Murder Takes No Holiday (4 page)

“You can count on my absolute discretion,” she said. Leaning forward, she added confidentially, “It’s my belief that they’re covering up for somebody.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be true,” Shayne said gravely. “I don’t want to ask for their files until I have to, so I’ll probably take you over ground you’ve already covered with them. I know this must be very hard for you, Mrs. Watts.”

The eagerness faded out of her face, and she became melancholy. She sighed.

Shayne went on, “So far I don’t know anything except what’s been printed in the paper. Your husband called up from work and told you not to expect him for dinner. He locked the office promptly at six, as usual, and walked off down High Street toward the bay, with his raincoat over his arm, also as usual. At that point he disappeared. The cops haven’t turned up anyone who laid eyes on him between two or three minutes after six and midnight, when a native watchman found him lying dead in a doorway. He had been stabbed three times. His wallet was missing and his pockets were turned inside out. From the trail of blood on the sidewalk, he had fallen several times before he collapsed for good in the doorway. His clothes were badly disheveled. He had been drinking heavily.”

“Poppycock!” Mrs. Watts said sharply. “They falsified those blood tests, for obscure reasons of their own, or perhaps not so obscure, after all. Albert was a militant abstainer. He hadn’t touched a drop in twenty years.”

“He never went to bars or nightclubs?”

“Certainly not, Mr. Shayne. He would sooner have patronized—” She blushed. “Well, I almost said a house of ill repute, but if you had known Albert—” She finished with one of her nervous giggles.

She glanced at the small upright piano. There was a photograph on it, obviously of the dead man. He had worn a bristling cavalryman’s mustache, which had been in striking contrast to the rest of his face. His hair and chin had both receded. Even in the photograph his eyes seemed to be watering. There were worried brackets at the corners of his mouth. He had tried to fix the camera with a soldierly stare, but it had been a failure.

Shayne asked, “Was your husband in the war?”

“No, he suffered from a kidney difficulty which kept him a civilian. He was reticent about his feelings, but I believe he felt it keenly. He was painfully shy and introverted, and it might have done him a world of good to rub elbows with men from other walks of life.”

Shayne lifted his cup as though about to drink, then set it back on the saucer. He observed, “Shy people don’t usually work for travel agencies.”

“Oh, he didn’t have the kind of position where he was called upon to mingle with the public. He used to refer to himself—he had a dry sense of humor at times—as a high class baggage clerk. He kept accounts, planned itineraries, placed reservations, and of course he did have a lot to do with baggage. You probably know that American tourists who stay more than a few days are entitled to take back five hundred dollars worth of goods duty-free. You’d be surprised how many people buy things they can’t possibly use, merely because they’re so much cheaper here. Albert didn’t care for tourists, especially ladies. He used to tell some horrendous tales.”

Looking away so she wouldn’t see what her hand was doing, she picked another little cake out of the basket. It was very hot in the room. Shayne could feel himself perspiring.

“What kind of tales, Mrs. Watts?” he said with an effort.

“Oh, you know what they’re like,” she said, chewing. “Brassy, immodest in their dress and language, screeching to each other about the sensational bargains. Albert could take them off quite aptly. The thing he chiefly couldn’t abide was their frightful sentimentality toward the natives. Charming and unsophisticated, so fresh, so childlike.” She snorted. “If they knew these savages the way we do!”

“That’s one of the things we wondered about,” Shayne said. “Did he have any reason to be in the native quarter the night he was killed? Did he have any native friends, or spend any time there as a rule?”

“I should say not! Quite the opposite. The place is filthy, unsanitary, a perfect sink. Albert was fastidious. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in that part of town.” She exclaimed, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Because he
was
caught dead there, wasn’t he? And that’s the whole point, you see. Reading the account in the newspaper—and I’ve seriously considered suing them for slander—what would one conclude? That here was another respectable and henpecked husband who had kicked over the traces and gone off to some low colored dive to make a night of it. He had more rum than was good for him, blundered among thieves and was just foolish enough and intoxicated enough to put up a fight. All very plausible. But untrue.”

