Murder in Haste

Chapter Seventeen

Tim Rourke raced back to his car, returning with a Japanese camera loaded with fast film. He arrived just as one of the cops was reaching down for Painter. But Painter hated to relinquish his grip on the piling, and the cop couldn’t quite touch his chief’s outstretched fingers until Shayne and a second cop held him by the legs. Rourke was ready. As Painter came over the side, sputtering, Rourke made the picture, which appeared on the front page of that day’s News.

“Get that man!” Painter yelled. “Confiscate his camera!”

Then his eye fell on Shayne. “I thought you’d be a couple of miles from here by now. Arrest this man. If he gives you any trouble, put the cuffs on him.”

“Arrest me for what?” Shayne said quietly. “Assaulting an investigator for a Senate Committee?”

“No,” Painter said “For— for—” he looked around. For—”

“Petey, don’t you think you better put out a call for that boat? Her name’s Ophelia, and her home port’s Baltimore, in case you were under water at the time and didn’t notice. We’ll be in better shape if we can pick them up before they get to a phone.”

“I’m capable of giving the orders around here, thank you. Get out a call for the Ophelia,” he said sternly. “From—” He looked at Shayne.

“Baltimore,” Shayne said. “Heading down the bay.”

One of the cops ran toward his radio, and Painter looked down at the Cuban, who was conscious but not yet active. “Let me see, which one is this?”

“His name’s Juan Grimondi,” Shayne told him. “He works for Luke Quinn. He was driving for the guy who tried to shoot Rose Heminway yesterday morning. He killed one of Plato’s thugs, named Gray. On top of that, he’s just committed piracy.”

Painter’s mouth was open. “He did? Yeah. Okay, book him.”

He started away, managing a good imitation of his usual cocky strut, in spite of the flapping garter. Rourke said in a low voice to Shayne, “I didn’t believe it at first. The son of a bitch is loaded.”

As though to prove it, Painter veered toward the edge of the dock. One of the cops grabbed him to keep him from falling in.

“I feel dizzy all of a sudden,” Painter said, and sneezed so hard he almost jolted himself out of the cop’s hands.

“What you need is a shot, Chief,” the cop said solicitously. “You’re catching cold. I always carry a pint in the car, for emergencies.”

Shayne and Rourke exchanged a look and hurried after them, leaving the third cop to bring the Cuban. In front of the clubhouse, the cop pulled open the door of the prowl sedan, and produced a pint of blended whiskey. Painter took it in both hands and drank eagerly.

“None for you,” he said, noticing Shayne. “Not after the way you hogged the liquor on the boat.” He sneezed again. “I’ve got to get into some dry clothes, and then we’re going to raise a little hell in a certain union.”

“Petey!” Shayne said brusquely, holding the door so it wouldn’t close. “I know it’s asking a lot, but think. As far as they know, you’re at the bottom of the bay. Let’s use it. You’re behind the times. Things have happened since the night before last.”

“I’ll catch up,” Painter said.

“How did you get on Quinn’s trail in the first place? You found something in Benjamin Chadwick’s wallet, isn’t that right? Okay, where is it now?”

“Take off,” Painter told the cop at the wheel. “If you have to run over any private detectives, don’t hesitate.” He swivelled back to Shayne, and made an anguished stab at his breast pocket. “It’s—”

“You’re damn right it’s gone,” Shayne grated. “The people who picked you up weren’t working for Quinn, but for Plato. Naturally they searched you. Naturally they’d be glad to find something they could use to hold over Quinn. Is your mind finally working? Go ahead and walk in and arrest Quinn, in front of the TV cameras. How long do you think you can hold him?”

“I can hold him,” Painter said unconvincingly. “I’ve got a very strong case, and I have no intention of giving it away to you.”

“What’s this strong case consist of? Chadwick can’t talk. Milburn’s dead. You’ve got one thing, and that’s all. Just before the robbery, Quinn was in hock to a loan shark. Just after the robbery he was able to pay off the loan shark and buy enough votes to move up in the union. That could be the cincher if you had anything else, but it’s not enough by itself.”

Painter sank back in the seat, seeming suddenly much smaller than usual. “I went through all this for nothing. I damn near drowned—”

“It’s not as bad as that. They’re fighting among themselves, and to take advantage of it we’ve got to work together. This can be a big thing for you, Petey. You can have the TV screen all to yourself. I’ll be satisfied with a small check from the insurance company.”

