Six Seconds to Kill

CHAPTER 8

Camilla Steele stepped out of the taxi at the International Airport. Friday night had arrived at last. It was a little after nine, according to the big clock confronting her as she entered the main concourse.

So far she was following instructions exactly, and she was pleased with herself. She had dressed carefully, because strange things had been happening to her lately, and she wasn’t sure how the evening would end. There was a smile of sorts on her face-a little strained, because those muscles hadn’t been exercised lately. The human mind is a mystery. She had no idea why the prospect of committing murder should make her feel cheerful. Perhaps because it gave her a goal, something she had lacked since her husband’s death.

Was she actually going to shoot this creep Crowther? Perhaps. Yes, now that she was here in the airport at the appointed time, she had to admit that the thing had begun to take on a certain reality.

She hadn’t had a drink for three days. Of course she was sorry to say that she was taking more Dexamyl than was good for her. But she didn’t want to miss anything. She wasn’t sleeping. These were her last days on earth, not that she wanted to romanticize anything, and she had been hurrying from place to place, seeing old friends on impulse, making lists and then misplacing them. She had had two more conversations with the anonymous voice, the man who was going to help her assassinate Eliot Crowther. She had annoyed him, she thought, by saying casually that she might as well fall in with his suggestion because how much did she have to lose? He would have preferred a little passion. But that wasn’t her way. She would take things as they came, and at the last minute, if she actually saw the handsome face and phony white hair of Eliot Crowther, and if she had a loaded pistol in her hand at the time, she would undoubtedly pull the trigger. But she didn’t intend to shout any slogans. He wasn’t worth the effort.

Her co-conspirator, whoever he was, wasn’t happy about this. In all the famous assassinations-Judith and Holofernes, Charlotte Corday and Marat, Booth and Lincoln, and all the more recent ones-the assassins had been fanatics, dedicated people. Now and then Camilla could work herself up to that pitch, but it passed quickly. Her attention span was getting shorter and shorter.

Still, if he was willing to keep reminding her, she thought there was a good chance that it might actually happen.

And a day later, a ticket arrived in the mail, entitling someone named Mrs. Doris Myerson to admission to the luncheon at which Crowther was to receive his ludicrous medal. She would need to show this ticket to get into the ballroom elevator. She would show it again at a table on the eighth floor. She had been told exactly where she was to stand. She went to the hotel the next day, ascended to the eighth floor, looked into the ballroom, took up a position according to instructions, and pointed her finger at an imaginary attorney general, a step or two away.

When the voice called that night-in her mind she capitalized it, the Voice-she told him the whole thing seemed childishly simple, and reminded him that he had done nothing about providing a gun. They had a strange kind of quarrel on the phone, like any bickering married couple. He demanded to know, before he got in any deeper, whether she was playing a game with him, or was she serious? She gave him an honest answer: she didn’t know. She wouldn’t know till it happened.

Before he brought the lengthy call to an end, he gave her a lecture about technique. No doubt she wasn’t much of a marksman with a pistol. No matter; at that range, accuracy was not essential. The important thing was to keep her head. Too many assassins got a good position on their victims and then were so nervous or excited that they fired only a single shot. Even when the bullet went home, the victim sometimes recovered. The thing to remember was to keep firing until the gun was empty. The final bullet might be the one that did the crucial damage.

Because of their quarrel about her lack of sincerity, it wouldn’t have surprised Camilla to hear nothing more about it. But the next day’s mail brought further instructions, a tiny key, and a claims ticket for a piece of luggage checked on an incoming flight to the International Airport. The letter was postmarked New York, and she decided, on an impulse, to save the envelope. Then another impulse took hold, and she ripped up the envelope and threw it away.

Now, at 9:05 P.M. Friday, at the International Airport, she looked for a window marked Unclaimed Luggage. Finding it without difficulty, she handed in her check.

She didn’t like the Voice, she decided as she waited. It had been a little too oily. She believed there was something in people’s voices that gave them away. This man, she sensed, didn’t hate Crowther. The killing was incidental to something else-that much had come through. She was only an instrument. Which was all right, she supposed, as long as she knew what she was doing.

