Stranger in Town by Brett Halliday

was wintering at the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach.
    Either the news story was in error, or Mr. Buttrell had lied for reasons best known to himself.

 
6
     
    MICHAEL SHAYNE strode up and down the length of the hotel sitting room, clawing at his coarse red hair with his right hand and tugging at his earlobe with his left.
    What in hell did it all add up to? A beautiful victim of amnesia, supposedly the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, walking into the bar last night and fingering him for a trio of murderers!
    Yet she had never seen him before in his life. At least, he had never seen her. Could that be a quirk of an amnesiac, he wondered. If they couldn’t remember things back beyond a certain point, were they likely to have hallucinations and think they remembered someone?
    But what was the girl doing in Brockton last night when she supposedly had been taken away by her father the preceding Saturday? Had she regained her memory in the meantime and come back to Brockton to identify the man or men who had attacked her in the first place? That was, supposing she had been attacked on the highway and a simple automobile accident wasn’t the reason for her appearance at the hospital in the condition she had been in.
    Nothing made sense any way you looked at it. Shayne needed a lot more answers before he could possibly start theorizing. He stopped by the telephone stand and looked up the number of the Courier, called it and got the City Desk.
    He asked, “Could you tell me the name of the reporter who covered the story of the identification of the girl-amnesia victim last week by her father?”
    “Wait a minute.” The voice was brusque and disinterested. Shayne waited, listening to the typical background noises of a busy City Room over the wire as he did so.
    “Yeh. That was Hy Brown. You got something new on it?”
    “I might have,” said Shayne cautiously. “He around now?”
    “Covering the police beat. Who’s calling?”
    The redhead hesitated. Then he said firmly, “Michael Shayne. If Brown comes in…”
    “Shayne? Hey, we got an item here…” There was a lengthy pause. Then a pleased chuckle. “Private detective from Miami, huh? How you like our hoosgow? Give us a quote, Mr. Shayne?”
    “You couldn’t print it,” Shayne said amiably. “Yeh. Your alert police force protected Brockton’s innocent children from my reckless driving last night. Okay. If I could get in touch with Brown…”
    “You still in town?” the voice demanded.
    “At the Manor Hotel. I’d like…”
    “Hy’d like too, I bet. An interview from you would make the front page, Shamus. You’re by way of being famous in Florida, you know.”
    Shayne said, “I didn’t know, but swell. If you could…”
    “You at the hotel now?”
    “In my room.”
    “I’ll have Hy around there in three shakes. Sit tight, huh?”
    Shayne said he would and hung up. He took the pile of newspapers dating back to the morning after Amy Buttrell had turned up at the hospital, and started going through them carefully. There was no Sunday edition, but the Monday paper carried a short item on the front page stating that no progress had been made by the local police toward solving the mystery of what had happened to Amy.
    Her missing automobile had not been located, and no one had come forward with any information about the girl at all. Not even the man who had picked her up on the highway late at night and then faded away without identifying himself. Locally, the case seemed to be at a dead-end and likely to remain there until the girl recovered her memory and was able to tell her own story.
    Shayne was searching through the inner pages of the previous day’s paper for anything further on Amy Buttrell when there was a rap on his door.
    He got up to open it and admit a wiry, eager young man who gripped Shayne’s hand enthusiastically in thin fingers and introduced himself as Hy Brown while his excited eyes danced happily as they studied the livid