“That’s the obituary,” Shayne said, still scraping his chin. “What do you think of him as a man?”
“You mean how does he perform in the sack? He still has his original wife, and I’ve never heard about any chicks on the side.”
“I’m thinking about how he’d stand up under pressure. Under threats.”
Rourke said slowly, “He’s a mean cat to have as an enemy. I wrote a piece once he didn’t like—it was about the Felix Steele case, remember—and he sent one of his Mafiosi to sniff around the paper and see if he could get me fired. Certain old charges against me were exhumed. Luckily the publisher knew about them and had already forgiven me.”
“Abe Berger says he worries about being assassinated. Anonymous letters make him shiver and shake.”
“Yeah?” Rourke said, interested. “Then why doesn’t he stay in Washington tomorrow? This medal isn’t a very high-priority thing.”
“That’s one of the things we’ve been wondering,” Shayne said. “The official reason is that he can’t afford to be intimidated by a Miami dentist. Unofficially, he’s hoping to flush out a crazy who may or may not be trying to murder a Supreme Court Justice, among other people, including Crowther himself.”
Rourke’s head shot forward at the end of his long neck. “More on that, please.”
Shayne described the acid-weakened climbing rope, and Crowther’s theory on why it had happened. Rourke listened intently.
“You don’t think Camilla did it?”
“No,” Shayne said. “I think Crowther did it himself.”
Rourke stood up, running his fingers through his tangled hair. He walked to the end of the dais and came back. “Mike, this man is attorney general of the United States.”
“And also, as you pointed out, a conniver, a frustrated ham actor. He’s mean and ambitious, and on top of that, scared. He hasn’t been on page one for months. How did this Freedom Medal come up in the first place?”
“It’s a money-raising lunch, and the medal’s just a gimmick. One of Crowther’s people probably dropped a hint that he was available.”
“And the next step was to leak the news that his law firm is on retainer from U.S. Metals.”
Rourke was skeptical. “Mike, that isn’t all plus.”
“It depends on his next move. He’s been mentioned for the Senate, and he may want the big political contributors to realize that he’s safe, in spite of his civil-liberties background. It guarantees him a nationwide news story. Defying potential demonstrators and ignoring threats on his life, fearless Eliot Crowther—you’d write it that way yourself.”
Rourke snapped his fingers silently. “If we could prove it, Mike—”
“We can’t,” Shayne said. “There’s more, and I know in advance that some of this you’re not going to believe. Camilla Steele has been writing him letters over the years, threatening to kill him in various gruesome ways. Half serious and half joking, and according to Berger they got under his skin. He got her an interesting job. He sent Berger down to lean on her. They had her arrested. She went right on writing the letters. The point is, she’s not exactly crazy. She had a real grievance and Crowther knows it. He got plenty of mileage out of that Felix Steele conviction. I doubt if he felt much remorse when the other confession came in.”
“Somehow I doubt it, too.”
“Nevertheless, it must have set up a few vibrations. He knew he deserved something, if only to be scared by an occasional threatening letter. He’d look silly if he tried to lock her away for good. But she’s been getting more and more unstable, and I have an idea the letters have been getting wilder and more convincing. She’s drinking and dropping pills, and there’s always an outside chance, he must think, that someday she’ll walk up out of a crowd with a gun—”
“Mike!” Rourke poured more whiskey and drank it excitedly. “Are you saying that Crowther set up this assassination himself?”
Shayne corrected him. “Not assassination. Attempted assassination. If he’s supplying the gun he can make sure it’s loaded with blanks.”
Rourke gave an awed whistle. “Let me think about this for a minute.”
“I talked to her boyfriend and her psychiatrist. She’s being treated for recurrent depressions. She tried to kill herself at least twice, and nearly succeeded. Here’s the hypothetical question. If somebody found out about those letters, if this person wanted to kill Crowther himself but was afraid to, if he called Camilla and asked her if she was just kicking the idea around or would she go through with it if somebody else made the arrangements? All right. Both the doctor and the guy think she’d probably say yes.”
