Violence Is Golden

by Brett Halliday

  A muscle flicked in her face. “That was—a slight exaggeration.”

  “Why did you tell me Naomi offered you a bribe to forget you’d seen some extra luggage?”

  Mary looked quickly at Naomi, whose eyes remained fixed on Shayne’s face. “I suppose she denies it?”

  “Tim,” Shayne said.

  “What’s the question, Mike? Why was George sick to his stomach last night? I’m in a position to explain that.” He grinned. “Mrs. Savage told the waitress George hasn’t been doing very well in bed, and she wanted to slip an aphrodisiac in his chili. The girl was glad to help. Only I guess it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. It was a drugstore emetic.”

  Naomi murmured faintly.

  Painter said, “Will you bear in mind that I don’t know who any of these people are, Shayne? They’re just names to me.”

  “Keep listening,” Shayne said. “George is Naomi’s husband. He’s a big good-looking guy, but I think she realizes now that he’s essentially a jerk. Still, she’s married to him, and she wanted to keep him out of trouble, if possible, especially after she realized that the way they had it set up, if anything went wrong, no one would believe she hadn’t been in on it all the way. She fed him something to make him too sick to take part in the action. And it worked. A man named Thompson died. A man named Jaime Sanchez died. Two Japanese gunmen died. But George lived through it. And then she set out to discover exactly what kind of razzle-dazzle this bunch of crooks was trying to pull. She decided she had to get rid of the extra luggage container. She couldn’t tuck it under her arm and walk out with it. Explain something to me, Naomi—where did you get the explosive?”

  “From Al Luccio.”

  “That’s what I thought, but how did you persuade Al Luccio—”

  Her eyes rose to meet his. “I tried a half dozen different stories, and he didn’t believe any of them. Finally I told him”—she hesitated, swallowing—“well, I told him you’d rented a car and I wanted to wire something under the hood, and he said he’d be glad to cooperate.”

  Shayne laughed.

  Mary exclaimed, “She blew off the compartment door!”

  “Yeah,” Shayne said. “A little lump of plastic explosive taped to the inside of the door over the lock. She borrowed a stewardess’s uniform so she could move around the airport without being noticed. She must have had a detonator at her seat. But something jammed, and the container didn’t slide out until later, as I’ve been telling Carmody. All right, all this indicates that Naomi had nothing to do with the smuggling, and Mary’s a liar.”

  “But Mike,” Christa objected, “don’t you remember? We heard Naomi talking to George about changes in the plan.”

  “We heard a woman’s voice. It wasn’t hers. You were in bed with me at the time, so it wasn’t you. It had to be Mary.”

  Mary gave him a pitying smile. “If you couldn’t tell the difference between my voice and Naomi’s, you didn’t hear much, did you?”

  Painter’s pencil was eating its way down a page of his notebook. It had barely begun, but Shayne was already tiring of the game. He forced himself to speak slowly and carefully. He was approaching the delicate point, and everything depended on balance and timing.

  “It’s been a rough couple of days. Most of the people on the plane were pretending to be somebody else, and I’m still not sure I’ve got everybody checked out. Adam fooled me with a double story. He fooled me badly. He started off as a Negro clergyman. He didn’t do that one too well, but just when I was beginning to have doubts, he pulled out a forty-five and turned into a Treasury agent pretending to be a Negro clergyman. That explained the little mistakes. We had a bank inspector, a travel agent, a couple of phony guerrillas. But the funny thing about you, Mary, is that I think you’re what you claim to be. A schoolteacher, not a professional criminal masquerading as a schoolteacher.”

  “Worse luck, you’re right. And, of course, I can prove it.”

  “You’re homely and awkward,” Shayne went on bluntly. “You’re ill at ease with men—and with women, too, for all I know. Your hips are too big. You’ve probably never had many dates. You go to the movies, you watch television, you wish something would happen. Last summer in the Middle East, something did. But as you must know by now, that was all manipulated. Nikko only did what he’d been told to do.”

  “That’s not true! He—”

  Shayne made a rude noise. “I talked to him. You know how men talk when women aren’t around. It was pretty frank on both sides. He seduced you because they needed somebody who could move about without being seen. Needless to say, he didn’t get any enjoyment out of it. And the theft itself didn’t turn out to be very romantic, did it? Just a switch of a few crates. At least it took place in a glamorous setting and you had a cruise on a millionaire’s yacht as the temporary mistress of the handsome Greek captain. And after that, you went back to Milwaukee.”

  “And I found it dull,” she said. “I found it very, very dull.”

  “So when they made you another proposition, you jumped at it. And it’s been anything but dull, even though you’ve missed most of the real excitement, the bullets flying around, the dead bodies.” He reached for a cigarette. “I was very much in your way. The hijacking could only work with no armed opposition. You’d established yourself as an amateur busybody. I fell for that because it was so near to the truth. You fed me a few facts—what difference did it make if I knew about La Guaira? You didn’t intend to let the gold get that far. When you pretended to be kidnapped, naturally I raced off after you. You timed it all very well, the horn in the parking lot, the escape in the mountains. Adam wanted me dead, but not quite yet. He came after me. After the dust settled, I hid on the plane. One small thing—that twenty-two you pulled when I was wearing the monster mask. Why would you want to shoot your own monster? Sanchez told everybody to look straight ahead, but that wouldn’t apply to you, would it? You must have seen me slug him. Let’s see. Does that cover everything?”

  Several voices began clamoring at once. Shayne held up his hand.

  “Let’s make this brief. I’m beginning to—”

  He waited until a haze of black whirling dots, which had appeared suddenly in front of his eyes, began to disperse. “I know, Carmody. The gold. I can give you a pretty good location, and you’ll probably want to send divers down to be sure, but you won’t find any gold in that luggage. I unpacked it last night and moved it into the tail-cone of the plane. Wait,” he said as Carmody came to his feet. “It won’t matter if it’s stolen. Adam knew the container fell out of the plane, but for some reason he wasn’t interested in finding out where. How do you explain that?”

