man, too. Think of that. He let it slip once about havin’ two kids back home. You know what I think, Mr. Shayne? Shucks, do I hafta call you Mister? Mike’s a lot cuter.”
“What do you think, Miss Piney?” Shayne was amused and interested in the swamp-girl’s complete ingenuousness in spite of himself.
“I think he’s hidin’ out down here from his wife,” she announced triumphantly. “Lotsa little things. Him always actin’ scared an’ lookin’ back over his shoulder. And that funny mustache… you can’t tell me he ain’t just grown it recent… ’way he keeps fingering it all the time. I think maybe she’s got detectives after him an’ he’s scared they’ll catch up with him. That’s why he talks crazy when he’s drinkin’ about us running off together to some island where there’d just be the two of us… all alone on this island he’s dreamed up.”’
She stopped to catch her breath and Shayne asked with a grin, “You’d like that?”
“Well, not the island part, maybe,” she admitted with a candid smile of her own. “But, to go off with him, sure. To South America, maybe, or somewheres… if he’s really got all the money he keeps hintin’ he’s got.”
“So,” said Shayne patiently, “you’ve lost a rich sugar-daddy and want me to get him back for you.”
“It ain’t like that at all. He’s real sweet an’ I’m scared for him. If you just knew Freddie, you’d see what I mean. Somebody else’ll just roll him. Me, I never did. Hundred bucks is the most he ever give me at one time, an’ I never even asked for that. But he’s just like a babe in the woods here in Miami. You know the kinda woman’ll get her hooks into him.”
“How old is your Freddie?”
“Fred Tucker, he says his name is. Pretty old. Forty, I guess maybe. Tall an’ thin an’ sort of stooped. And all the time scared of his own shadow. Honest-to-God, Mike, I just shiver when I think of him wanderin’ around Miami with nobody to look after him atall.”
“And with all that money loose in his pockets,” Shayne suggested.
“Yeh. That, too. How loose in his pockets it is, though, I wouldn’t know. He keeps talkin’ big about having a lot stashed away.”
“Maybe he’s on the lam,” suggested Shayne. “Pulled some sort of caper.”
“Freddie?” She laughed scornfully. “Not him. Not ever him. That’s what scares me, like I say. Not only the women, but tough hoods, too, that might get onto his trail. Like them two at the Club the other night…” She cut herself off suddenly, sucking her lower lip in between her teeth and looking absurdly naive and innocent.
“What about them?”
“Well, I thought first maybe they was detectives that his wife had sicked after him. They looked like I figured Private Eyes would look, but that was before I met you an’ now I don’t know. But there was these two that come in the Club an’ they had a pitcher that looked somethin’ like Freddie before he’d growed that mustache. An’ they showed it to the bartender there an’ slipped him a fin, I reckon, an’ he told ’em to talk to me. And so they did. But I didn’t like their looks, and I swore up and down that I never saw nobody in the Club looked like the pitcher they showed. One was big an’ tough and mean-lookin’ and the other was thin an’ sorta sad… dressed up in a black suit like a preacher. But they got no change outta me.
“So that’s why I’m scared for Freddie an’ want you should find him before they do. They asked all sortsa questions about this man I claimed I didn’t know, an’ knew all the time was Freddie. Like did he spend much money an’ had he ever flashed a big roll. An’ what fancy hotel he stayed at and all like that. Fancy hotels!” she added scornfully. “Not Freddie. That’s another reason why I think he’s duckin’ his wife maybe. He stays in cheap motels, and never very long in the same one. So, would you find him for me quick, Mike, an’ tell him not to come back to the Club to see me on account those goons might be back watchin’ for him?”
As she spoke she gave him a dazzling smile and reached forward to lift a large, black leather bag from beside his desk where she had evidently placed it when she entered. “It ain’t that I can’t pay you cash,” she explained as she opened it and groped inside. “Because I can. But maybe you’re like some other men an’ feel like I got somethin’ better’n cash to pay off with. Mostly it makes me mad when they say things like that to me, but you know what, Mike?”
Shayne glanced at the open intercom button on his desk and said gravely, “No, what, Miss Piney?”
She had extracted a wad of bills and was unfolding them thoughtfully. Without looking up, she told him, “If you was to say that to me, Mike, it wouldn’t make me mad. But if you want cash on the barrel-head…”
She separated five twenties from the other bills and held them loosely in her hand.
He shook his head. “Keep your money, Miss Piney. I’m sure you earned it the hard way.”
“It ain’t so hard. Like I say, there’s always suckers around. You come around an’ catch my dance at the Bright Spot. Like it says on the billing: Do a fast burn with Sloe Burn. You won’t be sorry you passed up this here little bitty ole cash money.” She composedly returned the bills to her purse.
Shayne pushed back his chair and stood up, studying his watch. “You’ve had a lot more than the two minutes I promised you. Maybe I will catch your dance some night.”
“And you’ll find Freddie, huh?”
Shayne shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s a little out of my line. If he’s the sort of man who can turn his back on your manifest charms, who am I to drag him back into your orbit?”
For a moment the girl from the Keys seemed utterly nonplussed. She got to her feet slowly and stammered, “You’re not gonna find Freddie for me?”
Shayne said firmly, “Nope.” He rounded the corner of his desk and took her by the arm. “This way out. I have another appointment.”
She jerked away from him angrily, then pushed her body hard against his and said in a voice that throbbed with sexual invitation, “You ain’t never seen me dance, Mister.”
He looked down at her without moving, and wrinkled his nose in disgust at the hot waves of perfumed air that roiled up between them. “Change your brand of perfume before you get so close to a man.”
Childish fury blazed in her lustrous, black eyes, and without the slightest warning her left hand swung up with fingers clawed to rake the side of his face with sharp nails.
He caught her wrist before she reached the target, and swung her away from him violently. “Get out before I turn you over my knee and spank you.”
She stood very still, quivering with wrath and with a dazed, hurt look on her overpainted young face.
Then she spat, “Don’t you ever come near me or I’ll have Ralphie cut you up in little pieces.” She swung away and marched out as disdainfully as she could in her scuffed loafers, and Shayne followed her to the door of his inner office and leaned against the frame as she stamped past Lucy without a glance at her and slammed through the outer door.
“Do a fast burn with Sloe Burn,” chanted Lucy with her gaze fixed on the closed door through which Miss Esther Piney had disappeared. Then she said, “Oh, Michael!” and began laughing helplessly.
He didn’t join in her merriment. He said sternly, “Control yourself and get in here with a deodorizer or something. Next time you close up an oversexed swamp-cat in my office I’m going fishing for a week.”
2
Michael Shayne’s next visitor was also a female who wanted to hire him to locate a missing man for her, but there the resemblance ended.
Mrs. Renshaw from Illinois was a cool, poised woman in her late thirties, beautifully groomed from the top of smoothly waved platinum hair to the tips of smart spike-heeled shoes. Her features had a chiseled sort of fragility about them, and her blue eyes were almost opaque with an impression of on-the-surface coloration; yet with all her outward trappings of sophisticated assurance, Shayne received an immediate impression of tremendous inner tension the moment Lucy ushered her into his office.
He stood up gravely and repeated, “Mrs. Renshaw,” and moved around his desk to move the chair recently vacated by Sloe Burn so that it faced him more directly, and took her cool, long-fingered hand in his after she stripped off one white, openwork glove and offered her hand to him.
The sudden, convulsive pressure of her fingers on his confirmed the impression that she was a seething mass of raw nerves behind her calm facade. Standing close in front of him with shoulders resolutely back and firm chin tilted slightly so that her eyes looked directly into his, she said with clipped mid-western directness: “You don’t
