“Mike Shayne!” he cried with his slight lisp. “This is what I call a pleasant surprith! Come in, Mike, and join us in a glass of cold champagne.”
His apartment was furnished simply, with good modern furniture. A big picture window looked out at the lights along the Potomac. There were two champagne glasses on a glass-topped table, a few lipstick-tipped cigarette ends in the ashtray, but no other sign of Bixler’s guest.
“I hope I’m not butting in,” Shayne said.
“Absolutely not. There’s always a welcome for Mike Shayne in my humble-ah, pad. I’ve been entertaining, because what would life be like without the ladies? She’s a little shy.” Lowering his voice, he said confidentially, “It’s the first time I ever had her up here.” He knocked at the closed bathroom door. “It’s OK to come out, Margaret. It’s Mike Shayne. The one I was telling you about.”
A faint voice inside said, “Tell me as soon as he’s gone.”
“I want you to meet him! I know it’s late, but you don’t have to worry-Mike’s been around.”
When there was no answer, Bixler shrugged.
“Make yourself at home, Michael. If I’d thought there was a faint chance you might be dropping by, I would have laid in a supply of Markell’s. Isn’t that what you drink? Or is it Martell’s?”
He twirled the champagne bottle ceremoniously in its bucket and filled a glass for Shayne. “See what you think of this bubbly. The man at the store said I couldn’t do better at twice the money.”
He beamed after Shayne tasted the champagne and nodded approvingly.
“Do you live it up like this every night?” Shayne asked. “Working for the government must be a better deal than I thought.”
Bixler laughed heartily. “That’s good, Mike. No, working for the government is financially very unrewarding, if you don’t count in the fringe benefits. This is a celebration.”
“You’ve started spending the two thousand bucks I gave you?”
Bixler touched his finger to his lips, sending a meaningful glance at the bathroom door. “I’m celebrating two things. The second thing was even more satisfactory, both to ye olde bank account and my self-esteem. A small financial token of esteem from a certain senator who must here remain nameless, but whose name begins with-” He sketched the letter W in the air. “I didn’t bargain. I named a price and then I was like granite. I just smiled quietly. Finally he paid it.”
“I hope this wasn’t the same information you sold me.”
“Certainly not. I never sell anything twice. That way you can make enemies.”
“I’m trying to find Wall. Do you know where he might be?”
“I think I can make an educated guess.” He went back to the bathroom door and rapped again. “Margaret, don’t be like that. Come on out.”
The door opened in a moment and a plain, dumpy woman emerged. She was stiff and embarrassed. Two pinch-marks on the bridge of her nose showed that she habitually wore glasses, though she had taken them off in honor of the champagne.
“Margaret, I’d like to have you meet the famous Mike Shayne,” Bixler announced, “in person. Mike, this is Miss Saul, my secretary. She’s in the pool, really, but I always ask for her, and do you blame me?”
“I certainly don’t,” Shayne said.
“How do you do,” Miss Saul said, looking no higher than Shayne’s necktie. “Ron, it’s so late I really think I must be going.”
Bixler tried to talk her into letting him fill her glass, but she insisted. She also refused to let him change his jacket and escort her home.
“I live downstairs on the sixth floor, you see, Mr. Shayne,” she explained, blushing.
Stooping swiftly, she retrieved a white bracelet from the floor near the sofa. Blushing more violently, she said, “I had a perfectly lovely evening, Ron. See you at work tomorrow.”
He took her to the door, where he whispered something. She giggled and gave him a push. He was preening himself when he came back.
“A very warm person, Mike. No raving beauty, I’ll be the first to admit, but the truth of the matter is that I think surface prettiness is greatly overrated in women. Bosoms-people believe in these great enormous bosoms, but I for one think companionability’s more important. You’re used to the women in the sensual south. You wouldn’t believe how puritanical they can be in this town. This apartment is setting me back an arm and a leg, but it’ll be worth it if tonight’s any example. More champagne?”
