“Which way would he rather have it,” grunted Rourke with a sour grin, “that she turn up in little pieces instead of having his dream world all smashed up?”
“I don’t know,” Shayne admitted angrily. “He’s so damned sure of her, Tim. I think it might be easier for him to live with it in the long run if she turns out dead.”
“Petey Painter and the Beachhaven Hotel aren’t going to like it if we spread that story over the front page,” Rourke warned him happily. “Either way the cat jumps, it’s going to be lousy publicity.”
“We’re not going to ask them whether they like it or not. Suppose you come along with me to the Beachhaven when I take that picture over and see what I find out. Merrill will let you sit in on it if I give him my word you’ll print only what I think needs to be printed.”
“Who’s Merrill?”
“Chief of Security. House dick, to you.” Shayne grinned, emptying his glass and picking up knife and fork as his plate was placed in front of him. “He’s in a real tough spot. Right now, he’s going to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.” He sighed and then attacked his steak zestfully.
The prints were still damp when they got back to the newspaper office after a fast lunch, but the snapshot had blown up much better than Shayne had hoped it would. He took two of the damp prints with him and arranged to have a couple more delivered to his place after they were dry, then he and Rourke drove over to the Beachhaven in their own cars so they could separate later if they wished.
The reporter’s car was already at the curb when Shayne got there, and Rourke was at the desk talking to the clerk when he entered the lobby.
Lawford looked fussed and irritated as Shayne walked up, and Rourke turned to him with a wink and said, “This guy claims Mrs. Harris isn’t in, but he refuses to call her room and check.”
Shayne said, “I’ll ask the questions, Tim,” and to the clerk, “Merrill in his office?”
“Yes, sir. It’s right around…
Shayne said, “I know where it is.” He took Rourke’s arm firmly and led him away from the desk. “These birds aren’t going to talk to reporters, damn it. Every person in the hotel has been clammed up.” They went around a corner to a suite of offices at the rear of the desk, and Shayne stopped at a closed, wooden door marked PRIVATE.
He knocked and turned the knob and walked in without waiting for an invitation. It was a small, neat office, lined with filing cases against the rear wall, with a bare desk in the center having only one telephone and a dictating machine. Robert Merrill was dictating into a microphone, leaning back at ease behind the desk and referring to on open cardboard folder in his lap. He pressed a thumb button on the microphone which shut off the machine when he saw Shayne in the doorway, and closed the folder and placed it on the desk in front of him.
With a hearty cordiality that did not appear to be feigned, he said, “Mike Shayne in the flesh. You don’t get around these parts often.”
He was a tall, middle-aged man, with iron-gray hair and coldly wary eyes. He was, as Shayne had assured Harris, competent and conscientious in his job-which was seeing to the security of the Beachhaven Hotel. It was a job that required a lot of intelligence and tact, the ability to unerringly detect a phony the moment he showed up in the hotel and to ruthlessly hound him away to another hostelry, and a sort of sixth sense acquired over the years which warned him in advance when trouble was brewing in any one of the more than thousand rooms overhead.
Shayne said, “The kind of people I deal with these days haven’t got the sort of money to pay your rates, Bob.” He held the door open for Rourke to come in, then closed it and asked, “Do you know Tim Rourke? Robert Merrill, Tim.”
Merrill looked dispassionately at the slouching figure of the reporter in his baggy suit, and said, “The name is familiar. Byline on the News, isn’t it? With a particular pipeline to Miami’s most famous private detective. What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he made no motion to rise or offer his hand.
Shayne sat down in a chair at the end of the desk, and Rourke moved quietly and self-effacingly aside to sit in one against the wall. Shayne took one of the pictures of Ellen Harris from his pocket and placed it in front of Merrill. “Recognize her?”
Merrill stared at it and pursed his thin lips. “Is this blown up from a small snapshot I saw this morning?”
“That’s right,” Shayne told him equably. “The lady you seem to have misplaced last Monday.”
