At the Point of a. 38

7

Shayne’s operator reported that Will Gentry had been calling. Shayne hesitated, and then told her to try to find Tim Rourke for him.

While she was trying numbers, Shayne crossed the river on the 27th Avenue bridge. Rourke came on. He was at his desk in the News city room.

“I wonder how you guessed I was writing my story. I’ve got two or three hundred questions. Do you have a minute?”

Shayne continued to maneuver through traffic, without replying.

“Mike? Are you on?”

Shayne had been counting backward. Three weeks before, Murray Gold had escaped from prison. A week before that, someone had appeared there to see him, with a Miami police card. At just about that time, Shayne’s good friend Gentry had been vacationing in Bermuda. Gentry’s wife had been sick for ten months, in the hospital for six. His expenses had been enormous. He had been spending all of his free time in the hospital, drinking too much, eating too little. Finally his own doctor had ordered him to take a few days off, completely alone, and do nothing but lie in the sun, out of the reach of the telephone. Shayne had been away from Miami himself, and he had wanted to ask Rourke if he or anybody else had been in touch with Gentry during that time.

But it was a question he found himself unable to ask. When Rourke called his name again, Shayne quietly broke the connection.

He drove to a small bar on 8th Street, patronized in the evening largely by homosexuals. The owner, a part-time homosexual himself, was a small, lively, brown-skinned man named Manson. He had once fought professionally at 150 pounds, and he still carried ring scars over one eye. Shayne, some years earlier, had broken up a ring of extortionists specializing in gay bars, and since then Manson had become one of Shayne’s principal sources of gossip.

Shayne interrupted him at breakfast, in the kitchen behind his bar.

“Mike, next time phone, all right? So I can meet you someplace. It isn’t good for the joint’s reputation to have private detectives walking in and out.”

“Today I’m in a hurry,” Shayne said.

He took out one of the hundred dollar bills he had confiscated from Marian Tibbett, the Homestead master sergeant, and laid it beside Manson’s coffee cup. Manson became more cheerful at once.

“Coffee?”

“No time,” Shayne said. “I have two topics. Number one, Murray Gold. Number two, heroin.”

Manson folded the bill and put it away. “And do they connect? Mike, anything’s possible. He always steered clear of it here, but you know it wasn’t for moral reasons. There he was, at loose ends, in the Middle East, where most of our shit comes from. If he really was broke, that’s the one way you recoup with one turnover of capital. But different ones have different ideas.”

“Why do you think he went to Israel in the first place?”

“We all thought they promised him a passport, and then they put on those delays and hesitations to run up the price. But Gold-you just know he couldn’t change his lifetime habits. A hospital orderly? After being that big? No, he saw an opportunity and started working on it, and they caught him at it. I’ll tell you what everybody’s saying about that prison break.” He finished filling his cup, and returned the pot to the stove. “He organized it.”

“Using Arabs?”

“That’s the nice part of the story. What other Jew would be so open-minded?” Manson took a sip of steaming coffee and lowered his voice. “I understand he’s in Uruguay.”

“Why Uruguay?”

“Why not? No, as a matter of fact, it was set up long ago. Maybe he hasn’t got there yet, but I do know he’s expected. This isn’t more of the usual crap, Mike. Most of what I give you is what I hear pouring drinks, but this I happen to know.”

“Can I count on that?”

“It’s definite.”

“Now talk to me a minute about the heroin situation. All I want is a market report.”

“I don’t know why everybody thinks I’m such an expert. I don’t do anything stronger than aspirin myself, and I keep it out of the bar. But when the subject comes up, I admit I don’t stop up my ears. It’s so-so, Mike. The big bust yesterday had everybody worried, but not that much, you know? No panic. Does that mean help is on the way? In the shape of a major shipment from someplace? You decide.”

“None of this is worth a hundred bucks. Now something specific. I’d like to get the name of his last girl friend before he left the country. Her first name was Helen.”

Manson shook his head. “I didn’t keep up with him that close. Do you have anything else on her except that she was under nineteen? Which goes without saying.”

“Her father’s a cop.”

“Robustelli!” Manson said promptly. “That was the angle that got it talked about. Did the old man know it or not? Gold used to pick her up every afternoon after school, was the story. Charming.”

Returning to his car, Shayne called Miami High School and asked for the vice principal. Helen Robustelli, he was told, was a junior there, and she had been absent for five days with a virus infection. Shayne checked the phone book. The listing for Captain Angelo Robustelli, the girl’s father, was in Southwest Miami, less than ten blocks away. Shayne drove past the house, turned around and parked. He gave his operator the Robustelli number. After nearly a dozen rings, a woman’s voice answered. It was Mrs. Robustelli, and she told Shayne emphatically that she didn’t wish to discuss her daughter.

