Fourth Down to Death

by Brett Halliday

  “You can’t blame Ronnie for that one,” Shayne said after the noise subsided. “It’s a wet field.”

  He raised his glasses to the press box, and picked up Ted Knapp, who was also using binoculars. Knapp wasn’t following the on-field action, but was studying the Miami bench. Shayne, behind and above, couldn’t see the players’ faces. Ronnie James came in toward the phones, removing his helmet and running his fingers through his damp hair. A man in a yellow rain slicker—Dr. Bishop—spoke to him. Ronnie gave him a small tight smile. Shayne followed him with the glasses until he took the phone.

  Shayne looked back at Chan. She had touched her face with her wet glove, and her eye makeup was smeared.

  “When New York saw that formation,” Shayne said, watching her, “they expected a certain pass pattern. We had them fooled. If Ronnie hadn’t slipped it would have been an easy TD. Watch some more.”

  Zacharias leaned forward. “What is all this, Shayne?”

  “You can figure it out. Chan owns two percent of the club. The income from that won’t be enough for a divorced woman to live on without alimony. She knows more about the team than you do, so don’t antagonize her. Give her a present.”

  “When I hired you, I didn’t know I was going to get marriage counselling thrown in,” Zacharias remarked bitterly.

  “My suggestion is thirty percent,” Shayne said.

  “What?”

  “Give her thirty-percent ownership and you’ll start winning again.”

  “Are you saying that Chan—”

  “You know her better than I do. What did you expect? That she’d lie down and ask you to kick her again?”

  Zacharias had forgotten that people might be listening. “Why should I saddle myself with alimony for somebody who treats me the way—” he said in a choked voice. “A coarse, loud, cheap—who has sex with any—”

  Shayne interrupted, “Face the facts, Sid. You’ve got more money than you did when you started, but that doesn’t make you Prince Charming. You don’t want Chan as an enemy. She’s been carrying on a systematic campaign to lower the value of the property, and she’s done a good job of it. But there’s time to reverse. Say you’re sorry and promise her thirty percent. As a thirty-percent owner, she’ll understand she has to talk to me, and talk fast. I need some hard facts, with names and dollar amounts. I think I can still control it, but we’re cutting it damn close.”

  “You’ll have to be more explicit,” Zacharias said.

  “You don’t want me to be more explicit. People are listening.”

  That was now true. The activity on the field was less interesting than what was happening in the Zacharias box.

  Zacharias leaned over, close to Shayne, and whispered, “Did she kill Reddick?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Zacharias looked at his wife, looked away, and looked back. “Hell, honey, is it worth it?”

  “Thirty percent,” Shayne said crisply. “Hurry it up.”

  “Twenty?” Zacharias said hopefully. When Shayne moved to get up, Zacharias said hastily, “All right!” He nudged Chan with his elbow. “Honey, we’ve got all those years invested. I don’t blame you for putting up a fight. I didn’t expect you to go this far, but we don’t have to go into it now. So it’s OK? I’ve got to see the commissioner after the game, and he’s going to be asking me questions—Questions I don’t know how I’ll answer. I don’t care for Shayne’s methods, and I don’t like the way he’s been talking, but we need him, baby, right now we need him. So let’s get back on the same team.”

  She moved uncomfortably, looking at Shayne instead of at her husband. “Mike, the trouble is—you don’t know him. That sounds sincere, but it could be an act. I’ve got to get it in writing.”

  “We don’t have time. You’ll have to trust him.”

  “I’ve trusted him before…”

  “I love you, dear,” Zacharias said, his voice low and expressive. “I want to stay married to you. From now on everything’s going to be different.”

  She murmured, “But if I do what Mike wants and you change your mind afterward, I can’t enforce it, can I?” She considered an instant longer. “No, I want a legal transfer of shares.”

  Shayne swore savagely and turned back to the field.

  New York had moved to another touchdown; Miami had yet to score. Maxwell was about to try for a field goal from the New York thirty-five.

  A shout went up. The official signaled that the kick was wide.

