Murder by Proxy (5 page)

Shayne nodded, expressionless. “Now, this trip you suddenly decided to make. Did I understand you to say it was completely unexpected… not planned at all… that your wife hadn’t the faintest idea you might turn up in Miami today?”

“That’s right.” Harris became suddenly aggressive. “I didn’t know, myself, until late Thursday afternoon. A situation came up in the office that required me to be in Charleston, South Carolina on Friday. One of our elderly clients took a sudden notion to discuss his portfolio. I drove to Charleston that night, arriving Friday morning. I caught a few hours sleep in a motel and spent the afternoon with our client, and on a sudden impulse decided to drive on down here and spend Saturday and Sunday morning with my wife. By driving straight through, I planned to be back in New York Monday morning.”

“That’s a lot of cross-country driving,” Shayne suggested. “Most businessmen find a plane much easier these days.”

“I happen to like to drive,” Harris informed him coldly. “Especially by myself and at night. There’s something about driving across the country at night alone. You can really put the miles behind you… and stopping along the highway at the little all-night diners where the truckers congregate…” He paused, shaking his head as though a little ashamed of the enthusiasm with which he spoke. “I happen to like it,” he repeated. “And, when I left New York, I really had no idea at all of coming on. But when I realized it was Friday evening in Charleston and there was no reason at all for me to be back in New York before Monday morning… I suddenly thought how wonderful it would be to surprise Ellen… and I just came on.”

Shayne looked at him thoughtfully and a little wonderingly. You had to be pretty young, he thought, and very much in love with your wife, to decide it would be a good idea to pop up at her hotel at dawn in Miami when she was on vacation and had every reason to suppose you were safely in New York. How would Herbert Harris have liked it, he wondered, if Ellen had suddenly turned up unexpectedly at the New York apartment a week before she was expected home?

And yet? And yet!

Harris was pretty young… and apparently he was very much in love with his wife of one year. Aloud, Shayne said, “I guess that’s about all for now, Mr. Harris. I’ll get to work on it. Will you be available at the Beachhaven?”

“Yes, I… I suppose I may as well stay there as anywhere. Look here, Shayne.” He leaned forward and his jaw jutted aggressively. “I didn’t argue with you or withhold any information when you pointed out that you had your methods of working on a case just as I would have my reasons for buying certain stocks or bonds. But I’d still like to know why in hell you wanted this list of Ellen’s friends in New York… including her hairdresser. How can any of those people possibly have any connection with what has happened to her here?”

Shayne said, “In the beginning, Harris, you complained that no one in Miami
knew
your wife, and therefore was not capable of conducting an intelligent investigation into her disappearance. I agree with you. I hope to conduct an intelligent investigation, and for that reason I want to know everything about your wife that I can. Does that answer your question?”

“In a way.” Harris’ manner was guarded. “Are you going to be in touch with those people whose names I gave you?”

“Have you any objections?” Shayne’s voice was crisp and he met Harris’ eyes levelly.

“Well… no. I just wondered.”

“I’ll be discreet,” Shayne assured him. “But I won’t take a case with any strings attached.” He stood up and held his hand across the desk. “I won’t tell you to go back to the hotel and stop worrying, but I do suggest that you go back feeling that everything is being done that can be done. I’ll be in touch with you.”

Harris shook his hand with more enthusiasm than he had shown the first time. “I feel better already. Uh… about your fee, Mr. Shayne.”

Shayne said, “Give my secretary a check for a thousand as a retainer. With any luck at all, that should cover it. If I see it running into more, I’ll let you know.”

Harris said awkwardly, “Well… thanks,” and followed Lucy out into the outer room.

Shayne sat down and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and sipped his cognac with narrowed eyes while he considered the young New York stockbroker and his problem. Lucy interrupted his musings by entering a few minutes later and asking, “Michael, do you want me to transcribe those notes right away?”

