contours of unbrassiered breasts even at that distance. She also wore a plenitude of crimson lipstick on her wide, full-lipped mouth, and an open, welcoming smile on her face. Her voice was throaty and warm, and it was welcoming too in a cheerful woman-to-man sort of way, so that it managed to be inviting without being brazen.
The smile Michael Shayne had prepared for Dorothy Larson came easily to his rugged face in response to hers, and he turned slowly, asking, “Do you have any idea when they’ll be home?”
“He’s never in till late… midnight or after.” She leaned her left shoulder comfortably against the door frame and rested her right hand lazily on her hip. “But if it’s Dottie you want, I expect she’ll be coming along any minute.” She paused, appraising him openly with eyes which narrowed a trifle and made pleasant crinkles at the corners, letting him sense that she liked what she saw. “You could wait in here if you like.”
Shayne said, “I would like.”
She did not stir from her stance in the doorway as he took two steps across the hall toward her. He stopped a foot in front of her and she straightened up and dropped her arm to her side, and in her bare feet her eyes were not more than three inches below the level of his own. He could smell whiskey on her breath, and there was the bold darkness of nipples behind the sheer yellow fabric of her blouse.
Studying his face quizzically, she worked her full crimson lips as though she were tasting something good, and she tilted her head slightly and asked, “What would you like, Red?”
Then she laughed quickly and happily, very much like a little girl’s laugh, and she linked her left arm in his and turned and drew him inside the apartment, and said gaily, “Don’t answer that. You came to see Dottie. But I will give you a drink on account of I want another one myself and I make it a strict rule never to drink alone… that is if there’s anyone else around to drink with. So, what’ll you have, Red?” She released his arm from hers and turned her back and padded toward the kitchen in her bare feet, moving hips and shoulders sinuously, and Shayne called after her, “Anything. Brandy if you happen to have it.”
She disappeared through the open doorway and her voice floated back with a trace of indignation in it, “Of course there’s brandy… if I can find it. Rest your feet while I dig it out.”
Shayne found himself grinning appreciatively after her as he stood there in the center of her living room, and he hoped Dorothy Larson wouldn’t show up too soon.
He got out a cigarette and lit it, and looked around him slowly. It was a pleasantly furnished and comfortably cluttered, feminine-looking room. The long sofa along one wall was covered with gold brocade and littered with small soft cushions in bright contrasting colors that managed not to clash. There were end tables with big utilitarian ashtrays on them, and two comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs ranged against the wall opposite the sofa. The muted music he had heard through the door was coming from a stereo set with twin speakers that were detached from it and set at right angles in different corners of the room. The music was not familiar to him, classical, he thought, probably one of the three B’s. A door at the end of the room directly in front of him opened onto a bedroom with a big double bed that was unmade and had two rumpled pillows at the head of it.
Shayne liked everything he saw as he stood there and heard clinking sounds of glass against glass in the kitchen, and he frowned and tried to analyze the warm feeling of contentment that welled up inside him. It was definitely a woman’s place, and yet it welcomed his masculinity and made him feel immediately wanted. He did not know why that was, or how the woman in the kitchen had managed it so well, but he did know instinctively that she had managed it, not consciously probably, but as an expression of herself.
He went to one of the deep chairs and sat down as she came back into the room carrying a glass in each hand. In her right hand was a big, bulbous brandy snifter with at least four ounces of amber fluid in the bottom of it. The other glass was tall, with tinkling ice cubes submerged in a dark brown mixture which appeared to be about three-quarters bourbon and one-quarter water.
She stopped in front of him and extended the snifter, frowning anxiously. “It says Napoleon V.O.P. on the bottle, and it smells okay. If you’d rather have something else…?”
Shayne took the big glass and inhaled the fragrance and assured her, “This is wonderful.”
She turned across the room from him and curled up on the sofa with her bare feet under her and took a long, sturdy drink from her own glass. She blew out her breath strongly and looked over her shoulder at the open door into the corridor, and said, “We leave it open, huh? So you’ll know when Dottie comes.”
Shayne shrugged and said evenly, “I do want to see her. In the meantime…” He lifted his glass and looked across the room at her over the top of it. “… here’s to you.” He tilted the glass and drank deeply.
She was looking at him with her eyes wide and probing as he set the glass down on the table beside his chair with a happy sigh. “You’ve got me puzzled, Red. I can’t figure you out. You and Dottie…?” She paused, delicately. Speculatively.
“Do you know her well?”
“Dottie? We’ve been next door neighbors for three months. You a friend of that squirt of a husband of hers?”
“Ralph?” Shayne shook his head. “I never met him.” He paused and added deliberately, “I understand he’s the jealous type.”
“Of her?” She widened her eyes and leaned back against the sofa, stretching her bare legs out in front of her languidly, clasping both hands behind her neck and thrusting her torso upward so that up-thrust nipples were clearly and provocatively defined, and her steady, wide-eyed gaze challenged him to ignore them… to ignore her… to be unaware of the whole hunk of lush femininity she was flaunting in front of him.
She said throatily, “I wouldn’t know, Red. She’s a lady. Dottie is. A real lady-bitch type. Different from me.”
“What type are you?”
“I’m a woman, Red. Like you don’t know.” She relaxed and sat upright and grinned suddenly. A gamin-like grin. “Like you didn’t know the moment you turned your head and looked at me across the hall. Like any real man knows when he looks at a real woman.” She laced her fingers in front of her face and peered through the interstices at him and said wonderingly in a low voice that was throaty with desire, “You could close that damned door and lock it, Red. Then you could kiss me.”
She was a lot drunker than he had thought, Shayne realized, and he was sorry. He wished to God he were a lot drunker… or she were soberer. Either way…
He fumbled for his glass and picked it up and glared at it, then put it up to his mouth and drained the remaining three ounces of liquor out of it.
He got up out of his chair then, and moved a step toward her, and stopped when he saw her eyes were open. She was watching him, and waiting.
He forced a grin onto his face and ran both hands through his rumpled red hair. He said, “This is a hell of a time…”
“I know.” She lay on her side on the sofa, staring up at him unblinkingly. “You’re like me, Red.” She sounded sad. Desolated and torn. He wondered if she was really as drunk as he had thought her to be. She smiled slowly. A crooked, understanding sort of smile. She said, “We’re two of a kind. Ships that pass in the night. But we’ll meet again, Red. Next time, we won’t pass.” She shuddered violently and closed her eyes and was silent.
Shayne didn’t realize he had moved, but suddenly he was standing close beside the sofa and was looking down at her. She kept her eyes tightly closed, but he knew that she knew he stood there, and he hesitated, clenching his fists tightly together so his fingernails bit into the flesh of his palms.
Then, through the open door behind him he heard the light clickity-clack of high heels mounting the uncarpeted stairs toward the second floor. He turned his head, still standing close beside the sofa, dropping his left hand toward the woman who lay curled up there, feeling her fingers twist around his, tightly, warmly, compellingly.
Through the open door at his right he saw a slender, smartly-clad young woman reach the top of the stairs and turn toward the door opposite him with a key held in her outthrust hand.
She was well-stacked, as Timothy Rourke had told him. She was also beautiful, with a careful precision of features that made her into a “real lady-bitch type.”
She unlocked the door of Apartment 3-B and walked inside without bothering to glance over her shoulder at the open door of 4-B.
Shayne stood unmoving until she closed the door behind her. His left hand was still tightly gripped by the woman who lay on the sofa with her eyes closed.
