Mermaid on the Rocks ms-55

by Brett Halliday

  “Go on,” Shayne said evenly.

  “Kitty happens to be a good friend of mine. She needs some assistance, and she needs it right now. It’s a tense little problem, the kind you can handle with your left hand. This expedition this afternoon was my idea. I thought if I could get you down here, feed you a steak and some good cognac, surround you with cute babes in minimum bathing suits, you might say yes. If you said no you’d say it politely.”

  “No,” Shayne said.

  “Don’t give up hope,” the reporter told Kitty. “He didn’t say, ‘Hell, no.’”

  Kitty said quickly, “Mike, I know this was a dirty trick. But I’ve been so worried! You just don’t know. It was bad enough before, but now! If you people hadn’t come down today I would have gone diving by myself. I hardly ever miss a Sunday. After a week at the typewriter it irons out the kinks. I know what they say about the buddy system, but I don’t worry about going down fifteen or twenty feet alone, on the rope.”

  She closed her eyes and touched her forehead lightly, as though the pain had been transferred from Shayne’s head to hers. “I usually go out as soon as I have breakfast and read the Sunday papers. I’d be dead now.”

  Natalie put in uneasily, “Kitty, now wait.”

  Kitty said, “It’s my aqualung. If somebody let out some air and put in something else, it was meant for me. No one would ever know it was anything but an accident-that’s the part that scares me. People would tut-tut and say I shouldn’t have gone down alone.”

  “Oh, by the way, Mike,” Rourke put in-the casual manner didn’t fool Shayne, who knew that the reporter was very much in earnest-“you remember Cal Tuttle. Kitty used to be his secretary. This was his Key.”

  “Key Gaspar,” Shayne said slowly, drinking. “I knew that name sounded familiar. Wasn’t it some kind of a rumrunners’ hangout during Prohibition?”

  “Absolutely,” Rourke said. “Tuttle used to bring the stuff up from Havana and land it in the cove at the south end. The Miami and Palm Beach bootleggers would come down in fast boats and pick it up. Tuttle owned a half dozen Keys, but this is the one he held onto. You’re going to listen to this now, aren’t you?”

  “I’d rather hear it some other time, but go ahead. Incidentally,” he added, looking across at Kitty, “I didn’t say thanks.”

  She blushed slightly again. “You’re welcome. I just hope nobody had a telescope on us when we came out of the water.”

  “I owe you a bathing suit,” Shayne said. “Pick one out and tell them to send me the bill. Where do you keep your diving equipment when you’re not here?”

  “In a kitchen closet, and I keep it padlocked. I remember unlocking it this morning.”

  “It isn’t hard to force a padlock. Does anybody else use this aqualung besides you?”

  “No, nobody. You’re the first one in ages. People sometimes come down to dive, but they bring their own gear.”

  Shayne nodded. “Toss me a cigarette, Tim. O.K., Kitty, tell me what’s happened.”

  Rourke threw him a cigarette and a book of matches. Kitty bit her lip.

  “Last weekend I found my cat on the back step with her throat cut.”

  “Kitty, how ghastly!” Natalie exclaimed. “Your lovely Siamese? You didn’t tell me.”

  Kitty shook her head, her face troubled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. I don’t mind living alone, really. I like it, in fact-my marriage was rather a mess at the end. I don’t want to turn into one of those hysterical women who run to the nearest man for help when the least little thing goes wrong. But this was actually quite scary. Her name was Awn. I loved her dearly. There wasn’t any doubt what had happened, or even why.”

  She raised her glass in both hands. Quickly, while she looked into it reflectively and then drank, Shayne reviewed the odd scraps of information Rourke had dropped earlier in the day as they drummed down the Overseas Highway in Shayne’s Buick.

