The Homicidal Virgin Read Free Page B

here before nine. About ten minutes later this chick comes in and asked for you. I can’t swear it was the same one that had just phoned, but I’m pretty sure it was the same voice. When I told her you wouldn’t be in till nine, she slid a ten-spot across to me and started askin’ all these questions. What you looked like, how long you been here, what do you do… all that. You never had told me not to answer questions, so I took her money and told her what she wanted to know. One thing in particular she pushed me hard on.”
    Dick paused to snicker. “This’ll kill you. She wanted most special to know if you was a cop. That’s one thing I did tell her flat you wasn’t.” The clerk snickered again, and then added anxiously, “If I did anything wrong…”
    “You did just right, Dick.” Shayne got a five from his wallet and flipped it across to avid fingers.
    “Gee, thanks, Mr. Wayne. So she left this here envelope for you and made me promise you’d get it the moment you came in.” He passed the thick, sealed envelope across to Shayne.
    Words were typed on the front and Shayne read them quizzically. MIKE WAYNE in capital letters, and the message: Don’t unseal this until you walk outside and stand under the light. Then tear it open and remain in plain sight while you read it.
    Shayne grinned at the clerk who he was sure had read the curious message, and said, “That’s a dame for you. Always playing games.”
    He turned back with the sealed envelope in his hand, went out to stand on the sidewalk under a bright overhead light. Several cars were parked nearby, any one of which might contain someone watching him.
    Deliberately he tore off one end of the envelope and shook the contents out. There was a folded sheet of square paper similar to the one on which the original advertisement had been typed.
    He unfolded it and read:
     
    You are being observed every moment. Remain in plain sight while you read this. Then hail the first empty cab that comes along. Get in and have him drive to the Boulevard and out to 79th Street and across the Causeway. You will be followed all the way. Go to the corner of Lime Road and Beach Plaza Place and let the cab go. A blue and white Plymouth sedan is parked at the Northeast corner. Get in and get a further message and the car keys from above the left sun vizor.
    Jane Smith
     
    Shayne refolded the sheet of paper and stuffed it back into the white envelope. He slid it into his right coat pocket and looked up the street for an empty cab. He stood there impassively, his rangy figure outlined in the bright overhead light, for several minutes before a cruising cab pulled in to the curb in answer to his signal. He got in and directed the driver, “Over to Biscayne and across the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway.”
    He settled back sideways in the corner and watched the street behind him with interest as the cab pulled away. A car that had been parked just beyond the hotel entrance eased out from the curb behind them and followed eastward toward the Boulevard.
    Shayne relaxed and lit a cigarette, a wry smile curving his lips as he went over the typed instructions in his mind.
    Jane Smith was playing it cagey, all right. Up to this point she was taking no chances of being confronted and identified. By having him open the envelope while she watched from a parked car, she had eliminated any possibility of him communicating with a confederate by telephone or otherwise. It was pretty cute figuring and indicated a certain amount of experience at this sort of thing or a devious mind that had read a lot of E. Phillips Oppenheim.
    He was comfortably conscious that another car was keeping a sedate and careful distance behind them as they sped up the Boulevard and east across the winding causeway. At the eastern end, he leaned forward and told the driver, “The corner of Lime Road and Beach Plaza Place. Know where it is?”
    “Just about. I can find it okay.”
    Shayne settled back with another