“You don’t happen to have those calls on tape?”
“No, I’m guessing. It’s my guess that he’d use a trace of a Spanish accent, to tie it in with the Latin American demonstrations.”
Rourke shook his head decisively. “The trouble is, everything would have to work out exactly right, and how often does that happen? After he gave her the gun she wouldn’t be under his control.”
“Back off a step, Tim. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s really incredibly simple. I think we’ll find that Crowther and Justice Jenkinson know each other socially. At some point in the last few months he located Jenkinson’s climbing gear and switched ropes. After that, it was a matter of two or three phone calls. He couldn’t possibly lose. If she said no, he could stop worrying about the letters. If she agreed, and then found that she couldn’t go through with it after all, she’d be mad at herself, and the next time she tried suicide she’d make sure nobody was around to bring her back.”
“And if she actually did take out the gun and fired—”
“Sure. She’d miss. She’s been drinking heavily. There’s a chance she never handled a gun before in her life. Nobody’ll be surprised if she misses the target with all her shots, even at close range. Then one of two things can happen. Everybody’s going to be very tense and gun-shy. The place will be crawling with cops and Secret Service people. They’ve been warned that an assassin is around somewhere. Suddenly a wild-eyed woman starts banging away with a revolver. Their guns are going to jump into their hands, and it’s a fairly safe bet that one or two will go off.”
Rourke repeated his long whistle. “Son of a bitch. Tricky, all right, even for Crowther.”
“And if she lives through it, she’ll get a long jolt in jail or end up in a hospital for the criminally insane. Either way, she’ll be out of his hair.”
“Now wait. Wait. What if she doesn’t get off all the shots, and we find a couple of blank rounds in her gun?”
“In Crowther’s shoes, in one of the early phone calls I’d tell her to keep firing till the gun was empty. Five shots are better than one, and so on. I’d keep drumming it into her until I was sure she understood it.”
“Mike, it’s too fantastic to believe, but I’m almost beginning to believe it. If it worked, it would make his career. He’s important enough to demonstrate against. He’s important enough to try to kill. The publicity! My God, it would go on for weeks. The best kind of publicity. There was a story once about how he choked when he was flying somewhere and one of the engines caught fire. He went down on his knees and prayed. It hurt him politically. Everybody thought it was a little excessive, a little chicken. This would blot that all out. A cool head in a crisis. And why the hell wouldn’t he be cool, if he knew there weren’t any real bullets in the gun? Mike, it could make him President! What a story, what a story.”
“Are you convinced?”
“I didn’t say that. I said what a story. Because what’s it based on? A long series of guesses.”
“Up to a point. He’s prosecuted enough murder cases to know the importance of physical evidence. There’s one gap in the story the way it stands. If she fired five live rounds and missed with all five, what happened to the slugs?”
Rourke looked thoughtful. “That would certainly be asked. They couldn’t all fly out an open window.”
Shayne stood up
decisively. Leaving the dais, he strode to the television platform.
“I may need your testimony, Tim, so pay close attention. Publicity is the key to this. You know he’d make sure the cameras were pointed the right way. All three networks are going to be here tomorrow. After he’s seated and while he’s speaking he’ll get full security coverage, and she wouldn’t be able to shoot more than once or twice. For Crowther’s purposes, the best time for the shooting to take place would be during the first minute or two after he gets off the elevator. A crowd will be milling around. He’ll want to be looking straight at the cameras when it happens, so people can see how calm and unruffled he is. That means the assassin ought to be standing just about here.”
He indicated a spot in the corridor, outside the arched entrance to the ballroom. There was a cigarette-shaped burn in the carpet, possibly put there as a marker. The burn pointed toward the elevators.
Rourke’s undernourished frame was coiled forward. “Goddamn it, Mike, you mean you’ve found some bullet holes?”
