Guilty as Hell

by Brett Halliday

  CHAPTER 9

  She swallowed the gum. She looked at him in terror, not able to understand how he had sprung into being in what she had thought was an empty apartment.

  “Mike Shayne,” she whispered.

  Then she uncoiled and bolted for the door.

  Shayne reached it at the same moment and let her wrench it open. It struck his solidly planted foot. The doorknob was jolted out of her hand. He swung the cast upward without taking it out of the sling and touched her bare breast with the curved point of the hook. She shivered away.

  He slapped her with the back of his hand, using his full strength. She went spinning against the bed and across it, to bang hard against the wall. Her eyes crossed for an instant. She touched her face, then crawled off the bed and across the floor toward him.

  “Please. Please, Mr. Shayne. I didn’t want to.”

  When she reached him, he hooked his toe under her chin and flung her over on her back.

  “If you were out there, you heard me,” she cried as he advanced on her. “I pleaded. I only agreed to do it if I didn’t have to go to court.”

  “We can take our time,” Shayne said deliberately. “We won’t be raided until a man walks in, and I’m already here. Let’s allow half an hour. You can answer a lot of questions in that time.”

  She looked up from the floor. “I don’t know anything.”

  He threatened her with his foot and she shrank back. “I don’t! I wasn’t trying to be smart-alecky.”

  He stripped the mattress cover off the bed and flung it at her. “Put this on.”

  She was taking quick shallow breaths. “You’re going to beat me up, aren’t you?”

  “I might,” he said evenly.

  She stood up, watching him, and decided to try something different. She filled her lungs, sucking in her stomach and thrusting her breasts toward him. She rubbed her hands slowly against her thighs.

  “If we’ve got half an hour—”

  Shayne went to the closet and took out the long whip.

  She said hastily, “I just meant I’d cooperate!”

  She pulled the coarse cotton mattress cover around her shoulders and brought it together in front. “Boy, is this ever unsexy.”

  She tried it another way, bringing it over one shoulder and across like a sari, leaving an arm and a shoulder bare. This she considered slightly better, and she glanced at Shayne’s face to verify it. She still didn’t like what she saw there.

  “Mr. Shayne,” she said, trying to sound younger, “if you knew what I went through before I said I would—”

  Shayne made a slight gesture with the coiled whip. “Answer my questions. Is Jake’s last name Fitch?”

  She nodded.

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “Different things. Right now he tends bar.”

  “Who paid him for setting this up?”

  “You know—those people. Some snooty girl.”

  “Candida Morse?”

  “That’s her name. One of those very snooty blondes.”

  “How much are you getting?”

  “Jake said a grand. I think more. I’ll find out, don’t worry.”

  “Do you know anything about a report on a paint called T-239’?”

  She shook her head. He slapped her again, using the whip handle and the coiled whip but not hitting her really hard. She fell on the bed, her hand to her face.

  “I never heard anybody mention it, even! Mr. Shayne, I’m a junior in high school! I’ll tell you how much I got out of this so far—a couple of hundred skins. What paint? Jake never tells me why, he just says do it.”

  “Do you know anybody named Hallam?”

  She shook her head.

  “Walter Langhorne?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s Josie?”

  “My guy! I mean, on top of Jake. He pays the rent for this place. We come here every Wednesday night when his wife plays bridge with her mother. He’s kind of cute, really. Jake took a couple of shots of us, you know—”

  A key turned in the lock. Shayne and the girl looked into each other’s eyes, feeling a common emotion at last. The detective whirled. When the door opened, he was standing behind it, his cast part of the way out of the sling, ready to pivot. There would be two of them, and he didn’t really think he could take care of them both.

  The door closed. Shayne’s swing was already underway. He checked it by catching the cast with his right arm. It wasn’t Vince Camilli, the vice cop. It was Jose Despard.

  His tailoring was impeccable, as usual. He had a bedside table in one hand, a small lamp in the other.

