Lady, Be Bad

by Brett Halliday

  “How are you, Rosalie?” Shayne said. “You look sleepy.”

  “I am, aren’t we all? Timmy’s a very tired boy. I’ve been trying to get him to—” She sat up straighter. “You mean you want me to go to bed so you can talk business? I don’t happen to be registered at this hotel.”

  Rourke sat up with an effort. He passed her a room-key and whispered something which made her giggle. As she leaned forward getting up he patted her rump fondly.

  “I won’t put on cold cream or anything,” she said.

  “Nice kid.” Rourke remarked, watching her leave. “Don’t wake up the bartender. Get your own drink and we’ll settle later.”

  Shayne located the cognac. Rourke came after him and deposited himself on a stool, smothering a yawn.

  “Glad you could get some use out of the chopper. That’s one way to do it. Rush around, put on the mileage, fool yourself into thinking you’re getting somewhere. That’s not my way. I like to stay in one place so everybody knows where to find me, and let the information seep in. What happened with Judge Kendrick? I hear they had you in jail up there.”

  “That was just so he’d know where he could put his hands on me.” He drank some of the cognac. “What did you do about Jackie?”

  “Mike, some of this you’re going to like, and some you’re not going to. I had to use my own judgment, so please don’t second-guess me, o.k.?” He opened a ten-by-twelve manila envelope and slid a glossy print across the bar. “A kid from the local paper was out at the lake taking pictures. This is just after the fire truck got there. See if you recognize anybody.”

  Shayne held the picture to the feeble light from the back bar. Assorted guests were grouped near the fire truck, facing the fire. Shayne saw Senator McGranahan, holding a moose head he had carried out of the building. Another man, probably also a legislator, had noticed the camera and was hiding behind his cupped hands. Anne Braithwaite, the English girl Shayne had left tied up in the room with Maslow, stared at the camera disdainfully. There were others in the background, one a fat man wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Teddy Sparrow! What’s he doing there?”

  “The question I asked myself. You understand there’s a block on the gate and the fire truck is the only vehicle they’ve allowed in. Teddy must have been there when the fire started. As soon as I recognized him I got on the phone and left word at various places. Half an hour later he walked in, looking, what’s the word, sheepish.”

  Shayne studied the picture. Teddy Sparrow was a private detective from Miami, friendly and eager but totally inept, with a real instinct for the wrong guess and the wrong move at the wrong time. He was tie-less, streaming with sweat. There was something heavy in the side pocket of his jacket. Shayne brought the picture closer to the light.

  “It’s a camera,” Rourke said. “He didn’t want to admit it, and he didn’t want to let me have the film. We had a big argument about it. I won.”

  He brought a sheaf of glossy photographs out of the envelope. Shayne pulled them toward him.

  “What did you do, send him out to follow Jackie?”

  “Hell, he can handle a simple follow-job,” Rourke said uneasily. “He’s in the business. I had to be here to take calls.”

  Shayne drummed his fingers on the bar, and Rourke said more defensively, “I know what you’re thinking, but if I was doing it I’d do it worse.”

  “Was he working for Maslow?”

  “He wouldn’t admit it. You can lean on him when he gets back.”

  Shayne looked at the pictures. The first showed McGranahan in bed with two girls. His face showed clearly in the middle of the tangle, obviously delighted with everything that was being done to him. In the second picture, Grover Kendrick was accepting a package of money from Phil Noonan, the Savings and Loan Association lobbyist. Other packages had spilled out of an open dispatch case on the bed. The next two pictures were different views of the same transaction. In the first, Noonan was holding out the money and Grover was reaching, in the second Noonan had pulled back his hand and Grover was riffling the bills.

  “I used a magnifying glass in the darkroom,” Rourke said. “The top bill in each package is a hundred.”

  The final picture showed Anne Braithwaite and an unidentifiable man. The man was behind her. Her handbag was open on the bedside table. Somebody had drawn a white circle around it.

