Weep for a Blonde

by Brett Halliday

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  Weep for a Blonde

  A Mike Shayne Mystery

  Brett Halliday

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

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  Muffet and Adam and all their progeny

  1

  The upstairs sitting room had a wide picture window on the east looking out over a magnificent expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Built directly on the edge of a cliff over-looking the beach, there was a sheer drop of some sixty feet from the upstairs window to the white sand below. It was early twilight, and westward from the window was an endless expanse of nothingness, the gray, restless surging of the ocean stretching on and on into the haze of the horizon.

  It was a period of half-tide, and the smooth swells rolling in from the Atlantic onto Miami Beach broke on the gently sloping shore a hundred feet out from the base of the cliff, swishing up softly on the white sand, curling back and receding to meet the next onrush of salt water.

  Lydia Kane stood in front of the picture window with her back to the room, gazing out over the gray expanse of gently heaving ocean. A little above medium height, her figure was very slender and there was a tragic sort of passivity about her stance as she stood there looking far beyond the horizon. This was evidenced by the downward slope of too-bony shoulders exposed by her evening gown, in the submissive quietude of her posture, the bowed head above a too-thin neck that looked curiously taut and strained with corded muscles showing faintly on each side in silhouette.

  There was a look of questing, of waiting, in the outline of her figure. A feeling of suspension in space and in time as she stood there.

  On her left from the window could be seen a flight of steep wooden stairs leading down beside the stone wall marking the northern boundary of the Kane property to the private beach below, and two hundred feet to her right was another high wall of coral rock to the edge of the cliff confining the property on the south.

  This was her domain. Two hundred feet of beachfront confined between high walls of weathered coral extending three hundred yards eastward from the paved street to the edge of the sheer cliff.

  The sound of a car came to her as she stood there, and a tremor tensed Lydia’s body. She swung about to gaze out one of the three windows on the south, and her features tightened as she saw her husband’s automobile turn in between the high gateposts and come up the winding drive to disappear from sight as it circled into position beneath the porte-cochère at the front door.

  In her mid-thirties, Lydia Kane’s features showed every evidence that she had been a surpassingly beautiful woman a few years before. The bone structure was good, with a classical nose and cleanly defined chin, smooth planes of cheeks and a wide brow above blue eyes that were startling in their clarity and roundness beneath heavy dark brows in contrast to the glistening gold of her hair piled in soft ringlets high on her head.

  Today, she was clearly a woman who had been beautiful, and who continued to fight a losing spiritual fight to retain her physical beauty. It was clearly much more an emanation from within than any outward retrogression that had robbed her of her youthful beauty. Somehow, there was a lack of vitality, a brooding sense of inner defeat, a drawing back from the determination to be beautiful. The clear blue of her eyes was shadowed by something very close to fear, and there was the pinched tightness of indecision on her face as she heard Richard Kane’s car slither to a halt beneath the window, the slam of his car door and solid footsteps on the gravel circling the car to mount the four shallow stone steps leading up to the front door.

  Lydia drew in a deep breath and plaited her thin fingers tightly together in front of her. Her shoulders straightened a trifle, and the look of questioning waiting went away from her. She turned from the window and moved across the rich Oriental rug out of the doorway and to the head of the winding stairway leading downward. As she hesitated there momentarily, unclasping her fingers and tightening her jaw muscles, she heard the front door open and the sound of her husband entering the living room below.

  She moved down the stairs with the fingertips of her right hand trailing lightly on the mahogany balustrade, adjusting her facial muscles into a tentatively welcoming smile.

  She reached the foot of the stairway and turned into the wide hall running the length of the house as his bulky figure loomed in the archway from the softly-lit front room.

  Richard Kane was only two inches taller than his wife, but he was heavily and solidly built so he had the appearance of being grossly oversized. He had a bullet-head without much discernible neck, and affected a modified crewcut of his shock of black hair that gave him a pugnacious look. Heavy-lidded eyes, a square face and jutting jaw added to the initial impression.

  Ten years ago when Lydia had married Richard she had regarded him as epitomizing the very height of virile masculinity. Even then his beard was so heavy that he was forced to shave in the evening if he wished to make a good appearance in public, and his deep, harsh voice had the qualities of cavemannish dominance to which the somewhat ethereal Lydia had responded with sweet and quivering submissiveness.

  But that was ten years ago. Ten years of existence as Mrs. Richard Kane added up to one hundred and twenty months—three thousand six hundred and fifty days!

  She paused at the foot of the steps as he moved toward her in the hallway. Her hands were tightly clenched at her sides so the fingernails cut into the soft flesh of her palms, and she tried to make her voice gushing and glad as she said brightly:

  “Hi, Rich. I’ve been watching upstairs for you to drive in. Shall I make martinis while you change?”

  He continued to move toward the foot of the stairs and she was forced to step aside at the last moment to avoid him. She knew he had been drinking again when he said with faintly slurred brutality, “Martinis will be all right if you’ll just for God’s sake remember to go light on the vermouth.”

