The Homicidal Virgin (7 page)

“Why should I?” asked Shayne amiably. “You’re doing all right. Beating the bushes for new business all over the place. Who else would show the same sort of initiative? Did you work out a profitable deal with the insurance guy… fix it so you can have dates with him every night in the week?”

Her eyes widened and then tears started streaming out of them. She walked directly to his desk, disregarding the liquid flow down her cheeks, leaned forward and said distinctly, “Damn you, Michael Shayne. You disappear somewhere on your own every night for a week leaving me around twiddling my thumbs. And then when a nice man comes along and invites me out to dinner and I spend the entire evening dutifully laughing at his corny jokes while I impress on him what a wonderful detective my boss is and get him to come up with a whopping retainer… when I do all
that
just for you… what do you do? Well,
tell
me,” she insisted fiercely. “What do you do?”

Shayne got up swiftly with his cognac in one hand, circled the desk and put his left arm tightly about her slim waist. He tilted her tear-streaked face back and held the paper cup to her lips while she sipped convulsively. He tossed off the rest of the drink when she stopped swallowing, tossed the empty cup on the floor and kissed each of her wet eyes lingeringly.

Then he said coaxingly, “Tell me about the contract you wangled out of Waring, angel, and I’ll tell you why I’ve been staked out the last few nights. And you’ve got a dinner date with me tonight, no matter what you fixed up with Waring.”

A little before noon Shayne dropped by the hotel where he had a room under the name of Wayne to get his things and check out. With his key, the clerk handed him a telephone message. It was stamped ten o’clock that morning and said,
Call Mr. Paul Winterbottom at once,
and a telephone number followed.

Shayne went up to his room with a frown of perplexity on his face. He didn’t know anyone named Winterbottom, and besides, who could be calling Mike Wayne at this hotel? The only person who knew that a Mike Wayne was registered there was the Jane Smith of the preceding night.

In his room he went directly to the telephone and asked for the number on the telephone message. A diffident and young-sounding masculine voice answered.

Shayne asked, “Paul Winterbottom?” and the young man answered, “Oh? Would that be… is this Mike Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“Could I see you right away, Mr. Wayne? It’s terribly important and I can take my lunch hour now.”

“What about?”

“It’s a personal matter.” Paul Winterbottom cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Pertaining to… a young lady whom you met on the Beach last night.”

Shayne said, “Okay. Where?”

“There’s a quiet little bar on Eighth Street, just east of Miami Avenue. The Dolphin. Could you meet me there in about ten minutes?”

“Okay. How will I know you?”

“I’ll know you, I’m sure,” the young man told him earnestly. “I’ll try to be in a booth near the back.”

Shayne said, “Okay,” again and hung up. He opened his suitcase and threw into it the few things he had brought to the hotel, recalling now that Jane Smith had told him she was engaged to a man named Paul to whom she didn’t dare tell the truth about Henderson.

Had she changed her mind after talking to Shayne last night? If so, maybe he hadn’t handled the situation so badly after all. He felt a lot better about the whole thing as he went down and checked out and drove to the Dolphin bar.

There were a few men at the bar, and only the rear booth was occupied. A young man sat facing the front with a glass of beer in front of him, and he got to his feet with a nervous smile as Shayne walked back toward him. “Mr. Wayne?” He held out a limp hand. “I’m so glad you could come. Let me bring you a drink from the bar. Then we won’t be disturbed.”

Shayne said, “Cognac with a glass of ice water on the side.” He sat down across from the glass of beer. Paul Winterbottom seemed pleasant enough. In his early twenties, sandy-haired and slender. Wearing a well-pressed but cheap cord suit and a white shirt with a dark bow tie. His mouth and chin weren’t strong, but his light gray eyes had met Shayne’s steadily enough, and it was perfectly natural that he would be under a lot of strain if Shayne’s hunch was correct.

