Blue Murder

CHAPTER 12

Rizzo and his friends, in the VW bus, had several minutes’ start, but in that attention-getting rig they were careful to observe all speed zones, and Shayne passed them several blocks from the Warehouse.

The parking area around the theater was less turbulent than when he had seen it earlier. Although many cars remained in the embrasures, some of the pole lights had been turned off. There were two guards at the gate. Shayne pulled past the gate and parked, and waited to see what the bus would do about the problem of getting in.

He saw its headlights approaching the fenced-in area from the rear. They passed out of sight behind a low building. The chain-link fence at that point was screened by plantings. Shayne waited, and when the headlights failed to reappear, he returned to his Buick and completed the circuit of the fence.

He passed the gate Rizzo must have used, parked again and came back. As he approached, he saw the cut chain. The bus had crept in without lights and parked twenty feet inside the fence, partially in shadow.

Shayne roused his operator and had her dial Frankie Capp’s number. Capp was on the phone at once. Shayne identified himself and heard a quickly indrawn breath.

“Shayne,” Capp said. “I was hoping you had a heart attack and dropped dead. What do we do now, negotiate?”

“I had a near-miss earlier tonight. Somebody planted a bomb in my car. I’m not sure I’m in a negotiating mood.”

“I don’t know about that, and I never heard of a spade named Page, either, so don’t ask me. But I’m realistic. I know you’re going to want some compensation. I thought half would be about right. Down the middle.”

“I know what you want me to do for my half. What are you planning to do for yours?”

“I made the contact. I take the chances. You don’t appear at all.”

“Only one thing bothers me, Frankie. Can I trust you?”

“Work something out where you’re protected. This isn’t a maiden race for you, Shayne. Anything reasonable I’ll go with.”

Through the fence, Shayne could see Rizzo leave the VW, holding long-handled wire cutters tightly against his leg.

“Let’s postpone it for now,” Shayne said. “The real reason I’m calling is to pass something on. You’re a local man. I know where to look for you. But I don’t like it when people come in from out of town and break up the patterns.”

“What are you talking about?” Capp said cautiously.

“Somebody named Pussy Rizzo or Rezzo. I understand he’s been ripped off by Tucker’s committee and he needs to recoup. A couple of other names — Angel, Pepe. There’s a fourth man with glasses, named Swenson. He’s some kind of expert, and I think what he’s an expert at is opening safes.”

“Why tell me?”

“It struck me that an old hijacker like you would hate to be hijacked, more than an ordinary person. Pussy has a connection inside the Baruch studio, an actress named Maureen Neal.”

“I know her,” Capp said grimly. “Has she been talking to Pussy about us? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“He wouldn’t come all the way from Los Angeles just to see the Atlantic. He seems to know quite a bit about Project X. That’s Domestic Relations, the Gretchen Tucker movie. At least he knows more about it than I do. He’s obviously planning to steal it.”

Capp said sharply, “Get off the line, Shayne.”

“So you can call the Warehouse? Not yet, Frankie. I want to make sure everything’s covered. You know about incoming calls. You can’t call out until I hang up. We started to talk about terms. I might have settled for half if you hadn’t pulled that trick with the bomb. I’m attached to that Buick, not to mention my own feet. So I want three quarters.”

“I always wonder with you — how much do you know? Three quarters of what?”

“I’ve heard a quarter of a million. That would make — I’ll need a pencil and paper to figure it out.”

“Give me the buyer’s name.”

“Pomeroy,” Shayne said promptly. “Have it ready in a used suitcase, in small bills. I’ll call again in exactly an hour. Be home.”

“Get off the line!”

“I can hear you,” Shayne said mildly. “I haven’t finished about Rizzo. You’ll want to hear this. They’re using the old freight hoist to get upstairs, and something was said about setting a car on fire. They’re driving a Volkswagen with ecology stickers. They probably stole it, because Pussy didn’t seem to be much of an ecology nut to me.”

Rizzo emerged from the shadows, having cut the telephone line, and started across the open space to the bus. Shayne wound up the conversation quickly.

“Now we’re colleagues. Don’t tell anybody I called you.”

He signaled his operator to break the connection.

“One other thing,” he told her. “Ten minutes from now, in exactly ten minutes, put in a fire call. The Warehouse Theater, Twenty-seventh Avenue, Northwest.”

“Mike, do you really want me to? Tell me exactly what to say.”

“Just say it’s on fire. Sound excited and hang up.”

“You know it’s against the law to turn in a false alarm?”

