Fourth Down to Death

by Brett Halliday

  He kissed her. She responded fully, but made no effort to prolong it.

  “If everything works, will you meet me somewhere for dinner tomorrow?”

  “I doubt it. Lock your doors.”

  As he crossed the porch, he heard the door close softly behind him. A phone was ringing somewhere in the house.

  CHAPTER 11

  He had left his car in the driveway, behind Chan’s sleek MG. He stepped into the shadows and waited.

  There was a half-moon. This was an expensive, quiet neighborhood, with nothing moving on the streets. A few lighted windows could be seen through the shrubbery, but most of the nearby houses were dark. There was a party somewhere, probably aboard a moored boat.

  When his eyes had adjusted, Shayne crossed the lawn to the garage. There were three berths, two empty. The third held a surprisingly battered station wagon. He went to the little MG and checked its mileage—which had vaguely registered with him when she was speeding. After Chan had dropped him at the causeway toll plaza, the car had traveled nine miles, just enough to bring her home.

  Again he stopped to listen before continuing to his Buick. He went around to the driver’s side, reached for the door latch, and then, hearing something move, leaped back and whirled.

  There was a blur of motion, and he was struck a violent blow across the chest. A heavy figure with upraised arms started to hover toward him. He swung hard. The shadows separated, and he saw two men trying to close with him. Both were enormous, and after one contact, he knew they were very strong. He brought his knee up, and somebody grunted. It was Joe Truszowski. The second man, a Negro, was clearly another football player, with bushy sideburns running along his jaws.

  “Aaron, hold him,” Truck ordered.

  The Negro was trying to pin Shayne against the car so Truck could hit him. It wasn’t football. There was no referee. Shayne, at six-feet-one a much smaller and lighter man, had been in this kind of brawl more than once in his career. Some he had lost, some he had won. This time he thought he had a chance, because so far the Negro wasn’t trying to hurt him badly.

  Shayne kept between them, turning their bulk and awkwardness to an advantage. He had faster hands. They stamped around heavily, part of the time in moonlight, part in shadow.

  Shayne swung an elbow at the Negro, and stung Truck with a rigid finger aimed at his eye.

  “Don’t be dumb, Joe,” Shayne said. “You’re in trouble already.”

  Truck grunted, straining. Shayne saw an opening, and hung a hard right on his jaw. The jolt traveled up Shayne’s arm and exploded in his shoulder. It was one of the hardest rights he had ever thrown. Truck stayed on his feet, leaning forward, but his powerful arms dropped to his sides and his head rolled.

  Shayne might have finished him then, but the follow-through after the punch took him through a predictable arc, and the Negro caught him.

  “Rack him, rack him,” Truck said.

  With a sweeping backward motion, Shayne broke the aerial off his car. It was extended to its full length and was no good for close work, but he brought the stump back and rammed it hard into the Negro’s stomach.

  It must have hurt, though the Negro said nothing. Shayne broke free and jumped onto the grass. Continuing the same movement, he spun around and slashed the Negro’s face with the aerial. In the half-darkness the Negro didn’t see it coming, but he heard it and felt it. Shayne brought it back and opened up the other side of his face.

  Truck was still doing a little shuffle on the asphalt. Shayne whipped the aerial at him, and Truck moved back, clawing at his eyes and swearing.

  Shayne kicked the Negro away from the car and got the door open. He managed to grab the galvanized pipe from the floor where he had dropped it.

  Aaron threw his weight against the door, trying to hold Shayne in the opening. Shayne stabbed the broken end of the aerial upward, and this time the Negro yelled. Freeing himself, Shayne swung the pipe.

  The man saw it coming and fell backward, raising an arm. Shayne put his full strength into the swing, and heard the crunch of breaking bone. With his other hand, Aaron seized Shayne’s wrist and wrung the pipe out of his hand, then took two backward steps and sat down hard on the grass, muttering in pain.

