Win Some, Lose Some ms-69

by Brett Halliday

  “I think chicken crepes,” she said. “He loves them. Chocolate cake.”

  The chimes sounded while DeLuca was rewinding the tape. This was a special-delivery letter, which Molly signed for and tore open breathlessly. It contained stale news. Her man had been kidnapped and the price was a million. The one interesting thing was that the note was almost a copy of the Eddie Maye one-same ink, same style. It was out of sequence, it should have arrived before the phone call. But that was the post office for you.

  DeLuca had to rush if he wanted to meet the deadline. And having heard that his name was number three on the kill list, he was no longer thinking about sabotaging the collection. Canada himself had probably contributed that suggestion-quick thinking, Larry. DeLuca would have to hand over the full sum. If he had anything to say about what happened after that, however, Canada wouldn’t be alive to eat supper.

  He gave Molly a quick, sympathetic hug and told her he would keep in touch. Flushed and excited, a little drunk, she was much more attractive today than he had ever seen her. He took both the tape and the recorder because he was going to be pitching to some very suspicious people. Cash was the problem. There would be notes to arrange, signatures to get. DeLuca himself, to maintain his new status, would have to contribute a tenth.

  His first stop was the Doral. After the busy night, Greco had decided to stay over. A girl in unbuttoned pajamas came to the door to see who was being so insistent. Greco was all but asleep, smiling blissfully while another girl chewed at him. Nick didn’t seem to be home, though that bed had been slept in. DeLuca picked a gun off the carpet and used it to drive the girls into the hall, throwing their clothes after them. Greco was up on his elbows.

  “Hey, man-”

  DeLuca swung, and he dodged back. “I don’t see why-” he whined.

  “What gave you the funny idea Canada was in that trailer? Did you see him?”

  “Not with my own eyes, no, but those other guys, one of them, looked in and saw him. If he said it once, he said it a couple of times. I wouldn’t shit you! Would I still be here? I’d be in Mexico.”

  “Where’s your tall friend?”

  “Well, Nick-he got shot and I had to put him in the fire.”

  DeLuca nodded. “Not as heavy as Canada, but about the same height.”

  Greco, paling, went even deeper into the pillow. He looked at the gun in DeLuca’s hand and began to babble. “I didn’t, honest-”

  He ended up in a fetal coil. DeLuca, disgusted, ordered him into a cold shower. In a pillow case, where Greco had hidden them from the girls, he found the six big ones he had paid for the job. Becoming impatient almost at once, he rolled up his sleeve, went in, and dragged Greco out of the shower. The big question was, who were the three people who had driven off with the trailer? All Greco knew was that they had definitely been after Canada. The name of Canada had been mentioned over and over. He would swear to that.

  To bring his anger under control, DeLuca forced himself to unwrap a stick of gum slowly and deliberately and chew it down.

  “Well, you blew it,” he told the boy, shivering in the chill blast of the air-conditioning. “This has been embarrassing for me, and if that slob comes home, it could be a lot more than embarrassing. I feel like blasting you, I really do, and start over with somebody else.”

  “Please-”

  In fact, DeLuca was strongly tempted. The trouble was, the recruiting and briefing would all take time, and he shouldn’t even be here, he should be out accumulating the ransom.

  “I’m going to give you one more crack. Better not fuck up twice. Stay here. No women. Be awake and dressed and straight by three-thirty.”

  Chapter 17

  Shayne, back in his own car, met the bondsman in Homestead. Half an hour later the man brought out the construction workers, Benjamin and Vaughan, who had been arrested the night before for the possession of heroin.

  Shayne unlatched his rear door and said he would drive them to work. “I’m Michael Shayne. I’m a friend of Soupy Simpson. Which one of you is Benjamin?”

  The stockier man nodded slightly. They were both in their thirties, in need of a shave and a shower, wearing work pants and dirty T-shirts. Shayne had two cartons of take-out coffee and a box of doughnuts. That convinced them he was friendly. They got in the car.

  “That stuff was planted on us,” Benjamin said.

