Fourth Down to Death

by Brett Halliday

  After finishing with the cops, Shayne drove to his apartment hotel on the Miami River, where he stripped off his wet clothes and carefully removed the head bandage. He touched the back of his head. If he hadn’t been wearing the bandage at the time he was clubbed, something much worse might have happened.

  He dressed. Returning to his Buick, he headed south toward the causeway to Key Biscayne.

  CHAPTER 10

  The door opened.

  Chan Zacharias swayed drunkenly against the brightly lighted hallway. She was wearing flowered pajamas, cut low in front—a fine-looking woman, more interesting to Shayne than any of the others he had met that night.

  She took his arm and pulled it against her. “You should have come straight over. I’m not as clear-headed as when we talked. Come in and join me. A brand-new fifth of Martell’s is waiting.”

  He turned her to face the light. Her body was totally relaxed. She smiled at him and shook her head slowly. Her hair swung.

  “I don’t deny I’ve been drinking,” she said, “and you’re not in good focus. But hang on to me and I know I’ll make it.”

  He turned back. “Get some sleep. I’ll call in the morning.”

  She pulled him hard. “You know you have to stay, Michael. It’s your duty as a detective. If you leave without asking me any questions they’ll kick you out of the union.”

  “Goodnight, Chan.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She slid her arm around his waist. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m still enunciating. I’ll drink some coffee and lay off the booze and tell you everything you want to know. If you ask me the right questions, it’ll make your life much simpler.”

  The phone rang.

  “Poll takers,” she said. “Ignore them.”

  She pulled him into the living room. The phone stopped after the third ring. She poured a strong slug of cognac into a bubble glass and pressed it into his hand.

  “That commits you to stay.”

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  She sat down in the middle of a big sofa and kicked off her shoes. “I’ll put the coffee on in a minute,” she said, picking up a highball that looked as though it was mostly Scotch. “I can’t remember what I said. I was sitting here.” She drank. “Worrying. Lonely as sin. Feeling sorry for myself. Poor Chandonette. And I went back over the conversation we had earlier, and I wished I’d been a little more honest. Mike, do sit down, please. I can’t be peaceful with you looming over me like that.”

  She patted the sofa, and scowled at him when he took a chair across from her. She continued her explanation.

  “Things have been piling up around me. I’m in a state of fury most of the time. The minute you appeared tonight, I started calculating how I could use you in my dogfight with Sid. That’s mean and self-centered, and it’s also fairly dumb, because if you don’t clear this up fast, a lot of fine people are going to be in the soup, including Chan Zacharias, needless to say.”

  When he did nothing but watch her, she said, “Ask me something.”

  “What are you mainly after, Chan?”

  “That’s easy. I want to stay married, keep the property intact, and have a satisfactory sex life. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Sex life inside marriage or outside?”

  “What’s wrong with both?”

  Shayne drank. “I’m trying to get everybody diagrammed, and it hasn’t been easy. If you really want to be candid, tell me about you and Ronnie, and whether Sid knows about it or not.”

  “Oh, Mike, do we have to start there? It makes me sound so promiscuous, and that’s a word I hate.” Shayne said nothing, so she continued, “Well… I can give you its full extent in fifty words. Sid wanted to talk to Ronnie about his contract. This was in San Francisco; we were out for the Oakland game. Something came up and Sid had to leave. When Ronnie got there I was all by myself, on my third drink, and open to any reasonable suggestion. He made a suggestion I thought was reasonable. That’s all there was to it. Once! Unfortunately—” She stopped.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “The maid came in. Ronnie tried to get out of bed and his knee locked. It does that unless he’s careful—it gets jammed and he can’t straighten it out. He couldn’t stand up and he couldn’t put on his pants… You wouldn’t believe it in a blackout skit in burlesque.”

  “And Sid came back with Ronnie still in his underwear?”

  “Did I say he was wearing underwear? No, we were spared that, but he heard about it. It was too good a story to keep corked.”