Merrill permitted himself a tired smile. “I’d like to have this, Mike. Harris refused to leave the snapshot with me so I could show it around to the members of the staff who actually saw Mrs. Harris when she checked in. He got up on his high-horse and stalked out of here, threatening to sue the hotel for criminal negligence and so forth, and I understood he was going direct to the police.”
Shayne said, “He did,” and grinned happily. “Petey Painter succeeded in rubbing him the wrong way just as you did, so he ended up in my office. My client,” he ended sternly, “feels that both you and Chief Painter are more concerned with covering up his wife’s disappearance than you are in finding her.”
“You know that isn’t so, Mike.” Some of the tension and strain inside Robert Merrill that had been building up since his interview with Herbert Harris early that morning showed through. “He’s her husband, damn it. And he’s nuts about her as far as I could tell. There were certain facts I didn’t wish to divulge…” He broke off, grinning ruefully at Shayne and suddenly becoming very warm and human. “Hell’s bells, Mike. I sound like a speaker at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, don’t I? Damn it all. That guy is due for a rude awakening. I’ve got a lot more dope now than I had when I talked to him this morning.” He dropped his gaze to the photograph in front of him, and said softly, “She’s pretty terrific, huh? If I were married to her, goddamnit…” He paused and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Why’d you bring a reporter, Mike? I’d be glad to go over the evidence with you personally, but…”
Shayne said forcibly, “I brought a friend, first… a reporter, second. I promised Harris that I’d have this picture in the newspaper with a story about her disappearance this afternoon unless I was convinced it could not possibly be helpful. I don’t give one goddamn what you or Peter Painter or the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce think about it, I’ve been hired by Harris to find his wife. Tim Rourke is here with me to decide whether we print her picture and story… and just what sort of story we print, if any. I’m the one who’s going to decide what’s best. Rourke will abide by my decision. You’re lucky to have it handled this way,” he insisted. “If another paper gets onto it…”
Robert Merrill smiled mirthlessly. “The whole thing is dynamite, Mike.” He hesitated, frowning down at the picture of Ellen Harris on his desk. “I think you’d better hear what we’ve got. Without this picture, we haven’t even got a definite identification.”
He leaned over his desk and spoke into a concealed intercom built into the surface of it: “Have Lawford relieved at the desk and come in. And I’ll want that bellboy, Bill Thompson, after Lawford.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. “At a time like this I’m damned glad I’ve stayed a bachelor all my life.”
Michael Shayne didn’t reply to this. He knew that Timothy Rourke was watching him from the side, and he wondered if Tim was thinking about Phyllis. Merrill, of course, didn’t know about Phyllis. There was a knock on the door and Shayne was glad of a reason to stop thinking the way he was.
Merrill barked, “Come in,” and the door opened and Justus Lawford walked in. He glanced swiftly from Rourke to Shayne and then to Merrill, and if he recognized them as having stopped at the desk recently, he gave no sign of it.
He stopped in front of Merrill and asked, “What is it, Mr. Merrill?”
Merrill turned the picture around for him to look at. “Do you recognize her?”
Lawford said, “It’s the woman you were asking me about this morning, isn’t it? Mrs. Harris who registered last Monday?”
“Can you identify her positively?” demanded Merrill. Lawford hesitated and drew in a deep breath. “I wouldn’t want to take an oath on it. But… yes, Mr. Merrill. I remember her quite distinctly. So far as I can judge, that is Mrs. Harris.”
“All right,” grumbled Merrill. “Tell Mr. Shayne what you told me this morning. Why you remembered her particularly out of all the guests who registered that day.”
“It’s hard to put your finger on the exact reason,” Lawford began, fixing his gaze on the wall above Merrill’s head. “I’ve worked in lots of hotels… signed in hundreds of thousands of guests, I suppose. Mostly, it’s a mechanical process. But Mrs. Harris…!” He shook his head slowly. “You noticed her and you remembered her. I remember being surprised that she was checking in alone… for two weeks. And when I asked her… just to be sure… she vouchsafed the information that her husband had the modern idea that married couples should spend
