Brett Halliday

Blue Murder

CHAPTER 1

Gretchen Tucker, an elegant thin-nosed blonde wearing glasses, very short shorts and a thin sleeveless top, turned out the projection-room lights, and the screening began.

This was a rough cut of scenes shot over the weekend, and the transition between shots was sometimes jarring. They were working against a deadline, attempting to shoot and assemble a four-reel feature in fourteen days. There were only two of them in the room, Gretchen and Armand Baruch, the director and producer, a heavily bearded young man wearing a striped Pakistani robe and sandals. He had extremely dark skin and an intentness when he was working that gave him the look of a mullah who had spent too much time alone in the desert.

He was murmuring instructions to himself into a tape recorder as he watched the action, a medium shot of an attractive blond girl approaching a closed office door. She smoothed her eyebrows and tucked in her blouse more securely, accentuating her breasts. She started to knock, changed her mind and walked in.

Gretchen was playing idly with the hair at the nape of Baruch’s neck. “The suspense is terrific. What’s going to happen now?”

“Suspense is our big problem,” Baruch said gloomily. “Every fool in the audience knows what’s going to happen. The only question is with how many people.”

On the screen, a short pompous-looking man behind a big desk looked up, annoyed. He was smoking a cigarette with an anticancer mouthpiece, and he was obviously very busy. It was also obvious that this was one visitor he was glad to be interrupted by.

“A pleasant surprise,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you knew the way.”

“I was shopping,” she said shyly. “I know this is a little unconventional, but I wanted to tell you that I saw you last night on Johnny Carson, and I thought you were super.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Relieved. I thought I muffed a few questions.”

“Oh, no! You made the rest of them look like jerks. So smooth. So — well—” defiantly — “sexy! And I’ve been having second thoughts about — you know. I shouldn’t have laughed. Will you forgive me?”

“My dear, you’re lovely. Of course I forgive you.”

She was playing with the buttons of her blouse. “And will you let me make it up to you?”

“Here? Now?” He loosened his neck inside his collar. “That would be… interesting.”

“May I confess something? I have this thing for fat people. I love those little folds and creases. I’ve been trying to get over it, and that’s why I laughed when—”

He stood up. “If you like fatties, this is your lucky day.”

“Groovy,” she said bravely.

“I thought I repelled you.”

“Definitely not!”

He switched on his intercom and told his secretary not to disturb him. Old hands in the audience would know, of course, that presently the secretary would forget his instructions and bring in something for him to sign. And after a certain amount of hemming and hawing, she would be asked to join them.

“He really is… rather large, isn’t he?” Gretchen murmured.

“That’s how he gets jobs.”

The fat little man continued to smoke, his cigarette cocked at a jaunty angle. His lovely visitor closed with him, and the camera moved in. She was still wearing her glasses, and her face was nearly hidden by her mass of fair hair. All that showed clearly in the shot were her mouth and tongue.

In spite of a few recent successes, Baruch still ran a marginal operation, cobbling his pictures together with promises and ingenuity and very little cash. The projection room was considered to be air-conditioned, but the equipment functioned only sporadically and never really well. The nudity on the screen was contagious. Gretchen took off her top and used it to wipe the sweat from her arms and shoulders.

“When my dear husband sees this,” she said, “he’s going to hit the ceiling and go right on through.”

“We hope so, don’t we? That’s it for now. Get the lights.”

When the lights came on he talked into the tape recorder for another moment while she watched, smiling.

“You’re a sort of genius, you know that, Armand? You do it so gaily. It’s the way sex ought to be and so seldom is.”

He was pleased. “That’s my aim, to put back the romance. But I can’t move too fast, because I’m not sure the market is ready for it. Come on, we’ve got another scene to shoot.”

Peter Fisher, feeling like a kid playing hide-and-seek, crept under a bush that was heavy with some kind of white flowers, giving off a powerful cloying fragrance. All he’d been told to do was watch the house. But when the uproar started inside, he thought it would be a sound idea to sneak across the yard and find out what was going on.

As soon as he stepped onto private property, he began regretting the decision. He was on one of the pill-shaped islands straddling the Venetian Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. It was a quiet neighborhood, a quiet night. No cars had gone by for some time. But what if one of these quiet neighbors took it into his head to walk his dog? And saw a furtive figure, with heavily muscled shoulders, creeping across the grass, obviously about to commit some felonious act? People in houses with eight bedrooms and three baths kept on cordial terms with the local fuzz, giving them whiskey at Christmas and writing handsome checks to the Police Athletic League. Peter had been out of jail for less than three weeks, and his hair had hardly grown out enough to take a part. He had promised to stay straight, and his parole officer would be very disappointed to hear of this backsliding.

He listened carefully, hearing nothing but the banging of his own pulse. He left the semisecurity of the bush and ran in a half crouch across the open lawn.

He felt less conspicuous among the low shrubs screening the cinder-block foundation. Several windows were lighted. He looked into an empty kitchen. A dog was barking angrily inside the house, causing the sensitive skin at the back of Peter’s skull to wrinkle. Somebody yelled at the dog and the barking stopped.

Peter was trying to talk himself into moving to the next window. The blind there had jammed before it was all the way down, and a thin strip of light showed at the bottom. Should he or shouldn’t he? The truth was, he didn’t give a damn about his parole officer, who was hopelessly square. You couldn’t allow these grubby bureaucrats to organize your life. There was a nice bit of money involved, in the low six figures, as the saying went, and he thought he saw a way of picking off most of this for himself. Admittedly, it couldn’t be done without a little coarseness and brutality, and was he capable of it? He couldn’t be sure until the time came.

It would be dangerous, of course — dangerous as all hell. The man he had followed here, Frankie Capp, believed in violent solutions to even the simplest problems — that was his reputation. If he caught a peeper, he wouldn’t bother the police with it; he would handle it himself, using something lethal like both barrels of a 20-gauge shotgun. Peter’s lifetime policy, in jail and out, had been to ignore the Capps, to assume that sooner or later, like the dinosaur and the passenger pigeon, they would die out. Common sense told him to return quietly to his car and face the fact that he was unlikely ever to have any more money in his pocket than he had now, fifty or sixty lousy bucks.

But when he heard a faint scream, like the cry of a bird, he stepped into the moonlight without any further debate. Going to the lighted window, he went down on one knee and peered in.

A chair lay on its back on a white carpet. Shifting his angle, he saw a woman’s foot, wearing a high-heeled shoe. The rest of her body was hidden by a long couch.

Capp walked into view, a short dark man in his early fifties, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, a hairpiece that had cost him so much money it looked nearly real. Bushy white sideburns framed his face. He had a good tan, and he wore three rings.

He looked down at the woman and lit a cigar, prodded her with his foot and said something. The house was sealed, with double panes in the windows. Peter heard the sound of Capp’s voice, but couldn’t break it into words.

Capp stooped, pulled the woman forward and threw her roughly onto the couch.

Her head rolled. She seemed only partially aware of what was happening. There was blood on her forehead. She was wearing tight yellow slacks and, like the man standing over her, considerable jewelry. Her unconfined breasts moved inside her buttoned sweater. All the lines of her body were good. This was the kind of female convicts like to pretend they have waiting for them outside.

Stooping again, Capp picked up a flat can marked with a green stripe. Peter’s grip on the windowsill tightened. He was glad now that he had found the courage to look. If that was the Domestic Relations negative, what in God’s name was it doing here? Capp wasn’t even supposed to know it existed. He didn’t have the delicate touch to handle something like this.

Inside, the woman on the couch proved to be less stunned than she seemed. As Capp stepped toward her, she managed to get her hands on a whiskey bottle. She swung it at his groin, and it would have done serious damage if the blow had landed. He doubled forward, covering himself, and the bottle smashed his watch. She brought it around again, more of a push than a blow. It chunked against his head, doing little except to disarrange his hairpiece. Throwing the bottle at him, she ran to the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace overlooking the bay. She fumbled with the unfamiliar latch while he recovered. The door started to move, but he caught her before she was through.

Peter heard: “You stinking bitch, what are you trying to work on me here?”

“Frankie, I had this nutty idea. Let me tell you about it, you’ll love it.”

He hit her. His rings plowed two furrows across her cheek. He had the front of her sweater in his other fist. Continuing to slap her, first with the back of his hand, then with the palm, he walked her into a wall.

“Yeah, let’s talk, and talk fast. I want the whole thing, all the whys and the hows.”

“I noticed something funny about the bed, Frankie! I’ve always had this terrible curiosity. Please don’t. When I found all those film cans, this brainstorm hit me! Money, money. Umm. But I wouldn’t do anything behind your back! I’m greedy but I’m not dumb, not that dumb.”

When he let her go she moved to put the couch between them. He rubbed his fingertips together, then settled his hairpiece more securely with both hands.

“You could have deballed me with that bottle, you know that?”

“Jesus, I’m sorry! You had that look in your eye. I thought you were going to massacre me.”

“How do I look now?”

“Not much better!”

He walked past and closed the heavy glass door, after which he drew the drapes so they couldn’t be seen by anyone on a passing boat. She didn’t like this and watched him warily, her eyes skittering to the doors and the dog.

He retrieved his cigar and rotated it until he had it drawing evenly. He motioned her to a chair. She wanted to do something about her face, which was bleeding badly, but he cut the request short with a gesture. Blood dripped onto her sweater.

He disappeared into another room and came back with a glass of whiskey. After studying her for a moment, his face unfriendly, he drank most of it in one long pull.

Now that the door was shut, Peter could hear nothing they were saying. She shook her head emphatically. Capp snapped another question. Peter thought he heard a name. Was it Baruch, the blue-movie man? She answered with a flood of words, sawing the air. Whatever the trouble was, she was taking it seriously.

Capp, his lips working on the cigar, moved back from the couch and stopped, facing Peter’s window. Peter willed himself not to move. The tension was making one eyelid twitch and flutter. Capp was staring straight at the closed blind. The muscles contracted around his eyes, bringing the overhanging brows closely together.

He rolled the cigar between thumb and fingertips, dislodged the ash, and after asking one more question, seemed to reach a decision. His features relaxed into a kind of smile. It had a good effect on the girl, but it didn’t reassure Peter.

Turning, Capp left the room and came back with a washcloth and a large towel. He folded the towel and put it behind her head. Suspicious at first, she was persuaded to put her head back and let him look at her cuts. He sponged off some of the blood, touching her face with surprising gentleness. Then he took out a short-barreled pistol, equipped with a silencer, and shot her in the head.

Peter made an involuntary sound, as though he, not the girl, had been shot, and dropped to both knees. There was some kind of stoppage in his brain. He knew what he had seen, but he couldn’t accept it. It was out of proportion. It didn’t fit with anything else he’d been told. Peter was temperamentally opposed to all forms of excess, of which murder was certainly one. This had begun as a joke, and when he heard the idea first, he had laughed so hard his face ached.

It was a joke no longer. He had witnessed a passionless murder by a man who happened to be an important person in the illegal life of this city, and Peter knew it would be wise to start traveling, wasting no time on good-byes. The hell with the money. If people were going to start murdering people, he wanted to be elsewhere.

And then what he had been worrying about actually happened. He heard a clack of footsteps and a woman’s voice speaking crossly to her dog.

“Now go, Buttons. What makes you so fussy? One tree is as good as another.”

A fruit tree had been espaliered to the wall on either side of the window. Peter remained still, holding the windowsill with both hands, but he was under no illusion that he looked like a fruit tree.

The footsteps halted briefly, then continued, moving in spurts while the dog weighed its decision.

Peter moved his head. For the moment, the patch of sidewalk in front of the house was empty. He came up on one knee again, but before he could push off there was another, more alarming sound.

The glass door onto the terrace was being opened.

He applied his eye again to the strip of unobstructed glass, trying to control his panic. Undoubtedly that gun of Capp’s had other bullets in it. The worst thing he could do was run.

The man inside hesitated at the open door. The murdered woman lay on the bare floor with her face on a folded newspaper. The large German shepherd sniffed her bloody head until Capp ordered him off.

“Not the boat,” Capp said softly, after another moment. “Too goddamn public.”

He slid the door shut and reclosed the drapes. The woman on the sidewalk came back briskly, and from the comments she was making to her dog, it was clear that the animal was still holding off. Waiting for Capp to commit himself, Peter continued to pretend that he was an espaliered tree.

Inside, Capp poured himself another drink and drank it slowly. Returning to the body, he undressed it carefully, making an attempt to keep the blood off his hands. He removed the girl’s rings and stood up painfully, kneading the small of his back.

After that he did an odd thing. He opened the dead woman’s legs and stuffed her jewelry into her vagina. Then he took off his belt and whipped her hard enough to leave marks. Peter, pinned to the window, could see that he wasn’t enjoying this, but was doing it to make the crime seem like a sexual murder.

After he finished, Capp needed another drink, a strong one. He was sweating.

Peter told himself that he really had to go. If he waited to find out what happened to the body, it would give him a hold over Capp, but trying to blackmail such a man was no way to stay healthy. Capp put down his glass, gathered up the cans of film and took them to a bedroom. Without moving from his position, Peter could see the foot of a double bed. To make it more firm, Capp had inserted a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood between the mattress and the springs. Raising this, he slipped the cans in one by one.

He returned to the living room bringing a long plastic bag, the kind used to store clothes. He laid it on the floor, open, and rolled the dead woman into it, then zipped it up. He had a separate, smaller bag for her clothes, shoes and purse. After sealing the bag with tape, he had to rip off the tape and open it again because he had forgotten to put in the gun.

Now, Peter thought, before Capp began loading these packages into his car?

He came to his feet and forced himself to walk slowly away. His spine prickled, all the way down. He had thought he was finished with the woman and her damn dog, but not at all; here they were again.

“Buttons, will you cooperate?” the woman was saying. “I know you don’t care, but I have a man waiting.”

Peter threw himself to the grass and wriggled quickly to the nearest bush.

It had been an eventful evening, and now, to make it complete, Buttons made his selection. Out of all the trees and shrubbery on the block, he picked the one bush under which Peter happened to be lying. Various disagreeable and degrading things had happened to Peter lately, but nothing had been quite as bad as this. When it was over, the animal wanted to investigate further, but his owner had had enough and dragged him away.

A screen door opened and shut. Capp’s garage was connected to the house by a short covered walkway. Peter kept his head down. A scheme was beginning to form. There might be more money than he had allowed himself to imagine. Capp wouldn’t be taking a chance like this for peanuts. It would be the riskiest thing Peter had ever done, but with a little luck, a little intelligence, why shouldn’t it work? He couldn’t go on losing forever.

The overhead garage door went up with a bang. Peter got ready to run, relaxing again when he understood what was happening. Capp’s car was too long to fit comfortably inside the garage. He backed out to the street, reversed, and came in again backward, stopping halfway. The screen door banged, and banged again. Peter heard a dragging sound. He knew what was taking place without going any closer. The body was being manhandled into the trunk, and this couldn’t have been easy for a man with a bad back.

The trunk hatch slammed. After another trip to the house for the smaller parcel, Capp moved the Cadillac out of the garage, closed the garage door and drove off. Peter started to count to ten. At the count of six he was up and running.

He had a three-year-old Dodge, completely anonymous, with dealer’s plates and a tendency to flood under pressure. This time it started like more reliable cars. He took the looping drive the wrong way, against the traffic if there had been any, and came out of the bend at the end of the island in time to see the Cadillac, ahead, going up the ramp to the causeway, taking the turn toward Miami. Hurrying, Peter followed.

Out in the open on the causeway, Peter passed several cars and dropped into line two spaces behind the Cadillac. There was nothing to worry about now. Capp had no reason to suspect his existence. Peter was new in Miami, with an equal right to space on the highways.

After leaving the causeway, the Cadillac worked south to Eighth Street, where it turned west. They passed through Coral Gables, West Miami. At the Palmetto Expressway interchange, an intricate tangle of concrete flung across the intersection of the Grand and Tamiami canals, Capp performed a quick maneuver, swinging over on an exit ramp to fling his smaller parcel into the water. He circled back and continued west.

They were meeting less traffic, and Peter began to tighten. This was the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades, and by this time it was obvious what Capp intended to do: ditch the body somewhere in the Glades. Peter had never tailed anyone in a car, and he didn’t know the technique.

He fell farther behind, speeding up occasionally to make sure he was in touch. A heavy produce truck roared past, and he let it pull him in its wake. After a time he pulled out to the left so he could see ahead. The Cadillac was gone.

He came about in a tight U. A narrow dirt road leading into the park to the south was the only one the Cadillac could have used. Peter pulled up in front of a ramshackle building, advertising cold drinks and Seminole artifacts, and consulted a road map. The dirt road, not important enough to deserve its own number, came to an abrupt end at what must be a boat-launching area a quarter of a mile away.

A braver or more foolhardy man might have pulled his car out of sight and gone down on foot, to pinpoint the exact spot where Capp dumped his victim, but for Peter this was close enough.

He headed back toward Miami, stopping at the first roadside tavern with a telephone sign.

CHAPTER 2

Michael Shayne, the private detective, waited a moment before getting out of his Buick. He was in the parking lot of a new upper-income condominium in Bal Harbour, at the northernmost end of the Miami Beach strip. He was here to see the Honorable Nick Tucker, who for the last four years had represented the Miami district in Congress.

Shayne had few friends among full-time politicians, and Tucker possessed every quality he disliked about that profession. He was a great practitioner of the head-fake, looking one way and going another. He had learned his sincerity as a TV actor. His political start was a result of a series of commercials for a major automobile company, whose public relations department had been so impressed that they hired him, on a large annual retainer, to tour the country speaking to business conventions and sales meetings.

His basic speech had been worked out by experts and honed to a fine edge in hundreds of appearances before sympathetic groups. Others on this circuit had used patriotism and anti-Communism, or had taken a strong stand in favor of law and order. Tucker’s subject was pornography. He opposed it, of course. He had film clips of the things he was attacking, samples of magazines and books that were being sold in big-city bookstores, under the protection of Supreme Court rulings. This was heady stuff. He became known, campaigned for Congress using his basic speech, and won. Somehow, during his freshman term, he wangled a resolution setting up a House Select Anti-Pornography Committee and became its chairman. He made CBS Evening News twice that first winter.

The important people in his party let him put his name on a few bills and saw to it that he had no trouble raising funds for his reelection campaign. Now he had his eye on the next rung, and he was going for governor. The general feeling among political experts was that he was likely to make it. His main opponent was a former state’s attorney, a competent man with a good record, and the prospect of Tucker’s success didn’t appeal to Shayne. But undoubtedly the state would survive, as it had survived floods and droughts and other natural disasters.

So that was Nick Tucker, and ordinarily Shayne wouldn’t have taken him as a client. His friend Tim Rourke, a longtime reporter on the Miami News, had wanted him to go to the trotters tonight, then on to a party in Fort Lauderdale. But there were angles to this, and Shayne had decided to come here instead, to let Tucker tell him about his problem.

Tucker lived among wealthy neighbors, with ocean under his front windows. He met Shayne at the door and thanked him gravely for coming. If he was upset about anything, he was enough of an actor not to show it. He had a short scar on one cheekbone, from a long-ago accident, strong lines at the corners of his mouth. His hair was still thick, but going white. Naturally his teeth were extremely good. A white suit was one of his trademarks, and that was what he was wearing now, with white shoes and a tie. Shayne, by contrast, had been drinking in an Opa-locka bar after a round of golf, and he still wore golf clothes.

After shaking hands with a politician’s grip, Tucker took Shayne into a room filled with plants, with glass on two sides. While he was making his guest a drink, he replenished his own.

“I don’t know how much Judge Nickerson told you,” he said, turning. “My wife has left me.”

Shayne accepted the drink. The nominating convention was less than a week away, and if Tucker was having domestic trouble, it might cost him some support. A wife who photographed well and did what she was told was a big help in politics at this level. But of course Shayne wasn’t here because of an interest in Tucker’s career.

“Nickerson said something to me about Frankie Capp.”

Tucker’s lip came back in a quick grimace, not quite a smile. “That was to get your attention. We had a hunch you might not consider my wife’s departure the major calamity of the week. Nickerson tells me you don’t usually take husband-and-wife cases. Capp, yes. She’s been seen with him. I understand you thought you had him on something last year, and he was too quick for you.”

Shayne swirled the cognac in the small bouquet glass. “He bribed two jurors. He’s one of the names on my list. How long has she been gone?”

Tucker drew a long breath and suddenly looked older. “I’m not sure. Bear with me for a minute. People in public life are fair game for gossip and rumors. I don’t know what you’ve heard about Gretchen.”

His fingers were white around the glass. Shayne waited a moment.

“I didn’t even know Gretchen was her name. Politics isn’t my subject, and I was out of town during the election. If I’ve seen her on television it didn’t stay with me.”

“I only wish you’d seen her on television,” Tucker said dryly. “That would be highly unlikely, I’m afraid. I may have some sharp things to say about the woman, and she’s been absolutely maddening, impossible, but damn it, I still hope we can get back together…”

He broke off and began again after a swallow of Scotch. “One of the things she refuses to do, one of the many things, is to make appearances with me. There aren’t many unmarried congressmen. There are occasions when it’s considered peculiar not to show up with your wife. But two years ago, at breakfast one morning, Gretchen announced that she was through with all that. If there was any political angle — and there’s a political angle to everything, if you look hard enough — that would be my affair, not hers. She didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life humbly helping me get reelected, over and over. Well, fine. We haven’t had children. I want her to be independent. The old-style political wife isn’t that much of an asset anymore. But just to goof around the house watching soap operas—”

He swallowed the rest of that sentence, along with more Scotch. “Hell, Shayne, she wouldn’t ask people in for drinks. That would be playing politics. She not only refused to go out for dinner, she lost the invitations. You can’t stay in this business long that way.”

“Why haven’t you divorced her?”

“The subject has come up. Obviously. Divorce used to be a dirty word in politics, but less so now.” He gave Shayne a sharp look. “Does that make me sound like an opportunistic bastard? Politics is how I make my living.”

Shayne started a question, but Tucker overrode him. “I’m also considering Gretchen’s health and well-being, believe it or not. She’s in some kind of trouble. Maybe I had something to do with that, I don’t know. I don’t think I love her anymore, if I ever did. But I can’t stand aside while she smashes herself into pieces, and there’s a good chance that may be happening now. She was twenty-five when we married, I was ten years older. Shayne, to begin with,” he said painfully, “she was — absolutely — marvelous. Marvelous! She seemed to understand what I was trying to do. She enjoyed the wheeling and dealing. That lasted about a year. God knows what happened then. She started refusing me in bed. Naturally it isn’t easy to talk about this, but it may have a bearing. I was putting in long hours. The first time around, I barely squeaked through, with a plurality of a hundred and fifty, which was reduced to a hundred and fifteen on the recount. I think I did more work for my constituents than any other freshman on the Hill, and I had no trouble the next time. Meanwhile, Gretchen was drinking too much, new people had come into her life, there were a couple of drug episodes that scared me. I got her to a shrink, and she’s been seeing him regularly since.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Hallucinogens, barbiturates. When I say I was scared, I also mean disgusted. I simply do not understand people who are willing to take chances with that delicate thing, the brain. But the doctor asked me to hang on, not pull the rug out. She was getting new insights, more self-understanding, you know the way they talk.”

“When was this?”

“Six months ago. We’ve been drifting since. This happens to be a fairly touchy moment for me. People tell me I have the nomination sewed up. But it’s going to be close. The wrong kind of story will kill me. I tried to get her to see this, to agree not to embarrass me publicly, and after the election she could have anything she wanted in the way of a property settlement, alimony. The funny thing is, I don’t think she’s really so desperate to get a divorce. It’s been too much fun bugging me. She isn’t the easiest person in the world to talk to. After about one and a half rational statements, she starts fighting dirty. In the end, I may have to do it the hard way and bring in the drugs and the disappearances and the rest. But in addition to her other qualities, she’s extremely intelligent. If she decides the intelligent thing to do here is to hurt me, I’m afraid she’ll be able to think up a way to do it.”

“Wouldn’t she wait till after you get the nomination?”

“I’ve been wondering,” Tucker said. “You asked me how long she’s been gone. I try to get away from Washington every weekend, Thursday to Monday usually, and Gretchen decided — unilaterally, as usual — not to go back at all, but to stay here through the week. That was all right with me. I don’t enjoy this tension and bickering. I didn’t press her to find out how she was spending her time, or with whom. She did volunteer, though, that she’s been logging three or four hours a day reading for the blind. Anna Karenina, three chapters a day. Needless to say, I was pleased to hear it. Well, we were getting out a piece of campaign literature, and my people wanted to stick in something about Gretchen, more or less to prove that I’m married. I told them about this reading program, and they used it. A couple of days ago we had a phone call. Apparently she’s never been near the program for the blind. Why did she bother to invent such a story? Who the hell knows? I suppose she thought I’d relax and wouldn’t check up on her. When I came down last Thursday, she wasn’t here. No note, nothing. I don’t know how much she took with her. Our things are mixed up between Washington and here. I think a suitcase, but I’m not positive. Her birth control stuff, her typewriter, some jewelry. She cashed a check for five hundred, which cleaned out her account.”

“Who saw her with Capp?”

“A friend, no one in particular. I need some more Scotch. How about you?”

Shayne finished his cognac and gave him the glass. Tucker went on talking while he made the drinks.

“Gretchen and Frank Capp — an appalling combination. She’s a lovely woman still, and from what I’ve heard about Capp—”

“He’s anything but lovely, but he manages to be seen with good-looking women.”

Tucker made a small face. “Ouch. All right, it’s possible. But there are two things about Gretchen. She’s excruciatingly moral. She’s also totally innocent about the way the world works. She thinks something should be done about crime, for example, preferably by me, as a member of Congress. Why should I concern myself with small pornographers while all these Mafia types are floating around in their Cadillacs? Frankie Capp — anybody who reads Miami newspapers knows the name. Gretchen wouldn’t be with him unless something very peculiar was going on. He was paying toll on the Venetian Causeway. In a black Fleetwood, naturally, the automobile of choice among that particular subspecies. There was no question that the lady in the front seat with him was my dear unstable wife. She was laughing,” he said with extraordinary bitterness. “For me that was the bad part. What joke could that particular couple have in common? I haven’t seen her laugh in months.”

“Have you notified the police?”

“No!” He added, “Fair’s fair. Put yourself in my shoes, Shayne. How would it look if it turned out she went somewhere to walk on the beach for a few days? To tell the truth, at first I was relieved! The shoe had finally dropped. But the next day I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was doing, and I made a few unnecessary mistakes. I thought we had an agreement to cool it till after the convention. I had to wonder what she was up to. There are four people in town I can trust. I mean trust. I told them she’d checked out and to let me know if they heard anything. Late last night — Frankie Capp. Laughing. I haven’t slept since.” He left his chair, looked at the reflection of the room in one of the glass walls and came back.

“I want to try not to be hypocritical. I don’t want her in any serious trouble, and Frankie Capp, by definition, is serious trouble. I also don’t want to lose that nomination! It doesn’t matter which of those reasons you believe. They’re both true. It’s the Capp sighting that worries me the most. It would be greatly to that man’s advantage to see me out of politics, back making TV commercials.”

“To his advantage in what way?”

“You know he’s got quite a bit of capital tied up in blue movies?”

Shayne had thought he was an expert on the subject of Frank Capp, but he hadn’t known that. He looked a question.

Tucker said: “That hard-core outfit in northwest Miami, the Warehouse. They make some of the filthiest films in the country.”

“Where does Capp come in?”

“He’s their Shylock. Short-term unsecured loans at twenty-five percent. You know my Anti-Porno committee. I don’t know if you followed our latest series of hearings…”

“More or less,” Shayne said. “Mostly less.”

Tucker crossed his legs carefully, picking up the skepticism in Shayne’s comment.

“I don’t want to get into that particular argument tonight, if you don’t mind. Does the open display of this kind of material have an effect on the moral climate of the republic? I maintain that it does. There are intelligent people who disagree with me. You may be one of them. Beside the point. The fact is that I’ve been given a mandate by the voters to do what I can to stamp out this traffic and put the traffickers behind bars. The high court of the land doesn’t happen to view the matter in the same light, and until we can succeed in turning some of those five-four decisions around, we’ll have to rely on exposure and good old-fashioned harassment, to skirt the constitutional problem. We’ve had a few successes. We’re pushing these people hard. We’ve cut their outlets in half, so they have a backlog of filth they haven’t been able to run through the sewer because certain district attorneys have been knocking over their theaters for building-code violations, arresting their projectionists for being behind on alimony payments and the like. Prints of their pictures have been seized and burned. Their legal expenses have been heavy — ruinous in a few cases. They’re all short of cash, and they’ve had to go to people like Capp. I don’t know how much he’s put up, what kind of control it gives him. I thought you might want to find out for me.”

“A couple of questions first,” Shayne said. “Do you have any more hearings scheduled?”

“Definitely, right after the convention, and I predict that one of the stars of the new series is going to be Armand Baruch, the Miami genius. He writes, directs, produces, and he’s one of those picturesque people who don’t believe in washing under the arms. He likes to be in the vanguard, one step ahead. He was the first to go into color, the first to show anal penetration, the first to use so-called literate dialogue. I look forward to getting him on the stand and watching him squirm. If we handle it right, I think public opinion will make it difficult for him to continue to operate in this town.”

“And if he has to close, Capp won’t be able to collect what he’s owed.”

“Exactly, which gives him an incentive. There are others on the committee, of course. I merely happen to be chairman. But to be frank, I think I provide the impetus, and if Capp and Baruch could discredit me in some way, the whole investigation would probably peter out in a matter of weeks. You can see what idea jumped into my mind. Gretchen would present herself to them as a weapon to use against me. So I’ve got to find her! I’ve got to stop her! Without publicity. Nickerson tells me you may be the one man in Dade County who can do it.”

“They won’t move without getting in touch with you first, to give you a chance to bid. What does your wife think about your antipornography thing?”

Tucker chose his words carefully. “She thinks my concern about it is… exaggerated. Or put that in the past tense. We haven’t discussed it for a year. It isn’t something I like to joke about. The thing I fear most” — he gestured with his free hand — “and I do mean for her sake as well as mine. I’ve discussed it with her Washington doctor. She’s been having periods of — I don’t know, irresponsibility. A kind of heedlessness. The doctor has been afraid she would move on to more serious drugs, and Capp would have no difficulty supplying them, would he? That would explain her laughter in the front seat of the Cadillac. High on something.”

Less controlled than he had been at the beginning of the conversation, Tucker pressed his fingertips against his temples, an actor’s gesture. “I’ve had some wild ideas. The vote’s going to be so close! If she does some crazy public thing, like walking out on the floor and taking off her dress — or if she turns herself in at a hospital with needle tracks in her arm — or if she stands up in a TV studio and throws something at me — or a drunk scene, a quarrel. The switch of a half-dozen delegates would do it. If my wife can’t stand me, there must be something off-color about me that doesn’t show on the surface. If I can’t run my own marriage, how can the voters trust me to run Florida? That kind of thing.”

“Have you subpoenaed Baruch yet?”

“A few days ago.”

“How much trouble would it be to quash that?”

