“I almost forgot something,” Gold said.
Using the point of a screwdriver, he chewed up the lock so the latch wouldn’t hold, and fastened the doors with tape.
“Did you happen to notice she wasn’t wearing pants?” Artie said.
“What?”
“The chick. How about that, in a funeral parlor? If you don’t believe me, go and look.”
“Thanks,” Gold said chillily. “What kind of a zombie do you think I am?”
Artie chuckled and faked a punch. “Didn’t it all go easy, though? Like you said.”
“The day’s just getting underway.”
Artie had taken three Dexies before they left, a dose Gold had considered about right. But after tying up the girl and laying her out in the coffin, without underpants, he was so high that Gold considered feeding him something different now to take off the edge. No, he decided. He wanted the boy to seem dangerously excited when they met the Arabs. Of course it was a gamble. He would have preferred to use somebody from his old world, whose behavior could be predicted exactly, but what the hell! This whole thing was out of character for him. He might as well go all the way.
Artie did an impromptu shuffle on the blacktop while Gold tended to one other matter. He had a paper bag containing two timing devices, two lumps of plastic explosive, two ping-pong balls and a hypodermic needle. Each assembly had cost him twenty dollars. He had placed the order by phone, refusing to give his name, and Helen had driven in to pick them up. The ping-pong balls were partly filled with some mysterious fluid. Gold had never inquired into the chemistry of it; all he knew was that it worked. He injected each ball with a spurt from the hypodermic needle, and sealed the puncture with a drop of quick-setting adhesive. He set one timer for 11:40, the other for thirty seconds later, wired each package, and then installed one in a limousine, the other in the hearse. At 11:40, when the plastic material blew, the ruptured ball would scatter its contents over the motor, burning with an intense heat. And if for any reason the timing mechanism failed, the ping-pong balls would catch on fire themselves, sometime within a twenty-minute range, between 11:30 and 11:50.
“I know you’re going to explain all this to me sometime,” Artie said, watching.
“When we get to Uruguay.”
“I wanted to look that up on the map, where it is.”
“Their winter is our summer,” Gold said. “Otherwise it’s about the same. Now throttle down, Artie. I want you to look like Bogart, in those early movies. Dumb. Deadly.”
“Like this?” Artie said, making a face.
Gold gave a half snort and waved him into the hearse. The black raincoat helped, but no funeral director in his senses would hire a driver with that tangle of hair. But it wouldn’t matter. They would only be travelling a few blocks.
Gold got into the limousine and moved the seat forward a notch. After checking the gas and working his way through the shifting system, he gave Artie the signal to move out.
He went first. Their destination was a parking garage between Dade Boulevard and Collins—a many-tiered concrete structure with a spiralling outside ramp. They picked up their tickets and began the climb. Ignoring open spaces along the way, they went all the way to the top, and found the Arabs waiting.
At this hour—it was 10:42—the tide of parked cars hadn’t risen this high, and they had the level to themselves. Artie parked at a slant, blocking the ramp. Bringing the keys with him, Gold got out of the limousine.
He counted Rashid Abd El-Din, the leader, and three others. Three more were somewhere out of sight. Unlike Artie, the Arabs were dressed for their role as undertaker’s helpers, in jackets and ties. It was only when they were clumped together that it could be seen how much they resembled each other. They were all in the same age bracket, mustached, equally dark and lean. Gold knew, however, that they were not all equally foolhardy or equally anxious to die.
But God, they looked serious.
Rashid gave him a tight smile and went to the rear of the hearse. “One limousine, one hearse. As ordered, Murray.”
“Something wrong with the doors. You’ll have to hold them shut from inside. You’ll find the guns in the coffin.”
Rashid stepped inside. Artie had drifted over to the elevators and leaned back, his hands deep in his side pockets. The outline of the guns showed clearly. After all Gold’s worrying, he couldn’t have been better. His eyelids were partly down. His demeanor showed that whatever he was called upon to do here, his conscience would give him no trouble later, because he didn’t possess one. He looked like the one thing he was not, a professional killer. He was the one the Arabs watched, not Gold, who had killed someone as recently as the previous evening.
