Armed... Dangerous...

by Brett Halliday

  He had finally succeeded in catching Shayne’s interest. The redhead sat forward and said thoughtfully, “Two and a half million bucks worth of junk is a lot of junk.”

  “About two tons,” Power said. He took a card out of his pocket. “Here are the figures for the last time. Total value $3,548,000. The heroin alone was $2.7 million. The rest was cocaine, marijuana, goof balls, odds and ends. Total number of arrests, eleven thousand over a three-year period. This time we’re cleaning house after two years, but the retail price has gone up. We’ll have an exact total later. Two and a half million is only a guess.”

  “Give or take a million, still it’s something to shoot at,” Shayne said. “And negotiable, as good as cash. But I don’t see your problem. How many cops do you have in New York? About twenty thousand. You ought to be able to move two tons of junk across town without being hit.”

  “Now wait. Who thought the Japanese would hit Pearl Harbor? Who expected anybody to rob the Brink’s warehouse? That’s the point. They can assume we won’t expect anything, because who in God’s name would have the gall? The stuff is downtown now, and our security is good there. Nobody’s going to walk in with a few handguns and walk out again alive. The incinerator at the other end is built like a fortress. We’ll have a bunch of people there to certify that the right envelopes are burned. That means the attempt has to take place between those two points. We’ll be out in the open for forty-five minutes and you know we won’t use twenty thousand cops. In the ordinary course of events, two would be enough.”

  “Nobody would try it without some good information,” Shayne said slowly.

  “Apparently they have it. I have an idea where it comes from, but never mind that now. Let him go on dreaming.”

  “What I’d do,” Gentry said. “It’s like any narcotics action—something has to happen before you make an arrest. But hell. Use twenty or thirty plainclothesmen in unmarked cars. Land on them the minute they make their move. You’d have a nice pinch.”

  “That was our first idea, Will. But listen.”

  He heaved up out of the chair and began to pace. “This is no nickel-and-dime operation, two or three crazy amateurs shooting for a big score. A couple of tons of narcotics—you need an organization to market it. Maybe the organization. And if you want to find guys who are willing to take on two armed cops in city traffic, you have to spend some money. You’ll need a minimum of six people. Three or four vehicles. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t want to pull in the small fry this time. I want the man or the men who hired them, who can always hire somebody else. And this time, damn it, I have a chance! I used to be in charge of Narcotics. I inherited the usual complement of stoolies, and I developed some of my own. About three weeks ago I began to get indications that something big was in the offing. A gun named Tug Wynanski turned down a job for a certain date, and that was the same day we’d reserved time at the incinerator. I hate to use shoo-flies, but sometimes you have to. I put men on every clerk in the property department, and seventy-two hours later I had the leak. We watched him around the clock. We put men on Wynanski. For a week now I’ve known exactly how many people are in it. I have their names and records. They’re holed up in a rented house on Staten Island, which I have under surveillance. How many times has it happened in your experience, Will, that you know in advance that a crime’s going to be committed, who’s going to commit it, and where you can put your finger on them whenever you like? As far as I’m concerned, it’s never happened!”

  “If your surveillance is that good,” Gentry put in, “you should be able to tie in the higher-ups without using Mike. No?”

  “Not unless I let them pull off the heist exactly as planned. That gets too risky. If we lost track of them somewhere along the line, I’d have some serious explaining to do to the Super.”

  He took a quick pull at his beer. “Wynanski’s been tagged once or twice, always for small things. What he’s supposed to be good at is putting together a package. You bring him an idea and he handles the details. There’s one trouble with him, he has a temper and he likes to drink. He drives over to Manhattan every day, and on the way back to Staten Island he’s likely to stop at a bar. Here’s how I think we can get Mike in. Two days before D-day, we’ll pick up Wynanski for assault. They’ll believe it. He’s the main guy on the execution level. It’ll leave a large hole.”

  Shayne snorted. “You’re out of your mind. What do I do, knock on the door and say I’ve heard on the grapevine that they need a man?”

