could I walk off and leave her? Only husbands are allowed to do that. Of course I sympathize with the guy, he’s an old friend of mine. He’s taken plenty of punishment. So have I the last couple of weeks.”
“How about her family?”
“There’s a mother in the south of France. I was supposed to be back in New York last week, so I finally cabled. I haven’t had an answer yet, and I don’t even know if she got it. After the cops were here I got Dotty to phone the lawyer, I forget his name-”
“Loring.”
“Loring, yeah, he’s some kind of guardian. But he just had a heart attack, it turns out, which leaves me.”
There was a bowl of mixed nuts on a low table, and he was shoveling them into his mouth as he talked. His hair was long but carefully tended. He had a petulant mouth and a chin with a deep dimple. His womanish chest and thighs were deeply tanned. He was still wearing his shades, though this stretch of deck was in shadow. Shayne, as a detective, would have liked to abolish sunglasses. They hampered him. Brady’s manner was confident, but Shayne had a feeling that his eyes were darting nervously from side to side behind the screen of the glasses. The salted nuts and the coffee kept his hands busy.
“She looks like the wrath of God,” Brady said. “And she’s worried about it so go easy on her, will you? It wasn’t exactly simple, talking her into this. It was my idea that a private detective could help, but she only agreed to it because I thought of working it through the lawyer.”
He threw more nuts into his mouth. “I don’t know what’s taking her so long. She said she’d just put on some lipstick. Well, I might as well tell you. The complication, the thing she didn’t tell the cops when they talked to her, is that when Henry walked, he took some of her cash with him. He cleaned her out.”
“How much?”
“She doesn’t know for sure. It could be as much as five thousand.”
“How did she happen to have that much with her?”
“Because she’s a little batty.” He lowered his voice abruptly. “Jesus, I hope she didn’t hear that. If you look at her cross-eyed she starts screaming. She always has to have cash around, because what if she sees a diamond bracelet or something and they don’t know her well enough to take her check? What if she forgets what name to put on the check? My own private theory is that it reassures her, it gives a certain substance to her personality. Whenever she wonders who she is she pulls out the dough to prove to herself that she’s really Dotty De Rham. You don’t get that kind of feeling from credit cards.” He made a gesture of despair, which ended with more salted nuts going into his mouth. “She tells me about her childhood sex experiences, but money we don’t discuss.”
“You said you’re due back in New York. What do you do for a living?”
“I’m not exactly due back. I’ve got a tentative business connection but it’s still very fragile. The real reason I joined this junket was to get Dotty to buy some stock, and please don’t think it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was damn hard.” He twitched up out of his chair. “I’m going to see what she’s up to. She must have that lipstick on by now.”
CHAPTER 7
“She tried to get up but she couldn’t make it,” he reported a moment later. “Come on in. She wanted me to pick up the room first, but that’s a day-long job. Be careful what you step on, it could be a T.V. dinner.”
They entered the stateroom. The shades were drawn. Shayne didn’t see any T.V. dinners, but there was everything else, clothes, newspapers folded open to stock market tables, empty bottles. Mrs. De Rham was in the double bed, hiding behind sunglasses. She was wearing a lacy bed jacket. She had tawny hair, and it was in fairly good shape. Her lipstick had been put on with a shaky hand.
She ran the glasses down her nose to look at him over them, then put them back up.
“I hope you’re used to squalor, Mr. Shayne,” she said in a pleasantly hoarse voice.
Brady picked a glass off the bedside table. “Baby, will you stop drinking gin for breakfast? Do you want to starve?” He tasted the drink. “Straight gin,” he said gloomily, and set it on the bureau.
“And what a Sunday School teacher you’re turning out to be.”
“Thank you,” he said, sitting down. “Find a place to sit, Shayne.”
Shayne moved a pile of underclothing off the chair at the foot of the bed.
“How much did Joshua Loring tell you?” she asked.
“Just that you needed a detective. I’ve already talked to Petrocelli, and he won’t be any problem. He’s ready to leave any time. But Mr. Brady tells me there’s more to it than that.”
“Yes. You see my-husband-”
She sniffed sharply and reached for a box of Kleenex.
“Now don’t cry, for God’s sake,” Brady said impatiently. “I’ve already told him about the dough.”
She turned her head angrily. “You-”
Brady put both hands on his head, as though to keep it from flying apart. “That’s what Shayne is here for, isn’t it? Let’s not go through the whole thing again. Otherwise why not let the cops find him? Or let him turn up by himself?”
“He can have the damn money,” she said in a muffled tone.
“Sure. He’ll be glad to do that. And you won’t see him again, I can guarantee you. I’ve known Henry longer than you have. He’s attached to it by now.”
She blew her nose. “Mr. Shayne-I want him back. I couldn’t tell the police that he-”
When she didn’t go on Brady picked it up for her. “How would it look? Five thousand is serious money to a cop. Hell, it’s serious to me. But Henry’s no ordinary thief. There was a certain amount of fuss on the way down about Dotty’s will. Shut up,” he said when Mrs. De Rham started to speak. “You really milked that bit, and you know it. You’ve got a choice. You can either tell Shayne what the situation is or give it to the cops. They didn’t sound too interested when it was a case of a husband who walked out on his wife after a fight, but a husband who walked out with the wife’s five thousand bucks-”
She made a gesture under the sheet. “You’re itching to tell him. Tell him.”
Brady sighed. “She wrote a new will, Shayne. Everything to charity and nothing to Henry. That was what the fight was about. She wanted to show him who had the power. She showed him, all right, and what was supposed to happen to the human relationship? I speak from experience-I’ve been getting the same business from my own wife. Dotty’s in her late twenties. With luck she’ll live another sixty years, if she tapers off on the gin. So if Henry’s only been staying with her for the inheritance it’s a long-range prospect, no? I know exactly how he figured! She was putting everything in monetary terms. O.K., he knew how it would bug her to look for those five G’s and find them missing. And why not? What else has he got out of the marriage except maintenance?”
“I want him back,” she said miserably.
“And if he doesn’t want to come back,” Shayne said, “do you want the five thousand?”