Brett Halliday - Violence Is Golden

“Do you know what I had to drink for lunch?” she demanded. “Absinthe! For the first time in my life. It tasted a bit like medicine, but the second wasn’t quite as bitter as the first. I was about to try a third when I remembered that I wanted to be enunciating clearly when I talked to you. Not knowing you planned to be fifteen minutes late. Honestly-do you think absinthe is all it’s cracked up to be?”

“How does it go with a chocolate sundae?”

“Pretty well so far. I’ve been amusing myself trying to imagine how the master would have handled that departure scene this morning.”

“What master are we talking about?”

“Hitchcock, of course. I’m a tremendous admirer of his films. I’ve seen The Lady Vanishes fourteen times. Do you know it? Think about it for a minute and you’ll see what I mean. It all happened on a train, remember? Everybody in the hero’s compartment was just a bit strange. The charming little old lady turned out to be a British spy. The nun had on high heels. Don’t look so puzzled. Take that Negro clergyman of ours. He’s no more a clergyman than I am.”

“Was he wearing high heels?”

“You aren’t taking me seriously, are you? If there’s one thing I can claim to be an expert on, it’s package tours. It’s easy for somebody like you to sneer, but this kind of tour isn’t such a bad way to do a continent for the first time. You get a fast overview, for a modest amount of money. Later, if there’s a place you especially like, you can go back for a visit in depth, by yourself or with a few friends. Well, I want to assure you, this is no ordinary tour. J. Moss. He actually looks like an interesting man, and believe me, if there’s one thing these tours have in common, it’s a shortage of interesting single men.”

“He sells vacuum cleaners. No, he changed that. He’s a bank investigator.”

“He’s a bank investigator, my foot. Naomi Savage isn’t very typical either. She’s too intelligent for the job. I’m not sure about her husband. I tried to talk to him a couple of times, but we didn’t seem to make any sparks. And now we come to a big redheaded swinger who calls himself Mike Shayne.”

Shayne’s ice cream arrived. He looked at it without enthusiasm.

“You’re a private detective, apparently,” she went on. “Specializing in murder cases, I believe. You command large fees. Most of the time you work on the extreme outer fringes of the law. Am I right so far?”

“Even private detectives take vacations. Not as often as school teachers, but-”

“This isn’t a vacation for me. I happen to be working on curriculum planning and development. And I doubt if it’s a vacation for you. I really doubt it. Your behavior. You yanked the stew’s blouse out of her skirt-a symbolic rape if I ever saw one. Did you feel the frisson of shock run through the plane when you did that? You dropped your pistol. Don’t pretend that wasn’t deliberate. Strange things! The captain downed a double whiskey before we took off. I’m sure the Federal Aviation people wouldn’t approve of that. Reverend Ward’s flight bag wouldn’t open and he used a piece of profanity which I hesitate to repeat aloud. What about your Christa’s charming accent? Swedish, isn’t it?”

“German.”

“Perhaps. What role is she supposed to be playing, a floozy? She’s mercenary enough, I’m sure, but actually I’m convinced she’s a lesbian.”

Shayne laughed. “Mary.”

“Men can be fooled, you know! To change the subject slightly, don’t you think it was clever of me to pretend to get a cramp in my leg?”

“Very clever.”

“Well, it was! Whether you think so or not! Have you figured out yet what they’re smuggling?”

Shayne held up one hand. “You mean Reverend Ward and the rest are-”

“Don’t pull that innocent act on me, Mr. Michael Shayne. You’re after the ten percent, aren’t you?”

“Ten percent of what?”

“I’m not ready to start answering questions quite yet.” She peered at him, then opened her bag and took out a flat pint of cognac. “I had an idea you might take that sarcastic attitude, so I came prepared. Notice that it’s cognac. Maybe I know more about you than you think. I want to appeal to your better nature, and I’m told that hard liquor helps.”

She poured cognac into her empty water glass and pushed it across the table. She sniffed tentatively at the open bottle, said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and took a long pull of the raw spirit.

“Goodness!” she said after a strangled cough. “It’s powerful.”

She poured the water from the second water glass on the floor and partially filled it with cognac. Shayne raised his glass and she clinked hers against it.

“I’m impressed with myself,” she said with another little bounce. “I tend to order Alexanders and Daiquiris, as a rule. Hurry up and get tight so you’ll stop being so critical.”

“Do you have any other reason to think Ward isn’t a clergyman?”

“No-o-o. But just because a zipper on a flight bag was stuck, would a genuine clergyman say-” She leaned across the table and whispered a word. “Would he?”

“I don’t know many Episcopal clergymen.”

“Well, I do.” She drained her glass, continuing to swallow till she had it all. “Are my roommate’s eyes going to pop when I come reeling in! Mike-” She put her hand on his, but quickly pulled it away. “Excuse me. One of the side effects of alcohol as far as I’m concerned is that it makes me amorous. I’ll try to control myself.”

“Mary, sooner or later you’re going to have to get around to what you wanted to tell me.”

She moistened her lips and folded her hands on the table.

“I’ve ruled out the possibility that you might actually be on vacation. If you wanted to take a vacation with an overstuffed Playboy Club bunny, you’d move into a Miami Beach hotel or take her down to Key West. Or maybe you have some reason of your own for signing up for the tour. I don’t think so. It would violate the unities. One further question-are you one of the good guys or one of the bad guys? I understand you’ve been known to be ambidextrous. I think you’re a good guy this time. I think you dropped your pistol so the bad guys would be sure to spot you. A bit dangerous? Not really. Nobody can catch you in a dark alley if you stay out of dark alleys.”

She poured more cognac, the neck of the bottle ringing against the glass. Shayne moved the glass out of her reach. “Let that first one soak for a minute.”

“I bet that’s the first considerate word you’ve spoken today,” she said, pleased. “Does that mean you’re human? Don’t worry about me, Mike. I’m famous for the amount I can drink without showing it. Famous in a limited circle, I’ll be the first to admit. A limited circle without any men in it. I’m thirty-seven, a terrible age for a woman. I’ve reached the top step of the salary schedule in the Milwaukee school system, and who cares? I’m pretty damn unappetizing, you don’t need to tell me.”

“That’s a long way from what you started out to tell me.”

“I notice you aren’t contradicting me, though. And it’s not really such a long way. I have some information that could be worth something. That ought to give you an incentive to sweet-talk me, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. I see a small streak of lipstick at the corner of your mouth. It doesn’t seem to be the shade I’ve seen your girl wearing. It looks more like Naomi’s. Probably you felt you had to kiss her and so on and so forth, standard procedure for people in your business-”

When she reached for her drink, he let her take it. She set it back without drinking.

“Self-pity, the curse of the spinster.” She was speaking quietly. “Here’s what happened, Mike. I came down to Miami a day early to go to the racetrack and get some sun. I left my suitcases at the airport. Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t use coincidences too often, but they do happen in real life, as everybody knows. There was a big baggage wagon at one of the checkout counters. The name on one of the tags jumped out at me. Mary Ocain! Do I need to remind you that that’s my name? It was a new bag, definitely not one of mine. It’s an uncommon name, but I do run into Ocains now and then, and I didn’t exactly clutch my forehead with amazement. I didn’t think of it again until I was introduced to that rather nondescript math teacher from East St. Louis. Sally Jennison, she was sitting behind me on the plane. And all at once I remembered another suitcase on that baggage wagon, tagged Jennison. You see what they’re doing? They have a whole set of bags with labels made out in the names of people on the tour. And I bet if we looked in those bags we’d all get a nice surprise. It’s a pretty good system, I’d say, not knowing anything about it.”