14
At 6:30 a man crossed the open breezeway leading to the garage from the house, and backed out a Pontiac station wagon. Forty-five minutes later he returned, bringing a well-dressed, healthy-looking woman, a boy and a girl in their early teens, and a great deal of luggage. The Pontiac was unloaded and put away. At eight a Mercury sedan drove into the driveway and a man and a woman went into the house. They were greeted enthusiastically in the doorway. A little over two hours later, Shayne ran out of cigarettes. Ten minutes later the couple left. Lights began going out.
Michael Shayne leaned forward hugging the steering wheel, his eyes hooded and wary. He had done a lot of this type of waiting in his career, and he would undoubtedly do a lot more. It didn’t bother him.
When the last light in the house went out, Shayne slipped lower in the seat. He had parked in a spot between streetlights, in the shadow of a leafy sycamore. At ten minutes after midnight, a woman approached on the opposite sidewalk. She was wearing ankle-length slacks and low-heeled shoes. It was Martha Slater. She glanced at the house Shayne was watching, and passed on, going around the next corner.
He left the car. Crossing the street, he crouched on one knee among the low-growing shrubbery at the foot of the lawn. He parted the shrubbery carefully and watched the house and the garage. After fifteen minutes he saw a flicker of movement in the breezeway. For just an instant he saw a woman’s figure. She came out a moment later wheeling a bicycle.
Instead of coming straight down the driveway, she headed across the lawn at an angle. Shayne would have to leave cover to intercept her. He kept behind the shrubbery as long as he could, but as he was crossing the drive she turned and saw him.
He set off toward her at a hard run. She wrenched the bike around, leaped into the saddle and shot rapidly down the sloping lawn. Shayne could see that he had no hope of cutting her off. He whirled and raced back to his car. Martha, peddling hard, bumped over the curb and was around the corner by the time he had the motor started. He roared into the nearest driveway, cramping the wheels viciously, reversed and came back. He reversed again and the powerful car leaped forward.
He turned the corner on the edges of his tires. For a moment he thought he had lost her. Then he saw a flash of movement between two stone gates into the University of Miami campus. Shayne swung the wheel hard. He knew she could get away from him among the university buildings, where he couldn’t follow in the Buick. Instead of turning through the gates he went past and made the turn on Ponce de Leon Boulevard. Again he was afraid it was a bad guess, and he began to slow down. Something glinted at him in the rear-view mirror; it was gone when he turned around, but he made a sweeping U-turn at the next intersection and came back with the gas pedal on the floor. Ahead, the bike shot through a red light and hurtled into the southbound traffic on Miami Avenue.
A horn sounded a long desperate warning. There was a shriek of locked wheels. Martha, on the bike, was trying to cut diagonally across the lanes. An open convertible swerved to avoid her. An opening appeared. She almost slipped through, but the car behind her was traveling too fast; it touched her rear fender and she went out of control. Lights flashed. Brakes and horns sounded at the same second. She disappeared from Shayne’s view. There was a long skid, a sickening crunch of metal.
The light changed, and Shayne came down hard on the gas. On the other side of the intersection he swung in toward the sidewalk, his wheels riding over the curb. He snapped off the ignition and leaped out.
He saw the bicycle first. It was a boy’s English bike, brand new, with the brakes on the handlebars. The front wheel was squashed flat, the center bar bent into the shape of an L. It had been hurled almost across the sidewalk, but Martha lay on the curb, her head and shoulders on the sidewalk, the rest of her body on the road.
The light changed, but the northbound traffic couldn’t move; a panel truck had slued as the brakes took hold, and now blocked both lanes. The driver, a pale young man in a sports shirt, ran toward Martha. He and Shayne reached her almost together.
“She shot right out in front of me!” he cried. “How could I—”
Shayne knelt beside the girl. Her body was twisted at a terrible angle. “I don’t feel anything at all,” she said wonderingly. “Mike. I knew you’d find out. I didn’t dare wait. I thought I’d still have a chance if I could get away tonight.”
