“My best friends never told me I could act,” she said in a perfectly straight, rather pleasant Midwestern voice.
The damnable part of it, he thought, was that he rather liked this girl — or might have if she weren’t such a dangerous unknown. At least, she represented more attractive company than Greg Jarvis, the writer, on the trip up, with his prattle of unities. Shayne took his time studying her, and she returned his gaze, point for point.
She was not quite as pretty as he remembered her — evidently, she was a girl who could project beauty without actually having it. She was also a little older — there were tiny hints of wrinkles around mouth and eyes that told the story. But there was disarming good humor in her not unhandsome face, and then that figure...
“Well?” she said. “Satisfied?”
He shook his head. “Far from it...” He raised his shaggy red brows a notch.
“Oh...” She understood the unspoken question. “My name’s Carol Hale, and I’m not married.”
He put it to her bluntly. “Carol Hale, why did you follow me aboard this plane from the hotel?”
The good humor became an afterglow, a memory, as she said with quiet determination, “Because, Michael Shayne, I wanted to know what you were doing with poor Ben Felton’s body.”
Shayne was stopped cold — but not by so much as the flicker of an eyelid did he reveal the fact. He allowed a look of surprise, of bewilderment, to spread over his ruggedly cast features. Perhaps this girl was a poor actor, but the redhead was a good one when he had to be.
He said, “One of us must be crazy.”
Mercifully, Carol Hale kept her voice low. She said, “I went to Tyndale’s suite with Ben this morning. He went into that master bedroom and told me to wait for him, he had someone to see. I waited — the whole day, and I couldn’t find Ben. Then you came in, and hour or so ago, and went in there to talk with Tyndale. You won’t deny that, I hope.”
Shayne’s answer was a shrug — there seemed nothing to say. The girl went on evenly with, “I decided to watch. You see, I knew who you were, though I didn’t expect to see you in New York. I used to spend some of my winters in Miami. I wondered why you were there, and I got afraid. Then I decided to keep an eye on the hall. There was another door from the hall to that bedroom. I saw them bring in the trunk. Then I saw them bring it out. A moment later, you followed. I followed you.”
Shayne sighed and shook his head. “I’m afraid your imagination has caused you to take a trip for nothing — not that I’m not grateful for a charming, if somewhat zany, companion.”
She shook her head, and her green eyes were like twin jewels — hard and cold. She said, “It won’t do, Mike Shayne. Tyndale kept watch like a bulldog all morning on that room.”
“If you were in there, you must know there wasn’t a body there,” the redhead told her with an air of patience. “Tyndale was waiting for me on a matter of business. As for the trunk, I’m taking some valuable papers back to Miami for him.”
“Mike Shayne playing nursemaid to a bunch of documents!”
“Why couldn’t your friend — Ben What’s-his-name — simply have ducked out of the bedroom into the hall and gone down in the elevator? He’s probably back at the hotel right now, wondering what happened to you.”
She shook her head. “Not Ben Felton,” she said firmly. “Ben wasn’t that kind of a character. He’d have called me — if he was able to.”
“Maybe he wasn’t able to.” The redhead was sparring desperately. The girl didn’t know the corpse was in the foot-locker — but as long as she was with him, she was intensely dangerous. If she blew the whistle on him before he had a chance to reclaim the trunk...
“Maybe he wasn’t,” she said. “He told me the deal he was on could be dangerous — so dangerous he’d been keeping out of sight for seventy-two hours.”
“Quite a story,” said Shayne, feigning amusement. “And just what was your role in this dangerous deal, Miss Hale? You’re not going to tell me your friend brought you along merely as window dressing — not that you wouldn’t dress a window damned attractively.”
“My role was — or is — very important,” she replied serenely. “Incidentally, believe it or not, it was not the sort of part I enjoy playing. But when you set out to destroy a rat, you can’t always name your poison.”
Shayne shook his head, puzzled. “Somewhere away back there, you lost me. But, now that you’re here, what’s on the docket?”
Her eyes studied him again. “That,” she said, “depends...”
It was exasperating. For the time being, there was nothing Shayne could do. He jerked his head toward the window.
“Hell of a beautiful sunset out there,” he said.
Carol Hale said, “Isn’t it lovely!”
They dined on excellent fried chicken, placed before them on trays by the inevitable trim hostess. They talked — about plane travel, about Miami, about New York, about a score of irrelevant things. But they never returned to the subject of the late Ben Felton, and she never revealed the least thing about herself.
Whatever element she represented in the deadly business, she knew he had the foot-locker aboard the plane and she probably suspected what it contained. If she had actually been with Ben Felton at Tyndale’s suite, it was unlikely she was working for what Shayne was beginning to think of as the other side. But he had only her word for all that.
There was no sense in trying to ditch her, once they landed, and walk away from the airport, leaving the trunk to be picked up later, He couldn’t risk checking a murdered corpse in a trunk in the airport luggage room, and he felt certain Carol Hale would keep watch and discover any pickup he arranged. A girl who had come along this doggedly on a mere hunch wouldn’t give up at that stage of the game.
There was only one thing to do — play out the string, bluff all the way, and keep the girl with him. He shifted his head to look at her covertly. She was lying back in her seat now, eyes closed. She looked harmless and innocent as a — well, baby was not quite the word he had in mind. Quite unexpectedly, the redhead felt a pang of genuine regret that they had met under such circumstances. Otherwise...
The distant barricade of Miami Beach was ablaze with jewel-lights as the big Super-Constellation circled and came in for its landing. A glance at his watch told Shayne they were on time. He stirred, and she yawned dimpling prettily. He said, “Someone meeting you?”
She shook her head, warily.
He added, “I suppose you’ll want to stand by while I claim the foot-locker?”
Her answer was, “What else? And if you make one false step, Mike Shayne, I’ll call the cops so fast you’ll never know what—”
“You will?” Something in his voice checked her.
They were standing, side by side, at the luggage-claiming counter, when Shayne, after a quick glance around said, in a low voice, “Looks as if you won’t have to call the cops after all, you double-crossing little...”
She said, “What are you...?” And then quick comprehension flashed into her alert green eyes. “It wasn’t me,” she whispered. Then, more loudly, “Thanks, Mike, but I can manage by myself. There are plenty of porters here. It was really very kind of you.” Deftly, she took the claim-check from his fingers. “Good night, Mike, it’s been fun. Hope I see you around.”
“Lots of fun,” he said grimly. “And more to come. ’Night, Carol.”
The redhead tipped his hat and walked away — almost into the arms of an enormous plainclothes-man, who was making his way slowly, purposefully, toward them through the small press of porters and passengers and their welcoming friends.
Mike said, “Hello, Len — what are you doing here?”