Shayne grinned skeptically.
Naples admitted, “OK, when you’ve seen one sea gull you’ve seen them all. Since I was a kid I’ve been on the jump, and sitting still all of a sudden—you’ll find out when it happens to you, Shayne. I got a bang out of how I handled Ladybug this afternoon. But that’s as far as it goes. Do you know how much you’d have to pay me to take Harry’s job? You couldn’t pay me enough. The headaches, I happen to know. The doctor says with my blood pressure not to get excited. When you’re sitting where Harry is, you’ve got to stay excited nine tenths of the time.”
He sucked at his cigar. “So somebody held up old Harry. I’ll be f—” He swallowed the rest of the word, looking past Shayne at his wife’s shoulder. “They walked right up to him with their bare faces hanging out? I wouldn’t want to do that myself, unless he’s really changed.”
“They wore masks,” Shayne said. “They stopped him by setting fire to his Cadillac. They pistol-whipped his driver and chased Harry over a stone wall. They were a lot younger than he is, in pretty good condition. They caught him and knocked him around. I think I’ve known Harry as long as you have. Anybody who thinks he’s turned into a cream puff is making a big mistake.”
“It could be I agree with you,” Naples said. “Maybe I get tired watching sea gulls, but that don’t mean I want any kind of trouble with Harry Bass.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to argue with you. He took a bad beating, and he ought to be in bed right now, under sedation. Instead of that he’s out beating the bushes for two-day money. He couldn’t find it in Miami so he went to New York. I might have been able to talk him out of it if I’d been there, but I wasn’t. He’s got a hell of a temper, as you probably know. One thing a concussion does is take off the brakes, and I hope everybody handles him with kid gloves. Naturally he’s going to be wondering who did this to him. He’s sure to be in a half-haze and not thinking too clearly, but somewhere along the line, on the plane going up or the plane coming back, it’s going to hit him—is it possible his old friend Al Naples—?”
He drank the rest of his cognac.
Naples said, “Hell, he can take my blood pressure. I’ll let him bring his own doctor.”
Shayne said seriously, “I’d like to get you to agree not to talk to him tonight at all.”
“I’ll hide under the bed,” Naples said. “Will that do?”
“I’m serious,” Shayne said. “Harry doesn’t go in for nonviolence. If he makes up his mind that you did it to him, he may come looking for you with a gun in his pocket.”
“For Christ’s sake! Give him credit for more sense.”
“I come back to what I said before,” Shayne said. He took out a cigarette and reached past Mrs. Naples to get a book of St. Albans matches. After lighting the cigarette he leaned forward again to toss the match into the ashtray. She was half-turned toward a paunchy little man with a head like a dried apple, but Shayne saw the small signs that meant he and her husband had her full attention.
He said deliberately, “It’s either somebody like you, with experience and confidence, plenty of funds and plenty of muscle. Or it’s somebody young and wild, without sense enough to be scared. I’ll tell you a few things I’ve picked up. Two of the stickup men died in a car crash. Both of them come from St. Louis.”
Mrs. Naples’ shoulder made a slight involuntary movement. The redhead went on, “St. Louis is close enough to Chicago so you’d know people there, but not too close. A third man got away. The money got away with him, but we’re hoping to find his fingerprints in the wrecked car. I have a lead to a fleabag hotel called the Gloria. I have another lead to a football fix. There are indications that that was planned here at the St. A.”
“What do I know about football?” Naples said.
“All you need to know is somebody who knows the quarterback. Harry hired me to look for the dough. I took the job before I knew you were involved. If this ends in a killing, if I find out who robbed Harry and the man is killed, I’m in line for an accessory rap. That could be serious if it happens here on the Beach, where the cops don’t like me. So I’m on a peaceful errand. I hope everybody will make up. Thanks for the drink. I don’t suppose you have any soothing message you want me to give Harry.”
“Tell him he has my sympathy,” Naples said. “I’ve been through it myself. If you see Doc, tell him I’m waiting for my dough.”
