Shayne suppressed a grin. But the girl bothered him almost as much as Ben Felton’s corpse, lying in the bathtub just beyond a thin wood door. Whatever Ben Felton had been, he was no longer. Whatever harm his body could do would be involuntary as far as he was concerned. But this green-eyed blonde — Shayne felt certain, from the wariness of her glance, that she had been sober. He doubted she was a genuine blonde. He was sure she was not a true Southerner. No Southerner ever said cood for could.
“Anybody else been in here today?” he asked.
“A few strays — but none as often as that one. What a mess!”
“How come your hotels are in trouble while you’re all tied up launching this new gizmo? I thought you, of all people, knew how to protect your rear.”
“I thought so, too,” said the millionaire wretchedly. “It wouldn’t have happened if a bunch of gang-backed sharks from Las Vegas hadn’t picked this moment to move in on me. When operations get as large as mine, there are bound to be leaks. You can’t count on one hundred percent loyalty — not from humans, anyway. The sharks have been giving me the full treatment, all the way from stock raids to bedbugs.”
“Who’s behind it?” Shayne asked warily.
“Ever hear of a smooth-talking, good-looking, dirty-minded, snake-moraled, twenty-nine karat rat name Copey Cottrell?” Tyndale asked. “He’s a no-good, underworld bastard, one of the Buggsy Siegal kind who can curl a pinkie around a teacup with an archduchess and beat up a hold-out whore on his string with a baseball bat half an hour later. Maybe you didn’t know this, Mike, but I picked up the White Sapphire, in Miami Beach, three months ago. Seems, by their lights, I made a mistake. Seems they’d set their sights on it. So...” Again he spread his arms.
Shayne nodded. “I had no idea you were in the White Sapphire mess,” he said. He was beginning to see why Ben Felton should have turned up in Harry Tyndale’s Suite. “Harry, if I were you, I’d go hunting for that leak with a monkey wrench.”
“Don’t worry,” said Tyndale. “I’m working on that. And don’t worry about my handling Copey Cottrell and all his nasty little men — I’ve been in dirty fights before. What worries me is that...” He nodded again toward the bathroom door.
“It damned well ought to worry you,” said Shayne. “It worries the hell out of me and I had nothing to do with it.”
“You never saw the guy before, did you?” It was a forlorn-hope question.
“Nope,” replied the redhead truthfully. He paused to glance at his watch as the last pieces of a hare-brained, impossible plan fell together. “Have somebody get a small trunk — one of those steel foot-lockers they use in the army, with a grip on it. Have him get it here quick. I’ve got to be on the dinner plane for Miami tonight.”
Harry Tyndale looked as if he couldn’t quite believe it. His deep voice was a whisper as he asked, “Mike, what are you going to do?”
“Harry,” the detective told him, “the less you know about it, the better. If I pull it off, you’ll be getting my bill — a whopper. If I don’t, it will cost you a lot more in lawyer’s fees. Now, get going, or we’re both up the creek without a paddle between us.”
Harry got going. The trunk was ordered, the reservations made, the chauffeur called for before Shayne had time to finish another drink. Shayne sipped it, rather than gulped it, wondering if he had gone out of his mind. He was used to taking long chances, to calculated risks. He was used to getting away with them. But to fly Ben Felton’s corpse back to Miami in a foot-locker and dump him in Homer Wilde’s lap...
He could still hear the television star’s musical voice saying, “I’d just as soon you’d turn up his corpse as not.”
If the redhead pulled it off, Homer was going to get his corpse.
When the locker arrived, Harry Tyndale locked the room doors. Then, for twelve minutes, he and Shayne were grimly busy. By the time they were through and had washed their hands, the redhead had acquired a sympathy for trunk murderers he had never thought would be his. If the deceased had not been such a small man... Shayne poured himself a drink, told Tyndale to have his men take the trunk down to the waiting car, then poured a half-tumbler for a newly grey-faced Tyndale.
“Okay, Harry, now take a reef in yourself and hope for the best.”
“Thanks, Mike.” Tyndale’s handclasp was fervent.
“It’s not over yet,” the redhead told him. “Keep your fingers crossed.”
III
Shayne made the waiting Super-Constellation with minutes to spare. He had to fork over an extra thirty dollars for overweight luggage and was again grateful that the late Ben Felton had been a small man. To say that he sweated the foot-locker through the weighing-in process was enormous understatement.
If anything went wrong — and he could think of half-a-hundred possibilities without stretching his imagination — it meant curtains for Michael Shayne, to say nothing of Harry Tyndale. But once Harry had called Shayne instead of the New York police, there was little else either of them could do.
Even if he got his strange cargo to Miami intact, there remained the little matter of arranging to plant it where it could do the most good for the team of Tyndale and Shayne — and the most damage to Copey Cottrell and his gangsters.
Why had Felton vanished? Why had he sought to contact Harry Tyndale? Had he been killed to prevent that contact? On the surface, the answers to all three questions lay in exactly two words — Copey Cottrell. Shayne had heard people call Cottrell good-looking. The detective found his eyes on his own right hand, which had, without conscious direction, balled itself into a fist. Perhaps, if Cottrell weren’t so pretty...
For the first time, the detective allowed himself to ponder the identity of Ben Felton’s killer. At a jamboree like the one Harry Tyndale was throwing, it could have been almost anyone. But for once, the identity of a murderer was not of supreme importance in a murder case. It was what was done with the corpse that mattered to Shayne now.
“Penny foah yuah thoughts,” said a rich, feminine Southern voice, almost in his ear.
Shayne’s self-possession was not merely a matter of pride — it had been, in hundreds of instances, a matter of life-and-death necessity. The redhead relied on his disciplined ability to withstand the most sudden shocks and never turn a hair. But this time, it took all his self command.
“You again?” He stared coldly at the beautifully stacked green-eyed blonde he had last seen in Harry’s bedroom.
“Yaaas, little ol’ me,” she replied, pouting prettily. “Ah tol’ yuah ah jess myught want something like li’l ol’ yuah. Ah think it was right ryude of yuah to take off without so much as sayin’ gude byah to li’l ol’ me.”
He grinned in spite of himself, just as the engines of the Super-Constellation cut in, one by one. He said, raising his voice above their roar, “Well, I don’t seem to have got away with it — you’re here.”
There was no more talk until the takeoff. Then she said, “What was that yuah were tryin’ to sayah?”
He said, amusement fading as he realized things had gone very wrong, “Cut the accent, honey-chil’. You’re no more Southern than you were drunk back in Harry Tyndale’s hotel room.”