At the Point of a .38

by Brett Halliday

  “Esther,” Shayne said gently. “You can put the gun away now. The fight’s over. You did very well.”

  “I did, didn’t I? I always made a good score shooting at a paper target. That was the first time I shot at a living man.”

  “I doubt if you killed him. It’s almost impossible at that range with a handgun.”

  The gun dropped and she began to shudder lightly. In a moment she was sobbing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?” He pulled over and stopped. “Everybody takes his chances in a war. The guy signed up to knock you over before you could talk to anybody. You fired first. I’ll repeat—I don’t think you killed him. He took a little stutter step and stayed on his feet. If he was going to die, he would have sat down. So brighten up and we’ll go somewhere and get some breakfast.”

  “Yes,” she told herself. “And one more or less of such people hardly matters, does it?” She added, “Except that for some reason it does seem to matter.”

  He offered her the cognac. “This sometimes helps.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “It’s a good time to start. Go ahead, it’s not that habit-forming.”

  Still tense, she took the bottle, looking at Shayne doubtfully. “Are you sure?”

  When he nodded, smiling, she put it to her lips and drank deeply. She sputtered, waited and drank again.

  “Strong, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the whole idea. Now let’s get something to eat and you can tell me what this is all about.”

  “Food?” she said faintly. “I really feel extraordinarily—”

  A Sanitation Department truck passed, clanking and emitting a smell of garbage and partly-burned diesel fuel. She forced herself to sit erect.

  “I’m quite all right,” she said firmly. “It is merely, you see, that I haven’t slept for two days, and the way it is necessary to do now, step in an airplane in one time zone and step out in another, I hardly know what planet I’m on. A doctor gave me some pills to keep from falling asleep. You wish to eat breakfast, I will accompany you. But order nothing for me.”

  He crossed beneath the expressway and entered it from the other side, joining the citybound flow. He was watching the mirrors closely. Nothing showed up; apparently their pursuers had definitely broken contact. He was heading for a nearby motel, which had a restaurant and coffee shop.

  After a moment’s strained silence, the woman took another pull at the cognac. The neck of the bottle chattered briefly against her teeth. She screwed the cap back on deliberately, and set it on the floor between her feet. When she straightened she made a faint sound and pressed her hand to her mouth.

  “Can you stop, please.”

  “This is a bad place to stop. Hang on for one minute.”

  She gagged violently. He pulled over, setting his emergency blinkers. She grabbed blindly for the door handle but didn’t get it open. Everything came up in a rush. She caught some of it in her cupped hands but the overflow went on her skirt. Then she was able to get the door open and was partially out of the car, vomiting hard. Shayne stayed in his seat-belt. Between spasms, she apologized.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’d get out and hold your forehead, but that always seems a little silly.”

  She was holding her hair back from her face with both hands. The dark glasses were still on. After a time she fell back into the seat.

  “I’m so ashamed. I don’t know how that could have happened. Look at me, I’m a mess.”

  “Are you finished for now?”

  “I think so.”

  He told her to close the door, and he moved along the highway to the motel turnoff. He rented a room while she lay with her head back and her eyes closed, pale and embarrassed. Returning, he parked in front of a ground-floor unit and helped the woman out of the car.

  “Did you leave your suitcase at the airport?”

  “Yes, but never mind it for now. I have some things I must tell you. If I can wash my dress it will dry quickly. I’m so disgusted. Disgusted! I have been a soldier, you know, and soldiers are not supposed to behave in such a weak fashion. But I can’t stop thinking about how the man put a hand to his stomach as though to keep it from emptying on the road. Yet I must tell myself, as you said, he is one of Murray Gold’s gangsters, and if he dies or not, it doesn’t matter a particle.”

  Shayne closed the door after them. “These weren’t local people. I don’t claim to know every button-man in Miami by sight, but I do know what kind of clothes they wear, how often they get haircuts and what kind.”

  Without her dark glasses, she gave him a puzzled look. “You mean they were imported from some other city?”

  “That’s possible, but there may be more to it.”

  She shivered again. “First I must stop feeling so wretchedly ill, then perhaps I can think. Somehow they knew I was coming to see you?”

  “That’s how it looks, if you’re part of it at all. I’m involved in more than one thing.”

  Her face wrinkled as she smelled herself. “First I must clean this off, then we can talk.”

  Shayne had brought the cognac in from the car, but he didn’t drink. The bathroom door—like all motel doors, a layer of air separating two layers of one-eighth-inch plywood—had been badly hung and gave her little privacy. He heard her clean her mouth and spit. She filled the basin and washed her dress. A bit later, she came out in her slip, and though she was wearing a bra underneath, she had arranged a bath towel modestly over her bare shoulders. Some of her color had come back. She had used a comb and lipstick.

  She sat down on the edge of one of the double beds, knees together, but groaned faintly, piled two pillows together and lay back against them, her feet up.

  “Take your time,” Shayne said.

  “But that’s the point, you see. If I lie here being sick while everyone else is hurrying, I will go home with empty hands. And if you knew how much arguing before they agreed to let me come.”

