Weep for a Blonde

by Brett Halliday

  He kept his own features coldly unsmiling and looked on past her to where her male companion had disappeared, then turned back to Lucy with a faint shrug of his wide shoulders. “No competition there, angel. She probably.…”

  “She’s getting up and coming over here,” Lucy told him stiffly. “Do you want me to disappear as conveniently as he did?”

  Shayne grimaced at her and turned, pushing back his chair and rising as a cultivated and incongruously husky voice spoke excitedly beside him:

  “Michael Shayne! It is, Michael, isn’t it? I know it is. I’d recognize you anywhere. After all these years. What a wonderful surprise, Michael. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  Close up and full face, she was beautiful. The blue eyes sparkled intensely and the short upper lip came back a trifle to show a line of white teeth. Both her hands were spontaneously outstretched and Shayne could not decently ignore them.

  He took them both in his, studying the flushed, excited face and shaking his red head slowly. “I may as well be brutally frank and admit I have forgotten.”

  “How could you?” Her slender fingers tightened on his with a sort of desperate strength and the gladness of her smile slowly faded. “Has it been such a very long time, Michael? I knew Phyllis so well. Don’t you remember now?”

  Shayne’s grip answered the pressure of her fingers. His features tightened and hollows appeared in both cheeks. “Lydia,” he said slowly. “Lydia … Cornwall?”

  “You do remember?” Her voice was throaty and seductive again. She stood very close to him, looking up into his face with blue eyes that were big and round again. She continued to hold his hands tightly, but glanced over her shoulder almost fearfully and breathed in a low voice, “It’s Lydia Kane, now. I’m married. My husband.…”

  “Doesn’t approve,” Shayne put in equably, “of your renewing old friendships?”

  “He.…” She bit her full underlip and turned back slowly, gently releasing her hands from Shayne’s and looking past him at Lucy. “He knows who you are, of course, but I guess I never happened to mention to him that I knew you before when you were married to Phyllis. So tonight, when I saw you here and I just knew it was you and I tried to explain to him, he got fearfully angry and pretended he didn’t believe me. I … I’m so terribly unhappy, Michael.” Her eyes came back to him and she swayed forward a little. “I’ve thought of phoning you, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know whether you would … well, I just didn’t know how to say it. Then when I saw you tonight I knew I had to … Oh, Michael! Help me. I’m so frightened.” Tears came into her eyes and she swayed closer, convulsively clutching both his upper arms and burying her face against his chest.

  “Perhaps,” said Lucy Hamilton in a light, brittle voice, “Mrs. Kane would like a chair, Michael.”

  He turned his head to grin down at her while Lydia clung to him, sobbing. He said, “I think she’d be better at her own table,” and put his big hands firmly on her shoulders to push her away, conscious of a couple of hovering waiters and of the amused attention of other diners nearby.

  She drew away from him slowly, lifting a tearstained face that looked almost haggard in the dim light. “Promise you’ll help me, Michael. I don’t know what else to do. I just don’t know.” Her fingers still gripped his arms and her voice trembled. “I’m so terribly alone.”

  He said, “Of course I’ll help you. But this isn’t exactly the time or place.…” He was turning her slowly, disengaging her hands, when a harsh voice spoke from directly behind Lucy’s chair:

  “But Lydia doesn’t mind what the time or place is, do you, my dear? Just so there’s a man around to fling herself at. Get back to your table, slut!”

  Shayne thrust her away and whirled to confront a short, stocky man circling around Lucy’s chair toward him. He was breathing hard and his broad face was suffused with anger, black eyes glinting murderously. He lurched a trifle and Shayne realized he was quite drunk.

  Lydia Kane wailed, “Richard,” in a high, keening voice, but Shayne moved in front of her and told her husband disgustedly, “Knock it off. You’re slightly out of order.”

  “Out of order, am I?” Kane’s voice was harshly slurred and he crouched a little with big hands clenched into fists. “Maybe you’d like to put me back in order, huh? Necking my wife right here in public when you thought my back was turned.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Shayne saw the headwaiter bustling up fast followed by half a dozen white-coated volunteers. He turned toward his chair, saying disgustedly, “We’ll discuss this some other time. Take your wife and beat it.”

