Caught Dead

THIRTEEN

Shayne called the maid and told her by signs to bring more champagne. She brought two warm splits. Shayne twirled them in the ice water and opened them both to make drinking less complicated.

“Did he have a room he used as an office?”

“You must find it by yourself.”

Her glass tilted. He straightened it for her and she repaid him with a lopsided smile.

He began checking rooms, trying to get an impression of the life these people had led together. At the opposite end of the cloister he found a room with an immense desk, its surface bare except for an elaborate cradle phone. A large portrait of the ex-president leaned against one wall. Another of Lenore Dante’s geometric oils had been hung in its place.

Shayne was going through the desk drawers when he heard a faint stirring within the phone. He lifted the handset gently. A man’s voice was talking in Spanish, protesting, explaining. Senora Alvares broke in. Shayne heard his own name spoken. He listened to the exchange until it ended. The woman was by turns hot and cold, plaintive and curt. The man was sulky. Shayne thought he heard the name Frost thrown up out of the torrent of unfamiliar sounds, but it flickered by too fast for him to be sure.

When good-byes were spoken, Shayne depressed the bar, waited a moment and then dialed the operator. After surviving the usual series of misunderstandings, he was connected with a voice that could respond in English. He asked for a number in Palm Beach, Florida.

While he waited he continued to open and shut drawers, finding nothing to change the impression he already had, that Alvares had been an orderly, apparently bloodless man. A snapshot of the dead president with Lenore Dante had been slipped under the desk blotter. She was in tennis clothes, holding a racket. Alvares, beside her, seemed to be trying to outstare the camera. There was a bulge in his pocket that could have been a gun.

The operator established the connection and a man’s voice said, “Katz Protection.”

“Sam? This is Mike Shayne.”

“Hey! What’s this thing about Tim Rourke? It’s all over the morning paper. Are they kidding?”

“They don’t seem to be. I’m in Caracas now, trying to find out. There’s a Palm Beach angle I’d like you to check out, if you’re not too busy.”

“Everything’s canceled, as of now. Go ahead, Mike.”

“It’s a lady named Lenore Dante. Do you know her?”

“Lenore Dante. It rings a sort of bell. Is she year-round?”

“She runs an art gallery there, and she used to be the girl friend of this Venezuelan dictator, the guy who got blown up in the bombing. I want to know if they’ve spent time together in Palm Beach, and if so, in what kind of style. What did it cost them? Were they asked out as a couple?”

“I know somebody who can tell me,” Katz said. “How soon do you want it?”

“Right away. The other part is harder. I want everything you can find out about her business and her personal finances. How much money has been going in and out? This is important. And if you have to spend money to get it, spend it. I want rumors as well as facts. Has Alvares invested any money in Palm Beach? Does he own any property there? Stay on it right through, Sam, and keep a line open because I’ll be calling you.”

He hung up and continued with his search of the house. He encountered two maids as he proceeded, and told them in English to go on with what they were doing. He worked his way around the square, ending where he had started.

The widow was asleep on a horsehair sofa under a black lace shawl. A lock of hair had been jarred out of the tight knot at the back of her neck, and lay along her cheek. She was snoring faintly.

She had finished another split of champagne. He filled his own glass from the last remaining bottle and sipped it, thinking. He worked his way through the cigarette without reaching any conclusions. Stubbing it out, he looked more closely at the overflowing ashtray, and picked a dead cigar out of the debris. He crumbled a piece of the wrapper and sniffed it. The smell was unmistakable. It was the same kind of excellent Havana Felix Frost had been smoking that morning.

He dropped it in the ashtray. Senora Alvares hadn’t stirred.

He encountered no one on the way out. As soon as he was back in the stolen French sedan the old man trudged out to open the gate for him. It creaked open. Leaning out, Shayne threw him a coin.

Since hearing his own name tossed back and forth between the Senora and the unknown man on the phone, Shayne’s internal radar had been emitting a steady series of blips. He didn’t need a reminder that he was not only a foreigner here, he was a foreigner who was asking unpleasant questions. He started the car rolling as the old man picked up the coin and moved out of the way. Shayne came down into second and hit the accelerator hard, exploding through the gate.

He spun the wheel, accelerating, and heard the shot as he came out of the skid with the gas pedal on the floor. It sounded like a high-powered rifle. His only weapon was a. 38 revolver. The car’s inner wheels ran over a stone curb.

The second shot went into a rear tire. As the tire blew it threw the car back across the driveway where it caromed off a young cypress. Shayne shifted up even before he was sure he had control and began looking for cover.

The car was tossing violently. He was on a rough track leading to a cluster of out-buildings, but from the way the car was bucking he knew he had no chance of making it. In the outside mirror, he caught a flash of a white shirt and a slanting rifle barrel. The rifle came around.

Without hesitating, Shayne wrenched the wheel over, left the road and headed across a patch of cleared ground toward a clump of trees. For that first instant the corner of the wall screened him from the rifleman. The car went up a rise, and then the ground fell away sharply. For a period of time, short but definite, all four wheels were in the air. When they struck, another tire went.

Shayne unlatched the door and let the car shake him loose.