  She had left her purse in the bathroom, but had brought a small leather folder, which she opened to show Shayne.

  “To start being formal. Though you don’t read Hebrew, I fear.”

  “You fear right.”

  “I am a member of the Shin Bet, which is a sort of police, but also part of the army. How much did the man from Washington tell you?”

  “Not a hell of a lot, just to expect you and it had something to do with an arch criminal who broke out of one of your jails.”

  “Arch criminal, I must remember not to say that any more. This is all you were told?”

  “If it turns out I can help, the State Department will be paying my fee, and they’re so damn tight they wouldn’t suggest it unless somebody in your government thinks it’s important.”

  “Which expresses it mildly. Very well, Murray Gold. We didn’t publish the reason at the time, but he was arrested for heroin.”

  “For doing what with heroin?”

  “For buying, to smuggle into the U.S. You realize his presence in our country presented a serious problem. Was he truly a poor Jew, or was that merely a ruse to persuade us to give him asylum? We were watching him, not very seriously. He had a young paramour in his house. We persuaded her to report to us who came to see him, how he filled his time. And she has vanished, by the way. We think she is no longer in the country.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Pulling the phone toward him, he dialled the combination to get an outside line, and then Tim Rourke’s number.

  “Tim, this has to be fast,” he said when his friend answered. “Can you give me a better description of that woman last night?”

  “The one we pulled out of the Ford?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The labels were cut out of her clothes. On the short side—say five-four. Broad through the can. She was shot in the face, and that changes anybody’s looks. Oh, heavy eyebrows—all the way across. When she rented the car she gave a New York address, but it’s a phony. Finge
rprints negative. That’s about all.”

  Shayne thanked him. After hanging up, he repeated the description to the woman on the bed.

  “Those eyebrows!” she exclaimed. “Her most conspicuous feature, the very strong eyebrows. Hair pulled back tightly. You mean she’s here?”

  “Her body’s here. Somebody killed her last night.”

  “My word,” she breathed. “Gerda Fox is her name. How complex it becomes. What we think, this is the current theory about Gold, is that when he first came he was authentically without money. At the same time, not ready to take his place as a working Israeli. He was constantly looking about for some crooked way to recover his fortunes. And one fine day he had a visitor from America. He was very much taken by surprise, and he jumped out the window and sprained an ankle. But afterwards they talked companionably. It meant nothing to us, merely an old friend or so. But Gerda reported that from this time on he had money. Now we began getting hints that heroin was entering the country. After the laboratories were closed down in the south of France, the smugglers were setting up new routes. And we are determined to keep this filthy traffic on the other side of Israeli frontiers. Many of our people have money-grubbing in their background, and heroin profits are so huge! Our Murray was behind this, we believed, but in police work it is always nice to draw a complete diagram before the pounce, to be sure of getting everyone. This time we couldn’t wait. He was accumulating a shipment, of this we were convinced. Where it was hidden, how it would be transported, these things we had not yet discovered. A decision was reached, and we came down on him like wolves and put him in prison under the Emergency Regulations. We continued our investigation, and it proved to be very true. He had invested a large sum in Turkish opium, and installed refining equipment on a fishing boat. They did the work at sea, so if the boat should be stopped for a search they could dump the evidence over the side. That he is clever, we already knew. Today, thank heaven, there is nothing left of the organization he put together. All have been jailed or have fled.”

  “Why didn’t you charge him and put him on trial?”

  “Because his big cache was still missing. So long as he was on preventive detention, it was possible to hope that he would come to terms. He was not a young man, or a well one. Our offer was one year, to be followed by deportation, in return for a guilty plea and the handing over of the hidden narcotics. He declared himself innocent. Then he escaped. Now I should tell you why I am coming to you and not the regular police. That person who visited him before he became less poverty-stricken also visited him in prison. Usually detainees are allowed no visitors, but this man presented police papers from the city of Miami, and stated that he wished to interrogate the prisoner on some criminal matter. What was actually said between them, we have no way of knowing. The escape happened a week later. So you see why I must be careful. One has heard accounts of police corruption in this country.”

  “What name did he give?”

  “Those records were destroyed in the explosions. The commandant was killed. Two of the survivors remember the visitor, but their descriptions differ. They agree that the name commenced with a J sound, Jennings, Jenny. The first name was Will.”

  “Will Gentry?”

  “Perhaps. Do you know such an officer? Is it likely?”

  “I know him, and it’s damned unlikely. But go on.”

  “I’ve been assigned to this business for a matter of months. I take it a little too personally, I’m sorry to say. This man tried to fool us, claiming the protection that has been earned by genuine victims of persecution. It was an affront to the memory of the millions who perished. Now if he is to succeed, after all, and live to a prosperous old age with good food and liquor and corrupt young women, it would be painful to me, in the extreme. So here I am. I have been convinced that he would come to Miami. I believe that immediately after his escape he recovered the hidden drugs and managed to slip across the border. How? It couldn’t have been simple, because it is my firm conviction that we had totally smashed his group. Every person who had the faintest, most cobwebby connection with that scoundrel.”

  “Why Miami? It’s true he comes from here, but it’s also true that everybody knows him.”