  Shayne himself had been hunched moodily over the wheel, hardly listening, letting the salt breeze whip away some of the tensions that had accumulated during the previous day and night. He knew Natalie, an agreeable girl who smiled a little too often for Shayne’s taste. She worked on the real-estate page on Rourke’s paper, the Miami News. Kitty also worked there, in the accounting department. She was in her late twenties, Rourke told him, separated from her husband, Hank Sims, a small-timer in the real-estate business, who was still around town somewhere. Rourke hadn’t mentioned her connection with Cal Tuttle, the last of the big Prohibition figures, who had died a year or two earlier. Instead, the reporter confined himself to a physical description. Kitty was tall, blonde, witty, anything but strait-laced, with a marvelous figure-a really marvelous figure, Rourke repeated-and in Rourke’s judgment, which he passed along to his friend with a leer, she could be accurately described as Shayne’s type of woman. Sexy, Rourke thought, was the word that sprang to mind.

  As a rule the reporter was the world’s lousiest judge of women, and Shayne paid little attention to the build-up. When they arrived at Key Gaspar and he actually saw Kitty, he was pleasantly surprised.

  Now, lowering her glass, Kitty met his eyes. “You’ll really let me tell you about it, Mike? If I put it into words, I may be able to decide if I’m getting skittery about nothing.”

  “Poisoning the air in an aqualung,” the redhead said dryly, “isn’t my idea of nothing. Who’s trying to kill you, Kitty?”

  chapter 3

  The simple tuck she had taken in the towel was beginning to slip. She put her drink on the deck and used both hands to tuck it back in.

  “I thought I knew,” she said. “But killing a cat and switching tanks on an aqualung are two such different things. Never mind. There are only a few possibilities.”

  “If you want to know my candidate,” Natalie put in, “it’s Brad Tuttle. What a repulsive character. Ugh!”

  “He was my candidate, too, till this happened,” Kitty said. “The point is, Mike, under the terms of Cal’s will five of us were left the Key in common, the Key and everything on it. I don’t know if you can see the main house from here. Part of it, anyway.”

  Shayne looked the way she was pointing. They were lying a half mile offshore. Near the southernmost end of the Key, facing a protected cove and partially screened by a tangle of mangroves and gumbo-limbo trees, he saw a low stucco belltower. Gaspar was one of the Middle Keys, halfway down the curving chain between the Straits of Florida and the Gulf. It was shaped like an hourglass, so narrow at the waist that higher-than-usual tides, Shayne thought, would probably wash all the way through. A ramshackle quarter-mile trestle connected it to Smuttynose Key and the highway to Key West.

  “He was a funny mixture, Cal,” Kitty said. “Most people never saw his sentimental side. He just wasn’t open to argument on the subject of Key Gaspar. Toward the end he told me a lot about what it was like back in the twenties. Whatever it was for most people, that was a glamorous period in Cal’s life. His boats were faster than anything the revenue people had. That was before the causeways, and he knew every inlet and shoal and passage. He could nip in and out on the blackest night without lights. He made tons of money. He spent most of it. You could tell by the way he described those days that he had a perfectly gorgeous time. Something slipped finally and he ended up in prison. His lawyer wanted him to sell the Key, but he wouldn’t. He wanted it to stay the way he’d always known it, wild and unspoiled. That’s why he tied it up the way he did in his will.”

  “Did he have any children?” Shayne said.

  “Only one, Barbara. She went to college and married a boy she met there. Naturally she didn’t boast about having a father who was in jail for killing a government man in a gunfight. After Cal got out she didn’t have anything to do with him for years. They finally made up after her husband died, and she came here to live. She didn’t especially care for the Key, though, and Cal knew she’d sell it like a shot if he left it to her outright. So he set up a Joint Tenancy. You’ve probably heard
about that kind of arrangement, Mike. It was new to me.”

  “Yeah,” Shayne growled, “and it’s always a hell of a way to leave property.”

  “He had a problem, you see,” she said. “He didn’t want the Key to be bulldozed and landscaped and covered with a clutter of those horrid little shacks on stilts. From his point of view, the more complications the better. There are only four of us left now. His brother Ev died in a fire last summer.” She ticked off the survivors on her fingers. “Barbara. Me. Brad, another brother. Frank Shanahan, Cal’s lawyer. We all have lifetime rights. The one who lives longest inherits the whole thing. Theoretically we could all move into the main house, but nobody wanted to do that. Cal left a letter explaining why he did it this way. He had to give us all equal rights in everything or it wouldn’t be legal, but he wanted Barbara to have the house. The rest of us could build if we wanted to, and he suggested where. I’m the only one who did. Brad has an old secondhand trailer on the other side. He brings a girl down most weekends and gets drunk and goes diving. I think he’s hoping to find a sunken treasure ship-there’s an old story about a wreck between here and Smuttynose.”

