So Lush, So Deadly

Whenever she wonders who she is she pulls out the dough to prove to herself that she’s really Dotty De Rham. You don’t get that kind of feeling from credit cards.” He made a gesture of despair, which ended with more salted nuts going into his mouth. “She tells me about her childhood sex experiences, but money we don’t discuss.”

“You said you’re due back in New York. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m not exactly due back. I’ve got a tentative business connection but it’s still very fragile. The real reason I joined this junket was to get Dotty to buy some stock, and please don’t think it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was damn hard.” He twitched up out of his chair. “I’m going to see what she’s up to. She must have that lipstick on by now.”

CHAPTER 7

“She tried to get up but she couldn’t make it,” he reported a moment later. “Come on in. She wanted me to pick up the room first, but that’s a day-long job. Be careful what you step on, it could be a T.V. dinner.”

They entered the stateroom. The shades were drawn. Shayne didn’t see any T.V. dinners, but there was everything else, clothes, newspapers folded open to stock market tables, empty bottles. Mrs. De Rham was in the double bed, hiding behind sunglasses. She was wearing a lacy bed jacket. She had tawny hair, and it was in fairly good shape. Her lipstick had been put on with a shaky hand.

She ran the glasses down her nose to look at him over them, then put them back up.

“I hope you’re used to squalor, Mr. Shayne,” she said in a pleasantly hoarse voice.

Brady picked a glass off the bedside table. “Baby, will you stop drinking gin for breakfast? Do you want to starve?” He tasted the drink. “Straight gin,” he said gloomily, and set it on the bureau.

“And what a Sunday School teacher you’re turning out to be.”

“Thank you,” he said, sitting down. “Find a place to sit, Shayne.”

Shayne moved a pile of underclothing off the chair at the foot of the bed.

“How much did Joshua Loring tell you?” she asked.

“Just that you needed a detective. I’ve already talked to Petrocelli, and he won’t be any problem. He’s ready to leave any time. But Mr. Brady tells me there’s more to it than that.”

“Yes. You see my-husband-”

She sniffed sharply and reached for a box of Kleenex.

“Now don’t cry, for God’s sake,” Brady said impatiently. “I’ve already told him about the dough.”

She turned her head angrily. “You-”

Brady put both hands on his head, as though to keep it from flying apart. “That’s what Shayne is here for, isn’t it? Let’s not go through the whole thing again. Otherwise why not let the cops find him? Or let him turn up by himself?”

“He can have the damn money,” she said in a muffled tone.

“Sure. He’ll be glad to do that. And you won’t see him again, I can guarantee you. I’ve known Henry longer than you have. He’s attached to it by now.”

She blew her nose. “Mr. Shayne-I want him back. I couldn’t tell the police that he-”

When she didn’t go on Brady picked it up for her. “How would it look? Five thousand is serious money to a cop. Hell, it’s serious to me. But Henry’s no ordinary thief. There was a certain amount of fuss on the way down about Dotty’s will. Shut up,” he said when Mrs. De Rham started to speak. “You really milked that bit, and you know it. You’ve got a choice. You can either tell Shayne what the situation is or give it to the cops. They didn’t sound too interested when it was a case of a husband who walked out on his wife after a fight, but a husband who walked out with the wife’s five thousand bucks-”

She made a gesture under the sheet. “You’re itching to tell him. Tell him.”

Brady sighed. “She wrote a new will, Shayne. Everything to charity and nothing to Henry. That was what the fight was about. She wanted to show him who had the power. She showed him, all right, and what was supposed to happen to the human relationship? I speak from experience-I’ve been getting the same business from my own wife. Dotty’s in her late twenties. With luck she’ll live another sixty years, if she tapers off on the gin. So if Henry’s only been staying with her for the inheritance it’s a long-range prospect, no? I know exactly how he figured! She was putting everything in monetary terms. O.K., he knew how it would bug her to look for those five G’s and find them missing. And why not? What else has he got out of the marriage except maintenance?”

“I want him back,” she said miserably.

“And if he doesn’t want to come back,” Shayne said, “do you want the five thousand?”

She didn’t answer for a long moment. Her hands moved beneath the sheet.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice.

“How I love you rich people,” Brady commented.

Shayne said, “Do you think he’s still in Miami?”

Mrs. De Rham had slipped down in the bed. She seemed exhausted.

“Paul,” she said faintly.

“Yes, baby. Do you want a saucepan?”

She moved her head. “I can’t talk any more.”

Brady hesitated, then stood up. “Get some sleep. I’ll take care of it. He’ll find him for you, baby, don’t worry.”

He picked up the glass of gin and took it with him, Shayne followed. After closing the door Brady stood leaning against it for an instant, breathing hard.

“I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but goddamn it! Why didn’t she treat him better when he was here?” He began shaking himself back into his earlier manner. “Of course a lot of that in there was summer stock. She overdoes everything.” He went to the galley and emptied the glass in the sink. “Not that she doesn’t have a bottle under the mattress, probably. But she’s better today. Yesterday she wasn’t making any sense. You’re going to want a picture.” He found two photographs in a drawer. In the first, De Rham was crouched over a guitar, an absorbed look on his face. The other showed him in bathing trunks, walking along a beach.

“Would he shave off his beard?” Shayne asked.

“I doubt it. He’s had it since sophomore year in college. There isn’t much of a chin behind it.”

Shayne was scraping his own chin thoughtfully, looking around the cluttered room. There was a record player and a drift of records, most of them folk music. He didn’t see a guitar.

“She didn’t answer my question. Do you think he’s still in Miami?”

“Shayne, after the pounding he took on the cruise he was in no shape to go through the rigamarole of getting a plane reservation and confirming and showing up in time for the plane. If I read the tea leaves right, and I think I do, he’d hunt for a place nearby to lick his wounds.”

He headed for another bowl of salted nuts and started working at it. “I think I could even find him myself, but I don’t want to leave Dotty. The thing about Henry, he’s not exactly burning with ambition. He doesn’t want to see his picture on the cover of Time, he just wants people to leave him alone. I used to feel the same, but I’m beginning to see that people won’t leave you alone unless you pay them to. At Harvard he used to moon around wondering what he was doing at a competitive college, instead of in some lazy pad in San Francisco or the East Village.”

He pushed a stack of records off a chair so he could sit down. “Then he met Dotty. Life with her had advantages, such as not having to pay the rent, but whenever he felt the strain he’d talk about how underneath he was really a frustrated beat.”

“How about lately?” Shayne said.

“Lately more than ever. Of course the hippies are all over the mass media these days, you can’t get away from them. I feel the attraction myself, after being cooped up with Dotty the last couple of weeks. I’ve never tried pot, but it might be an improvement over alcohol as it’s consumed on the Nefertiti. Is there a hippy colony in Miami?”

“A small one.”

“Then that’s where you’ll find him,” Brady said confidently. “Maybe you think taking the money contradicts what I’ve been saying, but Henry has a strong New England streak. If he’s really careful and doesn’t get rolled in