At the Point of a .38

by Brett Halliday

  Gold said feebly, “Baby, help me.”

  “God, look at Artie,” the girl said.

  Artie was clearly dying. His head was against Gold’s thigh. His hands fell away from the wound, which had the circumference of a clenched fist. He rolled out of the seat and lay with his neck on the knob of the stick shift.

  Shayne patted Gold and took a gun out of his waistband. Only then did he unhook the belt.

  “How bad is he?” the girl said.

  “Let’s take him somewhere and see. Move him to my car. You carry him. I’ll carry Raggedy.” While she struggled with Gold, Shayne went to check on Sergeant Tibbett. The top barrel of the Winchester had blown apart in his face, and there was nothing anyone could do to help. The air force would give him a military funeral.

  Gold was almost as limp and floppy as Helen’s long-limbed doll. She kept him on his feet and moving. A car stopped; Shayne waved it on. Gold and the girl fell together into the back seat of the Buick.

  Helen saw two things, the satchel and the shotgun. Her eyes jumped to Shayne.

  “Don’t grab it,” he told her. “It isn’t loaded. But the satchel is, you’ll be glad to hear. Close the door.”

  “And just leave Artie—”

  “Artie forgot that when you fool around with loaded guns, they sometimes go off. But you weren’t planning to take him with you, were you? Sergeant Tibbett was more mature. A much better complexion.”

  She cut her eyes at Gold, to see how much of this he was comprehending. Not much, probably.

  “Your father won’t care for any of this,” Shayne said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she muttered, and went on, for Gold’s benefit, “Was that Tibbett in the red car? What happened, did Artie shoot him?”

  Shayne gave a barking half-laugh, and drove off. Gold was waving, begging for attention.

  “Wipe off the blood and slap on a few band-aids. That’s mostly shock. Nobody’s had the guts to shoot at him in years. I think you’ll find a box of Kleenex back there somewhere.”

  She worked in silence while Shayne took the turn toward the ocean, then started south. Gold gave a yip of pain.

  “Are you going to tell us where the hell we’re going?” she said.

  “We’ll talk about that as soon as I find a place to stop. There’s a lot of picking up to do after a double-shooting, and we don’t want to spend the day answering questions, do we?”

  Hearing a faint sound a moment later, he twisted the rearview mirror so he could see what was happening in the back seat. The girl was whispering into the old man’s ear. Gold’s eyes met Shayne’s. Hearing that Shayne was willing to talk was helping him recover.

  Shayne swung into a two-table picnic area between the road and the ocean, and turned everything off except the tape-recorder. Gold came up on his elbows.

  “How serious?” he asked the girl.

  “If you’ll hold still for a minute,” she said crossly, “maybe I can tell you.”

  She spat on a folded Kleenex and scrubbed at his face. He tried to push her away.

  “Can you be a little more gentle?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without any water.”

  “Dip it in the ocean,” Shayne suggested.

  Helen considered this a not bad idea. Getting out, she crossed the strip of hard sand to the water’s edge. Shayne offered the old man his flask. Gold looked at it suspiciously, but finally took it. He touched the refrigerator with his toe.

  “Any ice in this thing?”

  “That hasn’t worked for weeks. Drink it straight. It’s better for you.”

  “Mike Shayne,” Gold said after drinking. “One of the reasons I blew this country was to get away from you. And here you are when I get back. You’d think Dade County would be big enough so we wouldn’t keep bumping, but no.”

  He handed the flask over the seat. “Well, I came close.”

  Helen returned with the wet Kleenex and a piece of cloth she had torn off the tail of her denim shirt. “What have you been talking about while I was gone?”

  “Nothing important,” Gold said wearily. “We don’t have secrets. We’re on opposite sides.”

  “Honey, maybe you didn’t catch what Mike said back there. He’s going to start talking business in a minute.”

  “It’s an old technique. That’s to get our hopes up. This car is famous—it’s heavily wired. He’s taping everything we say.”

  “So? That’s for insurance. Honest,” she insisted, “he’s as big a crook as anybody. I’ve listened to my old man. Let me see your face.”