“I see what you mean. No trouble at all. We’ve announced the hearings, but we could substitute somebody else or take his testimony in executive session, or ask him a few formal questions. Various possibilities. But the Warehouse is a local operation, here in my bailiwick, and I can’t go on pretending it doesn’t exist.”

“Even as a trade-off for your wife?”

“I don’t accept that alternative!” Tucker said sharply. “A trade-off? This was hardly a kidnapping. I’m sure she went off of her own accord. Do you want the job, Shayne? Because if you say no I have to get busy and locate somebody else.”

Their eyes held for a moment. Shayne said, “Nickerson may have told you I owe him a favor. It’s a big one, and I don’t enjoy having it hanging over me, because I don’t like or admire the man. This would be one way to work it off. There are things about it I don’t like. I don’t think dirty movies do any real harm. I also think the present governor has done a pretty fair job.”

“That’s your privilege,” Tucker said through tight lips. “I disagree with you, of course. The man’s as slippery as a weasel. I don’t see that it matters. I’m not asking for your vote. I’m asking you to find my wife.”

Shayne nodded curtly. “As long as we understand each other. The fee’s a thousand dollars. I’ll take care of my own ordinary expenses unless I have to pay for information.”

“That’s fair.”

“I’ll need a picture.”

“I know, and that’s a problem.” He had an envelope ready. Opening it, he handed Shayne four snapshots. “Another thing she’s been refusing to do lately is have her picture taken. These were the best I could find. They won’t be much help.”

The four photographs might have been taken of different women. They had two things in common, blond hair and glasses, but the glasses were three different shapes and the hair was differently arranged each time.

“Which is the most recent?”

“This one,” Tucker said. “But she’s gone back to wearing her hair straight, unless she’s cut it again in the last couple of days, which wouldn’t surprise me.”

Shayne put the photographs away. “You’ve given me two theories — that Capp is hoping to use her, and that she’s hoping to use Capp. Which do you think it is? It could make a difference.”

“I don’t know. She dislikes me, and she dislikes herself. But does she hate me enough to want to destroy me? All I know, for what it’s worth, is that she voted against me in the last election. She urged our friends to vote against me. I haven’t forgiven her that.”

“What do you want me to do if I find her?”

“Put her in your car and bring her home,” Tucker said grimly. “Then we’ll get to the bottom of this Frankie Capp business.”

Shayne finished his drink and stood up. “It’s pretty vague. If she’s taken a few elementary precautions she can stay ahead of me indefinitely. I’ll start with Frankie. But I’ll need a better picture.”

“I’ll keep looking. There are some old ones in Washington, but she’s changed so much in the last year.”

“And you’d better get on the phone and start calling people. Call everybody who may have seen her. You’ll have to announce that she’s left you, but it won’t mean anything politically unless it gets in the papers, and I don’t see why it should.”

“You’re right, I know. But God, it’ll be painful.”

“If you hear anything, call me on the car phone.”

CHAPTER 3

Both sides of Balfour Drive, between Collins Avenue and Indian Creek, were lined with cars. Shayne pulled out of the parking area and turned toward Collins, and as he did so, a flicker of movement in the front seat of one of the parked cars caught his eye.

He parked on Collins, in an open slot blocking a fire hydrant, and started back on foot, on the general theory that it would be useful to know who was watching his client’s building, preferably without being seen himself. There were too many streetlights. Before he could cross the street, he heard the slap of sneakers behind him, and turned.

A determined-looking woman was jogging toward him. She was a touch overweight, her black hair tied in a ribbon. Shayne smiled slightly and stepped out to block her.

“That looks like fun. Can I join you?”

She came down to a walk. When Shayne stayed in her path, she halted and glanced around, hoping to find that she wasn’t alone on this quiet block with a big, ruggedly built, red-haired stranger.

“Were you speaking to me?”

Shayne said pleasantly, “I’ve been thinking I ought to get more exercise. That’s a great way to do it. But I’m too chicken to go out alone. I worry about what people think. Seriously, let me keep you company. I’ll stay two feet away.”

“Actually, I prefer to run by myself.”

He sidestepped when she tried to edge past him.

“You ought to pick up your feet more and come down on your heels. You can give yourself shin splints that way. Let me show you.”

“I don’t need any coaching, thanks. Anyway, I’m about to go in.”

“My God, it’s hard to meet women in this town!” Shayne exclaimed. “What’s everybody so uptight about? What do you think I want to do, rape you?” He gave her a closer look. “And that might not be such a terrible idea. I don’t think I’ve ever raped anybody in a sweat suit.”

She took a backward step, her hand to her heart.

“O.K.,” Shayne said, laughing, and took out his wallet. “Let’s try it this way. I’m a private detective, and somebody’s sitting in a parked car down the street. I’d like to see who it is without scaring him too much.”

“Michael Shayne,” she said, reading his name from his license. “Why didn’t you say so? I thought you were making fun of me. Most people think people who run at night are ridiculous. I should care! I sleep better. All right, but try to keep in step.”

They set out at an easy jog, elbow to elbow. He had told her she looked as though she was having fun. The truth was, she looked as though she were being tortured.

“Don’t you feel conspicuous?” he asked.

“Not any more. There are more of us each day. Goodness, if I stopped doing things because of public opinion—”

“Come down on your full foot. Don’t clench your fists.”

“Like this?”

“Better.”

The sidewalk had been built at a time when there were still pedestrians, but tonight, except for Shayne and the young woman, it was empty. They came abreast of the car he wanted to look into. It was a cream-colored Dodge, with dealer plates, fenders that had been bashed in and pounded out and repainted. Shayne caught the first three numbers of the license — 576. A muscular young man was hunched over the wheel, his chin resting on his folded forearms. He had yellow hair cut shorter than was usual among persons his age. He was wearing wraparound dark glasses.

After jogging another thirty feet, Shayne’s companion said in a low voice, “People who run at night are ridiculous? I think people who wear shades at night are ridiculous.”

“He’s hiding.”

“Who is he? I live next door to that building. Should I be nervous?”

“Pay no attention. Do you know your neighbor Nick Tucker?”

“By sight. Somebody gave a coffee for him last year and I got to shake his hand, lucky me. I liked her better than him. He jogs, by the way, and that’s the only nice thing I can say about him.”

They continued to Indian Creek, then north to the Harbour Way and back to Collins, where Shayne stopped beside his car. He thanked her.

“You’ve got a good pair of lungs,” she commented, “along with everything else. If you’re in the neighborhood, I’m usually out at about this time. You’re right, it’s better with two people.”

She jogged off, clenching her fists again.

Shayne went up the front steps of the house on Vicenzo Island, which Frankie Capp had been able to buy, at a nice price, from the widow of a man who had been machine-gunned from a powerboat as he sat on his front terrace. A number of lights were on inside. Shayne rang the chimes twice. Nobody came.

He had been here before, and he knew that in Capp’s absence the house was protected by a German shepherd, trained to slobber on its owner’s hand and to tear out anybody else’s throat. Shayne returned to his car for a.38, which he stuck in his belt. He looked for a window that would be easier to force than one of the doors. Through a slit beneath a jammed blind, he was able to see into the living room. Somebody had already shot Capp’s dog. No longer dangerous, its front legs protruding stiffly, the animal lay in an unnatural position near the middle of a white rug, which would have to be cleaned.

Shayne found a smashed bedroom window. He raised the sash and pulled himself in. He went first to the living room to look at the dog. It had been shot through the head twice at close range and must have been dead before it hit the floor.

The phone clanged. Shayne picked it up and grunted.

“Yeah?”

“Capp,” a man’s voice said. “What the hell? Do you want me to sit here and turn purple?”

“Something came up. How soon can you get over?”

The voice, already high, rose a notch. “Are you drunk? By any chance are you putting me on? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You call me.”

The line went dead. Shayne weighed the phone thoughtfully before dropping it back.

He looked around, trying to get the feel and smell of the room. Something had happened here besides the shooting of a dog. A chair had been knocked over. He set it on its feet. He swiveled slowly, turning through a full 360 degrees. There was a dark patch on the arm of one of the upholstered chairs. He touched it with his finger; it was damp.

Various small things were disarranged. A glass-topped coffee table was out of square. He found a spattering of fresh blood along a baseboard, on the opposite side of the room from the dead dog.

Turning on lights as he went, he looked through the house. In a utility room, a washer-dryer was humming and clicking. It was on the drying cycle, with some minutes to go, and contained only two bath towels. There was a game room, with a refrigerator full of beer, a pool table and a dart board. Capp had been showing movies here. The screen and projector were still out — a portable roll-up screen and an expensive two-turret projector, capable of handling both thirty-five and sixteen-millimeter film. There was no film in the projector, or as far as Shayne was able to discover in the next ten minutes, anywhere else in the house.

The bathroom and main bedroom got most of his attention. He was looking for some sign of a woman’s presence. Capp was unmarried, and Shayne had seen him in restaurants and nightclubs with a changing succession of girls. The girls, over the years, had remained the same age — between eighteen and twenty-two — while Capp himself was getting older. They remained slim; Capp put on jowls and his waist thickened. They never smiled. They were hardly ever heard to speak.

But if they had slept in this house, they had left few traces. Shayne found a shower cap in the bathroom, a box of Tampax, pills to combat menstrual tension. In the bedroom he turned up one black bra but no other women’s clothing, and only men’s cosmetics. There was a huge bed under a ceiling mirror. The bedspread was disarranged, as though someone had been rolling about on it after it was made.

Headlights crossed the windows and a car turned into the driveway. From a window in the unlighted kitchen, Shayne watched Frankie Capp lean out of the front window of a Cadillac and blink an electronic gadget at the garage, causing the door to slide up out of the way. He was alone in the car. He backed partway into the garage, dismounted and sidestepped past the car.

Shayne heard the trunk hatch come up. It banged shut a moment later. Capp reappeared, finished garaging the car and lowered the overhead doors.

Shayne waited inside the kitchen door. Capp came out of the garage, dangling a wet towel. He seemed exhausted. Shayne heard him sigh as he slid his key into the lock.

“Going to be O.K.,” Capp assured himself aloud, and turned the key.

Inside, the long slanting bar of the police lock slid out of its socket. Capp came in. Shayne stepped in front of him and hit him in the chest with the heel of one hand. Capp went back against the doorframe with a whoosh of surprise.

“Where’ve you been, Frankie?”

“Shayne,” Capp whispered when his breath returned.

He smelled of insect repellent instead of his usual after-shave. He made a quick sideward move, but Shayne was on him before he was out the door and whirled him back and around. Capp sawed with both arms as he went across the kitchen. He went down, falling awkwardly with his legs tangled. Shayne pulled the.38 out of his belt and slapped him with it, hard.

Capp gave a yelp of pain. His eyes rolled.

Shayne caught him as he tipped and worked the keys out of his side pocket. He sorted out the garage key first. After using it to unlock the garage, he turned on the overhead light and opened the Cadillac’s trunk.

There was nothing inside except the usual tools and the extra tire, and twelve bottles of good burgundy. The carpet was damp in places. Shayne put his head down and sniffed. There was a brackish, faintly fishy smell.

Capp had removed something from the trunk before coming into the house, and Shayne stayed in the garage until he found it — an inflatable swimming pool mattress folded in quarters. The fabric was wet and gave off the same brackish smell as the trunk carpet.

Capp had lifted himself to his elbows, and was waiting for strength before he tried anything else. His breath whistled. Having already gone through the medicine cabinet, Shayne knew what was in it. He brought a small bottle of spirits of ammonia and moved it back and forth under Capp’s nose.

Capp batted his hand away. “You scared me. Jumping out like that.”

“I’m glad your heart’s in good shape. I want you to live a long time after I put you in jail. You didn’t answer my question. Where’ve you been?”

Capp’s eyes closed down. “I haven’t answered stupid questions in years. Keep poking your nose into my business and you’ll lose it, you’ll lose it. Somebody’ll bite it off for you.”

Without hurrying, Shayne took out the.38 again and gave him another hard slap. At this point, Capp’s reflexes were very slow. He saw the gun coming but all he managed to do was blink. He even blinked slowly.

Shayne let him think for a moment, then dragged him to the bathroom, where he pushed him into the shower and turned on the cold water. Capp lay under the icy stream, bleating, while Shayne went through his wallet.

He was carrying nearly fifteen hundred dollars in cash, including three hundred-dollar bills tucked in with his driver’s license, numerous credit cards, a rack of condoms, a glossy photograph of a sex act forbidden by most religions, and finally, a ruled sheet torn from a small notebook. A penciled notation said: “M. (from LA) — Rm 14, Modern Motel. After 8.”

Shayne transferred this to his own wallet. In the shower stall, Capp was blubbering. Shayne turned off the water, pulled him out and let him have another sniff of ammonia. The force of the water had knocked off his hairpiece.

“You look better bald,” Shayne remarked. “Watch closely, Frankie. See if you can tell how I do it.”

He tore one of the hundred-dollar bills in bits and flushed them down the toilet. Capp came up on his elbows again.

“That’s money!”

“You can spare it,” Shayne assured him. “I’ll ask you once more. Where’ve you been? It doesn’t have to be true. Make up something.”

“I went swimming. It’s a hot night.”

“Good. Now are you ready for a second question? Where’s Gretchen Tucker?”

Capp pulled a towel off a rack and blotted his face. “Am I supposed to know her?”

Shayne tore up another hundred-dollar bill and dropped it in the toilet.

“Will you cut that out,” Capp complained. “Gretchen Tucker. I’m trying to think. Who’s she?”

“The wife of a United States congressman, and she’s the wrong kind of person for you to fool with, Frankie. You want to stay with what you know.”

Capp used the edge of the washbasin to pull himself erect and managed to stay on his feet to confront his bedraggled image in the mirror.

“I don’t know the lady, but go ahead, pound on me some more. I’ve got an Italian name. They weren’t thinking about people like me when they wrote the Constitution. The Italians hadn’t come yet.”

He walked out of the bathroom ahead of Shayne, stopping short when he saw the dog. He breathed, “You killed him.”

“Did I?”

Capp said softly without turning, “I won’t forget this. He’s been with me a year and a half. I liked that mutt.”

“A real killer, I hear.”

“Vicious. But with me, so goddamn playful.” He collapsed into a chair. “Still sort of rubbery. If you want me to make any sense, get me a drink. A large Chivas. It’s been a long day.”

Shayne found a glass and filled it with Scotch. He poured a cognac for himself. Capp drank thirstily and breathed out in a shudder.

“Do me a favor. What’s happening in town? You wouldn’t shoot my dog and slap me with a pistol unless you thought I broke some ordinance or other. What is it this time? Come on, Mike, for Christ’s sake, it’s only a game.”

“If you don’t want to talk about Mrs. Tucker, how much do you know about dirty movies?”

“Movies?” Capp said, apparently surprised. “Not a hell of a lot. But I don’t talk about business, you know that about me. If you talk about business to people who don’t like you, it gets back to Internal Revenue. Are you working for Tucker?”

“Yeah, he’s mislaid his wife. We thought you might be able to help.”

“Much as I’d like to. Seriously — you bust into somebody’s house and shoot their dog. Is that any way to get cooperation? All I want of you right now is to stay out of my toupee. I want to hit the sheets. Tell me what you’ve got. Maybe I can explain it.”

“She was seen in your car, at the toll station on the causeway. And the thing that irritates Tucker most is that she was laughing.”

“Who’s your witness, Tucker?”

“A friend of his.”

Capp grinned. “Laughing, was she? Awful. There ought to be a law against it. Women go for you, don’t they, Mike? A private detective, you’ve killed people. That turns on a certain kind of chick. I get some of the same kind of thing, I’m not ashamed to admit, but with me, it’s ninety percent acting. But they don’t know that. I haven’t fucked her yet. Tell the congressman. Experience tells me it’s a matter of days. She’s panting.”

He went on talking, and Shayne watched him put his picture of himself back together, a man who knew the rules and understood how to bend or evade them. He had beaten Shayne twice, once badly, and it was clear from his tone that he thought he was going to beat him again.

Shayne discovered, after all, that he couldn’t drink Capp’s cognac. He broke in.

“Where’s she living?”

“I don’t call her. She calls me.”

Shayne stood up. “I’m wasting your time. One thing I ought to tell you. Every now and again Tucker reminds himself that he ought to be worrying about her. But when he’s talking about politics I think he sounds more sincere. Whatever you’ve got, you may not be able to squeeze much out of it. Put the price too high and he’ll write her off as a bad debt.”

“He’s a lousy human being,” Capp agreed. “I don’t know how you stand to work for him.”

Shayne flipped him his wallet. “You’ve been lucky, Frankie. This time I think you’re pushing your luck. Tucker has connections that may be too strong for you, not just here but all over the country. He’s an investment. Those backers will hang onto him as long as they can.”

“This is a threat?”

“Not exactly. I’ll be watching you. I want you to go right on doing what you’re doing, because this time I don’t think I can miss.”

“You don’t know shit, Mike — remember I said that. Tucker’s a politician. Don’t believe everything he tells you.” He croaked with laughter. “Man, are you in for surprises.”

“I’ll try to prepare myself. If you stay in Miami, we’ll see each other again.”

“Why shouldn’t I stay in Miami? It’s where I live.”

They were facing each other across the body of the dead dog. Capp nodded in that direction.

“I’m going to make you sorry you did that.” Shayne turned and went out. After starting his Buick, he gunned the motor and took off with a scream of tires. His phone buzzed beside him. He flipped the switch.

“Call you back.”

At the corner he double-parked, latched the door silently and ran back, not jogging now but running. The phone was ringing inside Capp’s house as he approached the broken bedroom window. He was in time to hear Capp say hello.

“You shouldn’t call me here,” Capp said harshly. “Did you ever hear of a guy named Mike Shayne? He’s working for Tucker, and that means we start being careful. Don’t say anything! Get up the goddamn money and I’ll be in touch with you!”

The phone banged down.

Shayne backed off as Capp came into the bedroom. A light was turned on. Seeing the disheveled bed, Capp swore and his face twisted. He lifted the mattress, exposing a plywood bedboard, and felt beneath it.

Whatever he was looking for wasn’t there. He straightened slowly.

“Shayne,” he whispered. “I’ll kill the bastard, I’ll kill him.”

He was facing the mirror, as though to check his own reactions. He had been about to light a cigar. It snapped in his fingers. Suddenly he swept everything off the bureau, and threw the broken cigar at the mirror.

“I’ll kill him.”

On his way to the bar for another drink, he changed course and kicked the dog’s body so hard that he lifted it off the floor.

“And you were supposed to be so quick. You phony.”

CHAPTER 4

Back in his car, Shayne signaled his operator and told her he was ready to take the call. It was from Tucker.

“Shayne, thank God I managed to reach you. Can you come right away.”

“What’s happened?”

“I’ve had a communication from our friends. I don’t want to talk on the phone. I don’t want to talk about it at all! It’s rather — terrible. I need your advice.”

Shayne told Tucker to expect him in ten minutes, and hung up. He was hurrying and jumped a few lights. The beat-up Dodge that had been parked outside Tucker’s condominium was gone, and the curb space was still open. Shayne parked as before in the tenants’ parking area.

Tucker was in shirt sleeves, his tie loose. He had been combing his hair with his fingers, and he no longer looked like a politician on the way up, but a politician whose career is over. Even that effect seemed slightly calculated, as though he had tried several versions of it before coming to open the door.

“You said ten minutes. It’s nearer fifteen.”

He turned to lead the way. “I had a couple of belts while I was waiting. Not such a good idea. Things are buzzing. In here.”

He had a slide projector in operating position on a low table, aimed at a patch of wall.

“Get yourself a drink if you want one,” he said. “Cognac, wasn’t it? You’re in for an interesting viewing experience.”

There was an empty manila envelope beside the projector, inscribed: “To the Hon. Nick Tucker, with love.” Instead of a stamp, there was an inked heart, dripping blood.

“Gretchen’s writing,” Tucker said. “A phone call right after you left. A man’s voice — you’ll hear it again in a minute. I don’t know how to describe it. Mocking. To look for an envelope underneath the mailboxes. This is the envelope. I’m afraid I’m not up to seeing it again. It was bad enough the first time. Press this button when you want to change slides. There’s a tape that came with it.”

He bent over a tape recorder and punched buttons.

“Good evening,” a man’s voice said, “whoever you are, wherever you are. The slides you are about to look at are not stills. They have been made from thirty-five-millimeter frames, taken from a four-reel Triple-X-rated sex comedy entitled Domestic Relations, produced by Armand Baruch for Warehouse Productions, soon to go into national release. The locale of our story is the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., generally considered a straight place, so the scenes we are about to show you may raise a few eyebrows. What do Supreme Court Justices wear under those black robes, for example? Not a stitch! This is only one of the many revelations in Domestic Relations. Women outnumber men two to one in that city, and competition is severe for the available supply. The old-fashioned positions and combinations aren’t good enough. The men call the shots. You never knew politics was like this. A penetrating picture! Your customers will come again and again. Turn out the lights now and enjoy yourself. Our salesmen will contact you.”

“Their salesmen will contact me,” Tucker said bitterly from the doorway. “That’s one thing of which I am reasonably sure.”

He killed the lights and Shayne turned on the projector. The tray revolved, and the white square of light on the wall was replaced by a color slide of a naked blonde wearing enormous airman’s glasses, tinted amber. She was smiling pleasantly.

“Reading for the blind,” Tucker remarked. “The Warehouse is a long way from Anna Karenina. I’ll leave you.”

Shayne worked the switch and the tray advanced. The blonde kept her glasses on. The next three slides showed her in bed with four men, two of them black.

Above the hum from the projector fan, he heard Tucker prowling restlessly in the next room. A second woman joined the group. One of the men in the shot was plump and bald, which was unusual in the fantasy world of this kind of film.

He worked on through the tray. The story line was unclear, but skin-flick audiences don’t expect much in the way of a story. Except in one shot, the performers were unclothed. The exception showed a white-haired man, wearing the same kind of broad-brimmed planter’s hat affected by Nick Tucker when he was out campaigning. The actor even looked a little like Tucker, with the same kind of scar.

Shayne held this slide on for a moment, then turned off the projector. The congressman came in bringing his own drink and a glass and the cognac bottle for Shayne.

“Whose voice was that on the tape?” Shayne asked.

“I expect Baruch’s. The Warehouse is a one-man operation.”

Shayne accepted the bottle, and poured. “Do you think there really is a film?”

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s just a matter of blackmail, all they’d have to do is stage those shots and threaten to make a film unless you pay up.”

“I see.” He glanced at the wall, where the images had been, and ripped off his necktie, as though it choked him even with the knot loose. “Can they be stopped, Shayne? Do you think it’s possible to stop them?”

Shayne considered before answering. “They’ll be in touch, one way or another. She must know approximately how much money you can raise.”

“Unless she’s gone into psychosis. I live on my salary. I could get a second mortgage on this place. There are people I could ask. Seventy-five thousand would be an outside figure, and I couldn’t do that on twenty-four hours’ notice. And would they take seventy-five if they could make that much by releasing the damn thing? A congressman’s wife! The ghouls would pack the theaters.”

“Get an injunction.”

“With the Supreme Court we have now? No way.”

“Then it may not be money blackmail. Merely a warning — this picture is on the way, so don’t run for governor.”

“I’ll run, and she knows it. I won’t be intimidated by these… He bit down hard. “These…” He stopped again. “It strikes me you’re being pretty damn cool! They weren’t faking those shots. Those men were inside her! You wanted to know if she hates me. There can’t be any doubt now, can there? One of the things she was doing in front of that camera, with strangers — that gross little man, my God, fantastic — the oral sex — fellatio or whatever the hell is the name of it — she never did that with me. Never. She’s sending me a message, you see, to show that she won’t be satisfied with making my life just a little bit difficult. She wants to wreck me, once and for all. Shayne, get that film for me, I don’t care how, and I’ll pay you fifteen thousand dollars.”

“I’ll give you some advice for less. There’s no rule of thumb with blackmailers. Sometimes the best thing to do is pay. But you have to know that you’re dealing with responsible people, and your wife doesn’t fit that category, by your description. Everybody has too much emotion tied up in this. You want to put them out of business, they want to put you out of business. Let’s find out what their terms are. Then we’ll set up a meeting and have the cops ready. There haven’t been many blackmail prosecutions lately, but the laws are still on the books.”

“And she’ll accomplish what she wants, drive me out of politics. ‘Wife of Anti-Smut Crusader Makes Blue Film.’ Shayne, I’ve been reading about your exploits for years. I know you want to put Capp in jail—”

“The problem is that even if I could manage to get the negative, we still wouldn’t know how many prints were made. They’d keep at least one to make sure you call off the Washington hearings and pay the seventy-five thousand, or whatever the price is going to be. This is hot enough so you couldn’t expect the lid to stay on indefinitely.”

Tucker ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve been through crises before. It always turned out that if I thought long enough and hard enough, I found a way out. But I can’t get my brain to work. It’s so totally evil. To take a sick woman, with a self-image of zero, and degrade her to the point where she could…”

This was a husband’s reaction, but it had seemed to Shayne, on the evidence of the slides, much more likely that the woman had been the instigator. She had shown no signs of distraction or guilty excitement and had seemed to be enjoying herself.

Tucker recalled abruptly that he was an important personage, a member of the U.S. Congress, possibly a governor, possibly a senator, perhaps even, if events broke in a certain way, something more. His chin came up.

“I’ll change the deal. A flat five, with fifteen more if you get the negative and all the prints. If that turns out to be impossible, I’ll follow your suggestion, bait a trap for them and hope we can clap the whole filthy crew into jail, not excluding my depraved wife. I can give you a lead into the Warehouse. My research staff has done a job on these people. We want to know what answers we’re likely to get before we ask the questions. We talked to a girl who’s worked in the films, Lib something. Last names don’t get used much in that world. She’s the one who told us about Frankie Capp’s loans.”

“How much did you pay her?”

“Three hundred, I think. You’ll have to be careful not to be outbid, because she’s a mercenary creature. Is it worth a try?”

He managed to keep his voice steady, but his hand was shaking. He spilled whiskey when he tried to drink.

CHAPTER 5

By now the last race had been run at Pompano Downs, and Shayne’s friend Tim Rourke must have moved on to the Fort Lauderdale party he had tried to persuade Shayne to go to with him. After three attempts, Shayne’s operator found someone who knew the number, and she placed the call.

Rourke’s subject was crime, not pornography, but he had talked his managing editor into letting him cover Tucker’s recent hearings. He returned to Miami three days later, Tucker having complained to Rourke’s publisher that his stories were biased, on the side of the pornographers. Rourke told his friends he was considering resigning. He decided against it after a night’s sleep. It was a good job as jobs went. Most of the time they let him alone.

A man picked up the phone in Fort Lauderdale. “What did you say?” he shouted. “A lot of noise here. What?”

He dropped the phone. After several confused moments, a woman came on. Shayne identified himself. The woman, apparently the hostess, insisted that he hop in his car and come up and join them. There were more women at the party than men, and she didn’t think that was fair. They had a rock group — this was no news to Shayne, he could hear it — several filthy, filthy movies, some great grass, and she thought at least one more case of champagne.

Shayne asked for directions. He was working, but if he finished before midnight, he would try to make it. Meanwhile, could he speak to Tim Rourke?

“Rourke?” she said doubtfully.

Shayne described him.

“Yes, indeedy,” she said with a giggle. “He’s been doing funny dives off the high board. Is he always this crazy?”

“Usually.”

“I’m delighted he came. Most of the others are so stodgy.”

She was gone for a time. Shayne was approaching the causeway, and he pulled over so he could concentrate on the conversation.

Presently Rourke’s voice said loudly, “I hear you’ve been asked. Don’t hesitate, man. Best party I’ve been to all winter. Lots of caviar. Girls. The works.”

His enthusiasm faded abruptly, and he said in a more ordinary voice, “That was for the lady’s benefit. As a matter of fact, people are finally beginning to loosen up. I’m doing what I can.”

“Putting on a diving exhibition, I hear.”

“Hell, it’s the vacation capital of the United States, right? Come on up, Mike, you could do worse.”

“Unless I had some other reason for calling you.”

“That’s a possibility,” Rourke conceded. “You’re in trouble? You need an expert’s advice?”

“Some information, Tim. I didn’t read those pieces you did about the Tucker hearings. Now I find I’m working for him.”

“For Tucker?” Rourke said, astonished. “For Congressman Nicholas Tucker? He’s one of the bad guys. What are you doing, digging up dirt on the porno people?”

“Not exactly. How are you situated? Can you talk?”

“I’m in bathing trunks, but I’ll sit on the floor and get the rug wet. Tucker. Something to do with the convention. Do you have the feeling he wants to be nominated for governor?”

“I do have that feeling. Tim, what do you know about an outfit called Warehouse Productions?”

“It’s basically just one guy, Baruch. I hear he’s under subpoena. Not much he can do about that except show up and take his lumps. Or is there?”

“I can’t answer any questions from a newspaperman. One reason Tucker hired me is to keep this out of the papers. If I told the crime man on the News that Baruch is trying to blackmail him, he wouldn’t like it.”

“Hey,” Rourke said softly. “I want to hear about that.”

“It’s still early, and a couple of things about it seem very strange. I keep remembering Tucker used to be an actor.”

“He’s also a prick. Bear that in mind. I have a personal axe to grind here, are you aware? The paper looks on this Tucker circus in terms of St. George versus the dragon, and naturally a big metropolitan daily isn’t supposed to be rooting for the dragon. I wrote the story as farce — they wanted melodrama. So I’d be pleased to have something nasty to print. If you don’t agree that this is one St. George who’s a bum and a hypocrite, you will after you watch him operate. Ask.”

“Do you know Baruch?”

“I’ve talked to him. Very loose. A talented guy. One of the two or three best directors in the country, and I don’t just mean porno directors… Frankie Capp,” he said suddenly.

“You know about him.”

“I begin to see,” Rourke said, relieved. “I didn’t like to think of you and Tucker on the same team. Is Capp in on the blackmail?”

“I’m not sure yet that it’s blackmail. But, according to Tucker Capp has money in Baruch’s business.”

“That goes back,” Rourke said. “It’s different now, practically legit, but in the old days blue movies were just one more illicit item. This is elementary stuff. How much do you want?”

“Go on. I’ll say when.”

“When I say illicit, I mean like heroin — all the money’s in distribution. The films themselves are cheap to make. One set, junky lighting, tawdry people. No copyright protection, naturally. Most of the prints you saw at parties had been taken off somebody’s positive, and each time it happened, the image got worse. It didn’t matter much. It was whack-off material, basically, they weren’t trying to win awards with it. It was all sixteen millimeter, black and white. They ran it straight, the way it came from the lab. If you wanted to rent a film — I’ve done it — you went to your neighborhood bookie, and if he didn’t handle them himself, he knew who did. People like Frankie, as a sideline. Then all of a sudden things changed. The first porno hits grossed a couple of million. It’s a new market now. But to get a shot at it, you’ve got to have production money. I mean like thirty or forty thousand bucks. The stuff has really improved. The lady here has a couple of Warehouse sixteens, and they’d surprise you. Basically it’s a bunch of guys and chicks balling, but what style. The dialogue isn’t all that bad. There was one great sequence—”

“You’re getting away from Capp.”

