Six Seconds to Kill

CHAPTER 17

Promptly at nine, an ambulance arrived at the taxi discharge point at the Miami International Airport. Michael Shayne came out first, and helped a woman to dismount. She was wearing a full black wig, dark glasses and the same nondescript flowered dress the assassin of Eliot Crowther had worn that morning. She carried a black handbag with a long strap slung over her shoulder.

She entered the terminal alone.

The real Camilla was sleeping in the North Miami clinic, breathing fitfully and occasionally throwing her head from side to side. To Shayne, looking down at her before they left the clinic, it had seemed that she was a long way from giving up. Paul London had agreed readily to the substitution. One of the nurses let out the side seam of the dress so it would fit him. Another nurse with exceptionally large feet contributed shoes and supervised the makeup. Not much padding was necessary. He had trouble walking in the high heels, but presumably Camilla herself would be walking unsteadily because of drugs.

He went directly to the baggage claims window. He surrendered a check and was handed the same lightweight suitcase Camilla had picked up the night before. He took it to the ladies’ room near the Pan-American ticket counter. He hesitated briefly here, but went in.

Tonight there were a half dozen women inside, including two armed policewomen. He entered a booth with his suitcase. Tonight there was no gun inside it. He already had a gun in his handbag, a heavy Colt.45 automatic.

He abandoned the suitcase and left the ladies’ room. Outside, he looked around quickly and bolted down a flight of steps. He was in the southernmost concourse, one of six that protruded from the terminal building like the spokes of a half-wheel. Banks of floodlights three quarters of the way up the control tower illuminated the gates and the holding areas. Two airplanes were loading, each surrounded by its own small school of service vehicles.

When a uniformed man approached, London ran out through the nearest gate onto the concrete, teetering on his unaccustomed heels. A crew bus, coming in from the hangar area, swerved to avoid hitting him, and the driver honked angrily. It had been agreed that when he broke into the open at the end of the concourse, instead of continuing out on the field as Camilla had done the previous night, he would cut back at once toward the Delta maintenance hangar. A security guard who hadn’t been warned about what was happening started for him, but was called off by a voice from above on a bullhorn.

London crossed to the hangar. The big galvanized overhead doors into the building were closed. He opened a smaller door beyond. One hand was inside his open handbag.

He waited an instant, then stepped through the doorway.

Only a few lights burned inside the cavernous building. A big DC-9 was suspended from a rig attached to an overhead crane. Three of its engines had been pulled. Two cherry-pickers were in position beyond it-trucks carrying a metal bucket at the end of a long movable arm. Using these buckets, workmen could reach the upper surface of the wings. One of the buckets was higher than the plane. As London moved further into the building, Michael Shayne, crouched against the opposite wall, reached up and touched a light switch.

He heard a faint metallic sound. He pulled the switch and flooded the building with light.

At the same instant, a gun banged. The blaze of light jarred the shooter’s aim. The bullet, from a high-powered Winchester sporting rifle fired from the cherry-picker overhanging the plane, struck London above the knee, knocking him back through the doorway.

Shayne shouted, his voice echoing from the metal ceiling, “Throw it down.”

The man in the bucket had disappeared. The bucket began to come down. For an instant it was hidden by the wing of the plane. Shayne moved before it could reappear. From the wing’s shadow, the gun banged again.

Shayne dropped behind a tow truck, going all the way down to the oily concrete. Abe Berger, near the hangar’s rear door, fired at random, to show he was there. Another shot from the moving bucket went through the fender of the tow truck.

And then the bucket was down, concealed from Shayne by the cherry-picker’s chassis. He crawled beneath the truck. He had a sixteen-gauge shotgun. The Winchester clattered to the concrete twenty feet behind the DC-9, without disturbing Shayne’s concentration. The man broke from cover. Shayne brought the shotgun around smoothly and fired at the cement floor, a foot or so short. The man ran into the ricocheting pellets and stumbled through the door. Paul London, lying on his back holding the Colt in both hands, shot him in the chest. He reeled into the open, into the path of a speeding power cart. The impact knocked off his hit and dark glasses, and as he went backward, Shayne saw that it was Teddy Sparrow.

He was dead when Shayne reached him.