He rolled once and was up, racing for the trees. He held steady for three strides, then jumped. A bullet went into the ground near him.

He broke through the trees and without slackening speed raced down the slope toward the stone buildings. He reached them after a straight, hard run, rounded the corner of a blank wall and leaped into a stable.

There was one dirty window. Shayne scrubbed the accumulated dirt off one pane with his knuckles and looked out.

The Renault had ended up against a tree. The walled farm was now a quarter of a mile distant. Smelling Shayne, a horse snorted and stamped inside a stall. Nothing moved outside until a man carrying a rifle, crouching, ran toward the trees.

Shayne returned to the stable door. There was another silent building across an empty corral. He gauged distances, but he would be out in the open for five seconds, and it would be a long five seconds. Even if the rifleman held up in the trees before coming farther, he would have a shooting-gallery shot at forty yards. He had been high with his first, startled by the Renault’s sudden eruption through the gate. The second shot had been careful and good. Though he had missed with his third, that had been a difficult, hurried shot downhill.

Shayne picked up a clod of dirt and shied it across the corral. Watching the line of trees, he saw a glint of sun on the rifle barrel.

A farm worker moved slowly across a distant field. Work in the fields was about to resume. When it did, Shayne would be badly outnumbered as well as out-gunned. The horse behind him knocked against the door of the stall. Shayne heard the sound of a truck motor starting and decided he could wait no longer. He thrust his. 38 inside his belt and let himself into the stall, telling the horse to hold still.

It was a gray stallion, enormously tall. He allowed Shayne to pat his flank and slide his hand along his head.

“I hope you understand English,” Shayne said, gentling the horse with both hands. “We’re going for a run and I want you to behave. If you see anybody with a rifle, stamp on the son of a bitch. That’s right, boy.”

The horse shook his head as the bridle came down and began to weave. Shayne talked him into taking the bit. There was no time to hunt for a saddle. He upended a feed tub. The horse shouldered him against the wall and Shayne cuffed him lightly.

“Easy, fellow.”

Somebody shouted in Spanish and the horse jerked back hard. Shayne mounted the feed tub and flung one leg over his back. The horse reared and came forward; the door sprang open. Shayne slid into place, well forward, and gathered the short reins. A sheathed machete hung from a nail outside the door and Shayne snatched it out of its sheath while the horse hesitated, turning.

The shout was repeated and the horse broke forward. Shayne dug in his heels and held on. They went out the door at a hard gallop, with Shayne in a tight forward crouch, his face against the rough mane.

The corral gate was closed. The horse checked and veered.

The man with the rifle had foolishly left cover. He tried to reverse himself and stumbled. The great gray, with Shayne clinging to his back, galloped at him.

Shayne saw a blur of a face, a streak of mustache, heavy black brows. The man coiled, swinging the rifle. Before he could set himself, Shayne threw the machete. The blade flashed as it revolved. The man gave a startled yelp and flung up both hands. The machete came down in front of him and stood quivering in the hard dirt.

A step away, the horse swerved, changing course so suddenly that again Shayne almost lost his grip.

Now they were galloping downhill through thin grass. Shayne had lost the reins. He gripped the mane with both fists-he was going wherever the horse wanted to take him.

For the space of perhaps half a minute he and the horse presented an excellent target. It seemed to Shayne that they galloped in slow motion. His face was spattered with flecks of saliva. There was a broad grassy ditch beside the road. An obstruction loomed ahead and the horse leaped. Shayne’s heels slipped and he went too far forward. If he had been thrown he would have floated down slowly to meet the ground as it rose slowly toward him. Then he was back in balance, the horse was running smoothly and time speeded up.

Once again part of the horse’s rhythm, he managed to glance around. They had the road to themselves. The farm and its outbuildings receded rapidly. The horse settled into a long reaching gallop, no longer excited but still completely outside Shayne’s control. Shayne fumbled for the reins, worked them up slowly, and was able to feel that he and the horse had again made contact.

Houses flashed past. The road forked. The right fork, which the horse chose, dropped into a shallow valley and climbed again to level ground. Gradually Shayne forced the horse to accept the bit.

They passed a group of peasants on foot, then a parked car. It was a green sedan, an Oldsmobile. By the time the color and the make had registered on Shayne-it was Lenore Dante’s borrowed car-the road had curved and it was gone.

To the left he saw two low buildings with tin roofs and a paved airstrip. Ahead, beyond the end of the runway, was a wrecked plane.

Shayne tightened the reins and sawed at the bit savagely. The horse fought for a time, then gave up abruptly and dropped into a canter. Shayne tightened his hold and forced the horse to stop and turn back. He walked the horse along the grassy strip at the edge of the road, stopping again when he came to a kind of bundle in the ditch.

Shayne slid to the ground. It was a man’s body. Crouching, Shayne rolled it over.

It was Andres Rubino, and he had been shot twice. The front of his shirt was clammy with fresh blood. Another bullet had caught him in the temple and blown a large exit hole in the back of his head. The lower part of his face, the mouth and the muscles around it, still seemed incongruously cheerful, as though he had been able to find amusement even in something as serious as death.