Dividend on Death

by Brett Halliday

  Brett Halliday

  Dividend on Death

  CHAPTER 1

  THE GIRL WHO FACED Michael Shayne in his downtown Miami apartment was beautiful, but too unblemished to interest Shayne particularly. She was young, certainly not more than twenty, with a slender niceness of figure that was curiously rigid as she sat in a chair leaning toward him. Her lips were too heavily rouged, and her cheeks were too pale.

  She said, “I am Phyllis Brighton,” as though her name explained everything.

  It didn’t. It didn’t mean a thing to him. He said, “Yes?” wondering why there should be that expression of self-loathing in her eyes; she was too young and too beautiful to have that look. The pupils of her eyes were contracted and cloudy beneath heavy black lashes, and they stared into his face with a fixed intensity that wasn’t quite sane.

  “We’re on the Beach,” the girl told him as though that should convey a great deal. She drew herself stiffly erect in the deep chair, gloveless fingers weaving together in her lap.

  Shayne said, “I see,” without seeing at all. He stopped looking into her eyes and leaned back, loose-jointed and relaxed. “You don’t use the phrase in its slang meaning, I suppose?”

  “What?” The girl was beginning to loosen up a trifle in response to Shayne’s easy manner.

  “You don’t mean you’re down on your luck—a beachcomber?”

  A nervous smile hovered on her tight lips. Shayne had an idea there would be a dimple in her left cheek if she relaxed and really smiled. “Oh, no,” she explained. “We’re at our Miami Beach estate for the season. My—father is Rufus Brighton.”

  Things began clicking in Shayne’s mind. She was that Brighton. He crossed inordinately long legs and clasped his hands about one bony knee. “Your stepfather, I believe?”

  “Yes.” Phyllis Brighton’s words came with a rush. “He had a stroke in New York four months ago—only a month after he and Mother married while I was in Europe. They were sending him down here away from the cold when I arrived so I came down with him and the doctor and his son.”

  “Brighton’s son?” Shayne asked. “Or, the doctor’s?”

  “Mr. Brighton’s son by his first marriage. Clarence. Mother stayed in New York to attend to some business matters and she is arriving this afternoon.” Her voice grew shaky on the final words.

  Shayne waited for her to go on. There was no hurry or impatience in his mind. It was quiet and comfortably cool in the apartment above the Miami River, and he had nothing urgent on hand.

  Phyllis sucked her breath in sharply and faltered, “I—don’t know how to say it.”

  Shayne lit a cigarette and didn’t help her out. She had something inside her that she would have to get rid of her own way.

  “I mean—well—you’re a private detective, aren’t you?”

  Shayne rumpled his coarse red hair with his left hand and looked at her with a fleeting grin. “That’s a nice way of saying it. I’ve frequently been called worse—with emphasis.”

  She looked away from him, wet her lips. Her next question came with a rush.

  “Did you ever hear of someone killing a person they loved devotedly?”

  Shayne shook his head slowly. “I’m thirty-five, Miss Brighton, and I’m never sure that I know what a person means when he speaks of love. Suppose you tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Tears came into Phyllis’s eyes. She flung out her hands toward him. “Oh, I have to! I just have to tell someone or I’ll go mad!”

  Shayne nodded, repressing an impulse to suggest it wouldn’t be a long journey. He looked directly into her eyes and asked, “Who are you thinking about killing, and why?”

  She jerked back involuntarily, and her breath came out between clenched teeth. “It’s—Mother.”

  Shayne said, “U-m-m,” and looked away from her, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. The girl’s answer had startled him for a moment, accustomed as Michael Shayne was to surprising revelations from clients.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” The girl’s voice was almost out of control.

  “We’re all slightly haywire at times.”

  “I don’t mean that way. I mean really crazy. Oh, I know I am. I can feel it. It gets worse every day.”

  Shayne nodded agreement, and mashed out his cigarette in a tray on the small table between them. “Haven’t you come to the wrong place? Sounds to me as though you need an alienist instead of a detective.”

