“All right, Terry. Do you think Kraus killed himself?”
“Of course he didn’t.”
She put a cigarette between her lips and pressed in the dashboard lighter. The faint glow showed Shayne a surprisingly pretty girl. She was younger than Herman Kraus, if the News had been right in giving his age as thirty- three.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people all day,” she said, “and I haven’t made an inch of headway. I’m furious! I’m so mad I could burst. The police won’t talk to me, and still they put those lies in the papers. ‘Spurned!’ Herman wasn’t spurned. I wasn’t his fiancee. Tim says your name is Mike Shayne. Oddly enough, I heard Herman speak about you. He used to say he had no more to do with criminals than if he’d gone on working for an insurance company, which is where he started, and that’s why he liked to read stories about real working detectives. I’m groggy, I’m afraid. You are the one he talked about?”
She reached behind him and snapped on the dome light. There were deep hollows in her cheeks, blue marks of weariness beneath her eyes. She remained an extremely pretty girl on the edge of exhaustion.
“You aren’t at all! Mike Shayne has red hair.”
Shayne flinched. “That’s dye,” he said in disgust.
“Does he or doesn’t he?” Rourke murmured.
“Yeah. They tell me if I shampoo it with a strong enough soap it’ll come right out. I’m under wraps on this, Terry.”
She snapped off the light, and Shayne continued, “I see how you feel, and I wish I could give some answers. I don’t know enough yet. But the cops had reasons for brushing you off today. There’s something big in the works and they don’t want to spoil it. They’re hoping the fiancee story will hold up through the morning papers. They have a suicide note, it seems, a confession that your guy has been stealing narcotics.”
“But that was over!” she exclaimed. “And he wasn’t my guy!”
“You knew about it, Terry?”
“No, not really. But I’ve been doing some thinking today. I’m sorry to say that isn’t something I make a practice of doing. Herman wasn’t the major thing in my life, he really wasn’t. I only saw him about once a week or once every two weeks-Well,” she said philosophically, “there it goes, and I made up my mind when I agreed to come out here that I wouldn’t say a word before I knew what you people are after.”
“We’re after the man who bankrolls the international heroin traffic,” Shayne said. “I have doubts about a few stories I’ve heard lately, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure of that one thing. I think the chances are about even that I can get his identity. They’re about one in four I can do anything about it even if I do find out. If you talk to me, it might drop the odds to something like seven-to-two.”
“I can tell you this. Herman Kraus never had any connection with anybody in the international heroin traffic. He was way down at the bottom of the ladder.”
“Yes, I think that’s true, Terry,” Shayne said seriously. “But whatever he did set something bigger in motion.”
She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled a lungful of smoke. “When he left me last night we made a date for tomorrow, a specific date for a certain French movie at an art theatre. We agreed on where we were going afterward. Maybe it sounds conceited, but after that he didn’t go straight home and shoot himself. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell the police.”
“Go back and tell it in order, Terry,” Shayne suggested.
She drew on her cigarette. “I’ll try to be honest. The reason I went out with him in the first place was because he put so much thought into where he would take me. He was a jerk, I’m afraid, but a perfectly harmless jerk. He’d call up and say he’d like to get tickets to some show I was dying to see, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no. Then he’d take me to the Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria or the Rainbow Room. This started about two years ago, when I was a lot younger than I am now. I wanted to see what those places were like! The other men I knew might take me to a party if they weren’t expected to bring a bottle. If I had a date for a movie, we met inside. I felt a little-well, like a hypocrite, but I guess he had a good time because he always called me again. Once in a while I’d tell myself this has to stop. I knew I was getting in too deep. But by then I was worrying about hurting his feelings. He asked me to go to Saratoga Springs with him for the weekend. I went.”
“Because you wanted to see Saratoga?”
“Yes! But it was a kind of obligation too, Mike. It’s funny how things work out. Sometimes people I liked asked me to sleep with them or go away for the weekend and I wouldn’t. But it seemed to me that I had to with Herman.” She fumbled for a piece of Kleenex and blew her nose hard and angrily. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t have to understand,” Shayne told her. “People do things for the damnedest reasons.”
“I might even have ended up married to him, just taking one step at a time. It makes me feel awful.”
“Did you ever wonder where he was getting the money he spent on you, Terry?”
“He was spending it on himself too,” she said with a flash of spirit. “He wanted to see those shows. He wanted to go to the Plaza. No, I didn’t wonder. I didn’t know about police salaries. He didn’t talk about his work much, and I never once saw him in uniform. You didn’t think of him as being a cop, somehow. And then quite a scary thing happened.”
“When, Terry?”
“About two months ago. We were in a little bar-really a tiny bar. The tables were so big.” She shaped a small square with her hands. “I don’t remember where we’d been before-somewhere expensive! It was terribly noisy. I was chattering away, I do chatter, and Herman was trying to look interested. He probably couldn’t hear what I was saying. And a man came up. He was honestly one of the creepiest people! Herman jumped up and told me he’d be right back. The bar was in a hotel, you could go in either from the street or the lobby. He went into the lobby. He didn’t come back. There was some kind of commotion. A waiter said somebody’d been arrested. I went on sitting there, and he didn’t come back at all. I barely had money enough to pay for the drinks. He called the next day and apologized for about fifteen minutes. He was always a great apologizer. He said the man he was talking to had a heart attack and he had to call an ambulance. I doubt that-I didn’t hear an ambulance. And that’s when I remembered all of a sudden that he’d said he was in charge of the evidence in dope cases. That man in the bar-he was on drugs, I realized. Well! Then I didn’t see Herman for a few weeks. He said he had to work overtime. I wish I could be more helpful, Mike. I don’t mean he was especially mysterious. He just didn’t say what he was doing.”
“You don’t know how helpful you’re being, Terry,” Shayne said. “Go on.”
“Helpful!” Rourke put in. “If you can make head or tail out of this you’re a better man than I am. Well,” he conceded, “you are a better man than I am.”
Terry continued, “You might think I wouldn’t go out with him again. I did, though. We were going to a film festival. We never got there. He drank too much before dinner and went to sleep in the taxi. If you think that had happened before! I took him home. In the morning he said he had something to tell me, but he felt too headachy and miserable, and I guess he didn’t have much experience talking to people. He couldn’t get started. The next time he was already high when he came to get me. I had the feeling he was drinking to get past that block, whatever it was, that kept him from talking. It made me uncomfortable. But last night was much better. My roommate was away. I didn’t want to eat out because I knew he’d keep on ordering drinks in that stupid, compulsive way. I cooked spaghetti and everything was fine. He had a phone call during supper. He didn’t say much except no, but he said it very firmly-it was as definite as he’d been in the two years I’d known him. Mike, could I have a drink, please?”
Shayne uncapped the bottle and gave it to her. The undiluted cognac made her cough.
“I’m glad I’m talking to you and not the police. They wouldn’t give me cognac to help it along. Mike, I have something else that’s important, at least I think it is. But you’ll have to take it on faith, pretty much. We spent some time in my bedroom after dinner. This wasn’t the accepted thing, it was always a big concession on my part. I never exactly looked forward to it. But last night he was different. It was”-there was a catch in her voice-“Mike, it was the best I’ve ever had with anyone. He’d stopped apologizing. Will you take my word for it and not ask any questions?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe he was mixed up in something. You never can tell. I’d just like to see that so-called suicide note, that’s all. The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that, if he did shoot himself, it wasn’t because I’d turned him down. The funny thing is, after last night I could have turned him down and I knew he wouldn’t go to pieces. He’d changed into an actual grown-up person, finally.”
