Guilty as Hell

CHAPTER 18

When Jose Despard arrived, looking gray and distraught, Shayne took him to the terrace and explained the ground rules. If they found the answer he wanted by seven in the morning, it was possible that Jose’s adventure with Deedee would never become public knowledge.

“Those pictures you mentioned,” Despard said in his worried voice. “I hope you’ll give me first refusal. If you’d be willing to take a monthly installment, I could work something out.”

“If I have to make a case against Forbes and Candida, everything goes in, the pictures included. So cooperate.”

“Oh, dear. Well, I’ll do what I can.”

Deedee showed up fifteen minutes later. Her arrival created a stir. Despard spilled his drink. Candida blushed slightly. Deedee said a general hello and headed for the bottles. Shayne gave her a Coke.

“That kind of party,” she said in disgust.

When Jake Fitch came in soon afterward, no one noticed. Forbes and his uncle were shouting bitterly at each other.

Shayne’s only contribution was to ration the liquor and see that the disputes stopped short of blows. Time passed. The group broke down into smaller groups and came back together. Between five and six everyone seemed to sag at the same time, and Shayne thought it might be over. Then Jose, brooding in silence on one of the beds, broke out with an accusation that Forbes had never really loved his mother, in spite of having been the most important single thing in her life.

“Did I ask to be?” Forbes demanded. “It was too much! We’re telling the truth now, Jose. I was embarrassed to be with her.”

“Embarrassed! By Cicely? She always had beautiful manners.”

“But she was a bit of a hypocrite, wasn’t she?”

An hour later Shayne remembered his seven-o’clock deadline. Without telling anyone of the change, he set a new deadline two hours later. When he next looked at his watch, it was five after nine. He carried the phone into the bathroom and shut the door on the cord.

First he called Tim Rourke at the News, to ask if he had access to a portable microfilm viewer. Rourke thought he could locate one, and meanwhile he wanted to know what had happened. Shayne told him he could find out by coming to room 1229 of the Hotel St. Albans.

After that, he called the Despard office and asked if the company president had returned from Washington. The plane, he was told, would arrive at the Opa-Locka Airport within the next half hour. Shayne phoned the airport and left an urgent message to be handed to Hallam as he stepped off the plane. Then he began calling Beach hotels.

Fletcher Perkins, president of United States Chemical, was registered at the Deauville but he didn’t answer his phone. Shayne had him paged, and pulled him out of the coffee shop where he was having breakfast.

“This is Michael Shayne,” he said wearily, “and I hope we can skip the preliminaries. Hal Begley was telling you about me last night.”

“Yes.”

“He may have passed on a proposition I made to him-an even trade of a three-month postponement for an agreement to drop all legal action. That was window-dressing, Mr. Perkins, and I hope you haven’t wasted any time thinking about it.”

“I didn’t let it keep me awake. I don’t think I quite know what you mean by the expression ‘window-dressing.’”

His crisp voice made Shayne realize all at once just how groggy he himself was. He made an effort to collect his thoughts.

“I’ve been fired by Despard’s, and I had no authority to make an offer. I’ve been operating since then for my own account. I have a new proposition, and this is the real one. It’ll cost you eight thousand, the balance of the fee I was going to get from Hallam. You were told that Forbes, Jr., supplied the paint folder. He didn’t. He had nothing to do with it, and I’m about to break the news to a few people. If you can come to room twelve twenty-nine at the St. Albans, I won’t have to repeat myself.”

“And why would this be worth eight thousand dollars? I know your reputation. Possibly you don’t know mine. I’ve never yet bought a pig in a poke.”

“This particular pig is worth more than eight thousand,” Shayne told him. “But I’ve been up all night and I’m too tired to haggle. Come over and listen. I’m not asking you for payment in advance.”

“I just may do that, Shayne,” Perkins said thoughtfully. “It seemed to me that Begley looked a little white around the gills. I’m curious to find out why. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Shayne went to sleep with the phone in his lap, waking when someone opened the bathroom door. He returned to the other room as Tim Rourke arrived, weighed down by a heavy piece of equipment. He set it on a bureau and looked around the room with unconcealed astonishment.

“Mike, what have you got cooking here?”

Shayne followed his look, seeing the room and its occupants as they would seem to a newcomer. The men were haggard, unshaven, very much on edge. Deedee was still wearing the dress Shayne had put her into twelve hours before, and that was all she was wearing. Having been more untidy than Candida to begin with, the night had changed her less. Candida had stopped thinking about how she looked hours earlier. Her careful makeup had worn away. Her sweater was partially unbuttoned. She was sitting on a bed, her legs up. Forbes, in a chair beside her, was down to his T-shirt. In spite of the stale air, in spite of everyone’s obvious pallor and fatigue, there was an unmistakable feeling of suppressed excitement in the room.

“We’ve just been killing time,” Shayne told his friend. “The boy has the key to this, but he doesn’t know it. He has to find it himself. Two more people are going to be joining us. Let them in and tell them not to interrupt.”

