Shayne said, “Okay,” again and hung up. He opened his suitcase and threw into it the few things he had brought to the hotel, recalling now that Jane Smith had told him she was engaged to a man named Paul to whom she didn’t dare tell the truth about Henderson.
Had she changed her mind after talking to Shayne last night? If so, maybe he hadn’t handled the situation so badly after all. He felt a lot better about the whole thing as he went down and checked out and drove to the Dolphin bar.
There were a few men at the bar, and only the rear booth was occupied. A young man sat facing the front with a glass of beer in front of him, and he got to his feet with a nervous smile as Shayne walked back toward him. “Mr. Wayne?” He held out a limp hand. “I’m so glad you could come. Let me bring you a drink from the bar. Then we won’t be disturbed.”
Shayne said, “Cognac with a glass of ice water on the side.” He sat down across from the glass of beer. Paul Winterbottom seemed pleasant enough. In his early twenties, sandy-haired and slender. Wearing a well-pressed but cheap cord suit and a white shirt with a dark bow tie. His mouth and chin weren’t strong, but his light gray eyes had met Shayne’s steadily enough, and it was perfectly natural that he would be under a lot of strain if Shayne’s hunch was correct.
He came back with a pony of cognac and a glass of ice water which he set in front of the detective. Then he reseated himself and began turning his glass round and round in a little pool of beer on the table while he stared down at it, and said in a low voice, “I know you must think that Muriel… she told you her name was Jane Smith… was absolutely insane last night. Well, she isn’t. Not really.” He lifted his head to gaze at the detective soberly. “She didn’t mean it, Mr. Wayne. Not actually. She was just on the verge of hysteria. My God, I was appalled when she told me her crazy plan. About sending the advertisement to the newspaper and all. I didn’t have the slightest idea. I thought she was in New York all last week when she was right here in a hotel cooking up that crazy thing about hiring someone to kill her stepfather. Not that the old goat doesn’t deserve killing. He does. But my God, you can’t take the law in your own hands, I told her. And I also told her how damned lucky she was that it was a man like you who got hold of her idiotic ad, and not some hoodlum who would have jumped at the chance of earning fifty thousand dollars.”
Shayne asked, “Did she tell you the whole story?”
“Yes. She telephoned me right after you gave her some good advice and walked out on her. I didn’t even know she was in town, like I say. She was practically hysterical and I couldn’t understand her at first. What hurt most, of course, was that she hadn’t come to me with her problem. Kept it bottled up inside her all this time.” He drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Now that I know about it, she’ll never go back to that house again, I can promise you that. I put her on a plane to New York at six o’clock this morning and she’s not coming back.”
“She told you why she wants Henderson dead?” Shayne persisted relentlessly.
“Yes. The whole sordid truth tumbled out in a torrent. Imagine a man like that. Trying to seduce his own stepdaughter with her mother scarcely settled in her grave. Her cooped up in that house with him and so frightened that she has to lock her door every night. It’s vile and nasty and makes me want to puke every time I think of it. No wonder she got all worked up to the point of doing what she did. I’m not passing judgment on her for it,” he went on fiercely. “If she had only come to me the first time he made a pass at her. I blame myself because she didn’t. She should have known I’d understand and wouldn’t think it was her fault. Well, she knows now, and there’s never going to be any more secrets between us.”
Shayne said gently, “That’s the way it should be if you’re in love.”
“She said you were a nice guy,” the youth burst out impulsively. “And I can see you are, too. But I just had to find out for myself and that’s why I telephoned you this morning. It frightened me, sort of, when she showed me that card you gave her with the private detective’s number on it. I thought what if you called him and told him. You didn’t, did you?”
“I didn’t tell anyone anything about it,” Shayne assured him. “You needn’t worry on that score.”
“I certainly am relieved to hear that. I got all kinds of crazy ideas when I got to thinking about it after telling her good-by this morning. Like if you had told your friend Mr. Shayne, maybe he’d think it was his duty to warn Henderson or even tell the police. And what if something did happen to Henderson? You know, if he should get bumped off. Well, you’d probably think sure as shooting that she had gone on and got someone else to do the job after you turned her down. And I wanted you to know she hadn’t. She promised me she’d never even think of such a thing again, and we’re going to fix it up somehow so she won’t have to go back and live with him until she inherits her money.”
“I’m damned glad to hear it,” Shayne told him sincerely. “I confess I was plenty worried when I walked out of her room last night.”
“God, what a narrow escape she had,” breathed Paul feelingly. “Believe me, I read the riot act to her after she told me what she had done.”
“Marry her right away,” Shayne advised him. “She’s past eighteen and doesn’t need her guardian’s consent. Whether you think you’ve got enough money or not. You’ll get by somehow.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. That’s what I told her. My God, we can live in a single room if we have to. Money isn’t everything, I told her. In just a couple of years you’ll get yours anyhow. Henderson can’t stop that. Just stay away from the bastard, I told her, and forget your crazy plan for hiring someone to kill him.”
Shayne felt vastly relieved when he strode out of the Dolphin bar a few minutes later. The girl had used good sense, he thought, in not telling her young man the full truth about Henderson and her sexual involvement. Paul Winterbottom didn’t appear to have the broadest shoulders in the world, but he seemed a nice enough fellow and genuinely in love with the girl. It was too bad, of course, that something couldn’t be done about Henderson, but he didn’t see how it could be accomplished without involving the girl.
There were lots of Hendersons in the world, though most of them weren’t on the verge of being elected mayor of an important city like Miami Beach. That, too, wasn’t any affair of Shayne’s, but he knew that if he could find a way to throw a monkey-wrench into the political pot, he would do so gladly. For that reason he decided to say nothing to Tim Rourke about no longer wanting to meet the man.
10
It was the next day when Timothy Rourke called to say that Shayne and Lucy were invited to cocktails at the Henderson house that afternoon. When Shayne asked if he’d had any trouble wangling the invitation, Rourke laughed shortly and said, “It was the other way around. In fact, it was Henderson himself who brought your name up while I was casting about for some way to get you together.”
Shayne said wonderingly, “Henderson mentioned my name out of a clear sky?”
“That’s right. I called to suggest I might interview him on his political prospects, and we made an appointment. Then, before I could say anything else he sort of gushed, ‘By the way, you’re quite friendly with Michael Shayne, aren’t you? The private detective.’ When I coyly confessed that we were practically on a first-name basis, he said he admired hell out of you and always had wanted to meet you. I told him it wasn’t difficult if he had the price of a drink on him, and he wondered out loud if you’d like to drop in for cocktails this evening, and I accepted for both of us.”
“And Lucy?”
“And Lucy. He said there isn’t any Mrs. Shayne, is there, and I told him no but you had a beautiful secretary with two hollow legs. He thought that was very funny indeed and insisted that you must bring her. Pick me up at my place a little before six?”
Shayne said, “Sure,” and hung up reflectively. Why would a man like Saul Henderson be anxious to meet him? Did he know about his stepdaughter’s meeting with Shayne? And would she be there? It looked like an interesting evening, and he went out to tell Lucy to leave the office early enough to be ready to be picked up at half past five.
The Henderson house was a modern one-story structure directly on the ocean at the far northern end of Miami Beach. There were already half a dozen cars parked in the circular drive in front of the ranch house when Shayne turned in at six-thirty. Sitting between the two men in the front seat, Lucy said, “You didn’t say it was going