  One group of players poured off the field and another group took their places. James, now very muddy, looked tired and discouraged as he came over to the bench and took the phone. A trainer was manipulating somebody’s leg. Shayne’s mind jumped, and he checked the bench. Dr. Bishop’s yellow slicker was gone.

  He stood up.

  Chan said pleadingly, “Mike, you see my position, don’t you? He’s such a tricky bastard. How do I even know he broke off with—”

  Shayne pushed out to the aisle. A moment later he was vaulting the rail onto the field. A sideline official turned toward him. Shayne ran to the concrete tunnel behind the bench. The crowd was yelling; New York’s quarterback had completed another long pass. A knot of equipment men and trainers clustered at the entrance to the tunnel, glumly watching the game. Captain Squire, a few steps away against the bottom rail, called to Shayne.

  Shayne pushed through, and headed for the locker room.

  The big dressing room was empty, littered with the debris left behind by the athletes who had used it earlier. Shayne kicked against a discarded helmet. Most of the dressing stalls were open, the clothes inside arranged with compulsive neatness.

  “Bishop? Are you down here?”

  In Dr. Bishop’s cubicle, a little refrigeration unit stood open and the drug chest was unlocked. Shayne was about to turn when a glint of broken glass on the floor caught his eye.

  He crouched. Apparently Bishop had dropped a hypodermic syringe and someone had stepped on it, grinding glass into the carpet. Shayne touched the bits of glass with a moistened fingertip and sniffed, without detecting anything new in the mixture of locker-room smells. He tore a piece of tape from an unused reel, and pressed it, adhesive side down, on the smashed syringe. He rolled up the tape and put it away.

  He checked the table by the chalkboard. The little mike was still in place, still open.

  He pushed his hat to the back of his head and looked around, frowning. There was a dull thumping roar from the crowd; something else had happened on the field.

  He looked into the toilets, then into the shower room. Water was dripping onto some soft, elastic surface. His scowl deepening, Shayne strode to the last stall.

  Dr. Bishop, still in his yellow rain slicker, was coiled on the floor with water tapping onto his upturned face. Shayne had to move him to see the traumatic marks the bullet had made entering one side of his skull and leaving by the other.

  He was lying on the gun.

  CHAPTER 17

  Shayne posted himself with his back to the locker-room door, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it.

  He had less than a minute to wait before the first cleats clattered down the concrete tunnel. A flood of football players rounded the turn in the corridor and swept down on him.

  He stayed where he was, his back to the door. One of the lesser coaches demanded to know what he was doing.

  “Get Lynch for me,” Shayne said.

  “This is the half, man! We’ve got to—”

  Lynch came bustling up. “What is it, Shayne?”

  “Look in the shower room, and don’t touch anything.” He moved aside and let Lynch enter. As those in the rear of the milling group pressed forward, the jam around Shayne increased. A babble of voices banged back and forth between the hard walls and the ceiling. The players who had seen action could be easily told from the substitutes—by the end of the half the mud had been very bad.

  The door opened against Shayne’s back. Lynch bellowed for silence.

  “I
t’s tough,” he said to Shayne, “but we’ve got a football game to complete here.”

  “We’ll need cops,” Shayne said. “You can use the main dressing room but that’s all.”

  “Some of the guys need medication. I hope you don’t think you can keep us out of the john. Out of the way, Shayne. The clock’s running.”

  Shayne opened the door enough so he could snap the spring lock, and slammed it again.

  “There are other johns. You’ve got plenty of time. We don’t have to start the second half on schedule.”

  Lynch had concealed any emotion he may have felt about the dead man, but now he exploded.

  “You don’t goof around with the TV schedule. Not in this day and age.”

  “Today we’re setting a precedent. Send for the cops. There are two at the end of the tunnel. That’ll be enough to start with.”

  For an instant Lynch seemed about to tell his football players to roll over Shayne and force the door. Then he turned away with an angry gesture and gave the orders.

