Mermaid on the Rocks Read online

  “Yes, what about me?” she said coolly. “That’s where your argument breaks down.”

  “Come on,” Shayne said. “You think he forgot about that badger game you pulled on him, just because he went on sleeping with you? And I think he had another big reason for including you. All the other heirs are clods, in one way or another. They might have been willing to settle for a percentage. Not you, Kitty. He knew you’d want it all.”

  Sims chuckled. “Mr. Shayne, you’ll have to stop making insulting remarks about my wife or I’ll ask you to step outside.”

  “Any time,” Shayne said evenly. “So Cal wasn’t doing anybody a favor by putting them in his will. He knew what would happen. But they wouldn’t start killing each other until they were sure the Key was actually worth something, and that’s where the treasure came in. If he and Eda Lou found it two years before he died, it puts those holes she dug later in a different light, doesn’t it? Please don’t anybody tell me that if she wanted to dig for buried treasure, she couldn’t do it without getting caught. Of course we don’t want to forget—I think she forgot it—that Cal had something against her, too.”

  She looked startled. Shayne said gently, “Cal never forgave Shanahan for that old affair. Why would he forgive you? He blocked out a script for you to follow, and you followed it. Somebody had to make the first move. One of the five had to die, in a way that would make the other four start thinking. Kitty was with Ev the night he died. I doubt if that was a coincidence. I think you were waiting for it. You knocked on his door and he was glad to let you in—his successful brother’s mistress, he’d probably lusted after you for years.”

  Barbara cried, “How do you know all that, were you there?”

  “There’s a witness,” Shayne said. “He was planning to burglarize Ev after he passed out. He saw a woman come out of his room. Apparently he only had one quick glimpse from the rear. She was blonde, with a sexy walk. Shanahan and everybody else assumed it was Kitty. I had a different idea. I’ve seen Eda Lou walk across a room in short shorts, and she has one of the sexiest going-away motions I’ve seen in years.”

  “Why—you angel!” Eda Lou cried. “Nobody’s said anything that nice about me since World War Two.”

  Shayne gave her a half grin. “It’s almost worth being convicted of murder for, isn’t it?”

  Her face clouded. “But my defense would have to be—”

  “Yeah,” Shayne told her. “That the burglar couldn’t possibly be talking about you because you’re so dried-up and unsexy. Your lawyer will establish your true age and make you wear a girdle in court. O.K. Ev’s dead. Four more to go. Kitty was the outsider. Everybody took it for granted that she burned Ev. Kitty and Hank, meanwhile, pretended to split up to give her more freedom of action. They set up a listening post in Barbara’s old tree house. There were discussions between Brad and Barbara, Shanahan and Barbara. Brad offered to take care of the Kitty problem, and Kitty knew exactly what was going to happen, and when. She could have arranged not to be home that night but she decided that if she had an armed man in her apartment, Brad would end up dead and the survivors would be down to three. Barbara and Shanahan, at the same time, were making separate plans for disposing of Brad after he disposed of Kitty. Shanahan arranged to have cops waiting when Brad ran out. Barbara stole a tank of nitrous oxide and pumped it into Brad’s aqualung.”

  Barbara glowered at Hank. He said in a friendly tone, “I never said a word.”

  “It’s all a matter of style,” Shayne said. “Kitty’s style is to get somebody else to do her dirty work. She switched air tanks with Brad and loaned me her aqualung. I was probably never in any real danger, but at the time I thought she saved me from drowning. So there I was in her apartment with a .38, waiting for Brad. Kitty’s next move after that was to make Barbara think Shanahan had sold her out. After a few carbine shots and some faked affidavits, Barbara wobbled, but in the end she decided that Kitty was still the person who needed eliminating most.”

  “I’m trying to keep track,” Rourke put in, “but before you go any further, who slugged you in the tree house?”

  “Let’s jump back to Miami. I put Kitty away for the night in somebody else’s apartment. She got up, left a note for her roommate, and drove to Gaspar with Hank. She headed for the tree house to find out if Barbara had fallen for those affidavits. The tree house was already occupied.”

  Kitty said briskly, “You don’t expect anybody to believe I knocked you out single-handed?”

  “With the help of a handspike,” Shayne said. “I was paying too much attention to what was going on in the house. I was squinting through binoculars and I had earphones on, with the volume all the way up.” He smiled at her. “I know that’s no excuse. I must have been tired.”

  “You should have given him a couple of extra licks to make sure,” Eda Lou said.

