Brett Halliday - When Dorinda Dances

Shayne shrugged, and slowly allowed reason to rule his anger. Rourke was right, of course. La Roma was no place for a private detective to start a brawl over one of the entertainers. He got in his car, gunned the motor, backed out, and drove to the front of the building.

Rourke was waiting with their hats. He got in and breathed a long sigh of relief. “Lawry’s punks were tailing us, all right. Stuck with me until Sluggo let me out the front door.”

Shayne pulled away, racing the engine, his gray eyes bleak with anger. “What did you find out?”

“That all the hired help is afraid of Moran, and they all lay off Dorinda. He hardly allows the kid to speak a word to any of the other performers.”

“She was on the verge of talking,” Shayne grated, “when that guy came up behind me. Who is Moran?”

“Dorinda’s manager — so far as any of them know. But he rides herd on her like he might be something more than that. Delivers her at the stage door every night at nine-thirty and picks her up in his car after the two-thirty show. Nobody knows a damned thing about them — where they live or anything. They disappear together at night and turn up again the next night.”

“Did you find out her last name? Any background?”

“Nope. This Moran showed up with her in tow a few weeks ago. He got her an audition, and she was in. He signed the contract as her manager at two hundred smackers a week. He collects the dough. Her name is Dorinda, and she can dance. There ain’t no more.”

Shayne’s anger gradually subsided, and the car slowed. For a while they rode in silence, then Shayne said, “Anything about a woman being there last night to talk to her?”

“If there was,” Rourke said drowsily, “nobody’s admitting it.”

“Did you talk to Billie Love? Mrs. Davis claims she talked to a singer about Dorinda.”

“Miss Love,” said Rourke, “is the only singer, and she denies it flatly. But hell! She could be lying. People in show business have always been superstitious and clannish as the devil. And ever since Red Channels has been published, half of them are scared to death.”

“Yeh,” said Shayne. “But that wouldn’t affect the entertainers at La Roma. They’re after the higher-ups.”

“What do you think about Dorinda?”

“I don’t — know.” Shayne spoke in a bemused tone, and after a thoughtful silence he said, “She’d have to be quite an actress not to react at all to her own name and to the name of the school she’s supposed to be attending.”

Rourke’s head lolled comfortably against the cushion of Shayne’s new car, and his eyes were closed. “Not if she was forewarned and on the lookout not to be caught up on anything. And that visit from her mother’s friend last night did give her warning that the cat was out of the bag.”

“Right. But — damn it, Tim, I’d swear she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t know any Mrs. Davis. I’d swear she was as honestly surprised as she acted.”

“I agree on that, Mike. But here’s a possible angle. Suppose the woman’s name isn’t Mrs. Davis? She might be as important in Washington as the girl’s parents are supposed to be. Maybe she doesn’t want to get mixed up in any publicity. She may even be the girl’s mother and didn’t want to admit it.”

Shayne carefully went over his interview with Mrs. Davis, recalling her words, her moods. She had actually looked under thirty when he first saw her, but she seemed older, more mature, when she left. He figured ages. She could easily be only thirty-five or six and have a daughter eighteen.

He said, “What are you getting at, Tim?”

“That Dorinda denied a friend of her mother’s was there last night — claims not to know any Mrs. Davis — and that maybe she sounded truthful because it was the truth.”

“My client,” said Shayne, “gave me a card with the name Mrs. Elbert H. Davis engraved on it.”

Rourke rolled his head lazily on the back of the seat. “Anybody can get a card with any name engraved on it,” he scoffed.

“Yeh.” Shayne was driving slowly and thinking fast. “Got time to drop by the paper and help me look up some dope in the files?”

“Sure.” Rourke yawned and added, “There’s a poker game at Jack Farrell’s, but it’s early yet.”

“You’ll make it in time to lose your shirt.” Shayne sped the car forward, and neither of them spoke again until they were in the Daily News morgue and Rourke switched on the overhead lights.

“What do you want, Mike?”

“Whatever you’ve got on Nigel Lansdowne and his family.”

Rourke’s nostrils quivered. “Judge Lansdowne?” He gave a low, impressive whistle.

“Strictly off the record, Tim. If you print a word—”

“What do you think I am?” Rourke demanded hotly. “My God, Mike, if he’s the man—” He paused, his cavernous eyes boring into Shayne’s. “Lansdowne is practically slated to take over as Industrial Administrator of the whole country. One whisper of this—”

“Right,” Shane cut in. “The country needs a man like Judge Lansdowne in that job more than it needs a thousand H-bombs. So, let’s see where we stand.”

Rourke turned away, saying, “We’ll have a hell of a file on him — going back fifteen or twenty years.”

Shayne lit a cigarette, eased himself down on a long table, and puffed smoke toward the ceiling until the reporter returned with a bulging file.

“This is the latest one. From nineteen forty-five. There are two earlier ones just as full.”

“We need to know if he has a daughter named Julia,” said Shayne. “How old she is and what she looks like.”

Rourke laid the big cardboard file on the table and began examining the clippings. Shayne stood beside him, and when he turned over a double-column spread with the photograph of a woman and a young girl at the top, they read:

August 16th, 1949. Mrs. Nigel Lansdowne of Washington, D. C., and her daughter Julia, prior to the popular young debutante’s departure to enter Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, for her freshman year. Mrs. Lansdowne is the wife of Judge Lansdowne who holds the important government position of Federal Security—

“There she is,” Rourke exulted. “Her name is Julia, and this would be her sophomore year at Rollins. Do you like it?”

Shayne had the clipping in his hand, studying the photograph carefully. The girl looked about sixteen, poised and beautiful beside her mother, and there was at least a superficial facial resemblance to the nude dancer at La Roma.

“Damn these lousy newspaper reproductions,” he growled. “Never can tell much from them. Could easily be Dorinda, but — is it?”

“If you paid more attention to the gal’s face,” said Rourke acidly, “or if she had posed for this in the all-together, you might recognize her.”

Shayne snorted. “Is it Dorinda?”

“Hell, I don’t know any more than you do,” the reporter confessed cheerfully. “If you think I was memorizing facial characteristics, you’re nuts.”

Shayne continued to study the picture, turning his attention from the daughter to mother. The woman was tall and slender. She wore a flowered afternoon dress and a wide-brimmed garden hat that shadowed her face. She appeared to be much older than the woman who had visited his office, and there seemed to be no marked facial resemblance. He realized, however, that there was nothing definite or conclusive. He had seen too many newspaper photographs of himself that were scarcely recognizable to accept this as positive evidence that Mrs. Davis was not Mrs. Lansdowne.

“What do you think?” Rourke asked seriously.

Shayne dropped the clipping in the file and said, “Offhand, I think the girl is Dorinda, all right. But I don’t believe that’s a picture of the woman who called herself Mrs. Davis.” He paused, tugging at his left ear lobe. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid it’s too late to call Rollins College and get any answers. Besides, it’s spring vacation. But I want to see Mrs. Davis right away.”