Win Some, Lose Some

by Brett Halliday

  Almost at once, they came to the empty tow truck, abandoned at the side of the road.

  “Here’s where they changed cars,” Shayne said. “Don’t stop. I want to be back on a paved road before they start talking about us on the shortwave.”

  “Next time we rob a construction site,” Frieda said, “let’s take a payloader. They’d make lovely pets.”

  With its heavy load, the van was giving them a surprisingly stable ride. Sometimes, even on pavement, it had a slight tendency to wander. The road gradually improved, skirting the Homestead Air Base, and came out on Route 1.

  “Now can we talk?” Frieda said, relaxing. “I think I’m beginning to see the idea. Canada’s gone. So is a lot of their portable equipment. What the real kidnappers are going to think—”

  “Right. That wasn’t a rescue, but a hijacking. According to Tim, there’s been some pretty heavy pilfering going on. They’ll think the regular thieves were working tonight, saw what was happening to Canada, and decided on the spur of the moment to move in. But this was a well-planned operation. When Canada didn’t cooperate, they reacted nicely. They’ve probably got the ransom note written, all their arrangements made. They’ve been thinking about how they’re going to invest all that money. I don’t think they’ll give up as long as they think there’s a chance to recover. If they can find out who’s been doing the stealing—”

  “They’ll try a hijack in reverse, and we’ll be there waiting for them. Clever. But how will they know anything’s missing? They were already gone when you did all that.”

  “A couple of angles I haven’t told you about yet. They already kidnapped one guy and killed him—a loan shark named Eddie Maye. Eddie’s wife told us he was being followed by a cop. How big a cop we don’t know, but he must have been fairly big because Eddie was lying awake worrying about him. That voice on the bullhorn sounded pretty professional, a cop’s voice. He’ll be talking to the sheriff. And then he’ll ask around—who’s been doing the stealing out here?”

  Chapter 10

  Werner peeled off his goalie’s mask and slapped it against the dashboard.

  “Strictly according to plan. Everything taken care of. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Now don’t bug me, boy,” Downey warned. “I’ve taken all the shit from you I’m going to take. I’ve had the full quota.”

  “Stop it,” Pam said, but her tone showed that she didn’t expect anybody to pay attention to her.

  Werner had torn the sweat shirt back from his shoulder wound. One look had told Downey that the bullet had nipped in and out without catching anything but flesh and muscle. But naturally the boy thought he was on the point of dying.

  Downey brought the tow truck to a sliding stop where they had left the cars. “Go straight to the Heights house,” he said curtly. “I’ll be with you in an hour, probably.”

  “We won’t wait up,” Werner said.

  “I’m going back in as a police officer and find out what’s going on. Something funny, I can guarantee you that.”

  “No more!” Werner shouted, suddenly furious. “We’ve had enough, do you understand?”

  “Come on, we have to talk about it.”

  “No more!” Werner shouted again. “You shit head, you know what you did? You nearly got us all killed!”

  Downey slapped his hand away and started the motor. Didn’t they understand they were like olives in a bottle here? First they had to scatter. Then they had to meet for the post-mortem. They couldn’t leave these loose ends flying around.

  He got off fast. They would realize soon enough that they could air their grievances inside four walls, not out here where they might be seen and remembered by a couple of teen-agers who had been to an X-rated movie and were looking for seclusion to do their own screwing.

  He heard a police siren. He didn’t believe it at first. How could they know? He listened more intently. That was what it definitely was, a siren, but it came from the Interstate.

  Werner, driving like a madman in his Ford, came up behind him, honking, headlights up full. He rode up to Downey’s car and clashed bumpers. On top of everything else, with that shoulder he had to be driving one-handed. A wipe-out here would be good news, wouldn’t it? Downey speeded up to establish an interval, got on a better road, and lost them. They had paid a month’s rent on a house in Miami Heights, back from the bay with trees around it and no close neighbors. They’d be sensible and go there and wait, wouldn’t they? Sure they would.