  “Three ounces, they tell me. That’s a lot to invest in a practical joke.” He passed them the coffee. “I’d like to watch your reactions, but I’ve got to be moving. Everybody seems to think you’ve been stealing construction equipment on a regular basis. True or false?”

  Benjamin took a swallow of coffee. “We’ll plead to that when the time comes.”

  “That won’t be the charge. The rap is much worse.” The traffic light changed, and he moved. “First-degree murder.”

  One of the men said softly, “How do you make that out?”

  “Somebody hit the Homestead job last night and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. It all ended up in your trailer.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Soupy about that? Take money.”

  “As soon as Soupy understands what he’s mixed up in,” Shayne said, “I think he’ll be hard to get hold of. I’d give you the same advice, except that you’re in a lot deeper. But I think I see a way you can dig yourself out. That’s why I put up your bail.”

  “Out of the kindness of your heart,” one of the men said ironically. “Now you want a return favor. First-degree murder. Who was murdered?”

  “Two people. Eddie Maye, a loan shark, a kidnapping attempt that misfired. Somebody else burned to death in your trailer. He hasn’t been identified yet. I think they’ll find he was also shot in the stomach, which helped. One other thing. The big boss was kidnapped.”

  “ Canada?”

  “That’s right, a big fish, and they want a big price for him. Apparently the kidnapping and robbery took place at pretty much the same time. The police have decided both crimes were committed by the same people. Canada was meeting somebody in the command trailer. A secret meeting, highly confidential, and the other person won’t step forward to admit it happened unless he absolutely has to. You were working with Canada in a pilfering racket. People will say you set up that meeting to report or pass money, got him out there, and grabbed him. Now for the next step, the big one. There isn’t much doubt the Canada kidnappers are also the Eddie Maye kidnappers. It’s one of those things where you’re going to be presumed guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. How does it sound, pretty rough?”

  “We’ve been in the tank most of the night. We haven’t been running around mailing ransom notes.”

  “Nobody thinks you did it all single-handed. You’d have somebody outside to handle the messages. Maybe you even set up the bust yourself so you’d have a fixed address overnight.”

  Both men protested the absurdity of the idea, and Shayne went on, “When they rake through the ashes, they’re going to find a payloader wheel, an acetylene tank, a welding torch, and a lot else. They’ll trace it back. I happen to know where you got it. You got it from Soupy, and Soupy got it from me. You don’t have to understand how that happened, just how it looks, and it looks bad. So I know you’ve already made up your mind to help.”

  For a moment there was nothing from the back seat, not even the sound of swallowing.

  “How?” Benjamin said then.

  After dropping the construction workers, Shayne called the bowling alley and asked for Soupy Simpson.

  “Another moneymaking opportunity,” Shayne told him. “I’m paying three hundred for this, and you may be able to milk it at the opposite end. I want to plant a story so every cop in town above the rank of patrolman will hear about it before noon. I want to start it in three places-Miami, Miami Beach, and the sheriff’s office. How are your connections?”

  “Good in all three. Go ahead, Mike, I’m listening.”

  “Larry Canada has been snatched. His wife had a ph
one call so we know he’s alive. The asking price is one million, and Lou DeLuca is raising it. The deadline is four-thirty. They’re under strong pressure to keep the cops out of it.”

  “And you want the cops in on it?”

  “One certain cop. I don’t know which one.”

  “Larry Canada snatched, one million, DeLuca.”

  “Don’t leave out the phone call-Canada himself talking.”

  “Got it. Mike, can you hand-deliver the money? I was listening to the morning news. A dead man in a trailer. I think I’ll take a little vacation.”

  “Good idea. I was about to suggest it.”

  Jack Downey was in bad shape. He dropped a couple of speed-up pills, and usually that was enough to enable him to get through the day. Today it merely had the effect of making everything spin. It was an ordinary Miami day, sunshine through smog, but the light hurt his eyes. It seemed to Downey that everybody looked at him strangely. He shouldn’t have been so greedy. Why hadn’t he settled for the small gain? He was a small man, what was wrong with small money? The details of the night were already beginning to recede. Those kooks, Werner and Pam, had talked him into it, and then when the going got rough, they ran.

