me, are you, about that whip?”
He moved her out of the way. “I want to hear this.”
Forbes was saying angrily, “I know how old Ruthie was. Five years older than I am. Five years-that doesn’t make her a mother.”
Shayne put in, “And she wasn’t anything like your mother either, was she?”
“Not a damn bit. She didn’t look like her, she didn’t behave like her. There was no resemblance at all.”
Jose said, “Cicely did look something like her when she was the same age.”
“And what’s that supposed to imply?” Forbes demanded hotly. “When I went to bed with her I was committing incest?”
“No,” Jose said doubtfully. “Don’t be so touchy.”
Shayne leaned forward, his arm around Deedee’s shoulder so she wouldn’t swing and block his view. “You were embarrassed when you were with your mother. Why?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t-” He held up for an instant, then plunged on. “It was when we were all together, Mother and Dad. There was this strain. With Dad, there’s always so much effort involved in everything he does. Being a father is like a role. He plays the stern father. I play the unruly son. We both know there’s nothing to it. It’s not real.”
“You don’t think he’s really your father?”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s-”
He stopped short, staring at Shayne. Everyone was watching him.
“God, I wonder,” he said slowly.
Jose objected, “Cicely was hardly the type to indulge in illicit relations outside her marriage.”
“Shut up!” Candida snapped. “What do you know about anybody?”
“She was my sister, damn it! There may not have been any passionate love in that marriage, but she knew the meaning of the word ‘duty.’”
“Obviously,” Candida said sarcastically. “From what Walter told me, bringing Hallam into the family was the thing that saved the Despard fortunes. Without him you would have foundered years ago.”
There was a light double knock at the door. Shayne heard it, and so did Tim Rourke, but the others were too preoccupied. Rourke opened the door to admit a stranger, a small neat man with black-rimmed glasses and gray hair parted in the middle. Rourke whispered something to him. He shrugged.
Candida was telling Forbes, “That’s why it was so hard for you to live up to your father’s requirements. That’s why you thought Ruthie and her bunch were so wonderful. You couldn’t invent a group more exactly the opposite of Forbes Hallam, Senior.”
“One time I was home from school on vacation,” Forbes said carefully. “I found her diary in the attic. I didn’t know it was a diary or I wouldn’t have read it. It looked like a plain notebook. After I got started I couldn’t stop. It gave such a picture of the way she lived just after she was married. Then all at once there was a change of tone. She did the same things, but now she was enthusiastic about them. There’d be an entry about a boat ride or a strawberry party with a group of friends. And then on a separate line, on a line by itself, there’d be an exclamation point. Or two. Once, after an entry about a picnic on an island, there were three. I haven’t thought about it for years. It was before I was born. I never did figure out those exclamation points.”
“You didn’t let yourself figure them out,” Shayne said. “Because if you’d counted nine months from one of those exclamation points, you must have known it would bring you down to the day you were born.”
There was silence.
Rourke opened the door again. This time, when Forbes Hallam, Sr., came in, carrying a small suitcase, the tension broke. Hallam looked as tired as everybody else, but in a different way.
He said abruptly, “What’s the meaning of this?” After looking around the room, he snapped, “Put on your shirt, Forbes!”
“Does it matter?” Forbes asked wearily.
Shayne stood up and stretched. “The night’s over. Do what your father says, Forbes. Get dressed. Anybody who wants another drink get it now. The bar’s about to close.”
“Perkins!” Hallam exclaimed, seeing the president of Despard’s chief competitor. “What are you doing here?”
The other shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Ask Shayne.”
Shayne grinned. “He’s trying to make up his mind whether anything I have to say could possibly be worth eight thousand bucks. We haven’t said a word about T-239 since one-thirty this morning, but now we’re about to get back to the dull subject of paint. Have you realized yet, Mr. Perkins, that your company’s been swindled?”
The word dropped like a stone. The Boston industrialist looked at Candida, his face suddenly nasty.
Shayne plugged in the tabletop microfilm viewer. Taking out the little reel of film he had found in the locked box in Candida’s bedroom, he fitted it into place. A strip of reinforced tape kept the film from slipping. Shayne used the scalpel to cut it loose. Rourke helped him thread the loose end into the empty sprocket. He snapped on the light inside the machine and turned the crank.
“There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that T-239 is a wonderful paint,” he said. “But Forbes said something that’s been picking at me for two days. He said there was an earlier version of the paint. It licked the peeling problem, but after a certain amount of exposure to the weather, white paint turned yellow. Probably the formula wasn’t much different from the one they finally used.”
He found the page he wanted. “Despard, you’re the R. and D. man. You remember what went into the first batch. Take a look at this.”
Despard put on his glasses. Bending over the viewer, he peered into its lighted interior and sharpened the focus. His lips moved as he read to himself.
Suddenly he broke into his high, nervous giggle and looked at Hallam.
“You dog, you,” he said roguishly.
CHAPTER 19
Hallam’s expression remained unchanged, but Perkins took a backward step, looking as though he had taken a hard punch in the stomach. His tanned face had gone yellow, like the first batches of T-239.
“I want to use the phone.”
“When I’m finished,” Shayne told him. “And don’t look at Candida. She’s a fellow victim. She was tricked into passing on a copy of the report that was completely authentic in every respect except one. The recipe in it was for the original mixture, before it was modified as a result of performance records in the early tests. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? To put it another way, the performance figures were genuine, but they applied to the final version, after various things were switched around or modified. Planting fake information is an old spy technique. It happens all the time in the cold war. The paint United States Chemical is announcing on television tomorrow morning will look fine in the cans, but it’ll turn yellow before the end of the first season. And as soon as the bad news begins to come in, United States will be up for grabs. After a coup like this, Hallam’s own position in his firm will be impregnable.”
“I have to hand it to you,” Jose told his brother-in-law. “Nobody like you Yankees to see tricky ways to make a dollar.”
“Don’t congratulate him yet,” Shayne said. “His problem now is that his idea was a little too good.”
Hallam, still stony-faced, picked up an unclaimed glass of whiskey and drained it, watched by a half dozen pairs of eyes.
“First time I ever saw you take a drink at nine-thirty in the morning,” Despard observed.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” Hallam said defensively. “Now this-this nonsense.”
“How can you say it’s nonsense?” Jose said. “You’ve done some tricky things in your time, but this takes the blue ribbon. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for it. It’s great, fantastic. It’s just not something I could have come up with myself. I don’t have that kind of mentality.”
“You fool.” Hallam gave him a baleful look. “Just because this wild man makes an improvable assertion-”