“Don’t touch her!” Shayne said roughly as the truck driver stooped to lift her onto the sidewalk. “Call an ambulance. The V. A. hospital’s nearest. Then call police emergency. Get moving.”
“How did you know I would come here?” Martha said.
“It wasn’t too hard to figure,” Shayne said. “The P & O had a cruise ship coming in tonight that touched at St. Albans this morning. I got a list of the passengers who went aboard at St. Albans, with their baggage declarations. These people were the only ones who brought back an English bicycle. You’d better not talk.”
“I want to. The strange thing is that I have no feeling anywhere at all. That means it’s serious, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll see when the ambulance gets here.”
“Has there been any news about Paul?”
“He’s dead.”
A spasm of pain twisted her face. “How horrible.”
Shayne looked down at her and said gently, “But if you were going to feel bad about it, you shouldn’t have shot him.”
Her eyes widened. “Michael, you know me! You know—”
“I’m beginning to think I don’t know you very well. There was a lot of wild shooting last night. One of those stray shots might have pinked any one of us. But not three shots in a row. I told you to throw away the guns, but you kept one of them, didn’t you? When the lights went out you called for your husband. He answered you. You took his hand, put the gun against his stomach and shot him three times.”
She turned her face away. “How can you think such a horrible thing?”
“Come on, Martha. Stop acting. What’s in the bike frame?”
“Diamonds. That doesn’t mean—”
Shayne looked up. A circle of people was standing around them. One was a cop whose face looked vaguely familiar.
“Anything I can do, Mike? The ambulance call is in.”
“Better clear the lane so it can get in against the curb.”
“Michael,” Martha said in a low voice, “talk to me about it. You owe me that much. The pain will be too bad later. I have to make plans.”
“I don’t owe you anything except one pound,” he said.
Reaching out, she found his hand. “Michael. I knew about the diamonds, but that’s absolutely all.”
“The hell it is, Martha. Paul didn’t make those arrangements last night. You did. You knew about the trick with the radio programs. You made the appointment with Alvarez. You arranged with someone up here to send the cable about Paul’s mother. You talked him into chartering the plane. And if he’d actually taken off, it would have worked. It was a pretty good try. You only missed by thirty seconds.”
She threw her head from side to side, keeping a desperate hold on his hand.
He said, “The cable was in his pocket when they brought him in. He wouldn’t have to send a cable to himself—he didn’t show it to anybody.”
“Damn you, Michael. The minute you came into that room I knew it was over. I have to know. Why do you think I should shoot Paul?”
“The minute Alvarez told him how the appointment had been made, he knew who made it. He probably guessed that the cable was a phony. He wouldn’t have the guts to pull a trick like that himself, but he was willing to cover up for you, and divide the profits. And it wasn’t part of your plan to divide with anybody. And there were other things. He thought he was the one who started the smuggling. I doubt it. I think it was your idea, and like a good wife you persuaded him that he’d thought of it first. Of course he was the one who’d go to jail if anything slipped. He wasn’t the world’s biggest brain, but in time he would have figured it ou
t. You didn’t want that, because he might figure out at the same time that you’re the one who put the knife in Albert Watts.”
“Michael. Stop.”
“I’d just as soon stop. This wasn’t my idea.”
“No, no, I have to know what you think. But it’s insane!”
“Look at it one way,” Shayne said, “and every murderer’s insane. Paul thought it was Alvarez or one of his people who killed Watts. Alvarez thought it was Paul. They both had the same reason. It was a good one, but yours was better. Because why didn’t Watts give information against you as well as Paul?”
She frowned.
Shayne went on, “You were the link, Martha. I’ve had since six tonight to work it out, and I think I’ve got it. Neither Paul nor you did any actual handling. You planted the stuff on people who didn’t know you existed. This afternoon Malloy reminded me that after the Camel was slugged I didn’t hear a car. Whoever did it must have got away on a bicycle. And it dawned on me. Everybody on St. Albans rides bicycles. The tourists rent them. Some of them take one of them home, if they’ve got any of their five hundred dollars left. I don’t know if they get as good a break on the price as on jewelry or liquor—”
“Just about,” she said tonelessly.
