Six Seconds to Kill

by Brett Halliday

  “You’re Mike Shayne, aren’t you? I thought it was you. Can I get in?”

  Shayne cut his headlights. Leaning over, he unlatched the front door. As he straightened, he activated his tape recorder.

  “Look, I’m Paul London,” the young man said quickly. “I’m a friend of Mrs. Steele’s. I know she’s in some kind of a jam, and I want to find out if there’s anything I can do.”

  “What kind of jam do you think she’s in?”

  London hesitated. “I don’t want to answer that. It might turn out to be something you didn’t already know. The other guy’s a cop, isn’t he? I can’t go up to a cop and ask him why he’s searching somebody’s apartment. They don’t give out that kind of information. But I thought you might be halfway human.”

  “Mr. London, are you or Camilla Steele affiliated with any group that’s working for the forcible overthrow of any Latin government?”

  “What?”

  Shayne put a cigarette in his mouth and waited. After a moment, London said, “I’m not, certainly. I guess I really don’t know about Camilla. She works for a foundation that gives research fellowships to Latin American scientists, but she doesn’t talk much about it. All that stuff in the papers. Is that why you’re—”

  He stopped. Shayne’s lighter flared.

  “How well do you know her?”

  “We were in high school together. We dated for a couple of years until—well, you know the story.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Not any more. If you’re wondering about my interest in this, I want her to marry me. She’s turned me down. Nevertheless—” He drew a deep breath. “I’m on vacation. I went away for a couple of days, but I couldn’t relax. I finally decided to come back. I’m—damn it, I’m afraid she’s going to try to kill herself or something equally stupid. If she can get through this weekend I think she may be all right.”

  Shayne smoked for a moment in silence. “She keeps a picture of you at the bottom of one of her bureau drawers.”

  “You’re mistaken,” London told him seriously. “She doesn’t care that much about—” He swung around. “You mean you found one?”

  “Yeah. I’d judge it was taken about three years ago. What were you doing parked outside her house?”

  “Waiting for her. She specifically said she didn’t want me hanging around, and she really meant it. But the way she drove off tonight—”

  “What time?”

  “About eight thirty. She was carrying a scarf, and one end was dragging on the ground. That’s what decided me. She doesn’t do that kind of thing, no matter how many drinks she’s had. She jumped in her car and took off like a drag-racer. By the time I got organized it was hopeless to try to catch her. I decided to wait and see if I could—” His grip on his knees tightened. “Did she have an accident? You can at least tell me that.”

  “We don’t know where she is. Do you think this funny behavior has anything to do with the medal Attorney General Crowther is getting tomorrow?”

  “Those letters!” London cried. “They don’t honestly mean anything, Shayne. It’s a game she’s been playing.”

  “Did she ever say anything to you about Supreme Court Justice Jenkinson?”

  “Who? What’s he have to do with this? The answer is no, but if you’d tell me what’s going on, maybe I could help. I’ve been seeing her fairly often.”

  “Does she own a gun?”

  “A gun,” London breathed. “Jesus. I doubt it like hell. You don’t believe she’s thinking about—?”

  Shayne snapped on the overhead light and asked to see London’s identification. He was thirty-one, an office-furniture salesman. Making up his mind abruptly, Shayne told him about the anonymous tipster who had warned him that an attempt was to be made on Crowther’s life, and that the potential killer was a woman. Then he described the tableau in the airport ladies’ room.

  “There’s more, but those are the two main items. Somebody’s putting up a smoke screen. We don’t know what the real move is going to be, or where. Whatever it is, it has to be serious. Three different people have pointed guns at me since four o’clock this afternoon, and I’ve been slugged from behind with an ax-handle, for no particular reason, because I don’t know much more about what’s going on than you do. I hope Camilla’s not planning to play any games with Crowther tomorrow. A battalion of airborne infantry’s coming down from Bragg. Every cop in town is going to be on duty with a loaded weapon.”

