Tonight it wasn’t a case they were celebrating. For some months now Shayne had been turning down business. All the work that was offered to him seemed to fall into one of two categories. Some were routine investigating jobs that could have been handled by any graduate of a correspondence school. People seemed to be willing to pay Shayne’s fees for the pleasure of mentioning casually in conversation that they had retained him in a confidential matter.
Then there was another group of potential clients who wanted Shayne because of the reputation he had painstakingly built up over the long and difficult years of his early practice—that he couldn’t be out-fought, outgunned or out-witted, and he would handle anything if the price was right. Many of these people left Shayne’s office faster than they had come in.
He felt tired and stale. In the past, whenever he had such periods, he would hang a “Closed” sign on his office door, pack a suitcase, draw a thousand dollars or so out of the savings bank, and catch a plane for some unlikely spot which he had never visited before. And whenever he went, things seemed to happen. In the end he would return to Miami, refreshed and ready to resume his hard, dangerous—and often boring and unproductive—work.
Lucy Hamilton, knowing the demands of Shayne’s restless nature, had been extremely careful not to tie him down. Nevertheless (though Shayne certainly wouldn’t have had it otherwise), his relationship with her had complicated his life. If he should take off on a sudden impulse for Afghanistan or Timbuctoo, he knew that no matter what adventures awaited him there, he would live for the moment when he could catch a homeward-bound plane.
Lucy had been waging a systematic campaign to cheer him up. For weeks she had urged him to take her to the races, but her motives had been so obvious that Shayne, out of simple stubbornness, had resisted. What difference did it make which horse out of a given group succeeded in running around in a circle faster than any of the others? But finally, with three days left of the racing season, he consented.
He had always liked Hialeah better than other racetracks. To his own surprise, some of his interest in horses returned. He hunted up a few old friends in the stables, then did some table-hopping among the owners in the clubhouse restaurant, and finally he bet on four races. Three of his selections came in, earning him a profit of $305. Lucy, who had passed up the first seven races, excused herself before the eighth. On an authoritative tip from a jockey who was in an excellent position to know, Shayne put $50 on a horse named Glory Be. To his great disgust, Glory Be was beaten by a head, placing second to a 17-to-l outsider named Lucy’s Joy.
“Wait till I get that jock alone,” he said ominously, tearing up his tickets. “Still, I did okay on the afternoon, and I’ll blow you to a fish dinner. Coming, angel?”
“In a minute,” she told him sweetly. “I have to stop at the cashier’s window and collect some money they owe me. You know about these things, Michael—if there’s too much to go in my purse, will they give me a paper bag?”
“You—you bet on that goat?” Shayne demanded.
“She had such a nice name. Thirty dollars times seventeen—that amounts to quite a lot, doesn’t it?”
They laughed about it all the way down the River Drive and across the Causeway to the Beach. Shayne felt better than he had in a long time. He crossed Collins Avenue, pulled into the parking lot alongside the Seafarer and found a vacant slot for the Buick. He left the windows open, for otherwise the car would have been as hot as a baker’s oven when they returned. The attendant gave him a ticket and told him to present it to the cashier for validation.
“Sure, sure,” Shayne said absently.
Taking Lucy’s elbow, he piloted her into the restaurant.
Live lobsters crawled about sluggishly on a bed of cracked ice in the front windows. To the left of the entrance, a Negro with badly scarred hands was opening clams and oysters at a short oyster bar. The walls were hung with fish-nets and stuffed game fish.
George, the manager, came through a little crowd of people waiting at the entrance to the dining room. He had been managing seafood restaurants in Miami for years, and was an old friend of Shayne’s. He had a long Greek family name which Shayne had never been able to remember or pronounce. He was small, plump, dark, completely bald.
“Michael,” he said with reproach, seeing the tall, broad-shouldered redhead. “And Miss Hamilton. How does it happen you never let me know when you are coming to dine with me? I would go out on the water, at great risk of sea-sickness, and catch something special for you with my own hands.”
