So Lush, So Deadly

by Brett Halliday

“How about lately?” Shayne said.

  “Lately more than ever. Of course the hippies are all over the mass media these days, you can’t get away from them. I feel the attraction myself, after being cooped up with Dotty the last couple of weeks. I’ve never tried pot, but it might be an improvement over alcohol as it’s consumed on the Nefertiti. Is there a hippy colony in Miami?”

  “A small one.”

  “Then that’s where you’ll find him,” Brady said confidently. “Maybe you think taking the money contradicts what I’ve been saying, but Henry has a strong New England streak. If he’s really careful and doesn’t get rolled in the meantime, it would last him a few years. He didn’t even take a toothbrush with him. He didn’t take his guitar. I think he wanted to cut himself loose from everything in his past.”

  “Did you see him go?”

  “Neither of us did, and he didn’t leave any farewell note. He was here one night and the next morning he was gone. We haven’t been too close lately. He thought I was selling out, and I am. I think there’s a certain basic minimum, and if you can’t come up to that minimum you’re in trouble.”

  “How about women? Did he have affairs?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Do you happen to know his mother’s last name?”

  Brady looked surprised. “Dotty may but I sure as hell don’t. Why?”

  “About a third of the people who drop out of sight take their mother’s names,” Shayne explained. “It’s less of a break. And it isn’t too easy to switch off their old personalities and switch on new ones. They keep the same habits and still do many of the same things. So I’ll need to know some more about him.”

  The nuts were gone. With nothing to occupy his hands, Brady kept changing position and running his fingers through his hair. Shayne made notes as he talked, wishing he could find some excuse to pull off the dark glasses and see what was going on behind them.

  He asked abruptly, “When did you get the gun?”

  Brady started. “That’s right, you talked to Petrocelli. Dotty had it. It’s just a .25, to protect her cash. Petrocelli got a lot less truculent when I showed it to him.”

  “Did you actually see that five thousand, Brady, or did she just tell you it was missing?”

  “She told me. But I believe her.”

  “I’m wondering if she hopes to get some evidence to use in a divorce action. Do you think it’s a possibility?”

  Brady stared at him for a moment. “Anything’s possible. I do know that she wants very much to stay out of the papers.” He read an imaginary headline. “‘Robbed by Husband, Says Textile Heiress.’ She’d hate that. At the same time, I think she may really want him back. She’s not a happy woman, or a stable one. I guess that’s obvious.”

  Shayne closed his notebook and stood up. Brady went across to Mrs. De Rham’s stateroom and knocked. When she answered weakly he went in.

  He was back a moment later. “His mother’s maiden name was Sealey. If you find him, Dotty wants you to give him a message. She’s restoring him to her will, and she’ll think about putting some of the Winslow stock in his name.” He shrugged. “Seriously.”

  Out on deck, the girl on the next boat called over cheerfully, “Another sunshiney day. Is Mrs. De Rham any better?”

  “A little,” Brady said shortly.

  CHAPTER 8

  After leaving the marina, Shayne arranged to meet his friend Tim Rourke, the gangling crime reporter on the Daily News. Rourke had recently published a series of articles about the Miami hippies, and while he was collecting material he had lived among them for a few days. They were hospitable and unsuspicious. Their dreaminess and apathy and the jargon they used continually had nearly driven him crazy by the time he left.

  He met Shayne in a bar near the paper, bringing tear sheets of the articles.

  “Only a loony would think he could hide around Jennings Park,” Rourke said after Shayne explained what he wanted. “It’s the most conspicuous place in Dade County.”

  “He may not want to hide,” Shayne said. “There’s a chance he took the money to make sure she’d send somebody after him.”

  “Of course the captain might be right. He could be dead. That would make a better story.”

  “I don’t think he’d dead,” Shayne said slowly. “I think Brady knows exactly where I can find the guy. But what’s his object? Does he want to get De Rham to come back to take over responsibility? God knows.”

