Captain Stackpole had assigned an officer to sponsor Shayne, and in spite of his damaged passport, the detective was one of the first to leave the ship. He was wearing his freshly cleaned suit and carrying his shipboard purchases in a shopping bag.
He immediately became the center of a swarm of reporters and television people. In the back of this crowd, Shayne saw his friend Tim Rourke, his usual half-smoked cigarette stuck to his lower lip. His fists were buried in his hip pockets. He was a thin, disjointed, carelessly dressed man, whose offhand style concealed a stubbornness and a probing mind that had made him one of the best investigative reporters in a fiercely competitive business. He didn’t approach Shayne, or indicate that they had talked by radio-telephone earlier. Shayne had loosened his necktie and unfastened the top button of his shirt, a signal he had adopted long ago to inform Rourke that they were being watched or monitored.
The reporters followed Shayne to Biscayne Boulevard, pressing him for further information on the Bermuda affair. Rourke had left Shayne’s Buick in a no-parking slot with a police card stuck in the wiper. Shayne removed the card, found the keys under the corner of the floor mat, and gunned the motor getting away, almost clipping one of the persistent TV people.
He made a quick U-turn at the corner of 13th and came back with the southbound traffic. He swung into 11th Street and double-parked, parallel to a Ford sedan occupying a curbside space from which he would be able to watch the disembarking passengers. In a quick series of actions, he fished for the Ford’s front-door latch and forced it open, unlatched the hood, used a wire bridge to jump the ignition, and moved the Ford around the corner where he parked it illegally in front of a hydrant.
Returning to the Buick, he moved into the space the Ford had vacated and cut his lights.
He found a note in the glove compartment in Rourke’s handwriting: “No. 1063 of Public Laws of 1949, To Establish a Cash Award for Information Relating to Smuggling of Atomic Material into U.S. Now what the hell did you want to know that for?”
Shayne unlocked an equipment box and took out a pair of high-powered binoculars. He had an unobstructed view of the lighted pier. He used the squirter to clean the windshield, and settled down with the glasses to his eyes, his elbows on the steering wheel.
His car phone rang. Rourke’s newspaper had recently installed a phone in the reporter’s car so he could phone in on the move. He and Shayne shared the same operator. He was two blocks away, on 11th Terrace.
“For Christ’s sake, man,” Rourke said. “Somebody’s trying to smuggle in an atom bomb and you think you can handle it by yourself?”
“Hang on. I’ll explain in a minute.”
He had picked up Anne Blagden in the glasses and was following her down the gangplank. Quentin Little was a step behind, and he seemed in poor shape. His nose was peeling. His long hair was blowing, and under the sunburn his skin had a greenish tinge. He looked sick and unhappy. Arriving at the bottom, he swayed and nearly lost his balance.
Drawing him aside, Anne spoke to him urgently. He nodded. While she talked, his head kept swiveling around. Coming in against him, she kissed him hard.
She left him standing alone, his hands going. Shayne followed her as she made her way through the crowd.
Suddenly she began waving. Shayne lost her for a moment. When he picked her up again she was being greeted by a man and a woman. She hugged them both, laughing excitedly. The man was dark, tall, hatless, with thick, tightly curled hair. The woman was a head shorter, and Shayne caught only fragmentary glimpses of her as the crowd shifted. She was plain-faced, with a grudging smile. He switched back to Anne, who was chattering happily, her face showing her relief at being back with normal, well-dressed, self-assured people, after the strains and odd excitements of the voyage.
Shayne lost them. He picked up the phone.
“OK, Tim. Do you want to pull around on the boulevard and double-park? Keep the phone open.”
He saw Rourke’s battered Chevy emerge a moment or two later. It crossed on a green light and stopped pointing south.
“I’ve got my hands full,” Shayne said. “If you’ll do a simple little follow-job for me I think I may be able to repay you with a major story. A green Olds is going to be coming off in a minute. It’s a four-door, two years old, Florida plates with a GB tag. It’s registered to a man who lives in Coral Gables, and I want to be sure that’s where he goes. We absolutely can’t lose track of that car. Keep on his tail, and if he tries anything tricky, ram him. I mean that, Tim.”
