Brett Halliday - Shoot to Kill

The cars parked in front of the building were uniformly gleaming late models in the medium-priced field, and Shayne maneuvered into a parking place between two of them with an increasing feeling of being an intruder in a setting specifically designed for quiet and comfortable living by middle-class people who normally lived out the full span of their lives untouched by violence or by tragedy.

He went up the walk toward the arched side entrance and found a row of mailboxes outside of wide double glass doors that stood invitingly open to a corridor carpeted from wall-to-wall and leading to a wide, curving stairway at the end.

The number under the Larson mail-box was 3-B. He could see no button to push, so Shayne went through the open doors and saw that the first apartments on either side were numbered 1-A and 2-A. He continued past 3-A and 4-A, and climbed the stairs and found 3-B on his right at the top. The door was closed, but the door directly across the hall stood half open and the muted sound of music came through it. That was the only sound to be heard as he pressed the button beside the closed door of 3-B. He took his hat off as he waited, and got a pleasant smile ready, and wondered what the devil he was going to say to Mrs. Larson when she opened the door.

He waited a full minute without hearing any sound from within the apartment, and was lifting his hand to press the button again when a pleasant voice spoke from behind him, “The Larsons aren’t home if that’s who you’re looking for.”

Shayne turned his head and saw that the door of 4-B now stood wide open and the tall figure of a woman was framed in the opening.

She was in her late thirties and she was bare-footed and bare-legged. She wore a short, peasant skirt of bright green cotton material that came just to her knees and a tight yellow blouse of sheer silk that showed the full contours of unbrassiered breasts even at that distance. She also wore a plenitude of crimson lipstick on her wide, full-lipped mouth, and an open, welcoming smile on her face. Her voice was throaty and warm, and it was welcoming too in a cheerful woman-to-man sort of way, so that it managed to be inviting without being brazen.

The smile Michael Shayne had prepared for Dorothy Larson came easily to his rugged face in response to hers, and he turned slowly, asking, “Do you have any idea when they’ll be home?”

“He’s never in till late… midnight or after.” She leaned her left shoulder comfortably against the door frame and rested her right hand lazily on her hip. “But if it’s Dottie you want, I expect she’ll be coming along any minute.” She paused, appraising him openly with eyes which narrowed a trifle and made pleasant crinkles at the corners, letting him sense that she liked what she saw. “You could wait in here if you like.”

Shayne said, “I would like.”

She did not stir from her stance in the doorway as he took two steps across the hall toward her. He stopped a foot in front of her and she straightened up and dropped her arm to her side, and in her bare feet her eyes were not more than three inches below the level of his own. He could smell whiskey on her breath, and there was the bold darkness of nipples behind the sheer yellow fabric of her blouse.

Studying his face quizzically, she worked her full crimson lips as though she were tasting something good, and she tilted her head slightly and asked, “What would you like, Red?”

Then she laughed quickly and happily, very much like a little girl’s laugh, and she linked her left arm in his and turned and drew him inside the apartment, and said gaily, “Don’t answer that. You came to see Dottie. But I will give you a drink on account of I want another one myself and I make it a strict rule never to drink alone… that is if there’s anyone else around to drink with. So, what’ll you have, Red?” She released his arm from hers and turned her back and padded toward the kitchen in her bare feet, moving hips and shoulders sinuously, and Shayne called after her, “Anything. Brandy if you happen to have it.”

She disappeared through the open doorway and her voice floated back with a trace of indignation in it, “Of course there’s brandy… if I can find it. Rest your feet while I dig it out.”

Shayne found himself grinning appreciatively after her as he stood there in the center of her living room, and he hoped Dorothy Larson wouldn’t show up too soon.

He got out a cigarette and lit it, and looked around him slowly. It was a pleasantly furnished and comfortably cluttered, feminine-looking room. The long sofa along one wall was covered with gold brocade and littered with small soft cushions in bright contrasting colors that managed not to clash. There were end tables with big utilitarian ashtrays on them, and two comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs ranged against the wall opposite the sofa. The muted music he had heard through the door was coming from a stereo set with twin speakers that were detached from it and set at right angles in different corners of the room. The music was not familiar to him, classical, he thought, probably one of the three B’s. A door at the end of the room directly in front of him opened onto a bedroom with a big double bed that was unmade and had two rumpled pillows at the head of it.

Shayne liked everything he saw as he stood there and heard clinking sounds of glass against glass in the kitchen, and he frowned and tried to analyze the warm feeling of contentment that welled up inside him. It was definitely a woman’s place, and yet it welcomed his masculinity and made him feel immediately wanted. He did not know why that was, or how the woman in the kitchen had managed it so well, but he did know instinctively that she had managed it, not consciously probably, but as an expression of herself.

He went to one of the deep chairs and sat down as she came back into the room carrying a glass in each hand. In her right hand was a big, bulbous brandy snifter with at least four ounces of amber fluid in the bottom of it. The other glass was tall, with tinkling ice cubes submerged in a dark brown mixture which appeared to be about three-quarters bourbon and one-quarter water.

She stopped in front of him and extended the snifter, frowning anxiously. “It says Napoleon V.O.P. on the bottle, and it smells okay. If you’d rather have something else…?”

Shayne took the big glass and inhaled the fragrance and assured her, “This is wonderful.”

She turned across the room from him and curled up on the sofa with her bare feet under her and took a long, sturdy drink from her own glass. She blew out her breath strongly and looked over her shoulder at the open door into the corridor, and said, “We leave it open, huh? So you’ll know when Dottie comes.”

Shayne shrugged and said evenly, “I do want to see her. In the meantime…” He lifted his glass and looked across the room at her over the top of it. “… here’s to you.” He tilted the glass and drank deeply.

She was looking at him with her eyes wide and probing as he set the glass down on the table beside his chair with a happy sigh. “You’ve got me puzzled, Red. I can’t figure you out. You and Dottie…?” She paused, delicately. Speculatively.

“Do you know her well?”

“Dottie? We’ve been next door neighbors for three months. You a friend of that squirt of a husband of hers?”

“Ralph?” Shayne shook his head. “I never met him.” He paused and added deliberately, “I understand he’s the jealous type.”

“Of her?” She widened her eyes and leaned back against the sofa, stretching her bare legs out in front of her languidly, clasping both hands behind her neck and thrusting her torso upward so that up-thrust nipples were clearly and provocatively defined, and her steady, wide-eyed gaze challenged him to ignore them… to ignore her… to be unaware of the whole hunk of lush femininity she was flaunting in front of him.