“You haven’t done any fishing since Coolidge was president, you bandit,” Shayne told him affectionately.
George shrugged and, turning with a smile, he ushered the detective and his secretary past the people who were waiting for tables. Shayne heard his own name spoken in a whisper; one of the women was pointing him out to her companion. He knew that eyes were following his rangy figure as he walked with long strides to a table against the wall. His ragged red eyebrows drew together in a scowl, feeling his contentment begin to vanish. That was all he was these days, he told himself fiercely, something for one tourist to point out to another.
He forced himself to say jocularly as George whipped a Reserved sign off the small table, “I thought you didn’t know we were coming.”
“I tell you a secret, my friend,” George said, drawing out Lucy’s chair. “A waiter is sick, and the union does not yet send me a substitute. Until he arrives, I put a Reserved sign on this table, so people will get the idea that next time it will be better to make a reservation.” He snapped his fingers for a waiter. “Because you are a good friend, Michael, try the pompano. It is good tonight. The chef let me make the sauce, as I am such a fine employer and recently raised his salary. It was high enough already, as the good Lord knows.”
Lucy was laughing when he walked away. “I like him,” she said. Then her face became grave. “Michael, this has been fun today, hasn’t it?”
“It sure has, angel. Why don’t we go out again tomorrow?”
She shook her head slowly. “I want you to take a vacation. Get away from Miami for a while. It hasn’t been so good for you lately.”
“I can’t complain,” Shayne assured her. “I don’t have to break my back if I don’t need to. I’ve got all the money I need, I’ve got you to go around with—”
“And you’re bored, aren’t you?”
“I may be a little bored,” he admitted, “but its nothing compared to the lives most people lead. And any day now somebody’s going to walk in with a case that—”
She interrupted. “And if you go on feeling this way, you’ll turn it down. Some of your most exciting cases started off as pure routine, and you know it. I don’t like to lecture you, but it’s your own attitude that’s at fault.”
Quickly, opening her purse, as though she might change her mind if she stopped to think about it, she spilled some travel folders onto the tablecloth.
“Don’t be angry with me, Michael,” she pleaded. “Anyway, don’t just dismiss it without thinking about it.”
“You want to get rid of me?” Shayne growled.
Lucy shushed him as a waiter came up, bringing a big folding menu. “Michael, you order.”
He gave the waiter two orders for oysters on the half shell, one clam chowder, two pompanos cooked in a paper bag, one large tossed salad, one side dish of asparagus with cheese sauce, two desserts with a French name, and a large pot of coffee.
“Plus one double cognac,” Shayne added gloomily, “one glass of ice water, and one cognac and soda for the lady.”
The waiter folded his pad and took the menu away. Shayne started to speak, but Lucy forestalled him.
“I’m not suggesting that you leave tonight, after all,” she said, dimpling. “And you ought to know by now that I wouldn’t want you to stay away very long.” She put her small hand over his big one. “As a matter of fact, it might do me good to have some time alone. Not much, just a little.”
“I k
now, angel, I know,” he said moodily, and they said nothing more until the waiter brought their drinks.
Lucy made a small ceremony out of it, inviting him to join her in a toast to Lucy’s Joy, who might never win another race. Shayne tried to recapture the pleasant feeling he had had as the horses came around the final turn. The travel folders, covered with bright pictures of beautiful girls dancing and water-skiing and being embraced by lean, handsome men in white dinner jackets, lay on the tablecloth to remind him of Lucy’s suggestion. Maybe she was right, he thought. Knock off for a while, follow the horses to New Orleans—
He managed to talk of other things. Lucy was bright and gay, and Shayne did his best to respond. The food, as usual at the Seafarer, was excellent. The chowder succeeded the oysters, and was replaced by pompano. The waiter was removing the dinner plates when an explosion rocked the building.
All motion in the crowded dining room was suspended as abruptly as if a movie projector had broken down. Waiters, carrying loaded trays, exchanged startled looks.