“Let’s go back to the phone call, Mrs. Watts. Exactly what did he say?”

“Well that,” she said, considering,
“was
a bit queer, one must admit. I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of island politics, which I don’t understand clearly myself, as a matter of fact. In brief, Albert had recently joined a committee to protect the traditional interest in the face of increasing native agitation. He phoned to say that this committee was having an extraordinary session to discuss a confidential matter. He would have a bite of something at a restaurant in town. Very well. So far so good. I had no reason to doubt that there would actually be such a meeting. But he kept on with it, and told me just where the committee would be meeting, who would be there, and this and that—all made up out of whole cloth, because about the one thing our brilliant police have established so far is that no meeting had been scheduled, or even discussed. By the end I said to myself, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ quoting the Bard, you know. He promised to bring home a magazine I had asked for, and those were the last words I heard from Albert in the flesh.”

She touched a little napkin to her eyes, although Shayne hadn’t noticed any tears.

“Was there any change in him in the last few months?” Shayne asked.

She put her finger to her chin. “Nothing too extraordinary, Mr. Shayne. There were little things. He was wakeful—Albert, who during the whole previous course of our married life had always slept like a log. Sometimes he would go out for what he called brooding walks. He would stride along the sand for hours, and come home drained and exhausted. And he became increasingly irritable. He was always a phlegmatic person, but one night a few weeks ago he took a rolled-up copy of Punch and struck Georgette a violent blow across the face. All she was doing, poor innocent, was scratching to go out.”

Shayne kept his face serious. “Did he ever mention the possibility of coming into a sum of money?”

She shook her head, her fingers moving toward the cake basket. “Money. I think not. One thing—he had always admired the way I managed the household funds, but recently he did tell me that I didn’t need to make do with the cheaper cuts. He specifically told me to get top-round from then on, and leave the spareribs to the natives.”

It was becoming hotter in the room by the minute. Shayne barely managed to resist an impulse to put down his cup and escape into fresh air.

“A couple of other questions, Mrs. Watts. Did he do much traveling?”

“No, I thought I’d explained that. He had to go to Miami recently for some kind of training course, but that’s the only time he stirred off this island in years.”

“Did he ever have any dealings with a man named Luis Alvarez?” She shook her head, and he tried another name: “Paul Slater?”

He was watching her closely. She started. “Surely you don’t think that nice good-looking Paul Slater could have any connection with—”

“Just a shot in the dark,” Shayne said. “He and your husband knew each other?”

“Superficially. We saw the Slaters sometimes at the Yacht Haven dances, or at fireworks displays, that kind of semi-public occasion. Mr. Slater was once kind enough to fetch me an ice at a dance. A most agreeable young man, for an American. I don’t mean to imply,” she said hastily, “but the Americans one sees on St. Albans—”

“You aren’t hurting my feelings,” Shayne said.

He put down his cup on the lee of the teapot, so she couldn’t see how little he had drunk.

“More tea, Mr. Shayne?”

“No, thanks,” he said, standing up. “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Watts, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

“Do have one of my little cakes, at least,” she said. “Dear me, they seem to be all gone. Mr. Shayne, you’re so abstemious you quite put me to shame.”

She struggled forward, but soon gave up the attempt to rise. “I’m going to be most discourteous and let you find your own way out. I feel a little faint. I don’t think of myself as a demonstrative person, but when I speak of Albert, the tears have a way of coming.”

She touched her eyes again. The cross little dog let Shayne leave without barking at him. It seemed to the American that the eyes of Albert Watts’ portrait followed him as he made his way to the door.

Outside, he mopped his forehead and let out his breath in a long, soundless whistle.

Michael Shayne spent the next day like any other tourist. He left a call with Miss Trivers to be awakened early. After breakfast, he phoned for a cab. One of Miss Trivers’ other guests came up to him as he was waiting on the Lodge steps.

This was a tall, sad-faced Englishman named Cecil Powys. He wore a battered tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Heavy-rimmed glasses gave him a somewhat owlish look. “I say,” he said hesitantly, taking his pipe out of his mouth, “Miss Trivers tells me you plan to go bone-fishing on the flats. Would you mind frightfully if I come along?”

