Six Seconds to Kill

CHAPTER 10

Will Gentry, in his office in police headquarters on NW 11th Street, opened a can of ginger ale and laid out a game of solitaire. At this stage in the evening, there was nothing to do but conserve energy, and wait for something to happen.

Shayne brought Paul London in with a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. London had several ideas about where Camilla might be spending the night.

Leaving them conferring, Shayne looked up the phone number of Dr. Irving Miller, the psychiatrist whose unpaid bill for $950 Shayne had found on Camilla’s bureau. An answering service gave him another number, where the doctor was spending the evening. Twenty minutes later, Shayne dropped off the Venetian Causeway onto one of the Venetian Islands and found the house, an expensive modern dwelling belonging to another psychiatrist. Most of the guests that evening drove Cadillacs, Shayne noted. After giving a maid his name and telling her that he wanted to talk to Dr. Miller, he walked around the house to a terrace overlooking the bay. The moon was in its final quarter.

Dr. Miller proved to be a sharp-nosed, nearsighted man in a white dinner jacket. He had been drinking. For obvious professional reasons, he explained to Shayne, he found it impossible to discuss his patients, ever. Shayne told him bluntly that this particular patient was involved, in some unexplained fashion, in a conspiracy to assassinate a high government official, and unless he discussed her now, he would find himself discussing her in front of a grand jury.

Dr. Miller’s breath came out as though Shayne had hit him in the stomach. He threw his cigar into the bay and sat down on the flagstone railing. Shayne explained the situation. Presently Dr. Miller went back into the house and returned with drinks. His training had conditioned him to attach labels to people, to divide them into categories according to the symptoms they had in common, but behind the bristling manner and professional jargon, Shayne thought he saw concern and a genuine liking for Camilla as a human being. They talked for more than an hour.

From there Shayne continued to Miami Beach.

At the St. Albans, as he expected, he found Johnny Cheyfitz, the head security officer, awake and worrying. He was glad to get an outsider’s opinion of the security arrangements, which had been worked out jointly with Peter Painter and the army, and okayed by Berger before he flew back to Washington. Cheyfitz had an uneasy feeling that they had overlooked something. Though it was no longer really his responsibility, he didn’t want any blood to be shed in his hotel.

“That’s the one thing you can’t get out of carpets,” he said. “You have to take them up and burn them.”

He turned on all the lights on the ballroom floor. After a time Shayne told him to go to bed. But if Cheyfitz didn’t mind, Mike would hang around a little longer.

“Glad to have somebody else involved, Mike. This I’m not possessive about.”

He said good night. Soon afterward a room service waiter brought up a bottle of cognac, a glass and a pitcher of ice water.

“Compliments of Mr. Cheyfitz.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Shayne said absently, dropping a bill onto the tray.

He poured a slug of cognac and went on prowling about the ballroom and the corridor between the ballroom and the elevators. There was a ten-foot gap between the raised dais and the nearest tables. Secret Service men would line up shoulder to shoulder in the interval, facing outward. Shayne checked the sight-lines from the front tables and the low television platform, which was placed at the ballroom entrance, where the cameras could cover Crowther’s arrival, and then swivel around to follow him to his place on the dais.

Half an hour later, Shayne called the Three Deuces, where he had told Tim Rourke to wait.

“Hey, Mike,” Rourke said genially, “what happened? I’m three quarters smashed. I’ve been drinking bar bourbon and whispering to a chick who pretends I’m slurring my words so she can’t understand me. She understands me, all right. I just watched the news. This is a hell of a story, and do you realize I don’t know anything more about it than I saw on that tiny screen? I shouldn’t be sitting here. I ought to be out talking to people.”

Shayne told him to leave his drink on the bar, say good night to the girl, and come to the eighth floor of the St. Albans, where he would find Shayne filling in the chinks in a story that could be one of the biggest of Rourke’s career. Rourke clicked off. Shayne then signaled for the switchboard girl and asked for Cheyfitz.

When the security man answered, Shayne apologized for disturbing him again.

“Tomorrow night I’ll sleep,” Cheyfitz said. “Or maybe I won’t, depending on what happens tomorrow morning.”

“Do you happen to know if Crowther’s been in Miami Beach lately?”

