The Violent World of Michael Shayne

by Brett Halliday

  “Can you reach Manners by phone?” Shayne said.

  Toby’s eyes became more wary. “Under certain conditions. He’s a strange man.”

  “I took a police buzzer off one of his boys. Another one, a big guy named Stevens, took a shot at me in the Senate subway. That’s going to be in the papers unless he can talk me out of it. He’s probably standing by in a parking lot, isn’t he, with a phone in his car?” He pointed out a phone on the side table. “Call him.”

  After thinking about alternatives for a moment, the lobbyist consulted a little book and dialled a number.

  Hitchcock came in. “Maggie doesn’t seem to be there, Mike.”

  Trina cried, “Maggie! Again? I thought that was all taken care of.”

  “She changed her mind,” Shayne said, feeling a spurt of apprehension. He had been sure she was not in danger, or he wouldn’t have sent her home to change her clothes.

  He rubbed the harsh growth of stubble on his chin. Telling them he would return in a moment, he went out to the corridor and around the corner to the door of the hearing room. Maggie was there, arguing fiercely with one of the guards.

  “Mike!” she cried, running to him. “I couldn’t get in!”

  “That dress is a great improvement.”

  She smiled at him gratefully, and hugged his arm.

  “God, Mike, I hope this works. They’re going to be a tough audience.”

  “It had better work,” Shayne said.

  Senator Wall had joined the others in the lounge. They were all talking in low worried voices. They broke off at once when Shayne came in.

  “Did you get Manners?” he asked Toby.

  “I got him,” Toby replied. “He may or may not be here. He’s not too predictable.”

  Shayne looked around. “If any of you people haven’t been told who I am, my name is Mike Shayne. I’ve been retained by National Aviation to see what I can do about quieting this thing down without offending anybody important.”

  “National Aviation!” Trina exclaimed.

  “Well, you fired me, didn’t you, Miss Hitchcock? I needed a client, and National didn’t seem to be satisfied with the service they were getting.”

  Sam Toby gave an odd little giggle, which he swallowed when Shayne looked at him. Senator Hitchcock, from a position on the arm of the chair nearest the door to the hearing room, put in, “Mike, I only called a ten-minute recess. The networks are covering this live. If we’re going to be out much longer, the courteous thing to do—”

  “Let’s not do the courteous thing,” Shayne said brusquely. “It’s going to be news to some of you that an investigator who used to work for this subcommittee was murdered last night. His name was Ronald Bixler. You knew him, didn’t you, Wall?”

  Wall’s face was gray. He was moving about jerkily, unable to hold still. “Bixler? We all knew him. Emory, you remember that incompetent little pipsqueak?—Always just about to discover something that would shake Washington to its foundations. Bixler. He went with the Civil Service Commission.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Hitchcock said, frowning. “What did he work on for us?”

  “It didn’t amount to anything,” Wall said. “He was definitely no ball of fire.”

  Trina Hitchcock said, “Sit down, Tom. You’re making us nervous.”

  Wall scowled and dropped onto a leather sofa. “So Bixler has been murdered. No doubt that’s a great tragedy to somebody. But he’s had no connection with the subcommittee for years. Get on with it, Shayne.”

  Senator Redpath said, “I think it would be better if we let Shayne do this in his own way.”

  Hugh Manners entered without knocking, wearing a black suit and a blue shirt with no tie. He looked around the room, checking off faces he knew, his mouth grim and unsmiling. His eyes ended on Shayne.

  “Now we have our quorum,” Shayne said. “I hope we’ll come out of this with a deal that will satisfy everybody, or almost everybody, but we all have to understand what we’re up against. What you’re up against, Mr. Manners, is a charge of assault with intent to kill, and I know some Girl Scouts I can use as witnesses.”

  “I’ve had a report on that,” Manners said evenly. “I think we’d better talk about it in private.”

  “We’ve already tried that. Aren’t you going to offer Manners a chair, Toby?”

  Toby hastily started to get up. Manners said coldly, “Stay where you are, Sam.”

  “I talked to Mr. Manners last night,” Shayne explained, “and one of the things he said was that he never asked Toby any questions about his methods. He could use women, or bribes, or threats, and Manners didn’t give a goddamn so long as he produced. Anyway, you can’t complain about Toby because the opposition is even worse.”