“All you had to do was find out who’d bought a bicycle to ship home, and borrow it for a few hours. That would be easy. Nobody locks up bicycles down there. You take off the handlebars and drop the little packages in the hollow frame. You put the bike back where you got it. A month later, or six months later, after the tourist is back in the States with all his wonderful bargains, you borrow the bike again. You take out the packages and have it back before the owner knows it’s missing. And there’s never any connection between you and Paul and the people who carry the stuff in for you. You keep to tourists who live in southern Florida, which is also easy because if they live farther away they don’t take a bicycle home. It’s a clumsy thing to carry in a car.”
“You should have been a criminal,” she said bitterly.
“Watts handled baggage at the agency,” Shayne went on. “He’d know who bought what, and when they were leaving. Paul tried Vivienne on him first. She scared him. But you wouldn’t scare him, Martha. Did you pay him with money or something else? Hell, maybe you didn’t have to pay him at all. But he found out what was going on. He didn’t denounce you both, just Paul. I think he saw Paul in jail for a long term, and Albert Watts and Paul’s wife on some other Caribbean island spending those nice thousand dollar bills. A dreamer, in short. But that was his dream, not yours. You couldn’t afford to have him alive with the big one coming up.”
A siren began rising and falling in the distance.
“I was across the island when he was killed,” she said.
“No, I don’t think so, Martha. He gave his wife a long excuse about why he wouldn’t be home for dinner, the kind of elaborate excuse a married man uses when he has a date with another girl. You were driving a rented car. You probably did some business on the other side of the island, counting on the natives to be vague about the time if anybody ever asked them. Watts walked out of town to some lonely spot, where you picked him up after dark. You did some hard drinking together, and he probably did some more dreaming. On the way back to town, you pulled off the road for one last kiss. You stabbed him three times, the same number of bullets you put in Paul. You took his wallet, to make it look like a robbery, and pushed him out in the native quarter. You knew the natives wouldn’t come out to help a white man with his well known views on the subject of natives. He bled to death.”
“Nobody else thinks—”
“Martha, he’d denounced a smuggler, and the man had reappeared on the island. At a time like that he wouldn’t go drinking in native bars. He wouldn’t be alone with anyone he didn’t trust.”
“Is that all?”
“I think it’s about all.”
The siren was coming rapidly nearer. Martha said, “Then it’s not very much. I’m going to fight it. I won’t give you an inch.”
Her face was suddenly distorted with pain. The cords stood out on her neck and her grip on Shayne’s hand tightened.
“It’s beginning,” she whispered. After an instant she went on, “Well, do you expect me to say I’m sorry? All you have is a theory. You’ll have your hands full convicting me of smuggling. And as for murder—”
“You hired me to find out who killed Watts,” Shayne said wearily. “With your husband, you used somebody else’s gun, and you’re probably in the clear. But I think they’ll pin Watts on you. They don’t need much. Just someone who saw you together once, someone who saw him being pushed out of the car. A little blood on the seat would do it. There’s a lot of blood in a stabbing. Maybe his raincoat didn’t catch it all.”
She turned her head to look at him as the ambulance pulled up at the curb.
“You must hate me, Michael.”
“Maybe just a little,” Shayne said.
Two interns jumped out of the ambulance with a stretcher. Shayne remained at the girl’s side.
“You had your full quota of luck with Slater,” he said. “He knew you shot him, but he wanted you to take the plane and get away with the diamonds, because he thought it was his fault. He thought he started the smuggling, and turned you into the kind of person who would kill her husband for money, because he’d made money seem that important to you. When I think of that, I’m a little sick. And I’ve suddenly started wondering about the first time you became a widow. Everybody thought Fred Baines was shot by a jewel thief. The guy always claimed he was innocent. I’m going to have another look at that case.”