“Two,” Shayne said. “There may be others, but two would be enough. He wouldn’t want to have more holes than shots. If she fires twice and the unfired rounds turn out to be blanks, whoever loaded the gun made a mistake, that’s all. Here’s the line of fire.”
He extended his arm, an imaginary gun in his hand. Rourke followed the line down the corridor. Beyond the elevators, the corridor turned sharply. He examined the wall at the turn.
“Hell, I don’t see anything.”
“She fired high.”
Rourke peered up doubtfully. “I see a couple of black dots—”
Shayne brought him a chair from the ballroom. “Look closer.”
Rourke clambered up on the chair and straightened gingerly. The plaster was painted a dull green. The two holes were several inches apart, a foot or so below the molding. Shayne opened his pocket knife and passed it up to him.
“Dig one of them out.”
Rourke twisted the point of the knife in the hole. A moment later he stepped down with a bullet in his hand.
“There’s a time warp here. The gun that fired this bullet isn’t scheduled to go off till tomorrow morning. Mike, I’d say this is conclusive. But dear God, it’s extraordinary! On the basis of a goofy…”
He looked at his friend curiously. “Unless you put it there yourself?”
“That’s a dumb suggestion.”
“It’s just so goddamned extraordinary! On the basis of a goofy theory you decide there are going to be two bullet holes in a wall seventy-five feet away, nine feet from the floor, and sure enough, there they are.”
Shayne said impatiently, “There’s only one place she could stand so the TV cameras could get Crowther’s expression. Bullets travel in a straight line.”
“I suppose this slug was fired by the same gun she’ll be using tomorrow?”
“I think so. I also think there’ll be a silencer on it. I agree it’s extraordinary. That doesn’t mean it was especially hard to arrange. Crowther stayed in this hotel last week. Anybody can get off the elevator at this floor and look around. After one or two in the morning he’d have the place to himself. Again, there was no risk. No risk at all. If the rest of the scheme didn’t pan out, nobody would notice the holes until the next time the place is painted.”
“Well, it’s fantastic.”
Rourke tossed the bullet in the air and caught it as it came down. Shayne asked to see it.
“Twenty-five caliber,” he said. “That closes another loophole. It’s hard to buy twenty-five caliber ammunition in this country. If she fired the gun by accident, she couldn’t reload it.”
“Fantastic,” Rourke said again. “And we’d better call a meeting right away, because I can name a few people you won’t be able to convince in a hurry. Peter Painter, for one.”
“I don’t intend to tell Painter.”
Rourke went back to the ballroom, where he headed for the whiskey bottle. He replenished his glass and sat down.
“Now I want to see if I really heard that. You don’t intend to tell Painter?”
Shayne held the cognac bottle to the light to check the level, and poured himself another drink.
“I don’t think we’ll find Camilla Steele tonight. Before Crowther shows up tomorrow, we can clear the public out of the corridor and saturate it with plainclothesmen. As soon as Camilla appears, we grab her before she can fire. The gun will be loaded with blanks, but she’ll get the publicity as a potential assassin, and probably a hospital commitment. How many people will believe that Crowther arranged it? I’m willing to make a statement, but would your editor be willing to print it?”
“Hmm,” Rourke said. “Those bullet holes. But if she’s really off her squash, maybe she did that herself, to make us think that Crowther—” He stopped. “In fact, Mike, while we’re talking about possibilities, isn’t that one? She sneaked in late one night, put the holes in the wall, sent herself the gun, and then tomorrow—wait a minute till I work this out—some smart head like Mike Shayne would find the holes and spread the wild tale that Crowther put them there. His career would be damaged, and she wouldn’t go to jail for murder.”
Shayne was shaking his head.
“A guy named Paul London has been following her for a few days, and she wasn’t in New York this morning checking a suitcase on a Miami flight. That could have been worked. But the main thing that’s wrong with the idea is that it doesn’t fit her condition. She’s not a politician and a manipulator, like Crowther. This is a Crowther type of thing. Her doctor has been seeing her three times a week for a year. He says she isn’t capable of carrying out anything complicated alone. She needs support all the way.”