  “Deedee!” he said, pleased. “You’re here! What a perfectly delightful—”

  Shayne’s figure caught the tail of his eye, and he was given a different kind of surprise as he swung around. “Shayne!”

  That was all Shayne let him say. He knocked the door out of his grasp and threw the bolt. When the raid began, he and the girl had to be somewhere else. He jerked Despard around with the hook. “Do what I tell you. We’re going to have cops in a minute.”

  “Cops!”

  Despard made an involuntary movement toward the door.

  “They’re between you and the elevator,” Shayne snapped.

  “They’ll want to know who signed the lease. Tell them. Don’t say anything else. Pull some rank. Don’t choke up and you’ll be O.K.”

  He snatched up the long whip he had dropped when the door opened.

  “A whip!” Despard exclaimed. “Shayne, I want an explanation.”

  “A black Buick parked on Sycamore Lane,” Shayne said. “Across the canal. Drive off in your own car and come back. I’ll meet you there.” He waved the whip at the girl, as though giving directions to a lion who knew no other language. “O.K., Deedee.”

  The girl was frozen on the bed. Shayne stuck the coiled whip in his sling, took her by the back of the neck and marched her to the terrace. Her improvised garment came apart as she moved and Despard saw the streak of fresh blood across her thighs.

  “You’ve been whipping her! You think you can get away with this?”

  He rushed the detective, who met him with an upward movement of the loaded cast. The hidden knuckles clunked against the side of his jaw and he went down.

  Shayne kept his hard grip on the girl’s neck. She was whimpering. They were outside on the terrace by the time he heard the first noises at the door.

  One long continuous terrace had been cast for each floor. It had then been partitioned by light metal panels, providing a separate terrace for each tiny apartment. Shayne had hoped to swing around the partition to an adjoining apartment, reaching the elevator or the fire stairs while the cops were occupied in 9-C. But lights were on in the apartments on either side. He looked over the rail. The apartment directly beneath them was dark.

  He thrust the girl against the railing. Without hesitation he uncoiled the whip and ran it around one of the concrete uprights, pulling the shank through the loop on the handle. When Deedee saw what he meant to do, she tried to pull away.

  “You can’t make me.”

  “Grab me around the neck and hang on, unless you want me to throw you over.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  Shayne grinned at her.

  “Oh, God,” she said in a trembling voice. “I just can’t.”

  He swung over the flat balustrade. A quick jerk of the head commanded her to follow. She was making frightened noises. Shayne tangled the hook in her long hair and yanked her toward him. She seized his neck with both thin arms. Her legs fastened themselves compulsively around his waist.

  He was already letting himself down, the thin end of the whip looped around his fist. With a splintering crash, the door in the apartment sprang open as Shayne’s lithe, rangy body disappeared below the balustrade. He crooked his right arm around the concrete upright, putting no weight on the whip. His feet probed out blindly. The ceilings were as low as the builder had been able to make them, and Sha
yne figured on a drop of no more than six feet to the railing.

  The girl had a stranglehold on him. Her bare knees scraped against the rough concrete as he let himself down another few inches, still not entrusting their combined weight to the whip.

  He shifted his hold. For one instant before his toes touched the concrete railing, only the stretched leather thong kept them from dropping eight floors to the embankment along the edge of the bay.

  Then he was balancing lightly on the railing, his cast pressed against the terrace ceiling. He revolved so the girl was over the terrace and pried her fingers loose from his neck. He jerked at the whip handle. As soon as it came free, he threw it straight out and, without waiting to see it fall, jumped down to the girl’s side.

  The mattress cover had dropped at her feet. She was shuddering, her face in her hands. Shayne threw the mattress cover around her shoulders and pulled her to the door.

  She started to speak, but he stopped her with a harsh whisper. Inside, he saw the looming shapes of furniture and banged his shin painfully on a low table. There was a faint hissing sound in the room. Discerning the oval outline of a lampshade, be let go of her hand and felt for the switch.

  Another light came on before he could find it. This was a tiny tensor lamp beside the bed, with a concentrated beam. The beam found Shayne.

