The Homicidal Virgin (3 page)

The Crystal Room of the Palms Terrace Hotel was very like hundreds of other cocktail lounges in similar resort hotels throughout the area. Discreetly lighted to provide an atmosphere of intimacy conducive to assignations, with a lavish decor and soft-spoken, attentive waiters, with the best brands of liquor served at high prices, it was a congenial spot for hotel guests to spend the dull evening hours in the hope of meeting other bored guests—preferably of the opposite sex.

At this slack season the room was uncrowded as Shayne entered. Four separate couples occupied small tables along the wall, and a boisterous party of six was making merry at a big round table in the rear. Five men and three women sat on stools in front of the bar behind which two bartenders were not being kept very busy.

Shayne paused momentarily in the doorway, and then lounged over to the third empty table from the entrance and sat in the chair facing in that direction, drawn out for him by an eager, white-jacketed waiter.

Shayne said, “Cognac with ice water on the side. A drink, not a pony. Monnet if you have it.”

The waiter said, “Certainly,” and went to the bar. Shayne got out a cigarette and lit it, turned slightly in his chair with left shoulder against the wall, and studied the backs of the three women at the bar speculatively. The one at the far end he dismissed immediately. She was middle-aged and dumpy and giggly drunk. She swayed on her stool, pressing a bare shoulder against the dinner jacket of her younger male companion who looked sleek and competent. There was an empty stool between her and the next man, with the slender figure of a girl on the seat next to him.

She had nice shoulders that showed just enough above a conservative cocktail gown, and a slender straight neck surmounted by a gamin-like Italian hairdo of auburn hair.

Shayne’s gaze lingered on the pair of them as the waiter brought his drink. They both sat very straight and lifted their drinks purposefully and appeared unconscious of each other. From his position directly behind her, Shayne could not see the reflection of the girl’s face in the bar mirror, but long experience in many bars gave him the distinct impression that the two were not yet acquainted but were both hoping to be before the evening became much older.

There was another vacant stool beyond the girl, then a very fat man sitting alone with a bottle of Heineken’s beer in front of him engaged in a dreary dissertation on the past baseball season to one of the bartenders.

The front end of the bar was curved, with two stools at the end facing the room. The final occupant of the Crystal Room was seated on the last stool against the wall. Both her elbows were on the bar, and her chin was supported by the backs of the folded knuckles of both hands. She wore a low-necked ruby-red dress with a short-sleeved Angora jacket the same color that was very attractive. She appeared to be in her twenties, with strong, clean features that suggested fine bone structure. She wore tinted Harlequin glasses that effectively concealed her eyes, and had a wide, smooth forehead beneath an upswept hairdo of light brown curls that were in faint disarray.

Shayne sipped his Monnet reflectively and let his gaze rest on her face for a long, contemplative moment. She appeared to return his gaze steadily, though he couldn’t be sure because of the glasses. He let his gaze linger long enough on her face to indicate strong interest and polite invitation without being rudely aggressive. She held her posture without the outward movement of a muscle. An empty cocktail glass stood between her two elbows.

Jane Smith? Shayne wondered. She appeared to be the only possibility in the bar. If so, she was giving him a solid going-over and taking her time about it.

Shayne set his half-empty shot-glass down and took a sip of ice water. He turned squarely in his chair to face the entrance and dragged smoke into his lungs. A tall, svelte woman with a very dark complexion and startlingly white hair came through the doorway. The bartender glanced up from in front of the fat man and moved to his right, smiling a greeting that betokened recognition. She moved to the bar and put one hand on a vacant stool and said something in a husky voice, and then turned to survey the room carefully, her gaze going down the length of the bar to the rear of the room, returning to brush over Shayne’s face unhurriedly. Then she turned and said something else to the bartender, moved aside gracefully and sat at the empty front table directly facing Shayne with one empty table between them.

She was about forty, Shayne thought. With aquiline features that were classically beautiful, but marred by a discontented droop at the corners of too-thin lips. She opened a beaded evening bag and extracted a long ivory holder and a flat enameled cigarette case. Her brooding gaze rested directly on the detective while she fitted a cigarette into the holder and accepted a light from the waiter who set a champagne cocktail in front of her with a flourish.

Jane Smith? If so, it looked like adding up to an interesting evening. Shayne met her eyes steadily until she glanced aside, and then slid his own gaze back to the girl at the end of the bar. She appeared to be watching him intently, and suddenly she reached a decision.

