“If Captain Squire was up here, he’d give you the warning at this point—you have a right to keep silent, and anything you say can be used against you. I’m going to get around that by doing most of the talking. If anybody wants to contradict me, clear your throat. I’ll be glad to listen.”
The commissioner started to get up. “The contradicting starts right now. This whole proceeding is outrageous! You have no authority to hold anybody and you know it. I refuse to sit here and listen to vague, unsubstantiated charges until I get legal representation.”
“Let the commissioner leave if he wants to, Squire,” Shayne said. “But before you go, Commissioner, let me tell you what my plans are. I’ve been taking a pounding from you people. In my business I can’t afford to let that happen. I’ve been lied to consistently and hit in the face a few times with hard objects, including Joe Truszowski’s forearm.”
“I said I was sorry,” Truszowski muttered.
“Nobody else has… Now, you watched the first half, Commissioner. Ronnie was a long way off his usual form. And Art Maxwell missed three field goals in a row for the first time this year. What makes this all so interesting is that one of Ronnie’s close pals is betting heavily on New York. So is the wife of the owner. Ordinarily we could handle this without headlines, but if we can’t work something out in this room, the whole smear is going to be spread on the record. That’s what happens, folks, in a murder investigation.”
The commissioner sat back. “I understood you to say it was a possible suicide.”
“Stitch Reddick wasn’t a possible suicide. So my contribution here is going to be following his trail backward, city by city, to find out how he operated. You’re staying?”
“It’s damned irregular, and I don’t like it. But talk fast. I want these players on the field in exactly”—he looked at a thin watch—“ten minutes.”
“Keep track of the time,” Shayne told him. “Let’s jump back to the Kansas City game last year. It may have started before then, but that’s where I picked it up. Joe, some of us may not remember what happened in that game. Remind us.”
“Ronnie threw it, that’s what happened! I get madder every time I think about it.”
“Threw the game?” James countered. “My elbow was so tight I couldn’t throw, period! It was loosening up by the end of the half, and Doc Bishop drew off some of the fluid. That helped for about two passes, and then it went.”
“Conveniently,” Joe Truck said.
“Joe, you’re paranoid.”
“Did you win any money on that game, Knapp?” Shayne asked.
Ted Knapp was sitting alone in the last row of chairs. “My memory isn’t that phenomenal, Mike.”
“Knapp’s one of the town’s big bettors,” Shayne explained to the commissioner, “but he doesn’t want to talk about it in front of you. He bets percentages. You don’t succeed that way without good sources and up-to-the-minute information. Dr. Bishop was his local man. Before the K.C. game, Bishop gave him a bulletin on Ronnie’s elbow, and didn’t he ask you to do some betting for him, Knapp?”
“You’re telling it,” Knapp said indifferently.
“The bookies may remember. This is going to scare every bookmaker in town, and I think we’ll get their full cooperation. Let’s say Bishop had ten thousand riding on Ronnie’s elbow that Sunday. Knapp is in on enough situations every week so he can lose a few without feeling it. But that would be Bishop’s one bet, and he’d be willing to take a chance if it meant he could make sure of winning. He gave Ronnie an injection at the half. Whatever it was, it didn’t help the elbow.”
“The swelling went down,” James recalled, “but I think there was some kind of numbing agent in the mixture. A weak solution of Novocain would do it. If you want to know the truth, I think he was manipulating that elbow all year. I’d get one kind of shot if he was on one side of the points, a different kind if he was on the other.”
“The team doctor!” the commissioner said, staring. “That’s too fantastic to believe…”
“Why? I haven’t had a bit of trouble with the elbow since he stopped taking care of it. A sting sometimes, on the follow-through. The thing about a doctor, when he gives you a shot you don’t take the syringe out to your own laboratory to have it analyzed. Like with Maxwell. He’s a great man for needles. B-12 every week. If he’s coming down with a cold, he gets penicillin. A little Seconal mixed with that penicillin will take just a tick off his timing.”
“When did you figure this out, Ronnie?” Shayne said.
