Million Dollar Handle

by Brett Halliday

  “Not right away,” Shayne said. “Rashid, I want to ask another favor. I’d like to have him disappear for a few days.”

  “I can do that,” Rashid said thoughtfully. “A broken back, perhaps.”

  “Wait!” Pedro cried.

  “It won’t be necessary to break the actual back. A body cast, a shot every six hours to help against the pain.”

  “Blessed Virgin,” Pedro moaned.

  “He can use my bed,” Shayne said.

  “No, for Jesus’s sake! Somebody else may come to dead Mr. Michael Shayne. Please. The fingers first. Then some faraway room.”

  Rashid and Pedro left. Shayne asked Frieda if she would like a few days in the Bahamas.

  “If you can take it over tomorrow, we can be sure it’s delivered. There’s an eight o’clock breakfast flight. ‘From Mike Shayne—Personal.’ Put a note inside—‘Stay out of Miami,’ something like that. Hire somebody off the street to take it in, and be very careful about that part. Now let’s do some guessing. When he sees my name on the wrapper, what’ll he think?”

  “That’s it’s been booby-trapped,” Frieda said. “He’ll give it to somebody else to open.”

  “I think so. Then Castle can’t wrap it up again and pretend he never got it. His people will know I’m making it a personal thing, and he’ll have to do something about it or lose respect. That’s the way they act in the movies, anyway, and he probably goes to the movies like anybody else.”

  “Can I talk now, Mike?” Rourke said. “Ever since his name came up I’ve been choking on this.” He came around to the bottle. “I got it from Wanamaker. He was doing a story on the big concession empires—you know, the companies that sell hot dogs and beer at the stadiums and ballparks. He queried Sports Illustrated on it, and they said they were interested. And there are some tricky angles. Two or three outfits have everything locked up, nationwide. There’ve been rumors about mob connections, and that’s what Wanamaker was trying to develop. J. T. Thomas has the Surfside business. Wanamaker went all the way back and found out that J. T. Thomas—not the man, he died in the twenties, but the company—may have put up some of the cash Geary used to get control in the first place. Going even farther back, he found a reference to a couple of characters who were involved in a power fight inside the Thomas company. One of the names still rings a bell—Tony Castagnoli.”

  “That’s been pretty well hidden.”

  “It had to be, because Geary has been selling purity all these years. The concession deal is very one-sided, I mean one-sided against the track, according to Wanamaker, but hard figures are almost impossible to get. So he took it to Geary, to confirm or deny. Geary asked him not to pursue it, and offered him a phony research project that would pay a few hundred more than he’d get from Sports Illustrated if they bought the story, which they probably wouldn’t because all he really had was some twenty-five-year-old rumors. Well, if you can prove you never got any Geary money, you’ll help everybody else on the list. Wanamaker can claim he went on those trips in the best tradition of investigative reporting, to get close to the victim so he could cut him down. And the paper might buy it, and give him the job back. So if there’s anything he can do to help, he’ll work his ass off, and from the way it looks to me, you need all the help you can get.”

  After immobilizing Pedro, Rashid returned to saw the cast off Shayne’s leg.

  “That mended quickly,” he said. “A triumph for Western medicine. As for the arm, if you are going to do much moving, it will be better in a sling. I assume that for you the night is not over.”

  “If you wake people up after midnight, they know it’s important. Don’t forget the ear.”

  “It’s waiting. A nurse saw me insert the hoop, and she gave me a look of real horror. What is the sinister Asian up to now? I assured her it was merely one of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen when Michael Shayne is a patient here.”

  The ear was wrapped in three layers of foil. Frieda accepted it with a grimace.

  “I once had an offer to be office manager of an insurance company. Clean, respectable inside work. Sometimes I wish I’d said yes.”

