Brett Halliday - Murder Spins the Wheel

“You don’t know Vince,” she said unhappily. “He’ll spit in your eye.”

“That’ll be too bad,” Shayne said briefly. “Where is he, on the boat?”

He turned to get out. She caught his sleeve.

“Wait. He’s on the boat, yes. It’s ours. Some friends are letting us use their dock. We needed a captain, and Vince is good with boats. I said he could have some guests aboard tonight to celebrate Ladybug’s success. Let me talk to him first.”

“No, you go back to your own party.”

“I must,” she said distractedly. “But don’t you see, this has to be put to Vince in a certain way. He’s a proud boy. If you walk in, big, masculine, competent, you’ll antagonize him. With his friends egging him on, he’ll have to defy you. And he can be so stubborn. I know! You won’t come away with either money or information. If you’ll just give me a minute I know I can persuade him. I just have to repair my lipstick first.”

Shayne took the lipstick out of her hand and dropped it into her open bag. “Al’s going to want to know why you’re spending so much time in the ladies’ room. I needed to find Vince, and you’ve cooperated nicely. Goodbye.”

She brought her hands together in an imploring gesture. “Don’t tell him how you found him, I beg you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Al isn’t trying to take over from Harry Bass. I’d know, really. We’re together half the day, for hours and hours and hours.”

“How much have you been seeing of Vince?”

“Oh, God, not enough! By plotting and planning and not thinking of anything else at all, I manage to meet him three or four times a week.”

She added in a low voice, “Don’t judge me. I’ve tried to break it off, but I can’t. I know it’s entirely physical. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been able to-” She broke off.

“You’ll outgrow it,” Shayne said, getting out of the car. After slamming the door he said casually, “If you only see Vince a few times a week I don’t suppose you know what he’s been doing for Doc Waters?”

Her eyes skipped away. “Nothing, I hope. I don’t trust that man.”

“Is Vince using narcotics?”

Her eyes opened wide. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. “No,” she whispered. She shook her head violently. “No! He keeps himself in such wonderful condition, he takes such pleasure in his body, he wouldn’t do anything to damage it. What put that terrible thought in your mind?”

“A girl at the Hotel Gloria wants to put him in jail. She gave me a reason, but it didn’t sound good enough. If he’s getting started on a habit, a jail sentence might break it up.”

“You’re wrong.”

Seeing Vince as little as she did, she shouldn’t have been that sure, Shayne thought, but he let it go.

“If you want to be helpful,” he said, “go to bed soon, take the phone off the hook and keep your husband occupied. I don’t want any conversation between him and Harry Bass before tomorrow.”

He nodded and walked away. She called after him anxiously, “Be careful what you say to him. He’s so touchy.”

The moment Shayne stepped on the planking of the pier a voice spoke from the doorway of the boathouse.

“Wait a minute there, mister. Where do you think you’re going?”

A short, muscular man, wearing a blue boating cap pulled over his eyes, stepped out of the doorway and put himself between the detective and the bay.

“Is this private down here?” Shayne asked.

“Damn right it’s private,” the man said belligerently. “It’s a private island, practically. This is a private dock, private boats, and that’s a private party. No crashing tonight. I’m making no exceptions.”

“I’m not interested in the party,” Shayne said mildly. “I just want a couple of words with Donahue.”

“No exceptions. If you want to leave a message for him I’ll see that he gets it.”

“The trouble is, I didn’t bring a pencil,” Shayne said.

He gave the bill of the man’s boating cap a hard yank, jamming it down over his eyes. The man groped out with one hand while wrenching at the cap with the other. Shayne spun him around and sat him down hard in a wooden arm chair, which rocked back on its rear legs and came to rest against the front of the boathouse.

When the watchman forced his cap up from his eyes, he found the powerfully built redhead towering above him, his gray eyes cold in the dim light from the interior of the boathouse.

“Well, hell,” he said weakly. “If you’re going to get hard about it.”

“Who are you working for?”

“Various ones. Captain Donahue tonight, he gave me a ten-spot to keep out the crashers. He says every time he gives a party the whole public piles in on him. But I didn’t undertake to get my face bashed in for ten bucks. A good big man can always take a good little man, and you can tell him that if he asks you.”

“How long have you been sitting here?”

“Right along. And there wasn’t no big rush of people. You’re the first.”

Shayne took out his cigarettes and shook one out for the other man. In the flare of the lighter, the watchman’s face was alert and inquisitive. The redhead closed the lighter after starting a cigarette himself.

“I’ve been looking for Donahue all over town. Has he been aboard all evening?”

The watchman, like most people in solitary jobs, was glad to have a chance to talk. “They all have, the whole kit and kaboodle, and by the sound of it, they ain’t going to be leaving under their own locomotion. It’s been going on since the cocktail hour. And they were soused then. Captain Donahue, he had a breath on him you could start a swamp fire with. That’s why I didn’t feel like putting up more of a scrap. Why spill any blood when he won’t know the difference anyway? So go ahead.” He waved his cigarette. “Go on in.”

Shayne breathed out smoke. “What time do you mean by the cocktail hour?”

“Say half past five? And you know they’ve got young girls in there? I’m no puritan myself, I like a snort as well as the next man, but one thing I do hate to see is a girl soused under the age of twenty-one. They don’t know what they’re doing. They keep pouring it down, and the next thing you know-one more unwed mother. Now I’m not going to say for sure that’s what’s been going on, but if you go by the screeching they surely to goodness ain’t been playing scrabble.”

“Did the noise keep you awake?”

“That’s not the problem. I suffer from insomnia. That’s why I hire out for night work.”

“Would you be willing to take an oath,” Shayne said, “that Donahue’s been on that boat every minute since five-thirty?”

“I would,” the watchman said promptly, adding in alarm, “What do you mean, an oath? I never took an oath in my life.”

Shayne left him worrying about it. The first boat was a great mahogany monster from Newport, Rhode Island. The next berth was empty. Then came a fifty-foot ketch, and finally the Nugget, which sounded more like the name of a gambling house than a boat, out of Chicago, Illinois. Al Naples was not a man to go cruising in anything small. The Nugget sat high in the water, and underway probably carried a crew of three. Shayne went up the gangway. Most of the lights were on except on the stern. When a girl laughed, Shayne went in that direction.

“Do that some more,” a voice said in the darkness.

Coming around the curving end of the deckhouse, Shayne smelled the harsh, penetrating reek of marijuana. He saw a glowing spark at shoe top level.

“Vince?” he said.

There was a light fixture on the jutting overhang. Shayne found the switch, on the cabin wall near the companion-way. His foot touched something soft and a girl’s voice said, “Watch where you’re walking.”