“Losing weight, according to Brady. Drinking, according to everybody else. She’s an abandoned wife, and it seemed to me she was enjoying the role.”
“That’s my Dotty. Probably there were tears. She has tear ducts she can turn on like a faucet. But she’s not getting me back with a few cheap tears! I feel sorry for her, but I feel sorry for myself too.”
“I’m supposed to tell you she’s put you back in her will.”
De Rham exploded. “If you knew how sick I am of that goddamn will! The cat and the chipmunk. I’d get interested in a conversation with some other woman at a party, and the next day Dotty would dash off to the lawyer’s and cut me down to fifty thousand. If I remembered to send her flowers on our anniversary, back I’d go as residuary legatee. The whole thing was disgusting.”
“She sounds like the most-” H. said.
“I never paid any real attention to it,” De Rham said, “but I couldn’t get her to believe that. I don’t care if she leaves her money to a home for unmarried dogs. I’m off that merry-go-round for good.”
This was emphatic enough, and the girl watched him with approval. But Shayne caught a movement at the corners of his mouth. Dotty De Rham, who had been married to him three years, might know him a little better than a girl who had been living with him two weeks.
“And she said she’d put some Winslow stock in your name,” Shayne went on.
“She knows what she can do with that stock.”
“Did she have any cash with her on the boat?”
“Dotty always has cash. It’s one of her eccentricities.”
“As much as five thousand?”
“I’ve known her to carry that much. Then sometimes we’ll be driving on a parkway and she won’t have a quarter for the toll.”
Shayne got off the table and looked around. “Ursula, how long have these people been living with you?”
Smoke trickled from her nostrils. “I stopped answering questions when I was a little girl.”
De Rham’s eyes were bright. “Did she tell you I walked off with
“Didn’t you?”
He smiled and spread his arms. “Search me.”
“All right. Turn out your pockets.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m not?”
He took De Rham by the elbow and squeezed the nerve. De Rham came to his feet, his body twisting. The girl started to move, but one of Shayne’s hands shot out and kept her in her chair.
“People have been telling me lies, as usual,” Shayne said. “I’m used to that, but when I run up against a point I can check, I like to check it. H., get me your bag and empty it on the table, and don’t give me any trouble.”
When he released De Rham, the smaller man twitched himself into some kind of order and began taking things from his pockets and piling them on the table.
“Do as he says, H. It’s unimportant. You don’t strike me as being exactly stupid, Shayne. How could I carry all that money in my pockets?”
Shayne glanced at the objects as they accumulated on the table. The girl had hung onto her lipstick and eye- liner, he noticed, though she hadn’t used them recently. He went over De Rham carefully. The little bearded man tried to keep his bearing casual, but his skinny body was shaking with fury. Shayne ran his hands down his legs, probed the cuffs of his pants and the insides of his shoes.
“Are you going to search me, too?” the girl said. “You could probably get away with it. You’re so strong.”
Shayne grunted and gave her the same attention he had given De Rham. Then he turned to the room. There was no closet. The only furniture besides the table and chairs was a chipped bureau. One drawer contained diapers and other baby things in orderly piles. The baby seemed to have as many material possessions as its mother. H. and De Rham each had a suitcase. Shayne checked them quickly, then ran his finger along the top of the door and the windows.
“What are you looking for?” H. said at last, after watching him furiously. “Heroin or something?”
“A key.”
He hoped to get a reaction, but she had her sunglasses back on.
He dusted his fingertips. “All right, De Rham. I’ll tell her you’re happily established and nothing can make you change your mind, especially offers of money.”
“That’s the message,” De Rham said. “And the next time you feel like breaking into a private apartment to turn everything upside down and intimidate people, I’d suggest you get a search warrant and bring some cops.”
Shayne looked at him narrowly. “Do you really want cops, De Rham?”
He went out.
CHAPTER 9
Shayne shut himself in a phone booth with a handful of change. First he called Richardson, the Beach detective who was handling Henry De Rham’s disappearance. Shayne told him he had found the missing husband, alive and living with a new girl.
“That’s the way it goes,” Richardson said philosophically. “I was getting a different set of vibrations, but it’s not the first time I’ve been wrong. I’ll cancel the Wanted sheets tomorrow. Thanks, Mike. It’s really just as well- now Painter can’t get on me for insubordination.”
After hanging up Shayne dialed a New York number and fed coins into the phone until the operator was satisfied. Joshua Loring answered.
“There you are, Michael. I was beginning to worry.” Shayne gave him a quick report.
Loring sighed. “Poor Dotty doesn’t have much luck with men. I hope she doesn’t think she’ll improve matters by exchanging Henry for this Paul Brady. He’s more of the same, I’d say. We don’t use the term fortune-hunter any more, but the practice still seems to exist.”
“Do you have anything more about her finances?”
“That Hoboken real estate deal is moving along. The closing’s set for next Tuesday, which must mean that Dotty’s been pushing them. I talked to her again this afternoon. She sounded much better, her old self, and I thought I could take a chance and mention the Hoboken sale. There are ways I could have heard about it without doing any snooping. Mike, she blew up. I’ve never heard her so furious. Then I made the mistake of telling her I’d asked Tom Moseley to look in on her. She hung up on me!” He paused. “I’ve seen them together socially, and they seemed to hit it off together well enough. I don’t understand the fury. Damn it, it’s so hard to know what to do.”
“Is Moseley here yet?”
“Yes, I just heard from him. He’s at the St. Albans and he’ll wait for your call. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to send him to see Dotty until he’d talked to you and now I’m glad I didn’t. Have you been able to work out any plan of action, Mike? I know you must have handled blackmail cases before, but what do you do about it? How do you proceed?”
“You have to play it by ear, Joshua. Most blackmail is seventy percent bluff, and blackmailers are the world’s jumpiest people. They can usually be handled. But we don’t know if she’s really being blackmailed, or who’s doing it or what’s being used. If you’re willing to pay for it I’d like to put De Rham under surveillance. I don’t think that hippy set-up is what it seems, or especially permanent.”
“Whatever you think is necessary, Mike, of course.”
“I don’t see how he could be blackmailing her unless Brady knows about it, to the extent of being in on it. It’s possible they may be working together. That would explain a few things. There’s one way you could help. You must have some idea about where she’s vulnerable. She’s had psychiatric treatment and she’s spent time in a mental hospital. Why? What brought it on?”