Rourke objected, “I know psychiatrists who’ve made some really lousy diagnoses.”
“So do I, but this guy impresses me. He likes her and he’s worrying about her. He won’t make any prediction about her future, except that it can go either way. If something good happens, he thinks she could get well in a hurry. But if she has a setback at this point, if something she’s been counting on falls through, she’s gone. Think about it. She worked herself up to kill somebody, and the damn gun was loaded with blanks. She’ll realize that Crowther tricked her, made a fool out of her. In psychiatric language, she’s suffering from a poor self-image, and this would reinforce it. Suicide or permanent depression. That’s why I said Crowther can’t lose.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, let’s break it up. Tell him you found a couple of inconspicuous little holes in the plaster on the eighth floor of the St. Albans. He’ll call everything off. She can’t shoot him if he isn’t here.”
“He wouldn’t take a phone call from me.”
“Tell Abe Berger and let him pass it on. It would be a great moment for Abe.”
“No, I don’t think I’ll bother either of them. Here’s the scene as I see it. She must have a ticket to the luncheon under a different name. That part of the corridor, in front of the cameras, will be jammed with people. As Crowther comes out of the elevator she fires four or five shots. They all miss, but never mind, she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she actually pulled the trigger.”
“She’ll run a risk of being shot herself.”
“I’m going to be there. I know exactly where she’ll be, and what to watch for. I’ll be in front of Crowther, and I’ll tackle her the second she fires. There’s a risk either way. And then we can report digging a bullet out of the wall the night before. If Camilla planned it herself, she wouldn’t do any actual shooting. Do you see that point? To prove it was a fake, to be able to blame Crowther for setting it up, there would have to be holes in the wall even though no shots were fired.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Well, we’ve got the rest of the night. My scenario ends with Crowther being kicked out of the cabinet, Camilla throwing away her sleeping pills. Happy ending. We all congratulate each other.”
“So you’re going to let it happen?”
“That�
��s right. I’m going to let it happen.”
Rourke gave him a direct look. “You’re not exactly impartial on the subject of Crowther, are you, Mike?”
“I have no interest whatever in saving his skin,” Shayne said. “Either his political skin or his actual skin.”
CHAPTER 11
The news programs were filled with warnings of trouble. A café in the Latin district, owned by a right-wing politician, had been wrecked in the night. Two boys distributing leaflets had been set upon and beaten. Until long after midnight, 8th Street was alive with knots of people, arguing bitterly. Will Gentry kept a concentration of police cars moving back and forth between Miami Avenue and 27th.
In the morning several thousand people from the Latin community crossed the causeways to Miami Beach and assembled on Collins Avenue in front of the St. Albans Hotel. Dr. Galvez, already there with his band of black-clad pickets, was astonished and pleased. It was a peaceful crowd, including many children.
Galvez spotted no more than a dozen of Vega’s toughs. They circulated for a time, decided they would be clobbered if they started anything, and went home. Vega himself never appeared. It was reported that someone had presented him with an expensive sports car, as a price for agreeing to stay away; Vega himself had started this rumor.
The left organizations boycotted the Miami Beach demonstration. Their adherents drove to the International Airport to boo Crowther when he arrived. Michael Shayne, on the observation deck of the main terminal with Teddy Sparrow, watched the long line of cars coming out of the LeJeune interchange and up the ramp.
“God, will you look at that crowd?” Sparrow demanded. It was a cool morning, but he was already perspiring heavily. “What I wanted to do was close the lots, but the brass overruled me, on the grounds that public relations-wise it would be counterproductive. I can see that. And with five hundred combat infantrymen on the premises we should be able to handle anything. Don’t you agree with me, Mike?” he said anxiously.
Six Seconds to Kill Page 10
