So Lush, So Deadly

CHAPTER 18

“Mrs. Brady?” Painter said. “I’m Peter Painter, Miami Beach Chief of Detectives. I have some questions to ask you.”

“I don’t have to answer any of your questions,” she told him scornfully, “and you’d better have some explanation for taking me off that plane. I’m one of those people who enjoy fighting City Hall.”

She turned back to Shayne. There were shadows under her eyes, but the eyes themselves were clear and untroubled.

“When did you wake up?” she said with a slight smile.

“About ten seconds after you left the cabin. I didn’t drink much of that mickey you gave me. I told you I didn’t like vodka-especially vodka laced with chloral hydrate.”

“That’s what I get for being soft-hearted enough to cut you loose. You might at least have finished the love making we started. I could easily resent that.”

“You didn’t have your heart in it.”

“You’re wrong about that, Mike,” she said softly.

“Now look here,” Painter said, “I want somebody to tell me-”

They continued to ignore him. Shayne picked her bag out of her hand. She grabbed for it, but Shayne took her arm and passed her along to Painter.

“Slug her if she makes any trouble.”

“Pretty transparent. Pretty crude provocation. Nobody’s going to accuse me of brutality.”

“I erased it, of course,” she remarked as Shayne took out the tape she had recovered with the aid of Teddy Sparrow.

“I think it’s too hot to erase. It won’t be hard to find out. The question Petey wants to ask you-did you kill a man named Thomas Moseley at about two-thirty this morning?”

“Do I look like a murderess, Mike?”

He looked into her eyes, and nodded.

“Yeah, a sexy-looking one. Did you see the red cross over the door? Your husband’s in here, in pretty bad shape.”

“Paul?”

Her smile faded, and Shayne saw a spurt of apprehension in her eyes. She went to the doorway.

“Paul,” she said, very low. “What happened to him?”

“We aren’t sure. He was in a fire. And apparently somebody threw acid in his eyes. Does it matter to you?”

“Of course it matters.”

Her own eyes had filled with tears. She went quickly to the bed and sank into the chair Shayne had been using. She took Brady’s hand.

Slowly Brady reached across with his other hand and touched her. His fingers went up to her hair, then down her cheek to her shoulder and her breast. He pulled his hand away.

“Shayne,” he said sharply and distinctly. “I want a lawyer.”

“Pretty soon, Paul. We still aren’t asking you questions. We’re just theorizing. You can order us out if you want to, but don’t you think you’d better know what facts we have so you can make your plans?”

When Brady didn’t answer Shayne said, “I have a tape I’d like to play. Tim, where’s your recorder?”

“Outside. I’ll get it.”

In a moment he was back with the recorder. He found an outlet.

“I’d better explain how this was made,” Shayne said, giving the reporter the tape he had taken from Mrs. Brady’s bag. “Mrs. Brady learned that her husband was living on a boat with another woman. She’s been trying to divorce him-I’ve heard that from a couple of sources. She hired a private detective to plant a listening device on the Nefertiti, to pick up any conversations that might be taking place in the main stateroom.”

“That’s illegal,” Painter snapped. “What’s the name of this private detective?”

“I can’t remember,” Shayne said. “Do you want me to play it or not?”

Painter’s eyes shifted. “Play it, of course.”

“A girl on the next boat, a nice kid named Sally Lyon, happened to be on deck, awake, and she saw the bug being planted. A little while later she saw somebody swim up to the Nefertiti’s blind side and come up a rope ladder. A man with a beard. The missing husband, obviously, who was supposed to be off in a pad in southwest Miami.” Brady lay perfectly still. The tape began to revolve.

A voice said suddenly, “Well, did Shayne fall for it?”

Shayne stopped the tape. “That’s Paul Brady. He means did I fall for the hippy set-up. Did Henry convince me he was really running away? The next voice is going to be Henry’s.”

“Why shouldn’t he fall for it?” De Rham said irritably when Shayne started the tape. “That’s my milieu, man. I can’t tell you, it’s just so great. The chick has still got a tangle of bourgeois hang-ups, but she knows they’re there and she’s trying hard. The thing is, there’s no pressure. The time floats by. Maybe part of it’s pretty phony, but it’s the best kind of phony. If we ever get out of this-”

“With dough,” Brady said.

