Brett Halliday

Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 1

Michael Shayne, wearing flippers and double-tank diving gear, sliced downward through the clear, green-gold water off Key Gaspar.

As always at this depth, he had a sense of perfect ease and freedom. He could do as he liked, go where he pleased. He was alone, with no duties and no obligations. The dangers down here, unlike those he kept meeting in the ordinary daylight world, were simple and predictable.

He said goodbye to the anchor rope, which led not only to the bottom but back to the surface. He went into a forward one-and-a-half somersault, for no other reason than to find out how it felt. He added a half twist at the end, grinning inside his mouthpiece. He was well aware that in the tight fraternity of scuba divers this kind of horseplay was frowned on except in pools. There was too good a chance of forgetting which way was down and which way was up. But today he had decided that the time had come to disregard the rules. They were meant, after all, for the cautious amateur, who wanted to move like a fish, in a fish’s element, while never forgetting for a moment that he was actually a man, with all the usual human worries.

He looked at the depth regulator on his wrist. He looked at it again, puzzled. The needle had given a sudden twitch. As a matter of fact, there appeared to be two needles, and the tiny numbers on the dial, which usually stayed in one spot to let the needle overtake them, were now whirling so rapidly that they kept overtaking each other. The mechanism was definitely out of order. Shayne was feeling too fishlike to let it bother him. Did a fish worry about where it was in relation to the surface? Obviously not.

He was enjoying himself more than he had in weeks. He had been shot at three times in the last twenty-four hours. Two of the men who had shot at him were dead; the third was in jail. This was just exactly the therapy he needed-clear water, absolute stillness except for the singing of the lung regulator, no criminals, no police, nothing living but himself and the fish.

A savage-looking creature slithered toward him. A barracuda, by God, a big one, only two or three feet shorter than Shayne himself. Shayne waved his big fist in the fish’s bared teeth. It flickered away.

The waving blob of a jellyfish was drifting below him, or perhaps above him, depending on whether he was swimming up or down. Shayne veered away, into a small disciplined army of spade fish. They scattered past.

The charts showed the reef at this point to be eighty feet down. But it shoaled sharply to the east, and Shayne hoped he would strike a trench which would carry him down to a hundred feet or beyond. He had always known, he realized, that by passing the invisible hundred-foot barrier he would break into a new and far more interesting dimension.

The high, steady singing of the regulator set off a peculiar overlapping echo in his head. Without understanding the reason for it, he found it far from unpleasant. He had been working too hard, drinking too much, sleeping too little. Once he was down to a hundred feet, he felt sure, the echo would disappear and his vision would sharpen. The truth was, something odd was beginning to happen to the light. Instead of staying a constant shade, somewhere between green and gold, it shifted to violet and was steadily darkening. The color now was like a spreading stain in the water.

Another large, supple fish swam at him through the violet murk. But it wasn’t a fish at all, Shayne noted with surprise. It was a mermaid wearing a white bikini.

And then as it approached closer, the creature’s tail turned into flippers. It was only a woman after all, Shayne was disappointed to see. She had long blonde hair, which was waving like seaweed. Her features were concealed by a glinting face plate. He wondered vaguely how she managed to get along down here without air. He checked his depth regulator again, and now, instead of two needles, there were none at all. The figures on the dial had swum away.

Looking back at the wavering bikini-clad figure, he decided it would be foolish to cross the hundred-foot line by himself. He wanted her to come with him.

He flipped his powerful body upright. She was shaking her head, her lips moving as though he had done something to make her angry. A thought struck him. She had a wonderful figure, a nicely shaped mouth, but perhaps she was one of those ordinary women without gills? That didn’t have to be a problem. He had enough air on his back for them both. There was a recognized technique for sharing an aqualung. Like every experienced diver, Shayne had been checked out on it.

He took a deep breath, which made the light blink on and off, as though it was stage lighting with some kind of faulty connection. As he loosened his mouthpiece and offered it to her, she became more angry. He couldn’t be sure because of the face-plate, but she appeared to be frowning. She made an incomprehensible gesture. Propelling herself closer, she gripped the strap over his shoulder and began to tug.

A stab of irritation threatened to spoil Shayne’s pleasure. What was going on here? These face-plates had one disadvantage: they made communication difficult. If she didn’t want to go down to the reef with him, that was her business. He would go alone.

A quick flutter kick took him safely out of reach. She clutched her throat and pointed upward. There was a twinkle of light. She was gone.

He hung where he was, waving his arms slowly. He decided he liked the strange things that were happening to the light. There was something dull and monotonous about daylight and darkness. But this combined the qualities of both. In a moment he would continue down, to see if the effect was the same at a lower level. He was in no hurry. He would hang around here a little longer on the chance that the girl would change her mind and return.

And there she was, suddenly. This time she swam up to him, took his shoulder straps in both hands and kicked out hard. Shayne laughed to himself. This was better. He put his arms around her, pulled her in against him and their face-plates clashed. He tried again. Again there was that clash of face-plates, convincing him that a kiss was impossible. But if they tried hard enough, perhaps they could manage to think of something else.

She wriggled provocatively in his arms. The contact was pleasurable, and Shayne was glad to find that she wasn’t as aloof and reserved as she had seemed at first. There was only one thing wrong. She wanted to go one way; he was determined to go another.

He shook his head, still grinning, tightened one arm around her waist and brought the other around in a long sweep.

His movements had lost some of their usual quickness. He must be more tired than he realized. All at once it seemed that he had either lost his flippers or someone had fastened a heavy weight to each foot. There was a time lag between telling himself what to do and getting around to doing it. He still had a certain amount of kick left, however, and when he at last completed his slow scissoring movement, she went with him. Their joined bodies described a graceful parabola, like one of the carefully rehearsed maneuvers in an underwater ballet.

At the end of the long curve he lost her.

He groped after her. A second Michael Shayne, which had separated itself from the first, watched him critically. He was damn slow. He would never capture the girl unless he could speed up a little. She hovered just beyond his grasp, a very attractive girl, long-legged, deeply tanned. Communication being what it was, he had to get his hands on her to pantomime his appreciation of the way she looked and moved.

Again she danced away. A suspicion began to penetrate his tired brain. She was leading him back to the surface. He wagged his head and let her go. He had come out on the reef to dive.

“Later,” he told her, moving his lips elaborately.

And was she even real? Consider the way she appeared and disappeared, without proper breathing equipment. There was something definitely off about this entire encounter. After he had gone down to one hundred and one, he would come back up. Perhaps she would still be there and he could question her.

He waved goodbye. Moving with agonizing slowness, he doubled forward to start the dive.

The girl, furious at being abandoned, clenched her fists at him. She reached around between her shoulderblades, fumbled with something and shrugged off the top of the bikini.

Shayne stopped. He had wondered if she was real. She was real, all right.

The tiny scrap of cloth drifted away. What the fish would make of it, Shayne didn’t know. It seemed smaller off than on, but even in Shayne’s trancelike condition he was surprised to see what a difference it made. The girl beckoned. Perhaps in a moment he would follow. He wanted to think it over first.

That coral reef had been down there for centuries, and it was still growing. It would still be there, still growing, another weekend. The girl, on the contrary, might choose to vanish, as she had done so suddenly before. And yet, was it wise, was it prudent, to let her think that all she had to do-

A flutter of her long flippers took her away. She looked back over her shoulder to see if he was following. He remained nearly motionless in the water, his head rolling. She returned. He saw her white teeth.

She stripped off the bottom half of her bikini, revolved once before him completely, and with a meaningful flirt of the tail, shot away.

This time Shayne tried to follow. But it seemed to him that the weights he was dragging must have fouled on the bottom. He felt a terrible heaviness in both his arms and his legs. He fumbled at his weight belt. As it fell away he looked up dreamily at the lovely naked girl and saw that he was catching up to her.

He reached the surface. As he broke abruptly into blinding sunlight, he lost consciousness.

chapter 2

The next thing Shayne knew, he was being hauled over the side of a small power-boat by several pairs of hands. He commanded his muscles to help, but the command didn’t go anywhere.

His mouthpiece had been wrenched aside, and he was breathing ordinary uncontaminated air, quite a change from what he had been getting below the surface. There was a shattering pain above and between his eyes.

Tim Rourke’s voice grunted, “Heavy bastard, isn’t he?”

“All together,” a girl’s voice said. “One. Two. Three.”

Again Shayne tried to move his legs. Again he could get no response. He went on breathing, but it took all his strength.

At the second count of three, his rescuers heaved him in over the low freeboard. His head bounced on the hard deck of the after cockpit.

“Turn him over!” the girl ordered sharply. “Hurry.” Hands hauled at Shayne’s shoulders. Lying on his back with the sharp flanges of the air tanks cutting into his shoulders, he stared up at a pelican wheeling above the boat against the sharp blue of the sky.

The blue hurt his eyes. He closed them for an instant, opening them in alarm to find himself being attacked by the same naked blonde he had followed up from the depths. She kissed him passionately, forcing his mouth open with her tongue. Her breasts pressed against him. Her fingers were caressing his face.

Lifting one heavy hand from the deck, he prodded her shoulder. It was probably impolite to mention it, but he had a headache. He also wanted to get out of this cumbersome gear.

“He’s breathing,” Rourke said.

The girl sat back. The pain in Shayne’s forehead slackened slightly and he was able to remember her name.

She wasn’t a figment of his imagination after all. She was a real girl named Kitty Sims. She owned a simple, modern beach house on the Key, and Shayne, his friend Tim Rourke and a second girl named Natalie something had been invited down for the day. Kitty had loaned the detective her diving apparatus so he could go down and look at the coral.

“Boy!” she said fervently.

Shayne rolled his head and looked at the other girl, a pleasant brunette in a one-piece yellow bathing suit. She shook her head, smiling. Rourke, the lank, bony reporter who was Shayne’s closest friend, was standing above him, all knobs and angles in the skimpiest of bathing trunks. He raked angrily at his untidy hair.

“I thought you were supposed to know how to dive, for Christ’s sake. Unless that was all a dodge to get some mouth-to-mouth respiration? There are easier ways.”

Shayne tried to lift his head. His face contorted with pain and he let it fall back.

“Get this stuff off me,” he said hoarsely.

Kitty worked the face-plate over his forehead and unbuckled the straps. The other girl unfastened the long ungainly flippers.

“Mike Shayne,” Kitty said softly, “you’re a hard man to convince.”

Her long wet hair framed a face which, at the moment, was unnaturally pale. Her blonde bangs came down almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes were gray and direct, her cheekbones well marked. She shivered. Drops of water sparkled on her lashes.

All at once Shayne remembered how she had lured him to the surface when he had wanted to go on with his suicidal dive. His lips moved in the beginnings of a grin.

Realizing abruptly that he was conscious again and she was kneeling on the deck beside him with absolutely nothing on but flippers, her hand flew to her mouth. “Natalie, for heaven’s sake throw me that towel!” The other girl, smiling, whipped a large striped towel around her. Kitty worked herself into it and knotted it under her arms. A flood of color had rushed to her face.

“I thought there was something missing,” Rourke said. “I didn’t want to say anything.”

Kitty pushed back her wet hair defiantly. “Well, damn it, I tried wrestling with him. That didn’t work. He outweighs me.”

Rourke gave a hoot of laughter. “Don’t worry about it, baby. You’re a genius. That’s the one sure way to manage Shayne.”

“Shut up,” Kitty said, trying not to smile. “Mike, how do you feel?”

“I’ve felt better.”

Coming to his elbow, he looked for the cognac bottle. He knew there was one there, because he’d had several belts before deciding to try Kitty’s aqualung. He motioned impatiently to his friend, and Rourke poured him a slug of cognac in a paper cup. Shayne rolled the first mouthful around in his mouth to kill the taste of the bad air. Then he emptied the cup in one long pull.

He looked up at Kitty. “I couldn’t understand how you got down that deep in a free dive. I thought I was down to fifty. It couldn’t have been anywhere near that.”

“Goodness no. You were at about ten. I was fooling around with the snorkel, and I knew right away something was wrong when you swam away from the rope. And then that crazy somersault. You know better than that.”

“Euphoria of the deep,” Rourke said, reaching for his highball. “I wrote a Sunday piece about it once. Of course this is the first time I ever heard of a case at ten feet. Well, we had a happy ending. Drink up, friends.”

There was something evasive about his manner, but Shayne put it down to the fact that his own hold on reality was still somewhat shaky. He sat up, checking himself as another stab of pain struck him between the eyes. Kitty offered to help, but he wanted to see what he could do by himself. He made it to a canvas deck chair and settled into it with a sigh. Rourke poured him more cognac.

“That’s enough diving for one day,” Shayne said. “How long was I in the water?”

“Three or four minutes,” Rourke said.

“Three or four minutes!” The detective made a wry face. “Kitty, when we get in, let’s talk to the man who sold you that air.”

She was busy stacking brightly colored pillows against a stanchion. She leaned back against them and lit a cigarette. She and Rourke looked at each other. Rourke puffed out his breath and shrugged.

“We might as well tell him. At this rate he’ll figure it out himself in another minute.”

“Figure out what?” Shayne said.

Kitty frowned at her cigarette. “Mike, I’m always careful about where I fill my tanks. I know you’re thinking about carbon monoxide, but I go to a place in Marathon that makes a big point about being absolutely kosher. Their compressors are water-cooled. There’s no chance of oil vaporizing, which I’ve always heard is the big thing to worry about. And if it was monoxide, it wouldn’t take hold that soon, would it?”

Shayne’s eyes narrowed. “It depends on the concentration. It would have to be pretty high.”

She took a sip of the gin drink Rourke handed her and said brightly, “There’s no point in wondering about it. There must be three-quarters of a tankful left. We can have it tested and find out for sure. Anybody hungry?”

Rourke dropped into a deck chair and pulled a tattered straw hat forward over his eyes. “Get a little sun first.”

For a moment no one spoke. Shayne took a deep breath, wishing perversely that he were back beneath the surface, where, although he had had a serious problem, he hadn’t known it. Here he was back in the real world.

“It begins to seep through,” he said. “There was more to this invitation than sun and a few drinks and an afternoon on the water.”

“I’m afraid so,” Kitty murmured.

Rourke said, “Now don’t get hard-nosed, pal. The girl’s in a jam and we’ll tell you about it when you feel better.”

Shayne hooked the cognac bottle with one bare foot and pulled it within reach.

“How about you, Natalie?” he asked the second girl. “Are you in on it?”

“Not me,” she said hastily. “I came for the sun and the drinks and the water. I also thought it would be sort of a coup to meet Mike Shayne.”

Rourke sat forward, pushing his hat back with his thumb. “Mike, I know you’ve been working hard. I’ll be the first to admit that you deserve a rest. But there’s a deadline on this thing. In a couple of days, when you get bored with having nothing to do, you’ll take the Do Not Disturb sign down off your doorknob and be ready to go back to work. But this can’t wait.”

“Go on,” Shayne said evenly.

“Kitty happens to be a good friend of mine. She needs some assistance, and she needs it right now. It’s a tense little problem, the kind you can handle with your left hand. This expedition this afternoon was my idea. I thought if I could get you down here, feed you a steak and some good cognac, surround you with cute babes in minimum bathing suits, you might say yes. If you said no you’d say it politely.”

“No,” Shayne said.

“Don’t give up hope,” the reporter told Kitty. “He didn’t say, ‘Hell, no.’”

Kitty said quickly, “Mike, I know this was a dirty trick. But I’ve been so worried! You just don’t know. It was bad enough before, but now! If you people hadn’t come down today I would have gone diving by myself. I hardly ever miss a Sunday. After a week at the typewriter it irons out the kinks. I know what they say about the buddy system, but I don’t worry about going down fifteen or twenty feet alone, on the rope.”

She closed her eyes and touched her forehead lightly, as though the pain had been transferred from Shayne’s head to hers. “I usually go out as soon as I have breakfast and read the Sunday papers. I’d be dead now.”

Natalie put in uneasily, “Kitty, now wait.”

Kitty said, “It’s my aqualung. If somebody let out some air and put in something else, it was meant for me. No one would ever know it was anything but an accident-that’s the part that scares me. People would tut-tut and say I shouldn’t have gone down alone.”

“Oh, by the way, Mike,” Rourke put in-the casual manner didn’t fool Shayne, who knew that the reporter was very much in earnest-“you remember Cal Tuttle. Kitty used to be his secretary. This was his Key.”

“Key Gaspar,” Shayne said slowly, drinking. “I knew that name sounded familiar. Wasn’t it some kind of a rumrunners’ hangout during Prohibition?”

“Absolutely,” Rourke said. “Tuttle used to bring the stuff up from Havana and land it in the cove at the south end. The Miami and Palm Beach bootleggers would come down in fast boats and pick it up. Tuttle owned a half dozen Keys, but this is the one he held onto. You’re going to listen to this now, aren’t you?”

“I’d rather hear it some other time, but go ahead. Incidentally,” he added, looking across at Kitty, “I didn’t say thanks.”

She blushed slightly again. “You’re welcome. I just hope nobody had a telescope on us when we came out of the water.”

“I owe you a bathing suit,” Shayne said. “Pick one out and tell them to send me the bill. Where do you keep your diving equipment when you’re not here?”

“In a kitchen closet, and I keep it padlocked. I remember unlocking it this morning.”

“It isn’t hard to force a padlock. Does anybody else use this aqualung besides you?”

“No, nobody. You’re the first one in ages. People sometimes come down to dive, but they bring their own gear.”

Shayne nodded. “Toss me a cigarette, Tim. O.K., Kitty, tell me what’s happened.”

Rourke threw him a cigarette and a book of matches. Kitty bit her lip.

“Last weekend I found my cat on the back step with her throat cut.”

“Kitty, how ghastly!” Natalie exclaimed. “Your lovely Siamese? You didn’t tell me.”

Kitty shook her head, her face troubled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. I don’t mind living alone, really. I like it, in fact-my marriage was rather a mess at the end. I don’t want to turn into one of those hysterical women who run to the nearest man for help when the least little thing goes wrong. But this was actually quite scary. Her name was Awn. I loved her dearly. There wasn’t any doubt what had happened, or even why.”

She raised her glass in both hands. Quickly, while she looked into it reflectively and then drank, Shayne reviewed the odd scraps of information Rourke had dropped earlier in the day as they drummed down the Overseas Highway in Shayne’s Buick.

Shayne himself had been hunched moodily over the wheel, hardly listening, letting the salt breeze whip away some of the tensions that had accumulated during the previous day and night. He knew Natalie, an agreeable girl who smiled a little too often for Shayne’s taste. She worked on the real-estate page on Rourke’s paper, the Miami News. Kitty also worked there, in the accounting department. She was in her late twenties, Rourke told him, separated from her husband, Hank Sims, a small-timer in the real-estate business, who was still around town somewhere. Rourke hadn’t mentioned her connection with Cal Tuttle, the last of the big Prohibition figures, who had died a year or two earlier. Instead, the reporter confined himself to a physical description. Kitty was tall, blonde, witty, anything but strait-laced, with a marvelous figure-a really marvelous figure, Rourke repeated-and in Rourke’s judgment, which he passed along to his friend with a leer, she could be accurately described as Shayne’s type of woman. Sexy, Rourke thought, was the word that sprang to mind.

As a rule the reporter was the world’s lousiest judge of women, and Shayne paid little attention to the build-up. When they arrived at Key Gaspar and he actually saw Kitty, he was pleasantly surprised.

Now, lowering her glass, Kitty met his eyes. “You’ll really let me tell you about it, Mike? If I put it into words, I may be able to decide if I’m getting skittery about nothing.”

“Poisoning the air in an aqualung,” the redhead said dryly, “isn’t my idea of nothing. Who’s trying to kill you, Kitty?”

chapter 3

The simple tuck she had taken in the towel was beginning to slip. She put her drink on the deck and used both hands to tuck it back in.

“I thought I knew,” she said. “But killing a cat and switching tanks on an aqualung are two such different things. Never mind. There are only a few possibilities.”

“If you want to know my candidate,” Natalie put in, “it’s Brad Tuttle. What a repulsive character. Ugh!”

“He was my candidate, too, till this happened,” Kitty said. “The point is, Mike, under the terms of Cal’s will five of us were left the Key in common, the Key and everything on it. I don’t know if you can see the main house from here. Part of it, anyway.”

Shayne looked the way she was pointing. They were lying a half mile offshore. Near the southernmost end of the Key, facing a protected cove and partially screened by a tangle of mangroves and gumbo-limbo trees, he saw a low stucco belltower. Gaspar was one of the Middle Keys, halfway down the curving chain between the Straits of Florida and the Gulf. It was shaped like an hourglass, so narrow at the waist that higher-than-usual tides, Shayne thought, would probably wash all the way through. A ramshackle quarter-mile trestle connected it to Smuttynose Key and the highway to Key West.

“He was a funny mixture, Cal,” Kitty said. “Most people never saw his sentimental side. He just wasn’t open to argument on the subject of Key Gaspar. Toward the end he told me a lot about what it was like back in the twenties. Whatever it was for most people, that was a glamorous period in Cal’s life. His boats were faster than anything the revenue people had. That was before the causeways, and he knew every inlet and shoal and passage. He could nip in and out on the blackest night without lights. He made tons of money. He spent most of it. You could tell by the way he described those days that he had a perfectly gorgeous time. Something slipped finally and he ended up in prison. His lawyer wanted him to sell the Key, but he wouldn’t. He wanted it to stay the way he’d always known it, wild and unspoiled. That’s why he tied it up the way he did in his will.”

“Did he have any children?” Shayne said.

“Only one, Barbara. She went to college and married a boy she met there. Naturally she didn’t boast about having a father who was in jail for killing a government man in a gunfight. After Cal got out she didn’t have anything to do with him for years. They finally made up after her husband died, and she came here to live. She didn’t especially care for the Key, though, and Cal knew she’d sell it like a shot if he left it to her outright. So he set up a Joint Tenancy. You’ve probably heard about that kind of arrangement, Mike. It was new to me.”

“Yeah,” Shayne growled, “and it’s always a hell of a way to leave property.”

“He had a problem, you see,” she said. “He didn’t want the Key to be bulldozed and landscaped and covered with a clutter of those horrid little shacks on stilts. From his point of view, the more complications the better. There are only four of us left now. His brother Ev died in a fire last summer.” She ticked off the survivors on her fingers. “Barbara. Me. Brad, another brother. Frank Shanahan, Cal’s lawyer. We all have lifetime rights. The one who lives longest inherits the whole thing. Theoretically we could all move into the main house, but nobody wanted to do that. Cal left a letter explaining why he did it this way. He had to give us all equal rights in everything or it wouldn’t be legal, but he wanted Barbara to have the house. The rest of us could build if we wanted to, and he suggested where. I’m the only one who did. Brad has an old secondhand trailer on the other side. He brings a girl down most weekends and gets drunk and goes diving. I think he’s hoping to find a sunken treasure ship-there’s an old story about a wreck between here and Smuttynose.”

Shayne looked at Rourke. “Brad Tuttle?”

“Yeah,” Rourke. said. “It rang a bell with me, too. I got all the Tuttle envelopes out of the morgue yesterday, and I talked to a couple of cops who know him. He’s Grade B bad news. Nothing like his brother. He never made any real dough, and whenever somebody wants some muscle, he has to be available. He collects bad debts for a couple of loan sharks on the Beach.”

“And he could have butchered my lovely Siamese,” Kitty said bitterly, “and sat down to dinner afterwards without washing his hands. I loathe that man.”

Natalie exclaimed, “Kit, you’d better move in with me and stop coming down for weekends. This is definitely not healthy.”

“Don’t I know it! Mike, what do you think?”

“First, what about the brother who died in the fire?”

“Ev. He was younger than the others, and nothing like either of them. He was drunk most of the time. Cal had to keep bailing him out of the drunk-tank, and he sent him three dollars in the mail every day. That was one of my jobs. A weekly allowance didn’t work-it vanished the first day. He fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and set his mattress on fire. That had happened before, but somebody always smelled the smoke and put it out in time. I liked Ev, but I didn’t know why Cal included him in the Key. He never came down here even for an afternoon. He said he had a superstition about it. He talked about taking legal action to resign his share, but he never stayed sober long enough to make the first move.”

“Now about Shanahan. Is that the Frank Shanahan who’s a Civil Court judge?”

“Yes. He was Cal’s lawyer all through. He’s engaged to Barbara.”

“I know him,” Shayne said, “and I doubt if he’s ever cut a cat’s throat in his life.” He lifted his paper cup thoughtfully. “Were you Cal’s mistress, Kitty?”

“Hey,” Rourke protested.

“No, it does seem to stand to reason,” Kitty said, coloring. “I was his secretary for four years. A one-fifth interest in his estate is a big bequest to a secretary. Of course, everybody assumed there had to be more to it, my husband, for one.”

“That goon,” Natalie said.

“Hank has his points,” Kitty said. “I admit I went through a stage where I didn’t think so, but I can be more objective now, if I force myself. Real-estate people get a very strong attachment to private property, and I was one of Hank’s possessions, like a toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to share your toothbrush with somebody else, would you? Of course not. I got along well with Cal, but that’s as far as it went, Mike. It never occurred to me that he was leaving me anything. I know why he did it-he knew how I felt about this place. With me in on the tenancy he could be sure it wouldn’t be sold. But Hank wouldn’t listen. After Cal’s funeral I opened the registered letter and clang! The fight began. It hadn’t gone far before I started throwing his clothes out in the hall. If that was the way his mind worked-”

Natalie said, “What about the theory that that’s what Cal expected to happen?”

“That was Ev’s notion, in one of his lucid moments. It’s that Cal never liked Hank. They were in some kind of deal together, and Hank made the mistake of trying to slip something past him. Cal was always offering to stake me to a divorce. He’d seen a couple of examples of Hank’s jealousy, and I suppose he knew precisely what would happen when Hank heard about the will. Ev had surprising insights at times. He said Cal liked to be the one who pulled the strings, and the chief quality he learned in jail was patience. He didn’t succeed in breaking up my marriage while he was alive. Very well, he’d do it after he died. This is Ev talking, you understand. It’s not the whole story, by any means. Hank said I could prove I hadn’t been sleeping with Cal by selling my one-fifth, but I wasn’t about to do that. So farewell, Hank.”

“One more question, Kitty,” Shayne said. “How much do you think the property is worth, in dollars?”

She frowned. “Natalie, you know real-estate prices.”

“It’s hard to say,” Natalie said. “There isn’t enough of a market. I like Kitty’s new place, but the big house is one of those Moorish monstrosities, and it needs a million things done to it. What’s the acreage, Kitty, about seventy-five? Well, if you found the right kind of well-heeled eccentric, maybe you could get two hundred thousand. If you were lucky. A developer might go another hundred. But that’s not really in the cards. The water supply’s too uncertain. Something has to be done about the trestle before it falls down. Not to speak of the low spot in the middle-that means an earth-moving operation. There are other keys nearer the mainland, without this screwy ownership. But in the long run, when there’s only one owner, who knows?”

“I didn’t tell you, Nat,” Kitty put in. “Florida-American is interested.”

Natalie looked surprised. “You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. They don’t know I know it. Dear Barbara has given them an option, contingent on getting the rest of us to agree. Everybody else has agreed. Not me.”

“What kind of money?”

“Don’t ask me. I haven’t let them get that far. I’ll be damned if I’ll sell! In the first place, and this may seem very cold and calculating, I’m the junior tenant. Barbara’s forty-four. Judge Shanahan’s in his fifties. I don’t know how old Brad is, but he’s been around a long time.”

“He’s sixty-three, if I remember,” Rourke said.

“There! Mike, I can show you a copy of Cal’s letter. He talks about how he hopes Gaspar will still be unchanged fifty years from now. In fifty years Barbara would be ninety-four! That must mean he wanted it to end up with me. Everybody’s been telling me all my life to stop being romantic and to be practical for a change. I’d be foolish to sell, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I, Mike?”

“If everybody dies a natural death,” Shayne said gravely, “the odds are on you.”