“As usual,” Painter said bitterly.

“As usual, and I think I deserve it. What time are they holding the election?” Shayne asked Rourke, who was standing beside him listening avidly.

“That’s their first order of business,” Rourke said, “and they’ve got the Honest Ballot Association to make the count. We’d better get moving, Mike,” he added nervously. “The Herald’s going to have a man here any minute.”

“It’s your story, Tim,” Shayne said. “Painter and I would probably both be dead now if you hadn’t called the cops.”

He looked at his watch. It was supposed to be waterproof, but it had been through too much violent activity in the last half hour, and was no longer running.

Rourke said, “Just before seven, Mike.”

“That gives us time enough, if it doesn’t take Petey more than an hour to tell us what he found in Benjamin Chadwick’s wallet.”

Painter sighed heavily. “How did you know—”

Looking down at him, Shayne said, “That’s when you put on a bodyguard. When somebody collapses on your doorstep, you look in his wallet for his name and address. You found that, and you also found something else.”

“A picture,” Painter said. “A 35 mm negative. I had it developed, and there was Luke Quinn, looking straight at the camera. He had a suitcase in one hand, and he was coming out of a vault.”

“Great detective work,” Shayne said sarcastically. “I knew it had to be something simple. No, I take that back, Petey,” he added quickly. “Now that we’re working together I’ve got to start being polite.”

“Maybe I should have turned it over to the FBI and let them make the arrest,” Painter said. “But why let somebody else in on it when I’m the one who — And there’s no reason to look at me like that. Not everybody would have thought of developing that picture. I dug up the loan shark, I found Fred Milburn and I did a good job of worming the truth out of him, if I say it myself. Quinn was coming down to Miami for the convention, so why shouldn’t I make the arrest myself? It was just a matter of a few days, a week at the most Meanwhile, I could make it airtight. Well, I guess we all make mistakes.”

Rourke and Shayne looked at each other in astonishment. Neither had ever heard the little chief of detectives make any such admission before.

“That’s all right, Petey,” Rourke said soothingly. “You go home. You’ll feel more like yourself when you’ve had some sleep.”

“Sleep? This is no time for sleep.”

He glanced at the driver, who was as surprised as the others at the turn the conversation was taking. Coming out of the car, Painter took Shayne’s arm and drew him to the dock, where they wouldn’t be overheard.

“What did you have in mind, Shayne? I’m not saying I’ll do it, you understand. But it’s perfectly true I’ve been out of circulation for a day. If you want to make a suggestion, I’ll be glad to consider it.”

Rourke followed Shayne’s Buick to the redhead’s apartment hotel. He phoned his paper while Shayne showered and shaved. Soon afterward a copy boy arrived to pick up his exposed film. The coffee was ready by the time Shayne was dressed. Shayne took a cup to the phone, where he made several calls. Meanwhile, Rourke was using his razor.

Shayne called from the phone, “Do you happen to know who writes the insurance for the Beach Trust? Wouldn’t that be Acme?”

Rourke answered from the bathroom. “They get most of the business in that part of town. Who do you think’s going to be there at this time of the morning?”

“Nobody. I’m calling the president, what’s-his-name, Goddard. He’ll be glad to skip breakfast.”

Rourke finished shaving and combed his hair, using Shayne’s equipment. The two men were more presentable when they were ready to leave.

“Wearing a hat, Mike?” Rourke said. “Isn’t that overdoing it a little?”

“Who knows? We may be on TV.”

“Gad. And I don’t have any make-up on.”

They pushed through the revolving door into the St. Albans lobby at five minutes of nine. From the number of police cars parked outside, Shayne saw that Painter had completed his part of the arrangements. Rose Heminway hurried across the lobby.

“Michael! I honestly don’t think I can stand much more of this. Is this how you live all the time?

“Not quite,” Shayne said. “Sometimes I get a little sleep.”

They walked up one flight to the ballroom. Rourke used his press-pass, and Shayne and Rose went up another half-flight to the gallery. They found seats overlooking a scene of considerable disorder. Harry Plato, on the dais, was hammering vainly with his gavel, but the delegates were in no hurry to settle down. One end of the gallery had been taken over by the TV cameras, which were not yet turned on. Rourke slipped into an empty chair at the press table, below Plato’s microphone.

“Take your places, brothers,” Plato was shouting. “This convention will come to order.”

