Nice Fillies Finish Last

CHAPTER 6

Michael Shayne had walked into the lobby of the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach at two o’clock exactly, the time fixed for his appointment with the go-between who had promised to bring him one step closer to the recovery of stolen diamonds worth $100,000. The man was late. Usually this wouldn’t have bothered the detective. People in the go-between’s position often have trouble making up their minds. But today, after waiting only ten minutes, Shayne phoned the insurance company and told Mort Friedman, the man he was dealing with there, that his contact had failed to appear. He would call in, probably, and Shayne asked Friedman to set up another date for the following day.

“Make it later this afternoon, Mike,” Friedman said. “This whole thing is very jumpy.”

“I won’t be available,” Shayne said briefly. Friedman wanted to know why. Shayne replied evenly that something else had come up, Friedman made an acrid comment on that, and before the conversation was over Shayne concluded that he had possibly lost a valuable retainer.

Leaving the Beach, he crossed the bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway and picked up the northbound expressway in Buena Vista. Shifting onto the Sunshine State Parkway at the Golden Glades interchange, he continued north, holding his speedometer needle steady at ten miles over the speed limit. He was swearing to himself. Rourke, he knew, had a special nose for certain kinds of trouble. His way of working up a story was to walk in, ask leading questions, and see what happened; and more often than Shayne liked to remember, what happened was that he ended up flat on his back hollering for help. One of these days, the redhead promised himself, Rourke was going to get into some stupid jam and find that Shayne had packed a bag and taken his secretary to New York to see a few of the new shows, leaving no phone number where he could be reached.

Shayne left the monotonous parkway at the Pompano Beach interchange and began following signs. The turns to Surfside Raceway were well marked. The closer he came to the track, the surer he was that something had gone wrong. He shouldn’t have let Rourke go alone.

The big, sprawling plant was quiet, apparently almost deserted in the hot afternoon. He locked his Buick and left it at the edge of the almost empty parking area, and plunged into the stable compound on foot.

Finding Paul Thorne’s stalls, he awakened a sleeping groom, who told him he had seen Thorne going off toward the trailer park, probably to take a nap, which was the sensible thing to do at this time of the day. Going in among the trailers, Shayne was in time to see the gangling body of his friend come hurtling through the narrow window of a trailer, his arms windmilling. He lurched away. The redhead spat out his cigarette and set off after him at a hard run.

He had left a trail of blood. Catching a glimpse of him as he staggered between two trailers, Shayne sliced into the tangle and cut him off. The reporter, in worse shape than Shayne had ever seen him, floundered a few more steps and collapsed against him. His coat and shirt had been cut to ribbons. He was only wearing one shoe. There were a dozen long slashes on his face and hands, but the blood made it hard for Shayne to tell which ones were serious. His face was a grotesque mask. His breath was loaded with martinis.

“Mike?” he said weakly. “You’re on the Beach somewhere, earning fifteen G’s. You’re not here.”

“What’s going on?” Shayne demanded. A heavy sedan halted at the edge of the trailer park. A burly uniformed figure leaped out and called, “Thorne! Thorne! Come here.”

A powerfully built, man in a sports shirt stepped out of the trailer with the smashed window. Rourke made a plucking gesture at Shayne with one of his bloody hands.

“Mike, it’s true. They’re trying to pull it off. The twin. Everything we thought. That means Joey Dolan was no accident.”

A fat woman in a playsuit, her forearms dredged with flour, opened the door of the nearest trailer and looked at Rourke with horror. The reporter sat down. “I’ve had it,” he said.

Shayne whipped out his bill clip and peeled off a dollar, which he handed to the woman. She took it automatically. “Get him a towel soaked in hot water,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

He returned to the Thorne trailer at a fast walk, approaching it from the kitchen end. Looking up at the broken window, he gave a short awed whistle. The opening couldn’t have measured more than two feet one way and ten inches the other, and he couldn’t believe Rourke had forced himself through it without being greased.

He pulled up in the lee of the trailer, his ragged eyebrows together and his eyes wary.

“Beating up on your wife again, I hear, Thorne,” the cop said. “People can’t take a nap with all the yelling and screaming. Well, you know what we told you, any more trouble of any kind and you’re through here, you’re through and no kidding. This time I’m turning you over to the sheriff’s office.”

“What crap,” Thorne said easily. “Who complained, Pruneface next door? Beating up on Win! Hell, man, we disagree sometimes, but she’s more likely to beat up on me than I am on her. Win, baby!” he called. “Come out here and tell the man.”

“You aren’t going to get out of this,” the cop said with satisfaction. “Look at that goddamn window. What did you do, throw a bottle through it?”

Shayne hesitated only briefly. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew they didn’t want Thorne to be tied up by the sheriff for the rest of the day.

He stepped out and came up to the two men, breathing hard. “I’m afraid he got away. I damn near had my hands on him for a second, but he was too slippery. He had a car waiting. I only got the first two numbers of the license-seven, eight. Christ!” He gave a sudden hoot of laughter. “When I saw him come crashing through that window!”

“You saw somebody jump out the window?” the cop said.

“Yeah, and I thought at first it was a case of the husband walking in at the wrong time, but then why would the guy have a getaway car all set, with the motor running? Did he get away with anything much?”

Thorne looked at him, thinking. “I haven’t had a chance to check,” he said slowly. He turned angrily on the cop. “Honest to God, this is typical of you people. If you hadn’t been so fast to jump to conclusions, I might have caught him.”

A disheveled but very good-looking young woman in a wrapper, barefoot, the side of her jaw swollen, appeared in the doorway of the trailer.