He filled Shayne’s glass and raised his own. “Here’s to money.”
Shayne started to speak, but Bixler forestalled him.
“Michael, I just wanted to say this. I know you want to locate Senator Wall, so you can confer about overall strategy, and the reason you dropped by is that you’ve figured out that I know that-” He stopped, confused. “I seem to be a little-but don’t worry, I know what I’m trying to say, I have a good head for liquor. What I mean is, I’m under no illusion that this is a social visit. You have an ulterior motive, like everybody, and you’re probably impatient to get moving. I know how monotonous it must be, always running into people who are sort of like disciples, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool disciple of yours and I always have been. You’re the reason I took up investigation in the first place. Maybe it didn’t work out the way I expected, but that’s no fault of yours. That’s Washington. It’s been tedious, and the financial pickings have been slim. Not many glamorous women have come my way. And then you blew in, and in six hours I made more money than in the whole last year. Margaret sensed the change right away. That made the difference between coming up for a drink and not coming up for a drink. Where was I?”
“Weren’t you about to tell me what it was you sold Wall?”
“I guess I was. He told me not to breathe a word to a soul, but that wouldn’t include you. If you want to check further, and knowing your methods I think you will, you may be able to find him at Oskar’s, that’s an after-hours joint, 17 Larue Place, off Ninth Street, pretty sleazy. That’s the first place I’d try if I was you.”
“I’m surprised he’s still making the rounds,” Shayne said. “I heard he usually gets to bed early when he’s going to be working the next day.”
“Oh, this is no pub-crawling expedition,” Bixler told him. “Wall? Heavens, no. He wouldn’t be caught dead in that kind of joint if he didn’t think there was money in it. You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t know anything at all about these people,” Shayne said. “That’s why I came to see you.”
Bixler broke into a happy smile. “Think of being in a position to give pointers to Mike Shayne! You’re going to be calling me Ron before the evening’s over, aren’t you, Mike?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Shayne said agreeably. “What does this all go back to, something you found out when you were investigating Toby for the Hitchcock committee?”
“There! You don’t beat around the bush, like some people. You put your finger right on the crucial point. I’ll tell it in chronological order, that would be the best way.”
He took a large gulp of champagne. “This was just before I went with Civil Service-well, I told you that. I was working for Hitchcock, if you can call it working. We had half a dozen things we were supposed to be looking into, and Toby was one of them. He’s a perennial. We weren’t any of us too eager. Step on the wrong toes in something like that and before you know it you’ll be lining up for unemployment insurance. So before you even call up and make an appointment to see somebody, better check to make sure you got the right kind of backing.”
“That must make it hard to operate,” Shayne put in.
“It does. But you have to remember that nobody in Congress likes these investigations, never mind on which side of the aisle. Because they can run away. We all knew nobody really wanted Sam Toby at that point. We weren’t feeling any pressure from the papers or anybody. They keep that subcommittee ’way understaffed, and if I’d really been working on all the things I was supposed to be work
ing on, I’d need six assistants and twenty-five pairs of hands. Well, there was this certain prominent woman named Mrs. Masterson, who had a Georgetown house and did a lot of entertaining. Those parties were the chic thing for a while. I didn’t see her allure, myself. We were speaking about female bosoms here a minute ago, and hers, to be frank with you, was a little excessive. One of the ten best-dressed Washington women. Maybe not too puritanical in her private life, if there was sufficient scratch on the line. Well, we got this tip that she was getting some financial backing from Mr. Toby. I won’t go into all the ins and outs. Usually, as I said, I wouldn’t follow up that sort of lead unless I was told to in writing, but this one was giving off a strong money-odor, and on my own initiative, and being very careful, believe me, I was looking into it. I’m being candid with you, Mike, you would have done the same thing in my shoes. I thought if I could tie her to Toby it would be worth something not to pass it on to the committee. I mean, the country wasn’t exactly clamoring for an expose, plus the fact that the situation wouldn’t be changed one iota even if we succeeded in putting him in jail.”
