glasses and filled them to the brim. He handed Gentry one of the glasses, ignoring the Miami Beach chief of detectives.
He held his glass high and said pleasantly, “Here’s to more and bloodier murders.” After draining his glass and smacking his lips, he added, “If you birds are all through I won’t take up any more of your time.”
“By God!” Painter burst out. “The voice over the telephone sounded a lot like yours. You’re just dumb enough to think that would be a smart stunt. It would cover you up nicely in the girl’s disappearance. Where were you at eleven forty-five?”
Shayne sat down and lit a cigarette. He said gently, “None of your damned business.”
Painter turned to Gentry and exploded, “We can drag him in on suspicion.”
Gentry had been watching Shayne. He shrugged his shoulders.
“He’d be out in an hour on habeas corpus. Nope.” He shook his heavy head. “I don’t think Shayne knows any more about where the girl is than we do. Come on.” He got up abruptly.
Shayne grinned at them quizzically. “Come back any time. You never can tell when I’ll have a murderess sleeping in my bed.” He sat at the table and watched them go out.
After a few minutes he went to the phone and called the clerk to ask if they had gone through the lobby. The clerk knew Gentry, and said they were just going out the door. Shayne hung up the phone and went into the bedroom. The covers were thrown back on the bed. He searched under the pillow and mattress, and on the dresser, for a note. There was none. Everything was in perfect order. He went through the bathroom carefully and through the kitchen. The night latch was on the kitchen door leading out to the fire escape. On sudden thought, he went into the living-room and found the. 25 automatic gone from the drawer.
Finally he went to the front door of the apartment and examined the marks carefully. The door had been expertly forced open by someone in possession of an excellent set of burglar tools. There was a Yale lock on the door, but a jimmy had spread the door far enough from the jamb to allow the insertion of a slender piece of steel behind the latch to force it back. The entire operation had probably taken only a few minutes and should have been noiseless.
Well, there was nothing to wait around for now. He closed the door and found it had been sprung a trifle but not too much to prevent the latch from holding. He got his hat and went down to the lobby.
The hotel was a small one and had no house detective on its staff. The elevator boys said they had noticed nothing unusual in the vicinity of his room that morning. He described Phyllis to them, but none of them remembered seeing her go out. Anyone who wished to, of course, could enter and leave the building by the private side entrance.
He went to the manager’s office, explained that his apartment had been burglarized, and asked that a thorough check be made of all employees to learn if any of them had noticed any suspicious persons loitering in the corridors. Then he went out and down to Flagler Street.
Pelham Joyce had a studio on the second floor of one of the many arcades on Flagler. Shayne climbed the dingy stairway and entered a huge room overlooking Flagler. The floor was uncarpeted and dirty, littered with the accumulation of cigarette ashes and butts. There were canvases hung on almost every inch of wall space. An easel stood back from the front windows with a half-finished portrait on it, and there were a few chairs scattered about. Pelham Joyce sat in a rocking chair, his slippered feet resting upon the window sill.
He craned his neck as Shayne entered, nodded, then went on interestedly watching the stream of traffic on the street below. He was a shrunken man with a huge bald head. His face was anemic and thin. He wore stained canvas trousers, a dirty shirt which had once been white, a polka-dotted Windsor tie fastened loosely about his gaunt neck, and a shabby velveteen smoking-jacket. His age was indeterminate, though Shayne had sometimes guessed him to be well past seventy. He had studied at the principal academies of art in Europe and had once achieved a small measure of fame for portrait work. But the boulevards of Paris and the absinthe which could be purchased there had sapped his strength and his skill.
Shayne had known him for years; a bit of flotsam tossed up by Miami’s hurrying tide of humanity, dreaming and idling away the declining years of his life contentedly in the tropical climate which demands so little effort for continued survival.
Shayne drew up a chair which had four whole legs and sat down beside him. Pelham Joyce waved a hand at the spectacle out the window. The hand was so thin it was almost transparent.
“Fools. Going around in their private circles and each believing that today is important.”
Shayne said, “Did you ever hear of D. Q. Henderson?”
“Of course.” Joyce did not look at him. “A self-appointed Art critic who trots around the world pandering to the insatiate desire of pork-packer millionaires to be known as patrons of Art.” Each time Pelham Joyce spoke this last word, he invested it with the dignity of a capital A.
“Men like Brighton?” Shayne spoke casually.
“Exactly.” Joyce’s gaze fluttered, birdlike, over Shayne’s face. “Henderson picked up some good things for Brighton when the fool was building his collection. Brighton made the grand gesture of turning his collection over to the Metropolitan, and then I understand he tried to retract when he found himself without funds. The Metropolitan refused, of course-trust them to hang onto anything they get hold of-so I doubt whether Brighton is so patronizing toward Art any longer.”
Shayne waited patiently until he finished. Then he asked, “Do you know if Henderson is still acting as Brighton’s agent?”
“Don’t suppose Brighton can afford the luxury of an agent any longer.” Pelham Joyce chuckled toothlessly.
“Don’t such agents sometimes trace and pick up for a song some unknown pictures by the old masters which later sell for a fabulous sum?”
“That’s more newspaper talk than anything else,” Joyce mumbled.
“But it does happen?” Shayne persisted.
“Oh, yes. It was Henderson, I believe, who dug up an authentic Rembrandt from some ruins in Italy five years ago. It hangs with the Brighton collection now.”
“How much,” Shayne asked, “is such a picture likely to bring?”
“Whatever some damned fool will pay for it,” Joyce told him sharply. “A hundred thousand-half a million-two million. It’s rarity that counts with the collectors, not Art.”
“They generally smuggle them into this country, don’t they?”
“Of course.” Sharply. “No self respecting collector would think of paying honest duty on a rare painting.”
“How,” Shayne asked patiently, “do they go about it?”
“The simplest method is to paint over the original signature and daub on the initials of a well-known imitator of the master’s work. Then, I believe, they generally make a practice of boldly entering through Mexico to avoid the discerning eye of the New York authorities.”
Shayne thanked him, and they sat together for a time while the old man grumbled about the decline of Art and the accompanying disintegration of all Artistic Integrity. But only for a few minutes. Shayne left the disconsolate old man and went down to the Ask Mr. Foster Travel Bureau. For some time he studied steamship routes from Europe to Mexico, and train and plane routes to the United States, jotting down a great deal of interesting information and firmly refusing the clerk’s pressing offer to arrange the details of a trip to any part of the globe. Then he went back to his hotel.
From his apartment he called long distance and asked for the customs office at Laredo, Texas. When the connection was made, he talked to the man in charge at great length. With two one-thousand-dollar bills in his pocket, he gave no thought to the toll charge momently piling up. He hung up with the customs official’s promise of full-cooperation in the matter of notifying him if and when a Mr. D. Q. Henderson passed through the Port of Entry.
It was three o’clock. Shayne went down to the lobby and learned that the careful questioning of all hotel employees had brought no information to light concerning the burglarizing of his apartment. The manager was despondent and sympathetic, but Shayne assured him it did not matter particularly, since nothing of value had been stolen.
Then he went out, got in his car, and drove across the causeway toward the Brighton estate on Miami Beach.
