Win Some, Lose Some

by Brett Halliday

  “A woman saw that bumper sticker when we were putting the car away.”

  “What?” Downey exclaimed. “What woman?”

  Pam told him about the woman and her dog. “I don’t know if she saw Eddie. I think she must have. She certainly saw Werner and me.”

  Downey was taking this with the utmost seriousness. He rubbed his mouth for a moment.

  “See what you mean. If they’re looking for a VW with that bumper sticker, she just might remember. Never mind, I’ll get rid of it someplace.”

  Chapter 5

  Timothy Rourke, the Miami News investigative reporter, usually worked in the city room, but he had a conference room off it for private conversations and phone calls. Whenever he was working on a major series, he kept his notes there in a locked file. The phone was an outside line so people could call him without giving their names to the switchboard operator. He could also drink there. In the city room, drinking was frowned upon as setting a bad example.

  He kept a bottle of Martell’s in his desk for his friend Michael Shayne, the private detective. Shayne was with him now. A big, red-haired man who spent as little time as possible in offices, Shayne kept moving, from the conference chair to the window to the corner of the desk. The paper had him on retainer to work with Rourke on the highway story. He was coming off two weeks in Washington, where he had combed the files kept by federal agencies on the Miami criminal infra-structure, looking for anything with a highway connection. Rourke was sorry to be told that he had come across nothing important.

  Rourke was thin, gangling, extremely nervous. He smoked continually, to his regret, coughed too much, and had a tendency to miss meals, especially when his work wasn’t going well. He and Shayne had teamed up before to pull off some major coups. This time they couldn’t seem to make anything start happening. The paper had insisted that he launch the series before he was ready. Sometimes it didn’t matter. People would see the headlines and call in with leads. On this one, each day’s story was a little more feeble. Duds, they just lay there.

  “If you have any good ideas, Mike,” Rourke said, “let’s hear them. I’ve had to listen to some heavy sarcasm from upstairs. Am I losing my touch? Possibly. In that case, I may be losing my job. I’m getting high pay with no contract. That means I have to produce.”

  “They’re the ones who insisted on going ahead,” Shayne commented.

  “That’s perfectly true. You tell them. I’ve tried, but I have a feeling they aren’t really listening. They want Canada’s head, not excuses.”

  “What happened while I was getting nowhere in Washington? I could read the clippings, but this way you can leave out the padding.”

  “That’s what it mainly is, padding. One new thing. Pilfering. You have to expect a certain amount of that on every construction site, but naturally on Larry s sites it’s organized. There’s a hell of a lot of valuable equipment parked out there on the Homestead job, and the guys have been nibbling away. He collects the insurance on it. So far, that’s standard. The angle is that it ends up with a crooked used-parts outfit and he buys it back so it can get stolen again. Not that I can prove any of this, but the lawyers say I can use it.”

  Shayne, a small bubble glass of cognac in his fist, was at the window, watching the traffic. “That won’t exactly set the Miami River on fire. Nothing else?”

  “Nothing we can print. The tip is that Canada has something going with Phil Gold, the Highway Commissioner. Hell, we all know that. That Palm Beach interchange last year—they changed the location three times, and you know and I know that somebody made a mint. There had to be at least eight million bucks on that platter. Canada and Gold got the major chunks, everybody else got scraps. But the lawyers say it’s actionable unless we can trace the real estate transfers, and the boys did a marvelous job there. It’s like a stream of water coming into a desert. It disappears. We’d need subpoena power and a blanket promise of immunity. That means a grand jury. We can’t get a grand jury unless we come up with something major. So there we are.”

  “We don’t need documents. A clandestine meeting between Canada and Gold would do it.”

  “Sure. The crook and the Highway Commissioner. Why would they be getting together except to work out a deal? That’s why I wanted you back early. I have a feeling something’s about to break.”