After a moment the clatter of cutlery and the buzz of conversation started up again. Shayne’s hand, holding the four-ounce snifter of brandy, continued to his mouth.
“A gas main,” he said after drinking, dismissing the explosion from his mind. “It couldn’t be blasting at this time of night.”
“It sounded awfully close, Michael,” Lucy said. “I felt it all the way up my spine.”
“About this vacation. Where do you—”
He stopped. The atmosphere in the room had changed in some indefinable way. He swung around in his chair.
Several men, including George, the manager, were talking excitedly at the end of the bar. George ran his hand nervously over his bald head. Two of the diners at the nearest table stood up hastily. Outside, Shayne heard people shouting. He felt absently for his cognac, drained the glass and stood up, the heap of travel folders forgotten on the tablecloth.
“I’ll go see,” he said.
Lucy came with him. Before they reached the door, still another man joined the group around George. It was the attendant from the parking lot. His face had lodged in Shayne’s subconscious, although as far as Shayne knew, he hadn’t actually looked at the man. He was fat and freckled, chewing on the dead stump of a cigar. He handed George a parking check, and Shayne was in time to hear George say worriedly, “A Buick sedan.”
“What about a Buick?” Shayne demanded.
“Have you got your parking stub, Michael?” George asked quietly.
“I think so,” Shayne said, feeling in his coat pocket. He brought out a torn check, bearing the same number as the one in George’s hand.
“Let’s go,” George said. “Somebody tried to blow up your car.”
The plump little manager hurried out beside him, taking two steps to the tall detective’s one. Shayne, his gray eyes bleak and his mouth a tight line, pushed roughly through the crowd. The vertical furrows in his forehead had deepened, but he felt a quickening of excitement in his veins.
The sidewalk was strangely empty, the crowd having drained into the parking lot. People were standing on bumpers, craning to look in the direction of Shayne’s car. Lucy and George followed in the redhead’s wake.
A uniformed Beach patrolman was wrenching at the Buick’s front door as Shayne broke through the crowd. The windshield showed a pattern of radiating cracks, and at the base of the windshield the metal of the hood bulged upward, as though it had been struck a powerful blow from underneath. There was a sharp, acrid smell.
The door had been badly sprung. Shayne and the patrolman pulled at it together, but it refused to yield.
“Be careful, Michael!” Lucy cried.
Shayne, his craggy face grim and thoughtful, made no reply. Somebody had booby-trapped his car. The upholstery across the back of the front seat had been cruelly torn, and several of the springs bulged out. The bomb had exploded prematurely, but there would be no second explosion.
“My God!” he said suddenly. “There’s somebody in there!”
“Where?” the patrolman said, but Shayne shouldered him aside.
Through the open window, he saw a slight, shirt-sleeved figure wedged in an awkward position below the steering wheel, between the wheel and the seat. His blond hair was close-cropped. There was a great deal of blood on the floor.
There was no doubt at all that he was dead.
4
Michael Shayne went quickly around the front of the Buick, between the front bumper and the side wall of the restaurant. He squeezed into the narrow space between the Buick and the next parked car. The door on that side would open only a little more than a foot. He edged his head and shoulders into the opening.
The figure cramped beneath the wheel was a teen-age boy, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. His eyes and mouth were wide open, and the face had a look of terror and surprise. The dead face looked upward, and he had been working at the reverse side of the dashboard when the bomb went off and killed him. One arm was hooked over the steering column, and his body couldn’t be removed till the door could be opened on the opposite side.
Shayne backed out, tugging at his earlobe. He saw Lucy’s frightened face, and said soothingly, “It’s all right, angel. What I want you to do now is go home and get out the cognac. There isn’t a thing you can do, and Petey Painter’s going to be showing up any minute, making a nuisance of himself. No reason we both have to listen to him rave.”
“But what happened, Michael? Why should somebody want to blow up your car?”
He grinned joyfully. “They hoped I’d be in it.”
“But who could have—” she said blankly. “It’s not as though you were working on anything.”
