The Violent World of Michael Shayne ms-50

by Brett Halliday

  “No. Now I need a phone.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yeah,” Shayne said wearily, getting into the front seat of the cab.

  Eddie came around and got in beside him. “Hacking nights, you run into things. But I’ve got a policy-go to sleep and forget it. Why don’t we let somebody else find him?”

  “A phone, Eddie,” Shayne repeated. “He didn’t die of smoking cigarettes. Somebody killed him. This is for the cops.”

  “Well, sure, as a rule. But do you have any idea of the red tape you can get involved in? The company will have to know I knocked off back there for a drink. That’s one example.”

  “Eddie,” Shayne said more sharply.

  “OK, but do you mind telling me who you are? I know you’re a pro, but who do you work for?”

  “I’m a private detective,” Shayne said, “and when I come across a dead body I notify the cops. It’s a habit you get into.”

  He checked the address of the battered tenement. Returning to Ninth Street, Eddie drove two blocks and stopped at a cheap hotel.

  “I’ll keep the motor running. Don’t let them tie you up in a long conversation while they trace the call.”

  “Stop worrying, Eddie. Nobody’s traced any calls since the dial system came in.”

  He climbed a flight of worn steps between a store and a shooting gallery. The hotel lobby was nothing but a desk and a few chairs in a corridor. An old man came out of an inner room while Shayne was leafing through a phone book hanging from a nail beside the wall phone.

  “Using your phone,” Shayne said.

  He found fourteen precincts listed, and he chose one with a Northwest address, without being sure he was actually in that part of town. When a voice answered he said brusquely, “I’m reporting a killing. I thought it was a drunk at first, and he certainly stunk of liquor, but the guy is dead, all right. Slugged and robbed.”

  “What’s the address?” the voice said calmly.

  “Thirty-seven and a half Fortescue Street, just off Ninth. In a little open space alongside the house. It runs all the way through, a place where people throw their junk, and he’s about ten feet in. I won’t give you my name. I’m hanging up now.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Shayne hung up. The old man at the desk continued to regard him impassively. Shayne nodded to him.

  Returning to the cab, he told Eddie, “Drop me at Oskar’s. You don’t have to come in with me if you don’t feel like it.”

  “You’re an optimist, I must say,” Eddie said. “What makes you think they’ll let you in?”

  “They’ll let me in,” Shayne assured him.

  Eddie drove back to Larue Place, staying at the wheel after Shayne got out in front of No. 17.

  “What do I owe you?” Shayne said.

  “Oh, hell!” Eddie said, disgusted. He turned off the ignition and joined the redhead on the sidewalk. “It’s against my principles, but they won’t take just your word for it.”

  “Let’s wait till we hear the sirens.”

  That took less than a minute. When the first siren began to wail Eddie went down from the sidewalk and rapped tentatively. Shayne reached past him and gave the door three hard knocks, which brought Pete in a hurry. Seeing who it was, he stepped out into the little areaway.

  “Man, you guys are really asking for it.”

  “He’s dead!” Eddie said excitably.

  Another siren joined the first, coming fast. Pete moved toward the street, then checked himself.

  “Who’s dead? Some more Senators?”

  “I have to apologize about that,” Shayne said. “I told you he was a Senator, but I was wrong. His name’s Bixler. He was sent by a Senator, and that’s almost as bad. I better talk to your brother.”

  With a scowl on his face, Pete listened to the screams of the sirens. “I’ll go in and find out.”

  Shayne felt a sudden hammering in back of his eyes. “Goddamn it, open that door or I’ll take it to the cops and let them ask the questions.”

  Pete stepped back, still undecided but being worked on by the sirens. When he opened the door, Shayne pushed it out of his hand and walked through. Oskar was on his way from the bar. The sirens had reminded his customers that they were breaking the law, and the atmosphere was no longer even partially festive.

  “What’s going on out there?” Oskar demanded.

  Pete spoke to him in an undertone. The sirens were dying as the police cars converged around Bixler.

  “Take it easy,” Shayne said. “They aren’t interested in you yet. I told them where they could find the body. I forgot to say he was drinking in here before it happened.”

