“Thanks, Petey,” Shayne said sarcastically. “I’d appreciate it.”
“Time after time you’ve done your best to make a fool of me. You haven’t succeeded because I have a certain competence and standing in my profession. You’re constantly trying to undermine me with my subordinates. You flout my authority, ignore my requests, put roadblocks in my way. I don’t pretend to like it. That little episode in the parking lot, that remark you made in front of everybody about my being a lousy human being—that rankled, Shayne. I’m not the type to bluster or make vain threats, but by God, you’re going to wish you hadn’t said that!”
His voice had begun to tremble and rise in pitch. “You had the damned effrontery to lay your dirty hands on me, and you’ll regret it! I’m going to teach you a little respect, if it’s the last thing I do on this earth.”
“Get to the point, will you, Petey?”
“I’ll get to the point,” Painter said. “A murder has been committed in my jurisdiction, and I intend to arrest that murderer. If you’d been killed in the explosion, Shayne, I think the killer would have got away scot free. Without a confession, it’s almost impossible to get a conviction in a bombing case, as you know. But the bomb killed the wrong man, and he’ll try again. If you were really smart, you’d pull up stakes and move to some other city, leaving no forwarding address. Because how can you protect yourself? He has all the advantages. He can afford to wait—he’s not the one who’s under pressure, you are. He can pick his own time. He can wait in your hotel room or your office, or outside Miss Hamilton’s, or at any of the bars and restaurants you frequent. He can follow you, and you’ll never know he’s there until another bomb goes off or you stop a bullet.”
“Are you trying to scare me?” Shayne said.
“No. I know how bull-headed you are. I know you’ll give him every opportunity. I’m counting on that, just as the killer is. I want him to make a second attempt on your life. That’s the only way we’ll ever know who he is.”
“I take it that it doesn’t matter to you whether or not the attempt succeeds?”
Painter shrugged. “He can’t be executed twice. It might be easier to prosecute him for your killing than for the boy’s. I’ll leave that up to the D. A. The point is, you’re my bait, Shayne. I’m going to take good care of you. My men are going to keep you company from now on. If I were you I wouldn’t try to duck them. This is one piece of trouble you can’t handle alone.”
“You’re offering me a bodyguard, is that it?” Shayne asked.
Painter smiled unpleasantly. “I haven’t made myself clear. I doubt if they can give you much protection, for the reasons I’ve given. I want to lure the killer into making a move, so we can arrest him when he does. Whether the move succeeds or not is really immaterial. And I’m not offering you anything. I’m assigning these men to you. You don’t have any choice about accepting them.”
“I wish you’d put it in the form of an offer, Petey,” Shayne said blandly, “because I’d like to accept.”
Painter studied him, flicking his thumbnail across his mustache. “Now that you’re in danger yourself, you’re finally beginning to understand that there’s something to be said for orthodox police procedure?”
“I’ve never denied it,” Shayne said. “If somebody’s going to try to kill me, well and good. I see no reason to make it easier.”
Painter kept his eyes on Shayne’s face. “You promise not to give my boys the slip? You’ll cooperate, for the first time in your life?”
“I wouldn’t want to promise, Petey, because I don’t like the feeling of having my hands tied behind my back. But I will say that under the present circumstances your offer seems reasonable, and I’ll go along with it.”
“Fine,” Peter Painter said, his suspicions not wholly allayed. “Tomorrow or the next day, if you’re still being cooperative, maybe we can work out a little trap. Stage a public disagreement, and ostensibly withdraw the guards. We’ll need to prepare the scene carefully. Make it seem so attractive that he’ll risk coming out in the open.”
As Shayne stood up, Painter opened the door and addressed the two detectives outside. “O’Brien, you and Paholsky. Mr. Shayne requires your services, and I’m assigning you to him until further notice. Stick to him like a burr, but don’t make yourselves too conspicuous. Somebody tried to kill him tonight, and he’ll try again.”
The detectives looked at Shayne in surprise.
“I’m ready if you are,” the redhead told them cheerfully.