  Rourke explained, “You can’t see it in a five-by-seven, but with a magnifying glass one of the things that shows up is a hypodermic syringe. They had something for everybody.”

  “What was the light-source, infra-red?”

  “Probably. But the girl in the darkroom said she thought it looked like a special kind of fast film. Surveillance film, it’s just been put on the market—with starlight you get a print of studio quality.”

  The phone rang at the end of the bar. Rourke pushed off and answered it, and a moment later held it out to Shayne.

  “McGranahan wants you, Mike.”

  Shayne took the phone.

  “There you are finally, Mike. I’ve been calling around.”

  “Is the party still going on?”

  “The party is definitely not still going on. I lost my pants in the fire, for one thing, and I’ve had to listen to some pretty thin humor about it, some pretty thin humor. I was changing to bathing trunks to go for a swim when the fire broke out, but nobody seems to believe me.”

  Shayne laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Mike, that’s not friendly. Damn shame about Maslow. I never liked him, but I think I’ll miss the creepy son of a bitch. So he turns out to be a lush. It encourages me.”

  “Did he ever try to blackmail you, Matt?”

  There was an instant’s silence, and McGranahan said, “Funny you should ask that. Now I remember why I wanted to talk to you. Call off the pressure. I may look like a good-natured slob, but I can be nasty. Anybody who thinks he can capitalize on the indiscretions in my past record is welcome to try.”

  “Who’s pressuring you?”

  “Colleagues of yours. This very tough voice, vote nay or else. The hell with the bunch of you, is my message! Most of those things he mentioned my wife already forgave me for. You’re not too up-to-date.”

  “I’ve just seen an up-to-date picture of you and two girls, but don’t worry about it. Vote as you please.”

  McGranahan hesitated. “You mean that?”

  “Absolutely. And if you get any more calls, tell them Mike Shayne says to go back to the Caribbean where they own the cops. They’ll get in trouble if they hang around here.”

  “You do mean it.”

  “How much did Sam pay you, Matt?”

  “I deny it. Sam who?”

  “I heard ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand? Ten thousand dollars? You’ve got inflated ideas, not that I’m admitting anything. In the days of the pari-mutuel bill, that was different. Those people were spenders. And that’s all on the subject! Goodnight.”

  Teddy Sparrow came in while Shayne was returning the phone to its cradle. The fat detective stopped in the middle of the floor, his eyes down.

  “Well, I’m sorry to say I lost her.”

  “I’ve lost plenty of tails at this time of night,” Shayne said. “How did it happen?”

  Brightening slightly, Sparrow moved his bulk to the bar. “Something tall and cool, Tim, with gin in it. I don’t see how you keep these hours. All I did was blink once and they were gone. That never happens when I get my regular eight hours.”

  Sparrow waited till Rourke prepared a drink, and then opened a notebook. There was too little light to read what he had written in it, and in the end he used a flashlight.

  “First thing subject did, at four-eighteen A.M., was make some phone calls. She had to hunt up the numbers in the book. Then she got a black Ford, license number MK 361, out of the hotel garage. Drove to the vicinity of the Skyline Motel. So long as we were moving along I was fine. Then we had ten minutes of sitting s
till, and that’s when the trouble started. You came out of an upstairs room with a dame, Mike. White-haired, terrifically stacked—but hell, you know that. I thought my subject might tail you, but no. At four fifty-five A.M. a nice dark-green Eldorado came cruising along, three guys in it. She winked her lights. There was carefulness on both sides. They drove past, they turned around and came back. One guy got in with her—”

  “Do you know what Al Luccio looks like?” Shayne said.

  “Who runs the big casino in the islands? Was that who? Short little legs, walks like an ex-pug. Snazzy sideburns. This sort of pot on him.”

  “Yeah. And that’s when you went to sleep?”

  “I didn’t exactly go to sleep. I kept snapping out and drifting back. I honestly don’t understand why I didn’t hear the motors when they left. You’d think on a quiet night like this, but it was like both cars vanished. Go ahead and say it. I goofed.”

