Million Dollar Handle

Chapter 9

Frieda Field was in her late twenties, trim, blackhaired. She was the widow of a private detective, killed a few years before as a result of not having been quite careful enough. Frieda had decided to continue the agency, and with occasional help from Shayne, she had managed to do fairly well in a business where women usually type the letters and answer the phones. Shayne started using her because he had worked with her husband, and continued because she turned out to be very good. She also became one of his best friends.

He called her as soon as Rashid finished with him. The phone in her apartment didn’t answer. He was considering whom to get instead, when she walked in, in a long dress and silver earrings, with a pint of cognac, not one of the medicines dispensed in even the best-run hospitals. She kissed him.

“I heard it on my car radio. Mike, when there are three of them, and they all have guns and all you have are your fists, what’s wrong with waiting for reinforcements? You don’t have to prove anything. I’ll still like you.”

“I didn’t know there were three. I only knew about two, and I thought I had one of them taken care of. I’ve been trying to call you. I’ve got a job for you. Martell’s, I see. Get some glasses.”

She went to the bathroom and came back with two tumblers. “How bad is it, Mike? That radio announcer makes a big point of sounding semihysterical, but I didn’t think you’d be up to cognac tonight. This was for tomorrow. They aren’t letting anybody in to see you, supposedly. That was to discourage Painter?”

“I couldn’t take that guy twice in twelve hours. But the news you heard was a little exaggerated. True, they were shooting at me, but everybody missed.”

She looked at the cast on his left leg, running all the way from ankle to hip. “You didn’t do all that just to get out of talking to Painter.”

“Only partly.” He drank some of the cognac, and waited for the pleasant explosion. “See if you can tell me what the radio said.”

“Mike Shayne, implicated in dog track scandal, seriously injured in gunfight in Surfside men’s room. At St. Francis’s, leg smashed. There was a statement from the Surfside safety director, some Italian name, but he didn’t say much. What’s the bandage on your arm, more window dressing?”

“One of the guys had a knife, and he didn’t miss. Did you bring a gun?”

“A gun. I think I’m beginning to see. No, I hardly ever bring a gun when I visit somebody in the hospital. I have one in the car.” She stood up and looked down at him seriously. “Are you really up to this, Mike?”

“I think so, but I’m not going to try to prove it to you by doing pushups. It has to be tonight, Frieda, not tomorrow. Right now they’re feeling dumb and mad. That’s when mistakes happen. Somebody sent three men after me. That costs big money and he won’t be happy it fizzled. Now they have to go back and tell him they blew it. He may think they didn’t try hard enough, and it could be dangerous, depending on who the guy is. They probably have another payment coming, on completion, and they won’t get that. When another job comes along, they’ll be passed over. So when they hear I’m lying in a hospital bed, after a hard operation, won’t it occur to them that hospitals are easy places to walk into? Maybe they can correct their mistake and skip all the hassle.”

“That’s enough. I’m persuaded.”

She went for her gun. Rashid stopped in a few minutes later.

“I’m a little worried, Michael. You know it will be bad publicity for the hospital if anything goes wrong. Two of them left out of three. Are you sure you can handle two?”

“They’ll only use one. Attendants don’t walk around a hospital in pairs.”

“How would he get the number of the room?”

“Call the switchboard and say he’s sending over flowers. That’s not classified information.”

“Well, this is your profession, after all, and you know these people. I’ll tell the duty nurse on this floor to be busy somewhere else. I will watch the stairs, and give you a telephone ring when-if-someone appears. And if there is more than one, I will be very official and ask what they are doing here.”

“Rashid, stay out of it. Frieda and I will both have guns. If I had any serious doubts I wouldn’t have brought her in.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Frieda had made it clear from the start that if she was going to be working as a private detective, she couldn’t expect special treatment because she was a woman. At first that had been hard for Shayne to accept, but they had been in some dangerous situations together, and she had behaved with extreme coolness. He now trusted her completely.

Rashid nodded and left the room. Shayne had been put in a room in the accident wing, in a bed that was rigged to be used by a patient in traction. There were rotating pulleys overhead, and two on the facing wall. When Frieda returned, they made up the bed with pillows to look like an anesthetized man, and ran a line through two of the pulleys, ending in a noose on the floor.

Then they turned off the lights and began the wait. Fifteen minutes later, the phone tinkled a warning. “All right?” Shayne said quietly.

“Ready. You make the first move.”

Shayne had one end of the rope doubled around his hand and elbow. He braced himself for the pull. He was listening intently, but he couldn’t hear Frieda breathing.

A heel scuffed on the cork floor of the corridor. The door handle turned, and a figure entered.

“Mike?” a man’s voice said cautiously. “Asleep?” Shayne was already in motion. The noose tightened around the man’s leg, and Shayne’s weight jerked him off his feet. Frieda slammed the door and stepped out with her gun. The light flashed on.

It was Tim Rourke. Only his shoulder blades were still on the floor; everything else was airborne.

“Now we know it works,” Shayne said.

He came forward, and Rourke’s legs returned to the floor.