  “You’re way out in left field, Mike,” Toby protested.

  “Shut up, Sam,” Manners said.

  “I think it’s about time you learned how Toby got you this contract,” Shayne said. “It starts a year ago, when an investigator named Bixler got wind of a certain diary. He figured that if he could get that diary in his possession long enough to make a copy, he’d end up rich. But somebody on the subcommittee or the subcommittee’s staff found out what he was working on and had the same idea, and Bixler found himself in Chicago with a much better job. He didn’t think there was anything strange about this. He knew he deserved a promotion. Somebody else then took over the diary operation.”

  “Can you prove any of this?” Wall demanded.

  “Hell, no,” Shayne said pleasantly. “And that’s my problem. The maid who actually stole the diary thought she was doing it for Bixler. All the arrangements were made by phone. Now. One of the people who had a good reason for not wanting this diary to be leaked to the papers was an Air Force colonel named Oulihan. One of the things I intend to do is get him busted out of the Air Force. I think he’s the son of a bitch who put a couple of MP’s on me. Make a note of that, somebody. Bust Oulihan, and I’ll feel more cooperative about everything else. Oulihan happened to be in a key position in this contract competition. Manners had put in a bid, but you didn’t stand much of a chance, did you, Manners?”

  “Not at that time, no.”

  Toby said, “And that’s a big objection to this theory, Shayne. Not that I admit a damn thing, but Manners was too broke to make any kind of substantial payoff. One of the things I’m known for is not doing anything like that on speculation.”

  “He paid off in stock,” Shayne said impatiently. “He’d jump at the chance. It was like shooting craps with play money, when everybody else is using real bills. His stock was trading at less than ten bucks a share. If the contract didn’t come through, it wouldn’t be worth a nickel. He’d be glad to lay out ten thousand shares. If it didn’t work, he wouldn’t be any worse off than he already was. But if it did, the stock would boom, and he wouldn’t have to hide any huge cash pay-out in his books. How’s the market this morning, anybody know?”

  “We opened at a hundred and fourteen,” Manners said.

  “Ten thousand shares times one hundred and fourteen—that’s over a million bucks. And the wonderful thing about it is that everybody stood to benefit, not just the blackmailer. Even Oulihan probably was smart enough to go into the market to pick up a few thousand shares. Toby had to let go of the stock Manners gave him, but I know it’s done wonders for his reputation as a wizard. The only person who wasn’t happy was Bixler. He’d never forgotten that old case he’d been pulled off of. He got himself transferred back to Washington and hunted up the maid who’d told him about the diary in the first place. When I bumped into him last night, he was drunk and talkative. I don’t know how much of what he told me was true. He said he’d sold the maid’s address to Wall, for example, for a sum in excess of two thousand bucks. True or false? Who knows?”

  “And of course you can’t give him a lie-detector test because he’s dead,” Wall commented.

  Shayne nodded somberly. “The same thing goes for my other big piece of evidence. Bi
xler was killed near an after-hours bar on Larue Place, and I know where I can put my hands on a witness who saw him getting out of a black and white hardtop. If this witness was sober and churchgoing and a good credit risk, I’d be in clover, but he’s actually a neighborhood drunk, and I’d hate to think how a defense lawyer could cut him up on cross-examination.”

  “I own a black and white hardtop,” Wall said, “as I’m sure you know, Shayne. There must be thousands in the city. Anything else?”

  “Well, you fit most of the requirements I’ve been looking for, Senator. You could have found out what Bixler was up to last year, and it wouldn’t be hard for you to get him shifted to that Civil Service job. You’re ambitious and tough and you’re willing to cut corners and you like money. Your National Aviation connection would give you the ideal cover. I asked Redpath what he thought of you in this role, and he said it was impossible because you were such a loyal National man. But Henry Clark tells me he’s suddenly beginning to have doubts about your loyalty. You were out till God knows when last night, and if you thought Bixler was a real threat to that million dollars and your job in the Senate, I think you’re capable of killing him. But there’s only one way we could ever prove anything against you, and that’s by finding those ten thousand shares of Manners’ stock.” His eyes were boring into Wall’s. “I have a man going through your rooms at the Park Plaza. Don’t be alarmed—he won’t harm anything. If he doesn’t find anything there, he’ll try a couple of others. Mrs. Redpath, Sam Toby, Trina Hitchcock. Somebody has that stock, and whoever has it is the murderer. Now, I think Maggie Smith has something she wants to say.”