“We either get out of it with dough or we don’t get out of it.”

Richardson put in suddenly, “Hold it, Mike.” Shayne pressed the stop button. “You said the bug was picking up conversations in the master stateroom. Then it wasn’t really a woman aboard with Brady?” He looked hard at Shayne. “It was De Rham in drag?”

“That’s how it looks,” Shayne said.

Painter stood up abruptly and sat down again. Mrs. Brady looked at her fingernails.

Rourke exclaimed, “I don’t get it, Mike.”

“I tried every possible combination, and that was the only one that would fit. Don’t feel bad about it, Tim. I’m the one they really fooled. They took a hell of a chance, but they had to, and I’m sorry to say it almost worked. I just want to point out before we go any further that the morning they put on their performance for me I had no reason to think they weren’t the people they said they were. The dialogue was pretty convincing.”

Rourke protested, “Mike, are you trying to get us to believe you can’t tell a man from a woman? For Christ’s sake.”

“Undressed I’ve never made a mistake yet,” Shayne said, “but they weren’t undressed.”

Rourke gave a disbelieving laugh. “I don’t buy it. Now give us the switch.”

“There’s no switch, Tim. This is straight. If I’d had a little more background when I went in I might have caught it, but I’m not sure about that-they did a damn good job. It was a carefully staged scene. They’d probably rehearsed it a dozen times.”

“But, Mike-”

“Use your imagination,” Shayne said impatiently. “I had no description of Mrs. De Rham except that she was a neurotic and a drinker. Petrocelli was the one person in Miami who knew what she looked like until Tom Moseley showed up, and somebody killed Moseley with a gin bottle. Petrocelli kept coming back to the boat after they fired him. He saw Brady a couple of times but he never saw Mrs. De Rham. She was in bed drunk-or so they said.”

“You talked to both Mrs. De Rham and De Rham the same day,” Rourke said, still unconvinced. “How about the voices? The hands?”

“O.K., the hands,” Shayne said. “I never saw Mrs. De Rham’s hands. They were under the sheet. She had a low, hoarse voice. His was high for a man and slightly nasal. The easiest way to change the pitch of a voice is let it come out through the nose. They arranged it so she didn’t have to say much. A few words here and there. She’d been drinking for two weeks and she was badly hung over. Drunkenness is a good disguise, and a hangover’s even better. She lay in bed and groaned, and Brady did the talking.”

“How about the-well, breasts, Mike?” Rourke said.

“Padding,” Shayne said impatiently. “A fluffy bedjacket. But the big point is that when I saw Mrs. De Rham in the morning and De Rham at night, I saw two entirely different faces. The blinds were closed because her eyes were hurting, and of course she was wearing a goddamn pair of wraparound dark glasses. A wig, with bangs over the forehead.”

He pulled out the wig he had taken from the woman in the water. “Here it is, if you want to try it on. He darkened his eyebrows with make-up. His mouth was plastered with lipstick, and he was pretending to be drunk when he put it on, so there was a lot of it and it was a little crooked. Heavy suntan makeup on the parts of his face that were showing, and those were the same parts that were covered by a beard when he was playing himself.”

“A beard!” Painter exclaimed suddenly. “That’s what was beside Moseley’s body. A piece of a false beard.”

Shayne grinned. “It’s hard to fool you, Petey. Yeah-it was a different beard from the one De Rham was wearing in the photographs I saw, but I just thought he’d trimmed it a different way, as a kind of token disguise. What does that leave, Tim?”

“The teeth.”

“I didn’t ask him to open his mouth so I could count the fillings. By the time I was back on the boat later I’d begun to realize something was wrong. I wanted to talk to her, but she was in the head, throwing up. You can’t barge in on a lady when she’s vomiting. That’s one of the rules. It was Henry, of course, making gagging noises and flushing the john.”

Painter had listened to this open-mouthed, with his eyebrows all the way up. Now he said smugly, “This is one of the nicest things that’s happened to me in a long, long time. When it gets round town that Mike Shayne fell for something like this-and I’m going to make sure that it gets around-your stock may not be quite so high.”

“How long were you in the room with them when you talked to them, Petey?”

