She looked puzzled. “That’s wonderful, Mike, but how did you manage to—”
He grinned at her. “Blackmail.”
The phone rang. Kendrick said one more thing before picking it up.
“And if you publicize that tape, Shayne, in any way, shape or form, if you even drop a hint to your newspaper friends that it exists—”
“Why would I do that?”
“To increase your fee,” Kendrick said coldly. “If I hear any reference to that tape, however remote, I’ll turn the full committee staff loose on Maslow’s files and his bank accounts, I’ll subpoena his private detectives, I’ll use every bit of influence I possess—”
“I get the idea,” Shayne said. “Answer the phone.” Kendrick broke into the third ring and put the phone to his ear.
“Judge Kendrick,” he said, his anger carrying over.
The phone was equipped with an amplifying device because of the judge’s deafness, and the voice at the other end came over clearly, in an ugly rasp.
“I’m calling to tell you to vote against the Dade County casinos. And I mean it, you’d better believe me.”
Shayne, leaning forward, was listening intently. The voice had been roughened deliberately, but he knew he had heard it before. The vowels were flat, the diction a little too guarded, as though the speaker might be fighting a tendency to stammer. Shayne snapped his fingers soundlessly, thinking. On the sofa, Jackie had gone very still.
“You’re opposed to the casinos,” Judge Kendrick said ironically. “Thank you for favoring me with your opinion. Are you a constituent of mine?”
“Never mind that. I know how much they paid you, and you’d better not mash the wrong voting-button or I’ll get you laughed out of public life.”
The judge’s face suffused with blood. “I’ll tell you what you can do with your threats, my friend, whoever you are.”
Shayne waved his hand. Moving his lips soundlessly, he said, “Keep him talking.”
Kendrick nodded.
“I’ve been threatened by people who thought they were experts,” he said into the phone, “and they usually send word to me afterward that they wish they’d been told. You’ll laugh me out of public life? Try it. There’s an outside chance it might work. I’ve heard of people who fell in a sausage machine and lived.”
“You think you’re tough,” the voice said with a sneer.
“I’m tough enough for most purposes.”
“Too bad you don’t want to believe me, because—”
“I’m seventy-two years old,” the judge said. “I fought in two wars. I broke into politics at a time when people who could be frightened easily wound up running errands. I believe you thought all you had to do was call me in the middle of the night and breathe into the phone and I’d break out in a cold sweat. Go to hell!”
He slammed down the phone. In a quick reflex, Shayne snatched it up again, saving the connection, and covered the mouthpiece.
“Unless you want Grover to go to jail, keep this guy on the line and find out what he wants.”
He handed the phone back. Kendrick’s eyes were sparking.
Shayne gestured with his fist, and Kendrick said slowly, “Now that I’ve got that off my chest, what do you have in mind?”
The voice sneered, “You blow up easy, Dad. But when you’re in a corner you’ve got to deal. Here’s both sides of the proposition, the good and the bad. I figure your vote is worth twelve G’s. I’ll send you six in the morning by Western Union, six more when I see your number light up. I’m doing it this way because I want to, not because I have to. Now for the bad part. You think I can’t finish you in politics? Maybe you’re right. You know the ins and outs better than me. But what I can do is finish you, period.”
“What do you mean, finish me?”
“Finish you. Wind you up. You’re dead in a week.”
“Should I worry about that?”
“If you’ve got any brains at all. But you don’t know me, and maybe I’m bullshitting. When you get the six grand by messenger, you’ll know I’m serious about that part. About the other, here’s the convincer.”
Kendrick, his face darkening again, started to speak, but Shayne clamped his hand over the mouthpiece.
The voice grated, “That’s your Lincoln out in the parking lot.”
“What about it?”
“Can you see it from your window? For laughs.”
“Nothing had better happen to that car.”
“If anything does, the insurance company will take care of it. Look out the window.”