  “It wasn’t real gold!” Rourke exclaimed.

  “Give the man a cigar. He set this whole thing up as an elaborate trap. He wanted three things—to expose the traitors in his organization, to find the gold he lost last summer, and to get me out of Miami so he could kill me. But what if something went wrong? He didn’t want to be burned twice. I think you’ll find that those bars are gold-plated.”

  “Goddamn it, Mike,” Carmody said, “you swindled me into—”

  “Into giving me a percentage I damn well earned. Don’t whine about it.”

  Shayne leaned back against the pillows and his eyes closed.

  “You don’t intend to charge me with anything, do you, Mike?” Mary said. “Do you? You know you can’t prove anything.”

  “That’s probably true,” Shayne said wearily. “You were involved in a conspiracy to commit murder and to hijack an airplane, but most of the possible witnesses are dead. Petey may try to get an indictment, but that’s up to him. As far as I’m concerned, the hell with it.”

  “Do you mean she gets off scot-free?” Christa said.

  “I didn’t say that. If she wants my advice, she’ll start running right this minute, and keep running. It’ll be adventurous as hell.”

  Mary stared at him.

  “Because do you think Adam is going to let you off?” Shayne sa
id gently. “He’s lost that million and a half for good this time. He’s lost a yacht worth a hundred thousand. He was holding a submachine gun on me at point-blank range, and he ended up with a bullet in his own shoulder. I doubt if he’s happy about any of this. I expect I’ll see him again. So will you. Think about it, Mary, and keep moving.”

  “But I didn’t do anything! Not really! Even if I did have anything to do with that Persian Gulf business, which I certainly don’t intend to admit, the gold was illegal the minute it left that bank. I don’t see—”

  “You killed three people, Mary.”

  “I did not!”

  “The Arab crew,” Shayne explained patiently. “You planted a bomb on their boat. They all drowned.”

  “But they were only—”

  She stopped short and looked around the room, the blood draining out of her face.

  Painter said briskly, “Did she kill LeFevre, too? That’s the one I want explained.”

  “Christa did that,” Shayne said.

  Christa took a step backward. “Mike, you’re mad.”

  “I’m a little mad,” he said. “Not crazy—angry. LeFevre was killed by a woman. That’s the one thing I know. He let her into the room himself. He liked women. He was hoping to hit a few striptease places later that night. He was carrying contraceptives. If he’d opened the door to Mary, he would have closed it in her face. But you, dear—”

  “You don’t mean this, Mike.”

  He raised himself on his elbows and said harshly, “You’re one of Adam’s people. Your assignment was to share a room with me until I’d done what he wanted me to do, and then kill me. Petey’s going to prove you were in LeFevre’s room. Leave him to himself and he goes yapping off in ten different directions, but point him right and he’s really not a bad cop.”

  Painter flicked at his mustache.

  “Thanks for nothing,” he snapped. “I don’t consider this case closed, by any manner of means. He shut the door in somebody else’s face. That’s the flimsiest basis for a murder accusation I ever heard in my life.”

  “He wanted a woman,” Shayne said. “He wasn’t thinking about gold, but about sex. He opened the door, and Mary was standing there. As I remember the line, it was, ‘You look lovely.’ For God’s sake—look at her.”

  Mary said, “You’re horrible. You’re a horrible man. He didn’t slam the door in my face! He let me in and I—”

  “No, he didn’t, Mary.”

  “You’re so wrong! You don’t know a thing about him or about me, either! I’ve had more sexual experiences than you can even imagine!”

  “Get her out of here before she confesses,” Shayne said to Painter.

  “I have!” she screamed. “Do you think men like to go to bed with Vogue models? Real men? You’re mistaken! Jules told me I was one of the best bed partners he ever had, and so did Nikko! Do you know how much they paid me for what I did last summer? Zero! Not a penny. What a sell. They thought I’d be satisfied with a little tumble. You’re so wrong about everything. That night in Miami Beach he was still putting me off. Sex, yes. Money, no.”

  “Where did you get the drugs?” Shayne said quietly.

  “I had them! I keep telling you—you don’t know a thing about me. I go to Chicago on weekends. During summer vacations, believe me, I really swing. I decided to give him one more chance. I loaded the pâté. I didn’t know you were going to be there—that’s what’s called ‘serendipity.’ And all the old goat wanted to do was go to bed and make love. I was high as a kite myself by that time, and the obvious solution to all my problems was right there staring me in the face. What did I need Jules for? I didn’t. And then you phoned from the lobby, and I saw exactly how I could do it.”

  She whirled on Painter. “And if you think you can get a conviction on that kind of evidence, try it! I take it all back. I don’t have a lawyer yet, do I, so it doesn’t really count.” She laughed. “And as for the sinister Sir Geoffrey Adam, he’d better not fool around with me! I’m ready for him.”

  There was more, but by that time Shayne had fallen asleep.

  He heard Christa say, “That was brilliant, Mike. The way you accused me and trapped her into confessing—”

  Shayne made a final effort. “Naomi knows Portuguese.”

  “What?” Christa said blankly.

  “She heard the orders you gave Sanchez. And now that we all understand each other, will you get the hell out?”

  After a moment Christa said lightly, “I didn’t really expect it to work. I thought it was worth trying.”

  Then Shayne was alone with Naomi.

  “Mike, I know you want to sleep, but can I stay with you? You were right about my marriage. It was finished after a week. I was foolish to think I could patch it up. I’ll be quiet. Can I stay with you?”

  “Yes,” Shayne said as the light faded.