Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 2

The next thing Shayne knew, he was being hauled over the side of a small power-boat by several pairs of hands. He commanded his muscles to help, but the command didn’t go anywhere.

His mouthpiece had been wrenched aside, and he was breathing ordinary uncontaminated air, quite a change from what he had been getting below the surface. There was a shattering pain above and between his eyes.

Tim Rourke’s voice grunted, “Heavy bastard, isn’t he?”

“All together,” a girl’s voice said. “One. Two. Three.”

Again Shayne tried to move his legs. Again he could get no response. He went on breathing, but it took all his strength.

At the second count of three, his rescuers heaved him in over the low freeboard. His head bounced on the hard deck of the after cockpit.

“Turn him over!” the girl ordered sharply. “Hurry.” Hands hauled at Shayne’s shoulders. Lying on his back with the sharp flanges of the air tanks cutting into his shoulders, he stared up at a pelican wheeling above the boat against the sharp blue of the sky.

The blue hurt his eyes. He closed them for an instant, opening them in alarm to find himself being attacked by the same naked blonde he had followed up from the depths. She kissed him passionately, forcing his mouth open with her tongue. Her breasts pressed against him. Her fingers were caressing his face.

Lifting one heavy hand from the deck, he prodded her shoulder. It was probably impolite to mention it, but he had a headache. He also wanted to get out of this cumbersome gear.

“He’s breathing,” Rourke said.

The girl sat back. The pain in Shayne’s forehead slackened slightly and he was able to remember her name.

She wasn’t a figment of his imagination after all. She was a real girl named Kitty Sims. She owned a simple, modern beach house on the Key, and Shayne, his friend Tim Rourke and a second girl named Natalie something had been invited down for the day. Kitty had loaned the detective her diving apparatus so he could go down and look at the coral.

“Boy!” she said fervently.

Shayne rolled his head and looked at the other girl, a pleasant brunette in a one-piece yellow bathing suit. She shook her head, smiling. Rourke, the lank, bony reporter who was Shayne’s closest friend, was standing above him, all knobs and angles in the skimpiest of bathing trunks. He raked angrily at his untidy hair.

“I thought you were supposed to know how to dive, for Christ’s sake. Unless that was all a dodge to get some mouth-to-mouth respiration? There are easier ways.”

Shayne tried to lift his head. His face contorted with pain and he let it fall back.

“Get this stuff off me,” he said hoarsely.

Kitty worked the face-plate over his forehead and unbuckled the straps. The other girl unfastened the long ungainly flippers.

“Mike Shayne,” Kitty said softly, “you’re a hard man to convince.”

Her long wet hair framed a face which, at the moment, was unnaturally pale. Her blonde bangs came down almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes were gray and direct, her cheekbones well marked. She shivered. Drops of water sparkled on her lashes.

All at once Shayne remembered how she had lured him to the surface when he had wanted to go on with his suicidal dive. His lips moved in the beginnings of a grin.

Realizing abruptly that he was conscious again and she was kneeling on the deck beside him with absolutely nothing on but flippers, her hand flew to her mouth. “Natalie, for heaven’s sake throw me that towel!” The other girl, smiling, whipped a large striped towel around her. Kitty worked herself into it and knotted it under her arms. A flood of color had rushed to her face.

“I thought there was something missing,” Rourke said. “I didn’t want to say anything.”

Kitty pushed back her wet hair defiantly. “Well, damn it, I tried wrestling with him. That didn’t work. He outweighs me.”

Rourke gave a hoot of laughter. “Don’t worry about it, baby. You’re a genius. That’s the one sure way to manage Shayne.”

“Shut up,” Kitty said, trying not to smile. “Mike, how do you feel?”

“I’ve felt better.”

Coming to his elbow, he looked for the cognac bottle. He knew there was one there, because he’d had several belts before deciding to try Kitty’s aqualung. He motioned impatiently to his friend, and Rourke poured him a slug of cognac in a paper cup. Shayne rolled the first mouthful around in his mouth to kill the taste of the bad air. Then he emptied the cup in one long pull.