Shayne pushed back his chair and stood up. “Harry can’t be back from New York before one, so enjoy yourself. After that don’t answer the phone and don’t go to the door. I hope I can head him off. Nice to have met you, Mrs. Naples.”
She started and swung around. “Going, Mr. Shayne? It was a pleasure to meet you.”
The ex-baseball player made him stop and meet his new wife. Out of the corner of his eye, Shayne saw Mrs. Naples excuse herself and start around the dance floor toward the ladies room. He freed himself from the ex-ballplayer and his bride and took the elevator to the lobby.
9.
“I DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD take that long,” he said to the doorman. “Everything OK?”
“Perfect.”
Shayne slid into his Buick and started the motor. He was gambling that Mrs. Naples wouldn’t be able to reach Vince Donahue by phone, or would want to talk to the boy in person, to warn him that Shayne was looking for somebody who formerly lived at the Hotel Gloria. Shayne pulled back his coat sleeve to check the time. If she didn’t come out in two minutes, he would have to go back and scare her some more.
In just under two minutes, an open red convertible shot out of the underground parking garage and turned north on Collins. Mrs. Naples had a gauze scarf over her hair, tied under her chin. She was driving rapidly, in a hurry to deliver her warning and get back to her party before she was missed.
Shayne joined the traffic behind her. Her scarf blew loose and she poked it back angrily with one hand. At 63rd Street, she swung sharply to the left and crossed the bridge to Allison Island, then turned again, over the canal to La Gorce. It seemed unlikely that Donahue would be living on this island of big estates. In a moment more she stopped near the mouth of a short lane leading to the bay. There was a lighted boathouse at the end of the lane. Several boats were tied up along both sides of a floating pier.
She unlatched the door hurriedly and started to get out, then checked herself and came back into the car. She removed the scarf and fluffed out her hair. Adjusting the mirror to check her lipstick, she caught the glint of Shayne’s headlights behind her. She whirled.
He blinked his lights at her and brought the Buick to a halt behind her convertible. He got out without hurrying. She waited for him, her lipstick raised as though to slash him with it. The boat at the end of the pier, he noted, a sixty- or seventy-foot cruiser, was brilliantly lit up.
He opened the convertible’s front door and got in beside her. She shivered and said in a low controlled voice. “I thought you were setting a trap for Al. You were setting it for me, weren’t you? And I walked right into it.”
“I meant part of what I told him,” Shayne said quietly. “I don’t want Harry to kill anybody. That includes Donahue.”
She made a distracted gesture with her open lipstick. “You don’t care about him and you know it.”
“That’s true,” Shayne said. “He kicked me in the kidneys a few hours ago, while one of his friends from St. Louis was rapping me behind the ear with a gun. That’s all right. I get used to it. But my client isn’t as understanding as I am. If Vince wants to live through this, he’ll turn over the dough and leave town fast.”
“You can’t really think that he robbed—”
“Sure I can. And so can you, Mrs. Naples, or you wouldn’t be here. He heard about Al’s plans for Ladybug from you, didn’t he?”
“Naturally.” She was trying to paste herself back together, and nearly succeeding. “Al said it was surefire. I saw no reason Vince shouldn’t benefit by it. He hates to take money from me.”
Shayne snorted
. “I’m sure.”
She looked at him pleadingly. She seemed older than she had under the flattering lights of the Mozambique Room, but she was still a beautiful, passionate woman. She put her hand on his.
“I’m in your clutches to some extent. Apparently you’ve picked up some circumstantial evidence, but I know Vince! I know his strengths, his weaknesses. He couldn’t have done this. He’s too interested in having a good time.”
“The quarterback who shaded the points in the football game gave me a definite identification, Mrs. Naples. One of the dead hoods is an old acquaintance of your boy. Vince was the third man in the robbery, and we both know it. The money wasn’t in the wrecked car. That means he has it, or he knows where it is. I want it.”