“What the hell?” he said weakly when he had his breath back. “I guess I was lucky it wasn’t a gun trap.”

“Let’s get that rope off,” Frieda said. “We’re expecting somebody.”

Rourke loosened the loop. “Guinea pig-that’s what friends are for. Christ, I thought the building collapsed.”

He came jerkily to his feet. He was a tall, bony figure whose long arms and legs often seemed to be following programs of their own.

“I see you’re walking around, Mike,” he said. “That can’t be too good for you after… No, I get it, I get it. Dawn breaks in the East. That diagnosis was for the bad guys. You’re really in good health.”

“More or less.”

“Can I stay and watch? I haven’t had a decent eyewitness story in months.”

“If you sit still and keep quiet.”

“I can sit still. I don’t know about quiet. I’ve got three thousand questions, and they’re fermenting. Who are we waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Shayne said shortly.

“Mike, did you knock against something?” Frieda said.

“Yeah. Tim, get the end of the rope. You can help pull.”

“I brought you a bottle, but I see you’ve already got one. Can I take a drink once in a while?”

“Quietly.”

After they reset the snare, Rourke had trouble settling down. His little movements made Shayne aware that time was passing, and that the real dawn would soon be breaking. He heard the bottle being opened, and Rourke breathing out after drinking. There was enough light from outside for Shayne to see that he was being offered the bottle. He drank and handed it back.

Rourke continued to fidget. Shayne was about to tell him to wait somewhere else when he heard a faint noise in the corridor. This time there had been no telephone warning. Shayne’s grip tightened.

The door opened very fast. As Shayne went backward he caught a glimpse of a slender figure wearing hospital whites. A gold hoop swung from one ear.

The noose tightened, and he heard a head hit the floor. The light came on.

“Watch it,” Shayne told Frieda as she advanced. “That’s close enough. He has a knife.”

Cognac was gurgling out of the open bottle. Rourke, nearly all the way down, was holding the rope desperately with both hands.

“Mike, get the bottle.”

Shayne turned the bottle right side up. “You got him. Just hang on.”

“That’s not so-easy.”

At the opposite end of the line, Pedro was thrashing wildly. He was completely off the floor, suspended by one ankle. Each convulsive movement jerked Rourke up and down. With Frieda’s help, Shayne lashed the rope to the bed. Then he stepped in close and kicked their prisoner in the neck. The agitated movements stopped and the knife clattered down.

“Is that the same man?” Frieda asked.

“Yeah. The guns were to make me stand still so he could use the knife. Now it’s time to break some news. Tim, pay attention.”

Rourke was jacking himself erect, fingering his spine. “That’s the first real exercise I’ve had in months. Like hooking into a goddamn marlin.”

“Shut up, Tim,” Frieda said. “Mike has something to tell us.”

“I’m now denying that I took any illegal payments from Max Geary,” Shayne said.

Rourke’s head came forward. “What do you mean, what do you mean? If they weren’t illegal, what were they?”

“I never received them. Now let’s sit down and see if we can make any sense out of this.”

Frieda said, “What do we do with this one, leave him hanging?”

Pedro was quieter, the white orderly’s shirt falling around his shoulders. His face was already noticeably darker. His breath came in gasps.

“He can listen. Pray if you want to, Pete, but not out loud. You’re in trouble, you know that.”

Shayne shifted the pillows to the head of the bed. Rourke prowled around, keeping well away from the dangling man, but unable to hold still.

“Mike, say that again. Eighty thousand bucks. Two, three thousand every month. Are you telling us that book was a fake?”

“You saw it. What did you think?”

“We didn’t get too good a look. He just flashed it and riffled the pages. But I want to tell you, if you weren’t taking, you’re the exception. The union guy, that was real cash and I can prove it. Wanamaker, on the paper. That’s what I came over to tell you. Officially he’s still claiming those gifts were made out of pure friendship, but I got the story at dinner. How about that beating in the parking lot outside the stadium? You must have had some good reason for that.”

“I assume it happened,” Shayne said, “but I didn’t do it. Either the nurse is lying or Geary lied to the nurse. Painter saw a three-hundred-dollar check with the right date on it, and that makes it look as though Geary planted the story to cover the person who actually gave him the beating. But it wouldn’t mean anything much unless he was killed later. Then I’d look like the killer. But why? I had nothing against the man.”

“Why in God’s name didn’t you say so this morning?” Rourke demanded.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me. What did you think, Frieda?”

She said quietly, “I thought you were paid the money, but not for any of the obvious reasons. I knew you’d tell me when you got around to it.”

“There’s a Pakistani doctor here. He’s the only one I’ve run into who didn’t automatically assume I was guilty. And I haven’t figured that out yet, because he doesn’t know me nearly as well as you guys.”

“If I’d known this, I might have written a different lead,” Rourke said. “I still don’t see why you didn’t-”

“All you could say was that Mike Shayne was yelling foul, like everybody else. Be honest, Tim. I’ve given you a flat denial. Do you believe me right now?”

