Count Backwards to Zero

Chapter 7

The owner of a black Jaguar, the car that had been in the way when the Bentley’s gas tank slipped out of Shayne’s hands the night before, was complaining angrily about his damaged fender. A low red sports car moved out, and Shayne saw Quentin Little standing beside the Bentley.

Shayne, two hundred yards away with field glasses, tightened the focus. The Englishman seemed close to collapse. He clawed at his collar, his homely face shining with sweat. He looked around furtively, then ducked into the front seat and strengthened himself with a pull from a pint bottle.

The Customs inspector was approaching, holding a clipboard. Standing beside the open door of his car, Little tried to quiet his hands by filling a pipe. The tobacco scattered. The official came up, reached into the Bentley, and snipped off the red tag on the steering wheel. He checked Little’s customs declaration, stamped another paper of some kind and held it out.

Little had taken a backward step. His hand was inside his coat pocket. He looked at the Customs man with something approaching horror, and for an instant it seemed that he was about to refuse the paper, and turn and run. He tried to speak.

The Customs man gestured impatiently. Little accepted the paper, and the official went on to the next car. Little gasped, looked desperately around once more, and slid behind the wheel.

Shayne lowered the binoculars to watch the traffic on the boulevard. It seemed to be moving normally.

Little let out his clutch too fast and the Bentley stalled. He restarted it, but before he could swing into the northbound traffic, a Negro boy leaped out at him and began polishing his windshield.

Shayne raised the glasses again quickly. Little was attempting to flag the boy off. The symbolic windshield washing continued until Little knocked on the glass with a coin.

The boy desisted at once. He appeared at the lowered window. As he reached out, Shayne saw his hand open and a scrap of paper drop into Little’s lap.

Shayne started his own motor. A big trailer-truck passed, blocking his view for a moment. When he saw the Bentley again, it was in motion.

Shayne inched ahead, jockeying for an opening. After turning onto the boulevard, the Bentley stopped almost at once. Little got out and entered a free-standing phone booth.

Keeping his binoculars fixed on the booth, Shayne signaled his operator. He gave her a number and a man’s name.

“Tell him you’re calling for me, and you want the number of a sidewalk phone booth on Biscayne at the northeast corner of Eleventh. Ask him to hurry. Dial the number he gives you and call me back.”

Little, inside the booth, turned the slip of paper so he could read what it said, and dialed.

Shayne watched from the other side of the double stream of traffic, tapping his steering wheel. As usual, he was improvising. The fact that Little had passed through the Customs without difficulty hadn’t surprised him. It fitted every alternative theory he had devised to explain the discrepancies in Little’s story. His only plan now was to stay as close as possible and go with the action.

Little began talking volubly, gesturing with his free hand. He listened, scowling, and shook his head. He listened again. He was hearing something he didn’t like. He objected, shaking both his head and his finger.

Shayne had the Buick in gear, ready to force an opening in the flow of cars.

Little drew a deep breath, nodded, and started to hang up, then thought of something else.

Shayne’s phone rang.

“I’m getting a busy signal,” Shayne’s operator said. “No, wait a minute. I’m through.”

Shayne heard the pulse of the ringing phone. He saw Little, in the booth on the opposite sidewalk, turn back angrily and pick up the phone again.

“Now what? Did you forget some unimportant detail?”

“This is Shayne. Who’ve you been talking to? Dessau?”

“Shayne!”

Little sagged and ran his hand through his hair. For a moment Shayne heard nothing but shallow breathing.

“Yes,” Little said heavily. “Dessau. I’m cracking up. I can’t go on with this one more minute.”

“Sure you can,” Shayne said calmly. “You’re doing fine. If it’ll make you feel better, there’s nothing in your gas tank at the moment except gas.”

“What do you mean? What did you do with it?”

“I switched tanks with another car.”

“Damn you, damn you, Shayne, why didn’t you tell me? Do you know what I’ve been going through?”

“I have a faint idea. I’ve been watching you. I wanted you to put on a convincing performance in case Dessau was also watching. Laurence Olivier couldn’t have done it any better.”

“Another car? What do you mean, another car? Shayne, I beseech you, don’t be too debonair about this. If I had a weak heart I wouldn’t be talking to you now. I’d be dead. What other car? Where is it?”

“We’ll get to that later. Dessau’s the immediate problem. We can’t do anything while he’s around. How did he explain the fact that Customs people didn’t give you their full treatment?”

