mind waiting while I put on some clothes?”
“Not at all. Go right ahead.” He sat down and poured more Scotch over the ice cubes, stirred it in, then settled back with a deep frown creasing his brow to sip the drink.
Glancing around absently he saw that she had left the bedroom door ajar fully six inches. From his position he saw her strip off the robe, and he had a rear view of her nude body as she stood in front of the dressing-table. She sat down and began doing things to her face, leaning close to the mirror. The line of her neck flowed smoothly down to well-fleshed, sloping shoulders and on to a neat waistline and fully developed buttocks that didn’t spread as she sat. When she stood up and lifted one arm to puff powder under it he had a glimpse of one large breast that sagged from the upper muscles, then protruded tuberously.
All of a sudden Shayne remembered that anyone he saw reflected in a mirror could also see him, and he hastily turned his eyes away. He took a long drink, looking squarely at the Japanese table at the opposite end of the room. Then he recalled that Marie Leonard had been wholly occupied with her toilet and had not once looked at his own reflection which had most certainly been in the full-length mirror.
Was it an act?
He was thinking rapidly, occasionally cutting his low-lidded eyes toward the mirror and no longer feeling like a peeping Tom. Marie moved in and out of his view as she dressed. She lived in this apartment, he reminded himself cynically, and must have known the angle of the mirror would reflect her body at certain positions in the room.
Shayne’s wide mouth tightened. It hadn’t been an accident that she left the door open those few inches. If she wanted to put on a strip-tease act for him there was no reason why he shouldn’t look. She had just been informed that her lover was dead, he told himself, and who could blame her if she set about acquiring another?
Suddenly he thumped the half-empty glass down on the glass-topped table and jerked himself erect. A sardonic smile twisted his lips, and he swore under his breath for having almost been taken in by a carefully calculated act.
Marie re-entered the living-room wearing a canary-yellow blouse of heavy, satiny material, and a gray skirt. The neck of the blouse was round, cut low to reveal the even sun tan of her chest and shoulders, and the fullness beneath the youthful neck revealed only the tips of her breasts encased in an uplift brassiere. With heels, she was taller than Shayne believed possible, and her heavy make-up dispelled his former illusions of youth.
“I think I’ll have a drink now,” she said. She disappeared through the swinging doors and returned with a glass full of ice cubes, poured a generous amount of whisky over them, and sat down in the club chair opposite Shayne.
“Did Bert’s wife kill him?” she asked abruptly.
Shayne sputtered on a sip of Scotch at the suddenness of her question. “What makes you think that?” he asked in a hostile tone.
Marie was leaning back with her eyes closed, but the rise and fall of her chest was rapid beneath the bright blouse. “She was horribly jealous of him, you know. And there was that other man she’s been in love with for years.” Her voice was low, gentle as a purr, but, Shayne thought, more effective than wild hysteria.
“What man?” he asked mildly, humoring her mood.
“I don’t know his name,” she answered.
“But you must have some idea,” he insisted.
“If she didn’t actually kill Bert,” Marie continued softly, “she was responsible for his death. She drove him to it-nagging him all the time for money and always refusing to divorce him unless he paid her a big cash settlement.” Her eyes fluttered open. She picked up her glass and took a long drink, then settled back again with the glass in her hand.
Shayne said, “Tell me about last night.”
“There isn’t much to tell. Bert was drunk when he came here. He said you were going to help him get enough money to buy a divorce from his wife. I begged him not to do it, but he was determined.” Her voice was subdued, listless, resigned.
“He made a phone call from here?”
“Just before he left, about ten. He was terribly angry with me for trying to persuade him to give up this plan of his. He dialed a number and then muffled his voice so I couldn’t hear whom he asked for, but I gathered that the person wasn’t there or couldn’t come to the phone.
“He talked to somebody,” she continued, keeping her eyes closed and her features in complete repose. “He said that you were working with him. He got terribly excited and insisted that it had to be done at once, and that if whoever it was didn’t call him back within half an hour with a proposition he was going to give the story to the paper-and if they refused to print it or if anything happened to him that you were going to turn all his information over to Timothy Rourke on the News. He gave his home telephone number for whoever it was to call, and hung up.”
“His home number?” Shayne asked, surprised.
“Yes. He left right after that. You see-”
“Hold it,” Shayne interrupted with a scowl, jerking his rangy body erect and trying to fit this information into the facts he already knew. “Are you sure he was headed for home when he left here at ten o’clock?” Marie had her glass to her lips and was swallowing rapidly.
“That’s what he said. How else could he get the call if he wasn’t home in half an hour?” She spoke irritably, set her empty glass on the table, relaxed, and closed her eyes once more.
Shayne settled back and did some fast thinking. How else, indeed, he wondered. Yet, Rourke had said that he went to the Jackson house at midnight, and Betty denied that Bert had returned all evening. Of course, Bert might have changed his mind on the way home. He could have stopped at a bar for a quick one and decided to make another phone call from there instead of going home and waiting. That would explain what Betty had told Rourke at midnight.
Setting his angular jaw, Shayne swore silently. If it were not for Tim he could go ahead with the extortion thing. But Marie Leonard was hinting at “another man” and that man was bound to be Tim, in spite of his hopes that there wasn’t another man when he lied to Gentry.
He came to his feet suddenly and walked slowly around the room, absently studying the two prints hanging on the wall, fingering the artistic statuettes on the lacquered table. Returning to his chair he poured another small drink, downed it, and demanded of Marie, “Why didn’t Bert stay right here to get the call? Didn’t he usually stay later than ten o’clock?”
“Sometimes.” She opened her eyes, drew one leg up on the chair, turned her body, and rested her cheek on the chair back to look directly at Shayne. “We’d had a big fight about this trouble he insisted on getting himself into. I told him it was all over between us unless he gave it up. I’ll-never forgive myself for doing that to him.” Her red mouth primped, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She dabbed at them with a handkerchief and continued.
“I sent him away angry. He slammed out without even saying good-by, but I didn’t know then-that I’d never see him again. Oh-I should have made him stay here with me, Mr. Shayne. If only I’d been-kinder to him.”
“Bert Jackson was a grown man,” he reminded her.
“But he wasn’t. He was just a boy in so many ways. Did that man kill him, Mr. Shayne? You haven’t even told me how Bert died.”
“What man?”
“That other man. You know-the one Betty-”
“Bert Jackson was shot,” Shayne told her harshly. “His body was found about three o’clock this morning out in the Northwest section.”
She shuddered and covered her face with both hands, weeping again. Shayne got up and stepped around the table, caught her wrists gently and pulled her hands away from her eyes. She gripped his fingers and cried desperately, “You must know who did it! With the information Bert gave you. He must have told you who the man was. You’ll see that he’s arrested and pays-even if Bert’s story about his political graft isn’t ever printed.”
“I don’t know who the man is,” Shayne told her.
“But Bert said that you-that he-”
“Your account of his telephone call clears up certain aspects of it,” he said soothingly. “If this man believes I have the information, he may come to me to buy it.”
“But if he does, you won’t deal with him!” She looked up into his eyes, her own wide and pleading. “You
