Murder Spins the Wheel ms-53

by Brett Halliday

  “Well, he used to claim that women gave him money, and I guess they did. The big hotels let him hang around the pools because he looked so good in trunks. If you want my honest opinion, I think he’d do just about anything, unless there was work involved.”

  “You never had his address?”

  “Two years ago he lived in a dumpy hotel in North Miami Beach, the Hotel Gloria. But it sure as hell didn’t go with a Jaguar or that girl I saw him with. He probably moved.”

  “How about somebody who might know where I can find him?”

  “I’m sorry. With Vince it was all one-sided. You didn’t ask him questions.”

  “Yesterday was the first time he mentioned having the tape?”

  “Yes. He wouldn’t have made it unless he expected to use it sometime, but he waited till the last possible minute.”

  “One other question, Johnny. How smart is he?”

  “Well-he always got lousy grades. I know that doesn’t mean anything because he hated the teachers. The brain’s a muscle, after all, or like a muscle-you have to exercise it. He didn’t seem to think he had to.”

  Shayne pulled up in front of the Lambda Phi house. The party seemed one degree noisier than when they had left

  “Don’t try to pull anything, Johnny,” Shayne said. “I can break any contract you sign, and the Warriors can stop payment on their check. Don’t go anywhere. I may want to call you.”

  Black assured him that he would stay close to the phone. He apologized for hitting Shayne, and repeated that everything he had said was the absolute truth. He had a hard time finding the door handle; there was still something else he wanted to say.

  “Mr. Shayne, about Vince. I know it’s serious. I know he’s been asking for it. But I hate to be the one to blow the whistle on him, I’ve known him so damn long. If you could see your way clear to give him a break-”

  Shayne leaned across and unlatched the door. “I’ll give him a break if he deserves one. First I have to find him.”

  6

  The Hotel Gloria, two blocks from the bay near the Miami Beach city limits, had been built in a hurry, during one of the brief booms, using semiprofessional labor and second-rate materials. It was in bad need of maintenance. The upholstery on the lobby furniture was worn and dirty, marked by the backs of many heads. There was a musty smell.

  Shayne asked the desk clerk, “Is a man named Vince Donahue registered here?”

  The clerk was tall and cadaverous, wearing rimless glasses and a small goatee. His prominent Adam’s apple rose and fell as he looked the detective over.

  “No, young Vincent hasn’t been in good standing here for months. You’re Mike Shayne, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Did he leave an address when he checked out?”

  The clerk laughed musically, showing a mouthful of decaying teeth that seemed to go with the hotel. “Anybody he wanted to see would know where to find him.”

  “Is there a manager on duty?”

  “I’m the night manager,” the clerk said coyly. “Come in during the daytime and you can speak to the day manager.”

  “All right,” Shayne said patiently. “There must be somebody on the staff who knows where he moved to. Or how about another guest? Who knew him?”

  The clerk put his fingertips on the counter and leaned forward. “Don’t private detectives usually offer a ten-dollar bill for such information?”

  “Why should we?” Shayne said coldly.

  “Well, I’ve got a brother-in-law in the police department here, and I happen to know for a fact that you never undertake a case unless you stand to clear thirty or forty thousand dollars. And he says that’s conservative! Per case! And maybe you wind it up inside of twelve hours. But of course you’ve got those terrific expenses. You go around to hotel people and restaurant people and lay out a ten here and a ten there, and at that rate you can spend as much as a hundred dollars an evening.”

  “What’s eating you?” Shayne said.

  The V-lines on Shayne’s eroded face were deeply etched. The clerk tried to look away, but Shayne held his eyes. The clerk didn’t like what he saw there. He took a half step backward.

  “I’m warning you, if you hit me-”

  Shayne made a disgusted face. “Would you have any objection if I bought a drink in your bar?”

  The clerk moistened his lips and looked down. “Be our guest,” he murmured.

  Shayne went into the bar through the lobby entrance. A line of unsmiling drinkers was watching a comic on television. The detective joined them, sliding onto a stool at the heel of the bar. When the bartender came over he said, “What’s the matter with the guy out there?” tipping his head toward the lobby and sketching a small beard on his chin.

  The bartender laughed. “He’s like that. What’ll it be?”

  Shayne told him, and the bartender brought him cognac in a four-ounce wineglass, with a glass of ice water on the side.

  “All I did was ask him about a kid named Vince Donahue,” Shayne went on, “and you’d think I’d insulted the flag. You must have had Donahue in here. He probably stopped in for a nightcap most nights.”

  “Donahue?” the bartender said thoughtfully. “To tell the truth I don’t get too many regulars. They come, they go. You can listen to a customer tell you his troubles every night for six months and in all that time you may never hear anybody call his name.” He met Shayne’s disbelieving look with a smile. “Excuse me. A man seems to want a beer.”

  After drinking half his cognac and chasing it with a long sip of ice water, Shayne turned his back on the bar and looked the room over. There were two waitresses. One was brown-haired, with an apologetic manner. The other wore extravagant eye makeup and had prominent breasts and red hair. It was hard to tell about the breasts, but the color of her hair was probably not natural. When she came over to the bar with a tray of glasses Shayne grinned and said hello.

  “Hi!” she said cheerfully, and looked up at his red hair. “Copycat.”

  “I’ve had it all my life,” he said.

  They went on from there, and Shayne was about to ask his question about Donahue when the bartender came over.

  “To give an example,” the bartender said. “You didn’t tell me your name when you sat down, did you? I didn’t tell you mine, and that’s the way it goes. We were talking about not remembering people,” he explained to the waitress. “For some reason I don’t think he believed me. What was the guy’s name again?”

  “Vince Donahue,” the redhead said to the waitress. “A good-looking boy. A diver. He drove a Jag for a while. But I don’t suppose you remember him either?”

  “Gee-” she said regretfully.

  “I didn’t think so. Of course I might be bringing him news about a legacy, except that that kind of kid doesn’t get legacies.”

  He went back to his drink, and shook his head shortly when the bartender asked if he wanted another. He picked his change off the bar. Turning, he found the plainer waitress, the one with the brown hair, trying to make up her mind whether or not to speak to him.

  She said with a rush, twisting the belt of her apron, “I might be able to tell you something, but first you have to tell me why you want to know. Go over to one of the booths. I’m not supposed to sit down in my uniform, but I’ll put on a raincoat and come back.”

  Shayne paid for another cognac and carried it to an empty booth. In a moment the waitress came back through a door marked “No Admittance,” wearing a raincoat over her uniform. The bartender spoke to her. She shook her head stubbornly. Coming over to Shayne’s booth, she slid in across from him. The red-haired waitress brought her a mixed highball.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Rose.”

  Rose pulled nervously at her drink. “I’d better find out what I am doing. I hear you’re Mike Shayne. Why do you want to talk to Vince, Mr. Shayne?”

  Over the second cognac, Shayne had been thinking. Given what he already knew about Vince Donahue, which of the two waitresses would
the boy pick? The one now sitting opposite Shayne would give him uncritical admiration, money when he needed it, sympathy when he needed that, she would always be waiting for him, she would pretend to believe his stories. To hang onto him she would do anything he demanded. She would probably feel flattered that he had any time for her at all. And giving her a closer look, Shayne saw something warm and appealing beneath her surface awkwardness. All she needed was to sit up straight and have a professional do something about her hair.

  He said carefully, “You won’t be too surprised to hear that he’s in trouble.”

  “Well, no,” she admitted.

  “He’s stepped on some people’s toes,” Shayne continued. “They’re middle-aged and settled. They wear white suits and neckties, and to somebody like Vince they probably look pretty harmless. They’re anything but.”

  “That sounds like him. He just doesn’t give a damn. But you’re going to have to be more specific.”

  Shayne continued feeling his way. At the first wrong approach, he knew the girl would take off her raincoat and go back to work.

  “He’s mixed up in a football fix,” he said. “He rigged something, or helped rig it, and it cost his friendly neighborhood bookie somewhere around a couple of hundred thousand bucks. I don’t mean Vince got all that, or even much of it. But so far he’s the only name I’ve heard mentioned.”

  “I knew it was something like that,” she said miserably. “Does that mean he’ll go to jail?”

  Shayne studied her. “There’s a law against blackmailing football players, and conceivably he might go to jail. But to be honest about it, I don’t know. People in the gambling business don’t like to let the courts handle their discipline problems. I might be able to influence what happens. If nobody cooperates I won’t have much of a chance. There was also a stickup, incidentally. I don’t know how much he had to do with that.”

  She made a quick joyless grimace and drank some more whiskey. “Oh, that’s great. If he had anything to do with a stickup, it wouldn’t be a gas station or a delicatessen, would it? It would be somebody important.”

  “That’s the picture of Vince I’m beginning to get,” Shayne said. “I still don’t know much about him.”

  She drew a deep breath. “I-lived with him, Mr. Shayne. You’ve guessed that. Everybody in the hotel thought it was foolish of me. They think it’s foolish to go on feeling the way I do about him now, but that doesn’t mean I can turn it off, like a faucet. When you came in, everybody automatically protected him because I guess they feel sorry for me. I’ve done my share of protecting Vince Donahue and pretending I didn’t know where he lived. But now I’m beginning to think that maybe-well, maybe if it’s not too serious, a little time in jail-”

  She met his eyes and said quickly, “Not because he walked out on me. I’m not trying to get back at him. But he has to realize! With most people, it’s easy to get into things and hell to get out. But Vince always manages to get out just as easily as he gets in. Nothing bad ever seems to happen to him. Maybe going to jail won’t work. I guess it doesn’t, usually. But it would get him away from Miami Beach before the roof caves in. He’s-terribly handsome, Mr. Shayne. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him, but he’s one of the best-looking people. The way he moves. And if something goes wrong this time I’m afraid-” She stopped and drank unhappily. “He’s proud of his teeth. He had caps put on last year and they’re absolutely perfect. The way he looks is the only real thing he’s ever had. And I can see how it’s going to end-with one person holding him and another hitting him in the face with brass knuckles.”

  “How what is going to end?” Shayne asked.

  She hesitated. “He’s running around with a married woman.” She searched his face. “Well, I started and I might as well finish. She’s staying at the St. Albans. Vince met her there at the pool. She must be thirty-five and she has loads of money. I saw her once and she’s not too bad-looking for somebody that old. I’m not jealous. Oh, I’m jealous, but I always knew I couldn’t have one hundred percent of Vince, even fifty-one percent. It isn’t the money that’s the big attraction this time. It’s who she’s married to. Would the name Al Naples mean anything to you?”

  Shayne kept his face carefully blank. “I’ve heard of him. I’d say Mrs. Al Naples was somebody to stay away from.”

  “But you’re not Vince, are you? She’s not the first married woman staying at the St. Albans that Vince has gone to bed with. But nothing like this ever happened before. The others were all married to-I don’t know-stocking manufacturers from New Jersey, who wouldn’t know what to do even if they found out. And they probably wouldn’t be too interested in finding out.”

  The red-headed waitress stopped at the entrance to their booth, still trying. “Don’t trust him, Rose. Be smart for once in your life. The way he gets business is to keep his name in the papers. He’ll notify TV and radio and Life magazine. Big brave private eye rounds up dangerous teenage thug with his bare hands.”

  “No, he won’t,” Rose said.

  “And why do you care what happens to that bastard, after what he did to you-”

  “I wasn’t married to him, after all. He didn’t make me any promises.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I wasn’t dumb enough to believe them. Please. You don’t know as much as you think.”

  The redheaded girl flounced off.