“I seem to be. All right, I mentioned thirty thousand a picture. They can’t raise that much from banks, which is where Frank comes back in. But it’s touchy. If they can’t get the picture into the theaters, they can lose the bundle. And that’s Tucker’s strategy. He’s working up vigilantes on a local level and pushing legislation to force the business underground again. And it’s been working. There’s no question they’ve been hurt.”

“And Frankie wants his money.”

“You know it. I’d guess the business conversations lately have been strained.”

“So if they can discredit Tucker—”

“Yeah, but it would have to be with something major.”

“This seems to be fairly major. Do you know Tucker’s wife?”

“I saw her in Washington, and speaking of sexy women… She used to do TV bits. Summer stock, maybe. Why?”

“How did she seem to you, outside of good-looking?”

“Normal. She smoked too much, but who am I?”

“Did she give you the impression of being on drugs?”

“Drugs?” Rourke said, surprised. “You mean those big bad addictive drugs that destroy people’s personality? I don’t know. Can you tell me more? Are they trying to get at Tucker through her?”

“That’s how it looks. What happens when Tucker gets Baruch on the stand?”

“He’ll show clips from some of the films and ask Baruch if he isn’t ashamed. The Frankie Capp connection could be big. Loan sharks. Organized crime. Sicilians with police records. This is a Congressional hearing, you understand, not a legal process. There’s no cross-examination, nothing has to be proved. Mike, I’m beginning to itch in these damn trunks. Capp, Gretchen Tucker, Baruch. That’s a weird threesome. I don’t see them all in the same bed.”

“Do you know anybody who knows her?”

“She’s not a Miami girl. Come to think of it, Tucker has been showing up places alone lately. Does that mean anything?”

“She told him she was reading for the blind. Somebody saw her in Capp’s Cadillac, and she was laughing.”

“Yeah,” Rourke said slowly. “I said she looked sexy. It’s not the way Tucker’s wife really ought to look. I hadn’t thought about that before. She ought to look like a good manager and a good cook and be able to carry on a two-sentence conversation on every possible subject. Wear bras. Smile a lot. Sexy, no.”

“Would it startle you if she appeared in a Warehouse film?”

“Startle me!” Rourke almost shouted. “It would startle me out of my shoes and socks. I’m going to pour the rest of this champagne in a wastebasket and look for a cup of coffee. Then I’m going to put on some dry clothes and come back to Miami.”

“I thought you might decide to do that if I made it sound interesting.”

“Gretchen Tucker in a skin-flick, that would be something to see. What’s your next move?”

“Tucker gave me the name of a girl who’s selling information to his committee. I thought you might go to the paper and look through the clippings, with these possibilities in mind. And don’t say anything to anybody.”

“You’re doling out information with an eyedropper, as usual. Has this film been made? Have you seen it? Or is it just being talked about? Mike, be kind.”

“I’ve seen stills. No, not stills — color slides made from the thirty-five-millimeter frames. Or that’s what I was told they were. One of the actors was doing a Nick Tucker imitation, with the white suit, the hat and the scar.”

“Man, if they can get that into the theaters, they’ll make a fortune. I’ll go to the paper from here. After that I’ll let your operator know where she can reach me. These are big names we’re throwing around. The one thing I don’t like is that Tucker’s the victim.” He added, “He’s a shifty bastard, Mike. Watch yourself.”

CHAPTER 6

Warehouse Productions got its name from its address, a converted warehouse in northwest Miami. The ground floor had been remodeled into a theater, showing mostly pictures made elsewhere in the building. The second floor was divided into two parts: the studio proper — offices, a single huge sound stage, cutting and screening rooms — and a bar serving free beer to those with a ticket stub from the theater downstairs.

Traditionally, porno films have played to an audience ninety-nine percent male. The customers arrived alone and sat in alternate seats. Armand Baruch was trying to break this chessboard pattern and fill the empty seats with women, doubling the capacity of the house. To a degree, he had succeeded. Boys were beginning to bring dates, which had rarely happened in the past. A few adventuresome married couples came to see what it was like. Baruch laid out a little money among the night clerks of the Collins Avenue hotels, who recommended the Warehouse to their tourists, and all at once it became a hard place to get into.

When the drive-ins around the edges of town met the competition by screening blue features, Baruch added an enormous, dimly lit parking lot, enclosed within a strong fence. This was one of the few parking lots in Southern Florida with trees and secluded bays and dead ends. The local uniformed police were given a small retainer to ignore the occasional whiff of burning hash that drifted over the barbed wire. Internal security was enforced by young men with the tans and builds of lifeguards — which was what most of them would have preferred to be — wearing luminous orange armbands.

The usual traffic flow at the Warehouse was from the theater to the parking lot, then to the bar, then back to the parking lot. The movies continued till two. The bar closed at three. All cars had to be gone at four thirty.

Shayne, arriving at the peak of the evening’s activity, parked as close as he could get to the main building. Outside the ticket office, he studied the cast lists at the bottom of the posters, looking for a movie with an actress named Lib in it. A Lib Callahan had appeared in two, Erotic Commune and Loves of Countess Dracula.

To be admitted to the bar, he had to buy a theater ticket, but he bypassed the ticket taker and went directly upstairs. The bar was long and curved, with the price of the drinks chalked on the mirror behind the bottles. Most of the customers were drinking beer. Theoretically no one under twenty-one was allowed to view the raunchy Warehouse films — signs were posted saying this — but again, the police had more important things to think about, such as how to send their children to college on the meager salaries paid them by the city. In spite of the recent innovations, the Warehouse complex still did a brisk singles business. Not all the women, by any means, were hookers. There was a small, crowded dance floor. The air conditioning was overloaded, and the backs of the dancers, swaying in time to a heavy beat, were patched with sweat.

Shayne walked the length of the bar, seeing no one he knew. Coming back, he picked a wall phone off its bracket and dialed. A woman answered, and Shayne chatted for a moment before asking for Max. This was an old friend, who had tended bar in most of the big hotels and was now business agent in the bartenders’ local.

“Haven’t had a good poker game in months,” Max said. “Let’s include Tim Rourke this time, because Lucille tells me I’ve been losing too often.”

“Any night next week,” Shayne said. “Let me know where and when. I’m out at the Warehouse — working, not playing. I need a sponsor. Do you know any of the bartenders here?”

“I must, but they don’t stay long. The paydays haven’t been too regular lately. Let me think.”

“They’re doing good business tonight.”

“That’s at the retail level. It’s the movie company that’s in trouble, according to the story I get. A young guy named Harvey. Sort of baldish in front, with a drooping moustache.”

“I see him. If I put him on, will you give me a reference?”

“Anything in particular?”

“Just that you know me, and I’m not too interested in any of the minor crimes.”

“You mean you’re not a narc or a vice cop. Sure.” Shayne left the phone hanging and shouldered in to the bar in front of the moustachioed bartender.

“If your name’s Harvey, somebody wants you on the phone.”

The bartender looked across at the phone, wiping his hands on his apron. “I keep telling the chick not to call me here.”

He left the bar by the service end and picked up the phone. After a word or two he turned to look at Shayne. Shayne nodded. He came back and Shayne ordered a drink.

“I’m trying to find a girl named Lib Callahan,” Shayne said. “She’s been in Warehouse films — that’s all I know about her. I’m hoping she may be drinking here tonight.”

“Lib Callahan,” the bartender repeated. “Is it all right to use your name?”

“No. I just want somebody to point her out to me.”

Harvey conferred with the other bartenders. Then he tried one of the lightly clad waitresses, who looked around the room and pointed to a far-off table. The bartender returned to Shayne.

“Dark hair, in a pink dress. Big coin earrings. All the way over in the corner, under the Jean Harlow poster. Drinking stingers.”

Shayne took his drink with him, leaving an extra bill on the bar. The four-man rock group was leaving the pedestal, to be replaced by another, equally scruffy. The girl under the poster seemed almost too young to be legally admitted to her own films. Her face showed a trace of sullenness in repose, but when she spoke she bounced in her chair, her earrings jangling. Shayne caught her eye and grinned.

“You were in that vampire movie. Of course you weren’t wearing those earrings, or anything else either.”

There was an odd assortment at her table, a middle-aged couple in resort clothes, two younger women holding hands, a heavy-set man with a face like roast beef, a puff of gray hair at the collar of his open shirt. He had his hand casually on Lib’s shoulder, one finger inside the fabric of her dress.

“One of your fans, Lib,” he said, giving it a sarcastic edge.

“It’s the first time it ever happened,” the girl said with enthusiasm. “A total of nine pictures, and nobody ever came up to me before. This may be the turning point.”

“It was beautiful,” Shayne told her. “And if you don’t think you made an impression on me, hold your breath and I’ll tell you your name. Lib” — he looked at the ceiling for help — “Calhoun. Am I right?”

“Close!” the girl said, delighted. “Very close! Callahan. Now if you tell me you’re a legendary Hollywood producer looking for talent—”

“Do I look like a movie producer?” Shayne said. “Just a humble member of the rank and file. Would anybody object if I…” He summoned a waitress. “Get us some more drinks here.”

He stole a chair from a nearby table and shoehorned himself in between Lib and the brilliantly clothed tourists, whose name, they told Shayne almost immediately, was Fox, Tom and Clarice, from Passaic, N.J. They were in town for ten days, staying at the Fontainebleau. They had three children. He was in footwear.

The red-faced man, on the other side of Lib, kept his hand on her shoulder, as though asserting a claim. A high school guidance counselor, he was named George.

“I have a question,” Shayne said to the girl. “You probably get asked it all the time—”

She groaned. “If you knew how often, lover. Does acting in this kind of movie turn me on?”

“You guessed it.”

“I usually say yes,” she said, taking her answer seriously. “The camera gives it a little extra something. You aren’t balling just one guy, you’re balling the audience. The young guys who haven’t found out yet how a woman reacts. Those lonely old guys who want to remember what it was like. The guys in between, who are working up to making it with somebody in real life. The first couple of times were tremendous! Real fireworks. But the funny thing was that it didn’t look that marvelous on the screen. Now I’ve got it so it looks convincing—”

“You certainly do,” Shayne said.

“But it’s less fun personally. All those stops and starts. I haven’t had an honest-to-God explosion in months. Just that teentsy-weentsy flutter.”

“That’s too bad,” Shayne said, and George, on the other side, was equally anxious to sympathize.

The Passaic, N.J., people were smiling brightly. The female orgasm was probably seldom mentioned in casual conversations in Passaic, N.J. Drinks arrived. After tasting hers to make sure it was what she had ordered, Lib asked Shayne to dance.

He stood up. “I’m willing to try. Don’t expect too much.”

She ran her fingernails through George’s haircut, and she and Shayne joined the group on the dance floor. There was so little room that all they could do was move from one foot to the other in time to the music.

“One thing, Mike,” she said in his ear. “That vampire picture hasn’t been released yet, so where did you see it?”

“I got your name off a poster downstairs.”

“Were you looking specially for me, or just somebody who’s been in a porno?”

“Nick Tucker told me to look you up.”

She pulled back, her pupils seeming to turn for an instant into tiny dollar signs. Then she tilted her face alongside his so she could speak directly into his ear again.

“How do you make your living, lover?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“So you really aren’t too interested in whether I’m having orgasms.”

“It’s not the main thing I’m interested in. There’s money available for a little cooperation.”

“Money I like. Nick sent you to the right girl. I’m completely amoral.”

“Completely what?”

“Amoral. That means when somebody makes a suggestion, I look at the pros and cons. The problem is, they’re so uptight about security lately. Notice the cats in the armbands? We’re supposed to go by the rules. If we don’t — zap, bam, pow. Like in the comic books.”

“I’ll meet you later.”

He felt her shake her head. “I don’t know you. It has to be with people around. Wait a minute, I’m thinking.”

She continued to grind slowly against him. The dancers around them seemed completely enclosed in their own electrical field. Lib’s hands moved lightly and absentmindedly on Shayne’s back.

She sent another burst of words into his ear. “How much money, in round numbers?”

“Up to four hundred, depending on what you can give me.”

“And you’re the one who decides what it’s worth? I’ll need something up front.”

“Two-fifty.”

“Three. I’ll drop on you for free.”

“Two-fifty is tops.”

She pulled back for another look. “I hope I’m not going to have trouble with you. What I could do is take you to this party. I’m serious about being careful. They’ll knock my head off if they find out you’re working for Tucker. The Tucker committee — that’s a dirty word around here. And everybody’s extra tense right now, I don’t know about what. Just float along and look drunk and dumb.”

The music stopped and they released each other. A small frown appeared between her eyes.

“George is the thing. I already asked him, and if he goes he’ll want to stick close.”

“I’ll explain it to him.”

“Without making a big noise, Mike? If you bop him or anything, those armbands will be down on us so fast…”

They maneuvered separately to the edge of the dance floor and between the tables. If she was thinking about money now, it didn’t show. She moved lithely, with a bounce, enjoying the crowd, the music, her own health and good looks.

Reaching their table, Shayne sat down beside the guidance counselor. “Lib wants me to break some news. She’s ending the evening with me. She says she likes you—”

“Very much,” Lib put in, the dollar signs in her eyes blinking on and off.

“But I have an angle,” Shayne continued. “I’m about to leave for the Caribbean. Some movie people are going to be along. They’re very minor people, and they probably don’t really know some of the names they drop all the time. But she’s decided she can’t afford to turn it down.”

George’s flush deepened. “You don’t have any boat.”

“She has to believe me until she finds out,” Shayne explained. “As a matter of fact, it’s a charter. We’ll be crowded, and getting dressed and undressed, we’ll catch an occasional elbow. We’ll either be good friends by the time we get back, or we won’t be speaking.”

George pushed back his chair.

Shayne said gently, “Nothing wrong with being a guidance counselor, George, but your school board wouldn’t like to hear you’d been busted for a fight over a girl who’s young enough to be one of your sophomores, upstairs over a theater showing pornographic movies.”

George had had just enough to drink so he believed his masculinity was being threatened. He began to shift. Shayne came to his feet in a fluid motion and kept the smaller man in his chair with a hard hand on his shoulder.

“Especially a fight you lost,” he added.

The tendon under Shayne’s hand was rigid at first. Gradually it relaxed and George reached for his drink.

“The story of my life,” he said.

Lib gathered her things and touched his hand. “I was looking forward to it, but you see how it is.”

“Sure, sure,” he muttered.

Lib had already explained about the party, and the Passaic couple came with them.

“Can you tell me?” Fox said on the way out. “Is there really a boat?”

“Not really. I thought of telling him she’s my daughter, but I don’t think he would have bought that, after the way she was feeling me on the dance floor.”

“What a bastard,” Lib said fondly, hugging his arm.

CHAPTER 7

They went in Shayne’s car.

His car phone rang before they had cleared the parking lot. It was Tim Rourke, but Shayne told the operator he was busy, and would call back. Tom Fox, the Passaic footwear man, had had a phone installed in his own car and he was having trouble with it. Police calls kept breaking in. Shayne discussed the problem with him until Mrs. Fox interrupted to ask if there would be pot at the party.

“God, I hope so,” Lib said fervently. “But Armand’s been so broke lately…”

She took them to a house in Coral Gables, a pseudo-Moorish structure with arches and ornamental towers, dating back to the days of the 1920s boom, when people had had live-in servants instead of repairmen. It was now a warren of apartments, each with its own entrance. Armand Baruch, the sex-film impresario, had a lease on the top floor, a long climb up an outside staircase.

One sniff as they entered told Shayne that pot was indeed being served. The Passaic couple debated whether or not, offered a joint, they should accept. Mrs. Fox thought they owed it to their children to find out what the fuss was all about.

“But we start with booze,” Lib announced.

Music came out of several speakers, the volume turned low. They went into a bare room, with a spiral staircase rising to a railed balcony, off which were several bedrooms. There was a cluster of studio lights in one corner, a big Mitchell camera on a tripod, mounted on a crab dolly. Shayne’s impression, looking around, was that the male guests averaged out a dozen years older than the females, almost always the case at show business parties. If the women weren’t younger, they looked younger. Most had year-round tans, but if they were permanent residents of Miami, they stayed on paths seldom traveled by Shayne and his friends.

A bronzed young man wearing his hair in a pony tail, with the armband that marked him as a member of Warehouse security, gave Shayne two looks, the first one casual, the second hard and suspicious. Shayne grinned amiably.

“Nice night for a party.”

“Every night’s a nice night for a party,” Lib said.

The bottles and ice were in a narrow kitchen. She was fixing drinks when a dreamy young man separated himself from a group and came to embrace her. He was wearing sandals and a striped robe. He had so much hair on his face that nothing showed except a furrowed forehead and a pair of pale eyes. His gestures were languid.

“Baby,” he said, brushing his hand across her breast. It was the voice on the tape, introducing the pornographic slides sent to Congressman Tucker. “Have you told these pleasant people about the specialty?”

“Not yet, Armand. Don’t you think it’s better to lead up to it gradually?”

“No, plunge right in.” He turned with a sweep of one arm. “I am Armand Baruch, known to my own flacks as king of the blues. And I have a setup here that may turn out to be the most terrific innovation in the industry since the wide screen. Is anybody old enough to remember the candid photographers who used to take pictures on Collins Avenue?”

He was looking at Mrs. Fox, who shook her head.

“This is my first trip.”

“Armand, let me get the drinks,” Lib said.

“Continue.” Baruch produced a burning cigarette from one of his wide sleeves and drew on it greedily. “You don’t happen to be a grasshead, do you?”

He was still concentrating on Mrs. Fox, who answered, “Not generally, but I may be about to become one! If you’ll show me how.”

“The main thing, dear, is that you don’t want to waste any.”

She did what he told her, but coughed up most of her first lungful of the forbidden smoke. With the second she did better.

“Sidewalk photographers,” Baruch went on. “A good business in its time. Killed by the Polaroid camera. People on vacation like to take something back to prove where they’ve been. Films are more of a problem because of the processing time. But people know they can trust me. I’m in the yellow pages. If I don’t deliver, the Better Business Bureau knows where to find me.”

“This is small stuff for you, isn’t it?” Shayne said.

“You wouldn’t say so if you knew my cash position,” Baruch said sadly. “The bastards have got me tied up. It’s like this,” he said, focusing again on Mrs. Fox. “I have cameras I’m not using. A cameraman I keep on the payroll because he’s the best in the business. A Moviola and editing facilities just sitting around. To add to all that, I have a God-given talent that’s unemployed too much of the time. I can make you a good price. We shoot in either eight or sixteen. You wouldn’t want thirty-five, because these are really home movies, to be shown in the home. But of professional quality is the difference, made by professionals. We’ll cut it and edit it for you. Do you understand what I mean? We shoot as many takes as necessary and use only the best, eliminating the footage that doesn’t seem to work. Color? Included in the price. For a few pennies extra, we’ll add title cards and a sound track.”

“Are you talking about a movie showing us having intercourse?” Mrs. Fox asked, fascinated.

“In a relaxed atmosphere. We use superfast film, espionage film, we call it, so the lights won’t make you self-conscious. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about anything with more than one person. You can’t shoot one of those off the cuff and make it convincing. Husband-wife stuff. I may make suggestions from time to time, but that’s all they’ll be — suggestions. You do exactly what you’d be doing at home, in your own bedroom, and let me get it on film.”

“My God,” Mrs. Fox said.

“You won’t want to show it to everybody, just a few close friends. Think of it as a permanent record. Twenty-five years from now, when you want to recapture the way it was—”

“No,” Fox said firmly.

“I agree with you, honey,” his wife said. “But let’s find out first how much all this would cost.”

“Pennies,” Baruch assured her.

Lib put her hand on Shayne’s wrist and took him to the main room, where he was given another look by the security youth.

“Do you know that kid?” Lib said as they moved away. “I hope to hell not.”

“He’s seen me someplace.”

“Don’t panic, Lib,” she told herself. “You knew you were taking a chance… How do you like Armand’s idea? I think it’s going to make some bread. And speaking of bread, let’s talk about figures. But we’ve got to move around a little first.”

Unlike most of the others, who had finished their thinking for the day, Shayne was aware of the passing of time. He invested fifteen minutes in establishing that he was an ordinary guest, interested in Lib only for obvious physical reasons, and then he suggested that they leave.

She passed him the joint. Baruch and his cameraman, a gnomish little man barely five feet tall, were preparing a camera setup, and most of the guests had drifted to that end of the room. Shayne was on the floor with Lib’s head in his lap.

“You know Armand got his Tucker Committee subpoena?” she said. “They give him a plane ticket and ten dollars per diem. That’s O.K., they’re subpoenaing everybody. But when they start asking questions, somebody’s going to wonder where they got the information. When I talked to the guy from the committee I didn’t know it was this serious. Now I think it may be time to start traveling. The magic has gone out of my sex life. And I’m scared.”

She lifted to make sure no one was listening. “I mean scared. Did you know a couple of Los Angeles guys are in town?”

“What guys?”

“From some porno operation out there. The sort of creeps who don’t feel complete unless they’ve got a gun on. Armand may be acting relaxed, but inside that robe, he’s twitching and jumping. I’ll tell you when I decided it was time to split. One fellow, who I always thought was around the Warehouse because he dug the scene, he carries a guitar with him everywhere. Except it isn’t a guitar, it’s a shotgun with the barrels cut off. When you see something like that, it makes you think.”

The tanned youth in the ponytail was standing over them. He had taken off both his armband and his shirt, but psychologically he was still on duty.

“I know you,” he told Shayne.

Shayne said easily, “Where are you from, New York?”

“No, here. Miami.”

Shayne shrugged. “I’ve been in town two weeks. Stoned most of the time, I’m happy to say.”

“Jack, will you bug off?” Lib said irritably. “I’ve been rowing upstream all day, and I want to drift. Go watch them make movies.”

“The thing of it is, when I recognize somebody and I don’t know from where, it bothers me.”

“We were thinking about going,” Shayne said.

Lib sat up. “Honey, we can’t yet, before Armand talks to you. He’s looking for somebody to play a part in a picture. That’s why I got you to come.”

“Luckily, I know you’re not serious. I don’t want to look back twenty-five years from now and see how it was.”

“Honestly, it’s easy after the first few minutes. We were supposed to look for somebody with specifications. I was thinking about George, but you’d be better. Let’s go upstairs. We can’t talk with all these people around.”

“You’re wasting your time if you think you’re going to get me into a skin-flick,” Shayne said. “It’s not one of the things I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Let Armand tell you about it. You can always say no.” Standing up, she wriggled her dress down over her hips. “There’s a water bed. Have you ever tried one?”

“Do you feel like making it three?” the security youth said when Shayne came to his feet. “Or I could get somebody else, for four?”

“Won’t you believe me?” Lib said. “I’m tired.”

Shayne followed her to the circular staircase. He passed a small heap of clothing, which included an orange armband. He picked it up and took it with him.

Upstairs, Lib took him to the end bedroom, where she turned with a shiver.

“This is getting heavy. But I need traveling money. A private detective! When they find that out, I want to be thousands of miles away. I wish I was the type of person who saves money, but it seems to slip through my fingers.” She was taking off her dress. “I’d hate to tell you how little I’ve got in the bank, it’s pitiful.”

“Do you really think all this is necessary?” Shayne said.

Her earrings jangled. “I really do. You don’t have to do anything, and to tell you the truth I sort of hope you don’t. I couldn’t take another miss right now, and that’s probably what would happen. I wouldn’t be concentrating on it, I’d be thinking about that shotgun in the guitar case. I hope you’ve got the two-fifty in cash. Look, get undressed in case anybody comes in.”

Shayne repeated that to see how it sounded. “Get undressed in case—”

“Come on, Mike,” she said impatiently. “You want me to fink on them, don’t you? I’ve got to start thinking of my own skin.”

The skin she was worried about was rapidly emerging from her clothes, which she left where they fell. “Do you want the light on or off? I think off. Then if somebody does walk in they won’t wonder how come we’re just lying there.”

“I’ve got a picture to show you first.”

He selected the clearest of the photographs his client had given him. Lib studied it for a moment.

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Tucker, I’m told.”

The light went off just as the title of a book on the bedside table registered on Shayne. It was a Modern Library edition of Anna Karenina, the novel Gretchen Tucker had told her husband she was recording for the blind. The door was not altogether closed, and enough light came in so he could see the girl arranging herself on the shifting surface of the bed. He lay down beside her and lurched into a kind of equilibrium.

“Mrs. Tucker?” she said. “Congressman Tucker?”

“For a minute I didn’t think I was going to get a reaction. She’s left home. He wants me to find her.”

“I might be able to help, a little,” she said slowly. “About the bread?”

“Above the two-fifty, I have to be the judge of how much the information is worth.”

“That’s a hell of a deal, Mike. What if you decide it’s only worth a nickel?”

“I buy information all the time. I wouldn’t stay in business if I got a reputation for stiffing people. Plus the fact that it isn’t my money, it’s Tucker’s.”

“Damn it, if I didn’t need it so bad. Armand still hasn’t paid me for the vampire picture.”

She thought they needed another joint. He shifted weight carefully so he could reach the matches. When he struck the match, the bed nearly threw him.

“Mrs. Tucker,” he said. “Have you seen her at the Warehouse?”

“A couple of times. Armand was looking under stones for people with money, and I thought that was it. Now I think she had something to do with X Project.”

“What’s that?”

“He shot it on a closed set. The technical crew was cut way down. He did the sound and lighting himself. We’ve been wondering, naturally, but people remember other times when it happened. Everybody tries to steal ideas in this business. Armand’s been first a lot of times, and when he has something new he plays it close, so the competition can’t beat him out with a quickie.”

“Is the picture finished?”

“I think it must be, or Armand wouldn’t be here. He does his own cutting.”

“Was she on the set?”

“I guess some of the time. I saw her coming out once.”

“Dressed?”

“I didn’t notice. Yes, I did, too. She was in a marvelous striped suit, cool as a gin and tonic. Do I hate women who look cool in hot weather.”

“I hope that’s not all you’re going to tell me about this project. Who else was on it?”

“Funny thing, they were all from away, none of the regulars. He shot long hours, all night sometimes. Frankly, I thought it might be something Tucker and those would be interested in if I could find out, but I couldn’t. The only guy I managed to contact was a fat fellow from New York. And that’s funny in itself. I mean, he looked like an ordinary person you’d see on the street. And maybe that’s the idea, to make it seem more real by using ordinary-looking people.”

“What did he tell you?”

“All he wanted to talk about was his off-Broadway roles. I kept trying to get him back to Project X. What was the plot, the theme? He didn’t notice. He just did what they told him. Stand up, lie down.”

“Do you know the names of any of the other actors?”

“One, Maureen.”

“What’s she look like?”

“About my height, dark hair pulled back tight. Somebody said she came in from the coast. I didn’t think she was anything special. Twenty-eight or nine, anyway.”

“Practically through,” Shayne commented.

“Well, in this business, unless the idea of using ordinary people catches on, which I don’t think it will.”

Shifting balance carefully, Shayne worked his pants nearer to the bed and got out his wallet. He turned on the light briefly and found the slip of paper he had taken from Frankie Capp: “M. (from LA) — Rm 14, Modern Motel, after 8.” The M might stand for Maureen.

“Do you know where she’s been living?”

“Some motor inn downtown. There was a party I never got to.”

“Tucker says you know Frankie Capp.”

“I know of him.” She blew out her breath, like a horse smelling something unpleasant. “He’s not around much anymore. He owns a piece of the company, I think. Anyway I told the committee guy that and he just about had kittens.”

There were footsteps on the treads of the spiral staircase. Lib sucked in her breath and rolled quickly on top of Shayne. The water inside its tight plastic sheath attempted to make waves, and for a moment they rocked and plunged.

“Pretend,” she whispered fiercely, her fingernails digging in.

Her heart was banging, and there was an equally strong pulse in her stomach. She was moving rhythmically. Shayne fell into the pattern, breaking off as the footsteps entered one of the other bedrooms. She remained above him. “I wish you hadn’t mentioned Capp. He kills people.”

“He’s never spent a night in jail.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said with a slight shiver.

“Lib, what happens to a Warehouse film after it’s finished, ready to go out to the theaters?”

She resumed her slight fore-and-aft motion. Shayne didn’t cooperate, but the bed seemed to be cooperating for him.

“What was the question?” she said vaguely.

He repeated it.

“There’s a vault,” she said. “First they make a work print and it goes to the negative matcher. One print from the matched negative plus the optical sound track…” She didn’t have her mind completely on what she was saying. “That’s the married print, the answer print. Then they wait as long as they can to see how many dupes they’ll need…”

“Have you ever heard about any of these films being used for blackmail? The Foxes from Passaic. If they aren’t really married—”

“Oh, honey, that’s out of the nineteenth century. Who cares any more?”

It was warm in the room, and she was as slippery as a trout. The water bed was giving them a giddy ride.

Someone else came into the room. Baruch’s voice said, “Turning on the light, O.K.?”

The light flashed on. Lib’s eyes closed, and she gripped Shayne convulsively.

“Not interrupting anything, am I?” the pleasant voice continued. “I want to talk to you about a part we’ve been trying to cast, Mike.”

The bed went on moving for a moment after Lib stopped. Her face relaxed slowly.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I bother,” she said, giving the moviemaker an evil look. “You blew this one, Armand. I told him about the picture, but he’s got this privacy hangup. I was trying to persuade him.”

“Privacy?” Baruch said in the same amiable voice, as though he had never heard the word. “What we look for in our men, Mike, what we pay money for, is physique and staying power. An ordinary four-minute episode — you know we can’t film that in four minutes, it’s more like four hours. Our audiences won’t let us get away with simulation or inserts. They want to see. So we can’t use young kids.”

“He’d be great,” Lib said, coming up on an elbow. “The problem is, will he?”

“The picture’s about pro football, Mike, a football team and a girl. We’ve cast everything but the coach. Most of the scenes take place in the locker room.” He was in a squatting position and he had clearly settled down to stay. “The girl’s a tremendous inspiration to the team. They get to the Super Bowl. I managed to steal some footage from the Dolphins, and we’ll cut that in.”

“Who’s playing the girl?”

Shayne was beginning to get the hang of the bed. Baruch passed him a joint. Apparently it was going to be that kind of conversation.

“The girl,” Baruch said. “She has to be small enough to fit inside a locker. I want Lib to do it, but she’s been giving me maybes.”

“Armand, I’m tired of taking my pay in IOUs. I had another call from my father last week. He keeps asking how I can live like this and I tell him I’ve stopped making moral judgments, I do it for money. He’s in advertising, Madison Avenue time, and his big account is deodorants. The commercials are pretty disgusting, but he does it for the money, damn good money, incidentally. But if they only promised to pay him—”

“My dear small child, if you knew how much I have tied up in finished product! Four feature-lengths and five two-reelers.”

“Tied up is it. I have to eat. The restaurants don’t take IOUs.”

“You could stand to lose a few pounds.”

“I disagree with you,” Shayne said. “I think she’s just right as she is.”

“Thank you, lover.”

Baruch took the joint back after it had made the rounds. “A firm offer, Mike. Five hundred, and we can do your scenes in three days. I run a relaxed thing. You’ll have fun.”

“Five hundred in cash?” Lib demanded. “Where did that come from?”