She touched her diamond necklace. “I don’t suppose you’d settle for—”
“No,” Shayne said brusquely. “It’s true I stand to collect a ten-percent recovery fee, but that’s not the only reason I have to have it. I need it to slow Harry down. He’s walking around like a time bomb. If I can scare Vince into coughing up the dough, and get it to Harry before anything happens, I think I can control him. I won’t use any names. As far as I’m concerned, Vince can take off. I’ll even leave him a couple of thousand for traveling money.”
“You don’t know Vince,” she said unhappily. “He’ll spit in your eye.”
“That’ll be too bad,” Shayne said briefly. “Where is he, on the boat?”
He turned to get out. She caught his sleeve.
“Wait. He’s on the boat, yes. It’s ours. Some friends are letting us use their dock. We needed a captain, and Vince is good with boats. I said he could have some guests aboard tonight to celebrate Ladybug’s success. Let me talk to him first.”
“No, you go back to your own party.”
“I must,” she said distractedly. “But don’t you see, this has to be put to Vince in a certain way. He’s a proud boy. If you walk in, big, masculine, competent, you’ll antagonize him. With his friends egging him on, he’ll have to defy you. And he can be so stubborn. I know! You won’t come away with either money or information. If you’ll just give me a minute I know I can persuade him. I just have to repair my lipstick first.”
Shayne took the lipstick out of her hand and dropped it into her open bag. “Al’s going to want to know why you’re spending so much time in the ladies’ room. I needed to find Vince, and you’ve cooperated nicely. Goodbye.”
She brought her hands together in an imploring gesture. “Don’t tell him how you found him, I beg you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Al isn’t trying to take over from Harry Bass. I’d know, really. We’re together half the day, for hours and hours and hours.”
“How much have you been seeing of Vince?”
“Oh, God, not enough! By plotting and planning and not thinking of anything else at all, I manage to meet him three or four times a week.”
She added in a low voice, “Don’t judge me. I’ve tried to break it off, but I can’t. I know it’s entirely physical. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been able to—” She broke off.
“You’ll outgrow it,” Shayne said, getting out of the car. After slamming the door he said casually, “If you only see Vince a few times a week I don’t suppose you know what he’s been doing for Doc Waters?”
Her eyes skipped away. “Nothing, I hope. I don’t trust that man.”
“Is Vince using narcotics?”
Her eyes opened wide. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. “No,” she whispered. She shook her head violently. “No! He keeps himself in such wonderful condition, he takes such pleasure in his body, he wouldn’t do anything to damage it. What put that terrible thought in your mind?”
“A girl at the Hotel Gloria wants to put him in jail. She gave me a reason, but it didn’t sound good enough. If he’s getting started on a habit, a jail sentence might break it up.”
“You’re wrong.”
Seeing Vince as little as she did, she shouldn’t have been that sure, Shayne thought, but he let it go.
“If you want to be helpful,” he said, “go to bed soon, take the phone off the hook and keep your husband occupied. I don’t want any conversation between him and Harry Bass before tomorrow.”
He nodded and walked away. She called after him anxiously, “Be careful what you say to him. He’s so touchy.”
10.
THE MOMENT SHAYNE STEPPED on the planking of the pier a voice spoke from the doorway of the boathouse.
“Wait a minute there, mister. Where do you think you’re going?”
A short, muscular man, wearing a blue boating cap pulled over his eyes, stepped out of the doorway and put himself between the detective and the bay.
“Is this private down here?” Shayne asked.
“Damn right it’s private,” the man said belligerently. “It’s a private island, practically. This is a private dock, private boats, and that’s a private party. No crashing tonight. I’m making no exceptions.”
“I’m not interested in the party,” Shayne said mildly. “I just want a couple of words with Donahue.”
“No exceptions. If you want to leave a message for him I’ll see that he gets it.”
“The trouble is, I didn’t bring a pencil,” Shayne said.
He gave the bill of the man’s boating cap a hard yank, jamming it down over his eyes. The man groped out with one hand while wrenching at the cap with the other. Shayne spun him around and sat him down hard in a wooden arm chair, which rocked back on its rear legs and came to rest against the front of the boathouse.