  Truck’s head had cleared. Shayne looked on the ground for the pipe. He thought he saw it, but then Truck swung a hand like a rock, and connected. Shayne was too close to use the aerial again. As Truck charged, he seized the heavy man with both hands and pulled, sidestepping. Truck plunged into the side of the Buick, no doubt doing considerable damage.

  Shayne hit him twice from behind and once more as he turned.

  “Shayne, you’re going to—”

  Shayne hit him very hard on the nose bandage, and felt the cartilage snap. But that nose had been broken so often Truck gave no sign of feeling it. Setting himself, Shayne swung again. Truck took it on the side of the jaw and kept coming. Shayne pumped in a hard left to the stomach, low, before the big arms closed around him.

  To Shayne’s surprise, the grip loosened at once. He brought up both arms as though breaking a tackle, and the explosive effort sent Truck staggering sluggishly back against the car.

  A woman’s voice said harshly, “Will you cut it out, Joe?”

  It was Bea Truszowski, wearing the same tight slacks Shayne had seen her in earlier. Her hair was up in curlers. She had just rapped her husband over the head with the pipe, and stood ready to hit him again. Draped across the fender, his chin against his chest, he was making vague swimming gestures.

  “Give me that,” Shayne said, putting out his hand.

  “You can go to hell,” she said. “This is stopping right now.”

  Truck rotated groggily and peered at his wife. He had taken out his teeth before the fight, and the empty mouth made him look older.

  “You hit me.”

  “Damn right I hit you! Stay where you are or I’ll do it again. If you move one inch—one damn inch—I’ll give the damn pipe to Shayne.”

  “Go right ahead,” Truck told her, but without moving in her direction.

  “It’s really something!” she said. “Being married to the town’s number one lunkhead. This is Mike Shayne! He has to be working for Zacharias, don’t you realize that yet?”

  “Never mind who he’s working for—he’ll sell us out to the highest bidder!”

  “What highest bidder? I know you can’t help it, but you’re the stupidest man in pro football, and that takes in a lot of people. Will you stop letting Chan baby do your thinking for you?”

  Shayne said to Truck, “What did Chan say when she called you?”

  “Nobody called me.”

  Bea raised the pipe threateningly. “What’s the point of lying?”

  “I saw money on your kitchen table,” Shayne said. “That’s all we need to get you banned and labeled. You’re supposed to stay away from people like Lou Mangione.”

  “Which is what I’ve been telling you,” his wife pointed out angrily. “They don’t have to prove anything. They tear up the contract and laugh.”

  Truck pushed off the car and flexed his shoulders. Shayne flicked the radio aerial, but the fight appeared to be over.

  “And that shows how much you know,” Truck said. “All they need to do is check with Stitch Reddick. I’m covered.”

  “Reddick’s dead,” Shayne said.

  Truck gaped at him. He sucked in air as though his throat had closed up suddenly.

  “He isn’t either!”

  “He is, though,” Shayne said. “He was in a car accident. The body’s at Mercy Hospital. You won’t want to take my word for it, so stop in and ask them how he’s doing. And you’d better take your friend in and have something done about that shoulder.”

  The huge Negro on the grass said thinly, “Joe, I got to get a shot—”

  “I told Reddick about Mangione’s offer the minute I got it!” Truck declared.

  “I know that,” Shayne said impatiently. “It doesn’t change the fact that w
ithout Reddick to back you up, you can’t prove it. Think about it, and maybe you’ll decide to apologize.”

  “He apologizes,” Bea said quickly. “Don’t you, Joe? He’s sorry he did anything that silly.”

  “That’s not enough,” Shayne said. “I want to start getting some cooperation for a change.”

  “Mr. Shayne,” Bea assured him, “he’ll cooperate all the way, or I personally am going to break his head for him.”

  The injured man on the grass made a small sound. “Joe—”

  “Take him in,” Shayne said curtly, “and then don’t go anywhere. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Bea tugged at her husband’s arm. “Joe, we’ve got to do what he says. Joe…”

  Truck blinked malevolently at Shayne. “If she hadn’t clipped me with that goddamn pipe—”

  “Sure, honey,” she said sarcastically, “we know about your muscles. It’s your brain we’re thinking about.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that kind of thing in front of other people,” Truck said.