“Glad to have you,” Shayne said.

“The price of a charter’s too steep for me to manage single-handed,” the Englishman said. “Divided in two, it becomes possible. Divided in three or four would be even better. I’ll get my impedimenta. Back in a sec.”

“They provide the tackle,” Shayne said.

“I’m not going out to fish. My forte is spear-fishing, actually. Underwater, you know? I’ll explain.”

He was back in a moment with what looked to Shayne like a battery-powered tape recorder.

“The whole thing’s a trifle ridiculous, when you come right down to it,” he said. “I’m reading for a doctor’s degree at Oxford in anthropology. Beastly subject, really. I’m writing my dissertation on Folk Beliefs of the Caribbean. It’s not going too well.” He put the pipe in his mouth and struck a match. “I thought I’d drift around the islands and let the natives tell me stories. But I’m having the devil’s own time getting them to talk. I’m after fishing material at the moment, but it’s like pulling teeth. Perhaps they’ll open up more when we’re out on the water.”

The taxi arrived. It proved to be a little British Hillman. Powys slid in with the ease of long experience. Shayne jack-knifed his long legs awkwardly into the back seat and told the driver to take them to the charter-boat dock at the Yacht Haven.

They divided the charter with two other Americans, a man and wife from Chicago. The native captain quickly showed that he knew his business. He took his boat to the far side of an offshore island, cut his motor and let the current move them quietly forward. He tested the wind, peered into the water, and finally said, “Here is good place.”

Shayne had his first strike within a minute after his bait hit the water. By the end of the afternoon, when they swung around and headed back toward the Yacht Haven, he had a string of eight handsome bonefish, the largest weighing over ten pounds. The Chicago couple had done nearly as well. Powys had spent the day chatting with the captain and his barefooted deck hand, sometimes switching on the recorder to get a story or anecdote in the island dialect. Shayne persuaded him to take a rod just before they turned back, and he caught the biggest fish of the day.

There was a photographer on the dock with a sixty-second Polaroid Land camera. Shayne borrowed the Englishman’s fish and posed for a picture. The photographer made a series of passes over his camera, and took out a large watch with a sweep second-hand. Ten seconds or so passed, and a native policeman strolled out on the dock, dressed in a brilliant blue and red uniform, white helmet and white gloves.

Then Shayne remembered. Half an hour earlier he had heard a big commercial plane pass over. It must have been the Miami plane, bringing the Wanted flier with his picture on it. The fliers probably wouldn’t be posted this soon, but nevertheless Shayne pulled his beat-up fishing cap forward over his eyes and was busy tightening his shoelaces as the cop went past. The Chicagoans converged on the splendid uniform and begged the cop to pose between them. Pulling down his tunic self-consciously, he agreed, and they formed up on either side and waited for the photographer. Shayne straightened, his back to the cop, and started for the end of the dock.

“Your picture, sah!” the photographer called. “Five seconds more.”

“That’s right,” Shayne muttered.

He had to turn, but the Americans had maneuvered the cop around so the boat would be in the background. The photographer gave Shayne the picture and a stamped envelope to put it in. Shayne glanced at it; it showed a tall, broad-shouldered American, his eyes shaded by the long peak of his cap, holding up a handsome twelve-pound bonefish and grinning broadly with pleasure. He was slightly sunburned, the picture of health, and clearly didn’t have a care in the world. This had been perfectly true sixty seconds ago, before Shayne had remembered the other picture of himself, which Jack Malloy had dug out of a newspaper morgue.

He hastily scrawled Lucy’s address on the envelope and dropped it in a mail box across from the cab and carriage stand.

When he presented the string of fish to Miss Trivers for the Lodge kitchen, some of his pleasure returned. The fact was, after a day on the water he felt better than he had in months. He showered, put on clean clothes and had a peaceful drink on the terrace. Shayne had the strong feeling that this would be his last peaceful moment for some time, and he made the most of it.

