Kill All the Young Girls

by Brett Halliday

  Rolling on one elbow, she reached for the gift bottle of bourbon. The ice bucket was on the floor by Shayne’s chair. He bent down to get it; and at that moment, there was a terrific, slamming explosion in the room.

  Chapter 5

  He felt a surge of warm air wash over him. Stunned, deafened, he went forward on one hand and one knee. The pain was so general that he believed at first that he had been blinded. His head filled with the crash of heavy surf.

  The ice bucket had been knocked over, and what brought Shayne back was a burning sensation in one hand. He was holding an ice cube. His grip tightened, and it squirted away.

  He straightened slowly.

  The light had been blown out. There was a harsh, acrid smell in the room.

  “Kate?”

  He groped for the lamp, but it was no longer where it had been. Reaching behind him, he pulled the short cord on the Venetian blind. The room was on the Collins Avenue side of the hotel, and enough light came in so he could pick his way to the bathroom. The bed in which Kate had been lying seemed to be empty. He stepped in a wet mess on the carpet and swore savagely.

  He ran his hand along the bathroom wall and located the switch. Bright light streamed out across the beds.

  His upper lip came back. The bed’s pale satin headboard was flecked with red.

  He moved back more carefully. Kate had been blown into the narrow space between the beds. Scraps of the scarlet paper in which the presentation bottle of Old Grand-dad had been wrapped lay on the crumpled sheet and on her body. Shayne stepped on a twisted fragment of metal. It was warm. What had happened was clear as soon as he saw the way she was lying. Instead of a bottle of bourbon, she had opened a bomb. It had gone off against her chest, tearing her face and the front of her body cruelly.

  Shayne moved the foot of the unmade bed aside so he could reach her. After a moment he came erect, his face hard. He wiped his fingers on the sheet.

  There was a sudden scrabbling sound on the floor, and he pulled back quickly. It took him a moment to understand that the phone had been blown off the table and the switchboard operator was trying to get in touch with somebody.

  “Hello? Yes. Hello? Can I help you?”

  Shayne needed help, but not the kind she was offering. He weighed the phone for a moment, thinking. He heard excited voices outside in the corridor. Doors were opening.

  He put the phone back on the table and closed the connection. Stepping across the bed, he looked for his clothes. They had been fully exposed to the blast. The chair he had put them on had been knocked over. For some reason, the pants, which had been on top, were only slightly torn. Everything else was shredded and soggy with Kate’s blood and bits of her flesh. He pulled on the pants, checking for his keys and money-clip and the wallet buttoned up in his hip pocket. He found one shoe easily but had to hunt for the other. He slipped them on without bothering with socks. Then he gave himself a quick inspection in the bathroom mirror and rinsed a spatter of blood off his bare shoulder.

  Much had happened, but no more than two or three minutes had passed since the explosion.

  Before he let himself out, he went back for the magazine and tore out the gatefold. He folded it into squares and buttoned it into the pocket with the wallet.

  Bundling up his clothes—one sock was all he could find—he pushed them all the way back on the closet shelf. Then he unlocked the door and went out.

  The people in the corridor were all talking at once. Shayne broke in, “Did you people hear a loud bang?”

  A woman who had come out of the room across the hall cried, “It sounded to me like it came from your room. Somewhere in there.”

  “No, from below,” Shayne said. “Definitely. It came up through the floor. Damn near knocked me out of bed. If I didn’t know we don’t have earthquakes around here…”

  The woman was barefoot, in striped pajamas. Her face had been creamed for the night, and her hair was an explosion of rollers.

  “I was brushing my teeth. The toothpaste shot all over.”

  An old man in an undershirt declared, “I say it was on this floor. Don’t you notice a funny smell? I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m getting out of here!”

  “I’m with you,” Shayne said quickly. “These hotels are supposed to be fireproof; but if you get caught in an elevator, it’s goodbye.”

  Other doors along the corridor had opened.

  “I smell smoke!” Shayne shouted. “Stay out of the elevators.”