  “You said something about divorce.”

  “That’s a guess. I haven’t heard from any lawyers yet.”

  “What kind of terms are you on with Ted Knapp?”

  She looked at him carefully before answering. “Friendly, I guess. I don’t know any of his secrets. He’s been to the house a few times, but always with a mob of people.”

  “He’s trying to buy the club?”

  “Everybody and his uncle have been trying to buy the club since we turned the corner. Sid was talking with Knapp last summer, and for a while I had a horrible feeling it was actually going through. I think somebody in Knapp’s group backed out and he couldn’t come up with the money.”

  “What was the price?”

  “They were talking about nine.” She knocked on the coffee table, a superstitious gesture she may have picked up from her husband. “Nine million dollars. A nice round sum.”

  “You called Joe Truck tonight when I was there. How much of all that was your idea?”

  “None at all.” She shuddered. “That really fell apart in a big way.”

  “Did Stitch Reddick get in touch with you tonight?”

  “No.”

  She made it a question. He drank, and for a moment they looked at each other.

  “Earlier, you wanted to talk to me,” Shayne said. “When I didn’t answer right away you had the operator keep on ringing. She usually only rings once—it’s a car phone, after all. You had something to tell me, and I don’t mean a story about some casual sex in a San Francisco hotel room. That’s very minor. Ted Knapp made a lot of money last week betting against Miami, and for Ted it was a bad move. It put him in the spotlight, and the bookies will be watching him from now on. If he gets to be known as a gambler, he’ll have to give up any hope of buying a football franchise.”

  “I don’t see what you’re driving at, Michael. I honestly don’t know anything about that.”

  “Ronnie thinks somebody may be selling plays. Have you heard any talk about that?”

  “Selling Miami plays? That’s serious.”

  “Does Sid bet on the games?”

  “With people he knows, not through bookies.”

  “How’s his financial picture outside of football?”

  “Sid’s financial picture is excellent. The son of a bitch is loaded.”

  “You said he’s involved with another woman. Tell me about her.”

  “She plays a good game of bridge. She raises money for arthritis—no, not arthritis, that’s not a rare enough disease. She always seems to be nipping off to Acapulco or the south of France. A real drip.”

  There was still some cognac in Shayne’s glass, but he left it. “Thanks, Chan,” he said, standing up. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  Her face froze. “You don’t think I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “You want me to think you’re trying to be helpful.”

  “If that’s so, I’m not succeeding, apparently. Mike, if you’d just tell me what you want to know—”

  “I want to know what kind of goddamn game you think you’re playing!”

  She sat forward. “I’m not playing any game,” she said quietly.

  “The hell you’re not. You’re trying to score points on Sid and win some money. That’s probably not everything you’re trying to do, but it’s all I’ve figured out so far. And if one of your football players or the private detective you’ve hired happens to get beaten up, too bad. Tha
t’s what they’re paid for. But when somebody gets killed—”

  Her breath caught, and her hand went out automatically to knock on the table. “Nobody’s been killed.”

  “Stop acting,” Shayne said scornfully. “You don’t do it that well. When you called me half an hour ago, you were breathing hard. Stitch Reddick was asking for money, and you needed help. You were ready to spill the whole thing and ask me to handle it for you. Now you put me off with some junk about extracurricular sex. Who cares who you sleep with? I don’t, and I doubt if Sid does, either.”

  “I don’t know what gives you the idea—”

  Shayne rode her down. “Then you found out that Reddick was no longer a problem, and you stopped worrying.”

  “Mike, you’re trying to trick me—”

  “You know damn well he’s dead… it’s the only way to explain this switch.”

  She came off the sofa and put her hand on his arm. “You’re so wrong… How did it happen?”

  “They’re finding out now. I think it was murder.”

  She swayed in against him. Shayne’s arms stayed at his sides. After a moment she drew a deep breath. Returning to the table, she picked up her drink and emptied it in one long pull.