“Nobody else knew you were working on it?”
“I had to cover myself, you understand. Working’s the wrong word-every so often I’d make a phone call, if I was in a certain neighborhood I’d drop in on somebody. Now it happened that Mrs. Masterson had a fight with her maid and fired her, and I heard about it. I looked up the maid and gave her a song and dance about how it was her patriotic duty to tell me everything she knew about the lady. I was disappointed to hear that she hadn’t slept in. What happened after dark was what I mainly wanted to know. The girl was a Polack, Olga Szep, with a z. Not bad looking, a bit on the husky side. The name’s fresh in my mind because her brother runs the place I was telling you about, Oskar’s. She works there waiting on table.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m not following you, Ron, but let’s finish up with what happened last year.”
“How’s your champagne holding out? There may be a dividend at the bottom.”
“You take it,” Shayne said.
“Well, if yours is OK, I believe I will. When I get a buzz going I hate to let it fade out on me.” He shook the last drops of champagne into his glass. “To make a long story short, Mrs. Masterson kept a diary! To protect herself, I suppose, because Toby has a reputation for using somebody just so long, and then when the wrinkles begin to show-kaput, finish.”
“You’re sure it was a diary?”
“That’s what it said on the outside, according to Olga, ‘My Diary,’ and she kept it locked in her jewel box. At that moment in history I hadn’t had a raise for eighteen months. Side money-you know, odds and ends-was all that kept me going. Mike, maybe right now I’d better get your promise. This has to be strictly between you and me.”
Shayne’s eyes were bleak. “I never make that kind of promise.”
“You don’t?” Bixler said, dashed. “Couldn’t you stretch a point in my case?”
“I’m sorry, Ron. I make that a rule.”
“Not that I committed any crime. I’m just trying to establish motivation. I didn’t clear one cent out of this until tonight, and that’s perfectly ethical. But at the time, in a situation that was pregnant with possibilities, I admit I began thinking of how I could turn it into cash. Did Olga know where Mrs. Masterson kept her keys? She did. Was she sore enough about being fired, or to put it another way, the way I actually put it to Olga, was she devoted enough to the internal security of the United States, to borrow that diary for half an hour so I could see if there were any government secrets in it? And she was! All she wanted was fifteen hundred dollars, believe it or not. Probably no more than a gradeschool education, no imagination at all. Of course she didn’t know about Mrs. Masterson’s Toby connection, and how much he grosses in fees and commissions. If things broke right, if I could sell that diary to Toby, I could retire from the government and open my own office, which has always been my ambition.”
“And if they didn’t break right, you might end up in the morgue.”
“Hardly. Toby’s done just about everything else, but he’s never killed anybody as far as I know.” He finished his glass. “You know champagne could get to be a pretty expensive habit?”
“And then what happened?” Shayne prompted.
“Then my Civil Service appointment came through. Finally, after hanging fire for months and months. Ronald Bixler, report to the Chicago office without delay. Well, I griped and I groused all the way to Chicago, but maybe subconsciously I was relieved. Going up against Toby with this material-I know my limitations. He would have smiled me out of it, or twisted it around some way. But I couldn’t just drop it after I’d developed it that far, could I? I said to myself I’d come back the next weekend and finish it up. And when I came back the next weekend, Olga Szep had made herself scarce. She’d dropped out of the scene altogether. I tried to find her for two days, but she didn’t want to be found.”
“How did you interpret that?”
“Either she’d caught a slight case of cold feet, or she’d decided she didn’t need me, and tried for more than the fifteen hundred. Well, an amateur like Olga against Sam Toby’s organization? That would be the mismatch of the century. I decided the better part of valor was not to ask too many questions. I did ask one of the guys on the committee staff what happened to the Toby investigation, and they’d all been pulled off. It could be that the fix was in, or maybe it was legitimate, who knows? I never decided how much hanky-panky there was in that, if any.”