  He bent over and helped the black player to his feet. Bea ran to get their car.

  “Is it really true about Stitch?” Truck said.

  “It’s really true. Keep thinking about it.”

  Bea brought the car up, and her husband and the other man climbed in. She got away fast. By that time Shayne was sprawled in a pool of shadow beside his Buick, waiting for the sound of an opening door. The party on the boat had accelerated in the last few minutes. He heard shrill laughter.

  Chan Zacharias came out of the house and ran across the lawn. She was carrying a flashlight and a length of clothesline. Her flashlight found him. He smelled ether.

  As she came down beside him, he quickly reached out and took an ether-soaked rag out of her hand. She fell back in surprise and the flashlight hit the driveway and went out.

  “Mike.”

  “Ether’s not bad,” he said. “Almost humane.”

  “Christ,” she said in disgust, recovering. “I thought two of them could handle you… Where are those clowns?”

  “I had a little luck.” Getting to his feet, he pulled her up so her face was in the moonlight. “Now…!”

  “Mike, I just wanted to put you in the freezer until after the game. You could have slept with me and this wouldn’t have happened.” She put her hand on her heart. “God, you scared me, sitting up like that!”

  “Are you scared enough to talk to me?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t see how anything’s changed.”

  “Everything’s changed. You have pretty good information, so you must know that I walked in on Joe Truszowski as he was taking a bribe from one of those bad Italians you read about in the papers. Stitch Reddick had planted a bug under a chair so they could get it on tape. The other guy, Mangione, had an open mike in his pocket. It banged against the chair and there was a real feedback screech. Joe must have known you need two mikes to make that kind of noise, but he didn’t look for the bug. He already knew it was there. He was very cool about the whole thing until somebody phoned him. I think it was Reddick, to say the plan wasn’t working. Are you following this?”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Truck was hoping to get some publicity as the man who cooperated with the league’s security machinery in exposing an attack on the integrity of the great American sport. But Reddick’s receiver was out of action. The conversation was going out, but nobody was taking it down. Still, Truck hasn’t been worrying because Reddick could always explain.”

  “And now with Reddick out of the picture—”

  “That’s right,” Shayne said. “After doing his best to clobber me a couple of times, Truck can’t think I have any reason to feel friendly. So he has to tell me exactly what happened last Sunday, exactly who said what, and when. If you want to give me your version first, I’m willing to listen.”

  “Come in the house where it’s comfortable. Or if you want to reconsider that hotel idea—”

  “I don’t think so, Chan.”

  “Now don’t rush me—I’m thinking. Even if I made up something wild, I couldn’t hold you more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and that’s not enough. I don’t want to get you really mad at me… But I don’t think Joe can tell you anything that will hurt me too badly. So goodnight again, Mike.”

  He let her walk away.

  CHAPTER 12

  Shayne, in the well-lighted Mercy Hospital parking lot, was wiring his broken aerial together when Tim Rourke came running toward him.

  “Developments, Mike! You know that gorgeous night nurse of Ronnie’s—”

  Shayne continued winding the flexible wire around the aerial’s overlapping ends. “Dody Germaine.”

  “Is that her name? She just took a taxi to the airport, and now I’m wondering if maybe I should have followed her to find out where she’s going.”

  “How long ago, Tim?”

  “Ten minutes at the most.”

  Shayne finished his provisional repair and signaled for the operator.

  “Was she still in uniform?”

  “No, she’d changed. She came down in the elevator with some tall, skinny guy, and he put her in the cab. I didn’t get much of a look at him, but I think it was the team physician; I forget his name—Bishop, Len Bishop. The knee man.”

  When the operator answered, Shayne gave her a number. In a moment more he was connected with Hank Shapiro, the night security man at the International Airport. He and Shayne had frequently worked together, most recently on a smuggling case which had ended with a fifty-fifty split of a $10,000 reward.

