Brett Halliday - The Homicidal Virgin

“That’s right, angel.” Shayne seemed completely unaware of the tension gripping his secretary. “Be an old school-friend or something. Maybe you knew Muriel in New York before her mother married Henderson and they moved down here. Use your imagination.”

He stalked into his own office, blandly disregarding the fact that Lucy was blinking violently to hold back angry tears, and there he crossed directly to a filing cabinet behind his desk and took a bottle of cognac from the second drawer. He uncorked it and turned to the water cooler where he nested two paper cups together and filled the inner one nearly to the brim with cognac. With a companion cup of water for a chaser, he settled himself at his desk and took an appreciative sip of liquor just as Lucy came in.

She said with heightened color and dangerous calm, “Maybe I don’t possess enough imagination to do this job right. After that outrageous scene of yours earlier, I guess maybe you’ve got a monopoly on the imagination around here.”

Shayne grinned irritatingly and raised ragged red eyebrows. “Is that a prelude to admitting you failed to get Miss Graham’s address?”

“I talked to a housekeeper,” said Lucy flatly. “She says that Muriel is visiting friends in New York. She doesn’t know how she can be reached there… or simply isn’t telling. But now I’m telling you something, Mr. Michael Shayne,” she went on fiercely. “If you ever… if you ever… act the way you did this morning again, I’m through. Do you hear me? That’s spelled t-h-r-o-u-g-h period. Get yourself another secretary. In fact, get another one right now so far as I’m concerned.”

“Why should I?” asked Shayne amiably. “You’re doing all right. Beating the bushes for new business all over the place. Who else would show the same sort of initiative? Did you work out a profitable deal with the insurance guy… fix it so you can have dates with him every night in the week?”

Her eyes widened and then tears started streaming out of them. She walked directly to his desk, disregarding the liquid flow down her cheeks, leaned forward and said distinctly, “Damn you, Michael Shayne. You disappear somewhere on your own every night for a week leaving me around twiddling my thumbs. And then when a nice man comes along and invites me out to dinner and I spend the entire evening dutifully laughing at his corny jokes while I impress on him what a wonderful detective my boss is and get him to come up with a whopping retainer… when I do all that just for you… what do you do? Well, tell me,” she insisted fiercely. “What do you do?”

Shayne got up swiftly with his cognac in one hand, circled the desk and put his left arm tightly about her slim waist. He tilted her tear-streaked face back and held the paper cup to her lips while she sipped convulsively. He tossed off the rest of the drink when she stopped swallowing, tossed the empty cup on the floor and kissed each of her wet eyes lingeringly.

Then he said coaxingly, “Tell me about the contract you wangled out of Waring, angel, and I’ll tell you why I’ve been staked out the last few nights. And you’ve got a dinner date with me tonight, no matter what you fixed up with Waring.”

A little before noon Shayne dropped by the hotel where he had a room under the name of Wayne to get his things and check out. With his key, the clerk handed him a telephone message. It was stamped ten o’clock that morning and said, Call Mr. Paul Winterbottom at once, and a telephone number followed.

Shayne went up to his room with a frown of perplexity on his face. He didn’t know anyone named Winterbottom, and besides, who could be calling Mike Wayne at this hotel? The only person who knew that a Mike Wayne was registered there was the Jane Smith of the preceding night.

In his room he went directly to the telephone and asked for the number on the telephone message. A diffident and young-sounding masculine voice answered.

Shayne asked, “Paul Winterbottom?” and the young man answered, “Oh? Would that be… is this Mike Wayne?”

“Yes.”

“Could I see you right away, Mr. Wayne? It’s terribly important and I can take my lunch hour now.”

“What about?”

“It’s a personal matter.” Paul Winterbottom cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “Pertaining to… a young lady whom you met on the Beach last night.”

Shayne said, “Okay. Where?”

“There’s a quiet little bar on Eighth Street, just east of Miami Avenue. The Dolphin. Could you meet me there in about ten minutes?”

“Okay. How will I know you?”

“I’ll know you, I’m sure,” the young man told him earnestly. “I’ll try to be in a booth near the back.”

Shayne said, “Okay,” again and hung up. He opened his suitcase and threw into it the few things he had brought to the hotel, recalling now that Jane Smith had told him she was engaged to a man named Paul to whom she didn’t dare tell the truth about Henderson.

Had she changed her mind after talking to Shayne last night? If so, maybe he hadn’t handled the situation so badly after all. He felt a lot better about the whole thing as he went down and checked out and drove to the Dolphin bar.

There were a few men at the bar, and only the rear booth was occupied. A young man sat facing the front with a glass of beer in front of him, and he got to his feet with a nervous smile as Shayne walked back toward him. “Mr. Wayne?” He held out a limp hand. “I’m so glad you could come. Let me bring you a drink from the bar. Then we won’t be disturbed.”

Shayne said, “Cognac with a glass of ice water on the side.” He sat down across from the glass of beer. Paul Winterbottom seemed pleasant enough. In his early twenties, sandy-haired and slender. Wearing a well-pressed but cheap cord suit and a white shirt with a dark bow tie. His mouth and chin weren’t strong, but his light gray eyes had met Shayne’s steadily enough, and it was perfectly natural that he would be under a lot of strain if Shayne’s hunch was correct.

He came back with a pony of cognac and a glass of ice water which he set in front of the detective. Then he reseated himself and began turning his glass round and round in a little pool of beer on the table while he stared down at it, and said in a low voice, “I know you must think that Muriel… she told you her name was Jane Smith… was absolutely insane last night. Well, she isn’t. Not really.” He lifted his head to gaze at the detective soberly. “She didn’t mean it, Mr. Wayne. Not actually. She was just on the verge of hysteria. My God, I was appalled when she told me her crazy plan. About sending the advertisement to the newspaper and all. I didn’t have the slightest idea. I thought she was in New York all last week when she was right here in a hotel cooking up that crazy thing about hiring someone to kill her stepfather. Not that the old goat doesn’t deserve killing. He does. But my God, you can’t take the law in your own hands, I told her. And I also told her how damned lucky she was that it was a man like you who got hold of her idiotic ad, and not some hoodlum who would have jumped at the chance of earning fifty thousand dollars.”

Shayne asked, “Did she tell you the whole story?”

“Yes. She telephoned me right after you gave her some good advice and walked out on her. I didn’t even know she was in town, like I say. She was practically hysterical and I couldn’t understand her at first. What hurt most, of course, was that she hadn’t come to me with her problem. Kept it bottled up inside her all this time.” He drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Now that I know about it, she’ll never go back to that house again, I can promise you that. I put her on a plane to New York at six o’clock this morning and she’s not coming back.”