  They looked at each other. Shayne yelled again, and they broke for the red light marking the fire stairs. But before Shayne himself had taken more than a step, the elevator door opened and the security party appeared. Shayne knew the officer here, a hard-drinking Swede named Lindholm. Two others were with him. Shayne had no chance of getting as far as the stairs without being recognized, and that would be that for the rest of the night. He swerved toward an open door. The woman in the pajamas and curlers sighed heavily. Her eyes rolled up, and she fell into his arms.

  He took her full weight. One of her rollers scraped his face.

  He pivoted, walked her back into her room, and kicked the door shut. He felt her stiffen in his arms before he had her as far as the bed. She wrenched herself away and looked at him in horror.

  “If you scream,” he told her, “I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. I mean that.”

  “I can’t stand the sight of…”

  Rather than say the word, she fainted again. He guided her down onto the bed. Inside the baggy pajamas, her body was firm and well muscled.

  He picked up the phone and gave the operator a number. She reported no answer. After two more attempts, while the unconscious woman sprawled on the bed continued to breathe raspingly, he located Tim Rourke at a bridge game in Bal Harbour. Rourke had recently discovered the narcotic pull of this game. He played it erratically but with passion, sometimes losing half a week’s pay in one all-night session. He kept claiming that his luck was about to improve, that it couldn’t continue this bad, and that meanwhile he was meeting a lot of very bright people.

  “Tim.”

  The tone was enough. They had been friends for years and had been in and out of various kinds of trouble. Rourke answered quietly. Shayne picked up the woman’s hotel key and read the room number.

  “Right away.”

  “My friends here won’t like it,” Rourke said. “Bridge is a four-handed game. And there’s a lady who I think may be getting interested in me; so will you guarantee that it’s important?”

  “Do you remember Keko Brannon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if that wasn’t a suicide?”

  “Be right there,” Rourke said hastily. “Don’t disappear.”

  Putting the phone back, Shayne found the woman on the bed staring up at him, her mouth still open. Shayne took out his wallet and showed her his license, but her eyes didn’t leave his face. She made a whimpering sound.

  “Through no fault of my own,” Shayne said, “I happened to be in the room across the hall when a bomb went off. A woman was killed. I didn’t kill her. I’ve just phoned a friend of mine, a reporter on one of the papers. I’ll explain everything when he gets here. Right at this moment, I don’t want to tangle with the Miami Beach cops. Some of them are halfway intelligent, but people expect them to be stupid, so they make you repeat everything a dozen times. The truth is, there isn’t much I can tell them.”

  “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  “Then close your eyes,” Shayne told her. “Did you hear one word of anything I just said?”

  “Are you Michael Shayne?”

  “Yeah, is that good or bad?”

  “I’ve heard so many conflicting stories. You’re supposed to be so… I don’t know, so…”

  Her hand came up and touched her curlers.

  “Where are you from?” he said.

  “New York. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. I’m down on vacation. I’m a phys ed teacher. Booker
T. Washington Junior High.”

  “That’s nice. Do you have anything to drink here?”

  She came up on her elbows. “I don’t drink. You probably think it’s funny that someone in my business has this thing about blood. But if one of my girls skins her knee, I’m likely to keel over. I shouldn’t even be talking about it. If you’re going to be staying here—and it seems you are—will you please, please, rinse off your shoes?”

  “In a minute.”

  He went to the door and listened to the commotion outside in the corridor. Checking rooms, Lindholm and his people had found the dead girl. Shayne turned.

  “They may be banging on the door in a minute. Then again they may not. We were all pretty excited. I need a shower; and don’t try anything, because some of my pleasantest memories are of beating up lady gym teachers.”

  “Phys ed,” she said. Looking determinedly away so her gaze wouldn’t be drawn to his bloody shoes, she said, “Go ahead, I won’t yell for help. I’m not that easy to beat up, as a matter of fact.”

  He moved the phone to the end of its cord and left it on the floor where he could see it from the bathroom. He didn’t close the bathroom door or that of the shower stall.

