“But there were pictures of Godfrey. You might have recognized him from—” Rourke stopped abruptly as remembrance came to him.
Shayne nodded with a wry twist of his mouth. “Pictures aren’t much good for that sort of identification. I did look at those photographs of Godfrey without recognizing him. Black hair and glasses, different clothes and mannerisms — even to the point of wearing shoes a size too small to give him a mincing gait — all add up to a hell of a difference in a man’s appearance. Particularly if you only observe him for a few minutes. I did have a vague feeling of familiarity when I looked at those pics, but that’s as far as it went.
“No. It looked pretty safe to Hiram Godfrey,” Shayne went on ruminatively. “Even if I did eventually learn that the whole story about Mrs. Lansdowne was made up. Mrs. Davis had disappeared in thin air, and there was nothing whatever to connect her with Godfrey.”
“Tim and I are just sitting here waiting,” Lucy told him sweetly, “to hear you say that the one mistake Mr. Godfrey made was in picking on the smartest detective in the country to provide him with an alibi.”
Shayne grinned at her and drained his cocktail glass. “I’ll let Tim point that out in the story he writes for his paper,” he told her modestly.
“But it is the truth, Michael,” she insisted. “Why do you suppose he did pick on you instead of all the other dumb detectives in Miami?”
“I can answer that one,” Rourke told her readily. “He had to be absolutely positive that the man he sent Mrs. Brewer to would fall for her story about Dorinda. Some lecherous-minded old goat who would take one look at the girl’s photograph and start slavering at the mouth. Who else would he pick but Michael Shayne — than whom—”
He broke off with a wicked chuckle as Lucy Hamilton jumped to her feet fiercely with angry spots of red in her cheeks and exclaimed, “Michael isn’t like that, Timothy Rourke. He just pretends he is to — to t-tease me. D-Don’t you, Michael?”
“Of course, angel.” Shayne was on his feet swiftly and drew her to him. He glared over the top of her brown head at the reporter and said, “You’ve got your story. Why don’t you get the hell out of here and put it on the wire?”