Target_Mike Shayne

by Brett Halliday

Clayton’s surprise seemed genuine. “Fran doesn’t give a damn about money.”

  “That’s good,” she said curtly, “because I do. One thing more about Fran. Is there any danger he’ll cut loose with that tommy-gun for no real reason?”

  “Hell, yes. With a kid like that it’s always a possibility. But you can’t stop him by telling him to be a good boy and you’ll buy him a candy bar. If he wants to at the moment, he’ll do it. That’s a risk you take. I don’t like to sound like a head-doctor, but pulling that trigger is physical with Fran. Every now and then he’s got to do it.” He smiled slowly. “I won’t promise, but I think I can persuade Fran to keep the chopper on safe tomorrow night.”

  If she had pressed him for an explanation, he would have retreated into his shell. She let it ride.

  “You obviously aren’t willing to tell me what happened tonight before I picked you up,” she said, “and I won’t press you. But I’d like to think we’re being honest with each other. This isn’t the end tomorrow night, Clayt. It’s the beginning.”

  “Okay,” he said impatiently. “Let’s drink to that and cut out of here.”

  She raised her glass and touched it to his with an ugly, unmusical sound.

  “Justin W. Briggs doesn’t get depressed, remember,” she said.

  “That creep,” Clayton responded. “You’ve only seen his public personality. He might surprise you. He has his bad days, like everybody.”

  She put her hand on his swiftly, finished her drink and got up to go. At that moment the program changed on the television screen hanging at the front end of the bar. An announcer finished demonstrating the effervescent properties of a headache remedy, concluding, “And now the news.”

  “He’s telling me I’ve got a headache,” Clayton said. “Hurry it up, baby.”

  Another face appeared on the screen. This was a young man with wavy hair, seated at a desk with a map in the background. He told his viewers good evening, and started reading from a sheaf of news items.

  “An unsuccessful attempt was made early tonight on the life of Michael Shayne, Miami’s well known private detective,” he said. “A bomb!”

  Miriam, who was reaching for her bag, spun around. Clayton spoke only one word, a low-voiced obscenity. Then he put one hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.

  “Be quiet, damn you,” she said.

  The commentator’s voice continued over the bar-noises. “—exploded prematurely, killing Terry Weintraub, of 301½ Myrtle Street, NW. According to a police statement, the youth was attempting—”

  The customers along the bar had fallen silent. Even the bartenders turned toward the TV set. A newspaper photograph of Michael Shayne, his hat pushed back on his head, flashed onto the screen, grinning at the camera. A shot followed of the ramshackle building where the dead boy had lived. Then there was a picture of the shattered interior of Shayne’s Buick. The camera panned slowly from the broken windshield, along the torn upholstery and down to the floor where the boy’s body had been found. There were dark stains on the floor which could have been blood. Finally there was a formal high school portrait of Sylvia Masante, dressed up and smiling, and then the commentator returned to say that Peter Painter, Miami Beach Chief of Detectives, had located an eye-witness, and was predicting an immediate arrest.

  “What crap,” Clayton said scornfully.

  A babble broke out among the bar’s customers as the commentator moved on to the latest disturbance in the Middle East. Miriam picked up her bag.

  “How much whiskey is left in that bottle at the room?” she said.

  “A couple of shots apiece,” Clayton said. “Not enough to get really loaded.”

  “Better pick up another,” she said grimly. “We’ve got a little talking to do.”

  10

  Miriam walked directly to the half-empty bottle on the dresser. A water glass stood beside it. She gave the glass a cursory glance, and dumped the stale residue of an old drink onto the worn carpet.

  “Gin-and-tonic is a nice genteel drink for a lady in public,” she said, “but what I need at the moment is a slug of straight rye.” She poured the tumbler half full. “Get your own glass, you double-crossing bastard.”

  In the mirror above the dresser she saw him approach, a sullen, lowering expression on his face. He put his hands at her waist and leaned over to kiss her neck. She accepted the kiss without moving, still watching him in the mirror. As he raised his head, their eyes met.

