way in?”
“It’s the brute in me. Do you admire brute strength, like D. L.?”
“Is that cryptic remark supposed to mean something to me?”
“You know D. L., of course.”
“No, I don’t.” She widened her round gray eyes and accepted the cigarette he offered, keeping them fastened provocatively on his face and leaning closer than necessary while he lit it. “What do you really want with me?”
“Besides the obvious, I’d like to know who set you up here and why.” He was aware of the warmth of her thigh.
“You asked me that before,” she said shortly, “and I told you I set myself up. And the reason is apparent.”
“Not to me. Let’s come at it from another direction, then. What was the meaning of those numbers on Jimsey’s tape at last night’s seance?”
“Tape?” Her face was blandly innocent. “Do you mean the message from ‘outside’?”
“Let’s drop the act. It was a message all right-from inside! It was information in some sort of cabala. What was the message? Who was it for?”
“In numerology there is a mystic meaning to all numbers.” Her voice was rarefied. “What those particular numbers meant, I do not know. I am only the-magnet which attracts the spirits. The person for whom the message was meant would know.”
“Since the voice was supposed to be from the spirit of the boy, Jimsey, the message was meant for his parents, the Thains. Did they understand?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t think they did. I think those numbers were incorporated in Thain’s message for someone else. I want you to tell me who it was.”
“I wouldn’t know. Different people attend my seances every night. Except for a few regulars I don’t know any of them.”
“Where did you get the numbers?”
“They came to me in my trance.”
“Now look.” Shayne’s voice hardened. “You didn’t say anything in what you call your ‘trance.’ Those messages were prepared beforehand on tape, and both you and I know it.”
“Well,” she took a deep drag on her cigarette, “what of it? I give them a good show. They get their money’s worth in entertainment.”
“They get more than their money’s worth. You could charge more. Why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not greedy,” she snapped.
He held her with his eyes. “I think you are-for everything.” He saw the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the silken blouse. Slowly, she moved one hand and rested it on his knee. The pressure was light, but he could feel the warmth of her tapering fingers.
For a moment Shayne wondered-would Dan Milford, or any man, resist her female appeal? Had he been too ready to believe Dan Milford’s assertion that he loved only his wife?
With a curious detachment, he saw that the roots of her hair were light and her skin too creamy for the ebony hair. Evidently Madame Swoboda had reversed the usual process and dyed her naturally blond hair, black.
Experimentally, he pulled her over, pressing a hard kiss on her lips. They pulsed. Her breathing quickened and Shayne felt her hands creep across his chest, her nails digging through his shirt.
It might have been the creak of a board in the moldering house, or because she opened her eyes to look beyond his shoulder into the opened doorway of the darkened seance room. Or perhaps it was a sixth sense of animal preservation that the redhead had acquired during a lifetime of professional sleuthing.
In a single burst of action he was out of her arms, crouched with one knee on the floor and his gun in his hand.
The two guns spoke at nearly the same instant, their combined echoes breaking flatly in the barren space.
The bullet aimed at Shayne went over his head and splintered the plastered wall. Shayne’s shot was precise. The man who had come from the dimness of the seance room heeled back as the bullet drove into his rib casing. The gun dropped from his hand, and both hands pressed hard over the spreading blood.
13
The figure stumped toward them into the light of the waiting room. Blood seeped from between the man’s fingers where he held his hands tight-pressed, his face was white and contorted. It was the acned face of the man who had been tailing Shayne since last night in the gray Buick.
“Who hired you?” Shayne drove at him.
“Get me to a hospital!” The words rasped hoarsely.
“Who hired you?”
“I’m bleeding to death, I tell you!”
“You’ll live-if we get you to a hospital in time. Who hired you?”
“Some guy… didn’t tell me his name.”
“Do you know D. L.?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Are you working for him?”
“Hell, no. I’m an independent. So’s the man that hired me.”
“How do you know?”
“He was afraid of D. L. I had instructions to stay clear of D. L. or any of his boys.”
“Describe the man who hired you.”
“I can’t. Medium size is all I know. He was wearing dark glasses.”
“Are you working with the other tail?”
“No. Don’t know him. For God’s sake, quit blabbing and get me to a doc.”
“Were you hired to tail me or kill me?”
“At first, just to tail-”
“When did they change the instructions? Before you tailed me to the boat this morning, or afterward?”
“Afterward. I was to take you out if you done certain things.”
“What things?”
“Comin’ here.”
“How do you contact the man who hired you?”
“I don’t any more. Dunno where to find him. He’s paying me off by mail-he says.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, he says.” The man moaned again and sank to one of the benches. “Can’t we go now?”
Shayne nodded bleakly. “As soon as I wind things up with the Madame.” He turned to the girl whose face was nearly as pale now as the wounded man’s, “Who wants to keep me away from you so badly he’d kill me?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know anything about this.”
“Put a call through to police headquarters.” He jerked his head toward the phone on the desk.
“Shayne!” She was pleading, desperately. “It’s the God’s truth! I don’t know-”
“When you get the police, tell them we’ve got a gun-shot man here.”
“Oh-” She moved toward the phone, looking relieved. “Thank you.”
“But whether the cops take you with them, depends on how fast you talk before they get here.”
She made the call sullenly and walked back.
Shayne eyed the luggage stacked in the hall. “Why were you running away?”
“It’s you and your goddam investigating!” She blazed at him, white-faced and defensive. “It was bound to bring the police in.”
