Cunningham stood up. “I might as well go along, Mrs. Groat. I’ll call you first thing in the morning, and I sure hope Jasper turns up all right.” He turned to Lucy, his black eyes running boldly over her slight figure as he said, “Good night.”
Shayne had his hand on the doorknob. He sauntered back into the room and sat down.
When Cunningham went out, Lucy turned flaming cheeks to Shayne and flared, “Did you see the way he looked at me?”
Shayne chuckled. “He’s just been rescued after two weeks adrift in a lifeboat.” Then to Mrs. Groat, “If you haven’t heard from your husband in the morning call me at my office.”
Mrs. Groat dragged herself up from the deep cushions. Lucy put an arm around her and accompanied her to her apartment across the hall.
Shayne let himself down in the elevator. In the office he stopped before the woman who was still placidly knitting and asked, “Do you keep a record of calls through the switchboard?”
She said, “Outgoing calls,” without looking up.
“Will you check a call about four o’clock this afternoon from 311? It’s police business.”
Her fingers stopped in the middle of a stitch. She glanced up at Shayne, startled. Without a word, she consulted a sheet of paper clamped to a board on the switchboard and said, “That was long-distance. To Mrs. Leon Wallace in Littleboro.”
Shayne laid a dollar bill on the desk and said, “I’d like to talk to Mrs. Leon Wallace in Littleboro.”
“You can take the call in there,” she stammered, indicating a booth in the corner of the small office.
Shayne waited a full five minutes before the booth phone rang. He lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.”
An operator said brightly, “On your call to Littleboro — there is no answer. Shall I keep trying?”
“Cancel it.” He hung up and went back to the anxious-eyed woman at the switchboard. “Do you know Mr. Groat in 311?”
“Yes. He and his wife have lived here for two years.”
“Did you see him tonight when he went out?”
She said, “He stopped and asked me the best way to get to Labarre Road.” She started to pick up her knitting but, instead, turned back to Shayne with a frown riding the gold bridge of her spectacles. “He made a phone call from the booth there before he went out.”
Shayne went back into the booth and thumbed through the names under H until he found Mrs. Sarah Hawley on Labarre. Then he walked out to his car parked at the curb.
A man moved forward from the shadows beside the building. “Just a minute, Mr. Shayne,” Leslie Cunningham said. “If you’ve got time I’d like to talk to you.”
The detective stopped. “It’s pretty late,” he said.
“This is important. It’s about Groat.”
“Why didn’t you do your talking upstairs?”
“I didn’t want to talk in front of his wife.” Cunningham made an impatient gesture. “No use getting her any more worried than she is.”
Shayne swung into a long-legged stride. “If you’ve got something to say, let’s find a place where we can sit down.”
Cunningham’s shorter legs fell into unrhythmic step. “There’s a place on Toulouse,” he suggested. “I’ll buy a drink.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” They turned right on Toulouse and, halfway down the block, went into a bar.
Jarring music from a rear room drifted through a heavy pall of smoke. Three men supported hunched shoulders with their elbows on the bar.
“Let’s go back where we can sit at a table,” Cunningham muttered, waving his hand and saying, “Hi, Louie,” to the bartender as he passed.
The juke-box jive grew louder and the smoke heavier when they pushed through the swinging door into the rear room. They found a vacant booth and slid into it.
A pretty girl wearing a dirty apron came over and flicked a dirty rag across the table, then asked, “What’ll you have, gents?”
Shayne said, “A double shot of the best brandy you can find in the joint.”
Cunningham ordered a double bourbon with plain water. The waitress slouched away, the music stopped, and when another record dropped into place, he leaned toward Shayne and said, “As I understand it, you ain’t hooked up with the cops, Mr. Shayne.”
“My letterheads say I’m a private investigator,” Shayne told him. “Tell me about your sea rescue.”
“It wasn’t much.” Cunningham made a deprecatory gesture. “Tough to get rolled out in the middle of the night with a ship breaking to pieces under you, but we came out all right. We had a sail rigged up and would’ve made land all right if the rescue ship hadn’t picked us up.”
The girl brought their drinks. Cunningham laid out a dollar and a half and she took it away.
“If you come onto something not just right,” the sailor said slowly, “you can keep your mouth shut, huh? You don’t have to blab all you know? Like a lawyer — you got a right to protect your client?”
Shayne’s lips thinned a trifle against his teeth. He held the glass of brandy to his nose and scowled, set it down on the table, and said gently, “Like a lawyer. What’s on your mind?”
“I’m plenty worried about Groat. Something bad’s happened to him. I know it. You know how it is when you think maybe you’re going to die. You plan to have a big celebration if you come out alive. I was gonna blow him to the dinner, and Jasper wouldn’t have passed it up.” Cunningham was watching Shayne intently. He was nervous and tight-strung.
“Any idea where he went tonight?” Shayne poured brandy into his mouth and swallowed it quickly, then chased it with water.
“Yeah. I think I have. I can’t go to the police, see?”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll ask too many questions. It’s a long story. Less you know about it the better it’ll be. It’s Jasper’s diary I’m thinking of.”
“The diary some reporter said he might buy from Groat for publication?”
“That’s it. He was writing in it all the time we were shipwrecked. Put everything down, see? Everything we said and what he thought. He was a great one for thinking.”
“What about the diary?”
“I want it. That is, if anything’s happened to Jasper I want it bad. It’s got — a lot of stuff about me in it.” The sailor took a big drink of bourbon and ran his tongue over his lips.
“Stuff you don’t want published?”
“That’s it. I told Jasper to lay off giving it to that reporter. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What kind of stuff?” Shayne persisted. Cunningham’s faint smile showed his big white teeth. His tone took on a lighter vein when he said, “You know how it is when a man thinks he might die. He tells all sorts of things he wouldn’t think of telling anybody otherwise. Things that wouldn’t look good in print.”
Shayne asked, “Did Groat turn the diary over to the reporter?” He finished his drink and thumped the glass down.
“Yeah. Yesterday morning, he did. You know how it was at the dock — a lot of excitement and all. The reporter high-pressured him, telling him how much money it was worth.”
“Has the reporter still got it?”
“I don’t know. He and Jasper may have got together later. That’s what I want to find out.”
“You want me to get it back for you?”
“I want to know where I stand.” Cunningham’s black eyes glittered. “If something’s happened to Jasper, like I think, could they go ahead and publish it anyway?”
“You mean if Groat is dead?” Shayne asked casually.
“Yeah.”
Shayne shrugged his wide shoulders. “That would depend on whether they had legally completed a deal, I suppose. Or whether the newspaper could make a deal with Mrs. Groat. It would become her property on her husband’s death.”