  “Who’s been double-crossing anybody?” he said. “I didn’t promise I’d give you a hundred percent of my time.”

  “Not in so many words. But you gave me every reason to believe—”

  He broke in. “So I told you Shayne doesn’t mean anything to me. As a matter of fact he means a lot to me. But what have you got to beef about? Everything’s right on schedule.”

  She sat down in the single arm chair, which was upholstered in a bright chintzy material which matched the curtains. To save money they had taken a single room, with a share in a communal bath at the end of the hall. This was not the way Miriam liked to live.

  She let the warmth of the whiskey run down her throat to her stomach, where she hoped it would counteract the tense, desperate feeling which had come over her suddenly when she learned of the incredibly foolish thing Clayton had done. Wiring a bomb to the ignition of a private detective’s car! She shuddered, tasting the whiskey a second time. Clayton had been responsible for buying this bottle. It was a cheap blend which he claimed to like as well as good bonded bourbon.

  “Seriously,” Clayton said. “What I do with my spare time is my business, so long as it doesn’t interfere with anything.”

  He was looking around for another glass, finding it finally on the floor beneath the bed. He poured it three-quarters full and turned to look down at her, one hip against the dresser.

  Miriam was waiting for the raw whiskey to do something to her.

  “I haven’t come close to screaming for a long time,” she said. “It’s lucky I didn’t have a gun. I think I would have killed you.”

  Clayton grunted. “Now that would really do a lot of good.”

  “I guess I didn’t make it clear to you what this money means,” she said, holding the glass between her and the unshaded light bulb. She moved her free hand in a quick circle, to include the sordid room, the bleak alley beneath the window, the smell of bathrooms and kitchens and unaired beds, even the lean ex-convict against the dresser. “It seems to me I’ve lived my whole life in this room. If I wasn’t born here, I was born in one exactly like it. Oh, I’ve spent some time in good hotels, I’ve gone on cruises, once I even lived in a two-hundred-dollar a month apartment. Those were vacations. Sooner or later I always woke up in a furnished room, looking at that goddam picture of the Everglades. At that same goddam wallpaper.”

  “It’s a big improvement over what I’ve been used to,” Clayton said sourly.

  “Goddam you!” she cried suddenly.

  For the next few minutes she swore steadily, using words she had been hardly aware she knew. He looked surprised at first, then grinned appreciatively.

  When she ran out of breath he asked, “Ready to come to bed?”

  “With you?” she snapped. “You can go to hell. Give me another drink.”

  Her flow of profanity hadn’t relieved her feelings, but Clayton appeared to be in much better spirits. He whisked an imaginary napkin over his arm and crossed the room with the deferent shuffle of an old waiter. He filled her glass to the brim and gave an alert little bow. “Will madam have anything else? Cocaine? Sex?”

  “Cut out the clowning,” she said “Sit down.”

  “What an audience,” he complained, and took his glass to the bed, where he sprawled on one elbow without taking off his shoes. “Wake me up when the sermon’s over.”

  “You’d better stay awake,” she said ominously, “or I’ll wake you up in a way you won’t like. I want honest answers to some questions. If I could get rid of you now and st
art over, I would, I assure you. But I’ve invested too much money in you, and with only a day left I’m obviously stuck with you. But I have to know what you’re doing. For instance, did you actually find out what to do about the switchboard?”

  He waved one hand in disgust. “I ran the switchboard at the prison for a year and a half. They use a bigger board in hotels, but it’s the same idea. I drew Fran a diagram. I know you don’t think much of him, but the kid’s no dummy. I made him draw the diagram from memory, and he did it without a single mistake. Tomorrow he’s going to look over a hotel board—not in the St. A., naturally.”

  “Is that why you hired Smith, instead of someone else? To help you with Shayne?”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “You mean you’d get just as big a kick out of it if somebody else does it?” she said curiously. “I thought that would be a personal thing.”

  “Honey,” Clayton said, “I don’t care if Shayne dies of a bullet or T.B. I don’t care if he goes out in an auto accident. I just want to know the two of us aren’t alive at the same time. Is that clear?”

