by Anthony Rome
“How long have you known Diana?” she asked me.
“About an hour.”
“Oh?”
There was another searching silence. Before any of us thought of anything to break it, Kosterman came into the den, his heavy, lined face troubled. “Rita is putting Diana to bed,” he told Pines. “If you want to help . . .”
“I want to find out what this fellow has to say first.” Kosterman nodded, looked at me. “Won’t you have a seat?”
“I haven’t got that much to tell you, Mr. Kosterman. Your daughter registered in a hotel in Miami early this morning. She was drunk at the time. She got more so with a bottle in her room—and passed out. The cops called around for her. The hotel management called me in to bring her home to you. That’s all I know.”
“Was she alone?” Pines demanded. He sounded tough about it. But he was just trying to cover how upset he was.
I told him, “She was all alone. Just her and an empty bottle.”
“This hotel she was in,” Kosterman said, “which hotel is it?”
“A hotel that doesn’t want its name mentioned. The management would rather not be involved in anything. That’s why I was hired to bring her back to you.”
“Hired?” Kosterman’s frown deepened.
“I’m a private detective, Mr. Kosterman.”
“Detective? I thought you said my daughter wasn’t in any kind of trouble.”
“She isn’t. I told you. They wanted me to bring her here to avoid getting the hotel’s name smeared in any way. I don’t think they really had anything to worry about along that line. But that’s why they hired me.”
“I could call in the police,” Kosterman suggested, watching my face. “You could be forced to tell the name of the hotel.”
“I doubt it. But why go to the trouble? It’s not the hotel’s fault that your daughter picked it to drink herself blotto in.”
“Mr. Rome,” Kosterman said quietly, “you can certainly understand my concern. My only child vanishes for over twenty-four hours, returns in this condition . . . Naturally I want to know if she’s in some kind of trouble.”
He ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. It was the thick-fingered, scarred hand of a man who’d done a lot of rough manual labor at one time. He looked at his hand as though he might be remembering that. The hand clenched into a wide, solid fist. But then it opened again and dropped to his side. “I’ll pay you quite generously for any information you can give me about Diana.”
“Why don’t you wait till tomorrow,” I told him. “Talk to your daughter when she comes around. Then, if you still think she’s in some kind of jam, it’ll be easy enough to hire me to find out about it. I’m in the phonebook. Captain Crown down at City headquarters will vouch for me. My rates are reasonable.”
“How do we know,” Pines demanded suddenly, “that you’re who you claim you are?”
I got out my wallet, opened it. Pines looked at my license photostat. Kosterman did not.
“You may be right,” Kosterman said at last. “Ill wait and talk with Diana in the morning. I may call you afterwards.” I put my wallet away. “Be glad to hear from you,” I told Kosterman. “Good night, all.”
I left the room and found my way through the main section of the house. At the doorway to the room containing the swimming pool and patio, I paused and glanced in to assure myself I’d seen it right the first time. I had. It was still there—all of it. Probably not unusual in a house like this; maybe each bedroom had one like it, along with its own private bath, dressing room, fireplace, bar, and billiard room. I went on toward the entrance.
I was in my Olds outside, starting the motor, when the redhead came out the front door and hurried down the stone walk toward me. A sable wrap was draped around her shoulders.
She stopped beside the car, looked in the side window at me. “Driving back to Miami?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mind taking me along with you? I don’t have my car here, and I think it’s time I went home.”
“Get in.” I waited while she slid into the front seat beside me. Her dress hiked up, showing her exquisitely curved thighs. She slammed the door shut, looked at me. Then she pulled her dress back down, but she took her time about it.
I let out the brake and followed the curve of the driveway.
CHAPTER
3
SHE DIDN’T SAY anything more till I drove the car out of the Kosterman estate and back onto the road. Then she sighed and relaxed against the seat cushion. “It’ll be a relief to get home. It hasn’t exactly been fun and games out here.”
“Where’s home?”
“It’s not. Though it’s getting so I call it that. It’s just a place to live.” She told me the address—a top-tab Miami Beach hotel.
“Nice neighborhood.”
“If expensive is nice,” she said, “I guess it’s nice.”
“Been out here since last night?”
She glanced at me sharply. “How’d you know?”
“Your dress. It’s not a daytime dress, and it’s not what you’d have worn if you’d come out tonight to help them wait and worry.”
“I forgot you’re a detective. Diana and Darrell threw a party there last night. Diana ran off in the middle of it. After everybody else left, I stayed.”
We reached the drawbridge. The cop at the guard hut touched the peak of his cap to me this time as I went past. I went over the bridge and onto the highway. The redhead looked out the window at the trees flashing by in the night. “I was worried about her,” she murmured. “Diana’s a good kid . . . and I guess it was my fault.”
I drove on without saying anything, waiting. But she didn’t add anything to it. Finally I asked her, “Do the Pines live back there with Diana’s father?”
“Yep.”
“How about the blonde—Rita?”
“She interest you?”
I smiled.
“She’s Rudy Kosterman’s wife.”
I looked sideways at her.