A siren howled in the distance. Shayne sighed.
“There he is now. I’ll make you a small bet, angel. I’ll bet you Painter won’t believe I’m not working on anything. Grab a taxi. I’ll be with you as soon as I can get away.”
He turned her toward the entrance to the parking lot. He wanted to get her away before she found out about the dead body in the front seat. He didn’t expect her to pass out at the sight of the blood, but it wouldn’t take her more than an instant to realize that if the boy hadn’t been clumsy about attaching the bomb, that dead body in the Buick would have been Michael Shayne.
But it was too late. Two police cars drew up at the curb, their sirens dying. Out of the first came Chief of Detectives Peter Painter, an old adversary of Shayne’s. He was small and impeccably dressed, and a tiny hairline mustache adorned his upper lip. He had steel plates in his heels so he would command more attention when he walked.
Shayne stuck a cigarette in his mouth and watched the little man survey the crowd like a bantam rooster. With an imperious wave of the hand he summoned the uniformed cop, who was already making his way toward him.
“Get this crowd out of here,” Painter snapped to the detectives who had come in the second car. “Let’s get ourselves a little room to breathe. All right, Moran,” he said as the cop reached him. “Where’s the stiff?”
Shayne heard Lucy gasp beside him. The cop gestured excitedly toward the parking lot. Following the gesture, Painter saw Shayne. The chief-of-detective’s eyes wrinkled up in an angry squint. He did a kind of dance step of vexation. The big redhead grinned mockingly and gave him a half-salute.
“Michael,” Lucy said warningly. “I don’t know why you always have to alienate him, even before he’s done anything.”
Shayne’s face sobered. “You’re right, angel. I guess he can’t help being such a jerk. Heredity, probably. This time I’ll try to go along with him and see if it helps.”
Painter came toward him, still doing the little strutting dance.
“What is it this time, Shamus?” he sputtered when he was still some distance away. “Another scalp to add to your collection?”
Lucy gripped Shayne’s arm. “What’s he mean, Michael?”
“Now, angel,” Shayne said, patting her hand. “I told you this w
asn’t going to be pleasant, and there’s no point in both of us getting ulcers. Run along, now.”
“Well?” Painter demanded. “I asked you a question. You’ve taken justice into your own hands enough so I have a pretty good idea what’s happened. What did this one do to annoy you?”
Shayne shrugged and said patiently. “I’ve never seen this boy before, but it looks as though he was trying to kill me. If you’ll keep your shirt on for a minute, Petey, maybe we can find out what happened. I didn’t want to move him till you got here.”
“I hope not,” Painter said. “And I’d like to remind you that private detectives generally have the sense not to address police officials by a nickname, especially one they have coined themselves.”
“I’d like to apologize, Mr. Painter,” Shayne said, looking meekly at Lucy. “I’ll try to remember.”
“Now let’s see what we’ve got here,” Painter said, slightly mollified. “This is your car?”
“Yes, it’s my car.”
Painter looked at the bulge in the hood, the broken windshield and the ripped upholstery. He frowned as he saw the body jammed in beneath the steering column. He wrenched at the door.
“It’s stuck,” Malloy said.
“I can see it’s stuck,” Painter snapped. Raising his voice, he called to the others, “I want some wrecking equipment in here. We may need a torch.”
Saying nothing to Painter, Shayne took out his car keys, selected one and unlocked the trunk. He found the long jack-handle. Taking it to the front door, he forced the pointed end between the door and the frame. He braced one foot against the side of the car to put forth his full strength. With a loud metallic complaint, the door came free.
Painter pulled up his trouser-legs carefully and stooped to look in at the dead youth. Shayne waited. The crowd had been driven back from the immediate vicinity. He saw with approval that Lucy was questioning the fat parking-lot attendant. Painter would get around to him in a moment or two, but Shayne made a practice of staying one jump ahead of the police, and Lucy had caught the habit from him.
Target_Mike Shayne Page 3
