Six Seconds to Kill ms-59

by Brett Halliday

  “How many?” Shayne said.

  “Twenty-eight? I know it doesn’t sound like much, but twenty-eight experienced activists, properly dispersed, can set a much larger crowd in motion. To quote Napoleon, ‘Give me a corporal’s guard-’”

  “All right. Twenty-eight phone calls. Tell them to stay home and watch the riot on television. In fact, if they stay home there may not be a riot.”

  “I’ve already paid-”

  “Don’t try to recover. That’s down the drain. They’ll be glad to earn money staying home. It’s less bloody.”

  “Some were looking forward to it, you know. I ought to have a fund to dispense in case-”

  “Lorenzo,” Shayne said softly, “if five of your people show up tomorrow, Internal Revenue is going to be looking for you, and I hope you believe I mean it. Don’t look so unhappy-people are talking about you again. You’re important enough to be bought. That’s better than nothing. Now let’s see how it sounds.”

  A good Japanese tape recorder was concealed under Shayne’s dashboard, with pickup mikes planted at various places around the car’s interior. The playback was tied into the radio speaker. He moved a recessed dial built into the left side of the driver’s seat. The tape whirred. He reversed it, and Vega’s voice came out:

  “His rudeness was unquestionably CIA. I captured it on magnetic tape. I will play it for you, and you will see plainly that it was definitely not the idea of Lorenzo Vega.”

  “Very good fidelity,” Shayne commented. “Not everybody has such clear diction.”

  “You do not surprise me,” Vega said wearily. “I made my tape of the spurious Mr. Robinson for the same reason, self-protection. Then I can expect no remuneration at all from you, even say five hundred dollars? One hundred?”

  “Zero.”

  “Past loyalties, I see, count for nothing. Now please tell me what I am to say when this Mr. Robinson, whoever he may be, asks me how he got so little value for his money?”

  “You’d better keep out of sight for a while,” Shayne told him. “First I want that tape. Then get to work on the cancellation. When that’s taken care of, go to the Royalton Arms Motel in North Miami. I may or not need you. I’ll call in a few days.”

  The phone rang between them.

  “Do call in a few days,” Vega said. “It makes me nervous to think that people have forgotten me. I do rash things.”

  “This time stay cool.”

  The phone rang again. He picked it up.

  A voice he didn’t recognize said, “Shayne?”

  Shayne jerked his head, dismissing Vega, and waited till the Cuban was out of the car. He rolled up the windows and returned to the phone.

  “Yeah, this is Shayne.”

  “Tell me your car license for an identification.”

  Shayne dropped his hand to the controls of the tape recorder, advanced the tape and opened the switch cutting in both ends of the phone transmission. By that time he had recited his license number.

  “Now who is this?”

  “No names! I am notifying you because I don’t like what is going on, and I want you to stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “When I went into this, nobody told me there would be someone killed. I am for the revolution like anybody else, but Madre de Dios! When you think of the excitement, the chance of a slip-up, and I am in it up to my neck. You have to do something.”

  “I’m listening.” Shayne felt for a cigarette. “What do you think I should do?”

  The next words rushed into his ear. “It is dangerous for me to be talking to you. They will kill me promptly if they find out. I have picked you because I am told you are careful, you don’t blab to the newspapers like the damn police. Crowther will be shot. And if we are caught, everybody with a small part in it will be thrown into jail forever. Tell him to stay away from Miami! They say the plan is sure to succeed. I know nothing of that, I am only to drive. You are listening?”

  “Carefully.”

  “I can tell you only this. The person who is to do the killing is a woman.” He said hastily, “I have to hang up. Bye-bye.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Camilla Steele stepped out of the taxi at the International Airport. Friday night had arrived at last. It was a little after nine, according to the big clock confronting her as she entered the main concourse.