“Last week, Mike. He stayed here at the St. A. That was before all the noise in the papers, and there was absolutely no fuss or bother. It was billed as a vacation, but I know they did some conferring about the ceremony tomorrow. He went in the pool like anybody else, and nobody took any shots at him.”

Shayne thanked him and hung up. Tim Rourke, coming into the ballroom some time later, found him sitting on the dais in the master of ceremonies’ chair, his heels on the table, swirling cognac. For what must have been the tenth time, he was rearranging his meager supply of hard facts. Again they dropped into the same pattern.

“What are you doing, Mike?” his friend demanded. “Thinking? This is no time for thinking, man. It’s a time for action.”

Shayne waved his glass. “I see a bulge in your pocket. You brought a bottle. Sit down for a minute.”

Rourke was tall, skinny, always sloppily dressed. At the moment he was in serious need of a haircut. His offhand manner concealed a quick intelligence and a consuming curiosity that had made him one of the top reporters in the country.

He took a pint of bourbon out of one pocket, a highball glass containing two ice cubes out of the other. He poured whiskey over the ice and pulled out a chair.

“What’s your opinion of Eliot Crowther?” Shayne said abruptly.

Rourke sat down and drank. “What kind of question is that, at this time of night? You know my opinion of Crowther. I think he’s a bum.”

“Be more specific. Pretend you’re writing his obit, and the paper is letting you be completely honest for once.”

“What is this, a Rorschach test? An obit of Eliot Crowther-that’s a dream assignment. All right, I’ll play the game.”

He considered. “Crowther. A phony, a bigmouth. Nobody with any political sophistication would trust him to mail a letter.”

Shayne continued to look at him hard, and Rourke now said, more seriously, “Let’s assume there’s some hidden meaning in this somewhere. While Crowther lived he was one of the luckiest bastards in American politics. As tricky as they come, but because of his thatch of white hair and Benjamin Franklin glasses he didn’t look tricky. A conniver. He’d do any goddamn thing in the world if he thought it would help his political career, and if he thought he could get away with it. Self-confident. Ambitious. My God, was he ambitious. If he hadn’t been a Protestant he would have wanted to be Pope, and if the College of Cardinals had offered him the job, he would have switched. Some people thought he was brainy. I didn’t. He failed his bar exams twice, and if you really looked into it, I think you might find that somebody was standing in for him the time he passed. Of course I have a reputation for cynicism… Is this the kind of thing you’re anxious to get?”

“Go on,” Shayne said, scraping his chin with a thumbnail.

“Now consider the matter of style. His courtroom technique was greatly admired. All his effects were carefully staged, and my personal feeling was that he overdid it a little. But juries hardly ever thought so. He must have been a pretty good politician because until the day of his death he never lost an election. The odd thing is that I literally don’t know one single person who ever voted for him.”

“That’s the obituary,” Shayne said, still scraping his chin. “What do you think of him as a man?”

“You mean how does he perform in the sack? He still has his original wife, and I’ve never heard about any chicks on the side.”

“I’m thinking about how he’d stand up under pressure. Under threats.”

Rourke said slowly, “He’s a mean cat to have as an enemy. I wrote a piece once he didn’t like-it was about the Felix Steele case, remember-and he sent one of his Mafiosi to sniff around the paper and see if he could get me fired. Certain old charges against me were exhumed. Luckily the publisher knew about them and had already forgiven me.”

“Abe Berger says he worries about being assassinated. Anonymous letters make him shiver and shake.”

“Yeah?” Rourke said, interested. “Then why doesn’t he stay in Washington tomorrow? This medal isn’t a very high-priority thing.”

“That’s one of the things we’ve been wondering,” Shayne said. “The official reason is that he can’t afford to be intimidated by a Miami dentist. Unofficially, he’s hoping to flush out a crazy who may or may not be trying to murder a Supreme Court Justice, among other people, including Crowther himself.”

Rourke’s head shot forward at the end of his long neck. “More on that, please.”

Shayne described the acid-weakened climbing rope, and Crowther’s theory on why it had happened. Rourke listened intently.

“You don’t think Camilla did it?”

“No,” Shayne said. “I think Crowther did it himself.”