“Of course they are. I knew you’d agree with me. Legally I only own twenty-five percent. As a practical matter it’s a good deal more.” She stopped short, catching Shayne’s eye. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”

“You asked me for advice.” He finished his drink and crumpled the paper cup. “Here it is. Sell.”

“Sell!” she cried. “For one quarter, when I have every expectation of-You couldn’t have been listening. All my life I’ve wanted a place of my own. You should see some of the holes I lived in with Hank. I had to go without lunches for a year to save up for the down payment on that house, and the mortgage won’t be paid off for another nineteen years. If they knock it down with a bulldozer, I’ll still be stuck with the mortgage payments. Over my dead body!”

She said that fiercely, but then clapped her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t like the way that sounded.”

Shayne said, “Just because an old rumrunner was sentimental about this particular Key doesn’t mean you have to be, too. You didn’t play cops and robbers here. If Natalie’s right, this land-company offer’s a fluke and it may never happen again. Your co-tenants don’t want to sit around waiting to see who dies last. Put yourself in their position. I take it there wasn’t much of a cash residue in the estate. I don’t know about the other two, but I know Shanahan. You can tell by the bags under his eyes that he owes money. This may be his only chance of ever raising any money out of his inheritance from Cal.”

“I’m sure they all want to sell,” she said miserably, “but doesn’t it make any difference what Cal wanted?”

“Cal’s dead and buried. Listen to me. It’s like the Ten Little Indians rhyme-you started with five and now there are four. Seventy-five acres sounds like a lot, but most of it’s swampland. You’re on pretty close quarters. It’s nice to have a place on the ocean to spend your weekends, but they’re going to be nervous weekends. When people start cutting cats’ throats, it’s a sign that it’s serious. Which one has been talking to you about selling?”

“Brad. I didn’t let him get very far. He said something about fifty thousand, I said go to hell and that was that.”

“Did he bring it up again after your cat was killed?”

She nodded. “The next day. He said they’d raise their offer to fifty thousand and one-I don’t mean fifty-one thousand, but fifty thousand plus one dollar. I had a real case of hysterics after he left.”

Shayne continued, “And the next step was the aqualung. That came pretty close, Kitty. They’ll keep on trying, and one of these days you’ll stop being lucky.”

“Mike, how can I just lie down and let them walk all over me? I thought if I explained things, you could-”

Shayne shook his head shortly. “You can’t buy around-the-clock protection for the rest of your life. It’s too expensive. After they murder you, I might be able to pin it on one of them, but how would that help?”

Natalie burst out, “But it’s monstrous! This is the United States, after all.”

“It’s a fairly remote part of the United States,” Shayne remarked. “These Tuttles have a point. Kitty’s an outsider. I’ve been given two possible reasons why Cal put her in his will-either to break up her marriage or to keep the Key from being sold. The rest of them can’t be pleased about either reason. If there was no actual cash in prospect, I don’t think they’d do anything but talk about it. Even with Kitty out of the way, there would still be three horses in the race, and the purse isn’t that big. Think of Brad for a minute. A smalltime collector all his life, and here all of a sudden he has a chance to pick up twenty-five percent of a purchase price of three or four hundred grand. No, make that thirty-three and a third percent-with Kitty dead of carbon monoxide poisoning there’d be only three survivors. Be realistic, Kitty. Turn it over to a lawyer and tell him to make sure you get your one fourth, plus full assumption of your mortgage. Figure that as your legacy, and buy some ocean-front property somewhere else. Then you can sleep nights.”

“I hate to say it,” Natalie said slowly, “but Mike’s right, you know. That Brad is a real Charles Addams character. If I had to spend weekends on the same seventy-five acres, I’d want him to think we were good friends.”

“It’s so humiliating,” Kitty wailed. “The Florida-American option expires Wednesday. I thought if I could only stick it out-”

Shayne’s eyebrows knotted. “Wait a minute. That might make a difference. What happens after Wednesday?”

“It’s back to the status quo, I guess. This isn’t the only area they’re interested in, and Barbara can’t keep them dangling forever. If she can’t deliver a clear title, they’ll look somewhere else.”

Shayne thought a moment. “I still think you ought to deal yourself out. It’s too touchy. But if you want to take a chance on the long run, the thing to do is leave town. They’ll be mad, but maybe not quite mad enough to kill you. Stay away a couple of weeks and give it time to die down. I’ll talk to Brad in the meantime. Maybe I can scare him a little.”

Her hands together, she was glowing at Mike. “Mike, I knew you could help! I don’t want a house somewhere else. I put too much blood and sweat into this one.”

“I think you’re out of your mind, dear,” Natalie said. “Mike knows about these things. Brad’s older than you, granted. But he can easily live another ten or fifteen years.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about Brad after Wednesday. Right now he’s taken with the idea of being a landowner, but it won’t last. He’s a city type. In another few months I predict he won’t be coming down at all.” She looked at Shayne. “I’ll go to New York, I think. I can call the paper from there-I’ve still got some vacation coming. I’ll get the first plane in the morning.” She tightened the towel with an abstracted gesture, without looking at the detective. “I don’t suppose anything more is likely to happen tonight.”

Shayne sighed. “You did save me from drowning. I’ll keep an eye on you until you get on the plane.”

chapter 4

After returning to shore, Shayne checked the padlocked closet where Kitty stored her diving gear. The top of the padlock, at the point where the shank fitted into the socket, was deeply scored.

Kitty’s beach house was a simple rectangle of glass and vertical cedar siding, at the edge of a dense hardwood hummock. Rourke was trying to start a driftwood fire on the sand beach above the highwater mark. Shayne took over and in a matter of moments had it blazing.

When the flames died down, they broiled the thick steaks Rourke had brought from the city. Kitty changed out of the striped towel into another bathing suit, a fragile affair of cloth and net, nearly as arresting as the one she had taken off underwater. There was a well-stocked portable bar, a battery-powered record player and a stack of jazz records, some of which Shayne hadn’t run across in years.

Suddenly, from somewhere in the tangle of undergrowth, a bird uttered a piercing cry, as though, like Kitty’s Siamese cat, it was having its throat cut. Natalie upset her paper plate as she hurled herself into Rourke’s arms.

The reporter patted her back. “Don’t be scared, honey. Nothing but Count Dracula. He has a right to eat, too, you know.”

She shuddered. “I know I’m being silly, but I keep thinking somebody’s looking at us from the bushes. This is a peaceful, isolated spot, Kitty, and I still say you’re out of your mind. Will everybody please chew a little faster? I’m not driving out through that swamp after dark.”

“Neither am I,” Kitty said firmly. “This isn’t turning out to be any fun at all. Let’s put out the fire and go.”

Shayne said easily, “There’s more steak. Make everybody another drink, Tim. I’m still hungry.”

In the end Shayne had to eat the last steak by himself. After that they poured seawater on the embers, dressed and started back for Miami.

Kitty left her little Volkswagen at the heliport on Goose Key and transferred to Shayne’s Buick. An hour and a half later they were back in the city.

Shayne dropped Rourke and Natalie at Natalie’s apartment, in a court in Southwest Miami. Rourke had brought the compressed-air tank from the aqualung. He unloaded it from the back seat, along with the picnic basket, which now held nothing but steak sauce and an unopened fifth of Scotch. He told Shayne that if anything came up he could be reached either at Natalie’s apartment or his own.

“At your own,” Natalie announced firmly.

“Hell, Nat,” Rourke protested, “I thought you said you were nervous. You don’t want to be alone.”

“I was nervous at Kitty’s. There’s nothing to be nervous about here.”

“Nothing to be nervous about! This is a dangerous neighborhood. It looks all right, but that’s the worst kind. How about that double killing last week in the next block?”

“What double killing?”

“You read about it. Two girls. A prowler, they think. I covered the story, and what a mess.”

Kitty was laughing as Shayne drove away, leaving Rourke and the girl arguing on the sidewalk. She sobered abruptly.

“I don’t know what I’m laughing about.”

“There’s still time to change your mind,” Shayne said. “Brad’s the only one we really talked about, and I think he can be handled. But what about the other two? Shanahan’s been practicing criminal law all his life. There isn’t an angle he doesn’t know. And there’s the woman-if she wanted to be vindictive she could be a worse threat than the other two combined.”

“All I want is one little sliver of beach and a right of way,” Kitty said. “I won’t bother her. Why should she want to bother me? I know I’ll be all right if I can get past Wednesday. She has lifetime use of the house, and I’m paying my share of the taxes. It might be different if she had children, but she doesn’t, and if she and Frank ever actually do get married I doubt if they’ll start raising a family. Can you see Frank getting up for the two A.M. feeding? I can’t.”

But the thoughtful look stayed on her face as Shayne crossed the Miami River and turned left along the River Drive. Following directions, he turned off at Curtis Park and continued north on 23rd Avenue.

“Mike, I don’t know how you usually do when you stand guard, but I’m not going to allow you to spend the night in your car. I have a spare bedroom. We’re both grown-up people.”

She glanced at him swiftly. He gave her a humorous look in return.

“It’s true I’ve had to spend a certain number of nights in a car. I never do it unless I have to. Around three in the morning the time tends to drag.”

“Mike, could we do it like this? Come up with me first and make sure there’s nobody there. Then go back down and drive away. There’s a fire escape. God, I hate to ask you, because there’s nothing filthier, but could you come in that way?”

“Why?” he asked bluntly. “The best thing to do when you have protection is to publicize it. Let everybody know you have a bodyguard and we won’t have any trouble.”

She smiled ruefully. “I was really thinking of my ex-husband, though he’s not quite my ex-husband yet. He’s been making all sorts of difficulties. He may have hired a private detective to keep tabs on me, it wouldn’t be out of character. If you go in with me and don’t come out again, it would be just one more complication, one more thing I’d have to explain.”

She was silent for a moment. “Maybe I just ought to phone Barbara and tell her I’m willing to do the cowardly thing and sign her damn sales contract. I’m no Joan of Arc. But then the rest of my life I’d wonder if I could have bluffed them out of it!”

“If you want to find out if they’re really bluffing,” he said, “call Barbara and tell her you’re leaving town tomorrow, and to keep an eye on your place while you’re gone. Then if they want to do anything about it, they’ll have to do it tonight.”

She turned to him. “You’d be willing to-”

“Sure. I owe somebody for that tank of air. I don’t like to let that kind of debt pile up.”

“Oh, Mike.” She hugged his arm. “Am I glad Tim Rourke put me onto you.”

She pointed. “That one.”

Shayne pulled up in the unloading zone in front of a modest apartment house on 28th. Kitty said, “One other thing we ought to settle before we get out. Your fee. Tim said to offer you two hundred dollars and see what you said.”

Shayne grinned at her. “Give it to the Red Cross. If this works out so you can keep your place, let me come down and dive sometime. But next time I’ll bring my own air.”

“I’d feel better paying you,” she said doubtfully, “but if I’m going to spend two weeks in a New York hotel I’d better accept. You really are quite a nice man, Mike.”

Shayne unlocked the glove compartment, unlocked a steel box inside it and took out a short-barreled. 38 revolver and a box of ammunition. He loaded the gun quickly while Kitty watched.

“I never thought I’d be reassured by the sight of a gun,” she said. “I really hate the damn things.”

Shayne dropped the. 38 into his jacket pocket. Kitty unlocked the door in the inner lobby and they rode upstairs in the automatic elevator. Her apartment was on six. Shayne entered first, the gun in his fist.

He listened a moment, then switched on the lights. He checked the apartment thoroughly before telling her to come in. There was one moderate-sized bedroom, another very small one. The dining area was at one end of the narrow living room, and the kitchen was only large enough to hold a single person at a time. The furniture and pictures were inexpensive, but they had been chosen with care.

“It’s not the Fontainebleau,” Kitty said lightly.

The kitchen window gave onto the fire-escape landing. Shayne freed the anti-burglary bolts on each side, lowered the top sash and looked out.

“Do you agree about the fire escape?” Kitty said from the doorway, sounding worried. “Don’t do it if you think it’s silly.”

“It may not work but it’s not silly. You’re the bait. Let’s see if we catch anything.” He closed the window, shot the bolts into the prepared sockets and drew them up tight. “Put the front door on the chain. I’ll be back in five minutes. I don’t want to park nearby.”

“All right, Mike. I’ll call Barbara and have everything ready so when you come back we can do some serious drinking.” She came in close against him. “It’s a comfort having you around. I’m beginning to realize I was on the point of coming unstuck.”

She pulled him in hard. Coming up on her toes, she kissed the corner of his mouth, then let him go.

He heard the chain clank into place as he went to the elevator. He had a cigarette in his mouth when he emerged from the building. Stopping on the sidewalk, he lit it deliberately. There was no movement on the block, but as he snapped the lighter shut, something pulled his eye to the facade of the building across the street. This was another apartment building like Kitty’s, dating from the same period and faced with the same parti-colored brick. He adjusted his sideview mirror before getting into the Buick. The little glint he had noticed came again, appearing and vanishing in a dark fourth-floor window.

The window was up four or five inches from the bottom, in spite of the fact that the squat bulk of an air-conditioning unit protruded from the next window, surely part of the same apartment if not of the same room. Binoculars, Shayne thought. That would explain why the window was raised, so the dirt and smears on the pane wouldn’t distort the image.

After getting behind the wheel, he turned on the dome light and consulted a road map, unfolding it and folding it again so the unseen watcher, if there was one, would be sure to see it.

Accelerating rapidly, he drove away.

At the next corner he joined the traffic on 17th Avenue, drove two blocks and slid into a parking slot near the YMCA. He strode rapidly back to 27th Street, the street before Kitty’s. Reaching a point which he judged to be about even with the back of her apartment building, he struck in between two buildings and across a paved yard.

The lowermost flight of the fire escape leading to Kitty’s window on the sixth floor was a vertical iron ladder, held in place by a counterweight, beyond the reach of even a professional basketball player. He tried the back door. It was locked.

Before going to work with his lock-picking equipment, he checked the next building, a twin to this one, with the same number of stories and a common wall. The back door was warped and had failed to latch. Shayne entered and rode the elevator to the top floor. A final flight of stairs took him to the roof.

He went cautiously to the front coping and looked over, careful not to let his head show in silhouette against the sky. The fourth-floor window which had been open before was now closed. There were still no lights in that apartment. Shayne waited another moment. When he saw the red glow of a cigarette or a cigar, he crossed the roof to the intervening wall and swung over to Kitty’s building.

There were eight floors, which meant that he had two kitchen windows to pass. No one was home in the top-floor apartment. A light was on in the window below. There was no way to get by without being seen. He clattered down the iron treads without trying to muffle his footsteps.

A woman was slicing onions at the counter in the little kitchen. She stared at him, her lips parted. The onion had made her cry but behind the tears her eyes were frightened.

“I forgot my key,” Shayne said loudly. “It’s really O.K.”

When he could see that she wasn’t going to yell he nodded pleasantly and continued past.

Kitty was waiting. She quickly pulled the bolts and lowered the window. He swung one leg through the opening and jackknifed his big body in after it.

She hugged him quickly. “You said five minutes. It’s five minutes on the dot. I’m beginning to see how people could come to rely on you.”

“Did you get Barbara?”

“Yes. I decided not to tell her where I’m really going. I said Mexico City, and I sort of jumped it at her, to see how she’d react. She didn’t react one way or the other. She just wanted to know if I’d changed my mind about signing. I said no, and that was that. At the end she gritted her teeth and told me to send her a postcard, the hypocrite.”

Shayne decided not to mention his suspicions about the apartment across the street. They would find out soon enough what that meant, if it meant anything.

She had brought out a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of gin, a bucket of ice cubes, and soda and water. Shayne made the drinks. She had an Ella Fitzgerald record on the record player, turned low.

“I’ve been trying to think if there’s anything else I ought to tell you,” she said nervously. “I can’t think of anything, and there’s no point in going around in circles. So to change the subject, how are you at backgammon?”

“Fair,” Shayne said, handing her the drink.

“Mmm. Now does that mean you’re really only fair, or that you’re very good and you don’t like to boast? Because I was going to suggest that we put a little money on it.”

Shayne smiled slightly. “There’s only one way to find out how good I am. Five bucks?”

She studied him for another moment before assenting. She moved the bottles aside and laid the board on the low coffee table.

“On guard,” she said, rattling the dice in the cup. “Expect no mercy.”

After a time, when bending over the table became awkward, they moved to the floor. Kitty kicked off her shoes. She was drinking steadily. She also won steadily, and by eleven, when the phone rang, Shayne had dropped three games in a row and was out fifteen dollars.

They looked at each other across the board while the phone rang again. She was on her knees, about to throw the dice, her eyes bright with excitement. She put the dice box down quietly.

“It’s a funny thing. I’d completely forgotten why you were here.”

She reached the phone and picked it up before it could ring again. After listening a moment, she held it out to Shayne.

“Tim Rourke.”

Shayne took the phone. “Yeah, Tim.”

“What’s that I hear?” Rourke’s voice said. “The faint tinkle of ice cubes? Soft music? The usual pattern, buddy. You relax while I keep my nose pressed to the grindstone.”

“Did Natalie kick you out?” Shayne said with a grin.

“She’s threatening to. Mike, this girl doesn’t know that the world is going through a sexual revolution. She’s still playing by grandmother’s rules. I want to talk about love and she wants to talk about real-estate prices.”

“What’s she say about real-estate prices?”

“In a minute. My thoughts are all organized, and don’t try to short-circuit me. First-you scoffed when I said I might get that air tank analyzed. It’s Sunday night. Everything’s closed. But you don’t want to underestimate my connections. I know a nurse who works the night shift at Jackson Memorial, and she had a lab technician run off the tests. It’s nitrous oxide, Mike.”

Shayne rubbed his thumb the wrong way along his jaw. Kitty had her head close to the phone so she could hear what the reporter was saying.

“The ordinary hospital anesthetic?” Shayne asked.

“That’s it. Ideal for the purpose. You can’t taste it. You can’t smell it. And so easy to get-every medical supply house has it, no prescription needed. Any time I want to murder a scuba diver, that’s what I’ll use. CO or CO 2 could get in by accident. Not nitrous oxide-that has to be put. The kid in the lab said it was about half air, half nitrous oxide. You still had about ten percent oxygen, a tick less than you’d get on the top of Mt. Everest. That was to give you plenty of time to get out of sight before you conked out.”

Kitty said something in Shayne’s ear. Shayne told Rourke: “Hold on.”

“How would they get it in the tank?” Kitty said.

“I heard that,” Rourke said. “No problem. All you’d need is a little two-way coupling. Any plumber would have it. Mike, are you on?”

“Yeah.”

“Point number two. During a brief interval while I wasn’t chasing Natalie around the sofa, she called a gal she knows who works at Florida-American, the land company. And the news is that yes, they made an offer for Key Gaspar, and confidentially, off the record and for God’s sake don’t put it in the paper, the price is a cool one million clams.”

“A million?”

“Three times what Natalie thought was the outside figure. Cash, not stock or promises. What gives? The head of the company is a guy named Hilary Quarrels. You never heard of him. Don’t feel bad-I never heard of him either. Apparently he’s a big name in that part of the forest. He’s handling it himself, playing it close to the chest. This friend of Nat’s doesn’t think either the price or the location makes sense, but Quarrels does all the deciding in that outfit. As far as she knows, Tuttle’s daughter Barbara has been doing the negotiating. And for the time being, that’s all.”

“Thanks, Tim. It’s been a long day. You must be worn out.”

“Oh, I am. And Natalie’s showing no consideration at all. I probably won’t feel up to calling you again.”

“Anesthetic,” Kitty said thoughtfully after Shayne put the phone back. “Speaking of coincidences-Barbara’s a nurse’s aid in a hospital a couple of days a week. These are nice people!”

“It may help keep the peace,” Shayne told her. “Most hospitals have a pretty good system for keeping track of that kind of stuff. I’ll find out if any bottles of nitrous oxide have been reported missing. It gives us one more handle. Whose play is it?”

She picked up the leather dice cup and shook it, putting it down a moment later. “Mike, I know it’s all very scary, but I keep thinking of more urgent things.” She poured more whiskey into her glass without looking at Shayne. “Such as what are we going to do about the sleeping arrangements?”

chapter 5

Shayne laughed. “It’s early. You can’t be sleepy yet. Let’s change games. How would you feel about a little craps?”

“I haven’t shot craps in years.”

“That’s fine. I’ll be glad to explain the rules.”

She used her backgammon winnings as betting money, and half an hour later she had won another forty dollars, all the cash Shayne was carrying. He looked ruefully into his empty wallet.

“I’ll have to give you an IOU.”

“I never gamble on credit,” she told him smugly, racking the bills. “No, Mike. The time has come. This has been one of the pleasantest evenings I’ve ever had, which is really amazing considering the circumstances. That doesn’t alter the fact that you’re here for business reasons and not for pleasure. Right?”

“Right,” Shayne said, a corner of his mouth quirking upward.

“Will you stop grinning at me so I can remember what I was about to say? You’re here on pleasure. Not business.” She stopped. “No, that can’t be right. It’s the other way around. I’ve had too much to drink, I regret to say. I’ve never been the bait in a trap before. It’s a brand-new experience and naturally I’m nervous. But nobody’s going to set a foot in the trap so long as the lights are on so let’s get underway.”

She sat back on her heels and looked at the sofa, then at Shayne, then back at the sofa. “You won’t fit there,” she said, “unless I saw you off at the knees. The bed in the guest room, so called, isn’t much better. So the solution is obvious. You sleep in my bed, I’ll sleep in the guest room. Where we’ll both keep reminding ourselves, I hope, that we met for the first time twelve hours ago, and actually we don’t know one single solitary thing about each other.”

“Except that you’re pretty good with a pair of dice,” Shayne said.

“That was because I didn’t put my mind on it,” she said. “Whenever I really try, I lose.”

She came to her feet, almost losing her balance. “Mike. You gave the rug a jerk. Was that fair?”

Shayne, laughing, took her by the shoulders to steady her, and turned her to face the bedroom. “You’re first.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she told herself. “Maybe you kick dogs. Maybe you’re a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan. As for me, I’m almost divorced but not quite, and just because you were nice enough to offer to be my bodyguard doesn’t mean-”

She veered too much to the left, but disappeared through the bedroom door without mishap.

Shayne, his smile fading, consulted his watch. It was after midnight. He went to the kitchen. A full range of brass-bottom saucepans hung from a pegboard over the sink. He unhooked a half dozen of these and lined them up on the floor under the fire-escape window, which he opened all the way. Going to the front door, he took off the chain and checked to be sure only the spring lock was engaged.

He poured himself another drink. Kitty came out of the bathroom wearing a short cotton nightgown, which gave her reasonable coverage without concealing the fact that what was being covered was the supple body of an exceedingly attractive girl. With her long blonde hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon, wearing no lipstick, she looked several years younger.

“Pouring yourself a nightcap, I see,” she said. “Don’t offer me one or I might decide to rearrange the sleeping arrangements. This is a job for you. Poorly paid, but a job. I’m bearing that in mind.” She came up to him. “Which doesn’t mean it would be out of place to kiss you goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kitty.”

Without putting down his drink, he cupped her chin in one hand and kissed her cheek lightly.

“Like brother and sister,” she said philosophically. “That’s what I call being sensible. When I get back from New York, maybe I’ll give you a chance to win your fifty-five dollars back?”

“I’ll insist on it,” Shayne said, letting her go. “Now get some sleep.”

She smiled up at him. “The funny thing is, with you here I think I can sleep.”

She went into the tiny second bedroom. After an instant’s hesitation, she left the door open. He heard her pull down the covers and get in.

“Goodnight,” she called, adding, “Thanks.”

Shayne turned off the lights and took his drink to the bedroom. He saw that she had turned down the double bed for him and had left a new toothbrush on the pillow, still in its transparent plastic box. He took off his jacket and shirt and hung them in the bathroom. He shifted the. 38 to the waistband of his pants. His shoes he nudged out of sight beneath the bed. After stacking both pillows against the headboard and making himself comfortable against them, he turned off the light.

He knew he had at least an hour’s wait, possibly much longer. But waiting was not unusual in Michael Shayne’s business, and generally he had to do it in less pleasant surroundings, on a street or in a hallway or the front seat of a car.

His drink and cigarettes were on the bedside table. The partition between the bedrooms was nothing but two layers of plasterboard nailed to the studs. He heard Kitty roll over. He heard her stretch. Once she sat up to check the time, and he heard that. He started another cigarette and so did she. At last, with a muffled sigh, she threw off the sheet and swung her legs out of bed.

And suddenly all Shayne’s senses sharpened. He pulled the. 38 out of his waistband. He waited, and the sound he had heard came again-a faint rustling in the kitchen.

Easing himself out of bed, he went silently to the door. All at once there was a loud clang from the saucepans beneath the kitchen window.

Two long strides took Shayne to the middle of the living room, where he checked abruptly. The Venetian blinds were drawn. It was very dark. He worked forward carefully, skirting the sofa. There was no further sound from the kitchen. At the kitchen door he waited again, listening, his shoulder muscles bunched. He felt for the wall switch and thumbed back the hammer of the. 38.

He snapped on the light and stepped through the doorway. There was a blur of action, too fast to follow. Shayne swore viciously under his breath. A lean gray cat reached the window in one leap from the counter and vanished up the fire escape.

Shayne let the hammer down, thrust the. 38 back in his waistband and swung around. Kitty, in the doorway to the guest room, was laughing and crying at the same time. Her breath came and went in great shuddering gulps.

Going to her, Shayne took her in his arms and stroked her shoulders, as though gentling a nervous horse. Speaking into her hair, he told her to calm down and go back to bed because he wanted to turn off the lights. Her arms were around him, her forehead pressed against his shoulder.

Gradually her shaking subsided. She pushed away defiantly.

“You’ll have to admit it’s funny,” she said, “after going to all that trouble. He’s a fire-escape cat, I know him well. I always put food out for him, but tonight I forgot.”

“I don’t want that light on any longer,” Shayne said.

He went back to the kitchen to snap it off. She was gone when he returned. He groped for the cords on the Venetian blinds and adjusted the slats, letting a faint grayness into the dark room.

“Goodnight, Kitty,” he said at the door to the guest room.

She didn’t answer. He saw the faint outline of the whiskey bottle, picked it up by its neck and took it with him. In his bedroom he found his glass in the dark and poured one by ear. Then he sat down on the bed and found that Kitty was waiting for him.

“I thought we decided this wasn’t a good idea,” he said.

“Mike, darling, I think we ought to change the plan.”

“How?”

“I ought to be here in my own bed if anyone breaks in. You go into the bathroom, I’ll talk to him and maybe find out how much of a combination I’m up against. Besides which-” She twisted up against him and said passionately, “It’s just plain ridiculous. Being apart. Isn’t it?” she demanded. “Say it’s ridiculous.”

Shayne made a wry face in the darkness. It was slightly ridiculous. He looked at his watch as his arm slid around her. The luminous dial told him that now would be an excellent time for their unseen antagonist to be making his move.

“Kitty, we’d better count ten.”

Her mouth found his. She didn’t want to count or do any more talking, and again Shayne admitted to himself that there was much to be said for her point of view. He believed in taking chances when necessary.

Murmuring excitedly against his mouth, she slipped down in the bed and pulled him after her. After a moment she wrenched herself away, pulled the nightgown over her head and came back into his arms.

“Mike. Do something about that gun.”

Then her mouth was against his again. Her flesh was cool and smooth under his hands. The bedsprings grated, and the sound of her harsh excited breathing beneath him roared in his ears.

Suddenly, cutting through these nearby noises, he heard another. It was faint but nevertheless crisp and distinct. He had been listening for it. He bit the lobe of her ear very hard, tightened his grip on her breast and clapped his other hand over her mouth before she could cry out. She tried to pull away. Then she lay quiet, listening.

The sound came again. It was metal against metal. A key was being pushed carefully into a lock.

When Shayne was sure she had heard it, he slipped off the bed and groped for the. 38. His spread fingers encountered her bare hip but not the gun. He couldn’t delay any longer.