He jerked his attention back from a period in his past and said, “There’s no hurry, angel. See if you can get me Jim Gifford in New York. If you can, stay on the extension with your notes, and read them off when I say so.”

She started to say something, then compressed her lips and marched out. Shayne drank the last of his cognac and crumpled the paper cups in his hand and tossed them into the wastebasket. He was taking a swallow of ice water when his buzzer sounded. He lifted his telephone and Lucy said, “I have Mr. Gifford on the wire.”

He said, “Jim?” and a hearty voice answered, “Is that you, Mike? How’re things in the sunny land of sin and sex?”

Shayne said, “Sinful and sexful. Can you do a fast job for me?”

Gifford laughed and said, “For you… and for a price… I can do anything.”

“Here it is, Jim. A Mrs. Ellen Harris from New York is missing from the Beachhaven Hotel in Miami Beach since last Monday. Husband is Herbert Harris, stockbroker. Lucy will give you the addresses from her notes in a moment. The way it looks, cold, Jim, is that the lady had a deal all set up before she left New York. She’s an ex-model. I want you to dig into her background… before and after her marriage to Harris. Everything you can get… particularly on ex or current boyfriends. She’s a real looker and should have plenty though hubby doesn’t believe it. Put some men in it, Jim, and get everything you can by late this afternoon? Call my apartment or Lucy’s home number if we’re not here. I’m going to put her on the line to give you everything we’ve got. Go ahead, angel.”

Shayne held the telephone to his ear until he heard Lucy start reading the important points from her shorthand notes to Jim Gifford in New York. Then he hung up.

He was standing in front of one of the wide windows looking down on Flagler Street when Lucy Hamilton come into the room behind him five minutes later. Her voice trembled with indignation. “Michael Shayne! What do you really expect Jim Gifford to find out in New York? If I ever saw a man truly in love and suffering because of it, it was Herbert Harris.”

He turned around slowly, shaking his red head. “How much
he’s
in love hasn’t very much to do with it really. She’s the one who has pulled the disappearing act. Get me Tim Rourke, huh?”

She stuck her tongue out at him and went back to her desk. Shayne turned away from the window, tugging at his earlobe and trying not to think about his dead wife, Phyllis.

Harris had really hit him below the belt with that one question he had asked. If it were Phyllis, now, who was missing… ?

His telephone buzzed and he picked it up and said, “Hi, Tim? Busy?”

He listened a moment to his old friend profanely telling him exactly how busy he was at the moment getting out world-shattering news to his millions of newspaper reading fans, glanced at his watch and then cut Rourke off by saying, “I’ve got a hell of a story cooking, Tim. Be by your office in about fifteen minutes. Then we’ll grab lunch. Cut yourself loose for at least a couple of hours.”

He hung up and went out to grab his hat and to tell Lucy she could leave the office whenever she was through, but to stick close to the apartment that afternoon in anticipation of a call from Gifford, and that he would check with her from time to time.

In the crowded, noisy City Room of the
News,
Shayne went directly to Timothy Rourke’s desk in a far corner and found the reporter pensively staring down at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter while he assiduously practiced blowing smoke rings into the already smoke laden atmosphere.

Rourke was a lean, greyhound sort of man, with features so thin they were almost emaciated, and deep-set cynical eyes that were as bright as a ferret’s. They became even brighter when Shayne laid the snapshot of Ellen Harris in front of him and asked, “Got room on your front page for a blowup of her?”

“We got practically nothing else for the front page today. What’s she done? Cut up her sugar-daddy into little pieces and made him into a stew… I hope.” Rourke studied the picture avidly.

Shayne said, “Right now… she’s just a missing person. Take that back to your photo department, huh, and get some prints made? I’d like half a dozen… six by nine or like that. You can have it retouched and ready to hit the front page before your deadline
if
I give you the go-ahead. We’ll grab some lunch and stop back for the prints.”