  “No, you made a connection for me,” Shayne said bleakly. “The girl I dropped at the hotel was definitely the girl who had the talk with Luccio?”

  “I can swear to that, Mike.”

  “How long have you been working for Maslow?”

  Sparrow cut his eyes at Rourke. “We were supposed to keep it confidential, but I guess it’s out now. Six months or so? Off and on.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Sparrow looked surprised. “I can’t honestly say I did. He had a tongue like a razor. Something like this tonight, where through no fault of my own things didn’t go as planned, he’d still be cutting me up twenty-four hours later. He was no joy as an employer, and the money wasn’t that good, either. But he was a rising man, I had hopes it would lead to something.”

  “Did you know he was blackmailing people with the material you collected?”

  Teddy rammed his big belly against the bar and swiveled around to look at Shayne.

  “Would you repeat the question?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I heard you, but it takes a minute! You’re damn well told I didn’t know he was blackmailing people, and what’s more I don’t believe it! He was head of the subcommittee, but he didn’t control the hiring and firing of the regular investigative personnel. They sabotaged him, the machine pols, because he was a free-wheeler, and he didn’t care whose toes got stepped on. He was very much anti-Establishment. The orders he gave us, as abrasive as he was to me personally, there were no strings attached. It could be the governor of the state, it could be the president of a corporation, it could be the chairman of the state central committee. If we had any indication of hanky-panky, we were supposed to nail that person, let the chips fall where they may.”

  He ran down at the end, sounding less and less convinced of the truth of what he was saying. He broke off and said complainingly, “Is it a fact, Mike? Was that what he was doing?”

  “You must have wondered what happened to some of the reports you turned in.”

  “Why, not at all,” Teddy said loyally. “You don’t break that kind of story in dribs and drabs. You wait and accumulate enough to make a page-one headline. He kept the whole thing in his own hands.”

  Rourke laughed. “But if anybody ever got rapped for blackmail, it wouldn’t be Sheldon Maslow. That I can guarantee.”

  They let him think for a moment. Finally he nodded. “When you look at it from that angle, it’s a possibility. That’s as far as I care to go at this time.”

  “You have to go further,” Shayne told him. “Did you ever pick up a package for him without knowing what was in it?”

  “I guess I may have,” Teddy said, beginning to look worried. “A couple of times anyway, from Phil Noonan for one.”

  “Tim, find out if he’s registered here, and if he is tell him we want to talk to him about some hundred-dollar bills.”

  Rourke went to the phone. Shayne continued, “Teddy, let’s figure that Maslow wouldn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. He could set up the cash deliveries so it would seem that you or somebody else on his staff was cadging behind his back. The whole operation was secret, and he had control all the way. You may never be charged with anything, but rumors can be just as bad in the private detective business. Let’s bring everything out in the open.”

  “I’m for that,” Teddy said fervently, wiping sweat off his forehead with a bar napkin. “What else do you want to know?”

  “How did Maslow hear about the party tonight?”

  “I told him. A girl I met in a bar, kind of a chintzy accent, she sold me the tip for forty-five dollars, and I guess now that’s going to come out of my own pocket. Old Maz was real excited. Here was our chance for some documentation. We went in early by boat and ditched the boat in the weeds, where we could get away in a hurry. I couldn’t find it later—somebody beat me to it, a little rowboat with an outboard motor. For a couple of hours we hung around in the trees getting bit by mosquitoes. After dark, he skinned up the back roof and in a window. We had a couple of these high-priced Japanese cameras. He didn’t scare easy, because it was risky in there for somebody with a camera, I can tell you. I identified three of Sam Rapp’s goons. We had a system worked out, whereby after he took a few shots through the closet door he tied a piece of twine around the camera handle and let it down and I tied on the other camera with fresh film. That way it could get confiscated and we’d still have something to show.”

  Rourke came back from the phone. “Noonan’s on his way.”

  “What about the package Noonan gave you?” Shayne asked Teddy.

