Murder by Proxy Read online

  Harris said, “I think I could use that drink now, if you don’t mind.”

  Shayne nodded and pushed back his chair to get up. Harris turned to Lucy and thoughtfully began giving her a list of names, mostly feminine, some married couples, with addresses or partial addresses as he recalled them.

  On the other side of the room, Shayne busied himself getting a cognac bottle from the second drawer of the filing cabinet, fitting two pairs of paper cups into each other and filling each to the brim with liquor and carrying them to the desk, then getting cups of ice water from the cooler which he brought back and set beside the nested cups.

  He pushed cognac and ice water toward Herbert Harris as the New Yorker concluded earnestly to Lucy, “That’s all the names I can think of at the moment.” He glanced at Shayne and explained, “I’ve told your secretary we didn’t go out a great deal socially. Actually, we were both pretty well wrapped up in each other and we didn’t need other people.” He lifted the cognac and sipped it appreciatively.

  Shayne said heartily, “I can understand that… during your first year of marriage. Let’s see, now. Have you got the name of her hairdresser, Lucy?”

  She shook her head as Harris broke in vehemently, “Now what in the living hell has her hairdresser in New York got to do with Ellen’s disappearance in Miami? You may know your business, Mr. Shayne, but I certainly fail to understand…”

  “All right, Lucy.” Shayne’s voice was grim. “Make a notation that Mr. Harris refuses to divulge the name of his wife’s hairdresser.”

  “Wait a minute. I didn’t refuse. Hell, I don’t know her name,” Harris said sulkily. “It’s a shop on Park Avenue just around the corner from our place. Blanche, I think. Something like that.”

  Shayne nodded noncommittally. “Now, let’s let Miss Hamilton get down the facts about your wife’s arrival, and so forth.” He settled back and took a long sip of cognac and narrowed his eyes. “You put her on a plane for Miami Monday afternoon. She phoned you from the hotel after her arrival, and you have heard nothing further from her. Didn’t that disturb you, Harris?”

  “No. Why should it? I didn’t expect her to call or write me unless there was some particular reason.”

  “And you didn’t bother to call her?”

  “No.” Harris was on the defensive. “We’re mature people. I wanted her to have these two weeks away from me. I wanted her to meet new people and have fun without feeling that she had to report to me or that I was checking up on her.”

  Shayne nodded, expressionless. “Now, this trip you suddenly decided to make. Did I understand you to say it was completely unexpected… not planned at all… that your wife hadn’t the faintest idea you might turn up in Miami today?”

  “That’s right.” Harris became suddenly aggressive. “I didn’t know, myself, until late Thursday afternoon. A situation came up in the office that required me to be in Charleston, South Carolina on Friday. One of our elderly clients took a sudden notion to discuss his portfolio. I drove to Charleston that night, arriving Friday morning. I caught a few hours sleep in a motel and spent the afternoon with our client, and on a sudden impulse decided to drive on down here and spend Saturday and Sunday morning with my wife. By driving straight through, I planned to be back in New York Monday morning.”

  “That’s a lot of cross-country driving,” Shayne suggested. “Most businessmen find a plane much easier these days.”

  “I happen to like to drive,” Harris informed him coldly. “Especially by myself and at night. There’s something about driving across the country at night alone. You can really put the miles behind you… and stopping along the highway at the little all-night diners where the truckers congregate…” He paused, shaking his head as though a little ashamed of the enthusiasm with which he spoke. “I happen to like it,” he repeated. “And, when I left New York, I really had no idea at all of coming on. But when I realized it was Friday evening in Charleston and there was no reason at all for me to be back in New York before Monday morning… I suddenly thought how wonderful it would be to surprise Ellen… and I just came on.”

  Shayne looked at him thoughtfully and a little wonderingly. You had to be pretty young, he thought, and very much in love with your wife, to decide it would be a good idea to pop up at her hotel at dawn in Miami when she was on vacation and had every reason to suppose you were safely in New York. How would Herbert Harris have liked it, he wondered, if Ellen had suddenly turned up unexpectedly at the New York apartment a week before she was expected home?