  As a matter of fact, for kids, they had done pretty well. Downey remembered the first time someone had shot at him. He hadn’t liked it much, either. He had hit the pavement so fast he skinned his whole face, the first blood he had lost as a cop. And that reminded him that he was a cop still, with a cop’s privileges. He turned on the police band. A couple of highway cruisers were talking to each other. A robbery? Robbery, hell. That was a snatch, man, interrupted by persons unknown, one armed with a gun, one with a payloader.

  He slowed down until he was barely crawling. The dispatcher had pulled off one of the cars to look for a tow truck. That worried Downey. How would they know about a tow truck unless somebody saw it, and in that case what else had they seen? Of course, the masks had still been on then. Coming to a full stop on the shoulder, he felt for the pint bottle in his glove compartment. As a matter of fact, he was damn tired. For the last couple of weeks, he had been working full-time at a regular job and full-time on this. He had had to do all the planning, all the psychology. The size of the stake had added to the strain. His two colleagues, he was discovering, were far from being the most transparent people in the world. With Pam especially, he could never be sure what she was thinking. He impressed her, he knew. At the same time, he had a strong suspicion that she thought he was a bit of a phony.

  He couldn’t understand Canada’s behavior. The part called for him to put down his gun and come out laughing. Why all the shooting? True, they had shot Eddie Maye, but they wouldn’t shoot Canada because he had to be delivered alive. And all those voices suddenly. Downey had been in some hairy situations in his time, especially during those years in the black precinct, but being attacked by a payloader was one of the worst. Usually a Cadillac gives you a feeling of security and power. Not this time. He could still see that big bucket lift, lift, lift fifteen feet in the air and come smashing down.

  The whiskey burned some of the fuzziness away, and he took another bite. If Werner hadn’t run off the minute he was nicked, Downey could have turned on the lights and found out what they were up against. It couldn’t have been cops. They hadn’t behaved like cops, and from what he was hearing on the police band, the cops were just beginning to get there now. Canada’s people? No, there would have been more gunfire, Downey would now be lying there dead probably, and the cops would never have been notified at all.

  So by God, maybe two things had been running concurrently there, their own thing and the robbery the cops were talking about. It would have to be somebody who knew the site and knew how to run a payloader. Two people at the most, amateurs, doing a little harmless picking on their own time. All that radio commotion might have come from a single source. Could it be? It could be, Downey decided. A couple of guys sitting there in the darkness, getting more and more itchy, and when they saw that what was happening was a snatch of Big Larry Canada, easily a million-dollar parcel, they decided to make a little racket with the radios and see what happened.

  He drove to the site, identified himself to the patrolmen, said he had picked up their conversation, and could he do anything to help? They couldn’t think of anything. He wandered away and looked for the Cadillac. That long, arrogant car, perched halfway up a little volcano of gravel, was surely a mess. Canada, as he had supposed, was no longer inside.

  “Now how the hell did that happen?” he asked.

  The highway patrolmen, who saw plenty of wrecked cars in the course of their working day, hadn’t been able to explain this one. Somebody happened to know that the job su
per lived in a trailer in the big encampment outside of Leisure City. They did some phoning. When the super arrived, the first thing he was able to do was identify the smashed car as belonging to the top boss. Everybody suddenly became much more careful. One of the sheriff’s deputies, who had found a bottle of whiskey in the trailer and was about to see how it tasted, replaced the cap and put it back in the drawer.

  The super exclaimed when he saw the looted trailer. Downey went inside with him. The super couldn’t believe the extent of the loss. Usually it was one or two small pieces, more on the order of petty pilfering. This had been done by professionals. On the other hand, the insurance company had been getting fed up with the incessant nibbling losses, so maybe the pricks had decided to go for a big score before more stringent security measures made it harder or impossible. A payloader tire had been taken. Mounted, one of those babies would set you back something like a thousand and a half. You couldn’t walk out with one in your back pocket.