  He opened the folder to look at the tear sheets. Rourke said, “You can’t read in this light, Mike. The main thing to remember—the real hippies, the Diggers, the boys and girls who really want to quit, have all hitched their way to New York, where they can do it in style. If you want to get publicity for shunning publicity, you go to the center of the communications business. Our Miami operation is still a little half-hearted. If the hippy life begins to wear thin the kids can get a haircut and go home. They’re just putting one toe in the water to see how it feels.”

  He summoned the bartender. “Another shot, Pete, and then I’ve got to get back. One other thing I ought to tell you, Mike. You remember the Dirty Angels, the motorcycle boys.”

  “I thought they were dissolved.”

  “The club was dissolved. They got evicted from their building and most of them lost their cycles. Three of the top guys went to jail, and I think they’re still there. But the rank and file took off the black leather jackets and put the swastika armbands in the back of their bureau drawers and looked for a new kind of action. You’d be amazed what a difference it makes when you go barefoot instead of wearing stomping boots. While I was hanging around Jennings Park I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of familiar faces. They had designs painted on their cheeks with food coloring and they were handing out flowers. But don’t believe it.”

  “Yeah,” Shayne said impatiently.

  “Just a small piece of information. If you remember the Angels, they never believed in nonviolence.” He took his shot of whiskey in a gulp. “Call me if you want anything.”

  The Jennings Park area of Southwest Miami is a district of cheap luncheonettes and rundown rooming houses. The park itself is a dusty square of broken asphalt, dotted with broken benches. Until the hippies moved in, it was used mainly by old men from nearby rooming houses. Now it was filled with bearded boys and unkempt girls, a few wearing sandals but most barefoot. From behind, and occasionally even from in front, it was hard to tell the males from the females. There were Indian headdresses and Hindu robes.

  By the end of the afternoon everybody appeared to be high. One of the contentions in Rourke’s Daily News series was that there was far less marijuana and acid consumed in Jennings Park and the surrounding blocks than the participants wanted people to think. They had quickly become a tourist attraction. By early dusk the sidewalks around the park were jammed with middle-aged people in colorful sports attire, slung with expensive cameras. There was always a heavy concentration of cops.

  Shayne circulated, looking at beards. His sleeves were rolled up and he was carrying his jacket over his arm. Whenever someone asked him for money he supplied some, and waited until the conversation was well under way before he brought out his photographs. The usual response was a smile and a sad shake of the head. Whenever he caught a glint of recognition he sauntered on, turning after a moment to watch the person he had been talking to and see what he did.

  It was nearly dark. He was in a luncheonette, eating an undercooked and overseasoned burger when a barefoot girl with straight hair, in jeans, short-sleeved jersey and sunglasses, came in from the street and headed straight at him.

  “You’re going to buy me a burger,” she said flatly.

  “It’s not very good,” Shayne said. “Why not finish mine?”

  She gave him a shocked look before deciding that the correct thing would be to accept.

  “How about the coffee?” Shayne went on, grinning slightly. “I only had a couple of sips.”

  She hesitated, then added
sugar and began to drink it, standing up at the counter. Her only concession to the middle-class standards she was running away from was to turn the cup and drink with her left hand, from the opposite rim. Shayne paid the check and they left together.

  “You people,” she said. Now that she was outside in the sun, she took off her shades and peered up at him from beneath an untidy fringe of brown hair. “Why don’t you stay in your own part of town? Are we harming anybody?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “No! All we want to do is live in our own way. What’s wrong with that? We don’t see the point in surrounding ourselves with vacuum cleaners and color television sets and a new model car every year—”

  She was a small girl, coming up only to Shayne’s shoulder, and in her bare feet she seemed even smaller. She threatened him with her pointed breasts; she was one Jennings Park hippy who was obviously not a boy. Shayne thought she was probably a new arrival. She had the fervor of a recent convert. The others Shayne had talked to had thought it was cooler to ignore him. Loving parents had sent her to an orthodontist, and her teeth were good. Her eyes were warm and emotional.

