Shayne stood still and put his hands in the air. Blinking against the glare of the flashlight he could see nothing except the glint of metal at the point of origin of the light. The glint of metal moved and the voice said triumphantly, “Keep your hands high in the air. This is a double-barrelled shotgun with both triggers cocked. What are you doing on this property?”
Shayne said, “I could say I was waiting for a streetcar, but I doubt if you’d think that was very funny. As a matter of fact I got lost out on the bay in a rowboat in the dark and rowed in to the closest light I could see on shore. I thought I might leave my boat tied up at your dock until daylight tomorrow, and telephone for a taxi to come for me.”
Charles’ voice had a note of feline ferocity in it as he said flatly, “Nuts. You’re that smart private eye, Mike Shayne. I was expecting you after you sent your secretary out to case the layout this afternoon.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shayne protested. “I’m a tourist from up north and I rented a row-boat…”
Behind the unwavering flashlight, Charles spat out an obscene word. “Don’t stand there and lie to me. Keep your hands up and turn to your right, back to the path and up to the house. I’ll be right behind you and this shotgun is hair-triggered.”
Shayne kept his hands high and turned slowly to his right and angled back toward the path. Since leaving the rowboat, he had heard not the semblance of a sound to indicate Timothy Rourke’s presence on the scene. He devoutly hoped that Charles had not heard anything either.
The light followed him, staying on his face as he passed ten feet in front of a stocky, motionless figure. By narrowing his eyes and looking sideways out of the corners, Shayne was able to minimize the full glare of the light and make out the outline of Charles’ figure. The chauffeur held the flashlight in his left hand, with the twin barrels of the shotgun resting across his left wrist following the direction of the light as it followed Shayne. He did not move from his stance until Shayne was well past him, and then the light dipped and wavered, and Shayne heard footsteps stalking his own. He slowed as he reached the pathway leading from boathouse to the garage, but the footsteps also slowed behind him and Charles ordered harshly, “Keep moving toward the house, Shamus. There’s buckshot in these two barrels.”
The voice was not more than ten feet behind him, and the light was steady on the small of his back. Shayne moved on, following the winding path easily by the light of the flash that fell ahead of him on both sides.
The blur of light ahead through the shrubbery grew stronger, and Shayne let his steps drag a trifle, listening intently to see if Charles would unwittingly close the gap between them. It seemed to him that his pursuer moved a couple of feet closer. That would make it eight feet, Shayne calculated, still not close enough to happily come to grips with a shotgun.
But as he approached a thick clump of hibiscus and could discern that the house lights were quite close and bright beyond its shade, he knew it was his last chance to avoid the ignominy of being marched in at the point of a gun like a craven thief. He didn’t know how much of his determination was born of the memory of what Lucy had said about Charles that afternoon (what she had left unsaid, actually), but he did know suddenly that he couldn’t let the Rogell chauffeur take him like this.
He tensed as he reached the thickest shadow of the hibiscus, braced his heels and flung himself backward and down. As he hit the ground full-length with arms still stretched over his head, there was the terrific blast of both barrels of a twelve-gauge directly over his body.
At the same moment his flailing hands fastened on Charles’ ankles and he jerked them from under the man and heard the gun fall to the ground. Then Shayne was on his knees furiously driving a left and then a right fist into the whitish blur that was Charles’ face as he tried to roll away. His left glanced off the chauffeur’s cheekbone, but his right connected solidly with mouth and blunt chin at the precise moment the back of the man’s head was in contact with the ground.
There was a splendid crunching sound and Charles’ head lolled to the side. Otherwise he did not move.
Shayne dragged himself to his feet and exhaled a great shuddering breath, faintly surprised to find that he was still alive. A bright light sprang on at the back of the house beyond the hibiscus, and in the light Shayne stooped to pick up the shotgun by the end of its twin barrels with his left hand. Then he got a firm grip at the back of Charles’ neat, green uniform collar, and straightened up and dragged the gun and the unconscious man around the clump of shrubbery into the full glare of a floodlight mounted above the kitchen door and directed across the parking space in front of the garage.