  “What I haven’t told you yet is that there’s a girl, a French girl named Michele Guerin. She’s the one who’s been handing out the advances. She has an apartment in Manhattan. According to her dossier, it’s her first time in this country, and she probably has the usual foreigner’s idea of how much everyday violence there is on the streets of New York. Now imagine this scene. She’s driving down Fifth. Shots are fired. A big redhaired hoodlum—no, we better dye your hair, Mike, that thatch of yours is too well known—not a red-haired hood, a black-haired hood, backs out of a bank with a gun in his hand. He shoots an off-duty detective and commandeers the girl’s car. Why wouldn’t she fall for it? She saw it happen.”

  Gentry said, “One thing I don’t like about that idea. It’s too public. Too many things to go wrong. Because what if Mike runs into a real off-duty detective, shooting real bullets? How would you time it so the car would be there at the right moment, and then wouldn’t get jammed up in traffic? I think it ought to be inside. You’d have more control.”

  Shayne looked at his friend in amazement. “Will, do you mean he’s already sold you on this pipe dream?”

  Gentry’s eyes moved uneasily. “It sounds far-fetched the first time you hear it, Michael, but it takes hold. It could be worked. The way I see it, it’s in an elevator. No problem about the timing—you simply wait till the girl shows up. You only need two men. Your straight man comes in with her. Mike’s waiting. All three of them get in the elevator. If somebody else gets in, no matter. Mike pulls his gun. The straight man—say he’s a gambler, carrying a real roll. Mike has to slug him. He can use the old cackle-bladder routine from the con games—a plastic membrane filled with chicken blood. He has it in the palm of his hand, and claps himself on the forehead and all at once starts bleeding like a damn pig. Then Mike shoots the off-duty detective, on the way out. He grabs the girl and backs into the elevator and lays up in her apartment. A few prowl cars circulate around with their sirens going. That’s all the atmosphere you’ll need. The girl needs somebody like Mike. She offers him the job. Why not? We can think of a few refinements, but basically it’s all right there.”

  Shayne shook his head morosely. “How many beers had you put away before I got here?”

  “Quite a few,” Gentry said, “and every time I have one more it looks a little better. Where’s the hole in it, Mike? All we want to do is establish you as a gunman in trouble, and it shouldn’t be hard. She won’t know you’re shooting blanks.” Suddenly he smiled broadly. “Sandy, show Mike the picture of this doll in a bikini. He’ll stop arguing.”

  Shayne said impatiently, “If she looks that good in a bathing suit, aren’t there any easier ways she can make money?”

  “She’s definitely not routine,” Power said, “but none of the rest of this is, either. I’ll tell you what Interpol has on her. She’s thirty-two, and well preserved. For three years, maybe longer, she was the mistress of a Greek shipowner. She went along on yacht trips with some highly placed people. She spends money freely. They think she carried some stolen bonds from Paris to Macao a year ago. She was suspected of blackmailing the younger son of a minor king, and that’s all, except for one small fact. During the bond investigation an agent heard her phoning somebody named Adam.” He looked at Gentry. “Does that name mean anything to you, Will?”

  Gentry shook his head. Power went on, “It meant something to me, and it meant something to the agent who put it in the dossier. Actually we know quite a bit about the man,
considering that we don’t know if Adam is a first or a last name. He’s English, probably not by birth. What we all agree on is the nature of his business. He finances the international movement of guns, drugs, gold, stolen paintings—you name it. He may or may not use an actual bank, nobody knows. We don’t know if he’s one man or a group. We don’t know where his headquarters is. It could even be some kind of a code name, though that I really do doubt. Well, I haven’t put away quite enough beer to give you my lecture on international underworld finance, and I don’t know such a hell of a lot about the subject anyway. But if you’re in the legitimate export-import business, shipping goods from one currency system to another, you need a legitimate banking connection. And if you’re in a crooked export-import business, you need a crooked connection.”

  Shayne shrugged. “You’d do better to take this to the FBI. Everybody there has to be either a lawyer or an accountant.”

