Weep for a Blonde Page 5

  “But if he ever found out I’d left the house at night, he’d … I don’t know what he might do. Can’t you come here? I swear it will be perfectly safe. He never comes home until after midnight when he’s drinking like this.”

  Shayne’s expression hardened. He said, “That’s not why I’m hesitating. If you want to consult me professionally I’m at your service.”

  “That’s exactly what I do want, Michael. I want to pay you a retainer and all. I’ve got sort of an idea that you can advise me about. Will you come out?”

  Shayne said, “Sure.” He glanced at his watch. “On the Beach, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Lydia Kane gave him an address a little south of 79th Street. “There’s a stone wall with high gateposts leading off to the right. Our house is right on the ocean.”

  Shayne jotted the address down and said, “I know about where it is. Look for me in half an hour or so.”

  He hung up and took another drink, glowering down at the telephone. He didn’t look forward to the assignment. Under almost any other circumstances he would have left the Kanes strictly alone to settle their own marital difficulties between themselves. But various things had conspired to push him into this. He had been suckered into a position from which he couldn’t gracefully withdraw. He didn’t like it, but there it was. Might as well get it over with tonight, and then forget the Kanes. He owed that much to the memory of Phyllis.

  He drained his smaller glass and topped the cognac with two big swallows of ice water, got up and adjusted his tie and put his jacket on again. He patted his pockets to make sure he had extra cigarettes, then grabbed his hat and turned out the light on his way out.

  Driving across the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach, Shayne held the big sedan at a moderate speed and forced himself to relax behind the steering wheel. The moon was a little past full and it hung in the sky directly in front of him just above the lacy tops of palms lining the causeway. Huge and almost round, impossibly golden, it gave a feeling of serenity to the night that made the tawdry sexual affairs of human beings like the Kanes seem completely unimportant and certainly not worthy of all the attention they were getting.

  Clean night air, scented by the salt spume of the Atlantic came through the open windows of the car, and Shayne pulled off his hat and dropped it on the seat beside him to let the breeze ruffle his coarse red hair.

  He refused to look ahead to the interview with Lydia. He had very little sympathy with husbands or wives who didn’t get along with their spouses, and he was in a mood to do some very plain talking to Lydia if she tried to weep on his shoulder tonight. From his two brief encounters with Richard Kane, Shayne felt it was little wonder that their marriage was on the rocks, and he had little desire to help keep it going. Very definitely, it was not the sort of situation that aroused his professional interest. For Phyllis’ sake, he would listen to Lydia and give her the best advice of which he was capable, though he knew beforehand she was unlikely to take the sort of advice he would offer.

  He reached the end of the causeway and drove onto the peninsula, continuing eastward to the main thoroughfare that ran north past the large private estates bordering the ocean.

  He checked a street number occasionally, slowing as he approached the one Lydia had given him, and had no difficulty finding the high gateposts that led in to the walled property. The driveway curved upward on a slight grade through a well-kept lawn dotted with tropical shrubbery to the two-story house on the edge of the cliff. Light streamed from the lower windows though the upper floor was dark. There was a wide circle that swung past the garage adjoining the house, and Shayne’s headlights showed the doors open and the two-car garage empty.

  He stopped under the porte-cochère at the front door and turned off his motor and lights. There was the cheerful sound of tree-frogs from the landscaped area in front of him, and the dull pound of surf at the base of the cliff beyond the house as it approached full tide, and he sat behind the wheel for a moment while he pulled his hat down over bristly hair, loath to go inside and listen to a recital of Lydia’s difficulties.

  But he had promised her, and the sooner he went in the sooner it would be over. He unlatched the door and got out, circled the front of his car to the stone steps with a night light above the closed double doors.

  He pressed an electric button and almost immediately the right-hand door opened inward and Lydia Kane was outlined in the rectangle of bright light.