And suddenly, as she was waiting for the suitcase, an alternative began to take shape. Obviously Camilla Steele as a person had very little future. She was assuming, and so was the Voice, that she would be caught. Security guards and police would be swarming all over her before the shots stopped echoing. And after that? Like her husband, she would spend years in a condemned cell while the lawyers squabbled. Felix had enjoyed it, in a way; she sometimes thought that he had even enjoyed his execution. He had been the center of attention, and had been able to annoy everybody. But Camilla, by that time, would have escaped into madness-if she wasn’t crazy already, which was certainly arguable. When she came face to face with Crowther, what if she shot herself instead of shooting him? It would end the agony. By reviving the old story of the miscarriage of justice, it might, it probably would, put a stop to his political advancement.

And what was so bad about suicide? Every thinking person had to keep it open as the final option. She herself had frequently come close-most recently, on the night Paul London asked her to marry him and she had her first phone call from the Voice. Under that kind of bombardment, what was the point in living one more day? A funny thing had stopped her. Her only weapons were sleeping pills, and a sleeping-pill death would be impossibly banal. She wouldn’t have a second chance-she had to get it right the first time. Suicide at its most elegant was an act of disgust. Crowther disgusted her. Politicians disgusted her. Awarding Crowther the Freedom Medal was one of the most disgusting things that had ever happened. The least she could do was spoil his luncheon for him. If she killed herself at his feet, he would have to discard his prepared speech.

The checkroom clerk brought out a nondescript fabric suitcase and pushed it across the counter.

She had been told not to return to her apartment, but to check into a Beach hotel. A reservation had been made for her in the name of Meyerson, the name on the luncheon ticket. But she was beginning to balk at those precise instructions. She wanted to find out right now what her unknown friend had sent her. It was irrational not to wait, but after coming this far in an assassination plot without knowing whether or not she wanted to do it, she could hardly consider herself rational.

She carried the suitcase to the nearest ladies’ room. The booths were coin-operated. She had given the taxi driver her last loose change. Instead of going back to the concourse to break a bill, she made a bet with herself.

There was no one around. She decided to open the suitcase there and see if it did, in fact, contain a gun, as promised. If somebody came in and saw her, that would be a sign that the bad luck was running, and she could stop thinking of herself in terms of Charlotte Corday, and return to her idle life in the Miami Beach bars.

The key worked stiffly, but at last the suitcase opened. Inside, she found a handbag packed in crumpled newspaper. Inside that, there was a neat, blue-black automatic. It was surprisingly small, almost pretty, with a funny kind of metallic attachment at the end of the barrel. A silencer?

It fitted nicely into her palm. Looking up, she saw her reflection in the mirror-Camilla Steele, thirty (thirty!), in her best black cocktail dress, with a heavy gold necklace given her by a man whose name she could no longer remember, holding a firearm, no less deadly for being so small. The picture was so exactly right, as though all her life she had been needing a gun to complete her personality, that she doubled forward suddenly and retched into the basin.

There was a sound behind her. When she straightened and looked in the mirror again, she was still alone, but the door was swinging slightly.

Now, of course, she had to hurry. She thrust the gun in the handbag. Leaving the empty suitcase lying open on the floor, she went back to the busy concourse. A voice on the public address was clamoring about planes that were about to depart. One of her sudden impulses hit her. Perhaps she should take that flight, no matter where it was going. She had money. When it landed, she would hunt up a cocktail lounge and order a drink.

The announcement came again-a Pan-American plane headed somewhere or other.

She started for the Pan-Am ticket counter. She saw a woman talking excitedly to a uniformed guard. She swerved and went down into a big kitchen. She thought she heard footsteps behind her. A surprised face under a chefs hat looked around, and somebody shouted. At an open door, an Eastern Airlines food truck was being loaded from rolling carts.

“What are you-” a voice said, and she ran past the food truck and out onto the loading apron.