  “It was more of an envelope. I had a piece of luck earlier with somebody in his office. This middle-aged lady cornered me and set up an appointment. She had evidence of a payoff, and she decided it was high time that kind of thing was stopped. Didn’t cost us a penny, a Xerox copy of some bookkeeping entries, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it myself, I just passed it on to Maslow.”

  “Did you ever come across anything to connect Maslow and Boots Gregory?”

  “As a matter of fact! I saw Gregory coming out of his office—the private one, not the one in the capitol. He rented a place on the way to the airport, where he could meet his informants and so on. He set up the schedule so nobody would run into anybody, but this was just after I started and I had something urgent, which is how I happened to see Gregory. The senator gave me a real ripping up and down, and he even fired me, but he took it back later. I thought it was funny—Boots Gregory, after all, but you know what they say about politics and bedfellows.”

  Phil Noonan came in. Usually one of the best-groomed men in the lobbying business, he had pushed a wet brush through his hair and knotted an ascot hastily around his neck, but he still had a long way to go before he could take his habitual place in the second-floor lobby connecting the house and the senate.

  “What is it that can’t wait till morning, Mike? I had three hours with the highway patrol—”

  He saw Teddy Sparrow, and shifted swiftly to his usual unruffled style. “Which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the opportunity. Is there someplace we can go where we won’t bother anybody?”

  “Your problem is a small part of the picture,” Shayne said. “Rourke knows about it already, and Teddy didn’t know there was money in the envelope you gave him.”

  “It didn’t even occur to me,” Teddy assured everybody. “I mean, it occurred to me, but I put it out of my mind.”

  “Here’s what I wanted you to see,” Shayne said.

  He sorted out the three photographs of money passing between Noonan and Grover Kendrick. Noonan looked at all three and slapped them on the bar. He swore explosively.

  “It’s been the damnedest legislative session I can remember. Where the hell—”

  He looked at Sparrow, who said hastily, “Senator Maslow took them. I only sent him up another camera.”

  “These were taken between nine o’clock and eleven last night,” Shayne said. “I’ve been told you paid Grover forty thousand dollars a few weeks ago. What was this payoff for?” />
  Noonan laughed sarcastically. “Wonderful. You’ve got the pictures out of sequence. He was paying me.”

  Shayne took back the pictures, rearranged them and looked at them again.

  “I’ve had nothing but trouble,” Noonan went on, “nothing but aggravation.” He looked at the slumbering bartender. “I need a drink.”

  “Let him sleep,” Rourke said. “I’ll get it.”

  “A large Scotch. A very large double-Scotch and very little soda. Mike, I’ve been beating up and down the thru-ways of this state for the last fifteen years, addressing chambers of commerce and Rotary Clubs, telling them about the services lobbyists perform, trying to erase some of the stigma. I never paid a political bribe in my life before last night. I just never had to.” He drained the drink in one harsh swallow, shuddering as it burned its way down. “I knew I shouldn’t step out of character. I should have bowed out gracefully, but it all seemed so—so extraordinary—”

  Shayne looked up from the photographs. “You mean Grover was paying you back?”

  “That’s what was happening, believe it or not, and if those pictures appear in the press, who would believe it? Mike, if you think it was hard rigging the books to cover the original payment, it was agony covering the repayment. There’s just no precedent. I begged him to keep the damn money, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. And how were we supposed to enter it? We had to patch and transfer and create an entirely new account. If we’re ever audited—”

  “What was the first forty thousand for?”

  “There was only one forty thousand. It went out, it came back in. I think I’m steadier. I can talk about it without going into falsetto. You’ve got me with these photographs, Mike. They’re publishable. They’re eminently publishable. But please don’t publish them. After the way I’ve been talking about ethics for so many years, the association would fire me and nobody would give me a job running their postage meter.” He looked at the pictures again. “Notice the sneaky look on my face. That man is obviously guilty. You say Maslow took this picture? One consolation—the bastard got what was coming to him!”