Brett Halliday: Murder Takes No Holiday

He was watching her closely. She started. “Surely you don’t think that nice good-looking Paul Slater could have any connection with-”

“Just a shot in the dark,” Shayne said. “He and your husband knew each other?”

“Superficially. We saw the Slaters sometimes at the Yacht Haven dances, or at fireworks displays, that kind of semi-public occasion. Mr. Slater was once kind enough to fetch me an ice at a dance. A most agreeable young man, for an American. I don’t mean to imply,” she said hastily, “but the Americans one sees on St. Albans-”

“You aren’t hurting my feelings,” Shayne said.

He put down his cup on the lee of the teapot, so she couldn’t see how little he had drunk.

“More tea, Mr. Shayne?”

“No, thanks,” he said, standing up. “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Watts, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

“Do have one of my little cakes, at least,” she said. “Dear me, they seem to be all gone. Mr. Shayne, you’re so abstemious you quite put me to shame.”

She struggled forward, but soon gave up the attempt to rise. “I’m going to be most discourteous and let you find your own way out. I feel a little faint. I don’t think of myself as a demonstrative person, but when I speak of Albert, the tears have a way of coming.”

She touched her eyes again. The cross little dog let Shayne leave without barking at him. It seemed to the American that the eyes of Albert Watts’ portrait followed him as he made his way to the door.

Outside, he mopped his forehead and let out his breath in a long, soundless whistle.

Michael Shayne spent the next day like any other tourist. He left a call with Miss Trivers to be awakened early. After breakfast, he phoned for a cab. One of Miss Trivers’ other guests came up to him as he was waiting on the Lodge steps.

This was a tall, sad-faced Englishman named Cecil Powys. He wore a battered tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Heavy-rimmed glasses gave him a somewhat owlish look. “I say,” he said hesitantly, taking his pipe out of his mouth, “Miss Trivers tells me you plan to go bone-fishing on the flats. Would you mind frightfully if I come along?”

“Glad to have you,” Shayne said.

“The price of a charter’s too steep for me to manage single-handed,” the Englishman said. “Divided in two, it becomes possible. Divided in three or four would be even better. I’ll get my impedimenta. Back in a sec.”

“They provide the tackle,” Shayne said.

“I’m not going out to fish. My forte is spear-fishing, actually. Underwater, you know? I’ll explain.”

He was back in a moment with what looked to Shayne like a battery-powered tape recorder.

“The whole thing’s a trifle ridiculous, when you come right down to it,” he said. “I’m reading for a doctor’s degree at Oxford in anthropology. Beastly subject, really. I’m writing my dissertation on Folk Beliefs of the Caribbean. It’s not going too well.” He put the pipe in his mouth and struck a match. “I thought I’d drift around the islands and let the natives tell me stories. But I’m having the devil’s own time getting them to talk. I’m after fishing material at the moment, but it’s like pulling teeth. Perhaps they’ll open up more when we’re out on the water.”

The taxi arrived. It proved to be a little British Hillman. Powys slid in with the ease of long experience. Shayne jack-knifed his long legs awkwardly into the back seat and told the driver to take them to the charter-boat dock at the Yacht Haven.

They divided the charter with two other Americans, a man and wife from Chicago. The native captain quickly showed that he knew his business. He took his boat to the far side of an offshore island, cut his motor and let the current move them quietly forward. He tested the wind, peered into the water, and finally said, “Here is good place.”

Shayne had his first strike within a minute after his bait hit the water. By the end of the afternoon, when they swung around and headed back toward the Yacht Haven, he had a string of eight handsome bonefish, the largest weighing over ten pounds. The Chicago couple had done nearly as well. Powys had spent the day chatting with the captain and his barefooted deck hand, sometimes switching on the recorder to get a story or anecdote in the island dialect. Shayne persuaded him to take a rod just before they turned back, and he caught the biggest fish of the day.

There was a photographer on the dock with a sixty-second Polaroid Land camera. Shayne borrowed the Englishman’s fish and posed for a picture. The photographer made a series of passes over his camera, and took out a large watch with a sweep second-hand. Ten seconds or so passed, and a native policeman strolled out on the dock, dressed in a brilliant blue and red uniform, white helmet and white gloves.

Then Shayne remembered. Half an hour earlier he had heard a big commercial plane pass over. It must have been the Miami plane, bringing the Wanted flier with his picture on it. The fliers probably wouldn’t be posted this soon, but nevertheless Shayne pulled his beat-up fishing cap forward over his eyes and was busy tightening his shoelaces as the cop went past. The Chicagoans converged on the splendid uniform and begged the cop to pose between them. Pulling down his tunic self-consciously, he agreed, and they formed up on either side and waited for the photographer. Shayne straightened, his back to the cop, and started for the end of the dock.

“Your picture, sah!” the photographer called. “Five seconds more.”

“That’s right,” Shayne muttered.

He had to turn, but the Americans had maneuvered the cop around so the boat would be in the background. The photographer gave Shayne the picture and a stamped envelope to put it in. Shayne glanced at it; it showed a tall, broad-shouldered American, his eyes shaded by the long peak of his cap, holding up a handsome twelve-pound bonefish and grinning broadly with pleasure. He was slightly sunburned, the picture of health, and clearly didn’t have a care in the world. This had been perfectly true sixty seconds ago, before Shayne had remembered the other picture of himself, which Jack Malloy had dug out of a newspaper morgue.

He hastily scrawled Lucy’s address on the envelope and dropped it in a mail box across from the cab and carriage stand.

When he presented the string of fish to Miss Trivers for the Lodge kitchen, some of his pleasure returned. The fact was, after a day on the water he felt better than he had in months. He showered, put on clean clothes and had a peaceful drink on the terrace. Shayne had the strong feeling that this would be his last peaceful moment for some time, and he made the most of it.

Miss Trivers’ native chef stuffed the bonefish and served it in a fiery sauce. After dinner Shayne took a pot of coffee back to his own terrace and drank coffee royals while the sun went down in a wild blaze of color. He waited till the first star was out before he called a carriage.

He was wearing a white Palm Beach jacket. He put all his paper money, a few hundred pounds, in a clip in his side pocket and left his wallet, with his private detective’s license, locked inside his suitcase. When he heard a horse’s hoofs on the gravel he went out. On the way down the path, he picked a brilliant crimson flower for his buttonhole. That was all he could do by way of disguise.

Getting into the decrepit carriage, he told the driver to take him to town. The driver clucked to his horse, and it clopped off at a leisurely pace. Shayne settled back, an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, and reviewed the situation.

He had talked with detectives and undercover government agents who as part of their jobs had allowed themselves to be recruited by criminal gangs. Shayne had played a similar part once or twice himself, and he was always surprised at how easy it was to get the confidence of a criminal, who logically ought to be more suspicious than an ordinary law-abiding citizen. All that was usually necessary was to drink in the right bars and look touchy and unsociable. But this took time, and time was something Shayne didn’t have. The Wanted circular had been an off-the-cuff idea, produced under pressure while the pilot of the Miami-St. Albans plane was straining to take off. There were many things wrong with it; it could easily backfire. On the other hand, it could just as easily work. If the police were looking for him, Luis Alvarez, proprietor of the nightclub known as The Pirate’s Rendezvous, would have no reason to think that he was anything else than the circulars said he was-a criminal wanted by the American police.