He came back with a pony of cognac and a glass of ice water which he set in front of the detective. Then he reseated himself and began turning his glass round and round in a little pool of beer on the table while he stared down at it, and said in a low voice, “I know you must think that Muriel… she told you her name was Jane Smith… was absolutely insane last night. Well, she isn’t. Not really.” He lifted his head to gaze at the detective soberly. “She didn’t mean it, Mr. Wayne. Not actually. She was just on the verge of hysteria. My God, I was appalled when she told me her crazy plan. About sending the advertisement to the newspaper and all. I didn’t have the slightest idea. I thought she was in New York all last week when she was right here in a hotel cooking up that crazy thing about hiring someone to kill her stepfather. Not that the old goat doesn’t deserve killing. He does. But my God, you can’t take the law in your own hands, I told her. And I also told her how damned lucky she was that it was a man like you who got hold of her idiotic ad, and not some hoodlum who would have jumped at the chance of earning fifty thousand dollars.”

Shayne asked, “Did she tell you the whole story?”

“Yes. She telephoned me right after you gave her some good advice and walked out on her. I didn’t even know she was in town, like I say. She was practically hysterical and I couldn’t understand her at first. What hurt most, of course, was that she hadn’t come to me with her problem. Kept it bottled up inside her all this time.” He drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Now that I know about it, she’ll never go back to that house again, I can promise you that. I put her on a plane to New York at six o’clock this morning and she’s not coming back.”

“She told you
why
she wants Henderson dead?” Shayne persisted relentlessly.

“Yes. The whole sordid truth tumbled out in a torrent. Imagine a man like that. Trying to seduce his own stepdaughter with her mother scarcely settled in her grave. Her cooped up in that house with him and so frightened that she has to lock her door every night. It’s vile and nasty and makes me want to puke every time I think of it. No wonder she got all worked up to the point of doing what she did. I’m not passing judgment on her for it,” he went on fiercely. “If she had only come to me the first time he made a pass at her. I blame myself because she didn’t. She should have
known
I’d understand and wouldn’t think it was her fault. Well, she knows now, and there’s never going to be any more secrets between us.”

Shayne said gently, “That’s the way it should be if you’re in love.”

“She
said
you were a nice guy,” the youth burst out impulsively. “And I can see you are, too. But I just had to find out for myself and that’s why I telephoned you this morning. It frightened me, sort of, when she showed me that card you gave her with the private detective’s number on it. I thought what if you called him and told him. You didn’t, did you?”

“I didn’t tell anyone anything about it,” Shayne assured him. “You needn’t worry on that score.”

“I certainly am relieved to hear that. I got all kinds of crazy ideas when I got to thinking about it after telling her good-by this morning. Like if you had told your friend Mr. Shayne, maybe he’d think it was his duty to warn Henderson or even tell the police. And what if something
did
happen to Henderson? You know, if he should get bumped off. Well, you’d probably think sure as shooting that she had gone on and got someone else to do the job after you turned her down. And I wanted you to know she hadn’t. She promised me she’d never even think of such a thing again, and we’re going to fix it up somehow so she won’t have to go back and live with him until she inherits her money.”

“I’m damned glad to hear it,” Shayne told him sincerely. “I confess I was plenty worried when I walked out of her room last night.”

“God, what a narrow escape she had,” breathed Paul feelingly. “Believe me, I read the riot act to her after she told me what she had done.”

“Marry her right away,” Shayne advised him. “She’s past eighteen and doesn’t need her guardian’s consent. Whether you think you’ve got enough money or not. You’ll get by somehow.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. That’s what I told her. My God, we can live in a single room if we have to. Money isn’t everything, I told her. In just a couple of years you’ll get yours anyhow. Henderson can’t stop that. Just stay away from the bastard, I told her, and forget your crazy plan for hiring someone to kill him.”

Shayne felt vastly relieved when he strode out of the Dolphin bar a few minutes later. The girl had used good sense, he thought, in not telling her young man the full truth about Henderson and her sexual involvement. Paul Winterbottom didn’t appear to have the broadest shoulders in the world, but he seemed a nice enough fellow and genuinely in love with the girl. It was too bad, of course, that something couldn’t be done about Henderson, but he didn’t see how it could be accomplished without involving the girl.