Shayne was in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, when he heard the knob being turned cautiously. Kitty made an involuntary sound from the bed; she was frightened.

For an instant there was a twinkle of light in the living room. Then the outer door closed and it was dark again.

Kitty scrambled up in bed. “Who’s that? Is anybody out there?”

There was no answer.

She said warningly, “I want you to listen, whoever you are. I know you’re there. I have a gun and I’ve taken the safety off and it’s pointed straight at the door. I mean what I say!”

Her voice rose at the end. She snapped on the bedside light. Shayne heard footsteps.

A man’s voice drawled, “You wouldn’t shoot your next-door neighbor. We own a valuable piece of property together, you and me.”

“Brad!” Kitty exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“I know I should have phoned, kid. But I was in the neighborhood. Happening to have a skeleton key in my pocket, I thought I’d stop in.”

Shayne touched the edge of the bathroom door, ready to jump. With his left hand, he took his jacket down from the hook on the back of the door.

Brad grunted. “Why, look at here. A nightgown on the floor. Pretty little trifle, ain’t it? What are you doing, sleeping raw?”

“Brad, please,” Kitty said, intensely but trying to sound reasonable. “It’s late. If you’re looking for a drink, take the bottle.”

“Sure, I’ll take a drink. But I want some conversation to go with it.”

“Not now. I’m dead. Tomorrow.”

“But didn’t I hear you’re taking off someplace in the morning?” Brad said vaguely. “I thought maybe you forgot that paper you was going to sign.”

“When did I say I was going to sign anything? I made it perfectly clear-I’m satisfied with the way things are.”

“You’re satisfied. But the rest of us ain’t. Maybe you didn’t think about all the angles. That Key belongs to us,” he said persuasively. “It’s Tuttle Key, that’s what everybody calls it, been in the family since aught-nine. Cal and me used to ramble around there together, trap muskrats and shoot snakes and have a high old time. I don’t give a damn how many legal-eagles say different, you can’t tell me Cal was in his right mind when he wrote that will. Just because you laid him in his old age, that don’t make you any part or parcel of the family to my mind.”

Kitty said sharply, “Now you get out of here, Brad! If you’re broke, look in my purse out there. Just leave me enough for a cab.”

There was a moment’s silence. Brad said thickly, “Who do you think I am, Ev? You can turn me off with a pint and a five buck bill?”

“I know exactly who you are. Brad, it’s one o’clock in the morning, and I have a headache.”

“You’ll have more than a headache by the time I’m done with you! You think I’ll let you get me potted and set me on fire the way you did Ev?”

Shayne’s eyes narrowed.

Kitty’s voice went into a thin scream. “Do you know what you’re saying, you damn moron?”

“Moron. Oh, sure. I’m stupid. I’m a moron. But I know more than you think! You were seen! You were seen getting him plastered. You were seen coming out of his room. We’ve got a witness! Surprised? Too bad, baby, it was a nice try. You’d better sign the paper, I’ve got it right here with me, or that little Ev matter goes to the D.A.’s office.”

“You’re raving,” she said coldly.

“Not that I hold it against you. Ev was asking for it. And it ups the percentage for the rest of us.”

“I think it’s time to put an end to this.” She raised her voice. “You can come-”

Brad interrupted her with a yell. “And if that don’t stick, there are other ways! I mean if worst comes to worst I’ll be happy to! You put out for Cal and don’t tell me different because I happen to know, he told me himself. But I stink! I’m a low-income slob. You wouldn’t pull down that sheet for me now, would you? Christ, no!”

He shifted ground abruptly. “Can’t you get it through your head? There’s only three more days! Jesus, when I think of that gold just laying there-”

“Stop it, Brad.”

“I’ll raise our offer to seventy-five, and throw in whatever that shack of yours cost you. When did you see seventy-five G’s? Put on some fancy duds and move to a Beach hotel for the season. Get yourself a husband with real dough. I know a couple of good prospects I can steer you.”

“Brad, you don’t get the idea. I want the place. I don’t want the money.”

When Brad spoke again his voice was almost plaintive. Again the change in tone caught Shayne as he was about to open the door.

“I’m saying if you don’t sign the paper I’ll have to kill you,” Brad said. “Who do you think killed your cat? That was to make you realize.”

“You aren’t killing anybody tonight,” she said.

Brad cackled, a high old man’s cackle. “I do like the way you handle yourself, baby. Naked as a clam under that sheet, and it don’t bother you a bit. I got an idea. Why don’t I switch over? I’ll take care of Babs and that shyster, that’ll leave the two of us, and how many years have I got? I wouldn’t bother you much. I don’t hardly ever do it more than once a night any more.”

She said slowly, “You’re a disgusting old man.”

He cackled again. “I hope to tell you! But I ain’t a day older than Cal was when you opened up for him. You’re turning me down? You wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole? Then let me tell you, baby, I got some disgusting plans for right now. Here’s some pictures to start with.”

“Playing cards!” Kitty exclaimed.

“Yeah, if you tried to play poker with this deck, your mind would keep wandering. Look at them positions.”

“Mike, he has a knife!” Kitty called.

Shayne pulled the door out of his way.

chapter 6

Brad whirled, a thin, tough old man with straggling gray hair. He needed a shave badly. His eyes were small and bloodshot and very mean. He wore sneakers, dirty jeans, a cheap short-sleeved shirt that showed the gray thatch on his chest, tattooed forearms that were like a twist of bridge cable.

He was holding a switchblade knife in his left hand, his thumb at the base of the blade. His first motion showed Shayne that he knew what he was doing.

“Do you know who I am?” Shayne said.

“Mike Shayne,” Brad said in a low voice, and moistened his lips. His eyes flickered around to Kitty. He forced a sneer to his lips, deciding on the tack he was going to take. “In the bathroom with only a pair of pants on. I’m just going to have to kill you too, Shayne. That’s too damn bad because I know it’s going to be work. Just take one step this way. O.K.?” He waved Shayne toward him with his right hand. “One step.”

Kitty reached for the whiskey bottle on the bedside table. Brad heard the slight readjustment of the bedsprings, darted his knife at her arm and snatched up the bottle himself as Shayne threw his jacket at him. He ducked beneath it, moving amazingly fast, and drove up at Shayne’s mid-section with the knife all the way out. Shayne was twisting even before the thrust started. It came very close.

Off balance, the detective chopped at Brad’s forearm. His hand glanced from the bone. The knife licked out at him again.

The old man’s spittle was flying. Shayne had no room to maneuver. He went down and away, and the point of the knife left a hot trail of pain across his shoulder.

He hit the wall and rebounded. He missed with a kick. Brad was unbelievably fast for a man his age.

Shayne came to his feet with the chair in his hands, its legs outward. For an instant everything stopped, as though frozen by a stop-action camera. Brad was nearest the door, his eyes darting from one enemy to the other. Kitty had recoiled against the headboard, still clutching the sheet to her breast. The sheet had pulled out at the bottom of the bed, and Shayne saw the butt-plate and crosshatched grip of the. 38.

“Shall I scream, Mike?” Kitty said quietly.

“Not yet,” Shayne told her.

He began to move, watching Brad’s eyes. Brad had seen the gun. Of the three, he was nearest by a step. He smiled viciously, showing gleaming false teeth.

“A gun. What do you know?”

He stepped toward a point where the knife would intersect with Shayne if the detective lunged. Then they both moved at once. Brad whirled the bottle at the lamp. There was a flash, then darkness. Shayne stabbed out with the chair, trying to get between Brad and the bed. He was late again. One of the legs hit something, but only Brad’s shoulder. Brad swore.

Shayne lifted the chair and brought it down with his full strength. A leg broke. Shayne sprang away.

For a moment there was no sound. The blackness was absolute. There was a wall switch near the door. Shayne knew where it was, and he could reach it in one fast motion. But he couldn’t risk turning on the light if Brad had the gun.

His hand went out to the top of the bureau and fastened on a small jar. He tossed it across the room. Brad fired at the sound.

“Now I know it’s loaded,” Brad said. “I know I didn’t hit you, Shayne. You threw something, didn’t you? The old tricks are always the ones I fall for. Kitty doll, did I hit you, I hope?”

No one answered.

“You don’t want to talk,” Brad said. “That’s O.K. I know I’m no Gary Grant. I live with it. Shayne? Throw something, so I won’t feel lonely.”

Shayne stood absolutely still. This was going to be a bloody business in the dark.

“They don’t give me jobs any more,” Brad said. “I don’t impress people, they tell me. That’s the thing when you’re making collections. One look, and they pay up. Now I give them the look and they think what is this? What’s this old party trying to accomplish? So I have to clobber them, and that’s not so good, it gets the cops in on it. I’m as good as I ever was. I can outwalk, outdrink, outswim and outfight any ordinary person twenty-five years of age, and what good does it do me? They don’t pay pensions in my line. Social Security never heard of me. Now I get a chance at a bundle. One chance, and this bitch stands in my way.”

His voice was coming from the far side of the door. As Shayne’s eyes adjusted, he was able to detect a slight difference between the doorway and the surrounding wall.

“I got the whole night,” Brad said. “You have to come to me, man. How can I miss? Turn the light on and I get you with the gun. Leave it off and I get you with the knife.”

Moving slowly, Shayne lifted a pillow from the bed and wedged it between the legs of the chair. He probed with his foot until it touched his jacket. Scooping it up, he buttoned it around the pillow.

“What did she tell you?” Brad continued. “That she and Cal was just good friends? Don’t believe it. She switched around in them tight skirts and got him so heated up he didn’t know if he was coming or going. Listening to me, baby? Or did you faint?” Shayne moved into position.

Brad’s voice continued, “And she was giving you more of the same when I came in, wasn’t she? Everybody’s got his own methods. Now with Ev. Would Ev take her to his room at that time of the night if she didn’t promise him something juicy and good?”

A slightly darker shadow drifted into the doorway. Brad was going for the light switch, as Shayne would have done in his place.

Brad said lazily, “Nobody making any remarks?”

Shayne thrust the chair at him and Brad struck like a snake.

The knife plunged through the jacket into the pillow. Shayne gave the chair a hard downward twist. Brad’s arm was caught by the rungs before he could withdraw the knife. Shayne whipped the bedspread off the foot of the bed and sent it over his floundering figure. Brad fired twice. Shayne vaulted the bed and came back low from the right, going for the gun.

The old man was still partly trapped in the chair. He was crouching, covered by the bedspread. Shayne was high with another chop. Catching the old man around the neck, he threw him violently, kneeing him in the back as he went down. He located the gun at last. He brought Brad’s hand back hard against the bed. In the dark, hampered by the billowing bedspread, nothing worked. Keeping pressure on the gun, Shayne came to one knee and stamped on it hard.

Brad cried out as his fingers broke, and threw off the bedspread, which wrapped itself around Shayne like a basketful of snakes. The old man slipped away and Shayne was left with the chair.

He hurled it aside and vaulted the bed again. Kitty was no longer on it. Gambling that Brad hadn’t been able to shift the gun from his right to his left hand, Shayne went for the light. At the last moment he reminded himself not to underestimate this antagonist. He whirled. The knife sliced up and hit him high on the right arm.

Shayne was moving away from the blow, and he kept on moving. Checking himself abruptly, he took two careful paces to one side. Brad’s only chance now, while Shayne had no weapon, was to keep him from the switch. He would be groping around in front of him with his injured right hand. The instant that made contact he would slash out with the knife.

Shayne’s leg brushed the bed and he stopped moving. Crouching, he felt about on the bed until his fingers closed on the neck of the broken whiskey bottle.

“You had a chance when you had the gun,” he said softly. “I’ve got a broken bottle. Touch me once and I’ll have to kill you. You ought to be out playing shuffleboard with the other old men. You’re not what you were, are you, Brad?”

Brad sneered. “You’ve got nothing but bare hands.”

“Turn on the light and find out.”

Shayne took a long stride forward, turned and eased back against the bed. He was listening intently. Hearing a faint rustle where he had just been standing, he sliced the flat edge of his left hand around in a wicked arc at what he judged to be throat-level. He hit the side of Brad’s head and instantly raked out with the bottle. The old man grunted. They broke apart instantly.

Shayne circled, listening for Brad’s breathing, waving his left hand slowly as though feeling for cobwebs. He was wound up tight. Listening hard in the tense silence, he heard something dripping near the door.

The dripping stopped. For another long moment the silence was complete. It was broken by the rattle of a sauce pan in the kitchen. Shayne moved fast. Halfway across the living room he slipped on the backgammon board and crashed to the floor. He rolled in the same motion and went into the kitchen in a crouch. He found the switch and flashed on the light for just long enough to make sure the kitchen was empty.

He listened at the open window. There was a faint clanging noise several flights below. Thinking about it later, he realized that Brad had made this noise by dropping something through the iron slats of the fire escape, probably a coin. Actually he was crouching on the sixth floor landing, in the pool of deep shadow against the building, waiting for Shayne to come through the window so he could knife him from behind and then go back inside to finish off Kitty.

Shayne swung up on the sill and put one leg out the window.

He straddled the sash for a moment before deciding to let the old man go. He had come this far in a kind of reflex, as a part of a linked series of actions that had started when they had been feeling toward each other in the dark, each with an edged weapon. But Brad had used up his menace for tonight.

Shayne was wrong. As he started to pull his leg back in, Brad lunged upward, trying to hamstring him.

He missed the tendons as Shayne’s leg jerked. The knife entered Shayne’s calf.

Shayne was blinded by a sudden surge of rage. He uncoiled through the window and followed the old man as he plunged recklessly down the iron steps. Halfway down the first flight Shayne’s leg gave way and he had to grab the railing.

Brad was two floors below, scuttling like a cockroach. Gripping the railing tightly, Shayne watched him go.

A light on the fourth floor came on. Reaching the second floor, Brad hurled himself out on the vertical ladder. It tore loose with a screech and jammed halfway down. He danced on the bottom rung in an effort to free it. Shayne found that he was still holding the broken bottle. Leaning far out, he threw it at Brad. It crashed into the court and Brad jumped from the ladder.

He landed badly, trying to start running too soon, and went down on his left fist, in which he still gripped the knife. When he lurched to his feet he was staggering. His crippled right hand dangled at his side. Wiping his eyes with the back of his left hand, he reeled along the delivery alley to 19th Avenue, where he stood for a moment, outlined in the light of a street lamp at the corner of 19th and 28th Street. Then he disappeared.

Other lights came on in Kitty’s building. Shayne turned to go back up the half-flight to the open window, and then Brad backed into the light at the end of the alley.

A voice shouted. He turned and started across the street at a shambling half-run, clutching his stomach. The shout was repeated. It was followed by a single shot.

Brad went down in a heap. A man walked into the light, his gun ready. He stopped warily a few steps from the crumpled figure. A moment later he was joined by a second man, also holding a gun. When the old man didn’t move they approached him together and looked down at him for a moment before putting away their guns.

Shayne hesitated, thinking.

Then he hobbled back to the sixth floor and swung in through the window. He forgot the saucepans. He kicked them out of the way angrily, snapped on the light and limped into the living room.

“Kitty?”

There was no answer.

“It’s O.K.,” he said. “He lost.”

When there was still no answer he went into the bedroom and turned on the light there. The room was a shambles. He looked in the bathroom, in the closet. Then he got down on hands and knees and looked under the bed, afraid she had been hit by one of Brad’s random shots. After that he checked the coat closet in the living room and returned to the kitchen.

At that point he accepted the fact that she was gone.

chapter 7

Shayne dropped onto the sofa, where he uncorked the gin bottle and took a long drink, after which he rolled up his pant leg to look at the damage.

It wasn’t as bad as he had feared. He went to the bathroom, where he found nothing more elaborate than band-aids in the medicine cabinet. He tore up a sheet, washed the cut as well as he could without being able to see it, and was binding it up when he heard a tapping at the outer door.

He unlocked it without bothering to use the peephole. It was Kitty, wearing Shayne’s jacket, which came down nearly to her knees. She looked lost inside it.

“I locked myself out,” she said faintly. “I went up to the roof.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hurt!” she exclaimed, seeing the trailing bandage.

“It’s not too bad. It’s just a hell of a place to get to.”

“I’ll do it.”

They returned to the bathroom. Kitty pushed back the long sleeves, took Shayne’s clumsy bandage apart and put on a better one, which stopped the bleeding. Using a wet towel, she sponged off his back and shoulder. Her touch was deft and sure.

“You can use a few stitches, Mike. In your leg, mainly. These cuts up here can take care of themselves.”

Using cotton at the end of a short stick, she sponged the cuts carefully with antiseptic. He was straddling a chair while she worked on him from behind.

“If I’d known what I was getting you into!” she said. “First I all but drown you. Then I win your money and more or less force you to make love to me. And right in the middle of that I get you involved in a knife fight with a crazy old man.” She gave a light nervous laugh. “I was so scared! I couldn’t make out what happened at the end. Was that a policeman who shot him?”

“Yeah. Sometimes they’re around when you need them. Not often, but sometimes.”

“He was staggering.”

“He had to jump from the fire escape,” Shayne explained. “I think he fell on his knife. All the emergency switches were turned on by then, and when the cops told him to hold still and explain the knife, all he could do was run. Now I want you to hold still, Kitty. I need an explanation of a couple of things.”

Her hand stopped on his back. “Yes. About me and Cal. You want to know if what Brad said was true. Yes, Mike. More or less.” She sighed. “It lasted for-oh, about half a year. I got in the habit of denying it, and that’s one subject it’s too easy to lie about. I wasn’t ashamed of it at the time. I am now, a little. I don’t need to be told it was the wrong thing to do. I’ve tried to understand why it happened, but you’d have to know Cal. He made me feel so-important, Mike. I thought it was love. There were other things mixed up in it.”

Her voice was dry and flat. “And that’s why I don’t want to let those zombies sell the Key! They didn’t give a damn for Cal when he was alive. Now all they care about is how much money they can squeeze out of the one thing that ever really mattered to him. Mike? Say something. You can see why I didn’t tell you.”

“People don’t usually tell me the truth the first time they talk to me,” Shayne said dryly. “Did you go to see Ev Tuttle the night he burned to death?”

She answered quietly. “Yes. He lost his only income when Cal died. I gave him money sometimes when I had it. He phoned me from a bar that night and I met him there, a seedy little bar on the other side of the river. I gave him a few dollars and he used it to get drunk So indirectly perhaps I’m responsible for what happened. If he hadn’t been drunk, he wouldn’t have fallen asleep with a cigarette in his mouth.”

“Did you go to his room with him?”

“Certainly not. He lived in a terrible hotel. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”

“I need the truth this time, Kitty.”

“That is the truth,” she said. “I don’t know what Brad meant about a witness. As far as I know there was never any question that it was an accident.”

“He started to say something about gold. I couldn’t catch it.”

“I don’t know what that was all about. Unless he thinks he’s located that Spanish treasure ship. But what connection could it have with the sale to Florida-American? It’s beyond me.”

Shayne stood up and looked at his watch. “I think you’d better stay with Natalie the rest of the night.”

“Mike”-she hesitated-“I know you have to go to the doctor, but won’t you come back?”

He didn’t reply. He was looking around at the chaos in the bedroom. “What the hell was the point of these dirty playing cards?”

He picked up several of the cards which Brad had flung on the bed. They were dog-eared and grubby. The pictures on the backs were the usual black-and-white photographs of naked men and women practicing various perversions, without seeming to be enjoying themselves. The quality of the photography was extremely poor.

Seeing something else amid the litter, he picked up a cheap pocket comb, gummy with hair grease, the tines partially clogged with dandruff. Several long black hairs adhered to the grease. He sniffed it and made a face.

“It’s a mean one, Kitty,” he said. “These are all props for a sex killing. You can see how he wanted it to look. The killer wouldn’t be some anonymous creep who was looking for a door he could force. Your door wasn’t forced. To the cops that would mean it had to be somebody you brought home yourself. The comb was the kicker. They’d look for a youth with black hair. Probably a Cuban.”

She put her arms around him from behind. “Mike, Mike, I wish-” She paused. “One of the things I wish is that I’d come in your bedroom half an hour sooner. I know we can’t do anything about it now, everything’s so horrible. But I wish you’d come back. Please. I’ll clean up this mess and make the place look halfway habitable, and the hell with everybody! I don’t see how they can hurt me now.”

He turned and took her by the shoulders. “Neither do I. But I want to make sure. There are three of you left. You, Shanahan, Cal’s daughter Barbara. Brad knew you’re planning to leave town in the morning. Barbara must have called him right after you called her. While she was telling him that, did she also tell him to give you a final chance to sell, and to kill you if you refused? Someone was watching the building earlier tonight from across the street. That means it was underway before your phone call to Barbara. These are all things we need to know, Kitty. I have to talk to Barbara about it, and it won’t work unless I do it tonight.”

“But why would she admit anything?” Kitty said, puzzled. “Why would she even see you? You won’t get there before four.”

“I will if I fly. Call her and see what she says.”

For a moment Kitty continued to look in his eyes, her face serious and questioning. Then she nodded. “Mike, do you know you’re absolutely the most-well, all I hope is that you’ll call me after I get back from New York. What do you want me to do?”

He told her. She went to the phone in the living room and dialed a number. A moment after giving the operator her own number, a voice answered.

“Eda Lou!” Kitty exclaimed. “I didn’t want to wake you up. This is Kitty Sims. You’re going to feel like shooting me, but I have to talk to Barbara.”

The voice interrupted.

Kitty said, “I do know what time it is, and I’m not drunk. Be an angel. Tell her I wouldn’t be calling unless it was something important. It’s about signing over my share in the Key. She honestly won’t mind.”

Kitty covered the mouthpiece and said to Shayne, “The housekeeper, Mrs. Parchman. She’s been a fixture for decades. A nice crusty old biddy, very unphony.” Uncovering the mouthpiece, she said, “Barbara. I know this is no time of night, but I have to ask you a favor. Now don’t say no right away until I tell you about it. You’ve heard about Michael Shayne, the private detective.”

She listened a moment.

“That’s the one,” she said with a smile at Shayne, who was putting on his shirt on the other side of the room. “And I assure you he lives up to his reputation. He’s with me right now, as a matter of fact.”

There was a quick squawking from the phone.

Kitty said, “Yes, I’m calling from my apartment. Scandalous, isn’t it? Here I am not even properly divorced, with a strange man in my room. What would my ex-husband say? No,” she said seriously, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. I asked him up and I’ve been telling him my troubles over a friendly glass. I must say he’s been sympathetic. Frankly, Barbara, something happened to my cat last weekend that gave me a bad jolt. I’m uneasy about being alone. I’ve explained the Key Gaspar thing to him, as far as I know it. I’m baffled by quite a bit of it, actually. He wants to know if he can come down and talk to you.”

Barbara asked a question.

“Yes, right now. I’ve tried to talk him out of it and when you see what he looks like you’ll know why. But when he gets an idea in his head-What it amounts to, Barbara, I know I told Brad I wouldn’t sell under any circumstances, but now I’m having second thoughts like mad. Discretion the better part of valor and so on. Mike seems to be leaning in the same direction. I think in the end I’ll take his advice, but he doesn’t want to make any firm recommendation before he knows all the facts. So if you’d be willing to see him-”

She listened.

“He’ll leave right away and fly down,” Kitty said. “Don’t ask me where he expects to find a helicopter at this ungodly hour, but he thinks he can arrange it. I left the VW on Goose Key and he can use that. If everything works out he can be there in three-quarters of an hour. I know it’s asking a lot, but conceivably he’ll advise me to sell, and isn’t that what you want? I’m having breakfast with him in the morning before I go. Yes. All right, fine. Be nice to him. I’ve been giving him whiskey, but he’ll enjoy the visit more if you break out a bottle of Cal’s cognac. He’s not an easy man to get drunk, however, as I’ve been in the process of finding out.”

She hung up triumphantly.

“Mike, you were absolutely right! You should have heard the gulp when I said I had you here in my apartment.” She made a busy gesture beside her forehead. “I could hear the little cogs turning. She knew what Brad was up to, all right! I’ll bet that sex-killing angle was her idea!” She gave a small joyful hoot, stifling it as quickly as it had come. “I’m actually gloating! Well, I don’t think I’ll shed any tears over Brad. He deserved it. He really and truly did. And I’m not out of the woods yet, am I?”

“Maybe,” Shayne said briefly, putting on his shoes. “It depends on how greedy they are.”

“Oh, they’re greedy, but they also have to be a little realistic. Mike, give her the idea that you’re coming straight back here to report-she’ll put on an all-night filibuster. Who knows? She might even try to seduce you.” She looked at him speculatively. “She isn’t bad-looking, you know.”

“This is my night for good-looking women,” Shayne said noncommittally. “Call Natalie. If Tim’s there, let me talk to him.”

He returned to the bedroom to look for the. 38. He searched that room and the bathroom, and he still hadn’t found it after following Brad’s trail to the kitchen. Apparently the old man had managed to take it with him.

Kitty called him and held out the phone. “Big surprise. Tim’s still there.”

Shayne took the phone. “Something I want you to do, Tim.”

“Sure. You just caught me going out the door. We were looking at the late movie.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shayne said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry. Things have been happening-I’ll fill you in later. There’s going to be a story for you, with some fairly big names. I’m flying back down to Gaspar. I want you to call me at Barbara’s at exactly three. As soon as I’m on start talking fast and keep talking. I don’t care what you say. I want the lady to get the idea you’re telling me some bad news, such as that a client of mine has been found in bed with her throat cut.”

“Ugh.”

“Just don’t fall asleep before three,” Shayne told him. “I’m bringing Kitty over to spend the rest of the night with Natalie.”

“Mike!” Rourke protested. “Without going into detail, that’s not such a hot idea.”

“I thought you said you were just going out the door,” Shayne said, grinning. “We’ll be there in five minutes.” He hung up before Rourke could say anything more. “Now I suppose you’re going to want your jacket,” Kitty said with a glint.

“Yeah. Can you get dressed fast, Kitty? I have two more phone calls.”

He called the house doctor in a downtown hotel and told him to get a needle and thread ready. Then he roused an old friend named Jeremy Blakey, a helicopter pilot who was paid a monthly retainer by the detective, in return for which he was always on twenty-four-hour call. Shayne told him to meet him at the Watson Park heliport, and not to expect to be back to Miami before breakfast.

chapter 8

The Tuttle house on Key Gaspar was a good example of the pseudo-Moorish period in Southern Florida architecture. Its walls were stucco, its roof steeply pitched and tiled. There were innumerable balconies with wrought-iron railings. On the seaward side, however, part of one wall had been knocked out and replaced by a large picture window and a glass door opening onto a flagstone terrace.

Pulling up in a cobblestone turn-around at the foot of this terrace, Shayne unkinked himself from the front seat of Kitty’s Volkswagen and stamped several times to start the blood circulating in the foot he had used on the accelerator. His injured leg had stiffened in the ride from the heliport. After stitching and bandaging the long cut on his calf, the doctor had changed to a larger needle and sewn up his torn pants.

The house was ablaze with light. Through the big front window, Shayne saw a black-haired woman, probably Cal Tuttle’s daughter, putting on eye-liner at a narrow pier-glass mirror.

He limped along a path skirting the terrace. Arriving at the front door, he pulled a jangling iron bell.

Almost at once the door was opened by an extraordinary old lady. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. The smoke was making her squint. Her eyes were heavily madeup, the lashes and upper lids very black, the lower lids blue green. Her hair, piled high on her head, was the color of heavy cream. She was barefoot, wearing very brief shorts and a bulky knitted sweater. Her legs were firm and beautifully tanned, her toenails painted blue-green to match her eyelids. In addition to a musky perfume, she gave off a strong smell of gin and vermouth.

“Mike Shayne,” she said in a low hoarse voice.

She didn’t move out of the doorway until she had looked him up and down. Reaching forward with a clawlike hand laden with rings, she pinched the flesh at his waist.

“You keep in shape,” she said approvingly. She jerked her head toward the room with the big window. “You’re going to make a big hit in there. That’s my weather forecast for tonight. Come on in.”

