She slid closer and touched her forehead to his shoulder.
He went on, “But why don’t you tell me about it, Joshua? If I can’t handle it maybe I can get somebody else for you.”
“It’s my god-daughter, Mike, Dotty De Rham. She was in the papers a lot at one time, before she was married. Does the name Dotty Winslow mean anything to you?”
“Not offhand.”
“Well, by papers I suppose I mean New York gossip columns. Nate Winslow was my best friend as a boy. He died when she was three or four. There’s quite a bit of money. She owns a controlling interest in Winslow Mills. I’ve got her out of a number of minor jams, but this time it could be a bit more serious-Mike, I really hate to break into your evening this way.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go ahead.”
“I’ll have to give you a little background. Dotty’s mother is a moral lightweight. There’ve been a couple of stepfathers but neither one lasted long. Dotty was kicked out of various European schools. Then she had a breakdown of sorts and spent a few months in a mental hospital. Voluntarily. She’s under psychotherapy now, and the theory is that lately she’s been getting better. She’s thirty. She married at twenty-seven, a man three years younger-Henry De Rham. I’m afraid I may be prejudiced against young men with beards, but she didn’t ask my advice. Like everything else with Dotty, that goes in cycles. Sometimes, for a few months, we have lunch once a week and she tells me everything. Then we go into a period where I represent everything she despises and she won’t have anything to do with me.”
“She has control over her property?”
“Complete control. Her father left everything in trust, but that terminated on her twenty-fifth birthday. As a matter of fact, she’s shrewd about money. I have no complaints on that score. When she makes a financial decision she seems to become a different person. All right. They’re in Miami now. They went down on their boat, the Nefertiti III, with a fellow named Paul Brady, a classmate of the husband’s. The plan as I understood it was that Dotty and Henry were going to leave the boat in Miami and go on to South America by air. She changes her mind frequently, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that they’re still there. But something’s going on, Mike, and I don’t like it.”
“She’s been in touch with you?”
“She’s called me three times. Around one-thirty in the morning has always been her favorite time to use the phone. I’m in the hospital, incidentally. She had to bully the switchboard to get the calls through. I’ve had what they call a cardiac spasm, and I’m supposed to stay out of airplanes, or I’d be talking to you personally now instead of using the phone.”
“I’m sorry,” Shayne said. “I hadn’t heard.”
“They’re letting me go home in a few days. Dotty asked me how I was feeling and so on, and then she started talking about her will. She was pretty incoherent. She’d been drinking. She and her husband have been having difficulties, apparently. As obnoxious as I find him personally, he seemed to have a stabilizing effect on her at first. But just before she left New York she came into the office and added a codicil to her will cutting him off with a cash bequest of fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Which isn’t much in that family?”
“Which isn’t anything. We were very much at cross-purposes in that phone call, but I gathered that they’d had a fight on the way down and he’d left her, at least temporarily. I couldn’t make out what she wanted-a sympathetic listener, I suppose. I advised her to leave the codicil as it was and not cut him out completely, as long as they remained legally married. Whether anything registered I don’t know. I asked what she was planning to do, and she said she planned to have another martini. That was the level of the conversation. The next call was different-friendly and chatty. And then last night, or rather at one-thirty this morning, she called again, very drunk. She wanted to know if I could get her a reliable private detective.”
Shayne was scraping his thumbnail along the harsh reddish stubble on his jaw, the phone clamped between his shoulder and his chin.
“I couldn’t get her to tell me why,” Loring said. “She was all but unintelligible. And then Brady got on the phone. He said they’d had to fire the captain, and if you’re going to help with this, Mike, you’ll want his name. It’s Raphael Petrocelli. Apparently he made some kind of pass at Dotty while she was sun-bathing, and they let him go as soon as they tied up in Miami. He’s been hanging around the saloons, spreading stories and making vague threats.”
“Is Brady still living on the boat?”
“It seems so.”
“The name is Paul Brady? What does he do?”
“He married Katharine Kuhn, which means he doesn’t have to do anything. I don’t know anything else about him. Mike, will you go and see them?”
“Hold the line a moment.”
The girl twisted before he could say anything and kissed him lightly. “I know that look, Michael. It seems to me I’ve seen it once or twice before. For the last few minutes you haven’t known I was here, have you? In spite of the fact that I’m wearing a new dress and some rather expensive perfume.”
“Of course I’ve-”
“No, Mike. You asked me to dinner, and if I wanted to be a stinker I could hold you to it. But it wouldn’t be any fun. I know you. You’re like a racing greyhound-the minute you see the mechanical rabbit you start to run. I don’t mind, really. It’s one of your nice traits. Of course you’re not the typical greyhound, because you usually catch your rabbit.”
“The point is,” Shayne said uncomfortably, “this guy did me a favor years ago. If he hadn’t gone to bat for me I would have spent a couple of years in jail for jury tampering.”
“Yes, dear. And it’s been a very enjoyable evening, as far as it went. I’ve got some hamburger in the refrigerator. When you think of me again, call me.” She opened the door. “After you catch the rabbit.”
“Next time I’ll switch off the phone.”
“Next time we’ll take my car. It doesn’t have a phone.” The inner door of her apartment building closed behind her and Shayne went back to Loring.
“Did they give you the name of the marina?”
“The Sunrise Shores on Indian Creek. There’s something else, Mike. The role I’ve always played in Dotty’s life is a kind of court of last resort. When everything else fails, she gets in touch with Joshua Loring. I’ve spent most of the day on the phone. There’s a boy who works in my office named Tom Moseley. He prepares Dotty’s tax returns and she seems to like him. He’s visiting his parents in Sarasota, and when I didn’t succeed in tracking you down I called him and asked him to come over. He’ll be staying at the St. Albans, and he may be able to help.”
He hesitated. “I may be building this up. But I can’t persuade myself that she isn’t worried about something more than an employee who got out of line and had to be fired. And I had a hunch. She sold quite a bit of stock all through the fall and winter, on my advice, and she put the cash into savings accounts and certificates of deposit. The president of her bank is one of my close friends, and I asked him about the status of her accounts. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have told me, but he knows something about her medical history and he agreed to check. She’s closed everything out, Mike, a total of over seventy thousand dollars, and the checks came back endorsed for deposit in Miami Beach. A total of eighty thousand dollars, and she may have had other accounts in other banks that I don’t know about. And another point. A piece of industrial property she owns in Hoboken was put on the market and the broker accepted the first offer that came along. It wasn’t a bad price, but that’s not the way Dotty usually operates.”
Shayne said thoughtfully, “Do you know any reason why she would need cash in a hurry?”
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason.”