“Sparrow!” Devlin exclaimed. “Mike, I know you’re usually on target, but you’re all wrong about this. Seriously, you don’t know him. He was out there in that Delta hangar because he had some nutty idea that he could help catch an assassin, and make himself famous. He was a clown.”

“He looked like a clown,” Shayne said. “People who look like Teddy get typed in the second grade. And I do know him. I know him well. He’s worked for me a few times, and he knew the reason I hired him was because I wanted a bumbler who couldn’t help drawing attention to himself. So he played the bumbler. That doesn’t mean he didn’t want money, like anybody else.”

“You sound pretty sure of yourself. Teddy Sparrow-I’ll be goddamned if I believe it.”

Shayne said patiently, “Nobody knew Camilla went into that hangar last night. She told me, and I told Abe Berger. The only other person who knew it was the man who met her there. She was the one person alive who could tie him into any of this, and he didn’t know there’s a good chance she’ll never remember a thing about him. This may have been one of the first operations in his life that really worked, that looked as though it might really pay off. He couldn’t risk losing it at the last minute. He thought he had to shoot her, and the hangar was the obvious place to do it. He was planning to drop the rifle, and if he didn’t succeed in getting out the opposite door, he could say he heard the shot and ran in to see what was happening. I had to let him get off one shot, to commit himself.”

“And to get himself killed,” Devlin commented.

Shayne shrugged. “Even if Camilla had identified him, and her doctor doesn’t think it’s likely, a good defense lawyer could break her apart on cross-examination.” They were in Devlin’s office on the mezzanine of the terminal, overlooking the main concourse. Devlin was a short, freckled ex-baseball player with a booming voice, still touchy about having been decoyed to Oklahoma by a fake telegram. He had sent down to a bar for drinks. Will Gentry was there. Berger had brought two FBI officials, including the district director.

“What do you know about Teddy’s background?” Shayne asked Devlin.

“He worked around. He was in the army a few years, the MP’s. He had that private-detective business. Before that he did some kind of labor relations for one of the copper companies in Latin America. I could look it up.” He stopped.

“Yeah,” Shayne said. “He said something to me about it once. He spoke Spanish well. He knew somebody who could put him in touch with Ruiz. In anything this big there has to be an inside man. How long have those rifles been in the warehouse?”

“About ten days.” Devlin ran his fingers through his sparse hair. “I just can’t get adjusted to it. He knew about the troubles I’m having with my son, and he could have sent that telegram. But remember I just got back. This happened in my jurisdiction, and I’ll have to get up in front of the TV cameras and tell the public all about it. What’s this wild business about Crowther organizing his own assassination?”

“I’ve explained that to too many people already,” Shayne said wearily. “Berger can brief you before you talk to anybody. The thing that gave us trouble was that everything seemed to dovetail. But there were actually two schemes running-Crowther’s and Teddy’s, and they kept getting in each other’s way. By itself, each one probably would have worked. Ruiz wasn’t going to be using more than about twenty people, and he needed a diversion. A small Miami Beach riot would be just the thing.”

Berger said, “You mean it was Sparrow who hired Lorenzo Vega?”

“I think so. I think he’d want to do it himself.”

“And was he the one who tipped you off to the assassination?”

“He didn’t know about it yet. That was Crowther. If Camilla’s functioning tomorrow, we can play her tape of that phone call. I think it’ll turn out to be the same voice that talked her into the assassination in the first place.”

“But I don’t see-”

“He wanted to be sure he got full network coverage. But this complicated things for Teddy and Ruiz. Teddy found out we were bringing in paratroopers, and it must have appalled him. They were planning to steal two cargo planes, load them and take off, and if anything went wrong, all they had to contend with was a force of security guards commanded by Teddy himself, who could be counted on to make his usual quota of mistakes. Regular infantry was a different story. They must have considered calling it off, and you know how much Ruiz wanted those rifles.”

“And of course,” Berger said slowly, “it was Sparrow who got the report about a woman in the ladies’ room with a gun.”

