younger-Henry De Rham. I’m afraid I may be prejudiced against young men with beards, but she didn’t ask my advice. Like everything else with Dotty, that goes in cycles. Sometimes, for a few months, we have lunch once a week and she tells me everything. Then we go into a period where I represent everything she despises and she won’t have anything to do with me.”
“She has control over her property?”
“Complete control. Her father left everything in trust, but that terminated on her twenty-fifth birthday. As a matter of fact, she’s shrewd about money. I have no complaints on that score. When she makes a financial decision she seems to become a different person. All right. They’re in Miami now. They went down on their boat, the
“She’s been in touch with you?”
“She’s called me three times. Around one-thirty in the morning has always been her favorite time to use the phone. I’m in the hospital, incidentally. She had to bully the switchboard to get the calls through. I’ve had what they call a cardiac spasm, and I’m supposed to stay out of airplanes, or I’d be talking to you personally now instead of using the phone.”
“I’m sorry,” Shayne said. “I hadn’t heard.”
“They’re letting me go home in a few days. Dotty asked me how I was feeling and so on, and then she started talking about her will. She was pretty incoherent. She’d been drinking. She and her husband have been having difficulties, apparently. As obnoxious as I find him personally, he seemed to have a stabilizing effect on her at first. But just before she left New York she came into the office and added a codicil to her will cutting him off with a cash bequest of fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Which isn’t much in that family?”
“Which isn’t anything. We were very much at cross-purposes in that phone call, but I gathered that they’d had a fight on the way down and he’d left her, at least temporarily. I couldn’t make out what she wanted-a sympathetic listener, I suppose. I advised her to leave the codicil as it was and not cut him out completely, as long as they remained legally married. Whether anything registered I don’t know. I asked what she was planning to do, and she said she planned to have another martini. That was the level of the conversation. The next call was different-friendly and chatty. And then last night, or rather at one-thirty this morning, she called again, very drunk. She wanted to know if I could get her a reliable private detective.”
Shayne was scraping his thumbnail along the harsh reddish stubble on his jaw, the phone clamped between his shoulder and his chin.
“I couldn’t get her to tell me why,” Loring said. “She was all but unintelligible. And then Brady got on the phone. He said they’d had to fire the captain, and if you’re going to help with this, Mike, you’ll want his name. It’s Raphael Petrocelli. Apparently he made some kind of pass at Dotty while she was sun-bathing, and they let him go as soon as they tied up in Miami. He’s been hanging around the saloons, spreading stories and making vague threats.”
“Is Brady still living on the boat?”
“It seems so.”
“The name is Paul Brady? What does he do?”
“He married Katharine Kuhn, which means he doesn’t have to do anything. I don’t know anything else about him. Mike, will you go and see them?”
“Hold the line a moment.”
The girl twisted before he could say anything and kissed him lightly. “I know that look, Michael. It seems to me I’ve seen it once or twice before. For the last few minutes you haven’t known I was here, have you? In spite of the fact that I’m wearing a new dress and some rather expensive perfume.”
“Of course I’ve-”
“No, Mike. You asked me to dinner, and if I wanted to be a stinker I could hold you to it. But it wouldn’t be any fun. I know you. You’re like a racing greyhound-the minute you see the mechanical rabbit you start to run. I don’t mind, really. It’s one of your nice traits. Of course you’re not the typical greyhound, because you usually catch your rabbit.”
“The point is,” Shayne said uncomfortably, “this guy did me a favor years ago. If he hadn’t gone to bat for me I would have spent a couple of years in jail for jury tampering.”
“Yes, dear. And it’s been a very enjoyable evening, as far as it went. I’ve got some hamburger in the refrigerator. When you think of me again, call me.” She opened the door. “After you catch the rabbit.”
“Next time I’ll switch off the phone.”
“Next time we’ll take my car. It doesn’t have a phone.” The inner door of her apartment building closed behind her and Shayne went back to Loring.
“Did they give you the name of the marina?”
“The Sunrise Shores on Indian Creek. There’s something else, Mike. The role I’ve always played in Dotty’s life is a kind of court of last resort. When everything else fails, she gets in touch with Joshua Loring. I’ve spent most of the day on the phone. There’s a boy who works in my office named Tom Moseley. He prepares Dotty’s tax returns and she seems to like him. He’s visiting his parents in Sarasota, and when I didn’t succeed in tracking you down I called him and asked him to come over. He’ll be staying at the St. Albans, and he may be able to help.”
He hesitated. “I may be building this up. But I can’t persuade myself that she isn’t worried about something more than an employee who got out of line and had to be fired. And I had a hunch. She sold quite a bit of stock all through the fall and winter, on my advice, and she put the cash into savings accounts and certificates of deposit. The president of her bank is one of my close friends, and I asked him about the status of her accounts. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have told me, but he knows something about her medical history and he agreed to check. She’s closed everything out, Mike, a total of over seventy thousand dollars, and the checks came back endorsed for deposit in Miami Beach. A total of eighty thousand dollars, and she may have had other accounts in other banks that I don’t know about. And another point. A piece of industrial property she owns in Hoboken was put on the market and the broker accepted the first offer that came along. It wasn’t a bad price, but that’s not the way Dotty usually operates.”
Shayne said thoughtfully, “Do you know any reason why she would need cash in a hurry?”
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason.”
“Do you think she’s paying blackmail?”
“The idea’s entered my mind,” Loring said dryly.
“Can you make any guesses about what kind of hold a blackmailer could have on her?”
Loring held up imperceptibly, and from many years’ experience with all kinds of clients, Shayne had a feeling that for the first time in this phone conversation he wasn’t going to be told the truth.
“I don’t, Mike. But she’s a complicated and unusual woman, my god-daughter, and it wouldn’t be anything routine.”
“In other words, not sex?”
“I don’t think they take sex that seriously, or that’s my impression. I think you can find out if anybody can. Don’t hesitate to be tough if you have to be, she may respond to that. You’re not supposed to know about the transfer of funds. That would come under the head of meddling in her private affairs, and she has an exposed nerve on the subject. She’s asked me to recommend a private detective and I’m recommending you. She has to take it from there.”
There was a doubtful expression on Shayne’s rugged face as he listened. He had questions to ask, but he decided to look at the set-up first. He went over the names and places, and they arranged about terms.
After hanging up, he lit a new cigarette and smoked it all the way through, leaning forward against the wheel. The bullet hole in the windshield swam into focus, a small circle surrounded by a network of radiating cracks. According to Loring’s description, Mrs. De Rham wouldn’t be likely to fire at him with a heavy-caliber pistol, but she didn’t sound exactly relaxing, either.
He threw the cigarette into the street and started the motor.
