“You’ve certainly given me something to think about, Mr. Shayne.”
“And I need some information I can’t get myself. I want to know who rented safe-deposit boxes in the principal Washington banks the week of June 25th last year. Is that possible?”
“If it’s important. I doubt if I could have it by ten-twenty.”
“Bring as many of them as you can. I may be a little late.”
CHAPTER 16
5:30 A.M.
MAGGIE SMITH’S HOUSE WAS ONE OF A ROW NOT FAR FROM her theatre, on a narrow street. Shayne made a note to duck when he went through the front door. The Szep brothers, who had followed in a Chevy pick-up, parked several blocks away, where the truck would be less conspicuous, and came back to wait in Shayne’s Ford. Shayne gave them descriptions of Stevens, Rebman, and the Mexican gunman who had accompanied Stevens. He didn’t expect them to look for him here, but they had surprised him before.
The sky was beginning to lighten in the east. Maggie Smith opened the door almost as soon as Shayne let go of the antique brass knocker. She was wearing slacks, high-heeled gold sandals, and a sleeveless green blouse, and her immediate effect on the redheaded detective was to make him forget to duck. As he stepped inside he grazed the top of his head on the lintel.
“I should have warned you,” she said. “These are famous houses, and thousands of tourists come by to gawk at them every day, but they’re small. Oh Mike!” Closing the door, she came in against him for an instant. “You’re so big and solid and comforting. I’ve been humming to myself ever since I got up. You’ve decided to believe me!”
“I tried believing everybody else first.”
“I don’t care! So long as you came around to believing me in the end. Go through to the kitchen. I’m in the middle of making breakfast.”
Shayne followed her down a narrow hall, papered in a striped pattern, with a stepped row of oval miniatures on the wall. The kitchen was large and modern. It was filled with pleasant smells. Coffee was filtering on the stove. A dozen strips of bacon were laid out to drain on paper towels and a bowl of uncooked scrambled eggs was ready to be poured into the pan. Something was underway in a wall oven.
“The muffins have ten more minutes. Coffee’s almost ready. The eggs—I hope you like eggs—”
“I like eggs,” Shayne said.
“Sit down.” She pointed him toward a big table, already prepared for two. “I know it would be more polite to wait till you’ve eaten something, but Mike, what happened? The last time I saw you, you certainly gave no signs of disagreeing with Trina Hitchcock. What made you change your mind?”
Shayne stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “A funny thing happened. I talked to Hugh Manners, and he claimed he’d never heard a thing about it. I happened to have something to bargain with, and I told him to get Toby on the phone and call it off. And he got Toby on the phone, and Toby called it off.”
She gave him a worried look. “You mean Toby himself admitted—”
“Yeah, and not only that. I’ve got it in Manners’ writing. He gave me a letter to Hitchcock. You can read it if you want to. The idea was that I wouldn’t use it unless you gave me more trouble. Manners says he’s just found out that you and Toby have been setting up Hitchcock for a dirty photograph. It’s not that specific, but Hitchcock would understand what he’s getting at. And then Manners says he’s sorry and tells Hitchcock not to worry—it’s all off.”
“He signed that? Why would he sign such a lie?”
“Didn’t know it was a lie,” Shayne said, the sharp outlines of everything in the kitchen beginning to fuzz over and blur. “Believed me and Toby. You said one thing, Toby said another. I tried believing Toby, made no sense. Because all a fake. Tried believing you, made sense.”
He had been able to stay awake and clear-headed in a hard, uncomfortable chair in Oskar’s after-hours bar, but here in the airy kitchen, filled as it was with pleasant cooking smells, he could feel himself going.
“Don’t fall asleep!” Maggie said urgently. “Mike, I have to know! What do you mean, all a fake?”
Shayne snapped out of it, giving his head a short shake. “How’s the coffee coming?”
“One more minute. What could Toby hope to gain by telling Manners something he knew wasn’t true? Aren’t they working together?”
“Toby’s been conning everybody, Manners too. He had to.”
As Shayne’s eyes began to close again Maggie hurriedly splashed some too-strong coffee into a cup and put it in front of him. The fumes brought him back for a moment, but getting the cup to his mouth, or his mouth to the cup, seemed to be beyond him. He blinked hard, then his eyelids relaxed and everything began to swirl.
She shook his shoulder. “Damn you, Michael Shayne! You can’t say something cryptic like that, and dodge out of it by going to sleep. Drink your coffee.”
He could hear her, but her voice seemed to come at him from a great distance, rising and falling as though being blown about by a strong wind. He managed to take the coffee cup in both hands. He lowered his face toward it, meeting it halfway. It was scalding hot. The first mouthful burned its way down and his head cleared.
“There’s no time to sleep!” he said. “I’ve got to explain something. I think I know what happened but I can’t prove it. I need your help.”
“What can’t you prove, that Toby was lying?”
“No, no. That—”
The cup began to tilt. He watched, powerless to stop what he saw happening. Maggie took it out of his hand and put it back on the table.
“All right,” she said more philosophically. “I can see you’re determined. You woke me up in the middle of the night, and now you can’t stay awake yourself to tell me why. If you think I’m going to carry you upstairs, you’re very much mistaken.”
“I just need a minute,” Shayne mumbled. “Some more coffee.”
“It’s too hot to drink, and you won’t still be awake when it cools off. Stand up.”
He shook his head, frowning. “Got to tell you something. It wasn’t Toby’s idea.”
She pulled at him gently, and he toppled sideward, knowing that if he went to sleep now the machinery he was caught up in would go faster and faster until it crashed into something and broke apart. Maggie guided him toward the living room. He heard a low hum from an electric clock on the wall and saw the sweep second hand revolving slowly. He was past before he was able to decipher the time.
He tried again. “Toby’s the hired man. He wasn’t—”
“No, Mike,” she said when he didn’t go on. “He definitely wasn’t. You can finish that sentence after you wake up.”
“I can’t go to sleep!” he exclaimed, finding himself lying on a broad sofa, with no memory of having crossed the living room. “You don’t understand.”
“You can say that again,” Maggie said, untying his shoe laces. “And the reason I’m taking off your shoes is not because I want you to be comfortable, but because I don’t want my sofa to get dirty. When do you want me to wake you up?”
“I can’t go to sleep,” Shayne insisted.
He could hear his own voice, but that was all, and it went on echoing for a long time. Damn right he couldn’t go to sleep. He had to meet Senator Redpath at the Capitol at ten, and he had a lot of persuading to do first. Ten was the absolute deadline. Ten o’clock.
CHAPTER 17
10:00 A.M.
WHEN HE AWOKE HE KNEW IMMEDIATELY WHERE HE WAS. He heard the low hum of the electric clock, and brought his hand up to look at his watch. It said ten o’clock on the button, and while that was registering, an announcer’s voice from a radio somewhere said cheerfully that it was already fifteen seconds past the hour.
“Maggie!” he yelled.
She ran in from the kitchen as he erupted off the sofa. “Mike! I thought you’d stay in that coma another twenty-four hours. Coffee coming right up.”
“No time for coffee.” He grabbed his shoes. “Come on, I’ll explain as
we go.”
“Mike, I can’t go anywhere dressed like this.”
“Sure you can, you look great,” he said, without looking at her, and hauled her to the front door. “The first thing you have to understand is that everything is the opposite of the way it seemed.”
“I’ve got to turn off the stove! Go on, I’ll catch up.”
She ran to the kitchen swiftly. He remembered to duck as he went out the front door. Oskar Szep, seeing him striding down the brick walk carrying his shoes, leaped out of the Ford.
“I wondered what this doll did to you. It’s after ten.”
“One minute after,” Shayne said. “Get the pick-up and let’s go.”
Maggie ran out of the house while Shayne was pulling on his shoes. As soon as the Chevy swung around the corner Shayne put the Ford in gear and shot away.
“You need something to eat,” Maggie said. “I brought you a muffin.”
“A muffin!” Shayne said. “Now listen carefully. I figured I’d need about three hours to bring you up to date and talk you into doing me a favor. Now I have ten minutes, and I sure as hell can’t do it with my mouth full. I want to end up at the Capitol, so if I make a wrong turn, correct me. In a nutshell. Everybody thinks this started when Hugh Manners hired Toby to get him a contract to build an airplane. It started before that, around June 25th last year, with a stolen diary.”
She murmured occasionally to show she was listening, and didn’t waste any of his time by making him repeat anything. As he turned past the Grant Memorial into the circle leading up to the Capitol, he said, “But how the hell am I going to prove any of that? Everybody’s been too cagey. There’s only one way I can see. You used to be an actress. What about doing some ad-libbing for me? So long as you understand the general outlines—”
“Which I still don’t.”
“I’ll keep driving around and around until you do. The thing to remember is that we’ve got an advantage right now, and we’ll lose it the minute they identify Bixler. We’ve got to cut a few corners and jolt people, get them to do something they wouldn’t do after thinking it over.”
“You’ll have a hard time jolting Senator Wall. He’ll just say, ‘Excuse me, I have to talk to my lawyer.’”
“Then we’ll put on some more pressure. Where do Senators park their cars?”
“Behind the Senate Office Building. No, that way.”
Shayne followed her directions, which took him along First Street between two large official-looking buildings into a paved court. Only about half the slots reserved for Senators were being used. The slot marked “Senator Thomas Wall” was filled by a recent-model Mercury, a hardtop with a white top and a black body.
“That’s what I thought,” Shayne said with satisfaction. He reversed, passing his amateur bodyguards in the Chevy pick-up, and returned to the Capitol. When he got out Maggie slid over to take the wheel.
“You do look great in those slacks,” he said, really looking at her, “but if you’ll feel better in a dress, you have twenty minutes. Better make it fifteen. Wait.”
He went to the other side of the car and opened the front door.
“You’re getting the muffin?” she said approvingly. “You really do need something.”
“I do,” he said fervently, and took out the blended whiskey Hugh Manners had pressed on him the night before, hoping he would use it to put himself to sleep. Unscrewing the top, he took a long pull. As he lowered the bottle he found himself being watched solemnly by three women and a row of little girls. All, including the women, were in Girl Scout uniforms.
“I missed breakfast,” he explained.
Maggie laughed as he tossed the bottle back in the car. Oskar was getting out of the Chevy. The Girl Scouts opened for Shayne, and he took the shallow steps two at a time. Oskar followed, entering the rotunda while Shayne was asking the guard at the door for directions.
“Get a guidebook or something so you won’t stick out so damn much,” Shayne told Oskar, overtaking him. “And tell Pete to roll down his sleeves to hide those damn tattoos.”
“Jesus, Mike, what if the cops have found out who Bixler is by now? Are we making any headway?”
“Relax, Oskar. Try to look like a tourist.”
Shayne found the room in which Senator Redpath had arranged to meet him. The door was unlocked and he went in without knocking.
It was a narrow conference room, with a dozen or so chairs around a long oval table. A man at the window swung around as Shayne entered. He was tall, heavily built, with jowly features, which probably still looked statesmanlike in a campaign photograph.
“You’re Shayne?”
It was close to an accusation. His voice was clear and resonant. Turned on its full power, Shayne was sure it could reach the last row in a large hall with no help from a microphone.
“I’m behind schedule,” Shayne said. “Let’s skip the preliminaries. Did Mrs. Redpath explain her problem?”
Senator Redpath moved out a chair and sat down. He looked at Shayne sharply, reminding the detective that one of the things he had been planning to do at Maggie Smith’s was wash and shave.
“I need some sort of bonafides before I can talk to you freely,” Redpath said. “Adelle thinks you’re working for Hitchcock.”