“That’s quite different! Maybe two minutes in all, and she didn’t say a word, did she, Luke?”

“Well-”

He flicked his mustache and said crisply, “All right, Shayne, you’ve made your point. De Rham was impersonating his wife. Now we come to the main question. Why?”

“You must have figured that out by now.”

“I haven’t been working on this case as long as you have,” Painter said stiffly. “You have information which for various reasons hasn’t been made available to the police.”

“I’m still just speculating,” Shayne said. “I don’t want to hog the spotlight. I’m willing to stop talking at any time.”

Rourke chortled. “He’s going to make you say please, Petey.”

Painter started to speak, swallowed it, and said through set lips, “Play the goddamn tape. I’d-appreciate it.”

Shayne pressed a button and the reel began to revolve. A voice began.

DE RHAM: Now we’ve got to talk about the timing, Paul.

BRADY: Relax. Relax. We’ve just bamboozled a guy who’s reputed to be the smartest and toughest private investigator in the United States. Worry can give you a heart attack. Let’s not worry.

DE RHAM: You thrive on this tightrope walking. I don’t. I’m exhausted.

BRADY: You did fine, baby, just fine. You were so irresistible in that bed jacket I almost climbed in with you myself after Shayne left.

DE RHAM: Cut it out with the queer stuff. I never did think that fag act was too funny.

BRADY (softly, after a moment): What makes you sure it’s an act?

DE RHAM: Come on. I know you too well. You made a ravishing chorus girl in the Pudding show-

BRADY: True, old chap. But who was the leading lady?

DE RHAM: Seriously. There’s enough tension around here without going out of our way. I’m a dedicated heterosexual, and if I ever had had any doubts about that, this hippy chick resolved them very satisfactorily. She’s a talented performer in the sack.

BRADY: Spare me the details.

DE RHAM (laughing): No, a queer like you wouldn’t be interested. (more seriously) This is my last day as Dotty De Rham, alcoholic. No reason to drag out the drag bit any longer. This is D-day minus one.

BRADY (sharply): You don’t mean that. We wowed everybody. Just because a clown like Shayne-

DE RHAM: That clown happens to send cold shivers up and down my spine.

BRADY: We haven’t used the sick-to-the-stomach business yet. Hell, we can handle him.

DE RHAM: If he got Loring to send him a picture of Dotty, for example-

BRADY: Why would he do that? He’s been getting by on muscle for years. There’s nothing but reflexes behind the eyes.

DE RHAM (slowly): I don’t think so. It’s too big a chance to take. Tomorrow morning we give our make-believe friend Dotty a funeral at sea.

(A moment’s pause.)

BRADY: I hate to bring up a promise, but you said you’d wait for the real estate money to come through. That’s only four more days. Let’s sweat it out.

DE RHAM: That’s earmarked for you, baby. Believe me.

BRADY: But there’s no way you can put it in writing, is there? Somehow I feel sure you’ll find some technical reason for hanging onto it.

DE RHAM (lightly): You can always blackmail me.

BRADY: Can I? I’m in it as deep as you are now. What I want is cash, and I want it before we dispose of Dotty, not after.

DE RHAM: Well, you’re not going to get another penny, because we’ve run out of time. And don’t give me that now crap. This has been a joint venture from the start. It was your idea.

BRADY: I take credit for it. And where would you be if I’d gone into a tailspin like you that morning?

The room was quiet. Shayne pressed the rewind button, and listened to the last few speeches again. Then the voices resumed.

DE RHAM: I’ve been wondering about that. If I hadn’t panicked like a damn fool-

BRADy: Hell, it was understandable. You’d just knocked off your wife.

DE RHAM: I’ve told you approximately one hundred times that I didn’t kill her. I’ll tell you another hundred times. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t-

BRADY: I seem to remember dragging you off when you tried to throttle her. She was blue in the face before I could make you let go. Petrocelli must have heard her scream. He knew she’d written a new will. Of course I could be wrong. All I know is, she was on the boat when I went to bed and she wasn’t on the boat when I woke up. If you didn’t kill her, give me a better explanation.

DE RHAM (sullenly): I can’t remember exactly what happened.