A power cart was blowing air into one of the engines of a big jet. A sudden exhaust spumed toward Camilla as the engine came alive. A truck carrying baggage bore down on her. Blinded by the lights, she leaped aside.

In an upstairs bedroom in an imitation Moorish apartment building in Coral Gables, a dark young man with pale green eyes, which seemed darker in photographs, moved the curtain a quarter of an inch and looked out carefully.

“Si. Son policias.”

There were several others in the room, including a girl. The young man at the window asked a slightly built teenager a question. The boy assented eagerly. The others fitted him out with a disfiguring set of front teeth, a false moustache and sunglasses. He emptied a glass of wine, went out to the street and sauntered north. Two detectives followed.

Soon afterward the young man and the others left the building by a rear door. They removed to another house some distance away. After making sure that they hadn’t been followed, they loaded two dozen Winchester sporting rifles into the trunk of a Pontiac convertible. The girl parked it two blocks away, checked twice to be sure it was locked, and walked back to the house.

The meeting was held in a conference room in City Hall.

The mayor of Miami was present with two of his aides. They remained silent. Will Gentry, Miami chief of police, had called the meeting. Peter Painter was there, representing the Miami Beach police. Abe Berger, the Secret Service agent charged with the protection of cabinet members, had flown in from Washington. General Matt Turner, of the U.S. Army, was sitting beside Michael Shayne.

Gentry opened the meeting, outlining the security situation as it had seemed that morning, and asked Shayne to take it from there.

There was a small flurry at the door and another man arrived. He was short and plump, with a nervous moustache which he dabbed at anxiously when he saw that everybody in the room was looking at him. “Am I late? Teddy Sparrow. I’m standing in for Mr. Devlin.”

Larry Devlin, a tough, competent ex-cop, commanded the International Protective Agency contingent at the International Airport, a uniformed force of thirty or forty private guards. Sparrow until recently had operated his own one-man private detective business in Miami. He had tried hard, but he was almost completely inept, and he had finally closed his office and gone to work at the airport. “Devlin said he’d be here,” Gentry said.

“He was called away, you might say. He’s in Oklahoma on private business. But he left me explicit instructions and I’m glad to report that the situation at International Airport is well in hand.”

He pulled out the chair next to General Turner, and the corner of the chair caught the general in the knee. Flustered, he apologized too profusely, and sat down. He laced his fingers, broke them apart and laced them again.

“Shayne’s going to fill us in on the background of this thing,” Gentry said. “Go ahead, Mike.”

“I’d like to ask what made Devlin take off for Oklahoma on such short notice,” Shayne said.

Sparrow looked startled. He tightened his necktie and looked around the table with an ingratiating smile.

“I find myself in pretty fast company, is all I have to say. I didn’t realize this was going to be on such a rarefied level.” He closed off his smile and looked serious. “I did promise Devlin before he left that I wouldn’t noise it around, but if he was here himself I think he’d give me the all-clear. It’s his son, Lawrence, Junior. He wired his father to come at once and bring six hundred dollars in cash, and not to say anything to the boy’s mother. And that indicates to me that it’s something embarrassing, but I more or less felt I had to leave it at that. I wish it hadn’t happened at just this juncture. But we’re a team out there, gentlemen. We finish each other’s sentences, so to speak. I’ll just ask myself what Larry Devlin would do in my shoes, and I don’t think I’ll go very far wrong. Every man on the regular force will be working tomorrow, plus twenty specials at double-time.”

“Do you have a number where Devlin can be reached?” Shayne said.

“He’s going to call me. We didn’t understand it was that much of an emergency.”

Shayne and Will Gentry exchanged a look. Gentry said calmly, “Continue, Mike.”

Shayne described Vega’s plan to disrupt the Galvez demonstration, and he played the tape Vega had given him. Parts of it were inaudible.

“I made a rough transcript,” Shayne said, “and you can pick up a copy before you leave. Now here’s a conversation I had with Vega a couple of hours ago. I have the man himself on tap in North Miami if anybody wants to talk to him.”

