At the Point of a. 38

18

At Shayne’s request, the Army nurse pressed a button, bringing up the head of the bed, and brought him a second pillow. She was the nicest-looking woman he had seen in weeks, black-haired, as graceful as a seal, and presumably she wasn’t a killer, a thief or a dealer in heroin. Nevertheless, she was getting less than Shayne’s full attention. He was too mad.

She put a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and offered him a lemonade with a bent straw.

“Lemonade,” he said.

“Get well, Mr. Shayne,” she said lightly, “and we’ll let you have all the hard liquor you can drink.”

While still in the air after dropping through the bomb-bay doors, Shayne had aimed a kick at the Arab’s spine. He had connected solidly, but the weight of his cast had pulled him off balance and he had come down hard on his left arm. Now both arms were in casts, and he was taking it badly. He bit down on the cigarette and she had to take it away.

“Be nice, please? I know it’s not pleasant, but from what people tell me, worse things could have happened. Incidentally, we’re overstaffed here since the cutbacks, so I’m pretty much available if you want anything. Within the general context of the patient-nurse relationship-”

“Hmm,” he said.

“I mean, if you want to be read to, or if you’d like a massage-Do you play chess? What I’m trying to get at, I think this whole thing today was fantastic!”

She took a deep breath and smiled. “All right, I got that off my chest. There are some policemen outside. I can easily tell them you’re sleeping?”

“No, I want to wind it up.”

In a moment Will Gentry and two others came in.

“Just you, Will,” Shayne said.

“You’re calling the shots,” Gentry said equably, and waved the others out.

“Did you get any of the messages I’ve been sending you?” Shayne said when they were alone.

Gentry filled his pipe. After he had it alight, he said, “We had a kind of communications breakdown. Phone calls didn’t get through for about forty minutes. As luck would have it, the radio net wasn’t working too well either.”

“As luck would have it. Did you go to Boca Raton? Did you find anybody with a fresh black eye?”

“I did, Mike. A handsome woman, except for that eye. I caught them as they were leaving for the airport. As soon as I told her my name she took me into a bedroom and tried to bribe me. Nobody’s done that for the last couple of weeks.”

“What did you book her for?”

“Attempted bribery and passing counterfeit money. I’ve been talking to Coddington about that, and it seems we’ll have to use the same evidence in two different cases.”

“All right, start the questions.”

“Who killed the woman outside the radio station last night?”

“Murray Gold. Her name was Esther Landau. She was working for Israeli intelligence. She got my name from a guy in Washington, and she was trying to intercept me before I went on Tim’s show. Gold was there to make some arrangements with a cop who came to see him in Israel. Will Gentry, he called himself.”

Gentry continued to smoke.

Shayne said, “What happened to Gold, has he turned up anywhere?”

“He’s dead. I know you’ve been arranging most of this, Mike, and you probably arranged that.”

“Did you kill him?”

Gentry shook his head. “Angie Robustelli killed him. He caught him with a suitcase of heroin in his car, and shots were exchanged. I keep trying to persuade Angie that he’s too quick with his pistol, but it’s an old habit. The funny thing is, it isn’t heroin. Somebody burned somebody, somewhere along the line.”

“How did Robustelli make out?”

“Shot in the stomach. He’ll live. And that brings us to the hard question. Are you going to let it ride, Mike?”

“So Robustelli gets credit for shooting the number one man?”

“What credit?” Gentry said. “He’ll get another citation. He already has seventeen. He also retires from the department.”

“With a pension.”

“Naturally. There’s plenty of other news today, Mike. People can only absorb so much.”

“You know he used your name to get in to see Gold. You’ve been needing money lately for hospital bills. He made the visit at a time when you were out of the country. If anything had gone sour, the rap would have been yours.”

“And he fouled up the switchboards on us today, which I don’t like, especially. Nevertheless, this is something the department doesn’t need right now. He’s been a good cop all his life.”

“He’s been a rotten cop, and a rotten human being. This was a typical drug bust, except that he didn’t mean it to end as a bust. He advanced Gold money to buy the stuff. The difference this time was that it wasn’t the city’s money. It was his. Where did he get it, out of his Christmas Club? He’s been stealing for years. There wouldn’t have been any crime here if he hadn’t organized it.”

“But in a roundabout way, he brought Gold back to us. The thing is, Mike, there’ve been too many police scandals lately, all over the country. This would be one of the biggest. It would take us years to digest it. And Gold’s dead. So where’s your case?”

“Gold had a boat waiting. He was a desperate man, and we all know I had a broken arm. I couldn’t stop him. Somehow he got the strange idea that he’d been paid off in counterfeit money. He’s lived all his life by certain rules. He couldn’t let it go by. He went looking for that man, the man who bought the heroin from him. The next thing we know, he was shooting at Robustelli.”

“It’s circumstantial, Mike.”

“After I tell my story to the grand jury, I think they’ll indict.”

“I’m not thinking of this one man,” Gentry said. “His money’s gone and he’s been shot in the stomach. His wife is a lush who lies down for anybody. His daughter hates him.”

“I won’t argue anymore. Arrest him. If you won’t do it, I’ll bring in somebody with a bigger badge.” Shayne gave his old friend a direct look. “When he took off in Coddington’s car, I didn’t know where he was going. The only name I’d heard mentioned was yours.”

Gentry took the pipe out of his mouth. “You didn’t seriously think-”

“Funnier things have happened. There was only one way to find out. Give Gold a gun. If you’d been the one he shot, I would have come to the funeral.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a friend.”

“Yeah, but it’s the business we’re in. You’ve got things to take care of. On the way out, send in the nurse. I think she’s going to try to teach me to play chess.”