“Not Diana’s mother, of course,” she said. “She’s the second Mrs. Kosterman. He divorced Diana’s mother.”
“They seem to like each other, Diana and Rita.”
“They do . . . Smoke?”
I shook my head. She lit one for herself and puffed at it while studying my profile.
“By the way,” she said, “I’m Anne Archer.”
She waited. “You have one?”
“Rome. I thought you knew.”
“I meant a first name.”
“Anthony.”
“Anthony like in Tony?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tony Rome,” she said, testing the sound of it. “I never met a private detective before tonight.”
“Now your education is complete.”
“Kind of a dirty business, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“How’d you happen to get into it?”
“A compulsion. I have one about earning a living. Maybe you’ve heard rumors about that kind of compulsion. Among the lower classes.”
“Okay . . . so I’m rich. Why be mad at me about it?”
“It’s not good manners to tell a man in a dirty business that he’s in a dirty business.”
Anne Archer sat up straighten “Oh-oh. Guess I said the wrong thing again. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I’ll recover.”
“You don’t like me much.”
“I like you fine,” I told her. “I like redheads. Especially ones with long legs and wicked figures.”
“Well, well . . .” she murmured. She turned sideways on the seat, looking at me more fully. “I didn’t think I was getting to you.”
“Don’t you usually?”
She laughed softly. “The desirable males at Miami Beach are awfully choosy. They can afford to be. We outnumber them ten to one . . . This calls for a drink. Let’s stop some place. Ill buy.”
“There’s a flask of brandy in th
e glove compartment.”
She got it out. “You?”
I shook my head.
She unscrewed the top and drank from it. “Very good.” She sounded a bit surprised.
“I liked to indulge myself with the little luxuries,” I said. “The little ones are the only kind I can afford.”
“You don’t have to keep leaning on how much poorer than me you are,” she snapped. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“It does to me,” I told her.
“Snob.”
She leaned her elbow against the top of the seat back and eyed me thoughtfully. “Are you married, Tony Rome?”
“Nope.”
“Ever been?”
“Not ever.”
“How come?”
I didn’t have to spend much time coming up with an answer. I’d been around that track before, many times. “I’ve got a gambling fever to feed,” I told her. “And I live on a boat and like it. A woman would have to be shy of good sense to put all her chips down on that combination.”
She considered that for a while. “Still,” she murmured, “there are women who like to bet against the odds . . . if they stand to win something worth the risk.”
I shook my head. “Sucker bet. We’d both come out losers.”
“I’ve got a sudden hunch about you,” Anne Archer said. “You’re afraid of women. That’s really it.”
“I’ve never thought so.”
“Well . . . you’re leery of us then. And that’s the same thing.”
It was close enough to the truth to keep me from answering.
She went on studying me for a while. Then she said, “I am. Married. Or was. It’s almost was now. I found out he was playing the field. Men are such dogs.”
“That why you’re down here? For the divorce?”
“Uh-huh. Sweating out my six months’ residence. I’ve only got one more month to go. A little less.” She added bitterly, “Then I’ll be free as a bird.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I just kept driving. “Didn’t you have me pegged from the start?” she demanded. “A smart detective like you? There’s so many of us down here. Isn’t there something about us all that you can tell us by?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Loneliness.”
“Oh, brother,” she murmured. “You sure hit it there. And do all the men down here know it!”
“Where are you from?”
“Detroit. Good old lousy Detroit.”
“How long have you known the Pines?”
“Five months now. Met Darrell and Diana at a party my first week here. I got high.” She paused and then added softly: “Like last night . . .”
She didn’t finish it. She looked away from me and took another drink from the flask. Then she put the flask away in the glove compartment and leaned back in the seat and stared straight ahead through the windshield. She didn’t say anything more the rest of the way.
I didn’t try to prod any more from her. You get used to unfinished dramas in my line of work. You’re always dropping briefly into the middle of people’s lives, getting a sharp, disturbing glimpse of how mixed-up they are, and leaving them that way. It’s a series of second acts, in which you seldom arrive in time for the opening scene or stick around long enough for the final curtain. I had a memory full of cliff- hangers about which I still wondered whether those hanging had finally managed to climb back up on solid ground—or had fallen to the jagged rocks far below.
I cut east to the shore above Golden Beach and followed it down through The Strip, with its endless rows of gaudy luxury motels lining both sides of the highway. Down the length of The Strip and into the canyon of Miami Beach’s Collins Avenue—with its mass of plush white hotels, cleverly illuminated at night to look like a hashish dream of an Arabian Nights’ paradise. The swish of tires on the asphalt sounded like millions of hundred-dollar bills changing hands.
It was pretty late when we reached Miami Beach. But there was still plenty of action along Collins Avenue. Men and women wearing their best clothes and their proud new sunburns drifted between the hotels and the night clubs that crowd the street. For the stronger tourists, Miami Beach is a town where there is no end to one day and no beginning to another. The days and nights just go round and round, interrupted only by haphazard cat naps whenever the legs start to buckle with exhaustion. They come down there for fun, they pay through the nose for it, and their time is limited. They hate to waste a moment of it sleeping.
