“I think that’s an extremely good idea.” Shayne finished off his drink and took a sip of ice water. He looked around for the waiter and crooked a bony finger at him, got out his wallet and extracted a bill.
The waiter brought a bar-check face down on a silver dish and Shayne laid the bill on top of it without looking at the amount.
He left fifty cents when the waiter brought his change, then got up and moved behind the girl to draw her chair back. She stood beside him, the top of her glistening black hair barely coming above his shoulder, and Shayne tucked her arm in his and led her past the end of the bar, nodding politely to the woman with the tinted glasses who had resumed her contemplative posture at the bar with chin supported by the backs of her hands.
4
Jane Smith unlocked a door on the fourth floor and stood aside to allow Shayne to enter a pleasant sitting room that showed no sign whatsoever of human occupancy. Two floor lamps were lighted at opposite ends of the room, and two closed doors led off to what Shayne assumed would be bedroom and bath.
The girl closed the door tightly behind her while Shayne strolled across the room, and asked in a controlled voice, “Cognac, you said? Any particular brand?”
He stopped at curtained windows and turned with a reassuring smile. “I don’t really need a drink, Jane.”
“But I want you to have one,” she told him with quiet dignity, crossing to the telephone and putting her hand on it. “Please tell me what to order.”
“Just ask for a double shot of Monnet cognac… with a pitcher of ice. And whatever you want.”
She lifted the instrument and tilted her chin determinedly, said, “Room Service, please,” into the mouthpiece, and then: “This is number four twenty-six. Miss Smith speaking. I’d like a double cognac… Monnet, please. Yes, a double,” she repeated firmly. “And some ice if you don’t mind. And could you send a limeade or lemonade with it?” She paused, listening carefully, then nodded and said, “That’s correct. Room four twenty-six.”
She replaced the receiver and told Shayne, “It will be right up.”
He moved away from the window to a deep chair at the end of the room, and sank into it, stretched his long legs out in front of him and advised her, “Sit down and relax. You’re wound up as tight as a violin string. Smoke?” He got out a pack of cigarettes and started to get up.
She shook her head, crossed to the sofa close to him and dropped into it, curling her feet up under her. “I don’t really like to smoke. If I inhale it makes me dizzy… and it seems silly to smoke if you don’t.”
Shayne said gravely, “I guess that’s right. A waste of time and money.” He lit his own cigarette and inhaled blissfully. “Was it you tailing me tonight?”
“Yes. All the way from your hotel in Miami.” She drooped her lashes and caught her underlip between her teeth. “Who else do you think I could trust?”
Shayne said honestly, “I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know very much about anything. Except here we are… and I’m willing to listen.”
“You don’t know how awful I felt,” she burst out, “when the News didn’t run my advertisement in the Personal Column. I just felt like it was the end of the world. I had considered the possibility that they might refuse it,” she added honestly. “But I tried so darned hard to make it sound innocent and innocuous. I guess I didn’t succeed, did
I?”
“Not quite. If you hadn’t underlined ‘anything’ that second time…”
“But it seemed to me that if I didn’t, there wasn’t much point in the whole thing,” she pointed out defensively. “And I did so hope the right sort of man would see it and be intrigued.”
“Someone like me?”
“I… think so. That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it? When your reply did come, I just felt as though God had planned it that way. Instead of having to sift through dozens of answers, there was only yours. And it sounded, well… mature and serious.”
There was a knock on her door. She uncurled her legs and got up to admit a bellboy with a tray. He set the tray on a coffee table in front of the sofa and offered her a check and a pencil to sign it with.
Shayne got up lazily from his chair while she signed Jane Smith in round, schoolgirlish script, got a dollar from his wallet and dropped it on top of the signed slip when she put it down.
The boy thanked them both and went out, and she told Shayne defensively, “You didn’t have to pay the tip. I fully intended…”
Shayne grinned and waved a big hand. “That’s cheap for a double cognac.”
He dipped ice cubes into a water glass and turned to the two closed doors. “Which is the bathroom?”
“On your left.”
He went through a door into a bathroom as antiseptically neat and uncluttered as the living room, ran water on top of the ice and returned. She was curled up on the sofa again with a tall glass of yellowish liquid and ice cubes out of which she was sucking from two straws.
Shayne got his double cognac from the tray and carried it with the glass of ice water to his chair. He sank back and took a meditative sip, and then asked bluntly, “What’s all the cloak and dagger stuff about, Jane? Supposing the price is right… exactly what do you want from me?”
She said firmly, “I think I should know a great deal more about you before I go into that.” She hesitated, then asked timidly, “Are you a professional gunsel?”
Shayne grinned. “You’ve been reading imitators of Dashiell Hammett. They completely misinterpreted that word.”
“Well then, a hood? A… a trigger-man? Because you don’t act or sound like one,” she went on with painful honesty. “Or at least the way I always thought one would be.”
Shayne took a sip of his drink. “Disappointed?”
“No. I’m delighted that you’re so personable and… well, literate. It makes it a lot easier to talk to you. But… what do you do for a living?”
“Anything to pick up a fast buck. I’ve killed a few men, Jane, if that’s what you’re getting at. Rubbed them out, in the vernacular. I exist on the edge of the law,” he went on, choosing his words carefully, “and haven’t a great respect for the way justice is administered in this country.”
“The clerk at your hotel intimated that you are a gambler.”
“Not a professional. But I do like to eat… and drink good cognac.” He lifted his glass in a salute and drank from it.
“Tell me about your girl at the newspaper office. Are you in love with her?”
“We’ve got a thing about each other. How does she come into this?”
“She doesn’t, of course. Except to help me understand what motivates you. If you are in love with a nice girl you’re most likely to understand my problem and sympathize with me. And if you need a lot of money in a hurry to enable you to get married and change your way of life, that would be an important incentive, I should think.”
By her speech, her choice of words, Shayne thought, she exhibited the damnedest mixture of naivete and sophistication he had ever encountered. Her language had a quaintly bookish tinge, as though she had acquired her knowledge of words from reading rather than from the actual give-and-take of conversation with other human beings. All-in-all, Jane Smith intrigued hell out of him at this point, and he was comfortably pleased that she had turned out to be this one instead of either of the other two possibilities he had considered in the Crystal Room.
He said, “I came here to listen to a proposition, Jane. I’ve got a gun and it’s for hire… if the job appeals to me and the price is right.”
She said impulsively, “You’re absolutely wonderful, Mike Wayne. I don’t suppose that’s your real name, is it?”
“No.”
