I Come to Kill You

8

Downstairs, he looked for Siracusa and the others. The Chrysler was not in sight, but the low-slung strongarm named Skeets was standing on the corner. Shayne passed him, swinging the envelope.

In an outside phone booth across the street, Shayne dialed the Daily News and asked for the city desk. When a voice answered, he said easily, “If you’re looking for your hot-dog reporter, you’ll find him in the last booth in the cafeteria john. Hurry it up, because he’s losing blood.”

Ringing off, he took out a felt-tipped pen and printed across the front of the envelope in block capitals: “WAIT HERE FOR CALL.”

Skeets was now against the building line a few steps away. Shayne walked out of the booth, leaving the envelope on the shelf beneath the phone. Skeets headed for the booth, feeling in his pocket for a coin.

The parking attendant brought out Shayne’s Buick. Shayne went out the lot’s side exit and had his operator dial the number of the phone booth. Skeets picked it up in mid-ring.

“Where’s Siracusa?” Shayne asked.

“Around the block. The goddamn fuzz is keeping him circling.”

“O.K. You see that envelope. Tell Musso to get back to Ponce de Leon with it in a hurry. Never mind about me for the time being. I had to put the slug on a guy, and he wasn’t looking too healthy when I left.”

“Rourke? You mean you dropped him?”

“I didn’t take his pulse. He won’t be talking for a couple of days, anyway. Let’s be careful. I may have picked up some heat on the way out. You people don’t want any part of this — it could be rough. I’ll find out how bad he’s hurt, and whether anybody’s looking for me. Give me twenty minutes. If it’s bad news, I’ll get a message to you. I may need help getting out of town.”

“Hey, talk to Musso, will you? He’ll be back in a minute. We were supposed to stick right with you, not let you pull anything.”

“I’ve got to hang up now,” Shayne said curtly. “When they see that envelope, we’ll all get a bonus.”

He broke off. He had crossed Miami Avenue and was driving west on 8th Street. He took out his flask and tossed it on the seat beside him. It was warm to the touch. An ingenious radio receiver, tuned to a little-used frequency on the citizens’ radio band, had been built into the bottom third of the flask. A signal broadcast on this frequency tripped a switch in the receiver and activated a coil which warmed the flask — and the cognac as well, making it undrinkable.

For this call, Shayne didn’t want to use his operator. He stopped and made it from a public phone.

“Shayne,” he said when a man answered. “Five minutes.”

After that he did some careful driving, playing games with the one-way traffic patterns around the County Courthouse and the railroad station. Then he picked up the North-South Expressway. He continued to watch the mirrors as he headed north, and swung off on Thirty-eighth Street toward the bay.

Six weeks earlier, a man named Hugh MacDougall had called from Washington to find out if Shayne would be interested in hearing about an assignment that carried a guaranteed hundred-thousand-dollar fee. To his surprise, Shayne’s answer had been a flat and immediate no.

The same day MacDougall phoned, Shayne had decided that he needed a change of scene and a complete change of pace. A woman who had been charged with first-degree murder, on the basis of evidence painfully accumulated by Shayne, had been found not guilty. After hearing the jury’s verdict, Shayne had walked to an airline office and bought two round-trip tickets to Hawaii. Back at his office, he was about to start phoning girls, to find one who wanted to use the second ticket. MacDougall persuaded him not to make those calls, and flew down.

Shayne knew his reputation. He had been a professor of criminal law at a New England university, and he had retained an academic manner, which combined agreeably with enthusiasm for his new job. He was executive director of the little-known Justicia Foundation. Originally established under the will of an ex-Attorney General, it had been fattened by grants from larger general-purpose foundations. Its stated aim was to advance the general welfare by financing innovative projects in the field of crime prevention. MacDougall’s grant program had been freewheeling and often wildly imaginative. In Denver, a Justicia grant had made possible saturation patrolling of a high-crime area, turning it overnight into a low-crime area. In San Francisco, another grant had financed a computerized system of closed-circuit-TV coverage in the principal banks, and San Francisco had quickly become known as a bad town for bank thieves.

