Brett Halliday - Never Kill a Client

“Glad to do it,” Ryan told him heartily. “Don’t forget your bottle.”

Shayne shook his head with a grin. “Stash it away. You never know, I may be back for another drink out of it.”

“Any time,” Ryan told him, following him to the door. “Good luck with your juicy blonde.”

Shayne found the Original Brown Derby Restaurant practically empty when he walked into it at about four o’clock. There was only a residue of hard-drinkers from the long business lunches that had filled the place earlier and a smattering of tourists who had dropped in early to order cocktails and establish beachheads at strategic tables where they would hopefully dawdle over their drinks and wait for Hollywood celebrities to arrive during the next two or three hours preceding dinner.

A captain of waiters bustled up to Shayne when he paused at the entrance to check his briefcase with a discerning glance at the redhead which failed to categorize the detective as either a celebrity or a celebrity-smitten tourist.

“Would you like a table, sir?”

Shayne nodded, “I’m expecting a lady to meet me. The name is Shayne. Michael Shayne.”

“Of course.” The captain made a notation on his pad and started toward a row of small tables against the wall. Shayne looked at his watch and said, “I think I’ll make a telephone call first.” It was a little after seven o’clock in Miami, and he had promised Lucy he would call her either at the office or at home. He still had nothing definite to report on the length of his anticipated stay in Los Angeles, but it would be pleasant to hear her voice and her comments when he told her about Elsa’s second note and relayed the taxi driver’s description of his mysterious female client.

The captain paused in front of Shayne and looked over his shoulder to say, “Certainly, sir. I’ll have a telephone brought to your table.”

He was being a trifle gauche, Shayne realized with inner amusement, hesitating in the Brown Derby and looking about for a public telephone from which to make his call. A telephone at his table, of course. This was Hollywood, he reminded himself. Where fabulous million-dollar deals were constantly being consummated by habituees of the Brown Derby by private telephones plugged in at their elbows for convenience, so there would be no interruption in the sipping of drinks.

He followed the captain to a table for two, was seated with a flourish, and noted with amusement that he was being covertly observed with a craning of necks by some of the tourists while a waiter hurried up with a telephone which was placed by his right hand and plugged into a jack in the wall beside him.

Shayne lit a cigarette and ordered a sidecar, telling the waiter firmly, “With Martel and a shade light on the Cointreau. And no sugar on the rim of the glass if your bartender here has that atrocious idea for serving a sidecar.”

“Indeed not, sir.” The waiter looked properly aghast at the thought, and scurried away.

Shayne lifted the telephone and wondered if he looked like a movie mogul offering joint contracts to Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Curtis to co-star in an adaptation of Darwin’s Origin Of Species written especially for the screen by Harper Lee. A happy feminine voice came bouncing over the wire, “May I help you, please?”

He grinned, thinking how unhappy the Brown Derby operator would be when he didn’t ask for either Liz Taylor or Tony Curtis, and told her, “I’d like to make a collect call to Miami, Florida. Michael Shayne speaking.” He gave Lucy Hamilton’s home telephone number, and was utterly amazed when the same feminine voice, sounding just as happy as before, gurgled over the telephone, “Certainly, Mr. Shayne,” and added sotto voce, “tall, tough and red-headed.”

He held the telephone away from him, looking at it in consternation, and then put it back to his ear, reminding himself that this was, after all, the Brown Derby in Hollywood, where anything might happen.

He heard diallings and pingings over the line, and then a telephone began ringing in Lucy’s apartment some three thousand miles away, and the waiter came back and deftly set a cocktail in front of him while Shayne counted the rings, knowing after the third one that Lucy was not going to answer.

After he counted eight rings, a dulcet voice broke in and informed him, “That number does not answer. Do you wish me to try again in twenty minutes, Mr. Shayne?”

He said, “Mike, to you,” and got a little gurgle in reply. “Shall I keep trying?”

Shayne said, “Thanks. We’ll skip it for this time,” and hung up before his worse instincts got the better of him and he tried to make a date with the soft-voiced operator who had whispered, “tall, tough and red-headed,” into the telephone.

The sidecar was perfect, clean-tasting and crisp, and Shayne sipped it pleasurably while he leaned back and watched people being escorted to tables about him, tightening up a little each time an unescorted woman between twenty and forty came in his direction behind a captain, relaxing happily when each one passed by his table, because none whom he saw fitted the description the cab driver had given him of Elsa.

He was working on his third sidecar, at least forty-five minutes after he had entered the restaurant when he saw the captain to whom he had given his name hurrying toward his table.

He stopped beside him with a worried frown and leaned over deferentially to say, “A most curious thing has just happened, Mr. Shayne. You did tell me you were expecting a lady to join you, no?”

“Yes,” said Shayne.

“A few minutes ago one came and asked for you. Mr. Michael Shayne. That is correct, no?”

“Yes,” said Shayne again.

“I told her yes and asked her to follow me. I started toward your table and became suddenly aware that she was not behind me. I turned and she had stopped and was looking elsewhere to the center of the room, pale and shaken, with an expression of deathly fear on her face, Mr. Shayne.

“She turned abruptly and ran out. Ran, Mr. Shayne.” The captain glanced about him and lowered his voice discreetly. “Although no one moved to pursue her. Indeed, I could discover no one who appeared to have noticed her at all. It was as though she fled from a phantom.”

Shayne sighed and asked matter-of-factly, “Was she a beautiful juicy blonde?”

“A blonde, yes. Beautiful, yes. Concerning the juiciness, Mr. Shayne…” The captain of waiters paused helplessly.

Shayne grinned at him. He said reassuringly, “It’s just that you’re not a taxi driver, Captain. You don’t know about the juices.” He drained his cocktail glass happily and held it out to the captain. “Could you get me another of these while I continue my vigil? With just a smidgen… I repeat… just a smidgen more of cognac?”

“Certainly, sir.” The man hurried away with Shayne’s empty cocktail glass, and the redhead shrugged and wondered what in hell was going to happen next.

He felt a little bit like Alice on the other side of the Looking Glass, and he reminded himself happily that this was Hollywood… it wasn’t Miami, where all the juices were long ago dried up. Wasn’t it just this morning, by God, when he had realized how juiceless Miami had become? He hadn’t used that word, of course, but it was a good one. Very descriptive. It took a taxi driver, he mused, to glom onto a word like that.

His fourth sidecar arrived and he tasted it happily and decided it did have a smidgen more of cognac in it.

And then his own private telephone rang at his elbow. He looked around the room distrustfully, and allowed it to ring a second and a third time before he could accept the fact that it was a call for him, at his own table in the Original Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood.