“It sounds simple, Mike. Larry Zion. Retaliation. You don’t try to kill Larry and stay rich and healthy.”
“He’s been in the hospital. I know that doesn’t mean anything—he could have gotten it underway as soon as he heard she was in town. She’d already threatened him. Marcus made sure I’d catch all these implications. However…”
He had left his pants in the bathroom. He brought back the eleven-year-old gatefold and showed it to Rourke, who recognized it at once.
“Hey… with the pubic hair, proving that Keko wasn’t a natural blonde. I remember it well.”
Shayne repeated Kate’s story of how the magazine had come into her possession.
“What was she doing—blackmailing somebody? Who knows? I think I’ll have to show it to Olson and see if he gulps and changes color. But first, I need a quick briefing on this proxy fight.”
“How quick? There are lots of angles.”
“Quick. These are important minutes before they sort out what happened. I left most of my clothes in the back of the closet, and some nosey bastard is going to notice them sooner or later. I was with her in the bar downstairs. That’s going to be reported. I was seen coming out of the room after the explosion. As soon as they put these items together, I’m going to be in demand and I won’t have room to maneuver. What do the experts think? Does the Olson slate have a chance to win?”
“Experts? What experts? The guys at the paper are as mystified as anybody. There are so damn many scattered holdings, nobody really knows. The Zions together have something like twenty-eight percent. In ordinary circumstances, that would be more than enough to give them working control. But Olson’s been buying for a couple of years through different kinds of fronts and nominees, and some of that was tricky and possibly illegal. The SEC and the Internal Revenue are both interested. He’s put together a pretty impressive coalition—TV money and so on. Both sides have been making the usual accusations…”
“I read the ads.”
“A lot of money’s being spent. For the Zions, it’s company money. Oscar’s using his own. The beauty of it is that, if he wins, his people get to sign the checks and he can pay himself back.”
Jane put in, “Would either of you be interested in going dancing?”
“Ordinarily,” Rourke said. “But we’ve got a problem here. Mike’s been done out of a fee, and he doesn’t take that lying down.”
“Lying down,” she said thoughtfully, looking at Shayne in his insufficient towel.
Rourke laughed. “Mike has to leave as soon as I bring him some clothes. But I might as well stick around. I can phone the story in from here, if that’s okay with you.”
“What story?”
“Honey, you’re a bit zonked, I think. Let me finish this up, and I’ll explain it to you. What I was about to say, Mike, is that the newspaper ads and the official mailings are just to make a record. The real fight is bloodier. Consolidated-Famous is just a shadow of what it used to be, but it’s a shadow with assets. Those assets are what everybody’s after. Money. Both sides have hired proxy solicitors, and those guys are tough. I mean, they don’t usually put bombs in bottles of Old Grand-dad; but otherwise, anything goes. Olson’s using one of the dirtiest firms in the business. Larry’s people have a dossier they’ve let me look at, a list of cases where the worst kind of pressures have been used. Of course they aren’t exactly Boy Scouts themselves.”
“Olson is definitely the long shot in this proxy fight?”
“Definitely. I’ve been giving four-to-one odds against. That’s what I’d like to have explained. Up to now, he’s had an unbroken string of successes. So why did he get mixed up in this nest of rattlesnakes? The movie guy on the paper has a theory that if Olson wins three seats, the Zions will give him his own production unit. His magazine is number two in the country. His key clubs and soft-cover books are coining money. Now he wants to prove he can do it in movies the way Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia. I haven’t been able to get in to talk to him. His publicity men, yes. Oscar, no.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“I see you’re not up on the Oscar Olson myth. He’s at the Pussycat Club. He keeps a private apartment in each of his clubs, and I think there are ten of them now around the country.”
“What’s it like? Have you ever been there?”
“Mike, old friend, this is no time for insults. Of course not. I like my sex without leers. You must have read about his private airplane. It’s the dream of every American adolescent: wall-to-wall girls. His local staff meets him at the airport and whisks him off to the club in a fleet of Pussycat Cadillacs. But if you’re thinking of asking him any questions, take along a flamethrower. When he doesn’t want to be bothered, as a rule he isn’t bothered. Now can we come back to Keko? I’ll get somebody to dig out the clippings. It would help if we had some idea of what kind of thing we’re looking for.”
“I don’t know any more than I’ve already told you.”
Rourke opened the gatefold and looked at it again.
“You’re obviously beginning to think she was murdered. But what the hell have you got to go on?”
Scraping his thumb nail across the side of his jaw, Shayne didn’t answer.
Chapter 6
Shayne gave Rourke the key to his Buick, and the reporter let himself out. Jane had moved from the bed to the floor, where she was waving her arms gently. “How are you feeling, Mike?”
Shayne looked down after a moment. “What?”
“That answers my question. I’m feeling wonderfully relaxed; and there you are, tight as a drum. I’m sorry for anybody who gets in your way the next couple of hours. Would you like me to teach you some exercises while we’re waiting?”
“Not now, Jane. Maybe you can do something with Tim. Now there’s a real challenge.”
“Mike, will you give me your autograph before you go?”
“What?”
“My friends won’t believe it unless I have something in writing.”
He laughed shortly and took the “Do Not Disturb” sign off the doorknob, reversed it, and wrote, “Anything Jane says happened really happened.—Michael Shayne.”
When Rourke came back with the suitcase, Shayne took his clothes to the bathroom and dressed quickly. Other questions had occurred to him while Rourke was gone, and the two men talked quietly for a moment.
“I want to know where to reach you,” Shayne said. “Find out what Jane thinks about your staying here. You can keep track of what’s going on across the hall.”
She heard that and came out of an intricate twist.
“I was planning to get to bed early tonight; but of course if it’s a question of catching a killer…”
Rourke had brought ice cubes back from the outside world. He raised his glass to Shayne, who nodded to him and went out.
The corridor was jammed with media people and uniformed police. A television unit was waiting. Reporters attempting to buttonhole police officials as they went in and out were getting nothing but rebuffs. The one-fingered bomb expert, Sergeant Lovejoy, had just arrived and was trying to force his way through the crowd.
“Now boys, what can I tell you? A bomb went off; that’s all I know. Let me look at it first.”
The cop at the elevator knew Shayne and remarked that he hadn’t seen him when he came in.
“Nothing I can do here till the crowd thins out. I’ll be back.”
“Was it really Kate Thackera?”
“It really was.”
He took the elevator to the basement garage. An attendant brought him his Buick. As soon as he left the hotel, he opened his car phone and signalled his mobile operator. She had trouble getting the number he wanted, and he pulled over to the curb and waited.
Presently a man named Jerry Lewellyn answered. Lewellyn worked for the telephone company; and although articulate enough in person, he was seldom willing to say anything on an open line except hello and goodbye. Without giving his own name, Shayne suggested that it mi
ght be a nice night to go bowling. A little late, but they wouldn’t have any trouble getting a lane.
“Bowling,” Lewellyn said without enthusiasm. “Just what I wanted to do.”
Shayne crossed on the Venetian Causeway and parked near a bowling alley. Lewellyn drove up in a panel truck. A light-skinned black with a degree in electronics, he was one of the phone company’s least loyal employees. Shayne explained what he wanted.
“Have to give you a no on that, Mike,” Lewellyn said. “A slow no, I could use the bread. But I know that Pussycat operation. They’ve got that whole island organized.”
“Come out with me, and look it over. It can’t be that tight.”
“It is, though. I put in their PABX for them, and I was watched every minute. They’ve got a guy running a dice game. Of course it’s protected, but the customers don’t know that. So they keep a bunch of hard white boys standing around. You need a key to get in. You’d think something sinful went on there. But what, outside of the crap game? The waitresses aren’t allowed to massage the customers. You can find bluer entertainment in any hotel on the Beach.”