  Rourke was late for his middle-of-the-night radio show. Electing to continue with Shayne, he called in to tell them to give the guests another drink and put on a discussion he had taped the previous week with several Beach call girls and their dispatcher. Shayne was silent as they drove south on Collins, past the procession of gaudy hotels. He had accepted Rashid’s offer of a sling, and he was steadying the wheel with the back of his hand. Rourke glanced at his friend from time to time, but said nothing.

  Shayne double-parked outside the Miami Beach police station. Rourke went in with him. The night sergeant looked at them with that special wariness Miami Beach cops always reserved for Shayne.

  “I thought you were supposed to be in the hospital with a gunshot wound in the leg.”

  “It was a knife wound in the arm,” Shayne said. “That station never gets it quite right. I want to talk to the guys who handled the Geary crash. Are they working?”

  The sergeant, hesitating, glanced from Shayne to Rourke. “I guess that’s information the public’s entitled to have. Yeah, Parker and Hamzy. They’ll be off in half an hour if you’d like to stop back.”

  “Find out where they are and we’ll meet them. Just a couple of questions—I was away when that happened.” The dispatcher put a call on the air. There was no immediate reply.

  “I know those guys,” Rourke said. “Sleeping.”

  The dispatcher kept trying, and finally a voice answered, giving the cruiser’s location.

  “We’ll meet them at Lummus Park,” Shayne said. Shayne and Rourke arrived first. The cruiser pulled in and Shayne walked around to the driver’s side. Hamzy was a plump youth with glasses who had been on the force for less than a year. Parker, at the wheel, was the veteran.

  “Shayne?” Parker said. “They didn’t say it was you. We have an unwritten rule in this department, I don’t know if you know about it, that we don’t put ourselves to extra trouble where Mike Shayne is concerned.”

  “That’s all right. We just want to find out if you know anything about a dispatch case with six thousand dollars in it. Turn off the motor and talk to us.”

  Parker came out of the car at once. “What dispatch case? Where?”

  The porches of the family hotels on the other side of the avenue were still brightly lighted, although the guests who usually sat there had long since gone to bed. Shayne perched on the seawall.

  “Relax,” he told the younger cop, whose hands were flying. “The chances are very good that it burned up in the fire. Even if it didn’t there’s no reason we can’t work something out.”

  “Work it out with me,” Parker said, “not the kid. To begin with, we don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You realize that today I’m in no position to make moral judgments. And Painter has his own theories—he won’t want to listen to mine. At the same time, it’s just as good not to let rumors get started. Then the money gets harder to spend. You can’t take an ordinary vacation without people making remarks, especially if the bills are a little singed.”

  Hamzy’s hand jerked, and to prevent it happening again, he put it in his pocket.

  “I know Geary had that dispatch case when he left the track,” Shayne said, “but nobody else has mentioned it, and there’s no reason it has to be in Tim’s story tomorrow.”

  “No reason whatever,” Rourke said, “and besides, I don’t know what you’re talking about, either.”

  Hamzy took his hand out, made it into a fist and said hotly, “I don’t like this hinting! Let me tell you—” His partner put a hand on his arm, and said quietly, “Why don’t we let Shayne finish?”

  Shayne said, “Do you think it’s possible there was somebody in the back seat, who was thrown clear?”

  “The car would be rocking coming off the embankment. It turned over when it hit the palm tree. Geary had his belt
on, which had the effect of keeping him inside. But we didn’t see anybody—did we?—and you have to remember that the way that fire was burning, it was bright as daylight.”

  “But if you were busy picking up money—”

  “Goddamn it!” Hamzy burst out. “Just because we’re cops does that mean we don’t have any rights?”

  His partner looked at him in amazement. “Boy, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  “Don’t bicker,” Shayne said. “You’ve got to go on living together. The suggestion’s been made that there was another car in the accident.”

  Both cops looked at him, and Parker said, “Are you talking about deliberate?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Meaning homicide,” Parker said softly. “Which would take it out of our hands.”