“He says they want to follow me and see who else is involved. And that’s not so marvelous, is it?”

Shayne said slowly, “For the original plan to work, you needed something clear-cut. A definite moment when they’d move in on you so you’d panic and the shooting would start. This way, if they pick the time and the place, they ought to be able to grab you before you can react. You can’t afford to wait. You have to provoke something.”

“That’s what Dessau told me, in almost those words. And I agree with him! My skull is about to explode. You’re in for a third of the assurance, damn you. Suggest something.”

“I don’t want to drag this out any more than you do. We want them to check your gas tank and find out there’s nothing in it. They get crackpot tips all the time, and I doubt if they ever had much faith in this one. Tell me what he told you to do. Maybe we can shift it around.”

“To continue to the first intersection and turn left. To drive three blocks and turn left again, on North Miami Avenue. At the first traffic light, I will see him standing on the corner. There will be a large building on the left, the post office. If he isn’t there yet, I am to wait. As soon as I see him, I will lose control of the car and collide with somebody. Police will be following me. As the first man in uniform approaches, I will become hysterical and wave my gun. Shots will follow. Pierre, an excellent shot, he assures me, will be there to make sure I don’t survive.”

Shayne thought for a moment.

“An accident’s a good idea, but make sure it’s a minor one, just bad enough so you’ll need a wrecker. When the cops check the car at the garage they’ll find out there’s nothing in it. I’ll need a little time to get Dessau off the scene. I’ll make a citizen’s arrest. Give me ten minutes. Wait right where you are now. And cheer up. We’re going to pull this out.”

“You know I doubt that, somehow. Money’s the key to most things, I firmly believe, and you stand to lose money by keeping me alive. That may be why I assented so readily to your unorthodox fee. I’m so sick of this life, Shayne!”

His mind jumped. “I don’t suppose Anne is with you. We spent a strange day, talking and talking. And at the end of that time, she was as much of an enigma as ever. I am without illusions. Why should a stylish person like Anne take me under her wing? I’m no prince in disguise.”

“Sooner or later we’ll find out. Look at the time now. Give me the full ten minutes.”

The phone rang while Shayne was maneuvering into a parking space on North Miami. It was Tim Rourke.

“No sense of direction, this guy in the Oldsmobile,” Rourke said. “We’re on the expressway going north, and that’s a roundabout way to get to Coral Gables.”

“Hang in there, Tim, and keep calling.”

He clicked for the operator, and told her to find Will Gentry, Miami’s Chief of Police. Gentry, one of Shayne’s oldest friends, rarely asked unnecessary questions, accepting the fact that Shayne, as a private detective, had a professional obligation that sometimes forced him to tell the regular police to go to hell. Like most city police departments, Miami’s was badly understaffed, and Gentry was still in his office.

“I hear you just gave the press a very informative statement about that business in Bermuda,” Gentry said. “Four words — three grunts and goodbye.”

“Those guys are beginning to irritate me,” Shayne said. “Will, I’ve got something going. I thought I could handle it myself, but maybe not. I hope you didn’t have any plans for the evening.”

“No plans, but I had hopes,” Gentry said. “Along the lines of a quiet dinner at home and a couple of beers. I’m supposed to glaze a broken window. I’ve had the pane for two weeks, and I haven’t got around to it yet. Doris is beginning to wish she’d married that other fellow.”

Shayne grinned. “You know the fight against crime comes first. I’ll let you know definitely, one way or the other, in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, will you send a patrol car to the corner of Fifth and North Miami? I’m about to make a collar, a foreigner carrying a concealed weapon.”

Gentry sighed. “That can be arranged, unless there’s a riot somewhere I haven’t been told about. I don’t know why you didn’t stay in Bermuda, Mike. Miami’s more peaceful when you’re out of town.”

Shayne had been watching people go by as he talked. Now, after ringing off, he walked to the intersection and stopped for a cigarette. He still saw no one who came close to fitting the description of Pierre Dessau, a pale man, six feet four, wearing British clothes. Shayne walked on, glancing into store windows. In the middle of the next block he entered a cigar store and found a place near the phone booths, from which he could watch the corner.

Ten minutes passed.