  And yet? And yet!

  Harris was pretty young… and apparently he was very much in love with his wife of one year. Aloud, Shayne said, “I guess that’s about all for now, Mr. Harris. I’ll get to work on it. Will you be available at the Beachhaven?”

  “Yes, I… I suppose I may as well stay there as anywhere. Look here, Shayne.” He leaned forward and his jaw jutted aggressively. “I didn’t argue with you or withhold any information when you pointed out that you had your methods of working on a case just as I would have my reasons for buying certain stocks or bonds. But I’d still like to know why in hell you wanted this list of Ellen’s friends in New York… including her hairdresser. How can any of those people possibly have any connection with what has happened to her here?”

  Shayne said, “In the beginning, Harris, you complained that no one in Miami knew your wife, and therefore was not capable of conducting an intelligent investigation into her disappearance. I agree with you. I hope to conduct an intelligent investigation, and for that reason I want to know everything about your wife that I can. Does that answer your question?”

  “In a way.” Harris’ manner was guarded. “Are you going to be in touch with those people whose names I gave you?”

  “Have you any objections?” Shayne’s voice was crisp and he met Harris’ eyes levelly.

  “Well… no. I just wondered.”

  “I’ll be discreet,” Shayne assured him. “But I won’t take a case with any strings attached.” He stood up and held his hand across the desk. “I won’t tell you to go back to the hotel and stop worrying, but I do suggest that you go back feeling that everything is being done that can be done. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  Harris shook his hand with more enthusiasm than he had shown the first time. “I feel better already. Uh… about your fee, Mr. Shayne.”

  Shayne said, “Give my secretary a check for a thousand as a retainer. With any luck at all, that should cover it. If I see it running into more, I’ll let you know.”

  Harris said awkwardly, “Well… thanks,” and followed Lucy out into the outer room.

  Shayne sat down and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and sipped his cognac with narrowed eyes while he considered the young New York stockbroker and his problem. Lucy interrupted his musings by entering a few minutes later and asking, “Michael, do you want me to transcribe those notes right away?”

  He jerked his attention back from a period in his past and said, “There’s no hurry, angel. See if you can get me Jim Gifford in New York. If you can, stay on the extension with your notes, and read them off when I say so.”

  She started to say something, then compressed her lips and marched out. Shayne drank the last of his cognac and crumpled the paper cups in his hand and tossed them into the wastebasket. He was taking a swallow of ice water when his buzzer sounded. He lifted his telephone and Lucy said, “I have Mr. Gifford on the wire.”

  He said, “Jim?” and a hearty voice answered, “Is that you, Mike? How’re things in the sunny land of sin and sex?”

  Shayne said, “Sinful and sexful. Can you do a fast job for me?”

  Gifford laughed and said, “For you… and for a price… I can do anything.”

  “Here it is, Jim. A Mrs. Ellen Harris from New York is missing from the Beachhaven Hotel in Miami Beach since last Monday. Husband is Herbert Harris, stockbroker. Lucy will give you the addresses from her notes in a moment. The way it looks, cold, Jim, is that the lady had a deal all
set up before she left New York. She’s an ex-model. I want you to dig into her background… before and after her marriage to Harris. Everything you can get… particularly on ex or current boyfriends. She’s a real looker and should have plenty though hubby doesn’t believe it. Put some men in it, Jim, and get everything you can by late this afternoon? Call my apartment or Lucy’s home number if we’re not here. I’m going to put her on the line to give you everything we’ve got. Go ahead, angel.”

  Shayne held the telephone to his ear until he heard Lucy start reading the important points from her shorthand notes to Jim Gifford in New York. Then he hung up.

  He was standing in front of one of the wide windows looking down on Flagler Street when Lucy Hamilton come into the room behind him five minutes later. Her voice trembled with indignation. “Michael Shayne! What do you really expect Jim Gifford to find out in New York? If I ever saw a man truly in love and suffering because of it, it was Herbert Harris.”