  She wore a simple blouse of white silk and a full peasant skirt of brightly variegated colors, and she held both her hands out eagerly to draw him inside, saying throatily, “I’m so glad you came, Michael. I just couldn’t stand being alone again tonight.”

  He let her take both his hands, and she stepped back to shut the door behind him, then moved close so the tips of her breasts touched his chest lightly and her eyes looked up pleadingly into his.

  He put his arm about her shoulders in a brotherly sort of embrace and said gruffly, “Sure. It’ll do you good to get it off your chest, Lydia.”

  Tears started in her eyes and she dropped her lids quickly to hide them. Then she pressed the length of her body against him fiercely with her forehead just touching his chin while sobs shook her, and Shayne stared somberly over the bright blonde curls atop her head at the long, pleasant sitting room and angrily considered what a hell of a thing it was that marriage did to some people.

  She clung to him for a long moment and he held his arm tightly about her shoulders. Then she drew away and laughed shakily and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, telling him, “And I swore I wasn’t going to break down and weep tonight. Forgive me, Michael. I’m all right now that you’re actually here.” She turned away, holding one of his hands tightly and drawing him toward the long sofa with a glass coffee table in front of it holding an assortment of bottles and glasses.

  “I’ve got the cognac set out and ready for you. And I know you used to take it with ice water on the side.”

  Shayne said, “I still do.” He sat on the couch and she busied herself pouring him a drink of straight cognac and liberally splashing bourbon into a tall glass that already held three partially melted ice cubes and the residue of a former drink. She sat beside him, not too close, and lifted her glass to make her blue eyes round over the rim of it at him.

  “Let’s drink to my finding you again, Michael. You don’t know how wonderful it is to just have you here.”

  Shayne lifted his glass and drank with her, settled back against the cushions and got out a pack of cigarettes. She shook her head when he offered her one, curling one leg up beneath her and saying pensively, “I can’t apologize enough for Richard last night. And then that awful thing this morning when he sneaked back and listened in when I phoned you. The horrible things he said. He just isn’t right, Michael. He’s got a complex about me and other men. And it’s getting worse all the time. Just eating him up with jealousy. In the beginning I thought it was proof he loved me, and I didn’t mind so much. But how can a man love anyone when he suspects such awful things about her? It’s getting to be a mania with him. I don’t know what he might do. This morning … after I hung up … he came downstairs and struck me after saying the most awful things. It’s the first time he … ever did anything like that. I’m actually afraid he may … kill me some time if he doesn’t get straightened out.”

  Shayne lit his cigarette and sucked smoke deep into his lungs, expelled a thin column of bluish vapor. He said flatly, “You’ll have to leave him, Lydia.”

  “But then he will go over the line. I can’t do that to him. I’d feel like a murderer.”

  “Better you than he,” said Shayne grimly.

  Lydia shuddered and drank deeply from her glass and set it down on the table with a slight clatter. “You don’t understand, Michael.” Her voice was low and tremulous. “I still love him. Can you understand that?”

  “All the more reason why you shouldn’t stay here and turn him into a murderer,” Shayne told her brutally. �
�That’s not going to help anyone.” He got up to stride to the end of the room where he stood for a moment looking out at the moonlit surge of waves below the window. He turned and went on wearily, “And you’d better begin thinking about the innocent bystanders you’re getting tangled up into the deal with you. One of these days you’re going to speak to an old friend as you did to me last night and it’ll end up in something nastier than just a night-club brawl. Did I tell you,” he went on harshly, “that the fool hunted me up at luncheon today and I had to slap him down?”

  She hung her head before his accusing eyes, shaking it slowly from side to side. “You didn’t tell me over the phone. Just that I could read about it in the afternoon paper. We don’t get the News,” she ended drearily.

  Shayne shrugged and said, “It simply doesn’t make sense, Lydia. You admit he’s becoming psychopathic. Get away from him while you can. If he’s determined to go to hell … let him go to hell by himself.”

  “I told you I still love him.”