  “No, no!” She placed the palms of her hands flat on the table and leaned sharply forward. Full red lips were drawn away from white teeth, and her eyes were clouded with fear. “They tell me I’m going crazy. Sometimes I think they’re trying to drive me crazy. They say I may try to kill Mother. They’re making me believe it. I won’t let myself believe it but then I do. With Mother coming this afternoon—” Her voice trailed off to silence.

  Shayne lit another cigarette and pushed his pack toward her. She didn’t see it. She was staring upward into his face.

  “You got to help me. You’ve got to.”

  “All right,” agreed Shayne soothingly. “I’ll help you. But I’m no good at guessing games.”

  She said, “It’s—it’s—I can’t bear to talk about it. It’s too awful. I just can’t.”

  Michael Shayne slowly unlimbered himself and stood up. He had a tall angular body that concealed a lot of solid weight, and his freckled cheeks were thin to gauntness. His rumpled hair was violently red, giving him a little-boy look curiously in contrast with the harshness of his features. When he smiled, the harshness went out of his face and he didn’t look at all like a hard-boiled private detective who had come to the top the tough way.

  He smiled down at Phyllis Brighton, turned away from her, and crossed the living-room of his apartment to an open east window which let in the afternoon breeze from Biscayne Bay. Better, he figured, to give her a chance to spill the whole thing. It didn’t look like a real case, but he wanted to give her a chance.

  “Take it easy.” His voice was unruffled, steadying. “You’ve got things bottled up inside of you that you need to get out into the open. I don’t think you need an alienist after all. I think you need someone to talk to. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Thanks.” The word was a faint whisper which barely carried to him across the stillness. “If you only knew—”

  Shayne did know, sort of. He remembered reading the papers, and he could guess at other things that hadn’t been in print.

  He said, “You’re not going crazy, of course. Count that off your list. You wouldn’t realize it if you were.” He paused. “About your mother—”

  “She’s coming this afternoon. From New York.”

  “You told me that.”

  “I hear them talking about me when they think I’m not listening. I heard them last night—talking about having me watched when Mother arrives.” She shuddered. “That’s what gave me the idea of coming to you—myself.”

  “You’ve said ‘they’ several times. Who are ‘they’?”

  “Doctor Pedique and Monty. Mr. Montrose. He’s Mr. Brighton’s private secretary.”

  Shayne turned and lounged against the window, elbows hooked on the sill.

  “What basis is there for their fear? What’s it all about? Do you hate your mother?”

  “No! I love her. That’s—what they say is the matter.” A rush of blood crimsoned Phyllis’s cheeks beneath Shayne’s steady gaze. She lowered her eyes.

  This seemed to him to be getting them nowhere. “Suppose you tell me just what they do say.” Shayne’s voice was gently impersonal. “Don’t make any excuses or explanations. Let me sort things out for myself first.”

  Phyllis Brighton clasped her hands together and began Jo speak
in a glib, curiously sickening patter, as though the words had been committed to memory and she was delivering them without letting herself consider their meaning. “They say I’ve got an Electra complex and it’s driving me insane with jealousy because Mother married Mr. Brighton and I’ll kill her before I’ll let him have her.”

  “Is it true?” Shayne threw the question at her before she had time to catch her breath.

  She raised her opaque eyes to his and cried out a vehement, “No!” then dropped them and added as if the words might strangle her, “I don’t know.”

  Shayne said dryly, “You’d better make up your mind, if she’s due this afternoon.”

  “It’s too horrible to be true. It isn’t. It can’t be. But I—everything’s mixed up. I can’t think any more. I’m afraid to let myself think. There’s something horrible inside of me. I can feel it growing. I can’t escape it. They say I can’t.”

  “Isn’t that something you’d better decide for yourself rather than let them decide for you?”

  “But I—can’t think straight any more. It’s all like a nightmare and I have—spells.”

  She was so damned young. Michael Shayne studied her morosely from across the room. Too young to be having spells and to have lost her ability to think straight. Still, he wasn’t a nursemaid. He shook his head irritably, went to a wall liquor cabinet and took down a bottle of cognac. Facing her, he held it up and raised bushy red eyebrows.