BRADY: Which would make a very lousy defense in a court of law. The will, baby. What happened to the will? I saw her put it in the desk drawer. And when we looked for it, where was it? Gone with the wind.

DE RHAM: I’ve had two weeks to think about that. I don’t deny she got under my skin. Maybe I killed her and threw her overboard and blocked it out of my mind. I’ve got an uncertain memory at the bottom of a bottle of scotch, as you know very well, incidentally. O.K. Or maybe you killed her.

BRADY (with a short laugh): She wasn’t my wife.

DE RHAM (very slowly): But she’d written you a check for forty thousand bucks and she was talking about stopping payment. You were on funny terms with her, Paul-I don’t know if it was sex or not, but there was definitely something. I could feel the static.

BRADY: That static always went one way.

DE RAHM: I’ve seen you when you lose your temper. It’s a frightening thing. She was teasing you and working you up, and if you did lose your temper with her, if you did kill her, it would be a smart thing to destroy that will.

BRADY: Baby, let’s cut this out. If we’d notified the Coast Guard that we had a woman missing, you’d be getting a big jolt of electricity two years from now, and no amount of hindsight can change that. I don’t think they could have touched me. I took a hell of a risk helping you, because if they catch us now I’ll be in for conspiracy. Well, we’ve cleared a hundred and seventy thousand bucks-what the hell, man. I’ll settle for that. Let’s wind it up tomorrow morning, then, if you feel that strongly about it.

DE RHAM: I do feel that strongly about it.

BRADY: We’ve got to pull together, Hank. That’s essential. I had the basic idea, but you executed. You did more of the hard work and you deserve a prosperous life. Have some more scotch. How can you pretend to be drunk tomorrow morning unless you’re actually lightly drunk?

(They both laugh. Drinking noises.)

DE RHAM: That first move with Petrocelli was the hard one. Everything after that was candy. I sometimes think I should have gone into the theater, except people tell me it’s hard work. When I was a kid I used to do an imitation of my mother, did I ever tell you? From the next room you couldn’t tell the difference.

BRADY: You told me. Do you want to go over the schedule again?

DE RHAM: Hell, no. I could do it with a broken leg and a temperature of a hundred and four.

BRADY: Then let’s get some sleep. Set your alarm for four-thirty and I will too. One is sure to go off. Good luck.

DE RHAM: Good luck.

(A door closes.)

The reel went on spinning. After a moment’s silence Shayne turned it off. “That explains most of it,” he said. “Any questions?”

“Yeah,” Rourke said. “What happened?”

Shayne laughed. “You mean what happened to Mrs. De Rham the last night before the boat got to Miami? Maybe Paul will decide to tell us after he’s thought it over. Or maybe he doesn’t know. I even wondered at one point if she tore up the will herself and jumped overboard after the boys went to bed just to make trouble. Did she have suicidal tendencies? We’ll have to ask her psychiatrist. Think of how it looked to Brady and De Rham when they woke up that next morning and she wasn’t aboard. Both of them had a good reason for wanting her dead. As a cop, Petey, if you’d known she was missing when Petrocelli came in with his story, what would you have done?”

“Put them both under surveillance,” Painter said promptly.

“Surveillance, then arrest, then a long sensational trial and a good possibility of conviction. But if they had nerve enough to hang on for a week or so, they could work out some kind of accident at sea to dispose of Dotty in a way that wouldn’t require them to produce a body. Meanwhile, they could be transferring cash. All they had to do was make it seem that Mrs. De Rham was still aboard and her husband was the one who was missing. De Rham was an accomplished mimic. Somebody mentioned the Pudding show-that’s a show put on by the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, with boys playing girls’ parts. Mrs. De Rham was known as a heavy drinker. She wore sun glasses and a wig. And of course they had no real choice. They had to try it. De Rham stayed below most of the time, and only came out at night to phone. He had three visits, one from the cops, one from me, and one from the lawyer who drew the new will. His signature was a little shaky, but there was no reason it wouldn’t stand up.”

He sat down beside Brady. “I don’t know if you’ve heard all this, Paul. I hope so, because it will save us time later. You didn’t want to move too fast. De Rham had to call Loring, imitating his wife’s voice to establish the fact that she was still alive. And he heard some bad news. She had already changed her will before she sailed. He used me to plant a motive for changing it back-as bait for the runaway husband.”

