Fit to Kill

by Brett Halliday

  Rourke and Malloy followed. A call came over the public address for all passengers on Flight 266, to Mexico City, to load promptly at Gate Five. As Shayne neared the gate, he picked out two Miami detectives, who were scrutinizing the passengers as they came through. Shayne made a small signal with one eyebrow. They let him pass without a greeting.

  Carla cried, “Isn’t that—Look, beside the porter.”

  Ahead, on the brilliantly-lighted apron, Shayne saw three separate groups, one a party of four, another a man and a woman, and finally a single figure walking beside a low truck loaded with baggage, which was being trundled toward the plane. The detective’s step quickened.

  The four passengers reached the steps. The lone figure, a man, was bent forward, peering at the asphalt, seeming to be using the truck as cover. Shayne beckoned to the Miami cops. They ran after him.

  At the sound of their clattering heels, the man looked around. His eyes were pursed up painfully. Without the glasses he usually wore, he probably saw nothing but a group of hurrying figures against the glare from inside the building. He fumbled in his breast pocket for his glasses and put them on.

  His step broke. For an instant he looked at the detectives converging on him. He darted to one side, scuttling like a beetle past the steps and beneath the plane.

  “Fan out!” Shayne shouted.

  He waved the cops to the front of the plane while he and Malloy took the rear.

  Other cops had come out of adjoining gates. Shayne heard Carla cry, “Give me that gun, Tim. You’ll hurt somebody.”

  As he emerged on the far side of the big Douglas, Shayne spotted the squat, bug-like figure moving with the speed of panic. The cops were shouting at him. He was running into the incoming lanes.

  Above, Shayne heard a sudden roar. A light two-motored plane dropped out of the darkness, heading straight at the fleeing Renzullo.

  Renzullo crouched for an instant, like a football halfback checking opposing tacklers. He turned sharply, heading straight for the whirling propellers of the oncoming plane. The pilot saw him in time, and swerved to one side as he swerved to the other. For a moment he was lost to view. He used the plane as interference, cutting back in its wake, toward the terminal. By the time Shayne and the others saw him, they were too far out to cut him off.

  A siren had begun its insane howling. Now in the bright light, Shayne saw Carla, running fast despite her high heels and tight skirt, ahead of the fugitive, a short distance to his left. She extended her arm and fired at Renzullo, while continuing to run toward him at full tilt. Renzullo diverged from his course, as though to meet her. Stopping, she aimed carefully, using her left hand to steady her right, and dropped him.

  He was lying on his face by the time Shayne reached him. The detective turned him over. He was still breathing, but he only breathed twice more before he died. One of the heavy lenses in his glasses had been shattered in the fall, and Shayne saw the small blackened hole above his left ear.

  “Pretty shooting with a .25,” he remarked.

  “I knew he had a gun,” she said wildly. “I couldn’t let him get away.”

  Shayne said bleakly, “He dropped his gun in an ashcan after he plugged Quesada, but you’d have no way of knowing that. Don’t brood about it. He won’t be missed.”

  A little group of police surrounded them. One by one the detectives put away their weapons.

  “Will Gentry’s going to want to handle this one,” Shayne said. “We’d better move him to an office until Will gets here.”

  “You can use mine,” Malloy offered.

  Shayne nodded, still looking down at Renzullo, rubbing the reddish stubble on his chin. Two detectives were told to carry off the body, one at the head, the other at the feet. Malloy took them to an emergency exit, leading to a stairway which brought them out across the corridor from his office. They lugged the dead man in and laid him on the couch, and one of the detectives phoned Will Gentry, police chief on the Miami side of the bay.

  Carla went to the window, turning her back on the man she had killed. She had her clenched fist to her mouth, and her slim body was racked with sobs. After a moment’s hesitation, with an embarrassed glance at Shayne, Tim went over and put his good arm around her shoulders.

  He said something soothing to her in a low voice. She turned with a spasmodic motion and pressed her head against his chest.

  “Tim, Tim, it was so—”

  “There,” Rourke said uncomfortably. “Take it easy. It’s over.”