Rourke had known Michael Shayne too long to ask any questions at this point. He shoved back his chair and got up and went around the corner to the newspaper’s darkroom, and returned in a few minutes with a nod, “Prints will be ready by the time we’ve eaten.” They went out together to a steak house half a block away and settled themselves with drinks and a luncheon order to come. Rourke cupped his thin chin in his hands and regarded his old friend shrewdly. “What’s the story… and what’s the ‘if’ about running the picture?”

Shayne told him, “The ‘if’ is whether we have any reason not to run the story by the time your first edition deadline hits. It’s got to be confidential as hell until I give you the word, Tim.”

“So?” Rourke sipped his bourbon and water and waited.

Shayne told it to him briefly the way Herbert Harris had given it to him. “Seemingly a hell of a nice guy. It’s going to smash his whole world into little pieces if it does turn out his wife is just having herself a ball and turns up all in one piece.”

“Which way would he rather have it,” grunted Rourke with a sour grin, “that she turn up in little pieces instead of having his dream world all smashed up?”

“I don’t know,” Shayne admitted angrily. “He’s so damned sure of her, Tim. I think it might be easier for him to live with it in the long run if she turns out dead.”

“Petey Painter and the Beachhaven Hotel aren’t going to like it if we spread that story over the front page,” Rourke warned him happily. “Either way the cat jumps, it’s going to be lousy publicity.”

“We’re not going to ask them whether they like it or not. Suppose you come along with me to the Beachhaven when I take that picture over and see what I find out. Merrill will let you sit in on it if I give him my word you’ll print only what I think needs to be printed.”

“Who’s Merrill?”

“Chief of Security. House dick, to you.” Shayne grinned, emptying his glass and picking up knife and fork as his plate was placed in front of him. “He’s in a real tough spot. Right now, he’s going to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.” He sighed and then attacked his steak zestfully.

The prints were still damp when they got back to the newspaper office after a fast lunch, but the snapshot had blown up much better than Shayne had hoped it would. He took two of the damp prints with him and arranged to have a couple more delivered to his place after they were dry, then he and Rourke drove over to the Beachhaven in their own cars so they could separate later if they wished.

The reporter’s car was already at the curb when Shayne got there, and Rourke was at the desk talking to the clerk when he entered the lobby.

Lawford looked fussed and irritated as Shayne walked up, and Rourke turned to him with a wink and said, “This guy claims Mrs. Harris isn’t in, but he refuses to call her room and check.”

Shayne said, “I’ll ask the questions, Tim,” and to the clerk, “Merrill in his office?”

“Yes, sir. It’s right around…

Shayne said, “I know where it is.” He took Rourke’s arm firmly and led him away from the desk. “These birds aren’t going to talk to reporters, damn it. Every person in the hotel has been clammed up.” They went around a corner to a suite of offices at the rear of the desk, and Shayne stopped at a closed, wooden door marked PRIVATE.

He knocked and turned the knob and walked in without waiting for an invitation. It was a small, neat office, lined with filing cases against the rear wall, with a bare desk in the center having only one telephone and a dictating machine. Robert Merrill was dictating into a microphone, leaning back at ease behind the desk and referring to on open cardboard folder in his lap. He pressed a thumb button on the microphone which shut off the machine when he saw Shayne in the doorway, and closed the folder and placed it on the desk in front of him.

With a hearty cordiality that did not appear to be feigned, he said, “Mike Shayne in the flesh. You don’t get around these parts often.”

He was a tall, middle-aged man, with iron-gray hair and coldly wary eyes. He was, as Shayne had assured Harris, competent and conscientious in his job—which was seeing to the security of the Beachhaven Hotel. It was a job that required a lot of intelligence and tact, the ability to unerringly detect a phony the moment he showed up in the hotel and to ruthlessly hound him away to another hostelry, and a sort of sixth sense acquired over the years which warned him in advance when trouble was brewing in any one of the more than thousand rooms overhead.