“Helen may be in trouble,” Shayne said politely. “I may be able to help. The school says they set up two conferences with you but you missed them both.”

“Those morons, what do they know? Well, O.K. I suppose you better give me the bad news.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop in and see you. I’m not far away.”

She did seem to mind, but Shayne persisted.

“Let me see now,” she said. “You’re that big ugly private detective. Well, all right. Give me ten minutes to sort of tidy up?”

A TV repair truck was parked across the street from the Robustelli house. A moment after Shayne hung up, a young man in coveralls came around from the kitchen door. As he crossed, he checked the closure of his front buttons and pushed back the hair over his ears. Shayne let him get off the block before leaving the Buick and ringing the Robustelli bell.

Mrs. Robustelli was wearing fresh lipstick, with a strong punctuation mark at each corner of her mouth. One of her sweater buttons was missing, showing a portion of the bulge beneath. She was large-hipped and large-breasted, with a sullen look. She glanced at the street where the TV truck had been.

“That was quick.”

She let him enter the house, giving his broken arm an appraising look. “Before we sit down, what are you drinking?”

“Coffee, if it’s made.”

She took him into a bright kitchen. The unwashed dishes piled up in the sink dated back more than one meal, possibly more than one day.

“We’ve been having TV troubles. Maddening. Not that I spend that much time watching. A big strong one-fisted man like you-you don’t want coffee. I’ll fix you a drink.”

The upshot was that she poured Shayne a cognac and made herself a bourbon and water, which was clearly not her first of the day. She enjoyed the taste so much that she took off the top half before setting it down.

“I suppose you think I’m perfectly terrible, drinking bourbon right after breakfast.”

Shayne didn’t comment. As a matter of fact, she was pretty terrible. Her diction was already slightly moist; she would be unintelligible by noon.

Robustelli, her husband, was primarily a drug cop, with a secondary interest in prostitution, and he hadn’t had much luck stopping that, either. His picture, cut out of the News, in which it appeared frequently-he gave his basic get-tough-with-drug-traffickers speech somewhere in town once a week-was pinned to the wall over the kitchen table. He had an abundant growth of iron-gray hair, a jaw like a rock, the steady gaze of a man who, as far as Shayne knew, had never enjoyed a moment’s self-doubt.

“He doesn’t know his daughter is missing,” Mrs. Robustelli said, with a glance at the picture. “He’s usually late to dinner, when he does us the favor of coming in at all. When you’re trying to stamp out heroin single-handed, you keep crazy hours, junkie’s hours. Even a wife can understand that.”

“I’m feeling the pressure of time, Mrs. Robustelli. Do you know where Helen is?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. What do you want with my daughter, Mr. Shayne?”

“She may know something about a man I’m trying to track down.”

“Now you’re talking my language. I hope it’s serious?”

“You know who it is?”

“Let’s say I have a pretty good idea. His initials wouldn’t be A.C., by any chance?”

“If they aren’t M.G. I’m wasting my time.”

She began paying more attention. “Not Artie Constable?”

“I don’t have time to play twenty questions, Mrs. Robustelli. Didn’t you know she’s mixed up with Murray Gold?”

That jarred her. She had the glass to her mouth, but some of the whiskey went down the wrong way.

“Murray Gold? Murray Gold? The gangster? What a goddamned fantastic lie. What kind of weirdos have you been talking to?”

“The guy who told me is usually right about these things. Gold’s been picking her up after school.”

It didn’t take the girl’s mother long to adjust to the idea. “I knew there was something fishy,” she said grimly. “She was supposed to be staying late for extra help. But she went right on getting E’s and D’s. Gold! My God, we all know he likes them young and dumb, but this is going a bit far.” Her eyes jumped to the photograph. “Listen-listen-if Angelo finds out about this, he’ll kill her, I swear. I know you sometimes say that and don’t mean it, but I mean it. He’ll take out his trusty revolver and shots will be fired. Gold’s about eighty years old!”

“Sixty-four.”

“But no longer a teenager, right? My Helen. I’m just-absolutely-flabbergasted. What this calls for is another drink.”

She poured for herself, and brought the cognac bottle for Shayne. “I’ve been taking this disappearing act a little too la-di-da, I see that. But Gold’s over in Israel, isn’t he? Isn’t he? That’s what it said in the paper.”

“Nobody’s sure. Helen sent him a letter, apparently.”

“The poor old guy,” she said, surprisingly. “All that money, why would he have to run to seventeen-year-old kids?” She waved her glass. “Seventeen, sixteen, which is she? I can never keep track.”

“Mrs. Robustelli-”

“I guess it’s revolting. I don’t know. We haven’t been such wonderful parents. Angelo believes in the strap, and I go too far the other way, to compensate. She’s never learned how to study. She never had dates, like the other girls. Let’s face it, she’s a bit of a slob.”