  Maggie smiled brightly as the faces turned toward her. She was holding her bag too tightly, Shayne noticed, but that was her only sign of stage fright.

  “It’s not really conclusive,” she said. “Two weeks ago I was called into the office of a certain investigative agency. Well, I suppose I can tell you—it was the FBI. I was told that Senator Wall’s financial affairs were under investigation.”

  Wall walked up to her and gave her a piercing look. She met it without flinching.

  “I’ll go on, Senator, if you’ll back away. I’m not at my best when people are breathing on me.”

  He moved off with an angry exclamation.

  She continued, “They knew that he and Trina Hitchcock were having an affair. I was asked—quite forcibly, I may say—to take advantage of my occasional presence in the Hitchcock house and plant a small electronic transmitting device, to pick up their conversations. The assumption was, I believe, that Senator Wall might be using Miss Hitchcock to control or influence her father.”

  “You filthy—” Trina began.

  Wall’s face was puzzled. “I’d like to hear the rest of this, Trina.”

  “The thing was,” Maggie said, “it was very much of a longshot, and you couldn’t expect them to put their own agents on twenty-four-hour duty, on the off chance that something important might come over. They thought I’d know when Trina and Senator Wall were together. They were wrong, actually; I wasn’t that much of an intimate of the Hitchcock household. However, last night I gathered from Mike Shayne that various extraordinary things were taking place, and I kept the receiver open. And suddenly, sure enough, I heard Senator Wall. Well, what I was supposed to do was tape what he said, but I couldn’t get the miserable recorder to function. I’m so stupid about anything mechanical. So I took notes.”

  Opening her bag, she took out a folded sheaf of pages torn from a stenographer’s notebook. “I got as much as I could, but my shorthand is terrible rusty.” She put on her glasses. “Trina Hitchcock’s voice—now you understand this isn’t verbatim, by any means—Trina said, ‘What are we going to do, Tom?’ And his voice said, ‘I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Let nature take its course. Nobody’s been hurt so far. The profit, my God, it’s fantastic. There’s only one stumbling block, and that’s Bixler. Something’s going to have to be done about him. There’s danger in trying to buy him off. He’ll have an exaggerated idea about how much he deserves. And could we trust him?’” Suddenly Trina sprang out of her chair and raked Maggie’s glasses off her face.

  “You’re lying, you dirty tramp! The whole thing is a damn dirty lie!”

  She snatched the notes and thrust them at Wall. “Here, Tom!”

  Her eyes shining, Maggie clipped her with an awkward right. As Trina staggered, one of her heels broke. She tore off her other shoe and came back at Maggie, who seized a newspaper from the table and flung it in her face. It came apart, blinding her for a moment.

  Then they were grabbed from behind.

  Trina screamed, “Let go! I’m going to kill that bitch! I swear I’m going to kill her!”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Maggie said.

  “OK, girls,” Shayne said, stepping between them. “War’s over.”

  “Of course she’s been lying,” Senator Wall said. “What interests me is who put her up to it?”

  Sam Toby exclaimed, “Hitchcock!”

  Everybody looked at the chair near the door, where Senator Hitchcock had been sitting. He was gone.

  CHAPTER 20

  11:25 A.M.

  “WHAT DID YOU THINK THIS RUCKUS WAS ALL ABOUT?” Shayne asked. “Trina wanted to give him a chance to get away.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Trina said icily after divesting herself of the newspaper. “He must have gone to talk to the TV people.”

  “Does anybody else think so?” Shayne said.

  Senator Wall blustered, “If you’re hoping to convince anybody that Emory Hitchcock had any part in the theft of that diary—”

  “It’s hard to tell what people will do before they do it,” Shayne said. “Yeah—there’s no question that Hitchcock is the one who stole the diary and milked it for just about a million bucks, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. He also killed Bixler, not because he’s a homicidal maniac, but because he had to. Bixler was too flighty and unstable, and it wouldn’t have been safe to cut him in.”