  Shayne sat down. “Trying to follow Canada would be a waste of time, Tim. He’s too good at the game. I explained this all to your editorial board. I’d need three cars with two-way radios, and that kind of operation is hard to hide. He wouldn’t do anything but go out to eat and play golf.”

  “The paper wouldn’t pay for three cars, anyway. They want the story, but they don’t want it to cost them anything extra. So I put Frieda on the opposite end, the Gold end. There’s so much security on those state jobs that they get careless sometimes. She has a Tallahassee agency working twenty-four hours. I don’t think they’re likely to lose him.”

  “Twenty-four-hour coverage. That’s expensive.”

  “Well, it just struck me.” He waved at the scribbled notes and clippings spread across the desk. “Every one of the ways Canada scoops in the dough—the insurance deal, the consultant fees that go into the cost base, the kickbacks from subcontractors, all the skimping on specs, the patronage no-show jobs—he can’t exploit any of that unless he gets the contract in the first place.”

  “You startle me, Tim,” Shayne said dryly.

  “All right, it’s obvious, but how do they make sure he’s always the low bidder? They’re sealed bids. Companies from all over come in to bid on those jobs. Granted, the real money comes from the angles he works later, but everybody else knows those angles as well as he does. There are fortunes to be made in highway construction, and some of those guys would put in negative bids to get a shot at the skim. But since Gold has been commissioner, Canada hasn’t lost a competition. That’s an interesting streak.”

  “You can print that.”

  “But I can’t draw any conclusions, the lawyers tell me, without some hard evidence of collusion. All right. The Everglades link-up. Seventy-five comes down the Gulf Coast, 95 down our side, and the highway freaks can’t relax until they get them connected. We have two days before Gold opens the bids. Canada will be bidding as usual. There has to be some kind of communication before then, and would they do it by telephone? I doubt it. If we can’t catch them at it, I’ll have to advise the paper to close down the series.”

  The phone rang. Rourke picked it up and listened. “Shayne? Yeah, he’s here, but if he’s already said no—”

  He listened another moment, and Shayne saw his attention sharpen. “I’ll check.” He covered the mouthpiece. “It’s a woman named Chris Maye. Her husband got killed last week.”

  “I talked to her,” Shayne said. “Not a hell of a lot I could do even if I had time. Look for a snitch, and the cops are better at that than I am.”

  “She says he was kidnapped, and he was a Canada man. What do you think? Let’s listen to her.”

  Shayne shrugged. Rourke told the woman he would send a copy boy out to show her the way. He went to the door and yelled.

  “The radar is working,” he said, coming back. “Blip, blip, blip. Something is going on in this town.”

  “Something generally is.”

  “No,” Rourke insisted, coughing. “It’s like that five minutes before a hurricane. You know something’s different. This highway series—why haven’t people been calling me? We’ve had one good tip, just one, the Gold-Canada tie-up. I know it’s authentic, but the guy who gave it to me didn’t owe me that big a favor. He owed me a favor, but more on the order of a superfecta at Pompano. Who stands to benefit? If Larry Canada is cut up and thrown to the sharks, who inherits? It strikes me that I don’t really know.”

  “You’re the number one crime reporter in Miami. If you don’t know, who does?”

  “Hell, all the number one crime reporter knows is what people are willing to tell him, and lately som
e of my friends have been crossing the street when they see me coming. Mike, the thought hit me when this woman was talking. What if that wasn’t a real kidnapping? What if it was only a cover to knock over a Canada man without starting a war? When that kind of high-level argument is going on, there are ways you can milk it. Or you can end up in the middle,” Rourke added, “which has happened to me a few times, as I know you remember, so I’m walking short. Nothing impulsive and sudden, like the old days.” He tapped his forehead. “I’m going to think before I jump.”

