Shayne’s eyes narrowed. “It depends on the concentration. It would have to be pretty high.”
She took a sip of the gin drink Rourke handed her and said brightly, “There’s no point in wondering about it. There must be three-quarters of a tankful left. We can have it tested and find out for sure. Anybody hungry?”
Rourke dropped into a deck chair and pulled a tattered straw hat forward over his eyes. “Get a little sun first.”
For a moment no one spoke. Shayne took a deep breath, wishing perversely that he were back beneath the surface, where, although he had had a serious problem, he hadn’t known it. Here he was back in the real world.
“It begins to seep through,” he said. “There was more to this invitation than sun and a few drinks and an afternoon on the water.”
“I’m afraid so,” Kitty murmured.
Rourke said, “Now don’t get hard-nosed, pal. The girl’s in a jam and we’ll tell you about it when you feel better.”
Shayne hooked the cognac bottle with one bare foot and pulled it within reach.
“How about you, Natalie?” he asked the second girl. “Are you in on it?”
“Not me,” she said hastily. “I came for the sun and the drinks and the water. I also thought it would be sort of a coup to meet Mike Shayne.”
Rourke sat forward, pushing his hat back with his thumb. “Mike, I know you’ve been working hard. I’ll be the first to admit that you deserve a rest. But there’s a deadline on this thing. In a couple of days, when you get bored with having nothing to do, you’ll take the Do Not Disturb sign down off your doorknob and be ready to go back to work. But this can’t wait.”
“Go on,” Shayne said evenly.
“Kitty happens to be a good friend of mine. She needs some assistance, and she needs it right now. It’s a tense little problem, the kind you can handle with your left hand. This expedition this afternoon was my idea. I thought if I could get you down here, feed you a steak and some good cognac, surround you with cute babes in minimum bathing suits, you might say yes. If you said no you’d say it politely.”
“No,” Shayne said.
“Don’t give up hope,” the reporter told Kitty. “He didn’t say, ‘Hell, no.’”
Kitty said quickly, “Mike, I know this was a dirty trick. But I’ve been so worried! You just don’t know. It was bad enough before, but now! If you people hadn’t come down today I would have gone diving by myself. I hardly ever miss a Sunday. After a week at the typewriter it irons out the kinks. I know what they say about the buddy system, but I don’t worry about going down fifteen or twenty feet alone, on the rope.”
She closed her eyes and touched her forehead lightly, as though the pain had been transferred from Shayne’s head to hers. “I usually go out as soon as I have breakfast and read the Sunday papers. I’d be dead now.”
Natalie put in uneasily, “Kitty, now wait.”
Kitty said, “It’s my aqualung. If somebody let out some air and put in something else, it was meant for me. No one would ever know it was anything but an accident-that’s the part that scares me. People would tut-tut and say I shouldn’t have gone down alone.”
“Oh, by the way, Mike,” Rourke put in-the casual manner didn’t fool Shayne, who knew that the reporter was very much in earnest-“you remember Cal Tuttle. Kitty used to be his secretary. This was his Key.”
“Key Gaspar,” Shayne said slowly, drinking. “I knew that name sounded familiar. Wasn’t it some kind of a rumrunners’ hangout during Prohibition?”
“Absolutely,” Rourke said. “Tuttle used to bring the stuff up from Havana and land it in the cove at the south end. The Miami and Palm Beach bootleggers would come down in fast boats and pick it up. Tuttle owned a half dozen Keys, but this is the one he held onto. You’re going to listen to this now, aren’t you?”
“I’d rather hear it some other time, but go ahead. Incidentally,” he added, looking across at Kitty, “I didn’t say thanks.”
She blushed slightly again. “You’re welcome. I just hope nobody had a telescope on us when we came out of the water.”
“I owe you a bathing suit,” Shayne said. “Pick one out and tell them to send me the bill. Where do you keep your diving equipment when you’re not here?”
“In a kitchen closet, and I keep it padlocked. I remember unlocking it this morning.”
“It isn’t hard to force a padlock. Does anybody else use this aqualung besides you?”
“No, nobody. You’re the first one in ages. People sometimes come down to dive, but they bring their own gear.”
Shayne nodded. “Toss me a cigarette, Tim. O.K., Kitty, tell me what’s happened.”
Rourke threw him a cigarette and a book of matches. Kitty bit her lip.
“Last weekend I found my cat on the back step with her throat cut.”
“Kitty, how ghastly!” Natalie exclaimed. “Your lovely Siamese? You didn’t tell me.”
Kitty shook her head, her face troubled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. I don’t mind living alone, really. I like it, in fact-my marriage was rather a mess at the end. I don’t want to turn into one of those hysterical women who run to the nearest man for help when the least little thing goes wrong. But this was actually quite scary. Her name was Awn. I loved her dearly. There wasn’t any doubt what had happened, or even why.”
She raised her glass in both hands. Quickly, while she looked into it reflectively and then drank, Shayne reviewed the odd scraps of information Rourke had dropped earlier in the day as they drummed down the Overseas Highway in Shayne’s Buick.
Shayne himself had been hunched moodily over the wheel, hardly listening, letting the salt breeze whip away some of the tensions that had accumulated during the previous day and night. He knew Natalie, an agreeable girl who smiled a little too often for Shayne’s taste. She worked on the real-estate page on Rourke’s paper, the Miami News. Kitty also worked there, in the accounting department. She was in her late twenties, Rourke told him, separated from her husband, Hank Sims, a small-timer in the real-estate business, who was still around town somewhere. Rourke hadn’t mentioned her connection with Cal Tuttle, the last of the big Prohibition figures, who had died a year or two earlier. Instead, the reporter confined himself to a physical description. Kitty was tall, blonde, witty, anything but strait-laced, with a marvelous figure-a really marvelous figure, Rourke repeated-and in Rourke’s judgment, which he passed along to his friend with a leer, she could be accurately described as Shayne’s type of woman. Sexy, Rourke thought, was the word that sprang to mind.
As a rule the reporter was the world’s lousiest judge of women, and Shayne paid little attention to the build- up. When they arrived at Key Gaspar and he actually saw Kitty, he was pleasantly surprised.
Now, lowering her glass, Kitty met his eyes. “You’ll really let me tell you about it, Mike? If I put it into words, I may be able to decide if I’m getting skittery about nothing.”
“Poisoning the air in an aqualung,” the redhead said dryly, “isn’t my idea of nothing. Who’s trying to kill you, Kitty?”
chapter 3
The simple tuck she had taken in the towel was beginning to slip. She put her drink on the deck and used both hands to tuck it back in.
“I thought I knew,” she said. “But killing a cat and switching tanks on an aqualung are two such different things. Never mind. There are only a few possibilities.”
“If you want to know my candidate,” Natalie put in, “it’s Brad Tuttle. What a repulsive character. Ugh!”
“He was my candidate, too, till this happened,” Kitty said. “The point is, Mike, under the terms of Cal’s will five of us were left the Key in common, the Key and everything on it. I don’t know if you can see the main house from here. Part of it, anyway.”
Shayne looked the way she was pointing. They were lying a half mile offshore. Near the southernmost end of the Key, facing a protected cove and partially screened by a tangle of mangroves and gumbo-limbo trees, he saw a low stucco belltower. Gaspar was one of the Middle Keys, halfway down the curving chain between the Straits of Florida and the Gulf. It was shaped like an hourglass, so narrow at the waist that higher-than-usual tides, Shayne
