Brett Halliday - Caught Dead

“It’s a symbol. Did your husband drink champagne?”

“Diet-Cola.”

“It must have been a pretty rough life for you in some ways.”

“Dreary, so dreary. I don’t bother about the insults, the humiliation. That is the lot of women in this world. But the endlessness. Do women tell you that you have a way of moving that draws the eye? In a film, you would fill the screen. You are the one that the audience would watch. My head is whirling, I think you are pressing me to drink.”

“It’s your champagne.”

“You noticed that I am confused by questions, so to keep my composure I drink before answering.” She demonstrated. “And you keep coming toward me with questions.”

“Did he tell you he’d closed out his Swiss accounts?”

She drank again. “What do you want from me?” She studied him, and it was clear that she was trying to make the images hold still. “You are mentioning my girdle, and yet I know you have no erotic plans. Why do you wish to disturb me-so the wine will take command?”

“I want to look through a few bureau drawers.”

She moved a hand in a gesture of permission. “I have hidden nothing. But I will warn you, he was careful about burning papers. It was his religion. Always, in wash bowls, in waste baskets, the servants and I found ashes. Look. Why should I be afraid from you? Before you go, move the champagne within my reach.”

Shayne called the maid and told her by signs to bring more champagne. She brought two warm splits. Shayne twirled them in the ice water and opened them both to make drinking less complicated.

“Did he have a room he used as an office?”

“You must find it by yourself.”

Her glass tilted. He straightened it for her and she repaid him with a lopsided smile.

He began checking rooms, trying to get an impression of the life these people had led together. At the opposite end of the cloister he found a room with an immense desk, its surface bare except for an elaborate cradle phone. A large portrait of the ex-president leaned against one wall. Another of Lenore Dante’s geometric oils had been hung in its place.

Shayne was going through the desk drawers when he heard a faint stirring within the phone. He lifted the handset gently. A man’s voice was talking in Spanish, protesting, explaining. Senora Alvares broke in. Shayne heard his own name spoken. He listened to the exchange until it ended. The woman was by turns hot and cold, plaintive and curt. The man was sulky. Shayne thought he heard the name Frost thrown up out of the torrent of unfamiliar sounds, but it flickered by too fast for him to be sure.

When good-byes were spoken, Shayne depressed the bar, waited a moment and then dialed the operator. After surviving the usual series of misunderstandings, he was connected with a voice that could respond in English. He asked for a number in Palm Beach, Florida.

While he waited he continued to open and shut drawers, finding nothing to change the impression he already had, that Alvares had been an orderly, apparently bloodless man. A snapshot of the dead president with Lenore Dante had been slipped under the desk blotter. She was in tennis clothes, holding a racket. Alvares, beside her, seemed to be trying to outstare the camera. There was a bulge in his pocket that could have been a gun.

The operator established the connection and a man’s voice said, “Katz Protection.”

“Sam? This is Mike Shayne.”

“Hey! What’s this thing about Tim Rourke? It’s all over the morning paper. Are they kidding?”

“They don’t seem to be. I’m in Caracas now, trying to find out. There’s a Palm Beach angle I’d like you to check out, if you’re not too busy.”

“Everything’s canceled, as of now. Go ahead, Mike.”

“It’s a lady named Lenore Dante. Do you know her?”

“Lenore Dante. It rings a sort of bell. Is she year-round?”

“She runs an art gallery there, and she used to be the girl friend of this Venezuelan dictator, the guy who got blown up in the bombing. I want to know if they’ve spent time together in Palm Beach, and if so, in what kind of style. What did it cost them? Were they asked out as a couple?”

“I know somebody who can tell me,” Katz said. “How soon do you want it?”

“Right away. The other part is harder. I want everything you can find out about her business and her personal finances. How much money has been going in and out? This is important. And if you have to spend money to get it, spend it. I want rumors as well as facts. Has Alvares invested any money in Palm Beach? Does he own any property there? Stay on it right through, Sam, and keep a line open because I’ll be calling you.”

He hung up and continued with his search of the house. He encountered two maids as he proceeded, and told them in English to go on with what they were doing. He worked his way around the square, ending where he had started.

The widow was asleep on a horsehair sofa under a black lace shawl. A lock of hair had been jarred out of the tight knot at the back of her neck, and lay along her cheek. She was snoring faintly.

She had finished another split of champagne. He filled his own glass from the last remaining bottle and sipped it, thinking. He worked his way through the cigarette without reaching any conclusions. Stubbing it out, he looked more closely at the overflowing ashtray, and picked a dead cigar out of the debris. He crumbled a piece of the wrapper and sniffed it. The smell was unmistakable. It was the same kind of excellent Havana Felix Frost had been smoking that morning.

He dropped it in the ashtray. Senora Alvares hadn’t stirred.

He encountered no one on the way out. As soon as he was back in the stolen French sedan the old man trudged out to open the gate for him. It creaked open. Leaning out, Shayne threw him a coin.

Since hearing his own name tossed back and forth between the Senora and the unknown man on the phone, Shayne’s internal radar had been emitting a steady series of blips. He didn’t need a reminder that he was not only a foreigner here, he was a foreigner who was asking unpleasant questions. He started the car rolling as the old man picked up the coin and moved out of the way. Shayne came down into second and hit the accelerator hard, exploding through the gate.

He spun the wheel, accelerating, and heard the shot as he came out of the skid with the gas pedal on the floor. It sounded like a high-powered rifle. His only weapon was a. 38 revolver. The car’s inner wheels ran over a stone curb.

The second shot went into a rear tire. As the tire blew it threw the car back across the driveway where it caromed off a young cypress. Shayne shifted up even before he was sure he had control and began looking for cover.

The car was tossing violently. He was on a rough track leading to a cluster of out-buildings, but from the way the car was bucking he knew he had no chance of making it. In the outside mirror, he caught a flash of a white shirt and a slanting rifle barrel. The rifle came around.

Without hesitating, Shayne wrenched the wheel over, left the road and headed across a patch of cleared ground toward a clump of trees. For that first instant the corner of the wall screened him from the rifleman. The car went up a rise, and then the ground fell away sharply. For a period of time, short but definite, all four wheels were in the air. When they struck, another tire went.

Shayne unlatched the door and let the car shake him loose.

He rolled once and was up, racing for the trees. He held steady for three strides, then jumped. A bullet went into the ground near him.

He broke through the trees and without slackening speed raced down the slope toward the stone buildings. He reached them after a straight, hard run, rounded the corner of a blank wall and leaped into a stable.