  “Clear enough. But I should think somebody in Smith’s category would insist on part of his fee in advance. No, wait,” she said as the answer came to her. “You paid him with my money.”

  “I let him have a thousand. I needed another thousand for the bomb. I’m a little ahead at the crap table. You lose on the passes because of the house percentage, but if you talk fast you can pick it up in side bets.”

  Miriam squeezed the glass tightly. “Then what’s your deal with Fran? A thousand down and how much later?”

  “Nine more, out of my share of the take. And here’s the angle on that. Sticking up people isn’t Fran’s line. His heart wouldn’t be in it. But this is a funny thing. His share of the stick-up money he could miss out on and never give it a thought. But that extra nine for the knock-off, he’s going to want that, and want it bad. He’d feel really lousy if he didn’t get paid, so lousy he’d probably shoot me. His rep’s involved. That’s why I say I can control him. He’ll be a very well-behaved boy.”

  She sipped at her whiskey. “Where did you get the bomb?”

  “You don’t want my whole life story. I got it. I’m not going to give you the guy’s name and street address, because why should I? But I’ll tell you how it went, so you can see it won’t interfere with your little party tomorrow night. And you can stop yakking about how important that is to you. It’s important to me, too, just as important. I’m going to be the man in there with the gun showing. I take the heavy rap if something goes sour. You have to be able to count on me, true, but I have to count on you to hold that elevator. I don’t want you to get so excited you do something dumb.”

  “Listen to him. I’m excited now, and you’d better lay it out in words of one syllable, or I’ll get hysterical.”

  “Will you shut up? I said I’d tell you.”

  He reached down for the bottle, finished what was in it and opened the new one.

  He said, “I’ve had it worked out for a long time. A bomb in a car is nice and neat, and it’s also bloody, and that I like. You can be miles away when it goes off, or you can stay around and watch, depending on how you feel. I got all the directions from a con who was in on a bad rap. He blew cars all over the States, and he never got caught at it once. He had a contact in Miami, where he bought explosives, and that address cost me my last buck. The guy might have moved in the meantime, and I really sweated that one out. But no, he was still there, open for business. And how that stuff of his costs! I’d been thinking I might have to do a job to raise the dough, a gas station or something, a quickie—and they’re the riskiest of any. Then you came up to meet me, sweetheart. You remember how glad I was to see you.”

  “Especially when I said I had some money I could loan you.”

  “There was more to it than the money,” Clayton said, “as you ought to know by now. I liked your bottle, I liked the clothes you brought me, I liked you. If that isn’t clear, come over here and I’ll show you in sign language.”

  “You bought a bomb with a thousand bucks,” she said. “Then what?”

  He came up to a sitting position so he could look at her. “Will you stop your belly-aching? If anybody’d caught me wiring up Shayne’s Buick, your nice stick-up would be cooked and you’d be out some money. But they didn’t.”

  “Luckily.”

  “There wasn’t much luck to it. I picked up the package yesterday afternoon. I had Fran along to drive, in case I had to move in a hurry. After that it was a simple matter of tailing Shayne. I could have done it last night when he put the Buick away in a garage, but I was afraid he’d call this morning to have it delivered, instead of going for it himself. I had another chance at the track this afternoon, but he had a girl with him, nice-looking babe, by the way. It might happen that he’d meet somebody out there and send the girl home alone in his car.”

  “So tender-hearted.”

  “That’s not the question. Anybody who hangs around the bastard has to take his chances. I wanted to make sure he’d be the one to turn on that ignition. The restaurant was perfect. I had all the time I needed. Shayne took the girl to dinner, so naturally he’d take her home afterward. And then what happened? Some crazy show-off of a kid—”

  He looked down at his drink, his jaw muscles set. Miriam looked at him in surprise, understanding the reason for his depression in a sudden flash of insight. He wasn’t brooding over Shayne’s escape, but the boy’s death.

  “It made me feel like dirt,” he said. “If the girl got it, I wouldn’t feel so bad. She’s his secretary, I found out. She’s connected with Shayne. But that kid just got in the way. Hell, I used to pinch cars myself.” He drank deeply. “I’ve got a funny feeling I’m going to have to pay for that kid.”