The Arabs had come in a rented Pinto. Looking into the back seat, Gold saw the suitcase. The young Sayyid was beside it, forcing himself to smile.
“A warm morning, Mr. Gold! Here it is, heroin, from the other side of the ocean, successfully.”
Gold got in and moved the suitcase to his lap. It was locked, but it was his own suitcase, bought in Beirut, and he had the key. He opened it. Moving shirts and pajamas aside, he saw the four tightly packed bags.
“Now that’s a beautiful sight.”
“The keys to the other cars, Mr. Gold. We must separate now, and good luck.”
“This is going to take about thirty seconds.”
He had a 200-tablet aspirin bottle, containing a colorless, slightly oily liquid. He slit the tape on one bag with the limousine’s key, and pinched out an approximate double-dose.
Sayyid murmured, “We didn’t expect any delay. We should move.”
“Don’t rush me.”
He unscrewed the cap with one hand. Heroin dropped into this bottle would turn the liquid deep blue. It was the same crude test used by narcotics agents, not for heroin’s purity but for its presence in a mixture after a cut. Rashid jumped down from the hearse.
“Sayyid,” he said sharply, and added something in Arabic.
“We can’t wait here, it’s dangerous,” Sayyid announced, and snatched the car key from Gold.
Gold was trying to do too much at one time with only two hands, and he dropped the damn bottle. As he went down to retrieve it before the liquid could gurgle out, Sayyid gave him a push.
And the door opened.
From a cramped position partly on the seat, partly on the floor, Gold looked into the hole at the end of a pistol barrel. The pistol was no larger than normal, but the hole looked huge. Gold had already begun to wonder if it had been smart to trust these enemies of the Jewish homeland. His pleasure at seeing the suitcase again had caused him to slack off, and his reactions were slow. He blinked up at a face he vaguely recognized. This was one of those people who do the small, dirty, high-risk jobs, and as a result spend most of their lives in jail. His face said that he had stopped caring. Gold had never had much contact with these men, and here he was, at the age of sixty-four, being stared at by one from the other side of a cocked pistol.
A second man of the same type got into the driver’s seat. No new car had arrived. They had been waiting for him, and it was apparent that they had known where to wait as a result of being tipped by the Arabs. The unnatural alliance was definitely over.
Sayyid said nervously, “All right? All right?”
He slipped away. The gunman came in and slammed the door.
“Barney’s going to scream when he sees that suitcase. Junk, Murray? And you were always such a big man.”
The name Barney explained something. Barney was head of a loosely-organized group of investors who wrote most of the organization bonds. Sale of the confiscated heroin would go a long way toward covering the losses they had incurred when Gold absconded to Israel.
The limousine and the hearse, with the Arabs inside, moved toward the exit ramp and disappeared. Artie Constable, as Gold could have predicted, had faded from view.
“In fact,” Gold said, “Barney’s going to be so glad he’ll give me a big hug and a kiss an
d put me on an airplane.”
The man seemed to doubt this. “But everybody’s been so pissed off at you, Murray.”
Artie, approaching the car from behind, didn’t try anything fancy. He fired through the window, hitting the gunman in the head and killing him instantly. Gold grabbed the pistol. The driver gave one backward glance, and his hands went up as though trying to catch a fly ball. Artie opened the door for him and he got out, his hands still high. Artie disarmed him, and Gold dumped the dead man at his feet. Artie contorted himself into the narrow space behind the wheel and they drove away, winding down to the exit, where they had to pay to return to the street.
9
Shayne had no trouble finding the Homestead Beach address. It was the upper half of a two-family house, three blocks from the ocean. Like many of the houses on the block, the For Sale sign was up; Homestead Beach had been hit hard by the cutbacks at the nearby airbase. The windows were curtainless. Shayne drove past. It was a street of nearly identical houses, most of which needed paint or other forms of attention. In a few more years, the only thing to do with the place would be to burn it down and begin again.
