She didn’t answer for a long moment. Her hands moved beneath the sheet.
“Yes,” she said in a small voice.
“How I love you rich people,” Brady commented.
Shayne said, “Do you think he’s still in Miami?”
Mrs. De Rham had slipped down in the bed. She seemed exhausted.
“Paul,” she said faintly.
“Yes, baby. Do you want a saucepan?”
She moved her head. “I can’t talk any more.”
Brady hesitated, then stood up. “Get some sleep. I’ll take care of it. He’ll find him for you, baby, don’t worry.”
He picked up the glass of gin and took it with him, Shayne followed. After closing the door Brady stood leaning against it for an instant, breathing hard.
“I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but goddamn it! Why didn’t she treat him better when he was here?” He began shaking himself back into his earlier manner. “Of course a lot of that in there was summer stock. She overdoes everything.” He went to the galley and emptied the glass in the sink. “Not that she doesn’t have a bottle under the mattress, probably. But she’s better today. Yesterday she wasn’t making any sense. You’re going to want a picture.” He found two photographs in a drawer. In the first, De Rham was crouched over a guitar, an absorbed look on his face. The other showed him in bathing trunks, walking along a beach.
“Would he shave off his beard?” Shayne asked.
“I doubt it. He’s had it since sophomore year in college. There isn’t much of a chin behind it.”
Shayne was scraping his own chin thoughtfully, looking around the cluttered room. There was a record player and a drift of records, most of them folk music. He didn’t see a guitar.
“She didn’t answer my question. Do you think he’s still in Miami?”
“Shayne, after the pounding he took on the cruise he was in no shape to go through the rigamarole of getting a plane reservation and confirming and showing up in time for the plane. If I read the tea leaves right, and I think I do, he’d hunt for a place nearby to lick his wounds.”
He headed for another bowl of salted nuts and started working at it. “I think I could even find him myself, but I don’t want to leave Dotty. The thing about Henry, he’s not exactly burning with ambition. He doesn’t want to see his picture on the cover of Time, he just wants people to leave him alone. I used to feel the same, but I’m beginning to see that people won’t leave you alone unless you pay them to. At Harvard he used to moon around wondering what he was doing at a competitive college, instead of in some lazy pad in San Francisco or the East Village.”
He pushed a stack of records off a chair so he could sit down. “Then he met Dotty. Life with her had advantages, such as not having to pay the rent, but whenever he felt the strain he’d talk about how underneath he was really a frustrated beat.”
“How about lately?” Shayne said.
“Lately more than ever. Of course the hippies are all over the mass media these days, you can’t get away from them. I feel the attraction myself, after being cooped up with Dotty the last couple of weeks. I’ve never tried pot, but it might be an improvement over alcohol as it’s consumed on the Nefertiti. Is there a hippy colony in Miami?”
“A small one.”
“Then that’s where you’ll find him,” Brady said confidently. “Maybe you think taking the money contradicts what I’ve been saying, but Henry has a strong New England streak. If he’s really careful and doesn’t get rolled in the meantime, it would last him a few years. He didn’t even take a toothbrush with him. He didn’t take his guitar. I think he wanted to cut himself loose from everything in his past.”
“Did you see him go?”
“Neither of us did, and he didn’t leave any farewell note. He was here one night and the next morning he was gone. We haven’t been too close lately. He thought I was selling out, and I am. I think there’s a certain basic minimum, and if you can’t come up to that minimum you’re in trouble.”
“How about women? Did he have affairs?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Do you happen to know his mother’s last name?”
Brady looked surprised. “Dotty may but I sure as hell don’t. Why?”
“About a third of the people who drop out of sight take their mother’s names,” Shayne explained. “It’s less of a break. And it isn’t too easy to switch off their old personalities and switch on new ones. They keep the same habits and still do many of the same things. So I’ll need to know some more about him.”
The nuts were gone. With nothing to occupy his hands, Brady kept changing position and running his fingers through his hair. Shayne made notes as he talked, wishing he could find some excuse to pull off the dark glasses and see what was going on behind them.
He asked abruptly, “When did you get the gun?”
Brady started. “That’s right, you talked to Petrocelli. Dotty had it. It’s just a.25, to protect her cash. Petrocelli got a lot less truculent when I showed it to him.”
“Did you actually see that five thousand, Brady, or did she just tell you it was missing?”
“She told me. But I believe her.”
“I’m wondering if she hopes to get some evidence to use in a divorce action. Do you think it’s a possibility?”
Brady stared at him for a moment. “Anything’s possible. I do know that she wants very much to stay out of the papers.” He read an imaginary headline. “‘Robbed by Husband, Says Textile Heiress.’ She’d hate that. At the same time, I think she may really want him back. She’s not a happy woman, or a stable one. I guess that’s obvious.”
Shayne closed his notebook and stood up. Brady went across to Mrs. De Rham’s stateroom and knocked. When she answered weakly he went in.
He was back a moment later. “His mother’s maiden name was Sealey. If you find him, Dotty wants you to give him a message. She’s restoring him to her will, and she’ll think about putting some of the Winslow stock in his name.” He shrugged. “Seriously.”
Out on deck, the girl on the next boat called over cheerfully, “Another sunshiney day. Is Mrs. De Rham any better?”
“A little,” Brady said shortly.
CHAPTER 8
After leaving the marina, Shayne arranged to meet his friend Tim Rourke, the gangling crime reporter on the Daily News. Rourke had recently published a series of articles about the Miami hippies, and while he was collecting material he had lived among them for a few days. They were hospitable and unsuspicious. Their dreaminess and apathy and the jargon they used continually had nearly driven him crazy by the time he left.
He met Shayne in a bar near the paper, bringing tear sheets of the articles.
“Only a loony would think he could hide around Jennings Park,” Rourke said after Shayne explained what he wanted. “It’s the most conspicuous place in Dade County.”
“He may not want to hide,” Shayne said. “There’s a chance he took the money to make sure she’d send somebody after him.”
“Of course the captain might be right. He could be dead. That would make a better story.”
“I don’t think he’d dead,” Shayne said slowly. “I think Brady knows exactly where I can find the guy. But what’s his object? Does he want to get De Rham to come back to take over responsibility? God knows.”
He opened the folder to look at the tear sheets. Rourke said, “You can’t read in this light, Mike. The main thing to remember-the real hippies, the Diggers, the boys and girls who really want to quit, have all hitched their way to New York, where they can do it in style. If you want to get publicity for shunning publicity, you go to the center of the communications business. Our Miami operation is still a little half-hearted. If the hippy life begins to wear thin the kids can get a haircut and go home. They’re just putting one toe in the water to see how it feels.”
He summoned the bartender. “Another shot, Pete, and then I’ve got to get back. One other thing I ought to tell you, Mike. You remember the Dirty Angels, the motorcycle boys.”