“Yeah. He saw her leaving, and followed her into the Delta hangar. He went after her with a flashlight. She fired at the light, but naturally she didn’t hit anything, as she was shooting blanks. He calmed her down, and I suppose she told him the whole story. If he hadn’t charged her up all over again, she would have wandered around and thrown the gun in the canal. But an assassination, from Teddy’s point of view, would be an even better diversion than a riot, especially if the assassin escaped. When he found out she’d used up her bullets he got her more from Ruiz.”

“Pretty risky,” Devlin observed.

“Not really. Ruiz already knew about him, and they had to confer anyway. They worked out the changes, so she stood a chance of getting away. You know the rest of it, or somebody can fill you in. Later he tried to kill her with morphine. Ruiz was dead by that time, and that would leave nobody alive to testify that Teddy Sparrow wasn’t as much of a clown as he looked. You realize that he shot Ruiz?”

“Did you see him do it?” Berger asked.

“I saw the look on Ruiz’ face when he was hit, and that was when everything started to make sense. I’d seen that same look a little while before, on Crowther’s. They were both surprised and annoyed. Not furious, just annoyed. Crowther knew for an absolute fact that the pistol was loaded with blanks. He’d loaded it himself. And the stupid girl wasn’t standing where he’d told her to stand. Ruiz was looking at another loading platform. There he saw Teddy Sparrow, a little foolish, but a man who sympathized with the revolution, who had helped pull off the great coup of the decade, and the clown was pointing a rifle at him. That was the look of somebody about to be shot by his inside man, and Ruiz didn’t believe it until he fell off the platform.”

“And now that Teddy’s dead,” Devlin said, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what he got out of it.”

Shayne finished his drink. Setting his glass down, he crossed to the door. Tim Rourke was outside with other reporters and TV people. They closed in around Shayne and began barking questions.

“Mr. Devlin will tell you what happened in a minute,” Shayne said. “Tim, what did you find out?”

Rourke grinned. “All the gold and platinum was owned by private shippers, and their insurance companies were glad to hear from me. You get twenty percent of what you recover, not including anything that turns up in the burned plane.”

“Call them back and say I accept.”

Shayne returned to the office. “We all know Teddy wasn’t in this for political reasons. They paid him off with permission to clean out the maximum security area. I saw a Port Authority vehicle heading for the warehouses. Teddy was probably driving. He loaded the trunk with gold bars and platinum, unloading the spare tire to get more room. I saw the tire later. What was a spare tire doing lying out in the open? I filed it away to think about when I had time.”

“Then where is it now?”

“I drove off in the car, which must have practically killed Teddy. It’s parked next to a mausoleum in the Forest Glade cemetery.”

Devlin and Abe Berger handled the press conference, referring to Shayne several times when they needed further details. Berger was heading back to Washington on the next available plane. Shayne had a moment alone with him before he left.

“Don’t you owe me something, Abe?”

“I wonder. I lost a politician I was supposed to be protecting. I took a full count in front of a hundred million people on ‘live’ television.” Then he understood. “I do owe you something, at that.”

Shayne was standing easily, his face impassive. Berger measured the distance, and swung hard, but he diverted the punch at the last instant, grazing Shayne’s jaw.

“The hell with it,” he said in disgust. “If they fire me, maybe I can get a job as number-two security man at Miami International. I understand there’s an opening.”

Rourke was waiting to talk to Shayne. When the reporter drove off to turn in his story, Shayne went out to the parking lot to pick up his Buick. He was oddly restless. He drove into town, found his radio-telephone and antenna on the floor of Adele’s Chevrolet, and reinstalled them in their usual place.

Checking the connection, he was surprised to get his usual daytime operator.

“Are you still working?”

“Overtime,” she said. “I just listened to the news, Mr. Shayne, and you were magnificent! I think I helped a little, didn’t I?”

“The phone service was very good, as usual. You’ll be hungry when you go off. Would you be interested in a couple of drinks and dinner?”

There was a brief pause.

“You don’t even know my name. What if I’m fat and bowlegged?”

“Are you?”

“Well, no, but if the supervisor ever found out-On the other hand, she’s away for the weekend, isn’t she, and if you’re really serious-”

“Damn right I’m serious. I’d like to talk to somebody normal for a change.”

She hesitated. “I wouldn’t say I was all that normal.”

Shayne laughed. “Where do I meet you?”