  “Nuts!” said Shayne violently. “Maybe you still love the guy he was when you married him. But you admit he’s turning into a different person. You’re just kidding yourself, my sweet. You’ve got some sort of complex of your own if you keep on closing your eyes to the truth.”

  She lifted her head, biting her underlip in agony. “I guess I have,” she said faintly. “I guess that’s it. I have got a complex. A guilt complex. I can’t run away from it. Don’t you see I can’t? I’m to blame for what’s happening. I was such a fool, Michael. I loathe and despise myself. I’ve got to stay with him and pay for my own damned foolishness.”

  “Even if it ends up with you a corpse and him in the electric chair?”

  “No matter how it ends,” she cried wildly. “But you’ve got to help me prevent that, Michael. Don’t you see? You’ve got to help me convince him that other thing didn’t mean anything. That I still love him just as much as ever, and that I am faithful. That’s his only salvation now. If I leave him, he’ll be convinced that he was right all along.”

  Shayne shrugged and turned to throw his cigarette butt into the fireplace. “A lot of help I’ll be. He’s already thoroughly convinced I’m your lover.”

  “I know. And it’s so silly. I had thought you could do it, but now I know he’d never believe you. But you can advise me, Michael. Give me the name of another detective in town who’s absolutely trustworthy. Because you see, that’s what Richard did. Got some local detective to follow me before and make reports to him. And now I thought if I’d get another one to do the same thing … and turn over his reports to Richard, don’t you see, that it would counterbalance the other.”

  Shayne said, “I’m afraid I don’t see.” He went back to the sofa and reseated himself, took a small sip of cognac and leaned back comfortably. “You’d better start at the beginning and give it all to me in plain words.”

  “I don’t know just when it began. Richard has been fearfully jealous and possessive all during the ten years we’ve been married. And I didn’t mind in the beginning. He had no reason at all for it. But he kept suspecting things and accusing me until it finally seemed to me it would just pay him back in his own coin if I did have an … well a sort of an affair. It never was serious. Just exciting, sort of.

  “I met this man at a party and he was extremely attractive and we flirted a little and then got to slipping off alone for lunches and dinners and things. And that was absolutely all, but Richard caught on somehow and he didn’t say a word about it to warn me. Instead, he hired a detective to watch me. This was just a few months ago. And he finally came home raving one night and had a whole list of places where I’d met Roger and he threatened all sorts of things. And he took my car away and sold it and told me he was having a watch kept at the gate and he’d have a record of every car that drove in here day or night.

  “It made me awfully mad at the time because there hadn’t been anything between Roger and me … not really. But he believed the very worst and accused me of committing adultery and said he’d have to keep me locked up here like a prisoner in a harem … and I just wanted to see Roger one last time to tell him goodbye, and so we fixed it on the phone to have him come on a night when Richard was going to be out, and slip along the beach down below where it’s dry at low tide and come up the stairs in the back way through the kitchen.

  “But Richard caught on some way, I never did know how … whether he had his dreadful detective tap our telephone or what … and he came back while Roger was here and chased him out and down the back stairs with a pistol. And that was the first I realized how big a fool I was, and how bad Richard was getting … and it’s just been hell ever since then.

  “Richard doesn’t even speak to me for days at a time and I stay cooped up here afraid to even call a taxi to take me out any place for fear Richard will find out and misconstrue it.”

  “So you think he’s still having you watched by a detective?” Shayne asked quietly.

  “I don’t think so. He swears he isn’t. I begged him to, you see, because I pointed out that would prove to him that I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t, and then he got nasty and refused to do it just because I wanted him to.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?” persisted Shayne.

  “I just don’t know what goes on in his mind any more.”

  “Women?” said Shayne wonderingly. “With all that background, you invite me up here tonight. Knowing the place may be watched … and after he’s twice publicly accused me of having an affair with you. How in hell do you think he’ll react if he comes home and finds me here?”