  “Oh God,” London said unhappily. “I’d better tell you everything that happened yesterday and today. Can you give me a cigarette?”

  Shayne shook one out of his pack.

  “As soon as I got in yesterday I called her office. She wouldn’t talk to me. I’d already decided I couldn’t afford to be too touchy, so I waited downstairs. She really looked like a ghost when she came out—very tired and sick and jumpy. We had a fight in the lobby about whether I had any right, etc. She used some strong language. She was trying to make me mad, and she succeeded. But she overdid it. She wouldn’t be yelling like that in a crowded office-building lobby unless something was wrong. I followed her over to one of the hotels on the Beach.”

  “The St. Albans?”

  “That’s right, where Crowther is getting his medal tomorrow. I don’t know what else she did, but she picked up a man in one of the bars and took him home. At that point I decided the hell with it, not for the first time. I didn’t wait to find out how long he stayed, which was just as well. I saw him leaving this morning.”

  “She didn’t take her birth-control pill yesterday,” Shayne remarked.

  London had been tightening up noticeably during his account of Camilla’s evening, and now he flared. “Damn you, Shayne, you don’t care what you do, do you?”

  “The medicine cabinet is always one of the first places I look. Did she know you were following her?”

  “I suppose. I wasn’t trying to keep out of sight.”

  “Then maybe the reason she picked somebody up was so she wouldn’t have to argue with you any more.”

  “Maybe. But it wouldn’t be the first time she slept with somebody she just met. I wish she wouldn’t do it, but it’s a symptom of something else, and when she gets over that, whatever it is—” He broke off. “And of course the truth is that it’s driving me out of my skull! The guy was such a slob!”

  “The slobbier the better, if the object was to get you to leave her alone. We need a recent photograph. Do you have any?”

  “A couple. I took some Polaroid shots a few weeks ago, and one of them made her look just the way she used to.”

  “I want one of the way she looks now. Has she ever attempted suicide?”

  “Several times. Once she came pretty close. I know she thinks about it whenever she gets depressed. The last few days just before she menstruates are the bad ones. I try to keep track, so I’ll be available. When she feels really low she calls me and sometimes we stay on the phone all night. But one time last year I had to go out of town and I couldn’t reach her before I left. I kept getting a busy signal when I called. I caught an earlier flight back and got her to the hospital. Just in time, they told me.”

  “What medical treatment has she been getting?”

  “Various doctors. Different pills. Sometimes she’ll be almost normal for a few weeks at a time, and then all of a sudden—”

  “Did she show you any of the letters she wrote Crowther?”

  “No, but I heard enough about them. Did she actually mail them?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Part of the time I thought she was joking. She claimed she was shortening Crowther’s life by keeping him in a continual state of terror, which I tried to tell her was absurd.”

  “Where is she in the menstrual cycle now, do you know?”

  “That’s just it—she’s due.” He added grimly, “Unless she’s pregnant.”

  Shayne stubbed out his cigarette. “OK, Paul, I want you to listen to a theory. If you collected
everybody who has a reason for killing Crowther, you could fill the Orange Bowl. What if somebody else found out about these letters, and also knew she’d been thinking about killing herself? What if he offered to arrange an assassination? She wouldn’t have to know who he was. He could do it by phone. One way to get her the gun would be to put it in a suitcase and check it on a flight into International Airport, and send her the claims check.”

  “You mean the phone rang and she picked it up and a voice said, Do you want to—”

  “Something like that,” Shayne said. “‘You’ve been threatening to murder this man. God knows he deserves it. Put up or shut up.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m asking your opinion. You know her. I don’t. You say these letters were partly a joke. Now here comes a genuine offer—someone who’s willing to work out all the details and tell her exactly what to do. It coincides with one of her low points, when she’s thinking about suicide anyway. This would be a much more interesting way to kill herself than swallowing pills, and she’d take Crowther with her.”