  After some bad experiences with partners, who invariably let him down, he had made his superiors acknowledge that he worked better alone. All they were interested in was results, and Downey got those, although it was fair to say that lately he had lost some of his edge. He had some paper work to get out of the way before he could coop up for the day. He was fighting the typewriter, making mistake after mistake, when Soupy Simpson called.

  Downey stood up so abruptly that he sent the typewriter table squealing back against the next desk. The man there looked at him curiously. Downey asked Soupy a few low questions. It was a rumor, that was all, but Soupy had heard it from several sources, and he thought Downey might be interested, not that he saw any connection with the other thing Downey had been asking about the night before, the pilferage thing. “A phone call?” Downey said. “To the wife?”

  “That’s what Lou DeLuca is saying. He has a tape he’s playing for people.”

  Downey thanked Soupy for thinking of him, then sat down and tried to finish the form. After four wrong strikes in a row, he yanked the damn thing out of the machine and filed it. Alive? Of course Canada wasn’t alive. This was some kind of con. He put on his harness and left without telling anyone where he was going. He didn’t know himself. It sometimes helped just to get in the car and go.

  Using an outside booth, he called a friend in the sheriff’s office and asked if they had anything new on the burned-out trailer. No identification yet; they were trying to get a dental chart, but the teeth were scattered all over. Downey drove a few blocks, pulled up at another phone, and called the Homestead barracks. Benjamin and Vaughan, in spite of having been caught with three bags of pure, were out on $10,000 bail. What did it mean?

  Canada lived on one of the man-made bay islands, with good security at the bottleneck leaving the causeway. The bottleneck couldn’t exclude cops, however, and Downey arrived in time to see Lou DeLuca come out of the house carrying a tape recorder. Downey considered giving him a fast frisk and a little pushing around, but decided he was too far down to know anything. He was the messenger boy, that was all. Downey rang the doorbell. The door was chained, and Mrs. Canada wouldn’t let him in.

  He set off again and presently noticed that his car had taken him to the Interstate. Maybe the car knew something he didn’t. He went south to Homestead and in through the site. If you knew where to look, you could see signs of what had happened. A couple of official-looking cars were parked at the command trailer. Otherwise they were making highway as usual, noisily, under the usual cloud of dust.

  Downey drove out the opposite end, made a forbidden U, and headed toward Miami Heights. He had a bet going. If his colleagues weren’t there, he would call it all off, the hell with it, it was too risky to attempt alone. But they were there. Werner was packing, and Pam was on the bed, wearing nothing to speak of and smoking a joint. Downey picked it out of her hand and drew on it deeply.

  “We said goodbye,” she said.

  “This may not be over yet.”

  “Will you get out of here?” Werner said, with that funny mildness he had been putting on for the last couple of days.

  With no change of expression, perfectly calm, Downey hit him twice, once in the kidneys, again at the hinge of the jaw. He put every ounce of his frustration into the punches. Ten years earlier he would have done some hospital damage. Werner went back on the bed, arms and legs splayed, looking surprised, but he stayed conscious.

  “They had a phone call,” Downey said, “from Canada himself. So the son of a bitch wasn’t in that trailer after all. Now shut up and listen. Don’t ask me who was doing that shooting last night. All I know is, I got one of them good, in the gut. What I’m wondering, are those his bones in that trailer? I swear I saw Canada in there, at least I saw something. But hell, the visibility-maybe they set it up to look fat like Canada, and maybe he was somewhere else all the time.”

  “You saw him breathing,” Pam said.

  “Let’s not rake it all up. We all make mistakes.”

  He was feeling dizzy, and he had to sit down. He had worked it out in the car, but under Pam’s skeptical look it began slipping away.

  “I just came from the site. A couple of places where he might be, like a stretch of conduit, and there’s that whole swamp country around there. I’m not saying we ought to go out and look. We wouldn’t know where to begin. We don’t care about Canada-write that off. The money’s the thing. Listen, remember that payloader?”

  “I’ll never forget.”

  “I found out this morning that Benjamin, one of the guys who ripped off the stuff, is a payloader driver. That’s pretty conclusive.”