When the watchman forced his cap up from his eyes, he found the powerfully built redhead towering above him, his gray eyes cold in the dim light from the interior of the boathouse.
“Well, hell,” he said weakly. “If you’re going to get hard about it.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Various ones. Captain Donahue tonight, he gave me a ten-spot to keep out the crashers. He says every time he gives a party the whole public piles in on him. But I didn’t undertake to get my face bashed in for ten bucks. A good big man can always take a good little man, and you can tell him that if he asks you.”
“How long have you been sitting here?”
“Right along. And there wasn’t no big rush of people. You’re the first.”
Shayne took out his cigarettes and shook one out for the other man. In the flare of the lighter, the watchman’s face was alert and inquisitive. The redhead closed the lighter after starting a cigarette himself.
“I’ve been looking for Donahue all over town. Has he been aboard all evening?”
The watchman, like most people in solitary jobs, was glad to have a chance to talk. “They all have, the whole kit and kaboodle, and by the sound of it, they ain’t going to be leaving under their own locomotion. It’s been going on since the cocktail hour. And they were soused then. Captain Donahue, he had a breath on him you could start a swamp fire with. That’s why I didn’t feel like putting up more of a scrap. Why spill any blood when he won’t know the difference anyway? So go ahead.” He waved his cigarette. “Go on in.”
Shayne breathed out smoke. “What time do you mean by the cocktail hour?”
“Say half past five? And you know they’ve got young girls in there? I’m no puritan myself, I like a snort as well as the next man, but one thing I do hate to see is a girl soused under the age of twenty-one. They don’t know what they’re doing. They keep pouring it down, and the next thing you know—one more unwed mother. Now I’m not going to say for sure that’s what’s been going on, but if you go by the screeching they surely to goodness ain’t been playing scrabble.”
“Did the noise keep you awake?”
“That’s not the problem. I suffer from insomnia. That’s why I hire out for night work.”
“Would you be willing to take an oath,” Shayne said, “that Donahue’s been on that boat every minute since five-thirty?”
“I would,” the watchma
n said promptly, adding in alarm, “What do you mean, an oath? I never took an oath in my life.”
Shayne left him worrying about it. The first boat was a great mahogany monster from Newport, Rhode Island. The next berth was empty. Then came a fifty-foot ketch, and finally the Nugget, which sounded more like the name of a gambling house than a boat, out of Chicago, Illinois. Al Naples was not a man to go cruising in anything small. The Nugget sat high in the water, and underway probably carried a crew of three. Shayne went up the gangway. Most of the lights were on except on the stern. When a girl laughed, Shayne went in that direction.
“Do that some more,” a voice said in the darkness.
Coming around the curving end of the deckhouse, Shayne smelled the harsh, penetrating reek of marijuana. He saw a glowing spark at shoe top level.
“Vince?” he said.
There was a light fixture on the jutting overhang. Shayne found the switch, on the cabin wall near the companion-way. His foot touched something soft and a girl’s voice said, “Watch where you’re walking.”
The light flashed on. Two girls and a man were lying on the deck amid pillows and scattered clothing. One of the girls, thin and tired-looking, sat up and blinked. She was wearing a thin gold necklace and toenail polish but nothing else. At first she seemed angry, but her expression changed as she took Shayne in. Her pout changed to a whistle.
The man was lying on his side, mixed up with the second girl, whose face was hidden under a tangle of blonde hair. This girl gave no indication of knowing that a light had been turned on or that a stranger was watching. The man was Vince Donahue’s age, but unlike the descriptions of Donahue Shayne had been getting, he was pudgy and out of condition. He was untanned, his skin the color of the underside of a trout. His eyes were so glazed they seemed to fasten on Shayne’s by accident.
“That light, man, it’s murder.”
The girl slipped her naked foot inside the leg of Shayne’s pants and scraped her toenails against his calf. “Come on down. We need some new blood.”
Murder Spins the Wheel Page 7