Turning abruptly, she led him along a hall and down several carpeted steps to the living room. The other woman had moved from the mirror to a deep sofa. She put out a hand to Shayne without getting up. She had the same magnificent tan as her housekeeper, though less of hers was showing. She was dressed in tight tapering red pants and a loose belted jacket, without buttons. By leaning forward to shake hands, she established the fact at once that there was nothing under her jacket but smooth skin, some of it tanned, some untanned. Her hand was hard and dry.

“Mr. Shayne,” she said. “I’ve read about your exploits, of course. I’ve always hoped to be able to ask you. How much of what you achieve do you ascribe to luck and how much to-well, rapid footwork, I suppose you’d call it? Please tell me your secret.”

“I just try not to make too many mistakes.”

“Now that’s a wonderfully evasive answer!” she cried. “I prefer to believe that luck enters into it, which is why I’m so delighted to meet you. I like lucky people. I like to be in their orbit.”

She settled back. “We’ve been drinking martinis because that was what we were in the mood for, but fix yourself what you want. Kitty mentioned cognac. There’s some over there.” She waved at a mahogany sideboard. “Eda Lou, honey, you’ve been a love. Get to bed now. You must be worn to a frazzle.”

“I’m about ready to drop,” the older woman agreed. “What do you need before I go? Ice, sparkling water, booze-it all seems to be there.”

She gave Shayne another up and down look. “Come down in the daytime and go swimming with us, Mike Shayne. The men we’ve been getting down here have been getting pansier and pansier.”

Barbara laughed from the sofa. “Maybe I’ll make myself so fascinating that Mr. Mike Shayne will still be here at dawn. That’s the best time in the whole twenty-four hours for a swim. Not if you get up for it, if you stay up. I’m sure we can find him a pair of trunks.”

“Well, if he’s still here and you do go in, wake me up. I mean it, Babs.”

She gave Barbara a forceful nod, which finally jarred loose the ash of her cigarette. She padded out.

Barbara went on laughing silently. “Did you ever see such a sex-hound? We’re both pretty well fried, incidentally, do you mind? Such an hour. Can you find everything you want?”

Shayne opened a bottle of Courvoisier at the sideboard and half-filled a bubble glass. He took it back across the long room. The rugs were a little threadbare. There was an equally threadbare tapestry on one wall, the dusty pipes of a pipe organ on another.

“Ducks, before you sit down,” Barbara said, “just look out in the hall and see if she’s listening, will you?”

Shayne gave her a look, put his brandy on a low table and went to the hall. It was empty.

“We’ll be talking about Daddy’s estate,” Barbara said when he came back. “She has no share in the property whatsoever, but the way she takes on you’d think she’s the sole heir. Kitty probably told you. Eda Lou was Daddy’s, let’s say paramour, for ages and ages. Do I shock you?”

“Not especially,” Shayne said.

“It was really more of a common-law marriage. I’ll say this for her, she was devoted to Daddy. She doesn’t look at all mushy on the surface, does she? Well, I happen to know that she takes flowers to the cemetery, for heaven’s sake. I never go near the repulsive place, and I’m the man’s daughter.” She studied her drink, as though it could tell her something. “I often wondered why they never married. My theory, not that I can prove it, is that she has Negro blood. She claims it’s Indian. Now I ask you. I’m not prejudiced, understand.”

She paused for breath, and Shayne put in, “About your offer from Florida-American-”

Barbara had been about to put down her martini glass. Her hand stopped. She took a small sip, and made a face expressing disgust and near-nausea.

“This is pure water. If you want me to make any sense you’re going to have to mix me up another batch.”

“In a minute,” Shayne said patiently. “I have a chopper waiting on Goose Key and it’s costing me twenty-five bucks an hour. As I understand it, Florida-American-”

“I’d like to know how the little bitch found out! Excuse the dirty language, you probably think she’s the Christian and we’re the lions. I’ll just point out while I’m on the subject that you haven’t known her very long.” She held out her glass. “Give me some gin, ducks. Don’t worry, I won’t pass out. I never pass out. I just get talkative.”

Shayne brought over the gin bottle and a bowl of ice from the sideboard. He emptied the dregs of the pitcher into the bowl, dropped in two fresh ice cubes and covered them with gin. After giving the pitcher a quick swirl he filled her glass.

She tasted it. “I must say you make wonderful martinis,” she said approvingly. “Imagine Kitty hiring a private detective! I thought she was supposed to be so broke. How can she afford your rates? I’m not trying to stall, Mike. I’m going to answer your question sooner or later. I really am. I’m just curious. What kind of a story did she give you?”

“She said somebody cut her cat’s throat.”

Barbara smiled. “That sounds like Brad. He believes in the old-fashioned methods. Imagine anything like that working nowadays.”

“I haven’t had time to look up his record,” Shayne said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised to find at least one killing in it.”

She waved her hand. “Long, long ago, dear man. Of no consequence whatever. The mores of those days were altogether different. Though the funny thing is, I mean it seems funny now, that’s why Daddy spent all that time in jail.”

Shayne looked at her sharply. “Let’s stop there for a minute.”

“If you want to,” Barbara said pleasantly. “But where’s the connection with your client who wasn’t even born at the time? Is that what you call her-a client?”

“She’s my client,” Shayne said.

“The year was 1927. Brad killed somebody in a speakeasy fight. Trust Brad-he had to do it in front of a dozen witnesses, including the sheriff, if I remember the story rightly. That entitled him to twenty years to life, and Florida still had the chain gang in those days. Let me see. What was the expression they used to use? Squeal. Brad squealed on Daddy in return for a nolle-pros in his own case. Daddy was in the export-import business, which was how I used to describe it to myself, isn’t it silly? He was a rumrunner, as a matter of fact, a damn good one. The sheriff couldn’t have cared less about that speakeasy manslaughter of Brad’s. I think he was up for reelection-I was the merest infant at the time, Mike, so don’t hold me to any of this-and the papers were saying he was getting rich from the liquor interests, which was true except that he didn’t happen to be getting rich from Daddy. Bootleggers weren’t getting more than thirty days if they had a good lawyer, and Daddy believed in hiring the best. So it was Daddy’s thirty days against twenty years for Uncle Brad, and Brad made the deal. They bottled Daddy up in the cove right in front of this house and the irony of it was-he killed a man. He never held it against Brad. He understood how it happened. Maybe not at first, but he had plenty of time to think about it. Does that dispose of that? Because I want to ask you a question. Did you go to bed with Kitty yet?”

She laughed at the look on his face. “She’s moderately sexy, I suppose, if you like the type. She’s paying you a contingency fee, isn’t she? That’s the explanation! And from our point of view that’s fine. Mike, they’ve made us a perfectly fabulous offer. An even one million dollars in cash! A quarter million apiece! Kitty can invest hers in an apartment house and get an income of twenty thousand a year, pretty much taxfree. How in heaven’s name can she have the effrontery to turn us down?”

“Has anybody offered her a quarter of a million?”

“No-o,” Barbara admitted. “I wanted to, but I was outvoted. My Uncle Brad, that great IQ, thought we should put on the screws, in his phrase, say nothing about the resale possibilities, and persuade her to resign her share for a more modest figure, say forty or fifty thousand, in the interests of peace and quiet. We decided to let him try. But I’ve never underestimated that female. She wound Daddy around her finger. He was in his dotage, granted, but even so he was never easy to fool. Come on, Mike. How did she find out about the deal? Everybody swore they’d keep it a secret.”

“That’s a hard kind of secret to keep. Her husband’s in the real estate business. Maybe he told her.”

“No, they aren’t on speaking terms. Of course,” she added, “if he had hopes of getting a slice-Anyway, it’s out of the bag now, and I’ll call Brad in the morning and tell him a change of tactics is in order. I can see why Kitty wouldn’t want to sell for peanuts. She wants to hang on till the rest of us die off, which in my case, by the way, isn’t going to happen for years. I know she thinks of herself as the child of the group. Stistically-and by that I mean sta-tist-ic-ally, I have trouble with that word, drunk or sober-she may be right. As a practical matter I intend to outlive her, if only out of spite. But that’s not the point. Who knows what prices will be like on that faroff day? If they’re as high as a quarter of a million I’ll be astonished. You tell her. Leaving personal feelings aside, and I’m as much at fault as anyone, doesn’t it make sense? A certain quarter of a million now, or wait till she’s a very old lady, when she won’t have any guarantee that she’ll inherit, or that she’ll get as much as a quarter of a million for the whole thing. But we have to get all four signatures by Wednesday or the deal’s off. This is no time for Kitty to go off on a vacation.”

“I’m the one who advised her to get out of town,” Shayne said. “That was before I knew about the million-dollar figure. It’s damned high.”

She frowned. “Do you think so? They made a great deal of money up in the Tampa area, and they want to spread out. Gaspar’s just what they’re looking for. I don’t pretend to understand business people, why they offer one million instead of two, or half a million. Real-estate developers are nothing like you or me, thank God. We look at Gaspar and see some lovely beaches, a mangrove swamp and that priceless thing, privacy. They see royal palms and poinsettia beds, fifty houses with two bathrooms, a dock and a two-car garage, at a minimum net profit of four thousand dollars a house.”

“So it’s a simple business deal,” Shayne said.

“But what else?” she asked. “Mike, I’ve always heard you were a heroic drinker. You’ve hardly touched that cognac.”

Shayne drained his glass and stood up abruptly. “I’ll tell her. You’re offering to bring her in on the deal and give her a full fourth. If you don’t want to wait till morning to find out what she says, stay awake and I’ll call you.”

“Mike, you just got here! You don’t mean to say you’re going back to Kitty at this hour?”

“I’ll wake her up if she’s asleep. There’s no point in dragging it out. It’s a simple case of yes or no.”

“You did go to bed with her!” Barbara exclaimed. She sat forward, her breasts swinging interestingly inside the loose jacket. “Well, by God, I’m not letting you out of here without a battle. Mike, of course there’s more to it than a simple real-estate transaction. Much more! If the only way I can keep you out of her clutches is to tell you, I’ll tell you. Don’t stand there looking stern and disapproving. She’s getting two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, isn’t that enough? Does she have to get a tumble in the hay with you, too? Pour yourself another drink.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Shayne said flatly.

“Oh, Mike, don’t be so dim.”

She came to her feet. She was taller than she had seemed on the sofa, only three or four inches from being as tall as Shayne himself. Taking his glass to the sideboard, she splashed brandy into it and brought it back.

She held it out. “Now sit down and I’ll tell you about this million-dollar figure. It’s a wild tale. You may not believe it at first, but I think you’ll enjoy it.” She pressed the brandy glass into his fingers. “Sit.”

He allowed her to back him toward the chair. He shrugged and sat down. He was facing a large baroque clock, on which the minute hand was laboring up toward three. Rourke would be calling in another fifteen minutes.

chapter 9

Barbara perched on the edge of the low table facing him. Their knees didn’t quite touch.

“I hoped Kitty wouldn’t have to know about this,” she said. “She’s such an avaricious thing, not that I expect you to agree with me. You’re quite right-a million dollars for Gaspar as it stands is fantasy. That’s thirteen thousand an acre, and most of those acres you can’t get to unless you happen to be a mosquito or a bulldozer. We’re swindling poor gullible Mr. Hilary Quarrels, that farsighted, hard-headed businessman, and if you sip your brandy and let me put my hand on your knee from time to time to emphasize a point, I’ll tell you about it.”

To emphasize that point, she put her hand on his knee. “You were limping, Mike. What’s the matter with your leg?”

“It’s still cramped up from that damn Volkswagen.”

“Poor dear,” she said sympathetically. “When the Germans designed that car they were thinking of somebody else’s specifications.” She stepped up the pressure for an instant, then removed her hand. “You don’t want me to make advances. You want to hear about our million-dollar deal. Mike, Quarrels and his organization aren’t buying just a development site. They’re buying a development site plus buried treasure.”

Shayne made a scornful sound. She chortled happily.

“Wait. The Key’s named after one of the last of the Florida pirates, Jose Gaspar. His main base was up St. Petersburg-way but there’s an old tradition that he had a stockade here where he kept people he was holding for ransom. Please, wipe that skeptical look off your face. I have no intention of telling you that Gasparilla buried a chest of doubloons in our back yard, and we have a treasure map to prove it. Not that we don’t have a map. We have a marvelous map. But it isn’t to pirate’s gold, it’s to swindler’s gold.”

“Barbara, can you move it along a little faster? I’m thinking of my helicopter.”

She drank off half her martini at a gulp. “Patience. I told you gin makes me talkative. Mr. Quarrels didn’t believe it either at first. But he believes me now, and by the time I’m finished with you, my fine skeptical friend, you’ll believe it too.”

“If you think there’s treasure on the Key and you have a good map, why don’t you do your own digging? Why sell it to Quarrels?”

“Don’t think we didn’t try.” She held out both hands and examined the palms. “They don’t show now, but I had callouses! Me!”

Shayne stirred, and she said hastily, “I admit I’m stalling. I don’t want you to walk out of my life one minute after you walked into it. Here it is. It started in the great Florida land boom of 1925, and what a crazy time that was. I’m so full of the subject I could talk about it for hours. Don’t worry. I know how anxious you are to get back to your client.”

She came forward suddenly, took his face in both hands and kissed his mouth. She darted her tongue against his lips for one tantalizing instant, then pushed away.

“Don’t say it! Your helicopter’s waiting! Back to ’25!” She gave him a mock salute. “Mike, imagine yourself a real-estate promoter in the spring of ’25. You’ve taken an option on a promising patch of swamp, but nobody’s interested in buying your lots because they’re miles and miles from anywhere, with no access, no ocean frontage, too many insects. The other promoters have more money for advertising and more salesmen, and possibly better drainage. You need a gimmick. One night you wake up with an inspiration. A week or so later some local yokel is digging for bait in the middle of your swamp and his shovel hits a crock of buried treasure! It’s genuine treasure. You’re positive about that because you buried it yourself the day before. The news makes the papers all over the country. People crowd in with picks and spades. But naturally you don’t let them dig until they’ve made the down payment on one of your hypothetical lots. I know it sounds crude, but I guess people were stupider in those days. It worked. The first promoter who tried it made a mint. There were three or four finds that summer, each one bigger than the one before. One of the big ones was on Key Largo.”

“Now you’re getting to the point,” Shayne said.

“Our man’s name was Jethroe. If suckers could be persuaded that pirates came ashore to bury their gold on Key Largo, or in Miami Shores, or in some place in the ’Glades a long way from salt water, why not on a Key that was actually named after a pirate? Daddy sold him the key, the way they sold real estate in those days, on a ten-percent binder. Jethroe built the trestle and this one sample house. He was all ready for the first public announcements on a certain day in October. The ads never appeared. I have the proofs. With nothing but those ads to go on, you’d honestly think Gaspar was bigger than Miami, with a brighter future.”

“And then the boom fell apart.”

“Pow. There was no mention of treasure in the ads, but there was quite a spiel about fabled romance and the swashbuckling days of the buccaneers, to set up the atmosphere. First there had to be a flashy opening, with a free boat ride from Miami, free food and entertainment. Jethroe had William Jennings Bryan booked for the main oration. The treasure was due to be discovered two days later. One of the first homesteaders would be out digging a hole for a privy, and lo and behold! Gold doubloons. After the collapse the papers wouldn’t run the ads unless they were paid in cash, and nobody had cash, least of all Jethroe. He never had a chance to come down and dig up the treasure himself. He got in an argument with a man from Ashtabula, Ohio, who’d put his life savings in one of Jethroe’s promotions, and the man from Ashtabula shot him. Didn’t I tell you it was wild?”

Shayne shook his head. “That’s the story you sold Quarrels?”

“I didn’t tell it to him the way I’m telling it to you. I showed him the documentation. There’s absolutely no question that Jethroe buried treasure on Gaspar October 2, 1925. I can prove that. I can’t prove it’s still there, but so? Quarrels comes out ahead either way.”

“What kind of documentation?”

“Eda Lou-” she raised her voice slightly and turned toward the hall-“and if you’re listening out there, dear, correct me if I’m wrong about any of the details-Eda Lou found the map in an old suitcase of Daddy’s. One day last fall I came down from Miami without phoning first. Eda Lou was nowhere to be seen, in spite of the fact that her car was in the garage. Then what did she do but walk in with a shovel. She doesn’t broadcast her age, but I know she’s too old to be out digging holes on a hot day just for the exercise. I followed her tracks and found three holes. Big ones. She refused to explain. I did a little snooping. It’s my house, after all, never mind what it says in that kooky will. And I found the map under the lace runner on her bureau.”

She studied Shayne for a moment. “I was going to say it’s in a safe-deposit box in the city, but damn it, I think I’ll show it to you.”

Going to the sideboard with quick steps, she pulled open a drawer and took out a locked dispatch case. She unlocked it, removed an envelope and brought it over to Shayne. She took out the map very carefully. It was obviously old. It had been folded twice and the markings had worn away at the folds. Other lines were blotted out by a brownish stain.

“And what do you think that stain is?” she asked. “Blood! Or maybe coffee, who knows?”

She opened both arms in a dancer’s gesture. “Isn’t it magnificent! I was absolutely nuts about pirates as a girl. Let’s be honest-I still am. One of the tragedies of my life has been that I’ve met so few. Mike, if you ever run into a pirate who wants to capture a sex-starved lady and hold her for ransom, put in a word for me, will you? Well! I waved this map under Eda Lou’s nose and did a little screaming. Where did she get it, what made her think it was O.K. to dig holes on somebody else’s property, et cetera? I pulled out a handful of hair, I’m sorry to say, and don’t be fooled by that switch she wears-that came from the wig store. She doesn’t have any of her own to spare.” She raised her voice again. “Do you, angel? Mike, at first we thought this must date all the way back to Gasparilla’s day. But I knew that couldn’t be, or Daddy would have shown it to me when I was going through my pirate phase. Then I remembered reading about that Key Largo promotion. It was in a book of memoirs by Ben Hecht, and I’ll loan it to you if you want to read it, it’s around the house somewhere. Nothing this interesting had happened to me for a long time. I went up to the Miami Public Library and took out a file of 1925 newspapers. I’d heard Daddy tell stories about Jethroe. He was one of the big men of the day, and whenever he cleared his throat on the subject of Florida’s future it made the front page. There were little squibs here and there about his plans for Gaspar, but never anything about what he was like personally, where he came from, whether or not he had a family. I talked to some old-timers who knew him, but nobody had any ideas about what might have happened to his records or his personal papers. I came back and practically took the house apart. And way in the back of a storage space up under the eaves, Mike, I finally found an old beat-up manila envelope.”

She emptied her glass and started back to the sideboard.

“There was a lot of junk in it I couldn’t understand,” she said over her shoulder, “along with the proofs of those opening-day ads, and things like the bill of sale for that pipe organ-which still works, incidentally. And then there was a sheet of ruled paper torn from a notebook without any heading, and I got a real fluttery pulse when I saw what it was.”

She selected a paper from the open dispatch case and brought it back.

“It’s a list of purchases of old Spanish money. The first time this trick was pulled it didn’t have to amount to much or look particularly authentic. Then as the summer went on, people began to get suspicious, and by the time Jethroe was ready, his map had to be very good, the treasure had to be genuine and of the right period, and there had to be lots and lots of it. There weren’t many real doubloons on the market, though of course the same coins were used over and over. As soon as one promoter milked all the publicity out of them, he sold them to another, at a nice advance in price. Now look.”

She sat on the arm of Shayne’s chair, her breast against his shoulder, and with a pointed fingernail ticked off the abbreviations on the top line. “July 6, twenty-seven eight-escudo gold pieces, seven thousand dollars. Then that word ‘Ort.’ That’s not an exotic kind of coin, it’s a man’s name, Charles Ort, the man who ran the Key Largo promotion!”

The fingers of her free hand were in Shayne’s rough red hair. “Now August 17. More doubloons from another promoter. September 6, a chest, New Orleans, fifteen hundred. A gold chain, New York, seven thousand. Some chain! Next line. More doubloons, some bar silver, Havana, C. T.-who can that be but Cal Tuttle, Daddy was going back and forth all the time-eighteen thousand. Mike, eighteen thousand! ‘Objects, seven thousand.’ Admit it, you’re impressed, aren’t you?”

“I’m impressed,” Shayne said. “How much does it total, around seventy-five?”

“Over. That’s a lot of money for a gimmick, but he only expected to tie it up for a few weeks, with the value going up all the time. Naturally I’ve tried to find out how much it would be worth today. A Philip V doubloon in good condition, costing say two hundred in 1925, will set you back a thousand now. A silver piece-of-eight brings about a hundred, and Jethroe paid twenty-five. And how about that gold chain? Those ‘objects’? There’s no way of knowing. Quarrels of Florida-American had an expert go over the list. He thinks four hundred thousand would be a pretty close guess.”

“It’s a long way from a million,” Shayne said.

“No, it isn’t really. Companies like Florida-American never put much of their own money into one of these things. Four hundred thousand would more than cover their cash outlay. And here’s the part they couldn’t resist. They’ll come out ahead whether or not they dig up the treasure. We aren’t giving them any guarantees, after all. We’ve had some bad storms since 1925, and maybe the chest has been swept out to sea. They’ll still get their money’s worth in publicity. Don’t tell me this story won’t sell real estate. Back in 1925 you could show people a map like this and they’d believe a pirate named Gasparilla rowed ashore with a band of cutthroats one dark night in the early 1800’s and buried a chest of gold. We’re more sophisticated today. But tell us that a crooked real-estate promoter rowed ashore one dark night in 1925 and buried a chest of gold to swindle the suckers of his day-”

“It’s an up-to-date version of the original swindle.”

“Isn’t it! Mike Shayne, you deserve another drink. And we have so much more than just the map. We have this cost sheet. The newspaper ads that never ran. A photostat of the story about Jethroe’s death. And one other thing I haven’t shown you yet.”

She left him for another quick visit to the dispatch case, and brought back a faded yellow sheet of copy paper. “This is the first draft of the press release on the finding of the treasure.” She gave it to Shayne. “Now be careful with it. Not that I don’t have a Xerox copy in the safe-deposit box, but it’s the color, the feel of the paper-”

She waited till he had read the story. The name of the finder had been left blank, probably because he hadn’t been hired at the time the story was written.

“The interesting thing is the release date,” Barbara said. “That’s a Thursday. The formal opening was scheduled for Tuesday. Jethroe was killed late Monday night. There just aren’t any holes in it!”

Shayne scraped his jaw. “You don’t think it’s almost too good?”

Her mouth tightened. “You bastard, what do you mean by that?”

“It has a certain smell,” Shayne said slowly. “I’m just wondering who’s being swindled. You couldn’t get anything definite out of the map?”

“That’s the whole point-it couldn’t be too precise. The treasure was going to be found first. Then the map would turn up. There’s no north-south orientation, and the coast line is just a squiggle. And those folds. Jethroe had to convince the customers that the map and the treasure weren’t necessarily connected. If this was a pirate hideout, doesn’t it stand to reason that they buried more than one chest of doubloons? Not only that. Things have changed shape since 1925. One whole neck was washed away in the ’35 hurricane. And look at this.” Her finger touched a spot partially concealed by the brown stain. “You’re supposed to take a sighting here from a point thirty paces southeast of a big buttonwood tree. There aren’t any buttonwood trees left on the Key. Eda Lou found some old photographs that showed a big tree about there, and she figured out what she thought was the best place to dig. I told you I dug a hole myself. And that crazy Brad paid no attention to the map at all and bought an army-surplus mine detector. He detected a lot of miscellaneous junk before he quit.”

“Kitty wasn’t in on the digging?”

“I should say not. I wanted to keep it between me and Eda Lou, but the dear old soul didn’t think she could trust me, for some reason. We called a meeting of the real heirs, everybody but Kitty. We decided to cut Eda Lou in for a twentieth because she found the map. Which was generous of us,” she added, raising her voice. “After Brad got nowhere with the mine detector we made a priority list of likely spots and brought a man in with a backhoe. He must have thought we were insane. Then I happened to meet Mr. Quarrels at an art auction, and he saw possibilities right away. If you were Jethroe, how deep would you put the chest? No deeper than three feet, or a man digging a privy wouldn’t hit it. Florida-American will come in with their bulldozers. They’ll rip out the mangroves, and those roots go down further than three feet. By the time they’re finished grading and filling, the chances are they’ll find it. If not, they’ll bring in an article writer and let him write the story and sell it to a national magazine. People will figure that maybe Jethroe buried the chest three and a half feet deep, and if they buy a piece of attractive ocean frontage, it could be on their land. This is going to be a fast-growing community, Mike.”

She clenched her fists, her face suddenly ugly. “And the whole thing depends on Kitty!”

chapter 10

The phone clanged.

The strained look stayed on Barbara’s face for only an instant longer. A smile took its place.

“I’m going to end up with a stomach ulcer unless I can cut that out,” she said. “I keep forgetting you’re in her corner. Now if the bitch drops dead of heart failure some morning, you’ll think I did it by witchcraft.”

The phone rang again. “And who the hell that is, at three in the morning-”

She picked up the phone and said hello.

“Shayne? Michael Shayne? Yes, he’s here.”

She held out the phone to the detective. An instant after Shayne took it he heard a muffled click, followed by a change in the intensity of the sound. Without bothering to cover the mouthpiece, he said to Barbara, “Where’s the extension?”

“At the end of the hall.”

He put the phone down and crossed the room. By the time he reached the hall the second phone was back on its bracket.

He returned and picked up the living room phone. “O.K., this is Shayne.”

“I want to report that it’s three o’clock,” Rourke’s voice said. “The girls kicked me out so they could go to sleep, which was unfriendly of them, I thought. I’m at Harry’s, and there isn’t much to do at Harry’s except drink. Come to think of it, it’s a bar, that’s what the place is for. Do you want to react now?”

“What?” the redhead exclaimed furiously.

“That’s a nice strong reaction. I’m not sure I follow your reasoning on this. You want the lady to think I’m calling to tell you that Kitty Sims has been found in her bed in a welter of blood, as we used to say in the days when they let us use cliches?”

Shayne swore savagely. Across the room, the lip of the martini pitcher rang slightly against the glass as Barbara poured. She looked at Shayne. Their eyes held while the reporter continued.

“Yeah. Nude, in a welter of blood, with filthy playing cards all over the bed. The age-old story. She should’ve asked for his references before she invited him up. Now don’t hang up on me before I pass along a piece of legitimate news I just picked up from a fellow barfly.”

“Where did you hear about it?” Shayne demanded.

“That’s a complicated story, and while she thinks I’m answering your question, I’ll pass on my tidbit. It comes from a legman who covers the courthouse for us. It’s about Francis X. Shanahan, one of your client’s fellow heirs, and how he became a judge. He became a judge by laying out a substantial hunk of money, Mike. I won’t bore you with how much, or whose safe-deposit box it ended up in, because I don’t want to shake your faith in the great American system of representative government. The interesting angle is that my guy was surprised that Frank had it, being what we call a semipro playboy. Then, too, he’s always given every sign of liking the bachelor life, so how come he suddenly decided to marry Cal Tuttle’s daughter Barbara? The talk is that she put up the dough. In return she gets a judge for a husband. They’ve been engaged six months. People in that age bracket don’t usually get engaged. They just get married. Maybe he’s not too enthusiastic about the idea, do you think? This might be something to work on.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Shayne growled. “I’ve only been on the case since yesterday afternoon, and all I know is what people have been telling me. I’m almost through here. I can be back in an hour and start picking up the pieces.”

He hung up. For a long moment he and Barbara looked at each other.

“There are only three in the pot now,” he said.

She picked him up sharply. “What are you talking about? What pot, Mike?”

She was facing him, her back to the tall picture window. Suddenly there was a small explosion, followed at once by a tiny ping. An instant passed before the little interruption broke through to Shayne.

“Get down!” he snarled.

He knocked her to the floor, jolting the glass out of her hand and sending the cold gin in a cascade over her chest. The quick little sequence of sounds was repeated, the explosion, the crisp spattering noise, the ping. Tiny holes had been drilled in two adjoining pipes above the organ. There were two matching holes side by side through the double glass of the picture window.