  London was staring at him. “Do you know anything you haven’t told me?”

  “I’m speculating. Would that kind of proposition appeal to her?”

  “It might, but she wouldn’t do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure! You see I know her. We used to make love in high school. We stopped for a few years, and then we started again after her husband was condemned to death, and we’ve been doing it ever since. That doesn’t make me any kind of an expert on what she’s really like.”

  Shayne didn’t comment.

  After a moment London went on reluctantly, “But if that call came in at just the right moment, if he didn’t make any mistakes, she might decide—oh, that if she didn’t agree, it would mean admitting that she hadn’t ever been serious about anything, just fooling around. One thing would happen, then another, and before she knew it she’d be committed. But she wouldn’t go through with it! At the last minute—”

  He thought about it, and then said helplessly, “No, I just don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Will Gentry, in his office in police headquarters on NW 11th Street, opened a can of ginger ale and laid out a game of solitaire. At this stage in the evening, there was nothing to do but conserve energy, and wait for something to happen.

  Shayne brought Paul London in with a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. London had several ideas about where Camilla might be spending the night.

  Leaving them conferring, Shayne looked up the phone number of Dr. Irving Miller, the psychiatrist whose unpaid bill for $950 Shayne had found on Camilla’s bureau. An answering service gave him another number, where the doctor was spending the evening. Twenty minutes later, Shayne dropped off the Venetian Causeway onto one of the Venetian Islands and found the house, an expensive modern dwelling belonging to another psychiatrist. Most of the guests that evening drove Cadillacs, Shayne noted. After giving a maid his name and telling her that he wanted to talk to Dr. Miller, he walked around the house to a terrace overlooking the bay. The moon was in its final quarter.

  Dr. Miller proved to be a sharp-nosed, nearsighted man in a white dinner jacket. He had been drinking. For obvious professional reasons, he explained to Shayne, he found it impossible to discuss his patients, ever. Shayne told him bluntly that this particular patient was involved, in some unexplained fashion, in a conspiracy to assassinate a high government official, and unless he discussed her now, he would find himself discussing her in front of a grand jury.

  Dr. Miller’s breath came out as though Shayne had hit him in the stomach. He threw his cigar into the bay and sat down on the flagstone railing. Shayne explained the situation. Presently Dr. Miller went back into the house and returned with drinks. His training had conditioned him to attach labels to people, to divide them into categories according to the symptoms they had in common, but behind the bristling manner and professional jargon, Shayne thought he saw concern and a genuine liking for Camilla as a human being. They talked for more than an hour.

  From there Shayne continued to Miami Beach.

  At the St. Albans, as he expected, he found Johnny Cheyfitz, the head security officer, awake and worrying. He was glad to get an outsider’s opinion of the security arrangements, which had been worked out jointly with Peter Painter and the army, and okayed by Berger before he flew back to Washington. Cheyfitz had an uneasy feeling that they had overlooked something. Though it was no longer really his responsibility, he didn’t want any blood to be shed in his hotel.

  “That’s the one thing you can’t get out of carpets,” he said. “You have to take them up and burn them.”

  He turned on all the lights on the ballroom floor. After a time Shayne told him to go to bed. But if Cheyfitz didn’t mind, Mike would hang around a little longer.

  “Glad to have somebody else involved, Mike. This I’m not possessive about.”

  He said good night. Soon afterward a room service waiter brought up a bottle of cognac, a glass and a pitcher of ice water.

  “Compliments of Mr. Cheyfitz.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Shayne said absently, dropping a bill onto the tray.

  He poured a slug of cognac and went on prowling about the ballroom and the corridor between the ballroom and the elevators. There was a ten-foot gap between the raised dais and the nearest tables. Secret Service men would line up shoulder to shoulder in the interval, facing outward. Shayne checked the sight-lines from the front tables and the low television platform, which was placed at the ballroom entrance, where the cameras could cover Crowther’s arrival, and then swivel around to follow him to his place on the dais.

