Brett Halliday - Die Like a Dog

Shayne got a grin on his face as he stalked forward dragging Charles and the shotgun behind him. His one fleeting thought was that Lucy was to be deprived of her wish to be on hand the first time he met Anita Rogell.

When she came close, Shayne relaxed his grip on Charles’ collar and the chauffeur slumped forward with his face to the macadam. Anita dropped to her knees in front of him and crouched there with her hands on his head and cheek, and cried out tearfully, “Charles! Answer me!”

When Charles didn’t answer, she looked up fiercely at Shayne and demanded, “What have you done to him?”

Shayne looked down at the skinned knuckles of his right hand and said, “He’ll be all right, Mrs. Rogell. Do you greet all your guests with a double-barrelled shotgun?”

Charles moved his head and groaned thickly. Anita bent over him again, crooning softly, and he twisted his body and got the palms of both hands flat on the pavement and hoisted himself up to a half-sitting position. His black eyes were wild and the front of his face was smeared with blood, and the red stuff dribbled off his blunt chin in a slow stream. He spoke groggily through mashed lips and a hole where two front teeth had been, “’S Mike Shayne, Nita. I tol’ you…” He choked on a clot of blood and hacked it out of his throat and then slumped down on his side again.

The older woman had reached the scene and Anita got to her feet, ordering her sharply, “Call Dr. Evans at once, Mrs. Blair. Charles is badly hurt. And tell Marvin to come out here if he’s sober enough to help. We must get Charles inside.”

While the housekeeper scurried away toward the back door, Shayne dropped the shotgun and said, “We don’t need any help for that.”

He stooped and got his right arm under Charles’ thighs, put his left behind the man’s lax shoulders and heaved upward with a tremendous effort, lifting the body that weighed fully as much as his own and holding it in his arms with feigned ease while he grinned down into Anita’s eyes and asked, “Where do you want him?”

For a moment there was electric silence between them while their eyes locked. Anita trembled slightly and sucked in her upper lip and there was a look in her eyes like a young child contemplating a forbidden delicacy. She said softly, “You’re very strong, aren’t you?”

Shayne forced himself to swagger forward as though the heavy burden were no effort at all, deriding himself inwardly as he did so with the knowledge that he was acting like a teenager flexing his muscles in front of his first love. “Which way?” he ground out through set teeth.

“Here. Through the back door. You’d never get him up to his apartment over the garage.” She hurried in front of him, and Shayne followed, his knees almost buckling under the strain, but grimly determined to carry it off.

He was halfway across the parking space and was becoming increasingly aware that he couldn’t possibly make it, when Charles fortuitously gurgled something deep in his throat and began making feeble efforts to free himself from Shayne’s arms.

The redhead thankfully lowered his right arm to let the chauffeur’s dangling feet touch the ground, and got Charles’ left arm around his neck where he levered it down over his own left shoulder. The man was conscious enough to support part of his weight on rubbery legs, and Shayne half-carried him on to the back door where Anita was waiting.

“In here.” She went through a gleaming modern kitchen to a small room directly off it fitted up as a comfortable sitting room. The housekeeper was talking excitedly into a telephone in one corner, and Shayne thankfully let Charles down on a chintz-covered sofa where he lay very still, glaring up at Shayne balefully.

Mrs. Blair replaced the phone and bustled forward, saying cheerfully, “Dr. Evans will be right here. Now you just lie easy, Charles, and I’ll get a cold cloth for that face of yours.”

She hurried through the connecting door into the kitchen and Shayne slowly turned his gaze away from Charles’ venomous glare to catch a queer look on Anita’s face as she stood back and to one side, studying him and not paying the slightest heed to the chauffeur.

It was a melancholy, questing look. At once frightened and somehow exalted. Compounded, Shayne thought, of sheer, lustful desire and passionate hatred. Fragments of Lucy’s description of Anita Rogell went fleetingly through Shayne’s mind as their eyes locked for a second time within a space of minutes.

Without taking her eyes from him and without change of expression, Anita slowly licked her pointed tongue out over her short, upper lip exactly like a cat contentedly licking off cream. Shayne almost thought he heard her purr in the silence.

When she spoke it was not in a purring tone. Her voice was throaty and had a little catch in it. “You’re Michael Shayne.”

He said, “I’m Michael Shayne. Does that give your man license to hunt me down like a mad dog with a shotgun?”

From the sofa, Charles uttered garbled words. Neither of them paid him the slightest heed. They were warily measuring each other like antagonists in a duel to the death.

She sucked in her breath and said, “He warned me you would come tonight. To try and dig Daffy up and take her away.”

Beside them and a few feet away, they were conscious that Mrs. Blair had returned from the kitchen and was ministering to Charles with little clucking sounds of sympathy. Neither of them looked in that direction.

Shayne said heatedly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I explained to your chauffeur that I got lost in the dark while fishing, and rowed in to the first shore lights I saw… hoping I could call a taxi to take me home. And he met me with a cocked shotgun.”

“Why did you send your secretary here this afternoon… if not to discover where Daffy is buried so you could come and take her away?”

“My secretary?” said Shayne in feigned astonishment. “Are all of you crazy?”

“She is named Lucy Hamilton, isn’t she?”

“That’s my secretary’s name,” Shayne admitted. “As a great many people in Miami know. What of it?”

“Do you deny she came here this afternoon pretending to be from a pet cemetery so she could find where Daffy is buried?”

“Of course, I deny it,” said Shayne vehemently. “Why on earth would Lucy do a silly thing like that?”

“Because Charles suspects that John’s crazy sister hired you to try and prove Daffy was poisoned by one of us here because she accused us of murdering her brother.” Anita spoke the words calmly and simply, as though they were of no consequence at all.

Shayne drew in a deep breath and shook his red head in what he hoped was a gesture of utter bafflement.

“You’re ’way beyond me. I don’t follow you at all.”

“I did call Haven Eternal after Charles came back from showing Miss Hamilton Daffy’s grave and told me he thought she was up to something else. They have no representative named Lucy Hamilton, and they don’t even send out people representing them. How do you explain that, Michael Shayne?”

Shayne said, “I don’t. Why should I?”

“And then,” Anita went on evenly, “Charles remembered reading in the papers that you have a secretary named Lucy Hamilton. You won’t deny that?”

“Certainly not,” Shayne said heatedly. “This conversation is utterly absurd. Don’t you have a drink handy?”

Anita tilted her head and considered him gravely for a moment. Then she put out her hand and Shayne took it in his and she said almost gaily, “Of course there’s a drink handy… Michael Shayne,” and her husky voice made rich music of the name.

With her hand in his, she led him past the sofa where Mrs. Blair was on her knees still making clucking noises over Charles. They went out of the room and through the kitchen to the wide, vaulted hallway that Lucy had described to Shayne, and some thirty feet down the hall toward the front door and through a pair of sliding doors on the right that stood partially open. It was a small conservatory, and the temperature inside was the same as Lucy had described the upstairs boudoir. Still holding Shayne by the hand, she led him to a gleaming refectory table in the center with a white lace cloth on it and a huge silver tray holding a cocktail shaker with a small amount of liquid in it, two long-stemmed cocktail glasses that had been recently drunk from, a bucket of cracked ice, a heavy, cut-glass decanter, marked creme de menthe and a quarter full, and another, larger decanter, unmarked, but containing an amber liquor that looked to Shayne’s avid eyes very much like long-aged cognac.