  “Those are real tears, aren’t they?” Shayne remarked. “Murder never gets easy, does it, Carla?”

  “Lay off it, Mike,” Rourke growled. “She’s fractured the law in a couple of places, but we all saw what happened out on the runway. It wasn’t murder. The guy was a paid assassin.”

  “But who paid him?” Shayne said. “And I’m not talking about this one. I’m talking about a kid named Juan Ramirez.”

  “Who?” Rourke said, puzzled. “You mean the student leader?”

  Carla’s shoulders had stopped shaking, but she didn’t look around at Shayne.

  “That’s the one,” the redhead said. “You explained it all to me on the way out, and if you’d ever taken five minutes to think about it, you would have seen it.”

  “What’s this?” Malloy demanded. “This is my pigeon, Mike. I want her.”

  Shayne said, watching the girl’s back, “Carla won’t want to be charged with anything sordid, like running drugs. She’s a different class of yard-goods. She didn’t want to kill her lover, but she had to. Otherwise how could she have got hold of the stolen diamonds?”

  “What diamonds?” Malloy asked, bewildered.

  “It’s like this,” Shayne explained. “At the college she went to, Carla fell hard for a Latin American exchange student. When he went home, she went home with him. That’s one of the things you didn’t know, Tim. You can see why she wouldn’t feel like telling you. And incidentally, while we’re on the subject, you’re a lucky son of a bitch—excuse my language, Carla—that you didn’t show up for that date at your apartment. You could have been number two.”

  He finally succeeded in getting a reaction. She whirled, her eyes blazing.

  “Stop beating around the bush. Come out with whatever mad accusations you care to make, so I can answer them as they deserve.”

  “Sure,” Shayne said easily. “I’m going to have to do some guessing on part of this, but when you come right down to it, not very much. I got a report on you tonight, Carla, from someone who roomed with you in college. She wasn’t a psychiatrist or a probation officer, but she had her eyes on you for a few semesters, and she says your pattern was first up, then down. Hot as fire, cold as ice. The headscratchers have a name for it. You were a red-hot revolutionary for awhile, and then you swung violently out of love with your guy and his movement. But you couldn’t admit you were wrong, and come back home and face your friends and your parents. You had to have something to show for it.”

  “You seem to know quite a bit about me.”

  “Enough so I know that the doctors are going to have a big debate about whether or not you’re sane within the meaning of the statute. I’m afraid they’ll find you sane, because of the diamonds.”

  “Mike,” Rourke said dangerously, “nobody down there had the least doubt that the Ramirez thing was a political killing, one of a series. It was exactly like the rest of them. Put up or shut up.”

  “The same thing fooled them that fooled you,” Shayne said calmly. “They thought Renzullo was working for the cops. But he wasn’t. He was working for Carla.”

  “What do you mean?” Rourke demanded. “I ought to know, if anybody does.”

  “Did he show you his papers? Of course not. All he had to do was say his name was Lieutenant Renzullo, and you believed him. Why would he lie about a thing like that? When the cops told the Embassy they had no Renzullo on the rolls, they were telling the truth for once.”

  Rourke frowned. “Where’s your proof
of that, Mike?”

  “I haven’t any,” Shayne admitted. “Anyhow, not at the moment. But it doesn’t make sense any other way. Look. Diamonds worth three hundred thousand dollars were lifted from a fancy jewelry store. That’s something else you didn’t know. Carla admitted to me that she was in on the robbery, that she planned it and expected to carry the loot to the States, where it was needed to pay for an arms shipment. Her idea was, of course, to change planes at Miami and keep on going. But something went wrong. Ramirez wouldn’t trust her with the diamonds, and to get them she had to kill him.”

  “But she didn’t kill him!” Rourke cried, exasperated. “The people who were hiding him out knew that the men who came to get him were cops.”

