Chief Gentry spoke into the inter-com again. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair and took another thick, black cigar from his breast pocket, snifiEed it hopefully and bit off the end.
"How does it change everything, Mike?" he asked absently. "You've still got the two of them telling diametrically opposed stories. You've still got a corpse that isn't there-a hysterical girl who doesn't recognize her own brother-"
He struck a match and put flame to the end of his cigar, contentedly puffed out a billow of black smoke.
"If they're mixed up in something like that," said Shayne. "I'd say she might have recognized him in the corridor and that's why she ran. Maybe they had a fight in Jax and he's out to get her. All that other stuff she told me-maybe that was just window-dressing-just to befog the issue because she didn't want to admit it was her own brother whom she was deathly afraid of."
"But you said," Rourke reminded him maliciously, "that she saw her brother's body and reported it over another phone before her brother jumped her. And Patton verified that when you called him."
"Yeh," Shayne agreed sourly. He angrily ran knobby fingers through his coarse hair and demanded, "Why do these screwy things have to happen to me? Why in the goddam hell can't I for just once in my life get a nice. high-priced, clean-cut sort of case like I used to handle back in World-Wide?"
"Because," Rourke told him cheerily, "youVe got all the taxi drivers in town capping for you and steering clients your way. And you'd turn it down cold if you did get one," he continued happily. "Look at tonight for instance. You have this well-stacked babe proposition you on a nice, high-priced, clean-cut sort of tailing case, and what do you do? Turn her down cold, of course. Why? Because you've got a great big black Irish hunch that something more interesting is waiting for you upstairs. So-o-o. Now you're in the middle of it, and here you are complaining."
There was a knock on the door and a uniformed man entered with a sheet of paper. He laid it on the desk in front of Gentry, saying, "The information you wanted from Jacksonville, sir."
Gentry laid his cigar aside and picked it up. He glanced through it and told Shayne placidly, "Tim was correct as usual. Bert and Nellie Paulson. Thirty-one and twenty-two respectively." He glanced on across the typed lines, muttering, "Blonde. Five-feet-four. Hundred eighteen. Brown hair. Five-ten. Hundred-fifty."
He paused a moment, frowned, and then put the sheet down, "Nothing here about a scar on his face, Mike. It's a pretty complete description otherwise."
Shayne's jaw was set and the trenches showed deeply in his cheeks. "Did I hear you read that right? Height five-ten and weight a hundred-fifty?"
Gentry referred to the sheet again. He nodded. "That's right. And no scar."
"So he was lying," Shayne said thickly. "He's not Bert Paulson at all."
"Guess not," said Gentry cheerfully. "Here's something else. It says they have evidence this isn't the first of these stunts the Paulson brother-and-sister team have pulled. Two others in the past three months that didn't get re ported until this was in the papers. Didn't your Bert Paulson tell you he'd been living in Detroit and just came down in answer to a wire from his sister?"
Shayne nodded grimly. "That's what he told me."
"And now he's gone out with a gun looking for her," said Gentry sharply. "Could be he's one of her victims that finally decided to get sore."
The telephone on Chief Gentry's desk rang just then. He answered it, said, "Hi, honey," after a moment, and extended it to Shayne. "Your ever-loving and long-suffering secretary on the wire, Mr. Shayne."
He took it and Lucy said, "She's here, Mike. You told me to call you."
"Swell." He made his voice light and bantering. "You just keep it right there until I get around. Before midnight as I promised."
He hung up and grinned. "Just reminding me she's still got that drink of cognac poured out and waiting for me.
ELEVEN: 10:46 P.M
Lucy Hamilton sat stiffly erect in a straight chair near the telephone in her living room, smoking a cigarette and frowning a little, half-closing her eyes against the blue smoke that curled lazily up from the tip of the white cylinder in her left hand.
Each time she opened her eyes, her gaze went across the room to the big chair beside the sofa and the low table beside it with the glasses and cognac bottle she had set out for her red-headed employer more than an hour previously.
The untouched glasses mocked at her. Her brown eyes smarted each time she looked at them, and she blinked them shut to keep back the tears.
It was silly of her to feel this way, of course. This was no difiEerent from many other times. Tonight was just an integral part of the pattern she had cut out for her future when she went to work as Michael Shayne's secretary. For years, she had accepted the pattern. She accepted it now. But, damn it! Tonight The fingertips of her right hand drummed restlessly on the telephone stand beside her. Until his telephone call a few minutes ago she had been not too unhappily quiescent, waiting for him to return so they could have a drink together.
Tonight? Somehow, tonight had been dijfferent. Michael had seemed subtly different as they drove home together after a perfect shore dinner. With her face pressed against his shoulder in the car she had allowed herself to drift away once again on the wings of a recurring dream. It wasn't often she allowed herself to do that. Not these days. Not after these years of being with Michael. Of working so closely with him.
Always, there would be a telephone to take him from her side. Her right hand clenched into a tight fist. That was] the pattern. His work came first. Any blonde floozy who had got herself in trouble and wanted him to get her out ' of it would always come first with Michael. Damn her j anyway I;
And now he was pulling Lucy into it with him. She had been sitting beside the telephone like this ever since Shayne had phoned to say he was sending his latest blonde over to her place for her to hold the girl's hand.
So, he didn't know whether she was "actually nuts" or not? And Lucy was supposed to bed down this blonde half-wit and keep her quiet and entertained while Shayne went off on a tangent hunting a brother who might not be a brother after all because she said her brother had been murdered God!
Her buzzer sounded from the push-button in the foyer downstairs. Lucy got up and went to the door and unhooked the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece: "Yes? Who is it?"
"Miss Hamilton?" The voice was flat and metallic in her ear.
"Yes."
"This is- I've a note for you from Mr. Shayne."
Lucy said coldly, "I know. He telephoned for me to expect you. I'm on the first floor." She pressed the button that released the catch on the inside door below. She held it a long moment, then released it and opened her door, stepped out on the landing and listened to the clack of high heels ascending the stairs.
She stood there and watched, saw the top of a blonde head of hair appear over the railing, then a pretty young face that was tilted upward anxiously. A timid smile fluttered on red lips when the girl saw her waiting on the landing. She came on up, clutching a black suede handbag nervously and said, "Miss Hamilton? I–I know this is an awful intrusion at this time of night, but Mr. Shayne said-"
"I know just about what Mr. Shayne said," Lucy assured her dryly. "It's all part of my job-giving succor to his frightened female clients. Go on in."
She stood back composedly and let the girl precede her into the lighted room, closed the door firmly and made sure it was double-locked, then turned slowly to look at her visitor.
She had stopped in the center of the long room and stood there with her back to Lucy. For a moment, her young shoulders slumped forlornly, and Lucy had to fight back a sudden up-welling of sympathy. She didn't want to feel sympathetic, damn itl She wanted to hate the girl who had taken Michael away from her on this particular night.