  “That’s not what I need,” Power told him. “I need somebody to get this girl’s confidence. I ought to mention that when she isn’t working, she seems to prefer large, rugged men.”

  “Which is why you thought of Mike,” Gentry said gravely.

  “Hell, we need everything going for us we can get.”

  “Christ!” Shayne said.

  Power opened a folder on the bureau and handed the detective a six-by-eight glossy photograph of a girl in a two-piece bathing suit, standing in a stiff breeze on the bow of a sail boat. Shayne studied it for a moment.

  “About the fee,” he said, “I’ll want that in writing.”

  Power laughed. “You can have it in writing. I had a feeling you’d like her looks. Now how could a lovely girl like that get involved in something like this?” He picked up his beer again and looked into it as though if he stared hard enough a scene would take shape. “I think they were sitting around somewhere in the south of France, she and our Mr. X—Adam something or something Adam. He mentioned a proposition he’d heard about in New York. A hundred-thousand-dollar investment, a couple of million in return. And what a coup for their side! The poor underpaid cops worked and slaved for two long years, picking up a dribble of heroin here and a dribble of marijuana there, and then they lose it all in one afternoon. He’s toying with the idea, but he can’t use any of his regular connections in the business because he’s afraid they’ll throw it away. And the girl, who’s tired of running penny-ante errands, says, ‘Let me!’ Adam likes to work with gorgeous girls, it’s one of his trademarks. He gives her the name of a New York gun, Tug Wynanski, who will do all the donkey work. Now cops always go by likelihood and percentages. How many would believe this girl was the contact on a big-time stickup? I’m retiring next year, Mike. This would make a nice thing to retire on. Listen—even if you can’t get anything conclusive on him, find out his name! Blow his anonymity and he’s more or less through. Sure, somebody else will come along six months later, but that’s the condition of police work. It goes on.”

  Shayne poured himself some more cognac. Both men watched him.

  “And what if I do succeed in getting in without getting myself killed? I’ll be at the bottom. How do I find out anything about this banker you don’t already know?”

  “We can bypass the girl. Say they have a series of ten steps. You carry out the first nine, and then pull a fast switch that puts you in possession, you personally. Then you can make him come to you. That’s only the outline. It needs a lot of work.”

  “I’ll say it needs work,” Shayne said. “What do you think about it, Will?”

  Gentry said impassively, “I wouldn’t have asked you over if I didn’t think you could swing it, Mike. You’ll be in touch with Sandy all along, and he’ll have his men within shouting distance. There’s a risk, but maybe it’s no worse than some of the jams you get into under your own steam. You know what I think about the heroin business. I think everything about it stinks.”

  “If you want to stop it,” Shayne said evenly, “all you have to do is change the law.”

  “Mike, I know you think doctors ought to handle the problem instead of cops, and it could be I agree with you. But that’s not in the cards right now and you know it. Personally I don’t like the idea of these creeps thinking they can make monkeys out of the New York police. My God, if anything went wrong no cop anywhere could show his face in public for weeks.”

  Shayne thought about it while he finished his drink, balancing inevitable dangers against possible results. It was wild and improbable; common sense told him that the odds against coming to grips with the shadowy banker were very long. But Shayne had always done his best work against the odds, and he found himself calculating how much luck he would need to bring it off.

  “I just hope they don’t ask me the way to the Empire State Building,” he said, and reached for the phone. “I’ll see if Tim Rourke can talk his paper into giving him a few days off on speculation. He’s a born ham. Nothing he’d like better than hitting himself in the face with a cackle bladder.”

  CHAPTER 6

  In the washroom in the eerie Victorian house on Staten Island, Shayne unfastened the wire from his battery case after reporting in to Inspector Power, opened the window and tacked the wire to the outer sill. Then he washed his face in rusty water. Dying his hair and eyebrows had changed his appearance more than he had thought possible. Everything had gone as Power had predicted until the moment when Szigetti said he thought he had seen Shayne somewhere.