“I’ve got a check in my pocket for six hundred and fifty, drawn on the First National Bank of Passaic, New Jersey, a wonderful, friendly bank. And I’ve got to remember to put it in night deposit in case he stops payment. It was lovely, Mike, the minute they let themselves go. You’d never suspect it from looking at him, but he played that broad like a xylophone.”

“Five hundred for Mike,” Lib said, sticking to the subject. “A hundred and fifty for me? That’s sexist.”

Baruch smiled and waved his hands, making a shape in the air. “Five hundred for you. Money’s on the way. We’ve hit bottom, and now we bounce. I’ll wrap up the football thing first. I’ve shot it in my head already, and I just have to put it on film.” He put a thumb in his mouth and blew a fanfare. “Quiet, everybody. Then The Ways People Love goes into production. I know you’re surprised.”

Lib sat up. “Not that we haven’t heard that announcement before.”

“No, this time it’s really happening. A budget of eight hundred thou, and eight hundred to me is like four million to those Hollywood hacks.”

Lib’s earrings glittered. “Do you mean it?”

“I think so,” he said after considering the question. “Ask me again in the morning. Right now I mean it. It looks very good.”

“And I suppose with that kind of budget you’ll protect yourself by using name people?”

“Unknowns,” Baruch said firmly. “This flick’s going to make it in the art houses, knock wood, and win a few modest prizes, knock wood, and I want to do it with the stock company.”

“You aren’t planning to bring in any overage chicks from Los Angeles? That sort of rubbed some of us the wrong way.”

“There was a reason for that. I forget what it was now.”

He puzzled about it briefly, then gave up and produced another joint.

“Mike, before I space out here. The coach.”

“How many episodes would I have to be in?”

“I don’t lay it out and run set plays,” Baruch told him. “I work from a situation, and see what kind of vibes I get.”

Shayne smiled slowly. “I’d like to ask a few people to dinner when I get back and talk them into going down to Forty-Second to catch a movie. There’s one chick in particular, I’d like to see the look on her face when she sees me up there on the screen. How many lines would I have to memorize?”

Baruch answered after a pause. “I never use a script. As the spirit moves you. Do we have a deal?”

“Let me talk to you in the morning. I want to get an idea what kind of sex you expect me to do.”

“Nothing homo, if that’s bothering you. You’re the craggy old coach. Meat and potatoes.”

The pauses between his words were becoming longer. He stared at the red eye of the cigarette without offering it to the others or raising it to his mouth.

“Wake up,” Lib said. “I want a little more time with Mike. Armand! If you want him to show up tomorrow—”

“I do.”

“Then will you walk the hell out, please? I know you don’t believe this, but some people don’t like to be watched.”

Baruch tipped forward and made it to his feet. “Light on or off?”

“Off,” Lib said. “I keep telling you, I’m breaking him in slowly.”

CHAPTER 8

Shayne left Lib asleep on the water bed, lying on her stomach with an arm trailing. He had paid her $300, and she had promised to ask the cameraman about Project X and Mrs. Tucker, in return for which Shayne would pay her the additional $200. But hearing about a possible part in a big-budget picture had made her wonder if she’d been wrong to betray Baruch to the Tucker committee. Mistake or not, Shayne told her, it was unlikely that Baruch would ever have the funds to make the picture.

The party was dying, all but dead. Shayne had left his Buick a block away, on a curving street leading to the canal. Several years earlier, the son of an accountant who had been sentenced to a prison term on evidence supplied by Shayne had wired a bomb to his ignition system, using much too much dynamite. If Shayne hadn’t been warned by the boy’s sister, it would have blown in the fronts of nearby houses. In all his cars since then, he had installed a simple relay, causing a yellow bulb to light up on his dashboard whenever the hood was lifted.

The bulb was burning now.

He hesitated, one foot in the car, then backed out, feeling in his pockets as though he had left his keys in Baruch’s apartment. He returned to the house. Baruch’s entrance was in back, off a narrow cobblestoned court, reached through an archway. Shayne continued past.

People who booby-trapped other people’s cars usually hung around to see whether their devices worked. He angled back carefully, taking advantage of the protruding porches and hanging staircases characteristic of Coral Gables architecture. He shifted position several times before he spotted the men he was looking for, in the front seat of a hardtop convertible with the windows rolled up all around, a fairly new Chrysler.

He planned his route carefully. Moving in a low crouch from a palm tree to a clump of shrubbery, and from there to the curb, he came up on the car from the rear. The air conditioning was on, and its low hum covered his approach. Bent double, pressed against the side panel so he would be seen only if one of the men turned completely around, he reached up to the rear-door handle.

He freed the latch soundlessly and focused his energy for a sudden burst. He yanked the door open and entered the car with a shot-putter’s yell, slanting upward between the two heads.

Before either man could react, Shayne had a forearm around each neck. The man at the wheel was a large black, with the columnlike neck of a fighter or football player. Hampered by the steering column, there was little he could do except claw at Shayne’s arm. The man beside him managed to get a hand inside his coat. A gun spilled out.

Shayne stepped up the pressure, counting aloud. Before the count reached thirty, both men had ceased to flounder.

He shifted his grip. Backing off slightly, he cracked their heads together hard. Reaching past, he opened both doors and let them fall out of the car.

He dragged them onto the curbside grass. The black was huge, over six four, at least two hundred and sixty pounds. Shayne checked their wallets. The black’s name was Abraham Page. The other had three different driver’s licenses, in different names. Shayne took the guns and wallets to his own car, where he raised the hood and disconnected the explosive device, a lump of plastic the size of a bar of soap, taped to the underside of the fire wall between brake and clutch. He pulled off the detonator and tossed the now harmless device into the back seat.

He backed up to the Chrysler and double-parked. The two gunmen on the curb lay where he had dropped them. He unlocked the liquor chest, checked the level in the cognac bottle, and drank. Then he signaled his operator.

She had two numbers for him, in the same part of town. One was his client. The other was a woman named Mrs. Ten Eyck.

“She said you wouldn’t know the name, but to tell you she’s the one you jogged with tonight in Bal Harbour. Did you really jog, Mike? I can’t quite picture it.”

“I’m recommending it to everybody. Ring her for me.”

Presently a woman’s voice said hello, as though speaking through water. The phone had awakened her, and there was a moment’s confusion until she separated Shayne from the dream she’d been having. “Michael Shayne. I remember I called you, and in a minute or two I’ll remember why it seemed important. Right, I’m beginning to tick. I don’t know what you’re up to, but doesn’t it have something to do with Nick Tucker?”

“I’m working for him. That doesn’t mean I’ll vote for him if he gets the nomination.”

“I’m glad to hear that, because I think he stinks, as I may have told you. Should I stick my nose in this, or not?”

“You already have.”

“But I haven’t told you anything yet.”

Shayne sipped cognac and waited.

She went on, “Well, I know I’m going to tell you. I just thought you’d want to urge me a little. The reason I run at night is to get my brain to slow down, but after that adventure with you, everything kept whirling and I couldn’t go to sleep so I went out and jogged another couple of miles. When I came back, Nick Tucker and somebody were in the parking lot, having what looked like a drunken brawl. Pulling and shoving, trying to keep their voices down because this is a quiet part of the world. No coat, his necktie flapping. Tucker. Shocking! That carefully arranged hair flying every which way. Well?”

“Who was he wrestling with — a man or a woman?”

“A man. Smaller, older, and I’m going to take a quick jump and say I know who he is. I used to live in Chicago, when I was married to the irresponsible heel I’m no longer married to. This guy was our congressman, and his name is Barnett Pomeroy. Believe me, a pain in the ass. Pompous? Incredibly. He’s had the job since Harding was President, practically, and if he ever had an original idea in all that time, he kept it to himself. That’s all I have to tell you. I hope it helps.”

“Did they see you?”

“Yes, and it calmed them down. I only heard one thing. Tucker kept saying. ‘I can handle it, let me handle it,’ something like that. I can’t give you the words, it happened so fast.”

Shayne, after another sip of cognac, asked how sure she was of her identification. She said very sure — during election campaigns in his Chicago district, Barnett Pomeroy’s face had looked out from every blank wall.

“I don’t know what it means, Mrs. Ten Eyck, but thanks.”

He wished her success in getting back to sleep. After breaking the connection, he had his operator call Tucker’s number. Tucker answered promptly.

“You wanted me to report in,” Shayne said. “I’ve confirmed a few things. Baruch’s expecting to come into a large chunk of cash, but don’t for God’s sake pay him a penny, because I’m beginning to think he doesn’t have anything to sell. Your wife has been seen at the Warehouse. I still don’t know where she’s staying. I warned you she’d be hard to find. There’s one thing you may be able to help me with. A congressman from Chicago, named Pomeroy.”

“Barnett Pomeroy? What about him?”

“Is he connected with this in any way?”

“Insofar as we’re both members of the same caucus,” Tucker said. “He’s in town, to keynote the convention. I made the mistake of including him in the people I called to see if they’d heard anything about Gretchen. He was out there like a shot. He’d been drinking, and he was hard to get rid of. What have you heard, Shayne? He was very indignant about this whole thing, and if he took it into his head to do something about it—”

“Where would he start?”

“At the Warehouse, I suppose,” Tucker said slowly. “He’s a feisty little guy. He’s had things his own way for the last thirty years. He hates pornographers more than I do, if that’s possible. And if Baruch and his merry crew get their hands on him—”

Shayne said quickly, “I have to go now. A guy I just hit is starting to sit up.”

“Shayne! What did you mean, Baruch may not have anything to sell? Shayne…”

Shayne hung up and stepped out of the car. The black had rolled over and brought one knee up. The second man was still out.

Shayne kicked the black in the head, then again in the side, staving in two of the short ribs at the bottom of the ribcage. The big man fell back on the grass.

“My name is Shayne. I’m the guy you were trying to blow up a minute ago. Can you understand me?”

“I hear you.”

He groped for his gun. Finding it gone, he swiveled on one hip, trying to tangle legs with Shayne and bring him down. But his movements were slow. Shayne stepped back, then forward, and kicked him even harder in the same place. Clearly, it hurt. He gave an almost feminine cry.

Stooping, Shayne rolled him off the curb into the roadway. When he tried to grab the bumper of one of the cars, Shayne kneed him in the small of the back.

“Car come along here, I’m going to get hurt.” the man said.

“Not much traffic this time of night,” Shayne said. “Chances are you’ll be O.K. I’m going to ask you some questions, Page, and we’re going to stay out in the open until you give me the answers. Then I’ll give you ten dollars for bus fare, because I know you’ll want to leave town. Who’s paying you to blow up people?”

“Don’t know the cat’s name.”

Shayne kicked him in the neck. A car came around the corner with a sweep of headlights, swerved violently, missing the prostrate figure by less than a foot, and came to rest against the opposite curb.

A young man yelled at Shayne, “What’s going on?”

“Move along,” Shayne said without raising his voice. “This doesn’t concern you.”

The black raised his head. “You broke my ribs.” He saved himself another kick by going no further with his complaint. The young driver restarted his stalled motor and drove off quickly.

“Answer the question,” Shayne said patiently. “Who paid you?”

“Frankie Capp. Never again. That dude is bad luck.”

“This whole thing has been bush,” Shayne said. “You can’t kill anybody with that amount of plastic. You’d just blow a hole through the floor and break my feet.”

“Yeah, and then he said to carry you out to the island.”

“Did you plan to bandage me, or let me bleed?”

Slowly and painfully, Page came over far enough so he could look up at Shayne. “Make it a hundred. I couldn’t come back to this town.”

“Because of Capp? Forget it. Capp won’t be around.”

“Capp won’t be around?” Page said in amazement. “You’re dreaming, man. He’ll live longer than anybody.”

“Did he tell you to search my car?”

“For eight cans of film.”

“What cans of film?”

“What cans? He didn’t tell me what cans. Frankie Capp?”

The second man sat up and shook his head. Shayne showed him one of the guns. He stood up heavily, stared at Shayne and started to lumber away. Shayne shot him in the leg.

He swung the gun toward Page, who held up both hands, palms outward. Shayne took out the photograph of Gretchen Tucker and moved it in front of his eyes.

“Does she look familiar?”

The black opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. Still patient, Shayne explained the seriousness of the situation. Page was in trouble with Capp for failing to mangle Shayne, in trouble legally for planting a bomb in a car. Shayne sometimes cut corners himself, but this time he and the police were on the same side, and if Page thought jail might be the best and safest place, Shayne asked him to remember that Capp had friends and associates among the prisoners in most jails. When the black’s lips remained clamped, Shayne had his operator cut in on the police band, and a patrol car was on the scene in less than five minutes.

CHAPTER 9

He called Tim Rourke while he was driving, opening the microphone and hanging it on the dashboard. Rourke took the call in the News morgue.

“Not much in the clips, Mike,” he reported. “But I had a minute with Jake Johnson, who’s been writing backgrounders for twenty years, and I picked up one or two bits. Jake’s heard rumors that Tucker has had meetings with some of those nutty right-wing billionaires in Texas. You know the ones, who won’t eat salad with Russian or French dressing. The aerospace people, the ex-Chiefs of Staff. It’s been kept very quiet, because the candidates they back openly usually have trouble on election day.”

“He’s mainly looking for money?”

“At this stage, mainly money. That’s one thing. The other is that there was a hitch about lining up some of the pols behind Tucker’s nomination, because of some scurrilous phone calls. A female voice. The wife, maybe? There were a couple of weeks delay until he could straighten it out. All right, what’s been happening in the real world, while I’ve been inside getting dust up my nose?”

“Does a Chicago congressman named Barnett Pomeroy mean anything to you?”

“It’s a fair-sized name,” Rourke said thoughtfully. “I don’t connect it with any of this. If you want to hold on, I’ll get out the envelopes.”

Shayne was driving north on Miami Avenue, through light traffic, heading for the Modern Motel, where an actress named Maureen, from Los Angeles, had lived when she was working on Baruch’s sub rosa project. It was a next step, but if she had checked out, Shayne intended to stop for the night and let people sleep.

Rourke came back. “What I thought. A lot of newsprint here, but it’s drab stuff. He’s in his eighth term, and as long as he stays on good terms with the Chicago organization, he can have a ninth. Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is a key slot.” He was turning over clippings as he talked. “You don’t want any of this. Will he give such-and-such a bill a favorable report, and so on. Nothing.”

“He and Tucker were pushing each other in a parking lot tonight. Come up with a quick theory.”

“Any bill Tucker wants to introduce has to go through Pomeroy’s committee. If Pomeroy decides to sit on it, it’s dead. So Tucker shouldn’t be pushing him in a parking lot. I know a guy in Washington who won’t mind being waked up. He might know something. I’ll call him. Anything else?”

“Something even vaguer. Los Angeles has been mentioned. ‘Some Los Angeles guys are in town.’ That’s a quote. From some rival outfit, apparently. I didn’t have time to go into it, but the Warehouse people are taking it seriously. Sawed-off shotguns. Extra security. What do you think?”

“Pussy Rizzo!” Rourke exclaimed. “Absolutely. The nickname explains itself. He looks the way people who make stag films ought to look. Pockmarked. Thin platinum wristwatch. He dates back. I can see why they’re getting the guns out.”

“Who’s he after?”

“Tucker had him on the stand for two days, and wiped him out. What Tucker did, he subpoenaed all Pussy’s pictures, all the negatives, all the prints in circulation, and then he accidentally lost them.”

“Accidentally?”

“They got misrouted somewhere, and you don’t think a United States congressman would deliberately lie about it, do you? Of course everybody knows what happened — they went through the shredder. Pussy figures the loss at a half million. He was talking about suing but that was before he asked the advice of a lawyer. Without product he’s finished. In some circles it’s considered a triumph for the forces of decency. My paper ran a long editorial commending Tucker for finding extralegal ways to take care of such lice. If Pussy’s in town, tell your client to make sure who it is before he answers the door.”

“Baruch has four films he hasn’t released yet. If these Los Angeles guys grab them and put on new titles—”

“Sure!” Rourke said. “It’d make a very nice rip-off, and what could Baruch do about it? Not a hell of a lot.”

Shayne saw the motel sign ahead, the Vacancy light on. He ended the conversation with Rourke as he turned in and followed arrows to the office. Leaving his car standing with its lights on, he looked for Room 14. He found it on the second floor. Its windows were dark.

He returned to the office. A woman who had been dozing on a cot with the television on snapped awake and patted her hair.

“Can I help you?”

Shayne gave her a quick look at the card that entitled him to ask questions. “I’m trying to catch up with a runaway. Fourteen. She’s traveling with an older man in a green Chevy.” He reached across the counter to pick the registration cards out of an open file. “Just a routine check — I’m hitting all the motels.”

The woman came off the cot, picking at the air with both hands. “Nobody like that here! Those records are in confidence unless you happen to be a police officer or the FBI.”

“I’m neither,” Shayne said, continuing to flip through the cards. “They wouldn’t be up this late. What’s the problem? Nobody else has given me any arguments.”

“I’ve had some unfortunate experiences with private detectives, that’s the problem. I don’t hold with any of it. A person who pays for a room is entitled not to be bothered, is my policy.”

Shayne found the card he wanted. Maureen Neal, from Los Angeles, had arrived in a Thunderbird with the two letters on its license plate that identified it as a rented car.

He racked the cards and returned them. “That’s it. I’m calling it a night. How much are your singles?”

“I do have a few vacancies,” she admitted, “but don’t think renting a room will entitle you to look at my cards, because it won’t.”

Shayne proved to be exceptionally fussy about where he slept. After the long day he’d put in, he wanted to be as far as possible from traffic. He wanted a second floor room so the people overhead wouldn’t wake him at dawn. He settled on Room 15 and registered.

All the rooms in that wing had minuscule terraces, looking down on the swimming pool. There was no Thunderbird in the line of cars. Before leaving his own car, Shayne had his operator dial the motel, and when the woman answered he altered his voice and asked for Maureen Neal, in 14. There was no answer in that room, he was told a moment later.

Shayne went up to 15. Rooms 14 and 15 had a common door, so they could be rented together. He unbolted the door on his side.

Turning off the lights, he opened the sliding door onto the terrace. This proved to be a strip of concrete, just deep enough to accommodate two tubular deck chairs, closed on each side by a lattice covered with climbing vines. He swung over the railing and around onto the terrace of Room 14.

He opened the door with a knife blade. Inside, he turned on a single light.

Maureen Neal was an untidy girl. Two suitcases lay open on one of the big beds, but no real effort had been made to subdue the mess in the room and transfer it to the suitcases. Following his usual procedure, Shayne started with the bathroom.

The medicine cabinet was open. Maureen was a pill taker. There were pills to wake up, to sleep, to remain unpregnant, pills against pain, depression, anxiety, tooth decay. She believed in vitamins, and left wet towels on the floor. She used cocaine and vibrators, various cosmetic aids, hair conditioners, shampoos and coloring agents. Bottles and tubes covered every flat surface.

In the bedroom, Shayne continued his inventory. She read paperback Gothics. She had been rubbed recently; there was a massage book and a bowl of coconut oil, and the bedspread was slightly oily. He found two phone numbers scribbled on the back of an envelope. One was Capp’s. The other was preceded by 213, the area code for Los Angeles. A half-dozen new dresses from an expensive Lincoln Road shop hung in the closet, still carrying their sales tags. The interesting thing about these dresses was their label — the shop had been burglarized recently.

He began to get a picture of the girl and the disorganized life she had led in Miami. When the phone rang, he ignored it. An instant later, hearing a car pull into the parking area, he stabbed off the light and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.

A black Thunderbird was wheeling around to park.

He returned to his own room through the party door, and was at the front window in time to see the Thunderbird’s lights go off. A girl’s elbow withdrew from the window and the glass came up.

Then a second car pulled in: Shayne recognized it at once. It was the Dodge with dealer’s plates and the telltale fenders, that had been parked earlier outside Nick Tucker’s condominium in Bal Harbour.

A young man got out after rolling up the windows. He was tall and angular, wearing only Bermuda shorts, and his back and shoulders were sunburned. The girl was partway out of the Thunderbird by the time he reached her. He waved her back. Shayne, from above, could see only her bare arm and part of one leg.

The young man tried to get her to move over. Instead, her other arm came out and embraced him. He seemed to resist, bracing himself against the car. She must have said something to persuade him, because he moved aside to let her out.

She was wearing a bikini, her black hair pulled back in a knot. Shayne heard her laugh through the sealed window, but not what she was saying. She managed to unfasten the young man’s belt, and as he went in under the overhang, she pulled it out of its loops and began whipping him with it. He leaped away.

Shayne didn’t see them again until they came out at the top of the steps. She had changed the game and was trying to pull his shorts down over his narrow hips. He was responding now. Her bikini top came away in his hand.

She whirled. He caught her and they kissed against the railing. It was a deep kiss, and when she let him go her hands had left white marks on his sunburned back. They broke apart and ran toward the room.

Shayne lowered the slat quietly.

He heard the door of the next room open and close. The girl stumbled against something in the dark and giggled, and a strip of light showed beneath the common door.

“Naked at last,” she announced. “I don’t know why people are so hung-up about clothes.”

“Not everybody looks like you, kid.”

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s beautiful, big like that. I think there’s some coke left. Do you want it?”

“I could force myself.”

There were sounds of moving around.

“Half for you, half for me.”

Shayne looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Something about the scene being played in the next room bothered him. There was some kind of undercurrent running. Why had they come in two cars?

“Now where’s that nice warm glow?” The girl’s voice. “What did somebody do, switch some bicarbonate of soda in on me? There it is. There it is. Lovely. And the nice thing is, it’s habit forming.”

The TV sound came on, too loud at first. One of them throttled it down.

“Umm,” the girl said. “Now how shall we do it? Tonight I decide.”

“You’re getting to be sort of bossy, you know?”

“Do what I tell you or I’ll scratch you. With that sunburn you’re helpless.”

Sounds of lovemaking followed. Shayne finished his cigarette and put another in his mouth, but didn’t light it at once.

The girl said, “Will I see you in LA?”

“You know. Maybe.”

“I thought it was great out there.”

“Part of it was great. The hassles I can do without.”

“One guy isn’t enough for me! A woman can come more times than a man — everybody knows that. I need that contented feeling. Otherwise I jitter so much I rattle the windowpanes. And the bread. When was the last time you picked up a check?”

“I don’t believe in it. How much did you milk out of Frankie?”

“Nickels and dimes. Will you stop bugging me about it? If I told you how he liked his sex, you wouldn’t believe me. Machismo, my ass. What did we get started on this for?”

The bed complained as they changed position. Shayne checked the time again. This was producing very little, but it would be unfair to walk in before they were finished.

By gradual stages, the activity next door picked up speed and intensity. The woman was running it. She carried him along, asking for comments but paying little attention to what he said. The bed’s headboard was loose, and it creaked like a chorus of frogs. The girl’s breathing became more and more rapid, and she finished with a yell.

He decided to give them three minutes to wind down.

“There,” the girl’s voice said. “Any Scotch in the bottle?”

The bottle was found.

“You know what the next step’s going to be in blue movies?” she said. “Animals. I don’t know if I dig that.”

“Two to one you will. What was it about this picture he just shot? Did you figure it out?”

In the next room, Shayne had been about to get up. He sat back to listen.

“I saw some of the dailies,” the girl said.

She went into the bathroom and called, over the sound of running water, “He paid me in cash, which I don’t mind, naturally. Then all this secrecy. I mean, why? I went out today and asked around, but nobody knows a thing.”

“That blonde chick, Gretchen.”

A toilet flushed. “I thought I’d get her to come to a party here and loosen up—”

Shayne lost what was said next.

“—nowhere. They never saw her before.”

“I’ll tell you my idea,” the young man said. “Could you get hold of a print?”

“Probably not, but why?”

“It’s worth money to somebody, that’s all we know. So let’s screen the mother and see.”

After a moment, slowly: “No chance.”

“They know you, they’d let you through that first door. Drop it to me out the window.”

“Can’t be done. They even put the outtakes in the vault, and it’s a combination dial, the size of a grapefruit. You don’t peel that with a can opener.”

Impatiently: “I’m not talking breaking into vaults. There must be a way to get the combination. Like Frankie Capp must know it.”

“I agree with you. So?”

“Feed him some barbs in coffee. Espresso, to kill the taste. I’ll rent a U-Haul, and while he’s asleep we’ll clean out his place, rugs, pictures, whatever. Those guys keep plenty of cash for emergencies, right? So if we don’t find the combination we don’t lose.”

“Frankie Capp? This is the coke talking. Miami’s his town.”

The young man’s enthusiasm vanished abruptly. “I know we won’t do it. It’s always somebody else who makes the million dollars. I really hate it. Something big’s going on, and we can’t even find out what.”

She stopped him with a hiss. “The door’s unlocked.”

“No, it’s not. I locked it.”

“Whisper,” she whispered, and Shayne missed the next thing she said. Then: “We better get some help in here.”

Shayne stood up, the unlighted cigarette still in his mouth. He unlocked the door on his side and went into the next room.

The girl, naked, was alone on the bed, against pillows. She stared up at Shayne.

“Who the hell are you?”

A violent blow against the door knocked it out of Shayne’s hand. He was moving, instinct telling him — a tick too late — that he had walked into an ambush. The youth had the Johnnie Walker bottle, bringing it around and up. Shayne caught the blow on his raised arm. The girl, moving fast, slithered off the bed, bringing the bedspread with her, and netted Shayne with it.

Shayne punched out blindly. He caught the youth a hard blow in the kidneys. Shayne went after him, trying to throw off the bedspread, and the girl hit him from behind, probably with another bottle. She wasn’t sure she had done enough damage, though Shayne was shuffling woozily, and she hit him once more.

He went down.

CHAPTER 10

He didn’t go all the way out. He told his arms and legs what to do, but the circuits seemed to be interrupted. He managed only a sluggish movement.

Meanwhile, his two assailants were swarming all over him. He kicked feebly upward at the girl, who seemed to be the fiercer, but his foot was too heavy to get it off the floor. The bottle came at him again. He sagged, turning everything off, and the blow missed.

No words were being spoken, but they were all breathing hard. The blow that finally put Shayne under was delivered by the youth, from the side, again with a bottle. A flashbulb exploded inside his head, driving splinters into his brain.

When he fought his way back, he found himself still on the floor. His mouth was heavily taped, his wrists and ankles bandaged together with strips torn from a sheet.

The girl was talking into the phone, reading Shayne’s identification folder. The youth had pulled on his Bermudas and stood regarding Shayne sleepily, kneading the place where Shayne had hit him.

“You bastard.”

When Shayne grunted, the girl hung up and turned on him. “Are you working for Frankie Capp?”

Shayne half laughed, the effect somewhat spoiled by the tape across his mouth.

“Are you or aren’t you?” the girl said sharply. “Shake your head yes or no.”

Shayne shook his head and hitched around into a sitting position against the wall. She came to stand over him. There was a tiny crucifix on a golden chain between her breasts, her only jewelry. Her fingers were bare. Her eye makeup was smeared, and she had lost one set of artificial lashes. Her hair, which had been under constraint when he saw her come in, was now around her shoulders. She was nicely tanned, in the usual places.

“You have a dirty job. Much dirtier than mine. In my book a private detective is two levels under a Peeping Tom. Look in the next room, Peter. See what kind of setup he’s got there.”

The youth stepped through the open door. The girl stayed close in front of Shayne. Leaning down, she flicked her fingernail contemptuously against the bridge of his nose.

Peter came back. “Not even luggage. Say something and I’ll see if I can hear it through the door.”

He closed the door and the girl directed several obscenities at Shayne, speaking in her ordinary tone. The youth came back.

“I heard you. Now we have to think back and remember what we were talking about.”

“Lots of things. But if we lock him in the bathroom until I get on a plane he can’t report to anybody, can he?”

She went back to sit on the bed and continued going through the things she had taken from Shayne’s pockets.

“It gives me a crawly feeling,” Peter said. “Big Brother’s watching you. Lucky I’m a peaceful fellow, or I’d be tempted to cut off one of his ears.”

She made a small sound as she opened the envelope with the pictures Shayne’s client had given him. She called Peter to the bed, and he made a sound almost a copy of hers. She picked out one picture and waved it in front of Shayne.

“Damn it, we’ll have to take off the tape if we want him to answer questions.”

She picked at a corner of the tape until it began to come, then ripped it off in a quick move.

Shayne said calmly, “My client’s name is Congressman Nicholas Tucker. His wife has been missing three days. Do you know where I can find her?”

Maureen, hardly moving, watched him. “You are so cool. As soon as we have some conversation I think I’m going to have to ball you. Did you ever do it with your hands and feet tied?”

She brought her pelvis forward and brushed his forehead lightly with the hair.

Shayne waited till she withdrew. “You could do worse than deal with me. You were talking about money. Tucker has money, and he can raise more.”

“We meant money. I’m going to talk it over with my friend in the bathroom, and don’t strain your ears because this time we’re going to be careful.”

The bathroom door closed behind them and the shower came on. Shayne fell forward, getting his knees under him, and propelled himself into the space between the beds. One more hard kick took him to the bedside table. He was facing the wrong way, and he had to pull the phone off the table with his teeth. It came apart as it fell. He put his lips to the mouthpiece.

“Operator? Operator?”

Peter came out and clucked when he saw what Shayne was doing. After replacing the phone on the table he dragged Shayne back in the open.

“Peter’s going to leave us alone now,” the girl said, “because I don’t want you to feel shy. Would you like me to feed you some whiskey?”

“Sure.”

Peter stopped at the door. “Are you positive this is the way you want to play it?”

“Positive,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

Peter muttered and went out without looking at Shayne.

“One thing you may not know,” Shayne said, “is that he was parked outside Tucker’s house in Bal Harbour earlier tonight. A package was delivered to Tucker a little later. If he didn’t deliver it, he may know who did.”

He thought she looked interested. “A package.” While she was in the bathroom she had pulled on a loose robe. It had a belt, but she left it dangling. She sat on the edge of the low bed.

“It’s barely possible that we’re going to become friends. Tell me some more. I know Tucker didn’t hire you just because his wife is missing. Is somebody trying to put the bite on him?”

“I think so.”

She was thinking hard. Her tongue came out. She massaged her forehead, to speed up the circulation, and said slowly, “At the Warehouse. I wasn’t supposed to see this, but when I get going I can be nosy as hell. Baruch was splicing single frames back into the negative. I bet he made transparencies! You said a package. Was that what it was? Stills? Like a trailer, coming attractions? To let Tucker know what they had?”

She barked suddenly, like a hound after a coon, and gave a happy laugh. Then she peered at Shayne.

“What did you make of it? I mean you, not Tucker.”

There was an edge to the question, as though it might be more important than it sounded, and Shayne was careful about his answer.

“You want me to guess how much Tucker would be willing to pay for the film. — If we’re going to be friends, why not untie me?”

“Finish,” she said impatiently.

“I think there might be quite a stink if it showed up in the theaters. He’s already imagining the headlines — ‘Anti-Smut Crusader’s Wife in Sex Film.’ And that’s how the story would be played. But somebody said something about the old blackmail ploys, that they don’t work the way they used to. If they broke this at the right time, he could lose this nomination. Otherwise he could ride it out. Naturally he’d like to clamp a lid on the whole thing, but too many greedy people know about it by now. All I’m saying is, there may not be as much money here as everybody seems to think.”

