Free Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday Page A

Helen’s only his stepdaughter.”
    “Sure. But you’d think with his wife sick and all—”
    “I wonder if she is a hophead,” Shayne muttered. “That might be an angle.”
    “There you go,” the girl complained. “I knew you were just after information. You don’t care a thing about me.”
    “Give me a chance to show you. At two o’clock. You don’t think there’s actually anything going on between Helen and her stepfather, do you?’
    “I wouldn’t know,” Lucile answered resentfully. “Their rooms are right next to each other. And it’s a cinch she doesn’t care much about the old lady. I haven’t caught her going in to see her mother once since they moved in. But let’s talk about you and me.”
    The lights of an automobile crossing the bridge cut a white swath across the garden. Lucile jumped up with a startled cry. “I’ve got to get in before they find out. Two o’clock—across the bridge.”
    She sped across the garden and through the hedge. Shayne followed more slowly. A limousine was pulling up behind his car. A chauffeur jumped out and ran around to open the door for the commanding figure of Burt Stallings. He got back in the limousine, backed up, and drove in the driveway while Stallings went up the walk.
    Shayne waited behind the hedge until the car passed, then sprinted out to his car and got in. He started the motor while Stallings was opening the front door, roared around the circular drive and across the bridge.

 
SIX
     
    SHAYNE STOPPED in front of a new and expensive apartment building on Miami Beach. He sat slouched behind the wheel for a time, morosely staring at nothing. His head throbbed with a dull, harassing ache that befuddled his brain. He was going around in circles without getting anywhere. The hell of it was that he had no idea where he should go. All he had succeeded in getting, thus far, was a beating and a few odd bits of information that added up to zero.
    “Losing my punch,” he muttered savagely when he realized that much of his depression was due to the two-o’clock date with the amorous Lucile. He suddenly laughed aloud with the conviction that a pouty-lipped girl was the cause of the first fear he had ever experienced. He wondered, moodily, whether the Stallings maid possessed any worth-while information, and toyed with the idea of calling the whole thing off. There was a midnight train north. He could catch it and reach New York a few hours after Phyllis arrived. The thought of his young wife brought an acute sense of loneliness upon him. He needed her buoyant faith tonight, the cool, caressing touch of her hands, the pressure of her smooth cheek against his, the influx of strength from her passionate belief in him.
    He was, he admitted, becoming increasingly dependent upon Phyllis. He, who had never been dependent upon any person or thing. The hard-boiled dick who had fought his way savagely to the top with a ruthless disregard for everything that stood in his path.
    He laughed again, a mirthless laugh of mockery. He was slipping, all right, letting himself get pushed around. What the devil had he been doing all evening?
    It wasn’t his case. As far as he could see, there wasn’t a dollar in it for him. There was the election, of course, but he had no real stake in it. He had no depth of personal feeling for Jim Marsh. He had, perversely, taken up the cudgels for Marsh after Peter Painter publicly backed Stallings. An instinctive and subconscious impulse had forced him to take a hand. He was more than ever convinced that there was something rotten behind Stallings’s candidacy, but hell! When had an election ever been pure and forthright?
    He had been a fool to get into it, but he had to see Marsh elected. He sighed and shrugged his wide shoulders, unlatched the car door, and got out.
    The apartment building was ultramodern, with faint light illumining an opaque glass front. Inside, a mirrored foyer led to a self-service elevator. He stepped into the