Kill All the Young Girls

Chapter 2

The hotel suite was a big, corner one overlooking one of the most expensive strips of sand in the world. The young woman who responded to Michael Shayne’s buzz identified herself as Evie Zion. She gave him a pleasant smile and thanked him for coming so promptly.

Her husband, Marcus Zion, broke off a phone call to shake hands. He apologized, waved Shayne to a chair, and returned to the phone. Mrs. Zion went to the sideboard, which was crowded with bottles and glasses.

“What can I give you?”

“Scotch is all right, unless you have cognac,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Shayne, a private detective, was tall and powerfully built, with large freckled hands and scarred knuckles, and a way of seeming entirely at ease in any context. He looked around. The air in the room was heavy with tension and cigar smoke. There were three phones, all in use. A typewriter clacked in the next room.

Zion listened and said little, grunting an occasional question and twirling a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Two other men, tanned and paunchy, in rumpled suits, shouted into the remaining phones, switching from incredulity to angry abuse to wheedling. The atmosphere was that of a political headquarters the night before an important election.

Mrs. Zion brought Shayne a snifter and a bottle of Courvoisier.

“We don’t usually live like this,” she said. “But it’s wartime. One more day and it’s over, and the clocks can’t move fast enough to suit me.”

“Weren’t you in the movies once?” Shayne said.

“Oh, dear, does it show? I’ve aged since then.”

She couldn’t have been older than thirty. She probably considered herself a few pounds overweight. As far as Shayne was concerned, it was distributed well. Her soft voice had an unusual throaty timbre, but it was her smile Shayne remembered from the days when he went to the movies more regularly.

“Now think back,” she said. “Did you ever go to vampire movies? I sometimes lasted into the third reel, and then I made the mistake of going to bed with the window open. For some reason, I’ve never wanted to give any blood to the Red Cross since.”

“Eva Price,” Shayne said.

“You remember,” she said, pleased. “When I graduated to grown-up pictures, they always cast me as the sweet, suffering wife — the one the leading man comes back to when she’s about to have a baby. Then I married Marcus, and I haven’t suffered too much. I haven’t had a baby either, I may add. But these annual proxy fights. They’re getting to be a bit of a drag. I wish we manufactured something simple, like neckties.”

Her husband, his head cocked, continued to listen to the voice on the phone. He retracted his lips as though he tasted something sour.

“Let me know what happens with him.”

He hung up with a thump and came across to Shayne. He was considerably older than his wife, a common practice in his industry. Unlike the others in the room, he had wasted little time in the California sun. The skin was slack below his jawline. He looked as though he had done nothing since early morning except take unpleasant phone calls.

He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. “I’m pressed for time. I have an appointment in half an hour with a trustee from Boston, and he’ll want me to look my best. Keep me company while I shave. Bring your drink.”

A man came out of the bedroom with a sheet of paper, but Marcus shook him off. The phone was ringing.

“Only if it’s a major disaster,” he told Mrs. Zion.

He stopped at the sideboard and dropped ice in a glass. But after picking up a whiskey bottle, he pursed his lips and put it back.

“Damn it, better not.”

Both twin beds in the bedroom were littered with lists and manila folders. A pretty girl was typing with a portable on her knees. The phone between the beds rang, but Zion continued into the bathroom.

He had brought the ice-filled glass. He filled it from the tap and left the water running.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Leaning forward, he peered at himself in the mirror. “I don’t think I look trustworthy, do you? Would you trust a man with this face to help run one of our biggest U.S. corporations?”

He pushed the shower curtain aside, sat on the edge of the tub and took a sip of cold water. “Who’s that eccentric billionaire who used to hold important business conferences in men’s rooms? Howard Hughes, no doubt. I never thought it was my style.”

“Do you want me to help by flushing the toilet?” Shayne said.

Marcus looked surprised and then laughed. “This may seem a bit paranoid. It’s not that I’m afraid of being bugged. But there’s money at stake here. Lots and lots of money. As well as certain intangibles such as power. Fame. I suppose even women. We’ve all got our spies, and some of the things I want to tell you I wouldn’t even like Evie to hear. How much have you heard about my father’s accident?”

“Just that he ran off the highway and smashed an expensive automobile.”

“He didn’t run off by himself,” Marcus said. “He was crowded off. And it happened at a bad time. Everything’s popping at once. Are you up to date on our proxy troubles? I don’t want to waste time telling you anything you already know.”

“I know that an outside group is trying to take over your company. I didn’t read past the headlines. It isn’t my kind of story.”

Marcus said dryly, “You might be surprised, Shayne. Both sides have been getting pretty rough. My father’s been in charge of our strategy. Unfortunately, nobody knows his secrets; and that goes for his own flesh and blood. So having him unconscious all afternoon has been a very serious thing.”