When the detectives still didn’t move, Painter snapped, “Any questions?”
“No, sir,” O’Brien said hastily. “It’s just that—”
He looked at his partner and shrugged. They let Shayne walk out ahead of them. Painter followed them into the open squadroom. At the top of the stairs by the lieutenant’s desk, Shayne turned and waved.
“Get a good night’s sleep, Petey,” he called. “Busy day tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Peter Painter said half to himself, worrying his mustache.
He looked around when Shayne and his escort were out of sight, and his eye lighted on Norris, a detective second-grade. “Come on, come on!” he snapped. “Give that swivel chair a rest. And you.” His darting finger picked out another idle detective. “Follow them. When Shayne ducks them, and he will, stay on his tail. Be smart and careful. If you let him shake you, your names are numbers one and two on the next transfer list.” The detectives hurried out. Painter remained where he was, frowning.
“Now I wonder what the son of a bitch is up to,” he said softly.
7
The police car came to a halt in front of Lucy Hamilton’s apartment house. Shayne and O’Brien went into the vestibule, where Shayne rang Lucy’s bell. The buzzer sounded almost at once, unlocking the inner door. Shayne went in first, with O’Brien following doggedly.
Halfway up the long flight, Shayne stopped. “Not that I don’t appreciate this, O’Brien, but how far does it go? Wouldn’t you be doing your duty if you waited downstairs?”
“You heard what the chief said, Mike,” O’Brien said. “He said to take real good care of you, and that’s what I mean to do.”
“Seriously. I know Miss Hamilton would be glad to give you a drink, but we have some private business to discuss.” He leered at the detective suggestively. “I don’t think I’ll be long, but if I do get tied up, you’ll understand, won’t you?”
O’Brien said stubbornly, “I’ll wait in the hall. It don’t matter a damn to me. I’ll just see if she’s alone first, if you don’t mind. I’d look awful dumb if the guy was in there hiding in the closet, wouldn’t I?”
The redhead laughed. They went on up.
Shayne touched the bell outside Lucy’s door, and as the chimes sounded inside he heard her say cautiously, “Michael?”
“Right you are, angel. Open up.”
He heard the double-bolt being thrown. The door opened and Lucy came into his arms.
“Michael!” she said in a muffled whisper against his chest. “That boy—it was so awful. If anything happened to you I couldn’t—”
She stopped, perceiving his companion, and drew away.
“This is Detective O’Brien from Painter’s office,” Shayne explained. “He gave me a ride over from the Beach, and now we’re going to let him look around your apartment to make sure you don’t have a murderer concealed on the premises.”
“Sorry, Miss Hamilton,” O’Brien said uncomfortably. “But there’s no such thing as being too careful, is there?”
“Of course not,” Lucy said graciously. “Please come in, Mr. O’Brien. I don’t have a murderer for you, I’m afraid, but I do have Mr. Baumholtz. He’s been waiting to see Michael.”
She moved out of the doorway. Walter Baumholtz, flushed and disheveled, was at the front window, looking down at the squad car. He looked over his shoulder.
“We meet again, Mr. Shayne. That’s a cop downstairs, isn’t it? Am I glad to see him!”
&nb
sp; “Just a minute,” Shayne said. “Go ahead, look around, O’Brien.”
As the detective entered, Baumholtz laughed. “We’re surrounded!”
Shayne looked at him. Lucy had given him a highball, and it probably wasn’t his first since Shayne had left him at the Seafarer. He swayed noticeably, and gestured with the almost empty glass.
“Nobody here but us chickens,” he said.
O’Brien clenched his teeth and completed the disagreeable job as swiftly as possible, looking into Lucy’s small kitchen and bathroom, then into her bedroom. The closet door opened and closed. O’Brien came out, looking angry.
“Sorry to disturb you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll wait outside.”
“Oh, no!” Lucy said. “I can’t allow that. Sit down and I’ll fetch you a drink. There’s Scotch and brandy, and I think some rye.”
“Thanks very much, Miss Hamilton. Excuse me. I won’t bother you any more.”