  “I don’t know why I bother,” she said. “You don’t care about our motivation. All you want to do is stand there in your white Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority, and stare at the animals. The only thing I don’t understand is where’s your Polaroid color camera?”

  Shayne grinned at her and took out his photographs. “Have you seen this guy around?”

  She still hadn’t replaced her sunglasses, and as she glanced at the pictures Shayne caught the flicker. She handed them back carefully.

  “Do I look like the type of person who would cooperate with the enemy?”

  “What enemy?”

  “You cops are the armed defenders of private property and the status quo, and I hope none of my friends saw me eating that burger. You were right,” she added, putting on the glasses, “it was lousy. The same goes for the coffee.”

  She turned abruptly and walked toward the park. Shayne watched her, still grinning, then lost interest abruptly and sauntered away in the opposite direction, his jacket over his shoulder. He entered the park at the opposite end. He stopped to watch a chess game being played by two old men. After a few minutes, when nothing happened, he moved on to listen to a dirge being chanted by a group in dirty gray robes. Meanwhile, he was careful not to lose track of the girl. She spoke to several people in various parts of the park, and they looked at the big red-headed detective, a conspicuous figure in that gathering.

  A boy self-consciously offered him a flower. Shayne took it and ran the stem into the buttonhole of his jacket, and walked on. The girl moved around a group of dancers, then turned abruptly, crossed the street and started into Coconut Terrace, which dead-ended two blocks from the park.

  Rourke had reported several hippy addresses in the second block. At the next corner she looked back to be sure no one was following, and crossed.

  Shayne returned to the chess game and waited till one of the old men finally made a move. Then he looked at his watch and went back to his Buick. As he drove off, he tilted the rear-view mirror and picked up two long-haired youths on the sidewalk, watching him go. He made two right-angle turns in quick succession, parked again, and returned by another route.

  The hippy houses on Coconut Terrace were easily identified. They were badly rundown, with blistering paint and broken windows. Shayne went into the first and began trying doors. Few were locked. At this hour most of the occupants were out in the park. In one a boy and girl were in bed together. The girl giggled and asked Shayne to come in. The boy growled, “Outside.”

  Henry De Rham was in the next room. He looked around as the door opened. He had shaved off his sideburns, but otherwise he had left his beard alone. It wasn’t as well cared for as it had been in the photographs, but it covered his face in the same way. His hair was very fair, his eyebrows almost colorless. Everything was relaxed about him except his eyes, which were small and hard and went with his old environment.

  The girl who had accosted Shayne in the luncheonette was sitting across from him at an unpainted table. There was a second woman on a mattress on the floor. She was breast-feeding a baby and didn’t look up. The girl spat an obscenity at Shayne.

  “Never mind,” De Rham said quietly in a high nasal voice. “It’s O.K., H. Who cares, really?”

  She pushed back her chair. “I think I’ll step out for a minute.”

  “Sit down,” De Rham said. “The trouble with clobbering one cop, he comes back an hour later with fifty cops. So why don’t we all relax? The only thing I’ve done lately is leave my wife. Unless I broke a speed limit getting away I haven’t committed any crimes. Who are you?” he said to Shayne.

  “Michael Shayne.” There were only two chairs, both of which were occupied, so he perched on the corner of the table and felt for a cigarette. “Do you want to talk about the money in front of witnesses?”

  The girl looked sharply at De Rham, then down at her dirty hands. De Rham smiled.

  “Money. I see. What a bitch Dotty is, after all. Let me see your badge.”

  Shayne opened his wallet and showed his private investigator’s ticket.

  “Shayne—I think I’ve heard about you.” He put a burning cigarette in his mouth and left it there while he talked. “I can’t remember if what I heard was good or bad. What did she hire you to do, bring me back screaming?” He leaned forward and his lips twitched away from his teeth in a sudden snarl. “I’m not going. By that I mean not willingly. You’ve got about fifty pounds on me and as a private detective you probably know all the tricks. You might be able to deliver me, if you could get me out of the building. But this is the second half of the twentieth century. Involuntary servitude hasn’t been legal for over a hundred years. Short of chaining me to the bed—”

  Shayne interrupted. “All I’m supposed to do is find you and give you a message.” He swung toward the girl. “What did he say his name was?”