  He started to sit down opposite Lucy again, but Kane moved in suddenly with flailing fists. One of them caught Shayne high on the side of the head as he was half-seated, and the force of the blow sent him sprawling on the floor.

  A flash-bulb in the camera of one of the girls who circulated among the tables taking snapshots of the diners went off at that instant, and several women screamed.

  Shayne was on his feet as several waiters closed in around Kane. Black rage gripped him, and he strode in, flinging two of them aside to plant himself for a solid swing at Kane’s exposed jaw.

  Lucy Hamilton was on her feet and caught his arm at the moment his fist went forward, deflecting it so it struck her shoulder, and another flash-bulb went off at the same moment.

  Then she was sobbing and dragging him back, and other white-coats closed in to separate the two men, and excited voices arose all about them, and Shayne shook his head violently and unclenched his fists and stepped back, grinning down wryly at his secretary while Richard Kane was efficiently hustled away.

  “Sorry, angel,” he said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t plan it this way.”

  She said bitterly, “I’m not blaming you. It was that blonde. I guess it’ll always be a blonde, won’t it?” She released his arm and went around to her chair with slumped shoulders.

  Shayne turned to see that the Kanes’ table was unoccupied, and to frown at the small group headed out the doorway. The other diners had reseated themselves and avoided his truculent gaze as it swept the room, and he started to pull back his own chair when the headwaiter in tails stepped up from behind and unobtrusively touched him on the shoulder.

  “If you don’t mind, sir, ah, we do definitely frown at this sort of thing here at the Martinique and if you and the young lady would just leave quietly, sir, it would be, ah, much appreciated by the management.”

  Shayne ruffled his coarse red hair and glared down at him. “We haven’t had our dinner yet.”

  “I understand, sir. Very, ah, regrettable. If you’d just depart quietly there will be no charge whatsoever, sir.”

  Shayne said, “That’s damned white of you, but we’re staying.” He pulled back his chair and sat down solidly as Lucy jumped up on the other side of the table and leaned forward to appeal to him, “Please let’s go, Michael. I couldn’t eat a bite now.”

  “I like it here,” he told her stubbornly and much more loudly than was necessary.

  “I trust you won’t force me to call the police,” said the headwaiter in a taut, warning voice behind him.

  Shayne swung about in his chair and glared at the frock-coated man. “Call anybody you damn please, but have the waiter bring me another drink in the meantime.”

  “Please, Michael!” Lucy was beside him now, leaning over, touching his cheek with her knuckles. “Everyone is looking at us. You know what I’d like right now? To try out one of those hamburgers with a slice of raw onion at Joe’s Diner.”

  Shayne looked up into her worried face and beseeching eyes, and suddenly he grinned widely, reached up to catch hold of her hand and squeeze it reassuringly. “For you, angel, I’ll go. After this joint, Joe’s Diner will look good.”

  He got up and put his arm about her slim waist, shouldered the hovering headwaiter aside and led her toward the door between tables where the diners kept their faces carefully averted as they went past.
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  Michael Shayne awoke at eight-thirty the next morning, feeling cheerful and rested. He lay on his back for a few minutes, reaching out for a cigarette and matches from the table beside his pillow, grinning faintly as he recalled the absurd scene at La Martinique the preceding evening.

  As he drew the first puff of smoke deeply and thankfully into his lungs he was conscious of a warm feeling of well-being that pervaded him as he recalled the meek and submissive manner in which he had allowed himself to be practically thrown out of the night-club after the altercation with Richard Kane. In the past, he reflected idly, he would have been thoroughly ashamed of such a memory. It would have been much more in keeping with his instincts and temperament to have stubbornly remained at the table and called the headwaiter’s bluff—forced the man to call in the police and then probably have ended up in night court on the charge of resisting an officer.

