Six Seconds to Kill

by Brett Halliday

  “After she wakes up.” He looked unhappy. “I only hope she does. I think she’ll try to protect herself by forgetting everything she just told us. That may be the last we’ll hear of the man with the flashlight, if he really existed.”

  “He existed,” Shayne said briefly. “I want to use the phone.”

  Miller left him alone. Shayne punched a button for an outside line, and dialed the St. Albans. Presently Rourke was on the line.

  “Back in touch,” Rourke said cheerfully. “Do you realize that certain people around here are beginning to flake?”

  “Can you get Abe Berger? I want to talk to him.”

  “They’re using the ballroom upstairs as a command post. I’ll send somebody up.” He was away for a moment. “Can you give me some indication of how we stand at the moment, Mike? I personally am taking a certain amount of heat here. I’m not complaining, you’ll notice. I just hope you’ll decide to come in fairly soon.”

  “I need some more time, and I need some cooperation from various people.”

  “If you think you’re going to get any cooperation out of Berger, lots of luck. That man has himself barely under control—barely. If I’m having trouble giving you the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine what’s going on there. He knows what he saw before you gave him that shot in the jaw.”

  “You know how unreliable eyewitnesses always are. What else has been happening?”

  “Gil Ruiz was killed at the airport. That’s a positive identification, from fingerprints. Two of his men were wounded. Local people, they didn’t come in with him. The plane got through to Cuba, or we assume that’s where it is. I know you put in an alert, which was clever of you, but we all thought you were trying to fake us out.”

  “Any mention of a girl?”

  “Any mention of a girl. There was a girl in the group that took over the control tower, but as far as we know she made the plane. If you want to give me any additional news, about her or about anybody else, I’m ready with a pencil.”

  “No.”

  “I figured as much. You asked for an inventory of what was missing out there. The problem is, how many guns burned and how many—”

  “I’m not interested in guns.”

  “Well, they also broke into the security area and cleaned out all the high-value, low-bulk cargo. I don’t have a list yet. Some gold bullion and platinum. The guess is about a quarter of a million bucks. Some crazy bastard fire-bombed one of the planes from a helicopter, and they may recover some of it. Gold doesn’t burn.”

  “They were mainly after the guns. Anything else would go on the second plane. While you’re sitting around there doing nothing, keep after this for me, will you? Find out who was shipping the gold. If it was a treasury shipment, forget about it. But if it came from a private bank, get the name of their insurance company and find out how much they’re willing to pay on a recovery. Not that they’re likely to recover anything if it got to Cuba. Same with the platinum. As soon as they understand the situation they’ll be glad to cooperate. Get the terms in writing, and tell them to put it in the mail this afternoon.”

  Rourke chortled. “My dear fellow, I don’t know why I’ve been worrying about you. You’re going to come out of this covered with roses, as usual.”

  Berger’s voice interrupted. “Shayne,” he said through set teeth.

  “I hear you’re sore,” Shayne said. “You shouldn’t have pulled that gun, Abe, but I’m willing to forget it if you are. Are you still in charge, or have they relieved you?”

  “It’s the same committee, plus the FBI district director. And minus Sparrow—Devlin is back. If you have something you want me to tell them—”

  “I can’t make a deal with a committee.”

  “No deal, Mike. No deal is possible. Please believe me.”

  “I asked for you, Abe, because you have a few more brains and a little more experience than the local people. And you have more to recoup. Your assignment was to protect Crowther, and you didn’t do it very well, did you?”

  “We know why.”

  “I know why. I don’t think you do yet. Are you assuming I was in on a plot to assassinate your boy?”

  “I’m reserving judgment. I know damn well you were in on something! Come in and we’ll talk about it. You can have your lawyer present.”

  “Do you want Camilla too?”

  Berger said cautiously, “Have you got her?”

  “I know where she is. I hope somebody’s given you her medical history. She’s a little unstable, to put it mildly. She attempted suicide a couple of hours ago. Right now she’s full of morphine and counter-morphine and barbiturates on top of alcohol, some kind of amphetamines and God knows what else. She may come out of it and she may not.”

