Brett Halliday - Killers from the Keys

She said truthfully, “I’d go off to any kind of an island with you any time, Michael, if I had to buy the tickets myself. And you know that without asking.” Her eyes twinkled at him to contradict the seriousness of her voice, and she offered an objection to his first answer:

“She did take her horrible sharpened conch shell along with her when she went to meet Shephard after he telephoned.”

“Just like you’d take your lipstick along to an assignation,” Shayne said easily.

“I don’t go to assignations, Michael.”

“Well, if you did go to an assignation. What I mean is…”

“I know what you mean,” Lucy said indignantly. “I just don’t like the way you phrase it. And that’s when Mrs. Shephard followed her from the Bright Spot and left me on the spot with Ralph… and she found them digging up the money together, and fought Sloe Burn over the conch shell and killed her husband with it.”

“Right. But she only got half the money, and she felt she deserved it all. She figured the conch shell might work as well a second time… and so she went after McTige.”

“Michael!” said Lucy suddenly. “There’s a bad discrepancy in your recapitulation of all this. Don’t you remember saying that Mrs. Shephard telephoned McTige’s room just before I reached you there. Why would she telephone him if she had already killed him?”

Shayne said, “Like almost every murderer, that’s where she made her one fatal mistake. It made me suspicious when she immediately knew it wasn’t McTige speaking over the telephone. I disguised my voice, as you know, and his voice couldn’t be very familiar to her. Yet, she knew at once it wasn’t he, and hung up. The reason she knew, of course, was because she had already killed him… and she was phoning his hotel room to establish an alibi for herself. She didn’t expect his room to answer, and wanted to leave a message to prove she had been trying to return his call. When I answered, she was flustered and hung up at once.” He finished his cognac and set the glass down on the low table in front of him.

There was a brief silence and then Lucy said in a small voice, “You’re not really a very good detective, Michael.”

“Admitted. But do we have to…?”

“Because if you were,” she interrupted determinedly, “you would have asked me how I got Baron McTige’s telephone number so I knew where to call him tonight.”

Shayne chuckled deep in his throat as he stood up. He moved over to Lucy’s end of the couch and leaned down to put both hands tightly on her shoulders. “Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions, angel.”

He leaned farther down and put his mouth over hers before she could say anything else.