He looked up at Kitty. “I couldn’t understand how you got down that deep in a free dive. I thought I was down to fifty. It couldn’t have been anywhere near that.”

“Goodness no. You were at about ten. I was fooling around with the snorkel, and I knew right away something was wrong when you swam away from the rope. And then that crazy somersault. You know better than that.”

“Euphoria of the deep,” Rourke said, reaching for his highball. “I wrote a Sunday piece about it once. Of course this is the first time I ever heard of a case at ten feet. Well, we had a happy ending. Drink up, friends.”

There was something evasive about his manner, but Shayne put it down to the fact that his own hold on reality was still somewhat shaky. He sat up, checking himself as another stab of pain struck him between the eyes. Kitty offered to help, but he wanted to see what he could do by himself. He made it to a canvas deck chair and settled into it with a sigh. Rourke poured him more cognac.

“That’s enough diving for one day,” Shayne said. “How long was I in the water?”

“Three or four minutes,” Rourke said.

“Three or four minutes!” The detective made a wry face. “Kitty, when we get in, let’s talk to the man who sold you that air.”

She was busy stacking brightly colored pillows against a stanchion. She leaned back against them and lit a cigarette. She and Rourke looked at each other. Rourke puffed out his breath and shrugged.

“We might as well tell him. At this rate he’ll figure it out himself in another minute.”

“Figure out what?” Shayne said.

Kitty frowned at her cigarette. “Mike, I’m always careful about where I fill my tanks. I know you’re thinking about carbon monoxide, but I go to a place in Marathon that makes a big point about being absolutely kosher. Their compressors are water-cooled. There’s no chance of oil vaporizing, which I’ve always heard is the big thing to worry about. And if it was monoxide, it wouldn’t take hold that soon, would it?”

Shayne’s eyes narrowed. “It depends on the concentration. It would have to be pretty high.”

She took a sip of the gin drink Rourke handed her and said brightly, “There’s no point in wondering about it. There must be three-quarters of a tankful left. We can have it tested and find out for sure. Anybody hungry?”

Rourke dropped into a deck chair and pulled a tattered straw hat forward over his eyes. “Get a little sun first.”

For a moment no one spoke. Shayne took a deep breath, wishing perversely that he were back beneath the surface, where, although he had had a serious problem, he hadn’t known it. Here he was back in the real world.

“It begins to seep through,” he said. “There was more to this invitation than sun and a few drinks and an afternoon on the water.”

“I’m afraid so,” Kitty murmured.

Rourke said, “Now don’t get hard-nosed, pal. The girl’s in a jam and we’ll tell you about it when you feel better.”

Shayne hooked the cognac bottle with one bare foot and pulled it within reach.

“How about you, Natalie?” he asked the second girl. “Are you in on it?”

“Not me,” she said hastily. “I came for the sun and the drinks and the water. I also thought it would be sort of a coup to meet Mike Shayne.”

Rourke sat forward, pushing his hat back with his thumb. “Mike, I know you’ve been working hard. I’ll be the first to admit that you deserve a rest. But there’s a deadline on this thing. In a couple of days, when you get bored with having nothing to do, you’ll take the Do Not Disturb sign down off your doorknob and be ready to go back to work. But this can’t wait.”

“Go on,” Shayne said evenly.

“Kitty happens to be a good friend of mine. She needs some assistance, and she needs it right now. It’s a tense little problem, the kind you can handle with your left hand. This expedition this afternoon was my idea. I thought if I could get you down here, feed you a steak and some good cognac, surround you with cute babes in minimum bathing suits, you might say yes. If you said no you’d say it politely.”

“No,” Shayne said.

“Don’t give up hope,” the reporter told Kitty. “He didn’t say, ‘Hell, no.’”

Kitty said quickly, “Mike, I know this was a dirty trick. But I’ve been so worried! You just don’t know. It was bad enough before, but now! If you people hadn’t come down today I would have gone diving by myself. I hardly ever miss a Sunday. After a week at the typewriter it irons out the kinks. I know what they say about the buddy system, but I don’t worry about going down fifteen or twenty feet alone, on the rope.”