“I wouldn’t ask you to do that. The fire hasn’t started yet, but in ten minutes things are going to be different.”

“All right, but one of these days,” she said ominously, “I’m going to stop doing favors for you, and I’ll probably digest my food better. Ten minutes. I’ve made a note of the time.”

Shayne, too, was checking the time. Capp, driving fast, was fifteen minutes away, but he wouldn’t get started before wasting a few minutes trying to get through to the Warehouse. While Capp would be hurrying, Swenson and the others would be taking their time. Handling nitroglycerin, people think about what they’re about to do before they do it.

Shayne drank from his flask. There was a faint glow in the back of the VW bus. They were going over the plans again, by flashlight, checking the diagram against the building itself. Nearby, a car came to life and backed into the open, its headlights showing the four men in the bus, their heads close together.

All but Rizzo came out after another minute: Swenson, then the fair-haired driver and a slender youth wearing pants so tight that they would probably give him trouble climbing in the window. Swenson carried a heavy leather satchel slung from one shoulder. It pulled him down on that side, and he steadied it with one hand as he walked. The boys with him were dancing with excitement. The dark one goosed the fair one, making him jump.

In a minute, the group disappeared around the building.

Craning, Shayne picked out the silhouette of the guard in the front of the theater, under the darkened marquee. Another guard, in the open, sat on his heels beside a motor scooter. There was an underlay of noise from dashboard radios, an occasional laugh.

Five minutes passed. Another car departed.

At last the VW door came open and Rizzo stepped down, holding the wire cutters along his leg as before. Shayne turned on his overhead light to pick the plastic bomb out of the clutter on the floor of the back seat. The VW’s engine, of course, was in the rear, and he took an extra length of wire out of his own trunk. Then he pulled up the floor mat and took a loaded pistol from a dropped compartment.

A stick had been jammed through the hasp of the gate to keep it from swinging. Shayne replaced it after opening the gate enough to slip through.

Many of the parking bays had emptied completely, but another Volkswagen, this one a red beetle, was parked on the far side of the larger bus. A radio in it was playing softly, and a girl’s sandaled foot protruded through the window.

After reaching the bus, Shayne used his body to conceal what he was doing. He removed the distributor cap and tied in the wire, then paid out enough to reach the front of the bus, where he connected the detonator and pressed the lump of plastic out of sight under the dashboard.

A boy called from the smaller VW, “Won’t she start?”

“Loose connection. I can take care of it.”

A door opened. “I’m a VW freak, self-taught. Let me take a look.”

Although heavily bearded, he looked extremely young to Shayne, in blue jeans cut off at mid-thigh. He was only five feet tall, which for some reason made him seem even more friendly.

Shayne blocked him. “I don’t need any help, thanks.”

“You don’t need help? Man, you left that wire hanging there. It’s going to snag on something before you turn around.”

“Lester, come back,” his girl called from the beetle. “He said he doesn’t want to be helped. Believe him.”

The boy gestured at the stickers on the side of the bus. “I’m into the same things myself. Us against the world!” He continued to come on, affable but determined. “Unless you fix that wire you’ll short out your whole system.”

It was the wrong moment, but Shayne stepped out of the way and said quietly, “It isn’t my car. It isn’t theirs, either. They stole it. Take a look, but be careful.”

“You are out of your wig, man. Nobody steals minibuses. It’s a matter of resale value.”

He lit a match to look under the dashboard. He dropped the match as though it had burned him, and backed out.

“Excuse me. I have to train myself to be less friendly.”

“How did you like the movie tonight?”

Lester replied carefully, “It was O.K. I mean actually it was quite a good movie. We were surprised.”

“Four guys from the Coast just broke into the building. They’ll be blowing the safe in another minute. There are four movies they want, and apparently Baruch won’t be able to do anything about it afterward but cry. I’ve called for help. It may not get here in time.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Michael Shayne, and I’m in favor of clean air and water, and I also wish somebody would manufacture a nonpolluting automobile.”

“In that case—” Lester backed away. “How about calling in some of these cats in the armbands? They’re all over.”

“They’d get themselves shot.”

“Lester,” the girl called again.

“Coming, believe me.”

Shayne was watching the second floor windows. On this side, everything was dark. But by this time, unless something had gone wrong, the men inside must have reached the vault.

He put on the armband he had picked up at Baruch’s party and went across the angle at the end of the parking area, making clear by the way he walked that he was on Warehouse business. Rounding the corner, he saw a service entrance with a short loading dock. Everything was closed up tight except for a missing pane in one of the ground-floor windows. It had been cut out neatly, and Shayne saw it only because he was looking for it.

