Brett Halliday - So Lush, So Deadly

“Michael Shayne.” There were only two chairs, both of which were occupied, so he perched on the corner of the table and felt for a cigarette. “Do you want to talk about the money in front of witnesses?”

The girl looked sharply at De Rham, then down at her dirty hands. De Rham smiled.

“Money. I see. What a bitch Dotty is, after all. Let me see your badge.”

Shayne opened his wallet and showed his private investigator’s ticket.

“Shayne-I think I’ve heard about you.” He put a burning cigarette in his mouth and left it there while he talked. “I can’t remember if what I heard was good or bad. What did she hire you to do, bring me back screaming?” He leaned forward and his lips twitched away from his teeth in a sudden snarl. “I’m not going. By that I mean not willingly. You’ve got about fifty pounds on me and as a private detective you probably know all the tricks. You might be able to deliver me, if you could get me out of the building. But this is the second half of the twentieth century. Involuntary servitude hasn’t been legal for over a hundred years. Short of chaining me to the bed-”

Shayne interrupted. “All I’m supposed to do is find you and give you a message.” He swung toward the girl. “What did he say his name was?”

When De Rham nodded she said, “Joe Sealey.”

“That’s close enough,” Shayne said. “Sealey’s his mother’s maiden name. His real name is Henry De Rham. Who’s she?”

He nodded toward the woman on the mattress, who was now burping her baby.

“It’s her room,” De Rham said. “Ursula, this is Mike Shayne, an unidentified flying object from outer space.”

The woman looked up. “He’s not fuzz?”

“Private.”

“He had me scared for a minute, because who’d look after Baby if I got busted?”

She reached under the mattress for a partly-smoked stick, and relighted it with a kitchen match. She took a deep drag, let the smoke out luxuriously, and sat back, putting the baby to her breast again.

“Pot and nursing,” she said dreamily. “It’s so great. One combination a man can’t have.”

De Rham shrugged and looked at his own cigarette, a Chesterfield. “My trouble is, it’s hard to break old habits. Is Paul Brady still around? Not that I give a damn.”

Shayne nodded. “He’s living on the boat, but he tells me he’s getting restless.”

De Rham clucked. “On the same boat. Shocking. Good old Paul. Well, he’s welcome to her. He thinks he’s had domestic troubles. Wait till he’s put in a couple more weeks with Dot.”

“She says she wants you back.”

He blew out his breath scornfully. “Have you ever watched a cat with a baby chipmunk? She doesn’t like to eat it all at once. That wouldn’t be enough fun. So she cuffs it around and watches it and sometimes even lets it get away for a minute-almost. Then she pounces on it again and eats a bit of its tail and plays with it some more. Men are supposed to be the ones with the balls, but I was never under any illusions about my married life. Dotty was the cat. I was the baby chipmunk.”

The girl called H. put her hand on his. “You’re a marvelous man, Seal. A terrific lover. Forget about that castrating bitch.”

“I intend to. All right, Shayne, you’ve delivered the message. Take her a message from me. The air tastes better in this part of town. For the first time in years I feel alive, really alive.” He gestured incoherently, then checked himself. “No, don’t tell her that. I don’t want to wreck her self-esteem, I just don’t want to go back. She can’t help being the way she is.”

He stood up and paced across the room and back. He was smaller than he looked sitting down, probably no taller than his wife. He dropped into the chair again.

“I actually think I loved her at first,” he said in a troubled voice. “Even so I wouldn’t have married her if it hadn’t been for her money. She was already putting me over the jumps. What I want is to break out of the kind of world where money can affect that kind of deeply personal decision. We all have only one life.”

“Did you think of leaving her a letter?”

“I tried to write one but I couldn’t decide what to call her. ‘Dear Dotty?’ Impossible. How is she?”

“Losing weight, according to Brady. Drinking, according to everybody else. She’s an abandoned wife, and it seemed to me she was enjoying the role.”

“That’s my Dotty. Probably there were tears. She has tear ducts she can turn on like a faucet. But she’s not getting me back with a few cheap tears! I feel sorry for her, but I feel sorry for myself too.”

“I’m supposed to tell you she’s put you back in her will.”

De Rham exploded. “If you knew how sick I am of that goddamn will! The cat and the chipmunk. I’d get interested in a conversation with some other woman at a party, and the next day Dotty would dash off to the lawyer’s and cut me down to fifty thousand. If I remembered to send her flowers on our anniversary, back I’d go as residuary legatee. The whole thing was disgusting.”

“She sounds like the most-” H. said.

“I never paid any real attention to it,” De Rham said, “but I couldn’t get her to believe that. I don’t care if she leaves her money to a home for unmarried dogs. I’m off that merry-go-round for good.”

This was emphatic enough, and the girl watched him with approval. But Shayne caught a movement at the corners of his mouth. Dotty De Rham, who had been married to him three years, might know him a little better than a girl who had been living with him two weeks.

“And she said she’d put some Winslow stock in your name,” Shayne went on.

“She knows what she can do with that stock.”

“Did she have any cash with her on the boat?”

“Dotty always has cash. It’s one of her eccentricities.”

“As much as five thousand?”

“I’ve known her to carry that much. Then sometimes we’ll be driving on a parkway and she won’t have a quarter for the toll.”

Shayne got off the table and looked around. “Ursula, how long have these people been living with you?”

Smoke trickled from her nostrils. “I stopped answering questions when I was a little girl.”

De Rham’s eyes were bright. “Did she tell you I walked off with five thousand bucks?”

“Didn’t you?”

He smiled and spread his arms. “Search me.”

“All right. Turn out your pockets.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m not?”

He took De Rham by the elbow and squeezed the nerve. De Rham came to his feet, his body twisting. The girl started to move, but one of Shayne’s hands shot out and kept her in her chair.

“People have been telling me lies, as usual,” Shayne said. “I’m used to that, but when I run up against a point I can check, I like to check it. H., get me your bag and empty it on the table, and don’t give me any trouble.”

When he released De Rham, the smaller man twitched himself into some kind of order and began taking things from his pockets and piling them on the table.

“Do as he says, H. It’s unimportant. You don’t strike me as being exactly stupid, Shayne. How could I carry all that money in my pockets?”

Shayne glanced at the objects as they accumulated on the table. The girl had hung onto her lipstick and eye-liner, he noticed, though she hadn’t used them recently. He went over De Rham carefully. The little bearded man tried to keep his bearing casual, but his skinny body was shaking with fury. Shayne ran his hands down his legs, probed the cuffs of his pants and the insides of his shoes.

“Are you going to search me, too?” the girl said. “You could probably get away with it. You’re so strong.”