  “Why? Because they were driving a Chevvy sedan, with a certain kind of radio aerial. The aerial would be easy to fake—you wouldn’t even have to have a radio to go with it. It would be easy to rent a black Chewy sedan for one night. Renzullo and the others were probably muscle-boys she’d met in the underground, who were willing to change sides in return for a nice diamond apiece. Anything in his pockets?” the redhead asked the detective who had searched Renzullo’s body.

  “Nothing much,” the detective answered. “There’s identification in a couple of names, but nothing for Renzullo.”

  Rourke objected, “He wouldn’t carry a cop’s ticket when he went off to murder somebody. What do you mean, Mike, your version makes sense? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  Carla said icily, “Continue with your fantasy, Mr. Shayne. I find this most interesting.”

  “Renzullo sent in a note that brought Ramirez out to be killed,” Shayne went on. “What did it say, Tim? I don’t know, but it had to be from Carla. Carrying messages was her job. He recognized her handwriting, and he came out, bringing the diamonds with him. So they beat him to death. They ripped off his fingernails, to make it look as though he’d been tortured, and dumped him the same way the cops dumped the rest of their victims. And it worked fine. Everybody believed it. The people in the underground believed it. Probably the regular cops thought it was the political cops, and the political cops thought it was the regular cops. Nobody asked any questions until you came along, Tim. Carla told her boys to beat you up and put you out of action, because she was afraid of what you’d find out.”

  “That was stupid of her,” Rourke sneered. “Everything I found out pointed straight at the cops.”

  “So far as you knew. But what if the News came out with a story describing the thug who picked up Ramirez? The cops would know then that it wasn’t one of their own men. They’d start digging. Nothing would suit them better than to pin one of these political murders on the opposition. So Carla sent her boys around to search your room and see what you’d discovered, and if necessary, to give you your lumps. And that had another angle. She figured it would make you mad enough to help her out through the exit control and in through the customs. The coincidences, Tim!” He ticked them off on his fingers. “A cop comes for Ramirez. It’s Renzullo. A cop beats you up. Renzullo. You call her room and a voice answers. Renzullo. That guy gets around.”

  “It was his job. The Hotel Presidente was part of his beat.”

  Malloy asked, “What about the tip I got on narcotics? That came from high up, Mike.”

  “They knew you’d get goose-bumps when you heard the word narcotics,” Shayne replied. “And it didn’t matter to them why you shook her down, so long as you found the diamonds. You’d seize them and send them back, and Carla would end up in jail. But she was too fast for them. Everything worked fine, up to a point. If you’d connected up at your place according to plan, Tim, she would have taken delivery on the package and been on her way, probably putting a slug in you before she left.”

  Rourke looked at her, beginning to be convinced. “Hell, it might have been worth it.”

  “Tim,” she begged, “you don’t believe this fantastic story, do you? Do you?”

  “Give us the rest of it, Mike,” Rourke said quietly. There’s still one killing to go. Why should Renzullo knock off the professor, if he was a private hoodlum working for Carla?”

  “He came up to Miami on yesterday’s plane,” Shayne said. “He had to be here to collect his percentage of the diamonds. Maybe Carla even conned him into thinking she’d go away with him somewhere, and make a new life together while they were spending somebody else’s dough. That was one of her specialities. She tried it on me.”

  “You—you—” Carla sputtered incoherently.

  Shayne continued, “The professor told me he’d just come back from a secret visit to his old stamping grounds. I doubt if Carla had known that. His big reason for going down just then must have been to arrange about the shipment of the diamonds. And here’s what I think happened. Probably none of the local people knew about Carla’s hot affair with Ramirez. For her to keep her value as a messenger, that would have to stay a secret. But when Ramirez was touting Carla as the ideal courier, he’d tell the professor about it. The professor had lectured at Carla’s college, and knew something about her, and so he put the kibosh on the idea. He and Carla met this evening, at the professor’s house in Coral Gables. The conversation went something like this. He told her he knew about her connection with Ramirez. He knew that only a note in her handwriting could have brought him out of the boarding house that night. But the professor cared about only one thing—the guns. He said he’d feed her to the cops for that killing unless she handed over the diamonds so he could complete the deal with Harry Mann. She told him she didn’t have them, but she thought she knew where they were. To protect himself, the professor made the meeting place the most public one he could think of, in the middle of a hotel lobby. She suggested the St. Albans, being familiar with the setup there—that’s where she shed the customs agents. After that it was a simple matter of getting word to her hired gun. She had a nice alibi for the shooting. She was right beside me when the shot was fired. Harry Mann would make a pretty good fall guy, and if that didn’t stick she could arrange things so the killing would be blamed on the Marshal’s secret cops. The Marshal would deny it, but he might have to hire an American public relations firm to clear his name. And then when she saw that we were right behind Renzullo, she pointed us in the right direction and shot him. She couldn’t let him live to be questioned.”