“Ram him, I see,” Rourke said. “That’s not the way I make my living, though, is it? Why don’t you ram him? You do that sort of thing so well.”
“There’s another car I’m more interested in. It’s going in a different direction.”
“Then here’s another suggestion. Let’s get a couple of police cars with a two-way radio, and do it right.”
“There’s no time to set that up. Nothing’s going to happen. If he doesn’t go straight home he’ll stop off for dinner somewhere.”
“Isn’t there a small explanation that goes with this?” Rourke said. “The name of that 1949 public law gave me a jolt. There’s an old saying. You’ll live longer if you don’t fool around with dynamite. And I understand these atomic things are even stronger.”
“I’ll believe it’s actually a bomb when I see it go off. It smells like a con to me, an old-fashioned gypsy handkerchief switch. My guess is narcotics.”
“So why did you ask for that Washington information?”
“That’s the cover,” Shayne said impatiently. “The mark is a British physicist, and he thinks he’s bringing in a bomb. That doesn’t mean he actually is. The cash award in that 1949 bill was half a million bucks, which was a lot of money in those days. But with a heroin shipment today you can clear a couple of million, and you don’t run the same kind of risk.”
“I can see where a British physicist might pick up an atom bomb. Where would he get a couple of million bucks worth of heroin?”
“He didn’t organize it. From the description I’ve been given of the other guy, he’d go where the money is. He wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of collecting the full reward, and I think he must know it.”
“Mike, there’s got to be more. You haven’t convinced me.”
“We’ll have to break this off any minute, Tim, so be ready. The big trouble with the bomb story is that it was supposed to be a two-man conspiracy. The scientist and the crook. It turns out there are others involved. I’ll know better in five or ten minutes. I think there’s a hijacking in the works.”
“Great. Mike, I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I’m not brave. I don’t ever feel called upon to prove my manhood by breaking up the Mafia. I believe the legend. Those Sicilians are mean.”
“The man in the Olds,” Shayne said patiently, “is going to be named Daniel Slattery, which isn’t a Sicilian name. As soon as I see what happens to my physicist and the Bentley he’s driving, we’ll bring in the cops and make some arrests. Whatever the shipment is, it’s safe in Slattery’s car. You’ll have another copyrighted story about still another victory in the fight against organized crime.”
“Mike, your instinct is telling you narcotics,” Rourke said stubbornly. “You’ve doled out very little information, but my instinct tells me that whether it’s narcotics or not, to go home and let other people carry on the fight against crime. I’m basically a voyeur.”
“There it is! The green sedan, coming out now. Keep in touch.”
Swinging his field glasses as the Oldsmobile passed, he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man in glasses, a much younger woman beside him. Rourke’s lights came up, and he fell in line two cars behind the Olds.
CHAPTER 7
The owner of a black Jaguar, the car that had been in the way when the Bentley’s gas tank slipped out of Shayne’s hands the night before, was complaining angrily about his damaged fender. A low red sports car moved out, and Shayne saw Quentin Little standing
beside the Bentley.
Shayne, two hundred yards away with field glasses, tightened the focus. The Englishman seemed close to collapse. He clawed at his collar, his homely face shining with sweat. He looked around furtively, then ducked into the front seat and strengthened himself with a pull from a pint bottle.
The Customs inspector was approaching, holding a clipboard. Standing beside the open door of his car, Little tried to quiet his hands by filling a pipe. The tobacco scattered. The official came up, reached into the Bentley, and snipped off the red tag on the steering wheel. He checked Little’s customs declaration, stamped another paper of some kind and held it out.
Little had taken a backward step. His hand was inside his coat pocket. He looked at the Customs man with something approaching horror, and for an instant it seemed that he was about to refuse the paper, and turn and run. He tried to speak.