  When Downey attempted to get a little more—had they ever caught anyone taking, for example?—the man closed up. That would have to come from the office.

  Never mind. Downey had already thought of somebody who was sure to know.

  Soupy Simpson, a well-known street figure in Northwest Miami, was built like an ex-jockey who has stopped starving himself to make weight. His bones were as light as a chicken’s. In periods when the money was good and he didn’t have to choose between food and heroin (heroin won), he put on weight around the middle. He usually seemed cool and easy, even cheerful, as though nothing bad could possibly happen to him. Much already had. He led a hazardous life. He was a fence, a gifted middleman who was willing to peddle any kind of stolen property if the margin was right. Because of his high expenses, he also had to moonlight by selling news and gossip. For this merchandise, his customers were the police, an occasional newspaperman like Tim Rourke of the News. This didn’t pay much, but it often made the difference between a bad night and going to bed happy.

  He slept in a bowling-alley shoe room. Turkey, who ran the place, was still at the front desk. Suddenly Turkey began coughing hard. He had a cigarette smoker’s cough anyway, but this was more and it meant they had visitors. Simpson swept his materials into a chamois bag. The top sash of his single window was down a few inches. Standing on the cot, he dislodged a taut elastic, hooked it into the bag, and let go. The bag left the room fast, coming to rest outside, high up under the eaves.

  He was back on the cot taking off his socks when a city detective named Jack Downey walked in. At this time of night, Downey was bad news. Nevertheless Simpson’s face split open in a wide, friendly grin, and he put out his hand.

  “Hey, Jack, I’m honored.”

  Downey was one of those cops it is impossible to like. He was a Godfather expert, with charts all over the walls of his office. Simpson and the others in his stable of snitches kept him contented by screening him from anything that would contradict his ideas. When a loan shark named Eddie Maye turned up dead, for example, Simpson told Downey it was an episode in a power struggle between organized crime families, although everybody knew it was actually a kidnapping attempt that had gone bad.

  Downey was in a rotten mood. Instead of taking Simpson’s hand, he put three glassine envelopes in it. Simpson looked down in surprise.

  “I do hope this isn’t a bust,” he said gently.

  “That remains to be seen.” His tone and manner were equally grating. Whatever his standing elsewhere, in this room he unquestionably had the power. “I want a few answers, and I don’t have time for the usual bullshit.”

  He swung over a straight chair, the only one in the room, and sat down. Simpson managed to stay relaxed, but he didn’t like the visit. The time of night by itself made it important.

  “Homestead,” Downey said. “Pilfering. The construction site on the Interstate. What do you know about that?”

  Simpson was liking this less and less. Homestead was sheriff’s country, and the sheriff was touchy about Miami cops who didn’t stay in their own jurisdiction.

  “Why are you interested, Jack? Homestead is out of your territory.”

  “Larry Canada is my territory, I go where he takes me. Let’s hear a yes or a no. Can you help me?”

  “Jack—maybe,” Simpson said, twisting. “I know it goes on.”

  Downey lit a cigarette, forgetting to offer one to the man on the cot. “Who are they? How do they fence it?”

  “I don’t know names and addresses, Jack. These are small guys by definition. They work for a living. It’s something they scoop on the side.”

  “I told you I don’t have time for the bullshit. Don’t try to Jew me up.”

  Simpson stopped smiling. He had had some unhappy experiences with Irishmen whose eyebrows came close to meeting over their nose. This could be a very mean man. He exaggerated his agitation slightly to give Downey a sense that the menace had been understood.

  “You say Canada. He has a piece of everything out there, never mind that it’s small, because of the principle of the thing. And if it gets back to Larry that we were talking about him, I could be in serious trouble. You know I live from day to day.”

  “I’m not asking about selling the stuff back later. That’s between Canada and his insurance. All I want to know is stage one and stage two. Small guys, I agree. Those kind of names are in the public domain.”

  Simpson continued to twist, fingers laced in his lap, and Downey’s eyebrows approached each other and touched. “What are you trying to tell me? That I can’t bust you right now for possession?”