Rourke stood up, running his fingers through his tangled hair. He walked to the end of the dais and came back. “Mike, this man is attorney general of the United States.”

“And also, as you pointed out, a conniver, a frustrated ham actor. He’s mean and ambitious, and on top of that, scared. He hasn’t been on page one for months. How did this Freedom Medal come up in the first place?”

“It’s a money-raising lunch, and the medal’s just a gimmick. One of Crowther’s people probably dropped a hint that he was available.”

“And the next step was to leak the news that his law firm is on retainer from U.S. Metals.”

Rourke was skeptical. “Mike, that isn’t all plus.”

“It depends on his next move. He’s been mentioned for the Senate, and he may want the big political contributors to realize that he’s safe, in spite of his civil-liberties background. It guarantees him a nationwide news story. Defying potential demonstrators and ignoring threats on his life, fearless Eliot Crowther-you’d write it that way yourself.”

Rourke snapped his fingers silently. “If we could prove it, Mike-”

“We can’t,” Shayne said. “There’s more, and I know in advance that some of this you’re not going to believe. Camilla Steele has been writing him letters over the years, threatening to kill him in various gruesome ways. Half serious and half joking, and according to Berger they got under his skin. He got her an interesting job. He sent Berger down to lean on her. They had her arrested. She went right on writing the letters. The point is, she’s not exactly crazy. She had a real grievance and Crowther knows it. He got plenty of mileage out of that Felix Steele conviction. I doubt if he felt much remorse when the other confession came in.”

“Somehow I doubt it, too.”

“Nevertheless, it must have set up a few vibrations. He knew he deserved something, if only to be scared by an occasional threatening letter. He’d look silly if he tried to lock her away for good. But she’s been getting more and more unstable, and I have an idea the letters have been getting wilder and more convincing. She’s drinking and dropping pills, and there’s always an outside chance, he must think, that someday she’ll walk up out of a crowd with a gun-”

“Mike!” Rourke poured more whiskey and drank it excitedly. “Are you saying that Crowther set up this assassination himself?”

Shayne corrected him. “Not assassination. Attempted assassination. If he’s supplying the gun he can make sure it’s loaded with blanks.”

Rourke gave an awed whistle. “Let me think about this for a minute.”

“I talked to her boyfriend and her psychiatrist. She’s being treated for recurrent depressions. She tried to kill herself at least twice, and nearly succeeded. Here’s the hypothetical question. If somebody found out about those letters, if this person wanted to kill Crowther himself but was afraid to, if he called Camilla and asked her if she was just kicking the idea around or would she go through with it if somebody else made the arrangements? All right. Both the doctor and the guy think she’d probably say yes.”

“You don’t happen to have those calls on tape?”

“No, I’m guessing. It’s my guess that he’d use a trace of a Spanish accent, to tie it in with the Latin American demonstrations.”

Rourke shook his head decisively. “The trouble is, everything would have to work out exactly right, and how often does that happen? After he gave her the gun she wouldn’t be under his control.”

“Back off a step, Tim. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s really incredibly simple. I think we’ll find that Crowther and Justice Jenkinson know each other socially. At some point in the last few months he located Jenkinson’s climbing gear and switched ropes. After that, it was a matter of two or three phone calls. He couldn’t possibly lose. If she said no, he could stop worrying about the letters. If she agreed, and then found that she couldn’t go through with it after all, she’d be mad at herself, and the next time she tried suicide she’d make sure nobody was around to bring her back.”

“And if she actually did take out the gun and fired-”

“Sure. She’d miss. She’s been drinking heavily. There’s a chance she never handled a gun before in her life. Nobody’ll be surprised if she misses the target with all her shots, even at close range. Then one of two things can happen. Everybody’s going to be very tense and gun-shy. The place will be crawling with cops and Secret Service people. They’ve been warned that an assassin is around somewhere. Suddenly a wild-eyed woman starts banging away with a revolver. Their guns are going to jump into their hands, and it’s a fairly safe bet that one or two will go off.”

Rourke repeated his long whistle. “Son of a bitch. Tricky, all right, even for Crowther.”

“And if she lives through it, she’ll get a long jolt in jail or end up in a hospital for the criminally insane. Either way, she’ll be out of his hair.”