“Take a chair with you,” Shayne suggested.
“No, thanks,” O’Brien said through set teeth. “I’ll manage. I don’t want a drink, and I don’t want a chair. I just want to put in a day’s work for a day’s pay.”
Shayne was grinning as he closed the door behind the detective.
“What was that all about, Michael Shayne?” Lucy demanded. “I never noticed that you were so willing to accept police protection.”
“If he wasn’t waiting out there he’d be waiting somewhere else,” Shayne said, still grinning. “That’s a detective’s job. For the time being, we’re working very closely with Painter.”
“With—? Michael, what’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you later,” the redhead said, in a voice that was suddenly businesslike. “Glad you’re here, Mr. Baumholtz. I was going to look you up at your hotel.”
“Delighted,” Baumholtz murmured, running the syllables together. “Any more of that wonderful Scotch, Miss Hamilton? I’ve still got butterflies in my stomach.”
“Sit down, both of you. Michael, give Mr. Baumholtz a cigarette.”
She went to the kitchen, and Shayne heard her opening and shutting cabinets and getting out ice. Baumholtz took a cigarette from the package the detective held out to him.
“How’s the Masante girl?” Shayne asked, raising his voice.
“She’s all right now,” Lucy called back. “The doctor gave her a sedative, and she was sleeping when we left. Her parents are very nice people, didn’t you think so, Mr. Baumholtz?”
“Very nice,” Baumholtz agreed, running his hand over his face. “Terrible experience for all of us, Mr. Shayne, really shattering. I don’t mean the girl. She’ll get over it. But that boy. Juvenile delinquent and all that, I suppose, but it makes you think, just the same. God, how it makes you think. I honestly don’t know what’s got into the kids today. The atom bomb or something? I don’t know. You try to tell them something, they don’t seem to give a damn. No values any more.”
Lucy appeared with a large silver tray loaded with bottles, glasses and ice. Shayne watched Baumholtz finish his drink to be ready for the refill. The detective had a proposition to put before him, and he wanted him sober enough to listen to it.
“What I’d really like,” Shayne said, “is a cup of coffee. How about you, Mr. Baumholtz? Change your mind?”
“Little Scotch, thanks,” Baumholtz said. “Easy on the water.” Then he looked up at the big detective and laughed foolishly. “I see what you mean. Well, if you’re going to have coffee, I’ll join you. Mrs. Baumholtz always says I tend to make a spectacle of myself when I drink a highball after dinner, and tonight, good gracious, I must have had five or six.”
Lucy looked at Shayne reproachfully, and returned to the kitchen to turn on the flame under the tea-kettle. There was an angry clatter of pots and pans.
Baumholtz went on, “Got a kid of my own. Fourteen years of age. Good kid, wouldn’t want you to think different. But we just can’t get him to study. He’s always out tearing around. Gets fresh with his mother. Crazy to learn to drive. Fourteen—that’s too young to trust anybody with a high-powered modern car, don’t you think? And when you think that he might take it into his head to steal a car—he’s never done it yet, but it’s just the sort of crazy thing he might do. That could have been Walter Junior tonight! A person who would do a thing like that, set off an explosion that way, I say hanging’s too good for him. It’s sneaky. Why wouldn’t he have the guts to come right up to you and shoot you like a man?”
“Don’t talk like that, Mr. Baumholtz,” Lucy called from the kitchen.
“It’s true, though, isn’t it? Kill a crazy kid that sneaky way—I’d do just about anything to bring him to justice. If I’d only got one good look at him! I think I had another chance, too, but I muffed it.”
“What other chance?” Shayne said.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything,” Baumholtz mumbled. “I’m nervous, I’ll admit that. I can’t help thinking that the murderer is going to find out what I said to Mr. Painter. But I was probably seeing things.”
“Tell him what happened,” Lucy said, coming to the doorway.
The water came to a boil, and she turned back to pour it into the coffee pot.