  So far she was following instructions exactly, and she was pleased with herself. She had dressed carefully, because strange things had been happening to her lately, and she wasn’t sure how the evening would end. There was a smile of sorts on her face-a little strained, because those muscles hadn’t been exercised lately. The human mind is a mystery. She had no idea why the prospect of committing murder should make her feel cheerful. Perhaps because it gave her a goal, something she had lacked since her husband’s death.

  Was she actually going to shoot this creep Crowther? Perhaps. Yes, now that she was here in the airport at the appointed time, she had to admit that the thing had begun to take on a certain reality.

  She hadn’t had a drink for three days. Of course she was sorry to say that she was taking more Dexamyl than was good for her. But she didn’t want to miss anything. She wasn’t sleeping. These were her last days on earth, not that she wanted to romanticize anything, and she had been hurrying from place to place, seeing old friends on impulse, making lists and then misplacing them. She had had two more conversations with the anonymous voice, the man who was going to help her assassinate Eliot Crowther. She had annoyed him, she thought, by saying casually that she might as well fall in with his suggestion because how much did she have to lose? He would have preferred a little passion. But that wasn’t her way. She would take things as they came, and at the last minute, if she actually saw the handsome face and phony white hair of Eliot Crowther, and if she had a loaded pistol in her hand at the time, she would undoubtedly pull the trigger. But she didn’t intend to shout any slogans. He wasn’t worth the effort.

  Her co-conspirator, whoever he was, wasn’t happy about this. In all the famous assassinations-Judith and Holofernes, Charlotte Corday and Marat, Booth and Lincoln, and all the more recent ones-the assassins had been fanatics, dedicated people. Now and then Camilla could work herself up to that pitch, but it passed quickly. Her attention span was getting shorter and shorter.

  Still, if he was willing to keep reminding her, she thought there was a good chance that it might actually happen.

  And a day later, a ticket arrived in the mail, entitling someone named Mrs. Doris Myerson to admission to the luncheon at which Crowther was to receive his ludicrous medal. She would need to show this ticket to get into the ballroom elevator. She would show it again at a table on the eighth floor. She had been told exactly where she was to stand. She went to the hotel the next day, ascended to the eighth floor, looked into the ballroom, took up a position according to instructions, and pointed her finger at an imaginary attorney general, a step or two away.

  When the voice called that night-in her mind she capitalized it, the Voice-she told him the whole thing seemed childishly simple, and reminded him that he had done nothing about providing a gun. They had a strange kind of quarrel on the phone, like any bickering married couple. He demanded to know, before he got in any deeper, whether she was playing a game with him, or was she serious? She gave him an honest answer: she didn’t know. She wouldn’t know till it happened.

  Before he brought the lengthy call to an end, he gave her a lecture about technique. No doubt she wasn’t much of a marksman with a pistol. No matter; at that range, accuracy was not essential. The important thing was to keep her head. Too many assassins got a good position on their victims and then were so nervous or excited that they fired only a single shot. Even when the bullet went home, the victim sometimes recovered. The thing to remember was to keep firing until the gun was empty. The final bullet might be the one that did the crucial damage.

  Because of their quarrel about her lack of sincerity, it wouldn’t have surprise
d Camilla to hear nothing more about it. But the next day’s mail brought further instructions, a tiny key, and a claims ticket for a piece of luggage checked on an incoming flight to the International Airport. The letter was postmarked New York, and she decided, on an impulse, to save the envelope. Then another impulse took hold, and she ripped up the envelope and threw it away.

  Now, at 9:05 P.M. Friday, at the International Airport, she looked for a window marked Unclaimed Luggage. Finding it without difficulty, she handed in her check.

  She didn’t like the Voice, she decided as she waited. It had been a little too oily. She believed there was something in people’s voices that gave them away. This man, she sensed, didn’t hate Crowther. The killing was incidental to something else-that much had come through. She was only an instrument. Which was all right, she supposed, as long as she knew what she was doing.