In Miami, MacDougall proposed to try an entirely different approach.

“Crime enforcement is too oriented to particular cases,” he said. “A man rapes a ten-year-old girl. The police can’t put together enough evidence to convict him, so he rapes another, then another. Finally he rapes someone who is able to identify him, and he’s locked up. If he could have been treated after that first rape, society would have been spared three further crimes.”

Shayne laughed. “Psychiatrists aren’t looking for that kind of practice. They can’t buy Rolls-Royces with it.”

“I’m not talking about psychiatrists. What I’ve suggested to my board is that we turn Michael Shayne loose among the organized criminals of Miami, on an open assignment. Let’s talk about the Sherman Meister killing. I’ve seen the clippings. I’ve discussed it at length with Mrs. Meister. Wouldn’t you call this a typical Mafia execution?”

“It has the earmarks.”

“And do you expect it to be solved?”

Shayne shrugged. “Sometimes somebody gets lucky.”

“There were four hundred and forty-seven clearly identified gangland murders in the United States last year. How many convictions?”

“None?”

“Precisely. There were no indictments, few arrests. And even if the actual killer in one of these cases had been identified and convicted, by some odd chance, would that dispose of the matter? Not in my estimation. The gunman in these things is only the mechanic. What about the man who gives the orders? He seems to be immune.”

“Nobody looks too hard at that kind of murder. Who cares, is the idea.”

“Society should care. The immunity of these people is the basis of their power. The FBI hasn’t had much luck with organized criminals of this type. It always pains me to see some well-known mobster go to jail — if at all — for tax evasion or perjury or contempt of court or of Congress, never for any serious crime. Mike, a sworn FBI agent and a sworn member of the Mafia belong to two utterly different species. They don’t understand each other’s language or rules of behavior. They’re an enigma to each other. Can you imagine an FBI district director a caporegime in a Mafia family? Could an FBI agent ever win the confidence of a Mafia boss? Obviously not. But you might be able to.”

He talked on into the night. The next morning Shayne made two calls, one to MacDougall, accepting the assignment, the other to the airline canceling his reservations for Hawaii.

The contract was drawn up and signed.

Shayne stopped opening his mail and paying bills. Drunk in the afternoon, he had a pushing and shoving fight with a well-known sportsman in front of hundreds of horseplayers in the Tropical Park clubhouse. This man, not in the best of physical shape, managed to knock him down with a feeble right to the cheek, a blow that did less damage to Shayne than to his reputation. He was seen in various clubs and entertainment rooms with a variety of girls, usually drunk, often sullen and dangerously quarrelsome.

To account for his need for money, he spread a story about a loss he had suffered in the over-the-counter market on a television stock. Sherman Meister’s TV operation had gone public the previous year. The stock had been fought for. It was issued at 15 and hit 85 four months later. There was a general feeling that after being granted a license to one of those priceless channels, only an idiot could fail to use it to coin money. Meister, unfortunately, had suddenly decided to expand his public-service programming. Tim Rourke and a few others had been critical of his news department for blandness and overcaution. Meister responded by going on the tube himself with a weekly half-hour editorial, usually attacking organized crime. Rourke supplied him with facts and pseudo-facts from his anti-Mafia file. Meister’s mobile cameras began dogging De Blasio and other leading underworld personalities, including visitors from the North, and picked up some excellent footage of well-dressed hoodlums waving their fists or covering their faces with newspapers. The station’s constant goading stirred the police into action, and they made a number of harassing arrests.

The counteroffensive began immediately. Business spokesmen urged Meister to find another subject, on the grounds that his exaggerations were giving people the wrong idea of ordinary life in Miami. No resort town can afford a Puritan look; people on vacation like to sin a little. On the other hand, they don’t want to vacation in a place that is dominated by mobsters and killers, which seemed to be the impression Meister’s station was trying to convey. Couldn’t he forget the Mafia at least till the season was over?