  Rose went on to Shayne, “Vince slept with her once, just once. She thinks that makes her the local expert on Vince Donahue. Everybody thinks I’m biased about him, but I know exactly what he’s like. You thought Grace was the one he’d go for, didn’t you? Yes, you did. You weren’t even going to ask me if I knew him. But she couldn’t give him what he needed. Everybody thought it was temporary with me. As I very well know, I’m not too terrific. I do all right in bed, but I can’t carry on a conversation about nothing, like some girls. And he told people it was just an in-between stand with me, the nice thing about it was that I didn’t make him work. That’s not why it happened. He needed somebody to listen to him who loved him. Who knew he was a heel in a lot of ways, but who loved him just the same. He told me about those other girls because he couldn’t boast about them to anybody else. And after a while he cut out the other girls. Well, I don’t want to fool myself. He’s like butter on a hot skillet, and he always will be. Mr. and Mrs. Al Naples-there was a combination I couldn’t beat. What would you call Al Naples? A mobster, I reckon. Vince couldn’t ever be that important himself, because you have to work your way up and he can’t stick to one thing that long. But he could get a tiny piece of it, do you see, Mr. Shayne? — through Naples’ wife.”

  “How did she turn out?”

  “She was very good,” Rose said without irony. “I mean sexually. She’d been so scared of her husband that she’d never had anybody before. Vince said it was like turning loose a skyrocket. They had some busy afternoons. Vince wasn’t exaggerating. I was in a position to know.”

  “The more I hear about Vince Donahue,” Shayne said, drinking, “the less I expect to like him.”

  “That’s the trouble with talking about him! I can’t explain him to you and I’m not going to try. I think the reason the sex part was so good with them, if you want me to go on, was that it was so dangerous. Naples almost walked in on them a dozen times. Boy! One time Vince had to hide in the closet. That sounds funny, but it isn’t so funny when you think that the husband’s Al Naples, and he used to murder people. They both knew what would happen if he caught them, and I couldn’t compete with that. So far they’ve been lucky, but there is such a thing as the law of averages.”

  “And he can’t catch them together if Vince is in jail?”

  “That. Other things, too.”

  She finished her drink and shook her head when he looked at her to see if she wanted a refill. “I was so worried I tried to get him to stop seeing her. I never did that with any of the other women, doesn’t that prove I’m not really jealous? ‘Realistic’
is a better word. She gave him money to move out of here. He didn’t want to go, but I sort of made him. I thought if they had a place of their own to meet it might not be quite so risky. They can’t deliberately take chances. I told him not to tell me or anybody else his new address. He’s been making some new connections lately and I thought-well.”

  “What new connections, Rose?”

  “I can’t tell you everything. There’s a limit to how much trouble I want to get him into.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “Never! He was very snooty about people who went in for that kind of thing.”

  “Do you know anybody named Pedro Sanchez or Tom Pond?”

  She groaned. “Oh, no.”

  “Does that mean you know them?”

  “I met Pete once. I didn’t know he was in town. I have to stop talking now. I think it was all right to tell you about Mrs. Naples-you could have picked that up from any number of people. But I want to ask you a favor.”

  “You don’t want me to tell him I’ve talked to you?”

  “That’s right. I could have made you promise before, but I don’t pay too much attention to promises any more. I hope you won’t tell him. He divides the world into rats and non-rats, and I don’t want him to put me in with the rats. I’d like to wish things would have a happy ending. At the same time I’m pretty sure they won’t.”

  She blew her nose into a Kleenex and said brightly, “That’s my big drawback. I take myself seriously.”

  Shayne wanted to reassure her that happy endings sometimes happen, but in Vince Donahue’s case he didn’t think that one was likely. Reaching out, he brushed the point of her breast very lightly with his thumb,

  “You’re a damned attractive girl, Rose.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He left her crying into her Kleenex. He collected some dirty looks on the way out.

  7

  Returning to his car, Shayne called Harry Bass’s number. The line was busy. He drove south and tried the number again after several blocks. When he found it still busy, he turned off Collins Avenue onto 71st Street, leading to Normandy Isle.