  A woman’s voice said, “Stand still.”

  Enough light leaked out of the intense beam to show Shayne something else—a Colt .45 automatic. He said easily, “Let me turn on this other lamp. Then you can hold the gun with both hands.”

  His hand continued its slow movement toward the lamp. When she didn’t tell him to stop, he snapped the switch, flooding the room with rosy light. This apartment was a duplicate of the one overhead in shape and size, but it contained enough furniture to crowd a much larger place. The woman in bed was wearing a cold-cream disguise and her head was a mass of exploding curlers.

  She said with surprise, “You’re the man with the broken arm in the elevator.”

  The hissing, Shayne saw, came from a vaporizer on the table by the bed.

  “That’s what fooled me. You went to bed with a cold.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject,” she said in a determined nasal voice, and gestured with the .45. The muzzle hole was pointed squarely at Shayne’s chest, and she was squeezing the grip so hard with both hands that he knew the handle safety wouldn’t be operating.

  She risked a sideward glance at Deedee and exclaimed, “Why, you’re as naked as a jaybird under that thing!”

  The barrel of the .45 twitched back at Shayne and held steady. “Mister, you just go on holding still while I call the police. If you’ve got an explanation, I don’t want to hear it.”

  Shayne started to speak and she repeated, “I don’t want to hear it!”

  He said in a conversational tone, “If you squeeze any harder, it’s going to go off. I’m standing still. I intend to go on standing still. Call the cops, by all means. But listen to me a minute first. My name’s Michael Shayne.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I’ll show you my license if you’ll let me take it out.”

  “I’m not as foolish as I look. Hold still, you!” she said as Deedee started to move. She pawed out blindly for the phone, upsetting the vaporizer. “I’ll tell you why I know you’re not Michael Shayne. I saw Shayne on TV about one minute after I rode up with you in the elevator. So much for that story.”

  “That was a tape,” Shayne said. “They taped it this afternoon. The phone’s just back of your hand. Yeah, right there. Did the Mike Shayne you saw on TV have one arm in a sling?”

  “Yes-s,” she admitted. “It was quite a coincidence, I thought.”

  “Don’t dial for a minute,” Shayne said as she put the phone on her lap. “I traded that TV interview for some information. I’ve been looking for a missing girl, and here she is.” He pulled the mattress cover aside to reveal the long whip mark across Deedee’s thighs. “They’ve been keeping her upstairs in 9-C, and they locked up her clothes so she couldn’t run away. They showed up at the door before I could get her out. We came down like Batman, which I don’t ever want to have to do again. I’d like to show you the license.”

  After a moment, she said reluctantly, “Move your hand a half inch at a time.”

  He turned slowly and unbuttoned his hip pocket. Removing the little leather folder, he flicked it open and extended it across the foot of the bed.

  “Not so close,” she said. “I’m farsighted.”

  He pulled it back slowly until she nodded. He put it away and she aimed the gun somewhere else, to Shayne’s relief.

  “I guess that’s who you are, then. Who’s she?”

  “I haven’t found out her name yet. You’ve heard about white slavery?”

  “Oh, yes—sure. Is she one?”

  Shayne nodded gravely.

  The woman put the gun aside and pulled back the covers. “Still and all, regardless of how she makes a living, we don’t want her to run around town in her birthday suit, do we?”

  She picked a dressing gown off the back of the nearest chair, then changed her mind and went to the closet, from which she took a much tackier garment of dark blue terry-cloth.

  “Never mind returning it unless you want to, Mr. Shayne. It’s outlived its usefulness. And I don’t want my name to appear publicly in this in any way.”

  Shayne assured her she could count on his discretion. Deedee shrugged into the robe, which was several sizes too large.

  “Maybe I can find a pair of slippers you could put on, honey,” the lady said.

  “She’s all right barefoot,” Shayne told her. “I’ll look out and see if the coast is clear, anyway,” the lady offered, going to the door. “I could even go down in the elevator with you, if you can wait till I take out the curlers.”