“Win!” Thorne said, alarmed. “Are you OK?”

“I’m-not sure.”

Now that they had their cues, they had no trouble manufacturing a story. A small, vicious-looking hoodlum had forced his way into the trailer waving a gun. He took her purse and then, liking her looks, tried to throw her down on the sofa. She was struggling with him when Thorne walked in. The cop looked from one to the other suspiciously, obviously sorry that Thorne was off the hook, and made no objection when Shayne excused himself.

Rourke was where Shayne had left him, bleeding into a towel.

“How in God’s name did you get out that window?” Shayne asked. “It’s about big enough for a midget.”

“Don’t ask me,” Rourke said bleakly. “I shut my eyes and sailed through.” He looked down at the blood-soaked towel. “I must look like a pound of raw hamburger. But if I hadn’t made it, I’d look a lot worse. He was fixing to clobber me. I don’t mean because I was making time with his wife. Because I was interested in tonight’s twin double. He said he’s got a busy afternoon. Tail him. See where he goes.”

“Sure, as soon as I get you to the doctor.”

“I can get myself to the goddamn doctor!” He started to get up, thought better of it and sat back. “Going to rest here a minute first. Take off.”

Shayne looked up at the fat woman, who had returned to the doorway of the trailer. “Is there a hospital around?”

“There must be one in Lauderdale, anyway. I can look in the book. Does he want an ambulance?”

“Call a taxi.” He grinned at her. “There’s an angry husband not far away, and we don’t want any sirens.” She disappeared.

“Go on, damn it,” Rourke said, looking up from the towel to find Shayne still hesitating. “If you’d come with me in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened. I haven’t won a fistfight from a guy that big in years. Mike, for God’s sake! As soon as he gets clear, he’s going to start moving. This may be the only chance we get. Don’t waste it.”

“OK,” Shayne said curtly. “Call me on the car phone so I’ll know where you are.”

He turned on his heel and stalked off. He had known something like this would happen. But from now on Rourke was going to have to get out of his own jams.

Seeing activity in front of the Thorne trailer, he pulled up abruptly and waited until the cop drove off. In a moment Thorne came out and headed for the barns, going straight to the stalls where he kept his horses. He emerged a moment later wearing a necktie and a light sports jacket, which probably meant that he had to keep an appointment somewhere else, as no one wore neckties here in the daytime.

Shayne went for his Buick. He wheeled it around near the end of the grandstand, where he could see any cars coming out of the compound. Thorne made it simple for him, appearing in a long red convertible with the top down, an easy car to follow. Shayne dropped out of sight until he heard the convertible whoosh past with Thorne getting everything the motor was able to give him in that gear.

Shayne had the Buick in motion as the convertible crossed the Seaboard Air Line tracks, heading south. At Sunrise Boulevard Thorne signaled for a left turn, and Shayne dropped back, letting a Volkswagen pass. The Volkswagen driver had trouble deciding which way to go, and Thorne was out of sight by the time Shayne made the turn. He built up his speed, taking chances in the thickening traffic, and came up with the convertible again as it waited for the light to change at the Route 1 intersection.

Shayne moved up close, following without difficulty as Thorne entered Fort Lauderdale. Thorne was clearly impatient, consulting his watch constantly, crowding slow-moving cars and racing the motor when he was stopped by a light. On S. E. Sixth Avenue, near Twenty-fourth Street, he swung into a parking slot. Without dropping any coins in the parking meter, he headed for a doorway between two stores. A sign over the door said, “Guys and Dolls, Billiards.”

Shayne snapped his fingers silently. The only opening he could see was an illegal one in front of a fire hydrant. He pulled in and left a Miami News card under his windshield wiper. The billiard room was over a men’s clothing store, directly across from a medical block. Shayne crossed, went up one flight and into a dentist’s waiting room. A bell sounded as the door opened, and a teen-aged girl with bands on her teeth looked up from a magazine. Shayne went to the window. When a middle-aged nurse came in, he gave her a quick look at his license and said quietly, “Police business. We’re expecting a stickup.”

“A what?” the girl in the braces said excitedly.

The redhead said, “Please sit down.”

He spoke in a quiet voice that carried authority. She obeyed instantly.

The dentist joined the nurse in the doorway. “There won’t be any shooting?” he said anxiously.

“I hope not,” Shayne said without turning.

The billiard room, some twenty or thirty feet away, was brightly lighted with fluorescent lamps. Only one table was being used. Paul Thorne was talking earnestly to a fat man in a blue linen coat at the cigarette and candy counter. The fat man listened, his lips going in and out. Presently he took a cigar box out of the glass case, opened it and counted out a dozen or so bills. Shayne couldn’t read the denominations, but the total was large enough to require a second count. Thorne counted it a third time.

Shayne nodded to the dentist and the nurse, and went out without further explanation. He was back in his Buick and had moved into double-parking position by the time Thorne returned to the convertible.

Thorne reversed and went north again on S. E. Sixth Avenue, turning right instead of left on Sunrise Boulevard, toward the ocean instead of the raceway. Reaching the ocean drive, he went north. Halfway to Pompano Beach, on the outskirts of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, his brake lights flared and he made a sharp turn into a double-decker motel called the Golden Crest. Shayne pulled into a gas station. While his tank was being filled, he watched Thorne leave his convertible in a depressed parking area and go up the outside steps to a room on the second floor.

Facing the door, he ran a comb through his long hair, which had been tossed about in the open car, tightened the knot of his necktie, brushed a wisp of hay off the sleeve of his jacket, and checked his fly. Then he tried the knob. Finding the door unlocked, he walked in.