He returned to his place beside the cognac bottle. Deedee leaned across him.

“This is a real neat party, Mr. Shayne. I’m going to give one for the gang at school. You aren’t still sore at me, are you, about that whip?”

He moved her out of the way. “I want to hear this.”

Forbes was saying angrily, “I know how old Ruthie was. Five years older than I am. Five years-that doesn’t make her a mother.”

Shayne put in, “And she wasn’t anything like your mother either, was she?”

“Not a damn bit. She didn’t look like her, she didn’t behave like her. There was no resemblance at all.”

Jose said, “Cicely did look something like her when she was the same age.”

“And what’s that supposed to imply?” Forbes demanded hotly. “When I went to bed with her I was committing incest?”

“No,” Jose said doubtfully. “Don’t be so touchy.”

Shayne leaned forward, his arm around Deedee’s shoulder so she wouldn’t swing and block his view. “You were embarrassed when you were with your mother. Why?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t-” He held up for an instant, then plunged on. “It was when we were all together, Mother and Dad. There was this strain. With Dad, there’s always so much effort involved in everything he does. Being a father is like a role. He plays the stern father. I play the unruly son. We both know there’s nothing to it. It’s not real.”

“You don’t think he’s really your father?”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s-”

He stopped short, staring at Shayne. Everyone was watching him.

“God, I wonder,” he said slowly.

Jose objected, “Cicely was hardly the type to indulge in illicit relations outside her marriage.”

“Shut up!” Candida snapped. “What do you know about anybody?”

“She was my sister, damn it! There may not have been any passionate love in that marriage, but she knew the meaning of the word ‘duty.’”

“Obviously,” Candida said sarcastically. “From what Walter told me, bringing Hallam into the family was the thing that saved the Despard fortunes. Without him you would have foundered years ago.”

There was a light double knock at the door. Shayne heard it, and so did Tim Rourke, but the others were too preoccupied. Rourke opened the door to admit a stranger, a small neat man with black-rimmed glasses and gray hair parted in the middle. Rourke whispered something to him. He shrugged.

Candida was telling Forbes, “That’s why it was so hard for you to live up to your father’s requirements. That’s why you thought Ruthie and her bunch were so wonderful. You couldn’t invent a group more exactly the opposite of Forbes Hallam, Senior.”

“One time I was home from school on vacation,” Forbes said carefully. “I found her diary in the attic. I didn’t know it was a diary or I wouldn’t have read it. It looked like a plain notebook. After I got started I couldn’t stop. It gave such a picture of the way she lived just after she was married. Then all at once there was a change of tone. She did the same things, but now she was enthusiastic about them. There’d be an entry about a boat ride or a strawberry party with a group of friends. And then on a separate line, on a line by itself, there’d be an exclamation point. Or two. Once, after an entry about a picnic on an island, there were three. I haven’t thought about it for years. It was before I was born. I never did figure out those exclamation points.”

“You didn’t let yourself figure them out,” Shayne said. “Because if you’d counted nine months from one of those exclamation points, you must have known it would bring you down to the day you were born.”

There was silence.

Rourke opened the door again. This time, when Forbes Hallam, Sr., came in, carrying a small suitcase, the tension broke. Hallam looked as tired as everybody else, but in a different way.

He said abruptly, “What’s the meaning of this?” After looking around the room, he snapped, “Put on your shirt, Forbes!”

“Does it matter?” Forbes asked wearily.

Shayne stood up and stretched. “The night’s over. Do what your father says, Forbes. Get dressed. Anybody who wants another drink get it now. The bar’s about to close.”

“Perkins!” Hallam exclaimed, seeing the president of Despard’s chief competitor. “What are you doing here?”

The other shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Ask Shayne.”

Shayne grinned. “He’s trying to make up his mind whether anything I have to say could possibly be worth eight thousand bucks. We haven’t said a word about T-239 since one-thirty this morning, but now we’re about to get back to the dull subject of paint. Have you realized yet, Mr. Perkins, that your company’s been swindled?”

The word dropped like a stone. The Boston industrialist looked at Candida, his face suddenly nasty.

Shayne plugged in the tabletop microfilm viewer. Taking out the little reel of film he had found in the locked box in Candida’s bedroom, he fitted it into place. A strip of reinforced tape kept the film from slipping. Shayne used the scalpel to cut it loose. Rourke helped him thread the loose end into the empty sprocket. He snapped on the light inside the machine and turned the crank.

“There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that T-239 is a wonderful paint,” he said. “But Forbes said something that’s been picking at me for two days. He said there was an earlier version of the paint. It licked the peeling problem, but after a certain amount of exposure to the weather, white paint turned yellow. Probably the formula wasn’t much different from the one they finally used.”

He found the page he wanted. “Despard, you’re the R. and D. man. You remember what went into the first batch. Take a look at this.”

Despard put on his glasses. Bending over the viewer, he peered into its lighted interior and sharpened the focus. His lips moved as he read to himself.

Suddenly he broke into his high, nervous giggle and looked at Hallam.

“You dog, you,” he said roguishly.