“How do you mean, he could ride it out?”

“She has a history of drug-taking, and she’s been seeing a psychiatrist in Washington.”

She nodded after a moment. “A sick girl. Corrupted by a filthy-minded, pot-smoking extremist Jew.”

“And whose business partner is a mafiosi, of sorts. It was a plot to get Nick, and to make it work they took a woman who was in delicate psychological balance to start with, and drove her nuts. That’s the press conference version. In the pictures I saw, she looked fairly O.K.”

She changed the subject abruptly. “Was I in those shots?”

To refresh his recollection, she opened her robe. A good makeup person could have changed the shape of her face and the color of her hair and the way she wore it, but there were too many important differences between this girl and the girl in the erotic slides. For one thing, that girl hadn’t spent any time out in the sun. Her nipples had been slightly cross-eyed, whereas the breasts Shayne was looking at now pointed slightly outward.

When Shayne shook his head, she bounced off the bed and began moving, her robe flying.

“A congressman’s wife. I knew there was something funny about her. I didn’t think Armand handled her too well. Now I think that was part of it, to make her uncomfortable. We did a Lesbian scene, and she didn’t enjoy one minute of it.” She turned with a quick laugh. “And it was probably the first time in her life! Dig that. On camera.”

She came back. “Do you mind listening to me think aloud? Poor Tucker. His poor helpless wife, out of her skull. But he could only get away with that version if she wasn’t around to contradict it.”

“Where would she be?”

“Dead.” She let the word fall like a stone. “Dead, dummy. She wouldn’t be the first suicide in the sexploitation business. There’ve been some gory ones where I come from. Now if Gretchen — that’s what we called her, is it her right name?”

“Yeah.”

“We keep changing names whenever we change our personality. Do you think I was born Maureen? Never mind. I’m not thinking about her so much because I don’t really know her. I’m thinking about me. Two or three years in the skins is a career. I want to make money now, and make it fast. That’s so you know where I’m at. And one of the ideas that’s running through my head — running, hell, hurdling — is wouldn’t I do better to deal with Tucker direct?”

“Are you in a position to sell him anything?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She looked for cigarettes, but found only an empty package. She picked up the loose cigarette Shayne had dropped. After lighting it, she put it between his lips.

“It’s yours, so you get every other puff. Did Tucker strike you as the kind of guy who would kill somebody if he thought he had to?”

“I didn’t talk to him long enough.”

She took the cigarette back and drew on it deeply. “I happen to be a little high on one thing or another, so shut up and listen. I have psychic feelings about people. The feeling I had about that Gretchen chick was that she didn’t have long to live.”

Shayne made a skeptical noise.

“I know,” she said. “You don’t believe in that crap. But she had this light in her eye. I mean it. She was giving off signals. Hey, I promised you a drink.”

She put the Scotch bottle to his lips, noticed that the cap was still on and removed it. “We were pretty tight there for a couple of days. You can fool the camera when you can’t fool the person who’s down on you. I didn’t get any reaction at all. Like novacaine, man.”

“She wasn’t doing it to have fun.”

“I know that. I wish I wasn’t this coked, I could think better. Do you know who I think of sometimes when I cop somebody? My grandfather. He was a Methodist minister, and I didn’t go to his funeral. But you don’t want me to go into this.”

“That’s right.”

She gave him another swallow of Scotch. “I thought she was just conflicted about — you know, people watching. And with a black, which she did a couple of times, that would be kind of hard for a congressman’s wife, right? That’s why nobody knew where she lived. She didn’t come to a party of mine because she was being careful. Armand had to give her a shot one day to quiet her down. She wasn’t scared of sex. She was scared, period.”

“Of what?”

“I said I’m thinking aloud. Do I want to deliver the girl to that shitty husband? The answer could be no.”

“You can’t deliver her unless you know where she is.”

“No, I mean, do I want to? For Tucker to get the kind of publicity you were talking about, she has to go all the way. The Big Sleep, baby. For the last scene, she has to stop hallucinating and understand what they’re doing to Mr. Clean. Remorse! She’s got this self-destructive thing anyhow — ask her doctor. So she gets in a car and slams into an abutment at ninety miles an hour. And whose fault? Not Tucker’s! Baruch. Frankie. Beethoven on the sound track for the finish. Wrap it. — I don’t mean she’d do it! I mean Tucker would arrange it, and that’s how it would look! If you aren’t following, are you trying?”

“Is this part of your psychic feeling, or do you have anything to go on?”

“Will you stop trying to put me down?” she said crossly. “I’m good at reading character, I really am. She’s a Taurus. There’s a toughness there. She knew what she was doing. It was hard for her but she gritted her teeth and did it, of course with some help from the drug industry, legal and illegal. The more I think about it…”

She probed her cheek with her tongue and looked at Shayne speculatively.

“Here we start lying,” he said.

“Not at all. I remember that jolt Armand gave her. I think it was Darvon. It takes off the edges, and you get a better perspective. That was the day he was shooting a wheel. You know, four people? When you’re into Darvon, you ask yourself, does it matter? After we finished the shot, the guys took off and we stayed on the bed, Gretchen and me, smoking and generally, you know, grooving. She said various things. How she didn’t like men. In contrast to me, because I’m omnivorous, if that’s the word.”

“That means you eat everything.”

“Everybody.” She was becoming more playful as she spun out the story. “And she let something go, I wish I could remember the words. Husbands will kill you every time. They’ll kill you. She’d moved out on him, but if he ever caught up with her—”

Again, as so often tonight, Shayne had the feeling that he was watching a performance, in a role that hadn’t been defined by the playwright and still needed considerable work.

“She had good reason to be nervous,” Shayne said. “Tucker hates pornographers, and I don’t think that’s just a gag to get space in the papers. By making a dirty movie, she’s trying to hit him where it hurts. Stay out of it, Maureen. You’re outclassed. There are other people involved besides Tucker. Frankie Capp. Somebody shot his dog tonight, so he wired a bomb to the ignition of my car, on the chance it might have been me. But I’ve been dealing with people like Capp for years, and we go off fairly even.”

She interrupted. “I know Frankie, and he doesn’t impress me. Who else? I mean, I want to know, you still might persuade me.”

“Some people from Los Angeles. Pussy Rizzo is the name I have. You’ve been phoning an LA number, and maybe you’re the one who brought them in. Then there’s a congressman I don’t know much about, except that he has a certain amount of seniority, which gives him leverage.”

“Named what?”

“Barnett Pomeroy.”

Shayne’s own psychic powers were limited to what he could see and hear, but the change in the girl’s face told him that she knew the name, and it alarmed her. She walked quickly away, to make her adjustments without being watched.

“You know him,” Shayne said.

“Heard of him,” she said without turning. “From Chicago, right? What’s he doing here?”

“They brought him in for the convention. Tucker didn’t want to tell me much about him either.”

“Leverage. Oh, yes. If Barney makes a phone call to the winter White House they’ll move in an airborne division. Outclassed? Maybe I am. But when I see an opportunity to solve all my problems, I think I owe it to myself—”

“We aren’t necessarily on opposite sides.”

“Yes, we are. Yes, we are. There are a million things you don’t know.”

She turned back, her face showing that she had come to a decision. “If I was going for the money against that competition, I’d need your help. But the hell with it. What good’s money if you get in a car and it blows up under you? So I’m back to my original thing, leave you here and let the maid find you. I’ll have to put the tape back on your mouth. Sorry. Unless you hold still I’ll have to clout you again. And you don’t want that, because I wouldn’t know how hard to do it. I’m a beginner.”

She turned again, sharply, at the sound of feet on the gallery. An instant later, a knock came at the door.

“Maureen.”

It was a statement, not a question: a man’s voice. She had been thinking about giving Shayne another mouthful of Scotch. The bottle flew out of her hand and landed on the bed, spurting whiskey. She whirled on Shayne, using both hands to tell him to be silent.

“Come on, come on, wake up,” the voice said, and the doorknob rattled.

She pulled at Shayne’s shoulder, indicating that he should propel himself to the connecting door. Her mouth was a straight tense line. He nodded toward the table.

“Wallet.”

Two quick steps took her between the beds. Change spilled on the floor. Shayne rolled back on his elbows and pumped hard. He worked himself to the doorway and through it. She was a step behind.

She shut the door carefully and locked it.

CHAPTER 11

“Cut me loose,” Shayne whispered.

Shayne, as usual, had been carrying a Swiss knife. She snapped out one of the blades and sawed the strips of linen binding his wrists. He took the knife and freed his ankles. They had made the bandage too tight, and he winced as he stood up.

“Who are they?” he said in the same soft whisper.

“Trouble. From the coast.”

He slid his hand inside her robe. Her heart was working hard, so her alarm was probably real. She put her hand on his and pulled it hard against her, then gave him a wry look, partly a smile.

“Money, who needs it?”

With a metallic clatter, the door to the next room slammed open.

“Maureen, goddamn it,” a voice said.

Shayne and the girl, touching, listened at the door. One of the things she had brought with her from the other room was a.38 revolver. She let him take it. He broke it open. There were two rounds, one under the hammer.

One of the men in the next room came back after checking the balcony. “Nobody.” He had a high-pitched, nervous voice, a faintly Germanic accent. “What happened with the bitch? Her car is downstairs.”

The other’s answer came slowly. “She was hot to do it. It was her idea. I came three thousand goddamn miles.”

“Somebody was smoking a butt in here, and it’s recent.” A moment later: “Pussy. Look at this here. Blood.”

On the other side of the door, the girl looked at Shayne’s forehead, where she had slugged him with a bottle. The same voice said, “Let’s get out of here. It’s off, isn’t it? We can’t do it without her.”

“Let me think for a minute. When did you talk to her?”

“Not since six thirty. Look at the bed, somebody’s been rolling on it. Do you think Frankie or them—”

“Will you wait a minute! Frankie’s been getting this short fuse, and if he found out she’s been jiving him…”

A pause.

“Cocaine. She said she’d stay straight. I don’t know, Pussy, I don’t like the looks.”

“I said to shut up, will you?”

The other, more nervous, was able to contain himself for less than two beats. “What makes anybody think they can trust this Congressman Pomeroy? I’ve seen sneakier faces, but I can’t remember where. There’s a time to be sensible!”

“Three feature films at fifty thousand apiece. Then a quarter of a million for the big one. Add it up, a total of three seventy-five in one small, easy burglary. Will you let me think?”

“I doubt it would run that high. O.K., O.K., think. But you know what? They’ll be out there at the Warehouse waiting for us.”

“There’s a way we could find out.”

“I know it, I’ve been to war movies. Somebody sticks his head out, and they shoot it off for him. And I know who’s going to be picked. Peace-loving Swenson, the boxman, who’s allergic to gunshots, who all he wants is to be left alone to practice his specialty.”

“They aren’t looking to murder anybody.”

“We need the girl, Pussy. That’s the version you sold me.”

“Right, with Maureen it would be easier. Because they know her, they’d think she was showing up for retakes. But it would be bad too, because they’d know who to look for, after. We could go back to the first idea.”

“You mean the fire.”

“To cover the bang, yeah. We had it worked out. You didn’t see the diagram we made. Sit down and I’ll draw it for you. We’ve got time.”

They had found the Scotch. One of the men drank from the bottle.

On the locked side of the connecting door, Shayne gave the girl a questioning look. She made a gun out of her thumb and index finger, pointed it at her temple and pulled the trigger. Then she shook her head, probably meaning that she had pulled out of the plan because she hadn’t wanted to be on the scene when guns started going off.

Pussy Rizzo’s voice: “Like this. There’s a separate entrance. They keep one guy there all the time, I mean all day and all night. Inside, there’s a hall and one of those big doors. Another guy there, outside the door. I was going to send Angel in with Maureen. Angel’s her boyfriend — no problem. He’d pull out his Saturday-night special and tie up the guy, then go back and jump the guy on the outside. Quietly. And you’d waltz in with your equipment.”

“And how many people are out there prowling around in the parking lot?”

“After three o’clock, a maximum of four. Maybe less. I won’t kid you. I’d rather do it that way. But there’s a back window and it’s not tied in to the alarm. They’ve got an old hoist back there, behind the screen, for deliveries. We tested it out, and it works. It’s on counterweights, you pull a rope and it goes up. Swenson. I went to the trouble to make this drawing. You aren’t looking.”

“Yes, I am. Where’s the vault?”

“Right here. The phone line’s cut by now, that’s the first thing I do when I get there. You set your charge and give me a wave out the window. I knock out the power. All right, I’ve got a Ford parked in back, and by this time it’s soused with kerosene. I ram it into the building. The minute you hear the crash, blow. We want to try and time it so everything goes up at once. You know there’s going to be a hell of a lot of confusion. Those security guys are going to be charging around on their goddamn scooters, wondering who and what. Angel and Pepe are covering you. I don’t see any reason on God’s earth why you shouldn’t go back down the hoist, out the window and get in the bus with nobody bothering you. I told you about the side gate. I cut the chain. We’re a hundred miles away by the time they know they’ve been taken.”

“Nice. And ordinarily, without this Maureen complication—”

“There are ways you can figure that. All I’m saying, let’s see how it looks, all right? I’ve laid out plenty, and I don’t feel like writing it off unless I have to. Maybe she just got nervous and got on a plane.”

Shayne and the girl had monitored this exchange with equal interest. She laughed silently. Holding out her hand, she made it shake like a poplar leaf.

Swenson said reluctantly, “Well. I’ve got debts to pay. I owe everybody. But I want a veto. If I don’t like it, I still may pull out. You’re at liberty to borrow my equipment if you want to.”

“Christ, no! I’d blow my ass off.”

“Are you sure Angel can find those doors and windows?”

“He went over the whole place. He’s a good, careful boy, a little faggy, is all.”

“The hell of it is,” Swenson said, “the reason I came in in the first place, I hear Maureen will open up for anybody, she likes it so much.”

“That’s my girlfriend,” Rizzo said philosophically.

They were leaving. Shayne went to the window and bent up one of the slats. He saw the backs of the two men go down the gallery. He recognized Rizzo from Tim Rourke’s description: dark sideburns, curly graying hair, pockmarks, a thin moustache. Swenson was shorter and broader, with a pink face. They came out from beneath the overhang and went to a Volkswagen bus, disfigured with stickers and signs. Conspicuous here, it would seem part of the landscape at the Warehouse. A third person was at the wheel. Shayne had a glimpse of blonde hair long enough to be a girl’s.

The bus moved off.

“Did you follow that?” the girl asked.

“Some of it. You and Pussy were going to score on Baruch, and you backed out. What kind of deal did you have?”

“Not good enough, I decided. Pussy’s a runner-up.”

She had been forced to stand still while they listened, but now she was moving quickly around the room, shaking herself like a wet dog or a swimmer before a race. She seemed peculiarly excited.

“Let’s do it on my bed, Mike. I feel—”

She tried to pull him through the door into the other room. He shook her off.

“I don’t want to miss this at the Warehouse.”

“A quick one.”

“Maybe later, but don’t count on it. Does this change anything for you?”

She forced herself to listen to the question. “No. I’m getting out of here in the morning back to LA, as planned.”

“Without trying to make any more money?”

“I’ll try and be satisfied with nothing. Because this is pretty heavy, right? I’ll gobble a couple of downers and go to sleep. Outclassed! Keep telling me. Because I know what’s going to happen.”

“What?”

“Somebody’s going to get killed. I won’t tell you who because I don’t want to spoil it.”

“Just be careful it’s not you.”

“Me? I’m fine. Oh, my. What’s happening?” She put her hand flat on the top of her head. “I had everything fastened down tight, and now all of a sudden I’m as high as a balloon.”

CHAPTER 12

Rizzo and his friends, in the VW bus, had several minutes’ start, but in that attention-getting rig they were careful to observe all speed zones, and Shayne passed them several blocks from the Warehouse.

The parking area around the theater was less turbulent than when he had seen it earlier. Although many cars remained in the embrasures, some of the pole lights had been turned off. There were two guards at the gate. Shayne pulled past the gate and parked, and waited to see what the bus would do about the problem of getting in.

He saw its headlights approaching the fenced-in area from the rear. They passed out of sight behind a low building. The chain-link fence at that point was screened by plantings. Shayne waited, and when the headlights failed to reappear, he returned to his Buick and completed the circuit of the fence.

He passed the gate Rizzo must have used, parked again and came back. As he approached, he saw the cut chain. The bus had crept in without lights and parked twenty feet inside the fence, partially in shadow.

Shayne roused his operator and had her dial Frankie Capp’s number. Capp was on the phone at once. Shayne identified himself and heard a quickly indrawn breath.

“Shayne,” Capp said. “I was hoping you had a heart attack and dropped dead. What do we do now, negotiate?”

“I had a near-miss earlier tonight. Somebody planted a bomb in my car. I’m not sure I’m in a negotiating mood.”

“I don’t know about that, and I never heard of a spade named Page, either, so don’t ask me. But I’m realistic. I know you’re going to want some compensation. I thought half would be about right. Down the middle.”

“I know what you want me to do for my half. What are you planning to do for yours?”

“I made the contact. I take the chances. You don’t appear at all.”

“Only one thing bothers me, Frankie. Can I trust you?”

“Work something out where you’re protected. This isn’t a maiden race for you, Shayne. Anything reasonable I’ll go with.”

Through the fence, Shayne could see Rizzo leave the VW, holding long-handled wire cutters tightly against his leg.

“Let’s postpone it for now,” Shayne said. “The real reason I’m calling is to pass something on. You’re a local man. I know where to look for you. But I don’t like it when people come in from out of town and break up the patterns.”

“What are you talking about?” Capp said cautiously.

“Somebody named Pussy Rizzo or Rezzo. I understand he’s been ripped off by Tucker’s committee and he needs to recoup. A couple of other names — Angel, Pepe. There’s a fourth man with glasses, named Swenson. He’s some kind of expert, and I think what he’s an expert at is opening safes.”

“Why tell me?”

“It struck me that an old hijacker like you would hate to be hijacked, more than an ordinary person. Pussy has a connection inside the Baruch studio, an actress named Maureen Neal.”

“I know her,” Capp said grimly. “Has she been talking to Pussy about us? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“He wouldn’t come all the way from Los Angeles just to see the Atlantic. He seems to know quite a bit about Project X. That’s Domestic Relations, the Gretchen Tucker movie. At least he knows more about it than I do. He’s obviously planning to steal it.”

Capp said sharply, “Get off the line, Shayne.”

“So you can call the Warehouse? Not yet, Frankie. I want to make sure everything’s covered. You know about incoming calls. You can’t call out until I hang up. We started to talk about terms. I might have settled for half if you hadn’t pulled that trick with the bomb. I’m attached to that Buick, not to mention my own feet. So I want three quarters.”

“I always wonder with you — how much do you know? Three quarters of what?”

“I’ve heard a quarter of a million. That would make — I’ll need a pencil and paper to figure it out.”

“Give me the buyer’s name.”

“Pomeroy,” Shayne said promptly. “Have it ready in a used suitcase, in small bills. I’ll call again in exactly an hour. Be home.”

“Get off the line!”

“I can hear you,” Shayne said mildly. “I haven’t finished about Rizzo. You’ll want to hear this. They’re using the old freight hoist to get upstairs, and something was said about setting a car on fire. They’re driving a Volkswagen with ecology stickers. They probably stole it, because Pussy didn’t seem to be much of an ecology nut to me.”

Rizzo emerged from the shadows, having cut the telephone line, and started across the open space to the bus. Shayne wound up the conversation quickly.

“Now we’re colleagues. Don’t tell anybody I called you.”

He signaled his operator to break the connection.

“One other thing,” he told her. “Ten minutes from now, in exactly ten minutes, put in a fire call. The Warehouse Theater, Twenty-seventh Avenue, Northwest.”

“Mike, do you really want me to? Tell me exactly what to say.”

“Just say it’s on fire. Sound excited and hang up.”

“You know it’s against the law to turn in a false alarm?”

“I wouldn’t ask you to do that. The fire hasn’t started yet, but in ten minutes things are going to be different.”

“All right, but one of these days,” she said ominously, “I’m going to stop doing favors for you, and I’ll probably digest my food better. Ten minutes. I’ve made a note of the time.”

Shayne, too, was checking the time. Capp, driving fast, was fifteen minutes away, but he wouldn’t get started before wasting a few minutes trying to get through to the Warehouse. While Capp would be hurrying, Swenson and the others would be taking their time. Handling nitroglycerin, people think about what they’re about to do before they do it.

Shayne drank from his flask. There was a faint glow in the back of the VW bus. They were going over the plans again, by flashlight, checking the diagram against the building itself. Nearby, a car came to life and backed into the open, its headlights showing the four men in the bus, their heads close together.

All but Rizzo came out after another minute: Swenson, then the fair-haired driver and a slender youth wearing pants so tight that they would probably give him trouble climbing in the window. Swenson carried a heavy leather satchel slung from one shoulder. It pulled him down on that side, and he steadied it with one hand as he walked. The boys with him were dancing with excitement. The dark one goosed the fair one, making him jump.

In a minute, the group disappeared around the building.

Craning, Shayne picked out the silhouette of the guard in the front of the theater, under the darkened marquee. Another guard, in the open, sat on his heels beside a motor scooter. There was an underlay of noise from dashboard radios, an occasional laugh.

Five minutes passed. Another car departed.

At last the VW door came open and Rizzo stepped down, holding the wire cutters along his leg as before. Shayne turned on his overhead light to pick the plastic bomb out of the clutter on the floor of the back seat. The VW’s engine, of course, was in the rear, and he took an extra length of wire out of his own trunk. Then he pulled up the floor mat and took a loaded pistol from a dropped compartment.

A stick had been jammed through the hasp of the gate to keep it from swinging. Shayne replaced it after opening the gate enough to slip through.

Many of the parking bays had emptied completely, but another Volkswagen, this one a red beetle, was parked on the far side of the larger bus. A radio in it was playing softly, and a girl’s sandaled foot protruded through the window.

After reaching the bus, Shayne used his body to conceal what he was doing. He removed the distributor cap and tied in the wire, then paid out enough to reach the front of the bus, where he connected the detonator and pressed the lump of plastic out of sight under the dashboard.

A boy called from the smaller VW, “Won’t she start?”

“Loose connection. I can take care of it.”

A door opened. “I’m a VW freak, self-taught. Let me take a look.”

Although heavily bearded, he looked extremely young to Shayne, in blue jeans cut off at mid-thigh. He was only five feet tall, which for some reason made him seem even more friendly.

Shayne blocked him. “I don’t need any help, thanks.”

“You don’t need help? Man, you left that wire hanging there. It’s going to snag on something before you turn around.”

“Lester, come back,” his girl called from the beetle. “He said he doesn’t want to be helped. Believe him.”

The boy gestured at the stickers on the side of the bus. “I’m into the same things myself. Us against the world!” He continued to come on, affable but determined. “Unless you fix that wire you’ll short out your whole system.”

It was the wrong moment, but Shayne stepped out of the way and said quietly, “It isn’t my car. It isn’t theirs, either. They stole it. Take a look, but be careful.”

“You are out of your wig, man. Nobody steals minibuses. It’s a matter of resale value.”

He lit a match to look under the dashboard. He dropped the match as though it had burned him, and backed out.

“Excuse me. I have to train myself to be less friendly.”

“How did you like the movie tonight?”

Lester replied carefully, “It was O.K. I mean actually it was quite a good movie. We were surprised.”

“Four guys from the Coast just broke into the building. They’ll be blowing the safe in another minute. There are four movies they want, and apparently Baruch won’t be able to do anything about it afterward but cry. I’ve called for help. It may not get here in time.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Michael Shayne, and I’m in favor of clean air and water, and I also wish somebody would manufacture a nonpolluting automobile.”

“In that case—” Lester backed away. “How about calling in some of these cats in the armbands? They’re all over.”

“They’d get themselves shot.”

“Lester,” the girl called again.

“Coming, believe me.”

Shayne was watching the second floor windows. On this side, everything was dark. But by this time, unless something had gone wrong, the men inside must have reached the vault.

He put on the armband he had picked up at Baruch’s party and went across the angle at the end of the parking area, making clear by the way he walked that he was on Warehouse business. Rounding the corner, he saw a service entrance with a short loading dock. Everything was closed up tight except for a missing pane in one of the ground-floor windows. It had been cut out neatly, and Shayne saw it only because he was looking for it.

A lighted flashlight was uncovered at one of the upper windows. The light showed for an instant and was covered again. Rizzo, somewhere in the darkness, had been waiting for this signal, and every light inside the fence blinked out at once.

Shayne moved toward the broken window. As he passed a parked car he was pinned in place by the beam of a three-cell flashlight. The man behind the flashlight was wearing one of the armbands.

A voice at Shayne’s elbow said, “We’ve been watching you. That’s not your armband. What was that light upstairs?”

Shayne shielded his eyes. “How would I know? I came back here to relieve myself.”

A hand came around and took the gun out of his belt. “You must be new in town. One of the things we guarantee when they buy a ticket is that they won’t be robbed.”

“You don’t want to bother with me. I just like to look in car windows when they’re getting undressed.”

A fire siren screamed in the distance, right on time. The men moved Shayne toward the theater entrance, one at each arm. Shayne went without resistance, waiting for the next event in Rizzo’s script.

But what happened next was one of the things Shayne himself had arranged. A big car broke through the front gate, traveling fast — Frankie Capp’s Cadillac. A lighter, less expensive car followed, rocking as the driver sawed at the wheel.

“You see,” Shayne said, “the interesting things are happening out there.”

Still a third car came out of a parking bay and headed straight for the building, headlights on full. Instead of turning, it kept going.

One of the men with Shayne shouted. The car smashed against the building. An instant later there was a clash of fenders involving Capp’s big car and the other that had come in behind it. The two drivers came out of their cars and began grappling under the marquee. A guard tried to push between them.

“Is that Frankie?” one of the men holding Shayne said.

It was clearly Capp. The man he was wrestling was small, fat and quite drunk, with flying hair. Rizzo, in the car he had crashed into the Warehouse, untangled himself from the seat belt and jumped out. Shayne dug in his heels. With an explosive whoosh, the car burst into flame. Only a tick later, there was a puff of sound from inside the building. Shayne heard it, but to the others, it was drowned out by the roar and crackle from the burning car.

They fell back, then started to circle. Shayne stopped cooperating. He jumped backward, throwing his arms upward and outward to break their grip. He pushed one man off balance and nailed the other with a looping left, which dropped him. An instant later, Shayne was around the corner, out of sight.

The second man decided not to come after him, but to continue to the theater entrance and assist Capp.

The fire engine came through the gate and headed for the blaze.

Shayne slid under the loading dock. His hand closed on a short length of two-by-two scrap lumber. Presently, from inside the building, he heard the creak of the descending hoist. A moment afterward, a light showed at the broken window. The sash came up and one of the thieves, the dark-haired boy in the tight pants, dropped to the ground. The men inside lowered a wire shopping cart, filled nearly to the brim with film cans.

Swenson, the safeblower, was next. He ordered the flashlight turned off, and when the last member of the group jumped down in the dark, he landed badly, going to one knee with a grunt. The others were wheeling the cart away.

“Pepe,” Shayne called in a low voice when the hobbling figure reached the dock.

He kept going, so this one must be Angel.

“Angel,” Shayne snapped.

Angel looked back. The gap had widened between him and the cart. Shayne swung the two-by-two at his shins and cut him down.

The men with the cart had now come out into the flickering light from the fire. Pepe looked back when Angel yelled, but Swenson was desperate to get away before anything worse happened, and kept him from returning. Angel writhed on the blacktop, in pain. Shayne took the gun he was wearing and tapped him with it, to confuse him further.

The whole corner of the building was burning, but another piece of apparatus had arrived, and so many firemen had converged on the fire that it seemed likely that they would succeed in halting it there.

A police car pulled in, and Capp ran toward it, waving his arms. Tonight he and the police were in the odd situation of being allies.

Firemen were bringing in hose from a street hydrant, passing it over the fence. Shayne was on the wrong side of the line. A surprisingly large crowd had already gathered, and most of the spectators had presumably come from the parked cars. Shayne looked for a car with nobody in it. He found a purple sedan that had no heads showing. The ignition key was in place. He had started the motor and moved out of the bay before realizing that the back seat was occupied. The seat itself had been replaced by a double mattress, on which a narcoticized couple lay entwined, moving dreamily without noticing that the car was also in motion.

Shayne drove all the way around the building, coming back under the marquee.

The girl murmured behind him, “Like that. Oh, it’s wild.”

Rizzo was standing beside the open rear door of the bus. The shopping cart was now empty. A kick sent it careening into the darkness. The Smaller VW, belonging to the bearded youth who had tried to help Shayne, was no longer there.

The cops came out of their car, looking around to see what crimes were being committed. One of the cars from the wrong side of the fire line forced its way, honking, past the firemen to head for the gate. One of the cops drew his gun and aimed carefully at a tire, blowing it with his third shot.

Making a wide arc to avoid this group, Shayne swerved back toward the theater, then back toward the Volkswagen. As he slowed to a stop in an empty bay, the girl on the mattress cried: “Oh! Oh! The greatest. Never in my life. The Fourth of July!”

Pepe had pulled the stick out of the gate, so it was free to swing. Rizzo, in the front seat of the bus, waited for the right moment to back out without being seen. The two cops had now lined up the occupants of the car they had stopped, turning them to face the fence so they could be searched for forbidden substances. Frankie Capp, behind them, was trying to convince them to ignore these small fry and look for a VW covered with left-wing graffiti. He was annoying them, and it was easy to predict that in another minute he would be included among the suspects.

He strode away in disgust.

Shayne had been ad-libbing, as usual, changing his plans as the situation changed. Now he decided it was time to make his presence felt.

The gate opened inward. The gun Shayne had taken from Angel was a heavy.45 Colt, an erratic weapon at this distance. To check its accuracy, he fired at a mercury-vapor lamp. It shattered. Pepe jumped at the sound, and as he came about, Shayne drilled him through the shoulder.

“Still going on,” the girl said. “I hear like sirens, explosions. Never.”

Capp and a security man, doubling up on a motor scooter, had begun a circuit of the lot, dipping in and out of the bays in search of the VW. Shayne left the sedan with the lovers moaning on the mattress. He had the two-by-two in one hand, the.45 in the other. Pepe stumbled forward and reached the bus, weaving.

Out in the open, the motor scooter struck a fire hose and spilled its riders on the slick pavement. Capp was up again at once, running. The VW was still hidden from him, but on that heading he would see it in a moment. Pepe grabbed for the door handle, beginning to slide. Shayne assisted him with a push.

He went down hard. “Pussy, I’m shot…”

Rizzo opened the door. Shayne came up alongside the bus on the opposite side.

“Swenson, is that you?” Rizzo demanded.

Shayne, out of sight, uttered a meaningless syllable, got into the cab and slammed the door.

“Start the motor,” Rizzo told him. “Nothing serious, Pep. It’s O.K. I want to take care of this Frankie.”