  Shayne looked at Rourke. “Brad Tuttle?”

  “Yeah,” Rourke. said. “It rang a bell with me, too. I got all the Tuttle envelopes out of the morgue yesterday, and I talked to a couple of cops who know him. He’s Grade B bad news. Nothing like his brother. He never made any real dough, and whenever somebody wants some muscle, he has to be available. He collects bad debts for a couple of loan sharks on the Beach.”

  “And he could have butchered my lovely Siamese,” Kitty said bitterly, “and sat down to dinner afterwards without washing his hands. I loathe that man.”

  Natalie exclaimed, “Kit, you’d better move in with me and stop coming down for weekends. This is definitely not healthy.”

  “Don’t I know it! Mike, what do you think?”

  “First, what about the brother who died in the fire?”

  “Ev. He was younger than the others, and nothing like either of them. He was drunk most of the time. Cal had to keep bailing him out of the drunk-tank, and he sent him three dollars in the mail every day. That was one of my jobs. A weekly allowance didn’t work-it vanished the first day. He fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and set his mattress on fire. That had happened before, but somebody always smelled the smoke and put it out in time. I liked Ev, but I didn’t know why Cal included him in the Key. He never came down here even for an afternoon. He said he had a superstition about it. He talked about taking legal action to resign his share, but he never stayed sober long enough to make the first move.”

  “Now about Shanahan. Is that the Frank Shanahan who’s a Civil Court judge?”

  “Yes. He was Cal’s lawyer all through. He’s engaged to Barbara.”

  “I know him,” Shayne said, “and I doubt if he’s ever cut a cat’s throat in his life.” He lifted his paper cup thoughtfully. “Were you Cal’s mistress, Kitty?”

  “Hey,” Rourke protested.

  “No, it does seem to stand to reason,” Kitty said, coloring. “I was his secretary for four years. A one-fifth interest in his estate is a big bequest to a secretary. Of course, everybody assumed there had to be more to it, my husband, for one.”

  “That goon,” Natalie said.

  “Hank has his points,” Kitty said. “I admit I went through a stage where I didn’t think so, but I can be more objective now, if I force myself. Real-estate people get a very strong attachment to private property, and I was one of Hank’s possessions, like a toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to share your toothbrush with somebody else, would you? Of course not. I got along well with Cal, but that’s as far as it went, Mike. It never occurred to me that he was leaving me anything. I know why he did it-he knew how I felt about this place. With me in on the tenancy he could be sure it wouldn’t be sold. But Hank wouldn’t listen. After Cal’s funeral I opened the registered letter and clang! The fight began. It hadn’t gone far before I started throwing his clothes out in the hall. If that was the way his mind worked-”

  Natalie said, “What about the theory that that’s what Cal expected to happen?”

  “That was Ev’s notion, in one of his lucid moments. It’s that Cal never liked Hank. They were in some kind of deal together, and Hank made the mistake of trying to slip something past him. Cal was always offering to stake me to a divorce. He’d seen a couple of examples of Hank’s jealousy, and I suppose he knew precisely what would happen when Hank heard about the will. Ev had surprising insights at times. He said Cal liked to be the one who pulled the strings, and the chief quality he learned in jail was patience. He didn’t succeed in breaking up my marriage while he was alive. Very well, he’d do it after he died. This is Ev talking, you understand. It’s not the whole story, by any means. Hank said I could prove I hadn’t been sleeping with Cal by selling my one-fifth, but I wasn’t about to do that. So farewell, Hank.”

  “One more question, Kitty,” Shayne said. “How much do you think the property is worth, in dollars?”

