Fourth Down to Death

by Brett Halliday

  Brett Halliday

  Fourth Down to Death

  CHAPTER 1

  In the darkened room, Mrs. Zacharias leaned forward to crush out her cigarette. Michael Shayne, the private detective, was sitting beside her on a deep leather sofa, a drink in his hand, completely relaxed. As she sat back, her jeweled hand brushed against his leg.

  Shayne’s powerfully built body screened her from her husband, who was at the movie projector. She found Shayne’s hand and passed him a crumpled piece of paper. Shayne slipped it into his pocket.

  “You have to be a genius to run this damn thing,” Sid Zacharias said. “Sweetie, get Mike some more cognac while I figure it out.”

  “Stay there,” Shayne told her, uncoiling.

  The lights came on. Shayne collected the two highball glasses, added ice and Scotch, and poured more cognac for himself. Sid Zacharias was one of the major taxpayers in this part of the world, and his bar was stocked with excellent brands of liquor. The film slipped, and Sid swore under his breath.

  “If you’ll get out of the way, maybe I can fix it,” his wife said.

  “I don’t want you to fix it. I don’t even want to hear you make any suggestions. In this family it’s the man who cooks the steak and runs the movie projector.”

  She smiled up at Shayne, taking the drink. “You’re not married, are you, Mike? Lucky you.”

  They were in the game room of a large, showy house on Key Biscayne. Every available inch of wall space in the room was covered with framed photographs of Sid or Chan Zacharias, their animals, cars or boats. The entire biography was there on the walls, wildly out of sequence: the first mile of federally financed highway, the first bridge, the first Miami Beach condominium. A picture of Sid as an Eagle Scout hung beside Sid as the golfing companion of the Republican nominee for President; and there was Sid as the owner of the Miami professional football team. In the early photographs he looked tense and hungry, but as the money accumulated he had learned to relax. His hair had turned gray and he wore it longer and longer. His tailoring improved. His style, too, had changed over the years. His stocky body was still heavily muscled, with the beginnings of a paunch. He was as tough as ever in the important ways, but he seldom yelled any more and he had hired a Yale graduate to write the speeches he delivered to business groups. (There were several widely spaced photographs of Zacharias in white tie and tails on a dais with other important men.)

  On the wall, he outnumbered his wife by four to one. Chan Zacharias was shown as a bride, giving the cameraman a bright sexy smile, on a cruise, in riding costume at a horse show. Two decades later, she was kissing an unflustered young quarterback named Ronnie James, who had just been signed by her husband at the highest bonus ever paid a rookie.

  The real woman on the sofa, still lean and good-looking, her long hair as platinum as ever, watched Shayne inspect the photographs. She was wearing a pants suit and considerable jewelry, and had kicked off her shoes.

  “A dreadful display,” she remarked. “One of these days I’m going to bring in the plasterers when Sid’s away, and plaster over the whole room.”

  “You do that,” Zacharias said absently, struggling to thread the film, “and I’ll plaster you over, baby, only with concrete. If I didn’t have those shots on the wall, I wouldn’t believe it all happened.”

  “It gives the wrong impression, Sid. People don’t realize you’re actually quite shy.”

  He pressed a button and the reels began to whir. “What do you know, the damn thing works. Somebody get the lights.”

  Shayne cut the lights and returned to the sofa, where he rolled the cognac around in his glass and drank.

  “Now, if I can find the place,” Zacharias said. “I want you to look at two plays, Mike. This is the Boston game last Sunday. Did you see it, by any chance?”

  “No, I was in L.A.”

  “Ronnie James got hit twice in the first quarter by the same guy. Twice in a quarter. Ronnie’s a valuable piece of real estate, and I don’t like it when that happens.”

  “I hear he’s still in the hospital.”

  “Still in the hospital, still in the goddamn coma! And that’s bad news for Miami football fans, because when Ronnie James isn’t healthy we have to go to our running game. And we don’t have a running game.”