  “He’s dead for sure?”

  “If you don’t want to take my word for it,” Shayne said, “you know where you left him.”

  “Goddamn you, if this is a frame-”

  Shayne interrupted. “Sure. I could have found him sleeping off his drunk and caved in his skull so I could get you to answer a few questions. Anything’s possible. But I’d say the blood on his face has been drying about as long as the blood on your knuckles. We can get the cops to give us an expert opinion. A better idea might be to close up for the night and talk about it.”

  His customers were hurrying out. Shayne closed the door and put his back against it. Everyone was trying to talk at once. Shayne smiled good humoredly and raised his voice.

  “You don’t want to attract attention by piling out of here all at once. Settle your tab and leave two or three at a time.” He picked the four bar-customers who looked most sober, and took their names and addresses. They didn’t like it, but they weren’t backed by the management; Oskar left them to Shayne. Oskar had gone back behind the bar and was flexing his shoulders nervously. His sister, at a table for two, stared hopelessly at her blunt fingernails.

  Oskar waited till all the customers had left, then burst out, “Where did you find him?”

  “On Fortescue.”

  “On Fortescue! We left him right down the block, outside the movie.”

  “Not that anybody would believe you,” Shayne remarked. Oskar grunted. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Michael Shayne. I think I’m working for Senator Hitchcock, but I haven’t been able to get through to him recently to find out. The guy who was in here, Bixler, used to investigate for Hitchcock’s committee. Everybody in the joint saw you walk out with him, and you weren’t being too gentle, were you?”

  “We tagged him, sure,” Oscar said uneasily. “He started calling Olga names-Polack, Hunky, and like that. Nobody gets away with that stuff in here. That don’t mean we killed him.”

  Shayne looked at the cab driver. “I appreciate your help, Eddie. Ten bucks ought to cover it. Now Oskar’s going to pour you a nightcap on the house.”

  Eddie protested, “I thought I was going to find out what this is all about.”

  “You don’t want to know,” Shayne told him. “Bixler knew, and look where he ended up.”

  “Something in that,” Eddie admitted.

  He tossed off the whiskey Oskar poured him, said goodnight, and left. Shayne pointed to a bottle of cognac on the back bar. Oskar served him, leaving the bottle within reach. His upper lip was beaded with sweat.

  “I’m not running a tearoom,” he said. “I get a good class of customer, government people, and the way I keep them, I slam down fast when anybody gets noisy. This guy, we didn’t land on him too hard. He passed out, more. He was carrying a load when he walked in here. All I wanted to do was jolt him, keep him walking, and he caved in on me.” He reached for a shot-glass and a bottle of sour mash and went on. “What was I supposed to do then, give taxi service? Pete and me, between us we walked him down to the corner. They have a kind of iron gate in front of the movie, we left him against that, sleeping like a baby.”

  “Which means,” Shayne said, “that somebody was watching, probably from a car, and as soon as you were out of sight they picked him up, whacked him hard enough to make sure h
e wouldn’t go on sleeping like a baby, and drove him a couple of blocks and dumped him. He wasn’t likely to be found before morning, if then. OK. You heard how it sounds. Do you think the cops are going to buy it?”

  Oskar filled the shot-glass with whiskey, his hand steady. “Why not?”

  “Because anything like that might get them involved with important people. I mean Senators, a big lobbyist, the president of an airplane company. You’re the perfect quick solution. No toes stepped on, nothing much gets in the papers. You’ve got a Polish name. You run an illegal joint in a bad neighborhood. The jury wouldn’t be out more than thirty seconds. That’s why you’ve got to talk to me.”

  “I’m talking,” Oskar said.

  “And why your sister has to talk to me.”

  “No!” He drank the whiskey and looked down into the empty glass before setting it back on the bar. “Olga, she has nothing to do with it.”

  Olga exclaimed impatiently and came over to the bar.

  “I have nothing to do with it? I have everything! The bad thing, Mr. Shayne, the way it started, I took the money from Bixler last year, that three thousand dollars. I knew I shouldn’t. But I did. And now see.”