  Shayne laughed. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Shayne had long experience with Rourke’s extrasensory hunches. They bit him hard, and while he was feeling their effect, he wasn’t open to rational argument. Still, once in a while they paid off, and Shayne had learned not to disregard them completely. Several winters before, with Shayne scoffing most of the way, one of these hunches had carried Rourke into an investigation that led to a Pulitzer prize.

  The copy boy came in with a nicely dressed woman wearing glasses, who introduced herself as Chris Maye. In Eddie Maye’s world, the wives seldom get taken to the races or the games, and Shayne was meeting her for the first time. She refused Rourke’s offer of a drink, but accepted a cigarette. When that was out of the way, she said abruptly, “I have twenty-five thousand dollars. I don’t know what you usually charge, Mr. Shayne, but I don’t know who else I can go to. I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time since Eddie—”

  The rest of her breath came out in a sob. Rourke was around the desk in an instant. He was surprisingly good with grief-stricken women. He patted her, gave her Kleenex, poured whiskey, and made her drink it. Shayne let him handle it. He had liked her husband, but there was nothing surprising about his early death. Loan sharks have only a slightly longer life expectancy than racing-car drivers.

  After a time, Rourke said gently, “Can we talk about it, Chris?”

  “We have to talk about it.” She blew her nose hard. “I’m not a weeper and a wailer as a rule. I want to find out what happened to Eddie so it will have some meaning. Or shape. I don’t know how to say it.”

  “How much did you use on it, Tim?” Shayne said.

  “Couple of paragraphs. Found slain, was about all. Chris, will it bother you if I tell him?”

  “In a phone booth outside the Bowl,” she said, looking down at the wadded Kleenex. “A bullet hole in the head. There wasn’t much—mess, considering. He had tape marks on his mouth and wrists. The phone booth was where I was supposed to leave the money.”

  “Do you have a ransom note?”

  She took out a folded paper, on which the instructions and the usual threats were printed in ragged capitals.

  “‘He will be killed,’” she said, quoting. “‘You will never see him again unless instructions are followed, to the letter.’ So I followed instructions, to the letter. The strange thing is that I wasn’t especially scared. It sounded so businesslike, it didn’t occur to me that if I met their price they wouldn’t deliver. I scurried around, saw a few people—”

  “Can we stop there?” Rourke said. “Did these people include Larry Canada?”

  “Of course. You know how Eddie made a living. He didn’t keep it a secret. But he wasn’t part of any Godfather organization or anything like that. He used to laugh about the stories in the papers. I know you have to simplify things, Mr. Rourke, use labels and so on. ‘Alleged,’ ‘reputed,’ ‘according to law enforcement officials—’ Most of the law enforcement officials I’ve ever run into are morons. Eddie and Larry grew up in the same neighborhood, that’s all it amounts to. Larry took bets, Eddie made loans. I needed a hundred thousand to go with this twenty-five. Larry collected it for me. I don’t know how Eddie would have paid him back, but he’s been talking about selling the business.”

  “It says seven o’clock,” Shayne said. “Were you on time?”

  “Exactly on time. There was an out-of-order sign on the phone. Eddie was scrunched down on the floor with another note in his mouth.”

  She took out another printed message, in the same green ink as the ransom note. This one had been rolled instead of folded. It said: “SORRY, EDDIE TRIED TO SAVE YOU SOME MONEY, HE’LL KNOW BETTER THE NEXT TIME.”

  “Eddie,” she said, “my God, I’ve been married to him eighteen years. He wasn’t one of those show-off masculine types. He went along. He rolled with the punches. There were other things in his life besides money. He would have done what they told him, and made a funny story out of it when he came back.”

  She had been doing well after a difficult beginning, but now she tightened up and began crying again. “We never had children. We were still trying. Eddie was so good with his nephews and nieces, the kids on our street. Something like a car crash, an accident, I could have adjusted to that. But if it’s some kind of political thing—”

  They were watching her closely. She explained, “Not that kind of politics. To get control of those businesses, the gambling and all.”