“I didn’t do much figuring. It came to me. Last winter sometime. I was looking at boats, wandering around the Chris-Craft showroom on the Beach, and I bumped into Doc Bishop on a forty-eight-foot cruiser. I forget what the price was, but it was more boat than I wanted. As far as I knew, Bishop was like me, just looking. But he gave a kind of jump and banged his head on the ceiling. And he got all red in the face. You don’t see that happen too often. That’s not much to go on, I know that, but he couldn’t afford a forty-eight-footer unless he was moonlighting. So I had a conference with another doctor I know, and we went over those elbow symptoms and fitted them in with the point spread on a couple of crucial games.”
“Didn’t we see Len in a kind of big boat last summer, Sid?” Chan said.
“Don’t volunteer anything until we see where this is going,” Zacharias replied.
“Are you ready to tell us how much Bishop cleared on the K.C. game, Knapp?” Shayne said.
“Be reasonable. It’s too long ago.”
“How about two weeks ago—is that too far back? Miami against New Orleans.”
“Mike,” Knapp said slowly, “it begins to dawn on me that I won’t come out of this little disturbance with a football franchise. I’ve already told you that’s only one of the possibilities I’ve been exploring, and I won’t be too heartbroken if it falls through. Betting on football games is one thing. But when you start talking about shooting a quarterback’s elbow with Novocain, you’re getting up on a different level. I think I’ll start following your advice and shut up.”
“Then I’ll go back to guessing. To lower the price of the club by two million, all Chan had to do was make sure of a losing season. It’s easy to lose football games. A little dissension will do it. With Ted Knapp’s help, she set up a scene to convince Joe Truck that Ronnie was taking a payoff—”
“I saw that, goddamn it!” Truck objected.
“Everybody was being conned that morning, Joe. When you blew those two blocks last Sunday, Ronnie thought you’d been paid to do it. Everybody was getting suspicious of everybody else, and that’s not the way you play winning football. There were also some sexual aspects I’ll save for executive session. But Chan made sure I knew about them so I’d ask questions and stir up more trouble… Ronnie, do you want to tell us about Dody Germaine now?”
“Go ahead, you’re doing fine.”
“Ronnie was keeping a close watch on Dr. Bishop. Any football player has more peace of mind if he can trust his club physician. So he brought down one of his New York girls, who gave Bishop a simple fake and Bishop fell for it. The doctor and the girl have been sharing the same bed for the last few weeks. Remember—Bishop was never a percentage bettor. He was always looking for a sure thing. All he wanted to do was double his money every time. Last week Dody was able to tell Ronnie that Bishop was betting against Miami, betting a lot of money. And that alarmed Ronnie to the point where he went into a week long coma. All right. Handling Bishop’s bets was getting to be a problem for Knapp. It was part of his technique to be as unobtrusive as possible, and he especially didn’t want to come out in the open now, with the purchase of the club hanging fire. Nevertheless, he bet fifty thousand last week, and I know damn well that he wouldn’t have done it unless he was under some kind of heavy pressure. Bishop must have threatened to expose his betting network, and that would have killed the deal for the club. Is this getting too complicated for you, Commissioner?”
“I understood what you’
re saying. But I don’t believe much of it.”
“Why else would Knapp suddenly change systems and go over to sure-thing betting? He’d been winning regularly, but not enough to get himself labeled. It’s the big conspicuous winner who gets sandbagged on the way home from the casino.”
He looked at Knapp, who just shrugged. Shayne went on, “Ronnie wanted two things. He wanted to expose Bishop and get him fired, and he also wanted to break him financially. Ronnie’s name was on the serious list, the point spread went to seventeen, but Dody Germaine was able to fell Bishop that a coup was in the making, that Ronnie was really planning to play. It looked like another sure thing. One hundred thousand dollars would turn into two hundred, and Bishop could stop trying so hard. But by this time, Ted Knapp was balking. Bishop had to place most of the bets out of town. Doctors know doctors all over the country. He’s probably been giving them tips all along, and his performance record has been perfect. Even so, they wouldn’t bet any serious money for him on the strength of a phone call. They had to have cash. So he sent Dody, with a suitcase full of bills, on a swing of a few major cities. He bought her the plane ticket and sent her out to the airport, but she didn’t bother to go, of course. She came back with the money intact—it was Ronnie’s paycheck to her—and I’m really sorry Dr. Bishop isn’t alive so I could tell him the news. She had to be here by game time to reassure Bishop that his bets were down, but she’s not the kind of girl to sit out in the rain and get her hair wet watching a football game. I expect she’s on her way back to the big city.”
