Brett Halliday - Murder by Proxy

Shayne said, “In the beginning, Harris, you complained that no one in Miami knew your wife, and therefore was not capable of conducting an intelligent investigation into her disappearance. I agree with you. I hope to conduct an intelligent investigation, and for that reason I want to know everything about your wife that I can. Does that answer your question?”

“In a way.” Harris’ manner was guarded. “Are you going to be in touch with those people whose names I gave you?”

“Have you any objections?” Shayne’s voice was crisp and he met Harris’ eyes levelly.

“Well… no. I just wondered.”

“I’ll be discreet,” Shayne assured him. “But I won’t take a case with any strings attached.” He stood up and held his hand across the desk. “I won’t tell you to go back to the hotel and stop worrying, but I do suggest that you go back feeling that everything is being done that can be done. I’ll be in touch with you.”

Harris shook his hand with more enthusiasm than he had shown the first time. “I feel better already. Uh… about your fee, Mr. Shayne.”

Shayne said, “Give my secretary a check for a thousand as a retainer. With any luck at all, that should cover it. If I see it running into more, I’ll let you know.”

Harris said awkwardly, “Well… thanks,” and followed Lucy out into the outer room.

Shayne sat down and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and sipped his cognac with narrowed eyes while he considered the young New York stockbroker and his problem. Lucy interrupted his musings by entering a few minutes later and asking, “Michael, do you want me to transcribe those notes right away?”

He jerked his attention back from a period in his past and said, “There’s no hurry, angel. See if you can get me Jim Gifford in New York. If you can, stay on the extension with your notes, and read them off when I say so.”

She started to say something, then compressed her lips and marched out. Shayne drank the last of his cognac and crumpled the paper cups in his hand and tossed them into the wastebasket. He was taking a swallow of ice water when his buzzer sounded. He lifted his telephone and Lucy said, “I have Mr. Gifford on the wire.”

He said, “Jim?” and a hearty voice answered, “Is that you, Mike? How’re things in the sunny land of sin and sex?”

Shayne said, “Sinful and sexful. Can you do a fast job for me?”

Gifford laughed and said, “For you… and for a price… I can do anything.”

“Here it is, Jim. A Mrs. Ellen Harris from New York is missing from the Beachhaven Hotel in Miami Beach since last Monday. Husband is Herbert Harris, stockbroker. Lucy will give you the addresses from her notes in a moment. The way it looks, cold, Jim, is that the lady had a deal all set up before she left New York. She’s an ex-model. I want you to dig into her background… before and after her marriage to Harris. Everything you can get… particularly on ex or current boyfriends. She’s a real looker and should have plenty though hubby doesn’t believe it. Put some men in it, Jim, and get everything you can by late this afternoon? Call my apartment or Lucy’s home number if we’re not here. I’m going to put her on the line to give you everything we’ve got. Go ahead, angel.”

Shayne held the telephone to his ear until he heard Lucy start reading the important points from her shorthand notes to Jim Gifford in New York. Then he hung up.

He was standing in front of one of the wide windows looking down on Flagler Street when Lucy Hamilton come into the room behind him five minutes later. Her voice trembled with indignation. “Michael Shayne! What do you really expect Jim Gifford to find out in New York? If I ever saw a man truly in love and suffering because of it, it was Herbert Harris.”

He turned around slowly, shaking his red head. “How much he’s in love hasn’t very much to do with it really. She’s the one who has pulled the disappearing act. Get me Tim Rourke, huh?”

She stuck her tongue out at him and went back to her desk. Shayne turned away from the window, tugging at his earlobe and trying not to think about his dead wife, Phyllis.

Harris had really hit him below the belt with that one question he had asked. If it were Phyllis, now, who was missing…?

His telephone buzzed and he picked it up and said, “Hi, Tim? Busy?”

He listened a moment to his old friend profanely telling him exactly how busy he was at the moment getting out world-shattering news to his millions of newspaper reading fans, glanced at his watch and then cut Rourke off by saying, “I’ve got a hell of a story cooking, Tim. Be by your office in about fifteen minutes. Then we’ll grab lunch. Cut yourself loose for at least a couple of hours.”

He hung up and went out to grab his hat and to tell Lucy she could leave the office whenever she was through, but to stick close to the apartment that afternoon in anticipation of a call from Gifford, and that he would check with her from time to time.

In the crowded, noisy City Room of the News, Shayne went directly to Timothy Rourke’s desk in a far corner and found the reporter pensively staring down at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter while he assiduously practiced blowing smoke rings into the already smoke laden atmosphere.

Rourke was a lean, greyhound sort of man, with features so thin they were almost emaciated, and deep-set cynical eyes that were as bright as a ferret’s. They became even brighter when Shayne laid the snapshot of Ellen Harris in front of him and asked, “Got room on your front page for a blowup of her?”

“We got practically nothing else for the front page today. What’s she done? Cut up her sugar-daddy into little pieces and made him into a stew… I hope.” Rourke studied the picture avidly.

Shayne said, “Right now… she’s just a missing person. Take that back to your photo department, huh, and get some prints made? I’d like half a dozen… six by nine or like that. You can have it retouched and ready to hit the front page before your deadline if I give you the go-ahead. We’ll grab some lunch and stop back for the prints.”

Rourke had known Michael Shayne too long to ask any questions at this point. He shoved back his chair and got up and went around the corner to the newspaper’s darkroom, and returned in a few minutes with a nod, “Prints will be ready by the time we’ve eaten.” They went out together to a steak house half a block away and settled themselves with drinks and a luncheon order to come. Rourke cupped his thin chin in his hands and regarded his old friend shrewdly. “What’s the story… and what’s the ‘if’ about running the picture?”

Shayne told him, “The ‘if’ is whether we have any reason not to run the story by the time your first edition deadline hits. It’s got to be confidential as hell until I give you the word, Tim.”

“So?” Rourke sipped his bourbon and water and waited.

Shayne told it to him briefly the way Herbert Harris had given it to him. “Seemingly a hell of a nice guy. It’s going to smash his whole world into little pieces if it does turn out his wife is just having herself a ball and turns up all in one piece.”

“Which way would he rather have it,” grunted Rourke with a sour grin, “that she turn up in little pieces instead of having his dream world all smashed up?”

“I don’t know,” Shayne admitted angrily. “He’s so damned sure of her, Tim. I think it might be easier for him to live with it in the long run if she turns out dead.”

“Petey Painter and the Beachhaven Hotel aren’t going to like it if we spread that story over the front page,” Rourke warned him happily. “Either way the cat jumps, it’s going to be lousy publicity.”