  She put out her hand to touch his shoulder as he set his foot on the first step.

  Her voice was faint with longing as she said, “Is that all you’ve got to say to me, Rich?”

  He paused, turning to regard her with glittering animosity from low-lidded eyes. “What else do you want me to say? We’ve got a table reserved for seven o’clock, haven’t we?”

  She said in a thin voice, “We are married. Remember? Can’t you even say hello decently?”

  He said, “Hello,” and turned to start up the stairs.

  Lydia’s thin fingers tightened on his upper arm with surprising strength. “Richard! How long do you think I’m going to stand your treating me like this?”

  He hesitated with his bulky back uncompromisingly toward her. “This is the way we decided it was going to be, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the way you decided,” she panted. “I’m going insane. Cooped up here in this house like a prisoner day after day. What do you expect?”

  “I expect you to live with it and like it,” he told her brutally. He lifted his right hand to brush her clenching fingers off his arm.

  She said in a low voice, “Haven’t I suffered enough, Rich?”

  He said, “No,” keeping his back to her. Then, in a different tone, with a sadistic undertone of gladness, “Suffering, Lydia? I’d be happy to believe it, but I wonder. Do you really know how to suffer? Are you capable of that sort of e
motion.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “You are a beast, Richard.”

  “No, my dear.” He turned on the first step and smiled down at her. “I’m your husband. Remember? I’m the man you promised to love and honor and obey for the rest of your life … forsaking all others. Remember? Who was it that smashed our marriage and dragged it down into the filth? Not I, Lydia. It was your free choice.”

  “Please, Rich.” She swayed toward him, her hands held out imploringly, her thin face upturned in the dim light from the living room looking haggard and old. “You promised you’d forgive me. You promised that if I went on living with you, you’d never mention it again.”

  “It’s you who persist in mentioning it. I don’t recall saying a single word this evening until you brought it up.”

  “That’s just it,” she cried desparingly. “You don’t say a single word. You treat me as though I don’t exist … or as though I’m just a servant who lives in your house for your convenience.”

  “Do you think I’m being unfair?”

  “I think you’re being inhuman,” she cried out wildly, dropping on her knees and reaching her hands toward him. “Why don’t you divorce me? That would be much kinder.”

  “Were you kind to me, Lydia?”

  She choked off a sob and sank back on her heels, her head drooping. “I think I will go mad, Richard. Stark, staring insane.”

  He shrugged his heavy shoulders and turned away from her to climb the stairs. “Because I’ve deprived you of your lover? For a woman like you, I realize that must be a very serious deprivation. But you made a bargain with me, Lydia, and I expect you to live up to it. Get some martinis working while I change.”

  She remained on her knees, lifting her chin to watch his heavy body mount the stairs and turn to the left at the top to go into his bedroom which he had occupied for the past three months.

  She caught hold of the railing and dragged herself to her feet, went drearily into the kitchen and got out ice cubes to make martinis the way Richard liked them.

  2

  Michael Shayne was in a relaxed and expansive mood. Seated across the small, secluded dining table from his secretary, the redhead was suddenly glad that he had gone to all the trouble of changing into a dinner jacket for this evening date with her.

  It was hard for a man to realize how much a small thing like that mattered to a woman, Shayne mused as he looked across at Lucy’s happy face. Men and women just didn’t think alike about such things.

  Not that Lucy would have been surprised or dismayed if he had turned up at her apartment earlier wearing the same business suit and four-in-hand tie that he had worn at the office all day. She was used to him and his ways, he thought comfortably. But, on the other hand, there wouldn’t be the same glow in the brown eyes across the table from him.

  It was funny, but it was a fact. If a man just wanted to take the least bit of trouble, it was the simplest thing in the world to make a woman inordinately happy. Trouble with him was, Shayne told himself somewhat disgustedly, he too often didn’t bother to take that least bit of trouble.

  So, he was glad he had tonight. Lucy Hamilton was beautiful in the soft glow of candlelight across from him. He didn’t apppreciate her properly. She was wearing the new dress she had told him about that afternoon. Very carefully explaining that it was one of the modern fifty-fifty deals that was perfectly correct for afternoon cocktails or evening wear. Giving him an out if he didn’t want to dress for dinner, but at the same time subtly assuring him that he would not be ashamed of her appearance if he did bother to change.

  The new gown had everything that Lucy had enthusiastically claimed for it. The material was a deep, rich red, with a sort of iridescent sheen to it. It had a collar that stood up behind the nape of her neck, off-the-shoulder enough to show a pleasing expanse of bare flesh on each side, yet not cut low enough to be incorrect for afternoon wear.

  Shayne didn’t, of course, analyze the cut of the dress or the effect it had on Lucy’s appearance in such detail. He simply looked at her across the thin-stemmed cocktail glasses in front of them and knew that he was glad that he had pleased her so much by dressing for this date.

  His basic reaction at the moment was that this was destined to be one of their good evenings together. The sidecars, for instance, were superb. He was working on his second while Lucy still dawdled with her first. A really fine cognac went into them, with the best imported Cointreau. And sufficient freshly-squeezed lemon juice to cut the sweetness and give it the clean taste of three perfectly married ingredients.