  “Hitchcock,” Senator Redpath said. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe it.”

  “I only started believing it myself at about five o’clock this morning. He made his big mistake when he didn’t take his daughter into his confidence. He misjudged the girl. He thought she’d be shocked.”

  “Shayne,” Senator Redpath said, “we don’t want to be too leisurely, do we? When you said you were sending a man to look for the Manners stock at Trina Hitchcock’s, wasn’t the object of that to alarm Emory?”

  “Sure,” Shayne agreed. “And the fireworks started a minute later, which probably means that the stock is hidden somewhere in the house. But let’s give him another couple of minutes.”

  “Will you explain something, Mike?” Maggie Smith said. “What was the point of that whole business with me, or wasn’t it connected?”

  “Of course it was connected,” Shayne said. “Wall, for his friends in National Aviation, had begun to look into the old investigation of Toby. Probably Hitchcock had pulled everything out of the files, but he couldn’t keep Bixler out of town indefinitely without calling attention to his interest in the jerk. Sooner or later Wall was going to add everything up and decide that one of his colleagues had been up to some dirty work, and had taken over the theft of the diary after sending Bixler out of town. But he couldn’t conceivably suspect Hitchcock, because the old man had arranged something very clever. Maggie Smith did a job once for Toby. We can skip the details. Just because somebody does a certain kind of thing once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again. I’ve known that for years, but it slipped my mind. Toby, you understand, was the only person who had to know that Hitchcock was pulling the strings. Manners didn’t know it, Oulihan didn’t know it, Mrs. Redpath didn’t know it. Hitchcock got Toby to suggest a woman who could be linked to some one of Toby’s operations in the past, and Toby arranged the dinner where Maggie and Hitchcock met. She wasn’t the aggressor in this, Hitchcock was. It was the perfect red
herring, except that it worked too well. It scared Trina into hiring an out-of-town detective to break it up. She tried to fire me when she found out how much money her old man had cleared, but by then it was too late. I was a little rough with Maggie, and it didn’t bother me at all. She denied it, of course. And then it struck me that the whole case against her depended on the say-so of one man, Toby, who isn’t exactly famous for honesty and square-dealing.”

  “Now, Shayne,” Toby said.

  Senator Redpath said, “The diary, perhaps. Emory’s always been conscious of being the poorest man in the Senate. He couldn’t save anything out of his salary. He tried to get more insurance, and they turned him down because he was a cardiac patient. But murder—”

  Shayne looked at his watch. “He didn’t know that was where it would end. Everything else worked like a charm. Then Bixler came back, sold Wall the story of the diary, and stirred everything up again. Wall made certain deductions. We invented that conversation between Trina and Wall, but it probably wasn’t too far off. My guess would be that Wall settled for half, which was more than he could ever expect from National. If he ever married Trina, the other fifty percent would make a nice dowry. But Hitchcock still thought he’d better talk to Bixler. To be on the safe side, he used Wall’s car. And Bixler had had a hunch, which he was happy to share with an important Senator like Hitchcock. Wouldn’t whoever stole the diary put the copy in a safe-deposit box? It probably wouldn’t be his regular box—the diary was too hot. I found a note in Bixler’s wallet. He was going to start checking the banks this morning. And Hitchcock couldn’t allow that, because he himself had rented a box in the Second Federal on June 24th, the day before the diary was stolen.”

  “Is that where we’ll find it?” Redpath said hopefully.

  “Not any more. It was too dangerous to keep. He only rented the box for three months. My guess is that he burned the copy as soon as the deal was underway. He was a cautious man. And being a cautious man, he had to do something about Bixler. He persuaded him to go to the joint where the maid was working, to question her further. He made sure that Bixler was carrying plenty of cash. He could be fairly sure what would happen. Bixler had been tossed out of there before. He was drunk and cocky, and if the woman was slow about answering, as she was bound to be, Hitchcock knew that he would try to see what a little bullying would do. Of course, he was bounced by her brothers, in front of fifty witnesses, and left lying unconscious on the sidewalk. Then all Hitchcock had to do was load him into the car, kill him and dump him a couple of blocks away. Bixler had already been rolled, and Hitchcock took off his shoes to make it look even better. He didn’t have to douse him with liquor. Bixler had already done that himself.”