  But he was a changed man, now, he told himself with a chuckle as he mashed out his half-smoked cigarette and threw the covers back. An older and a wiser man. There was something to be said, after all, for passive, non-resistance. Lucy’s great pride in him for one thing. The way she had clung gratefully to his arm as they went out together. And that first moment after they had settled themselves in the front seat of his car when she turned without a word and put her arms tightly about his neck and pulled his face down to hers and he felt the warm tears on her cheeks. She hadn’t said anything. Just held him tightly while her body trembled against his and the trembling slowly subsided.

  He swung his body out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen in his pajamas to run hot water into a teakettle and put it on a gas burner to boil, measured generous tablespoons of coffee into a dripolator.

  What an utterly ridiculous thing it would have been if Lucy hadn’t grabbed his arm to prevent him from clobbering Lydia Kane’s drunken husband in front of all those people in the night-club. Fighting over a woman he hadn’t seen for at least ten years, and scarcely remembered from back in that shadowy past when Phyllis had been his wife.

  Alone in his own apartment last night with a midnight drink of cognac after dropping Lucy off at her place, Shayne had worked hard to recall everything he could about Lydia Cornwall. It was all quite vague. She had been much younger, of course, and without that pinched look on her face. He had a vague impression she had been some sort of actress or showgirl, though Phyllis hadn’t been particularly inclined to mingle with a theatrical crowd. Try as he would, he couldn’t single Lydia out from among a dozen or more females he had encountered occasionally with Phyllis.

  The water boiled and he poured it into the top of the dripolator, went out of the kitchen and shed his pajamas on the way to the bathroom for a fast shower. He couldn’t help wondering, of course, what her cryptic utterances of the previous evening had meant. Broken phrases kept running through his mind while he showered and shaved, moved back into the bedroom to dress.

  “I’m so terribly unhappy, Michael … I didn’t know whether you would … when I saw you tonight I knew I had to … I’m so frightened.…”

  What woman wouldn’t be unhappy married to a jealous lug like Richard Kane? But why the devil did women stay married if they were unhappy with their husbands? Divorce was a fairly simple matter. Particularly in Florida.

  She didn’t know whether he would—what? What else was it she said before Kane broke in? “Promise you’ll help me … I’m so terribly alone.…”

  He grinned wryly as he buttoned up a white shirt and tucked the tails inside the waistband of gray slacks. Alone? Not for very long, she wasn’t. Not with Richard Kane lurking around jealously.

  Well, he hadn’t promised her a damned thing. Maybe he would have if Kane hadn’t intervened just then—but Kane had intervened—and so?

  Shayne shrugged off the incident and went back to the kitchen to pour out a preliminary cup of coffee and slice a generous hunk of butter into an iron skillet.

  He sipped the hot black coffee and scrambled three eggs in the melted butter over a low heat while toast popped up and got itself buttered, poured a second cup of coffee and ate with gusto at the white table in the kitchen.

  He heated the remaining coffee to a boil while he rinsed the few dishes in steaming water and put them to dry in a rack on the sink, poured a cup three-quarters full and carried it into the living room, stopping by a wall cabinet to uncork a cognac bottle and fill the cup to the brim.

  With the second cigarette of the morning and the best part of his regular breakfast in the cup beside him, he settled comfortably into a deep chair and contemplated Life with solid pleasure.

  He was an exceedingly lucky guy. No doubt in the world about that. Here it was practically mid-morning and he sat lazing comfortably with a coffee-royal beside him and not a care in the world. There was nothing pressing waiting for him at the office. Lucy Hamilton would telephone him if anything important came up. Efficient Lucy! She would have been there since nine o’clock. Nine o’clock on the dot. Come hell or high water, the office was open at nine with Lucy on hand to cope with whatever needed coping with. Well, it was her own idea. It was she who insisted that he open a regular office on Flagler Street and that she should keep regular office hours whether he did or not.

  He sighed and dragged deep on his cigarette and tested the liquid mixture in the cup to see if it had cooled sufficiently for a deep draught. It hadn’t. Not quite.