“That’s a thirty-caliber carbine,” Shayne said quietly, “so keep your head down.”

Barbara’s eyes were wide with shock. “You mean somebody’s shooting at us?”

“Not at me, baby. I’m not one of the joint tenants.”

She moved her head and looked toward the window. A tiny network of cracks radiated out from each neat double hole. She looked back at the pipes, and Shayne could see her drawing an imaginary line connecting the holes and projecting it outside.

“Someone in a boat,” she whispered.

“What kind of a shot is Eda Lou?”

“Eda Lou! Don’t be an idiot.”

Eda Lou spoke acidly from the doorway. “On the floor already, I see. That didn’t take long. I don’t like to barge in on the orgy, but I thought you might like to know there’s a boat out in the cove.”

“Stay away from the window!” Barbara commanded. “They’re shooting at us.”

“Who’s shooting at us, may I ask?” the old woman said sarcastically. “Cupid?”

She was wearing high-heeled slippers and an old-fashioned floor-length negligee with a collar of feathers. The carbine fired again and she went down like a stone. A loose feather floated down after her.

She moaned faintly.

“Eda Lou!” Barbara cried. “Are you hurt?”

“Twisted my ankle,” the old woman snapped. “What a rotten shot. I thought there was something creepy about that boat-it just sat there with no lights on. What a comfort to think we have a man in the house for a change.”

Shayne grunted. “Take a look around.”

She did as he told her, without lifting her head. “I think I see what you mean,” she said slowly.

The front windows came down to within twelve inches of the floor. The room was as brightly lit as a stage set. From the gunman’s position in the cove he commanded every inch of it except for a narrow stretch of front wall. There were two standing floor lamps, one large ornate table lamp with a Tiffany glass shade. The main light came from a brass ceiling fixture, four frosted bowls attached to a central stem. This was controlled by a switch which Shayne could see on the wall inside the door. To reach the switch, he would have to pass the double sliding glass door.

“We’d better turn off the lights,” Eda Lou suggested. “I’ll unplug the lamps. You get the chandelier.”

Shayne grinned at her. “You get the chandelier. I’ll unplug the lamps.”

“Good for you,” she said. “Let the women do the hard part. And Cal always said you were one of the toughest people around. You’ve slowed down, Shayne.”

Shayne went on grinning. “What would Cal do in a case like this?”

She glared at him fiercely. Then one of the feathers in her collar tickled her and made her nose wrinkle. She gave a short laugh.

“Just what you’re doing, boy. He played the odds, and that’s how he lived as long as he did.”

Using his elbows and the muscles of his upper thighs, Shayne wriggled forward without raising any part of his body more than an inch. He ended at the front wall beyond the big window.

“Who do you think’s out there, Barbara?” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“How would I know?” she responded irritably. “Daddy was involved in a million things. He was never afraid to make enemies.”

Eda Lou snorted. “Honey, give the man credit for some sense. You know who it is, and Mike knows you know.”

Barbara shot her an angry look. “Will you keep out of this? I don’t suppose I can ask you to leave the room, but please stop interrupting.”

“Pardon me for living,” the older woman said acidly.

Barbara pivoted to look at Shayne. There was fear in her eyes, but she made an effort to speak lightly. “As it happens, I can make a pretty good guess who it is. It’s my demented Uncle Brad. Divide a million dollars in two and it’s more money than if you divide it in three, that’s elementary. Mike, obviously you don’t want to risk your neck unless you’re paid to do it. Will you work for me? Keep me intact through Wednesday, and I’ll pay you ten thousand. That’s five thousand dollars a day.”

Eda Lou put in, “This is Mike Shayne. Don’t you read the papers? He wouldn’t help you across the street for less than twenty.”

Barbara gave her another hard look and she said meekly, “I thought you might not know.”

Barbara said through set lips, looking back at Shayne, “Fifteen, Mike?”

“Do you have fifteen?” Shayne asked.

The fear in Barbara’s eyes deepened to panic. “You won’t insist on being paid in advance, will you? Cash is the problem.”

“What happened to the option money from Florida-American? Did that pay for Shanahan’s judgeship?”

Eda Lou snickered. Barbara’s face was working.

“Don’t turn me down, Mike, please. What’ll I do? Brad’s insane! You don’t know what he’s like. He’s a killer.”

“Yeah, there’s that old killing in his record,” Shayne observed, “but I thought you said it wasn’t important?”

She swallowed, saying nothing.

Shayne went on, “And I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I can’t work for two people at the same time. That’s one of the rules. I already have a client.”

“Not any more. Can’t you-”

She stopped abruptly. She looked at the phone, then at the detective. The blood drained out of her face. Shayne grinned at her.

“You bastard,” she said faintly.

“That’s what people sometimes call me,” Shayne agreed.

“What’s going on around here?” Eda Lou demanded. “What’s all the back-and-forth?”

“Brad met with an accident,” Shayne said without looking away from Barbara. “A cop shot him. I’m glad to say that I helped.”

Barbara cut her eyes toward the neat little holes in the window.

“No, that isn’t Brad out there,” Shayne said. “So who is it? It can’t be Kitty, because I know where she is. That leaves Judge Shanahan. It hardly seems in character, but who else is left? People sometimes step out of character when they have a strong enough reason-if they don’t want to get married, for example.”

“You tricked me once,” Barbara said coldly. “Although what you imagine you’ve proved, merely because I assumed that phone call was about Kitty-”

“I’m not trying for courtroom evidence,” Shayne told her. “Just checking an idea. You work in a hospital, don’t you? What do you know about the properties of nitrous oxide?”

Barbara drew in her breath sharply and raised her head. The carbine cracked. This round gouged a splinter out of the window frame. Barbara banged her forehead against the floor.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said in a low voice.

“The hell you don’t,” Shayne said. “Do you know what the statutes say about conspiracy to commit murder? Look it up.” There was a harsh edge to his voice. “I’m going to chase that guy away in another minute. I’ve been faking a bit here. I can push the sofa in front of the glass doors and get past without being shot at. I didn’t bring a gun, but I doubt if he’ll stick around to find that out. I’ll see Kitty at breakfast and pass on your proposition. If she asks my advice, I’ll advise her to take it. By the time she gets a hundred-percent ownership, this buried-treasure story is going to sound pretty stale. But it’s up to her. If she says no, I want you to realize there isn’t a thing you can do about it. Not one thing. So relax and stop trying. If you decide to go on trying, you’d better kill me first. Is that clear?”

Eda Lou clapped ironically.

“I haven’t done anything,” Barbara said in a faint voice.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Go on doing nothing, and if you’re lucky you’ll stay out of the electric chair.”

She made a weak little sound.

“What she’s trying to tell you, Mike,” Eda Lou said, “is that she’s going to change her ways. And if you want a gun, there’s a. 25 in the drawer of that table.”

“A. 25,” Shayne said sarcastically. “You wouldn’t happen to have a slingshot to go with it? Never mind, it’ll save moving the furniture.”

He worked away from the wall and slowly reversed. He began to creep toward a heavily carved table, all the way across the room. Reaching it finally, he rolled over on his back.

Looking up from beneath, he saw a small drawer suspended from parallel guides. He began to slide it slowly out. It was while he was doing this that he noticed a small button microphone screwed to the inside of one of the massive carved legs.

chapter 11

When the drawer was almost out Shayne gave it a final flick and let it fall to the floor. He rolled over to wriggle into the open, and as he did so his trained eye followed the wire out of the little mike down the carved leg to a hole drilled in the baseboard.

“It better be there,” Eda Lou said, meaning the. 25. “I saw it a couple of weeks ago.”

The drawer had picked up the usual accumulation of household objects-a single glove, receipted bills, flashlight batteries, a package of Kleenex. Shayne took out the little automatic and released the clip. It was loaded.

Creeping along the wall, he twitched the plug of the big table lamp out of its socket. “Get the other lamps,” he told Eda Lou. “You were right in the first place-I’m getting the chandelier.”

The floor lamps blinked out one after another. Rolling over on one side, Shayne shot out one of the four overhead globes.

“Give the man a cigar,” Eda Lou said.

When Shayne shot out the second globe the man with the carbine fired twice, shooting at random.

“Mike,” Barbara said urgently, “listen, go down the hall and out through the kitchen. You’ll see the boathouse.”

Shayne fired again, leaving only one bulb alive. “I’m not chasing anybody. A. 25 is no good in a fire fight with a carbine.”

“I have a fast boat. Stay out of range. You can do it. We have to know who it is! If it’s really Frank-”

Shayne shot out the final light and rolled to his feet. A motor roared outside in the cove. He had mapped out a path between furniture and he moved fast in the sudden darkness. But Eda Lou hadn’t stayed in the same spot and they collided. Shayne got a mouthful of feathers. He sent her flying, and one of the heavy floor lamps went over.

He moved down the hall at a kind of half-run, the fresh stitches pulling at every step. He went through the brightly lighted kitchen and out the door toward the low boathouse. The door was half open. He felt inside for the light switch and found it on the second pass.

The boat was a 28-footer, a Hatteras cruiser. He swung over the rail, made his way to the short ladder to the pilot room and hitched himself up. Sliding behind the wheel, he turned the key. The powerful twin Chryslers took hold with a roar. As Shayne snapped on the running lights, the roar faltered and died.

After listening to the growl of the starter until it began to fade, he turned out the running lights, climbed down the ladder and limped back to the house. The sound of the other boat’s motor was already far away.

The two women met him on the terrace. “Here’s your. 25,” he said to the older woman.

“I was out this afternoon,” Barbara said. “Everything ran perfectly.”

“Somebody’s been tinkering with the fuel line in the meantime,” Shayne said. “Thanks for the drinks and the information.”

Barbara tried again, without being able to get much conviction into her voice. “Mike, I don’t know how much she’s paying you, but won’t you negotiate with me a little? I can give you a postdated check. I really have been helpful, haven’t I? Fifteen thousand for a few day’s work-I don’t care what anybody says, that’s good pay. Don’t just advise her to come in on the deal. Tell her. It’s the best thing for everybody, you said so yourself.”

Shayne lit a cigarette on the top step. “Remember what I told you,” he said in a grating voice. “Stop thinking up smart ways to murder people. This is the end of the line. When you see Frank, pass it on.”

Barbara stayed where she was but Eda Lou came down the steps to the Volkswagen.

“More excitement than we’ve had in the last twenty years,” she observed. “Can you actually get in that thing?”

“It’s not easy.”

Shayne contracted his big frame and backed downward into the tiny opening. After he closed the door Eda Lou touched his elbow.

“That swimming invitation’s still open.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” he said. “But with a little luck I won’t be down this way again.”

“The soul of politeness,” she said agreeably. “So long, Mike.”

He wheeled the Volkswagen around and headed back toward the curving trestle to the next Key and the highway. Just before the road joined Route he remembered a dirt track running into a swampy tangle that was only slightly less dense than the one on Key Gaspar. Coming to this opening in the wall of undergrowth, he pulled off the paved road and followed the ruts, past No Trespassing, No Hunting, No Shooting and Positively No Fishing signs.

There was no way to leave the ruts until he reached the water’s edge. Here was an unpainted wooden bunkhouse, a rickety dock. He reversed the car and headed back, leaving it close to the road but around a bend where it couldn’t be seen. He began the slow walk back across the trestle.

His leg was hurting badly long before he reached Key Gaspar. He forced himself to hobble on, undoing much of the doctor’s work. He had been stretching matters when he told Barbara to look up the law on conspiracy. So far he had no case against anybody, merely a jumbled hodgepodge of guess, hearsay and conjecture. Before he could decide on his next move, he had to clear up a few of the relationships. His immediate concern was with the little microphone under the massive table. In the city, that kind of device usually tied into a miniaturized radio. The other end of the circuit could be anywhere within a two-hundred-yard radius, in any one of a thousand apartments, in a briefcase or a parked car. Here, with the sea on one side and swamp on the other, there was probably a wire and he wanted to know where it led.

The lamps in the living room had been plugged in again. Shayne kept at the edge of the crushed-clamshell driveway, making as little noise as possible. He found the wall he wanted. Crouching, he felt along the foundation. When his fingers found the wire he followed it to the ground, then along the base of the foundation to the terrace, and from there to the garage. It crossed an open stretch of unkempt lawn toward the swamp. He walked bent over, letting it slip between his fingers.

He was more careful after he struck in among the trees. If he lost it now he would have to go back and start over. He startled some animal, which plunged noisily away. The foliage made a tight canopy overhead. It was very dark. He forced himself forward, a few inches at a time. Before he had gone far he had an even better reason for hanging onto the wire; without it he doubted if he could have found his way out.

Creepers and tendrils fastened themselves about his face. Caught by a strong vine, he had to backtrack until he could free himself. When he could go forward again he felt a mound of loose dirt underfoot, and stepped into a deep hole.

He swore in disgust. This must be one of Eda Lou’s holes. She had gone down almost four feet before giving up, and the edge caved in under his weight. He managed to get out on the third or fourth try, then scratched about until he located the wire.

He presently found himself on a kind of path, and was able to move faster. After another twenty feet, the wire came to an end at the base of a big gumbo-limbo tree.

He snapped his cigarette lighter, shielding the little flame with one hand. The wire was stapled to the scaly bark. Some kind of crude wooden staging seemed to be nailed to the lowermost branches, twenty feet overhead.

He let his lighter blink out and thought for a moment. Then, snapping it on again, he examined the bark closely. Finally, on the side away from the house, he came upon a vertical line of one-inch holes bored into the trunk at 18-inch intervals. His foot struck something hard. Looking down, he saw a scattering of large spikes, the kind used by linemen to climb utility poles.

Shayne picked them up and began to fit them in the holes. As soon as he had the beginnings of a ladder he picked up as many spikes as he could carry in one hand and started to climb.

He moved upward step by step. Several times he had to use the lighter before he could find the next hole. Once a spike slipped from his hand and fell to the ground with a clatter, startlingly loud amid the more natural swamp noises.

After a moment Shayne clambered down, gathered another bundle of spikes and took them back up the tree.

The wire ended in a ramshackle three-sided tree house, crudely constructed of secondhand lumber. He tested the floor carefully before leaving the spike-ladder and swinging in. Part of what had passed for a roof was gone. Holding the branch with one hand, the detective waved the lighter flame from side to side to see where the wire had brought him.

It was a crazy structure about five feet high, narrower in one direction than the other. A faded skull-and-crossbones dangled from one wall. Other objects were more recent-a binoculars case slung from one of the broken roof timbers, a pair of earphones, a peanut can overflowing with smoked cigarettes.

Shayne lowered himself carefully to the floor. He was able to let one leg dangle through a hole where a plank had given way. Another plank in the wall nearest the house had been pried loose. The house seemed surprisingly close to Shayne, no more than a hundred feet in a direct line, though he was sure he had followed the wire a full quarter mile.

He found himself looking through a long horizontal window on the back wall of the living room. Barbara, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, moved restlessly into view. For an instant she seemed to look straight at him. Her lips moved soundlessly. Then she passed out of sight.

chapter 12

Using his lighter again behind the shield of his other hand, Shayne checked the earphones. The wire emerged from a crack in the floor to lead into a small black box with an on-off switch and a rheostat. Shayne clamped on the earphones and clicked the switch. He could hear a faint sputtering.

The binoculars were a good Japanese model with six-power magnification. They brought the lighted living room in so close that it seemed to Shayne he could almost reach out and tap on the window. Barbara came back. Shayne had been told that she was in her early forties, and now that she was alone with her housekeeper, she was no longer making an effort to look any younger. Stopping in front of the window, she lit a cigarette from the butt of her previous one. Tilting back her head, she breathed out a mouthful of smoke.

“OH, I’M TIRED, TIRED,” she said.

In the tree house, Shayne hastily cut down the volume.

Eda Lou’s voice, from somewhere out of sight, replied dryly, “As who isn’t?”

“I certainly fluffed that,” Barbara said. “I can think of a dozen different ways I could have handled it. Everything he said when that phone call came in could have two meanings. Naturally I assumed he was talking about Kitty! I couldn’t be madder at myself. It’s nearly as bad as signing a full confession.”

“I wonder how he is in bed,” Eda Lou said thoughtfully.

“Oh, for God’s sake! Bed, bed, bed. Can’t you think of anything else?”

“You don’t want me to change this late in life. What does he know, anyway? That you had a good idea what Brad was fixing to do. That’s nothing to worry about.”

“I could have stopped him.”

“You could have stopped Brad?” the older woman said incredulously. “Where would you get the bazooka?”

“You know what I mean. I could have warned Kitty.”

“Like so much-You were willing to keep Shayne talking, I noticed, when you thought Brad was still on his way.”

Barbara moved restlessly to the far wall and started back. “I know. And that makes me an accessory.”

“Baby, you’re wicked,” Eda Lou said affectionately. “Except in your own head you can’t be an accessory to a murder that didn’t come off. What do you care what Shayne thinks? You’ll never see him again. You or me both.” She added in a tone that was carefully casual, “What was all that about nitrous whatever?”

Shayne had the binoculars on Barbara’s face. She was facing the window, her back to the housekeeper. Her nostrils flared.

“Nitrous oxide. It’s a kind of anesthetic, I think. He was throwing out things to see what kind of knee jerk he could get out of me.”

“And he got one, darling,” Eda Lou said softly. “I’m sorry to say he got one.”

For an instant there was a small secret smile on Barbara’s face. Then she turned toward Eda Lou.

“I never know what you’re thinking! Why can’t you break down and say two honest words? You could give me some advice if you felt like it. You knew Brad. You’ve known Frank longer than I have. What do I say to him when I see him tomorrow? Do I ask him where he got the idea it was all right to sit outside my front window at three o’clock in the morning and use me for target practice?”

The question sounded eerie to Shayne, but Eda Lou took it seriously. She came into view, still wearing the feathered negligee, and poured herself a drink.

“I’m going to have a pip of a hangover when I wake up,” she said. “You don’t really think that was Frank, do you? The Honorable Francis Xavier Shanahan? I doubt if he even knows which end of a gun the bullet comes out of.”

“But if Kitty’s really put away for the night-”

“Maybe she hired somebody. Maybe Brad arranged it, as a last will and testament. What seems funny to me-I know there’s a little chop in the cove tonight, but he had three or four good shots at under fifty yards. He missed with all of them.”

Barbara threw out both arms in one of her dramatic gestures. “Don’t torture me! Why would anybody want to shoot at me and miss?”

“Maybe because-” the older woman began, then didn’t go on. “Oh, Christ. All I have to say is, if I can see you through Wednesday without losing my marbles I’m going on a long, long cruise, all by myself.”

Barbara muttered something. She was turning as she spoke, and Shayne’s apparatus didn’t pick it up.

Eda Lou carried her drink to a tall carved chair beside the front window, and sat down facing Shayne. She fluffed out the feathers on her collar.

“This is a nightcap. Then we go to bed. Tomorrow’s another day. I’ll correct that. Today’s another day.”

Barbara, beside her, touched the starred bulletholes in the window, as if to persuade herself they were real.

“Even if this deal falls through, I can’t go on living here. Kitty can have the damn house if she’s that nuts about it.”

“Hey, what happened to the old fighting spirit all of a sudden?”

“All gone. Damn it all, if Frank doesn’t want to get married I don’t see why he can’t say so.”

The binoculars picked up the deep downward lines from the corners of her mouth. Shayne looked away. This part of his business was often necessary, but he didn’t ever want to get to like it.

“Once and for all,” Barbara said in a flat unemotional voice, “damn it, are you my mother?”

With his unaided eye, Shayne saw only her outline against the front window. Her face was blank. He raised the binoculars, looking not at Barbara but at the older woman. There was a strange expression on that heavily madeup face. Her lips had a mocking twist.

“That again,” she said. “Your mother’s name was Mrs. Cal Tuttle. A sweet uncomplaining pain in the ass, who never said a cross word to anybody. Why you can’t be satisfied I’ll never know. Very good stock. Churchgoing people, the flower of the Old South. And square? Your mother did one offbeat thing in her entire life, and that was to marry Cal. What’s wrong with you? Now we’re going to bed. We sat up the whole night, what do you think of that? Well, it’s the only wake that son of a bitch Brad is going to get.”

She lit a cigarette and said briskly, “To answer your question, I’m not your mother. I repeat, not. It seems to me I’d know, wouldn’t I? Freeze it, will you, for good?”

“I haven’t mentioned it once in five years!”

“And that’s once too many. I was your father’s dear friend and longtime companion, and the only reason he never married me was because I never brought the subject up. If I’d been the mother of his only child, wouldn’t he leave me a piece of his stinking Key? Really. Think it over.”

“God, you’re a hard person to get along with.”

“And how would you change your way of life if I said yes? What would you do, look after me in my old age? When I said I wanted to go on a cruise, did I say I wanted to go with you? You’re the world’s dullest travel companion, dear. I’ll never go through that again. Those goddamned ruins.”

Barbara dropped her cigarette into her martini glass. The phone rang before she could speak. Shayne saw her shoulders stiffen.

“Well, answer it,” Eda Lou said. “It’s probably somebody who wants to break the bad news about Brad.”

“Damn it, I’m too tired.”

Eda Lou exclaimed with annoyance and went to the phone, her cigarette between her lips.

“Hello? Yes, but she’s asleep. The way all Christian people ought to be at this time of night. This is her housekeeper, and what can I do for you?” After a moment she said sharply, “Who?” She covered the mouthpiece. “It’s Hank Sims! Now what the hell?”

Into the phone she said, “Out of the blue. We were all so broken up when we heard that you and that pretty wife had decided to go separate ways. What do you mean I don’t sound sincere? I’m always sincere when anybody wakes me up just before daybreak. You already said you wanted to talk to Barbara. Call at a civilized hour. I’m going back to bed. Dial the number again and you’ll get a busy signal.”

She listened briefly. “Hold on a minute.”

Covering the phone again she said, “It’s about Frank, and he says it’s important. You have to talk to him, baby.”

“About Frank?” Barbara went to the phone as though sleepwalking. “He’s dead. Brad killed him before he went to Kitty’s. I know he did.”

“Talk to him,” Eda Lou said patiently. “I don’t think it’s that bad.”

Barbara took the phone. “Is Frank all right? — But where are you? I’m coming into Miami later. I can meet you. Yes, of course, if you’re in Marathon you might as well drive over, but what’s it about? — All right, I’ll make some coffee. But this better be important!”

She hung up and whirled on Eda Lou. “He has something to show me and he won’t talk about it on the phone.”

Eda Lou’s eyes narrowed against the smoke from her cigarette. “If it’s bad, we can’t guess it away. He’ll be here soon enough.”

“How about their divorce? Did that go through or are they still-”

She left the room. Eda Lou followed, taking the martini pitcher and the glasses.

Shayne changed position, easing the pull on his injured leg. The sky was beginning to brighten in the east. The tangled undergrowth all around the big tree seemed less formidable than when he had fought his way through it in pitch darkness. He rubbed his ears and replaced one earphone. After finishing his cigarette he added it to the burned out butts in the peanut can and lit another.

Then the women came back into the living room.

Eda Lou was still wearing her negligee but Barbara had changed into pink slacks and a blouse. She had worked on her face and hair. Shayne checked her appearance through the binoculars. She looked fresh and glowing, and Shayne wondered, not for the first time, at the resilience of women.

“I ought to be worrying,” she said brightly, “but I’m not. I’ve decided how to handle Frank. I’ll bring it out in the open. Was he shooting at me, or wasn’t he? Naturally he thought I’d just send back his ring on some pretext or another. He’s in for a surprise.”

“Baby,” Eda Lou said admiringly, taking bottles to the sideboard, “I like to listen to the way your mind works. We have to do something about this broken glass, unless we want Hank to think we sit around shooting out light bulbs.”

“I’ll get the vacuum cleaner.”

Barbara left the room. Alone, Eda Lou picked up a fragment of one of the frosted bowls. Her eyebrows knotted.

“Goddamn it to hell!” she said in a fierce undertone, and hurled the piece across the room. It shattered against the far wall. Sighing, she poured herself a slug of straight gin and tossed it off.

“And what a slob I’m turning out to be,” she said.

Her face brightened as Barbara came back with the vacuum cleaner.

Barbara said, “What do you think about my Shanahan strategy? Aren’t you going to give me the benefit of your long experience?”

“None of the men I’ve known ever took a shot at me with a carbine. They knew I’d shoot back.”

“Frank doesn’t dislike me. He just doesn’t like the idea of marriage. Heavens, people get used to it.”

She turned on the vacuum cleaner. Shayne saw their lips move, but the roar from the machine drowned out their words.

Barbara was in midsentence when she turned it off. “-with Kitty. Frank said to leave it to him. He knows a way he can make her sign, if she still says no.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with Uncle Ev, something sordid, no doubt. Blackmail usually is.”

Eda Lou was frowning. “Did Frank say that about Ev, or is it just a guess?”

“He implied it. Sweetie, don’t give me a third degree, all right?”

“There’s the car. We’ll talk about it later. I’ll bring in the coffee and vamoose. Just one thing about Hank, baby. He’s as crooked as a hairpin.”

“Crookeder. I know that. I can’t abide him, so will you worry about something else?”

“Don’t answer any questions. If he starts to give you a hard time, yell. I’ve got the. 25. I’ll come a-running.”

In the tree house, Shayne freed one ear from the earphones and heard the sound of a car on the clamshell driveway.

chapter 13

Hank Sims was at the wheel of a promoter’s car, a white Chevrolet convertible with white-walled tires and red leather upholstery. The top was down. It passed out of sight for a moment and stopped in front of the house.

Barbara waited in the living room, checking her hair and makeup, while Eda Lou went to the door to let him in. He sauntered into binocular-range, hands in the back pockets of his tight Levis. He was a burly young man in a full black beard.

“Still wearing that awful disguise, I see,” Barbara observed. “No wonder nobody wants to give you a full time job.”

Sims slouched into the room. “I’m not looking for jobs. I’m self-employed.”

“And it must pay very well,” Barbara said cheerfully. “I see you’re driving a new car.”

“I’ll get some coffee,” Eda Lou said disapprovingly.

The moment the housekeeper was out of the room Sims’s hands came out of his pockets. He took Barbara in his arms and kissed her hard. At first she tried to twist away. That lasted only an instant. Then her arms came up and the embrace became deep and mutual.

He broke off abruptly. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing too exciting,” she said shakily. “Damn you, anyway. After Kitty walked out I thought you might at least give me a ring once in a while.”

“After who walked out? I walked out, for cause, and that’s how it’s going to be in the action. Goddamn it, when money’s going around the table I want my share.” He put his hand on her breast. “I wanted to call you. I almost did a couple of times but things were too involved.”

He dropped his hand as Eda Lou came in with a tray.

“Coffee.”

Giving Sims a narrow look, she put down the tray and went out.

“Somehow,” he said, looking after her, “I get the feeling that somebody around here doesn’t like me. She’s got colored blood, do you know that? There’s a thing about the half-moons on the fingernails-you can always tell. How you two can be so palsy-I’d go out of my skull.”

“Eda Lou is a very old and very good friend.”

“Yeah. You didn’t put on a bra, I notice. That was foresighted.”

“I hardly ever wear one down here.” She moved a chair to the low table. Leaning forward over the tray, she poured the coffee. “I forget about you. Cream and sugar?”

Sims picked the cognac bottle off the sideboard. “Stick some of this in it.”

“Not a bad suggestion. I believe I’ll join you.”

She poured cognac into both their cups and passed one to him. He watched her for a moment and said abruptly, “Are you really bucking for judge’s wife?”

“That’s one way to put it. He’s another old, dear friend.”

“Christ! How far along is it?”

“Quite far. His work keeps him busy. We’ll be married after court recesses in June.”

“I know how busy he is,” Sims commented. “On the go every minute. Babs, I think about you a lot, especially lately.”

“I know precisely how much you think about me.” She made a circle of her thumb and forefinger. “Not at all. I don’t blame you. Nobody gives you foundation grants. You have to think about yourself, and that’s a big subject.”