  As Shayne drained the last drop from his glass, he admitted to himself wryly that he was getting soft of late. He wondered if it was good for a man to let himself enjoy this sort of thing too much. The luxurious decor and the perfect service of a joint like La Martinique on the Beach. The cloth on their table was snowy damask and the room was lighted by individual candles on each table. Each table was far enough from its neighbor that the diners could talk together in normal voices without fear of being overheard. The service was discreetly perfect, with a white-coated waiter hovering unobtrusively, but never unaware for more than a few moments of each patron’s wants.

  As he set his empty glass down on the white cloth, a waiter appeared at his elbow with a faintly questioning though not servile smile on his face. Shayne nodded toward his glass and looked across at Lucy. “Ready for a refill, angel?”

  She smiled happily and nodded her brown head. “One more, Michael. Then can we have dinner?”

  He told the waiter. “Make mine a double in that case. And you’d better chill the champagne.” He lifted a ragged red eyebrow at Lucy and asked with an unabashed grin, “How’m I doing tonight? You really go for this set-up, don’t you?”

  She smiled across at him happily, the soft glow of happiness still shining in the depths of her brown eyes. “No more than you do, Mr. Shayne. You’re sitting there guzzling it all up just the same as I am.”

  “The quail probably won’t be as good as a hamburger steak with a slice of raw onion in Joe’s Diner.”

  Lucy Hamilton laughed softly and leaned forward with both elbows on the table, her chin cupped in her palms. “You don’t fool me for one little moment, Michael.”

  He took a cigarette from a pack on the table in front of him and leaned forward to pull flame from the candle. “Joe’s hamburgers are out of this world,” he protested.

  She said, “We’ll go there next time you take me out for dinner.”

  “It’s a date,” He drew smoke in and exhaled it thoughtfully. “I’ve just figured out one of the nicest things about you.”

  “Tell me.”

  The waiter came with a double sidecar for Shayne, a single for Lucy. Behind him was busboy wheeling a large silver ice-bucket with the napkin-clad neck of a bottle protruding from a nest of shaved ice.

  “You fit perfectly in either environment.” The redhead took an appreciative sip from his large glass. “In fact, angel, you’re a very comfortable person to be with.”

  She said, “I’m glad.” Her gaze slid away from his, went past him over his right shoulder, and her eyes narrowed a trifle. “I wish I could say the same thing about you.”

  “What?”

  “That you’re a completely comfortable person to be with.” Her gaze was still fixed at some point beyond him and her voice had a slightly deeper timbre than before.

  Shayne quirked an incredulous eyebrow at her. “You’re hinting that I’m not?”

  Lucy Hamilton sighed and looked back at him. “Not exactly comfortable, Michael. I think exciting is the word.”

  He took another drink and his voice was teasing. “Now, angel. Don’t tell me that at your age.…”

  She tossed her head back and laughed lightly but with a faint undertone of bitterness. “Not you, Michael. Wait a minute. You’re getting me confused. It is you, of course. You’re a sort of catalyst … that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s exciting to go out with you because things are always so
damned unpredictable when you’re around. Or, maybe I should say predictable.” The undertone of bitterness came through more strongly and her eyes were worried as she looked past his right shoulder again.

  He asked quietly, “What brings that on, Lucy?”

  “Just another blonde.” She kept her voice carefully light. “There’s always a blonde, isn’t there?”

  “The world’s full of them,” he agreed.

  “This one looks so damned possessive.” Lucy’s voice trembled a little as she withdrew her gaze and looked down at her drink. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank half of it. She said slowly, “She’s scarcely taken her eyes off you since they came in. Don’t look now, but it’s the second table back at your right. Her husband doesn’t like it either. If it is her husband … and he must be. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but it isn’t good, Michael.”

  Shayne grinned across at her. “I believe you’re jealous. Can I help it if my red hair attracts blondes?”

  “I’m not jealous. I just don’t want this evening to be spoiled. Damn it, I wish now we had gone to Joe’s Diner.”

  “Blondes go there, too.”

  “They’re quarrelling, Michael.” Lucy’s voice was low and her eyes were hooded beneath long lashes as she darted brief glances past him. “She’s so obviously interested in you.” She paused and then added unsteadily. “He’s leaving in a huff. At least he’s going away. I wish he’d drag her out with him by that blonde hair of hers,” she added fiercely.

  Michael Shayne chuckled and emptied his glass. He turned slowly in the direction of her gaze and saw the broad back of a man in a tuxedo striding away from the table Lucy had indicated. The woman remaining alone had her head half-turned to watch the man’s back also, and Shayne studied her profile briefly. She was in her mid-thirties, with sharp, thin features that disquietingly reminded him of someone he had once known. Tight blonde curls were swept up on her head, giving her a clean neckline and almost a regal appearance, and when she turned her head back slowly he saw blue eyes that widened tremulously as they met his, and thin lips that relaxed from a tight into a hopeful smile.