I pulled the Olds up to the entrance canopy in front of Anne Archer’s hotel. Beside me, she straightened, hugging the sable wrap tighter around her shoulders, and studied me.
“I could ask you up to my suite for a drink,” she said quietly. “But I don’t think I will. I’ve done too much of the pursuing down here. It’s not healthy for my ego. I just decided that. Just now.”
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. And she was damned attractive. “Go easy on yourself,” I told her. “You haven’t been doing anything unusual for Miami Beach. It’s a common symptom of something we call the Divorcee Blues. You’ll get over it.”
“Ugh! You make it sound like post-pregnancy depression.”
“There is a similarity. And neither lasts.”
She shook her head slowly. “Still . . . I don’t think I will ask you up. I’m beginning to dimly remember something from Detroit. Men act better if you let them do the pursuing. At least Detroit men do.”
“We’re pretty much the same, one place or another.”
“Unfortunately.” She got out of my car, onto the pavement, and slammed the door shut after her. Looking in at me through the open window, she told me quietly, “If you are interested, give me a call sometime.”
She turned on her high heels and walked quickly across the pavement. A uniformed doorman appeared from nowhere, opened the big rose-tinted glass door for her. After she went through it, I let out the brake and drove away, feeling vaguely depressed and eager to get back to the Straight Pass.
I followed Collins down to Fifth and went over the MacArthur Causeway to the mainland, skirting southeast Miami to take the Bay Shore Drive back down to Dinner Key. I began to feel better as soon as I got out of my car and onto the docks. It was quiet and dark there, and I could see millions of stars crowding the sky. Lights showed on some of the big yachts. The sea air’s fresh tang filled my lungs and cleared my brain. On one of the dark vessels along the family pier, a baby began to cry but soon stopped; the gentle rocking of a moored boat and the sound of water lapping at the dock pilings add up to the most effective baby soother there is.
My sneaks made little sound on the timbers of my pier. I was halfway along it when I saw the man sitting in the outdoor phone booth near the end of the pier. He was not making a phone call. Just sitting there waiting, with the glass door open to get the air.
As I drew even with the booth, he stood up and came out of it. He was a paunchy man of medium height in a wrinkled white suit and a blue straw hat. He had a thin, pointed nose, pale eyes that had never liked anything they’d seen of the world, and a small mouth like a locked purse.
“You Anthony Rome?” He had the voice of the chronic whisperer.
I nodded.
He jerked a thumb at the Straight Pass. “Your boat?”
I said it was.
“I gotta talk to you, private.”
I didn’t know at the time that I had anything to be nervous about. I’d had a few desperate would-be clients seek me out there in the middle of the night before. I assumed he was one of those.
“Sure,” I told him. “Come on board.”
I stepped down off the pier into the cockpit of the Straight Pass. He climbed down behind me. I went to the light switch behind the flying-bridge ladder, flicked it. It lighted a small lamp in the deckhouse and a larger one up in the main cabin.
Just inside the open cabin door another man stood facing me with a gun in his hand.
This man was short and thick-bodied, with immense shoulders an
d a wide, brutal face that looked as if it had been stepped on gently by an elephant. The gun in his massive hand was a .38 Police Special with a silencer attached to the barrel. The dark, deadly little snout of the silencer was aimed at my stomach. The gun didn’t quiver even a little bit. Nothing about the man moved.
Even his lips hardly moved when he spoke. “Come on in.” I looked from the gun to his tiny cold eyes.
The man behind me whispered, “You better. He don’t look it, but he gets nervous.”
I moved slowly through the deckhouse. The massive gun toter backed deeper into the cabin, keeping the gun aimed at my middle. I entered the cabin. The man behind me followed, but he wasn’t quite close enough for me to be able to get away with whirling and grabbing him. Not with that gun trained on me.
The man with the gun tilted his head slightly at the canvas- and-hardwood yacht chair beside the transom settee. “Sit.” I lowered myself tensely onto the canvas seat, still watching the massive hood’s gun and his eyes.
The voice of the man behind me whispered, “Put your left arm behind the chair. Just the left arm.”
I felt myself stiffening. “Do I get told why?”
“I could shoot you,” the short, wide man in front of me suggested thickly. “It wouldn’t hardly make any noise at all.” He meant it. They both meant it; they wouldn’t mind a bit.
I got my left arm behind the chair. The whisperer’s hands seized my wrist, forced it down, taped it quickly and tightly to one of the chair legs.
“Now the right arm.”
I did as I was told. My right wrist was taped securely to the other chair leg. Then the hands left me. I started to turn my head to look at the man behind me.
A large sopping sponge came against my face, smothering my nose and mouth and obscuring my vision. I held my breath as the first whiff got up my nostrils.
“Don’t do that,” the voice of the man behind me whispered peevishly. “I could easy knock you out first.”
I fought down panic, made myself relax. I began to breathe in the chloroform fumes. They went up my nostrils and filled my mouth and seeped into my brain . . .