A lighted flashlight was uncovered at one of the upper windows. The light showed for an instant and was covered again. Rizzo, somewhere in the darkness, had been waiting for this signal, and every light inside the fence blinked out at once.

Shayne moved toward the broken window. As he passed a parked car he was pinned in place by the beam of a three-cell flashlight. The man behind the flashlight was wearing one of the armbands.

A voice at Shayne’s elbow said, “We’ve been watching you. That’s not your armband. What was that light upstairs?”

Shayne shielded his eyes. “How would I know? I came back here to relieve myself.”

A hand came around and took the gun out of his belt. “You must be new in town. One of the things we guarantee when they buy a ticket is that they won’t be robbed.”

“You don’t want to bother with me. I just like to look in car windows when they’re getting undressed.”

A fire siren screamed in the distance, right on time. The men moved Shayne toward the theater entrance, one at each arm. Shayne went without resistance, waiting for the next event in Rizzo’s script.

But what happened next was one of the things Shayne himself had arranged. A big car broke through the front gate, traveling fast — Frankie Capp’s Cadillac. A lighter, less expensive car followed, rocking as the driver sawed at the wheel.

“You see,” Shayne said, “the interesting things are happening out there.”

Still a third car came out of a parking bay and headed straight for the building, headlights on full. Instead of turning, it kept going.

One of the men with Shayne shouted. The car smashed against the building. An instant later there was a clash of fenders involving Capp’s big car and the other that had come in behind it. The two drivers came out of their cars and began grappling under the marquee. A guard tried to push between them.

“Is that Frankie?” one of the men holding Shayne said.

It was clearly Capp. The man he was wrestling was small, fat and quite drunk, with flying hair. Rizzo, in the car he had crashed into the Warehouse, untangled himself from the seat belt and jumped out. Shayne dug in his heels. With an explosive whoosh, the car burst into flame. Only a tick later, there was a puff of sound from inside the building. Shayne heard it, but to the others, it was drowned out by the roar and crackle from the burning car.

They fell back, then started to circle. Shayne stopped cooperating. He jumped backward, throwing his arms upward and outward to break their grip. He pushed one man off balance and nailed the other with a looping left, which dropped him. An instant later, Shayne was around the corner, out of sight.

The second man decided not to come after him, but to continue to the theater entrance and assist Capp.

The fire engine came through the gate and headed for the blaze.

Shayne slid under the loading dock. His hand closed on a short length of two-by-two scrap lumber. Presently, from inside the building, he heard the creak of the descending hoist. A moment afterward, a light showed at the broken window. The sash came up and one of the thieves, the dark-haired boy in the tight pants, dropped to the ground. The men inside lowered a wire shopping cart, filled nearly to the brim with film cans.

Swenson, the safeblower, was next. He ordered the flashlight turned off, and when the last member of the group jumped down in the dark, he landed badly, going to one knee with a grunt. The others were wheeling the cart away.

“Pepe,” Shayne called in a low voice when the hobbling figure reached the dock.

He kept going, so this one must be Angel.

“Angel,” Shayne snapped.

Angel looked back. The gap had widened between him and the cart. Shayne swung the two-by-two at his shins and cut him down.

The men with the cart had now come out into the flickering light from the fire. Pepe looked back when Angel yelled, but Swenson was desperate to get away before anything worse happened, and kept him from returning. Angel writhed on the blacktop, in pain. Shayne took the gun he was wearing and tapped him with it, to confuse him further.

The whole corner of the building was burning, but another piece of apparatus had arrived, and so many firemen had converged on the fire that it seemed likely that they would succeed in halting it there.

A police car pulled in, and Capp ran toward it, waving his arms. Tonight he and the police were in the odd situation of being allies.

Firemen were bringing in hose from a street hydrant, passing it over the fence. Shayne was on the wrong side of the line. A surprisingly large crowd had already gathered, and most of the spectators had presumably come from the parked cars. Shayne looked for a car with nobody in it. He found a purple sedan that had no heads showing. The ignition key was in place. He had started the motor and moved out of the bay before realizing that the back seat was occupied. The seat itself had been replaced by a double mattress, on which a narcoticized couple lay entwined, moving dreamily without noticing that the car was also in motion.

Shayne drove all the way around the building, coming back under the marquee.

The girl murmured behind him, “Like that. Oh, it’s wild.”