Capp, seeing the bus, slowed to a walk. There was a glint in his hand. Rizzo, too, had his gun out. He was down on one knee, steadying the gun on his bent left arm. He had the advantage. Capp was silhouetted against the fire.

“Swenson,” Rizzo said, tightening up for the shot. “Let’s time this. I’m going to drop the mother. Heave Pep in back and I’ll get in with him. Back out slow. You’ve got a nice face. Nobody’ll stop you.”

Shayne leaned out of the window and clubbed him with the two-by-two. Rizzo jackknifed forward. Shayne came out, unfolded him and took his gun.

“Take it easy,” he told Pepe. “There were four of you. I only count three. Where’s Swenson?”

“Out the gate, gone. I’m bleeding!”

“Is that your first gunshot wound? You’ll be surprised how fast you get well.”

Capp had seen the activity beside the bus, but not knowing what to make of it, he retreated a little, signaling for help, believing that the bus could only leave by the main gate. Shayne stepped over Pepe. He had a minute or two in which he could separate Domestic Relations from the rest of the hijacked film. And if it hadn’t been in the vault — he had known for some hours that this was a possibility — he would pick a half dozen cans at random, and use them as chips to buy his way into the game. As he reached for the rear door, a heavy-caliber bullet slammed into the metal a foot from his head.

He went all the way down. The shot had come from the bushes between this parking bay and the next. Nothing moved there. Pepe, beside Shayne, had passed out. Shayne moved, and as he came up from the asphalt, he brought the boy with him.

Another shot went into the bus. Shayne saw the flash and fired at it twice.

Letting Pepe slide, he wriggled under the bus and out. The gun in the bushes banged again. The bullet ricocheted from the pavement. Shayne pulled the side door open, reaching up from beneath.

Then the cop car arrived, pulling to a stop between Shayne and the concealed gunman. There was only one cop inside, the driver. Shayne went to meet him.

“That’s the man,” Capp said excitedly, running up and pointing with his whole hand. “His name’s Shayne. I saw him set the fire.”

CHAPTER 13

Capp continued to point at Shayne. “He threw a burning rag in through the window. I got a good look at the guy.”

The charge couldn’t be made to stick, of course, but at this time of night, in this part of town, it might take hours for Shayne to get back into contention. This would give Capp time to pick up the pieces here without any interference. Shayne decided — it was more of a reflex action than a conscious decision — to take Capp out until he himself was circulating again.

He reversed the.45, as though to hand it over, stepped forward and chopped at Capp’s mouth with the butt. He sidestepped, meeting the cop as he turned, moved in close and dragged down on the cop’s gun arm.

“Let’s not do any more shooting. I know that was uncalled for, Frankie. I apologize.”

It was doubtful if Capp could hear him. A bloody gap had appeared in his face and he was making a bubbling sound.

The cop tried to get away, swearing in an ugly voice, but Shayne had him in a firm grasp.

“You’ve got a good pinch here,” Shayne told him. “Arson, aggravated assault, resisting an officer. You see these two guys on the ground. I did that — two more counts. There’s a kid in back of the building with a broken leg. I broke it. This is a stolen car, with a load of stolen property. There’s a professional thief named Swenson around somewhere, and there’s also a guy with a gun out in the bushes. But things are complicated enough, and I have a feeling you’ll be satisfied with what you’ve got.”

“You’ll be sorry about this,” the cop said hoarsely.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get started. If I let you go, will you promise not to shoot anybody?”

“Try it and find out.”

Shayne shifted his grip to the cop’s elbow and jerked the gun out of his holster before letting him go. He collected the guns. There were four.

“I have a carrying permit, but I’m afraid none of these are mine.”

Capp was blowing blood, trying to speak. He was barely conscious. The security man was holding him up.

“What he’s trying to tell you,” Shayne said, “is that the Warehouse has been robbed. Dirty movies, very artistic stuff. Look in the VW.”

Another patrol car drove up. There was a delicate moment while Shayne surrendered the guns. One of the newly arrived cops recognized Shayne, and might have listened, but several of the Warehouse customers, who had been arrested for possessing the wrong kind of cigarette, broke loose and had to be chased and recaptured. It was decided that the confusion could only be resolved in the quiet of a station house.

As Shayne bent over to get into the back seat of one of the police cars, a back seat without inside door handles, and a wire grate to separate the prisoners from their captors, the cop he had had the altercation with sneaked a two-knuckle punch into his kidneys. Shayne had had this kind of thing happen to him before, but he had never learned to like it.

Entering the police station, he was sorry to see that the sergeant on duty was one Gus Neihart, who at the moment was attempting to live on his city salary and finding it difficult. In happier days, he had had a lucrative assignment in the hotel district, netting him over $60,000 a year. A Tim Rourke series in the News, based on information developed by Shayne, had been followed by several jail sentences and Neihart’s transfer to a part of town where the private-enterprise money was considerably thinner.

There wasn’t much Neihart could do except spin things out. Shayne was a licensed private detective, with friends at Headquarters. The man who had accused him of arson was equally well known, and the idea of calling Frankie Capp as a prosecution witness couldn’t be taken seriously by anybody. Nevertheless, an hour and a half went by before Shayne was permitted to make his phone call. He made it to his client, Congressman Nicholas Tucker.

Twenty minutes later, the door of the detention cell was unbarred and Rourke was admitted. The reporter’s eyes were bloodshot, and his long face, always an indoor gray, was drawn tight with fatigue.

“Excuse me for bothering you,” he said, extending a pack of cigarettes. “I know it’s a pleasant change for you here, after chasing porno girls all night, but will you kindly tell me what the hell went on at the Warehouse and why you didn’t let me know in advance so I could be there?”

“I didn’t schedule most of that.”

After lighting the cigarettes, Rourke shook out the match and dropped it on the littered floor. The cell had two other occupants, arrested at the same time as Shayne. They were asleep.

“Barnett Pomeroy,” Rourke said. “That’s a wire service story if I could get in to see him, but I can’t.”

“Was Pomeroy there?”

“Mike, please. I’ve been pawing through clippings most of the night, and my eyes have a tendency to cross.”

“Something must have happened after I left. People were doing a lot of running around and jumping up and down. Did somebody shoot Pomeroy?”

“Don’t take that line with me, Mike,” Rourke said wearily. “I know it’s a great act, and sometimes I’ll go along with it. Wait till you know all the answers, so you can surprise everybody. Just for a change, this time will you call the plays as they happen? When a leading congressman gets into a beat-up Volkswagen bus and it blows up when he turns on the ignition—”

Shayne breathed out smoke. “So now I know what happened. How is he?”

“It tore up his feet and ankles. Broke a few bones. Whoever planted the thing did a sloppy job. Nobody cares anymore, Mike. I don’t know what’s happened to the craftsmen there used to be in this country.”

“What happened to the bus?”

“They towed it away. Are you wondering if there were any stolen movies in it? Nothing unusual. A satchel of tools, punches, one of those little collars they use to pull the stem out of a safe. That kind of thing. Which would seem to bear out your story about a robbery, except that Baruch is maintaining that nothing’s missing.”

“Have you got a drink, Tim?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I know how easy it is to get dehydrated in jail.” He brought out a half pint. “I’m probably breaking all sorts of regulations offering it to you, because I understand you’re in for resisting arrest. That’s one of the worst crimes there is. If everybody resisted arrest, who’d have any respect for the police?”

Shayne drank; it was a harsh American blend, which Rourke claimed to prefer.

“Would Pomeroy be about a forty-four short, with white hair over his ears?”

“That sounds like him.”

Shayne, trying to fit this new piece into his unfinished puzzle, said nothing more, and Rourke went on, watching him, “Here’s a small fact. Maybe you’ll feel grateful. I told you I’d call the AP guy in Washington to find out if there’s any connection between Tucker and Pomeroy. It took me an hour, but I got him. Yeah, there’s a connection. Pomeroy was the one who put through that Select Committee and got the chairmanship for Tucker. There was a special resolution that he floor-managed. True, it’s Tucker’s subject, but he’s fairly junior for that big a plum. The idea is, he’s being groomed.”

“Which makes Pomeroy his sponsor.”

“In a way. But it’s a loose tie-up, Mike. If Tucker gets hurt on this thing, it won’t damage Pomeroy. It can’t. He’s in too solid. One other thing I forgot to mention when you asked me about him. He’s treasurer of the national campaign committee.”

Shayne arched his eyebrows.

“Right,” Rourke said. “Political money on that level flows in and it flows out, and the bookkeeping is very scratchy and imprecise. Not because they can’t afford accountants but because they don’t like to put too much in writing. If Pomeroy wants to take care of Tucker and the only way he can do it is by laying out cash, the cash is available. Now catch me up, Mike.”

“I was trying to dovetail too many things, and my timing was off. Pomeroy? I don’t know. My client was very edgy when I asked about him. I called Capp to get him out to the Warehouse. I didn’t think I could handle Pussy Rizzo and three others by myself. While the shooting was going on, I thought I could get hold of the films. Pomeroy must have been with Capp when I called. Or watching the house, I don’t know. He seemed pretty swacked, but I only saw him for a minute. He must have seen Rizzo wheel out the films and load them in the VW.”

He snapped his fingers, remembering. “That must have been the son of a bitch who took those shots at me. Then when everybody cleared out — yeah, he thought he’d get in and drive off, and solve Tucker’s problem and get back the film without spending any money.”

“So who ended up with the film?”

“Don’t ask me tonight.”

“I heard from Gretchen Tucker.”

“What?” Shayne said, sitting forward.

“I thought that might grab you. Gretchen Tucker was the name she gave. I’ve never heard her voice on the phone, but it sounded like her.”

“Hurry it up,” Shayne said when Rourke broke off to drink from the common flask.

“It was all very friendly. She sounded a little excited, but not as though she was falling apart, or spooked, or spaced out. Just a pleasant social call at three thirty in the morning.”

“Yes, Tim. Now what did she say?”

“She knows you’re working for her husband. She knows I’m a friend of yours, and that’s why she called me. She said she had a story, and where was I going to be at nine thirty in the morning? Nine thirty on the dot. I said I could make a point of being anywhere, and she said at home would be O.K.”

“And then you asked her what the story was about.”

“Naturally. And she said politics, naturally. At nine thirty she’ll send me the key to a locker in the Greyhound bus terminal. It’ll take me twenty minutes to get there from my place. Are you following this?”

“That means she has a date to meet Tucker at nine thirty.”

“Or a little before. And it means she’s selling him something. Some cans of film, maybe? She’ll need duplicate keys to the locker, but they wouldn’t be hard to get. The film’s in the locker, or it will be at nine thirty. If he meets her terms, whatever they are, she can give him the key, or drive to the terminal herself, pick up the films and hand them over. And when I get there, the locker will be empty.”

He drank. “But if anything goes wrong — if he refuses, if he doesn’t show up, if, God forbid, he decides that the way to get off the hook is to put out a murder contract on the lady — she’s protected. I’ll pick up the films with my key and break the story.”

“Whatever it is.”

“Right, whatever it is. So what do you want me to do besides be home at nine thirty?”

“Be awake.” Shayne scraped his chin with his thumbnail. “You’re a newspaperman. What are you supposed to do with a blue movie starring a congressman’s wife? Rent a theater and charge admission? It’s a one-day story. What’s the follow-up on it? People are talking about fantastic amounts of money, a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars for what?”

CHAPTER 14

Shayne was eating breakfast off a plastic tray when word arrived that the necessary moves had been made, and he was a free man. Sergeant Gus Neihart was still on duty. He told Shayne, with obvious sincerity, that he was sorry to see him go.

The arrest-blotter was chained to his desk. Shayne reversed it and read the name of the arresting officer in his case: Francis Beatty.

“A little thing I’ve got to take care of,” he said, and went into the squadroom.

This was a low-crime precinct and a low-water time of day. Four on-duty cops were sitting around doing nothing in various ways. Beatty was stirring coffee. The spoon clattered in the cup as he saw Shayne.

“About that rabbit punch you gave me,” Shayne said. “I used to go in for returning those things, but I’ve got a different policy now.”

The door of the metal locker beside Beatty was partly open. Shayne gave it a powerful kick. Beatty swung around, his hand going to his gun. A chair scraped and one of the others sprang to his feet. The door clanged open, and shut again.

“But I’ll remember your face,” Shayne said. “I don’t think you ought to be a cop, and I hope I can do something about it. We’ll meet again. It’s a small town.”

On the front steps, he stretched and took a deep breath of reasonably uncontaminated air. He had phoned for a cab, but it hadn’t arrived.

A red Volkswagen beetle was parked against the opposite curb. Shayne gave it a second look, and saw a bearded youth asleep with his head on the wheel. It was Lester, who had wanted to help Shayne with his electrical trouble the night before.

The dashboard radio was playing softly. Shayne crossed the street, reached in and turned it off. The abrupt silence woke Lester up.

“Michael, hey, we meet again. You know I didn’t believe any of that stuff you told me last night?”

“I had that feeling.”

“I mean, stealing skin-flicks, that’s a first. Then the goddamn guns started banging away. My girlfriend tells me I ought to mind my own business, but it’s time people started helping other people, or we’ll all go to hell in the same basket, don’t you agree?”

“I thought you went home early.”

“No, I just moved the car and snuck back. Man! The fire engine got there before the fire started, did you notice? I had a ringside seat for the whole event.”

“Then maybe you can tell me what happened to a couple of dozen cans of film.”

“Absolutely. The fuzz loaded everybody up and took off, with the sirens wailing, needless to say, and this little drunk with white hair came up and started to get in the bus. I tried to tell him he was going to get booby-trapped, but do you know he waved a revolver at me to scare me? And he scared me! I try not to argue with irrational people. He turned on the ignition key. Boom. Then he wanted some help, but I decided to draw the line, and I went around back and made a citizen’s arrest of the film.”

Shayne got in the front seat beside him. “Lester, as a rule I have a low opinion of people, but sometimes they surprise me. How much will it cost?”

“I thought ten bucks a can would be about right? Then a couple or three of us could go to Mexico for the winter.”

“It’s a deal,” Shayne said, taking out his wallet. “Where do you have it?”

Lester pulled the hood release. “Right here. Take your time. I want you to be satisfied.”

Shayne went to the front of the car and raised the hood. Except for the extra tire and a few tools, the interior space was crammed with film cans, each can labeled with a sticker giving its title and reel number. He went through the cans quickly, stacking them like poker chips: Sally, Friends and Neighbors, Delinquent Venus. But Domestic Relations, the Gretchen Tucker picture, was not included.

He lowered the hood and returned to Lester. “Were those the only cans in the bus?”

“Yes, why?” Lester said, alarmed. “I hope you’re going to take them off my hands, because if you don’t what the hell will I do with them?”

“No, you’ve got a buyer. I left my car at the Warehouse. Can you drive me?”

Lester agreed. Shayne went back inside the station house to cancel his cab, but it was already on the way. He took out a bill to leave for the driver, but after looking at Sergeant Gus Neihart, put it back in his pocket.

“No, he’d never get it.”

“Shayne,” Neihart said, “one of these years you and I are going out in the alley and shed some blood.”

Shayne waited for the driver outside and paid him. As he started back to the VW, a car pulled into the no-parking zone and Nicholas Tucker jumped out.

“Shayne! I was afraid I’d missed you.”

“Did your wife call you?”

It was an effort for Tucker to take in the question. His political image required him never to appear in public unshaven, without a necktie, but neither of these items had been taken care of this morning. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn all night, and the linen jacket was smudged and wrinkled. He took off his planter’s hat and wiped his forehead.

“Did Gretchen call me. No, I haven’t had a word. Did you learn anything out of that Donnybrook last night?”

“Somebody else ended up with the film. But I finally have something to trade with, and I may be able to pry some information out of a few people who’ve been ducking questions. I’m hoping you can tell me what Barnett Pomeroy thinks he’s up to.”

“The damn fool thinks he’s helping me!” Tucker burst out. “May the Lord protect us from our friends. I never realized what a wild man he can be when he’s drinking. Never mind that. I just had a call from the airport police. Somebody saw a woman being forced into a car in front of the motel. There’s a letter addressed to me, and they want me to come out right away. I was hoping I could take you, so we can talk on the way.”

“I’ll meet you. I want to get my car.”

Tucker wanted Shayne to go with him, but he lost the argument. Shayne needed the time to plan his next moves.

The two cars separated at the corner. Tucker turned north toward the airport expressway. Lester and Shayne, in the little VW, had more lights to contend with, but it was early and there was little traffic. Lester, refreshed by his nap, wanted to discuss the battle he had witnessed, but a look at Shayne’s face discouraged him. At the Warehouse, he pulled up beside Shayne’s Buick and helped transfer the film from his trunk to Shayne’s.

Shayne paid him. “Enjoy yourself in Mexico.”

“I want to. But I know she’s going to keep nagging at me about how I got this bread. That’s my prediction.”

Shayne was only a few blocks from the Expressway. It was 8:25 by the time he reached the airport.

He found Tucker in the motel lobby, surrounded by a knot of police officers. During the short journey from the city, Tucker had convinced himself that he was actually the Nicholas Tucker who was a member of Congress, favored to win the nomination for governor, a man with a glistening future. He had put on a necktie. He still needed a shave, but his clothes seemed to hang on him properly again.

He was listening to a police lieutenant. Seeing Shayne, he signaled with a raised forefinger. When that finger went up in a restaurant, waiters jumped. He excused himself from the others.

“Doesn’t look too good, Mike. She was here, apparently, but—”

As normal as he had seemed from a distance, his eyes betrayed him. They looked through Shayne instead of at him. “I think I knew it would end in something like this. But I kept hoping. The hell of it is, I don’t even know what I’m sorry about.”

Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police and one of Shayne’s oldest friends, came into the lobby. He was stockily built and moved with authority. He had a gruff manner and a kind of directness and candor that was surprising to find in someone who had managed a big-city police department — in many respects a political job — with complete success for twenty years.

“I didn’t know you were working on this, Mike.”

“Since last night.”

“Excuse me, Congressman,” Gentry said. “We’ll get less repetition if I can talk to Shayne privately for a minute. There isn’t much more you can do right now. They’ll get you some coffee.”

Tucker nodded stiffly. “I have some phone calls. Don’t disappear, Mike.”

Gentry took Shayne to a sofa in an unused corner of the lobby. “I need a fast fill-in, and I can’t get it from him. I think he’s hoping to keep this small, but it’s going to be impossible. The media people will be swarming all over us in another ten minutes, and the more we can get accomplished before they get here, the better. So talk to me.”

“I’ve been making headway,” Shayne said, “but there’s a long way to go. Tell me what happened here, and I’ll try to tell you where it fits.”

“At seven fifty,” Gentry said, “a call to the emergency number downtown, a man’s voice. I wish we still taped those calls, but you remember they cut it out of the last budget. He only had a minute because he was catching a plane, and he didn’t want to get involved. Every time I hear somebody say that, the less I like it.”

“Well, you can see his point. He can buy the Miami papers to find out if it’s serious. He wouldn’t want to be called back to testify for anything minor.”

“You defend him,” Gentry said. “I can’t. He said he wasn’t registered here, and he made a big thing of it, so maybe that means he actually was — we’re checking everybody. He saw two guys come out of a room with a woman and put her in a car. ‘Put her in a car.’ Forcibly, is the idea. There was blood on her face. A big car, a Caddy or a Lincoln, with Florida plates.”

“I suppose this woman was a blonde?”

“Yes, indeed. High heels, glasses, good looking, nicely dressed. We got the identification from stuff in the room. It was definitely Mrs. Tucker.”

“Any description of the men?”

“He said they looked like hoodlums. I guess he meant hoodlums in the movies. Most of the hoodlums you and I know look like ordinary people. One of them had a beard. The other had had some trouble and was wearing a face bandage.”

“That’s interesting,” Shayne commented. “I knocked out some of Frankie Capp’s teeth in the middle of the night. Frankie’s one hoodlum who looks like a hoodlum even without a bandage.”

“I like that,” Gentry said. “If we could put Frankie Capp away for kidnapping, I’d retire happy.”

“Yeah,” Shayne said skeptically. “Get a call out on him. I want to talk to him about something else. But don’t expect him to confess. Anybody can put on a bandage. The town’s full of good-looking blondes. Good-looking brunettes can turn themselves into blondes by coloring their hair or wearing a wig.”

“You always were a suspicious bastard. It sounds pretty authentic to me. And there’s more, a long letter that definitely points a finger at Frankie, now that I think of it.”

“People have been trying to hustle and flimflam me all night,” Shayne said, “and I’m getting a little leery. This would be mild, compared to some of the performances I’ve been watching. All these people are actors. Was there any mention of luggage? I’m thinking of a suitcase large enough to hold six or eight cans of movie film.”

“Right. Now how’d you know that? A carrying case — our man on the phone thought it might be a cat or a small dog. Movie film? What kind of movie?”

“I haven’t seen it. Again, anybody can take an empty film can and stick on a label.” He stood up. “Let me see the letter. Then it may be time to start pressuring people. If I can find them,” he added.

“Who besides Capp?”

“A girl, Maureen Neal. She’s been staying at the Modern Motel and driving a Hertz Thunderbird. She has a friend named Peter something. I especially want to get my hands on him. He’s driving a Dodge, dealer’s plates, and the first three digits are five seven six. Did you hear what happened to Barnett Pomeroy? He’s a congressman from Illinois, a friend of Tucker’s.”

“The bomb in the VW?”

“Yeah, and if they’re finished with him at the hospital I want to know where he is and what he’s doing. Then somebody named Pussy Rizzo, from Los Angeles, and two friends. We’ve got them cold on a heavy felony rap, and they may want to cooperate with us. Again, we have to find them first.”

Gentry had been making notes. “That leaves a few points unexplained.”

“More than a few, Will. I’m expecting a call from Tim Rourke, which may shed some light.”

“What about Tucker? Do I push him?”

“No, let him alone.”

“For some reason I can’t warm up to the guy. He’s always onstage.”

As a matter of fact, Shayne thought that Tucker was playing his role well. He was in one of the sit-down phone booths with the door ajar, sipping black coffee from a container. He showed his fatigue not by slumping, but by holding himself unnaturally erect. When Shayne approached, he brought the conversation to a close and came out of the booth.

“I have a choice, Mike. I can cancel all meetings and pull out of the race, which will please certain people, or I can carry on as if nothing has happened, until we find out what precisely has happened. I have a breakfast appointment with people from upstate. I’ve decided to keep it. She left a letter, did Gentry tell you? It makes painful reading. He’s agreed to withhold it from the press for the time being. Can you think of anything else I ought to tell you now?”

“Has your wife ever mentioned anybody named Peter? About her age, a few years younger. Good shoulders. I’d say he’s lifted a lot of iron. Five nine, about a hundred and sixty pounds.”

“Here in Miami? We know a Peter in Washington, but he’s ten years older, and definitely not a weight lifter. Her brother’s name is Peter, but we haven’t seen him in years. Is he part of this ghastly movie?”

“I don’t know much about him. I ran into him last night.”

“Well,” Tucker said awkwardly.

He told Gentry where he could be reached, nodded to them both and walked off stiffly. He checked after a few steps, and came back.

“Find her,” he said in a choked voice. “Please. I want her back. I didn’t know this last night. The hell with everything else!”

Shayne said nothing.

“That’s what I mean about being onstage,” Gentry said as Tucker walked away again. “Does he mean it?”

They left the lobby. A reporter cornered Tucker as he was getting into his car. Tucker gave him a strained smile.

“No comment now, Jerry. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Just a minute. Congressman—”

Tucker drove off, waving.

“What name did she use when she signed up for the room?” Shayne asked Gentry.

“That’s it. It wasn’t her room. The letter explains it. It’s registered to a man and wife from Ohio, but they used a phony address. We called Cleveland, and there’s no such street. It wouldn’t be the first false registration here this year. The guy next door heard them get up early — five o’clock, daylight — use the john and so on and pull out.”

Two of Gentry’s men were in the room. Both beds had been used. There was an open suitcase and a light raincoat on the foot of one bed, overflowing ashtrays, crumpled tissues and other debris, an ice bucket, a portable typewriter.

“Any drugs?” Shayne asked.

“In a zipper bag in the suitcase. A good supply of prescription barbiturates. A tin of hashish, miscellaneous pills, who knows for what, all the colors of the rainbow. The letter was in the raincoat pocket. Just skim through it, Mike. I have the feeling there are things we ought to be doing.”

He gave Shayne a fat envelope, addressed to the Honorable Nicholas Tucker at his campaign headquarters. It had been stamped with triple postage and sealed, but not mailed.

“Written on this typewriter?”

“It seems so. There’s a floating capital A. Tucker identifies the typewriter as his wife’s.”

Shayne sat down and began reading.

Darling man,

Though I don’t know if I should call you that any more. I’m a mess, Nick. And getting worse. And worse and worse.

Is this news to you? Or have you been too wrapped up in the affairs of state? By which I mean the affairs of Nicholas Tucker! Excuse me, of the

Honorable

Nicholas Tucker, and I have to remember to write that on the envelope or you may refuse delivery. I’m being mean, which comes naturally to me, as you never hesitate to point out. But all of a sudden I begin to ask myself if some of this meanness has been absolutely necessary. I’m in what used to be known as a predicament. I got there because I was bound and determined to be nasty, to do something so thoroughly nasty that our friends and acquaintances, that dear crowd, would decide I must be out of my mind. Which I am, I suppose. Consult our sweet asshole Dr. Gold. I don’t know why you wanted to pay that charlatan thirty dollars an hour so I could listen to myself talk. I can do that in the bathroom for nothing.

I’m leaving this subject. New paragraph.

Fuck you, buster.

That’s not what I meant to say, either. Why is it an insult, anyway? The action described by the verb has given mankind a great deal of pleasure for years. I’ve treated myself to quite a lot of it since leaving your bed and board, and I found most of it highly enjoyable. You’ll recall that one of the things the doctor and I have been working on is the fact that I couldn’t come. That turns out not to be true, given certain combinations of people. I’ve had some spectacular blast-offs. All this shocks you considerably, I hope. I’ve been among people who have no trouble getting erections, which is more than I can say for a congressman I know. Some of these erections have been black. I know you hate blacks. You, yes. You pretend you don’t because in some parts of the state they’ve been emancipated and given the vote, but you hate them and you fear their potency.

That’s not what I started to tell you…

I’m scared, honey lamb. I’m scared out of my wits, such as they are these days — they’ve deteriorated badly. You remember I used to get all A’s. Now I doubt if I could find the school.

Decisiveness was never my strong suit, even in saner days. But a lightning bolt came down out of the sky and hit me, it was that sudden. I don’t want to run you off the highway anymore! Isn’t that odd? I don’t know what happened. I think just wrenching myself up out of one situation into another made me put our differences into perspective. There are more important things in life. Such as death!

Honestly, Nick, I’ve been so mad at you at times I wanted to crush you like a bug. Now I’m asking myself. If a person’s a bug, and you are, why be angry when he behaves like a bug?

The next step is easy. Actually I don’t consider you as buglike as I once did. You know how I hate to admit I’m wrong! Well, I’m wrong. You can’t be holier-than-thou and win elections, and of course that’s what you do for a living. You can’t give every voter a morality check before you allow him in the booth.

I look back on those dippy right-left fights we had as conversations in a dream. Did I really say those dumb things? America does have to keep herself strong! We have to go on being the number one country in the world, or the world won’t last a year. I’d like to talk to the good doctor about how I reached that simple conclusion. The fact is that I could use an aircraft carrier and a battalion of marines right now myself, and that may have something to do with it.

I’m sorry as hell for what I’ve done. And what I did was this.

There’s a man whose initials are FC. You don’t know him. He has a mat of curly hair on his back, running all the way down. I don’t know why that seemed so exciting to to me, but it did, or why I feel like telling you about it now. Be patient.

I’ve been looking for shortcuts to happiness the last few years, for new kinds of visions. You know that, even though you haven’t known it with the top of your mind, because for somebody in politics a wife who’s a dope fiend is a handicap, that I freely concede. This man I’m talking about, this prick — and I shouldn’t use that lovely word either — saw to it that I had all the “medicine” I needed, or that I thought I needed. All very high quality. I met him whenever I could, which was often. Didn’t you ever wonder what I did with my afternoons? No, you were TOO BUSY, bless you. F. is an evil person, not very articulate, but there’s one thing in his favor, and that is that he was always willing to listen to me talk, like Dr. Gold. And I talked about you, mainly, what else? And he had an idea. Why didn’t I sell my rings and so on, those bonds Mother left me, cash in my savings, and MAKE A MOVIE? I blush to say that I jumped at it. Because at that point in time, my dearest husband, my dearest wish was to put a period to Nick Tucker’s political career. I couldn’t

stand

the idea of you as governor.

And the money entered into it, a little. I’d made my break, that was definite, but I thought I deserved something in the way of alimony. What would you give me if I came to you and asked for a modest sum like $50,000? Airplane fare and a pitying smile. F. said I needed something to threaten you with. I went along with it. I did something I knew was wrong. I hope you don’t ever find out what it was because it was awful! And the awfullest thing was that I enjoyed it! I enjoyed it so much that I changed my mind again, and I decided I’d be damned if I went through with it.

I looked at the calendar once last week and five days had disappeared! Disappeared. You’re sober and upright and ambitious and you believe the lies they told you in Sunday school, and you can’t possibly know how it feels.

Well, F. takes the position that he’s invested a certain amount of time and trouble in this, and I suppose he has. Speaking of mean and nasty, I couldn’t be half as mean and nasty as this man. And speaking of threats, one or two have been made to your confused and chastened ex-wife, who among other things is ten pounds lighter than when you saw her last. I’ve stayed straight for two days, believe it or not. I’ve made arrangements. I think it’s going to be all right, and nobody will know about this little aberration.

But I have to get out of town, and I have to do it in an intelligent way, or I’m sorry to say there’s a good chance that I’ll end up dead!

And if I’m dead, I won’t be able to take back what I’ve told people about you. I don’t think I hate you anymore, now that I’ve flown the cage and taken a good look at the actual world. You’re rotten in certain respects, but compared to the real thing you’re a saint! And I wish I’d realized it long ago.

Now darling, down to brass tacks.

F. has no reason to believe I’m not where I’m supposed to be, which is in bed with a hypo and an empty bag beside me. But I didn’t shoot the contents of that bag into my arm, I shot it into the bathroom toilet, and if you don’t think that took courage and character! I’ve got a reservation on a plane leaving at eleven, and never mind to where because you’ll never see me again. It was too risky to stay where I was. I didn’t want to come out and sit in the airport, because this man of mine has friends and informants and connections. So I took a cab. And here I am, typing this long letter. Where? At the motel. I think it was actually rather clever. There’s always one or two weird people at every motel who like to get going at dawn. They leave the key inside and the door unlocked, and if somebody like me walks in and hangs a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, they won’t be bothered till check-out time. I’ll be airborne by then.

This has been hard to write. It’s taken me ages. Because of all my medication lately I’m as weak as a cat. But I’m nearly finished. I’ll make out somehow. And in case everything looks too ugly, I’ve saved up some sleeping pills, more than enough.

I hope I’ve learned something out of it all. I hope I haven’t hurt you too much. I say too much! I want to hurt you a little, because you know you’re a bastard. (Notice I didn’t say prick.)