  “You tell a plausible series of lies,” Carla said. “I deny them absolutely. I’m wondering about the same thing Tim has mentioned—the small matter of lack of evidence.”

  “That bothers me too,” Shayne admitted. “But think about Renzullo for a minute. He killed two men for you. You made him certain promises, but he’d want to make sure you kept them. Maybe he felt inferior because of his glasses, and that made it easy for you to handle him. But was he an imbecile? He’d want some protection, so you wouldn’t be tempted to get rid of him, the way you got rid of Ramirez. Wouldn’t he keep something to tie you to that first murder?”

  The detective paused, and added softly. “How about the note he sent in, that brought Ramirez out in such a hurry?”

  He saw a little flicker in her eyes.

  Turning to the detective who was spreading the contents of Renzullo’s wallet on the desk, he said, “How about it, Hill?”

  “Nothing like that here, Mike.”

  “And you looked through is clothes carefully?” the redhead said, disappointed.

  “Damn right,” Hill said angrily. “If you think you can find anything I missed, you’re welcome to look.”

  “I think I will,” Shayne said. “But first—Tim, you said she gave you a shopping list or something. Let’s see it.”

  Rourke fished out the list of articles of clothing which Carla had given him.

  “This is your writing, Carla?” Shayne said.

  She watched him suspiciously, and didn’t answer.

  “It’ll be an easy thing to check,” the redhead said.

  Turning his back to the others, he stooped over Renzullo’s corpse. “I noticed t
hat this isn’t an American suit. They’re behind the times down there, and it occurred to me that they might still be making pants with a watch pocket.”

  He ran his finger along the dead man’s waist. “Right,” he said, with undisguised triumph in his voice. “Give the man a cigar.”

  He unfolded a small slip of paper. He read what was written on it, and nodded. Then he compared it with the list Rourke had given him. The room was silent. He looked at the girl.

  “Carla, you don’t have any luck, do you?”

  “Damn you!” she screamed suddenly. “But you aren’t going to live to gloat about it!”

  She pointed Rourke’s automatic at him, and again that unfocused look came into her eyes.

  He observed calmly, “I checked that gun after you shot at me the other time, Carla. There were two bullets in it then. You used them up on Renzullo. You’ve had it, baby.”

  She looked down at the useless weapon. Rourke grabbed it and threw it onto the desk. Hill jerked back the slide, shucking an unfired bullet out of the chamber, and removed the clip.

  “Two more,” he said.

  Carla put her face in her hands, sobbing as the door opened and Will Gentry came in. He looked at the weeping girl, the dead man on the couch, the grinning detectives.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t want to go through all that again,” Shayne told him. “Hill or somebody can give you the high spots. You’re going to need a statement from Rourke.”

  Rourke took the pieces of paper out of Shayne’s fingers.

  “I know you, you bastard. There was something phony about that act of yours.” He unfolded the note and read, “‘Mike—be sure to pick up a bottle of cognac and a half pint of cream. I’m out of both.—Lucy.’ That’s what I thought. I didn’t think you took anything out of that watch pocket.”

  Shayne grinned. “Look at the pants, Tim. No watch pocket.”

  Carla shuddered and broke into a series of piercing, heart-breaking screams. Gentry stood it for only a second, then growled an order. Two detectives took her out of the office.