  He was a lazy bastard, he told himself amiably. By all the rules of American get-up-and-go he should be down at the office eagerly waiting for a client to show up with a sizable retainer. But he always had been a lazy bastard, he countered his own argument. Phyllis had tried to change him, too, but she hadn’t succeeded any better than Lucy had.

  Memory of Phyllis took his thoughts inevitably back to Lydia Kane, and he sternly put those thoughts away from him. One of the last things in the world he wanted was to mix into the marital strife between a husband and wife.

  The mixture of coffee and cognac in his cup had cooled just enough so a large gulp burned pleasantly on its way down his throat, and he emptied the cup in four man-sized swallows. A warm glow tingled through his rangy body as he stood up and stretched. He sauntered into the bedroom and negligently knotted a tie about his neck, slid into a light jacket and paused by the door on the way out to pull down a snap-brim hat from the rack and tug it down over his bristly red hair.

  He pulled the door shut behind him and strode down the hallway to the elevators, gave a cordial good morning to the uniformed boy who stopped for him on the way down, paused by the desk on his way out to glance with lifted red brows at his empty mail cubicle over the clerk’s head and to grin ruefully when the wizened little man said eagerly,

  “Gosh, Mr. Shayne! You see this morning’s Herald? That’s a lousy picture, huh? I sure bet he caught you when you wasn’t looking.”

  Shayne’s grin widened. “I haven’t seen it, but I’ve got a hunch what it is. Could be I’m getting old, Pete.”

  “A-h-h-h!” The clerk’s hero-worshiping tone dismissed the suggestion as did an airy wave of his hand. “I’m not swallowing that guff in the paper—not for one minute. Anybody could tell he must of sneaked in that punch.”

  Shayne said, “We’ve all got to slip some time, Pete.” and went on across the lobby into the sunlight of Second Avenue and north toward Flagler Street.

  He reached his office fifteen minutes later without having given way to curiosity and glanced at a Miami Herald on any of the newsstands on the way, but Pete had fully prepared him for the gleam in Lucy’s eyes and the tight-lipped anger on her face as he strode into the small anteroom.

  Seated in front of her typewriter beyond the low railing, she stormed at him, “It’s about time you were getting here, Michael. Have you seen the Herald?”

  Shayne stopped just inside the door and dragged off his hat, roughing up his coarse red hair. “I haven’t bothered,” he said mildly. “I was sure you’d have a copy.”

  “Look a
t it, Michael!” She lifted the offending newspaper from her lap to display the front page with a headline: MIAMI DETECTIVE IN NITE-CLUB BRAWL, and a prominently displayed picture of the redhead sprawling ungracefully on the floor with Richard Kane standing pugnaciously over him with doubled fists and Lucy seated across the table in the background.

  Shayne crossed to the railing with a chuckle and took the paper to study the picture with interest. “What are you fussed about, angel? It’s very good of you. Of course,” he added judiciously, “your mouth is gaping open a little and it doesn’t really show off your new gown to the best advantage. Aside from that.…”

  “Oh, Michael! What do you think I care what I look like?” wailed Lucy. “They ought to be sued for printing that picture of you. Isn’t it against the law for a newspaper to use a picture like that without your permission?”

  “We’ve still got freedom of the press in this country,” he told her with a shrug. “After all, the guy did knock me down.”

  “When you had your back turned and were already half sitting in your chair. But that isn’t half of it, Michael. It’s the way the reporter wrote up the story. Full of innuendos and half-truths. Reading it cold, anyone will get the idea you had arranged to meet that woman there on an assignation. And that her husband caught you in the act and was protecting his wife and the sanctity of marriage by attacking you.”

  Shayne nodded gravely and handed the paper back to Lucy. “It makes a better story that way.”

  “But, Michael! Don’t you care? Don’t you realize what people will think. It’s pure libel. It … it besmirches your reputation.”

  Shayne lowered one hip onto the railing and tugged at the lobe of his left ear, asking incredulously, “It does what to my what?”

  “Besmirches your reputation, that’s what.”

  “I’ve had worse than that printed about me,” he told her mildly. “There’s very little that can be done to besmirch my reputation in Miami.”