  “But I’m sure he won’t. He’s out some place getting sodden drunk. And I didn’t think you’d be afraid anyhow, Michael. You’re not like Roger. Just running with his tail between his legs.” She looked at the detective with admiringly rounded eyes. “You’d know how to handle Richard if he did come. And you could explain everything and make him feel ashamed of himself.…”

  Shayne continued to shake his head wonderingly, a look of disbelief on his face. He said, “You are a bitch, Lydia. I’ll be damned if I don’t believe you hope he will come home while I’m here. Just for the excitement of it.”

  “Michael! How can you believe such a horrid thing?”

  “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense,” he told her angrily. “By your own account, you’ve practically driven your husband insane with jealousy, yet you refuse to leave him. You stay on here and after getting your former lover almost killed, by God you make a pass at me last night while your husband’s back is turned, and then talk me into coming out here tonight. And I fell for it just because you were once a friend of Phyllis’ and because I didn’t like your husband’s jumping on me, and felt sorry for you.

  “Sorry, by God.” He laughed shortly and got up from the sofa. “And all the time you were setting me up like a sitting duck so your husband’s suspicions would be confirmed. You’re the one who needs a psychiatrist, rather than your husband.”

  Lydia came out of the sofa fast as he started to turn away. She flung herself on him, weeping wildly. “It wasn’t like that. I swear it wasn’t. Maybe it was foolish to ask you here, but I was at my wit’s end. Don’t go, Michael. I know Richard won’t come back. He absolutely refused weeks ago to have the detective go back to watching me when I begged him to.”

  Shayne pushed the sobbing woman aside, his features as hard as granite. “I’ve given you the only advice I can. Get out of this house and give your husband a chance to recover. Stop playing with fire, you little fool.”

  He was striding toward the door when the telephone rang from the other end of the room.

  “That’s probably Richard now,” Lydia said brokenly. “Wait while I answer it and find out where he is. Then you’ll know it’s all right to stay awhile and.…”

  While she spoke, she hurried franctically to the telephone and scooped it up. Shayne stopped with his hand on the door-knob, waiting to have a final word before walking out o
f the house and leaving her to her own devices.

  She lifted the telephone and said tremulously, “Hello. Oh yes, Richard.…” and then pressed the mouthpiece tightly between her breasts to tell Shayne before he could halt her:

  “It is Richard, Michael. Wait until.…”

  From where he stood at least twenty feet away, Shayne heard the grating interruption from the telephone receiver: “Yes, Michael. It is Richard, sure enough. Please do wait until I can get there …”

  The color drained from Lydia’s face and she held the telephone out in front of her, recoiling from it as though it were a deadly snake. Then she dropped it on its prongs, crying out, “How could he hear me, Michael. I held it just as tight as I could.…”

  “With the mouthpiece pressed right against your breastbone,” Shayne finished for her grimly. “If you didn’t know it before, and I’ll be damned if I know now whether you did it intentionally or not, that has exactly the same effect as talking directly into it. The vibrations of your voice are transmitted through the bone directly to the diaphragm and he heard you speak my name as clearly as I did.”

  “But I didn’t ever dream that, Michael,” she cried in a stricken voice. “I always thought it was perfectly safe.…”

  “It doesn’t matter now what you thought,” he told her wearily. “From what I know about your husband, he’ll be helling back here in a few minutes with blood in his eye. You’d better come with me and give him a chance to cool off.”

  “No! You go, Michael. Hurry, please. I don’t know where he was, but you’ll have time to get out of the driveway and away safely before he can get here.”

  “And leave you to martyrdom?” asked Shayne in disgust. “Don’t be an utter fool. Come on, damn it. This is no time for mock heroics.”

  “I shan’t run away from him,” Lydia said quietly, a desperate sort of dignity taking possession of her. She drew herself up tautly. “I’m still his wife. If he finds me alone he won’t hurt me. Please go at once while there’s still time.”