Two women stood just outside the open back door beneath the floodlight looking at him from a distance of forty feet. One was middle-aged and short and somewhat dumpy, Shayne’s first glance told him. The other was young and slender and beautiful. She was bareheaded and dressed all in white, and white draperies trailed out behind her as she sped toward him across the parking space, crying out in a choked voice, “Charles? Is that you?”
Shayne got a grin on his face as he stalked forward dragging Charles and the shotgun behind him. His one fleeting thought was that Lucy was to be deprived of her wish to be on hand the first time he met Anita Rogell.
6
When she came close, Shayne relaxed his grip on Charles’ collar and the chauffeur slumped forward with his face to the macadam. Anita dropped to her knees in front of him and crouched there with her hands on his head and cheek, and cried out tearfully, “Charles! Answer me!”
When Charles didn’t answer, she looked up fiercely at Shayne and demanded, “What have you done to him?”
Shayne looked down at the skinned knuckles of his right hand and said, “He’ll be all right, Mrs. Rogell. Do you greet all your guests with a double-barrelled shotgun?”
Charles moved his head and groaned thickly. Anita bent over him again, crooning softly, and he twisted his body and got the palms of both hands flat on the pavement and hoisted himself up to a half-sitting position. His black eyes were wild and the front of his face was smeared with blood, and the red stuff dribbled off his blunt chin in a slow stream. He spoke groggily through mashed lips and a hole where two front teeth had been, “’S Mike Shayne, Nita. I tol’ you…” He choked on a clot of blood and hacked it out of his throat and then slumped down on his side again.
The older woman had reached the scene and Anita got to her feet, ordering her sharply, “Call Dr. Evans at once, Mrs. Blair. Charles is badly hurt. And tell Marvin to come out here if he’s sober enough to help. We must get Charles inside.”
While the housekeeper scurried away toward the back door, Shayne dropped the shotgun and said, “We don’t need any help for that.”
He stooped and got his right arm under Charles’ thighs, put his left behind the man’s lax shoulders and heaved upward with a tremendous effort, lifting the body that weighed fully as much as his own and holding it in his arms with feigned ease while he grinned down into Anita’s eyes and asked, “Where do you want him?”
For a moment there was electric silence between them while their eyes locked. Anita trembled slightly and sucked in her upper lip and there was a look in her eyes like a young child contemplating a forbidden delicacy. She said softly, “You’re very strong, aren’t you?”
Shayne forced himself to swagger forward as though the heavy burden were no effort at all, deriding himself inwardly as he did so with the knowledge that he was acting like a teenager flexing his muscles in front of his first love. “Which way?” he ground out through set teeth.
“Here. Through the back door. You’d never get him up to his apartment over the garage.” She hurried in front of him, and Shayne followed, his knees almost buckling under the strain, but grimly determined to carry it off.
He was halfway across the parking space and was becoming increasingly aware that he couldn’t possibly make it, when Charles fortuitously gurgled something deep in his throat a
nd began making feeble efforts to free himself from Shayne’s arms.
The redhead thankfully lowered his right arm to let the chauffeur’s dangling feet touch the ground, and got Charles’ left arm around his neck where he levered it down over his own left shoulder. The man was conscious enough to support part of his weight on rubbery legs, and Shayne half-carried him on to the back door where Anita was waiting.
“In here.” She went through a gleaming modern kitchen to a small room directly off it fitted up as a comfortable sitting room. The housekeeper was talking excitedly into a telephone in one corner, and Shayne thankfully let Charles down on a chintz-covered sofa where he lay very still, glaring up at Shayne balefully.
Mrs. Blair replaced the phone and bustled forward, saying cheerfully, “Dr. Evans will be right here. Now you just lie easy, Charles, and I’ll get a cold cloth for that face of yours.”
