what you’re doing in that crummy job.”
“But what possible connection-”
He rode her down. “You’re sleeping with Begley, aren’t you? Do you have any respect for him, in bed or any other place? It took me ten seconds to see that you have the makings of a very nice girl. What happened to you?”
She had fallen back, her eyes burning in her dead-white face. He continued to hold her eyes. “You recognized the real thing when you met Walter Langhorne, in spite of the fact that he was twice your age. You couldn’t bring yourself to set him up for the usual blackmail squeeze. That left you with Jose. Think about those infrared photographs for a minute. You didn’t want to go ahead with that mess, did you? You’re not as tough as you think. You jumped at the telephone offer without insisting on a face-to-face meeting, which is against all the rules. Even so, how do you think that kid Deedee is going to turn out? She’s seventeen. Her parents threw her out of the house-I think I’ll get her in on this,” he added suddenly. “It might do her some good.”
“Don’t,” Candida said faintly.
Shayne wheeled on Forbes. “What attracted you to Ruth Di Palma? Forget about the jams you’ve been in over the years. Just stay with that one point. I only saw her for ten minutes, but I liked her. But she wasn’t for you, and she had the sense to know it. What hooked you?”
There was a thoughtful expression on the boy’s handsome dark face. He poured some whiskey. Candida moved to the terrace. After waiting a moment, Shayne made several quiet-voiced phone calls.
When Candida came back, she sat on the foot of the bed facing Forbes’s chair.
“I think he’s right. I don’t want to talk about the points he raised about me. Not right now. Later I think I can. I’m wondering about the stories you write. They meant something special to Walter. Do you think you’re really a writer, or is it just something to keep from thinking of yourself as a rich boy with a rich father?”
Shayne checked the level in the cognac bottle and put it on the floor. He sat down with his back against the wall, lit a cigarette and settled down to listen.
CHAPTER 18
When Jose Despard arrived, looking gray and distraught, Shayne took him to the terrace and explained the ground rules. If they found the answer he wanted by seven in the morning, it was possible that Jose’s adventure with Deedee would never become public knowledge.
“Those pictures you mentioned,” Despard said in his worried voice. “I hope you’ll give me first refusal. If you’d be willing to take a monthly installment, I could work something out.”
“If I have to make a case against Forbes and Candida, everything goes in, the pictures included. So cooperate.”
“Oh, dear. Well, I’ll do what I can.”
Deedee showed up fifteen minutes later. Her arrival created a stir. Despard spilled his drink. Candida blushed slightly. Deedee said a general hello and headed for the bottles. Shayne gave her a Coke.
“That kind of party,” she said in disgust.
When Jake Fitch came in soon afterward, no one noticed. Forbes and his uncle were shouting bitterly at each other.
Shayne’s only contribution was to ration the liquor and see that the disputes stopped short of blows. Time passed. The group broke down into smaller groups and came back together. Between five and six everyone seemed to sag at the same time, and Shayne thought it might be over. Then Jose, brooding in silence on one of the beds, broke out with an accusation that Forbes had never really loved his mother, in spite of having been the most important single thing in her life.
“Did I ask to be?” Forbes demanded. “It was too much! We’re telling the truth now, Jose. I was embarrassed to be with her.”
“Embarrassed! By Cicely? She always had beautiful manners.”
“But she was a bit of a hypocrite, wasn’t she?”
An hour later Shayne remembered his seven-o’clock deadline. Without telling anyone of the change, he set a new deadline two hours later. When he next looked at his watch, it was five after nine. He carried the phone into the bathroom and shut the door on the cord.
First he called Tim Rourke at the News, to ask if he had access to a portable microfilm viewer. Rourke thought he could locate one, and meanwhile he wanted to know what had happened. Shayne told him he could find out by coming to room 1229 of the Hotel St. Albans.
After that, he called the Despard office and asked if the company president had returned from Washington. The plane, he was told, would arrive at the Opa-Locka Airport within the next half hour. Shayne phoned the airport and left an urgent message to be handed to Hallam as he stepped off the plane. Then he began calling Beach hotels.
Fletcher Perkins, president of United States Chemical, was registered at the Deauville but he didn’t answer his phone. Shayne had him paged, and pulled him out of the coffee shop where he was having breakfast.
“This is Michael Shayne,” he said wearily, “and I hope we can skip the preliminaries. Hal Begley was telling you about me last night.”
“Yes.”
“He may have passed on a proposition I made to him-an even trade of a three-month postponement for an agreement to drop all legal action. That was window-dressing, Mr. Perkins, and I hope you haven’t wasted any time thinking about it.”
“I didn’t let it keep me awake. I don’t think I quite know what you mean by the expression ‘window- dressing.’”
His crisp voice made Shayne realize all at once just how groggy he himself was. He made an effort to collect his thoughts.
“I’ve been fired by Despard’s, and I had no authority to make an offer. I’ve been operating since then for my own account. I have a new proposition, and this is the real one. It’ll cost you eight thousand, the balance of the fee I was going to get from Hallam. You were told that Forbes, Jr., supplied the paint folder. He didn’t. He had nothing to do with it, and I’m about to break the news to a few people. If you can come to room twelve twenty-nine at the St. Albans, I won’t have to repeat myself.”
“And why would this be worth eight thousand dollars? I know your reputation. Possibly you don’t know mine. I’ve never yet bought a pig in a poke.”
“This particular pig is worth more than eight thousand,” Shayne told him. “But I’ve been up all night and I’m too tired to haggle. Come over and listen. I’m not asking you for payment in advance.”
“I just may do that, Shayne,” Perkins said thoughtfully. “It seemed to me that Begley looked a little white around the gills. I’m curious to find out why. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Shayne went to sleep with the phone in his lap, waking when someone opened the bathroom door. He returned to the other room as Tim Rourke arrived, weighed down by a heavy piece of equipment. He set it on a bureau and looked around the room with unconcealed astonishment.
“Mike, what have you got cooking here?”
Shayne followed his look, seeing the room and its occupants as they would seem to a newcomer. The men were haggard, unshaven, very much on edge. Deedee was still wearing the dress Shayne had put her into twelve hours before, and that was all she was wearing. Having been more untidy than Candida to begin with, the night had changed her less. Candida had stopped thinking about how she looked hours earlier. Her careful makeup had worn away. Her sweater was partially unbuttoned. She was sitting on a bed, her legs up. Forbes, in a chair beside her, was down to his T-shirt. In spite of the stale air, in spite of everyone’s obvious pallor and fatigue, there was an unmistakable feeling of suppressed excitement in the room.
“We’ve just been killing time,” Shayne told his friend. “The boy has the key to this, but he doesn’t know it. He has to find it himself. Two more people are going to be joining us. Let them in and tell them not to interrupt.”
He returned to his place beside the cognac bottle. Deedee leaned across him.
“This is a real neat party, Mr. Shayne. I’m going to give one for the gang at school. You aren’t still sore at