Rourke reached for the cognac. “No, goddamn it. I think you’re trying to fake me. Not for the first time, either. I think you’ve got some surprise up your sleeve. You want me to put a slant on tomorrow’s story so it’ll have a certain effect on certain people unknown to me. I’m not complaining-what good would it do me? I know your pattern. I get to hear about it after everything’s all buttoned up.”

“I’m not that much of a mastermind,” Shayne said dryly. “I admit I wanted to get an effect with your piece today. I wanted people to think, ‘Hey, Tim Rourke, he’s been flacking for Shayne for years, and even Rourke thinks that this time his old buddy has been caught with his hand in the jam.’”

“I may be a little slow, but why would you want that?”

“Use some imagination. Imagine that when Painter sprang this on me, the whole thing was a total surprise. Imagine that I can’t explain it any more than you can. I tried telling Painter, but there was my name on the list, in Geary’s writing, in black and white. All right. There’s only one way to disprove that kind of thing, and that’s from inside. Obviously the real takers would talk more freely to a co-conspirator than to a detective trying to find out where the money really went. So I went out to the track tonight. I walked around, trying to look like the man Max Geary was paying three thousand a month for something or other, surely discreditable. Nobody seemed to find it hard to believe. It was a funny business-I tried every remark two ways before I said it. And I didn’t get much. The state tax guy, Liebler-and his name isn’t even on the list-was afraid I was going to take over and cut everybody else out. Linda Geary, the daughter, told me to behave or she’d tell everybody what I did for the money. That was a hard one to handle. I asked her to tell me, because I wanted to know myself, and then she was the one who refused to answer.”

The upside-down man began whimpering a little, and Shayne said, “I’ll be getting around to you in a minute, Pete.”

“Do you want him to hear all this?” Frieda said.

“Sure, it’ll scare him more. He’s through and he knows it. He won’t be reporting to anybody.”

The hanging body twisted and convulsed. A strangled voice said, “Put me down, man.”

“Are you going to talk to us?”

“I have to, you know man.” It was a lilting Caribbean accent, with a rising inflection.

“O.K., we have a realist here. Lower away, Tim. Stand by to fly him again if he gives us any trouble.” Rourke picked at the knot. It loosened all at once and Pedro came down in a heap. He sorted himself out and sat up with a long sigh.

“You know you people are bastards.”

“Are we?” Shayne said. “Maybe you’re feeling so sorry for yourself you didn’t hear what I said. I want you to understand it. This isn’t the ordinary hit. Usually when you go out to kill somebody, they know why. I don’t. And that changes things. You’ve tried twice. You lost both. I have to expect a third try, with new people, and they may be a little better at it. So I need some answers.”

“You were lucky.”

“I was lucky,” Shayne agreed. “But you were sloppy too, Pete. You should have taken a couple of days and researched it.”

Pedro’s moving glance stopped on the cognac bottle.

“Do you want a drink?” Shayne said. “Take one.” Pedro lowered the level of the cognac by a half inch. As he put the bottle back, Shayne caught his wrist and jerked him to his feet.

“Hold his arm, Tim. I don’t think he realizes we’re serious. Pedro, take hold of the top rail of the bed.” Rourke forced his hand down on the bed frame. Shayne reversed the. 45 and brought the butt down hard on his fingers. He yelled.

“This is the floor where they bring the accidents,” Shayne said, “so they’re probably used to yells in the middle of the night. You can’t go back with an alibi, Pedro. It’s time for you to look for a new career.”

Pedro was holding his mashed fingers, hopping. “You didn’t give me no chance, man. Tony Castle.”

“I was beginning to think it had that look,” Shayne said. “You probably need more cognac. Take as much as you like. We have another bottle.”

Pedro drank.

“Take a couple of days, man. Careful, careful. Get a shooter who knows how to shoot. Had to be tonight. Got it at noon.”

“From Castle himself?”

“His own hand. Enormous honor.”

“Now the price.”

“One thousand dollar. Not so much, you know, for so fast. You think this is the way I like? In Florida-very crazy, you know. But you not say no to Mr. C. You say yes.”

“Did he tell you where to find me?”

“At dog track, yes. He had pictures, envelope of pictures. Some younger than you are now. And he say to me this one thing. He was wanting to do it long time now. Now he has excuse.” He opened his hand. “I think fingers broken, Mr. S. Hurt.”

“We’ll have them set for you. But it’s too soon to stop talking.”

“Is all, I swear it on the name of the Holy Virgin.”

Rashid, the Pakistani doctor, stepped in. “Somebody heard a shout.”

“Yeah, we’ve got a man here who doesn’t know who he ought to be scared of most.”

Pedro said urgently, “Mr. S. Mr. C. in Nassau, you in Miami. I tell you, believe me. But is all I know.”

“Are you on his payroll full-time?”

“No. Now-and-then jobs.”

“Did you ever do anything else for him in Florida?”

“Once, I and Angelo, you know. We follow a man here one week and when everything is right, we beat the shit out of him.”

“A man named Max Geary?”

“I believe.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Rourke said.

“And you didn’t know what that one was all about either?”

“He make Mr. C. angry some way. My fingers.”