The Customs man gestured impatiently. Little accepted the paper, and the official went on to the next car. Little gasped, looked desperately around once more, and slid behind the wheel.
Shayne lowered the binoculars to watch the traffic on the boulevard. It seemed to be moving normally.
Little let out his clutch too fast and the Bentley stalled. He restarted it, but before he could swing into the northbound traffic, a Negro boy leaped out at him and began polishing his windshield.
Shayne raised the glasses again quickly. Little was attempting to flag the boy off. The symbolic windshield washing continued until Little knocked on the glass with a coin.
The boy desisted at once. He appeared at the lowered window. As he reached out, Shayne saw his hand open and a scrap of paper drop into Little’s lap.
Shayne started his own motor. A big trailer-truck passed, blocking his view for a moment. When he saw the Bentley again, it was in motion.
Shayne inched ahead, jockeying for an opening. After turning onto the boulevard, the Bentley stopped almost at once. Little got out and entered a free-standing phone booth.
Keeping his binoculars fixed on the booth, Shayne signaled his operator. He gave her a number and a man’s name.
“Tell him you’re calling for me, and you want the number of a sidewalk phone booth on Biscayne at the northeast corner of Eleventh. Ask him to hurry. Dial the number he gives you and call me back.”
Little, inside the booth, turned the slip of paper so he could read what it said, and dialed.
Shayne watched from the other side of the double stream of traffic, tapping his steering wheel. As usual, he was improvising. The fact that Little had passed through the Customs without difficulty hadn’t surprised him. It fitted every alternative theory he had devised to explain the discrepancies in Little’s story. His only plan now was to stay as close as possible and go with the action.
Little began talking volubly, gesturing with his free hand. He listened, scowling, and shook his head. He listened again. He was hearing something he didn’t like. He objected, shaking both his head and his finger.
Shayne had the Buick in gear, ready to force an opening in the flow of cars.
Little drew a deep breath, nodded, and started to hang up, then thought of something else.
Shayne’s phone rang.
“I’m getting a busy signal,” Shayne’s operator said. “No, wait a minute. I’m through.”
Shayne heard the pulse of the ringing phone. He saw Little, in the booth on the opposite sidewalk, turn back angrily and pick up the phone again.
“Now what? Did you forget some unimportant detail?”
“This is Shayne. Who’ve you been talking to? Dessau?”
“Shayne!”
Little sagged and ran his hand through his hair. For a moment Shayne heard nothing but shallow breathing.
“Yes,” Little said heavily. “Dessau. I’m cracking up. I can’t go on with this one more minute.”
“Sure you can,” Shayne said calmly. “You’re doing fine. If it’ll make you feel better, there’s nothing in your gas tank at the moment except gas.”
“What do you mean? What did you do with it?”
“I switched tanks with another car.”
“Damn you, damn you, Shayne, why didn’t you tell me? Do you know what I’ve been going through?”
“I have a faint idea. I’ve been watching you. I wanted you to put on a convincing performance in case Dessau was also watching. Laurence Olivier couldn’t have done it any better.”
“Another car? What do you mean, another car? Shayne, I beseech you, don’t be too debonair about this. If I had a weak heart I wouldn’t be talking to you now. I’d be dead. What other car? Where is it?”
“We’ll get to that later. Dessau’s the immediate problem. We can’t do anything while he’s around. How did he explain the fact that Customs people didn’t give you their full treatment?”
“He says they want to follow me and see who else is involved. And that’s not so marvelous, is it?”
Shayne said slowly, “For the original plan to work, you needed something clear-cut. A definite moment when they’d move in on you so you’d panic and the shooting would start. This way, if they pick the time and the place, they ought to be able to grab you before you can react. You can’t afford to wait. You have to provoke something.”
“That’s what Dessau told me, in almost those words. And I agree with him! My skull is about to explode. You’re in for a third of the assurance, damn you. Suggest something.”
“I don’t want to drag this out any more than you do. We want them to check your gas tank and find out there’s nothing in it. They get crackpot tips all the time, and I doubt if they ever had much faith in this one. Tell me what he told you to do. Maybe we can shift it around.”