She hurried through the connecting door into the kitchen and Shayne slowly turned his gaze away from Charles’ venomous glare to catch a queer look on Anita’s face as she stood back and to one side, studying him and not paying the slightest heed to the chauffeur.
It was a melancholy, questing look. At once frightened and somehow exalted. Compounded, Shayne thought, of sheer, lustful desire and passionate hatred. Fragments of Lucy’s description of Anita Rogell went fleetingly through Shayne’s mind as their eyes locked for a second time within a space of minutes.
Without taking her eyes from him and without change of expression, Anita slowly licked her pointed tongue out over her short, upper lip exactly like a cat contentedly licking off cream. Shayne almost thought he heard her purr in the silence.
When she spoke it was not in a purring tone. Her voice was throaty and had a little catch in it. “You’re Michael Shayne.”
He said, “I’m Michael Shayne. Does that give your man license to hunt me down like a mad dog with a shotgun?”
From the sofa, Charles uttered garbled words. Neither of them paid him the slightest heed. They were warily measuring each other like antagonists in a duel to the death.
She sucked in her breath and said, “He warned me you would come tonight. To try and dig Daffy up and take her away.”
Beside them and a few feet away, they were conscious that Mrs. Blair had returned from the kitchen and was ministering to Charles with little clucking sounds of sympathy. Neither of them looked in that direction.
Shayne said heatedly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I explained to your chauffeur that I got lost in the dark while fishing, and rowed in to the first shore lights I saw… hoping I could call a taxi to take me home. And he met me with a cocked shotgun.”
“Why did you send your secretary here this afternoon… if not to discover where Daffy is buried so you could come and take her away?”
“My secretary?” said Shayne in feigned astonishment. “Are all of you crazy?”
“She is named Lucy Hamilton, isn’t she?”
“That’s my secretary’s name,” Shayne admitted. “As a great many people in Miami know. What of it?”
“Do you deny she came here this afternoon pretending to be from a pet cemetery so she could find where Daffy is buried?”
“Of course, I deny it,” said Shayne vehemently. “Why on earth would Lucy do a silly thing like that?”
“Because Charles suspects that John’s crazy sister hired you to try and prove Daffy was poisoned by one of us here because she accused us of murdering her brother.” Anita spoke the words calmly and simply, as though they were of no consequence at all.
Shayne drew in a deep breath and shook his red head in what he hoped was a gesture of utter bafflement.
“You’re ’way beyond me. I don’t follow you at all.”
“I did call Haven Eternal after Charles came back from showing Miss Hamilton Daffy’s grave and told me he thought she was up to something else. They have no representative named Lucy Hamilton, and they don’t even send out people representing them. How do you explain that, Michael Shayne?”
Shayne said, “I don’t. Why should I?”
“And then,” Anita went on evenly, “Charles remembered reading in the papers that you have a secretary named Lucy Hamilton. You won’t deny that?”
“Certainly not,” Shayne said heatedly. “This conversation is utterly absurd. Don’t you have a drink handy?”
Anita tilted her head and considered him gravely for a moment. Then she put out her hand and Shayne took it in his and she said almost gaily, “Of course there’s a drink handy… Michael Shayne,” and her husky voice made rich music of the name.
With her hand in his, she led him past the sofa where Mrs. Blair was on her knees still making clucking noises over Charles. They went out of the room and through the kitchen to the wide, vaulted hallway that Lucy had described to Shayne, and some thirty feet down the hall toward the front door and through a pair of sliding doors on the right that stood partially open. It was a small conservatory, and the temperature inside was the same as Lucy had described the upstairs boudoir. Still holding Shayne by the hand, she led him to a gleaming refectory table in the center with a white lace cloth on it and a huge silver tray holding a cocktail shaker with a small amount of liquid in it, two long-stemmed cocktail glasses that had been recently drunk from, a bucket of cracked ice, a heavy, cut-glass decanter, marked creme de menthe and a quarter full, and another, larger decanter, unmarked, but containing an amber liquor that looked to Shayne’s avid eyes very much like long-aged cognac.
