“Why should I ask a man like that to my house?” demanded the old lady.
“Most mothers would have been eager to see him under the circumstances,” Shayne pointed out. “It was reasonable to suppose he might bring a dying message from your son.”
“Nonsense,” the old lady said harshly with another emphatic thump of her cane. “No Hawley would make a confidant of such riffraff.”
The girl said lazily, “He did call here on the telephone late yesterday afternoon. I told him I’d see him if he came at eight last night.”
“Beatrice! After I expressly stated I wanted no contact with either of those ruffians who allowed Albert to die while saving their own skins.”
“I know, Mother.” Beatrice’s upper lip lifted in an unpleasant smile that gave her face a perverse look of childishness. “But Gerald and I had talked about Uncle Ezra’s will that we knew Mr. Hastings was going to read this morning, and I thought it might be smart to talk to Mr. Groat.” She paused, regarding her mother with unblinking animosity. “Don’t you wish now that I had?”
Hastings cleared his throat loudly. “Please be quiet, Beatrice. This man is a stranger.”
Shayne stepped past him to look down at the girl. “Are you saying that Groat didn’t come?”
“Don’t answer the man, Beatrice.” The cane thumped again. “Address your questions to me, young man.”
Shayne stood looking down at the girl and didn’t turn his head. Her lids opened, disclosing sooty black eyes, and she caught her underlip between her teeth and gnawed on it as though it tasted good.
Suddenly she giggled and pushed herself out of the chair. She walked past Shayne without looking at him, and went out of the room.
Shayne transferred his attention to the young man who had not moved on the sofa during the interchange between mother and daughter.
“Do you know anything about Groat coming here?”
He lifted his gaze to Shayne’s, and then his eyes flickered away evasively toward Mrs. Hawley. “I think your questions are insolent, old boy.”
“Here’s another one,” Shayne said flatly. He half turned to the matriarch. “Where is Leon Wallace?”
Her eyes glittered at him and her hands clutched the top of her cane fiercely. “Who is he?”
“A gardener whom you employed here about a year ago.”
She said, “I don’t make a practice of keeping track of the names of my servants. Gerald is right. You are insolent.” She thumped her cane commandingly. “Eject this young man, B.H.”
Shayne grinned bleakly at the lawyer as he stepped forward hesitantly. He said, “The police will be around asking the same questions,” and turned his back and stalked out through the curtains.
The Negro was waiting at the door and he drew it open as Shayne approached. There was a scurry of feet in the hallway behind him as Shayne stepped out onto the veranda and thankfully drew a deep breath of clean, sunladen air.
Hastings joined him as he started down the steps, clamping his panama tightly onto his head. “Mrs. Hawley is under a great strain,” he said nervously. “I… ah… think we had best discuss certain matters in the privacy of my office. Will you meet me there, Mr… ah… Shayne, isn’t it?”
Shayne said, “I’ll be glad to,” and the lawyer hurried down the steps ahead of him and got into the black sedan parked in front of Shayne’s car.
He started the motor and pulled away as Shayne circled around to the left side of his car and opened the door.
A shrill, penetrating, “Eeewee,” from the house made him pause and lift his gaze over the roof of his car. It was a sound he hadn’t heard since he’d played Indians as a child, and it was repeated as he stood there.
Then he saw Beatrice. She was leaning over the ornamental iron railing of a second-floor balcony, beckoning to him eagerly with one hand while she held her finger tightly against her pursed lips.
His ragged, red brows came down in a frown and he hesitated as she pointed to the outside stairway leading up to her balcony and beckoned urgently again.
He shrugged and closed the door of his car, crossed around to the iron stairs and climbed up to the balcony where Beatrice waited for him.
5
She caught hold of his hand excitedly as he reached the top, pulled him back with her through an open French door into a large bedroom that was childishly girlish in its appointments. It was all pink and white, with delicate rosebuds on the wallpaper, ruffled skirts on the vanity table matching the cretonne bedspread and window curtains.
Beatrice stopped in the center of the room and turned to look at him, cocking her head on one side and demurely inserting the tip of the little finger of her left hand into her mouth. She said, “You know what?”
Shayne asked gravely, “What?”
“You make me feel all gurgly inside.” She giggled naughtily and turned aside to a low bookcase where she pulled out two books and groped in the back to bring out a pint whisky bottle a little more than half full. She worried the cork out with her teeth and presented the bottle to Shayne in much the manner of a little girl offering a playmate her favorite doll.
“You’ll have to take it straight,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’s too much trouble to sneak ice and mixers up here.”
Shayne put the bottle to his mouth and swallowed a couple of times without letting much liquor trickle down his throat. He passed it back to her and she drank deeply, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and said delightedly, “More damn fun.”
In the light from the open window behind her there was an abrasive hardness about her features that surprised Shayne. He realized, of course, that she was older than her brother Albert, and had been married for several years to the unpleasant-looking young man whom he had encountered downstairs, but in the half-light below he had gained the impression of retarded physical development. Now a hot light gleamed in her slate-gray eyes and she moved closer to him to confide, “If I didn’t keep a bottle stashed away where I could hit it once in a while I’d go nuts cooped up here.”
Shayne moved back from her to a slipper chair at the foot of the wide bed and sat down. He said casually, “You’re Albert Hawley’s sister, aren’t you?”
A faint frown creased her forehead. “I was. But Albert’s dead.” She sat on an ottoman a few feet in front of him with her feet placed too wide apart for grace and with the whisky bottle dangling from her hand. “Mother’s a tough old witch to live with. Gerald’s sort of precious, but he bores hell out of me sometimes.”
“Your husband?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long have you been living here with your mother?”
“Couple of years now. Waiting for Uncle Ezra to die so I could collect my share of the estate.” She giggled unexpectedly and for no good reason that Shayne could discern.
He asked gravely, “Can’t your husband support you?”
“I guess he could but why should he bother?” She took another drink from the bottle, held it out toward Shayne but he shook his red head. “Uncle Ezra had millions,” she went on indifferently. “He stole it all from Dad and now he doles out just enough to Mother to keep this damned old monstrosity of a house going.”
“How did your uncle steal your father’s money?” Shayne asked patiently.
“They were in business together. When Dad died there wasn’t anything left of his share. Mr. Hastings explained all about it to us. He explains things like that very well.” She tilted her head to one side and thrust the tip of her tongue out between her lips. “You want to kiss me?”
“Not right now,” Shayne told her. “So now your uncle’s dead and you get all those millions he stole from your father?”
“That’s just it.”