  “That’s what my blips have been telling me,” Rourke said with a glance at Shayne. “And if you can give us some more on that, maybe Mike will reconsider and say yes.”

  She shook her head helplessly. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel him lying there with his eyes open, stiff as a board. All he ever said was that he was trying to make up his mind which way to jump. He thought I was better off not knowing about it. I keep puzzling about things. What happened to his car? Why hasn’t it turned up? He was collecting money that day. He had a lot of cash. I saw it—a lot. What happened to it? And if this was an ordinary kidnapping, wouldn’t they try to collect and then throw the body in a canal? Isn’t that what you’d do?”

  “That’s been standard since the Lindbergh baby,” Rourke said. “Have you told the cops any of this?”

  “Certainly not. And I don’t intend to. I took the note out of his mouth and let somebody else find him. When they called me, I went down and identified him. Eddie Maye, reputed or alleged or reported to be a notorious loan shark, killed by one of his business rivals or by a customer he squeezed too hard. The police in this town don’t solve any of those. One criminal less is the way they look at it. Well, Mr. Shayne?”

  She took three packages of bills out of her purse and put them on the desk, squaring them neatly. “This was in Eddie’s safe-deposit box. If it isn’t enough—”

  “It’s too much,” Shayne said. “Put it away. I can’t take it. There’s a rule against working for two clients at the same time. Tim’s paper is paying me full rates, and they expect my full attention. But what you’ve been telling us is very interesting. Canada has been refusing to see us, and this gives us a lever.”

  The phone rang, and Rourke dived at it.

  “Frieda, Mike.”

  Frieda Field ran her own detective agency, Field Associates, with an office in Miami Beach and retainers from several of the Beach hotels. The agency had belonged to her husband, who had been killed a few years before. She had elected to continue the business and had turned out to be good at it. Rourke had brought her in to keep track of the comings and goings of Philip J. Gold, the State Highway Commissioner, who might or might not have concealed dealings with Larry Canada, their principal target. Frieda was a handsome woman, dark-haired, slender, with a beautifully coordinated body, and yet to someone worrying about being followed, she was all but invisible. How could such a great-looking woman have the humdrum job of finding out if a certain state official was meeting the president of a certain road construction firm?

  “I’m at a gas station off Route 10, Mike,” she said, “and I think he’s gassing up for the Interstate. He’s getting a sandwich, and it’s the wrong time for food unless he plans to skip supper.”

  Shayne checked his watch. It was five-fifteen. “Anybody with you?”

  “No. But I’ve got the van, and I’m dressed as a tourist. The bike on the rack—everything. I won’t be noticed as long as he stays on the highway. I’ll need help if
he goes all the way. Here he comes now.”

  Shayne quickly told her he would check with the mobile operator and pick her up above Palm Beach.

  “To wind up what I was saying,” he said to Mrs. Maye, after hanging up, “I didn’t take this job with Tim because of the money they’re paying me—”

  “Which is lucky,” Rourke said, “because they’re not paying him a hell of a lot.”

  “And I don’t think many problems will be solved by putting Larry Canada in jail. People are standing in line to take his place. But I’ve spent a lot of time out in the Glades, and I hate to think what that highway could do to it. With a little luck, we may be able to stop this one. Before you came in, I was trying to tell Tim how I felt about Eddie. I’ve known legitimate bankers I’ve liked less. I’m sorry he’s dead, and killing is the one crime I can still get worked up about. Tim tells me we have a forty-eight-hour deadline, and I hope he can think of things to keep me busy. I’ll call you at the end of the week and let you know how it’s going. Meanwhile I think you ought to take it to the cops.”

  She shook her head again and said quietly, “That would be the wrong thing, Mr. Shayne. The night before it happened, we were having one of those rigid periods around two o’clock, and Eddie suddenly got up and went to the window and said he was being followed by somebody. Everywhere. He was really worried about it. A cop. He didn’t tell me the name.”