  “We’ll see that she gets the best of medical attention. Bring her in.”

  “Abe, what’s the matter with you? You’ll get her. You can have custody by ten o’clock tonight. But you may have custody of a corpse, depending on what you decide right now.”

  “I want her alive, Mike.”

  “Sure. But you would have shot her in the elevator if I hadn’t decked you. Your gun would have gone off by itself. I’m in a position to play God. I can give her to you, and there’s a chance she’ll pull through. And after that, the way things look at the moment, she’s a cinch to be found guilty of first-degree murder. So why should I give her to you? She’s not guilty of first-degree murder. She’s guilty of holding a gun that killed Crowther. Hundreds of people saw her do that. There are going to be some very tricky legal questions. When all the facts are known, you people are going to be combing the books to find what charge to bring against her. In the end you may decide not to bring any.”

  “Are you still trying to persuade people that Crowther arranged to have himself shot?”

  “Think of some other explanation. That’s the only thing that fits the bullet holes in the wall. How did the bullets check out?”

  “They were all fired from the same gun.”

  “Yeah—he used an odd caliber to make it easier for you. And harder for her to replace if she noticed hers were blanks, which she wasn’t likely to do. You’re probably thinking I should have called you up last night and told you about those holes in the wall.”

  “Why, no,” Berger said ironically. “Why should I think that?”

  “If you haven’t worked it out for yourself, here’s why I didn’t. You’d have told Crowther. He’d say, ‘My God, bullet holes in the wall, something funny going on down there and I’d better stay away from Miami after all.’ Camilla would go on falling apart. Sooner or later, the pills would kill her. Crowther would run for the Senate and probably make it. Eight years from now, with that wonderful head of hair, he’d be a good presidential possibility.”

  “God forbid,” Berger said involuntarily.

  “All right, Abe. That remark makes you an accessory. The weapon that killed him wasn’t a Czech automatic. It was Camilla Steele. She’s going to put in a stretch in a mental hospital, whether she’s sent there by a judge or somebody else. She may pull out of it in the end. Meanwhile, I’m going to see to it that the public knows the facts about the gun and where it came from. Crowther won’t do any lying in state in the Capitol rotunda.”

  “Let’s be sure they are facts.”

  “Now that’s the first sensible remark you’ve made in this conversation. Last night when she picked up the gun she was in no condition to kill anybody except possibly herself, and she couldn’t do that because it wasn’t loaded with live ammunition. Somebody—not Crowther, somebody else—straightened her out, switched clips, found her a place to sleep, made a few little changes in the plan so she’d have a chance to get away, and then left her a syringe with an overdose of morphine, so she wouldn’t be around to identify him in court. I was hoping she could describe him. She can’t remember much. She’s already beginning to paper it over. By tomorrow she may not remember anything at all. Here’s what I want you to do.”

  �
�Now we get to the pitch.”

  “That’s right. There are still major blanks in her story. I want to take her over the same route tonight and see if anything else comes back to her.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Abe, it’s our only chance to find out who really killed Crowther. It may not work, but it seems to me we have to try it.”

  “Bring her in. Maybe we can arrange something.”

  “That’s not the deal,” Shayne said coldly. “I think she finally trusts me, but it’s been touch and go. I can’t take a chance on turning her over to anybody else, and I obviously can’t do this without your help. If you can’t talk your committee into it, I’ll stop working on her and let her die.”

  “Say that again.”

  “I’ll let her die,” Shayne said harshly. “It’ll save her from a sure death by execution, and I won’t be any worse off than I am now. Here’s the option. Call off your dogs. All of them, Abe. At nine tonight I’ll bring her to the airport. You can have a thousand cops out there, as far as I’m concerned, so long as they’re in plain clothes and keep out of my way.”

  “It’s a stunt,” Berger said. “I don’t like it a bit.”