“I understand he wasn’t badly hurt.”

“That’s the way we’re playing it. And as a matter of fact,” he said with some distaste, “the son-of-a-bitch is amazing. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m as full of filial crap as anybody else. I haven’t been sitting around the hospital chain-smoking, but I’ve worried about him from time to time. On top of everything else, we’ve just put a picture into production. I’ve had the full burden of setting up the stockholders’ meeting tomorrow, with no way of knowing what surprises Larry has in store for us. And now this. Larry’s conscious. He intends to chair the meeting and give the main report. Somebody tried to murder him this afternoon. Conceivably they’ll try again. I’m a stranger in Miami. I asked our attorneys to give me the name of a good man, and they gave me yours. But they said you’re semi-retired, and I’d have to persuade you that the job would be interesting. If I can’t make it interesting enough, I’ll call in some writers to help me make it interesting. They also said you expect your clients to be honest with you.”

“I expect it,” Shayne said. “It doesn’t always happen.”

“I don’t see any reason to hold anything back. If you come in on this, you’ll be talking to people. I’m the money man in the organization, and I’m not too popular because I’m the one who has to decide that some ideas are too expensive. But you may be told that under this plodding exterior, I have my ambitions — I’d like to see if I could make it on my own, without Larry breathing down the back of my neck from morning to night. You may hear that I resent the sneers and sarcasm that have come my way over the years and that the only reason I want to make sure Larry lives through the night is because if he dies his shares will revert to a family trust with two trustees. I’m one of them. The other’s my mother. She’s a venal woman who hates Larry and will vote against his slate, and I’ll be job hunting.”

Shayne drank. “It’s interesting so far. You said another car crowded him off. What does he say about that?”

“There wasn’t much traffic. They shouldn’t have been that close together. He swerved off on the shoulder — all the way off on the grass. From the skid marks, both cars were travelling very fast. And before he could get back, he ran into one of those lovely exit barriers. Zap. The other car didn’t stop. It was a red convertible. Somebody coming north saw it pull past and leave the highway.”

“Unless the highway patrol has something, I’d have to be lucky to find out who was driving. And if they do have something, you don’t need me.”

“We know who was driving. An actress named Kate Thackera. I caught Larry at the right moment, when he was coming out of the concussion, before the censorship could start working. He said, and I quote, ‘That Brannon bitch, do you know what she did? She tried to shoot me.’”

“Brannon?” Shayne said, frowning. “Keko Brannon?”

“Kate Thackera took Brannon’s place in that sad lady’s last picture. He got them confused.”

“And she tried to shoot him from the other car?”

Marcus spread his hands. “That was all he’d say. I said something like, ‘What? Who? Tried to shoot you — what are you talking about, Larry?’ He came back into focus and his brain started clicking. I told you he doesn’t go in for telling secrets, and not to Junior especially. I tried to get him to go back to it, naturally; but he pooh-poohed it — more important matters to think about and so on. I had a man check the hotels. Kate Thackera is here at the St. Albans. She came in this afternoon. And she’s driving a rented Chevy, which happens to be red and a convertible.”

“Why does she want to kill him?”

“She’s trying to get the part of Doña Isabella, in The Last Buccaneer. We’re shooting it on location in Homestead; and if you haven’t heard about it, our publicity people are doing a lousy job. It’s a fat part, really fat — the only woman on a pirate ship. I saw her costume tests, and I thought she was okay. Maybe better than okay. But I’m not the creative genius. Larry’s using somebody else.”

“So she ambushed him on Interstate 95? I don’t know many movie stars, but how often does this happen?”

“This is a special girl. Not the world’s most stable individual. Larry used to screw her, and that makes it less simple. I don’t mean it was nutty, anything but. Under the circumstances, it might have worked. Larry likes people to fight for a part — he thinks it carries over into their performance. That was a heavy thing she did. Larry has to be impressed. Everybody else wanted her for the part, the producer, the director.”

“Are there any bullet holes in your father’s car?”

“You’re ahead of me. I couldn’t see any. Now I want to tell you something that’s not common knowledge. First I’d better see if we can cut a deal. What I want to have you do is take charge of Kate Thackera. I don’t care how you do it. I want you to tie her up so she can’t make another move for thirty-six hours. Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night.”

“That sounds possible.”

“And I’m not thinking in terms of surveillance. Our own people could handle that. I want you to be actually on the scene all the time. I don’t know if anybody’s working with her; so I don’t want her to have access to a phone. I’m told you set your fee according to the difficulty of the assignment. I’d prefer it if you could do all this without letting her know you’re working for us, but she’s not dumb, and she may be hard to handle. I’m thinking in terms of a thousand dollars.”

