A Redhead for Mike Shayne

8

Michael Shayne put in a long, hot and frustrating afternoon before he finally got back to his hotel a little before dark that night.

On his return to the office after lunch, Lucy Hamilton had insisted on a detailed account of the warehouse affair, was properly wide-eyed and aghast at his description of the six large-caliber bullets which had missed him so closely, and intensely interested in the Russian weapon that had discharged the bullets in less than a second.

She then tried to twit him good-naturedly about the “dish” whom he had met at Tony’s with Timothy Rourke, but quickly concluded from his short and ill-tempered replies that he had not been impressed by a nationally syndicated writer named Molly Morgan, and that she had no cause to harbor any jealousy toward her.

Then they cleared up a lot of past-due correspondence, and Shayne was about to call it a day and suggest they go out together for a drink when there was an urgent call from an insurance company asking him to go at once out to North Miami where a dowager named Mrs. Drewther-Jones had just reported the loss of an eighty-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet and that it was definitely an inside job and she was positive one of the servants was the thief.

Shayne drove out dutifully to the huge estate on the Inland Waterway near Sunny Isles where he interviewed a big, lantern-jawed woman who had very positive ideas about the ingratitude and the thieving propensities of modern servants, and her meek husband who looked startled and said, “Yes, my dear,” each time she addressed him.

There were eight servants, and Shayne interviewed each one of them separately, patiently and painstakingly, eliciting a great deal of extraneous information about the character of their mistress and the rigors of servitude in newly-rich society, but nothing whatever about the theft of the diamond bracelet.

He was giving it up for the night and was waiting in the huge, panelled library for Mrs. Drewther-Jones to appear so he could report his negative findings when Mr. Drewther-Jones scuttled in to inform him unhappily that his wife (it now appeared her name was Amanda) had apparently mislaid the bracelet herself when she had last worn it a few nights previously, and that the services of a detective were not required after all.

Shayne was not particularly surprised and not really displeased by this denouement, and he assured the apologetic husband that such mistakes often happened and warned him he would receive a bill for the time the detective had wasted.

The little man didn’t even offer him a drink before he left, and Shayne made the long drive back to downtown Miami in the warm dusk increasingly eager to reach the relaxation of his bachelor quarters and the pleasure of the bottle that awaited him there.

He put his car in its accustomed stall in the hotel garage, and entered through the lobby, pausing at the desk to see if there were any messages or mail.

The night clerk was an old and privileged friend and he greeted him with a sympathetic grin. “You look all fagged out, Mr. Shayne. Like you been, maybe, slaving all day over a hot secretary, huh?”

Shayne said reprovingly, “Watch your language, Dick. You know Miss Hamilton.”

“Well, sure. And no disrespect meant, you can be sure of it. She’s a real lady. It was just that, well… uh… you look sort of like you could stand a real restful evening all by yourself, huh? With maybe a bottle of good cognac to keep you company.”

Shayne yawned widely and agreed, “That’s what I came home for, Dick. Nothing for me?” he added, looking past the clerk at an empty pigeonhole above his room number.

“What I’m telling you.” Dick leaned forward and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “You got company upstairs.” His pale blue eyes glistened and he held his hands wide apart and moved them suggestively. “This chick ain’t looking forward to no restful evening, Mr. Shayne. Not if I know my onions.”

Shayne stiffened and his heart started pounding unaccountably. “Did she give any name?”

“Nope. Just said it was important and she’d wait when I told her I didn’t know when to expect you. So I told her to go on up and wait in your place if she liked. You know you always told me that if they were between sixteen and sixty and their faces wouldn’t stop a clock… Well, this one sure ain’t no clock-stopper.”

Shayne said, “That’s okay, Dick.” He turned away from the desk and went to an empty elevator that was waiting, and the operator smiled admiringly as he closed the doors and said, “You sure do pick some honeys, Mr. Shayne. What kinda case you workin’ on this time?”

Shayne said, “I honestly don’t know.” He got out on the second floor and went down the hall toward his door, automatically getting out his key-ring and separating his room-key from the others.

The transom over his door showed a light inside. Shayne hesitated for perhaps ten seconds before inserting the key and turning it and pushing the door open.

Molly Morgan stood up slowly from one of the deep chairs in the center of the room and faced him with her hands demurely clasped together in front of her.

She said gravely, “Let me make a little speech before you throw me out. After that… I’ll go quietly, if you insist.” She drew in a deep breath and lifted her determined chin so the line of her throat was smooth and taut.

“We acted childishly at lunch. Both of us did. I tried to analyze it afterward and I finally realized why I reacted as I did. You frightened me, Mike. What I mean to say is, I frightened myself. And I said to myself, ‘My God, Molly Morgan, you’re thirty-seven years old. Suppose that redheaded bastard did make you get weak in the knees and wet between the thighs. Is that any reason to run from him?’ No, wait a minute,” she went on desperately as Shayne was about to speak.

