“So what?” Shayne said. “It’s an occupational risk.”
“Up to a point, lover. Just up to a point. Jay’s no fool. He’ll give you the big man now, and cut out with what he has already. God knows it’s enough for ten lifetimes. The game can’t last much longer anyway. They kill you tonight if they can, okay, but who shows up tomorrow? We’ll take you to Mr. Big. I think you can guess who he is.”
“I can guess,” Shayne said. “I can see the fingers point.”
“We’ll give you proof. Then you take him and leave us be.”
“Big talk,” Mike Shayne said. “When does the action start?”
“Right now,” she said.
A car had just pulled into the closed and darkened gas station and garage up the block.
IX
MIKE SHAYNE and the woman, Nita Nolan, sat perfectly still in the front seat of the rented car.
A hundred yards down the block the other car parked and its lights blinked off. Mike Shayne could see that there were two men in the front seat.
After a moment one of them got out and walked over to the side door of the locked and darkened garage building. He must have had a key because he went right on in. He wasn’t there more than a couple of minutes—and when he came out Shayne could tell by the way the buzzer in his watch acted up that the man was carrying the Esperance Diamond.
The second hand on the watch was a direction indicator. Instead of making regular sweeps it pointed to the location of the impulse that activated the buzzer.
Nita saw Shayne look at his watch. “So that belt buckle wasn’t the only bug,” she said. “I figured you had to have another one, but I didn’t think of the watch.”
“Never underestimate an honest ruffian,” Shayne said.
The man carrying the diamond got back into the car and it started to pull out of the service station.
Mike Shayne started his own motor and prepared to follow. “Suppose they spot me tailing them?”
“They won’t,” Nita said. “Rocky is doing the driving. He has orders to make sure he doesn’t lose you if the traffic gets thick. He’s going where you want to go, and Jay means for you to get there. So don’t worry. Just tail him.”
“Officer, follow that car,” Shayne said and laughed.
The car ahead made directly for the nearest causeway to Miami Beach, and Mike Shayne had no trouble following. Even without his directional bug in the wrist watch it would have been easy enough. At this time of night there was still plenty of traffic on the main arterial streets and expressways, so he managed to keep at least a few cars between himself and his quarry.
It was all very well to know that Rocky expected to be followed, but presumably the other man in the car, the one actually carrying the million-dollar diamond, wouldn’t be so complacent. If he became suspicious of a tail, he could take sudden and drastic action to interfere.
Once on the Beach the lead car turned north and Mike Shayne followed until they got into the section of the newest, biggest, gaudiest and most expensive of all the hotels. On “Billion Dollar Row” he saw his quarry head into the parking lot of the tallest tower of them all.
Shayne pulled his own car into the drive of the hotel next to it and accepted a parking check from the attendant. He and Nita Nolan got out to walk back down Collins Avenue.
The buzzer on Shayne’s wrist was still sending out its steady vibrations and the second hand of the watch swung and then held steady like a compass needle.
The hotel they were entering was the New Imperial.
“Surprised?” Nita asked.
She walked along beside Shayne matching him stride for stride but with an effortless grace the big man could never hope to equal. In the bright lights of the hotel lobby she was a beautiful woman and heads turned to watch them pass.
More than one northern millionaire envied Mike Shayne his companion that night.
He looked down at her and grinned.
“Surprised, lover?” she asked again.
“Of course not,” Shayne said. “It’s the penthouse suite, I guess.”
“No,” she said. “This is on the fifteenth floor. You can guess the name.”
“Of course I can guess the name, beautiful,” Shayne said. “Every finger has been pointing right to that one name all night. The big question is, how do we get in? He has to be guarded.”
“Sure he is,” she nodded. “A couple of his boys are watching everybody that comes into the lobby. Only one thing, though. They know me. I’m your passport tonight. Where I go, you can go. Just don’t make any moves until I tell you, though. We go up nice and easy and knock on the door like a couple of friends come up from the Surf Club for a cocktail.”
“And when they let us in—”
“There’ll be guns inside, lover, but don’t forget Rocky will be there too. This time he’ll be on our side. He’ll be posted where he can cover the rest of them from behind. You and I both have guns too and can take care of ourselves. Check?”
Shayne said, “Check, beautiful.”
He said that much out loud. In his mind he thought: “And maybe double check. Double cross and double check. How big a fool do you think I am, beautiful? Maybe a damn fool, but not a dead damn fool. Not tonight.”
They crossed the huge lobby toward the bank of elevators and Shayne felt his feet sink into the soft, deep pile of the luxurious carpeting. Old men with diamond shirt studs and diamond rings on their hands sat in the chairs and watched the lovely woman on his arm as buzzards might watch a lamb before they stooped and struck.
Mike Shayne knew who he was going to find in the apartment on the fifteenth floor of the New Imperial Hotel in Miami Beach. All day the fingers had pointed more and more convincingly in one direction—and it was the direction in which the big private detective least wanted to go.
According to all the evidence he was going to have to turn in the one man against whom it would be impossible to make a case stick, not because of lack of evidence but because all of that evidence would be circumstantial in nature and because too many people in high places would want to see Mr. Big go free again.
Of course, once Mr. Big got himself cleared of this charge he could continue to operate as usual. He might even have set up this confrontation deliberately in order to clear himself because he had begun to feel the net of the law closing in.
There was nothing Mike Shayne could do, though, but get into the elevator and ride to the fifteenth floor.
X
NITA NOLAN TOUCHED the bell of the apartment on the fifteenth floor. Her finger bounced in and out as she rang what had to be a code. A moment later the door swung open.
This was an elaborate and expensive apartment. There was even a small vestibule with a table topped by a Ming Dynasty jade statuette. Beyond the vestibule was a living room as big as the floor area of the average Miami home. Big picture windows looked out over the Atlantic Ocean at the far side of the room.
The man who had opened the door was big and broad-shouldered with the large, brutal face of a professional hood. He wore a three-hundred dollar suit with a bulge under the left shoulder where he packed a gun. His shirt had cost forty-five dollars and was dirty and soiled by sweat around the collar. He was balding and one ear had been almost torn loose in a fight. It had healed into a knot of scar tissue.
He gave them what he probably thought was a smile and stood aside to let them come in.
The second man inside the doorway to the big room could have been a carbon copy of the first except that both his ears were normal.
The man Rocky whom Shayne had last seen flipping over backward into Biscayne Bay was at the far end of the room, leaning one elbow on a white and gold grand piano. He gave the big man a wolfish grin. Shayne didn’t like that grin.
There were two other men in the room.
One was a little fellow with a nose that kept twitching like a weasel on the hunt and two black obsidian marbles for eyes. Shayne recognized him as a well known “contract man”�
�killer for hire—from the Detroit area.
The other man was Evan Hargrove, the insurance executive. He was the first to speak.
“My God, Shayne,” he said, “what in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here?”
“Why I thought you knew, Mr. Hargrove,” Mike Shayne said. “They brought me up here to arrest you.”
“Arrest me?”
“What in hell is going on here?” said weasel-nose.
“Everybody freeze!” That was a shout from Rocky at the far end of the big room.
Rocky had his gun out. It was a .357 magnum revolver with enough power to smash a man’s head to a pulp or break him in half with a belly shot.
Nita had pulled a gun out of her shoulder bag. It was only a thirty-eight police positive that looked like a toy beside Rocky’s cannon, but she used it to herd the thug in the vestibule into the big room.
“The jig’s up, boss,” she said to Hargrove. “You’d better turn the diamond over to Shayne.”
“You don’t believe this damned nonsense, do you, Shayne?” Hargrove asked. He looked white-faced and strained.
“What should I believe?” Shayne said. “What should I believe, Mr. Hargrove?” He took a few steps over toward the insurance president, acutely conscious of the two guns at his back. “You do have the diamond, don’t you, Mr. Hargrove?”
“Yes, I’ve got it,” Hargrove said. “I can explain.”
“He has it,” Nita said. “You know he has it, Shayne. You tailed it here from the airport yourself. That’s fact. Anything he says is just words.”
“I know,” Mike Shayne said. “Words.”
“I’ve got a right to explain,” Hargrove said. “Half an hour ago this man”—he jerked a thumb at weasel-nose—”came up here. He said the diamond had been stolen, but he could make a deal to sell it back to my insurance syndicate. He said you couldn’t tail the stone and he showed me your belt buckle with the bug in it to prove you couldn’t.
“I didn’t know what to think, so I stalled. I said if he could really produce the Esperance stone I had to see it first before I could talk any sort of deal. He made a phone call and said that the diamond was on its way here.
“A few minutes ago these other three men showed up. They had the Esperance Diamond with them and they showed it to me. It’s in my pocket now, and I’m convinced it’s the real stone.”
The bug on Mike’s wrist confirmed that fact, but he didn’t say so.
“Then this woman brings you in,” Hargrove said. “I don’t know what this is all about. Unless you’re part of this mob, Shayne. Have you sold me out?”