  CHAPTER 14

  3:55 A.M.

  “Olga, you go to bed,” Oscar said. “We’ll handle this.”

  “Yes, the way you handle that little man! You only know one thing, you and Pete. Throw him on the sidewalk, beat him. That’s all you know, beat, beat.” She turned to Shayne. “My brother Oskar, he comes out of prison. He got in fist fight about some cheap girl, the other fellow died. He was in three years. Now, who will believe he takes this Bixler out and only just taps? I don’t believe!”

  Oskar raised his hand. “Olga, by the memory of our mother, I’m telling you-”

  Olga sniffed. “It was all right when I took his money. That was fine. Now he wants to talk to me, you take him out and kill him.”

  Her other brother said warmly, “I was there, for Christ’s sake! I put a newspaper under his head! Oskar didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill him.”

  Shayne put in, “Will everybody please stop talking? Personally I think you’re telling the truth, Szep. But if your own sister won’t believe you, don’t be too surprised if a jury won’t. We’ve got a little time before they pick you up. Are you with me so far?”

  “I better get in the car and start moving, huh?”

  “Not just yet. There’s no identification on the body. No shoes. He’s covered with dirt and blood. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum, and they won’t bother about him much until they take his prints in the morning. They may not hurry with that, but they’re sure to know who he is by noon. I’m beginning to get a few faint ideas, but I need some cooperation, in fact all the cooperation I can get. You can help, Olga. Will you try to remember exactly what Bixler said when he came in?”

  She moved a stool out from the bar and sat down, her chin on one hand. “Do we have champagne, and will I drink some with him. I said my brothers don’t allow. Then he said why do I go away from town last year. I said I was scared. He said did anybody else ever ask me about the diary. Then Oskar came over.”

  “What did he pay you the three thousand bucks for, a look at Mrs. Masterson’s diary?”

  Olga nodded. “That was her name then.”

  “What do you mean-she married again?”

  “Uh-huh, to that Senator, I forget his name.”

  “Redpath?” Shayne said sharply.

  “That’s right, Redpath. I saw her picture in the paper.”

  Shayne tapped his fingers on the bar and fitted another piece on the puzzle into place. “How long did you work for her?”

  “How long, Oskar? Maybe a year. Good pay, but she had so many dinners. Eighteen, twenty people. They never sat down before eight-thirty, it was twelve when you finished the dishes. An hour to go home. Back at eight the next morning. I said to her once, I better sleep at her house the nights she has a party. There’s maid’s room. She said no. I know why-then I might find out who came back to sleep with her after everybody went home.”

  “I didn’t want Olga to take that job,” Oskar said, “but try telling Olga.”

  “Why did she fire you?” Shayne asked.

  “She said I didn’t keep the house clean. Those floors sparkled! The silver, always A-one condition. The bathrooms-perfect.” She gave an indignant sniff. “One night I get home to my house and forget the key. I must go all the way back in a taxicab, or sleep on the sidewalk. You think I try to find out who she has in her bedroom? She can have fifty men if she wants to. I don’t care. I go in by the back door. I know where I leave the key, on the drainboard by the sink. And Mrs. Masterson comes stamping downstairs very mad, in her bathrobe. Oh, she was so mad. What am I doing, spying on her? Some people. She did have a man up there, I see his hat in the hall, one of those army hats.”

  Shayne swung around. “Do you remember what color braid? What kind of insignia?”

  “What kind of what?”

  Oskar explained in Polish, and Olga said, “Some big bird, like an eagle?”

  Shayne smiled for the first time since finding Bixler’s body. “Now how about the diary?”

  Olga said bitterly, “I wish I never saw that diary.”

  Oskar filled Shayne’s glass and poured another shot for himself. “What did you do that was so bad, Olga? He said they were crooks, they were robbing the government, and you had to help so he could stop it.”

  “Oh, yes, and I helped him. I turned into a thief myself.”

  “You didn’t steal it, you borrowed it! I’ve told you time and again.”

  “Steal it, they know it’s gone. Borrow it and put it back, maybe they don’t even know it happened. That’s worse.”