  “That’s the way it seems to be going. I want to hurry it up. A vague recollection of a couple of taillights, moving too fast. Does it begin to come back? You didn’t say anything to anybody, it wasn’t that definite. You did some quiet detective work in the neighborhood, and turned up a witness who remembers hearing a first crash, like two cars colliding, before the big one.

  “And who is this witness?”

  “That’s it. The witness refuses to become involved.”

  “It could be Mike Shayne,” Parker said, “but we don’t want to use that name because of that unwritten rule in the department. Somebody who couldn’t get to sleep that night. I think we can swing it, don’t you, Hamzy?”

  “If you think we ought to. But what’s the point?”

  “I don’t see the point either, but you know we’re just beatmen, not thinkers.”

  Chapter 11

  A theory was beginning to take shape, but there were still many blanks. Until Shayne could fill them in, he decided to take a few ordinary precautions. Instead of returning to his own apartment, he drove south on One, and picked a motel where his car couldn’t be seen from the road. He slept for three hours, had a quick breakfast in the coffee shop, and got on the phone.

  He woke up the real estate editor of Rourke’s paper, and after apologizing for that, asked if there was any truth in the rumors about Harry Zell, the developer. Shayne had heard his business was about to fold.

  “That’s nothing new, Mike. It’s always about to fold. He’s been in some terminal jams, and he always came out smelling of roses. I don’t know where his Surfside deal stands, now that Geary is dead. God knows Harry could use a winner. At the same time, it might be a cash drain, so nothing’s simple.”

  “If you were giving advice to an investor—”

  “I’d tell him to cross the street when he sees Harry coming. But I always give that advice about Harry, and some of my friends hate me for it. I’m not predicting anything. He’s had some dazzling successes when the phone company was just about to shut off his service. What can I tell you about operators like Harry? Most of the time they aren’t using their own money. In a typical office-building deal, they can’t get the mortgage commitment until they get a lease from the main tenant, and the tenant won’t give them the lease until they have the mortgage. So what they contribute is confidence. People have to be confident they can put it together. And Harry has lost some of that.”

  “Who are his big creditors, banks?”

  “Banks, yes, but he can’t get real money at the prime rate anymore. He’s in pretty deep with factors. C. and W. is the main one, and the vigorish there is brutal. Twenty percent and more. In other words, loan-shark money. They make loans to people the banks won’t let in the door.”

  “What does C. and W. stand for?”

  “Probably nothing. Charlie and Wilbur? I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “I’ll try, Mike. If I get anything I’ll give it to Tim.”

  More phone calls, to Rourke, to the sports editor, Ben Wanamaker. After several unsuccessful attempts, Shayne located Bobby Nash, a dog track owner. The Nash track was dark at present because Surfside, again, had been awarded the valuable middle dates. His father, now dead, had been a contemporary of Geary’s, and had been through the same kind of early trouble.

  “I don’t know if I ought to be talking to you, Mike,” Nash said. “But I probably can’t catch anything on the phone. Just don’t try to put the bite on me, because I’m a poor man. Ask anybody. Ask IRS.”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute why I’m calling,” Shayne said. “Can I ask a couple of general questions first?”

  “Go ahead. That doesn’t mean I’ll answer them.”

  “Were you surprised at the names on Max’s payoff fist?”

  “Surprised?” Nash made a bitter sound. “In most cases, for obvious reasons, not at all. That statement is not for quotation. I’m surprised Max thought he had to write it down. To be frank with you, the one name that really surprised me was yours. My father used to think highly of you. I seem to remember you did a couple of jobs for him—straight jobs for a straight fee, agreed upon in advance. So surprised is too mild a word. Mystified would be better.”

  “Thanks,” Shayne said. “What effect do you think this is going to have on dog racing?”

  “On dog racing as a whole? I hope we can survive it. Everybody’s going to want to wipe the mud off his boots, and you know who they’re going to try to wipe them on. Max is out of the picture. The rest of us aren’t. I’ve just had my first report from Tallahassee. Two investigations in the works. Two separate committees, public hearings, possibly televised. I’ll be called. There’s no way it can be avoided. I’ll be asked questions that may be mighty hard to answer.”