“Shayne hasn’t sold anybody out,” Nita said. “He did what he was hired to do. You thought he couldn’t when you tipped us about the bug in his belt buckle and how to find it. You underrated him, boss. He’s an honest man.”
“She’s crazy,” Hargrove said. “You know who I am, Shayne. You know that no court in the country will convict me on a damned frame-up like this.”
“Sure I know it,” Shayne thought. “So does Nita-baby here, and Rocky and Mr. Jay and the Seventh Regiment of the cavalry. They all know. So you and I aren’t going out of this room alive, Hargrove. We’re going to stay here with the diamond and your corpse or mine will be labeled Mr. Big.”
He didn’t say that aloud. All he said was; “Show me the diamond, Mr. Hargrove. Put it on the coffee table there. Hurry up.”
Hargrove looked desperate, but he wasn’t a fighting man and the rest of them were. He took a soft chamois pouch out of his pocket and walked to the coffee table. He pulled the drawstring of the pouch.
Mike Shayne walked over and stood beside Hargrove at the coffee table. That put him between weasel-nose and the insurance man. Rocky and Nita Nolan and the two hoods were at least fifteen to twenty feet away and at his back.
Hargrove tipped the soft leather pouch and tipped out the gold and jeweled pendant onto the dark wood top of the coffee table.
The million-dollar diamond blazed like a miniature sun under the lights.
Mike Shayne swung a hard right hand punch from his side. The blow took Hargrove on the side of the jaw and knocked him out like a light. His limp body hit the floor between the coffee table and the couch.
Shayne swung all the way around on the balls of his feet like a pivot. As he came, his right elbow took weasel-nose back of the ear. The killer lost interest in going for his gun. He went down on the floor next to Hargrove.
Shayne’s right hand flipped down to the belt holster riding behind and above his right hip. As his hand closed on the butt of his own automatic the big man dropped on one knee. Rocky’s first shot went over Shayne’s head and smashed the big picture window.
Shayne brought his gun up with a fast, smooth sweep. His right knee was on the floor. He put his left elbow on the left knee—caught the right wrist in his left hand—braced the gun, and put a 300-grain soft lead slug into Rocky’s heart.
He braced himself for the impact of Nita’s thirty-eight but it missed his head by inches. Then the woman slid sideways along the wall and flipped the light switch. The room went partly dark. There was still light coming in from the sky outside. It’s never really dark in Miami Beach.
The gotch-eared thug was trying to get his gun out. Shayne fired at the blur of movement and heard his slug thud into flesh. The man screamed, tried to run, fell down and went on screaming and flopping like a broken-legged horse.
There was a moment of frozen inaction except for the wounded man on the floor.
The third hood called out then: “Don’t shoot, Shayne. My hands are up.”
Nita Nolan was only five feet from the man. When he called out, she twisted around and shot him through the head.
“I’m on your side, Mike,” she called. “Here. I’ll prove it.” She threw her gun over onto the floor in front of Shayne.
The battle of the New Imperial Hotel was over.
“THEY MADE IT just too damned easy to believe,” Mike Shayne told Evan Hargrove, Chief Gentry and the federal men an hour later. “Everything that happened pointed to a frame-up to convince us that Mr. Hargrove was the master mind. If I’d swallowed that story hook, line and sinker they’d have made an excuse to kill Hargrove ‘trying to resist arrest’ or something and let me sell it to you.
“At the end Nita realized I was too smart for that. We were both going to be killed and left here with the diamond. The rap would have been pinned on one or both of us.
“I knew damn well it couldn’t be Hargrove. If it had been he’d never have hired me. Above all he’d never have had the stone brought directly to him. Besides, I was sure he was an honest man.”
“Why try to frame him at all, then?” Gentry asked.
“Because a thief always makes a wrong move when he’s scared and this crowd felt the law breathing down their necks.
“Nita Nolan was Mr. Big, of course. Jay and the rest worked for her. She figured to trap the trappers, so to speak, use the diamond caper to throw the blame on somebody else and get herself in the clear by being on my side if anything went wrong. She almost made it too.”
“What made you sure it was Nita?” Will Gentry asked.
“She didn’t have to shoot that hood after he gave up,” Shayne said. “There was only one reason to do that. To keep him from spilling that she was the boss. Rocky and gotch-ear were dead or dying already. Weasel-nose couldn’t talk. She’d used him to kill before and could hang him if he did.”
“That was the only reason?”
“No,” Mike Shayne said. “I was pretty sure before that. It was only the clincher. She was the only one all day who showed enough brains to be boss of an outfit like that. It just had to be her.”
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The Postman Brought Murder Page 5