“Now wait. Wait. What if she doesn’t get off all the shots, and we find a couple of blank rounds in her gun?”

“In Crowther’s shoes, in one of the early phone calls I’d tell her to keep firing till the gun was empty. Five shots are better than one, and so on. I’d keep drumming it into her until I was sure she understood it.”

“Mike, it’s too fantastic to believe, but I’m almost beginning to believe it. If it worked, it would make his career. He’s important enough to demonstrate against. He’s important enough to try to kill. The publicity! My God, it would go on for weeks. The best kind of publicity. There was a story once about how he choked when he was flying somewhere and one of the engines caught fire. He went down on his knees and prayed. It hurt him politically. Everybody thought it was a little excessive, a little chicken. This would blot that all out. A cool head in a crisis. And why the hell wouldn’t he be cool, if he knew there weren’t any real bullets in the gun? Mike, it could make him President! What a story, what a story.”

“Are you convinced?”

“I didn’t say that. I said what a story. Because what’s it based on? A long series of guesses.”

“Up to a point. He’s prosecuted enough murder cases to know the importance of physical evidence. There’s one gap in the story the way it stands. If she fired five live rounds and missed with all five, what happened to the slugs?”

Rourke looked thoughtful. “That would certainly be asked. They couldn’t all fly out an open window.”

Shayne stood up decisively. Leaving the dais, he strode to the television platform.

“I may need your testimony, Tim, so pay close attention. Publicity is the key to this. You know he’d make sure the cameras were pointed the right way. All three networks are going to be here tomorrow. After he’s seated and while he’s speaking he’ll get full security coverage, and she wouldn’t be able to shoot more than once or twice. For Crowther’s purposes, the best time for the shooting to take place would be during the first minute or two after he gets off the elevator. A crowd will be milling around. He’ll want to be looking straight at the cameras when it happens, so people can see how calm and unruffled he is. That means the assassin ought to be standing just about here.”

He indicated a spot in the corridor, outside the arched entrance to the ballroom. There was a cigarette-shaped burn in the carpet, possibly put there as a marker. The burn pointed toward the elevators.

Rourke’s undernourished frame was coiled forward. “Goddamn it, Mike, you mean you’ve found some bullet holes?”

“Two,” Shayne said. “There may be others, but two would be enough. He wouldn’t want to have more holes than shots. If she fires twice and the unfired rounds turn out to be blanks, whoever loaded the gun made a mistake, that’s all. Here’s the line of fire.”

He extended his arm, an imaginary gun in his hand. Rourke followed the line down the corridor. Beyond the elevators, the corridor turned sharply. He examined the wall at the turn.

“Hell, I don’t see anything.”

“She fired high.”

Rourke peered up doubtfully. “I see a couple of black dots-”

Shayne brought him a chair from the ballroom. “Look closer.”

Rourke clambered up on the chair and straightened gingerly. The plaster was painted a dull green. The two holes were several inches apart, a foot or so below the molding. Shayne opened his pocket knife and passed it up to him.

“Dig one of them out.”

Rourke twisted the point of the knife in the hole. A moment later he stepped down with a bullet in his hand.

“There’s a time warp here. The gun that fired this bullet isn’t scheduled to go off till tomorrow morning. Mike, I’d say this is conclusive. But dear God, it’s extraordinary! On the basis of a goofy…”

He looked at his friend curiously. “Unless you put it there yourself?”

“That’s a dumb suggestion.”

“It’s just so goddamned extraordinary! On the basis of a goofy theory you decide there are going to be two bullet holes in a wall seventy-five feet away, nine feet from the floor, and sure enough, there they are.”

Shayne said impatiently, “There’s only one place she could stand so the TV cameras could get Crowther’s expression. Bullets travel in a straight line.”

“I suppose this slug was fired by the same gun she’ll be using tomorrow?”

“I think so. I also think there’ll be a silencer on it. I agree it’s extraordinary. That doesn’t mean it was especially hard to arrange. Crowther stayed in this hotel last week. Anybody can get off the elevator at this floor and look around. After one or two in the morning he’d have the place to himself. Again, there was no risk. No risk at all. If the rest of the scheme didn’t pan out, nobody would notice the holes until the next time the place is painted.”

“Well, it’s fantastic.”