  She frowned. “Natalie, you know real-estate prices.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Natalie said. “There isn’t enough of a market. I like Kitty’s new place, but the big house is one of those Moorish monstrosities, and it needs a million things done to it. What’s the acreage, Kitty, about seventy-five? Well, if you found the right kind of well-heeled eccentric, maybe you could get two hundred thousand. If you were lucky. A developer might go another hundred. But that’s not really in the cards. The water supply’s too uncertain. Something has to be done about the trestle before it falls down. Not to speak of the low spot in the middle-that means an earth-moving operation. There are other keys nearer the mainland, without this screwy ownership. But in the long run, when there’s only one owner, who knows?”

  “I didn’t tell you, Nat,” Kitty put in. “Florida-American is interested.”

  Natalie looked surprised. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. They don’t know I know it. Dear Barbara has given them an option, contingent on getting the rest of us to agree. Everybody else has agreed. Not me.”

  “What kind of money?”

  “Don’t ask me. I haven’t let them get that far. I’ll be damned if I’ll sell! In the first place, and this may seem very cold and calculating, I’m the junior tenant. Barbara’s forty-four. Judge Shanahan’s in his fifties. I don’t know how old Brad is, but he’s been around a long time.”

  “He’s sixty-three, if I remember,” Rourke said.

  “There! Mike, I can show you a copy of Cal’s letter. He talks about how he hopes Gaspar will still be unchanged fifty years from now. In fifty years Barbara would be ninety-four! That must mean he wanted it to end up with me. Everybody’s been telling me all my life to stop being romantic and to be practical for a change. I’d be foolish to sell, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I, Mike?”

  “If everybody dies a natural death,” Shayne said gravely, “the odds are on you.”

  “Of course they are. I knew you’d agree with me. Legally I only own twenty-five percent. As a practical matter it’s a good deal more.” She stopped short, catching Shayne’s eye. “Or isn’t that what you meant?”

  “You asked me for advice.” He finished his drink and crumpled the paper cup. “Here it is. Sell.”

  “Sell!” she cried. “For one quarter, when I have every expectation of-You couldn’t have been listening. All my life I’ve wanted a place of my own. You should see some of the holes I lived in with Hank. I had to go without lunches for a year to save up for the down payment on that house, and the mortgage won’t be paid off for another nineteen years. If they knock it down with a bulldozer, I’ll still be stuck with the mortgage payments. Over my dead body!”

  She said that fiercely, but then clapped her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t like the way that sounded.”

  Shayne said, “Just because an old rumrunner was sentimental about this particular Key doesn’t mean you have to
be, too. You didn’t play cops and robbers here. If Natalie’s right, this land-company offer’s a fluke and it may never happen again. Your co-tenants don’t want to sit around waiting to see who dies last. Put yourself in their position. I take it there wasn’t much of a cash residue in the estate. I don’t know about the other two, but I know Shanahan. You can tell by the bags under his eyes that he owes money. This may be his only chance of ever raising any money out of his inheritance from Cal.”

  “I’m sure they all want to sell,” she said miserably, “but doesn’t it make any difference what Cal wanted?”

  “Cal’s dead and buried. Listen to me. It’s like the Ten Little Indians rhyme-you started with five and now there are four. Seventy-five acres sounds like a lot, but most of it’s swampland. You’re on pretty close quarters. It’s nice to have a place on the ocean to spend your weekends, but they’re going to be nervous weekends. When people start cutting cats’ throats, it’s a sign that it’s serious. Which one has been talking to you about selling?”

  “Brad. I didn’t let him get very far. He said something about fifty thousand, I said go to hell and that was that.”

  “Did he bring it up again after your cat was killed?”

  She nodded. “The next day. He said they’d raise their offer to fifty thousand and one-I don’t mean fifty-one thousand, but fifty thousand plus one dollar. I had a real case of hysterics after he left.”

  Shayne continued, “And the next step was the aqualung. That came pretty close, Kitty. They’ll keep on trying, and one of these days you’ll stop being lucky.”

  “Mike, how can I just lie down and let them walk all over me? I thought if I explained things, you could-”

  Shayne shook his head shortly. “You can’t buy around-the-clock protection for the rest of your life. It’s too expensive. After they murder you, I might be able to pin it on one of them, but how would that help?”