They listened closely. Abe Berger, the Secret Service man, shot Shayne a sharp look when Vega called what he had been persuaded to believe was a Washington number.

“You’re a sharpshooter, Mike.”

“Yeah. Now here’s the phone call I got about the assassination.”

On this hearing, it seemed to Shayne that the Latin accent was too careful to be real.

“He used a filter to change the pitch,” Abe Berger said slowly. “I’d better take it back and let the lab boys fool with it.”

“But it’s an obvious phony!” Peter Painter said waspishly. “I’m surprised you’re taking it so seriously. It’s supposed to distract our attention so they can hit us somewhere else.”

General Turner started to speak, and Painter said hastily, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t take every precaution. I can assure you that my Miami Beach organization is ready for anything short of a natural disaster. If these radicals think they’re going to outflank me, they’re in for a surprise. There’ll be some skulls cracked tomorrow, I can promise you that.”

“Which may be just what they want,” Shayne observed. “And I’m prepared to oblige them!”

The meeting broke up twenty minutes later. One important decision had been reached: General Turner had made four phone calls, in ascending order of importance, and a battalion of airborne infantry was promised for nine o’clock the following morning. Security precautions were to be intensified at the airport and the hotel. The assassination tip was to be kept quiet. The printing plant that had printed Vega’s leaflets had been fire-bombed earlier that evening, and the leaders of every militant Latin American organization in Miami were to be picked up and held on high bail until Eliot Crowther had completed his speech and started back.

Berger and Shayne left the room together. Teddy Sparrow, who had bolted to the corridor the minute the meeting was over, intercepted them at the elevators.

“Mike,” he said, patting his forehead with a folded square of Kleenex, “could I have a word with you, more or less in private?”

“Be with you in a minute, Abe.” He took his plump ex-colleague further down the corridor. “What is it, Teddy?”

“Well, listen, I didn’t anticipate getting thrown in there with the top brass. I used to hold my own pretty well when I had the investigator’s license, but I know what your regular cop thinks of people in protection agencies. Glorified night watchmen. Painter! He looks down his nose at anybody who didn’t pass their civil service exams. Never mind that. I wanted to ask what you think about that telegram Devlin got. Do you think there’s a chance it was a fake?”

“A very good chance, Teddy,” Shayne said. “Gentry’s checking on it.”

Sparrow patted his forehead. “And the deduction I make from that is that something’s definitely going to take place at the airport tomorrow, and they wanted to get Devlin out of town. Not so flattering to yours truly, but let that go. Damn it, I may not have that much experience in airport security, but I know the physical plant inside out, and if I say it myself, I have good rapport with the men. Who are not all dunces, by any manner of means.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Teddy,” Shayne said impatiently. “Can you get to the point?”

“The point is this. The army and Berger and so on are planning to bypass us. You may have noticed that whenever I made a suggestion, it was received with an amused little smile. Well, it’s dumb! It’s all very well, bringing in paratroops, but those boys have never been in Miami International, and they’ll need Seeing Eye dogs to lead them around. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting in everybody’s way out of ignorance of the situation, when I could be making a contribution. I’ll be up all night if I can manage to stay awake, which is a problem with me, and if there’s anything you think I ought to know, I hope you’ll call me.”

“I’m pretty far down the chain of command this time,” Shayne said.

“Now, Mike,” Sparrow said, smiling. “But that’s neither here nor there. Bear it in mind, and here’s what I really wanted to tell you. Painter was sort of pooh-poohing that phone call you got, the voice from nowhere that said the potential assassin was a female. Something happened at the airport tonight, a peculiar little episode on the face of it, and I want to get your opinion. A lady went into the rest room on the main concourse. I can get you the time if you think it’s important. I made a note of it. About nine. As she told me the story, somebody was being sick into a washbowl. Another lady, naturally, that goes without saying. And she had a gun in her hand.”

Shayne frowned. “Why didn’t you bring this up at the meeting?”