  Before the signing of Ronnie James, the Miami club, an expansion team, had lost money at the rate of half a million a year. James was not only a first-class quarterback, as measured by statistics, he was a star, a draw. He always had a little crowd around him. Women agonized over the risks he ran. In James’s second professional year, ticket sales boomed and Miami nearly won its division, losing to Kansas City in the final game of the season when James injured an elbow. This year the won-lost record was four and two, and until James’s concussion Miami had seemed certain to make the playoffs.

  Zacharias slowed the reel, and the blur on the screen turned into football players.

  “Too far.”

  He reversed, and after several false tries found the play he wanted.

  “Third and fourteen, so you know he’s going to be passing. You know it, and eleven Boston players know it, weighing a total of a ton and a half.”

  “Poor Ronnie,” Chan said, sitting forward.

  This was the sideline movie, with a good view of the Miami backfield. The ball was snapped. The lines clashed. James dropped back, setting up for the pass.

  “Watch number sixty-six,” Zacharias said.

  Behind a protective semicircle of huge men, James looked small and vulnerable, like an athlete who had blundered onto the field from some less violent sport. He needed four seconds, while a Miami halfback ran a fifteen-yard down-and-in. Suddenly a defensive end with sixty-six on his white jersey ripped through the screen. One of the Miami defenders tried a clothesline jab from the side, but he knocked it away. He threw himself at James’s fragile knees, which had already been taken apart and put back together again too many times. James got rid of the ball as he went backward. It was caught for a first down. Number sixty-six landed on him hard, all knees and elbows.

  Zacharias froze the action with James lying crumpled up beneath the heavier man. “He got up from that one. You may not know this sixty-six—Horace Monroe—he’s in the game of football for the pleasure of tearing people apart. You notice the way he went for Ronnie’s knee. All you have to do with that left knee is tap it to see if you get a knee jerk, and Ronnie’s back on the table for another operation.”

  “How many times did they catch him last season?” Shayne asked.

  “Fourteen. Those goddamn knees are the reason I pay my offensive line two hundred grand. Now we’re going back and look at Truszowski, who got beat on the play.”

  Joe Truszowski, also known as Joe Truck, had been All-Pro offensive tackle two years running, and he rarely made a mistake. Now, as Zacharias reversed and came back into the action at half speed, Shayne saw the huge tackle take a blow on the earhole of his helmet and another across the face bars. Reeling away, Truszowski bumped a teammate and tied him up long enough to prevent the man from blocking number sixty-six effectively as he went through. Truszowski, recovering, threw himself against the chest of another defensive lineman and knocked him to the ground.

  Zacharias ran the play again, then advanced the film rapidly and worked it back and forth until James could be seen backpedaling in another passing situation. This time Shayne watched Truszowski from the beginning. The big tackle came out of his three-point crouch and jumped at Monroe, bringing both arms up under the man’s chin. Again he absorbed a swinging forehand smash, and Monroe grabbed his pads and yanked him off-balance. He fell against Monroe’s ankles, but Monroe sidestepped and continued into the Miami backfield. He came in low,
aiming at the quarterback’s knees. As Ronnie danced daintily away, Monroe sliced upward. His helmet slammed against James’s chest. The helmet continued to slide, ramming James’s face mask and driving his head backward. James was still holding the football. Both feet were off the ground. He landed badly, and the ball squirted away.

  “Oof,” Zacharias said.

  “A contact sport, as they say,” Mrs. Zacharias observed.

  Zacharias switched off the projector. “Let’s not look at that again, it’s too painful.”

  Turning on the lights, he planted one hip on the corner of the billiard table and removed his horn-rimmed glasses. He immediately looked more like the Sid Zacharias he let the public see. In none of the photographs on the wall, Shayne had noticed, had he been caught wearing glasses. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and drank some Scotch.

  “What do you think, Mike?”

  Shayne drew carefully on the expensive cigar he had been given. “Monroe was trying to force a fumble and send Ronnie in early, and he did both. The Boston management probably gave him a new car. If you mean was there anything funny about those two missed blocks, I’m the wrong man to ask. I’m not that much of a football nut. It looked legitimate to me.”