Miss Trivers’ native chef stuffed the bonefish and served it in a fiery sauce. After dinner Shayne took a pot of coffee back to his own terrace and drank coffee royals while the sun went down in a wild blaze of color. He waited till the first star was out before he called a carriage.

He was wearing a white Palm Beach jacket. He put all his paper money, a few hundred pounds, in a clip in his side pocket and left his wallet, with his private detective’s license, locked inside his suitcase. When he heard a horse’s hoofs on the gravel he went out. On the way down the path, he picked a brilliant crimson flower for his buttonhole. That was all he could do by way of disguise.

Getting into the decrepit carriage, he told the driver to take him to town. The driver clucked to his horse, and it clopped off at a leisurely pace. Shayne settled back, an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, and reviewed the situation.

He had talked with detectives and undercover government agents who as part of their jobs had allowed themselves to be recruited by criminal gangs. Shayne had played a similar part once or twice himself, and he was always surprised at how easy it was to get the confidence of a criminal, who logically ought to be more suspicious than an ordinary law-abiding citizen. All that was usually necessary was to drink in the right bars and look touchy and unsociable. But this took time, and time was something Shayne didn’t have. The Wanted circular had been an off-the-cuff idea, produced under pressure while the pilot of the Miami-St. Albans plane was straining to take off. There were many things wrong with it; it could easily backfire. On the other hand, it could just as easily work. If the police were looking for him, Luis Alvarez, proprietor of the nightclub known as The Pirate’s Rendezvous, would have no reason to think that he was anything else than the circulars said he was—a criminal wanted by the American police.

Shayne leaned forward. “I thought I might take in a nightclub. Someplace with a good band and a floorshow.”

The driver listed three or four before he came to The Pirate’s Rendezvous.

“Somebody was telling me about that last one,” Shayne said. “It sounds o.k.”

The driver grunted. Fifteen minutes later he pulled his horse to a stop in front of a huge sign that showed a peg-legged pirate with a patch over one eye and a parrot on his shoulder. A goombay orchestra was playing inside. The sign was brightly lighted, and there were other similar signs further along the block, but the narrow, cobbled street was empty. Two native policemen were stationed at the corner.

“Looks kind of dead,” Shayne said.

“Big crowd later,” the driver assured him. “If you don’t like, take you to Dirty Ed’s—very colorful, very pretty girls.”

He gestured with his whip toward one of the other nightclubs. At that moment the two policemen started to saunter toward them, and the redhead said hastily, “No, I’ll try this one.”

He crossed the wide walk while the cops were still half a block away. Inside, a head waiter greeted him cordially, and asked if he wanted a table. Shayne shook his head, turning toward the bar. The bartender was wearing a pirate costume, and there was a lurid mural with a pirate motif above the mirror on the back-bar; but with these exceptions the place resembled a hundred others Shayne had been in around the Caribbean. There were even some like it in Miami. In the dining room beyond, a few of the tables were occupied and one couple was dancing valiantly on the handkerchief-sized dance floor. The little orchestra played mechanically.

“Is that all the cognac you’ve got?” he asked the pirate, nodding at an inferior brand against the back-bar.

“Not much call for cognac,” the bartender said. He was squat and solidly built, with a powerful chest and shoulders. He had a long, drooping mustache, a several-day-old beard, a bandanna knotted around his head and a gold hoop in one ear. He spoke English with a New York accent. He went on, “But the boss may have a bottle down cellar. Do you want me to—”

“No, the hell with it,” Shayne said. “Give me a triple rum. Ice water chaser.”

When the bartender set the two glasses in front of him Shayne said, “You’re not doing much business.”

“Still early,” the bartender told him. “We had a little trouble in the neighborhood, and not many walk in off the street. But we’re still getting the guided parties from the hotels and the cruises.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Shayne said. “A gay, uninhibited tour of the exotic native night spots. Price includes two drinks.”

“Also includes tips,” the bartender said sourly.

Shayne grinned. “Doesn’t that get-up make you feel a little silly?”

