Counterfeit Wife (2 page)

The New Orleans episode was over. That was very clear to him now. He convinced himself that he was glad he had been able to do Parson a favor, and he wasn’t at all sure that the little pasty-faced man had not also done him a favor in return. If Lucy couldn’t understand that a man sometimes gets caught up in a tangle he can’t get out of—if she didn’t have enough loyalty to carry on for a few days—A few days! He suddenly realized that it had been months since he had been in New Orleans.

He said aloud, “To hell with it,” picked up his suitcase, and strode back into the terminal building.

BIG BLONDE

AS SHAYNE CAME IN from the rear, a woman entered the front door with a free-swinging, masculine stride. She caught his eye at once because she was statuesquely and lushly blonde, and because she carried her liquor superbly.

She stopped just inside and stood flatly with her feet planted apart a trifle, swaying ever so slightly while her head turned slowly in an arc to study every person in the waiting-room.

She was tall. Big-boned and solid-fleshed. She wore a gray tailored suit that should have looked mannish on a woman her size, but didn’t. It merely managed to look slightly out of place on her, as though the fabric itself dishearteningly realized that the most cunning tailoring could not hide the full, feminine convolutions of her body. She was bareheaded, with two heavy braids of honey-colored hair wound about her head. She wore no make-up except a great deal of freshly applied and very crimson lipstick. Her face glistened with perspiration.

When she completed her slow survey of the room with big, wide-open eyes, her lashes came down to make narrow slits of them. Her mouth tightened and she turned purposefully to the nearest ticket counter and asked a question. The clerk’s reply sent her swinging toward the National Airlines counter with that steady and careful manner of placing each foot solidly before the other, a practice of experienced drinkers who are just sober enough to realize they are drunk.

Men got out of her way and turned to look at her as she passed them by.

She brushed a small man aside and took his place in front of the
Immediate Departures
window, planted both elbows on the counter, and thrust her face toward the smiling girl with the freckles on her nose. Her neck was a white column rising from solid shoulders. Wisps of honey-colored hair curled downward behind her ears and lay plastered against her moist skin. Her voice was warm and husky. Not loud, but it carried well, and Shayne heard her question clearly.

“Has your plane for New Orleans left yet?”

“Flight Sixty-two has just taken off.”

The woman’s shoulders lifted slightly, swelling the tight fit of her tailored coat A pulse throbbed in the white flesh on the right side of her throat. She said, “I wonder if my husband managed to get a seat on that plane at the last minute?”

The girl said, “If you’ll give me his name I’ll check the passenger list.”

“Dawson,” the woman told her. “But that won’t cut much ice if he was sneaking out on me. He’d probably give another name. It would be in the last ten minutes,” she went on impatiently. “You’d remember him.”

“The last ten minutes have been very busy,” said the girl. “Perhaps you could give me a description of him.”

“He’s a little runt. Had on a gray suit. Not a drop of red blood in his body. He’s nobody you’d get excited about—sort of bald and stupid looking. Funny looking eyes on account of they’re brown, and his eyelashes and brows are pure white.”

Shayne edged closer as he listened. He wondered how a man like Dough-face could be married to a woman like that. There was an impression of tremendous vitality about her. She wasn’t old, not past her middle thirties, yet she gave one the feeling that here was a woman who might have mothered a brood of Vikings, a maiden of Odin straight from the pages of Norse mythology.

The freckle-nosed girl looked as though she were trying hard not to smile. “I do remember him now, Mrs. Dawson. He didn’t give me his name. He got here just before the take-off,” she went on, stroking her cheek with a forefinger. “He said it was terribly important that he get space on Sixty-two, but there simply wasn’t anything for him. We had no last-minute cancellations tonight.”

Shayne was standing at the counter, not more than five feet away from the girl as she spoke. He turned slightly, instinctively tugging his hat lower over his face.

Mrs. Dawson said, “They told me over at the Eastern counter that no other planes have left since then, and that none are due out until morning.” It was more a statement than a question.

“That’s correct.”

Mrs. Dawson straightened to her full height. She was at least ten inches over five feet tall, and her body tapered gracefully from heavy shoulders and big breasts to a neat waistline above the spread of wide hips. She turned slowly to study the interior of the waiting-room again with an intent gaze.