  Shayne went on, “I hadn’t started thinking seriously about Eda Lou at that point. I made the mistake of letting her hear some phone calls I made. I told Will Gentry to round up everybody and stop the action. She didn’t want that. She also thought Barbara was gunning for Shanahan. Eda Lou’s plan, as opposed to Cal’s, was to end up the elimination with Barbara the sole survivor. She didn’t want her to get caught in the act of shooting a judge.”

  Eda Lou gave him a beseeching look. Many secret links and connections had been brought out in the past eighteen hours, but if Eda Lou and Barbara were actually mother and daughter, Shayne thought it was the one thing that could safely stay buried.

  Eda Lou’s face cleared as he went on, “But there hasn’t been much unselfishness in any of this, and I doubt if she was acting out of friendship. We don’t know much about that old love episode with Shanahan. Probably it ended badly.”

  “I don’t kill people because something happened when I was twenty-five,” Eda Lou said. “What makes you think Kitty didn’t do it, or is this another case of somebody with a sexy walk?”

  “It’s a case of somebody with a mop and a scarf,” he said. “Kitty could have done it. I think she was back in time. But why would she send Hank to the courtroom to take a picture of it?”

  The first crack appeared in Eda Lou’s self-assurance. She put out a hand to steady herself, touched a headstone and pulled the hand back as though burned.

  Sims lifted his beefy shoulders. “As I was saying, the light wasn’t too good.”

  “I don’t know what Eda Lou said to Kitty in New York,” Shayne said. “It probably went something like this. She said she’d hoaxed everybody. She had the treasure, and had had it for years. Kitty should stop being stubborn and let Florida-American get stuck. If the others found out Eda Lou had the gold and had wrecked the deal, they’d kill her for it. She was willing to give Kitty a tenth to sweeten the arrangement. Naturally Kitty would refuse to believe such an outlandish story. Eda Lou told her to hurry back and she’d prove it. We already know what she planned to do when the crypt was opened.”

  His hand shot out and seized Kitty’s oversized purse. He held her off with one hand while he felt inside it. He took out a .38 revolver.

  “This is the one gun I couldn’t account for,” he said. “I lost it last night in the fight with Brad. Eda Lou likes dramatic effects. She’d take her time unwrapping the Luger. I really think Kitty would have beaten her to it.”

  “You bitch!” Eda Lou said with feeling.

  “It’s true that shooting isn’t Kitty’s usual style,” Shayne said, “but every good fast-ball pitcher can use an occasional change of pace.”

  Kitty said coolly, “This is all supposition, Mike.”

  “True.” He turned to Quarrels. “Is your million-dollar offer still open?”

  Quarrels said carefully, “I can see that Key Gaspar is going to get a good deal of publicity in the coming weeks. Will it be the kind of publicity that sells real estate? I’m not sure.”

  “When did Florida-American get really interested in Key Gaspar? Wasn’t it right after Ev Tuttle was killed?”
r />   “I don’t follow you.”

  Shayne shrugged. “If you had any reason to suspect that was a murder, it would show there was something on the Key worth being murdered for.”

  Quarrels looked at him directly. “A rumor of that kind could ruin us, as you know very well, Shayne. I think I can say definitely that the deal is off.”

  “Thank you so much, Michael Shayne,” Kitty said.

  One of the detectives, at a sign from Gentry, stooped over the box of treasure. Kitty said wistfully, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever see it again.”

  “I’ll see it again!” Eda Lou snapped.

  “I’m wondering about the laws governing buried treasure,” Quarrels said slowly. “The crypt has been sold to Mrs. Parchman but we still own the mausoleum. I think that we could maintain that the treasure was reburied on Florida-American property and that it consequently belongs to us. It’s a nice legal point.”

  “A nice point!” Eda Lou cried. “It’s mine! I’ve got a paper to prove it!”

  Shayne gave a short deliberate laugh. “My prediction is that most of it’s going to end up with the lawyers.”

  Eda Lou must have been closer to the breaking point than Shayne had realized. She threw herself on the box. The box upset, sending gold and silver coins rolling in all directions. By the time the doubloons and pieces-of-eight were gathered up and put back in the box, she was quivering and helpless, her eyes glowing terribly in her pale face.

  “I’ll get you, Shayne,” she muttered.

  She went for the detective, screaming, trying to rake out his eyes with her curved fingers. It took two husky homicide detectives to pull her away. They heard her swearing and shouting all the way out of the building.

  “And that leaves the two survivors,” Tim Rourke said slowly.

  Barbara and Kitty, who had harbored murderous thoughts about each other but who were actually guilty of no more than a few minor misdemeanors, were eying each other warily, gauging the changed situation.

  “Yeah,” Shayne said. “Anybody want to make book?”