  “But you’ve got to do it.”

  Berger hesitated. “Well—maybe so. It’ll mean stalling the media wolves, getting clearance from Washington—I don’t think you have any conception of the kind of tension we’re under. Let me think if there’s any way it could backfire.”

  “Any number of ways.”

  “Call me back in ten minutes. No, make it twenty. I’ve got some selling to do.”

  Shayne put the phone down slowly. Outside on the terrace, Camilla was still being walked slowly up and down. Her face was empty of expression. At nine o’clock that night, when Shayne had told Berger he would deliver her at the airport, she would be unconscious.

  The next time around, Shayne asked Paul London to let Dr. Miller relieve him for a moment.

  CHAPTER 17

  Promptly at nine, an ambulance arrived at the taxi discharge point at the Miami International Airport. Michael Shayne came out first, and helped a woman to dismount. She was wearing a full black wig, dark glasses and the same nondescript flowered dress the assassin of Eliot Crowther had worn that morning. She carried a black handbag with a long strap slung over her shoulder.

  She entered the terminal alone.

  The real Camilla was sleeping in the North Miami clinic, breathing fitfully and occasionally throwing her head from side to side. To Shayne, looking down at her before they left the clinic, it had seemed that she was a long way from giving up. Paul London had agreed readily to the substitution. One of the nurses let out the side seam of the dress so it would fit him. Another nurse with exceptionally large feet contributed shoes and supervised the makeup. Not much padding was necessary. He had trouble walking in the high heels, but presumably Camilla herself would be walking unsteadily because of drugs.

  He went directly to the baggage claims window. He surrendered a check and was handed the same lightweight suitcase Camilla had picked up the night before. He took it to the ladies’ room near the Pan-American ticket counter. He hesitated briefly here, but went in.

  Tonight there were a half dozen women inside, including two armed policewomen. He entered a booth with his suitcase. Tonight there was no gun inside it. He already had a gun in his handbag, a heavy Colt .45 automatic.

  He abandoned the suitcase and left the ladies’ room. Outside, he looked around quickly and bolted down a flight of steps. He was in the southernmost concourse, one of six that protruded from the terminal building like the spokes of a half-wheel. Banks of floodlights three quarters of the way up the control tower illuminated the gates and the holding areas. Two airplanes were loading, each surrounded by its own small school of service vehicles.

  When a uniformed man approached, London ran out through the nearest gate onto the concrete, teetering on his unaccustomed heels. A crew bus, coming in from the hangar area, swerved to avoid hitting him, and the driver honked angrily. It had been agreed that when he broke into the open at the end of the concourse, instead of continuing out on the field as Camilla had done the previous night, he would cut back at once toward the Delta maintenance hangar. A security guard who hadn’t been warned about what was happening started for him, but was called off by a voice from above on a bullhorn.

  London crossed to the hangar. The big galvanized overhead doors into the building were closed. He opened a smaller door beyond. One hand was inside his open handbag.

  He waited an instant, then stepped through the doorway.

  Only a few lights burned inside the cavernous building. A big DC-9 was suspended from a rig attached to an overhead crane. Three of its engines had been pulled. Two cherry-pickers were in position beyond it—trucks carrying a metal bucket at the end of a long movable arm. Using these buckets, workmen could reach the upper surface of the wings. One of the buckets was higher than the plane. As London moved further into the building, Michael Shayne, crouched against the opposite wall, reached up and touched a light switch.

  He heard a faint metallic sound. He pulled the switch and flooded the building with light.

  At the same instant, a gun banged. The blaze of light jarred the shooter’s aim. The bullet, from a high-powered Winchester sporting rifle fired from the cherry-picker overhanging the plane, struck London above the knee, knocking him back through the doorway.

  Shayne shouted, his voice echoing from the metal ceiling, “Throw it down.”

  The man in the bucket had disappeared. The bucket began to come down. For an instant it was hidden by the wing of the plane. Shayne moved before it could reappear. From the wing’s shadow, the gun banged again.