Shayne lit a cigarette and met her eyes from beneath the brim of his hat as her gaze passed over him. Her eyes were blue. A clear, hot blue like the clean flame of an alcohol burner. They dwelt upon him for a moment before going on to the others. She was relaxed now, and steady, with the outspread fingers of one hand lightly touching the counter.

The little man whom she had brushed aside fidgeted behind her, but made no move to take his rightful place.

Mrs. Dawson turned back to the girl and asked in her husky voice, “Where’d he go if he didn’t get on that plane? I don’t see him around.”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” She spoke with the compressed-lip patience of a public servant dealing with a fool or a drunk. “I presume he returned to the city after being told there would be no more planes departing until morning. And now, if you please—”

“I don’t see him around,” said the woman again.

“I’m very sorry I can’t do anything to help you. If you’ll please step aside now—”

The big blonde looked down at her for a moment in speculative silence. The girl looked back at her with a touch of weariness in the bend of her head. The little man behind Mrs. Dawson fidgeted again.

She turned, finally, and strode across the waiting-room toward a door marked
Men.

Shayne thought she was going in, but she stopped just outside, beckoned to a porter and said something to him. The man went inside the room and Mrs. Dawson remained firmly planted outside, oblivious of the glances of people standing about.

The porter returned shaking his head. She gave him a coin and went toward the front door, and people got out of her way again.

Shayne picked up his suitcase and followed her out, keeping a dozen paces behind her. He hadn’t made up his mind yet whether to accost her or not. He remembered the terror in the pasty-faced man’s brown eyes, and he reminded himself that it wasn’t up to him to put a Valkyrie on the trail of a poor devil who might be trying to escape from a personal hell.

Yet he was, he realized, the only person in Miami who could tell her the truth about the man who called himself Parson. If she were actually worried about the little guy, he supposed it was only decent for him to put her mind at rest by telling her the truth.

She was moving across the driveway toward a row of parked cars as Shayne emerged into the illusive tropical moonlight. It glistened on the coiled hair about her high-held head, and played queer tricks with the contours of her body, softening and slenderizing her, producing the hallucinatory effect of stripping the severely tailored suit from her and replacing it with a flowing robe of some translucent material that trailed behind her, accentuating rather than hiding the sensuous, supple curves.

Shayne set the Gladstone on the steps, lit a cigarette, and watched her approach a gray sedan parked beyond the fringe of light from the terminal.

The left-hand front door opened as she reached it. She got in and closed it. He could not see the other occupant of the sedan. He couldn’t see anything of either of them as he stood there, undecided. He could, however, hear a murmur of voices from the parked car. Hers, throaty and full-bodied, faintly slurred but still resonant. Mingled with her tones were the strident ones of the man in the front seat with her. He sounded querulous and demanding, though Shayne couldn’t hear any of the words that were spoken.

He picked up the Gladstone, shook his head at the driver of a loitering taxi in the driveway, and passed in front of the taxi on his way toward the gray sedan.

The voices hushed as he approached, and his quickened perceptions guessed that they heard him coming and did not wish to be overheard.

He was ten feet away when a cigarette lighter flared in the front seat. The man’s cupped fingers shielded the flame as he drew it into a cigarette, and the light showed the flickering outline of a thin, hawklike face.

Shayne kept on walking at the same even pace but swerved to the left and passed the sedan without another glance. One look at the man’s face had been enough to warn him away from Mrs. Dawson.

He hadn’t seen Fred Gurney for three years, but Gurney was a man not to be forgotten easily. Any woman who bummed around with him was very likely to be bad medicine and not one whom Shayne cared to put on the trail of an escaping husband.

He walked on twenty feet to another row of parked cars, stood there indecisively for a moment as though looking for someone, then turned and went briskly back to the waiting taxi.

The driver unlatched the door; Shayne shoved his suitcase inside and stepped in after it.

The gray sedan showed headlights and the motor began throbbing. The taxi driver asked, “Where to, mister?”

Shayne hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t given any thought to the immediate future. He had checked out of his apartment that afternoon, and the management supposed him to be now well on his way to New Orleans. With the apartment shortage, there was every chance that the one he had vacated had been rented. Still, it was a building where he was well known from previous years in Miami, and if they had any sort of vacancy they’d be glad to give it to him.

