Brett Halliday - Murder Spins the Wheel

She hugged herself miserably and glanced around at the waiting police car. “Can I come with you? I don’t want to stay here alone.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She walked beside him, taking two steps to his one. “My father’s a Baptist minister, and the big thing when I was growing up was going to camp meeting in the summer. It wasn’t much of a preparation for this.”

The watchman had gone to bed. Shayne and Theo went aboard the Nugget, picking their way through broken glass and pieces of chairs. The boat looked as though it had been visited by a freakish tornado. The repair bill was going to take most of Al Naples’ winnings on his mare, if he ever succeeded in collecting from Doc Waters. Theo was appalled.

“My God, Mike!”

“A small disturbance of the peace,” he said, looking around with satisfaction.

Working the dented movie projector out of the way so the door would open, he went through into the main cabin. Mirror splinters crunched underfoot. The footboard of the bed had been smashed. Torn bedding littered the floor. Sliding the frame of the broken window aside, he pointed his flashlight down toward the water.

“Aim this for me,” he said, giving Theo the flashlight.

He brushed broken glass off the windowsill, swung out onto the rope ladder and started down. When he was able to reach the light line attached to the bottom rung, he pulled it in hand over hand.

The bait bucket floated toward him out of the darkness. He hoisted it up and carried it back up the ladder. A bucket filled with money is heavier than a bucket with nothing in it but air, and even before he unsnapped the lid and looked inside, he knew by the way it handled that it was empty.

“Mike, please, I can’t stand not knowing,” Theo said. “Please throw me a few crumbs.”

“At one point this was full of bills,” Shayne said. “Somebody beat me to it. I need a drink.”

“I think I saw a bottle in the other room.”

That was where most of the fighting had taken place, and the debris was ankle-deep. Shayne tried the light, but the fixture had been pulled out of the ceiling. The beam of the flashlight moved about the floor, stopping on a bottle.

“Brandy!” she exclaimed.

Stooping, she came back up with a bottle of Courvoisier. Perhaps, Shayne thought, his luck was beginning to change.

“I don’t think we’ll find any glasses,” he said. “Have you had much experience drinking out of the bottle?”

“Absolutely none.”

He unscrewed the cork and offered her the bottle. She took it dubiously, then put it to her lips and took a long swallow.

“It burns!” she said, gasping.

“It’s supposed to,” Shayne said, and drank himself. “Let’s get back to the Buick. I want to try Rourke again.”

He stopped short as he came out on deck. A black limousine zoomed past the mouth of the lane, braking to a stop beside the police car. It looked like the showy Lincoln which Peter Painter had recently talked the city into letting him use as his official vehicle. Theo caught Shayne’s arm.

“Take it easy,” Shayne told her. “The night’s a long way from being over.”

He waited, his eyes hooded, his powerful body deceptively relaxed. He had no more time to waste on Painter tonight.

Watching the Lincoln’s rear door, he said quietly, “Do you see where we’re tied to the dock?”

The Lincoln’s door opened and the sleeve of Painter’s white dinner jacket appeared.

“Throw the lines off the cleats,” Shayne said sharply. “We’re going for a sail.”

“We aren’t!”

Painter and Sanderson and the two cops from the squad car, walking quickly, passed under a street light.

Shayne snapped his fingers. “Move, Theo! Or we’ll spend the rest of the night answering questions.”

She sprang onto the dock. Running to the forward cleat, she cast off. Shayne held the gangway while she cast off the second line and scrambled back on board. He gave the gangway a powerful thrust. Its loose end dropped into the water and the Nugget shot away.

They still had a going tide. In a moment the current caught the boat and they began to turn. Painter’s little group had reached the boathouse. One of the cops pointed to the end of the dock and broke into a run.

“Didn’t they let you go?” Theo protested in a half-whisper.

“He must have had some news from New York. I don’t like to have Painter tell me things I don’t already know.”

The boat was moving more rapidly now. Because of the light from the boathouse, they could see Painter and the rest of his party clearly, but the Nugget was probably no more than a faint shadow.

Painter shouted, waving his fist, “Shayne, come back here! This is your last chance. Come back in and I’ll give you the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT!”

He bellowed the last few words. Grinning, the redhead felt his way forward, using the flashlight only after the curve of the deckhouse concealed him from the dock, and answered Painter by starting the motor. It choked, died, then took hold with a rude, deep-throated roar.

He switched on the navigation lights, swung the wheel and headed for mid-bay. Theo called something from the doorway. He couldn’t hear her over the roar of the motor. He took a long pull from the cognac bottle. After running a few minutes with the tide, he swung into the current and throttled down the motor.

Theo was perched on the corner of the plotting table, lighting a cigarette. She blew out a match and watched him study the radiotelephone, a four-channel unit mounted to the left of the wheel. He picked up the handset and depressed a button. Instantly a woman’s voice, clear but metallic, said, “Yes, sir?”

“I’m glad you’re still up. My name’s Mike Shayne. Can you get me a Miami number?”

There was a moment’s silence. “Mike Shayne,” she said breathily. “Excuse me while I pinch myself.”

Theo gave Shayne an amused look.

“Ouch!” the operator said. “I guess I’m awake. You’d think any number of interesting things would happen on this job, wouldn’t you, but no. It’s mostly routine. Like calling up somebody’s wife to tell her to get the martinis ready.”

He gave her Rourke’s number. He heard the stutter of the dial, then the busy signal.

“Can you try that for me every few minutes,” Shayne said, “and call me when you get it?”

“For Mike Shayne,” she said, “if you’re everything they say you are, I’ll be glad to.”

He hung the handset back with a rueful grin. Theo had taken off her glasses and was tapping them against one nylon-clad knee.

“I hope the line will stay busy while I talk to you,” she said. “Before Harry got on the plane tonight he asked me to marry him.”

Shayne’s expression didn’t change. He checked their heading. There was a lighted buoy to starboard, and he let the wheel fall off a point so the boat would hold the same position against the current.

“What did you tell him?”

“I haven’t told him anything yet. But I can’t marry him. I can’t! I don’t know how to get out of it without hurting him.”

“I’m the wrong person to come to for that kind of advice,” Shayne said. “I’m a friend of his.”

“That’s why you have to help me. Please hear me, Mike. I’m at my wit’s end. Don’t condemn me out of hand, but for the last three months Harry and I, I’ve been his-”

She couldn’t find any word for the relationship that she was willing to use. Shayne put in, “I got the idea from the way you kissed him.”

“Yes. He wouldn’t have asked me to do that if he hadn’t been so shaken. Don’t be so grim, Mike. It wasn’t grim at the beginning. I had a proper secretarial job in an insurance office, and it bored me to tears. The same thing over and over and over, with everybody acting as though I ought to be grateful for being permitted to work for such an imposing company. I met Steve Bass at a party. His father was looking for an executive secretary. My friends all said, ‘Don’t you know who Harry Bass is?’ Somehow that made it more attractive, Mike. He’s a wonderful, interesting man. I don’t have to tell you that. I worked late a few times and he took me to dinner, and inside of six weeks I was-” She hesitated. “Well. I was going to bed with him.”