“Mike Shayne,” she said. “Damn you. I knew you had something to do with this.”
CHAPTER 18
“Mrs. Brady?” Painter said. “I’m Peter Painter, Miami Beach Chief of Detectives. I have some questions to ask you.”
“I don’t have to answer any of your questions,” she told him scornfully, “and you’d better have some explanation for taking me off that plane. I’m one of those people who enjoy fighting City Hall.”
She turned back to Shayne. There were shadows under her eyes, but the eyes themselves were clear and untroubled.
“When did you wake up?” she said with a slight smile.
“About ten seconds after you left the cabin. I didn’t drink much of that mickey you gave me. I told you I didn’t like vodka-especially vodka laced with chloral hydrate.”
“That’s what I get for being soft-hearted enough to cut you loose. You might at least have finished the love making we started. I could easily resent that.”
“You didn’t have your heart in it.”
“You’re wrong about that, Mike,” she said softly.
“Now look here,” Painter said, “I want somebody to tell me-”
They continued to ignore him. Shayne picked her bag out of her hand. She grabbed for it, but Shayne took her arm and passed her along to Painter.
“Slug her if she makes any trouble.”
“Pretty transparent. Pretty crude provocation. Nobody’s going to accuse me of brutality.”
“I erased it, of course,” she remarked as Shayne took out the tape she had recovered with the aid of Teddy Sparrow.
“I think it’s too hot to erase. It won’t be hard to find out. The question Petey wants to ask you-did you kill a man named Thomas Moseley at about two-thirty this morning?”
“Do I look like a murderess, Mike?”
He looked into her eyes, and nodded.
“Yeah, a sexy-looking one. Did you see the red cross over the door? Your husband’s in here, in pretty bad shape.”
Her smile faded, and Shayne saw a spurt of apprehension in her eyes. She went to the doorway.
“Paul,” she said, very low. “What happened to him?”
“We aren’t sure. He was in a fire. And apparently somebody threw acid in his eyes. Does it matter to you?”
“Of course it matters.”
Her own eyes had filled with tears. She went quickly to the bed and sank into the chair Shayne had been using. She took Brady’s hand.
Slowly Brady reached across with his other hand and touched her. His fingers went up to her hair, then down her cheek to her shoulder and her breast. He pulled his hand away.
“Shayne,” he said sharply and distinctly. “I want a lawyer.”
“Pretty soon, Paul. We still aren’t asking you questions. We’re just theorizing. You can order us out if you want to, but don’t you think you’d better know what facts we have so you can make your plans?”
When Brady didn’t answer Shayne said, “I have a tape I’d like to play. Tim, where’s your recorder?”
“Outside. I’ll get it.”
In a moment he was back with the recorder. He found an outlet.
“I’d better explain how this was made,” Shayne said, giving the reporter the tape he had taken from Mrs. Brady’s bag. “Mrs. Brady learned that her husband was living on a boat with another woman. She’s been trying to divorce him-I’ve heard that from a couple of sources. She hired a private detective to plant a listening device on the
“That’s illegal,” Painter snapped. “What’s the name of this private detective?”
“I can’t remember,” Shayne said. “Do you want me to play it or not?”
Painter’s eyes shifted. “Play it, of course.”
“A girl on the next boat, a nice kid named Sally Lyon, happened to be on deck, awake, and she saw the bug being planted. A little while later she saw somebody swim up to the
A voice said suddenly, “Well, did Shayne fall for it?”
Shayne stopped the tape. “That’s Paul Brady. He means did I fall for the hippy set-up. Did Henry convince me he was really running away? The next voice is going to be Henry’s.”
“Why shouldn’t he fall for it?” De Rham said irritably when Shayne started the tape. “That’s my milieu, man. I can’t tell you, it’s just so great. The chick has still got a tangle of bourgeois hang-ups, but she knows they’re there and she’s trying hard. The thing is, there’s no pressure. The time floats by. Maybe part of it’s pretty phony, but it’s the best kind of phony. If we ever get out of this-”
“With dough,” Brady said.
“We either get out of it with dough or we don’t get out of it.”
Richardson put in suddenly, “Hold it, Mike.” Shayne pressed the stop button. “You said the bug was picking up conversations in the master stateroom. Then it wasn’t really a woman aboard with Brady?” He looked hard at Shayne. “It was De Rham in drag?”
“That’s how it looks,” Shayne said.
Painter stood up abruptly and sat down again. Mrs. Brady looked at her fingernails.
Rourke exclaimed, “I don’t get it, Mike.”
“I tried every possible combination, and that was the only one that would fit. Don’t feel bad about it, Tim. I’m the one they really fooled. They took a hell of a chance, but they had to, and I’m sorry to say it almost worked. I just want to point out before we go any further that the morning they put on their performance for me I had no reason to think they weren’t the people they said they were. The dialogue was pretty convincing.”
Rourke protested, “Mike, are you trying to get us to believe you can’t tell a man from a woman? For Christ’s sake.”
“Undressed I’ve never made a mistake yet,” Shayne said, “but they weren’t undressed.”
Rourke gave a disbelieving laugh. “I don’t buy it. Now give us the switch.”
“There’s no switch, Tim. This is straight. If I’d had a little more background when I went in I might have caught it, but I’m not sure about that-they did a damn good job. It was a carefully staged scene. They’d probably rehearsed it a dozen times.”
“But, Mike-”
“Use your imagination,” Shayne said impatiently. “I had no description of Mrs. De Rham except that she was a neurotic and a drinker. Petrocelli was the one person in Miami who knew what she looked like until Tom Moseley showed up, and somebody killed Moseley with a gin bottle. Petrocelli kept coming back to the boat after they fired him. He saw Brady a couple of times but he never saw Mrs. De Rham. She was in bed drunk-or so they said.”
“You talked to both Mrs. De Rham and De Rham the same day,” Rourke said, still unconvinced. “How about the voices? The hands?”
“O.K., the hands,” Shayne said. “I never saw Mrs. De Rham’s hands. They were under the sheet. She had a low, hoarse voice. His was high for a man and slightly nasal. The easiest way to change the pitch of a voice is let it come out through the nose. They arranged it so she didn’t have to say much. A few words here and there. She’d been drinking for two weeks and she was badly hung over. Drunkenness is a good disguise, and a hangover’s even better. She lay in bed and groaned, and Brady did the talking.”
“How about the-well, breasts, Mike?” Rourke said.