  Quickly Shayne reviewed what he knew about Szigetti. Power had had little information about the man. His arrest record was short and unimportant. He had been a Marine for four years. He had been court-martialed for selling supplies but acquitted for lack of evidence. His discharge had been honorable.

  A transistor radio, tuned to a disc-jockey program, was playing when Shayne entered the living room. Irene danced toward him with thin arms extended. He embraced her. Without a partner, her entire skinny body had been in active motion, but this was not Shayne’s style of dancing at all.

  “You’re creaky, Dad,” she said.

  Shayne let her go with a disgusted wave. “Where do they keep the liquor?”

  She tried to hold him. “I didn’t mean anything. I like to dance that cornball way. It’s a change.”

  “I want a drink. Where’s Billy? He’ll dance with you.”

  “He had to go back on guard. And who’s going to drive in here in the middle of the night? I mean, it’s nuts.”

  “There you are,” Shayne said, spotting a bottle. “I don’t suppose we have ice.”

  “Sure we have ice.”

  She went to the kitchen. Shayne emptied somebody else’s watery drink out of a jelly glass and filled it from a bottle of blended rye. Irene came back with a handful of ice cubes.

  “Where did Michele find you, anyway?” she said, putting one in his glass. “I really thought we were raided when you walked in.”

  “I like to see a girl put up a fight,” Shayne said irritably.

  She laughed. “It only took five of us to slow you down. You know what I was thinking when I had you around the waist?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  She was standing close to him, drinking. She was older than he had thought at first—twenty, perhaps. Her torn blouse was held together with a straight pin. There was a prominent horizontal bone at the top of her ribcage. Her skinniness was charged with vitality, like a naked wire. Her hair was long and messy, and not much face showed. From across the room she had merely looked eccentric, but at a distance of less than a foot she was an arresting and unsettling girl. She idly slid her fingertips inside the waistband of his pants and gave him a small tug.

  “Later?” she said.

  “Who knows?”

  “Not that it matters,” she said, “except to me, but I had an off-Broadway part last year. Just a walk-on. You didn’t see it—it only lasted nineteen performances. That’s the way I look at this—a part. But God, I’m nervous.”

  She touched the outside of his jacket,
feeling the hard bulge of his .45. “I had a vague suspicion.”

  Across the room, Michele was talking to Szigetti, her eyes on Shayne. Brownie was slumped in a leather-covered Morris chair, his dark face as uncommunicative as a wall. All were holding drinks. Shayne walked over to Michele and asked if there were any cigarettes.

  “You have some, Ziggy,” she said.

  He unwillingly offered his pack to Shayne. “I was just saying,” he said. “Basically the idea is good, but I got a couple of minor suggestions. The one thing I don’t want to touch is that act of Irene’s. The big black buck and the Greenwich Village beatnik. That’s going over big.”

  Shayne looked down bleakly. “Do you and Brownie get the same cut?”

  Szigetti’s eyes jumped away from Shayne, not quite reaching the Negro, who regarded them impassively.

  “As far as that goes.”

  “Then let’s have less of this color crap,” Shayne said.

  Szigetti looked at Michele for support. “What did I say wrong?” he asked on a high note.

  “We change the subject,” she said firmly. “I have told Frank about your shooting. Perhaps you will show him the gallery.”

  “Well,” Szigetti said grudgingly, “I’ve been sopping up booze all day. I could be a little off.”

  He finished his drink and started for the kitchen, saying carelessly, “Brownie, let’s do some shooting.”

  Without change of expression, the big Negro followed. Only Irene stayed upstairs.

  “Exhibitionist,” she said with a look at Szigetti’s back.

  The others, waving cobwebs out of their eyes, went single file down a narrow flight of steps to the basement. It was a spooky place, lit only by two dim bulbs. Rust had eaten holes in the furnace, but the bin beyond was still half-filled with dusty coal.

  Szigetti faced into the shadows. “What’s the matter with that light down there? See if it’s loose or what, will you, Brownie?”