When Kendrick, alarmed, started to leave his seat Shayne waved him back. The two windows in the outer wall were sealed against the warm Florida air, and screened with Venetian blinds. Shayne picked a leather cushion off the sofa and brought Jackie to his side with a gesture. Keeping to one side of the window frame, she held the cushion against the blind so its shadow would show from outside. Shayne, crouched between the windows, looked out through the bottom slit without changing the setting of the blind.
There were two cars side by side in the parking lot, one a black Lincoln sedan, the other a Ford.
Kendrick held the phone away from his ear so Shayne could hear the amplified voice. “You’ve got forty-five seconds, but I wouldn’t go near it if I was you.”
Shayne lifted the bottom slat a quarter of an inch. There was a small dusty square in front of the courthouse, with the standard pyramid of cannonballs and undersized Confederate soldier. There was a row of stores across the square, and then the residential district began, big square houses on tree-shaded streets. Nothing stirred within sight.
“Look at that there,” the voice said suddenly. “There’s somebody in the other car.”
Shayne’s eyes jumped to the Ford. Judge Kendrick joined him on the floor. The front door of the Ford opened and a man stepped out, wiping his mouth and stretching. The wide-armed mercury-vapor lamp at the entrance to the parking lot showed him to be Grady Turner, the deputy sheriff who had slapped Shayne with his .38.
“Twenty seconds left,” the voice said more urgently. “Give him a yell or you’re going to lose a man.”
The judge said coolly, “He’s been lying to me for years. Is he in danger?”
“Ten seconds!”
Shayne jabbed the metal-tipped end of the judge’s carved stick through the slats. The window shattered. Turner came about sharply and started running toward the building. He had taken only a half dozen steps when the front end of the Lincoln blew.
Shayne covered the mouthpiece again. “He can see the parking lot and this window. Keep him talking. Maybe I can spot him.”
Moving fast, he went to the gun case on the opposite wall. It was locked. He signaled to Kendrick, who brought the phone back to his desk and opened the center drawer.
Shayne heard the voice say, “It’s only a car, Judge. Is the guy o.k.?”
“He’s getting up. Some day you’ll realize this was the biggest mistake you ever made. If you think you can intimidate me—”
The voice broke in. “Shut up for a minute! I could have fixed it to go off when you were in it, don’t you understand that?”
Kendrick was throwing things around in the drawer, hunting for the key to the gun case. Shayne grabbed up a pen and scribbled a note on a memo pad: “Sam Rapp threatened to kill you.”
The voice said, “I’ll go over it again. I don’t want that bill to pass. Vote no and you’ve got twelve thousand bucks in the bank, no questions asked. Vote yes and it’s final unction. It’s that simple. Repeat it so I’ll know it soaked in.”
Shayne pushed his scrawled note in front of the judge, who had to change glasses to be able to read it. He looked up, frowning.
Then his face cleared. “Why do I need to repeat it?” he said into the phone. “My mind is perfectly clear. I’ve listened to your terms, and now you listen to me.”
Using the judge’s stick for a second time, Shayne broke the glass door of the gun case. He selected a Winc
hester .264. The ammunition was in a series of labeled drawers. He loaded rapidly and crossed to the window.
“Do you think I’d go back on the beliefs and practice of a lifetime,” the judge was saying, “for any amount of crooked money? You don’t know me very well. But you have the edge, you people. You can shoot from ambush. I didn’t make that ambiguous statement because I’d been paid. I was threatened. I was threatened in almost the same words you’ve been using. You aren’t too inventive, any of you.”
“Who threatened you?”
“Are you really as innocent as that? Sam Rapp.”
Shayne raised the blind another half-inch, locking it in the new position. Crouching, he looked out. Grady Turner’s hat had been blown off. Although standing still he seemed to be wandering. The sheriff ran up to him, shouting, and shook his shoulder.
The square was empty and quiet. There were pools of deep shadow between the few streetlights on the residential blocks. Shayne panned slowly back and forth, looking for a flicker of movement, a glint of light. There was an outdoor phone booth at the extreme edge of his range of vision, too far for him to be able to tell if it was being used.
