Murder Spins the Wheel

by Brett Halliday

  “I’m the wrong person to come to for that kind of advice,” Shayne said. “I’m a friend of his.”

  “That’s why you have to help me. Please hear me, Mike. I’m at my wit’s end. Don’t condemn me out of hand, but for the last three months Harry and I, I’ve been his—”

  She couldn’t find any word for the relationship that she was willing to use. Shayne put in, “I got the idea from the way you kissed him.”

  “Yes. He wouldn’t have asked me to do that if he hadn’t been so shaken. Don’t be so grim, Mike. It wasn’t grim at the beginning. I had a proper secretarial job in an insurance office, and it bored me to tears. The same thing over and over and over, with everybody acting as though I ought to be grateful for being permitted to work for such an imposing company. I met Steve Bass at a party. His father was looking for an executive secretary. My friends all said, ‘Don’t you know who Harry Bass is?’ Somehow that made it more attractive, Mike. He’s a wonderful, interesting man. I don’t have to tell you that. I worked late a few times and he took me to dinner, and inside of six weeks I was—” She hesitated. “Well. I was going to bed with him.”

  “Harry never wasted much time,” Shayne said.

  “No. He had a look in his eye the first time he interviewed me. I recognized it, and he knew that I recognized it, and I took the job anyway. Growing up as a minister’s daughter in a little Tennessee town—I know it’s a cliché that ministers’ children kick up their heels as soon as they get away from home, but goodness knows it happened with me. Harry was going to France for a vacation. He asked me to go with him. I jumped at the chance. I’d never been anywhere before. And I had a wonderful time. He bought me a car. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but he—blossomed, Mike. His last divorce hit him hard. He must have known our arrangement was temporary! We never talked about it, I thought it was understood. He’s charming and fun to be with and generous and full of vitality, but I just can’t marry him!”

  “Because of his age?”

  “Partly. But the fact is, like it or not, I can’t close my eyes any more to the way he makes his money. Especially since we came back from Europe there have been—oh, hidden places in his days which I’ve known by instinct I shouldn’t ask him about. Conversations are broken off when I come into a room. I picked up the phone once when he was talking to somebody on the bedroom extension. That’s the only time he ever yelled at me.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “I think I love him, whatever the word means. I want him to be happy. He says he wants to stop all the cloak-and-dagger conniving we have to go through to be together. He thinks it makes me feel sordid and humiliated, but it doesn’t at all. It’s simply not important. Mike, I know it’s asking a lot, but could you explain that to him?”

  “No,” Shayne said unfeelingly. “I stopped delivering that kind of message years ago. That’s why I still have a few friends. This is between you and Harry. First you have to decide how you really feel.” He broke off. “The hell with it.”

  He drank from the bottle. There was a quick buzz from the radio telephone. He picked it up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mike,” Tim Rourke’s voice said soberly. “What’s with this marine operator? Never mind. I’ve got some bad news.”

  “About Harry,” Shayne said flatly.

  “Yeah. Do you want the worst of it first, or hear it in sequence?”

  Shayne’s fingers automatically felt for a cigarette. “In sequence.”

  “My man on the Daily News knows the duty sergeant in that precinct, and all it took was a phone call. You won’t like this, Mike. It’s a narcotics squeal.”

  Theo’s head was close to the phone. The reporter’s brassy voice came through the instrument loudly enough for them both to hear. The color emptied out of her face.

  “Where did the tip come from?” Shayne said.

  “I don’t have that. These were detectives from the narcotics squad, not federal men. They were in the lobby of the Central Park West apartment house where the big guy lives, waiting for somebody in a head bandage to make a drug delivery. Harry showed up in a topcoat and a head bandage. The doorman checked on the house phone—was it OK to send up a man named Bass? He was told it was OK. The dicks wouldn’t be able to get upstairs to see the transfer, so they arrested Harry as he was getting into the elevator.”

  “No,” Theo said distinctly.

  “Mike?” Rourke asked.

  “Go ahead,” Shayne said in a steely voice.