  “I’ve seen naked men before,” she called. “It isn’t that big an experience.”

  He soaped up quickly and rinsed off. He came out a moment later with one of the skimpy hotel towels knotted about his waist. The woman had removed the curlers, wiped off her face cream, and put on lipstick.

  She wasn’t bad looking, Shayne observed. She laid two crumpled cigarettes side by side on the bedside table. Her eyes flicked to Shayne.

  “I can guess how tense you feel; and if you’d care to join me in a joint…”

  “But you don’t believe in drinking.”

  “These are better for you. They really are.”

  She lit one and passed it to him after filling her lungs. She breathed out luxuriously.

  “That feels so good. This is my first trip to Miami Beach; and it hasn’t been so marvellously exciting, frankly. If you don’t know anybody… People are basically shy; and when, like me, you’re not much of a boozer…”

  Shayne was at the door, listening, his eyes slitted against the smoke. She had already lit the second joint.

  “Of course to get the full benefit, you’re supposed to let go—sorry, you want to think; go right ahead, I understand.”

  He kept checking the time. Rourke in a hurry was a menace in an automobile, and Shayne hoped that all the other drivers between Bal Harbour and the St. Albans would see him coming and get out of the way. He began pacing about the room.

  The woman on the bed, crossing and uncrossing her ankles, said finally, “I wonder if I ought to be so trusting. You could be a total impostor. And even if you’re genuine, how do you think you’ll get out of here without any clothes on? With the corridor swarming with fuzz? I think you’ll have to spend the night and hope they won’t be looking for you in the morning.” She added thoughtfully, “And I hardly know you.”

  “I have a change of clothes in my car. Tim Rourke’s going downstairs to get it for me in return for the inside track on a very big story. Thanks for the pot. I needed it. She was lying to me some of the time; but by the end, I was actually beginning to like that girl.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about; but I’ve been pretty good about not asking questions, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve been fine.”

  “What I’m wondering is—will anybody believe any of this when I get back to New York?”

  There was a knock on the door. Shayne opened it carefully and admitted Tim Rourke, a tall, bony individual with the more usual type of cigarette in his mouth. As was often the case with Rourke, he looked as though he had spent several days in the same clothes. He walked in eagerly, his head thrust forward at the end of his long neck.

  “Are you involved in that thing across the hall?”

  “I’ve just been washing off the blood.”

  “Please,” the girl on the bed said faintly.

  Shayne waved at her. “Introduce yourself. She’s been very hospitable, but she hasn’t told me her name.”

  “Jane.”

  Rourke sniffed the air. “Hospitable is the word. Here I went to the trouble of bringing you some booze. What was that on the phone about Keko Brannon?”

  “I wanted to get you here fast; so I used the hottest name I had. All I know is what two people told me. What have you got—whiskey?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know you’d moved on into dope.”

  “That was Jane’s contribution. She doesn’t believe in drinking.”

  “It’s the worst thing for you,” she said. “Like you, Tim—your eyes are bloodshot; you have no muscles that I can see; you’re terribly, terribly underweight…”

  “I know,” Rourke agreed affably, producing an unopened pint of bourbon from his side pocket. “How are we fixed for glasses? If you’ve only got one, I’m willing to drink from the bottle.”

  “Go ahead if you want to poison yourself.”

  She rummaged in her purse and brought out another joint. Shayne came back from the bathroom with two glasses. Rourke poured and took his glass to the foot of the occupied bed, where he sat down gingerly.

  “Mike Shayne, all right,” he said. “You started the night with one girl; and when that didn’t work out, you moved across the hall.”

  “Jane’s down on vacation, and she hasn’t met many people,” Shayne said, “so she decided not to scream.”

  “You threatened to knock out my teeth, if I remember,” she pointed out. “You were leaving wet footprints on the carpet, and you looked pretty murderous. Knots of muscle at the hinges of your jaws. Naturally I didn’t scream; and on the whole, I’m glad now that I didn’t.”