“For thirty-six hours?” Shayne said. “It’s high for escort duty. It’s low for kidnapping.”

“I’m not talking about kidnapping. Well, I suppose I am, if you look at it a certain way. Fifteen hundred? Half in advance.”

“What happens thirty-six hours from now?”

“The meeting will be over, and the Honest Ballot Association will announce the count. But that’s not all. Larry rushed Buccaneer into production and moved the meeting to Miami so the stockholders could visit the set and see the old dazzler in action. The proxy thing has been getting national coverage, and we want to spin some of that off on the picture. We’re on a thirty-day schedule. Right now — through tomorrow — we could switch Kate into the part. Then we start shooting scenes with the new girl, and it would cost too much. And Kate knows it. At that point, unless she’s completely out of her head, she’ll give up.”

“Have you put bodyguards on your father?”

“Three. But he’s not going to stay in the hospital a minute longer than he has to. They’ve put on a walking cast. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s already out. The important thing is tomorrow’s New York papers, the Times and the Wall Street Journal. They’ll carry a wire-service story, and it has to say that the dynamic Consolidated-Famous executive, lucky as always, came out of the crash with nothing more serious than a broken leg and a few minor cuts. We aren’t mentioning the concussion.”

“Where’s he staying, here on the Beach?”

“No, he has a location trailer in Homestead. The idea is, he’s giving the picture his personal supervision. That doesn’t mean he’ll actually sleep there. The most sensible thing for him to do would be to check in somewhere inconspicuously under another name, with two or three armed men; and then we could stop worrying. But if I suggest that he do it, he’ll do the opposite. That’s why we have to work on it from the other end.”

“What was the thing you were going to tell me?”

Marcus faced the mirror again and began laying out his shaving equipment.

“That Larry had a heart attack last year, and this is really confidential. I know it happens all the time, and people accept the message and slow down. But we’re talking about Larry Zion. He’s a cliché, but don’t forget he’s one of the three or four people who originated the cliché — Louis B. Mayer, Harry Warner, Larry Zion, Harry Cohn. In Larry’s position, you can’t slow down. You keep going at the same speed, or you get the hell out of the movie business. All the way out. For this reason: if you have a bankable star and a property, there’s no problem getting financing. But you need financing before you can tie up the star and the property. It gets more complicated, but that’s basically it. Some of our big deals have been pretty bizarre lately. You plot and connive and blackmail; you beg some people and put the arm on others; you trade and cut corners and promise the moon; but to close that circle finally, you need somebody as hard as steel. Somebody like Larry, who’ll cut throats if he has to to get the deal. He’s the guy who drove the gangsters out of the studio unions, and he didn’t do it by being nice. A heart attack makes people soft. But that’s not the way pictures get made. All Larry did after the attack was transfer from tennis to table tennis; and my God, he’s turned into a demon at the game.”

“So the lady in the red convertible wasn’t trying to shoot him; she was trying to scare him to death?”

“That’s the way it looks. She wouldn’t have to shoot real bullets. The bang and the flash would be enough. He knew she had a good reason for wanting him to die. By that I mean a good reason in terms he himself has always accepted. He had half a second to recognize her and react. One twitch at that speed would do it. And then Kate would go into Buccaneer, the critics would love her, and she could get off unemployment insurance. That’s my theory; and whether it’s true or not, I’m betting that Larry believes it.”

Shayne looked down into his glass and studied the shifting patterns on the surface of the cognac.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this. He regretted telling you about the gun. He’s a tough man who doesn’t believe in falling back on his son or anybody else when he’s threatened or in trouble. He believes in taking care of his own problems. That was a close miss today. She was taking a big chance herself, and he knows she’s serious. So you aren’t hiring me because you’re worried about what she’ll do to him. You want me to keep him from doing anything to her.”

Marcus rinsed his razor. “Shayne, I don’t want either one of them killed or hurt. I can’t put company guards on her because Larry outranks me. He formed his attitudes in the days when movie companies could pretty much do what they pleased. But this is Miami, not Los Angeles. Nobody knows us here. I don’t want any trouble right now. I happen not to give a goddamn about the girl personally, but I want her immobilized, and I want her protected. I assume we have a deal?”

Shayne finished his drink and nodded. “Where can I find her?”

“The last time I had a report, she was drinking downstairs in the Seminole Room. She’s a great bourbon drinker; and this would be a good time of night to make the connection, while she’s still fairly sober.”

Shayne stood up. “How do I recognize her?”

“Kate Thackera?” Marcus said, sounding really surprised for the first time. “She’s made some big-budget pictures for us.”

“We don’t go to the movies as much here as you do in Los Angeles.”

Marcus shook his head. “I’ll send somebody down with you to point her out. Do you have a gun with you? I’m sure we can scare one up if you haven’t.”