“For five hundred bucks. That’s good money. How about cutting in where the line comes out of the building?”
“With the right kind of equipment—which I don’t have. And I’d be only too visible. Ma Bell doesn’t approve of this kind of moonlighting. Sorry. I was watching a basketball game when you called. I’ll get back.”
“Wait a minute. Olson is having some kind of tax trouble. Would IRS have a tap on him?”
“I’ve known cases. But they wouldn’t do business with us.”
“How would they work it? They wouldn’t do anything crude, like putting transmitters in each phone.”
“Man, what are you saying? That the phone company would cooperate with government snoops? Our big mission is to preserve the integrity of the customer’s messages; and if some dirty person sneaks in and puts in a crossbar shunt, we don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Can you check?”
“Easily.”
He went back to his truck. Shayne stayed behind him and waited outside while he went into a fortress-like building on Second Avenue. He came out some minutes later, smiling.
“This is actually going to work. We tap in on the tappers. Why not? It’s practically legal.”
“Where’s their setup?”
“In Buena Vista, and I think it’s a street of two-family houses. That’s the easiest kind.”
He moved off in his panel truck, with Shayne behind him. They stopped in a residential neighborhood a block or two from the noisy swath torn through the city by the big north-south expressway.
Lewellyn disappeared between houses with a bag of tools. This was a quiet street, with little traffic. Cars were parked along both curbs. Lewellyn came back into view, unreeling wire. Where it crossed the sidewalk, he ran it into one of the transverse cracks and glued it down with a quick-setting adhesive. After carrying it into the back of his truck, he climbed in to check the installation.
“Couldn’t be clearer,” he said, coming back to Shayne. “If they were all as easy as this, I’d go into tapping full-time. Can you let me know by midnight if you want all-night coverage? I have to work in the morning. I can get somebody else or cut in a tape recorder and sleep in the truck.”
“I have your number. I’ll try to call you.”
Pelican Island, one of the man-made lozenges in Biscayne Bay off the Julia Tuttle Causeway, had been bought by Olson Enterprises and turned into an entertainment complex. After appropriate sums had been contributed to the campaign funds of office holders on both sides of the bay, its name had been changed to Oscar’s Island on the official maps; but everybody still called it Pelican.
It was an island dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. To rent one of the efficiency apartments or a room in one of the motels, it was necessary to be single. Marriage—the word itself was in disrepute here—was cause for expulsion. Naturally the entire operation was regularly denounced from all the pulpits within a hundred miles; but as Lewellyn had pointed out, everything that happened there also happened elsewhere, if less self-consciously.
The Pussycat Club, where Shayne hoped to find Olson, had been built with a vaulted glass roof that emitted light like a beacon for incoming airplanes. Its walls were of concrete, unbroken by windows, with the rough grain of the wood used in the forms still showing on the surface. The entrance was unobtrusive, without a sign or marquee.
Shayne parked and waited until a raucous party arrived in three taxis from the Beach. Several of the men wore badges in the shape of rubber plungers, identifying them as salesmen from the convention meeting in the St. Albans. Shayne joined them. He claimed an acquaintance with a plump, unsteady man whose true home, according to his badge, was Omaha, Nebraska. He was glad to acknowledge Shayne as an old friend, and they all went in together. The two guards inside the door, dark, smiling boys in suits, didn’t notice that the group had picked up a hitchhiker.
Inside, Shayne stopped at the long bar with his new friends and paid for a round of drinks. Then, a brandy glass in his hand, he moved on.
All the female help—and except for the guards all the help seemed to be female—were extraordinarily pretty and well filled out, wearing a minimum of clothing, cats’ tails and unfailing smiles. The murals were semipornographic cartoons by artists whose work appeared in Olson’s magazine. There was a poker room and a dice room, an amplified rock group, and a well-known girl singer. One person at each table, on an average, appeared to be enjoying himself. The others were waiting for the evening to run its course.