Shayne said, “The kind of people I deal with these days haven’t got the sort of money to pay your rates, Bob.” He held the door open for Rourke to come in, then closed it and asked, “Do you know Tim Rourke? Robert Merrill, Tim.”

Merrill looked dispassionately at the slouching figure of the reporter in his baggy suit, and said, “The name is familiar. Byline on the
News,
isn’t it? With a particular pipeline to Miami’s most famous private detective. What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he made no motion to rise or offer his hand.

Shayne sat down in a chair at the end of the desk, and Rourke moved quietly and self-effacingly aside to sit in one against the wall. Shayne took one of the pictures of Ellen Harris from his pocket and placed it in front of Merrill. “Recognize her?”

Merrill stared at it and pursed his thin lips. “Is this blown up from a small snapshot I saw this morning?”

“That’s right,” Shayne told him equably. “The lady you seem to have misplaced last Monday.”

Merrill permitted himself a tired smile. “I’d like to have this, Mike. Harris refused to leave the snapshot with me so I could show it around to the members of the staff who actually saw Mrs. Harris when she checked in. He got up on his high-horse and stalked out of here, threatening to sue the hotel for criminal negligence and so forth, and I understood he was going direct to the police.”

Shayne said, “He did,” and grinned happily. “Petey Painter succeeded in rubbing him the wrong way just as you did, so he ended up in my office. My client,” he ended sternly, “feels that both you and Chief Painter are more concerned with covering up his wife’s disappearance than you are in finding her.”

“You know that isn’t so, Mike.” Some of the tension and strain inside Robert Merrill that had been building up since his interview with Herbert Harris early that morning showed through. “He’s her husband, damn it. And he’s nuts about her as far as I could tell. There were certain facts I didn’t wish to divulge…” He broke off, grinning ruefully at Shayne and suddenly becoming very warm and human. “Hell’s bells, Mike. I sound like a speaker at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, don’t I? Damn it all. That guy is due for a rude awakening. I’ve got a lot more dope now than I had when I talked to him this morning.” He dropped his gaze to the photograph in front of him, and said softly, “She’s pretty terrific, huh? If I were married to her, goddamnit…” He paused and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Why’d you bring a reporter, Mike? I’d be glad to go over the evidence with you personally, but…”

Shayne said forcibly, “I brought a friend, first… a reporter, second. I promised Harris that I’d have this picture in the newspaper with a story about her disappearance this afternoon unless I was convinced it could not possibly be helpful. I don’t give one goddamn what you or Peter Painter or the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce think about it, I’ve been hired by Harris to find his wife. Tim Rourke is here with me to decide whether we print her picture and story… and just what sort of story we print, if any. I’m the one who’s going to decide what’s best. Rourke will abide by my decision. You’re lucky to have it handled this way,” he insisted. “If another paper gets onto it…”

Robert Merrill smiled mirthlessly. “The whole thing is dynamite, Mike.” He hesitated, frowning down at the picture of Ellen Harris on his desk. “I think you’d better hear what we’ve got. Without this picture, we haven’t even got a definite identification.”

He leaned over his desk and spoke into a concealed intercom built into the surface of it: “Have Lawford relieved at the desk and come in. And I’ll want that bellboy, Bill Thompson, after Lawford.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. “At a time like this I’m damned glad I’ve stayed a bachelor all my life.”

Michael Shayne didn’t reply to this. He knew that Timothy Rourke was watching him from the side, and he wondered if Tim was thinking about Phyllis. Merrill, of course, didn’t know about Phyllis. There was a knock on the door and Shayne was glad of a reason to stop thinking the way he was.

Merrill barked, “Come in,” and the door opened and Justus Lawford walked in. He glanced swiftly from Rourke to Shayne and then to Merrill, and if he recognized them as having stopped at the desk recently, he gave no sign of it.

He stopped in front of Merrill and asked, “What is it, Mr. Merrill?”

Merrill turned the picture around for him to look at. “Do you recognize her?”