There were lots of Hendersons in the world, though most of them weren’t on the verge of being elected mayor of an important city like Miami Beach. That, too, wasn’t any affair of Shayne’s, but he knew that if he could find a way to throw a monkey-wrench into the political pot, he would do so gladly. For that reason he decided to say nothing to Tim Rourke about no longer wanting to meet the man.

It was the next day when Timothy Rourke called to say that Shayne and Lucy were invited to cocktails at the Henderson house that afternoon. When Shayne asked if he’d had any trouble wangling the invitation, Rourke laughed shortly and said, “It was the other way around. In fact, it was Henderson himself who brought your name up while I was casting about for some way to get you together.”

Shayne said wonderingly, “Henderson mentioned my name out of a clear sky?”

“That’s right. I called to suggest I might interview him on his political prospects, and we made an appointment. Then, before I could say anything else he sort of gushed, ‘By the way, you’re quite friendly with Michael Shayne, aren’t you? The private detective.’ When I coyly confessed that we were practically on a first-name basis, he said he admired hell out of you and always had wanted to meet you. I told him it wasn’t difficult if he had the price of a drink on him, and he wondered out loud if you’d like to drop in for cocktails this evening, and I accepted for both of us.”

“And Lucy?”

“And Lucy. He said there isn’t any Mrs. Shayne, is there, and I told him no but you had a beautiful secretary with two hollow legs. He thought that was very funny indeed and insisted that you must bring her. Pick me up at my place a little before six?”

Shayne said, “Sure,” and hung up reflectively. Why would a man like Saul Henderson be anxious to meet him? Did he know about his stepdaughter’s meeting with Shayne? And would
she
be there? It looked like an interesting evening, and he went out to tell Lucy to leave the office early enough to be ready to be picked up at half past five.

The Henderson house was a modern one-story structure directly on the ocean at the far northern end of Miami Beach. There were already half a dozen cars parked in the circular drive in front of the ranch house when Shayne turned in at six-thirty. Sitting between the two men in the front seat, Lucy said, “You didn’t say it was going to be a party, Tim. If I’d known that…”

“I didn’t know myself, and
what
would you have worn different if you had known?” Rourke’s amused glance took in her neat tailored suit of blue silk with a fresh organdy blouse which she had changed into after leaving the office.

“But this isn’t a party dress.”

Shayne stopped and switched off the motor and said gruffly, “You look good enough to eat, angel. Next time I bring you to meet a wolf like Henderson remind me to make you wear that gunnysack that makes you look like Old Mother Hubbard.”

“You don’t even know the man, Michael. Yet you keep on making veiled remarks about him,” Lucy protested as they got out and circled the parked cars toward the front door.

“That’s right,” Tim Rourke averred with a curious glance at him over Lucy’s head. “What does give between you and Henderson, Mike? You asked me to set up this meeting…”

Shayne said, “Just don’t let him get you into a bedroom alone with him, Lucy.” He squeezed her arm and grinned to make the warning lighter than it sounded, but she stopped on the steps to glare at him and said furiously:

“You sound as though I make a practice of going into bedrooms with strange men.”

Shayne pulled her on up to the front door and said grimly, “Just don’t.” He put his finger on the button and the door was opened almost instantly by a maid in a neat white uniform.

There was a small entry hall behind her, and from an archway on the right flowed a loud babble of voices and laughter and the welcoming click of ice in glasses.

The maid smilingly took the men’s hats and they passed her to enter a large square room that held twelve or fifteen people in three groups, all with glasses in their hands and seemingly all talking at once.

Saul Henderson detached himself from the group nearest the entrance as they hesitated there. Shayne recognized him at once from his newspaper picture, and immediately disliked him more in the flesh than he had in his thoughts. He was of medium height with thinning dark hair, and he carried his forty-odd years with a youthful bounce that somehow managed to be irritating to the redhead. He had an ingratiating, smile that was almost effusive as he advanced with outstretched hand and exclaimed, “Mr. Rourke. How delightful that you could come. And in such charming company.”

He pumped Rourke’s hand and beamed at Lucy as the reporter introduced her, and then took Shayne’s hand firmly and squeezed it a little harder than was necessary and looked him steadily in the eye in a man-to-man way and made his voice very serious as he declared, “I’m one of your great admirers, Mr. Shayne. I’ve read everything Mr. Rourke has written about you in the papers, and I want to say quite frankly that I feel Miami is a better city for having you as a citizen.”