  “No, no. If I knew off the top of my head, would be one thing. I’ll have to make a phone call, and they’ll remember it was Simpson was asking.”

  Downey took out three more little envelopes and added them to the pile on Simpson’s knee. He really must want this information. Usually he paid cash out of the informers’ budget. So it couldn’t be regular police business. The police-informer tie is like a marriage. To work, it must go both ways. The cop needs to know what his snitch is up to, to keep him in line. And the reverse is true. For a really solid relationship, the snitch, too, needs a handle.

  “Give me a couple of minutes, if I can locate the bastard. He sleeps different places.”

  Downey’s expression continued to threaten, telling Soupy that if he tried to evaporate or come back without the information, he was not only going to get arrested, he was going to have the shit kicked out of him for resisting arrest. Part of the cop mystique is getting a chance to bloody your knuckles now and then.

  Simpson went out to the office, where his friend was worrying about him.

  “Give me a shot of booze,” he said urgently. Turkey got out the bottle and poured. “Heavy stuff in there. I’d like to know what he’s into.”

  “I don’t like him coming around.”

  “I love it myself.”

  He folded himself in the phone booth and took the phone off the hook in case Downey looked out. After a certain amount of time, he went back and told Downey what he wanted to know. There were two regular thieves, Rusty Benjamin and a truck driver named Vaughan. His informant didn’t know if Vaughan was a first name or a last name. They lived in a big trailer park seven or eight miles south of the new interchange, near Leisure City. Apparently the set-up was this. They had their own camper there, and they rented a trailer from the park under a fake name. Whatever they brought back from work, they stuck in this second trailer. The whole point was not to take much at one time, so it didn’t pay a fence to keep in day-to-day touch. As soon as they accumulated a fair-sized load, they notified the buyer, who came with his own vehicle, hooked onto the trailer, and took it away, bringing it back empty the next morning. They got their money through the mail.

  All this was true. The one fact Simpson suppressed was that he himself was the link between the guys and their buyer. Downey didn’t need to know that. Downey’s eyebrows moved a fraction of an inch further apart, which meant he was satisfied, even
though for once Simpson hadn’t given him a Mafia connection.

  He left. He had been gone only a few minutes when Turkey began coughing again. Simpson swept Downey’s envelopes under the mattress, although for all he knew they contained nothing but milk sugar, and was ready for his next guests, who turned out to be Tim Rourke and Mike Shayne, the detective.

  Simpson was sort of a friend of these guys, though nobody with his lifestyle could really afford to be friends with anybody. He knew where he was with them. If he didn’t want to do business, he said no, and they accepted it.

  “Tim, how’s the crusade?” he said with his big smile. “Larry Canada’s still walking around loose, I’m sorry to see.”

  “We’re working on it,” Rourke said.

  “You’ll never get that guy. Coffee? Turkey just made a fresh pot. A drink maybe?”

  “We have some hot construction equipment we want to unload,” Shayne said. “It has to be moved fast, and you get the whole take. Do you want it?”

  “Sure,” Simpson said agreeably, “after you tell me what you’re getting me into. Sit down, fellows. You may be in a big rush, but this is the time of night when I begin to go slow.”

  Shayne took the chair. Rourke, too nervous to sit still, continued to circle. If Simpson had been a fox, his ears would be standing straight up, his mustache would be vibrating. He smelled money, and of course he also smelled trouble. If they said this hot load came from Homestead—

  “You’re an odds man, Soupy,” Shayne said. “What do you think the odds are we can stop that Everglades link-up?”

  “The big four-lane? Too much going for it, man. I admit you’ve surprised me a few times, but even so—well, twenty to one?”

  Shayne snorted. “Always nice to talk to you, Soupy. Yeah, I’d say about twenty to one. But we’re trying various things, and maybe we’ll come up with something. This one’s a little far-out. Canada’s Homestead job was hit tonight. I happened to walk in on it.”