“Mike, after the way Painter was cutting me down I didn’t feel like opening my mouth. And nothing came of it. I investigated myself. By the time I got down from my office there was nobody there. It was kind of touchy going into a lavatory for the opposite sex, but I gritted my teeth and went in. Right in the middle of the floor was this empty suitcase. I say empty. There were some crumpled-up pieces of The New York Times inside it, but nothing else. The flight tag was still on the handle. I checked that immediately. It was a New York flight and it came in at four o’clock this afternoon.”

“Did you get a description of the woman?”

“Absolutely. That was the first question I asked, but she was leaning over the basin, and of course the view was definitely from the rear. The impression my informant got was that she was kind of middle-aged, and maybe a Negro.”

Shayne considered for a moment. “Tell Will Gentry right away. He’ll want to talk with your witness and check the flight records. If she came in at four o’clock, why was she still hanging around your terminal at nine? Maybe the airline lost her suitcase. The baggage people might remember her.”

“Oh, my God,” Sparrow said, his hands flying. “The one thing I neglected to do when I interrogated that woman was take her name. I mean, I took down her verbatim statement and I thought that was adequate. I didn’t know anything about a possible assassination at the time.”

“We’ll have to work with what we have,” Shayne said, patiently. “She said a gun. Does that mean a handgun?”

“A pistol. Definitely not a rifle or anything.”

Will Gentry appeared with General Turner. Shayne left them conferring with Sparrow, who was having another nervous attack, smiling too much and continuing to pat at his forehead.

Berger and Shayne found a booth in a dim bar two blocks from City Hall. After ordering drinks Shayne told the Secret Service man about Sparrow’s account of the woman who had been seen in the ladies’ room with a gun in her hand. Berger listened skeptically, reserving judgment.

“How do you evaluate it, Mike?”

“I used Teddy a number of times when he had a private detective’s license. He’s not a complete fool. I admit I’d feel better if Devlin was here. He’s a known quantity. But Teddy can surprise you at times.”

Their drinks arrived. Shayne looked down into his cognac without drinking.

“I still can’t believe Gil Ruiz is here in Miami in person. But even if he’s masterminding it from a distance, we have to expect a certain amount of razzle-dazzle. I think Painter may have been partly right. Isn’t it one of the big theories that to win in guerrilla warfare you fake in one place, and come in somewhere else, where nobody’s expecting you?”

“That’s Chapter One. It’s like a football offense. You try to hide what you’re doing until the defense is committed.”

“OK. Somebody sent a telegram that decoyed Devlin out of town, leaving airport protection in the hands of Teddy Sparrow. So we concentrate on the airport. But Crowther won’t be using the terminal tomorrow. He’ll transfer to a helicopter on one of the taxi-strips. Anybody who wants to take a shot at him out there will have to use a rifle. This woman in the ladies’ room had a pistol. The only place the public will get close enough to use a handgun will be at the hotel.”

“Unless that’s the fake,” Berger said. “That whole scene sounds a little peculiar. Let’s see.” He ticked off the possibilities. “Either Sparrow’s witness was lying and there wasn’t any woman, or she had something else in her hand that only looked like a gun. Or she was really there, and really had a gun, but the scene was staged. Or she was really there and the scene wasn’t staged, in which case we’re dealing with a kook, and not a political assassin.”

Shayne drank half his cognac. “Don’t qualify it when you talk to Crowther. Tell him it’s a real woman with a real gun. It may persuade him to stay home.”

“I’ll try. But he’s convinced that if he doesn’t keep this date, he’s through in politics, and he could be right.”

“Do you think there’s a chance he leaked that story about the U.S. Metals retainer?”

“Why would he do that?” Berger said, surprised. “It was a slam. He’s known as a civil-rights man-it’s going to hurt him with the liberals.”

“Unless he’s looking for new backing,” Shayne said. “It costs money to run for senator. It’s just the kind of tricky move he’s famous for. He hasn’t had much exposure on the home screen lately, and from what I know about Crowther, I’m sure it’s been bothering him. This U.S. Metals story is what’s bringing out the demonstrators tomorrow. The more excitement, the bigger the headlines.”