Meister began losing accounts. He found himself having labor trouble for the first time. Various pressures were brought to bear, some on a very high level. A Federal Communications Commission investigator arrived and began going over his books. There were rumblings from Internal Revenue about an old tax case. Meister was denounced by a national Italian-American organization which objected to his use of the term “Cosa Nostra.” A spaghetti-sauce manufacturer pulled his commercials off the station. When Meister reported a fourth-quarter loss for the first time in the station’s history, the stock skidded catastrophically.

Shayne’s story was that he had bought a thousand shares on margin at 50, and his broker had sold him out on the way down. He moved out of the office he had occupied for ten years, and rented space in a six-desk operation in a grubby building in a deteriorating neighborhood. His office-mates, who shared a single telephone and secretary, treated him with contempt. He dropped eight thousand dollars in a Miami Beach crap game. He tried to borrow money from an organization judge.

Word of mouth did the rest.

Even Shayne was surprised at how fast the news spread. At first a number of old friends — more than he expected, because he took a somewhat dim view of human nature — offered to help, but he discouraged them with complaints and insults.

Now Shayne pulled into a huge parking area wrapped around two sides of an anonymous high-rise apartment near Biscayne Park, a block from the bay. No attempt had been made to provide downstairs security. Shayne rode an elevator to one of the upper floors.

He sounded a buzzer. The peephole clicked open, and Hugh MacDougall opened the door.

Twenty-four hours earlier on St. Albans, he had been masquerading as Gregory Nash, the hotel-supplies salesman from Chicago, using the simplest of disguises — a wig, a moustache, and a pair of rented sideburns. The thick glasses had been his own. Now he was back in his normal academic disguise. He grinned engagingly.

“Our amateur stickup artist. I thought you did that very well for a beginner.”

“You invested ten thousand in the deal,” Shayne said, “and got thirteen back. Speaking of con men.”

MacDougall laughed. “I thought that up on the spur of the moment. To make it more credible. And what did you think of the bomb?”

“Did you do that?”

“I did that. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I wanted to give them something to think about — I’ll explain in a minute.”

He took Shayne into the living room. He had rented this apartment for the sole purpose of having a place they could meet, and the only furniture was a battered sofa and a few chairs. To Shayne’s surprise, a woman was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette in a holder. He looked questioningly at MacDougall.

“This is Jo Meister — have you met? Michael Shayne.”

She was some ten years younger than her husband, who had been fifty when he died. She was thinner than Shayne remembered. Her hair had been lightened and cleverly cut. The only times he had seen her had been on public occasions, accompanied by her husband, a big, bald man with a booming laugh. Her habitual expression then had been a self-effacing smile, as though she didn’t believe she belonged on the dais, but down at the less desirable tables among the common people. She hadn’t altogether lost the look, but she was moving in that direction. A few more months out of her husband’s shadow might turn her into a handsome woman.

Shayne said in a carefully controlled voice, “Our arrangement was that you were to be the only contact.”

“You know I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t important.”

“This has to be fast,” Shayne said, sitting down. “It’s a bad time for me to be off the scene. They’re on edge.”

“I can imagine.” MacDougall took a place at the opposite end of the sofa from the woman. “Two things, Mike. First, the girl you went to St. Albans with, Sarah Percival, was Meister’s girl friend the last few months before he died.”

“What?” Shayne exclaimed.

“She worked at the station,” Mrs. Meister said. “And when Hugh mentioned her name—”

“Wait a minute. How much do you know about what I’m doing?”

MacDougall answered. “In a way she’s the instigator of this whole thing. When Sherm’s money troubles started, he applied for a Justicia grant. Naturally, we were interested in what he was doing. Then he was killed. Jo seemed to think we had a kind of obligation…”

“Damn it, Hugh,” she said, “you know you encouraged him.”

“I thought he was performing a valuable public service. I still think so.”

Shayne cut the explanations short. “So long as you both understand that if anything leaks, I’m dead. I’ve got to get off the streets before the cops start looking for me.”