  “Have a drink?”

  “No.” She was looking down at the carpet. While he poured himself one she began talking with dreary hopelessness.

  “I suppose it was silly of me to come to you. No one can help me. I’m in a lonely place, Mr. Shayne. And I can’t face it alone any more. Perhaps they’re right.” Her voice sank to an awed whisper. “I do hate him. I can’t help it. I don’t see how Mother could have done it. We were so happy together. Now, it’s spoiled. What’s the use of—going on?” Her lips scarcely moved.

  Shayne let the drink trickle down his throat. The girl was talking to herself, not to him. She seemed to have forgotten him, in fact, and was staring at the window with remote, glazed eyes. After a while she stood up slowly, her face twitching, and took one slow step toward the window. Abruptly she flung herself at it in one desperately swift motion.

  Shayne lunged in front of her.

  Then she was clawing at him, her breath coming in short gasps. Shayne’s face hardened; he smashed one big hand down on her shoulder, and shook her with an almost savage violence.

  When she went limp he slipped his arm about her waist to keep her from sliding to the floor; she hung there with her head back and eyes closed, her breasts taut against the thin knit jacket of her sports outfit.

  Shayne’s face lost its impersonal fierceness. He looked down at her face moodily, remarking how her lips were parted and her breath was coming unevenly. It was a hell of a note. She was just a kid, but old enough to know better than to act like one.

  Abruptly, he realized he didn’t believe that stuff she had hinted about herself and her mother. He would have felt an instinctive repulsion if it was true, and she was not repellent. Far from it. He had to shake her again roughly to keep himself from kissing her.

  She opened her eyes and swayed back when he shook her. “That’ll be enough of that,” he said with self-annoyance in his tone.

  She sank back into a chair and regarded him gravely, catching her lower lip between sharp teeth. Her eyes were clearer. “I’m all right—now.”

  Shayne stood before her with his hands on his hips. It hadn’t been an act, that hysteria of hers. None of it was an act. But it didn’t make sense. Still, he told himself, he liked things that didn’t make sense. Hadn’t he started passing up routine stuff a long time ago? That’s why he had no downtown office and no regular staff. That sort of phony front he left to the punks with whom Miami is infested during the season. Mike Shayne didn’t touch a case unless it interested him. Or unless he was dead broke. This case—if it was a case and not a case history—interested him. There was the feel of beneath-the-surface stuff that set his nerves tingling in a way that hadn’t happened to him for a long time.

  He sat down in front of Phyllis Brighton and said, “What you need more than anything else right now is someone to believe in you. All right. You’ve got that. But you’ll have to start trying to believe in yourself a little bit. Is that a bargain?”

  Phyllis’s eyes blinked with tears, like a small girl’s. “You’re wonderful,” she said finally. “I don’t know how I can ever pay you.”

  “That is an angle,” Shayne admitted. “Haven’t you any money?”

  “No. That is—not enough, I’m afraid. But—would these do?”

  She lifted a beautifully matched string of pearls from a bag and held them toward him with a hesitation that was either genuine timidity or a wonderful imitation.

  Shayne let the pearls dribble into his hand without change of expression. “They’ll do very nicely.” He opened a drawer of the center table and dropped them in carelessly. His manner became brisk and reassuring.

  “Let’s get this straight, now, without hysterics. Your mother is coming from New York, and you’re suffering from a morbid inward fear that you may go out of your head and do her some harm. I don’t believe there’s any danger, but we’ll let that pass. The important thing is to see that nothing of the sort can happen. When is your mother expected?”

  “On the six o’clock train.”

  Shayne nodded. “Everything will be taken care of. You probably won’t see me, but you have to remember that it’s part of a detective’s job not to be seen. The important thing for you to keep in mind is that I’m making myself responsible for you. The matter is out of your hands and in mine. If you feel you can trust me.”

  “Oh, I do!”