She said, “Marvin and I had stingers after dinner. Would you like to mix another batch?”
Shayne squeezed her hand hard and looked down at the top of her shining head which lightly brushed his shoulder. He released her hand and said, “I’d rather have a straight drink.” He reached for one of the cocktail glasses and she moved toward a silken bellcord, murmuring, “I’ll ring for a clean glass.”
Shayne said, “Please don’t. I’d much rather use one of these and be alone here with you.” He twisted the glass stopper from the large decanter and filled one of the cocktail glasses to the brim. She had moved back close to him when he lifted it to his lips. He breathed in deeply the clean, delightful bouquet from the distillate of sun-ripened grapes, and the tips of her taut, full breasts, behind the silky white of a loose blouse, pressed lightly against his chest as she moved even closer.
She stood rigid, just touching him, her arms straight down at her sides and both hands tightly clenched. Over the rim of his glass, he stared down into her uplifted face. Her eyes were tightly closed and a tear squeezed out of the inner corner of each one and trailed down her lovely, waxen cheeks. Her lips were parted and the tip of her tongue showed between them, and they moved almost imperceptibly, and, faintly as the sound of a muted bell, he heard the whispered words that seemed to well up from deep inside her and not from her vocal cords at all:
“I want you, Michael Shayne.”
He sat the cocktail glass down without tasting the contents. She stood rigid and unmoving against him. Very carefully, he put his right arm about her shoulders. Her flesh seemed to pulse against his as he put slowly increasing pressure against her shoulders, crushing her against his chest, and her head fell back farther and her lips parted more widely, and then her eyes came open as he lowered his head, and they were unfocussed and gleaming, the irises showing enormously large, and when his lips touched hers, her belly and her loins writhed against him and the suction of her mouth on his was avid and compelling.
It was either a brief moment or an eternity that they stood like that, as close as two humans can get. Then Shayne heard the insistent ringing of door chimes from the front, and he slowly released her and stepped back to pick up the cocktail glass in a trembling hand, just as Mrs. Blair hurried past the open doors on her way to answer the front door.
Anita smiled dreamily at him and rested the knuckles of her left hand on top of the table. “I imagine that will be Dr. Evans come to see Charles. He’s always so prompt.”
Shayne took a gulp of cognac. It burned all the way down his throat to meet but not assuage another sort of burning in the pit of his stomach. He said, “That’s nice of Dr. Evans,” set his glass down and fumbled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket while Anita sauntered to the gap in the sliding doors and stood there looking out composedly until Mrs. Blair and the doctor hurried by, and said, “Let me know about Charles at once, Doctor. I do hope it isn’t serious.” She turned back to Shayne and asked serenely, “It isn’t, is it?”
“Just a few teeth knocked out, I’m afraid.” He looked down at his raw knuckles and drew in a deep breath. “You were giving me some absurd reason for his attacking me with a shotgun when…”
“When you decided you needed a drink,” she finished for him. “And it wasn’t absurd at all. I’m sure Charles was exactly right and Henrietta did hire you to dig up Daffy and try and prove she was poisoned.”
“Was she?” demanded Shayne.
“Poisoned? Of course not. Why would anyone want to do a cruel thing like that? Everyone loved her. Except Henrietta, of course. She hated everyone. If Daffy was poisoned, you can be sure that old bag did it. And maybe she did at that,” Anita went on slowly. “It’d be just like her. She could have, you know. Poisoned that chicken herself, and then fed a plate of it to dear Daffy out of spite.”
Shayne grinned sardonically. “And then went around and hired a private detective to disinter the dog and prove her guilt? You can’t have it both ways, Mrs. Rogell.”
“Please call me Anita,” she said absently, her forehead furrowed pensively in thought. “Maybe not, but you can be certain no one else in this household would have harmed Daffy.”
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