“The client’s paying for it.”
“And who is your client, Mike?”
“Despard’s. You know that.”
“I suspected as much. Have they lost something valuable?”
Her lips moved at the corners. She was leaning toward him slightly, her eyes alive. A bracelet sparkled as she revolved her martini glass. She had set out to charm him, and she obviously thought it was going to be easy. He decided to remove her smile.
“Walter Langhorne’s dead.”
The smile went. He was looking into her eyes, and he thought the shock there was real.
“Walter.”
“Hallam shot him in the face with a twenty-gauge shotgun at pointblank range.”
The blood drained out of her face. Her eyes rolled upward, which gave her the look of falling forward. Then she actually did fall. He shot an arm in front of her to take her opposite shoulder, catching her before she was too far out of balance. From other parts of the terrace, heads swung toward them. Candida’s blonde hair partially concealed her face.
“Sir? Is anything wrong with the lady?”
It was the waiter, bringing Shayne’s cognac. Still gripping the girl’s shoulder, most of her weight on his forearm, Shayne reached over his own arm and fished an ice cube out of one of the water glasses.
“She’s out cold!” the waiter exclaimed.
“Yeah.”
Shayne pressed the ice against the soft flesh behind the lobe of Candida’s ear. As the ice melted, the cold water ran along her jawline and down her neck. She shivered. When her shoulder tightened under his hand, he let her go.
Her head continued forward a few inches, but she snapped the rest of the way out of her faint before she hit the table. Pushing back her hair, she looked from face to face, ending at Shayne’s. The intelligence was back in her eyes.
“I fainted.” She made it an accusation.
“Yeah, probably for the first time in your life,” he said. “Anybody can see you’re not the swooning type. If that was a fake, it was a good one. More cognac,” he told the waiter. “Two doubles. Here.”
He held the glass to the girl’s bloodless lips. Taking it from him, she drained it in one long pull and breathed out with a cough. Although still pale, she was nearly back to normal.
“You believe in body-punching, don’t you, Mike? That really jarred me. You must know I’ve been seeing Walter, or you wouldn’t have done it that way.”
“It’s almost the only thing I do know,” Shayne said. “Young Hallam told me somebody saw you together at an art auction in Palm Beach. I didn’t think it meant anything. If you’d wanted not to be seen, you could have fixed something.”
“Don’t forget the law of averages, Mike. It’s too small a world.” She drew another long breath. “I’m sorry about Walter.”
“Another lost commission.”
She gave him a straight look and said in a level voice, “There was no question of a commission. He’d already decided to stay where he was. You caught me off balance, but I’m beginning to ask myself a few questions. You wanted to scare me into thinking Hallam shot him because of his meetings with me. I don’t believe it. That was a typical duck-shooting weekend-whiskey and loaded shotguns. It was an accident, of course.”
“Maybe,” Shayne said briefly.
The waiter brought two more cognacs. Candida shook her head when he put one in front of her, and slid it toward Shayne. The detective drank.
He went on, “What were you talking to Langhorne about at that auction-a higher-paying job with some other company, or a new kind of paint? I thought I might find out if I sprung it on you. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might actually like him.”
“I liked him.”
“All right. You’ll hear about it from Begley as soon as he’s sober. The senior Hallam and Langhorne were alone in a two-man shooting blind. Hallam’s a big taxpayer in that part of the world. He knows the sheriff’s first name. I think it’s probably gone in as an accidental shooting. But there are a couple of odds and ends you may want to know about. Langhorne had Scotch for breakfast this morning. If his flask was full when he started out, he drank nearly a pint between four-thirty and seven. The first thing the sheriff was going to do when he got the body to town was get an alcohol count. Hallam said they’d been arguing. If I’d done a little hammering in the first five minutes, I think he would have given it to me word for word. That was another thing I didn’t think was important. He was having second thoughts when we talked later. By that time it didn’t sound much like a shooting argument. What he was really doing was rehearsing his story for the sheriff. When he talked to the sheriff, he probably stepped it down another notch.”
“Why do you say that this concerns me?”
“A man’s been killed, Candida,” Shayne said patiently. “That always makes a difference.”
He swung around so he could bear down on her. “Up to now I’m sure it’s all been wonderful fun. You have an adventurous job. You’ve been making money, eating in good restaurants, meeting fascinating men from St. Louis, setting up clandestine deals. Here’s the other side, all of a sudden. Who’s really responsible for Langhorne’s death? You are.”
“Mike, you’re raving,” she said uneasily.
“Hallam’s finger pulled the trigger. That’s the only thing there’s no doubt about. He kept making a funny remark. He said Langhorne fell toward the gun. Did Langhorne deliberately put himself in the way of the shot? Was the quarrel so tense and upsetting that they both forgot the loaded shotgun? Or did Hallam provoke it, to get Langhorne to rush him? I saw the duck go over. There was something wrong about the angle. Hallam should have been shooting more to the left, unless the gun went off before it was all the way to his shoulder. Those are the main possibilities, and you’re mixed up in every one of them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe your name wasn’t mentioned,” Shayne said softly, “but they were fighting about you. You haven’t started to think about it. If he was only a suit of clothes to you, you won’t be bothered by any of this. I doubt if you’re that far gone.”
“Mike, outside of trying to make me feel like a heel, what do you want from me, exactly?”
“Begley drew a hundred and twenty G’s from United States Chemical during the spring and summer. We assume that was payment for the transfer of a three-hundred-page report on a new paint developed by my client. I want to know who supplied that report and how much he was paid. If you pried it out of him for nothing, I want to know what you used as a handle.”
“That’s all.”
He grinned at her. “For openers. And I’d really like to put your boss in jail. That may not be possible this time, but if it isn’t I’ll keep trying.”
“Mike, you keep shifting ground. There are certain conceivable admissions Hal might make, but not at the point of a gun.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Shayne said. “That’s the only way to get him to do anything. You know him better than I do. How much pressure do you think he can stand?”
“I don’t think it’ll come to that. We’re in good shape on this, it seems to me. You’ve had a salutary effect on us, Mike. We’ve toned up our procedures. If you ever manage to subpoena our records again, you’ll find everything in order. On this consultant job for United States, we have the correspondence and a work schedule, and I don’t believe the courts would consider our fee excessive. What you can do in the way of pressure, if you’re willing to spend money, is scare off a few potential clients, like poor Clark Ahlman, who naturally don’t want their present employers to know they’re looking for a job somewhere else. I don’t think Hal will let himself be intimidated. In fact, we may close down the office temporarily and take a vacation.”
“When you come back, don’t open up in Miami.”
“The hell with you, Mike Shayne!” she said abruptly, pushing back her chair. “If you’re going in for low punching, you’d better get ready to take a few yourself. Hal wanted me to feel you out on a possible deal. I talked