  “You told me you were slugged. Does that have anything to do with—”

  “Reddick was still alive and talking. I was wearing a head bandage, and that took some of the impact. Even so, it was close. I’m not complaining. Anybody who gets into an automobile these days has to be lucky to stay alive. It happened that I was lucky. Reddick wasn’t.”

  She gave him a dazed look. “I need a minute to straighten this out. You think he found out something I wouldn’t want him to make public—”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I had him killed?”

  “God knows you’re involved. If you want to tell me about it, fine. Otherwise I’m on my way.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t go now. Mike, would you please, please, stop putting this pressure on me and tell me exactly what happened to Reddick, so I can know what to say?”

  She looked at him appealingly.

  “I suppose you won’t,” she said when he failed to answer. “That would be poor technique. It’s true I haven’t been thinking of this as a life-and-death matter. I may have even been a little frivolous about it. I did know he was dead, but I didn’t think there was any possibility of murder. I was told he got drunk and smashed up his car.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I have friends who call me when they think there’s something I ought to hear. He was dead when he got to the hospital, that’s all I know. It seemed to solve quite a few things.”

  “Whenever a blackmailer dies, Chan, murder is one of the possibilities that has to be looked into. It’s going to be a hell of a big story, either way. Stitch Reddick, investigating rumors of a football fix, dies the night before one of the most surprising point-spread changes of the year. I don’t know why sports scandals are bigger than any other kind, but they always are. People must be glad to find out that those hot pitchers and quarterbacks are as crooked as anybody else.”

  “Sid won’t be delighted.”

  “How much do you have on the game, Chan?”

  “Too much,” she said ruefully. “I was an idiot, and I can’t hedge—I don’t have any cash left. But don’t tell Sid.”

  “Will you start thinking? Before I took Reddick into the canal with me, he mumbled your name. It was all very garbled and hard to make out. He said Mrs. Z. worked it. Is there anybody else around with that initial?”

  She looked puzzled. “What did he mean, I worked it?”

  “It’s too late to ask him, Chan,” Shayne said impatiently. “He also mentioned Coach Lynch. He said if we went in together we could clean up.”

  “Lynch? That’s impossible. He’s the one coach in the league—Mike, he’s a Mormon, he gives a tenth of his pay to the church. He won’t do commercials—”

  “You’ve convinced me. Go on from there. If you’ll go back to the beginning and stop lying, I think there’s a chance we can straighten this out before anybody else gets hurt. Right now is the deadline.”

  “I don’t see why anybody else should get hurt.”

  “You know about momentum. When something like this gets underway, it has to play itself out. It’s harder to stop a war than it is to get into one, and you’re right out in the middle of the battlefield.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Mike, if that’s what it is, but I think the boy’s going to get the girl, and we’re all going to live happily ever after.”

  Shayne made a movement, and she said hastily, “Except for Stitch Reddick, of course, and he brought that on himself. If you drink, don’t drive. Why should I care about Stitch Reddick? I wish you’d sit down. I want to talk about making a deal.”

  “What kind?”

  “I know exactly what happened in last week’s game, and in the New Orleans game the week before, and in the Kansas City game last year when Ronnie had his elbow trouble. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I wish I did. Together we might be able to work it out and get in on it. But I need some proof that you aren’t implacably hostile. I have a suggestion.” She looked at him evenly. “Make love to me.”

  Shayne laughed.

  After a moment she smiled. Sitting back, she said in a softer voice, “I had to say it that way. If I tried to put my arms around you to say it, you would have slugged me. But why not? Those are the rules of the house.”

  “They aren’t my rules.”

  “I’ve got a philosophy. If I talk to you, there’s a good chance I’ll come out with an empty bank account and everybody mad at me. And you’d get a solution, one-percent ownership of a valuable ball club, excellent word-of-mouth publicity. Mike Shayne triumphs again. A deal’s no good unless it’s good for both parties.”