“How long did you stay in Chicago?”
“’Till last month. This I wangled, because in the back of my mind I’ve never forgotten Mrs. Masterson’s diary. Would you, in my shoes? So when Senator Wall looked me up-he looked me up-I knew right away what he was talking about and how to proceed.”
“Did he have anything to do with the investigation last year?”
“He had access to the files. More than that I don’t know. We felt each other out. I was still a little leery, but as soon as he told me there were National Aviation funds available, it solved my problem.”
“I don’t think I get that, Ron.”
“I mean I could sell it in that quarter without risk. Dealing with Toby, eyeball to eyeball-well, I don’t know if I have the stature for it, frankly. It just so happened that I knew where they could contact Olga and take it from there, because the minute I got transferred back from Chicago I went to work on it. I ran down about ninety blind leads until I came across the right one. It turned out that she’d been away. One of her brothers-she has two, both apes-owned this joint, and when she came back to town she went to work for him. I dropped in one night to look it over. She let out a yell, recognized me right away. Her brothers walked me to the door and gave me a kick in the slats to remember them by. I’m not like you, Mike. I don’t keep fit. I had to let them get away with it.”
“You didn’t find out why she went out of town, or where?”
“Mike, they didn’t let me utter more than two or three words. OK, what should I do now? I decided that doing nothing might be the best bet. But it kept gnawing at me. It took away my peace of mind. And then in walked Senator Wall, out of the blue, so to speak. I brought him up to date and sold him Olga’s address. I made it clear-no public testifying, because I value my rating. Gee,” he said abruptly, “maybe I made a mistake taking that last drink. I have a tremendous capacity for liquor, but isn’t there something about the dregs at the bottom of a wine bottle?”
“Ron, stay with me another minute. Did this Mrs. Masterson ever have anything to do with an Air Force colonel?”
Bixler fell against the arm of the sofa. “Snuck up on me. Millions of Air Force colonels.”
“This one’s about five-ten, broad through the shoulders-”
Bixler waved his hand to stir up the air in front of him. “Funny thing. All I can see is bubbles.”
“Is Mrs. Masterson still in Washington?”
He fixed Shayne
with an eye that suddenly seemed off-center. “Not in the papers any more. Going to find out first thing in the morning. Child’s play for experienced investigator. Maybe there’s more money in this. Could be, you know.”
He stood up, his hand to his mouth. “’Scuse me, Michael. With you in a minute.”
He headed for the bathroom in an S-shaped line, taking the last few feet at a run. He slammed the door. Shayne waited, listening to the bathroom noises, then made up his mind and let himself out.
CHAPTER 11
2:45 A.M.
Accumulated fatigue caught up with Michael Shayne as he got into his car. Heavy weights pulled at his eyelids. His hands suddenly became too heavy to lift. For an instant, as he sat at the wheel, willing himself to turn the key, he went to sleep. Wall, Hitchcock, Sam Toby, Trina, Maggie Smith-they were like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and as he slept they shifted about and changed places, turning over and over. He seized each in turn and made it hold still. Even then nothing would fit.
He snapped awake. The car seemed to start itself and glide away from the curb with no help from Shayne. He was finally beginning to adjust to Washington’s pattern of avenues and circles. A short drive north brought him to the Capitol, and after that it was no problem to find Connecticut Avenue and the Park Plaza Hotel. Leaving the Ford double-parked, he asked at the desk if Senator Wall was in. Again the answer was no.
He lit a cigarette after getting back in his car. At some point, he knew, Bixler had stopped telling the truth and started lying. He had sold one set of facts to Shayne, another to Senator Wall. In spite of his denials, had he sold still a third to Toby?
The detective smoked the cigarette down to the stub before deciding that, late as it was, he had to tell Hitchcock what he had learned. Bixler had worked for Hitchcock’s committee. If he had been dealing with Toby, Hitchcock should know about it. Not in the morning, but right now.
The Violent World of Michael Shayne ms-50 Page 9