“Oh, hell,” Baumholtz said. “See what you think, Mr. Shayne. I wanted to give Miss Hamilton a hand with the girl, so I took care of the taxi. We had the hardest time getting the parents to understand. You can imagine—two perfect strangers walk in with your daughter, and tell you she was out with a boy who tried to steal a car and got killed. They couldn’t seem to get it through their heads. It turned out that they’d told her she couldn’t date this Weintraub boy, too, and that made it worse.”
“Mr. Baumholtz was wonderful, Michael,” Lucy said from the kitchen. “I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been along.”
“Well,” Baumholtz said with an embarrassed laugh, “I’m a parent myself, I know how they felt. I had the taxi wait, but that’s all right, I’ll put it on my expense account. I was going to drop Miss Hamilton and go back to the hotel. I don’t know what made me look out the back window, but I did. And sure enough, a car was following us. It took the same turns we did. When we slowed down here it went by and stopped down the block. I only got a glimpse of the person who was driving, because it was getting dark by then, and he tromped down hard on the gas and his head was turned the other way. But here’s the thing, Mr. Shayne. I’m pretty sure he had on that same kind of bluish-grayish shirt. I’ll just bet it was the same man I saw fiddling around in your Buick.”
“Help me with this, Michael,” Lucy called. “It’s heavy.”
Shayne went to the kitchen for the tray, and set it on the low table in front of the sofa. He moved Lucy’s chair forward so she could pour. She smoothed out her skirt and arranged the crockery in the proper pattern. “Mr. Baumholtz? Cream and sugar?”
“Black, thanks.”
He accepted the cup after Lucy filled it. He took a cautious sip, making a wry face.
Shayne relented. “I feel the same way about plain black coffee. How about a slug of Lucy’s cognac to go in it?”
“It might go down pretty good,” Baumholtz admitted. The redhead went for the bottle and poured them both a generous portion. Lucy accepted a few drops.
Shayne stirred his coffee reflectively. “Did you get a look at the driver, angel?”
“No, I didn’t, Michael. Mr. Baumholtz didn’t want to worry me.”
“You know what I should have done?” Baumholtz asked. “I should have told that taxi driver to take me to where the car was stopped, and we could both take a good look at him. He couldn’t shoot both of us, could he? And if it turned out to be the same man, I might have grabbed him and—”
But even to himself, the possibility of grabbing a dangerous killer and hauling him off to the nearest police station apparently seemed somewhat remote. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t have actually grabbed him,” he said grudgingly, “especially if he turned out to have somebody else with him—and I think there
was, scrounged down in the front seat—but anyway I could have found out if he was really the one I saw go into the parking lot, and then we’d have something to go on.”
“Was it the same car?”
“I really think it was, only because of the way I am about cars I couldn’t swear to it.”
Shayne stared into the depths of his coffee cup. “How long did he stay?”
“Just a couple of minutes,” Baumholtz replied. “And do you know I didn’t even think to write down the license number? That’s how rattled I was. Of course it was probably stolen, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I just fell down all along the line. I paid off the taxi and we rushed upstairs. Miss Hamilton was going to call the police station, but I looked out the window and the car was gone. I guess he knew I’d spotted him when he saw the cab go off empty.”
He shuddered, tasting the loaded coffee. “But I can’t get it out of my head that he’s still down there somewhere, in a doorway maybe, waiting for me to poke my head out so he can shoot a hole in it. Nothing like this ever happened to me before, Mr. Shayne. I’m not really up to it. I’ve never had occasion to find out if I was a coward or not. Now I’m beginning to suspect that I’m a coward of the very worst kind.”
“Being a coward and being afraid when there’s something to be afraid of are two different things,” Shayne said.
“Well, I can tell you I’m certainly glad there’s somebody like you around,” Baumholtz said fervently. “Your business, and all.”
Shayne gave him a somber look. “It seems to me, Mr. Baumholtz, that you and I are pretty much in the same boat.”
“In the same boat!” Baumholtz exclaimed. “You’re the one he tried to blow up, not me.”
“The way it stands, a clear-cut identification by you can send him to the chair.”
Baumholtz loosened his collar. “I’ve explained over and over that I can’t identify him!”
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