The boat was moving more rapidly now. Because of the light from the boathouse, they could see Painter and the rest of his party clearly, but the Nugget was probably no more than a faint shadow.
Painter shouted, waving his fist, “Shayne, come back here! This is your last chance. Come back in and I’ll give you the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT!”
He bellowed the last few words. Grinning, the redhead felt his way forward, using the flashlight only after the curve of the deckhouse concealed him from the dock, and answered Painter by starting the motor. It choked, died, then took hold with a rude, deep-throated roar.
He switched on the navigation lights, swung the wheel and headed for mid-bay. Theo called something from the doorway. He couldn’t hear her over the roar of the motor. He took a long pull from the cognac bottle. After running a few minutes with the tide, he swung into the current and throttled down the motor.
Theo was perched on the corner of the plotting table, lighting a cigarette. She blew out a match and watched him study the radiotelephone, a four-channel unit mounted to the left of the wheel. He picked up the handset and depressed a button. Instantly a woman’s voice, clear but metallic, said, “Yes, sir?”
“I’m glad you’re still up. My name’s Mike Shayne. Can you get me a Miami number?”
There was a moment’s silence. “Mike Shayne,” she said breathily. “Excuse me while I pinch myself.”
Theo gave Shayne an amused look.
“Ouch!” the operator said. “I guess I’m awake. You’d think any number of interesting things would happen on this job, wouldn’t you, but no. It’s mostly routine. Like calling up somebody’s wife to tell her to get the martinis ready.”
He gave her Rourke’s number. He heard the stutter of the dial, then the busy signal.
“Can you try that for me every few minutes,” Shayne said, “and call me when you get it?”
“For Mike Shayne,” she said, “if you’re everything they say you are, I’ll be glad to.”
He hung the handset back with a rueful grin. Theo had taken off her glasses and was tapping them against one nylon-clad knee.
“I hope the line will stay busy while I talk to you,” she said. “Before Harry got on the plane tonight he asked me to marry him.”
Shayne’s expression didn’t change. He checked their heading. There was a lighted buoy to starboard, and he let the wheel fall off a point so the boat would hold the same position against the current.
“What did you tell him?”
“I haven’t told him anything yet. But I can’t marry him. I can’t! I don’t know how to get out of it without hurting him.”
“I’m the wrong person to come to for that kind of advice,” Shayne said. “I’m a friend of his.”
“That’s why you have to help me. Please hear me, Mike. I’m at my wit’s end. Don’t condemn me out of hand, but for the last three months Harry and I, I’ve been his-”
She couldn’t find any word for the relationship that she was willing to use. Shayne put in, “I got the idea from the way you kissed him.”
“Yes. He wouldn’t have asked me to do that if he hadn’t been so shaken. Don’t be so grim, Mike. It wasn’t grim at the beginning. I had a proper secretarial job in an insurance office, and it bored me to tears. The same thing over and over and over, with everybody acting as though I ought to be grateful for being permitted to work for such an imposing company. I met Steve Bass at a party. His father was looking for an executive secretary. My friends all said, ‘Don’t you know who Harry Bass is?’ Somehow that made it more attractive, Mike. He’s a wonderful, interesting man. I don’t have to tell you that. I worked late a few times and he took me to dinner, and inside of six weeks I was-” She hesitated. “Well. I was going to bed with him.”
“Harry never wasted much time,” Shayne said.
“No. He had a look in his eye the first time he interviewed me. I recognized it, and he knew that I recognized it, and I took the job anyway. Growing up as a minister’s daughter in a little Tennessee town-I know it’s a cliche that ministers’ children kick up their heels as soon as they get away from home, but goodness knows it happened with me. Harry was going to France for a vacation. He asked me to go with him. I jumped at the chance. I’d never been anywhere before. And I had a wonderful time. He bought me a car. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but he- blossomed, Mike. His last divorce hit him hard. He must have known our arrangement was temporary! We never talked about it, I thought it was understood. He’s charming and fun to be with and generous and full of vitality, but I just can’t marry him!”
“Because of his age?”
“Partly. But the fact is, like it or not, I can’t close my eyes any more to the way he makes his money. Especially since we came back from Europe there have been-oh, hidden places in his days which I’ve known by instinct I shouldn’t ask him about. Conversations are broken off when I come into a room. I picked up the phone once when he was talking to somebody on the bedroom extension. That’s the only time he ever yelled at me.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “I think I love him, whatever the word means. I want him to be happy. He says he wants to stop all the cloak-and-dagger conniving we have to go through to be together. He thinks it makes me feel sordid and humiliated, but it doesn’t at all. It’s simply not important. Mike, I know it’s asking a lot, but could you explain that to him?”
“No,” Shayne said unfeelingly. “I stopped delivering that kind of message years ago. That’s why I still have a few friends. This is between you and Harry. First you have to decide how you really feel.” He broke off. “The hell with it.”
He drank from the bottle. There was a quick buzz from the radio telephone. He picked it up.
“Yeah?”
“Mike,” Tim Rourke’s voice said soberly. “What’s with this marine operator? Never mind. I’ve got some bad news.”
“About Harry,” Shayne said flatly.
“Yeah. Do you want the worst of it first, or hear it in sequence?”
Shayne’s fingers automatically felt for a cigarette. “In sequence.”
“My man on the Daily News knows the duty sergeant in that precinct, and all it took was a phone call. You won’t like this, Mike. It’s a narcotics squeal.”
Theo’s head was close to the phone. The reporter’s brassy voice came through the instrument loudly enough for them both to hear. The color emptied out of her face.
“Where did the tip come from?” Shayne said.
“I don’t have that. These were detectives from the narcotics squad, not federal men. They were in the lobby of the Central Park West apartment house where the big guy lives, waiting for somebody in a head bandage to make a drug delivery. Harry showed up in a topcoat and a head bandage. The doorman checked on the house phone-was it OK to send up a man named Bass? He was told it was OK. The dicks wouldn’t be able to get upstairs to see the transfer, so they arrested Harry as he was getting into the elevator.”
“No,” Theo said distinctly.
“Mike?” Rourke asked.
“Go ahead,” Shayne said in a steely voice.
“The lining of his topcoat was loaded with uncut heroin. I’m sorry as hell, Mike. I know how you felt about the guy. You know how it is with heroin estimates-some pretty big figures are being passed around in dollars. They haven’t weighed it yet, but they will. They’ve got the coat.”
Shayne frowned. “They don’t have Harry?”
“I’ll say they don’t have Harry. I can’t swear to what happened. Apparently Harry was almost out on his feet to begin with, and when they found the heroin he caved in. It was a real collapse, because the narcotics boys are experts at making arrests. They do it all the time and they’re hard people to fool. They didn’t think they could take him in except in an ambulance. He was in a chair or on the floor, I don’t know which. One cop went to the phone and all of a sudden Harry came up like a rocket. He butted the cop who was watching him. I don’t know anything about his head injury, but it must have hurt like hell. Maybe the pain helped. He hit the other cop with a standing ashtray. The next second he was out the door. Now this is what makes it tough. The guy he hit with the ashtray has brain damage, and they don’t think he’s going to make it.”
“Harry, goddamn it,” Shayne said, half to himself. “You poor son of a bitch.”
“It’s still early. Until we actually get the flash there’s no law against hoping. But the cops assume they’re looking for a big heroin man who killed a cop, and that adds to the pressure. He got away in the cops’ car. This