Shayne intercepted one of the lightly clad waitresses. “I seem to be lost. Which way to the man’s apartment?”
“Now what man you-all talking about?” she said, giving him a dazzling smile.
“Oscar. We’re old army buddies.”
“Sure enough? You better cut that out, because Oscar Olson never spent a single day in any army.”
“We had our own army. I’m not trying to bust in on anybody. I just want to send my name in so he’ll know I’m here.”
She shook her head, her smile undimmed. “You know that just isn’t possible. If he opened himself up to any old body who wanted to see that revolving bed, I mean he’d be mobbed.”
“Would money persuade you?”
“Certainly,” she said promptly. “It could get me in hot water, too; but I’m not fixing to stay in this job forever. For an old army buddy, I believe I’ll just charge you a miserable twenty-five dollars.”
“That’s fair.”
He counted out the bills. They disappeared in the pocket between her breasts.
“Thanks, honey,” she said. “Now you understand this is just going to get you an interview with one of the secretaries.”
“How much will she cost me?”
“They’re on another level. They don’t take tips. I had a chance to audition for it, but you really have to dig the concept, and I’m not ready to commit myself yet.”
She went off with a flirt of her behind. Presently she was pointing him out to a tall, dark-haired girl in pink-tinted glasses. She was equally gorgeous but more conventionally dressed. She bore down on Shayne, her unfettered breasts like cannon beneath her loose shirt. She was the first Olson employee Shayne had seen without a smile.
He spoke first. “I don’t know him. I’m Michael Shayne, and I’m working for Marcus Zion. That doesn’t automatically make me an enemy. I’m not part of the proxy fight.”
The girl gave him a close inspection. She had gray eyes and looked alert and competent.
“Did you tip her?”
“Yeah, twenty-five bucks.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to find suitable girls. What do you want, precisely?”
“There’ve been a few late developments I don’t think he knows about. She told me not to offer you money.”
“She was right. Hold still.”
Her hands slid under h
is arms and patted him for weapons. Stooping in such a way that he could see her breasts down to and including the nipples, she ran her hands down both his legs.
“Lucky I’m not ticklish,” he said. “I’ve got a gun in the car if you think I ought to take one in with me.”
She came erect and said coldly, “Oscar doesn’t like private detectives. And that means anybody who works for him doesn’t like private detectives. Michael Shayne. Didn’t I read a piece about you in one of the news magazines?”
“A couple of years ago. It was eighty percent wrong. I’m not that good.”
“I’m Mandy Pitt. Tell me about these late developments.”
“What’s the point?” Shayne said impatiently. “I’m not going to bite off his nose. He’ll want to hear this, I promise you.”
She shook her head. “It goes through me first. That’s the way Oscar wants it to be. He gets certain shots in the evening, and one of the effects is to make him drowsy.”
Shayne broke in. “An actress named Kate Thackera has been offering him a deal on Consolidated proxies. She was killed in her hotel room about an hour ago.”
Mandy Pitt’s breasts lifted as she drew a sudden audible breath, a quick gasp.
“Killed!”
“And tell him I was with her most of the evening. We had a long confidential talk. His name came up a few times.”
She breathed out slowly. “You’re right; that’s news. But why do you think he’ll want to hear about it tonight? He has a hard time getting to sleep.”
“Tell him I’m older than I was when Newsweek ran that piece about me. Older and more venal.”
“Venal?”
“That means I’m willing to listen to any reasonable offer.”
“I know the word. I don’t understand how you’re applying it here.”
“You’ve done your duty, baby. You’ve convinced me that he’s a major personality who doesn’t like to be disturbed unless it’s important. This can have a bearing on the vote tomorrow, and of course it’s important.”
Kill All the Young Girls Page 6