She stood up and said something to the bartender, moved around the end of the bar just as another girl entered behind her.

This newest arrival was very young to be dropping into a cocktail lounge unaccompanied. Not yet twenty, Shayne thought, with a virginal and appealing look of timidity about her. She wore a plain black sheath dress tightly belted about her slender waist with a wide leather belt and glittering rhinestone buckle. She had piquant features and smooth black hair that framed her face and flowed to curled tips resting on her shoulders.

The girl with the Harlequin glasses moved toward Shayne, blocking out the newcomer from his sight. She paused pensively beside his table looking down at him, and he pushed back his chair and half rose with a smile which she could assume as welcoming if she chose.

In a light voice that held the faint trace of a foreign accent, she asked, “Are you expecting someone?”

Shayne said carefully, “Not exactly. More hopeful than expectant, shall we say?”

“I saw you were alone… and I am lonely. It always seems so foolish that strangers must follow the rules and drink alone.”

“So let’s break the rule,” said Shayne. “Will you join me?”

The waiter was hovering behind her and he drew out the chair opposite the detective as she inclined her head. She sat down and looked across the table at him through her blue-tinted glasses. “I would enjoy having a stinger.”

Shayne emptied his brandy glass and pushed it toward the waiter. “A stinger for the lady… and a refill.”

Glancing past his companion’s left shoulder, Shayne noted that the younger girl had seated herself at the corner stool where she faced their table. She was looking at him steadily with her lips half-parted, and jerked her gaze away with a faint flush when his eyes met hers. Keeping her face averted, she conferred with the bartender while the thin fingers of both hands nervously clutched and unclutched a black velvet bag on the bar in front of her.

Shayne dragged his attention back to the girl opposite him. Close up, she looked older than he had first guessed. There were tiny lines radiating from the outer corners of her eyes, and the flesh of her chin was not quite as firm as it must once have been.

To the redhead, she was the most intriguing and attractive of the three possible Jane Smiths, yet she was also the only one of the trio who had been waiting when he arrived, and therefore the least likely prospect.

He said conversationally, “I’ve often felt exactly as you do… that it’s stupid to drink alone just because a stupid convention insists that people must be properly introduced before they can speak to each other. So let’s circumvent that convention. My name is Mike Wayne.” He was studying her face carefully as he spoke. Did a trace of excitement cross her mobile features? He couldn’t be sure. Those damned glasses! He wished she would take them off.

The waiter deftly served their drinks. She toyed with the slender stem of her glass and said thoughtfully, “Must we use our correct names? My own is so commonplace.”

“Something like Smith?” hazarded Shayne. “Plain Jane Smith, maybe?”

A demure smile curved her lips. “Something like that, yes. What could be less alluring? What could be so disappointing as to meet a girl named Jane Smith?”

The trace of a foreign accent persisted in her voice. Slavic, Shayne guessed. Or possibly Hungarian.

He sensed movement beside him, and looked up to see the young girl standing very close to his table. She leaned forward from the hips slightly, and her dark, humid eyes were fixed on his face in a sort of desperate appeal. Her voice was light and fluttery and frightened:

“Pardon me, but aren’t you… I think I recognize you… aren’t you Mike Wayne?”

“Sure,” he said heartily, pushing back his chair and standing up, extending his hand to take her hot fingers in his. “I thought I recognized you, too, Jane, when you first walked in, but it’s been so long that I wasn’t sure. I was just sitting here waiting…”

Harlequin stood up with her stinger in her hand and said composedly, “You will pardon me for intruding. Now that you are no longer alone I will go back to my corner. I thank you for the drink.”

Shayne said, “It was a pleasure,” and she turned away and the girl slid into the chair she had vacated with a little frightened exhalation of relief.

“I didn’t know what to do when I saw her come over and sit down. I knew it was you and that if I didn’t break it up you’d most likely think she was me. And I didn’t know what you might say to her.”

She was trembling, and Shayne reassured her gently, “I didn’t give anything away. What will you drink?”

“Nothing. That is… well, nothing really. I hardly ever drink.” She fluttered incredibly long and incredibly black lashes over violet eyes, and asked in a small voice, “What are you drinking?”

“Cognac.” Shayne lifted his glass and swallowed half of it.

“That’s a kind of brandy, isn’t it? Imported from France?”