She stared at him. “You monster! Damn you, damn you. I didn’t!” she cried as the pain began again. “I had to kill Watts and Paul. You don’t understand. After I started I had to go through with it, wherever it led. But not Fred. I loved him! He was the only man—”
Shayne stood up. One of the interns had a hypodermic syringe. Shayne watched bleakly as the needle went in. Slowly and painstakingly, the interns worked the stretcher beneath her body.
“I didn’t!” she sobbed. “You horrible, horrible—”
Her voice died, and with a sigh she went under. As one of the interns went past him, Shayne gave him a questioning look. The intern shook his head.
“Not a chance.”
They slid the stretcher into the ambulance. As the ambulance moved off, its siren howling, Malloy’s Chevy pulled into the space it left vacant.
“I thought that would be you, Mike,” he said, coming out. “I’ve been listening to the trouble on short wave.”
Shayne was looking after the departing ambulance, his face drained of expression.
“Martha?” Malloy said.
“Yeah,” Shayne said heavily, and with an effort he turned toward the smashed bike. “Diamonds. In the frame.”
“Well, well,” Malloy exclaimed. “I knew you’d come through for me with that much dough involved, Mike.”
“What?” Shayne said, and then he thrust his head forward. In an instant he had thrown off his depression. Everything seemed in much sharper focus. “Open it up, Jack. Twenty-five percent of a hundred and twenty grand—”
Malloy said suspiciously, “Where’d you get that figure?”
“Alvarez said that’s how much he lost when he was slugged.”
“That’s wholesale. We’ll put it up at auction and get pretty close to the market price. It should run a quarter of a million or better, if he figured it at a hundred and twenty.” He went to pick up the bike. “But I might as well tell you. You’re only getting half.”
“What do you mean, half? I did all the work. They were shooting at me, not you.”
“I’m not talking about me. I’ll go on drawing my modest salary for another twenty years, when I’ll become eligible for a modest pension. But there’s a character named Powys—”
“Powys!” Shayne said. “The guy who claimed he was working on a Ph.D.?”
“Doctors
in anthropology get even less than people who work for the U. S. government, I understand. It could be that he was also having himself a good time, but this twenty-five G’s will come in handy.”
“Good God!” Shayne said, clapping his thighs as many things suddenly became clear to him. “He must have thought I actually was a hoodlum.”
“He saw your face on a Wanted flier. What else would he think? There’s one thing wrong with our way of paying for information—when one of our tipsters gets wind of a shipment, he wants it to go through so he can take his percentage of the seizure. Powys didn’t want you arrested. He wanted you and the Slaters to get away. The moment your plane took off he cabled me.”
“You didn’t find anything on the plane,” Shayne said. “So how does he come in for half?”
“This is a one-shot with you, Mike. If Alvarez beats this murder charge, and I have a hunch he will, he’s going to start operating again. And Powys is still on the scene. I want to keep him happy.”
Shayne looked at him for a moment, somewhat groggily. Then he pulled himself together.
“I can’t stand here arguing. Sergeant Brannon or no Sergeant Brannon, I’ve got to get back to St. Albans.”
“Why?” Malloy said, surprised.
“You forget I’m on vacation. I have to send postcards, get a sunburn and do some shopping. And then come in at the International Airport on the right plane so my secretary can meet me. If she knew I’d come home ahead of time she’d wring my neck.”
“Mike, you can’t mean—”
“That’s exactly what I do mean,” Shayne said grimly.
But life, as Shayne had known for years, is full of surprises. There were almost a million people in greater Miami. The odds that Lucy Hamilton would be passing that spot on Miami Avenue in a taxi at exactly that moment were rather long. For one thing, she only came into that part of town once or twice a year. For another, when Shayne was out of town she usually went to bed earlier than this. But as it happened, she had had dinner with friends nearby, and had been listening to records all evening, and was now on her way home. She called out sharply to her driver. When he came to a stop in front of Malloy’s Chevy she leaned out the window.
Murder Takes No Holiday Page 17