“Hell, the girl worked for that money,” Ronnie said. “As a matter of fact, it was a hundred and eleven thousand. Your guesses haven’t been off by much, Shayne.”
The commissioner looked at his watch. “Two more minutes.”
“I don’t think we can make it,” Shayne said. “I don’t know where Reddick picked up the scent. One tapped phone conversation would do it, and isn’t that the main way he worked—by tapping phones? He had a choice. He could collect from Knapp, from Sid and Chan, or from Dr. Bishop. He tried to collect from all four. One of them called him out of a bar, gave him a doped drink and told him a fancy story… Ronnie may have something to say on that point.”
“I knew he was up to something,” James said, “and I wanted to get him to hold off for a day. I thought five hundred bucks would do it—I guess I figured too low. I didn’t get to him in time. I saw him get into Doc Bishop’s car.”
“That’s definite, Ronnie?” Rourke said from the rear of the room. “You saw Bishop?”
“Yeah.”
Shayne continued. “When I followed Stitch, Bishop followed me. He was afraid Reddick might tell me something after I pulled him out of the wreck, so he knocked us both into the canal.”
There was a sound at the door and Coach Lynch looked in.
“Shayne, what do you suggest I do for a quarterback, damn it?”
The commissioner snapped, “Stay in the dressing room with the door locked!”
Lynch’s eyes widened and his head disappeared.
“I’m nearly through,” Shayne said. “Trouble has brought Sid and Chan back together, and the club is no longer for sale. Do you want to verify that for the commissioner, Sid?”
Zacharias, unsettled by the question, looked at his wife. “She almost cost me two million bucks, and now we should get back together…?”
“It’s your best bet. She’s in a position to go on sabotaging you even if you kick her out. She’ll take you for more in the end.”
“Jesus,” Zacharias said, “what a basis for a marriage!”
“I’d like to know what happened to Bishop,” the commissioner said impatiently. “Not that I care a hell of a lot, if he murdered Stitch.”
“First I want to make sure everybody sees the beauty of Ronnie’s idea,” Shayne said. “With Ronnie starting, with New York the favorite at seventeen points, Knapp and Bishop both knew they had an overlay, as close as you can get to a sure thing in professional football. I almost went for it myself, and then I was told that Ronnie’s own doctor, Prettyman, who’s been covering for him in the hospital all week, wasn’t betting on Miami, he was betting on New York. And not just a couple of hundred bucks—thirty thousand. That meant Ronnie was going to be throwing to lose. He persuaded Maxwell to come in on it, to miss a few kicks so Bishop couldn’t fail to see what was being done to him. Coming off the field after one of his interceptions, Ronnie gave Bishop a look, and Bishop understood it. If Ronnie played through the second half, Bishop’s hundred and eleven thousand bucks were down the drain. The halftime score was pretty close to the spread. Bishop’s one chance of winning was to knock Ronnie out between the halves.”
“I already told him I was going to need a jolt,” James said. “And I was going to grab the needle, turn it over to Sid, and that would be it for Doc Bishop.”
“So a few minutes before the end of the half,” Shayne said, “Bishop came down to get ready. I didn’t see him leave the bench, but somebody else did.” Shayne lit a new cigarette from the butt of his old one. “We can eliminate Chan and Sid. I was talking to them at the time. Eliminate the commissioner. I can’t see him shooting anybody.”
“I haven’t shot anybody in years,” the commissioner said.
“Ronnie and Joe were both out on the field playing football. That leaves Ted Knapp.”