  She gave Shayne a relaxed smile, which he returned.

  “Jane’s a gym teacher—excuse me, a phys ed teacher—and the only other thing I know about her is that she gets queasy if you mention blood. It’s going to be hard to tell you what happened without doing that because there was a lot of it.”

  “I’m better now,” she said. “Blood. See—I can say it.”

  “Who was she; who was she?” Rourke said impatiently. “I thought you were in such a hurry.”

  “Kate Thackera. An actress.”

  “Did you say Kate Thackera?” Jane exclaimed. “I’ve seen every picture she ever made.”

  “A bomb went off in her face. Have any of the demolition people got here yet?”

  “They wouldn’t let me in, Mike. I had enough trouble getting off the elevator.”

  Shayne swirled the bourbon in the hotel tumbler, drank it at a gulp, and waited for it to hit him. He was still too restless to sit down.

  “You’ve always done a lot of complaining about how I don’t tell you things as they happen,” Shayne said. “I keep it all to myself so I can tie it up in a neat package and throw it at somebody.”

  “That’s your pattern, man. And it’s infuriating, believe me. Don’t tell me you’re about to change the tactics of a lifetime.”

  “I read that you’re covering the Consolidated-Famous story. You must have done some advance work on it. At this point, you probably know more about this than I do.”

  “Consolidated-Famous. Kate Thackera. Keko Brannon. This is heady stuff for a newspaperman. Do go on.”

  “And we mustn’t forget the other big event of the day: Larry Zion’s accident on Interstate 95.”

  Rourke leaned forward in growing excitement. “That red convertible. Was that Thackera?”

  “That’s one of the few things everybody agrees about. They don’t agree about what she was up to. She pulled up alongside at eighty or ninety miles an hour and pointed a pistol at him. She said she wasn’t really trying to kill him, she was only trying to convince him that she was crazy enough to kill him. She tried to explain that there’s a difference. He has a bad heart, which nobody’s supposed to know about. She knew about it becaus
e he had the heart attack in her bed. To the Zions, it looked like a murder attempt which came pretty close to succeeding. He ran into an exit abutment. That isn’t the kind of activity the heart doctors recommend.”

  “Did anybody tell you why she did all this?”

  “She wanted the lead in The Last Buccaneer. If you read the movie page today, you know about it. The director wants her; and according to Marcus, he’d have enough clout to get her in if Larry were out of the way. By out of the way, he didn’t mean in a coma or multiple traction. He meant dead. If this all sounds very unlikely, all I can say is that these seem to be unlikely people.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “Marcus. Larry had recognized Kate, and now they were both going to be gunning for each other. If I’m moving too fast for you, ask questions. She tried to make me believe she’d given up, but there was a glitter in her eye when she said it. She was thinking in terms of giving me so much sex and bourbon that I’d fall asleep, and she could sneak out. If that didn’t work, she would have tried some other ploy in the morning. My game-plan was to stay awake and get her into my car after breakfast, handcuff her to the dashboard, and keep driving.”

  “And instead of that, you lost her.”

  “I lost her,” Shayne agreed bleakly. “The bomb was planted in the room before I got there. Maybe I should have spotted it; I don’t know. It was camouflaged in a gift package of bourbon. How many people could have known that Old Grand-dad was her favorite brand? She didn’t think there was anything funny about it, and neither did I. Do they still have that same jerk doing bomb work here on the Beach?”

  “Sergeant Lovejoy. Head of the bomb squad,” he explained to the girl. “He only has one finger left on his right hand, and people give him plenty of room when he works.”

  “Ugh,” Jane said. “You guys have nice friends.”

  “It’ll take him hours to figure it out,” Shayne said. “Maybe you can help. There are little scraps of red paper scattered around, and there was a gold label on the package. She had her own bottle. We finished that first. She made a couple of passes at opening the hotel bottle, but she wanted to be sure I’d help her drink it. I was leaning over getting ice when it blew. Thirty seconds later and I would have been in the same bed, or sitting on it. So that gives me a personal incentive.”