He parked and came back across-lots, approaching the house from the rear. The two-car garage was empty. He went quietly up the back stairs. The door was unlocked.
He turned the knob, and entered a kitchen. Like her mother, Helen felt no obligation to keep abreast of the dishes. The fare here was TV dinners, sardines and crackers, store pie, instant Sanka. Much beer had been drunk, many cigarettes had been smoked. The remains were everywhere.
He heard a belch. A girl walked in with a beer in one hand. When she saw Shayne she screeched and the can went flying. She had just come from the bathroom and her jeans were open. This was clearly Helen. She had her mother’s hips and thighs, from which she would probably have been glad to shed a few pounds. Her hair was in curlers. Without them, and with a new expression on her face, she might have been almost pretty.
“How are you making out down here?” Shayne said. “I’m Michael Shayne. A couple of questions to ask you.”
She grabbed her jeans as they started to slide. “Goddamn you, goddamn you. Two minutes later I would have been on the road. How did you find me?”
“You left footprints.”
She took a step forward. “What do people have to do to get a break in this world? Please, please! Don’t take me back.”
The shock of finding a strange man in her kitchen had drained most of the color from her face. Even her lips were white. She held out both hands to him and said desperately, “Please! You don’t know what he’ll do to me.”
“Your father? What will he do?”
“Beat me to a pulp. Do you think I’m kidding? You know how he does with the pot-heads. He comes home with scabs on his knuckles. Why do you think I kept dropping out of school? Because I was bruised up! Give me a break, Mr. Shayne?”
“Let’s find out what the situation is first. Where’s Gold?”
She stared. “She-it,” she said in disgust. “I hoped you didn’t know about that.” She came closer and picked at his sling. “I can’t offer you money because I don’t have any. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in—” She gave him a look. “No, I didn’t think so. But I’ve heard about you. You’re supposed to be halfway fair. I don’t care about Murray, I don’t care about anybody in the goddamn fucking world. I’ll confess every little sin I ever committed, if you won’t make me go home.”
“You still haven’t told me where Gold is.”
A calculating look fled across her face. “I’ll make a deal. I’ll tell you the whole thing, from the time I first went down on him, if you’ll say you won’t make me go back. You don’t know what it’s like there.”
“I’m beginning to get a pretty good idea. Maybe you can persuade me.”
She gave a relieved laugh. “Then come on in and have a beer or a smoke. Are you a pot-man, by any chance?”
“Sometimes, when I’m not working.”
The kitchen had a table and chairs, but the only furniture in the living room were two mattresses and a folding beach chair. Helen sat down cross-legged on a mattress.
“You’re the guest, you can sit in the chair.” She waved around. “Ghoulish, yes? And if I told you what they charge for this place!”
Shayne sat on the footrest of the long chair. Helen popped a beer can and offered it. When he declined, she took a quick pull at the beer herself.
“Luke,” she complained. Setting it down, she began taking out curlers. “I must look like a singed cat. Not too irresistibly attractive, huh? I know where you want me to start, and I’m not going to start any place until you give me your oath. If I answer all your questions to the best of my ability, so help me God, will you bug off and tell my old man you couldn’t find me?”
After considering for a moment, Shayne nodded. “Unless you’ve done something you can be arrested for.”
“You could probably get me for conspiracy, but that’s the shittiest law there is, and besides I’m a juvenile.”
“Conspiracy to do what?”
She said sincerely, leaning forward, “Mr. Shayne, I honestly don’t know! Murray kept telling me it would be better if I didn’t. The idea I had at first, he was bringing in a shipment of hash. But considering how nervous everybody’s getting, I think it may be something a little stronger. A little more illegal. Anyway, I had nothing to do with that part, and I know Murray will bear me out if you can find him.”
Shayne lit one of his own cigarettes, the kind containing tobacco. “How did he get in touch with you?”