  “You don’t think the questions will be confined to Surfside?”

  “We’re all in the same boat. Our security measures are much the same. We use many of the same people. We deal with the same unions, the same politicians, some of the same cops. If they ask me did I ever pay you, Mike Shayne, any money, I can say absolutely not. That one is easy. A couple of seasons back, I had a kennel situation I was going to bring you in on, but we straightened it out without calling in outside help. That’s just the sort of thing these inquiries are going to rake up. All I see ahead is trouble.”

  “I think I may have thought of a way to get you off the hook.”

  “Is that so,” Nash snapped. “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “This would be barter. I need the loan of some equipment and a couple of technicians.”

  “What kind of equipment?”

  “I want to tie some of your closed-circuit cameras into the Surfside system. Would that be possible?”

  “Complicated, but not impossible. I’ve got a full setup sitting here doing nothing. Now tell me why.”

  “If I could answer that, I wouldn’t have to do it. I’m somebody else who’s going to be asked questions under oath, and not just by an investigating committee. By a grand jury. Don’t know and don’t remember—those are the two answers they don’t like to hear. Sometimes it’s the small man who didn’t cooperate who gets the longest term.”

  “But we all know it’s the best legal system in the world. So cooperate, Mike. Why not? Geary’s dead. Nobody’ll blame you.”

  “No, I’ve got to do it another way. If I can blow the whole thing open, there may be enough fallout so they’ll forget about me. There was a hell of a lot of money loose up there. Apparently Geary himself was taking six thousand a night.”

  “Six thousand!”

  “And that would be six thousand times what?”

  “One hundred and eighty programs a year. That’s the million-dollar handle we’re always hoping to hit. You don’t mean out of the cash register? Here in Miami?”

  “Where else?”

  Nash waited a moment. “Mike, when I was trying to decide whether to take this call, I called my lawyer. He said absolutely not. But my old man was almost always right about people, so I’ll trust you to take this for what it is, which is guesswork. I’ve had a theory about the Surfside concessions. Assume that somebody’s in
volved in an illegal business, making good money. He can’t spend it freely because he hasn’t paid taxes on it.”

  “Are we talking about Tony Castle?”

  “Mike, Tony Castle would fit, but I’m not giving you facts. I’m giving you a supposition. Suppose that such a person or group of persons bought control of a concessions company and made a deal with Surfside and similar operations. Pick a figure. Say that if Geary put his concession business out to bid, he could get a contract for three million. Instead, he negotiates a contract with J. T. Thomas for four. That soaks up the track’s profit, but who cares? The extra million will be paid back somewhere offshore. Castle—if you want to use Castle as an example—could take it out of the skim from his Nassau casino. There’s no income tax in the Bahamas. Geary would set up a company and sign a service contract with the casino, so it would look legitimate. Do you follow me, Mike? Castle washes a million dollars of illegal money in Florida. Surfside doesn’t earn a profit, and so doesn’t owe the United States any income tax. Geary gets the million tax-free in the Bahamas. One of those lovely deals that benefit everybody.”

  “Then why is Castle’s name in Geary’s book?”

  “I didn’t know it was. It shouldn’t be.”

  “Painter’s holding it back, to keep the story alive another day.”

  “That’s in character. But I’m not trying to explain everything, Mike. If I understand your idea, you want to lay down enough smoke so people will forget to ask you about that three thousand a month. Castle is still a big name in Miami. If you bring in his head, you’re home free. The trouble is, he’s got sense enough to stay out of Miami.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes. Yeah—I’d like his head. He put a team on me last night, and as far as I can tell, the contract is still open. But I don’t want to narrow this down to one man. I really want to take the lid all the way off. It’s like stopping an oil-well fire with dynamite. One bang, and it’s over. And of course I’d want everybody to know that I couldn’t have done it without full cooperation from Mr. Bobby Nash.”