  When De Rham nodded she said, “Joe Sealey.”

  “That’s close enough,” Shayne said. “Sealey’s his mother’s maiden name. His real name is Henry De Rham. Who’s she?”

  He nodded toward the woman on the mattress, who was now burping her baby.

  “It’s her room,” De Rham said. “Ursula, this is Mike Shayne, an unidentified flying object from outer space.”

  The woman looked up. “He’s not fuzz?”

  “Private.”

  “He had me scared for a minute, because who’d look after Baby if I got busted?”

  She reached under the mattress for a partly-smoked stick, and relighted it with a kitchen match. She took a deep drag, let the smoke out luxuriously, and sat back, putting the baby to her breast again.

  “Pot and nursing,” she said dreamily. “It’s so great. One combination a man can’t have.”

  De Rham shrugged and looked at his own cigarette, a Chesterfield. “My trouble is, it’s hard to break old habits. Is Paul Brady still around? Not that I give a damn.”

  Shayne nodded. “He’s living on the boat, but he tells me he’s getting restless.”

  De Rham clucked. “On the same boat. Shocking. Good old Paul. Well, he’s welcome to her. He thinks he’s had domestic troubles. Wait till he’s put in a couple more weeks with Dot.”

  “She says she wants you back.”

  He blew out his breath scornfully. “Have you ever watched a cat with a baby chipmunk? She doesn’t like to eat it all at once. That wouldn’t be enough fun. So she cuffs it around and watches it and sometimes even lets it get away for a minute—almost. Then she pounces on it again and eats a bit of its tail and plays with it some more. Men are supposed to be the ones with the balls, but I was never under any illusions about my married life. Dotty was the cat. I was the baby chipmunk.”

  The girl called H. put her hand on his. “You’re a marvelous man, Seal. A terrific lover. Forget about that castrating bitch.”

  “I
intend to. All right, Shayne, you’ve delivered the message. Take her a message from me. The air tastes better in this part of town. For the first time in years I feel alive, really alive.” He gestured incoherently, then checked himself. “No, don’t tell her that. I don’t want to wreck her self-esteem, I just don’t want to go back. She can’t help being the way she is.”

  He stood up and paced across the room and back. He was smaller than he looked sitting down, probably no taller than his wife. He dropped into the chair again.

  “I actually think I loved her at first,” he said in a troubled voice. “Even so I wouldn’t have married her if it hadn’t been for her money. She was already putting me over the jumps. What I want is to break out of the kind of world where money can affect that kind of deeply personal decision. We all have only one life.”

  “Did you think of leaving her a letter?”

  “I tried to write one but I couldn’t decide what to call her. ‘Dear Dotty?’ Impossible. How is she?”

  “Losing weight, according to Brady. Drinking, according to everybody else. She’s an abandoned wife, and it seemed to me she was enjoying the role.”

  “That’s my Dotty. Probably there were tears. She has tear ducts she can turn on like a faucet. But she’s not getting me back with a few cheap tears! I feel sorry for her, but I feel sorry for myself too.”

  “I’m supposed to tell you she’s put you back in her will.”

  De Rham exploded. “If you knew how sick I am of that goddamn will! The cat and the chipmunk. I’d get interested in a conversation with some other woman at a party, and the next day Dotty would dash off to the lawyer’s and cut me down to fifty thousand. If I remembered to send her flowers on our anniversary, back I’d go as residuary legatee. The whole thing was disgusting.”

  “She sounds like the most—” H. said.

  “I never paid any real attention to it,” De Rham said, “but I couldn’t get her to believe that. I don’t care if she leaves her money to a home for unmarried dogs. I’m off that merry-go-round for good.”