“Do I look like a murderess, Mike?”
He looked into her eyes, and nodded.
“Yeah, a sexy-looking one. Did you see the red cross over the door? Your husband’s in here, in pretty bad shape.”
“Paul?”
Her smile faded, and Shayne saw a spurt of apprehension in her eyes. She went to the doorway.
“Paul,” she said, very low. “What happened to him?”
“We aren’t sure. He was in a fire. And apparently somebody threw acid in his eyes. Does it matter to you?”
“Of course it matters.”
Her own eyes had filled with tears. She went quickly to the bed and sank into the chair Shayne had been using. She took Brady’s hand.
Slowly Brady reached across with his other hand and touched her. His fingers went up to her hair, then down her cheek to her shoulder and her breast. He pulled his hand away.
“Shayne,” he said sharply and distinctly. “I want a lawyer.”
“Pretty soon, Paul. We still aren’t asking you questions. We’re just theorizing. You can order us out if you want to, but don’t you think you’d better know what facts we have so you can make your plans?”
When Brady didn’t answer Shayne said, “I have a tape I’d like to play. Tim, where’s your recorder?”
“Outside. I’ll get it.”
In a moment he was back with the recorder. He found an outlet.
“I’d better explain how this was made,” Shayne said, giving the reporter the tape he had taken from Mrs. Brady’s bag. “Mrs. Brady learned that her husband was living on a boat with another woman. She’s been trying to divorce him-I’ve heard that from a couple of sources. She hired a private detective to plant a listening device on the Nefertiti, to pick up any conversations that might be taking place in the main stateroom.”
“That’s illegal,” Painter snapped. “What’s the name of this private detective?”
“I can’t remember,” Shayne said. “Do you want me to play it or not?”
Painter’s eyes shifted. “Play it, of course.”
“A girl on the next boat, a nice kid named Sally Lyon, happened to be on deck, awake, and she saw the bug being planted. A little while later she saw somebody swim up to the Nefertiti’s blind side and come up a rope ladder. A man with a beard. The missing husband, obviously, who was supposed to be off in a pad in southwest Miami.” Brady lay perfectly still. The tape began to revolve.
A voice said suddenly, “Well, did Shayne fall for it?”
Shayne stopped the tape. “That’s Paul Brady. He means did I fall for the hippy set-up. Did Henry convince me he was really running away? The next voice is going to be Henry’s.”
“Why shouldn’t he fall for it?” De Rham said irritably when Shayne started the tape. “That’s my milieu, man. I can’t tell you, it’s just so great. The chick has still got a tangle of bourgeois hang-ups, but she knows they’re there and she’s trying hard. The thing is, there’s no pressure. The time floats by. Maybe part of it’s pretty phony, but it’s the best kind of phony. If we ever get out of this-”
“With dough,” Brady said.
“We either get out of it with dough or we don’t get out of it.”
Richardson put in suddenly, “Hold it, Mike.” Shayne pressed the stop button. “You said the bug was picking up conversations in the master stateroom. Then it wasn’t really a woman aboard with Brady?” He looked hard at Shayne. “It was De Rham in drag?”
“That’s how it looks,” Shayne said.
Painter stood up abruptly and sat down again. Mrs. Brady looked at her fingernails.
Rourke exclaimed, “I don’t get it, Mike.”
“I tried every possible combination, and that was the only one that would fit. Don’t feel bad about it, Tim. I’m the one they really fooled. They took a hell of a chance, but they had to, and I’m sorry to say it almost worked. I just want to point out before we go any further that the morning they put on their performance for me I had no reason to think they weren’t the people they said they were. The dialogue was pretty convincing.”
Rourke protested, “Mike, are you trying to get us to believe you can’t tell a man from a woman? For Christ’s sake.”
“Undressed I’ve never made a mistake yet,” Shayne said, “but they weren’t undressed.”
Rourke gave a disbelieving laugh. “I don’t buy it. Now give us the switch.”
“There’s no switch, Tim. This is straight. If I’d had a little more background when I went in I might have caught it, but I’m not sure about that-they did a damn good job. It was a carefully staged scene. They’d probably rehearsed it a dozen times.”
“But, Mike-”
“Use your imagination,” Shayne said impatiently. “I had no description of Mrs. De Rham except that she was a neurotic and a drinker. Petrocelli was the one person in Miami who knew what she looked like until Tom Moseley showed up, and somebody killed Moseley with a gin bottle. Petrocelli kept coming back to the boat after they fired him. He saw Brady a couple of times but he never saw Mrs. De Rham. She was in bed drunk-or so they said.”
“You talked to both Mrs. De Rham and De Rham the same day,” Rourke said, still unconvinced. “How about the voices? The hands?”
“O.K., the hands,” Shayne said. “I never saw Mrs. De Rham’s hands. They were under the sheet. She had a low, hoarse voice. His was high for a man and slightly nasal. The easiest way to change the pitch of a voice is let it come out through the nose. They arranged it so she didn’t have to say much. A few words here and there. She’d been drinking for two weeks and she was badly hung over. Drunkenness is a good disguise, and a hangover’s even better. She lay in bed and groaned, and Brady did the talking.”
“How about the-well, breasts, Mike?” Rourke said.
“Padding,” Shayne said impatiently. “A fluffy bedjacket. But the big point is that when I saw Mrs. De Rham in the morning and De Rham at night, I saw two entirely different faces. The blinds were closed because her eyes were hurting, and of course she was wearing a goddamn pair of wraparound dark glasses. A wig, with bangs over the forehead.”
He pulled out the wig he had taken from the woman in the water. “Here it is, if you want to try it on. He darkened his eyebrows with make-up. His mouth was plastered with lipstick, and he was pretending to be drunk when he put it on, so there was a lot of it and it was a little crooked. Heavy suntan makeup on the parts of his face that were showing, and those were the same parts that were covered by a beard when he was playing himself.”
“A beard!” Painter exclaimed suddenly. “That’s what was beside Moseley’s body. A piece of a false beard.”
Shayne grinned. “It’s hard to fool you, Petey. Yeah-it was a different beard from the one De Rham was wearing in the photographs I saw, but I just thought he’d trimmed it a different way, as a kind of token disguise. What does that leave, Tim?”
“The teeth.”
“I didn’t ask him to open his mouth so I could count the fillings. By the time I was back on the boat later I’d begun to realize something was wrong. I wanted to talk to her, but she was in the head, throwing up. You can’t barge in on a lady when she’s vomiting. That’s one of the rules. It was Henry, of course, making gagging noises and flushing the john.”
Painter had listened to this open-mouthed, with his eyebrows all the way up. Now he said smugly, “This is one of the nicest things that’s happened to me in a long, long time. When it gets round town that Mike Shayne fell for something like this-and I’m going to make sure that it gets around-your stock may not be quite so high.”
“How long were you in the room with them when you talked to them, Petey?”
“That’s quite different! Maybe two minutes in all, and she didn’t say a word, did she, Luke?”
“Well-”
He flicked his mustache and said crisply, “All right, Shayne, you’ve made your point. De Rham was impersonating his wife. Now we come to the main question. Why?”