  “First because of his Miami visitor,” she said. “If here is where the money came from, here is where the drugs will be delivered. Second.”

  Shayne had followed her story carefully. Now he was trying to bring back the dimly-lit scene in the parking lot the night before—the two cars, the Ford with its trunk lid raised, a glimpsed figure struggling to lift a woman’s body. Murray Gold? Gold had always been a man who committed his crimes behind a screen of lawyers. The funny cap, the beard, the quick lift of a shoulder. It seemed almost as unlikely as her other idea, that Will Gentry had visited Gold in an Israeli prison. “Second,” the woman repeated.

  Her hand was at her mouth, and she was showing signs of returning distress.

  “I’m sorry as the devil, but I think I am going to vomit again.”

  She ran into the bathroom. The door slammed. She retched violently, and the toilet flushed.

  6

  Inside the bathroom, the woman who was using the identity of Esther Landau—she was the wife of the Sheik Muhammed al-Kabir, and a strong sympathizer with the Freedom Front—flushed the toilet again. She let the tank fill and flushed it once more, to cover the half-hearted choking noises she was making.

  And that was enough, she decided. It was hard to vomit convincingly without feeling sick. Earlier, to maneuver Shayne into a motel room, she had swallowed a fast-acting emetic, but she wasn’t putting her long-suffering stomach through that torment again, and there wasn’t anything left to come up.

  She gave her reflection in the mirror a small smile. So far, everything had meshed like the works of a fine watch. Shayne’s phone call from Washington, which had frightened her at first, had actually helped; he had given her identification folder no more than a quick glance, after all the trouble they had put themselves to, changing photographs.

  She listened at the door. She didn’t want the man to make any more of those sudden phone calls. She had convinced him, she thought, that the dead woman in the back of the car had been someone named Gerda Fox, one of Murray Gold’s procession of Israeli mistresses, but Shayne was no fool, and she knew that his mind was working. He impressed her, this American. There was strength and competence beneath his quiet manner, and something else. A hint of passion, if that was the proper word. Given the right occasion, he would catch fire, and like fire moving through brush, he would be impossible to stop.

  Even with his immobilized arm, he was as graceful as a cat. The movement of muscle across his chest had been delightful to watch. She was unaccustomed to big men, and she had been stirred by him. She had even considered—for only a moment, she was glad to say—maneuvering herself beneath the covers of that bed, still wearing the personality of the Israeli policewoman, and maneuvering Shayne’s large body in beside her. She herself, though she had never been allowed the freedoms that were considered by Israeli women to be theirs by right, was a woman of the twentieth century. She subscribed to western magazines, which kept her aquiver with reports about the worldwide sexual revolution. She agreed with this in theory, but until recently there had been pitifully little she could do to put it into practice. From this moment on, however, things were going to be very different.

  She took the pistol out of her purse, and started the water running hard into the basin to cover the sound she made changing clips. As she had been shown, she cleared the harmless blank round out of the chamber, replacing it with one that looked the same, but was nevertheless deadly. She smiled. Fuad had overdone the agony, pretending to be shot in the stomach, and Shayne, even with nine-tenths of his attention on the road, had come close to seeing the deception. She reminded herself again that it was a sharp man she was about to kill, and her hand had better not tremble.

  She slid the pistol back carefully, and wadded up handkerchiefs to wedge i
n around it. When she reached, she wanted her hand to close naturally on the handle. She was an amateur here, whereas the man in the other room was clearly skillful with guns.

  Her head felt suddenly queer and light. It would be the first time for her, ever. She had to do it, that had been made plain by everybody. She had asked to be included in the main action, and they had smiled. A woman? It was a galling reflection to her, that in the hated nation of Israel, women were required—not permitted, required—to serve in the army, elbow to elbow with men. Presumably they were also allowed, in certain circumstances, to initiate the sexual encounter. Among her own people, it was a different story. The women could show their faces at last, after centuries of agitation. But while the men talked and acted, they were expected to make the soup and keep their eyes modestly lowered.

  The thought had always made her angry. Now if she could focus on it she could carry this off without wishing it didn’t have to happen. She had been a soldier for one hour, Esther Landau, once an army lieutenant, now a police agent, who had come to a foreign country, entirely on her own, with a gun, to hunt a fugitive. The real Esther had had hair on her legs, a straight bar of eyebrows—an unattractive woman, probably. Did Israeli women make up their eyes? Probably not. Nevertheless, she took out a brush and worked on her eyelashes.

  Perfume? Unnecessary. She looked at herself once more. In another moment, she would kill a man.

  Shayne was at the TV set, flipping channels, with the sound down. “Better?” he said, causing the picture to dwindle and disappear.

  “Somewhat, I think.”

  “Cognac?”

  “No!”

  She sat in a chair this time, setting the purse on the floor so she could touch it with her right hand. Shayne stayed across the room. She had been advised to shoot him twice, aiming first at the bulk of his body, to knock him down, and then at his head, to kill. But if she missed with her first shot, he would be on her like a bolt of lightning. So she had to get him to come to her.

  “You were beginning to tell me something,” Shayne said.