  Shayne dropped behind a tow truck, going all the way down to the oily concrete. Abe Berger, near the hangar’s rear door, fired at random, to show he was there. Another shot from the moving bucket went through the fender of the tow truck.

  And then the bucket was down, concealed from Shayne by the cherry-picker’s chassis. He crawled beneath the truck. He had a sixteen-gauge shotgun. The Winchester clattered to the concrete twenty feet behind the DC-9, without disturbing Shayne’s concentration. The man broke from cover. Shayne brought the shotgun around smoothly and fired at the cement floor, a foot or so short. The man ran into the ricocheting pellets and stumbled through the door. Paul London, lying on his back holding the Colt in both hands, shot him in the chest. He reeled into the open, into the path of a speeding power cart. The impact knocked off his hit and dark glasses, and as he went backward, Shayne saw that it was Teddy Sparrow.

  He was dead when Shayne reached him.

  “Sparrow!” Devlin exclaimed. “Mike, I know you’re usually on target, but you’re all wrong about this. Seriously, you don’t know him. He was out there in that Delta hangar because he had some nutty idea that he could help catch an assassin, and make himself famous. He was a clown.”

  “He looked like a clown,” Shayne said. “People who look like Teddy get typed in the second grade. And I do know him. I know him well. He’s worked for me a few times, and he knew the reason I hired him was because I wanted a bumbler who couldn’t help drawing attention to himself. So he played the bumbler. That doesn’t mean he didn’t want money, like anybody else.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself. Teddy Sparrow—I’ll be goddamned if I believe it.”

  Shayne said patiently, “Nobody knew Camilla went into that hangar last night. She told me, and I told Abe Berger. The only other person who knew it was the man who met her there. She was the one person alive who could tie him into any of this, and he didn’t know there’s a good chance she’ll never remember a thing about him. This may have been one of the first operations in his life that really worked, that looked as though it might really pay off. He couldn’t risk losing it at the last minute. He thought he had to shoot her, and the hangar was the obvious place to do it. He was planning to drop the rifle, and if he didn’t succeed in getting out the oppos
ite door, he could say he heard the shot and ran in to see what was happening. I had to let him get off one shot, to commit himself.”

  “And to get himself killed,” Devlin commented.

  Shayne shrugged. “Even if Camilla had identified him, and her doctor doesn’t think it’s likely, a good defense lawyer could break her apart on cross-examination.” They were in Devlin’s office on the mezzanine of the terminal, overlooking the main concourse. Devlin was a short, freckled ex-baseball player with a booming voice, still touchy about having been decoyed to Oklahoma by a fake telegram. He had sent down to a bar for drinks. Will Gentry was there. Berger had brought two FBI officials, including the district director.

  “What do you know about Teddy’s background?” Shayne asked Devlin.

  “He worked around. He was in the army a few years, the MP’s. He had that private-detective business. Before that he did some kind of labor relations for one of the copper companies in Latin America. I could look it up.” He stopped.

  “Yeah,” Shayne said. “He said something to me about it once. He spoke Spanish well. He knew somebody who could put him in touch with Ruiz. In anything this big there has to be an inside man. How long have those rifles been in the warehouse?”

  “About ten days.” Devlin ran his fingers through his sparse hair. “I just can’t get adjusted to it. He knew about the troubles I’m having with my son, and he could have sent that telegram. But remember I just got back. This happened in my jurisdiction, and I’ll have to get up in front of the TV cameras and tell the public all about it. What’s this wild business about Crowther organizing his own assassination?”

  “I’ve explained that to too many people already,” Shayne said wearily. “Berger can brief you before you talk to anybody. The thing that gave us trouble was that everything seemed to dovetail. But there were actually two schemes running—Crowther’s and Teddy’s, and they kept getting in each other’s way. By itself, each one probably would have worked. Ruiz wasn’t going to be using more than about twenty people, and he needed a diversion. A small Miami Beach riot would be just the thing.”