She closed her eyes and touched her forehead lightly, as though the pain had been transferred from Shayne’s head to hers. “I usually go out as soon as I have breakfast and read the Sunday papers. I’d be dead now.”

Natalie put in uneasily, “Kitty, now wait.”

Kitty said, “It’s my aqualung. If somebody let out some air and put in something else, it was meant for me. No one would ever know it was anything but an accident-that’s the part that scares me. People would tut-tut and say I shouldn’t have gone down alone.”

“Oh, by the way, Mike,” Rourke put in-the casual manner didn’t fool Shayne, who knew that the reporter was very much in earnest-“you remember Cal Tuttle. Kitty used to be his secretary. This was his Key.”

“Key Gaspar,” Shayne said slowly, drinking. “I knew that name sounded familiar. Wasn’t it some kind of a rumrunners’ hangout during Prohibition?”

“Absolutely,” Rourke said. “Tuttle used to bring the stuff up from Havana and land it in the cove at the south end. The Miami and Palm Beach bootleggers would come down in fast boats and pick it up. Tuttle owned a half dozen Keys, but this is the one he held onto. You’re going to listen to this now, aren’t you?”

“I’d rather hear it some other time, but go ahead. Incidentally,” he added, looking across at Kitty, “I didn’t say thanks.”

She blushed slightly again. “You’re welcome. I just hope nobody had a telescope on us when we came out of the water.”

“I owe you a bathing suit,” Shayne said. “Pick one out and tell them to send me the bill. Where do you keep your diving equipment when you’re not here?”

“In a kitchen closet, and I keep it padlocked. I remember unlocking it this morning.”

“It isn’t hard to force a padlock. Does anybody else use this aqualung besides you?”

“No, nobody. You’re the first one in ages. People sometimes come down to dive, but they bring their own gear.”

Shayne nodded. “Toss me a cigarette, Tim. O.K., Kitty, tell me what’s happened.”

Rourke threw him a cigarette and a book of matches. Kitty bit her lip.

“Last weekend I found my cat on the back step with her throat cut.”

“Kitty, how ghastly!” Natalie exclaimed. “Your lovely Siamese? You didn’t tell me.”

Kitty shook her head, her face troubled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. I don’t mind living alone, really. I like it, in fact-my marriage was rather a mess at the end. I don’t want to turn into one of those hysterical women who run to the nearest man for help when the least little thing goes wrong. But this was actually quite scary. Her name was Awn. I loved her dearly. There wasn’t any doubt what had happened, or even why.”

She raised her glass in both hands. Quickly, while she looked into it reflectively and then drank, Shayne reviewed the odd scraps of information Rourke had dropped earlier in the day as they drummed down the Overseas Highway in Shayne’s Buick.

Shayne himself had been hunched moodily over the wheel, hardly listening, letting the salt breeze whip away some of the tensions that had accumulated during the previous day and night. He knew Natalie, an agreeable girl who smiled a little too often for Shayne’s taste. She worked on the real-estate page on Rourke’s paper, the Miami News. Kitty also worked there, in the accounting department. She was in her late twenties, Rourke told him, separated from her husband, Hank Sims, a small-timer in the real-estate business, who was still around town somewhere. Rourke hadn’t mentioned her connection with Cal Tuttle, the last of the big Prohibition figures, who had died a year or two earlier. Instead, the reporter confined himself to a physical description. Kitty was tall, blonde, witty, anything but strait-laced, with a marvelous figure-a really marvelous figure, Rourke repeated-and in Rourke’s judgment, which he passed along to his friend with a leer, she could be accurately described as Shayne’s type of woman. Sexy, Rourke thought, was the word that sprang to mind.

As a rule the reporter was the world’s lousiest judge of women, and Shayne paid little attention to the build-up. When they arrived at Key Gaspar and he actually saw Kitty, he was pleasantly surprised.

Now, lowering her glass, Kitty met his eyes. “You’ll really let me tell you about it, Mike? If I put it into words, I may be able to decide if I’m getting skittery about nothing.”

“Poisoning the air in an aqualung,” the redhead said dryly, “isn’t my idea of nothing. Who’s trying to kill you, Kitty?”