  “The lining of his topcoat was loaded with uncut heroin. I’m sorry as hell, Mike. I know how you felt about the guy. You know how it is with heroin estimates—some pretty big figures are being passed around in dollars. They haven’t weighed it yet, but they will. They’ve got the coat.”

  Shayne frowned. “They don’t have Harry?”

  “I’ll say they don’t have Harry. I can’t swear to what happened. Apparently Harry was almost out on his feet to begin with, and when they found the heroin he caved in. It was a real collapse, because the narcotics boys are experts at making arrests. They do it all the time and they’re hard people to fool. They didn’t think they could take him in except in an ambulance. He was in a chair or on the floor, I don’t know which. One cop went to the phone and all of a sudden Harry came up like a rocket. He butted the cop who was watching him. I don’t know anything about his head injury, but it must have hurt like hell. Maybe the pain helped. He hit the other cop with a standing ashtray. The next second he was out the door. Now this is what makes it tough. The guy he hit with the ashtray has brain damage, and they don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  “Harry, goddamn it,” Shayne said, half to himself. “You poor son of a bitch.”

  “It’s still early. Until we actually get the flash there’s no law against hoping. But the cops assume they’re looking for a big heroin man who killed a cop, and that adds to the pressure. He got away in the cops’ car. This happened a couple of hours ago, maybe three—I couldn’t get an exact time. The News has a dozen men on it now. I get credit for starting it, so they’ll call me with developments as fast as they come in. I’d better hang up now so the phone will be open.”

  “Yeah,” Shayne said bleakly.

  There was a tiny pause. “God, Mike, did you ever think Harry would—”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Shayne snapped. “Haven’t you been around long enough to spot a frame when you see one?”

  17.

  HE HUNG UP.

  “Here,” he said, extending the cognac bottle to Theo. “This may help.”

  She almost dropped the bottle but succeeded in downing a mouthful of cognac.

  “It’s not a frame-up,” she whispered. “The horrible thing is that it’s true.”

  “True that Harry was selling heroin to get Doc Waters out of a hole?” Shayne said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Her lips trembled. “I’m so sorry, so sorry. He hated the drug business. Mike, don’t you see? It must mean he was afraid he couldn’t raise the money on Monday. I knew things were bad, but not as bad as this. He’s lost money in grain futures. In the big real estate deal I’ve been working on there’s been delay after delay. I should have realized no one would loan him that amount of money without security, old friend or not. They don’t trust each other that much.”

  “Theo, are you trying to tell me he kept a reserve of heroin to fall back on when he needed cash?”

  She nodded slowly. “And I helped! Not knowingly, but there I am, right in the middle of it.”

  “All right, Theo,” Shayne said. “Take your time.”

  Suddenly her face went to pieces. It started quietly, but in a moment it took hold and she was weeping wildly. Shayne, one hand on the wheel, keeping an eye on the buoy, left her alone. As her sobs became more violent, she slipped off the table and crumpled to a heap on the floor.

  He waited till the first paroxysm passed. Then he said harshly, with the brusqueness that is often more effective than sympathy, “Get up now, Theo. You
must have known when you let Harry make love to you that it wouldn’t be simple.”

  She took a despairing breath. “Why can’t it be?”

  “The only time sex is simple is when you don’t see each other again after it happens, and that has drawbacks too. Get up and blow your nose. I want to hear what happened in France.”

  She was quieter, but when she still didn’t move he said with deliberate roughness, “Get up, Theo. It won’t be pleasant for you, but it’s worse for other people. So long as that narcotics man is alive, Harry has a chance. Stop sniveling and tell me exactly what you know.”

  She gave him one white, frightened glance, and came to her feet. Her glasses were askew and her face was streaked. She tottered against him. He gave her a little shake and kissed her lightly.

  “All right?”

  She reached out defiantly for the bottle. She took a long drink without coughing, then another. He took the bottle away.

  “You can get drunk later.”