“There’s more to it than that. A lot more. We’re both good at our own jobs. We’re both damned well determined we’re not going to let that old debbil sex sidetrack us from going on and doing a job. That’s fine. I say let’s go right on being determined. In the meantime there’s one whale of a story here in Miami that I’m going to get. With your help, or without it. Right at the moment, I think you’re on the trail of something important, and I’d like to follow that trail with you. Maybe I can’t help you any. That remains to be seen. Maybe, on the other hand, you’re not so goddamned self-sufficient as you’d like to think you are. Think that over, Mike Shayne, before you throw me out of here and out of your life.” There was the faint suggestion of a desperate sob in her voice when she concluded, but there was no suggestion of it in her defiant stance as she stood there facing him.

He heeled the door shut behind him, and he said, “Molly,” and that was all he could think of to say for the moment.

Then he moved toward her slowly and she stood waiting for him. Her gaze held his, desperately seeking for something in his eyes, searching for something which he could give her and which he withheld from her.

She did not move or shrink away as he stopped in front of her, very close to her, and stood flat-footed and lifted his hands to place them on both of her shoulders.

She stood tall and strong in front of him, the level of her eyes not more than two inches below his, and they were unblinking and demanding.

His fingers tightened on the smooth flesh of her shoulders and he said roughly, “I’m going to kiss you, Molly.”

Her lips curved into a smile that might have been mockery or might have been something else. She said, “And God have mercy on both of us.”

With his hands tightly on her shoulders, he pushed her away so there was at least twelve inches between them, and he demanded angrily, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I think you know what I mean, Mike.”

He shook her then, savagely, and she laughed deep in her throat and she moved her body forward against him so they were standing knee to knee, thigh to thigh, torso to torso, and her softly heaving breasts held their straining bodies apart.

Her red lips parted less than four inches from his, and she said, “There’s work to be done, Mike. You haven’t given me a chance to tell you. There was a telephone call not more than fifteen minutes ago… from someone who said he was Papa Gonzalez.”

Shayne’s fingers slowly released their grip on her flesh. He moved backward, almost imperceptibly, but enough so there was no longer the intimate pressure of flesh against flesh.

Shayne said, “You took a message?”

“I took the call,” she told him evenly. “I told him I was your secretary and he called me Miss Hamilton, and I am to inform you that the gun you are interested in is for sale at a cash price of one hundred dollars at the Liberty Loan Shop in Miami. The address is…” Molly turned away from him and his hands dropped from her shoulders to his sides.

She put her finger on a scrap of paper on the table and read off an address on N. W. Third Street not far from the railroad station. She turned back and leaned her hips against the table and put her hands on both sides of her to support her weight, and smiled up at him happily and said, “I knew my intuition was right and that I’d do well to stick by you, Mike Shayne. Shall we go out to the Liberty Loan Shop and find out what’s what? Maybe,” she added gently, “you’ll be able to pick up a dozen at the bargain price of a hundred dollars each. That would be a clear profit of… what? Almost five thousand dollars, isn’t it? Quite a sum for an indigent private eye who doesn’t get a check from Washington every month.”

Shayne grinned faintly and said, “Suppose you go to hell, Molly Morgan?” He moved around her to the table and looked down the cognac bottle and the two coffee mugs still sitting there from breakfast. He circled the table toward the wall liquor cabinet, saying, “I’m going to pour myself a drink of cognac before taking off. Do you prefer good clean American bourbon?”

She shuddered and said, “I hate the taste of it. That’s one reason why I got out of Tony’s when I did today. I was afraid I’d have to drink the one I ordered. Right now, cognac will be wonderful.”

Shayne came back with two wine-glasses and filled them both. “Why don’t you settle down here and relax,” he suggested. “I’ll take a run out to Third Street and see what’s what. Then maybe we can have dinner together, and… who knows? I still haven’t kissed you, Molly.”

“I’ve got a rain-check on it,” she assured him happily, lifting her glass and boldly downing half of it while her eyes watched him over the rim.

“But I’ll run out to Third Street with you, if you don’t mind. I’m as much interested in the source of those guns as you are.”

“Suppose I do mind?”

She said composedly, “I’ve got a rented car parked outside. Let’s not fence with each other, Mike. I had the address of the Liberty Loan Shop ten minutes before you got here, and I played fair, didn’t I? I could have gone out there on my own and never told you about the call I intercepted. Damn it, don’t I get any credit?”

“All right,” Shayne agreed lightly, “you get full credit, Molly. Bottoms up, and then we’ll go buy a Lenski twelve-oh-seven, and if you’re a real good girl I may get you an extra one to give to your boy-friend at the C.I.A. Eddie? Was that his name?”

Molly Morgan giggled and stuck out her tongue at him. Then she finished her drink with a flourish and ceremoniously set the glass on the table upside down, saying dubiously, “I suppose that’s the kind of bottoms-up you meant.”

“For the moment,” Shayne told her, “that’s what I meant. Let’s hope there’ll be time for another sort later on.” He tossed off his drink and set his glass upside down beside hers, then took her arm firmly and hurried her toward the door.