Rizzo was standing beside the open rear door of the bus. The shopping cart was now empty. A kick sent it careening into the darkness. The Smaller VW, belonging to the bearded youth who had tried to help Shayne, was no longer there.

The cops came out of their car, looking around to see what crimes were being committed. One of the cars from the wrong side of the fire line forced its way, honking, past the firemen to head for the gate. One of the cops drew his gun and aimed carefully at a tire, blowing it with his third shot.

Making a wide arc to avoid this group, Shayne swerved back toward the theater, then back toward the Volkswagen. As he slowed to a stop in an empty bay, the girl on the mattress cried: “Oh! Oh! The greatest. Never in my life. The Fourth of July!”

Pepe had pulled the stick out of the gate, so it was free to swing. Rizzo, in the front seat of the bus, waited for the right moment to back out without being seen. The two cops had now lined up the occupants of the car they had stopped, turning them to face the fence so they could be searched for forbidden substances. Frankie Capp, behind them, was trying to convince them to ignore these small fry and look for a VW covered with left-wing graffiti. He was annoying them, and it was easy to predict that in another minute he would be included among the suspects.

He strode away in disgust.

Shayne had been ad-libbing, as usual, changing his plans as the situation changed. Now he decided it was time to make his presence felt.

The gate opened inward. The gun Shayne had taken from Angel was a heavy.45 Colt, an erratic weapon at this distance. To check its accuracy, he fired at a mercury-vapor lamp. It shattered. Pepe jumped at the sound, and as he came about, Shayne drilled him through the shoulder.

“Still going on,” the girl said. “I hear like sirens, explosions. Never.”

Capp and a security man, doubling up on a motor scooter, had begun a circuit of the lot, dipping in and out of the bays in search of the VW. Shayne left the sedan with the lovers moaning on the mattress. He had the two-by-two in one hand, the.45 in the other. Pepe stumbled forward and reached the bus, weaving.

Out in the open, the motor scooter struck a fire hose and spilled its riders on the slick pavement. Capp was up again at once, running. The VW was still hidden from him, but on that heading he would see it in a moment. Pepe grabbed for the door handle, beginning to slide. Shayne assisted him with a push.

He went down hard. “Pussy, I’m shot…”

Rizzo opened the door. Shayne came up alongside the bus on the opposite side.

“Swenson, is that you?” Rizzo demanded.

Shayne, out of sight, uttered a meaningless syllable, got into the cab and slammed the door.

“Start the motor,” Rizzo told him. “Nothing serious, Pep. It’s O.K. I want to take care of this Frankie.”

Capp, seeing the bus, slowed to a walk. There was a glint in his hand. Rizzo, too, had his gun out. He was down on one knee, steadying the gun on his bent left arm. He had the advantage. Capp was silhouetted against the fire.

“Swenson,” Rizzo said, tightening up for the shot. “Let’s time this. I’m going to drop the mother. Heave Pep in back and I’ll get in with him. Back out slow. You’ve got a nice face. Nobody’ll stop you.”

Shayne leaned out of the window and clubbed him with the two-by-two. Rizzo jackknifed forward. Shayne came out, unfolded him and took his gun.

“Take it easy,” he told Pepe. “There were four of you. I only count three. Where’s Swenson?”

“Out the gate, gone. I’m bleeding!”

“Is that your first gunshot wound? You’ll be surprised how fast you get well.”

Capp had seen the activity beside the bus, but not knowing what to make of it, he retreated a little, signaling for help, believing that the bus could only leave by the main gate. Shayne stepped over Pepe. He had a minute or two in which he could separate Domestic Relations from the rest of the hijacked film. And if it hadn’t been in the vault — he had known for some hours that this was a possibility — he would pick a half dozen cans at random, and use them as chips to buy his way into the game. As he reached for the rear door, a heavy-caliber bullet slammed into the metal a foot from his head.

He went all the way down. The shot had come from the bushes between this parking bay and the next. Nothing moved there. Pepe, beside Shayne, had passed out. Shayne moved, and as he came up from the asphalt, he brought the boy with him.

Another shot went into the bus. Shayne saw the flash and fired at it twice.

Letting Pepe slide, he wriggled under the bus and out. The gun in the bushes banged again. The bullet ricocheted from the pavement. Shayne pulled the side door open, reaching up from beneath.

Then the cop car arrived, pulling to a stop between Shayne and the concealed gunman. There was only one cop inside, the driver. Shayne went to meet him.

“That’s the man,” Capp said excitedly, running up and pointing with his whole hand. “His name’s Shayne. I saw him set the fire.”