“As of this minute,” Shayne said honestly, “I’m not working for anybody. I was hired by Trina Hitchcock, but I think the money for the fee came from National Aviation, through Henry Clark. For obvious reasons, National didn’t want Toby to get a blackmail handle to use on Hitchcock. I don’t have time to be anything but blunt, Senator. I’m assuming that your wife’s diary was the lever that got this whole thing moving. Toby could use it against your wife and various other people whose names were mentioned in it. Apparently there were enough of those to put over the Manners contract. Clark tells me it’s too late to revoke that now. He’ll settle for a couple of concessions, and an assurance that the diary won’t be used when Manners comes back to Washington looking for more business. If I can destroy it or turn it over to you, I’ll collect a fee of fifty thousand clams. I think that puts us on the same side of the fence. But if you wait to check every statement I’ve just made—”
Senator Redpath shifted his weight abruptly. “I’ll accept that, Shayne. What do you want to know from me?”
“Who approached you about backing Manners?”
The Senator began preparing a long cigar. He hesitated, then spoke decisively. “My wife, of course, on Toby’s behalf.”
“Did he give her any proof that he’d got hold of her diary, or had access to it?”
“He showed her several snippets cut from a photostatic copy. I wasn’t aware that any such document existed until this morning. She merely asked me to look into the Manners bid to see if I could back it, and she said it was important to her. I knew she had been associated with Toby. I assumed there was something about that association which could be misinterpreted, and he had reminded her of that. I asked only one question, whether this would be the final claim he would lay on her. Her answer was yes. Our marriage was a calculated risk on my part, Shayne. On the whole I considered it successful. She manages my household well. She is an excellent hostess, a marvelous campaigner. In last fall’s election I credit her with picking up between fifteen and twenty thousand votes. I won by eight thousand.”
Shayne kept his feelings about all this to himself. “And those fifteen to twenty thousand voters wouldn’t understand if her Toby connection made the back-home papers.”
“That describes the situation. However, if my investigation of Manners’ bid hadn’t convinced me that he would build the best plane, I would never have had any part in it.”
“Was an Air Force colonel involved?”
Redpath twirled his cigar until it was burning evenly. “That would be Colonel Oulihan, executive aide to the Source Selection Board.”
“What’s that?”
“An ad hoc committee which evaluated the test results and made recommendations, th
rough channels, to the various commands.”
“How much weight does a colonel pull on something like that?”
“He can pull quite a bit, depending on the caliber of his chairman. Oulihan’s a major general, doesn’t happen to be one of the most brilliant officers in the armed services.” He looked at his cigar reflectively. “So Oulihan was in on this. That explains why Manners knew the exact details of the opposing bids. Not only that, he seemed to have an uncanny grasp of the basis on which the bids were being judged.”
“I don’t get that.”
“Every proposal’s a compromise,” Redpath explained. “If you add too much speed you may have to cut down on your cruising range. You have to balance performance against logistics, both against costs. Most companies make a practice of coming in with a hungry bid, planning to get it back on cost overruns, and it’s known that the Secretary disapproves. But how strongly does he disapprove? And so on. An ally on the Source Selection Board would make all the difference between guessing right in such matters and guessing wrong.” He added casually, “Is Oulihan one of the cast of characters in Adelle’s diary?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Shayne said irritably.
“You’ll want to know how much I had to do with Manners’ success. I spent several hours at the White House, an afternoon at the Pentagon. I made four phone calls, I wrote one letter, I introduced Manners’ chief engineer to a brigadier general. I kept a log of these activities, which were actually fairly routine. I did one other thing which I didn’t record. I occasionally play golf with one of the Joint Chiefs. One afternoon I remarked that I hoped Manners would get the contract. That may sound innocuous enough, but I make it a habit never to intervene with the military except in matters of extreme importance. I believe he got the message. He has to come before the Senate Finance Committee for his appropriation, and as you may know, my views carry some weight on that committee.”
The Violent World of Michael Shayne Page 13