  Gold offered it to her, and she cleaned him off. Apparently most of the blood had come from Artie.

  “When that gun went off,” Gold said. “A double-barrelled shotgun from a range of two feet. Quite a surprise.”

  “Will you hold still?”

  She pulled the thread of a band-aid and slapped it on.

  Gold said, “If we’re going to be talking about money, Shayne, I’d like to get out of earshot of that tape recorder. But go ahead. How much are you thinking about cutting yourself in for?”

  “Half,” Shayne said. “One dollar to you, one dollar to me.” He drank from the flask before putting it away. “I don’t know what your father was talking about, Helen. I try to stay straight on everything but narcotics. That whole thing’s such a mess there’s no honest way. I think half would be fair. If I turn you in, Murray, and I don’t turn in the whole package, I’ll have rumors to cope with, and for a private detective rumors can be bad. And if I tried to rip off the whole amount, I’d have you on my back.”

  “Which isn’t such a big thing as it used to be,” Gold said, “but still.”

  “I’d be worrying, and I couldn’t enjoy the money. I don’t know how much there is there, but fifty percent ought to keep you going. To be realistic, how many years do you have left?”

  “Eight hundred thousand bucks,” the girl said dreamily.

  “Divide it in half and it’s still good bread. I’ll drop you in Key Largo and hope I never set eyes on either of you again.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything,” Helen declared when Gold looked at her. “He saw the key to the boat.”

  “People have been talking about Uruguay,” Shayne said.

  Gold exclaimed, “That’s the thing about you, Shayne. ESP or something.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll want to take Helen, after she tried to get you killed.”

  “I—!” Helen cried. “I tried to kill Murray? He’s my passport.”

  “Sergeant Marian Tibbett,” Shayne said. “Same money, same boat. But much more of a fun companion for a young girl.”

  “Murray, he’s just saying that to make trouble.”

  Gold put his hand on her leg. “As far as I’m concerned you can come. I’ve lived with this kind of thing for a long time.”

  Shayne laughed. “Murray, you’re pathetic.”

  “Then let’s move,” she cried. “Open the bag and start counting.”

  “Oh, there’s more,” Gold said. “This is a law and order man, basically. He wants an arrest. So we’re going to chat for a few minutes. But the kid’s right, Shayne. We don’t want to hang around all day. Who can I give you? I don’t suppose Helen’s big enough.”

  “I know you’re not serious,” she said nervously.

  “For my own information,” Shayne said, “who was your buyer?”

  “That’s the one thing I’ll reserve. I don’t even like to mention the word.”

  “Heroin.”

  “That’s right—get it on tape. But that’s stale stuff. You want to get in on the big news today, and that’s not heroin and it’s not Murray Gold. I’m passé.” He linked fingers with the girl. “In more ways than one.”

  “Daddy, you’re not,” she protested. “You’re just a little slow sometimes.”

  “Turn on the radio, Shayne.”

  Shayne flicked on the dashboard radio. It was still tuned to the FM station that carried Tim Rourke�
�s show. It played jazz most of the day, and that was what was being broadcast now, an old Bessie Smith single.

  Gold said, sitting forward, “Is that a Miami station?”

  Shayne punched a preset button and the indicator jumped. An unexcited voice was telling them what to expect in the way of weather: continued warm, a three out of ten possibility of showers.

  Then: “Repeating the day’s top story. A woman has been found slain in a luxury suite at the Hotel St. Albans. Identified as Mrs. Lillian LaCroix, thirty-one, of this city. She was shot three times at close range with a heavy-caliber weapon. Robbery has been ruled out as a motive, police say. The expensively dressed Miami Beach woman was wearing a valuable watch and other jewelry, and carrying several hundred dollars in cash. The suite is registered in the name of Louis Solomon of New York, who is being sought for questioning. Further details as they come in.”

  And he went into a commercial.

  “Lou Solomon,” Gold said in a low voice. “What the hell.”

  When he didn’t go on, Shayne reached for the dial.

  “Leave it on, leave it on,” Gold said.

  13

  That commercial was followed by another.