The Bentley should be traveling south, but on the chance that Little hadn’t followed directions exactly, Shayne was watching all the cars going both ways and entering the avenue from the side streets. He checked the time again, his jaw muscles tightening, and left the cigar store to return to the intersection. A police car had arrived some minutes before, but there was still no sign of either the tall man or the Bentley.

Shayne threw away his cigarette and strode back to the Buick. “Ring Tim Rourke’s car for me,” he told his operator.

Rourke answered promptly. “Mike, you may not like this, and then again you may. They just turned in at the Holiday Inn, off the North Miami interchange. The lady’s still in the car. The guy went in to register.”

“What the hell?” Shayne said softly. “Tim, don’t let that Oldsmobile out of your sight. I’ll get back to you.”

He brought in the operator and asked her to dial the home phone of Daniel Slattery, in Coral Gables. In a moment a woman’s voice said hello.

“Is Dan in?” Shayne asked.

“He’s not, I’m sorry. He won’t be back for another week.”

“This is Mike Shayne. I’m a friend of his. Is he still in England?”

“As a matter of fact, I think it’s Paris at the moment. It’s one of those hectic trips. Is there a message, Mr. Shayne?”

“I’ll have to talk to him personally. Maybe I could meet his plane.”

“He left his car in New York and he’ll be driving down. Next Monday, I believe.”

Shayne untangled himself from the conversation and the operator put him through to Gentry again.

“You said twenty minutes,” Gentry said. “I just called Doris to put the steaks in the broiler.”

“Call her back. I’ll hang on.”

“Damn it, Mike — all right, all right! I can tell from your tone of voice that this isn’t a simple little breaking and entering.”

He clicked off.

“Doris didn’t like it,” he said, coming back a moment later. “I don’t like it either. Why don’t you ever need help between nine and five, like ordinary people?”

“I’m sorry,” Shayne said grimly. “I thought I had this under control, but it got away from me. You’re right, it’s not breaking and entering. It’s a smuggling operation. Don’t say anything to anybody, but it’s possible it may involve—” He hesitated. “Hell, I don’t buy it myself completely, but now I’m talking about possibilities. I think it’s possible that what came in on the Queen was an atom bomb.”

“Now, Mike.”

“I know it sounds insane. It may be true just the same.”

“I’m a cop, Mike. You’re a private detective. This isn’t for us. This is the sort of thing we kick upstairs.”

“Not this time. It’s us or nobody, and we’ve got to move fast. We can’t call time to convince some Washington pipsqueaks that we haven’t been blowing dope. Forget I said anything about a bomb. Assume it’s narcotics, and go on from there. We’ll need an all-precinct call on a Bentley. You know the make — it’s a Rolls with a different radiator, and it ought to be easy to spot. It had GB plates when I saw it last.”

After describing the Bentley he told Gentry that he also wanted a call on a green Oldsmobile, registered in the name of Daniel Slattery, last reported parked outside the Holiday Inn in North Miami.

“And make it urgent,” Shayne said.

Without giving Gentry time to object, he cut the call short. The traffic signal at the corner had gone through another half dozen red-green cycles, and Pierre Dessau and Little’s Bentley had still not appeared. Now he had to find out which one of the two had faked him away from the pier.

Returning, he used his siren to bull his way through two blocked intersections. He left his Buick in a forbidden zone and hunted up the Customs inspector in charge of the five-man detail working the arrival of the big passenger liner. A plump, good-natured man named Ben Wainright, he was perspiring freely.

Shayne jerked his head to one side. “Let’s talk, Ben.”

“One of the things I like to do best. I’ll just clear these last cars. The public’s getting restless.”

“It can’t wait,” Shayne said brusquely. “Over here.”

Wainright hesitated, then followed him to the other side of the cluttered pier. Shayne stopped beside a loaded baggage wagon.

“Did you get tipped that anything unusual was coming in?”

The good humor drained out of Wainright’s face. “You know we don’t answer that kind of question.”

“Yeah, yeah, to protect your sources. I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important. To pin it down, the tipster would be a big pasty-faced guy named Pierre Dessau. Six-four, English. The stuff was due to come in in a five-year-old Bentley, owned by another Englishman, Quentin Little.”

Wainright’s eyes were alert and probing. “No cigar, Mike. I remember the Bentley. Ugly little guy, pretty well gassed. We didn’t shake the car all the way down, but it looked OK structurally. Wait a minute. What name did you say — Little?”

“Dr. Quentin Little.”

“That’s the one. His daughter has been trying to find him.”