  And suddenly, as she was waiting for the suitcase, an alternative began to take shape. Obviously Camilla Steele as a person had very little future. She was assuming, and so was the Voice, that she would be caught. Security guards and police would be swarming all over her before the shots stopped echoing. And after that? Like her husband, she would spend years in a condemned cell while the lawyers squabbled. Felix had enjoyed it, in a way; she sometimes thought that he had even enjoyed his execution. He had been the center of attention, and had been able to annoy everybody. But Camilla, by that time, would have escaped into madness-if she wasn’t crazy already, which was certainly arguable. When she came face to face with Crowther, what if she shot herself instead of shooting him? It would end the agony. By reviving the old story of the miscarriage of justice, it might, it probably would, put a stop to his political advancement.

  And what was so bad about suicide? Every thinking person had to keep it open as the final option. She herself had frequently come close-most recently, on the night Paul London asked her to marry him and she had her first phone call from the Voice. Under that kind of bombardment, what was the point in living one more day? A funny thing had stopped her. Her only weapons were sleeping pills, and a sleeping-pill death would be impossibly banal. She wouldn’t have a second chance-she had to get it right the first time. Suicide at its most elegant was an act of disgust. Crowther disgusted her. Politicians disgusted her. Awarding Crowther the Freedom Medal was one of the most disgusting things that had ever happened. The least she could do was spoil his luncheon for him. If she killed herself at his feet, he would have to discard his prepared speech.

  The checkroom clerk brought out a nondescript fabric suitcase and pushed it across the counter.

  She had been told not to return to her apartment, but to check into a Beach hotel. A reservation had been made for her in the name of Meyerson, the name on the luncheon ticket. But she was beginning to balk at those precise instructions. She wanted to find out right now what her unknown friend had sent her. It was irrational not to wait, but after coming this far in an assassination plot without knowing whether or not she wanted to do it, she could hardly consider herself rational.

  She carried the suitcase to the nearest ladies’ room. The booths were coin-operated. She had given the taxi driver her last loose change. Instead of going back to the concourse to break a bill, she made a bet with herself.

  There was no one around. She decided to open the suitcase there and see if it did, in fact, contain a gun, as promised. If somebody came in and saw her, that would be a sign that the bad luck was running, and she could stop thinking of herself in terms of Charlotte Corday, and return to her idle life in the Miami Beach bars.

  The key worked stiffly, but at last the suitcase opened. Inside, she found a handbag packed in crumpled newspaper. Inside that, there was a neat, blue-black automatic. It was surprisingly small, almost pretty, with a funny kind of metallic attachment at the end of the barrel. A silencer?

  It fitted nicely into her palm. Looking up, she saw her reflection in the mirror-Camilla Steele, thirty (thirty!), in her best black cocktail dress, with a heavy gold necklace given her by a man whose name she could no longer remember, holding a firearm, no less deadly for being so small. The picture was so exactly right, as though all her life she had been needing a gun to complete her personality, that she doubled forward suddenly and retched into the basin.

  There was a sound behind her. When she straightened and looked in the mirror again, she was still alone, but the door was swinging slightly.

  Now, of course, she had to hurry. She thrust the gun in the handbag. Leaving the empty suitcase lying open on the floor, she went back to the busy concourse. A voice on the public address was clamoring about planes that were about to depart. One of her sudden impulses hit her. Perhaps she should take that flight, no matter where it was going. She had money. When it landed, she would hunt up a cocktail lounge and order a drink.

  The announcement came again-a Pan-American plane headed somewhere or other.

  She started for the Pan-Am ticket counter. She saw a woman talking excitedly to a uniformed guard. She swerved and went down into a big kitchen. She thought she heard footsteps behind her. A surprised face under a chefs hat looked around, and somebody shouted. At an open door, an Eastern Airlines food truck was being loaded from rolling carts.

  “What are you-” a voice said, and she ran past the food truck and out onto the loading apron.

  A power cart was blowing air into one of the engines of a big jet. A sudden exhaust spumed toward Camilla as the engine came alive. A truck carrying baggage bore down on her. Blinded by the lights, she leaped aside.