Luke Quinn emerged from one of the side rooms, surrounded by a compact group of ten or twelve men, all but one of whom were smoking cigars. He said something to one of the men, and that man and several of the others laughed.

“Isn’t that Luke Quinn?” Rose remarked. “He wasn’t this sure of himself when I knew him.”

Gradually the knots of delegates broke up and drifted to seats at the long tables, which seemed to be arranged by geographical districts. Shayne glanced at his watch, which was functioning again. He saw Goddard, the insurance company president, come into the gallery and look around until he saw Shayne. The redhead gave him an inquisitive glance. He nodded.

“Wait here, Rose,” Shayne said. “I’ll want you later, so don’t go anywhere.”

He returned to the main floor, passing a compact formation of fifteen or twenty uniformed cops, and went along the hall to the entrance nearest the dais. Plato had brought the convention to order and a minister was giving the invocation. Shayne doubted if many of the delegates were actually praying. He was stopped at the door by a burly sergeant-at-arms. He found an envelope in his pocket and borrowed a pencil. Holding the envelope against the wall, he wrote. “Harry, did you know the Panther has been sunk with all hands? — Shayne.”

He folded the envelope and gave it to the sergeant-at-arms with a five-dollar bill. “Hand this up to Harry.”

“After he gets done?”

“Now.”

The man gave the envelope to someone at the nearest table, who passed it across the aisle. The minister finished the invocation and sat down. Shayne watched his message travel from table to table until it was finally passed up to Plato, who was back at the microphone. He finished a sentence and glanced at what Shayne had written. He went on, but broke into the next sentence and read the note again. He looked across at Shayne, who was planted in the doorway, his hat pushed back on his head, his hands in his pockets. Shayne grinned. After a moment Plato called another official to take the gavel, and came down. The ballroom was reasonably quiet, and the delegates were all watching him. His eyes were stormy.

As he came up to Shayne, the redhead said pleasantly, “I thought I’d be telling you something you didn’t know.”

“In private, baby,” Plato said briefly.

He led the way to a door marked, Midwest. He called over a nearby lounger. “We don’t want to be bothered in here.”

“Sure, Harry.”

They entered a private dining room, which was being used as headquarters of the Midwest district. A secretary was drinking coffee from a cardboard container.

“Outside,” Plato said.

“Certainly,” she said, spilling some of the coffee.

She went out hurriedly. Shayne tossed his hat on the nearest desk and sat down on the desk beside it “Where do you keep your liquor?”

“Let’s do it without,” Plato said. He picked up the phone, put it in a bottom drawer and stuffed rags around it. “We go over the place for bugs a couple of times a day, and we keep finding them, too. But with a phone you never know until you take it apart.”

Shayne grinned. “You don’t mean people want to listen to your private conversations?”

“Mike, you don’t know. They’re thicker than seagulls around a garbage scow, at convention time especially. Thank the Lord I had the sense to get out of it. Say it fast because I got to get out to vote for myself.”

“The water’s probably not over fifteen feet deep where she went down, Harry, so you can raise her. But let’s talk about money for a minute. I could use a retainer.”

“I might arrange something, Mike. In how many figures?”

“I keep thinking of about a thousand a month.”

Plato looked at him closely. “You’re trying to tell me it’s serious?”

“Yeah,” Shayne said soberly.

Plato cracked one powerful fist into his other palm, and for a long moment he did nothing but swear, using language he had learned before he became a labor statesman.

“You take the words out of my mouth,” Shayne said.

“What I’d like to do to that son of a bitch! Well, I better get the details on it so I don’t make a mistake.”

“You don’t want to hear the whole thing, Harry. I was looking for Painter. I—”

Plato raised a hand, puzzled. “I thought you two had a grudge fight going. What’s that, something they made up to sell papers?”

Shayne smiled. “There’s something to it. But he was planning to break a story yesterday morning, and I was looking for him to find out what it was. I found out. Do you know a hood named Juan Grimondi? And an ex-con from Baltimore, called Whitey?”

Plato ran his hand across his jaw. “Those names seem to ring a bell.”

“There were eight or nine in all. Your boys put up a good scrap, but they were outclassed. Gray’s dead.”

“Yeah?” Plato said bleakly. “I’m sorry to hear it. He was a good man.”