“Sam Rapp,” the grating voice on the phone repeated. “He said if you didn’t vote for casinos he’d knock you over?”
“Exactly.”
“And you believed him?”
“I believed him. He sent me a clipping about a man who tried to compete and ended up at the bottom of the bay in a barrel of concrete.”
“That sounds like Sam—corny.”
“Very corny. Very believable. What am I supposed to do now? If I vote one way Sam Rapp will kill me. If I vote the other way you will. I think I’ll just have to not vote.”
“Don’t do that,” the voice said quickly. “Let me handle it. Keep your radio tuned to the news and you’ll see you don’t have to worry about Sam Rapp and any barrel of concrete.”
“I don’t really know what you’re saying,” the judge said querulously. “Be more explicit.”
“Just keep your radio turned on.”
The phone clanged as a dime was collected. Shayne brought the rifle to bear on the distant phone booth. The caller must be using binoculars. Shayne took up on the sling, tucking the stock against his cheek, and adjusted the sights. He was guessing the range at three-hundred-and-fifty yards.
“Before I hang up,” the voice said. “I could send you clippings, too, but I don’t want to—it takes time. You don’t sound too shook about that deputy, the one with no hat on. I’ll do you a favor. Remember. The next time it’ll be you, and not in the leg.”
A flashlight blinked in the booth. An instant later there was a gunshot, and Turner, in the parking lot, screamed and went down.
Shayne put one bullet into the booth, high, to break the glass, then dropped the sights to knee level and pulled off another shot. A figure broke from the booth and disappeared. Shayne moved his rifle back and forth in short arcs, watching for the gunman who had taken the blinking signal and fired at Turner. A man carrying a gun jumped from a porch, and for an instant showed up against the glow from a streetlight. Shayne fired twice. The angle was bad, the light was impossible, and both shots missed.
The man jumped and was gone.
CHAPTER 12
At first the steady thrum of the rotor helped Shayne arrange a picture in his mind, but almost at once the picture began to spin. There were too many pieces still missing.
Jackie said, “Judge Kendrick was lying, wasn’t he, about Sam Rapp threatening to kill him?”
“Yeah. That was my idea. Sam’s outgrown that kind of thing, but it gives me an excuse to get him out of bed and see if he wants to be more responsive than he was the last time I talked to him.”
“Mike, do you understand any of it?” she asked helplessly.
“Not much, but it’s coming.”
“I feel like—oh, calling the whole thing off. That man on the phone is on the same side I am—against the bill! There’s nobody on my committee who knows how to blow up a car. They’re most of them ministers!”
“We still have five hours. That’s everybody’s deadline.”
“Well.” She sighed. “I know you don’t want me to go with you to see Sam. I know it’s no use telling you to be careful. But I’m responsible for getting you into this.”
Her lipstick had worn away during the scene in Judge Kendrick’s office and she hadn’t renewed it. She looked tired and tense. Opening her bag, she glanced with loathing at her reflection in the mirror.
“I’m not used to staying up all night. Mike, whatever you do, be sure to come back and wake me in time for the vote.”
As they came in over Tallahassee airport, Shayne went up to talk to the pilot, a tanned youth named Gene Salzman. Shayne had him drift slowly over the parking lot while Shayne looked for the markings and the buggy-whip aerial of state police cars.
“Take her down, Gene.”
“Then what, Mike? Am I through for the night?”
“I wish I knew. No, stick around. I’ll put two hundred on top of what you’re getting from the News.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m on double-time after midnight.”
After they landed Shayne stayed out of sight while Jackie scouted the public rooms in the terminal, looking for highway patrolmen. She sent him an all-clear signal and he joined her.
“Get a cup of coffee while I call Rourke.”
Tim Rourke had taken a room at the Prince George, the hotel near the capitol. His room didn’t answer, and Shayne had him paged. In a moment he was on the line.
“Mike, good buddy. Fireworks. Surprises. Where are you?”