Shayne took his hand away from his effusive host and thrust it into his pocket for safekeeping. He said dryly, “One of your prominent law enforcement officers here on the beach wouldn’t go along with that.”

“You mean Detective Chief Painter?” Henderson threw back his head and chuckled delightedly, showing a double row of even, white teeth. “How right you are. But I mustn’t monopolize you. Come and get a drink, all three of you, and then meet my guests, who are all anxious to shake your hand.”

He took Lucy’s arm and led them to a small bar set up at the rear of the room that was presided over by a colored man in a white jacket and said hopefully,

“A sidecar, Miss Hamilton? Or don’t you go along with your employer’s choice of cocktails?”

She said, “Oh, but I do. Michael would fire me if I dared order anything else,” and Shayne stood by sardonically while the waiter efficiently mixed a shaker of excellent sidecars and filled two tall-stemmed glasses.

While Rourke lagged behind to get a bourbon and water, Henderson took them around to the various groups in the room, introducing them in the prideful manner of a man who has snagged a celebrity and insists upon everyone recognizing the fact.

Faces and names were a meaningless blur to the detective. “Jane Smith” was not among those present. Nor did he recognize anyone else whom he met. They all seemed to recognize him by reputation and he tolerantly fenced with gushing females while Lucy clung to his arm and glowed happily.

After he had dutifully made the rounds, including another foursome who arrived after them, Shayne left Lucy in the company of three young men who surrounded her admiringly, and looked around for Timothy Rourke.

The reporter, he discovered without a lot of surprise, had expertly corralled the prettiest female at the party (if you excluded Lucy) and had her blocked off in a corner of the room where he was leering at her happily and working on his third highball while he heartily agreed with her that newspaper reporters were, indeed, a daredevil and fascinating lot.

Bored by it all, and again wondering why Henderson had so obviously wanted to meet him, Shayne wandered back to the bar and secured another sidecar, then found a comfortable chair in a deserted corner of the room and sank into it gratefully, lighting a cigarette and half-closing his eyes, making his mind as blank as possible so that the waves of sound from the throats of the score or more of people in the room flowed over and through him without making direct contact.

He had been sitting like that for a few minutes when he straightened in his chair with a tingle in his spine as he saw a lone late-comer being ushered through the archway by the maid.

It was Hilda Gleason. She was dressed exactly as he had seen her before, wearing the tinted Harlequin glasses that made her look younger and less sophisticated than she was without them.

Shayne took a deep, disbelieving drag on his cigarette and held his hand up to hide the lower portion of his face while she stood just inside the archway and her gaze moved around from one group to another in the room. It moved over him without recognition, he thought, though it was difficult to tell with those glasses on, and then she smiled and moved forward gracefully as Saul Henderson went hurriedly to greet her with outstretched hand.

From his position across the room, Shayne could hear nothing they said as they stood together for a moment chatting like old friends. Then Henderson took her arm and led her toward the bar and Shayne wondered if she would ask for a stinger.

What was Hilda Gleason doing here at Henderson’s party? It made absolutely no sense if you believed the story she had told him a few evenings ago. True, there was the inexplicable connection between Muriel Graham and her missing husband. Could she possibly have managed to identify Jane Smith as Henderson’s stepdaughter, and thus come here to try and find out something about her husband?

Shayne didn’t see how she could have managed that. The girl had checked out of the hotel before Hilda came to him, and left for New York the next morning.

He kept his hand up in front of his face, broodingly sucking on his cigarette while he watched Henderson get her a cocktail at the bar (a stinger, no less, if the liqueur in the squat bottle was crème de menthe as Shayne suspected) and lead her to a group nearby and start introducing her to other guests.

At this point, Shayne found himself heartily inclined to disbelieve every word that had been said to him by both Jane Smith and Hilda Gleason. Since meeting Henderson in person he had been having more and more difficulty casting him in the role of a black-hearted seducer of his virginal stepdaughter while the mother lay dying in the adjoining bedroom. It wasn’t that he liked the man. He didn’t. He was irritated by his effusiveness and his surface charm, but he didn’t feel the really deep-rooted loathing for the man that he wanted to feel for one who had done what Jane Smith so feelingly and graphically described.

