Brett Halliday - The Careless Corpse

Lucy looked at the bill, horrified. “And leave you here alone in Michael Shayne’s office?”

“But my dear Miss Hamilton,” he soothed her. “To allow you to go on and keep your engagement. There can be no harm in my remaining to answer the telephone.”

Lucy said, “My salary is quite adequate.” She bit her underlip and glanced at her watch. “I said ten minutes. If you will excuse me…” She unlatched the gate in the low railing and swept past him into Shayne’s private office, leaving the door open behind her.

She crossed to the window and stood looking down at the late afternoon traffic on Flagler Street while she fought to regain her composure, and then turned when she sensed that she was no longer alone.

The man stood on the threshold, hat pressed against his chest and an apologetic smile on his face.

“I regret that I have offended you in my eagerness to reach Michael Shayne. If I knew any other way to contact him…”

“Why don’t you call the Peralta residence yourself?”

His smile faded. He said shortly, “I am the best judge of the manner in which this should be handled. If you would relax and sit down…”

Lucy looked at her watch again. She said, “His appointment was for four-thirty and he is always very prompt. Something important must have detained him. I think I shall have to ask you to leave now, and I will close up the office.”

He took a small, short-barreled gun from the side pocket of his coat and gestured toward the swivel chair behind Michael Shayne’s desk.

“You will sit there, Miss Hamilton. We will wait for the telephone call, and you will proceed as instructed when it comes.”

Michael Shayne was almost exactly four hours late for his appointment with Julio Peralta when he turned Timothy Rourke’s shabby coupe between imposing stone gateposts off Alton Road.

The macadam drive curved gently upward between a double row of feathery Australian pines to the large three-story house dominating several acres of carefully landscaped lawn and tropical shrubbery. There was a cream-colored Cadillac convertible and a long, dark blue limousine parked in front of the house, and Shayne pulled in behind them.

Twin porch lights illuminated a flagstone path leading to wide double front doors beyond a row of white pillars rising two full stories, and the front windows of all three stories showed light behind them.

There was the scent of hibiscus and bougainvillea in the soft evening air as Shayne went up the flagged walk to press the doorbell, and, as he stood there, he could hear the barbaric strains of a Stravinsky symphony coming from a second-floor window.

A maid opened the door for him. She wore a plain, dark uniform with a little, frilly white apron, and she tilted her head slightly to look up at the detective and ask, “Yes, sir?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Peralta.” Over the maid’s head, Shayne could see a wide empty hallway leading back to a magnificent curving stairway. Draperies were drawn back from a wide archway on the right of the hall, and soft light came through it together with the subdued clink of glasses and silverware.

The maid pursed her lips doubtfully and shook her neat dark head. “I’m afraid he couldn’t be disturbed just now. If you’ll give me your name, I’ll see…”

“Michael Shayne. If he’s at dinner, I’ll wait.”

“I’ll see,” she said again doubtfully, and started to close the door as she turned away. Shayne grinned down at her wearily and moved forward over the threshold, suggesting, “You might bring me a drink while I’m waiting.” He moved past her along the hall to a point where he looked through the archway at a long dining table lighted only with a dozen or more candles. Half a dozen people were seated at the table. Only one of them raised her eyes to notice the detective.

She sat at the opposite end of the long table, wearing a low, square-cut frock showing creamy, smooth shoulders and a considerable swell of breasts in the soft light. She had plump, even features, and a lot of dark brown hair piled in tight ringlets on her head. At that distance and in that light, her eyes appeared vacant and unseeing. Not a ripple of interest crossed her face as she looked at him.

The visual encounter with the woman whom Shayne recognized from newspaper photographs was very brief because the maid was almost instantly at his elbow, looking properly horrified and a little frightened by his intrusion, urging him past the archway with a hand on his arm and whispering, “Please! This way, please.”

Shayne allowed himself to be led down the hall and into a large square library on the left. He smiled at the agitated maid and assured her, “It’ll be perfectly all right with Mr. Peralta. I’m late for an important business appointment is all. You might let him know I’m here and that you’ve made me comfortable with a brandy.”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps I could give your card to Mr. Freed.”

“I haven’t any card,” he told her cheerfully, dropping his hat into one chair and sitting down in another. “My business is with Peralta, not with someone named Freed. Martell, if you have it,” he went on calmly, “though I won’t quibble over Courvoisier or Napoleon. With some ice-water on the side,” he added, taking out a pack of cigarettes and lighting one.

The maid hesitated momentarily, then went away. Shayne relaxed in the deep, leather-covered chair and looked about the library with approval. It had very much a lived-in look. The half dozen comfortable chairs were pulled around under reading lamps or in front of windows, an open book lay on the seat of one, and the low table beside another was strewn with three books and the current issue of the Saturday Review. The bookshelves lining two walls were filled with volumes that had not been selected for uniformity of binding and which mostly showed signs of handling.

Shayne was not aware that he was no longer alone until a voice spoke at his elbow:

“Annette tells me you forced your way in and refuse to leave.” It was a tenor voice with a note of grievance in it that sounded habitual. Shayne turned his red head slowly to squint upward through cigarette smoke at the man who had entered noiselessly on thick crepe soles of cream-colored loafers. He wore dark trousers which bulged tightly at plump hips, a white shirt with a neat blue and white polka dot bow-tie and a fawn-colored lounging jacket. He had a plump face and a petulant, rose-bud mouth which stayed slightly open to show the white tips of two protruding upper teeth. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, though he was quite bald with only a fringe of hair at the sides of a darkly sunburned scalp covered with tiny fuzz.

Shayne knocked ashes from his cigarette and said, “I’m waiting for a drink to keep me company until Peralta is free to see me. Don’t tell me there’s no cognac in a layout like this.”

“I’m Mr. Peralta’s secretary. Nathaniel Freed.” The secretary fluttered plump, white hands at Shayne with an expression on his face of shooing off a caterpillar. “I know you did have an appointment with Mr. Peralta this afternoon… made against my advice, to be quite frank… but after you failed to keep it, he made other arrangements. Mr. Peralta is not a man,” Freed went on severely, “to be kept waiting for hours without an explanation.” He did not add, “by a punk like you,” but the idea was implicit in his tone.

Shayne said, “I’ll let your boss do his own talking, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. Most definitely.” Freed’s upper lip quivered under Shayne’s amused gaze. “I am following his instructions in ordering you to leave.”

Shayne said, “I think you’re lying, Bud. I don’t believe he knows I’m here.” He came to his feet easily and Freed took a hasty backward step just as there was the sound of excited footsteps behind him in the hall and two youngsters trotted into the library.