Brett Halliday: Murder Takes No Holiday

He retrieved it and looked for a match.

“You really are getting absent-minded,” she said gaily. “You let another cigarette go out on the table. Before we go looking for your philanthropist, I’m going to break you of the habit of putting a cigarette down wherever you happen to be.”

He muttered something. She leaned forward for the light, holding the cigarette between two fingers. Her nostrils flared slightly.

“Aren’t you using a new after-shaving lotion, darling?” She sniffed again and said judiciously, “I don’t know if I approve or not. It’s pretty strong for a man.”

“Just trying it out,” Slater said, leaning forward so she couldn’t see his face. His hands felt damp, and he wiped them on his shorts.

She put the tip of one finger against a mark on his neck, inside the open collar of the sports shirt. There were several slightly irregular indentations there, that might have been made by teeth. Again her nostrils flared. She was frowning slightly.

Airplane engines were throbbing high in the sky. Slater looked nervously at his watch.

“That must be the plane from Miami,” he said. “It’s late.”

Getting down from the horse-drawn carriage that had brought him from the airport, Michael Shayne was greeted by a small English lady who could have been any age between thirty and fifty. She wore a long-sleeved print dress, buttoned to the neck.

“You will be Mr. Shayne,” she said firmly. “How d’you do? I am Miss Trivers, your hostess. Welcome to Hibiscus Lodge.”

She put her small hand briefly in Shayne’s. He found her grip surprisingly strong.

“I’m delighted you decided to come to us, Mr. Shayne,” she continued, “and I do hope we can make your stay pleasant. If you will come with me I’ll show you your cottage.”

She took him through a well-kept garden, along a path that led to the pink stucco cottage Lucy had picked out from a portfolio of pictures in the Miami Beach travel agency. It was pleasantly situated on a rise overlooking a crescent of beach. There were other cottages near it, each with its own patch of lawn and its own garden screening it from the others. The sand below was very white, dotted with clumps of low-growing palms.

The Englishwoman showed him around the cottage, ending where they had begun, in the living room.

“Fine, fine,” Shayne told her. “All as advertised.”

The carriage driver had put the redhead’s battered suitcase in the bedroom. Shayne pulled out a handful of the British coins he had been given at the airport and held them out to Miss Trivers, who sorted out the proper amount for the fare. The driver was dissatisfied with the size of the tip, but Miss Trivers gave him a crisp nod and he went back down the path, grumbling.

“Now let me see,” she said. “What else should I tell you? Dinner’s at seven. After you get settled in, why don’t you come up to the Lodge and let me give you tea?”

Shayne grinned. “Tea’s never been my favorite drink. I think I’ll skip it, thanks. I may want to go out fishing in the morning. Wouldn’t your local paper have a list of charter outfits?”

“Right here, Mr. Shayne.”

The current issue of the Island Times was laid out on the coffee table, alongside fresh copies of the popular U. S. weeklies. Miss Trivers, picking it up, glanced at the front-page headline and made a clicking sound with her tongue. She turned the pages until she found the charter-boat ads.

“These are all quite reliable, I believe,” she said. “I am not a sportswoman myself.”

Shayne took the paper. “I see you people have had a murder.”

“Well,” she said grudgingly, “yes, we have. But I hope you won’t think such a thing is an everyday occurrence with us. It’s anything but.”

“That’s all right,” Shayne said, the corners of his mouth twitching. “People get murdered now and then in Miami. I’ll feel more at home.”

She shot him a sharp look and said severely, “Now Mr. Shayne. You’re pulling my leg. It isn’t a joking matter for us, I can assure you. I wish there was some way it could have been kept out of the papers, but I suppose-freedom of the press and so on. Our economic health is so dependent on tourists that something like this can have an extremely deleterious effect. There’s been a terrific falling-off in the nightclub business. People are reluctant to go into the Old Town after dark, which is just plain ridiculous, in my opinion. You’re as safe there as in your own sitting room. I know you won’t have any such hesitation, Mr. Shayne,” she said, glancing at his rangy, powerfully built frame.

“I came down for a rest,” Shayne said, “but I suppose I can always rest in the daytime. I hear you’ve got some night-spots that are well worth seeing.”

“Oh, we do!” she assured him. She touched her back hair. “Not that I frequent them myself. My dancing days are long since over. But if I took it into my head to go dancing, I’d go, murder or no murder.”

“And if your cops are anything like ours,” Shayne said, his face under control, “they’re probably thick as flies in that neighborhood, so how could anything happen?”

“My point exactly!” Miss Trivers exclaimed. “I was saying precisely the same thing to some friends this afternoon. We don’t have an elaborate police establishment, never having had much call for one, but they’ve all been taken off traffic duty and put to work patrolling the native quarter. The old story of locking the barn after the pony has been stolen. But I’m standing here gabbling, and you must be dying for a wash and a change.”

“No, I’m interested,” Shayne said. “This must have given people plenty to talk about.”

“They can’t talk about anything else! It’s so unusual, you see. I think we must be one of the most peaceful spots on the face of the entire globe. Oh, I don’t say there isn’t a spot of trouble sometimes on Saturday nights, when our young people take on a bit too much rum and get to dancing those rather uninhibited native dances. But that’s a matter of sheer animal spirits, and I, for one, am all against bottling them up so they explode in other ways. Those who are complaining the most now never stop to think that the island would be a pretty tame place without our black people. I’ve heard some pretty drastic proposals in the past week, including a nine o’clock curfew, if you please. Well, do tourists come down here solely to enjoy our sun and our scenery? I beg leave to doubt it! They would leave us in droves.”

“You think he was killed by the natives?”

“There’s not much doubt about that, I’m afraid. But here is the question, if you really are interested-”

Shayne assured her that he was, and she went on, “Some of the Britishers are saying that we must look on this senseless murder as the first outbreak of nationalist feeling, because why on earth would any native in his senses murder poor Albert Watts except inasmuch as he was a symbol of the ruling race? And if you knew Albert, incidentally, you’d realize that they picked themselves a pretty poor symbol.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes indeed. The Wattses live almost across the way, and we British tend to be somewhat clannish on foreign soil, I’m afraid. Daphne Watts, with all her faults, is a great friend of mine. Well, there’s talk in certain quarters that we ought to organize a citizens’ militia, and strap pistols around our waists, a la Kenya, when the Mau-Maus were on the rampage, otherwise we’ll all have our throats cut while we sleep. I say nonsense. Let’s keep our heads. Leave the matter to the police, and first and foremost, the native police. I’ve been on this earth long enough to know that the truth about people will sometimes surprise you. It’s true that Albert Watts seemed the most ordinary man alive, but I say that somebody, I don’t know who and I don’t know why, had a good reason for wanting him dead.”