  In an upstairs bedroom in an imitation Moorish apartment building in Coral Gables, a dark young man with pale green eyes, which seemed darker in photographs, moved the curtain a quarter of an inch and looked out carefully.

  “Si. Son policias.”

  There were several others in the room, including a girl. The young man at the window asked a slightly built teenager a question. The boy assented eagerly. The others fitted him out with a disfiguring set of front teeth, a false moustache and sunglasses. He emptied a glass of wine, went out to the street and sauntered north. Two detectives followed.

  Soon afterward the young man and the others left the building by a rear door. They removed to another house some distance away. After making sure that they hadn’t been followed, they loaded two dozen Winchester sporting rifles into the trunk of a Pontiac convertible. The girl parked it two blocks away, checked twice to be sure it was locked, and walked back to the house.

  The meeting was held in a conference room in City Hall.

  The mayor of Miami was present with two of his aides. They remained silent. Will Gentry, Miami chief of police, had called the meeting. Peter Painter was there, representing the Miami Beach police. Abe Berger, the Secret Service agent charged with the protection of cabinet members, had flown in from Washington. General Matt Turner, of the U.S. Army, was sitting beside Michael Shayne.

  Gentry opened the meeting, outlining the security situation as it had seemed that morning, and asked Shayne to take it from there.

  There was a small flurry at the door and another man arrived. He was short and plump, with a nervous moustache which he dabbed at anxiously when he saw that everybody in the room was looking at him. “Am I late? Teddy Sparrow. I’m standing in for Mr. Devlin.”

  Larry Devlin, a tough, competent ex-cop, commanded the International Protective Agency contingent at the International Airport, a uniformed force of thirty or forty private guards. Sparrow until recently had operated his own one-man private detective business in Miami. He had tried hard, but he was almost completely inept, and he had finally closed his office and gone to work at the airport. “Devlin said he’d be here,” Gentry said.

  “He was called away, you might say. He’s in Oklahoma on private business. But he left me explicit instructions and I’m glad to report that the situation at International Airport is well in hand.”

  He pulled out the chair next to General Turner, and the corner of the chair caught the general in the
knee. Flustered, he apologized too profusely, and sat down. He laced his fingers, broke them apart and laced them again.

  “Shayne’s going to fill us in on the background of this thing,” Gentry said. “Go ahead, Mike.”

  “I’d like to ask what made Devlin take off for Oklahoma on such short notice,” Shayne said.

  Sparrow looked startled. He tightened his necktie and looked around the table with an ingratiating smile.

  “I find myself in pretty fast company, is all I have to say. I didn’t realize this was going to be on such a rarefied level.” He closed off his smile and looked serious. “I did promise Devlin before he left that I wouldn’t noise it around, but if he was here himself I think he’d give me the all-clear. It’s his son, Lawrence, Junior. He wired his father to come at once and bring six hundred dollars in cash, and not to say anything to the boy’s mother. And that indicates to me that it’s something embarrassing, but I more or less felt I had to leave it at that. I wish it hadn’t happened at just this juncture. But we’re a team out there, gentlemen. We finish each other’s sentences, so to speak. I’ll just ask myself what Larry Devlin would do in my shoes, and I don’t think I’ll go very far wrong. Every man on the regular force will be working tomorrow, plus twenty specials at double-time.”

  “Do you have a number where Devlin can be reached?” Shayne said.

  “He’s going to call me. We didn’t understand it was that much of an emergency.”

  Shayne and Will Gentry exchanged a look. Gentry said calmly, “Continue, Mike.”

  Shayne described Vega’s plan to disrupt the Galvez demonstration, and he played the tape Vega had given him. Parts of it were inaudible.

  “I made a rough transcript,” Shayne said, “and you can pick up a copy before you leave. Now here’s a conversation I had with Vega a couple of hours ago. I have the man himself on tap in North Miami if anybody wants to talk to him.”

  They listened closely. Abe Berger, the Secret Service man, shot Shayne a sharp look when Vega called what he had been persuaded to believe was a Washington number.