  “I don’t think I was crying for myself,” she said in a low voice. “I suppose I was partly. Harry didn’t think he could get away from those policemen, Mike. He wanted them to shoot him. He knew he didn’t have a chance. He’d be sent to prison for a long time, for the thing he hated most. His friends would think he’d been a hypocrite all these years. What his friends thought was important to Harry.”

  Some of her color had come back. She touched her temples with trembling fingers. She felt for a cigarette, and Shayne lit it for her. Then he turned back to the wheel, bringing it up a tick.

  “He bought me that car in France,” she said behind him. “The Alfa. Even if I could have afforded it I wouldn’t have driven a car like that before I met him, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It’s custom-built. They kept installing new gadgets the two weeks we were there. Harry wasn’t as interested in sightseeing as I was, and I was off by myself part of the time. I was walking on the promenade—” She faltered.

  “I’m listening,” he prompted.

  “I saw him with two men at a café. One was the garage-man, the man who was working on the Alfa. The other—” She hesitated again, and went on with a rush, “I can’t describe him but oh, he was creepy-looking. There was a package on the table. I didn’t say anything to Harry. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. I suppose I knew that the package had money in it and he was paying the creepy-looking man for something he intended to smuggle back inside the Alfa. We came home separately. He flew and I came by boat, with my new car. And a few days after I was back something funny happened. I park on the street outside my apartment building. Late at night I felt like going for a drive, for no particular reason, just for the feeling of driving at night in a new white Alfa-Romeo. And it was gone! I didn’t call the police. I was afraid they’d ask me how I could afford a car like that on my salary. I called Harry. He said not to worry. He’d put the word around. If a local thief took it, it might come back by itself. And next morning there it was. I thought it showed the advantages of having such an influential friend. Now I know where it was that night—in a garage, being taken apart so they could get at the drugs inside it.”

  She was silent for a moment, staring at her clenched hands. “The face of that man in the Nice cafe. Mike, I didn’t like that man’s face.”

  Shayne swore to himself. “Well, maybe I’m wrong.” He swung the wheel, brought the throttle up and headed back toward the Miami Beach side of the bay. “I’d better see if Doc Waters is still at Harry’s. I think we can find a place to tie up on Normandy Isle.”

  “I’d like another drink, please,” Theo said. “Don’t worry, I’m not getting drunk.”

  He handed her the bottle. Over it she said brightly, “I’m sorry for Harry, but don’t think I’m not sorry for myself too, because I am. What am I going to say when the police talk to me? They must already know quite a lot, if they were waiting for Harry in New York. There’s no way out of it for either of us. No way.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. She gave him the automatic smile of an efficient, self-possessed secretary. She began repairing her lipstick.

  “I’m a newspaper figure from now on. Tim Rourke and his friends will have a field day. I don’t blame them—it’s their job. In plain English, I’m Harry’s mistress. He took me to the Riviera and bought me a five-thousand-dollar car and other expensive presents. I thanked him in the usual way. Will anyone believe I didn’t know there was heroin in the car? And the truth was, I had doubts about that disappearance and reappearance. I didn’t do anything about it so I wouldn’t have to put any serious questions to myself, such as what was I doing hanging around with these people? I wonder how long a sentence they’ll ask for. I wonder if my father and mother will want to attend the trial. They get so little diversion.”

  Shayne didn’t like the hysteria in her tight voice, and, as he eased up on the wheel to make the turn around the buoy, he glanced at her again. She had a little automatic pressed beneath her left breast. Her eyes were tight shut, her arms and shoulders were rigid, and there was a look of concentration on her face.

  He went sideward very fast. He gave her hand a sharp twist, as though turning a doorknob, and at the same instant he hit her shoulder, breaking her contact with the gun. There was a crisp explosion. She screamed and threw herself back on the gun before Shayne could get it out of her hand. She fired again. This time the bullet hit her. She staggered back against the table, gave a small cry, and all the rigidity went out of her body. He shook the gun out of her hand. The Nugget, coming about in the current, banged against the buoy, sending Theo into Shayne’s arms.

