Brett Halliday - So Lush, So Deadly

BRADY: I take credit for it. And where would you be if I’d gone into a tailspin like you that morning?

The room was quiet. Shayne pressed the rewind button, and listened to the last few speeches again. Then the voices resumed.

DE RHAM: I’ve been wondering about that. If I hadn’t panicked like a damn fool-

BRADy: Hell, it was understandable. You’d just knocked off your wife.

DE RHAM: I’ve told you approximately one hundred times that I didn’t kill her. I’ll tell you another hundred times. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t-

BRADY: I seem to remember dragging you off when you tried to throttle her. She was blue in the face before I could make you let go. Petrocelli must have heard her scream. He knew she’d written a new will. Of course I could be wrong. All I know is, she was on the boat when I went to bed and she wasn’t on the boat when I woke up. If you didn’t kill her, give me a better explanation.

DE RHAM (sullenly): I can’t remember exactly what happened.

BRADY: Which would make a very lousy defense in a court of law. The will, baby. What happened to the will? I saw her put it in the desk drawer. And when we looked for it, where was it? Gone with the wind.

DE RHAM: I’ve had two weeks to think about that. I don’t deny she got under my skin. Maybe I killed her and threw her overboard and blocked it out of my mind. I’ve got an uncertain memory at the bottom of a bottle of scotch, as you know very well, incidentally. O.K. Or maybe you killed her.

BRADY (with a short laugh): She wasn’t my wife.

DE RHAM (very slowly): But she’d written you a check for forty thousand bucks and she was talking about stopping payment. You were on funny terms with her, Paul-I don’t know if it was sex or not, but there was definitely something. I could feel the static.

BRADY: That static always went one way.

DE RAHM: I’ve seen you when you lose your temper. It’s a frightening thing. She was teasing you and working you up, and if you did lose your temper with her, if you did kill her, it would be a smart thing to destroy that will.

BRADY: Baby, let’s cut this out. If we’d notified the Coast Guard that we had a woman missing, you’d be getting a big jolt of electricity two years from now, and no amount of hindsight can change that. I don’t think they could have touched me. I took a hell of a risk helping you, because if they catch us now I’ll be in for conspiracy. Well, we’ve cleared a hundred and seventy thousand bucks-what the hell, man. I’ll settle for that. Let’s wind it up tomorrow morning, then, if you feel that strongly about it.

DE RHAM: I do feel that strongly about it.

BRADY: We’ve got to pull together, Hank. That’s essential. I had the basic idea, but you executed. You did more of the hard work and you deserve a prosperous life. Have some more scotch. How can you pretend to be drunk tomorrow morning unless you’re actually lightly drunk?

(They both laugh. Drinking noises.)

DE RHAM: That first move with Petrocelli was the hard one. Everything after that was candy. I sometimes think I should have gone into the theater, except people tell me it’s hard work. When I was a kid I used to do an imitation of my mother, did I ever tell you? From the next room you couldn’t tell the difference.

BRADY: You told me. Do you want to go over the schedule again?

DE RHAM: Hell, no. I could do it with a broken leg and a temperature of a hundred and four.

BRADY: Then let’s get some sleep. Set your alarm for four-thirty and I will too. One is sure to go off. Good luck.

DE RHAM: Good luck.

(A door closes.)

The reel went on spinning. After a moment’s silence Shayne turned it off. “That explains most of it,” he said. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” Rourke said. “What happened?”

Shayne laughed. “You mean what happened to Mrs. De Rham the last night before the boat got to Miami? Maybe Paul will decide to tell us after he’s thought it over. Or maybe he doesn’t know. I even wondered at one point if she tore up the will herself and jumped overboard after the boys went to bed just to make trouble. Did she have suicidal tendencies? We’ll have to ask her psychiatrist. Think of how it looked to Brady and De Rham when they woke up that next morning and she wasn’t aboard. Both of them had a good reason for wanting her dead. As a cop, Petey, if you’d known she was missing when Petrocelli came in with his story, what would you have done?”

“Put them both under surveillance,” Painter said promptly.

“Surveillance, then arrest, then a long sensational trial and a good possibility of conviction. But if they had nerve enough to hang on for a week or so, they could work out some kind of accident at sea to dispose of Dotty in a way that wouldn’t require them to produce a body. Meanwhile, they could be transferring cash. All they had to do was make it seem that Mrs. De Rham was still aboard and her husband was the one who was missing. De Rham was an accomplished mimic. Somebody mentioned the Pudding show-that’s a show put on by the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, with boys playing girls’ parts. Mrs. De Rham was known as a heavy drinker. She wore sun glasses and a wig. And of course they had no real choice. They had to try it. De Rham stayed below most of the time, and only came out at night to phone. He had three visits, one from the cops, one from me, and one from the lawyer who drew the new will. His signature was a little shaky, but there was no reason it wouldn’t stand up.”

He sat down beside Brady. “I don’t know if you’ve heard all this, Paul. I hope so, because it will save us time later. You didn’t want to move too fast. De Rham had to call Loring, imitating his wife’s voice to establish the fact that she was still alive. And he heard some bad news. She had already changed her will before she sailed. He used me to plant a motive for changing it back-as bait for the runaway husband.”

Rourke said, “Can you skip to what happened this morning, Mike? I ought to phone the paper.”

“In a minute. Everything went fine until Petrocelli started getting suspicious. He brought in the cops. Brady and De Rham were getting ready for the big climax, and they didn’t want cops hanging around. I was brought in to find the missing husband and prove he hadn’t been murdered yet, one of the easiest assignments I’ve had in years. I called Luke Richardson off and reported to Loring that the little three-person group was apparently still intact. But Loring thought his god-daughter was being blackmailed because of the cash transfers, and he kept me on. Last night, when I came back to the Nefertiti, they did some fast thinking and invented an errand to keep me busy. Henry swam ashore and set up an ambush, a half dozen tough kids with bicycle chains.”

“That explains that,” Rourke said impatiently. “Now bring us up to date.”

Shayne turned to Painter. “Did your men find a rented car at Haulover Park?”

“Yes, a Hertz Chevy rented to Henry De Rham.”

“That was the logical place. Here’s what they planned to do this morning.”

“Finally,” Rourke said.

“Mrs. De Rham, with her mental instability and her history of arson attempts, was going to get a few miles offshore and set fire to the boat. Henry gave his Mrs. De Rham imitation for the benefit of the neighbors in the marina. Wig, woman’s clothes, sunglasses, gin. It was dark, and even an observant girl like Sally Lyon never doubted that she was looking at Mrs. De Rham. It was still dark when they went out through Haulover Cut, where Henry was supposed to glue on his beard and swim ashore. This would leave Paul alone on board to finish it up, but it wasn’t really too complicated.”