  “Goodnight, Chan.”

  “You haven’t said why not,” she said reasonably. “I have to get something out of this. Then I can tell my friends I’ve had an intimate experience with Mike Shayne. It’s worth more than an autograph.”

  She went for his unfinished cognac and brought it to him. “Dear Michael Shayne. Consider my suggestion without sentimentality. Where will you go if you leave? It’s late. Everybody’s gone to bed. Whereas if you stay you’ll get quantities of valuable information, and you might even enjoy yourself slightly.”

  “Let’s do it the other way around. Talk to me first and then I’ll pay off.”

  She came close enough to touch him with her body. “I’m not sure I could trust you. Damn it, don’t argue. I’ve just had my bedroom repapered. Let me show you.”

  The points of her breasts moved against him. Evidently she thought she had him. Her eyes were partially closed, and she touched her forehead to his shoulder.

  “Whose idea was it to hire me,” Shayne said, “yours or Sid’s?”

  She drew back. “His, but I concurred. I’m one of your admirers. I think you’re without a doubt one of the sexiest men in Dade County, and if you care to step into my bedroom, which is just around the corner, I’ll give you some proof of the way I feel. Or we can stay here, if you don’t want to go that far. Keep your clothes on if you want. Whatever you like, I like. I’ve been having fantasies about you for weeks.”

  “Has Sid ever heard you say anything like that?”

  “I don’t believe in keeping my esthetic opinions to myself. I could give you a rundown on all your big wins. I’m girlish on the subject. Just the other day there was a picture of you going up the front steps of the courthouse, taking them three at a time, and it honestly made me shiver. As for Sid—he goes up steps one by one.” She frowned suddenly. “Are you suggesting he knew I’d ask you to—”

  “It would explain the high fee. He must know you don’t like to sit around by yourself on a Saturday night looking at old movies. It sounds to me as though he set up that episode in San Francisco, and then thought better of it. Ronnie’s a propert
y, after all. Use him in a divorce case and you lower his trading value. I’d be much better. It wouldn’t even hurt me professionally.”

  She returned to the coffee table for a cigarette. “Sid is kind of an intriguer… Yes, let’s stay out of my bedroom.”

  She lit the cigarette and blew out the match. “Goddamn it, let’s fool him and go to a hotel! I mean it! I’m not sure you’re right, but if there’s anything to it at all, don’t you think it puts us under a sort of obligation? Mike,” she said excitedly, returning to him and prodding him in the chest, “why don’t we, really? I don’t want to be alone, I’m too charged up. And you wouldn’t be copping out, because it’s in the postcoital conversations that I get really confidential…”

  “Tell me one thing.”

  “Afterward.”

  “You must know that every now and again some good-looking woman has tried to tie me up by getting me into bed with her.”

  She breathed out smoke and said philosophically, “But it doesn’t usually work, does it?”

  “Sometimes it works. I’m human. You do the bit as well as anybody, including those little looks to make me think it’s all very carefully calculated. I’m supposed to decide that you want to divert me because I’m on the right track—which must mean I’m doing something wrong.”

  “I don’t follow that! But never mind, I get the general idea. Tonight I sleep alone.”

  He poured himself more cognac and drank it off. “Have you been here the whole evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody called Reddick in a bar a few minutes after ten. They met in a car, and before they started talking Reddick was given a drink. I think it was laced with barbiturates, which can be bad in combination with alcohol. He was driving about twelve minutes. It would take just about that long for the dose to hit. If I hadn’t been right on his tail, he would have died in the hospital. If he hadn’t gone off the road he would have died at home. Pretty surefire, all in all. How’s your supply of sleeping pills?”

  “I never take them. All right—go on if you’re going. Go out and find your goddamn murderer, and the hell with you.”

  But she came to the door with him. “Sorry about this scene, Mike. If I’d done it a little differently, I think it might have worked. The pro’s going to beat the amateur, every time. Give me one real kiss before you go.”