Heads turned toward the insurance man. Knapp shook his head good-naturedly, forgiving Shayne for his obvious lack of intelligence.
“I was in the press box. It’s public up there.”
“People were coming and going all the time. Miami was in scoring position. Everybody was looking the other way. You’d been watching the bench, and you could see how things were going. Ronnie was giving it to you. You could absorb the loss, but Bishop, the damn fool, was down on the bench chewing his fingernails and telling himself he had to do something drastic. It wasn’t just money with Bishop. It was his new girl, a whole new way of life. He had to stop Ronnie before the boy ruined him. And if that backfired, as it was likely to—you were a lot cooler at that point than Bishop was—your whole connection with him was bound to come out. He was on your payroll. You’d worked together on something equally tricky the previous week. You’re the gambler, the automatic bad guy. The jury would be sure to decide that giving the quarterback a crooked injection was your idea and Bishop was only following orders. You couldn’t get less than three years.”
“Mike, you’re dreaming aloud!”
“You took the elevator down. Bishop was preparing the hypodermic. You tried to talk some sense into him, but he wouldn’t listen. The minutes were passing. You had to be out of there before the players came in. The thing that’s going to be bad is the fact that you had a gun in your pocket. That shows premeditation. You must have been expecting something.”
“You’re right about part of it,” Knapp said in an exhausted voice, “but let’s think up a different theory. Bishop realized at the last minute that he’d never get away with it, and shot himself. He’s the one who had the gun in his pocket.”
“It could have happened that way,” Shayne agreed.
He picked up the drawer he had pulled out of the table in the taping room and turned it around to expose the little mike. “One of the things Chan did—as part of her scheme to undermine the club—was plant this bug under the blackboard in the locker room. If Bishop had a conversation with anybody just before the end of the half, this would pick it up. There must be a receiver around someplace.”
He suddenly strode forward and picked Chan’s purse out of her lap and emptied it into the drawer.
“Mike!”
He chose a cigarette package as the most likely possibility. It had been opened. Only one cigarette had been removed.
The room was silent. Shayne and Knapp looked at each other.
“It won’t have my voice on it,” Knapp said.
Shayne stepped forward. “Maybe not. And maybe it’s only a pack of cigarettes. But you like
to bet. You told me last night that the next best thing to winning is losing. Squire, give me your gun.”
Squire hesitated before taking his revolver out of its holster and passing it to the private detective. Shayne reversed an empty chair, flapped up the writing arm and dropped the cigarettes on it.
“Here’s the bet. If there’s a recorder inside this package, there’s only one way you can destroy it. That’s with bullets.”
One of the chairs behind him fell over as Chan scrambled toward the wall.
“These transistorized babies are pretty sturdy,” Shayne said, “but fire all six rounds and the odds are that you can blow it apart.”
“Shayne, this is out of some bad TV script,” Knapp said.
Shayne held out the gun, butt first. “Take a chance. It’s a good bet. I’m giving you the edge. We might find somebody who saw you leaving the press box, but we couldn’t get a conviction on that by itself. We’ll need the tape.”
Further along the corridor, an official was hammering on the locked door of the Miami dressing room.
“Can I touch it?” Knapp said.
“Go ahead.”
Knapp squeezed the cigarette package between his thumb and forefinger and put it carefully back on the chair arm.
“I think it’s cigarettes,” he said after a moment. He took the gun and looked around with a strained smile. “This is what you call a good bet? Chan, is it cigarettes, or not?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Knapp pointed the gun at the package. “The choice is…” he said slowly. “If you have a tape to take into court, you can get your goddamn conviction. But if I shoot up this package”—he waited, thinking—“I’ll be tried in the newspapers, right? And go to jail for conspiracy to tamper with football players. Three years, Shayne? I’d be lucky to get out in six. I’ve inquired. I definitely wouldn’t like it in jail. So how can I win? I can’t. But there’s always the next best thing.”
He put his face down, lifting the gun, and fired. Shayne, expecting the move, chopped the gun out of his hand. The shot went high, plowing a furrow along Knapp’s scalp.
Fourth Down to Death Page 16