The bartender gave Shayne a hard look and put both hands palm down on the bar, one on either side of Shayne’s drink. “What do you think you’re trying to be, Jack? Funny?”

“Hell, no,” Shayne said. “Just wondering. Let me buy you a drink.”

After a moment the man relaxed. “I’m getting hard to get along with. Either I put a rag on my head or I don’t work here. The rest of it I don’t mind, except this goddamn earring. Toward the end of an evening I have to take plenty of cracks.”

“Anyway,” Shayne said, “they didn’t make you cut off one leg.”

The bartender wasn’t amused. He poured himself a double jigger of rum, saluted Shayne with it, and knocked it back.

Shayne ordered another drink. A party of American vacationers came in, and things began to pick up. The orchestra played another number, with better spirit, enticing two couples out on the floor. Then the drummer, a strapping native in a straw hat and a red shirt, beat out an intricate rhythm, and a dancer ran out from behind the orchestra, wearing a ruffled dress split to the waist, with a brief ruffled top.

When the performance was over, Shayne found that a girl had slid onto the next stool but one. She was dark and slender, with short tumbled hair, and was wearing a revealing white evening gown. She lit a long cigarette.

“I will have a glass of light rum, Al,” she said to the bartender, in an accent Shayne couldn’t place.

“Why not have it with me?” he suggested.

She breathed out a mouthful of smoke, and only then looked at Shayne coolly. “That is nice of you, but I am afraid I must say no.”

“I won’t bite you,” Shayne said. “What’s that nice pronunciation? Are you French?”

He took out his money-clip, squinting to keep the smoke out of his eyes, and when both the girl and the bartender had seen how much money he was carrying, he flipped a pound note onto the bar. Al picked it up and looked at her. She moved her shoulders in a slight shrug.

“Very well, if you wish. Yes, I am French. An unhappy Parisienne, at present far from the boulevards. You are American, Mr.—?”

“Michael Shayne. Sure. What brings you to St. Albans?”

“Ah, that is a long story. Not a very interesting one, I am afraid. I am an artist, you see. No,” she said, as Shayne looked at her questioningly, “not an artist with paint and brush. A dancer. I started off with a group to perform in the South American capitals and later, perhaps, if all went well, in your own country. A supper room in the exciting hotels in New York? Hollywood? Television? Such are the dreams of foolish people. Thank you, Al.”

She took the glass of rum and lifted it, without drinking. “And of course, being entertainers from the sinful city of Paris, we are expected to perform—” she made a brief gesture—“in costumes too small to be seen by the naked eye. Very well. One is realistic. Then the pig of a manager took it into his head to vanish with the leading dancer, and what is worse, the money we are owed for three weeks. Engagements cancelled. Voila—we are marooned on this island. The owner here wishes some different entertainment than the other places, so I have a job. For how long I do not know.”

She smiled. “You are not listening. I know, it is a tragedy only to me.”

“Sure I’m listening,” Shayne said. “Let’s take our drinks to a table. Hit me again, Al.”

He moved his glass toward the bartender, who filled it. Shayne picked up the three glasses, including the girl’s. She hesitated, then repeated her slight shrug and followed him to a corner table in the other room. As she sat down she said, “But there is one thing I should make clear.”

“I’m ahead of you,” Shayne said, interrupting. “Just because a girl comes from Paris and works in nightclubs, I don’t think that necessarily makes her a tramp. Was that what you were worrying about?”

She smiled. “A little. But you have not seen me work. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred—”

“Maybe I’m the hundredth,” Shayne said. “Relax.”

“You seem to be quite a—nice person, Mr. Michael Shayne.” She looked at him over her glass. “You make me feel a little better, I think. I have been sad and discouraged.”

Shayne waited a moment. “Don’t throw me any bouquets. Any other time I’d be one of those ninety-nine other guys. In fact, in that dress you almost make me forget that I’ve got my own troubles.”

“Troubles,” she said, smiling. “What kind of troubles can you have?”

“Never mind, I wouldn’t want to spoil your evening,” Shayne said. He reached for a cigarette and said casually, “But I’m as anxious to get off this island as you are.”