Shayne said, “That’s right,” with amusement in his voice.

“Well, wouldn’t you… wouldn’t it be more private up in my suite? I’m sure I can order a bottle of whatever you want from Room Service.”

“I think that’s an extremely good idea.” Shayne finished off his drink and took a sip of ice water. He looked around for the waiter and crooked a bony finger at him, got out his wallet and extracted a bill.

The waiter brought a bar-check face down on a silver dish and Shayne laid the bill on top of it without looking at the amount.

He left fifty cents when the waiter brought his change, then got up and moved behind the girl to draw her chair back. She stood beside him, the top of her glistening black hair barely coming above his shoulder, and Shayne tucked her arm in his and led her past the end of the bar, nodding politely to the woman with the tinted glasses who had resumed her contemplative posture at the bar with chin supported by the backs of her hands.

Jane Smith unlocked a door on the fourth floor and stood aside to allow Shayne to enter a pleasant sitting room that showed no sign whatsoever of human occupancy. Two floor lamps were lighted at opposite ends of the room, and two closed doors led off to what Shayne assumed would be bedroom and bath.

The girl closed the door tightly behind her while Shayne strolled across the room, and asked in a controlled voice, “Cognac, you said? Any particular brand?”

He stopped at curtained windows and turned with a reassuring smile. “I don’t really need a drink, Jane.”

“But I want you to have one,” she told him with quiet dignity, crossing to the telephone and putting her hand on it. “Please tell me what to order.”

“Just ask for a double shot of Monnet cognac… with a pitcher of ice. And whatever you want.”

She lifted the instrument and tilted her chin determinedly, said, “Room Service, please,” into the mouthpiece, and then: “This is number four twenty-six. Miss Smith speaking. I’d like a double cognac… Monnet, please. Yes, a double,” she repeated firmly. “And some ice if you don’t mind. And could you send a limeade or lemonade with it?” She paused, listening carefully, then nodded and said, “That’s correct. Room four twenty-six.”

She replaced the receiver and told Shayne, “It will be right up.”

He moved away from the window to a deep chair at the end of the room, and sank into it, stretched his long legs out in front of him and advised her, “Sit down and relax. You’re wound up as tight as a violin string. Smoke?” He got out a pack of cigarettes and started to get up.

She shook her head, crossed to the sofa close to him and dropped into it, curling her feet up under her. “I don’t really like to smoke. If I inhale it makes me dizzy… and it seems silly to smoke if you don’t.”

Shayne said gravely, “I guess that’s right. A waste of time and money.” He lit his own cigarette and inhaled blissfully. “Was it you tailing me tonight?”

“Yes. All the way from your hotel in Miami.” She drooped her lashes and caught her underlip between her teeth. “Who else do you think I could trust?”

Shayne said honestly, “I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know very much about anything. Except here we are… and I’m willing to listen.”

“You don’t know how awful I felt,” she burst out, “when the
News
didn’t run my advertisement in the Personal Column. I just felt like it was the end of the world. I had considered the possibility that they might refuse it,” she added honestly. “But I tried so darned hard to make it sound innocent and innocuous. I guess I didn’t succeed, did I?”

“Not quite. If you hadn’t underlined ‘anything’ that second time…”

“But it seemed to me that if I didn’t, there wasn’t much point in the whole thing,” she pointed out defensively. “And I did so hope the right sort of man would see it and be intrigued.”

“Someone like me?”

“I… think so. That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it? When your reply did come, I just felt as though God had planned it that way. Instead of having to sift through dozens of answers, there was only yours. And it sounded, well… mature and serious.”

There was a knock on her door. She uncurled her legs and got up to admit a bellboy with a tray. He set the tray on a coffee table in front of the sofa and offered her a check and a pencil to sign it with.

Shayne got up lazily from his chair while she signed
Jane Smith
in round, schoolgirlish script, got a dollar from his wallet and dropped it on top of the signed slip when she put it down.

The boy thanked them both and went out, and she told Shayne defensively, “You didn’t have to pay the tip. I fully intended…”

Shayne grinned and waved a big hand. “That’s cheap for a double cognac.”

He dipped ice cubes into a water glass and turned to the two closed doors. “Which is the bathroom?”

“On your left.”

He went through a door into a bathroom as antiseptically neat and uncluttered as the living room, ran water on top of the ice and returned. She was curled up on the sofa again with a tall glass of yellowish liquid and ice cubes out of which she was sucking from two straws.