He had no idea, however, how long he would stay in Miami. Perhaps only overnight. He hadn’t had time yet to sort out the feelings that had overwhelmed him since Lucy Hamilton had curtly hung up on him after informing him he was no longer her employer.

His first sensation had been one of angry hurt. It had been a long time since any woman had been able to hurt him. Somehow, his action in turning over his ticket to Parson—or Dawson if the big blonde’s statements were true—and remaining in Miami had been a way of striking back at Lucy. If she didn’t want the pearl necklace, he was damned sure he could find plenty of dames in Miami who would be glad to have it.

Inexplicably, he thought of the coiled braids of hair around Mrs. Dawson’s head, of the smooth column of neck rising above her shoulders. There, the pearls would look good.

The occupants of the gray sedan seemed in no hurry to move even after the motor was started. Now it was being backed out and turned into the driveway.

“Where to, mister?” the taxi driver asked again.

“Follow that car,” said Shayne. “The gray sedan heading toward town. But stay back far enough so they won’t know they’re being followed.”

The taxi slid away. Shayne settled back to make himself physically comfortable in the car, but there was a deep scowl between his half-closed gray eyes. Suddenly he wanted to get drunk. Drunk enough to forget all about Lucy and the empty office in New Orleans. But he needed a drinking companion and he liked women who could hold their liquor the way Mrs. Dawson had been holding hers when he had first seen her entering the terminal.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the glimpse he had had of Fred Gurney. Gurney was nothing to him. He simply felt sorry for a woman like Mrs. Dawson who had to rely on men like her dough-faced husband and Fred Gurney for male companionship. He was convinced that she deserved better than that.

On the other hand, perhaps she was genuinely in love with her husband and worried about him. In that case, the decent thing would be for him to tell her where he was. He’d heard too many women blaspheme husbands whom they loved, when they were angry or upset. And certainly Mrs. Dawson had reason to be worried and angry and upset about hers.

If he could contact her and get rid of Gurney, maybe she’d invite him to her home where they could talk privately and have some drinks. He’d like to see her in a flowing dressing-gown, with her hair brushed out and hanging around her shoulders.

Shayne stirred angrily as the taxi sped on through the cool, humid air. A derisive grin twisted his mouth as he looked ahead at the taillights of the gray sedan. He was bored and jealous and feeling sorry for himself. By God, he was chasing after the first woman to come within his line of vision after Lucy kicked him in the face. He was striking back at Lucy, and she was in New Orleans and would never know how he felt.

The sedan was whipping along at a good pace on the nearly deserted street a couple of blocks ahead. Mrs. Dawson drove steadily and well, giving no more evidence of drunkenness than she had at the airport. The road led due east into Miami, and Shayne’s thoughts went around in circles. It had been a tough day and a tougher evening.

He knew there were some night spots in this section, and he was about to tell the driver to forget the sedan and stop at the first place that was open when he felt a slackening of pace, and the driver grunted, “They’re slowing down. Want me to stay behind ’em?”

“Without making it too noticeable,” said Shayne.

They were much closer to the gray sedan now. A cluster of neon lights on the left side of the street told passers-by that the Fun Club was still open for business and half a dozen cars parked in the semicircle in front proclaimed that they weren’t without customers.

The car they were trailing suddenly swung to the left and into the driveway leading up to the low, stuccoed building.

“Go on past,” Shayne directed the driver sharply. “Far enough so you can swing around and come back after they’re inside.”

The driver accelerated and passed the driveway as the sedan pulled into an open place among the parked cars. Shayne let him continue a few blocks before saying, “Turn around now and take me back.”

The driver made a U-turn and, a moment later, pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the door. Music pulsed gently into the silent night, and brilliant red and green lights on the outside rippled over the gently swaying palm fronds circling the building, dimming the yellowish glow from within.

“No,” the driver said unhappily, when Shayne invited him to go in and have a drink. “I gotta be gettin’ in, see? I’m due in at midnight, an’ my old lady’s sorta sick, an’ I’ll catch Hail Columbia if I’m any later’n I am already.”