  “That’s swell, then.” Shayne patted her hand and stood up. “I’ll be seeing you,” he promised her casually.

  She got up and moved close to him impulsively. “I can’t tell you how you’ve made me feel. Everything is different. I’m glad I came.”

  Shayne went to the door with her and took her hand briefly. “Keep your chin up.”

  “I will.” She smiled uncertainly and went down the corridor.

  Shayne stood for a moment looking after her and rubbing his chin. Then he closed the door, went back to the center table, and lifted out the string of pearls to study them with narrowed eyes. He wasn’t an expert but they certainly didn’t look phony. He dropped them back into the drawer, shaking his head. There were a lot of possible angles.

  Ten minutes later, when he left his apartment, he was whistling tunelessly. At the desk downstairs he told the clerk he’d be gone half an hour—he never forgot to do that at the start of a case—and went down the street to a newspaper office, carefully read all the dope he could find on the Brightons, and went back to the hotel. This time he entered by the side door and climbed the service stairway to his second-floor apartment. His phone was ringing. It was the clerk.

  “Mr. Shayne, there’s a Doctor Joel Pedique here to see you.”

  Shayne frowned at the telephone and told the clerk to send Dr. Pedique up. Even after he had hung up and given the room a swift, characteristically speculative look, he was still frowning. From what Phyllis Brighton had told him, he had an instinctive feeling that he wasn’t going to like Dr. Pedique.

  He didn’t. Dr. Joel Pedique was a man whom Shayne, surveying him at the doorway, would have instantly disliked if he had met him with no previous knowledge of him at all. He was small-boned and dark-skinned. His black hair was too long and it glistened with oil, combed straight back from a V where it grew low on his forehead. His lips were full and unpleasantly red. His eyes were beady and nervous, and his nostrils flared as he breathed. The rest of his appearance pleased Shayne equally little. The man’s double-breasted blue coat clung snugly to his sloping shoulders and sunken chest, and immaculate white flannels were tight about plump hips.

  Shayne sto
od aside with his hand on the doorknob and said, “Come in, doctor.”

  Dr. Pedique held out his hand. “Mr. Shayne?”

  Shayne nodded, closed the door, and walked back to sit down without taking the doctor’s hand.

  Dr. Pedique followed mincingly and sat down.

  “You have been recommended to me, Mr. Shayne, as an efficient and discreet private detective.” Shayne nodded and waited. The doctor folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward. They were effeminate hands, soft and recently manicured. “I have an exceedingly delicate mission for you,” he went on in a voice like thin silk, his sharp white teeth flashing behind full lips. “I am the physician attending Mr. Rufus Brighton, of whom you must have heard.” He paused as though for effect.

  Shayne blinked and looked at his cigarette. He said, “Yes,” noncommittally.

  “An exceedingly curious and difficult situation has arisen.” Dr. Pedique seemed to choose his words carefully. “You are perhaps not aware that Mr. Brighton has lately married, and his stepdaughter has accompanied him here.” He paused again.

  Shayne kept on looking at his cigarette and didn’t tell him whether or not he was aware of the fact.

  The doctor purred on. “The unfortunate child is subject to certain—ah—hallucinations, I may call them in nontechnical terms, stimulated by a violent sexual oestrus and marked by unmistakable symptoms of an Electra complex. In her depressed moods she sometimes becomes violent, and I fear the poor child might do harm to her mother if such a mood were to come upon her.”

  “Why the hell,” Shayne asked irritatedly, “don’t you put her in an asylum?”

  “But that would be too terrible,” Dr. Joel Pedique exclaimed, spreading his hands out, rounded palms upward. “I have every hope of effecting an ultimate cure if I can keep her mind at ease. The shock of being incarcerated in an asylum would completely unhinge her reason.”

  Shayne asked, “Where do I come in?”

  “Her mother arrives from the north this afternoon. I should like to arrange for some sort of a superficial guard to be kept over the mother or child during the first few days of her stay. During that period I shall keep the child under close observation and determine definitely whether she can be cured or if she is doomed to enter a psychopathic ward.”