“The cops?” MacDougall asked. “Because of St. Albans? I thought that was taken care of.”

“This is something that just happened. Tell me about the girl.”

“Yes. The St. Albans police couldn’t find her, so I assumed she flew back with you. I vaguely remembered the name, and I checked it with Jo. I thought this was something you’d better know about, and I brought Jo along in case you had any questions.”

“Yeah — but make it brief,” Shayne said, looking at Mrs. Meister. “Are you sure they were sleeping together?”

“I’m not sure, but I think so. It’s a feeling I had, a dozen little things put together. I’m sure he had girls, as a general proposition. He must have, don’t you think? Outgoing, always ready to plunge into some new form of noisy activity. He was often away. I don’t say I enjoyed the idea, but I’m enough of a rationalizer so I think I understood it.”

“Can you give me anything more specific?”

“Just that whenever he said he’d be out of town and I checked, Sarah Percival wouldn’t be answering her phone. I smelled her perfume on his underwear. That’s an embarrassing thing to admit.”

“We went back and checked the payroll,” MacDougall said. “She got the job just after the anti-De Blasio campaign started, and the obvious question is, did they put her in there to keep track of what was happening? And if that proves to be the case—”

“I’ll have to watch my step. I thought I picked her up in a bar. Apparently she’s the one who picked me up. As I remember, the night Meister was shot, he was working at the station with his accountant. Was Sarah there?”

“No,” Mrs. Meister said. “But he’d reserved a table at Mario’s, a table for two. A call came in on his private phone. He went out a few minutes later. It’s possible that she made the call.”

“O.K. That’s the first thing you wanted to tell me. What’s the second?”

“That a New Jersey hoodlum named Bobby Burns is in town,” MacDougall said.

“We get hundreds of people like that every winter. The hotels live on them.”

“This doesn’t sound like a vacation. He has ten or fifteen men with him, maybe more. He had a small union foothold in one of the New Jersey counties — Hudson, I think — and he tried to expand. One of his people died of bullet wounds, and another disappeared, and Bobby was told to get out of the state.”

“What kind of guy?” Shayne said thoughtfully.

“Young and hungry, Mike. No capital of his own, not much in the way of connections. It’s known that De Blasio is under pressure, and wouldn’t this be a good time for an ambitious free-lance to move in and try to pick off a piece of a very rich market?”

“If he was crazy enough.”

“And won’t the De Blasios think it was Burns who set off the bomb in the St. Albans casino last night? I hope so.”

“All right,” Shayne said curtly. “I’ll keep it in mind, and I may be able to use it.”

“One other thing we should talk about, Mike,” MacDougall said as Shayne started to get up. “I know how you feel about this, but I’d like to come back to it. I think we should work out a system so you can give me occasional progress reports. Now, hear me out. I have connections all over the country. I’d like to think I’m contributing something. We’re off to an amazingly good start. You’re inside their lines, and you’re going to be picking up information all the time. I believe—”

“I know. If I get wiped out, you want to have something to show for your money.”

“That’s not what I mean at all. By working together—”

“I’m working alone on this,” Shayne said. “That’s the deal. You don’t want day-to-day information. The FBI has been getting that kind of junk for years, and a hell of a lot of good it’s done. We want to be able to prosecute a few people. Don’t expect anything on the Meister thing. But if you’re right about Burns, if he’s really trying to move in on De Blasio, there are going to be killings. I hope to be there when they happen, so we can go into court with some eyewitness testimony for a change. I’m also hoping I won’t be one of the victims.”

He turned to Mrs. Meister. “And that’s not such a far-fetched idea, so don’t talk about this at the hairdresser’s.”

“My God, Mr. Shayne! You must realize that I have every conceivable incentive to say nothing to anyone. Anything you find out that has a bearing on my husband’s murder — I know the dangers you’re running. I think it was wonderful of you to agree to do it.”

“I agreed to do it for a hundred thousand dollars,” he said, “and don’t hand me any bouquets till I’ve actually done something.”