  “They’re in jail.”

  “Not anymore they’re not. Somebody bailed them. They stashed Canada somewhere, in a junked car or wherever, and he’s still there, isn’t he? They wouldn’t have time yet to move him. Now if I was in their shoes, I’d go to work as though nothing happened. They’re working overtime on that highway job, to seven or eight most days. Four-thirty is when they want the money to be ready. They’ll slip off to go to the john or something, pick up the dough, however they’ve got it arranged, hide it, and get back on the job. That’s guesswork, but it fits the facts. So what we do, we work on it on both ends. The money guy’s somebody nobody ever heard of, DeLuca. He’s my responsibility. You guys get over to the site and watch the exits, keep an eye out for Vaughan and Benjamin. We’ll rig up something good. When they go looking for the money, it may not be there. Or we’ll let them pick it up, put on the masks, and take it away, whichever. I’m not talking nickels now. I’m talking a million bucks.”

  They didn’t see any of this as clearly as he did. The more he argued, the realer it looked. It took him over an hour to get them out of the house. At the end he was talking wildly, hardly knowing what he was saying.

  He drove back to the site, showed his badge to the foreman, and asked him to identify a whole string of names, made up on the spot except for Benjamin and Vaughan. Vaughan was a dump-truck driver, in and out. Benjamin, the payloader guy, was working back and forth between the gravel pile and the hot plant.

  Downey deployed his troops. He wanted them both to be really invisible, which meant they had to have a legitimate reason for being here. Downey attached his own police blinker to the roof of their rented Ford. With that long hair, Werner was hard to believe as a cop, so Downey bullied him to a Homestead barber, who cut a lot of it off. It changed his appearance completely. He looked like a detective Downey knew-that man, too, looked angry most of the time.

  He drove Pam to the top of the site, where dump trucks bringing in sand and gravel had to cross the highway. A flag girl in a yellow hat and bright orange vest brought the traffic to a halt to let them pass.

  Downey stopped beside her. “We got a call f
rom your family, dear. Do you have your own car?”

  “What do you mean? Is anything wrong?”

  “Some kind of accident. She was so hysterical I couldn’t make out. Your dad? Somebody.”

  The girl’s hand went to her mouth. “Is it bad?”

  “She was leaving for the hospital. She wants you to go straight home.”

  The girl was already untying her vest. “Oh, God. That’s a two-hour drive. Did she say what hospital?”

  “Just to go home. Somebody’ll be there by then.”

  “Now isn’t that just like my mom?” the girl cried. “I’ll be worrying all the day. Dad-he drives like a crazy person. I hope it’s not too bad.”

  Pam put on the vest and hat and accepted the flag. Downey drove off with the girl.

  Chapter 18

  After counting the money, and counting it again to be sure he’d been right the other times, DeLuca had a final exchange with Canada’s wife.

  “Lou, you’ll be careful?” She put a moist hand on his arm. “You won’t provoke them? Because he meant that. You know Larry, he wouldn’t put his money in any obvious place. I’ll bet you it’s in the Bahamas someplace. If anything goes wrong I’ll never find it.”

  “If anything goes wrong,” DeLuca said, “it won’t be Lou DeLuca’s fault. I want to stay alive myself, you know. Most of this dough is other people’s. If Larry lives through, he’ll pay them back. Otherwise they’re out. So I’m going to play this strictly according to the book.”

  Her hold tightened. “Lou, you’ve been such a good friend today. When this is over, I hope we can see each other more. You don’t know how lonely it’s been.”

  He stood on the front doorstep for a moment to let anybody who was watching see that, as instructed, he was completely alone. Then he drove to the Miami High School, on Twenty-fourth Avenue. He had played the tape for a number of people during the day, but he had always cut if off at the point where it started to get specific. He didn’t want anybody lying in wait along the way. He was the only one who knew he was going to change cars. He spotted the pickup at once. A Chevy several years old, it had been used hard. Empty beer bottles were rolling under the seat. He turned on the radio. It was set on Channel 19, but was producing nothing but frying noises.