  “And all we’re doing is sitting here,” Helen complained.

  Shayne turned down the volume. “Who’s Lou Solomon?”

  “One of the big Jewish fund-raisers. Rich? It goes without saying.” He turned Helen’s wrist so he could see what her watch was telling them. “But what’s going on up there, will you kindly tell me?”

  “What’s supposed to be going on?”

  Helen moved restlessly. Gold shook her wrist without letting go.

  “I’ll fill you in, Shayne, and when the news breaks we’ll go our separate ways. Give me a slight idea how much you know.”

  “Helen told me quite a bit.”

  “To get him to go, Murray!” she said. “He planted himself down as though he planned to stay all day. You were due any minute.”

  “You used to be a hot pro-Israel man yourself,” Shayne said. “I seem to remember some arguments about whether or not they should take your money.”

  “A long time ago,” Gold said. “And if I’d gone on acting one hundred percent pure, where would I be right now? In Ramleh prison, on indeterminate sentence, and I’d be dead in six months. I’ve got a heart condition, I’m a physical wreck. So when an Arab was willing to talk to me, I shouldn’t extend him the courtesy?”

  “Murray—Daddy—” Helen said. “That’s ancient history. Tell him about it, but in a nutshell.”

  “I needed their help with the bust-out, and that went off fine. And there I was, didn’t have a cent to my name, and all my friends were either scared to see me or I couldn’t find them. How I needed those Black September guys. They bought me some clothes and an airplane ticket, and they carried in a suitcase for me. But after they got over here, this is my neck of the woods and the shoe was turned around, they needed me. They had no phone numbers at all. Of course I let them think I’m bigger than I really am any more. But with help from this dear child here, I worked it. Though I’m willing to state for the tape recorder that she didn’t know she was doing anything against the law.”

  “At the beginning,” Shayne said.

  “She’s a bright kid,” Gold agreed, giving her leg a pat.

  “Who had the idea for the kidnapping, you?”

  The question embarrassed Gold slightly. “It came up. They’ve been wanting to pull some kind of trick in this country. Everything sort of fitted in. There’s this oil sheik who had a standing invitation to visit some big muckymuck in Boca Raton. They found out when the committee was having the quarterly meeting in Miami Beach, and timed it to overlap. All right!” he said defensively. “But what they don’t realize is that this won’t cut into the flow of funds at all. Wait till you see next month’s totals. Every Jew in America will bring out his checkbook. I grant you—it’ll be a big boost for the Arabs if it works.” He smiled slightly. “But not if they blow it.”

  “Explain that,” Shayne said, and Helen added, “Quickly?”

  “Artie and me supplied the vehicles,” Gold explained, “but before I turned them over I stuck in a couple of bombs. Timed to go off just about now.”

  “The ping-pong balls!” Helen said.

  “Incendiaries. You know what we’re talking about, Shayne? All the arsonists have been using them lately.”

  On the radio a voice began speaking in great excitement. When Shayne turned up the sound, it proved to be merely the regular announcer praising a liquid floor wax.

  “Goddamn it,” Gold said, worried. “They wouldn’t hold back a piece of news like that. They’d put it out right away.”

  The girl put in, “If anything’s wrong, Murray, isn’t it all the more reason for you and I to be heading out to sea?”

  “I kept hearing how everything had to be timed, to the goddamned second,” Gold said. “A guy named Rashid. I saw him work at Ramleh, and the cat is good. He’d be a colonel in any army in the world. When he said something would happen at such and such a time, that’s when it happened or some heads got chopped. We got the cars to them at a quarter to eleven. Game-time was eleven sharp.”

  “I was talking to the manager of the St. A. when they walked in,” Shayne said. “Eleven o’clock straight up.”