“True,” Berger said doubtfully, “but he doesn’t go out of his way to stir up trouble. One of the few things I like about him, he’s a coward.”

When Shayne laughed, Berger said seriously, “That’s a compliment. A little realistic cowardice is a fine trait in an elected official. It’s the hunters and shooters, who don’t know what it means to be afraid, who drive me crazy. If he didn’t think it was vital to be here-and I don’t mean just important, I mean vital-he’d cancel like a shot. When I told him you’d been tipped off to an assassination, I really thought he’d turn white and call in his speech-writers to draft a statement of why, after all, it was impossible for Attorney General Crowther to go to Miami. It jarred him, but not much. He lit a cigarette, and his hand was hardly shaking at all.”

Shayne tapped his glass thoughtfully. “He usually follows your suggestions?”

“Always, Mike, he’s always been very docile. If I tell him to go in the back way he may gripe about it-they all do-but he goes in the back way. He takes his hate mail seriously. I remember once-” His eyes narrowed. “You had something to do with the Felix Steele case, didn’t you?”

“Not officially, and too late to change the outcome.”

“It’s a funny thing, but the first person I thought of when I listened to that tape you played us was Steele’s wife, I forget her first name.”

“Camilla.”

“Does she still live in Miami? She used to write Crowther regularly, and if you’re interested in threatening letters, hers were gems. I had a long talk with her myself, and I came to the conclusion that she didn’t really mean what she said. But Crowther thought she meant it. He got her a job, to give her something to think about. We had her arrested briefly, and I think the letters finally stopped. Anyhow they didn’t get as far as me. It’s something I’ll have to check.” He looked at the time. “I’m getting an eleven o’clock flight back, but I’d better phone him before he goes to bed. Conceivably the mysterious lady with the gun will convince him that Miami isn’t healthy. Order me another drink. It’s on the government.”

Catching the waiter’s eye, Shayne made a swirling gesture for another round. Something Berger had said bothered him. He returned to the start of the conversation and followed it through again, ending with the same dissatisfied feeling. He put out his cigarette, crumpling it viciously, and started over once more.

Berger returned, and took the top off his Scotch before saying anything.

“Here’s the current theory, and it’s a wild one. The Steele woman is still writing Crowther, mailing her letters from different cities and using words cut out of newspapers. They aren’t signed, but there’s something about the tone. A sort of playfulness, he says. Very macabre, apparently. He didn’t want to get her in any more trouble because of everything she’s been through, that’s why he didn’t report it. Translated out of Crowtherese, that means he didn’t think the evidence was good enough to get a conviction.”

“How current is this?”

“Very. The last one was two days ago, postmarked Miami. It was in a kind of elementary Spanish. Now I’m going to tell you a secret, Mike. Last month Jenkinson, the Supreme Court Justice, was checking his climbing equipment before he went off to climb some damn South American mountain. One of his nylon ropes snapped under a fifty-pound pull. He turned it over to us for analysis. On either side of the break, the strands had been weakened by acid.”

“What’s the connection?”

“Wait a minute. He thought it might have something to do with his antisegregation opinions, and that worried Crowther because he’d argued some of those cases for the government. Oddly enough, Jenkinson denied the last application for a stay of execution in the Steele case. Here’s Crowther’s notion. Maybe this madwoman plans to eliminate, one by one, everybody who had a part in her husband’s death. Unquote. He feels it’s his duty to force her hand and possibly forestall a number of other killings. So he’s coming. No change in plans.”

He drank angrily. “That sabotaged rope was like the anonymous letters-playful. Alpinists are careful people. Jenkinson tests everything very carefully before he starts up a mountain, and whoever weakened that rope probably knew it. It’s as though she wants to do something to notify her old enemies that she’s still around, still thinking about them. What if Sparrow’s eyewitness was actually Camilla? A mild hoax, and of course we all panicked. I don’t know. I expect she’ll be hard to find. That would be part of the joke. But find her, Mike. If Teddy can identify her we’ll get her committed.”

“I always thought she was quite a woman,” Shayne said. “So did I when I met her. What difference does that make?”