“Will you cool it, Babs? I may be a son of a bitch in some ways-”

“In some ways?”

“In all ways if you like that better. You mentioned the car. It’s not mine. I borrowed it from a certain connection. He don’t know I took it. And the way luck has been running for me lately, some orange-picker’s going to bang into me on the way back to Miami and he won’t have any insurance.”

“That old song and dance. Unlucky Hank. What’s so important it can’t wait till after breakfast?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to get some more of this so-called coffee inside me before you kick me out.”

Something moved near the corner of the house. Eda Lou came out of the boathouse carrying a wooden footstool and something else which Shayne was unable to identify. She put the stool on the clamshells under the rear window and stepped up on it. The object in her other hand took shape. It was a bullhorn, probably the kind with a two-way amplifier, which can send voices a long distance across open water and can also pick up ordinary sounds at the same distance, like a gigantic hearing aid.

She put the mouthpiece to her ear and pointed the bell of the horn toward the open window.

“I’m always the one who gets burned,” Sims was saying. “With anybody ordinary, it evens out. Sometimes a thing clicks, sometimes it don’t. If you happen to be born lucky, maybe it clicks for you seven out of ten. With me it’s the other way. Seven times out of ten, year in and year out, I end up with horse turd in my face. Where I’m concerned they suspended the law of averages.”

“Hank, you’re just no damn good, that’s the only trouble with you.”

“But I know it!” he said quickly. “That makes a difference. You wouldn’t keep wondering where I was all the time. You’d know I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Wouldn’t that give you a kind of security? God knows I make a lousy husband. Ask Kitty.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“But I could tell you a couple of ways I’d be an improvement on your ordinary jerk, even if I don’t go to the barber for a trim every second Friday. Even if I don’t think the goddamn jokes in The Reader’s Digest are funny.”

Barbara laughed. “Hank, you make out a very good case.”

“It’s nothing immediate,” Sims said gloomily. “First I have to cut my own marriage ties and get that in writing. Then if you decide not to share Frank’s sunset years-”

Barbara interrupted. “What did you want to show me, bearing in mind that whatever it is, I’m not paying you anything?”

“You’re not too dumb at that,” he said. “I thought maybe I could peddle it for a couple of G’s. But I know me. I’d get it all bollixed up and walk out owing you money.”

He put the cup on the table and said seriously, “We’ve been batting that pingpong ball back and forth, which is O.K. as far as that goes. Knock me. I’ll knock you right back. But in back of this beard I’ve got feelings. I don’t know what it is about you, but goddamn it, it appeals to me.”

“I have part ownership of a property a land company’s offering to pay one million dollars for, that’s what there is about me. I know what makes you tick, beard or no beard, and I hear you ticking.”

“Baby!” Sims exclaimed. “One million bucks! This is news to me. You mean to tell me you have a buyer for Gaspar?”

She gave a silvery laugh. “The reason you don’t own a white convertible of your own is that you’re such a lousy liar.”

He pulled up his blue knitted sports shirt absentmindedly and scratched his stomach. “One, comma, zero zero zero, comma, zero, zero zero. One million bucks. I honestly didn’t hear one word about it. Who would tell me?” Reaching back into his hip pocket, he pulled out an envelope and rapped it on his knee. “I don’t have the funds to hire a private eye. Kitty wants me to give her one of those no-contest decrees. Be polite and get the hell out. You know the bitch-she can’t understand why I want to be nasty when she’s being so civilized, not asking for alimony. Hell! I’m the aggrieved party. I’m the one who ought to get the alimony! She laid your old man, and got paid off with a big one-fifth of his property. One-fourth now. And you tell me that may be worth something in the way of real dough.”

“Hank, men don’t get alimony.”

“That’s going to be changed! She’s got a good job. It begins to dawn on me that I may be unemployable. I know the courts won’t see it my way-they’ve been paying off the wives for too many years. This has to be under the table. Before I sign any papers she’s going to give me a three-year contract. I’ll be her personal-affairs consultant, I’ve got it all worked out. Monthly payments for thirty-six months.”

“Why tell me?”

Opening the envelope, Sims whipped out several sheets of stiff white paper, folded in three. “Just giving you the background. I’ve been tailing the kid. What a crummy thing to do, really. But I had to. It never occurred to me to get any photographs of her in bed with your old man. All right. She’s been going to a certain room in the St. Albans Hotel on the Beach.” He unfolded the papers and slapped them on the table. “And that room is registered to a certain fiance of yours named Francis X. Shanahan, believe it or not, and why should I care if you don’t believe it?”

“Frank-”

“Baby, I checked and I double-checked. I’m like you-I didn’t think it made sense. I thought at first he was loaning a friend of his the key. But when I saw him go into that room on three separate occasions when my wife was inside.” He stabbed at his eyes with his spread fingers. “With these two eyes. He’s a hustler, we know that. Kitty likewise. Well, nobody’s going to hustle me if I can help it. Maybe it isn’t sex. Maybe she’s helping him with his legal research. But it sure looks like sex, and all I’m interested in is the way it looks.”

“Hank, it’s fantastic.”

“I knew you’d say that, which is why I brought along these affidavits.” He shuffled them apart so he could read the signatures. “Robert Truehauf, bellman. Emory J. Sedge, assistant night manager. Helena Csern-Czerniewicz. I can’t pronounce it. Maid. All notarized. Testifying to the occupancy of said premises on said dates and so on-I put it in my version of legal language, probably got it all wrong.”

He poked one of the sheets in front of Barbara and jabbed it with his forefinger. “One time it was all night, anyway till the night man went off shift. All there in black and white. Do you know what you’re looking at, baby doll? You see words. I see dollar signs.”

Shayne, in the tree house, took out an envelope and a pencil and made a quick note.

Barbara snatched the affidavits and threw them at Sims. The corner of one of the stiff pieces hit him in the eye.

“You’re a dirty, crawling person.”

“Dirty?” he said, gathering his sheets and returning them to the envelope. “Crawling? And did I ever have any chance to be different?”

Barbara gave a sudden shriek of laughter which ended in a sob.

“Hell, Babs,” the bearded man said in embarrassment, “I didn’t know it would hit you that hard. I go on the theory that when I’m dying of cancer I want the doctor to tell me. What’s so surprising? You knew he’s a tomcat. He’s always been a tomcat. He’ll always be a tomcat, as long as he has the strength.”

“Shut up! Get out!”

“I’m on my way. I didn’t do this the way I rehearsed it, which is what generally happens. Hell, honey, I know you won’t agree with me now, but I’m doing you a favor. Why be a tackling dummy all your life? If you want somebody’s hairy chest to cry on, mine’s available.”

She threw a coffee cup at him.

“I’m better than nothing!” he shouted. “That’s all I’m saying!”

She went at him with both fists. He tripped on the bunched edge of the carpet and went down. Snatching up the cognac bottle, she hurled it at him. Shayne heard the crash, but she must have missed his head because he came to one knee a moment later and seized her around the waist.

Eda Lou, alarmed, was getting down from her stool to help. But the battle seemed to be over, or at least its nature had changed. Barbara was holding Hank’s shaggy head against her stomach.

“Hank?” she said faintly. “What are you doing?”

Eda Lou changed her mind and came back to the stool. She listened at the mouthpiece for a moment, then stepped up on the stool, reversed the amplifier and put the bell mouth against the screen.

“SIMS, YOU CRUD, QUIT THAT AND GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” she bellowed.

Shayne had the rheostat all the way up, straining to catch the strangled exchange of dialogue. The sudden roar of the bullhorn almost blew off the top of his head. Barbara and Hank froze.

Shayne’s hand shot toward the rheostat, and at that moment an alien noise, very close, penetrated the static in the earphones. He started to turn, but before he could bring his head all the way around he was hit, very hard, from behind.

chapter 14

The bullhorn went on roaring in his ears. He was trying hard to yell when he lost consciousness.

His first impression was that the Key had blown up around him. He was out of contact with the ground for a time, and then he was plunging down into the crater through a hail of flaming debris. He came to rest at last, and after an unknown period of time he began the long climb back.

When he opened his eyes, the brightness was so painful that he closed them again.

He tried to move. Nothing happened, and he thought at first that his nerve centers were still blocked. Then he discovered that his ankles were bound together and his wrists were lashed behind his back. He was gagged.

He told himself his name and profession. After making that effort he had to rest. Then he told himself where he was. He was on one of the Middle Keys, Key Gaspar. He had been slugged with something hard and jagged. He put his mind to that for a moment. It was unimportant, except that at this stage he had to clear up each confusion before moving on to the next. The nature of the pain suggested something long and narrow, like a spike. He opened his eyes again, and found himself looking directly into the sun. If the sun was up, he had to hurry.

He twitched forward. The earphones and binoculars were gone. The tin can full of cigarette stubs had been knocked over, and stale butts and ashes lay all about him. He twisted so he could look through the hole in the floor. The climbing spikes had been pulled out of their holes and lay scattered about in the long saw-grass at the foot of the tree. In the old days of the buccaneers, prisoners had been either killed or marooned. Though he had been left alive, Shayne had been marooned in a tree house twenty feet in the air.

Arching his back, he was able to see out through the broken wall. The Moorish house, unshaken by the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that had taken place in Shayne’s vicinity, stood where he had last seen it. The surface of the ocean beyond was flat and unoccupied. There was no sign of life anywhere.

He rested another moment before taking a fresh inventory. It still turned up the same objects-cigarettes, peanut can, a short flagstaff flying a torn bit of black cloth. His attention came back to the can.

It had been opened by peeling off a narrow strip of tin. Finding the top with his thumb, he tested the cutting edge. It was as dull as a butter knife. Working entirely by touch, he maneuvered the can until he was able to get a grip on it with one hand. He bit down hard on the gag and squeezed. The can crumpled slowly under the pressure. He bent it back with his thumb and crumpled it again, then again, trying to tear the edge. It got away from him. He groped after it blindly, looking for something that would give him more leverage.

Bending both knees, he kicked out a rotten plank from one of the side walls. When the plank splintered it left a rusty nailhead protruding from the two-by-four. He jackknifed around with a difficult backward contortion of his rangy body and brought the can and the nailhead together. Several minutes later he was able to open a small, jagged sawtooth in the lip of the can.

His wrists and ankles were bound with the same wire he had traced through the underbrush in the dark. He turned the can end over end and snagged the wire around his wrists in the little nick. Applying only minimum pressure, he began to work his wrists back and forth. The can shot away from him again.

This time it stopped at the edge of the hole in the floor, where the tiniest nudge would send it over. Shayne brought it back to safety with a quick movement of his feet.

He decided to work on his ankles first. By bringing his knees up hard against his chest and straining downward, he could just reach the wire. He worked one strand into his improvised sawtooth, alternately tightening and relaxing his leg muscles while holding the can steady in his numb fingers. He was able to generate a small friction. A moment later the wire snapped.

He freed his ankles quickly. But the quick success made him careless. The hard downward pressure had tightened the wire around his wrists and his fingers were now nearly dead. He wrestled himself into a sitting position, trapping the can against the wall. He leaned back slowly, feeling the sharp point of tin bite into his forearm. He brought it toward his wrists, using the pain as a guide to where it was. It touched the wire for only an instant, then slipped. When he looked for it, it was gone.

Somehow he forced himself to his feet and out on the nearest branch. No one knew where he was but his assailant. If he didn’t get down by himself, he wasn’t going to get down. And he had to do it fast. There was no longer any feeling in his hands at all.

He straddled the branch and began to inch slowly backward. Coming to a lesser branch, he rocked forward, swung one leg over the obstruction and worked slowly past.

Slowly the branch began to sag under his weight. Soon he would have to decide whether to stay with the branch till it broke, or drop off while he had some control over where he would land. The branch cracked while he was still trying to make up his mind.

He landed in a low-growing thornbush, reeled into the open, tripped and went headlong. He came back to his feet by slow stages. He looked up at the tree to get his bearings and began hunting for the path.

He found it and lost it. The vines seemed determined not to let him go this soon. The thick green canopy above seemed to wheel in ever-widening circles, and when he broke out onto the clamshell driveway, caught up in the clockwise rotation of the landscape around him, he turned the wrong way. He kept veering toward the dense wall of foliage, first on one side, then the other. He rounded a bend and saw nothing ahead of him but a long white streak of clamshells. After a long moment he turned back.

Some time later he went around another bend and came upon the house. He lurched up two steps and fell against the kitchen door. When it failed to open, he backed off a step and came at it from the side, trying to reach the knob with his numb hands.

There was a gasp from inside. Eda Lou called, “Who’s out there?”

A figure swam toward him, stopping on the other side of the screen. “Mike Shayne?”

She tried to open the screen, but Shayne had propped himself against it.

“Je-sus! Move. Don’t fall down, for God’s sake. You must know I can’t carry you.”

Shayne pivoted, the door came open and he fell through.

chapter 15

Eda Lou ran to a drawer for a pair of shears and freed his wrists. He brought his arms forward, and levered himself up on his elbows.

“Hold still, I’ll get that thing out of your mouth.” She touched the side of his head to keep it from wavering. “You’re in great shape, aren’t you?”

She picked at the knot at the back of his neck, and when it came loose Shayne spat the gag onto the floor.

“Phone,” he croaked.

“Yes, baby,” she said. “You can tell me all about it as soon as I fix you up so you don’t bleed on my carpets. Lie on the floor. It’s washable.”

He laid his cheek gratefully against the cool black and white tile. He heard her muttering above him while she did something to the back of his head.

“Not as bad as I thought,” she said finally. “In six months you’ll be as good as new.”

Shayne raised his head. “What time is it?” It came out as a meaningless grunt. He said it again, more carefully.

“Not quite nine. Can you walk? Crawl? I better drive you into Marathon. If we make it a house call, the doctor won’t be here before noon.”

Shayne brought himself to his hands and knees, then came erect with the help of the kitchen table. He bared his teeth in what he meant as a smile. She was wearing city clothes, a striped cotton suit, and she had brightened her lipstick while toning down the colors around her eyes.

“I want to phone.”

“What? I didn’t catch.”

The room turned over, and the detective sat down in a straight chair. “Phone!” he said impatiently, and pantomimed a phone call.

“Oh, the phone,” she said. “You’d better wait till you get your tongue working again, don’t you think? I’d advise it.”

“I’ve got to hurry.”

“What?”

He looked away hopelessly and saw a coffee pot on the stove.

“You want some coffee, is that it?” she said.

He nodded. While she was lighting a burner and getting a cup and saucer, he shook hands with himself in an attempt to restore the circulation.

“I won’t ask you what happened,” she said, “because I can’t translate that gibberish. But Christ, people don’t drop in this way, with their wrists tied and a rag in their mouth. Who did it? Where’s the VW? Mike, hurry up, get better.”

“Where’s Barbara?”

“Did you say where’s Barbara? You’re improving. She went to Miami.”

Shayne groaned and started to get up. The ceiling descended rapidly, dealt him a hard rap and retreated to its usual place. He sat back and put his hand to his head. To his surprise he found that he was wearing a bandage.

“Don’t pull it,” Eda Lou said. “It’ll come off. Outside of the phone, and believe me, you can’t handle any phone calls yet, is there anything else I can get for you?”

“Cognac.”

“You’re still talking baby talk. That sounded like cognac.”

Shayne nodded.

She laughed at him. “Honey, if I give you a drink with that hole in your head I’ll be liable. You could sue me for thousands and thousands, not that you’d be able to collect thousands and thousands.”

Shayne pushed himself up. This time he made it all the way.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get it. But I’d make you sign a waiver if you could hold a pen.”

The coffee was boiling when she came back. She turned it off and poured a cup, adding a few drops of cognac. When he growled at her, she added a little more.

Shayne’s fingers were being stabbed with sharp needles as the blood came back. He put his face down to the coffee and breathed in the pleasant fumes.

“When did she leave?” he said.

“Barbara? Twenty minutes ago. Today’s her nurse’s aide day, but I don’t know if that’s where she’s going. She was in a foul mood. We had words, and she slammed the door on the way out, as if we don’t already have enough broken glass. Hell, I’ll help you.”

She steadied his head with one hand and lifted the coffee with another. For an instant, after taking the first sip, he felt almost normal.

“Who’s the guy with the beard?”

“Hank Sims, Kitty’s husband. Is he the one who jumped you? Of course. You’re working for Kitty and he’s in the middle of a mean divorce. I’m kind of surprised you let him get away with it, though.”

“Had my back turned,” Shayne said bleakly. “Loan me your. 25.”

“What for?”

He made a peremptory gesture and she shrugged. “O.K. If you’re going after Hank Sims in that condition, you’d better have something. He’s nobody’s dream boy. Shoot a couple of holes in him and I’ll give you a dollar.”

She left him sagging over the coffee. As soon as she was out of the kitchen he fought his way to his feet and followed quietly.

He stopped at the top of the two steps leading down to the living room. She was rummaging in the little drawer in the long mahogany table. After sliding the drawer shut she straightened and stood for a moment, her back to Shayne, thinking.

She turned decisively. Seeing Shayne, she put her hand to her heart.

“Not there?” Shayne said.

“How hard do you have to get hit before you stop thinking? No, it’s not there, which doesn’t mean a single damn thing. I’m getting forgetful in my old age. I put it somewhere else, that’s all.”

“Or else Barbara took it to Miami.” Shayne came down the steps and dropped onto the sofa, at the end nearest the phone. “Bring me the coffee.”

“Go to hell.”

Shayne rubbed his forehead. “Eda Lou, if Barbara’s walking around with a gun in her purse, I want to know it. I need that kind of information. I also need coffee.”

“Poor man, my heart bleeds.”

She went to the kitchen, came back with coffee and put it down near him. “But she didn’t take the gun. I remember now-I put it away upstairs. And on second thought, I think I’d better hang on to it.”

“Are you going to help me with the phone?” Shayne said wearily.

She lit a cigarette deliberately. “I suppose I have to, if I want to find out what’s going on. Why don’t I take you to the doctor first?”

After a moment she moved a straight chair into position and sat down.

“The News,” he said. “Ask for Tim Rourke.”

He told her the number. The switchboard girl at the paper passed the call on to the city room. She gave Shayne the phone.

He dropped it. She picked it up for him and wedged it into place against his shoulder.

“Mike?” Rourke was saying. “Mike?”

“Yeah,” Shayne grated.

“I’ve been wondering,” Rourke said with none of his usual levity. “I talked to the helicopter guy on Goose Key and he said he hadn’t heard from you. At twenty-five bucks an hour he’s in no hurry. Where are you?”

“Same place. Is Natalie in the office?”

“Sure. Want to talk to her? Kitty got off to New York O.K., if that’s what you’re worrying about. Nat can give you the details.”

Shayne motioned at Eda Lou. She gave him her cigarette and lit another for herself. He crouched over the coffee and took a long sip. As he straightened he noticed Eda Lou flick back her sleeve to look at her watch.

“Mike?” Natalie said, out of breath. “We were thinking of calling out the Marines.”

“I got sidetracked. Tell me about Kitty.”

“She’s in New York, Mike. She just called me from Kennedy. She woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep so she took the six-o’clock plane. She left me a note. She’ll be staying at the airport hotel, the International, if you want to call her. She said to tell them who you are and they’ll keep on ringing her room till she wakes up.”

Shayne tried to remember what else he had meant to ask her.

“Mike?”

“Yeah. Put Tim back on.”

“Mike,” Rourke’s voice said, “I’m sitting here trying to write the Brad Tuttle story. There’s a hell of a lot I don’t know.”

“There’s a hell of a lot I don’t know. You’ll have to go with a bulletin in the first edition, whatever the cops put out.”

“I already told the desk that was pure crap,” his friend protested. “I said I’d write the real story as soon as I heard from you.”

“That’s how it has to be for now,” Shayne said. “How did he die?”

“Gunshot. He’d been in a fight, knifed in the lower abdomen, bad cut over the eyes. He had about ten-percent vision, they figure, which is one reason he didn’t stop when they yelled.”

“What were the cops doing there?”

“That I didn’t ask. I assumed they were cruising.”

“Tim, I want you to get hold of Shanahan. Somebody has to hold his hand till I get back. Tell him what happened to Brad. Then stick with him. I mean in the same room till he goes to court. Go to the john with him. Hold on a minute.”

He asked Eda Lou, “How much did Frank pay for the judgeship?”

“Forty thousand,” she said promptly, then caught her breath and threatened him with her fist.

Shayne returned to the phone. “If he tries to throw you out, tell him you know about the forty thousand, who got it and in what size bills. I’ll meet you at the court house as soon as I can.”

“Mike, do you feel O.K.? You sound kind of fuzzy.”

“I’m fine. Get on it.”

Eda Lou broke the connection. He refreshed himself with more coffee. His mind had begun to move, lurching painfully from point to point.

“The St. Albans on the Beach.”

She looked up the number and dialed it, then looked at him questioningly.

“Harry Hurlbut,” Shayne said.

When the hotel security man answered, she asked him to hold the line.

“This is Mike Shayne, Harry,” the detective said, taking the phone. “I want to check a reference. Who’s your assistant night manager nowadays?”

He felt for the envelope on which he had jotted down two of the names on the affidavits Hank Sims had flashed in front of Barbara. “The name Emory J. Sedge doesn’t mean anything to you? One more thing. If you have your payroll handy, look under the T’s and see if you have a bellman named Robert Truehauf.”

He waited.

“I didn’t think you would,” Shayne said. “Thanks. I’ll buy you a drink in a day or so and tell you about it. I have to rush.”

He dropped the phone in his lap and told Eda Lou: “Get me Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police.”

She placed the call. Gentry wasn’t in his office, she was told, but he was in the building somewhere; they would hunt him down and have him return the call.

She squinted at Shayne over her cigarette. “You have no reason to confide in me, but I’m on the fringes of the family and I can’t help wondering. How did you get those St. Albans names, just for instance?”

“I used a bullhorn with a two-way amplifier,” Shayne said.

Her lips twitched, depositing cigarette ash on the front of her suit. “Sarcastic son of a bitch, aren’t you? We don’t have TV down here. I have to make my own entertainment. And where were you at the time, may I ask?”

She removed her cigarette. “I know!” Going to the kitchen, she came back with Shayne’s gag and shook it out. It was a torn piece of black cloth with part of a skull-and-crossbones showing.

“Barbara’s tree house! How long were you up there?”

“Long enough,” Shayne said.

The phone rang. Shayne picked it up.

“This is Gentry,” a gruff voice said. “What is it now, Mike, trouble?”

“The usual kind,” Shayne said. “Murder.”

“Who’s been murdered?”

“Two brothers, Ev and Brad Tuttle. Ev was a drunk. He went out in a mattress fire. You have it listed as accidental. You’re probably working on Brad now.”

“Nothing to work on. It’s open and shut. Your information is off for once. He was shot by a police officer. One of my best men, Hubie Elliot. I hope you’re not trying to pin anything on the department, Mike. Your batting average is pretty good, but this is one time you’re going to go down swinging.”

“I didn’t say Elliot murdered him. He was murdered by whoever put him on that street corner at that time of night with a knife in his hand. How did it happen your men were there waiting for him?”

Gentry said grudgingly, “We had an anonymous tip that a burglar was going to be working that block. O.K., Mike. Tell me more.”

“There’s an elimination contest going on. We started with five contestants, and we’re down to three. But what they don’t realize is that the game is fixed. It’s the big con, one of the best I’ve seen. I don’t expect you to follow this, Will. But unless we move fast we’ll have a couple more murders.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to round them up. The three principals plus an estranged husband. Number one-”

“Whoa! You know I can’t commit the department to that kind of operation with nothing to go on but a phone call. I also wouldn’t say you sounded exactly sober.”

“You’re within your rights, Will,” Shayne said carefully. “Even though one of the threatened persons is a Civil Court judge. This is a democracy. There’s no reason a judge should be given more protection than an ordinary citizen.”

“Damn it, Mike,” Gentry said after a moment. “Wait till I switch in the recorder. O.K., go ahead.”

“The touchy one is Frank Shanahan. You’d better collect everybody at his chambers. Hank Sims-late twenties, six one, about a hundred and ninety, full beard. He was driving a white Chevy convertible when I saw him. Wait a minute. I’ve got an informant here who may want to tell us where we can find him.”

He was looking at Eda Lou. She shrugged.

“He keeps changing addresses. The last I heard, he had a little business taking pictures of houses for real-estate agents. He must have a phone and a dark room somewhere.”

Shayne relayed this information to Gentry. “Now Mrs. Sims. Kitty Sims. She’s at the International Hotel at Kennedy Airport in New York. Tell her I said it’s O.K. to come back. Send somebody out to meet her plane.” To Eda Lou: “Nobody told me Barbara’s married name.”

“Lemoyne.”

“What hospital does she work at and what kind of car does she drive?”

“Angel of Mercy. Green Oldsmobile, four-door.”

She was meeting his gaze too candidly. He told Gentry, “Barbara Lemoyne. I’m told she may be working at the Angel of Mercy and she drives a green Olds sedan. You’d better check the other big hospitals and see what the Motor Vehicle Bureau says about her car. I hope to be back by ten, if I can talk my friend here into driving me to the heliport. I’ll meet you at the County Courthouse.”

He handed the phone back to Eda Lou and she depressed the bar.

“You really recover when you put your mind to it, don’t you? Anybody else?”

“Hilary Quarrels, the Florida-American Land Company. Let the operator find him. He may not be in Miami.”

Eda Lou raised her eyebrows but made no comment. After giving the operator the necessary information she leaned back, the phone to her ear.

“You’d like a lift to Goose Key,” she said. “Fine. But don’t I deserve one or two morsels in return?” She waved the phone at him and screamed, “What the hell do you mean the game’s fixed?”

Shayne winced. “Quieter. What’s your idea about why Cal left you out of his will?”

She stiffened. “He didn’t. He left me some money. He said in the letter I could live here as long as I please. I’m not wild about this kind of life. I like to have a little something going on. He didn’t know the Key was going to be worth anything.”

Shayne said softly, “The hell he didn’t.”

“Maybe eventually. Not in my lifetime. You’ve talked to a couple of people, done some eavesdropping here and there, somebody sandbagged you, and all of a sudden you know more than everybody else combined! What game is fixed? You can’t drop a remark like that and expect people to pretend they didn’t hear it. I’m more than a match for you, Mike Shayne! You explain that this minute, or so help me I slug you with the phone!”

Shayne laughed. “Did you find anything when you dug those holes out in the swamp?”

She looked at him open-mouthed. “I wish I knew how much you heard,” she muttered.

“Everything that was said in this room,” he told her. “Let’s talk about Shanahan. Was he Brad’s lawyer, too?”

“God, no. He never handled anybody small.”

“Who made the deal that got Cal his jail sentence?”

“You’re really going back, lover. Frank made it, who else? And it was a tricky thing. He reached a couple of guys on the jury. They dismissed three out of four counts and let him off easy with manslaughter.”

Shayne was scraping his chin with one thumbnail. “What did you do while Cal was in jail?”

She smiled slightly. “Baby, that intuition of yours. I couldn’t write him because we weren’t man and wife. If I had to send him any messages, and I did, all the time, they had to go in through his lawyer.”

“You moved in with Shanahan?”

“This is ancient history! It sounds lewd to say it at my age, but I was only twenty-five then, and any time I had to spend a night by myself it was a night wasted. That was my philosophy. Cal never knew what was going on. Why dredge it up now? If you think that’s why he included me out of the Key, you’re wrong.”

Noises came from the phone and she sat forward. “Mr. Michael Shayne calling. Hold the line.”

The detective took the phone. “Quarrels?” he said without preliminary. “About the Key Gaspar deal. You’ve probably heard that another joint tenant was killed last night?”

“No,” the voice said cautiously. “Which one?”

“Uncle Brad.”

Eda Lou picked up Shayne’s empty coffee cup and took it to the kitchen.

“When you say killed,” Quarrels said, “I take it you mean accidentally?”