  Presently Squire and a second cop worked in through the football players. A custodian arrived a moment later to unlock the door.

  Shayne, Lynch and the cops entered first, and the others poured in behind them. The players settled down in groups with their appropriate coaches. The half-time score, Shayne learned from one of the unmuddied rookies, was 23-7, New York. Maxwell, bothered by the mud and the dead ball, had missed on three field-goal attempts.

  Squire came out of the shower room, brushing his fingertips. “Suicide?”

  “Possibly,” Shayne said. “If somebody killed him it’s going to be a bitch to prove. We can’t wait for everybody to talk it over—we’ve got to hit them while they’re still off balance.”

  He explained what he wanted.

  Squire squinted at him. “I think it might be better to go by the book, Mike. These are important people.”

  “Yeah, and it’s an important industry. Give them a couple of hours, and you’ll see everything closing down.” Squire nodded, still not entirely convinced. Leaving the other cop to keep the players out of the shower room, he put in a call to Homicide while Shayne removed the live mike from the table in the taping room.

  Then he found another room deeper in the bowels of the stadium. It was cold and dank, containing a portable chalkboard and a dozen small chairs with hinged arms. The board still showed a diagram of a simple draw play, with an arrow showing where the fullback would go if all the opposing players behaved predictably and moved out of the way. More cops arrived, and Squire sent them off on various errands. Coach Lynch objected violently when Shayne pulled Ronnie James and Joe Truszowski out of the locker room.

  “You’ll do better with your backup man,” Shayne told the coach. “Ronnie’s still feeling the effects of that coma.”

  James grinned at him. “What are you talking about, Mike?”

  “You didn’t seem to be concentrating out there.”

  “The conditions, the conditions, man… What happened to Bishop? He shot himself?”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  The people he had sent for began to gather. Zacharias came in blustering.

  “I must say, Shayne, this is a pretty high-handed procedure.”

  “Shut up and sit down,” Shayne told him coldly. Zacharias stopped short and gave him an incredulous look. “Shut up and—”

  “Sit down. I tried saying please, and nobody listened.” Zacharias looked around at the others, and sat down in one of the little schoolroom chairs. Chan, who had just entered the room, sat down beside him.

  “Ronnie, what’s the explanation of this?” Zacharias demanded of his quarterback.

  “I asked,” James said, “but he isn’t saying anything until everybody gets here.”

  “We need a couple more people,” Shayne said. “The commissioner’s not in his box. He may have gone out to his car so the fans won’t see him drinking. Dody Germaine doesn’t seem to be using her seat in section O, Ronnie. Does that bother you?”

  If Ronnie’s expression changed, the mud concealed it. “That’s one chick nobody owns.”

  Chan threw back her rain hood and looked at herself in a pocket mirror. Distressed, she began to work on her eyes.

  Ted Knapp came in with Rourke. Seeing the others, Knapp stopped on the threshold and Rourke ran into him.

  “I’ve got an insurance matter to ask you about, Knapp,” Shayne said. “Another death, and this one is in the family. Was Dr. Bishop covered by the club policy?”

  “Bishop?” Zacharias said. “What’s happened to Bishop?” Knapp came into the room and sat down. “He’s covered against any football-related injury—plane or vehicle crashes while traveling with the team. Why—what are the circumstances?”

  “They’re football-related,” Shayne said. “And now we’re all going to keep quiet and think of how much better it would be if everybody made a practice of telling the truth.”

  They were sitting facing him. He picked up a piece of chalk and tossed it idly, his eyes moving. Joe Truck’s huge body overflowed the small seat. Chan put her makeup tools away and lit a cigarette.

  “This is all so obvious,” Zacharias said. “The oldest technique in the world.”

  “Maybe the commissioner didn’t like the kind of football he was seeing, and went home,” Shayne said. “We can start without him, but first we need to hear what the Homicide boys have to say about Bishop. Maybe he died of a heart attack, and that bullet wound was put there to confuse everybody.”

  “Len was shot!” Chan exclaimed.

  There was a stir in the room.