  Chan put in, “Sid’s in a minority of one. Truck already had a fractured finger. The guy broke his nose on that second play, and he didn’t have it fixed till after the game.”

  “Joe Truck has been playing pro ball for nine seasons,” Zacharias said. “He knows where every official is on every play, and if the officials don’t see it, the cameras don’t, either. Joe doesn’t get fooled twice in one quarter. After the first time, Ronnie ran at least four plays into the line. Four pileups, with Joe Truck and number sixty-six on the bottom. That’s when Joe does most of his damage. This time apparently nothing happened. Number sixty-six came right back and gave him another arm—broke his nose, true. Simple-minded people like my dear wife think that proves he couldn’t be lying down on the play.”

  “I keep telling him,” Chan said to Shayne. “Joe didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. My God, even on the street he looks stoned. He’s been hit in the face too many times.”

  “He’s conditioned,” her husband said impatiently. “He knows what he has to do on a pass play—keep that headhunter away from the passer. But the reason I wanted to consult you, Mike, and this isn’t really a change of subject—one of the commissioner’s gumshoes has been in town the last couple of weeks, making everybody nervous, including me. Stitch Reddick, do you know him?”

  “I’ve heard the name. He’s not supposed to have much on the ball.”

  “Two security men,” Zacharias said. “One thousand athletes, two hundred and sixty coaches, another five hundred front-office people. You don’t want anybody too brainy, because what if he actually found out something? Of course Stitch did get a couple of players suspended a few years ago for betting on their own teams, and maybe that means everybody else is honest. I hope so.”

  “He’s been here two weeks,” Shayne said thoughtfully. “What happened two weeks ago? You beat New Orleans.”

  “By seven points,” Chan said, “and the spread was nine. Everybody who bet on Miami lost their money. We were in field-goal range, and Ronnie threw an interception. A field goal would have put us over and our backers would have won.”

  “Stitch wouldn’t come in unless he had more to go on than that.”

  “I don’t know what he has,” Zacharias said, “and I hope nobody tells me. Maybe it’s just routine, but I’ve heard of a couple of episodes in other cities where the guy did more harm than good. At this point we start talking business.”

  He picked up a manila envelope from the top of a color TV cabinet. “Whatever it is, somebody has to handle it. It can’t be me, because the way I deal with creeps like that is kick them in the ass and tell them to sue if they don’t like it. We’ve got to run our own investigation, find out what he’s after, and forestall him, if possible. My first idea was to put you on retainer. But if we go out and hire a private detective in the ordinary way, and that leaks, people are going to think we have something to conceal. Where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire kind of thing.”

  “I haven’t done any retainer work for years,” Shayne said.

  “Here’s how I’d like to do it.” He pulled a stock certificate out of the envelope. “I’ll sell you a hundred shares, one-percent ownership, for a nominal sum like fifty dollars. The price doesn’t need to be public knowledge. As a partial owner, you’ll have an interest in protecting your investment. Any kind of gambling scandal would depress the value of your shares. Right now the franchise is worth around nine or ten million. Last year at this time the tag would have been a million less. A year from now? That may depend on what you can do about Stitch Reddick.”

  Shayne studied him. “What you’re saying,” he said slowly, “is that you think where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

  “Hell, Mike, let’s be realistic. Counting hangers-on, we’ve got a hundred and twenty people in the organization, plus wives and girl friends. We know more about the situation than anybody does in Las Vegas, and when the point spread is really out of line, you know that out of that mob of people somebody’s going to find a way to get some money down.”

  “And isn’t that terrible,” Chan said sarcastically.

  “All right,” her husband said. “Did Joe Truck, or anybody connected with Joe Truck, have a bet on last Sunday’s game? I want to find out before Stitch Reddick does. I don’t know anything about Truck’s private life. He’s married, that’s all I know. He gets about a fourth of what I pay the quarterback, and no endorsement money. He can’t last many more seasons, and then what? The pension doesn’t start until he’s sixty. Maybe he has some kind of grievance against Ronnie—I don’t know. I hope you’ll agree to make it your problem.”