  “Are you busy, Hank?”

  “Just sitting around listening to the airplanes take off.”

  “A girl’s coming out in a taxi from downtown. I’d like to know what flight she takes. She was alone when she left here, and she shouldn’t be hard to spot. Wait a minute.” To Rourke: “What’s she wearing?”

  “A suit, I guess you’d call it. Little blue checks. The important thing was what was inside the suit. She had a little suitcase, small enough to carry on the plane. Tell him not to worry—he’ll notice her.”

  After passing on this information, Shayne hung up thoughtfully and started a cigarette.

  “I’ve been nosing around asking questions,” Rourke said, “and here’s something I picked up. One of Ronnie’s day nurses brought a shopping bag to work yesterday, and inside that shopping bag she had a couple of those insulated canisters you get in Chinese restaurants when you order dinner to go out. The orderly I talked to said that shopping bag was giving off the very definite smell of steak. Steak’s one of the things they don’t feed intravenously. Which makes me think Ronnie may be—” Shayne’s expression stopped him. “Now you’re going to tell me you know it already?”

  “It’s old news, Tim. I think I’ve got a couple of minutes to fill you in. I’ve connected a few people, but we still don’t have a pattern.”

  His head thrust forward at the end of his long neck, Rourke listened. After a moment he took out a notebook, laid it on the hood of Shayne’s Buick and began making notes in his tiny, unreadable script.

  “I knew this was going to be big.” He turned back a page to check his earlier notes. “But I hate to tell you this, Mike—somebody’s lying.”

  “There goes another illusion,” Shayne said, putting out his cigarette. “I need a check on this Germaine girl. She said she worked as a New York model a couple of years ago. Do you know anybody who might know her?”

  Rourke considered. “One of my old News buddies has been taking pictures for Vogue. It won’t hurt to try him.” The phone rang.

  “And what a pleasure that was, Mike,” Shapiro reported from the airport. “Following a chick like that could get to be habit forming. That’s one of the most interesting going-away actions I’ve ever seen.”

  “Where did it take her?”

  “That’s the funny thing—nowhere. She was here about three minutes, and went back to town.”

&
nbsp; Shayne scraped his chin. “Give me the play-by-play.”

  “Right. She got out at the cab drop, and I noticed her right away. You didn’t tell me she wouldn’t be wearing a bra. That brightened everybody’s evening. She came into the main concourse, bought a paperback mystery at the newsstand and checked arrival times at the Pan Am counter. Then she went out and picked up another cab to take her back to Miami. She was under observation all the time—and I do mean close observation. She didn’t speak to anybody. She didn’t pass any packages. She didn’t pick up anything. Sorry, Mike.”

  “Don’t be sorry. That explains quite a lot.”

  “When you’ve got any more assignments like this one, think of me, will you? Nothing much happens out here after midnight.”

  Shayne put the phone down and repeated what Shapiro had told him.

  “What the hell?” Rourke said, puzzled.

  “What the hell is right. Fakes all over the place. I’m seeing Joe Truck in a minute, as soon as he gets his bandage changed, and I hope he’s going to be the exception.” Rourke went off to shut himself in an outside booth to call New York, while Shayne crossed the parking lot and entered the hospital by the emergency entrance.

  This part of the building was bleak and functional, with exposed cinder-block walls, a preparation room and a series of bare cubicles off a low-ceilinged concrete corridor. Bea Truszowski was alone in the waiting room. She sat on a wooden bench, her hands on her knees, staring at nothing. She had taken out her curlers and put on lipstick. Her face showed tired, hard lines.

  She leaped up, seeing Shayne, and spoke with animation. “They’re working on him now, but they must be just about through. Mr. Shayne, we agreed in the car—he’s going to tell you the whole thing. I think I believe him, sort of, but I can see how Coach and Mr. Zacharias are going to want something in the way of evidence. Can you give me a cigarette?”

  Shayne provided her with one and lit it for her.