  “Mike, it hurts!” she said accusingly.

  “Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.”

  He lifted her into a seated position on the table, with her back to the wall. Blood was spreading across the shoulder of her dress, below the collar bone. He ripped the dress down from her shoulder. The bullet had gone in high, an upward angle. Possibly it hadn’t hit the bone.

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” he said.

  “It was stupid of me to miss.”

  He went down for the gun, a little Belgian .25, put it on safety and dropped it in his pocket. He ripped a piece out of her skirt, which he wadded up and handed to her. “Hold this against it as hard as you can.” He turned back to the wheel. The motor had cut out. He started it again. They had drifted off the buoy, but he could feel an underwater drag, as though he had fouled the rudder on the buoy cable.

  “I don’t have any strength,” Theo said weakly, and slumped over to one side.

  “I’ll take care of you in a minute.” Shayne reversed, backed all the way to the buoy and came forward at full speed. There was a wrenching and scraping underneath the boat. The motor labored and died. Shayne tried the starter. It ground on and on but the motor wouldn’t turn over.

  “I thought I’d get you to a doctor,” he said, “but I guess not. I’m not much of a doctor myself. It’s lucky it isn’t much of a wound.”

  “Lucky,” she said bitterly.

  “I’ll see if I can find any bandages.” He took the flashlight to the main cabin. In a cupboard beneath the stainless-steel washbasin he found a first-aid kit and a box of sanitary napkins. Probably there were other medical supplies aboard, but he didn’t want her to lose any more blood while he looked for them. He filled an empty whiskey bottle with water.

  When he returned he found her lying awkwardly across the table, her eyes closed. She was trying to hold the wadded cloth against the bullet hole, but she couldn’t maintain pressure; all it was doing was catching the blood as it came out. He moistened a sanitary napkin and sponged off her shoulder. There were two wounds, a tiny one in front, a larger one in back where the bullet had come out.

  “People sometimes kill themselves with a .25,” he said, “but you can do a better job with a larger gun. I won’t ask you how long you’ve been carrying this. Why didn’t you ever talk to Harry about what you thought had happened with your car?”

  “I
tried tonight. That’s when he asked me to marry him.”

  Shayne folded one of the napkins and bound it tightly in place with a long strip torn from her slip. “You could have told him you wouldn’t marry him because you suspected him of smuggling heroin.”

  She raised her head and said with surprising spirit, “I wouldn’t marry him even if he wasn’t!”

  He bound the ends of the improvised bandage under her shoulder. She wanted another drink and he held the bottle for her so she could get it down.

  He lifted the radiotelephone and summoned the operator.

  “Mike Shayne again,” he said.

  “I was wondering if you’d call. I’ve been sitting twiddling my thumbs.”

  “I need the Coast Guard,” he said. “I seem to be hung up on a buoy at the entrance to the La Gorce canal.”

  “Mr. Shayne! How did you manage to do that?”

  “It was easy,” Shayne said with disgust.

  18.

  AFTER NOTIFYING THE COAST GUARD air station of Shayne’s predicament, the operator rang Tim Rourke’s number for him. The reporter answered.

  “Nothing more, Mike,” Rourke said. “The AP here in town has the story, but just the lead. The New York guy won’t admit he was expecting Harry. Says he hardly knows him, hasn’t heard from him in years.”

  “And I bet the cops believed that,” Shayne said.

  “Steve Bass called me, Mike. Harry’s boy. He’s been talking to a girl named Betty something. Don’t forget I’m in the dark about this. I told him to bring her over and you’d show up sooner or later.”

  “That’s fine. Don’t give the girl much to drink or she’ll pass out before I can talk to her. I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up. Theo said weakly, “Who’s Betty?”

  “No one you know. She was in jail with me. It’s a long shot, but I’m playing the long shots tonight.”

  She was breathing quickly. “Poor Mike. It’s embarrassing. Bumping into a buoy. And all for nothing, because next time I’ll make sure you’re not around to stop me. You know that, don’t you?”