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her from a nasty scandal… from the utter ruination of a young life. Think about it, Mike. I’m not asking much. Nothing wrong. Nothing that will in any way change the end result. If she were a criminal and I were asking you to let her go free it would be different. But she’s done nothing criminal in the eyes of the law you prate about. You admit that yourself. Then why, in the name of God, should she be publicly pilloried?”
    He shook his head doggedly. “I can’t be judge and jury. God knows, I’ll help any way I can, Carla. I have a certain amount of influence with the authorities and with the newspapers in Miami. If she comes back and gives herself up, we may be able to keep the whole affair very quiet and out of the papers.”
    She said bitterly, “You know that is a false hope, Mike. With Vicky engaged to marry Senator William C. Greer of Miami Beach tomorrow afternoon. You say you’ll help any way you can. What you mean is that you refuse to take a chance by helping her. You’ll help any way you can without sticking your neck out.
    “And I was fool enough to believe those stories Brett used to tell me about you. The way you ran circles around the cops here and on the Beach. The way I remember it from a couple of the books Brett wrote about your cases, it wouldn’t be the first time you moved a body in a homicide case. What about that girl who was murdered in your hotel room just when your wife was going off on a vacation? You and that reporter friend of yours drove half over the city of Miami swapping her body from one car to another.”
    “But that was…” Shayne tried to cut in on the flow of words, but she rushed on:
    “And another time there was the body in your secretary’s bedroom. You didn’t have any moral qualms about lugging his corpse down the fire escape and loading it into your car.”
    “But Lucy was in deadly danger that time,” Shayne pointed out angrily. “If the cops had found the body there…”
    “And it’s my little girl who’s in deadly danger this time,” she interrupted him. “It’s not your secretary… or you. It’s Vicky. I wish to God now I hadn’t ever telephoned you,” she went on viciously. “I could have done something. Thrown it out the window, maybe. Anything would be better than just to leave him lying there. But I’d listened to Brett telling all his stories about you and what a great guy you were, so now I’m stuck with you. I don’t suppose you’d even be willing right now to walk out of this room and forget you ever saw me,” she ended forlornly. “Let me try to figure out something for myself.” Shayne compressed his lips and got up and strode across the room and stopped in front of a mirror to look at his reflection curiously.
    The hell of it was… there was so much truth in what she was saying. Certainly, justice would not be served by leaving the body in the bedroom and having Vicky and her mother crucified by the public press. He had taken matters in his own hands in the past without any inner qualms about the legality of his actions.
    But, as she pointed out so scathingly, that had been when he was endangered… or someone close to him like Lucy.
    Is that the kind of selfish guy you really are, he asked himself in the mirror. When the chips are really down, haven’t you got the guts to do for someone else what you wouldn’t hesitate to do for yourself? Have you been kidding yourself all these years? Kidding Brett and the public to the point that a woman like this thinks you will come to her help, and entrusts her daughter’s future to you… and you refuse because it’s too much trouble and might get you in bad with the cops?
    Looking at himself in the mirror, he knew he wasn’t that kind of selfish guy. He had just got complacent and lazy these last few easy-going years. He’d been riding on his reputation and collecting big fees that involved no personal danger and little real difficulty.
    He grinned at the mirror suddenly, and