“At the airport, and I can’t talk now. Do you have a car available?”
“Yeah. But Mike—”
“Later, Tim. I’m dropping Jackie Wales in front of the hotel as soon as I can get there. I want you to follow her and see where she goes. Be careful. It won’t be easy this time of night.”
“Easy? It won’t be possible. I’m not a hundred per cent sober. There’s no traffic on the streets at all. How do you suggest—no, wait a minute. An idea. A mutual friend of ours is in town. Yeah, I’ll take care of it. Let me tell you one thing?”
Shayne checked to be sure Jackie was still in the coffee shop. “Hurry.”
“Just the headline. You know the doctor she brought in to watch the medical examiner. They both agreed on what killed Maslow—too much smoke on top of too much booze. Mike, he’s a hack, this second doctor, a party man with a soft patronage job in the V.A. hospital. And before he talked to the gentlemen of the press, he was closeted for fifteen minutes with Judge Kendrick, who may or may not have brainwashed him.”
“I’ll think about it,” Shayne said. “If you leave the hotel, tell the desk where you’re going.”
“No reason to leave the hotel, Mike. They’re keeping the bar open for me.”
Shayne hung up. Jackie met him outside the coffee shop. “I’ve just tasted a horrible cup of coffee. Can we go? I can’t keep my eyes open much longer.”
He sent her to the parking lot for his rented car. When she drew up at the curb he crossed the sidewalk hurriedly.
“Keep inside the speed limit,” he told her. “I don’t want to talk to any cops.”
After driving in silence for a time she said doubtfully, “Not that I really understand that business with Judge Kendrick, but isn’t it your idea that whoever was talking on the phone is now going to try to eliminate Sam Rapp?”
“More or less.”
“What I’m worrying about, would he have to do it in person?”
“Nobody arranges murders on the phone anymore. He has until ten A.M., so there’s no real hurry. I’ll be there in time if the cops don’t hit me on the way.”
A half-block short of the hotel she stopped and got out. Shayne slid over behind the wheel.
“Get some sleep. I’ll wake you at nine.”
She kissed his cheek lightly before closing the door. “Mike, dear
, you know you can be rather impressive at times.”
He gunned the motor hard getting away.
The Skyline Motel was built to a standard U-shaped design, with two-story wings embracing a swimming pool. Shayne parked and started for the office to get the number of Sam Rapp’s room.
A Venetian blind on the second floor, jolted from within, emitted splinters of bright light. Shayne stopped. He heard a thud, and a door opened.
He stepped in under the balcony. There was a stamping of feet almost directly above his head, and a voice growled, “Will you cut that out, Rapp? Quit that. You’ll be o.k. What do you want—a concussion?”
“Get my hands on the bitch—” Rapp panted.
“You heard me, you heard me. I hate to cream an old man, so watch it.”
There was a violent flurry of movement, a grunt, a scrambling sound. Shayne moved toward the stairway. Then he heard a sharp ringing slap and Sam’s voice: “Goddamn women! You give them everything you have, and they still want blood.”
“Don’t moan about it,” Lib Patrick said coldly. “You got your money’s worth.”
“Grab the other arm,” a voice said, “before we wake up the whole—”
Shayne returned to the parking lot. When he found a car with someone at the wheel, he got into the front seat beside the driver and snapped, “Let’s go. We had some trouble.” The driver hit everything at once, in a fluid series of linked motions, ignition, gas, lights. The quick dashboard glow showed Shayne a familiar face. It was Boots Gregory’s driver, still wearing dark glasses and a jaunty baseball cap.
He glanced at Shayne as the transmission meshed and said in surprise, “You’re not—”
Shayne’s fist exploded below the dark glasses. When he continued to twitch, Shayne hit him again, choosing the spot carefully, and then relieved him of gun, dark glasses and cap and tumbled him out on the blacktop. Putting on the shades and the cap, Shayne shut down the dashboard lights, backed out of the slot and around to the stairway leading up to the second level of rooms.
Lady, Be Bad Page 10