And now Hilda walked in on the party calmly, and acted perfectly at home with her host whom she certainly had not mentioned to Shayne while imploring him to locate her husband, supposedly in Miami on some secret and dangerous errand of his own.

He stayed in his chair removed from the others, watching Henderson take Hilda from group to group, getting the distinct impression that she was a stranger to the others and meeting all of them for the first time.

When they finally turned toward his corner of the room, Shayne mashed his cigarette out and got to his feet, grimly studying Hilda’s face as she was led nearer by Henderson, striving to guess whether she was as surprised by his presence as he was by hers.

Those damned glasses made it difficult. He had never before realized just how important a woman’s eyes were in helping a man judge her inner feelings. Certainly she dissembled well if she was surprised and disconcerted to see him.

There was an interested smile on her full lips and the bluish blankness of her glasses to conceal what she really felt when Henderson said, “Mrs. Moran. It’s an honor to present Mr. Shayne. Michael Shayne. One of the most famous private detectives in the country, if you don’t already know.”

“But, of course, I have heard of Michael Shayne.” She extended her hand and gripped his firmly, held it for an extra squeeze which he interpreted as a signal for him to pretend not to recognize her.

Shayne said very formally, “I’m delighted to meet you. I was just sitting here waiting for you to show up.”

“So?” She wrinkled her forehead charmingly. “How could that be?”

“Very simple. You are an extremely beautiful woman without an escort, and my date has deserted me. Do you mind being the perfect host, Henderson, and leaving us alone to get better acquainted?”

He reached for the arm that Henderson was clutching, and deliberately pulled her away and stepped aside so she could sit in the chair he had been occupying.

Henderson was unable to conceal a flicker of irritation that crossed his face, and Shayne wondered if it went deeper than mere irritation, but his voice was bland as he bowed slightly and said, “I don’t blame you for one minute, Shayne, but I warn you that you’ll have to work fast. About five minutes is all I’m going to allow you. Then I have an important matter I want to discuss.”

Shayne stood with his back to the room, facing the chair and Hilda as Henderson went away. She leaned back with her head against the cushion, looking up at him with parted lips and heaving breasts that showed inner tension.

In a low, harsh voice, Shayne said, “Take your glasses off, Hilda.”

The tip of her tongue came out to wet her lips. She reached up obediently and removed her Harlequin glasses. There was animal fright in her luminous brown eyes. “Why are you here, Michael Shayne?”

“I was invited. Why are you here?”

“I, too, was invited.” She lifted one hand appealingly toward him as he stood over her, blocking her off from the rest of the room. “Later, I will explain everything. Come to my room, yes? We cannot talk here.”

“Why not?” He kept his voice low and harsh. “After the run-around you gave me the other night I think I deserve an explanation.”

“It was no run-around as you call it, Michael. Please believe me it was not.”

“Do you want me to believe it’s sheer coincidence that you turned up here today using another name?”

“Perhaps as much coincidence as you being here,” she answered composedly. “Am I to believe that is true?”

“I had my own reasons for coming.”

“I, too, had my reasons. Have you… found any trace of Harry in the city?”

“No. Have you?”

Pain clouded her eyes as she moved her head slowly from side to side. “Nothing. But I am a stranger here and I do not know how to proceed.”

“You don’t appear to be a complete stranger to Henderson.”

“I have said I will explain that later.” She looked past him and sat up straight in her chair, taking a sip from her cocktail. In a fuller-bodied voice, she declared, “I think that would be most pleasant, Mr. Shayne. After the party is over, then?”

Henderson’s voice intruded just behind Shayne. “Just the sort of thing I’ve always heard about you private eyes. Leave you alone for one minute with a beautiful woman and you end up with an assignation.”

Shayne said, “Do you mind?”

“Of course I mind. But I don’t see what I can do about it. Now that you’ve got that settled, Shayne, would you mind stepping inside my office with me? I’ve a matter of extreme importance to discuss with you.”