Rourke tossed the bullet in the air and caught it as it came down. Shayne asked to see it.

“Twenty-five caliber,” he said. “That closes another loophole. It’s hard to buy twenty-five caliber ammunition in this country. If she fired the gun by accident, she couldn’t reload it.”

“Fantastic,” Rourke said again. “And we’d better call a meeting right away, because I can name a few people you won’t be able to convince in a hurry. Peter Painter, for one.”

“I don’t intend to tell Painter.”

Rourke went back to the ballroom, where he headed for the whiskey bottle. He replenished his glass and sat down.

“Now I want to see if I really heard that. You don’t intend to tell Painter?”

Shayne held the cognac bottle to the light to check the level, and poured himself another drink.

“I don’t think we’ll find Camilla Steele tonight. Before Crowther shows up tomorrow, we can clear the public out of the corridor and saturate it with plainclothesmen. As soon as Camilla appears, we grab her before she can fire. The gun will be loaded with blanks, but she’ll get the publicity as a potential assassin, and probably a hospital commitment. How many people will believe that Crowther arranged it? I’m willing to make a statement, but would your editor be willing to print it?”

“Hmm,” Rourke said. “Those bullet holes. But if she’s really off her squash, maybe she did that herself, to make us think that Crowther-” He stopped. “In fact, Mike, while we’re talking about possibilities, isn’t that one? She sneaked in late one night, put the holes in the wall, sent herself the gun, and then tomorrow-wait a minute till I work this out-some smart head like Mike Shayne would find the holes and spread the wild tale that Crowther put them there. His career would be damaged, and she wouldn’t go to jail for murder.”

Shayne was shaking his head.

“A guy named Paul London has been following her for a few days, and she wasn’t in New York this morning checking a suitcase on a Miami flight. That could have been worked. But the main thing that’s wrong with the idea is that it doesn’t fit her condition. She’s not a politician and a manipulator, like Crowther. This is a Crowther type of thing. Her doctor has been seeing her three times a week for a year. He says she isn’t capable of carrying out anything complicated alone. She needs support all the way.”

Rourke objected, “I know psychiatrists who’ve made some really lousy diagnoses.”

“So do I, but this guy impresses me. He likes her and he’s worrying about her. He won’t make any prediction about her future, except that it can go either way. If something good happens, he thinks she could get well in a hurry. But if she has a setback at this point, if something she’s been counting on falls through, she’s gone. Think about it. She worked herself up to kill somebody, and the damn gun was loaded with blanks. She’ll realize that Crowther tricked her, made a fool out of her. In psychiatric language, she’s suffering from a poor self-image, and this would reinforce it. Suicide or permanent depression. That’s why I said Crowther can’t lose.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, let’s break it up. Tell him you found a couple of inconspicuous little holes in the plaster on the eighth floor of the St. Albans. He’ll call everything off. She can’t shoot him if he isn’t here.”

“He wouldn’t take a phone call from me.”

“Tell Abe Berger and let him pass it on. It would be a great moment for Abe.”

“No, I don’t think I’ll bother either of them. Here’s the scene as I see it. She must have a ticket to the luncheon under a different name. That part of the corridor, in front of the cameras, will be jammed with people. As Crowther comes out of the elevator she fires four or five shots. They all miss, but never mind, she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she actually pulled the trigger.”

“She’ll run a risk of being shot herself.”

“I’m going to be there. I know exactly where she’ll be, and what to watch for. I’ll be in front of Crowther, and I’ll tackle her the second she fires. There’s a risk either way. And then we can report digging a bullet out of the wall the night before. If Camilla planned it herself, she wouldn’t do any actual shooting. Do you see that point? To prove it was a fake, to be able to blame Crowther for setting it up, there would have to be holes in the wall even though no shots were fired.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Well, we’ve got the rest of the night. My scenario ends with Crowther being kicked out of the cabinet, Camilla throwing away her sleeping pills. Happy ending. We all congratulate each other.”

“So you’re going to let it happen?”

“That’s right. I’m going to let it happen.”

Rourke gave him a direct look. “You’re not exactly impartial on the subject of Crowther, are you, Mike?”

“I have no interest whatever in saving his skin,” Shayne said. “Either his political skin or his actual skin.”