  “I hope you can steal a little money first,” Miriam said dryly. “Are you sure nobody saw you?”

  “Dozens of people saw me, but they didn’t notice me. There’s a difference. I had a mechanic’s uniform on, I was carrying a tool-box. I was checking the wiring of somebody’s Buick. I had a mechanic’s cap pulled down over my forehead, a couple of grease smears on my face. I had pads inside my shirt. I walked with a limp.”

  “What did you do with the uniform, burn it?”

  “It was just a pair of pants and a matching shirt. I cut out letters from red felt, spelling Ace Garage, and glued them to the back of the shirt. Afterward I tore them off and flushed them down a john.”

  “What about this eye-witness they talked about on TV?”

  “What a farce, no kidding. Forget it.”

  “No, really. What is it, a phony hand-out from the cops to show they’re busy?”

  He said reluctantly, “No, there’s actually a guy. I drifted back after I changed clothes, because I thought it might be pleasant to see the Buick blow up. It didn’t make nearly as big a bang as I’d expected, you know that? I thought there’d be pieces flying around in the air. Well, afterward this jerk claimed he’d been standing on the sidewalk and he saw me go by. The cops took him into the restaurant. But what could he tell them, for Christ’s sake? Just that he saw somebody with Ace Garage on his back, a dirty face and a limp. He’ll probably be all over the papers tomorrow, but don’t let it worry you.”

  There was a small change in his manner as he spoke of this witness. The muscles of his face seemed to tighten, as though he was trying to alter his features while an accuser rose in the witness box to point him out. His eyes appeared to become smaller and more cruel.

  “But if the son of a bitch saw Fran,” he said softly, “we may have to do something about it.”

  “There goes another ten thousand,” she said sarcastically. “What are they going to do, stand in line?”

  “So long as the line forms behind Shayne,” Clayton said.

  “You and your boy have another plan to fall back on, no doubt? Scheduled, say, for eight-thirty tomorrow morning?”

  “That was the idea of
getting Fran. I don’t need to pay ten thousand for somebody to drive a car. I guess I could swear up and down that I’ll let Shayne alone if you insist, and then sneak out when you go to the bathroom. But you said yourself it’s too late to make a switch. Just sit tight for half an hour in the morning, and it’ll be over.”

  “What is it this time, a plain old-fashioned shooting?”

  “With Fran’s burp gun. When Shayne comes out of his hotel.”

  “You’re sure he’ll sleep there tonight?”

  “I’ve been asking around. He used to be big with the dolls, but he’s settled down some since my day. He sleeps at the hotel, all by himself, except when he’s out of town. He usually comes out between nine and nine-thirty. This information cost me ten dollars. Excuse me. It cost you ten dollars. It was your dough.”

  “Who did you say you were this time?”

  Clayton laughed. “I said I’d been trying to sell him some life insurance, and I couldn’t get past his secretary. Life insurance! No insurance company would write a policy on Michael Shayne right now. He’s a bad risk.” His laughter was gone in a moment, leaving his face dark and somber. Miriam was silent, trying to think of the best way to handle him.

  She said, “It sounds insane to me, but if Fran Smith thinks this is the way to do it, I suppose you might get away with it. But there’s always a chance you won’t, isn’t there?”

  “Hell, yes. Smith is one of the boys who chopped Anastasia in that barber shop in New York. After that one, he’s been operating on borrowed time. Tomorrow may be our unlucky day. The point is, Shayne goes first.”

  “I hope you get him with the first shots. Mike Shayne is pretty tough.”

  “Tough?” Clayton sneered. “He doesn’t even carry a gun. And I’m not planning to fight him with sixteen ounce gloves and a referee. That’s not my idea at all. A few .45 slugs from a Thompson sub-machine gun ought to cut him down.”

  “Clayt, wouldn’t you consider putting it off a day? After thirteen years, what’s another twenty-four hours?”

  “A day and a night,” Clayton said. “I don’t want to be fanatical about it, and I might be willing to wait. But there’s one or two odds and ends you don’t know.”