“No. He was knifed, cut up with a broken bottle and shot. All of which goes to prove that Gaspar actually may be worth something. I understand your purchase hinges on a document purporting to be a treasure map.”

Quarrels gave a small chuckle. “Put it like that and it seems absurd. But it’s going to give us a wonderful selling angle.”

“I can already see the ads,” Shayne said dryly. “How about you personally? Do you think there’s buried treasure on the Key?”

“Well-l, if you want an off-the-record answer, and I’ll deny it if anybody quotes me, let’s say that on that subject I have a well developed bump of cynicism. At the same time, I recognize a first-class story when I see one. There isn’t much romance in real-estate development as a rule, Shayne. We sell location and shelter. At so much a square foot. If you can add a small dash of pirate gold, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum and all that, and make it look reasonably plausible, it gives you an edge. That’s all we’re looking for here. Will the Key be mentioned in connection with Tuttle’s death?”

“You can bet on it. I want to be sure I understand your attitude. As far as you’re concerned there are only two possibilities? If your bulldozers turn up a chest of doubloons you get back your out-of-pocket costs. If they don’t, you still get mileage out of the story.”

Eda Lou returned with another aromatic cup of coffee. Shayne drank some and set it down.

Quarrels said, “I think I can go along with that. It’s either-or.”

“No, there’s a third possibility,” Shayne said. “That you’re being taken.”

“I don’t quite see-”

“If the key word in the publicity is ‘fraud’ instead of ‘romance’ you’ll lose that edge, won’t you?”

There was a moment’s silence. Shayne sipped at his coffee royal while he waited. Eda Lou had put more cognac in this one.

Quarrels said carefully, “Will you enlarge on that a little, Shayne?”

“It’s only a theory. You’ll want to base your decision on facts. A good deal of work still has to be done on it. I was brought in on overnight bodyguard duty, and at the moment I don’t have a client. If I can prove before you pick up your option Wednesday that you’ve been a victim of a clever swindle, you’ll save yourself a million bucks and a certain amount of embarrassment. I’ll send you a bill for twenty thousand.”

Quarrels hesitated. “I’d say ten.”

Shayne was too tired to argue. “Ten. With luck I can wrap it up today. Are you in Miami?”

“No, in Atlanta. I’m about to leave for Miami.”

“O.K., we’ve got a deal. I’ll be in the Dade County Courthouse in Judge Shanahan’s chambers.”

Quarrels started to reply but Shayne handed Eda Lou the phone, which had become too heavy to hold. She hung up for him, looking worried.

“Mike, you’re pushing too hard. You can’t hope to snap back from that kind of knock on the head. Don’t pass out on me now. I’ll tell you one thing. You’re seeing a doctor before you take any helicopter rides. Finish your coffee. I’ll get out the car.”

Shayne’s head rocked. He tried to hold it still, using both hands, but then the whole house started to rock.

“Shot of cognac. I’ll be O.K.”

“Like hell I’ll give you a shot of cognac!” she snapped. “Cognac in coffee is bad enough. Hang on, for the love of God. You’re getting in that car under your own power or you’re staying right here.”

Heavy weights pulled at Shayne’s eyelids. Eda Lou’s face went in and out of focus. He needed sleep, he told himself. A brief nap would make a big difference. There was no point in going up against Shanahan in this condition. He needed a clear mind and a cool eye. He had to gauge reactions, which he couldn’t do when he wasn’t even able to keep one side of Eda Lou’s face from changing places with the other. And why did she have five eyes?

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Get some sleep now and you can move faster when you wake up.”

He was lying on the sofa with his feet up, he discovered. This was more comfortable. He wound and set his mental alarm clock. He would wake up in exactly half an hour. He was vaguely aware that his friend Eda Lou was thumbing back one of his eyelids. It was a professional gesture. A professional himself, Shayne appreciated professionalism in others. She had drugged his second cup of coffee, of course, but she was such an unsentimental old lady that he could hardly hold it against her. He fell asleep.

chapter 16

A door slammed. An instant later a car got away to a wheel-spinning start on the crushed clamshell driveway.

Michael Shayne, sleeping heavily, heard these noises, and as they entered his dream they became transformed into something sinister and ominous. He stirred. Suddenly he was trying to escape on foot through loose clamshells from a squadron of armored helicopters, hovering above him at treetop level, adjusting their speed to his. He threw his head from side to side, weaving evasively while fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets sliced the air around him.

When the back of his head, where he had been slugged in the tree house, struck the unpadded arm of the sofa, the explosion of pain blew him to his feet. At first he was sure he had been hit by one of the gunners in the helicopters, and he was surprised to find himself alive, though tottering, staring blindly at double bullet holes in a picture window. Beyond the window, sunlight danced on water. His arms hung helplessly at his sides.

With the pain still vibrating in his head, he picked up the coffee cup. His lips came back in a snarl and he threw it at the great window. The window came down with a crash, and the noise helped clear his head.

Picking up the cognac bottle as he passed, he lurched onto the terrace. The harsh morning sun hit him like a blow from a plank. His brain could only hold one thought at a time. To get back to Miami he needed a helicopter. To get to the heliport he needed a car. He peered down the driveway.

Its straightness and blinding whiteness nearly hypnotized him.

He fumbled the cork out of the bottle and raised the cognac to his lips. A long swallow helped get him off the terrace and back in the house, mumbling under his breath, “Goose Key heliport, don’t know the number.” He himself knew what he was saying, and he hoped he could make the operator understand.

He knocked the phone over and fumbled at the dial. On the second try he managed to get the “O” all the way around. He picked up the phone and listened, but heard nothing except absolute silence, no hum, no dial tone. He gave the phone a shake, but there was still no response. The wires had been cut. He threw it through the broken front window.

He had his next drink in the open doorway of the empty two-car garage, the one after that in the boathouse. He was out of breath, though he had taken a route giving him the maximum number of objects to lean against. He went to sleep again briefly as he studied the fiberglass sports fisherman. It needed some work to put it back in running condition, but so did he, Shayne thought wryly, so did he.

He climbed into the pilot room and groped about until he found a flashlight. He pulled off the heavy plate covering the twin engines. They had quit on him the night before as soon as they tried to run on air instead of the usual mixture of air and gasoline. Shayne followed the gas line until he came to an open coupling. He forced the flexible copper line into feed-in position, slid the nut into place and tightened it with his fingers. He didn’t waste time looking for a wrench. He wasn’t going far.

The engines hawked, hesitated, then took hold as the gas reached them. Again Shayne went to sleep. His chin jolted against his chest, and the sudden sharp rush of pain brought him back. He engaged the gears and put the throttle all the way down.

The powerful boat surged backward. There was a splintering crash, and it broke through the door into open water.

He came about. Leaving the cove, he circled the southernmost point and headed toward the bridges and causeways of the Overseas Highway. He woke up from another heavy sleep a little later and saw the tumbledown dock at the end of the track where he had left the Volkswagen. He veered to the right, shut off the power and ran aground. The shock carried him out of the wheel room and over the forward deck to the pebbly beach.

He struck off toward the Volkswagen, resisting the impulse to lie down on the pebbles and go to sleep, letting the three remaining Tuttle heirs continue the elimination until only one was left. He saw the Volkswagen. He was glad he had had the foresight to point its stubby nose in the right direction. He fell into it and it seemed to start by itself. He had to hold the steering wheel hard with both hands to keep it in the ruts. It was easier to control on the concrete highway. Shayne himself, however, wavered between being sixty percent asleep and sixty percent awake. The even whine of the motor soothed him. He began shaking his head from one side to the other. Presently the little car picked it up, seeming to shake its blunt front end in the same rhythm.

He leaned into a long sweeping curve on the first causeway. The wheel increased its resistance, and in spite of anything Shayne could do, the little car drifted over the center line. He gave his head a sharp deliberate shake. The wheel’s resistance collapsed and the Volkswagen came back too far, scraping the retaining cable.

Shayne’s common sense took over. He had been hurrying, but he was still too groggy to be driving this fast. He wouldn’t get there any sooner by way of the sea.

The moment he touched the brakes he set off a series of quick jolting events. Apparently some of the strange sensations he had been experiencing had been caused by something more serious than the sleeping pills Eda Lou had put in his coffee.

A rear wheel rolled past him. The little car swung into the lefthand lane, knocked down two retaining posts and swung all the way around, ending up headed the wrong way with the wheelless rear axle on the heavy rock fill at the extreme edge of the causeway.

The door burst open as Shayne hit it, but the Volkswagen was halted an instant later by the retaining cable. The detective sprawled half in and half out of the car, fully awake at last.

chapter 17

Three hours later, a scowling Michael Shayne strode into the Dade County Courthouse on West Flagler Street, near North Miami Avenue.

The first car to come past after Shayne’s Volkswagen lost a wheel was a big semi-trailer, running empty. The driver blinked his directional signals but didn’t stop. The next car stopped. It was driven by a hard-bitten, red-faced trooper who had been operating in Southern Florida for only two months, having learned his trade as a deputy sheriff in farming country in central Mississippi.

He had never heard the name Michael Shayne. He had a strong prejudice against big-city private detectives. Shayne’s makeshift head bandage aroused his suspicions. Detecting the odor of brandy, he forced Shayne to walk a straight line. By this time Shayne was coldly furious. He knew the folly of antagonizing this kind of low-level official, and by biting down hard he suppressed any remarks he would ordinarily have made. His anger took care of the last of his vertigo. He walked the line without wavering.

After that the trooper wanted to know what he was doing in a Volkswagen registered in someone else’s name. Shayne told him evenly that it was a stolen car, and to take him in. The Marathon Chief of Police recognized him at once, and after Shayne explained the nature of his accident, ordered the trooper to drive him to the heliport.

The trooper did so in silence, fuming. Reaching the heliport, Shayne found that Blakey, his pilot, was no longer waiting. He put in an angry phone call to Miami. Blakey, he was told, had brought in a passenger and was on his way back to Goose Key. The helicopter settled down on the strip as Shayne hung up.

He went out to meet it.

“What the hell?” he demanded, throwing the door open. “I told you to wait.”

“Sure, Mike,” the pilot said. “Didn’t you-” One look at Shayne’s face gave him his answer. “Uh-oh. You didn’t.”

“Take her up,” Shayne snapped.

As soon as they were off the ground and heading for Miami, the pilot explained what had happened. A tart old lady named Mrs. Eda Lou Parchman had presented a written order signed by Shayne, telling him to take her to Miami. Blakey had never seen Shayne’s handwriting, and had had no reason to suspect that the order was forged.

“Let’s see how fast you can make this thing go,” the detective said grimly.

Judge Francis X. Shanahan, playing nervously with the neck of a water carafe, was hearing argument from opposing counsel in a negligence case. The heavy bags under his eyes were the only visible indication of his well-known fondness for late hours, noisy nightclubs and glossy, ambitious young women. As Shayne entered his courtroom, an expression of extreme physical discomfort passed over his still-handsome face. He gave his little two-part mustache a quick stroke with the ball of his thumb.

Tim Rourke was in the last row, nibbling his nails. Hearing the door open, he looked around hopefully. The detective slid in beside him.

“Where’s Will Gentry?” Shayne asked in a low voice.

“Down on the street in a radio car.” The reporter glanced at Shayne’s head bandage. “You had some trouble, I see. I didn’t think you sounded right on the phone.”

“I gave him the names of four people,” Shayne said. “How many did he find?”

“You see Shanahan up there. So far that’s it. We’re batting. 250.”

Shayne swore under his breath. “Did he get through to Kitty Sims?”

Rourke shook his head. “She’s registered at the New York hotel all right, but she’s not in her room.”

“Is he sure?”

“Yeah. Her luggage was there when he called, but she wasn’t. A Do Not Disturb ticket was on the doorknob.”

Shayne went on scowling. A bailiff left his post beneath an American flag and came over to warn them that they were making too much noise. They ignored him.

“Give Gentry a message,” Shayne said. “There’s one other person I want him to pick up, and I hope he can find this one. An old lady named Eda Lou Parchman. Cal Tuttle’s common-law wife. Blakey set her down at the Watson Park heliport and she must have picked up a cab at the stand there. Skinny old dame, fake white hair, heavy eye makeup, striped cotton suit, high heels. Plenty of style.”

Rourke made a few quick notes. “Gentry’s beginning to get restless, Mike. I told him as much as I knew, but you know how much that is-not a hell of a lot.”

“Tell him to meet me in Shanahan’s chambers as soon as he gets the new call out. I’ll tell him about it.”

He stood up.

Rourke said, “Court doesn’t recess for half an hour.”

“It’s going to recess in twenty seconds,” Shayne promised him.

Sidestepping the bailiff, he went down the aisle to the broad railing. From the raised bench, Judge Shanahan watched him approach. At the swinging gate Shayne stopped and took out his wallet. He had borrowed thirty dollars from Rourke after Kitty cleaned him out at backgammon. Without taking his eyes off the judge’s face, he removed the bills from the wallet and counted them out slowly on the oak railing.

Shanahan’s mustache jumped. He took a long swallow of water while the detective counted his money again.

“Yes, I get the drift,” Shanahan said, breaking into a droning citation of precedents from one of the lawyers. “I’ll rule after lunch. Court will now stand in recess.”

The lawyer’s jaw dropped as Shanahan stood up. Stuffing the bills carelessly in his pocket, Shayne opened the gate and sauntered through. The bailiff moved to cut him off.

“Here now. Where do you think you’re going?”

Shayne gave him a hard look and he stood aside.

Shanahan, his mustache working nervously, was waiting in his chambers. “Hell, Mike, couldn’t you think of any other way? That joker who was moving for a dismissal merely happens to be head of the ethics committee of the Bar Association, that’s all. It’s lucky he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head.”

“Sorry, Frank. It couldn’t wait.”

“Rourke has been dropping hints I don’t care for at all,” Shanahan went on. “Why single me out, for God’s sake? You know you don’t get named to the bench in this town just because you wear the right color necktie. And how did a guy like you get involved, I’d like to know? I never figured you for a crusader.”

Shayne grinned at him. “That forty thousand payoff is just a jack handle, Frank, to jack some information out of you on another matter. I could use a drink, how about you?”

“Could I! After the needling Rourke has been giving me? Shut the door.”

Shayne kicked the door shut and sat down on a leather sofa. The judge took a bottle of whiskey and two glasses out of the lower drawer in his desk. After pouring two drinks he handed one to Shayne and sat down on the corner of the desk with a swish of his black robes.

“Cheers,” he said, lifting his glass. “And the one thing the boys insisted on when they gave me the endorsement was that I’d stick to tap water while court’s in session.” He ducked his head toward the glass to meet it as it came up and drank greedily. “Nothing like whiskey.”

“Have you seen your fiancee this morning?” Shayne said.

“Who?” Judge Shanahan asked.

“Mrs. Lemoyne.”

“Oh, yeah.” He gave an unwilling snort of laughter. “Damn it, I know I’m getting married, but-no, I haven’t. This is one of her hospital days. I’ll see her for dinner. I hear on the grapevine that you’re working for Kitty Sims.”

“That was yesterday. Today I’m working for Florida-American. I’ve been retained to find out if there actually is any buried treasure on Key Gaspar.”

Shanahan choked on a mouthful of whiskey. When he was able to stop coughing he remarked indifferently, “Didn’t they brief you? They win either way.”

“Not if I can show it to be a hustle.”

“But that’s actually the whole point, Mike. It was worked out in 1925 as a fraud on the lot-buying public. All we’re doing-”

He broke off abruptly and looked at Shayne over his raised glass, his mustache twisting.

“Yeah,” Shayne said, “there’s always that one other possibility. I’m surprised it took this long to hit you. That it doesn’t date back to ’25 at all. That it was worked out fairly recently as a fraud on Florida-American. And if that’s the way the publicity breaks-and there’s going to be publicity, Frank, lots of it-Quarrels will be out a million bucks and he’ll look stupid, which is bad in his business. You know there’s no buried treasure, Frank.”

“I deny that. I deny it categorically. There, may or may not be. But I’ve examined the evidence, and as a lawyer I can assure you-”

Shayne made a scornful noise and tossed off his whiskey. “The victim has to be willing. That’s rule number one. Did your office draft Cal’s will?”

“No. I recommended a firm which makes a specialty of eccentric trusts. If he’d asked my advice, I would have advised him against setting it up as a joint tenancy. But I was tickled that he wanted me in. The others are a rather emotional bunch. I’m the only one who pays attention to taxes, for example.”

“Frank, where were you at three-fifteen this morning?”

“Why?” Shanahan asked calmly. “What was going on at three-fifteen?”

“Somebody was shooting at Barbara with a carbine.”

“Did they miss?”

“They missed.”

“Well, I hope I don’t have to tell Barbara where I was. I was spending the night with somebody, as a matter of fact.”

“She won’t break the engagement over a little thing like that,” Shayne told him. “Did you know that Brad planned to call on Kitty last night with a deck of pornographic playing cards and a greasy comb and a knife?”

“I’ve passed my bar exams, Mike. I don’t answer that kind of question. Ever.”

“How about this one? Did you call the cops and tell them to expect a burglar in Kitty’s neighborhood?”

Shanahan smiled thinly without answering. He shifted position, as though he was wearing figure-control underwear which was beginning to bind.

Shayne went on, “Do you keep a room at the St. Albans?”

Shanahan squinted over his whiskey. “What kind of reaction are you trying to get? Why throw good money away on a hotel room? I have a perfectly good pad.”

“Mrs. Lemoyne knows where it is. You’ve been meeting Kitty Sims at the St. A., I’m told. On at least three occasions. On one she stayed the night.”

Shanahan put his glass down carefully. After easing the pull of his tight underwear he said brusquely, “What’s your source?”

“Hank Sims. He’s been following his wife, to get evidence of adultery for the divorce action. He has affidavits from an assistant night manager named Sedge, a bellman named Truehauf and a maid whose name I can’t remember except that it’s Polish.”

“Affidavits,” Shanahan said evenly. “And who were these affidavits supposed to impress, Babs? You’re beginning to tell me things, Mike. Maybe I’ve been a little too trusting. Now I’ll tell you about Kitty Sims. She’s got one of the greatest builds I ever saw on a woman, but the reason she never did any more with it is that she’s pure poison and she can’t conceal it for long. She’s too much the conniver for her own good. You can guess my approximate age, Mike. I’m no undergraduate. When you pass that half-century mark, it’s sad but the dolls tend to get a trifle reserved. It may turn out O.K. after you get over the first hurdle, but they really make you work for it, the dears. Being a judge has made a difference. They get some kind of perverse satisfaction out of going to bed with a judge, and why should I knock it?”

He picked up a Miami phone book and ruffled through it with both hands. “I’m not bragging, Mike. I’m stating facts, so you’ll know how much credence to put in those phony affidavits. There are two or three or four phone numbers under every letter of the alphabet in this book except X and Z, and there’s a girl at each one of them who’s always glad to find time for Frank Shanahan, feeble old crock that he is. Kitty, who needs her? Especially after the way she took Cal-”

“I wondered about that,” Shayne said.

“The badger game, Mike, in its classic form. Hank Sims walked in at the wrong time and said, ‘What are you doing between those sheets with my wife, sir? No clothes on, either! Fork over.’”

“Cash?”

“Damn right, cash. In the form of a capital investment in one of his real-estate promotions. You’d think Cal would bring somebody in from out of town, wouldn’t you, to tie them up and drop them in a swamp?” He shook his head. “No, he forgave her. He went on sleeping with her to the day he died. He looked into Hank’s promotion and put a hundred grand in it. He came out with an eighty-percent capital gain, and Hank never made a penny. That’s the way everybody should handle the badger game.”

He belched slightly. “Excuse me.”

He downed more whiskey and suppressed another bubble as it rose to his lips. “One way I’ve gone downhill, in the old days I never had hangovers. It hits me like this, all of a sudden.” He hiked up his robes to get at a handkerchief, with which he dried his forehead. “What about Quarrels, will he go by your recommendations?”

“I may have to persuade him. He’d like to believe in that buried treasure.”

“Mike, for Christ’s sake-if it’s a con, who’s behind it? Tick them off. Brad? He’s dead. Ev? Dead. Babs? Now Babs has a college degree, but you don’t think she’s got the brain power to swing something like this, do you? Kitty? I’ll tell you another thing about Kitty. She was with Ev the night he died. That’s established. The point is, if there’s no gold in that swamp, if there never was any gold in that swamp, what’s everybody getting worked up about?”

He put the handkerchief to his mouth. “I’m going to lose my breakfast, goddamn it. There’s just too damn much tension, and it’s been building up. One million bucks-it’s the sound of it that gets everybody, Mike. I defended a burglar once. Never mind his name. His specialty’s hanging around bars and seeing who gets plastered. Then he follows them home, waits fifteen minutes and walks in. Most of the time they’re passed out cold. He takes his time and cleans out the place. All right. Ev died in a fire in a southside hotel. This guy I’m telling you about was picked up for pulling a job that same night in that same hotel. I talked to him. If one of my fellow heirs murdered another of my fellow heirs, I thought I’d better find out about it. And it paid off. He was in the bar with Ev. A blonde with a sexy shape gave him some dough. He followed Ev when he staggered back to the hotel. He waited fifteen minutes. He went up the fire stairs. When he came out on Ev’s floor a woman was coming out of Ev’s room. Blonde. Very sexy ass.”

His whiskey glass fell. Shanahan clutched his stomach with both hands, a look of pained amazement on his face, and he pitched forward to the floor.

chapter 18

The bailiff opened the door.

“Chief of Police wants to talk to you, Judge. Judge? Where’d he go?” he asked Shayne. “Oh, my God!”

Will Gentry pushed past. The police chief was an old friend of Shayne’s, a red-faced, scrupulously honest cop who had seen too much violence and heard too many lies and alibis. Shayne was on his knees beside the unconscious judge. He let Gentry check Shanahan’s breathing and make the necessary phone call.

“He was telling me something when he collapsed,” Shayne said thoughtfully. He touched the drawn flesh at the corner of Shanahan’s mouth. “He’s been under a strain. I’d say he was the cardiac type, but it seemed to me it hit him in the belly.”

Suddenly Shayne’s face changed. He stood up and strode to the courtroom.

Except for the bailiff and one old man asleep on a bench, the big room was empty. The bailiff, at the judge’s bench, was shaking two aspirins into his hand, his face the color of dirty snow. He popped the aspirins into his mouth and raised a glass of water.

“Drop that!” Shayne commanded.

The bailiff’s hand jerked and the glass fell and shattered. He gulped down the aspirins dry and cried, “Look what you’ve done! I was going to get a clean glass for the judge. Who do you think’s going to clean it up?”

The big double doors burst open to admit a compact group, including Tim Rourke and two courtroom reporters. Rourke signalled to Shayne as he passed, then went through into Shanahan’s chambers with the others. Shayne took a paper tissue out of the soggy box of Kleenex on the bench, wrapped it carefully around the water carafe and carried it down to a table in the well of the court.

He heard a hum of excited voices from Shanahan’s chambers. More officials arrived, including a short preoccupied man he recognized as the medical examiner. Rourke and a reporter for the rival paper ran out to the phones.

Shayne was frowning at the burning end of his cigarette. Will Gentry appeared in the doorway. Seeing the private detective, he came over and sat down across from him.

“He’s dead. I don’t suppose you’re surprised.”

“That makes three,” Shayne said. “Two more to go.” He pushed the carafe across the table. “Better have this analyzed.”

“You think he was poisoned?”

“I know damn well he was poisoned. Shanahan’s a Monday-morning hangover man. Listening to lawyers argue is thirsty work. If the water bottle was full when court convened, he must have drunk at least two glasses.”

Gentry called an assistant, who listened to Shayne’s theory and picked up the carafe.

Rourke came in and dropped into the chair beside Shayne. “‘Jurist Collapses, Dies,’” he said. “They’ll be satisfied with that for the time being, but when they find out he was part of the Gaspar set-up they’ll scream for an explanation. I can’t play it coy much longer, Mike. I’ll have to give them what I have if I want to go on working there.”

“Yeah.” Shayne turned to Gentry. “I gave you five people, Will. We can cross off Shanahan. Now where the hell are the other four?”

Gentry flushed angrily. “Mike, there are five hundred thousand people in greater Miami, two hundred thousand cars. If you have any suggestions on how to narrow it down I’ll be delighted to hear them. I’ve got the head of security at Kennedy Airport checking to see if Kitty Sims, or anybody who looks like Kitty Sims, got on a Miami plane this morning. We’ve found out quite a bit about Barbara Lemoyne, who her friends are, where she has her hair done. So far we haven’t found her. She never showed at the hospital. A woman answering to the description of Eda Lou Parchman took a cab from Watson Park to the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. Needless to say, she is no longer at the corner of Biscayne and East Flagler. I have two men watching Hank Sims’s office. It’s one room and a darkroom. He’s been sleeping there on a cot. He doesn’t make his bed, so we don’t know if he was there last night or not. Give us time, Mike. We’ll collect them for you.”

“Time is the one thing we don’t have.”

“Mike,” Rourke said pleadingly. “You don’t want the TV boys to beat me on a Mike Shayne story. Talk.”

Shayne rubbed his hand wearily across his face. “There doesn’t seem to be much else to do but talk.”

Rourke put the names of the five joint tenants of Key Gaspar at the top of a folded sheet of yellow copy paper. While Shayne talked, he made aimless doodles up and down the page, and by the time his friend had finished he had put little checks after the names of three of the five. As for Shayne, he had a helpless feeling, a rarity at this stage of a case. He had most of the facts he needed, but none of the people.

The detective who had been talking to the bailiff came over to the table.

“We don’t have the lab report, Chief, but everything else fits. Want to talk to him?”

When Gentry nodded, the detective called the bailiff over. He was still pale, shaken by the narrowness of his escape from the same fate that had overtaken Shanahan. Prodded by the detective, he repeated his story.

He unlocked the doors at nine-thirty. In the next half hour a dozen people had drifted in, the usual courthouse loungers. He had remained in the courtroom continuously until court convened at ten-thirty, except for one short period when he was called to the press-room phone. That had been sometime around ten. No one was on the line by the time he got there.

Shayne listened intently. “Where do you keep your cleaning equipment?”

“You mean mops and pails and so on? In a closet down the hall. Why? Because the funny thing is, I found a wet mop right outside the door. I don’t know who left it there.”

“All right,” Shayne said slowly. “Here’s how it was worked, Will. It would have to be a woman. She called the press room from one of the dial phones, to get the bailiff out of the way. All she’d need would be a mop and a scarf around her hair. Nobody would give her a second look. A couple of passes at the bench with a dust cloth. Check the wastebasket. See that the judge has fresh water.”

Gentry nodded. “See if you can dig up any witnesses,” he told his men.

Two other detectives came through the swinging doors, bringing a husky young man in a light blue sports shirt, a 35 millimeter camera over his shoulder. He was clean-shaven, but as he approached the wooden barrier, Shayne saw that his forehead and nose had had more exposure to the weather than the rest of his face.

One of the city detectives opened the gate. Shayne came out of his chair as the burly young man came through and met him with a hard rising right to the point of his jaw.

He went backward, collided with the end of a bench and slid slowly into the aisle.

“Mike, what the hell?” Gentry protested.

“Just paying a small debt,” Shayne remarked, loosening his shoulder muscles.

“Who is it, Hank Sims?” Rourke said. “But what’s this debt stuff? Maybe I wasn’t listening, but didn’t you say you had the field glasses on him when somebody skulled you in the tree house?”

“Yeah.” Bending down, Shayne unclenched the unconscious man’s grease-smeared right hand. “What he did do was loosen the lugs on the wheel of my Volkswagen. I lived through that, but he didn’t care whether I did or not.”

He looked around for the bailiff, who was swallowing more aspirin. “Was this man in the courtroom this morning?”

The bailiff looked down doubtfully. “I couldn’t say, Mr. Shayne. They’re all reading morning papers at that hour. I just don’t think I could say.”

Sims sat up, waggled his jaw to see if anything was broken, and came to his feet with a roar. He was grabbed by three detectives and made to hold still.