  He turned around slowly, shaking his red head. “How much he’s in love hasn’t very much to do with it really. She’s the one who has pulled the disappearing act. Get me Tim Rourke, huh?”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and went back to her desk. Shayne turned away from the window, tugging at his earlobe and trying not to think about his dead wife, Phyllis.

  Harris had really hit him below the belt with that one question he had asked. If it were Phyllis, now, who was missing… ?

  His telephone buzzed and he picked it up and said, “Hi, Tim? Busy?”

  He listened a moment to his old friend profanely telling him exactly how busy he was at the moment getting out world-shattering news to his millions of newspaper reading fans, glanced at his watch and then cut Rourke off by saying, “I’ve got a hell of a story cooking, Tim. Be by your office in about fifteen minutes. Then we’ll grab lunch. Cut yourself loose for at least a couple of hours.”

  He hung up and went out to grab his hat and to tell Lucy she could leave the office whenever she was through, but to stick close to the apartment that afternoon in anticipation of a call from Gifford, and that he would check with her from time to time.

  7.

  In the crowded, noisy City Room of the News, Shayne went directly to Timothy Rourke’s desk in a far corner and found the reporter pensively staring down at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter while he assiduously practiced blowing smoke rings into the already smoke laden atmosphere.

  Rourke was a lean, greyhound sort of man, with features so thin they were almost emaciated, and deep-set cynical eyes that were as bright as a ferret’s. They became even brighter when Shayne laid the snapshot of Ellen Harris in front of him and asked, “Got room on your front page for a blowup of her?”

  “We got practically nothing else for the front page today. What’s she done? Cut up her sugar-daddy into little pieces and made him into a stew… I hope.” Rourke studied the picture avidly.

  Shayne said, “Right now… she’s just a missing person. Take that back to your photo department, huh, and get some prints made? I’d like half a dozen… six by nine or like that. You can have it retouched and ready to hit the front page before your deadline if I give you the go-ahead. We’ll grab some lunch and stop back for the prints.”

  Rourke had known Michael Shayne too long to ask any questions at this point. He shoved back his chair and got up and went around the corner to the newspaper’s darkroom, and returned in a few minutes with a nod, “Prints will be ready by the time we’ve eaten.” They went out together to a steak house half a block away and settled themselves with drinks and a luncheon order to come. Rourke cupped his thin chin in his hands and regarded his old friend shrewdly. “What’s the story… and what’s the ‘if’ about running the picture?”

  Shayne told him, “The ‘if’ is whether we have any reason not to run the story by the time your first edition deadline hits. It’s got to be confidential as hell until I give you the word, Tim.”

  “So?” Rourke sipped his bourbon and water and waited.

  Shayne told it to him briefly the way Herbert Harris had given it to him. “Seemingly a hell of a nice guy. It’s going to smash his whole world into little pieces if it does turn out his wife is just having herself a ball and turns up all in one piece.”

  “Which way would he rather have it,” grunted Rourke with a sour grin, “that she turn up in little pieces instead of having his dream world all smashed up?”

  “I don’t know,” Shayne admitted angrily. “He’s so damned sure of her, Tim. I think it might be easier for him to live with it in the long run if she turns out dead.”

  “Petey Painter and the Beachhaven Hotel aren’t going to like it if we spread that story over the front page,” Rourke warned him happily. “Either way the cat jumps, it’s going to be lousy publicity.”

  “We’re not going to ask them whether they like it or not. Suppose you come along with me to the Beachhaven when I take that picture over and see what I find out. Merrill will let you sit in on it if I give him my word you’ll print only what I think needs to be printed.”

  “Who’s Merrill?”

  “Chief of Security. House dick, to you.” Shayne grinned, emptying his glass and picking up knife and fork as his plate was placed in front of him. “He’s in a real tough spot. Right now, he’s going to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.” He sighed and then attacked his steak zestfully.

  The prints were still damp when they got back to the newspaper office after a fast lunch, but the snapshot had blown up much better than Shayne had hoped it would. He took two of the damp prints with him and arranged to have a couple more delivered to his place after they were dry, then he and Rourke drove over to the Beachhaven in their own cars so they could separate later if they wished.