  Half an hour later, Shayne called the Three Deuces, where he had told Tim Rourke to wait.

  “Hey, Mike,” Rourke said genially, “what happened? I’m three quarters smashed. I’ve been drinking bar bourbon and whispering to a chick who pretends I’m slurring my words so she can’t understand me. She understands me, all right. I just watched the news. This is a hell of a story, and do you realize I don’t know anything more about it than I saw on that tiny screen? I shouldn’t be sitting here. I ought to be out talking to people.”

  Shayne told him to leave his drink on the bar, say good night to the girl, and come to the eighth floor of the St. Albans, where he would find Shayne filling in the chinks in a story that could be one of the biggest of Rourke’s career. Rourke clicked off. Shayne then signaled for the switchboard girl and asked for Cheyfitz.

  When the security man answered, Shayne apologized for disturbing him again.

  “Tomorrow night I’ll sleep,” Cheyfitz said. “Or maybe I won’t, depending on what happens tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you happen to know if Crowther’s been in Miami Beach lately?”

  “Last week, Mike. He stayed here at the St. A. That was before all the noise in the papers, and there was absolutely no fuss or bother. It was billed as a vacation, but I know they did some conferring about the ceremony tomorrow. He went in the pool like anybody else, and nobody took any shots at him.”

  Shayne thanked him and hung up. Tim Rourke, coming into the ballroom some time later, found him sitting on the dais in the master of ceremonies’ chair, his heels on the table, swirling cognac. For what must have been the tenth time, he was rearranging his meager supply of hard facts. Again they dropped into the same pattern.

  “What are you doing, Mike?” his friend demanded. “Thinking? This is no time for thinking, man. It’s a time for action.”

  Shayne waved his glass. “I see a bulge in your pocket. You brought a bottle. Sit down for a minute.”

  Rourke was tall, skinny, always sloppily dressed. At the moment he was in serious need of a haircut. His offhand manner concealed a quick intelligence and a consuming curiosity that had made him one of the top reporters in the country.

  He took a pint of bourbon out of one pocket, a highball glass containing two ice cubes out of the other. He poured whi
skey over the ice and pulled out a chair.

  “What’s your opinion of Eliot Crowther?” Shayne said abruptly.

  Rourke sat down and drank. “What kind of question is that, at this time of night? You know my opinion of Crowther. I think he’s a bum.”

  “Be more specific. Pretend you’re writing his obit, and the paper is letting you be completely honest for once.”

  “What is this, a Rorschach test? An obit of Eliot Crowther—that’s a dream assignment. All right, I’ll play the game.”

  He considered. “Crowther. A phony, a bigmouth. Nobody with any political sophistication would trust him to mail a letter.”

  Shayne continued to look at him hard, and Rourke now said, more seriously, “Let’s assume there’s some hidden meaning in this somewhere. While Crowther lived he was one of the luckiest bastards in American politics. As tricky as they come, but because of his thatch of white hair and Benjamin Franklin glasses he didn’t look tricky. A conniver. He’d do any goddamn thing in the world if he thought it would help his political career, and if he thought he could get away with it. Self-confident. Ambitious. My God, was he ambitious. If he hadn’t been a Protestant he would have wanted to be Pope, and if the College of Cardinals had offered him the job, he would have switched. Some people thought he was brainy. I didn’t. He failed his bar exams twice, and if you really looked into it, I think you might find that somebody was standing in for him the time he passed. Of course I have a reputation for cynicism… Is this the kind of thing you’re anxious to get?”

  “Go on,” Shayne said, scraping his chin with a thumbnail.

  “Now consider the matter of style. His courtroom technique was greatly admired. All his effects were carefully staged, and my personal feeling was that he overdid it a little. But juries hardly ever thought so. He must have been a pretty good politician because until the day of his death he never lost an election. The odd thing is that I literally don’t know one single person who ever voted for him.”