  Shayne was pulling at his earlobe. “Bixler told me he didn’t go through with it.”

  Olga laughed without humor. “He lied, Mr. Shayne.”

  “How did you work it?”

  “This diary,” she said, “she kept it locked in a box on the back of a shelf in the bedroom closet. If she didn’t want me to know where she puts the key to the box, the other little key to the diary, she should change her own towels and vacuum-clean and straighten up and make her own beds. In one year, the maid finds out little things. When I tell Bixler I know about the keys, oh, he goes crazy. This was after she fired me, and I had to give her back my key to the house. He got another key for me. He told me what I must do. One day we practiced, to be sure there was time for everything. The day after when she went out to lunch-he knew she was going out to lunch, he had everything worked out-he called the house. The new maid answers, he says it’s the furnace company, go down and get the number off the furnace. There was no number! That was his business, to know how to do those things. So the maid is looking for it in the basement, I unlock the back door very very quietly and walk up to the bedroom, get the keys from the desk, open the box, unlock the diary, put the keys back, the box back, hurry downstairs-one minute, no more.”

  “Did you look in the diary?”

  “I had no time. Everything was all hurry, hurry.”

  “Olga, you know you looked in it. You’re human.”

  “I opened it, but it was in this tiny writing, you’d need hours to read one sentence. Every day she put down names for lunch, names for dinner, and numbers, like two hundred dollars, five hundred dollars.”

  “You couldn’t make out any of the names?”

  “You try reading something that little in a taxi sometime. Bouncing around. And I was scared. I couldn’t keep my mind on it. I put it in a locker at the Greyhound depot. I went back and watched the house to be sure she didn’t come home early. One hour later, back to the depot, get the diary. The three thousand dollars was in an envelope. We spent it to air-condition this place for Oskar, the down payment on the mortgage.”

  “Wait a minute. How did Bixler get the key to the locker after you left the diary in it?”

  “That part I didn’t tell. He sent me the key
in the mail the day before. He had another, see? Then he called the maid and talked to her on the phone in the kitchen and I walked in the front door, as bold as you please. All over. Then he said I should move to another house and be careful. I thought, if he says be careful, I’ll be extra careful, so I went to my other brother and sister-in-law in the Bronx, New York. I stayed four months.”

  Shayne said slowly, “Are you sure it was Bixler who arranged all this?”

  She looked at him as though he had challenged some basic religious belief. “He said he was Bixler, Ronald Bixler.”

  “OK,” Shayne said. “This sounds simple because it worked, but it was really pretty complicated. From the depot he’d have to take the diary to an office, and back to the depot. Even with a high-speed copier, say a late-model

  Zerox, the timing would have to be close. How did he work it all out with you, on the phone?”

  She shook her head. “No, I saw him. He came to my house once, once I met him in a cafeteria. After that it was on the phone. The keys, I told you, in the mail. He fixed it so the day it happened nobody saw us together. He said there was dangerous, danger. I was the one he was thinking about, so I wouldn’t go to jail for stealing when all I did was borrow for two hours. He didn’t have to tell me to be careful. I was careful, believe me.”

  Oskar said, “Notice that only one person ran any risks, and it was Olga? What did he do besides get a couple of keys made and call the house? If anybody had asked me, which they didn’t, I’d say don’t settle for a measly three grand. That’s a three-to ten-year rap for burglary right there. To tell the truth, it’s the main reason I clipped him tonight. That always griped me.”

  “The thing that bothers me,” Shayne said, “is where did he get his hands on three thousand bucks?”

  They looked at him blankly. He explained, “That’s a lot of cash in one lump for anybody at his level.”

  Pete said scornfully, “That’s how much you know. You should see the roll he was flashing tonight.”

  “I’m not talking about tonight,” Shayne said. “Tonight he had hundreds sticking out of his ears. You must know by now that this thing was never legitimate. Whoever got hold of the diary has been using it for blackmail. A year ago Bixler was trying to live on his salary, and just getting by. If he was the one who laid out that three thousand, it means somebody else was bankrolling him. And maybe they didn’t bother to use him at all. Think about it.”