“If you have any ideas about where I can reach her-”

But she was going to make him work for it. She glanced at him almost flirtatiously over her raised glass. “I’m not one of those uptight parents, as you can probably guess by looking at me. I gave her the full lecture the first time she menstruated. Personal example is so very important! I think I can honestly say that I tried to give her a healthy attitude toward the sexual relationship. I have few hangups on that score. I like it upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber. I don’t actually get all that much, and that’s no reflection on Angelo because the dear man does what he can. The reason I mentioned Artie Constable.” She considered. “Should I tell you? I think so, because you may not be right about Gold, you and your sources. They never made a mistake? Artie lives over here on the next block. He used to deliver papers on this street. Now don’t get any dirty ideas! Nothing happened. Really a great-looking kid, Mike. He would have gone out for football, but you know these chicken-shit high school coaches. I thought I’d encourage him, find out if he’s college material, kind of help him develop his potential. I invited him in one day last week when I had the house to myself.”

Her eyes glazed; she was beginning to daydream.

“Mrs. Robustelli, will you get back to your daughter?”

“She’s part of the story, and I wish she wasn’t. Call me Angela. I’m Angela, my husband’s Angelo. Cute?”

“Very.”

“I know, I know, you’ve got lots to do, places to go, and I have to hang around here doing the vacuuming. Did you ever think about marriage from a woman’s point of view?”

“All right, tell me about Artie.”

“Blond, you know? Very good pectorals and triceps. But wild, wild as they come. Ask anybody about Artie Constable at that high school. He threw his Social Studies teacher through a plate-glass door once. And I had him right there in the palm of my hand.” She swallowed part of a giggle. “And was it enormous, too. And wouldn’t you know? Helen walked in. Artie was extremely embarrassed, because he and Helen, I was astonished to learn, had been making it themselves. I felt like a pretty fool. So that put me on my guard. Mothers aren’t exactly helpless, you know. I sneaked into her room that night and did a little private investigating of my own. She was zonked out on reds. She was into that scene at school, never mind, I knew all about it.”

“But not as far as heroin.”

“Good Lord, no. Speed, LSD, mesk and the like. Angelo’s completely irrational on the whole thing, but to me it’s like booze with our generation. I went through her purse, I’m ashamed to say. There was too much money in it, for one thing. Ah-ha, I said to myself. Pushing? And a receipt for a hundred dollar deposit on a certain apartment in a certain beach community, and right now I want to get your solemn promise that my daughter’s name is not going to figure in any of the publicity.”

“I can’t promise that, Mrs. Robustelli. I’ll do what I can. How soon after that did she leave?”

“Call me Angela. Next day. I knew she was gone because when I went in to make her bed, Raggedy Ann was missing. She didn’t take her toothbrush, but she wouldn’t leave Raggedy. So I got to work and I did a little intriguing, and sure enough, Artie Constable didn’t go to school and he didn’t come home that night either. So there may be some holes in your Murray Gold story! I sat down at this very table and poured myself a strong bourbon and pondered. Tell Angelo? No. He’s about as much of an expert on female psychology as that fly on the lampshade. Send Angelo to bring her back, and she’d end up emotionally scarred for life. If they wanted to play grownup, she and Artie, why not let them alone for a few days? And I have a right to consider myself a teensy bit too, don’t I? They’ve had it with Helen at school. This time it wouldn’t be another ten-day suspension, it would be out on her ass. And then I’d have her around underfoot all day, and goodbye privacy. I’ve been trying to figure out something to tell Angelo when he notices she’s gone. He loves her madly, supposedly.”

“Is Constable still missing?”

“I haven’t checked up, I couldn’t be bothered.” She shook the ice cubes thoughtfully. “The night before the night I was telling you about. I didn’t think about it until this minute. The phone rang. When I picked it up nothing happened. A little later it rang again. Helen answered, and she got so excited. She hung up and took the rest of the call upstairs. I had my curiosity up by this time, but she was practically whispering. Could that have been Gold? Maybe so!”

When she didn’t go on, Shayne finished his cognac and stood up. “If you want to tell me that address now it may help, but I can’t spend any more time here.”

“Rush, rush. Homestead Beach, 37 Azalea Drive. Try not to make her feel guilty. We all make mistakes. Don’t worry, I won’t let her off scot-free, I’ll think of a good way to punish her.”

She came to the door with him, snapping her fingers as she walked, not to any music that Shayne could hear. After opening the door for him, she pulled him closer by his sling and whispered against his face, “Why don’t you come back later and fuck me?”

She pulled back and put her fingers to her lips. “Forget I said that.”