“Oh, I wrote him a silly letter. I was feeling moody that day. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but what did it cost me? I sort of exaggerated how much I missed him. I like Murray, he’s sweet, and he’s not too enterprising sex-wise any more. It’s been practically all oral on my part. I told you I wasn’t going to keep anything back.”
As the curlers came out and the dark hair fell around her face she looked younger and prettier. “I’m supposed to be kind of good at that, as a matter of fact. I can make almost anybody squeal. Be that as it may, I drew him some X-rated pictures to get that old tingle going. I had this nutty idea, that if he ever came back it would change my luck. And that’s the way it happened! But I don’t see why I owe him a hell of a lot of gratitude, considering I have to think of my own self, don’t I?”
“Yeah.” Her mother had said much the same thing.
“Well, I do! He called from New York. I was so thrilled! He told me to rent a place, and then he came down, looking just like all the other tourists. He told me he rented a car, but what he really did, he stole it at the airport. So all the time I’ve been hurrying here and there, I was driving a hot car, and if some nosy trooper had picked me up, wouldn’t that have been marvelous, though?”
“Where does Artie Constable come in?”
She gave a high laugh and took some more beer. “You’ve been talking to dear old mom. He’s this friend of mine from school. Murray needed somebody who looked sort of tough and I suggested Artie and we contacted him, and he said sure. He’s been staying here, and the less said about that, the better. Murray doesn’t mind, he’s so out of it himself.”
“Now about the heroin, Helen.”
“I never said it was heroin. All I know is, some Arabs brought it in for him.”
“What kind of Arabs?”
She went into a handbag on the floor beside her. “I’ve got a clipping. I cut it out when Murray broke jail. I’ve been reading everything, all that stuff about the citizenship, keeping my fingers crossed that he wouldn’t get it and he’d have to come back. Well, I know it’s here somewhere, but take my word for it. It had the name of one of the Arabs, Rashid whatever. Murray sent me to this certain mansion in Boca Raton to ask for somebody with that same identical name, and don’t tell me that was a coincidence. And to bring him down here. A neat guy, but he looked right through me. He could be a fag—I wondered about that. He and Murra
y had a lot to chew over. Do you mind if we pick up the beat a little, Mr. Shayne? I was about to split when you walked in. I’m going to try and make it in Southern California.”
“Without your two friends?”
“Seriously! Artie’s O.K., but all he likes to do is smoke dope and float. And Murray I said goodbye to this morning. He gave me two hundred for a going-away present, which wasn’t too bad. That was no permanent thing. To begin with, how long would he last? All I wanted was travelling money, and I got that. So.”
She poured down more beer. “I bought a few things for him. You may not believe this one—ping-pong balls and a hypo. I know! Don’t ask for an explanation. And there was a sergeant here from the airbase one night.” She giggled, sounding for an instant like her mother. “He put his hand on my ass in the kitchen, which I appreciated because he knew it was risky, with Artie and Murray in the next room. Am I helping?”
“Some. What happened this morning?”
“He packed his bag. So long, kid, thanks a million. I didn’t ask any questions! Artie was so wound up he had to keep going to the bathroom. Before they left he hopped himself up with some jumpers. Murray told him to take three. He took five. I popped a couple myself, does it show?”
She sneaked a look at her watch.
“How are you travelling?” Shayne said.
“By thumb, natch.”
“What do you think they’re doing now?”
“What I think they’re doing now—I could have wormed it out of Artie, but I decided not to—is picking up a package and taking it somewhere and turning it into cash. And then they’ll go their separate ways. Murray did some phoning last night. Plane reservations? Maybe. He’s got a wonderful Lebanese passport, it looks just exactly like him. He grew a beard, did I tell you? And he has this creepy hairpiece that looks about as real as Astroturf. Well.” She looked at her watch again. “The thing is, I want to be out by the time Artie gets back. He thinks we’re going to stay through the month. What he doesn’t know is, I already got back the deposit. If you want to, you can drop me on the highway. And gee—I certainly want to thank you, Mr. Shayne. It shows there are nice people in the world, after all.”
At the Point of a .38 Page 9