Shayne got his double cognac from the tray and carried it with the glass of ice water to his chair. He sank back and took a meditative sip, and then asked bluntly, “What’s all the cloak and dagger stuff about, Jane? Supposing the price is right… exactly what do you want from me?”

She said firmly, “I think I should know a great deal more about you before I go into that.” She hesitated, then asked timidly, “Are you a professional gunsel?”

Shayne grinned. “You’ve been reading imitators of Dashiell Hammett. They completely misinterpreted that word.”

“Well then, a hood? A… a trigger-man? Because you don’t act or sound like one,” she went on with painful honesty. “Or at least the way I always thought one would be.”

Shayne took a sip of his drink. “Disappointed?”

“No. I’m delighted that you’re so personable and… well, literate. It makes it a lot easier to talk to you. But… what do you do for a living?”

“Anything to pick up a fast buck. I’ve killed a few men, Jane, if that’s what you’re getting at. Rubbed them out, in the vernacular. I exist on the edge of the law,” he went on, choosing his words carefully, “and haven’t a great respect for the way justice is administered in this country.”

“The clerk at your hotel intimated that you are a gambler.”

“Not a professional. But I do like to eat… and drink good cognac.” He lifted his glass in a salute and drank from it.

“Tell me about your girl at the newspaper office. Are you in love with her?”

“We’ve got a thing about each other. How does she come into this?”

“She doesn’t, of course. Except to help me understand what motivates you. If you are in love with a nice girl you’re most likely to understand my problem and sympathize with me. And if you need a lot of money in a hurry to enable you to get married and change your way of life, that would be an important incentive, I should think.”

By her speech, her choice of words, Shayne thought, she exhibited the damnedest mixture of naïveté and sophistication he had ever encountered. Her language had a quaintly bookish tinge, as though she had acquired her knowledge of words from reading rather than from the actual give-and-take of conversation with other human beings. All-in-all, Jane Smith intrigued hell out of him at this point, and he was comfortably pleased that she had turned out to be this one instead of either of the other two possibilities he had considered in the Crystal Room.

He said, “I came here to listen to a proposition, Jane. I’ve got a gun and it’s for hire… if the job appeals to me and the price is right.”

She said impulsively, “You’re absolutely wonderful, Mike Wayne. I don’t suppose that’s your real name, is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t suppose it was… any more than Jane Smith is mine. If you knew how worried I’ve been… the sort of uncouth hoodlum I thought might answer my advertisement. But when I read your reply I thought you couldn’t be so terribly horrible. And you’re not at all. I’m not even embarrassed sitting here talking to you this way,” she ended wonderingly.

Keeping his face impassive, Shayne said, “I’m delighted that you find me couth enough for your purpose. But I still don’t know what that purpose is.”

“Are you enjoying your drink? Shall I order you another?”

“I’m enjoying it very much and I’m not trying to push you too fast, Jane. I can stay here all night if necessary.” He stretched out his long legs and lit another cigarette.

She laughed nervously. “That won’t be necessary. What would you tell your girl-friend?”

“A good, convincing lie.” Leaning back relaxed in his chair, Shayne’s gaze brooded on her face. “How old are you, Jane?”

“Nineteen.”

“At least, that’s past the age of consent in Florida.”

She blushed and averted her face from his, gave her entire attention to sucking lemonade from her glass.

“And I don’t believe this sort of hotel would ask any prying questions,” Shayne went on as though he were considering the matter seriously. “Haven’t you often found it’s easier to talk to a man in the dark while he’s lying in bed beside you than any other time?”

“Please don’t talk that way.” Anger burst from her lips. “Not even jokingly.
You’re
not a lecherous old man. Are you?”

“All men are lecherous to a certain extent. I suppose I even seem old to nineteen.”

“But you don’t! You’re just nice to talk to. Please don’t spoil it.”

“I won’t.” He made his voice very gentle. “Relax, child. I was just trying to find out something about you in my own inimitable way.”

“Did you?” she asked in a small voice.

“I think so.” Shayne took another sip of cognac and made his voice briskly businesslike again. “Take your own time about getting it off your chest.”

“Would you like to make fifty thousand dollars?”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t?”

“But… is that enough to… to induce you to kill a man?”

“Who do you want killed, Jane?”

“My stepfather.”