  He finished his drink. “I used to worry more about this, but I’ve got other things on my mind these days, and the players know it. I want you to be my scarecrow. Stand out in the field and keep the crows away from the corn. As soon as everybody understands that Michael Shayne is one of the owners, they’ll decide not to do anything illegal, I hope, or if they take a chance, they’ll be very, very careful.”

  “One percent of nine million is ninety thousand,” Shayne said. “For that much money you don’t expect me to stand around.”

  “The club is worth nine million only if somebody’s willing to pay nine million for it. This week, with Ronnie in Mercy Hospital, nobody’s making any offers. The value of your fee will depend on how well you do your work.”

  Shayne started to frame a question, but broke off. “If you knew anything more about Joe Truck, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

  Zacharias said seriously, “That’s the idea. All I want to know is what I see in the films. If Stitch Reddick wasn’t standing in the wings, I’d be tempted to let it ride. Ronnie can be pretty irresponsible at times, but one thing I know about the boy is that he can take care of himself.” He added, “But not while he’s unconscious.” He rapped his knuckles against the rail of the billiard table to take off the curse. “Knock wood. Do we have a deal, Mike?”

  Shayne waited a moment. “OK. I still think the fee’s high for what I’m likely to accomplish. Don’t expect too much. If Truck actually took money for those mistakes, there’s not much chance of proving it a week later.” He stood up. “But you never know. I’ll push him a little, and see how he reacts. If I find out anything, how much do you want me to tell you?”

  “As little as possible, unless there’s some action you think I ought to take. I don’t even intend to be around. I’m driving down to the Keys tonight, so I can get up early in the morning and do some spear fishing. I may not even come back for the game tomorrow.”

  He took out a pen and scrawled an endorsement on the stock certificate, then put it back in the envelope and gave it to Shayne.

  “I feel better already. Another drink?”

  Shayne shoo
k his head. “I’d better talk to some of the bookies before they turn off their phones.”

  They shook hands. Zacharias took him to the door and wished him luck, giving the door frame a quick knock as he did so.

  “Damn it, I’m getting as superstitious as my grandmother.”

  The Zacharias’s house was on Ocean Drive, along the outer edge of the Key. Shayne waited until he made the turn onto Crandon Boulevard before pulling over to read the note Chan Zacharias had slipped into his hand.

  It said: “More to this than meets the eye. Wait for me at tollhouse.”

  CHAPTER 2

  As he drove, Shayne picked up a sports broadcast on his dashboard radio, but he had missed the football news.

  He tried to raise the mobile operator on his car phone, but he was too far out. After passing the toll barrier on the Rickenbacker Causeway he signaled her again. This time she answered, and he gave her several numbers where she might be able to find his old friend, Timothy Rourke, a reporter on the Miami News. Rourke was the paper’s crime specialist, but during the football season he spent much of each day lounging around the sports department, on the alert for information. He bet ten or a dozen college and professional games a weekend, and after deducting the bookie’s vigorish—the ten-percent fee on each losing bet—he usually ended up a little better than even.

  Shayne locked the stock certificate in a strongbox welded to the floor beneath the front seat. Presently the phone sounded. He picked it up.

  “Hey, Mike,” Rourke’s voice said cheerfully. “When’d you get back?”

  “This afternoon. Where are you?”

  “En route. My answering service gave your operator my mobile number. How’s that for status?”

  Shayne grinned. “An answering service? A car phone? Who’s paying for all this?”

  “Well, I’m not. The city desk kept complaining about the way I didn’t return their calls. Now I won’t have any excuses, is the idea. You asked about my whereabouts. I’m driving north on North Miami between 7th and 8th. At this moment I’m passing Luigi’s Big Pizza. Now I’m stopping for a red light.”