Brett Halliday: The Body Came Back

A half-filled car waited for him to step inside, and went up smoothly, discharging passengers at the fourth and seventh floors.

He was the only one who got off at the eighth. There were signs with arrows, and he followed the arrows around a corner and down a wide, well-lighted hall with his heels thudding softly in the thick carpet.

He stopped in front of 810 and knocked, and the door opened instantly.

The woman who faced him across the threshold was tall and willowy, and appeared to be about forty. Her body was well-fleshed, though not excessively, and in the right places. She had lustrous coal-black hair combed smoothly back from a wide smooth forehead, and very dark eyes which glowed as though with unspilled tears. She managed to look terrified and happy and relieved all at the same time, and both her hands went out to clasp his convulsively while her eyes searched his rugged face and she exclaimed throatily, “Mike Shayne! I think I’d have known you anywhere.”

She held both his hands tightly and drew him into the room, backing away at arm’s length with her intense gaze fixed on his face as though she drew strength and assurance from what she saw there. “It was so good of you to come. I don’t know how to tell you…

He said gruffly, “Any friend of Brett’s… any time. How is the old so-and-so?”

“It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen him. I don’t know whether he’s still on the Coast or not.” She released his hands and moved around him to close the door.

“He settled in Santa Barbara after the show was canceled,” Shayne told her, standing flat-footed just inside the room and surveying it carefully, noting the ice bucket and Scotch bottle and one glass on the coffee table. The ash tray beside it holding half a dozen crushed butts… the closed door leading into the bedroom.

He turned to her slowly with lifted eyebrows and added pointedly, “You didn’t ask me over here to discuss Brett, Miss Andrews. You said something about a dead man…?”

“You’d better… see for yourself.” She nodded toward the bedroom with her eyes wide and glistening, and a single tear slid slowly down each cheek.

Shayne turned on his heel and strode to the bedroom door. He opened it and looked down at the dead man lying on his back a few feet inside the room. He moved closer, noting the bloodstains on the front of his shirt, the tiny pearl-handled automatic on the carpet just beyond. He leaned down and pressed the back of his hand against the corpse’s neck, and guessed that he had been dead between thirty minutes and an hour. He straightened up and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and made a careful survey of the room, noting the neatly made twin beds that had not been turned down for the night, an array of toilet articles on the vanity near the bathroom door, an overturned open suitcase beside a luggage stand at the foot of one of the beds.

He went back and closed the door behind him, and found the woman composedly seated at the end of the sofa leaning forward to reach for the Scotch bottle which was a little more than a quarter full. She looked up at him carefully, studying his face for a clue to his reaction toward what he had seen in the bedroom, and said steadily, “There’s ice but no soda left. And only one glass. I’m sorry there’s no cognac, but… I d-didn’t kn-know I was going to entertain Mike Shayne t-tonight.” She tried to keep her voice light, but it broke at the end and she put her hands to her face and began sobbing.

Shayne lit a cigarette and moved to the other end of the sofa and sat down. When her sobbing subsided, he asked matter-of-factly, “Who is he, Carla?”

“My… husband.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“I didn’t,” she exclaimed vehemently. “I found him like that. I was so utterly surprised. I haven’t seen him for years. I thought he was dead,” she wailed, the sobs beginning again. “I thought that was all ended… that I’d never in my life see his nasty face again. And I walked in and there he lay. Dead. Oh God, what am I going to do?”

“Get hold of yourself and tell me about it,” he ordered emotionlessly. “You say you walked in. When?”

“About… half an hour ago. Maybe more. It was a little after eleven. I flew in from the West Coast and my flight was late. It was a little after eleven when I reached the hotel. I came straight up to the suite expecting my daughter to meet me. She’s been here several days and I knew the room number. When she didn’t answer the door, the boy let me in with his key, and I had him just set my bags down there and go on.” She nodded toward a smart overnight bag and a small hatbox on the floor near the front door. “Thank God he’d gone before I opened the bedroom door and saw Al lying there on the floor. I suppose I had a slight case of hysterics,” she admitted ruefully. “I called out for Vicky, and ran into the bathroom looking for her, and looked in the closet and even under the bed. But there was just Al. Alone on the floor and dead. And Vicky’s pistol on the floor. One I bought for her five years ago when we had a prowler around our house in Laurel Canyon. And I came back in this room and, well… you’d better read it, Mike. You don’t mind if I call you Mike, do you?” She was fumbling nervously inside the bodice of her dove-gray gown and drew out several crumpled sheets of hotel stationery which she smoothed out with trembling fingers. “I found this note lying over on the desk.” She nodded across the room. “First I thought I should destroy it, and then… then I remembered you were in Miami. You read it and tell me what to do, Mike.” She thrust the sheets of paper into his hand.

He spread them out and began reading the excitedly scrawled words:

“Dear Mom-I don’t know how to say this-I can’t think straight-I’m scared to death and sick at my stomach. I just killed a man. He’s lying in the bedroom-dead. I shot him, Mom. With that little automatic pistol you gave me several years ago. Remember?

“Who ever thought I’d use it? I didn’t. I wasn’t sure I knew how. But it was easy. It just went Pow, Pow, Pow-and that did it.

“I know I sound crazy. I feel crazy. Like I could just jump right out of my skin. I better start from the beginning and tell you.

“I was waiting for you, Mom. I had the bell-boy bring up a bottle of Scotch and some ice and soda so it would be here waiting for you to have a drink when your plane got in. And I was so happy and I guess I sort of dozed off waiting for you and I woke up suddenly when there was this knocking on the door. I didn’t notice what time it was. I just thought it was you, and I trotted to open the door and there stood this man.

“I didn’t know what to do, Mom. I was still groggy and half-awake, I guess. I never saw him before and he smelled of whiskey and was positively disgusting and he squinted up his eyes at me and said, ‘Where’s Carla?’

“I still wasn’t thinking straight because I should have slammed the door in his face, but I just said, ‘She isn’t here yet, and who are you?’

“And he pushed in past me with a nasty grin on his face and headed straight for the whiskey bottle that I had set out for you in front of the sofa, and over his shoulder he smirked at me and said, ‘Carla’ll tell you who I am all right when she gets here. You must be Vicky, huh?’

“And he poured a big drink of straight whiskey and tipped it up, and I was purely petrified, Mom. He knew your name and mine and seemed to be expecting you and-well, I’ve been away the last few years and I know you always did know the weirdest characters out there in Hollywood, producers and writers and like that, so I just thought he was another one of them that you had arranged to meet here in Miami and so I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I just said yes I was Vicky and I was expecting you to arrive any minute.