Rourke let his thin frame sink back in a slumped position against the back of the wooden bench with his head sunk down between jutting shoulder blades. He shook his head slowly and said, “You’re talking through your hat, Mike, and you know you are. This thing with Ralph has got beyond routine police procedure. None of those stopgaps you mention would be any good. The only thing that will possibly work is to throw the fear of God into Dorothy Larson and bring her back to her senses. She’s a good kid, Mike. Basically, she’s fine. I know her, goddamn it. She and Ralph have got off the track somehow. It isn’t for you or me to sit in judgment. You can’t just sit back and complacently wash your hands of the whole affair and say they’ve brought it on themselves. Sure, they have. Does that mean they don’t deserve help? Who the hell are you to sit back and refuse to lift a hand when it may mean life or death to a couple of intrinsically decent young people. You’re not that cynical, Mike.” The reporter’s deep-set eyes blazed across the barroom table at his old friend, and his voice shook with fervor.
Shayne dropped his gaze from Rourke’s and lifted his glass and drank from it deeply. He sat it down in front of him and turned it round and round with his fingers while he scowled deeply. Without lifting his eyes to meet Rourke’s, he muttered, “All right. I guess I’m not. Just what the hell do you want me to do?”
“Just what I said in the beginning.” Timothy Rourke was very careful not to let a tinge of triumph sound in his voice, though he could not restrain a note of relief. “Go and see Dorothy Larson. Right away. Now. After listening to Ralph rave last night, I don’t think there’s any time to spare. As I said before: Get tough with Dorothy. Scare the pants off her. Send her off on Ralph’s vacation with him next week… and I’ll go to work on Ralph tonight. He’s got to quit his goddamned job with Ames. Running around the night spots and snooping out dirt for his filthy column is no job for a self-respecting newspaperman anyhow. Tell Dorothy that pressure is being put on Ralph to quit. They don’t need that extra money. They’ve got to get out of the whole Ames’ orbit.”
“Suppose she won’t see me?” muttered Shayne. “Why should she? How can I explain…?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” exclaimed Rourke in exasperation. “You’re a detective, aren’t you? For more years than I like to remember you’ve been solving cases by barging in on people who had no desire to talk to you. Now, you ask me. Tell her any damn thing. Except that you’re a friend of her husband’s and feel sorry for him. Somehow, I don’t think that’s the right approach.”
Shayne nodded his head thoughtfully, draining the last of his cocktail from the glass. “How much am I supposed to know? That is… what sort of games have she and Wesley Ames been playing? If I claim to have been hired by Mrs. Ames, for instance… what sort of dope am I supposed to have gathered on the two of them?”
Rourke hesitated before replying, getting his underlip between his teeth and gnawing on it indecisively. “You’ve sort of got me there,” he confessed. “Ralph wasn’t making too much sense last night. I gather that it all started a couple of months ago when Ames suggested that Ralph take Dorothy along to a couple of night spots where Ames joined them with some other doll he had in tow. Dorothy being a sort of protective coloration in making it a foursome. Then Ames apparently asked Dorothy out on a couple of occasions while Ralph was carefully sent some other place to do errands for Ames… all perfectly innocent, perhaps, but Ralph began adding two and two together and is now convinced that Ames is using his position as boss to keep him in some other part of town while laying his wife… or trying to lay her… Ralph isn’t quite sure which it is at this point.”
“Then I don’t have any chapters or verses to quote to her,” muttered Shayne. “No specific instances to throw in her face if she denies everything and tells me to get the hell out.”
“N-no,” conceded Rourke reluctantly. “I don’t think Ralph has any real evidence of anything wrong. As I said before, you’ll just have to play it by ear and pretend you know a lot more than you do. But she must have certain guilt feelings no matter how far she has or hasn’t gone, and just having a detective show up on her doorstep at all should scare hell out of her.”
“It sounds,” said Shayne, “like a pretty lousy assignment. All right. Just where is her doorstep?”
“They have an apartment in the Northeast section.” Rourke eagerly dug into the right-hand pocket of his baggy jacket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. “I wrote it down for you.” He unfolded it and glanced at the penciled notation, passed it across to the redhead. “Northeast Sixty-First. Right now would be a good time to walk in on her. Ralph will be tied up at the newspaper office until seven.”
Shayne frowned and looked at his watch, shaking his head. “Not tonight. I’ve got a date to pick Lucy up at her apartment in half an hour and take her to dinner at Lucio’s. Tomorrow will be soon enough for Dorothy Larson.”
“Don’t put it off, Mike,” Rourke urged him. “I swear to God I’m afraid one more night may be one too many. Go out and see her now. I’ll pick up Lucy and take her out to Lucio’s. Meet us there whenever you’re through with Dorothy. I’ll ply Lucy with drinks and keep her happy.”
“And explain that I’ve stood her up for another woman… and a well-stacked one at that?” Shayne lifted a quizzical red eyebrow at his old friend across the table.
Rourke grinned back at him and said happily, “I’ll tell Lucy the truth. That you’re mounted on your white charger and doing your Boy Scout good turn for the day. Get going, damn it. I’ll even pay for Lucy’s drinks and for both your dinners.”
2
Driving out through the soft Miami twilight toward the Northeast section of the city, Shayne became more and more irritated with himself for allowing Tim Rourke to talk him into undertaking this errand. It just didn’t make sense to barge in on strangers and start arranging their lives for them. They were bound to resent his officious interference… and rightly.
And there wasn’t one chance in a thousand that it would do any good. If a young couple decided to go to hell on a hay-rack, that’s damn well what they were going to do, and no well-meaning advice from an outsider was likely to have the slightest effect.
Besides all that, the redheaded detective’s years of experience told him that men who were really worked up by a jealous rage to the point of murder didn’t talk about it beforehand. Getting drunk and making violent threats was a good way of blowing off steam, and was more likely to prevent a murder than lead up to one.
Well, he’d see Dorothy Larson and draw his own conclusions. Later on it might be worthwhile to have a talk with her husband despite Rourke’s objections. That would depend a lot on Dorothy and how she reacted to his visit.
In this section of the city many small modern apartment buildings had recently been erected in blocks that had formerly been given over to moderate-priced, single-family homes, most of which had been built in the early twenties.
The address Rourke had given him proved to be one of those newer buildings. It was a square two-story structure on a large corner lot, set well in from the street on two sides behind a wide expanse of neatly-clipped lawn. There were wide concrete walks leading in to two entrances, and there were old shade trees lining the sidewalks, and scrubbed-faced, neatly-dressed children playing decorously on the lawn.
The cars parked in front of the building were uniformly gleaming late models in the medium-priced field, and Shayne maneuvered into a parking place between two of them with an increasing feeling of being an intruder in a setting specifically designed for quiet and comfortable living by middle-class people who normally lived out the full span of their lives untouched by violence or by tragedy.
He went up the walk toward the arched side entrance and found a row of mailboxes outside of wide double glass doors that stood invitingly open to a corridor carpeted from wall-to-wall and leading to a wide, curving stairway at the end.