“That’s about all I can tell you. They opened up a plate in the engine room and she went down fast. Painter was taped up in a locked cabin, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. It’s bad for public morality when one of you people knock over a cop. All things being equal, I’d like to put somebody away for it. But all things aren’t equal. A grand a month that I won’t have to pay taxes on is quite an inducement.”

Plato waited a moment, the fingers of his right hand opening and closing. “Jesus, I’ll be lucky to get out of this without a bleeding ulcer. It’s a deal, Shayne, as of now. The first thing I’d like to have you do is bring that son of a bitch in here.”

Shayne got off the desk: “Quinn? What do I say to him?”

Plato smiled grimly. “I’m still president of the goddam union, for another half hour. Do you carry a gun, Shayne?”

“No. Do I need one?”

“It might be a good idea, for when Quinn realizes you saw the Panther go down. I don’t think he’ll try to pull anything here, we got just about every cop in town, but the bastard is crazy! He’s out of his mind! Take care of your health, would be my advice.”

“I’ll do it for your sake, Harry,” Shayne told him. “So long as I’m healthy you’ve really got something to use on Quinn.”

“I’m thinking of that,” Plato said.

Shayne went out, leaving the union president slumped in an armchair, looking old. The redhead used the door where the sergeant-at-arms knew him. The balloting was about to begin. There were two voting machines, and officials of the Honest Ballot Association were ready with delegate rosters, to be sure that no faction tried to vote its men more than once. The TV cameras were recording the scene, but neither cameraman bothered to follow the tall, rangy figure of Michael Shayne as he made his way among the tables and up to Quinn.

Quinn’s after-breakfast cigar had burned down halfway. The smell of tobacco mingled with the strong smell of after-shaving lotion. He was tipped back slightly in the chair, giving off an atmosphere of power and confidence, but Shayne saw that his manicured fingers were drumming nervously against his leg.

“Quinn?” Shayne said.

Quinn looked at him coldly through his horn-rimmed glasses. “We got a rule against letting private dicks on the floor.”

“They waived it for me,” Shayne said, “and it only cost me five bucks. Harry wants to see you.”

“Here I am,” Quinn said indifferently. “He knows what I look like.”

Shayne smiled down at him. “He also knows what you looked like three years ago, when you still owed Sticky Horvath some money.”

“Christ,” Quinn said in his gravelly voice, and added for the benefit of his fellow-delegates, who were pretending not to listen, “He probably needs somebody to tie his shoelaces. Hell, he’s got another twenty-five minutes, let him live it up.”

The delegate beside him said, “What do we do about — you know, the Welfare Fund?”

“Plenty of time,” Quinn said. “They’ll keep the machines open till everybody votes.”

He came with Shayne. Outside in the corridor he started to speak, but straightened his glasses instead and walked on, puffing busily at his cigar.

“You working for Harry these days?”

“He made me an offer,” Shayne said, “but I’m not sure he has much of a future.”

“Now that’s using the head, Shayne. I’ll give you a tip. He hasn’t got any future.”

Plato was standing, facing the door. He had succeeded in summoning up his old belligerent expression.

Shayne said, “You won’t want me, will you, Harry?”

“Stand by outside. Nobody comes in. Nobody.”

Shayne closed the door and moved fast. He called to the nearest cop. “Nobody in or out of this door,” he said, echoing Plato.

Lieutenant Wing was coming toward him. Shayne signalled, and Wing met him at the entrance Shayne had used before.

“Wait a minute,” the sergeant-at-arms said.

Shayne went on to the press table and worked in beside Rourke.

“It’s all set, Mike,” Rourke said in a low voice.

Shayne looked at the floor. The reporter had hooked into the main cable from the microphone, scraping off the insulation and tying in two wires from a small receiving set in his lap.

“I thought I was going to take a few thousand volts doing it,” he said. “But how did you plant the mike? Wasn’t he with you all the time?”

“It’s in my hat,” Shayne said. “The hat’s out on a desk. We ought to get good reception.”

“Son of a bitch,” Rourke commented.

Wing sent two cops to stand beside the microphone above them. Shayne switched on the receiver. It was a powerful set, manufactured for this purpose and no other. It only received on one wave-length and its single knob was a volume-control. There was a good deal of noise in the hall, but Shayne heard a faint crackling from the loud-speakers suspended from each corner of the gallery. He grinned at Rourke and stepped up the volume.

Plato’s voice roared over the public address: “When are you going to get it through your thick head that times have changed?”