Lawford said, “It’s the woman you were asking me about this morning, isn’t it? Mrs. Harris who registered last Monday?”

“Can you identify her positively?” demanded Merrill. Lawford hesitated and drew in a deep breath. “I wouldn’t want to take an oath on it. But… yes, Mr. Merrill. I remember her quite distinctly. So far as I can judge, that is Mrs. Harris.”

“All right,” grumbled Merrill. “Tell Mr. Shayne what you told me this morning. Why you remembered her particularly out of all the guests who registered that day.”

“It’s hard to put your finger on the exact reason,” Lawford began, fixing his gaze on the wall above Merrill’s head. “I’ve worked in lots of hotels… signed in hundreds of thousands of guests, I suppose. Mostly, it’s a mechanical process. But Mrs. Harris…!” He shook his head slowly. “You noticed her and you remembered her. I remember being surprised that she was checking in alone… for two weeks. And when I asked her… just to be sure… she vouchsafed the information that her husband had the modern idea that married couples should spend their vacations separately, and she asked me if I… approved.”

He stopped and gulped nervously and told Merrill, “I changed the subject at once, of course, sir. But she did mention her fear of being bored and lonely, and I assured her that we had a hostess and many social activities, and I recall that she didn’t seem interested. And… that’s about all, I think.”

“You did notice her go out later?” prompted Merrill.

“Yes. She had asked us to rent a car for her, and I advised the doorman to call her room when it was delivered. I saw her go by from the elevator to the door about half an hour later, and assumed she was going for her car. She had changed into a very noticeable red dress… cut quite low in front.”

“She didn’t leave her key as she went out?” prompted Merrill.

“No, sir. And I simply don’t recall seeing her again.” He dropped his gaze from the wall above Merrill’s head to the photograph on the desk, and shook his head slowly from side to side.

“All right, Lawford,” said Merrill briskly. “If the boy is waiting outside, send him in.”

As the clerk turned to go out, Merrill told Shayne, “Bill Thompson is the boy who took her bags up that first afternoon. I’m not absolutely sure…” He hesitated as the tall, rangy, good-looking young bellboy came in as Lawford went out. “I’ll let him tell it his own way,” he went on. “Nothing to be worried about, Thompson. Step up here and take a look at this picture.”

Bill Thompson threw a quick, frightened look at Rourke and at Shayne, then moved forward on stiff legs to the desk.

“Ever see this woman?” Merrill shoved the picture at him.

Bill Thompson stared down at it for at least thirty seconds. He put the palms of both hands flat on the desk to support his youthful weight, and his face began working queerly. There were actually tears in his eyes as he blubbered, “Honest to God, Mr. Merrill, I didn’t… do anything. Not after that first time at midnight. I swear I never did go back to her and I never did even see her after that first time.”

“Hold it, son. First tell me who she is.”

“It’s Mrs. Harris. In three twenty-six. You asked me about checking her in this morning, sir, and I told you how kind of funny she was… giving me a five dollar tip for nothing really, and how she was sore because there was twin beds in her room instead of a double… and how
she
liked to sleep in a double bed.”

He paused, swallowing hard in embarrassment, and Merrill said softly, “Yeh. You told me that, Bill. But you didn’t tell me anything about midnight. What about that?”

“Well, I didn’t think it was important, and I didn’t want to… but maybe it is important now she’s missing and all,” he stumbled on. “I was on my way out the door when she came up close behind me and asked when I got off duty, and I told her at midnight that night. And then she kind of whispered in my ear that she was going to be lonesome and for me to stop up for a nightcap with her at midnight.”

“All right, Bill.” Merrill’s voice was cutting and hard. “What happened at midnight?”

“Nothing. I did go up and knock on her door. I know it’s against the rules and I’ll get fired for it, but I can’t help it. And I’d do it again, I guess, anyhow if it was someone like Mrs. Harris. But her room was dark and she didn’t answer, and… and that’s all there is to it.”