  The reporter’s car was already at the curb when Shayne got there, and Rourke was at the desk talking to the clerk when he entered the lobby.

  Lawford looked fussed and irritated as Shayne walked up, and Rourke turned to him with a wink and said, “This guy claims Mrs. Harris isn’t in, but he refuses to call her room and check.”

  Shayne said, “I’ll ask the questions, Tim,” and to the clerk, “Merrill in his office?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s right around…

  Shayne said, “I know where it is.” He took Rourke’s arm firmly and led him away from the desk. “These birds aren’t going to talk to reporters, damn it. Every person in the hotel has been clammed up.” They went around a corner to a suite of offices at the rear of the desk, and Shayne stopped at a closed, wooden door marked PRIVATE.

  He knocked and turned the knob and walked in without waiting for an invitation. It was a small, neat office, lined with filing cases against the rear wall, with a bare desk in the center having only one telephone and a dictating machine. Robert Merrill was dictating into a microphone, leaning back at ease behind the desk and referring to on open cardboard folder in his lap. He pressed a thumb button on the microphone which shut off the machine when he saw Shayne in the doorway, and closed the folder and placed it on the desk in front of him.

  With a hearty cordiality that did not appear to be feigned, he said, “Mike Shayne in the flesh. You don’t get around these parts often.”

  He was a tall, middle-aged man, with iron-gray hair and coldly wary eyes. He was, as Shayne had assured Harris, competent and conscientious in his job—which was seeing to the security of the Beachhaven Hotel. It was a job that required a lot of intelligence and tact, the ability to unerringly detect a phony the moment he showed up in the hotel and to ruthlessly hound him away to another hostelry, and a sort of sixth sense acquired over the years which warned him in advance when trouble was brewing in any one of the more than thousand rooms overhead.

  Shayne said, “The kind of people I deal with these days haven’t got the sort of money to pay your rates, Bob.” He held the door open for Rourke to come in, then closed it and asked, “Do you know Tim Rourke? Robert Merrill, Tim.”

  Merrill looked dispa
ssionately at the slouching figure of the reporter in his baggy suit, and said, “The name is familiar. Byline on the News, isn’t it? With a particular pipeline to Miami’s most famous private detective. What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he made no motion to rise or offer his hand.

  Shayne sat down in a chair at the end of the desk, and Rourke moved quietly and self-effacingly aside to sit in one against the wall. Shayne took one of the pictures of Ellen Harris from his pocket and placed it in front of Merrill. “Recognize her?”

  Merrill stared at it and pursed his thin lips. “Is this blown up from a small snapshot I saw this morning?”

  “That’s right,” Shayne told him equably. “The lady you seem to have misplaced last Monday.”

  Merrill permitted himself a tired smile. “I’d like to have this, Mike. Harris refused to leave the snapshot with me so I could show it around to the members of the staff who actually saw Mrs. Harris when she checked in. He got up on his high-horse and stalked out of here, threatening to sue the hotel for criminal negligence and so forth, and I understood he was going direct to the police.”

  Shayne said, “He did,” and grinned happily. “Petey Painter succeeded in rubbing him the wrong way just as you did, so he ended up in my office. My client,” he ended sternly, “feels that both you and Chief Painter are more concerned with covering up his wife’s disappearance than you are in finding her.”

  “You know that isn’t so, Mike.” Some of the tension and strain inside Robert Merrill that had been building up since his interview with Herbert Harris early that morning showed through. “He’s her husband, damn it. And he’s nuts about her as far as I could tell. There were certain facts I didn’t wish to divulge…” He broke off, grinning ruefully at Shayne and suddenly becoming very warm and human. “Hell’s bells, Mike. I sound like a speaker at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, don’t I? Damn it all. That guy is due for a rude awakening. I’ve got a lot more dope now than I had when I talked to him this morning.” He dropped his gaze to the photograph in front of him, and said softly, “She’s pretty terrific, huh? If I were married to her, goddamnit…” He paused and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Why’d you bring a reporter, Mike? I’d be glad to go over the evidence with you personally, but…”