“To continue to the first intersection and turn left. To drive three blocks and turn left again, on North Miami Avenue. At the first traffic light, I will see him standing on the corner. There will be a large building on the left, the post office. If he isn’t there yet, I am to wait. As soon as I see him, I will lose control of the car and collide with somebody. Police will be following me. As the first man in uniform approaches, I will become hysterical and wave my gun. Shots will follow. Pierre, an excellent shot, he assures me, will be there to make sure I don’t survive.”
Shayne thought for a moment.
“An accident’s a good idea, but make sure it’s a minor one, just bad enough so you’ll need a wrecker. When the cops check the car at the garage they’ll find out there’s nothing in it. I’ll need a little time to get Dessau off the scene. I’ll make a citizen’s arrest. Give me ten minutes. Wait right where you are now. And cheer up. We’re going to pull this out.”
“You know I doubt that, somehow. Money’s the key to most things, I firmly believe, and you stand to lose money by keeping me alive. That may be why I assented so readily to your unorthodox fee. I’m so sick of this life, Shayne!”
His mind jumped. “I don’t suppose Anne is with you. We spent a strange day, talking and talking. And at the end of that time, she was as much of an enigma as ever. I am without illusions. Why should a stylish person like Anne take me under her wing? I’m no prince in disguise.”
“Sooner or later we’ll find out. Look at the time now. Give me the full ten minutes.”
The phone rang while Shayne was maneuvering into a parking space on North Miami. It was Tim Rourke.
“No sense of direction, this guy in the Oldsmobile,” Rourke said. “We’re on the expressway going north, and that’s a roundabout way to get to Coral Gables.”
“Hang in there, Tim, and keep calling.”
He clicked for the operator, and told her to find Will Gentry, Miami’s Chief of Police. Gentry, one of Shayne’s oldest friends, rarely asked unnecessary questions, accepting the fact that Shayne, as a private detective, had a professional obligation that sometimes forced him to tell the regular police to go to hell. Like most city police departments, Miami’s was badly understaffed, and Gentry was still in his office.
“I hear you just gave the
press a very informative statement about that business in Bermuda,” Gentry said. “Four words—three grunts and goodbye.”
“Those guys are beginning to irritate me,” Shayne said. “Will, I’ve got something going. I thought I could handle it myself, but maybe not. I hope you didn’t have any plans for the evening.”
“No plans, but I had hopes,” Gentry said. “Along the lines of a quiet dinner at home and a couple of beers. I’m supposed to glaze a broken window. I’ve had the pane for two weeks, and I haven’t got around to it yet. Doris is beginning to wish she’d married that other fellow.”
Shayne grinned. “You know the fight against crime comes first. I’ll let you know definitely, one way or the other, in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, will you send a patrol car to the corner of Fifth and North Miami? I’m about to make a collar, a foreigner carrying a concealed weapon.”
Gentry sighed. “That can be arranged, unless there’s a riot somewhere I haven’t been told about. I don’t know why you didn’t stay in Bermuda, Mike. Miami’s more peaceful when you’re out of town.”
Shayne had been watching people go by as he talked. Now, after ringing off, he walked to the intersection and stopped for a cigarette. He still saw no one who came close to fitting the description of Pierre Dessau, a pale man, six feet four, wearing British clothes. Shayne walked on, glancing into store windows. In the middle of the next block he entered a cigar store and found a place near the phone booths, from which he could watch the corner.
Ten minutes passed.
The Bentley should be traveling south, but on the chance that Little hadn’t followed directions exactly, Shayne was watching all the cars going both ways and entering the avenue from the side streets. He checked the time again, his jaw muscles tightening, and left the cigar store to return to the intersection. A police car had arrived some minutes before, but there was still no sign of either the tall man or the Bentley.
Shayne threw away his cigarette and strode back to the Buick. “Ring Tim Rourke’s car for me,” he told his operator.
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