  “Eleven forty-five now,” Gold said, checking the watch. “Even if they ran into trouble right away, we ought to be hearing about it. They were going to collect everybody in Solomon’s room. Nine men on the committee, but a couple aren’t getting in till this afternoon. They had everybody’s room number. Like with the manager, they were going to take his secretary and everybody else in the office, to keep the lid on as long as they could. Phase one was fifteen minutes. If they couldn’t find somebody, forget it. Then down to the lobby for the announcement. They had a bullhorn. Rashid figured out the best place to stand. Eleven-twenty. ‘I’m Rashid Abd El-Din, known to my friends as the Palestinian Superman. The vile Jews, blah, blah, blah. We want one million apiece, and we want to see it at the airport in exactly one hour, sixty minutes. An airplane, and get it gassed up and rolled out on a runway, all by itself, with a full crew. And no monkey business or all the Jews will get killed. Which they’re used to, of course.’ Any questions? No questions. Off to the airport.”

  “Taking everybody?”

  “Just the committee. There were eight Arabs to start with, one kid didn’t make it in time. Just about one on one. I tried to tell them it would take over an hour to scrape up that much cash. What do you think, Shayne?”

  “Six or seven million? Banks, racetracks.”

  “His big point was that he didn’t want to get into one of those long negotiations, with everybody armed on both sides and getting more and more nervous. That’s why he didn’t make any demands on Israel. Everybody knows they don’t pay blackmail, period. If they didn’t have the cash by the deadline, too bad for the hostages. The hour was supposed to start at eleven-twenty. So what’s happening? I set those timers for eleven-forty, to go off about halfway between the Beach and the airport. They’re distributed like this. Three Arabs in a limousine, the rest in a hearse, two in the front seat, two in back with the Jews. They’re bowling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour. Bang. The guy who sold me the ping-pong balls said those flames are going to shoot thirty feet in the air. The explosion comes up through the floorboards and takes out the driver. They’re going to rack up, aren’t they? That takes out the limo. The hearse slams on its brakes. Thirty seconds later, another bang. I jammed the back doors so they wouldn’t lock. They fly open and six or seven Jews and two Arabs spill out on the highway. I think we can take them, if we jump fast enough. There’s going to be plenty of confusion, and that’s all to the good. The bomb in the hearse, I put it in on the right, and hopefully that’s where Rashid is going to be riding. The others aren’t in his class.”

  “Murray,” the girl said admiringly, “you know you’re sort of a genius? Now ca
n I make a suggestion? While we’re talking why don’t I divide the money?”

  “Shayne wants to be in on that.”

  “Get it up off the floor where I can see it,” Shayne said. “Do it by packages, throw one over and keep one.”

  “And don’t try any razzle-dazzle,” Gold said. “He said half, and if we don’t give him half he’ll hold it against us.”

  Shayne stepped up the volume again. Fifty minutes had now passed since the Arabs walked into Manny Farber’s office. The St. Albans was one of the long row of Collins Avenue hotels, almost as closely spaced as the two-family houses in Homestead Beach. The Fontainebleau security officer had listened intently to Shayne’s call, and had seemed to take it seriously. So where were the police?

  “One for you,” the girl said. “One for us. This is fun.”

  “Any ideas, Shayne?” Gold said after a moment.

  “Yeah,” Shayne said slowly. “Did these guys trust you?”

  “Not an inch. Trust me? You know Barney, the bondsman. They told him how he could find me, and he had a good financial reason to do it. That way I’d be tied up so I couldn’t call the cops and have them waiting at the hotel. I sneaked out of it O.K., but it damn near worked.”

  “So why would they give you the right timetable?”

  Gold’s eyes slitted down. “You said they put the snatch on Farber exactly at eleven.”

  “But they didn’t make an announcement in the lobby at eleven-twenty, or we’d know it by now. This is a new kind of operation for them. If they’re smart they’ll try to keep it quiet until they’re gone—all the way out of the country. After they picked out the hostages they wanted, I think they left the others locked up in the hotel. Helen said that you and Rashid were looking at diagrams. He wouldn’t need diagrams if he was really planning to walk out the front door with all the guns showing.”

  “They have to run a press conference somewhere, why not at the hotel? They’re perfectly safe, nobody’s going to shoot at them as long as they’ve got those hostages. Be serious, an hour isn’t a hell of a lot of time to raise six million bucks. You mentioned the racetracks. The money’s there, but somebody’s going to have to persuade those guys.”