  “You heard what he said,” Zacharias said sourly. “He told us to shut up, so let’s shut up until we collect a few lawyers.”

  “It’s not time for the lawyers yet,” Shayne said. “Before it’s over, they’ll get plenty of business.”

  The door opened again. This time it was a Miami cop and the commissioner, a short, nearly bald man who put on a flashing smile at the sight of any newspaper or television camera. There was no smile on his face now.

  “Sid Zacharias,” he said. “You weren’t answering your phone this morning. Nobody knew how I could get hold of you. Obviously you didn’t feel the situation was serious. Now you send a police officer after me… Ronnie James, I see. What are we going to be treated to, a lecture on how not to throw the forward pass?”

  “This is Mike Shayne,” Zacharias muttered. “He may explain or he may not, you never know.”

  The commissioner shot a look at Shayne. “Reddick was trying to get away from you when he went into the canal…”

  “You’re the one who sent him down here, Commissioner. Now, I’ve told everybody else to shut up and you’re included.”

  The commissioner swelled slightly. “No two-for-a-quarter gumshoe is going to talk to me like that, I can guarantee it.”

  The chalk in Shayne’s fingers snapped. He took two forward strides. Gathering up a handful of the commissioner’s raincoat, he walked the smaller man back hard against the cinder-block wall.

  “Two security men for twenty-six teams,” Shayne said, “and one was Stitch Reddick. You knew how he worked. He was too sloppy to find out much, but if he did happen to come across something, he wasn’t the type to rock the boat. He’s gone now, and the boat is rocking. If you’re really interested in protecting organized football you’ll sit down”—he moved the commissioner around until his knees hit a chair—“and shut up.”

  The commissioner sat down hard.

  Zacharias snapped, “And I hired you! Christ, when I make a mistake—”

  After that, they kept quiet, and listened to the thump of the bass drums from the marching band on the field. James and Truszowski, the only athletes, were the most composed. The others fidgeted and shifted. Presently Squire put his head in and called Shayne. They conferred in the corridor in low tones, and when Shayne came back the police captain came in with him, remaining in the back of the room without sitting down.


  “Come to order,” Shayne said. “There’s a bump on the top of Bishop’s head. He may have been hit in the taping room and dragged to the showers and shot there. Or he may have shot himself and knocked his head when he fell. The gun has a knurled grip and won’t show any prints. They’re still working, but let’s assume it can go either way.”

  “Bishop? Who’s Bishop?” the commissioner demanded, sitting forward.

  “The team doctor. Keep listening, and you’ll pick up things as we go… How much did you offer for the franchise last August, Knapp?”

  The commissioner looked around. Knapp bobbed his head at him.

  “I’m Ted Knapp, Commissioner. I’m an insurance broker here. Sid and I have been talking, off and on. I put together a syndicate, but we felt Sid’s price was a little unrealistic. Unless he’s changed his mind lately, we’re two million apart.”

  “Give us the dollar figure,” Shayne said.

  “Nine million bid, eleven million asked.”

  “Now I’m going to imagine a scene,” Shayne said. “Negotiations are off. Chan Zacharias meets Knapp privately and makes him an offer. She’ll drive the price down to nine for a fee of—let’s see—half a million bucks. How close am I, Chan?”

  “What? What?” the commissioner said.

  “I’ll ask you once more,” Shayne ordered, mildly enough. “Hold your questions for now. We’re trying to establish some facts. Sid was working himself up to call off the marriage, if possible without paying alimony. A half million in cash would be a fair settlement from Chan’s point of view, and if she couldn’t get it from her husband, she felt entitled to raise it somewhere else. She considers herself partly responsible for the club’s financial success.”

  “Mainly responsible,” Chan put in.

  “How close is that half-million figure?” Shayne said. “I don’t think you’d do it for less.”

  She returned his look without replying.

  “I think it’s pretty close,” Shayne went on, “and that’s the big thing that’s been going on here. The rest has been incidental.”

  He made them wait while he started a cigarette.