And I suddenly think I should have been more mush-mouthed about some of the things I’ve said here, if you have to make it public. I hope you won’t, because I think I have everything taken care of, but if it gets out — any of it — I want you to use this letter in ANY WAY that seems right to you.

Shayne looked up. A cop was at the door.

“Mike, your car phone.”

“Yeah.”

There were only a few more lines.

Honey, I went to a double bill at the Warehouse and it was creepy. You may be right about dirty movies! I’m sorry about everything. DON’T LOOK FOR ME. I don’t know why I say that because I know you don’t want to.

The signature was a single typed initial: “G.”

CHAPTER 15

It was Tim Rourke on the phone.

“A kid just brought me the key to the bus terminal locker, Mike. Here I am where I told Gretchen I’d be, at nine thirty. I’m leaving now.”

“Wait a minute. Things are beginning to move, finally. You’ll get there ahead of us. Wait across the street. I’m bringing Will Gentry with me.”

“No media people, please. This is my story.”

“After that bomb in my car, let’s be careful about opening the locker.”

“I don’t insist on doing it,” Rourke said quickly. “I’ll let you.”

“If you see Frankie Capp coming or going, forget about the locker. Follow him. He has a fractured jaw — he’ll be easy to spot.”

He broke off and signaled Gentry, who responded to the urgency of the wave by moving more nimbly than usual. Gentry led the way in his official car, using his siren. Several blocks from the bus terminal, Shayne honked at him from behind and he cut the siren.

Rourke came out of a doorway. “So things are moving, are they? I’m glad to hear it, because the paper’s been trying to get me. They’re under the false impression that I know what’s happening.” Shayne took the key. Entering the terminal, he found the locker, one of a long three-tiered rank in a side corridor. Gentry hovered nearby, not watching Shayne but the people around him. Shayne stood well to one side when he opened the door, using a knife blade instead of his fingers. There was a carton inside. He was equally careful with the carton, examining it closely before cutting the tape.

It contained eight film cans.

“Well, well,” he said softly.

“What did you expect, store cheese?” Rourke said.

Shayne pulled out the uppermost can and read the label taped along its edge: “Domestic Relations, answer print, reel two.”

“Now who do we know with a thirty-five millimeter projector?”

There was one at police headquarters. Rourke left his car and rode in Shayne’s Buick.

“I’ve been patient, Mike? I’ve cooperated to the best of my humble ability? Just don’t forget I’m employed by an afternoon newspaper, and I have a deadline coming up. Did Tucker’s wife really work in a porno movie?”

He opened the top can and unreeled a short strip of the film. Shayne was changing lanes but he knew that something was wrong by the quality of the silence. Stopped by a red light, he glanced at the reporter.

Rourke pulled more film off the reel and held it against the windshield. “Somebody spoiled this. You can’t even see the separate frames. Overexposed is hardly the word.”

They were joined by Gentry in front of police headquarters, and they checked the other cans. All the film was a uniform dark purple.

“What the hell?” Rourke said. “Nobody’s going to pay money to see a sex film shot in the dark.”

“Don’t look at me,” Gentry said. “Look at Mike. He’s the expert on dirty movies.”

Shayne was examining the labels. He unlocked his trunk to compare them with the labels on the cans he had bought from Lester. They seemed identical — the same white tape and slapdash lettering.

“It must mean something,” Rourke said. “Who was Gretchen trying to fool — me? If she was going to use dead film, why bother to put anything at all in the cans? Or anything in the locker? Or send me the key?”

“She must have thought it was the real thing,” Shayne said. “Which means somebody else switched it on her. Let’s see if anything’s come in on Capp.”

The sergeant in charge of running down the names on Shayne’s list had recently been promoted from the street and was still the most conscientious man in the building. The call to pick up Frankie Capp had gone out to all city cruisers and the Highway Patrol. A Beach patrol car had checked his house and found his Cadillac missing from the garage. Maureen Neal had checked out of the Modern Motel at 7:10. Her rented car had been turned in at the Hertz lot at the International Airport at 7:55. The next flight to Los Angeles after that left at 8:30, but no one using the name Maureen Neal had been on board. The Los Angeles threesome, Rizzo and the others, were still on call. A demolition man named Swenson had been picked up at the Palm Beach airport and was being held there. Nothing had come in on the cream-colored Dodge with dealer’s plates, but they were looking. Congressman Pomeroy was still a patient in Jackson Memorial, but he was making a nuisance of himself with demands to be allowed to leave.

“You must know somebody at Jackson, Will,” Shayne said. “See if you can get them to stall. If they have to let him go, be damn sure you don’t let him out of your sight. You’ll want to know why, but I can’t tell you yet. It’s just a feeling.”

“Mike, this Pomeroy’s an important man—”

“I know it, and he may be the key to this whole thing, not Tucker. Let Tucker float. He’ll get in touch with me. Now I’ve got a date at the Warehouse. They’re testing me for a part in a movie. It sounds a little antifootball, and I haven’t decided to do it. This is just a suggestion, Will, and nothing may come of it, but give me twenty minutes with Baruch. Then it might be helpful if you showed up with three or four cars, using your sirens. Really come on screaming. And don’t walk in, bust in. Push everybody out of your way.”

“And let you do the talking?”

“Not necessarily. Give him the warning, and arrest him for conspiracy to commit murder.”

“Who’s been murdered?” Gentry said quickly. “Remember I came in on this cold about an hour ago.”

“Maybe nobody,” Shayne said, “and maybe more than one. Conspiracy to commit has a nice ring. I’m hoping if we hit him hard enough with it, he’ll start telling the truth. Which will be such a goddamn novelty I hope I can recognize it when it happens.”

Gentry wanted to pursue the possibilities, but Rourke told him: “You ought to know Shayne by now. It isn’t quite time to pull all the aces out of his sleeve.”

“Tucker, Pomeroy,” Gentry said. “There’s going to be real heat on this when it breaks.”

“That’s the deadline,” Shayne said. “We won’t be the only ones in a hurry.”

The sergeant manning the phones said, “Your managing editor’s calling, Tim, are you here?”

“I just left,” Rourke said, starting for the door. “Mike’s going to take me along and see if there’s a part for me in that movie, aren’t you, Mike? And on the way, maybe you’ll tell me who you think has been murdered.”

But within a block from police headquarters, Rourke was asleep, listing toward the door but held in place by the shoulder and lap belts. He woke up when Shayne turned off the motor in front of the Warehouse marquee.

“Nothing like a good night’s sleep to give you a new slant on life,” he said sourly. “Chasing you around isn’t the most relaxing thing in the world, Mike. I’m going to have to find another specialty.”

“Are you coming in?”

“I’d like to, because I like naked girls. But will there be any shooting? I mean, of guns? If somebody dropped a plate right now I’d go out two different doors at the same time.”

“These are peace-loving people. They use cameras.”

“Last night they didn’t.”

Shayne took one of the Domestic Relations cans. A well-muscled young man wearing the bright orange armband stopped them almost at once. Lib had alerted him that somebody named Mike would be showing up to see Baruch, but this was a jumpy morning. He pressed a buzzer which brought a second guard, who then went upstairs to bring Lib down to authenticate Shayne.

“Mike, it’s you!” she said, pleased. “I thought you might change your mind and not come. And that would be too bad, because I came so close last night. I was only an eyelash away.”

She took a handful of his shirt and pulled him in against her.

“Away from what?” Rourke said.

“This is Tim Rourke,” Shayne said. “He’s from the News. He wants to talk to Armand about the shoot-out last night. He seems to be friendly.”

“I should say,” Rourke said warmly, clearly digging the way Lib looked. This morning she was without makeup, wearing a blue work shirt knotted beneath her breasts to show a slitlike navel and six inches of tanned flesh.

“I know Armand wants to see you, Mike,” she said, “but I don’t know about anybody else. He’s been flying all morning. He rushed in, and he rushed out again with a sixteen-millimeter Arri, and then he rushed in again. We’ve made one master shot so far, and that’s all.”

They passed through a second locked door and reached a narrow stairway.

“And that’s not like Armand,” she continued. “He went on shooting through the hurricane last summer, the one that blew off the roof.”

The reception room was empty. She took them on into the big dusty sound stage. Four sets had been dressed, one in each corner. The cameras and lighting equipment were clustered in the center, and the floor was alive with cables. One of the sets was a locker room — a large rubbing table, benches strewn with football equipment, a door to the showers.

“That’s where we play the big scenes,” she said. “But I haven’t signed for it yet. Were you there last night when he said we were going to get paid this morning? So far I haven’t seen any money.”

Shayne recognized the tiny cameraman. One of the bedroom sets was lit. Two young men — not big enough to be football players — were on the bed, resting.

“I don’t know where he went,” Lib said. “He’ll be back in a minute. How about some coffee and Danish? It’s the only thing around here that’s on the house.”

“I’ll look for him,” Shayne said. “I’m pushed for time.”

He walked away before she could object. A girl in a wrapper, no one he had seen before, passed him in the corridor and gave him a raking look. There was another high-ceilinged room jammed with lumber and random furniture, mainly beds.

He found Baruch in an editing room, bent over the editing table with his back to the door. He snapped around as Shayne entered.

“Who—”

The main change from the night before was that his movements, instead of being slow and flowing, were now abrupt and jerky. He was still wearing his monk’s robe, open at the throat and with the cowl hanging. His beard probably never got much attention; he could have hidden money in it. He made a quick slicing gesture.

“Wait outside. I’m working.”

Shayne held out the film can. “Is this yours?”

The title was toward Baruch. One glance told him that it was indeed his, and he snatched it from Shayne.

“Third reel — where’s the rest?”

“I have it,” Shayne told him. “Did you actually ever make a picture called Domestic Relations, or was that part of the con?”

Baruch was staring at him. “I knew I was getting vibrations off you last night. Who do you work for, Pussy?”

“Rizzo? He had three people with him. Let’s see. Angel — or was it Pepe? I broke his leg with a piece of scrap lumber. I put a.45 slug through Pepe’s shoulder and gave Pussy a small concussion. I’ve just heard that the boxman, Swenson, has been picked up in Palm Beach. Does that answer your question?”

Baruch went on staring for a moment. Then he laughed and relaxed, perching on one corner of the table. After a moment he reached behind him and snapped off the light.

“It’s been a queer one. Now what’s this about a con?”

“Look at the film and you’ll see why the word occurred to me.”

Baruch snapped off the top of the can. It took him only an instant. He looked up at Shayne, then unreeled more film and examined it carefully.

“This never went through a camera. It’s raw stock, exposed to daylight. Sure I made a picture called Domestic Relations, with a real script and live actors. But I thought that was my secret. If you’re a cop, the fair thing to do is to tell me whether you’re federal or local so I can decide whether to offer you girls. I’m sorry to say I can’t offer you money. I was robbed last night, and I don’t carry burglary insurance.”

“I’m a private detective. The real cops won’t be here for another half hour. What happened to all that money you were dreaming about last night?”

“That’s a sad story. What do the cops want with me? I hope you didn’t tell them about my home movie project. My fans would think it was beneath me.”

“A Mrs. Tucker has disappeared. There’s some thought that she’s been murdered.”

Baruch’s eyes changed, and he came off the table. “If you mean Mrs. Gretchen Tucker, I’d better stop talking until I can get some legal advice.”

“That would be the worst thing you could do, Armand. I’m working for her husband, and he wants to keep lawyers out of it. I’m beginning to think that may not be possible, but he wants me to try.”

“Disappeared is one thing. Anybody’s entitled to disappear. But murdered?”

“Somebody who looked like her was taken out of a motel this morning and pushed into a Cadillac by two men. One of them may have been your partner Frankie Capp. The second man had a beard. That isn’t too unusual these days, but wouldn’t Frankie want to claim it was you? He’ll need to work every angle there is. Murder’s hard to prove without a body, and an experienced man like Frankie doesn’t get caught with bodies in his car. So let’s consider blackmail. It’s pretty much gone out as a crime. It sounds worse than it really is. But you’re an outlaw, Armand, because of the movies you make. You’d get the maximum.”

“Naturally I’ve been thinking about just that.”

“Naturally. What are you working on here?”

“Some retakes. An exterior we didn’t get right. It’s therapy, to keep me from brooding.”

“About the robbery last night?”

Baruch gave an angry laugh. “A year’s work down the drain.”

“And on top of that, the cops. I guarantee that they’re going to be unpleasant. They have to guard the public from people like you.”

“I know, I know. I have trouble fixing parking tickets.”

“I can’t offer you any deal on a criminal charge. The state’s attorney likes to handle those things himself. But I might be able to help with your financial problem. I need a few answers from the inside. I think you could clear up most of this in fifteen or twenty minutes, which is about how much time we have. Delinquent Venus. Sally. Friends and Neighbors. Do any of those titles ring a bell?”

The bells rang so loudly that Baruch jumped and jangled. “Oh, yes. They’re near and dear to me.”

“I have them outside.”

Baruch licked his lips and swallowed. “And what’s your price?”

“Congressman Tucker would love to get his hands on them. He could predate a subpoena, and that’s the last you’d ever see of them. I haven’t been able to deliver his missing wife, or the one film he really wants, but I could get back some prestige if I gave him these films, and collect part of my fee. I’ll hand them over to you in return for a little candor. I’ll correct that. In return for total candor. I want you to start with the day she walked in, and give it to me minute by minute.”

Baruch’s eyes were sliding. “I’ve got to salvage something. I need money. If I go in with a Legal Aid lawyer they’ll hang me. Frankie — he’ll have the best legal talent in town. Yeah. But what I’m wondering is, is a handshake enough? I don’t know that much about you.”

“We can call in the lawyers and draw up a contract. That might take a little too much time.”

Baruch gnawed at a fingernail, which was already as short as he could get it.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’ll be your dog. I’ll lollop around with my tongue out, and maybe I’ll be so lovable you’ll throw me my ball. I couldn’t be in worse shape than I am now, could I?”

CHAPTER 16

Shayne pulled out a chair. Baruch, more nervous, returned to his perch on the editing table.

“No smoking in here,” he said when Shayne took out cigarettes. “An age-old tradition. You said to take it from when Gretchen walked in. She walked in with Capp. We were shooting a five-person tangle. We had the big Mitchell on a dolly, for the master. Two hand-held Arries for the tight shots. The lighting guy, the sound guy. A makeup chick squirting glycerine on anything that looked dry. I mean, it was a busy scene. Gretchen was interested, but not too much so — about right, I’d say. Then while everybody was cooling out she laid the idea on me. And it looked good, surefire.”

“How did she seem?”

“I don’t run into many stable women, so how would I know?”

“Was she sleeping with Capp?”

“With Frankie? Good God, no. Those are two different species of people. I mean, strange things happen, but he would have talked about it if he was getting any. He’s always telling people how many times he can come in one night. You called him my partner — partners we aren’t. He needs me, I need him. Forget about eyewitnesses, I wouldn’t abduct anybody out of a motel with that jerk. That’s one of the last things I’d do. And why should I abduct Gretchen? She’s been to my place, we balled a few times. Nice.”

He swung down from the table. “No, I can’t do it this way. Look at this film first. It’s only a couple of hundred feet. Do you have a time for that so-called abduction?”

“Seven fifty a.m.”

“Now how can that be? I met her here at eight forty-five. If somebody kidnapped her an hour earlier, she got over it in a hurry. She was high on something, I’d say, but she looked great, just out of the shower. I’ll show you how to work this thing. An imbecile could do it, and they often do.”

Shayne took the editor’s chair, and Baruch, standing behind him, showed him the manual controls.

“The processing people did a rush job and the quality’s terrible. Some of that is my fault. The angle was lousy, as you’ll see.”

Blurred images, meanwhile, were running backward across a screen the size of a piece of typewriter paper. The film itself, behind the screen, was moving from a reel on one side of the table to the plastic core on which it had been wound at the lab. Baruch punched a button, and the film began to wind back at normal speed.

Shayne saw a thin woman with long blonde hair, in slacks and a striped sweater, walking away from the camera. She was in a parking lot somewhere, marked off with diagonal hash marks. He froze on a frame in which she began to turn her head. He backed off and came forward again, a frame at a time. She was wearing enormous sunglasses. For an instant, from behind, he had thought she was Maureen Neal. She had the same thighbones and flat haunches. But the resemblance disappeared as she turned.

“Who is this? Where was it taken?”

“The exposure’s wrong by a couple of stops. It gets better in a minute. That’s the lady we’re talking about. Gretchen Tucker. It’s at a shopping center downtown, off Flagler. I’ve got this van with a breakaway panel. We use it for crowd shots, exteriors. People don’t know we’re shooting so they don’t look at the camera. She’s meeting her husband here. The date was for nine thirty, but he was early, by a couple of minutes. Most of the stores don’t open till ten, that’s why there aren’t many cars.”

“What’s she going to do, sell him the film?”

“They’re going to talk about it. The film’s in a locker at the bus depot, and if he brought the right amount of cash and promises, she’s going to give him the key. Run it, run it.”

“Did he call her, or did she call him?”

“She called him. I squeezed into the booth with her so I could listen, because after last night I decided to play it cool. He already knew that the meeting was going to be at this shopping center. We put that in when we sent him the slides. We left the time open so he wouldn’t have a chance to arrange anything.”

“How much money were you asking?”

“Sixty thousand. Plus his agreement to get out of politics, all the way out. To resign from Congress and not run for anything.”

“How much of the sixty was going to be yours?”

“All but ten. She put up ten for production, and she wanted that back. And I put up ten. I didn’t spend ten, but I owe ten. That would give me forty thousand profit. With forty thousand in front money I can raise three hundred, which automatically puts me in a different category. And if he didn’t pay it, or if he couldn’t pay it, I could exhibit the picture and come back with fifty at least. So I thought there was no way I could lose. And here I am, as usual.”

Shayne restarted the film. The woman continued to walk away, moving from one aisle to the next by crossing between cars. Nicholas Tucker was waiting beside an open convertible, in bright sunlight. Even from that distance, he was easily recognizable by his wide-brimmed hat and white suit.

“He came past later and I got a shot of his tag,” Baruch said. “Now they’re going to talk for a minute.”

The woman halted several feet from the man, who remained beside his car. She was clutching a purse. After only a moment, they were arguing. She started to turn, and the man stepped toward her. A passing car blocked them for a moment.

“Right here it happens.”

Reaching past Shayne, Baruch slowed the film to quarter speed. The car moved on, and the two figures were seen entering the convertible. The man’s hat had fallen off, and his hair was like a beacon. He pushed her hard. She fell away to the opposite side of the seat.

Baruch backed the film off and came into the action again, stopping at frames he wanted to look at more closely.

“This one. I think he slugged her with something. I didn’t react too fast. I was thinking about getting the shot. I’ve been doing that all my working life, and it’s an instinct with me. I was supposed to be bodyguarding her, and I was supposed to be filming the action so we’d have a record in case anything happened. Well, hell! I couldn’t do both at the same time.”

The top of the convertible folded out of the boot and came down. The car was already moving toward the camera, traveling fast. The license plate showed clearly. Then the image disappeared in a blaze of light. Shayne ran the last minute again, in slow motion.

“I couldn’t have caught him,” Baruch said. “He’s really peeling out there. I turned my goddamn ankle getting up in front, which didn’t help a hell of a lot. By the time I got out on Flagler, he was on his way.”

“All right. What do you think happened?”

Forgetting his own rule, Baruch took out a cigarette and lit it. “Somehow the son of a bitch got hold of the film, so he didn’t think he had any worries. That’s an angry man on that film. He knows that when she said she wanted him out of public life, she really meant it. If this didn’t work, she’d try something else. She doesn’t give much of a damn about anything, and that’s impressive.”

Shayne ran the film back to the frame he had looked at before. “Are you sure this woman is Gretchen Tucker?”

The cigarette spun out of Baruch’s hand. “What are you doing, trying to loosen my hold on reality? Of course it’s Gretchen Tucker.”

“Capp introduced her by that name. You said you didn’t trust Capp.”

Baruch pulled at his beard. “I didn’t ask her to give me fingerprints—”

“Did you talk to anybody who knows her?”

“No! I didn’t take an ad in Variety to announce the picture, either. I was working under the table.”

“Then let’s try it this way. Are you sure the man is really the congressman? The hat, the white hair, the white suit. Those are props.”

“Mike, all I know for absolute sure is that I made a movie, called Domestic Relations, with some cute scenes. A lot of sex, a pretty good story, a fair amount of laughs.”

“What happened to it after you finished it?”

“We picked out the slide frames, to get a good synopsis, and stuck it in the vault, along with everything else. I thought that was what they were after last night. I used an actress from the Coast, and I got told this morning, a little late, that she’s Pussy Rizzo’s part-time lady. She had the run of the place while we were shooting, and that’s how they knew how to get in and out, how big a charge they needed to blow the vault.”

“Is that your own label on this can?”

“It looks like it. I don’t understand it, but I don’t understand a lot of things. Is this the time for a long explanation, Mike? Tucker’s your responsibility. Don’t you want to dash off and stop him before he does something he’ll be sorry about? I like her, damn it. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

He picked up a grease pencil from the table and made a savage X in the air.

“Why do you really think she made the picture?” Shayne said.

“To stop the buildup before it starts! He’s got a committee behind him, Shayne, six names that would curl your hair. Rightwing? Man, they’re over to the right of Adolf Hitler. They need a front, and they’re betting that Tucker can go all the way. Mike, will you get off your ass and move?”

Shayne heard the wail of sirens. “There they are. Let’s see if they have any news for us.”

The 16-mm. footage Baruch had shot at the shopping center had rewound itself on the core. Shayne snapped it off the spindle and took it with him.

The police converged on the Warehouse in three cars and a police helicopter from the Watson Park heliport. These various noises from outside had alarmed Baruch’s crew and actors, and one of the naked youths was hastily pulling on his pants. Tim Rourke and Lib, using locker-room benches in the unlighted set, were having coffee.

“Armand,” Lib called, “could you use a reporter in the picture? This is Tim Rourke, from the News, and he’s interested.”

“I don’t think they let people make pictures in jail,” Baruch said gloomily.

“Jail!” Lib exclaimed, starting up.

The sirens expired in front of the building. A moment later, Will Gentry’s party boiled onto the sound stage and fanned out, their guns showing. Gentry himself followed more slowly.

“Armand Baruch?” he said, picking out the movie producer by his robe. “You’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder. It’s my duty to warn you—”

“There’s been a script change, Will,” Shayne said. “Armand’s decided to work with us. He likes Mrs. Tucker and he doesn’t want her to be killed.”

“He’s a bit late,” Gentry said dryly. “Apparently it’s already happened.”

CHAPTER 17

The car had been seen entering a dirt road in the Everglades.

The Seminole proprietor of a small roadside stand selling cold drinks saw it go by. It slowed abruptly and backed up to make the turn. There were two persons inside, a man and a woman. It was a Detroit-made convertible, with a belly too low, the Indian knew, to get over that rutted road. He waited in some amusement, expecting to see them come limping out, leaving a trail of oil from a sprung pan.

A shot was fired. When the car emerged, minutes later, it carried only one person, the driver. Doing a citizen’s duty, the Indian had written down the license number.

“What was it, Will?” Shayne said. “KL 1905?”

“That’s it. A Pontiac, the property of Congressman Nicholas Tucker. And that makes three cars we’re trying to find.”

“You’ll find this one in Tucker’s garage. There’ll be bloodstains on the carpet. Where does the road go to?”

“It dead-ends at the water. The rangers are meeting us with a boat and grappling equipment. That’s why I brought the chopper.” He looked at Shayne more closely. “It seems to me I’m picking up something. You don’t think we’re going to come up with a body?”

“I think it’s damned unlikely. I want you to look at some film footage. Armand, can you screen it so we can all see it at once?”

“If I rewind it.”

“Then never mind. I’ll tell you about it, Will. Armand shot it from a van they use for this kind of work. Everybody tells me what a skilled moviemaker he is, but this was very clumsy and amateurish. It’s supposed to show Gretchen Tucker meeting her husband at a shopping center to discuss the terms of surrender. The husband slugs her, or maybe he doesn’t. We don’t know which, because a car’s in the way at the crucial moment. They get in his convertible, a Pontiac, and take off, with Gretchen seeming to be semiconscious in the front seat. I say seeming because they’re heading into the sun and light’s shining from the windshield. We never get a good look at either face. The man’s wearing a white suit and a certain kind of hat, and there seems to be a scar on his face, in the same spot where Tucker wears his. We get one good shot of the license plate, so that part of the scene is probably genuine.”

“Lib, honey,” Baruch said, “go in the office and call Manny Cohen. I want him out here right away.”

“I even wonder about that Seminole,” Shayne continued. “Will, how long has it been since you ran into a homicide with this kind of tricky circumstantial detail? I’ll bet you a steak dinner that both ends were staged. This is a movie studio, and there’s no problem getting actors. What we have to find out now is where the real Gretchen and Nicholas Tucker were at nine thirty this morning.”

Baruch’s first reaction had been alarm, but now he seemed genuinely puzzled. “I don’t dig you, Mike. You really think I set up that scene?”

“Tucker himself used to be an actor. He’s played a total of four scenes with me, and he was acting hard the whole time, using dialogue he worked out in advance. Gretchen Tucker was an actress when he married her. I did a long scene in a motel last night with Maureen Neal. She was faking every minute. When I showed up at your party last night, you knew who I was and exactly what I wanted. All you were doing was feeding me lines.”

“That’s true, to a certain extent, but I couldn’t throw you out, could I?”

“If you’d wanted to stop Tucker, or the actor portraying Tucker, from driving off with his wife, or the actress portraying his wife—”

“Mike, that’s ridiculous! I was there when he drove in. I couldn’t move the van to a different part of the lot so I could get a better picture. People don’t move around in those lots. They park, and that’s it. He picked a bad place, but it was good enough so I could shoot it. What’s my incentive?”

“Money, Armand. I’m finally beginning to see how you people worked it. Did you actually expose any motion picture film at all? Or just set up the actors and take stills?”

“Mike, listen! I thought of that, but the film was my protection. In the mood you’re in now you won’t believe this, but I was hoping all along that the deal would go sour so I could release the picture. It would have done turn-away business.”

Gentry interjected, “Maybe you guys know what you’re talking about, but I sure as hell don’t. If we aren’t going to run off to the Everglades to look for a body, wouldn’t this be a good time to bring me up to date?”

“I’m not working on you, Will,” Shayne said. “I’m working on Baruch. I think he’s about to decide to start telling the truth.”

Baruch was chewing another fingernail. “But if Gretchen was the one who staged that scene at the shopping center…” He nodded slowly. “The guy came in and looked for the van, and then he parked in the worst possible place, so he’d be driving into the sun on the way out. They waited for a car to go by so I couldn’t be sure exactly what happened. He had the sunscreen down—”

“Now you’re thinking,” Shayne said. “Or else you and Gretchen worked it together. I like that one better.”

“And then what do you think, I went out in the Glades and played the Indian? I’m not the one who travels in helicopters. All right, I’ll give you the possibility that I was conned on that one. But why?”

“To be sure you didn’t sell the film to a Congressman named Barnett Pomeroy and let him suppress it. That would leave Nick Tucker in the race for governor, and you’ve told us this was the main thing his wife was trying to prevent. But if you had reason to suppose that Nick had killed her, that would force your hand, and blast everything out in the open. Murder’s a serious thing. You couldn’t afford to fool with it.”

“Mike,” Gentry said, “are you really saying what I think you’re saying, that that whole schmear with the Indian—”

“She had the key to her husband’s car,” Shayne said. “Obviously the Tuckers are a two-car family. So that was no problem. When she called him to set the time, Armand was close enough to hear her end of the call. ‘The shopping center, nine thirty.’ But she’d told Tucker a different shopping center. He went there and waited. This is a busy day for him, but I think we’ll find that nobody knows where he was at nine thirty.”

“And they picked that Glades road,” Gentry said, “because they knew somebody would hear the shot and report it. I begin to get the idea. When the car came out, she was lying on the floor of the back seat. Who was the guy driving?”

“It could be someone she hired, but you still aren’t understanding me, Will. We don’t know the woman was the real Mrs. Tucker. Could it have been Maureen Neal? Was Maureen the girl who was kidnapped at the airport this morning? Did somebody else dress up in a head bandage to look like Frankie Capp? As a matter of fact, did that whole episode happen at all?”

When Gentry started to object, Shayne said, “All we have is one anonymous phone call. Let’s wait till we get some corroboration. Any number of people could have stolen her typewriter and used it to write that letter. The point of that whole thing was to implicate Capp. Baruch’s name was hardly mentioned. Blame it on the Mafia. That’s topical.”

Baruch threw up his hands. “You’re wasted in the private detective business, Shayne. You ought to be a screen writer.”

“How many other things didn’t happen?” Gentry demanded. “I suppose they didn’t really shoot up this place last night? Those were actors? Pomeroy isn’t a real congressman, a bomb didn’t go off and break his ankles, and certain very important people from the political world aren’t going to be calling me to ask questions I don’t know the answers to?”

“All we can do now is wait for a real event, and see which theory fits. Unless somebody has a better suggestion?”

He looked around. Nobody had.

And then a lieutenant from Gentry’s office came in, in a hurry. “The park rangers have come up with a body, Chief.”

Shayne swung around. “A woman?” he said sharply.

“They didn’t specify. They want to know what to do now.”

“There’s your real event, Mike,” Gentry said. “I seem to remember some mention of a bet. You owe me a steak. But I suppose we’d better go out and see if this body is real flesh or plastic.”

The helicopter’s racket made conversation impossible. Shayne sat at the window, drinking. The fact that he’d been wrong didn’t bother him; he’d been wrong before. But he had the strong feeling that there was something else he ought to be doing now. He ran down the list of names: Capp, Tucker, Pomeroy, Rizzo, Baruch, Maureen Neal, the missing Peter. He rearranged the sequence, and rearranged it again, trying combinations. There was always at least one element that didn’t fit.

Gentry pointed to the ground. The outside world came back into focus for Shayne, and he saw a cluster of vehicles and men at the end of a dirt road winding southward into low scrub from the ruled precision of the Tamiami Trail. A boat was beached at the end of the road. To the south and west lay an intricate landscape of slowly moving water and hummocks and saw grass.

Men looked up and waved. The helicopter settled slowly onto the Trail, and two of Gentry’s people jumped out, to run off in different directions to stop traffic. The rest of the passengers dismounted. The helicopter lifted, to wait in the air until it was needed again. A Land Rover came out to take them to the water.

The dead woman lay face up in the back of a park pickup. She had been shot in the head, at close range. Her face was muddy and unrecognizable. The hook that had brought her up had torn a gash in her thigh. She was wearing green slacks and a sweater. Baruch, at the shopping center, had been shooting black-and-white film that didn’t show the color of her clothes. She wore a wedding ring and a good diamond.

“All right, who is it?” Shayne said.

“Gretchen Tucker,” Baruch said, and turned away, his mouth a tight line.

“Tim, who is it?”

Rourke had gone very pale, and the many lines of his face seemed more deeply etched. Stooping, he brought up a double handful of water and dashed it in the dead woman’s face. He reached out, hesitated, then went through with the necessary gesture, smoothing the blonde hair back from the forehead. The bullet, entering from behind, had blown a large exit hole through a cheekbone and the fleshy part of the nose.