“Where’s your wife?” Shayne demanded.

Sims looked around and began to do some thinking. “You’re Mike Shayne, aren’t you? No point in asking me. We’re separated. I haven’t laid eyes on the bitch in weeks.”

“You’re a liar,” Shayne told him. “And that’s not the only thing you’ve been lying about lately. You were out in that boat last night, weren’t you, Sims? Didn’t anybody ever tell you there’s a law against shooting at lighted windows with a carbine? You wanted Barbara to think it was Shanahan. And that’s why you faked those affidavits, to make her think her fiance had changed sides and gone in with Kitty. And then you couldn’t resist making a play for her, could you, on the off chance that she’d turn out to be the survivor?”

“You’ve got the wrong idea about me,” Sims said. “I do things on the spur of the moment.”

“Will, have somebody develop the film in his camera.”

Sims took a backward step. “Like hell! Didn’t you ever hear about Amendments One to Ten in the United States Constitution? Let’s see your warrant.”

Shayne grinned. “There’s no shortage of judges in this building. It won’t be hard to get a warrant.”

Sims’s hand went to the snap of his camera case. Shayne took a stride forward and clamped his wrist before he could open it.

“Hell with the warrant,” Sims said in disgust. Slipping the camera off his shoulder he handed it to Gentry. “Let’s have a receipt.”

For a moment longer he looked at Shayne, then he said softly, “What’s it take to stop you, anyway?”

Another cop came in hurriedly with a yellow sheet. “Chief, a call from the morgue about the Lemoyne woman.”

“The morgue!” Shayne swung toward him savagely. “Another one.”

“No, she’s alive, or she was at ten o’clock. She was just identifying Tuttle and picking up his stuff. The call on her hadn’t filtered down that far yet.”

“That’s what I mean, Mike,” Gentry said. “Just be patient. We’ll get everybody for you.”

Shayne felt absently for a cigarette. “How close to ten was she there?” he asked the detective.

The man consulted his slip. “They signed her in at two minutes after.”

“Then she couldn’t have put the slug on Shanahan,” Shayne said. “Nobody gets around as fast as that in this town. But on a day like today, why would she go to the morgue? It couldn’t be out of respect for the dead. Nobody had much respect for Brad Tuttle.”

His eyes rested on Hank Sims’s face without really seeing him.

“Don’t ask me,” Sims said. “I’m only the guy who gets shot when the cops aim at the hold-up man.”

Shayne pushed off from the table. “O.K., Will. If she didn’t go there to see what Brad looked like dead, she went to get something he was carrying when he was killed. One of the things he was carrying was the key to Kitty’s apartment. I may be wrong, but let’s check.”

chapter 19

On the way out of the courthouse they passed a hatless white-haired man who had just got out of a Cadillac on West Flagler. Shayne, walking behind Hank Sims, saw the young man’s start of recognition.

“Is your name Quarrels?” Shayne asked the white-haired man.

“Yes. You’re Mike Shayne, of course.” He glanced at the others. “Can you spare a moment or two in private? You may not be surprised to hear that I have some questions.”

“Tim,” Shayne called. “Ride with Mr. Quarrels and give him the background. Tell him about Shanahan and anything else he wants to know.”

“I’m not the expert, Mike. You are.”

Shayne made a brusque gesture. Rourke and the real-estate man returned to the Cadillac. Shayne went in the police car with Gentry, the police driver and Hank Sims. Gentry sat in front listening as the reports he had called for came in over the radio. These were uniformly negative.

Presently the little two-car convoy drew up in front of Kitty Sims’s apartment house on 28th Street.

“She has a gun,” Shayne said. “If she’s here she’ll be all cranked up and ready to fly. So I’d better handle it myself. Our casualty list is long enough as it is.”

He strode into the building. The downstairs door only held him up a moment. He took the elevator to Kitty’s floor.

If Barbara had actually used Brad Tuttle’s key and was waiting in Kitty’s apartment, Shayne knew that she had heard the elevator. He pressed another button to send it on its way, and then he let a minute or two pass to give her time to relax. He went quietly to the door. Standing to one side, out of range of the peephole, he slid a strip of celluloid between the door and the jamb and forced the latch. He turned the doorknob silently and let the door swing open,

“Barbara,” he said in a quiet tone. “It’s Mike Shayne. I’m alone here, but there’s a carload of cops downstairs. So let’s not do any shooting, is that O.K. with you? It’s a little late for that now.”

He stepped into the doorway and lit a cigarette. While he was breathing out his first mouthful of smoke, Barbara Lemoyne appeared from the bedroom. She was wearing a low-cut black dress and pearls and her face was pale. Eda Lou’s little automatic was pointed at Shayne’s chest.

“You’ve interfered in my affairs for the last time.”

“Frank’s dead,” Shayne told her. “There’s no gold. There never was any gold. You’ve been fooled, all five of you. Your million-buck deal is cooling off fast.”

Slowly the muzzle of the little automatic came down until it pointed at the floor. “Frank’s dead?”

Shayne took the gun out of her unresisting fingers and kicked the door shut. Barbara looked up at him, the pupils of her eyes enormous. Her lip fluttered and she began to sag. Shayne slapped her hard. She spun around and caught the door frame. Shayne dropped the gun in his pocket. She whirled and flew at him, trying to get the gun. He caught her in his arms.

“That’s better,” he said. “Adrenalin always helps. Don’t break up over Frank. Think about your own problems. You’re in serious trouble, and it’s going to get worse unless you answer a few questions. I want truthful answers this time. Get this fact in your head and you’ll see that the time has come to cut your losses. This whole buried treasure thing was Cal’s idea.”

She still looked dazed, but Shayne was glad to see that her pupils were back to their ordinary size.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said.

“Not quite, Barbara. A little fed up, that’s all. Where’s Eda Lou?”

“I don’t know.”

Shayne tightened his grip on her arms. “Where is she?”

“I don’t! I only talked to her on the phone. We’re all meeting at Larue’s for lunch, Kitty and Eda Lou and I.”

“Kitty went to New York.”

“I know that. But Eda Lou heard you tell somebody what hotel she’s staying at. She called and told Kitty to come back on the first plane. But I know Kitty. She won’t go to a fancy place like Larue’s straight from the airport. She’ll come here to change.”

“Listen to me, Barbara. Eda Lou knows you took her gun. She knows you figured out that Hank and Kitty are still working together, and those St. Albans affidavits are phonier than your treasure map. Eda Lou doesn’t want you killing anybody. She knew you’d come here and stay out of her way.”

“Mike, I honestly don’t know where she is. You’re hurting me.”

“Think about it! Right here is where the killing stops. If you don’t know how many kinds of trouble I can make for you, you’re dumber than I think. If Eda Lou wanted a quiet conversation with somebody, one of those confidential little chats that sometimes end with a gun going off, where would she go? A car would be fine, but neither she nor Kitty has a car here. She wouldn’t rent one. She wouldn’t go to a hotel.”

Barbara shook her head. “I can’t even guess!”

Shayne gave an exclamation of annoyance. “Let’s see if they’ve heard anything new downstairs. Keep thinking.”

He pulled her to the elevator.

“Mike, won’t you explain just one of those things you said? We always knew there was a chance there wasn’t any gold. I don’t see-”

He gave her a look which silenced her. The lines of concentration around his eyes were deeply etched.

He said suddenly, “Are you the one who told me she takes flowers to the cemetery?”

“Eda Lou? Mike, let go of my arm. Flowers? Yes. I don’t know how often, but she did once, on his birthday. It surprised me. She’s not at all religious. Long-stem roses. I thought it was touching, in a way. She was furious that I saw her.”

Shayne gave a bark of relieved laughter. “Touching is right. Long-stem roses? Not the dame I met. Where’s he buried?”

“Out beyond Miami Springs, in the big new mausoleum. Really-”

The elevator arrived. They went down in silence and he hurried her across the lobby to the street, where he put her in the back seat of the police car.

“What happened to you?” she exclaimed, seeing Hank Sims.

He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “For you, dear. I’m turning over a new leaf.”

“Miami Springs,” Shayne told the driver. “There’s a cemetery out there somewhere. She’ll give you directions. Use your siren.”

He looked out the back window as they began to move. Hilary Quarrels’ Cadillac was still behind them.

“Any late news, Will?” he said to Gentry.

“I have the lab report on the water in Shanahan’s carafe. It’s one of those coal-tar derivatives with the long names. Enough to knock off the whole Court of Appeals.”

“Frank was poisoned?” Barbara said quietly.

“Hank can tell you who did it,” Shayne said. “He was there with his camera. Clean-shaven, so none of his friends would notice him if they had other things on their minds.”

“It does look as though I was there to take a picture, don’t it?” Sims said. “But maybe the picture didn’t come out, have you thought of that? I used fast film, but the conditions weren’t too good.”

Barbara turned to Shayne, but one look at the expression around his mouth told her not to pursue the subject. Narrow gaps kept appearing in the traffic ahead. The police driver widened them with his siren and plunged through, the Cadillac following before the gaps could close. At 22nd Avenue they picked up the expressway. They shot off the entrance ramp and in a moment they were doing ninety.

“I think I was wrong about one thing, Will,” Shayne said. “Maybe there’s going to turn out to be some buried treasure after all.”

“Fine,” Gentry said. “A cemetery’s a good place for it-all that digging equipment.”

They left the expressway after crossing the big bridge over the Miami River, skirted the airport on 36th Street and went north on the Palmetto Expressway.

“Next exit,” Barbara said.

The driver slowed. Off to the right Shayne saw Whispering Glades, the huge new cemetery, surely large enough to house all of Southern Florida’s dead for decades to come. They turned in through elaborate wrought-iron gates. The graves were laid out on a right-angle grid, like Miami itself, with streets, terraces and alleys running east and west, avenues, places and courts running north and south. The headstones were set flush with the ground, to be cleared more easily by the wheels of the power mowers.

The police driver dropped his speed to thirty, out of respect for the surroundings. Shayne snapped his fingers. He speeded up, swung around a slow-moving back-hoe and in a moment halted in front of a great brick mausoleum.

“What’s this all about, do you know?” Sims asked Barbara.

“No, and I’ve stopped trying to guess.”

“Will,” Shayne said. “The rest of you wait here.”

He and Gentry took the broad steps two at a time. They passed between two tall marble pillars and found themselves in a high central hall with organ music coming at them from concealed outlets. The floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpet. A commitment ceremony was taking place in a chapel at the far end. In spite of the air conditioning, there was a heavy smell of flowers.

“Mike, would you mind telling me what the hell we’re doing here?” Gentry said in a hushed voice.

“Playing a long shot,” Shayne said briefly.

An attendant approached, wearing the sober garb and smug look of all members of his profession. Shayne told him they were looking for the final resting place of Calvin Tuttle. The attendant consulted a directory and offered to take them, but Shayne asked for directions and said they would like to find it by themselves.

The crypts were arranged on three levels, like the stacks of a large library. Shayne and Gentry took an elevator to the middle level. A railed balcony ran around three sides of the hall. They turned into the third aisle. Crypts were stacked on both sides to a height of ten feet. Some had been sold but were not yet in use; these were faced with wood instead of stone, and held in place by four ornamental brass screws. Cal Tuttle’s headstone gave his name and dates, and the inscription, “Amid Turmoil, Peace.”

“Somebody had a sense of humor,” Shayne said.

The space above his had been reserved for Barbara; the space above that for Eda Lou.

“Keep an eye out,” Shayne said. “We don’t want to get picked up for robbing graves.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Gentry said fervently as Shayne took out a pocket knife, selected a blade with a blunt end and went to work on the screws holding Eda Lou’s wooden headplate in place.

“Mike!” Gentry said suddenly from the railing overlooking the central hall.

Shayne joined him. Tim Rourke, below, was mugging furiously, pointing at the front entrance and mouthing the same word over and over. The attendant who had greeted Shayne and Gentry watched gravely and then stepped out to the middle of the hall to look up at the balcony. Rourke turned abruptly and joined the group of mourners around the coffin in the chapel.

“I think our long shot came in,” Shayne said.

“Yeah, they generally do for you.”

Two women came in the front entrance. Both were blondes, Eda Lou’s improbably white hair more conspicuous than Kitty’s at that distance. The attendant approached with his obsequious murmur. Eda Lou spoke to him and the two women turned toward the elevator.

“That makes everybody,” Gentry said. “I told you it was a matter of time.”

“Let’s fade,” Shayne said.

They walked along the balcony, stopping when they were above the chapel. A single overhead spot bathed the coffin in brilliant light, but the mourners around it, and Shayne and Gentry above, were in semidarkness. A woman’s voice could be heard sobbing.

“I think I’m finally beginning to get the idea,” Gentry said. “Slow but sure.”

“It makes sense when you think about it,” Shayne said. “That crypt is better than a safe-deposit box and not so conspicuous. The headplate won’t come off till they put her in.”

The two women came out of the elevator and turned into the aisle Shayne and Gentry had just left.

“How much time do we give them?” Gentry asked.

“She can use some help. When she tightened those screws she really tightened them.”

Shayne hissed at Rourke and made a rounding-up gesture. He and Gentry went back along the balcony, the thick carpet deadening their footsteps. Both women whirled guiltily when they came into the aisle.

“We’ve been looking all over,” Shayne said.

Eda Lou, looking at Shayne malevolently, dropped her hand to her side to conceal the screwdriver. Kitty cried, “Mike! The most fantastic thing has happened! Do you know what she’s been telling me?”

“Up to a point,” Shayne said. “I don’t think you know Will Gentry, Chief of Miami Police. He’s a sucker for stories about buried treasure. Mrs. Sims, Mrs. Parchman.”

Eda Lou whirled and threw the screwdriver at him. It flew over the railing to drop almost noiselessly in the central hall.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “I should have put something stronger than seconal in that coffee.”

“Things were already out of hand,” Shayne told her. “You should have taken a couple of sleeping pills yourself and let Shanahan alone. That’s the one we’re going to get you on. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.”

“You try to put me in jail, buster. You’ll know you’ve been in a fight.”

“I know that already,” Shayne said wryly.

He snapped open the screwdriver blade of his knife and went back to work on the screws. The attendant appeared at the entrance of the aisle with the screwdriver Eda Lou had thrown at Shayne.

“You people have to remember where you are,” he admonished them. “One of you dropped this, and it didn’t miss me by more than a foot.” He gaped. “What are you doing? You can’t open a crypt without an order from the managing director!”

“Police business,” Gentry said gruffly, showing him his shield. “I’ll see that nothing’s damaged.”

“I should certainly hope so.”

Shayne pulled the plate off, unblocking the crypt just as a little group arrived, consisting of Tim Rourke, Quarrels, Barbara, Hank Sims and two detectives.

“Mr. Quarrels!” the attendant exclaimed. “It’s all right-they’re police officers.”

Shayne looked at Quarrels questioningly, and the white-haired man nodded.

“Whispering Glades is one of our subsidiaries.”

“And I’m sure it’s a gold mine,” Shayne said, “in more ways than one.”

He thumbed his lighter and held it in front of the crypt’s dark opening. The others crowded around to see what the little flame would reveal.

“A fiasco!” Rourke said. “There’s nothing there.”

“Look again,” Shayne told him. “How did you get it that far back,” he asked Eda Lou, “climb in after it?”

He tugged at a cord running the length of the seven-foot space, and slowly a long cardboard box slid into view.

It was a florist’s box, long and narrow. Shayne lifted it out. He broke the string, stripping off the thin cardboard, and exposed a wooden box underneath, the same size and shape.

“You couldn’t carry a brassbound treasure chest into a mausoleum,” he said. “You’d have to keep coming back. With long stem roses you’d only have to make one trip.”

He set the box on the floor. Eda Lou made a small anguished sound as he raised the hinged lid.

There were two golden candlesticks on top. He lifted them out. There was a jeweled dagger, a golden chain, a goblet, then something long and angular wrapped in wash-leather. Beneath this layer the box was filled with loose coins, oddly-shaped silver pieces-of-eight, gold doubloons the size of a silver dollar, a cross on one face, a shield on the other. Each coin had been lovingly polished before being put away, and they glowed warmly in the dim light.

“It’s mine,” Eda Lou said. “Cal gave it to me instead of leaving me a share in the Key.”

“When?” Shayne asked.

“Two years before he died, and I have a paper to prove it.”

“He gave you something else too, didn’t he?”

He unwrapped the object in the washleather, and took out a long ugly Luger equipped with a silencer.

chapter 20

He snapped back the slide.

“It’s loaded. The safety’s off. I can see the scene, can’t you, Kitty? Soft music. The smell of flowers. Corpses stacked up five deep all around.” He picked up a handful of coins and let them clink one by one back into the box. “It looks a lot more authentic than a check for the same amount. You wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off it. Maybe she’d let you dig your fingers in to see how deep it went. And meanwhile, she’d be unwrapping the Luger.”

A light shiver passed over Kitty. “What a terrible way to die, with your hands in money.”

“Mike, be serious!” Rourke said. “There are people all over the place. How would she get rid of the body? Wait a minute. You don’t mean-”

Shayne stood up and handed the Luger to Gentry. “Why not? Simply unscrew another face plate and slide the body in. It’s true that after a few days-” He looked at the attendant. “Would the air conditioning take care of it? You couldn’t open up every crypt on this level to see who’d done the bad embalming job.”

“How morbid can you get?” the attendant exclaimed.

Shayne turned back to Kitty. “What did she say when she called you in New York?”

“Kitty baby,” Eda Lou warned her. “There are three or four cops here. It’s time we all talk to a lawyer.”

“I haven’t killed anybody,” Kitty responded. “Speak for yourself.”

Barbara said, “I don’t suppose you set Ev’s mattress on fire? Oh, no. Certainly not.”

“Babs!” Eda Lou said sharply. “Don’t you see what Shayne’s trying to do? Shut your flytrap and keep it shut.”

Shayne continued, watching Barbara, “Eda Lou set that mattress on fire.”

The old lady gave a laugh like a parrot. “I thought you said I killed Shanahan. Make up your mind.”

“You killed them both,” Shayne said coldly. “And it’s a bum rap, in a way, because here’s the real killer.” He kicked Tuttle’s headstone. “He’s been pulling the strings all the way. Calvin Charles Tuttle, Amid Turmoil, Peace. If we all keep quiet a minute, maybe we can hear him laughing.”

He paused, and they actually heard the sound of ironic laughter. It came from Eda Lou.

“You’ve been smoking the wrong kind of cigarette, Mike. You’re hallucinating.”

“Am I?” Shayne said. “I don’t think so. This has been a strange set-up. Everybody kept telling me that everybody else treated Cal like a dog, but Cal always forgave them. Like hell he forgave them!” He swung savagely on Barbara. “Did he forgive you for the way you treated him after he got out of jail?”

“Of course. We had a very warm relationship at the end.”

Shayne snorted. “And Brad. All Brad did was tip off the cops to save his own neck, and Cal spent the prime of his life in jail. Cal forgave him. Shanahan? When I first heard about Cal’s will I couldn’t make out what Shanahan was doing in it. People like Cal never get too fond of lawyers, who make a living out of crime without running any risks. Then I was told that the minute Cal was locked away, Shanahan hit the sack with Cal’s girl. But Cal forgave him! I don’t know what Cal had against Ev, maybe just having to keep him in drinking money all those years. Have I left out anybody? Kitty.”

“Yes, what about me?” she said coolly. “That’s where your argument breaks down.”

“Come on,” Shayne said. “You think he forgot about that badger game you pulled on him, just because he went on sleeping with you? And I think he had another big reason for including you. All the other heirs are clods, in one way or another. They might have been willing to settle for a percentage. Not you, Kitty. He knew you’d want it all.”

Sims chuckled. “Mr. Shayne, you’ll have to stop making insulting remarks about my wife or I’ll ask you to step outside.”

“Any time,” Shayne said evenly. “So Cal wasn’t doing anybody a favor by putting them in his will. He knew what would happen. But they wouldn’t start killing each other until they were sure the Key was actually worth something, and that’s where the treasure came in. If he and Eda Lou found it two years before he died, it puts those holes she dug later in a different light, doesn’t it? Please don’t anybody tell me that if she wanted to dig for buried treasure, she couldn’t do it without getting caught. Of course we don’t want to forget-I think she forgot it-that Cal had something against her, too.”

She looked startled. Shayne said gently, “Cal never forgave Shanahan for that old affair. Why would he forgive you? He blocked out a script for you to follow, and you followed it. Somebody had to make the first move. One of the five had to die, in a way that would make the other four start thinking. Kitty was with Ev the night he died. I doubt if that was a coincidence. I think you were waiting for it. You knocked on his door and he was glad to let you in-his successful brother’s mistress, he’d probably lusted after you for years.”

Barbara cried, “How do you know all that, were you there?”

“There’s a witness,” Shayne said. “He was planning to burglarize Ev after he passed out. He saw a woman come out of his room. Apparently he only had one quick glimpse from the rear. She was blonde, with a sexy walk. Shanahan and everybody else assumed it was Kitty. I had a different idea. I’ve seen Eda Lou walk across a room in short shorts, and she has one of the sexiest going-away motions I’ve seen in years.”

“Why-you angel!” Eda Lou cried. “Nobody’s said anything that nice about me since World War Two.”

Shayne gave her a half grin. “It’s almost worth being convicted of murder for, isn’t it?”

Her face clouded. “But my defense would have to be-”

“Yeah,” Shayne told her. “That the burglar couldn’t possibly be talking about you because you’re so dried-up and unsexy. Your lawyer will establish your true age and make you wear a girdle in court. O.K. Ev’s dead. Four more to go. Kitty was the outsider. Everybody took it for granted that she burned Ev. Kitty and Hank, meanwhile, pretended to split up to give her more freedom of action. They set up a listening post in Barbara’s old tree house. There were discussions between Brad and Barbara, Shanahan and Barbara. Brad offered to take care of the Kitty problem, and Kitty knew exactly what was going to happen, and when. She could have arranged not to be home that night but she decided that if she had an armed man in her apartment, Brad would end up dead and the survivors would be down to three. Barbara and Shanahan, at the same time, were making separate plans for disposing of Brad after he disposed of Kitty. Shanahan arranged to have cops waiting when Brad ran out. Barbara stole a tank of nitrous oxide and pumped it into Brad’s aqualung.”

Barbara glowered at Hank. He said in a friendly tone, “I never said a word.”

“It’s all a matter of style,” Shayne said. “Kitty’s style is to get somebody else to do her dirty work. She switched air tanks with Brad and loaned me her aqualung. I was probably never in any real danger, but at the time I thought she saved me from drowning. So there I was in her apartment with a. 38, waiting for Brad. Kitty’s next move after that was to make Barbara think Shanahan had sold her out. After a few carbine shots and some faked affidavits, Barbara wobbled, but in the end she decided that Kitty was still the person who needed eliminating most.”

“I’m trying to keep track,” Rourke put in, “but before you go any further, who slugged you in the tree house?”

“Let’s jump back to Miami. I put Kitty away for the night in somebody else’s apartment. She got up, left a note for her roommate, and drove to Gaspar with Hank. She headed for the tree house to find out if Barbara had fallen for those affidavits. The tree house was already occupied.”

Kitty said briskly, “You don’t expect anybody to believe I knocked you out single-handed?”

“With the help of a handspike,” Shayne said. “I was paying too much attention to what was going on in the house. I was squinting through binoculars and I had earphones on, with the volume all the way up.” He smiled at her. “I know that’s no excuse. I must have been tired.”

“You should have given him a couple of extra licks to make sure,” Eda Lou said.

Shayne went on, “I hadn’t started thinking seriously about Eda Lou at that point. I made the mistake of letting her hear some phone calls I made. I told Will Gentry to round up everybody and stop the action. She didn’t want that. She also thought Barbara was gunning for Shanahan. Eda Lou’s plan, as opposed to Cal’s, was to end up the elimination with Barbara the sole survivor. She didn’t want her to get caught in the act of shooting a judge.”

Eda Lou gave him a beseeching look. Many secret links and connections had been brought out in the past eighteen hours, but if Eda Lou and Barbara were actually mother and daughter, Shayne thought it was the one thing that could safely stay buried.

Eda Lou’s face cleared as he went on, “But there hasn’t been much unselfishness in any of this, and I doubt if she was acting out of friendship. We don’t know much about that old love episode with Shanahan. Probably it ended badly.”

“I don’t kill people because something happened when I was twenty-five,” Eda Lou said. “What makes you think Kitty didn’t do it, or is this another case of somebody with a sexy walk?”

“It’s a case of somebody with a mop and a scarf,” he said. “Kitty could have done it. I think she was back in time. But why would she send Hank to the courtroom to take a picture of it?”

The first crack appeared in Eda Lou’s self-assurance. She put out a hand to steady herself, touched a headstone and pulled the hand back as though burned.

Sims lifted his beefy shoulders. “As I was saying, the light wasn’t too good.”

“I don’t know what Eda Lou said to Kitty in New York,” Shayne said. “It probably went something like this. She said she’d hoaxed everybody. She had the treasure, and had had it for years. Kitty should stop being stubborn and let Florida-American get stuck. If the others found out Eda Lou had the gold and had wrecked the deal, they’d kill her for it. She was willing to give Kitty a tenth to sweeten the arrangement. Naturally Kitty would refuse to believe such an outlandish story. Eda Lou told her to hurry back and she’d prove it. We already know what she planned to do when the crypt was opened.”

His hand shot out and seized Kitty’s oversized purse. He held her off with one hand while he felt inside it. He took out a. 38 revolver.

“This is the one gun I couldn’t account for,” he said. “I lost it last night in the fight with Brad. Eda Lou likes dramatic effects. She’d take her time unwrapping the Luger. I really think Kitty would have beaten her to it.”

“You bitch!” Eda Lou said with feeling.

“It’s true that shooting isn’t Kitty’s usual style,” Shayne said, “but every good fast-ball pitcher can use an occasional change of pace.”

Kitty said coolly, “This is all supposition, Mike.”

“True.” He turned to Quarrels. “Is your million-dollar offer still open?”

Quarrels said carefully, “I can see that Key Gaspar is going to get a good deal of publicity in the coming weeks. Will it be the kind of publicity that sells real estate? I’m not sure.”

“When did Florida-American get really interested in Key Gaspar? Wasn’t it right after Ev Tuttle was killed?”

“I don’t follow you.”

Shayne shrugged. “If you had any reason to suspect that was a murder, it would show there was something on the Key worth being murdered for.”

Quarrels looked at him directly. “A rumor of that kind could ruin us, as you know very well, Shayne. I think I can say definitely that the deal is off.”

“Thank you so much, Michael Shayne,” Kitty said.

One of the detectives, at a sign from Gentry, stooped over the box of treasure. Kitty said wistfully, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever see it again.”

“I’ll see it again!” Eda Lou snapped.

“I’m wondering about the laws governing buried treasure,” Quarrels said slowly. “The crypt has been sold to Mrs. Parchman but we still own the mausoleum. I think that we could maintain that the treasure was reburied on Florida-American property and that it consequently belongs to us. It’s a nice legal point.”

“A nice point!” Eda Lou cried. “It’s mine! I’ve got a paper to prove it!”

Shayne gave a short deliberate laugh. “My prediction is that most of it’s going to end up with the lawyers.”

Eda Lou must have been closer to the breaking point than Shayne had realized. She threw herself on the box. The box upset, sending gold and silver coins rolling in all directions. By the time the doubloons and pieces-of-eight were gathered up and put back in the box, she was quivering and helpless, her eyes glowing terribly in her pale face.

“I’ll get you, Shayne,” she muttered.

She went for the detective, screaming, trying to rake out his eyes with her curved fingers. It took two husky homicide detectives to pull her away. They heard her swearing and shouting all the way out of the building.

“And that leaves the two survivors,” Tim Rourke said slowly.

Barbara and Kitty, who had harbored murderous thoughts about each other but who were actually guilty of no more than a few minor misdemeanors, were eying each other warily, gauging the changed situation.

“Yeah,” Shayne said. “Anybody want to make book?”

Content

Brett Halliday
Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20