Michael Shayne’s next visitor was also a female who wanted to hire him to locate a missing man for her, but there the resemblance ended.

Mrs. Renshaw from Illinois was a cool, poised woman in her late thirties, beautifully groomed from the top of smoothly waved platinum hair to the tips of smart spike-heeled shoes. Her features had a chiseled sort of fragility about them, and her blue eyes were almost opaque with an impression of on-the-surface coloration; yet with all her outward trappings of sophisticated assurance, Shayne received an immediate impression of tremendous inner tension the moment Lucy ushered her into his office.

He stood up gravely and repeated, “Mrs. Renshaw,” and moved around his desk to move the chair recently vacated by Sloe Burn so that it faced him more directly, and took her cool, long-fingered hand in his after she stripped off one white, openwork glove and offered her hand to him.

The sudden, convulsive pressure of her fingers on his confirmed the impression that she was a seething mass of raw nerves behind her calm facade. Standing close in front of him with shoulders resolutely back and firm chin tilted slightly so that her eyes looked directly into his, she said with clipped mid-western directness: “You don’t know what a relief this is, Mr. Shayne. I’ve so dreaded coming to your office. But now, I’m glad I found the courage to come.”

Shayne put his other big hand over hers in his palm and pressed it warmly. He said, “Private detectives are pretty much like other professional people, Mrs. Renshaw, despite popular fiction and television.”

She lowered straw-colored lashes over her blue eyes, and the intense rigidity went away from her posture. Her fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on his, and he released her hand and went back to his chair while she seated herself on the edge of hers and folded her hands carefully in her lap.