“Gretchen Tucker,” he said in a low voice. “No doubt about it.”

He moved aside and let Shayne take his place. Shayne took out his knife; the long blade snicked open.

Beside him, Rourke sucked in his breath. “Mike—”

But Shayne had to be sure. He slipped the knife inside the sweater, between the woman’s breasts, and sliced it all the way down. There was no bra. He looked closely at the upper body. He opened the side zipper and worked the tight slacks and underpants down to her knees.

He stepped back. “As far as I’m concerned, this is Maureen Neal.”

The head ranger was watching with distaste, through narrowed eyes.

“Don’t stop dredging,” Shayne told him. “I think you’ll need heavier equipment. I don’t know about the currents here, but it could be out a fair way. If you don’t bring up anything with the hook, we’ll have to get divers. There’s another body out there, with weights on it. That one wasn’t meant to be found.”

CHAPTER 18

The ranger looked at Gentry for confirmation. Gentry, after a long look at Shayne, shrugged slightly and nodded.

Two cops stayed behind. Gentry waved down the helicopter, and the Land Rover took them out to the highway to be picked up.

“Will you tell me one thing?” Gentry said. “Don’t tell me who killed her and put her in the water if that would betray a confidence. But is that Mrs. Tucker’s body back there, or somebody else’s?”

“It’s Mrs. Tucker. Tim and Baruch both identified her.” He spoke abstractedly, because there were still things he had to work out. “We ought to be at Jackson Memorial right now. There isn’t time to explain. I’ve been telling people that it’s Pomeroy who has access to the important money, but I haven’t followed through on that idea myself. Now we’ve got to hurry, and do it right.”

“Mike—”

“There really is a film called Domestic Relations and there really is a quarter of a million in cash. We’ve got to keep them apart. Can you line up two or three radio cars, and have them meet us?”

Rourke, in the back of the Land Rover, overheard this exchange. “Why not let Pomeroy pay the money and arrest the son of a bitch?”

“Too chancy. We don’t know who has the film.”

“You’re hoping it’s Capp?” Rourke said after a moment.

“I’m hoping it’s not Capp. I want to use it to force Capp to come to us.”

The helicopter rose with its deafening clatter, and Gentry went forward to shout directions to the pilot. As they came in over West Miami, he unhooked the transmitter and began calling police frequencies. Presently he made contact with the Northwest Miami dispatcher, who cut him into the circuit. He directed all circulating cars in this part of town to close in on Jackson Memorial, on Twelfth Avenue at Twentieth, and to report their positions at one-minute intervals.

Almost immediately afterward, Shayne saw the big hospital below and ahead, planted solidly amid acres of parked cars. The craft heeled and started to circle. Gentry was getting his first reports from the ground. Shayne, at the window beside him, picked up the beacon of one police car, then another.

Several moments later, he saw a third. The streets below were black with cars. Slowly the circle began to tighten, with Gentry orchestrating the movement from the hovering helicopter. One of the cars reached the hospital and turned onto Twelfth Avenue.

A report came crackling in: the driver had spotted Capp’s Cadillac.

Gentry pointed. The helicopter came clacking around, and Shayne saw the long black car enter the parking lot from the north.

“Set her down?” Gentry called.

Shayne shook his head and made a swirling motion: continue to circle.

Gentry positioned the police cars so they covered all exits from the lot. The Cadillac was moving erratically, as though searching for somebody. Suddenly one of the parked cars came to life and shot out of line toward Twentieth Street. It was the familiar cream-colored Dodge.

Shayne gestured, and Gentry ordered one of his cars to pick up the Dodge as it came out.

“Siren?” he asked, and when the detective shook his head he called into the transmitter, “No siren.”

The Cadillac braked and reversed, turning in the space left vacant by the Dodge. Accelerating, it frightened a smaller car aside and forced its way into the traffic. For one risky moment, it was running on the wrong side of the two-way separation.

Shayne joined Gentry at the transmitter. The Dodge swung onto Fourteenth Avenue and doubled back on a diagonal street cutting across the terraces at an angle parallel to the river. From above, the street plan was a chessboard and the cars were opposing pieces. Gentry could position his pieces at will, while his two opponents were running blind.

One police car was on Twentieth, moving west. The Cadillac was out of contact with the Dodge, which now made the mistake of staying on Seventeenth instead of disappearing into the maze of short streets to the west. The Cadillac came up fast, swinging in and out of lanes. Soon less than a block separated the two cars.

The Dodge made quick reckless darts one way and another, in an effort to shake its pursuer, but the driver was unfamiliar with the patterns, and he made several costly blunders. The Cadillac continued to hang on his rear bumper, edging into position to come up alongside and force him over.

Shayne made an encircling gesture with both arms, and Gentry ordered the police cars to close in.

The Dodge shot into a school grounds, across and out the opposite side, passing one of the police cars. At the sight of the revolving beacon, the Cadillac, following, slowed for a moment, then speeded up again when at a command from the helicopter, the police car pulled into a driveway and parked.

In open traffic, the Dodge was overmatched. Swerving, it ran up on a sidewalk, across a shallow lawn and back, in a fast U-turn. The Cadillac made the turn more slowly at the next intersection, but quickly recovered ground. Gentry, above, was telling his three cars to move in. The parked police car backed out and blocked that street. The Cadillac had overtaken the Dodge and forced it against the curb.

Shayne tapped the pilot’s shoulder and pointed down. The ungainly craft wheeled and settled onto the ball field behind the school.

When Shayne and the others reached the street, all three police cars were in position. Frankie Capp, his face heavily bandaged, backed out of the Dodge, a gun in his hand. Peter, shot, lay in the street.

Capp saw Shayne and Gentry first. He turned one way, then another. Every way he looked, he saw police.

Congressman Nick Tucker, meanwhile, had set a trap of his own, using the same bait — Pomeroy. Earlier, the older congressman had checked a battered suitcase at the International Airport, following instructions he had received by phone. An unknown person — Peter, of course — was to pick him up at the hospital, drive him to the airport and exchange checkroom stubs, the money for the film.

Armed with a small revolver, Tucker waited in Pomeroy’s hospital room for the youth to appear. Pomeroy, with a bad hangover and throbbing feet, had agreed to this procedure. If it had worked — Tucker had convinced him it had a chance of working — it would relieve him of the necessity of handing over a suitcase containing $225,000 that didn’t really belong to him.

Two homicide detectives found the congressmen together. Disregarding Tucker’s protests that he was a busy man, with a crowded schedule, they drove both men to the Warehouse, where Shayne had gathered a small group in one of the screening rooms.

There were twenty seats, half of them filled. Shayne, at the front of the room, seemed in good spirits. He thanked them for coming.

“I don’t know exactly what we’re going to see,” he said. “When we picked Peter off the street — Peter, what’s your last name?”

The youth looked at him sullenly. He had been shot in the fleshy part of his hand, not seriously. His right forearm was also bandaged. Frankie Capp sat several seats away. It was painful for Capp to talk because of his injured jaw, and in this kind of situation, unrepresented by counsel, he would have done as little talking as possible.

“Peter,” Shayne said again. “Your last name.”

“Fisher,” Peter said unwillingly.

“What were you in for?”

When he didn’t reply, Shayne said, “Your hair’s too short. Even soldiers don’t keep it that short anymore. Your prints are on file, so why waste our time? You don’t want to start by making us feel unfriendly.”

“Possession,” Peter said. “A block of hash and four marijuana cigarettes. Four years. I served twenty-eight months in the great state of Texas, where else?”

“O.K., Armand, get the lights. I’m going to give you a little commentary as we go. Peter had a baggage check in his pocket, and when we turned it in at the airport they gave us eight unmarked cans of thirty-five millimeter film. Four of these are the negative. We’re going to start in the logical place, with Reel One.”

The lights blinked off. Baruch stepped into the glassed-in projection booth.

A lighted pattern flashed on the screen, followed by a shot of a naked girl moving slowly in front of a three-panel mirror. The first title card came on: “Domestic Relations, an Armand Baruch presentation.” Other credits followed, printed over the languorous movements of the girl. The author of the screenplay was given as Gretchen Fisher.

“Hold it,” Shayne called, and the action stopped. “Tucker, did you ever meet Gretchen’s brother?”

“Never, I’m glad to say.”

“O.K., here he is now. Brother-in-law, meet brother-in-law.”

“You may think you can get away with this, Shayne,” Tucker warned him, “but I want to tell you—”

Shayne rode him down. “This is what you hired me for. You didn’t want a routine skip trace. You thought you could handle your wife yourself. A woman, after all. But you needed somebody like me to get the film for you, and keep Capp and Baruch sniping at each other and out of your way. You knew all you had to do was mention Capp’s name and I’d jump at the chance to get him. And that part pleases me. I haven’t liked quite a bit of this, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that Frankie’s finally going to get his first major conviction.”

“You think so,” Capp muttered.

“Why else am I smiling?” Shayne said. “It’s the first case in a couple of years where I won’t collect a fee. Of course my client’s going to resign from Congress and refuse to run for any other office, so I can write my time off as a public service.”

“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Tucker said.

“That’s part of your problem.”

To Baruch: “Armand, can you freeze on a front shot of this woman? I want both her face and body.”

The titles continued while the camera moved closer and closer to the girl at the mirror. Her eyes were partly closed. The action stopped.

“How’s this? We cut away in a few more frames.”

“All right. This is a professional porno actress named Maureen Neal, and the reason she was brought east for the role is that she looks a bit like Gretchen Tucker. What do you think, Congressman?” he asked Pomeroy. “You knew Gretchen. You’ve seen her with no clothes on. How close does it come?”

Pomeroy, in the aisle in a wheelchair, blinked at the screen. The skin on his face sagged, and his eyelids were fluttering.

“Not really too close.”

“Tim, give the man a drink of whiskey. He’s in pain.”

Rourke passed his half-pint to the congressman. Shayne continued, “They didn’t need identical twins. All Armand wanted was someone with the same style, the same shape of face. Feel free to break in, Armand.”

“We did a good makeup job — changed the hair and so on. In my pictures the face is never too important, anyway.”

“When Tucker first told me about this,” Shayne said, “the implication was that Gretchen appeared in the picture. I realized later that he never actually said so, in so many words. But that was what was supposed to be so shocking — that the wife of a rising congressman had been persuaded to star in one of these things. And that’s the main thing that’s been bothering me. It wouldn’t have hurt him that much. He’s a great performer in a press conference.” He quoted, with some of Tucker’s stage manner: ‘My wife’s been going to shrinks, and I’m afraid she’s been swallowing too many synthetic chemicals. I’ve done my best to protect her and look after her, but these drug purveyors, these pornographers, have got their claws in her. But I won’t be intimidated! I’ll prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law!’ Tim Rourke even thinks a small jam might have helped him. His trouble has always been that he looks too lucky and handsome and successful.”

“A touch of tragedy,” Rourke said. “Give his face a little character.”

“My God!” Tucker exclaimed. “You talk as though what happened to Gretchen doesn’t matter to me!”

“Does it?” Shayne said gently. “She’s dead, and you haven’t given it a thought. You’re fighting to get out of this with your future intact.” He shook his head. “But you won’t make it. She saw to that by hiring Baruch to make this picture. She never intended to do the scenes herself.”

“She tried a couple,” Baruch said casually, “but the right things didn’t happen. And she was a touch overage, you know? The public likes them young, it’s part of the dream.”

Her brother said, “The weird thing to me, you’re talking about her as if she wasn’t crazy. You just don’t know.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” Rourke said suddenly. “What they were blackmailing Tucker with was the story! Not that she appeared in the film but that she wrote it! A play within a play. Like the one in Hamlet, only here it’s a skin-flick. Terrific.”

Shayne said, “Let’s see.”

He signed to Baruch, and the movie resumed.

The blonde actress was playing a girl named Gretel, married to a congressman named Dick, a former actor. Their domestic life was quirky. Dick showed sex movies in his bedroom while he and his handsome wife occupied separate beds.

“According to Gretch that really happened,” Peter said. “All the films the committee confiscated ended up in my brother-in-law’s closet.”

Tucker snapped, “Absurd.”

Late at night, the congressman in the movie went out to meetings of right-wing business men, which ended in a series of homosexual encounters. He was eager to ingratiate himself and did everything he was asked.

As Shayne had been told, the quality of the moviemaking was good. The tone was light and cool, and many of the lines brought snickers from the audience, in spite of the fact that all but one or two had more pressing things on their minds.

The action moved quickly. Gretel’s brother was caught in Texas with marijuana cigarettes in his car. Narcotics cases in that state are handled with notorious severity, and Gretel urged her husband to intervene. The Texas prosecutor wanted to be made a federal judge. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bertram Lovejoy (Barnett Pomeroy), could secure that appointment for him. Lovejoy-Pomeroy was willing enough, Dick reported, but he wanted compensation, in the form of sex with Dick’s wife, a lady he had long admired. Reluctantly, Gretel consented. But her husband double-crossed her. Instead of arranging a nol. pros. for his wife’s brother, in the squalid Texas jail, Dick arranged something to help his own career, a Select Committee to investigate the pornographers who made the films he himself liked to watch.

Shayne told Baruch to stop the film there and turn on the lights. Rourke protested, “The last reel’s the topper, Mike.”

“You’ll have a chance to see it later. This is going to run for months.”

Congressman Pomeroy, in his wheelchair, was looking much better. “I may say,” he said to Baruch when he came out of the booth, “that if you make any attempt to exhibit this picture you’ll answer to a suit for libel and slander.”

“I don’t think so,” Shayne said. “You must be a lawyer. If you’d thought you could stop this legally, you wouldn’t have been so quick to get up a quarter of a million to buy it in. I’m going to back off now and try to put it in chronological sequence. I’ll need help as I go along, especially from you, Peter. Remember, the main person I’m interested in is Frankie Capp. I want him. The rest of you make the best deal you can get.”

Capp growled, “I’m O.K., bastard.”

“You’re far from O.K., if Peter decides to testify against you.”

“That I did what?” Capp said, glancing at the youth.

“You must have realized by now that he saw you get rid of Maureen’s body. There’s a dirt road into the Glades. You had a rubber mattress. You floated her out into the stream and dumped her. I saw the wet mattress in your garage.”

“Talk about crazy.”

“Maybe Peter can do better than that,” Shayne said. “I think he saw you shoot her through the head from behind. Let’s have a comment, Peter.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“Take your time. I’ll go back to last night. Armand said something about arranging the slides in sequence so they’d tell a story. Tucker broke up the sequence and rearranged them before he showed them to me. Now they were random shots of people having sex. The original package may have included a voice-over tape—”

“It did,” Baruch said.

“Tucker didn’t play it for me, just the opening announcement. Now I’m going to ask Tim Rourke a question. If you went to a sneak preview of this film, written by Tucker’s wife, what would be your first move?”

“Call a high-level conference, including attorneys,” Rourke said promptly. “Pomeroy wouldn’t sue Warehouse, but he’d be delighted to sue the News, because we have assets. It’s a hell of a story by itself, just the fact that such a movie has been made. The timing’s perfect, with the convention coming up. First I’d check the Pomeroy angle. Does Gretchen really have a brother in a Texas jail on a drug rap? Is the prosecutor known to be someone who wants a judgeship? We already know Pomeroy pushed through the resolution setting up the Tucker committee, but do the dates fit? What she’s doing here is accusing her husband of pimping, of persuading her to go down on an elderly congressman to get her brother out of jail—”

“The kid brother she’s always been very close to,” Peter put in.

“But how much of it I could write, I’d have to work out with the lawyers. Meanwhile, the public would flock to the picture, and they’d have to believe it was true. All of it. And I think the scene that would hurt Tucker most is that first one, where he’s watching the stag film. The woman was clever.”

“Say something, Tucker,” Shayne said. “We don’t want to do all the talking.”

“Gretchen wasn’t well.”

“And didn’t you have something to do with that? I agree with Tim, people would think so. Well, we’ll find out. I know Armand’s already planning to pull the movie he’s showing now and open Domestic Relations without advertising.”

“Who needs advertising?” Baruch said. “The word of mouth is going to be terrific.”

Gentry said, “Mike, are you suggesting that we let him go ahead and show this movie?”

“I don’t see how we can stop him, Will.”

“There are ways,” Tucker said harshly. “I don’t understand your attitude. Are you working for me or against me? Your fee was contingent on finding and destroying this lying film. It’s true, I didn’t tell you the full story. Would you have acted any differently in my place?” He leaned forward, his hands tightening on his knees. “You don’t think I murdered her, do you?”

Shayne let an instant pass.

“I think you meant to, Tucker.”

CHAPTER 19

Tucker sat back, as though believing the worst was over. “Murdering people is not one of the things I do. Tell me why you think so.”

“I’ve got another film I want you to see.” He tossed Armand the core with the 16-mm. footage he had shot in the shopping center. “Can you run this on the same projector?”

Baruch had to rewind it onto an empty reel. He made the necessary adjustments and again the lights went off. They watched in silence.

“That’s my Pontiac,” Tucker said as the convertible approached the camera. “But it isn’t me! It’s an obvious frame-up!”

“I agree with you,” Shayne said when the lights came up. “What was your wife’s blood type, do you know?”

Tucker made a distracted gesture. “O, with some funny Rh business, I don’t remember.”

“Did you find the car in his garage?” Shayne asked Gentry.

“With blood on the carpet. They’re testing it now.”

“I’ll bet you another steak it turns out to be the same type as Gretchen Tucker’s. That gives us a good circumstantial case, but let’s hold it.” He took a step toward Tucker. “Why didn’t you tell me she made a date with you for nine thirty this morning?”

“I wanted to talk to her, make her realize—”

Shayne shook his head. “You were keyed up to kill her. You knew you couldn’t relax as long as she was alive. You knew she hated you so much, you and your ideas, that she wouldn’t stop until she brought you down.”

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “A determined woman, Gretchen. She knew him better than he knew her.”

Shayne swung to face Peter. “And she thought you ought to hate him just as much.”

“You know it. She kept saying the son of a bitch was responsible for putting me in jail. But was he? He didn’t write the Texas drug laws. That business with Pomeroy wouldn’t have worked. Too far away, too many people involved. If she’d come down and taken on the prosecuting attorney and the judge and all the gentlemen and ladies of the jury, we might have got somewhere. Jail wasn’t really that bad. But I couldn’t get her to see it, she thought Tucker wrecked my life.”

“Then she actually did—” Gentry said. “With Pomeroy—”

“She told me so often enough,” Peter said wearily. “But if it was that repulsive, why did she go on with it? Once, O.K., to keep me out of jail. But it wasn’t just once, was it, Congressman?”

Pomeroy smiled slightly. “I’m not even admitting to once. The girl in the film seemed to enjoy it.”

“Nobody has hangups in my movies,” Baruch said.

“Now is everybody clear about the situation?” Shayne said. “Gretchen and Baruch had come up with a very good blackmail technique. It was a vanity film: she put up the cash. But they weren’t in complete agreement about what they were after. She wanted her husband’s capitulation, and a little money. Armand wanted a lot of money and a success. The difference didn’t matter until Capp came on the scene. Capp is basically a hijacker.” He looked at his old enemy, who looked back through narrowed eyes. “He prefers the old way of making dirty movies, when you didn’t keep books or pay taxes. Armand tried to keep this picture a secret, and Capp couldn’t have liked that. As soon as he found out what they had, he decided to hijack it. Because there was one thing they overlooked. If it was good blackmail against Tucker, it was better against Pomeroy, a much more important figure. So Capp sneaked the film out of the vaults and invited Pomeroy to a private screening. They agreed on a price. Then some dirty dog came along and hijacked the hijacker. Here’s what happened. Maureen Neal, in a new town, picked Capp as the most important person to move in with. Every night she told him about that day’s shooting. But her real loyalty was to Pussy Rizzo, an old friend in LA. She decided that Pussy deserved that quarter of a million more than Capp.”

“I’m trying to follow,” Gentry said. “Capp had the film at this point?”

“Between his bedboard and mattress. Maureen found it. He caught her on the way out. Things were too far along. He was swindling his partner, selling company property. He didn’t want out-of-town hoods moving in on the deal. To keep it under control, he had to kill her.”

Gentry again: “Do we even know she’s dead?”

“She has to be dead. I’ve been working backward. Gretchen had been worrying about Capp, and she had Peter watching the house. This is last night now, the night of the declaration of war. Am I right so far, Peter?”

Peter turned sideward to look at Capp. “I’ve decided to let him have you, Frankie. Maybe he’ll be grateful and send me cigarettes in jail. Because I’m in violation of parole here, aside from the fact that I’ve probably broken a few freaky laws.”

“What did you see, Peter?” Shayne said.

“He knocked her around a little, cut her face. Then he said he was sorry and she let him sponge off the blood. She was sitting in a white chair. He shot her through the head so she’d be hard to identify.”

The room was silent.

“Nothing like that happened,” Capp said.

“Then he whipped her and did one or two other things. I was outside the window shaking like a leaf. The whole thing was out of character for me.”

“Then you tailed him to the Everglades,” Shayne said. “You saw where he ditched her personal belongings, including the key to her car and motel room, and recovered those later. Then you got back to town fast, and grabbed the film.”

“Gretchen did that — I phoned ahead.”

“I was having my first meeting with Tucker just about then,” Shayne said. He took out the photographs Tucker had given him. “These were all I had to go on. In the slides he showed me, the woman was either pretending to be in an advanced state of sex, or her face was partially blocked. But he was careful, so he could move either way. Unless he could persuade me that the woman in the slides was his wife, he’d have to tell me what they were blackmailing him with, and he didn’t want to do that. Now let’s shift to his wife. She knew there was a good chance he could outmaneuver her. He’s an incumbent, with money and press support, important people committed to him, and all she had was the film. That’s why she waited till Peter came out on parole — she needed an actor she could trust. He’s the one who played Tucker, in the scene in the shopping center.”

“I’m glad to see you aren’t totally gullible,” Tucker said.

“I recognized her by her walk,” Shayne said. “The girl who told me she was Maureen Neal moved the same way. Naturally I thought it was a film of Maureen acting Gretchen, which meant that Baruch had to be part of it because he knew both women.”

Gentry said, “You lost me, Mike.”

“It was a simple reverse,” Shayne explained. “Maureen Neal acted the part of Gretchen Tucker in the movie we just saw. At the motel last night, Gretchen turned it around and acted Maureen. Why? Because if Tucker could talk Baruch into selling out for a simple sum of money and the quashing of those subpoenas, all her effort would have gone for nothing. But if Baruch thought she’d been murdered—”

“Wait a minute,” Gentry said. “The letter at the airport. The kidnapping out there. What was that all about?”

“Tucker wrote the letter,” Shayne said. “Gretchen was still alive, but he planned to do something about that promptly at nine thirty this morning. We don’t know what the plans were, because she was smart enough not to show up. But somebody would have to take the heat for the murder he was planning, and from Tucker’s point of view, Capp was the ideal man. Tucker’s going to deny some of this—”

“I deny it all,” Tucker said.

“He wouldn’t have time to fake anything afterward. It had to be done before. That airport scene looked fairly elaborate to us, but it was actually simple. He wrote the letter at home, on his wife’s portable. And it was an ingenious letter. He even included something about his own sexual difficulties. The attitude was right, but the facts were wrong. She hadn’t been sleeping with Capp, she’d been sleeping with Armand, but we wouldn’t believe Armand in the role of a Mafia killer.”

“Thanks, if that’s a compliment,” Baruch said. “Tucker made a reservation in her name on an eleven o’clock plane, and packed one of her suitcases. He took the typewriter, the suitcase and the letter to the motel and walked into the first vacated room. Two minutes later he walked out, leaving a sign on the door, and made the anonymous phone call.

Rourke said, “I knew one of these scenes had to be faked. But both!”

“Everybody’s been making movies,” Shayne said. “Gretchen wanted to make us think she’d been murdered. Her husband had a strong motive, and no alibi for nine thirty, when Baruch was filming the scene at the shopping center. That was your blood in the car, wasn’t it, Peter?”

“We have the same type,” Peter said. “We had to do it beforehand, and it had to be my wrist, because that’s what she decided. It came out like champagne.”

“So that would give us a fair case against Tucker, but with no body. So they drove out to the road where Capp disposed of Maureen and staged a final episode. The body of Maureen Neal would be dragged up, with no identifying papers and without much face. Sooner or later Tucker would be able to establish that it wasn’t his wife, but by that time he’d be under arrest and Domestic Relations would be playing to standing room. And the story would be out. Tucker and Pomeroy would be finished in politics. Don’t sue anybody, Congressman,” he advised Pomeroy. “That would be your worst possible move. Act amused, if you can do it in a wheelchair. Don’t run for reelection, either.”

“That may be good advice,” Pomeroy said agreeably. “Luckily I’ve been skimming a little over the years, according to my enemies. I won’t go on welfare.”

“I’m still confused,” Gentry said. “I thought you were telling us there were two women in the water.”

“There has to be another woman in there,” Shayne said. “That’s the only way to explain Peter’s behavior the last hour or two.”

He looked at the boy, who drew a deep breath. “Of course I knew I’d be going back for something worse than violating parole.”

“Murder takes precedence,” Shayne said.

Gentry moved out quickly from the wall. “He killed his sister?”

“He’s going to make us prove it. The fact that he tried to sell the film to Pomeroy will count against him, but you never know with a jury.”

“But why?” Gentry asked.

Peter stirred, looked at Shayne and then looked quickly away. Rourke and most of the police in the room knew how Shayne worked, and they cleared the side to let him go one-on-one.

“Why?” Shayne repeated. “Because unlike his sister, Peter doesn’t believe everything has to be black or white. Will it really matter if Tucker gets to be president?”

“He believes in dropping the hydrogen bomb, for Christ’s sake,” Peter said. “Of course it matters. It just doesn’t matter to me.”

“Did you always feel this way, or did you change in jail?”

“She had illusions about me. She thought I wanted to be the Count of Monte Cristo or somebody.” He raised a fist. “Revenge!”

“It started as a semijoke,” Shayne said to Gentry, without looking away from Peter. “I think he likes to dress up — another actor. But when Maureen was killed it gave him a scare. Frankie Capp doesn’t fool around, as the rest of us have known all along. It didn’t bother Gretchen. She went right to work thinking of ways she could use it.” Suddenly: “Are you gay, Peter?”

“I swing both ways, but don’t tell Gretchen. Well, you can’t, can you?”

“What I have to say next may embarrass you. Last night” — he was still talking to Gentry — “Gretchen decided to make things confusing for us by using Maureen Neal’s motel room and checking out in the morning in the usual way. Remember — she wanted us to think the dead girl in the water was Gretchen herself, not Maureen, and she wanted the identification to stand up for at least a day. Peter was with her. I happened to coincide with them at the motel.”

“I spotted your car,” Peter said. “I wanted to get the hell out, but to Gretch it was some kind of goddamn challenge.”

“And a funny thing happened.”

“You thought it was funny, did you?”

“Brother and sister had sex,” Shayne said. “I was on the other side of the connecting door.”

“I had to,” Peter said, almost whispering.

“She told you you had to. As Maureen Neal, she could tell me things that would head me the wrong way and keep me busy. She didn’t know I’d never seen a good picture of her. If Tucker had shown me the slides in the right order, I’d know that Gretchen Tucker had a brother. The sex was to make sure I didn’t make the connection. That’s what she told you, anyway.”

Peter muttered, “I can’t deny it happened. She didn’t give me time to think.”

“Thinking back now, was it necessary? When I walked in you knocked me out with a bottle. You kept me tied up till you were sure I didn’t know who she was. You could have played it that way from the start. Or used sound effects. You didn’t actually have to do it.”

“She said you might be photographing us—”

“She tricked you, I believe that. But she liked it. She went off with a bang. I’ve had enough women fake it to know that was real.” He added, “You too, I think.”

Peter looked at the floor. “It disgusted me.”

“But you couldn’t refuse, could you? Because you were already planning your switch. With all this money floating around, none of it was floating your way. She’d worked out a procedure for breaking the story through Rourke. You had the rest of the night to put junk film in the cans, but it had to be real motion-picture film, in case she checked at the last minute. You bought it before the stores closed yesterday.”

“So.”

Now Shayne began to bear down. “I think I know why you had to kill her, but I want to hear it from you. She wanted to have sex again, to calm you down before the scene at the shopping center. You’d done it once, and the world hadn’t come to an end. Sex without hangups, the way it is in Warehouse films. She’s always bossed you, hasn’t she, Peter?”

Peter nodded dumbly.

“And if you’d let her win this morning, she’d have you for life. Under new names, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, that nice couple from the east. You said it disgusted you. It disgusted you later. It didn’t disgust you then.”

“Yes.”

“No, you liked it as much as she did,” Shayne said calmly. “You knew it was wrong and dangerous. You knew your sister was a sick woman, and you were putting yourself in her hands. After the second time, you couldn’t ever refuse her again. And she was a schemer and planner. Maybe that was the real reason she worked out this movie — not to ruin her husband but to get you under her full control.”

“I couldn’t let her—”

“There was only one way you could break free, turn her own plan around and use it against her. She’d tricked you. Now you had to trick her. That was fair. She was stronger than you.”

“So much stronger, Mike. We used to play around when we were kids. I never wanted to, she was the one.”

“That’s not so bad up to the age of ten. But nobody wants to stay ten years old all his life. And that’s how it would have been, playing house in Omaha. Chicago. Seattle. There was only one way to grow up.”

“That’s it!” Peter said excitedly. “I didn’t know you’d understand. Sooner or later everybody has to grow up. She was wild! We did it this morning in the Everglades, Mike. We did it that second time. And it was immensely exciting! The best time I’ve ever had with a woman. And it was terrible. I didn’t plan to shoot her. I’m not the schemer. She was laughing, you see. Today was the first day of the rest of our lives. She gave me the gun and told me to fire in the air. She had a rock to throw in the water, to make a splash. Realistic.”

He finished dully, “I fired, but not in the air. She made the splash with her own body. The acting was over.”

“That was carefully done, Mike,” Gentry said. “Do you think it’ll stand up?”

Shayne rubbed his mouth without replying.

They were walking through the Warehouse lobby. Lib stepped out to intercept them.

“Is it over? Is it true there were two murders?”

New letters were being put up on the marquee: “Domestic Relations, the picture the whole town is talki—” A higher admission price had been posted.

Baruch and his cameraman came out behind them. Baruch made an apron of his striped robe so he could load the cans of film: Sally, Delinquent Venus, Friends and Neighbors.

“Mike, the coach’s part in the football film. Do you want to talk about it?”

Shayne slammed the trunk and went to the front of the car. Lib was still hanging at his elbow.

“You look tired, Mike. I live a couple of blocks away. I’m told I give a great massage.”

Shayne started the motor. She held on to keep him from leaving.

“And we could—”

Shayne seldom fed the motor too much gas at the start, spinning his wheels and leaving rubber behind him to mark where he had been. But he did it this time. He came down hard on the accelerator and shot off toward the city. He’d spent too many hours of his life among these people.

Content

Brett Halliday
Blue Murder

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19