Brett Halliday - Caught Dead

“Baby, you’re beautiful,” she said admiringly.

He kissed her and gave her a quick mechanical caress. “I’m taking the cognac.”

“Leave me the gun?”

“No, I may need it.”

Passing out of the line-of-sight from the wall mirror, Shayne tightened the picture wire near the front door so the glass would fall over again and Lenore would know that the door to the next apartment had been opened.

Downstairs in the parking area, he found an unlocked Renault, with the starter on the floor. One of Shayne’s standard items of equipment was a short length of cable with a spring-clamp at each end, for bypassing a locked ignition switch. A moment later, he was moving.

He located the conspicuous towers of the Centro Bolivar and used them as aiming stakes. He drove east on Bolivar Avenue until he saw the bullring on his right and made the necessary turn to the south. The street he had picked looped back on itself. He returned to the avenue and tried another. This time he had found the road to Valencia.

He followed it into the mountains.

As he approached the farm he noted the pattern of roads and the arrangement of out-buildings. This was the hottest part of the day, and the fields were empty. He turned into the long cypress avenue. Halfway to the house he had to stop to open a stock gate. Then he came to the main wall, where he sounded his horn. A stocky peasant with two sidearms, a pistol, and a machete, came out to look him over from under a broken sombrero.

“I’m a detective,” Shayne said slowly. “Police. Policia. To see the Senora.”

Nothing changed in the man’s face.

Shayne motioned toward the house. “She wants to talk to me.” He pantomimed a conversation. “Very important. Norte Americano. Mejia sent me. The President of the United States sent me. El Presidente.” When none of this had any effect, he said more harshly, “Get out of my way, goddamn it, or I’ll run you down. Felix Frost sent me.”

Either the angry manner or Frost’s name worked. The man retired to open the gate. After getting out of the car, Shayne walked past a chained Doberman pinscher, which bayed at him furiously. He clanged an ornate wrought-iron bell at the front door and entered the building without waiting.

A uniformed maid was on her way toward him. He nodded and walked past, waving away the question she was asking.

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

She went with him, protesting, as he looked into the big front room, then into a formal dining room beyond. The furniture was dark and forbidding.

“Where do I find the Senora?”

The maid tried to hold him, but he brushed her aside. This building, like Frost’s, surrounded a central court. As he came out on one side of this court, a woman in black appeared on the other. The maid, waving her arms, shrieked something in Spanish.

Shayne crossed the courtyard on a raked walk. Senora Alvares was a severe woman, and somewhat on the plump side, tall, with her black hair pulled into a tight knot. She wore no makeup or jewelry.

“I hope you speak English,” he said, approaching. “I don’t seem to be coming across too well.”

“I speak a little English, badly. Who are you?”

She had a deep voice, a heavy accent that at first sounded somewhat Germanic.

“I’m Michael Shayne, a private detective from Miami. I’ve been retained by the Miami News to see what I can do about one of their reporters, Tim Rourke, who’s in jail here. I have some questions. I know it’s a bad time, but they can’t wait.”

“Questions,” she said, putting her hand to her face. “About the death of my husband.”

“And one or two other things.”

She looked him over deliberately, then, surprisingly, reached out to pinch the muscle of his right arm.

“You are a powerful, powerful man.”

She started carefully along the paved cloister. She was wearing high heels, but she was so tightly girdled that the jolts had no sensuous effect. She went in under a stone archway.

Shayne followed. It was a sitting room, as gloomily furnished as the other rooms at the front of the house, but with one splash of color-a geometric painting in light reds and greens. Even before checking the signature, Shayne recognized this as one of the works of her husband’s mistress.

“May I offer something to drink?” Senora Alvares said.

Without waiting for his answer, she drew an open split of champagne from a silver ice bucket and filled two glasses.

“Champagne. I am not celebrating the bombing apart of my husband; this is the only liquid the doctors have let me drink in recent years. To you, sir. That you remain in your present state of health.”

She seemed to want to clink glasses with him, but he avoided that. She lowered herself into a tall-backed chair.

“I see you looking at my painting,” she said. “And it astonishes you, because of the relationship between the painter and my poor husband. Have you met her? A cheap woman, with such fraudulent hair. Unquestionably a talented artist, however, would you not agree? I have owned this painting and others, and I thought to hang them, to show Caracas that for my husband to fall between this woman’s legs was of no consequence to me. But in the end I was too frightened! Until this morning, when I called my little servant and we hung this one, to remind me of my great cowardice. It is valued at twenty thousand bolivars, those few simple shapes. Do you believe it? Some people are taking their Dantes down since the recent events. As for me, I am putting mine up.”

She drank deeply, set the glass on a low chest and looked at him.

“You are the famous detective who always captures the ones who do the murder.”

“Some of the time,” Shayne said. “On this one I’ll settle for getting Tim Rourke out of jail.”

She reached for her glass and Shayne watched her drink. There were two more splits in the ice-filled bucket, and he saw two empties on the sideboard.

“I’ve been talking to Miss Dante,” he said. “She told me about the plan to rescue your husband. I’d like to get your version of that.”

She blinked. “On the whole I think I should imitate your friend Mr. Rourke and stay silent.”

“That’s your privilege. I think I have most of it already, but naturally she told it from her own point of view. I liked her. Very juicy, I thought. That doesn’t mean I believed every word she said.”

The Senora drank, emptying her glass. “Believe every third word. That would be my piece of advice.”

Shayne opened another split and refilled her glass.

“How long have you known about your husband’s association with her?”

“From its beginning, I think. That has no significance. He has announced for many years already that he would do what he pleased, in the matter of who shared his intimate moments. But to become so much in the clutches of a North American was a mistake. His people ask each other, are there no equally juicy Venezuelans?”

“How much of the week did he spend with you?”

“All! There is a mode of behavior to be observed in a Catholic country. So he was with me every day for either dinner or breakfast, rarely for both. Why do you think this important?”

“I’m interested in a diary he was keeping at the end.”

He had noticed that whenever a question bothered or puzzled her, she drank before speaking. She reached for her glass.

“What is meant by the word diary? Something that is written from day to day?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Then you should ask that question of his mistress. Here is where he had his clothes washed, where he read his mail.”

“You never saw him writing in a little book with lined pages?”

She lifted her face from the champagne. “No, Mr. Shayne. I know nothing of any such book of that type.”