  “We’ll be all right now,” Shayne said. “Which way to the stairs?”

  She pointed. After they went out she stood in the doorway watching them. Then, with a deep sigh, she turned back into her crowded apartment. The door swung shut behind her.

  CHAPTER 10

  “And just what is white slavery, may I ask?” Deedee said haughtily on the fire stairs. “If it’s what I think it is—”

  Shayne grinned. “Ask your parents.”

  “That’s a laugh. First I’d have to find them. What are you going to do with me?”

  “What do you think I ought to do?”

  She looked at him suspiciously, to see if he was serious. “Why, let me go, as soon as I answer the rest of your questions. I’m going to cooperate a hundred percent. You don’t want to have me arrested. All that red tape, Mr. Shayne, I know how busy you are—”

  She trailed off when he failed to reply. Several more times on the way down she tried to continue the subject, but the grim set of his mouth discouraged her. Between the fourth floor and the third, she began to feel dizzy and told him she had to stop and sit down. He ignored her. She pulled his arm in hard against her breast.

  “I’m about ready to flop! Honestly and truly. I don’t get enough exercise.”

  Shayne still didn’t slow down.

  They passed the first floor and continued to the basement. She went on revolving even after Shayne had stopped, reeling back in to clutch him with both hands, the robe flying. He put her aside, opened the door and looked out carefully.

  The cinderblock corridor was dimly lit by forty-watt bulbs. Hearing footsteps, Shayne let the door swing nearly shut as a man in work clothes, carrying a mop and a pail, came out of the elevator, left mop and pail in a storage closet and entered another room. Through the open door, Shayne could hear TV voices, the sound of screeching tires, then gunfire. A baby was crying.

  He pulled Deedee into the corridor and motioned to her to open a door. She did so. He felt for the light switch and turned it on. It was a storeroom, jammed with bikes, baby carriages, cots and luggage, with three windows high in the back wall.

  “What
was Jake going to do?” he asked. “Wait to see what happened?”

  “Uh-huh. In case you didn’t show up, he’d have to lay a few bills on the cops, to keep everybody happy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I guess in his car.”

  Shayne snapped his fingers twice and she said hastily, “A new air-conditioned DeSoto, and it’s double-parked at the dead end if he didn’t move it. I’ll show you exactly where. Believe me, Mr. Shayne, I’m cooperating right down the line.”

  He put out his hand. “Let’s have the robe.”

  She pulled it together defensively. “I won’t try to get away. I won’t budge an inch.”

  He continued to hold out his hand. She made a pleading face, but her sense of realism won. “Aah!” She shrugged out of the robe and gave it to him.

  “Maybe I’ll walk out of here like this and get a taxi.”

  “They’re scarce around here,” he said.

  He looked into the corridor. The door of the superintendent’s apartment was still open. He hesitated. He didn’t want any trouble while the raiding party was still in the building.

  “O.K., I’m going out the window. When I get out, turn off the light.”

  “And what if somebody comes in for a baby buggy or something?”

  “Hold still. They’ll think you’re a statue.”

  He kicked a trunk into position beneath one of the windows and pulled out the screen. Pushing his cast ahead of him, he pulled himself up and out. The light winked off behind him.

  He went around the building. Protected by a screen of low-growing shrubs, he spotted the DeSoto where Deedee had said it would be parked. There was a figure at the wheel.

  After a moment’s reflection, Shayne returned to the back of the building and stepped down off the embankment onto the strip of hard sand at the water’s edge. He walked on to the canal, came back up on the embankment and approached the DeSoto from behind.

  He pulled open the door on the passenger’s side and slid into the cool interior. The man at the wheel swung around.

  Shayne left the door open slightly so the dome light would stay on and they could look at each other. Jake Fitch was swarthy and unshaven, with bushy eyebrows which almost met over a meaty nose. His forearms were hairy, and heavy black hair tufted out of the neck of his shirt, his ears, his nostrils. He was wearing a blue linen cap with some kind of insignia.