Rourke said, “Can you skip to what happened this morning, Mike? I ought to phone the paper.”

“In a minute. Everything went fine until Petrocelli started getting suspicious. He brought in the cops. Brady and De Rham were getting ready for the big climax, and they didn’t want cops hanging around. I was brought in to find the missing husband and prove he hadn’t been murdered yet, one of the easiest assignments I’ve had in years. I called Luke Richardson off and reported to Loring that the little three-person group was apparently still intact. But Loring thought his god-daughter was being blackmailed because of the cash transfers, and he kept me on. Last night, when I came back to the Nefertiti, they did some fast thinking and invented an errand to keep me busy. Henry swam ashore and set up an ambush, a half dozen tough kids with bicycle chains.”

“That explains that,” Rourke said impatiently. “Now bring us up to date.”

Shayne turned to Painter. “Did your men find a rented car at Haulover Park?”

“Yes, a Hertz Chevy rented to Henry De Rham.”

“That was the logical place. Here’s what they planned to do this morning.”

“Finally,” Rourke said.

“Mrs. De Rham, with her mental instability and her history of arson attempts, was going to get a few miles offshore and set fire to the boat. Henry gave his Mrs. De Rham imitation for the benefit of the neighbors in the marina. Wig, woman’s clothes, sunglasses, gin. It was dark, and even an observant girl like Sally Lyon never doubted that she was looking at Mrs. De Rham. It was still dark when they went out through Haulover Cut, where Henry was supposed to glue on his beard and swim ashore. This would leave Paul alone on board to finish it up, but it wasn’t really too complicated.”

“They used a dummy!” Rourke exclaimed.

“Sure, with a burned face so it didn’t have to look too lifelike. It had to be wearing Mrs. De Rham’s clothes, and by that time the jacket had a bullet hole in it. But the dummy was supposed to disappear, so Paul didn’t think it would matter. The sequence was supposed to be-start the fire, call the Coast Guard, wait till the helicopter was overhead, jump in the water with the dummy wearing Mrs. De Rham’s wig and clothes, flounder around until rescue was close, and let the dummy sink. It could have worked. The trouble was that neither Brady nor De Rham really trusted each other. They were on each other’s nerves. That reconciliation at the end of the tape had a hollow sound to me. Would Paul be satisfied with a hundred and seventy thousand, when he’d done most of the staff-work and made all the really dangerous moves? Do you want to comment on this, Paul?”

Brady remained motionless and silent.

“De Rham used the word blackmail,” Shayne went on, “and it must have been very much on his mind. At the same time, Brady would be scared that De Rham would do something dumb or impulsive. If you were one of these two characters, would you want the other one tied around your neck the rest of your life? They both decided, independently, to do something about it. Brady finally used his little. 25. He shot Henry point blank, undressed him, and dropped him in the water. He wouldn’t bother to weight the body because he’d have nothing to worry about when it came ashore. Henry, meanwhile, had rigged a nasty surprise for his old friend. I had a look at the burning boat through binoculars. One side of the wheelhouse was blown out. A simple little home-made bomb and a bottle of acid inside the radio. After the fire was burning nicely, Paul switched on the radio to call the Coast Guard. Bang. Acid in his eyes. He was blinded and helpless. He couldn’t put out the fire, he couldn’t call for help. Henry assumed he’d go down with the boat or swim around helplessly until he drowned. And Henry would be rid of both his wife and his good friend, and he could take it easy the rest of his life. Paul did what he could when he heard the helicopter, but he couldn’t see the Panther and his timing was off.”

“Great,” Rourke said, sticking his notes in his side pocket. “Where’s the phone?”

“There’s more,” Shayne said quietly.

He had heard a car arrive. Shayne had arranged many confrontations in his time. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t, but this one worked very well.

Raphael Petrocelli, unshaven, his hair uncombed, was hustled in by the detective Painter had sent for him. Katharine Brady hastily covered her mouth, but there was no place to hide.

“Mrs. De Rham!” Petrocelli said in surprise. “They were talking about you on the morning news. The announcer said you were drowned.”