Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

In the pocket of my topcoat is his leash, with which he shall be secured to a leg of my park bench. I long to take him with me but a man on the run from such a heinous crime as I am about to commit has no use for excess baggage, no matter how personal the attachment to it has become. Someone will find him a good home and a loving master.

It is now 10:02 three minutes until the explosive execution of a wicked, thoughtless brother. It disturbs me that Cory is two minutes late coming through Mishkin’s trap door. Always his impetuous race to the park has been Pavlovian in its punctuality.

The time has proceeded to 10:03 and still Cory has not emerged from the building. Something is delaying him and I see now, the solitary flaw in my plan. Depending on an animal’s sense of punctuality, I have not allowed time to disarm my bomb should that punctuality lapse. There will be no time now to return to the apartment and disarm the bomb. If, in the next thirty seconds Cory does not appear, he shall die an ignorant, innocent death!

It is now 10:04, sixty seconds from the blast. I put my face in my hands and pray, intermittently writing these final few words. To live, it is imperative that Cory now be pounding down the stairs from the impending holocaust on the sixth floor. And out Mishkin’s trap door in the lobby. And across the street to the safety of Bryant Park, to lick my hand a fond goodbye and then to wonder as I leash him to the bench.

Writing, I have now raised my head from my prayers. The second hand on my watch sweeps through the final minute of silence before the morning is tom apart by an explosion.

And then I see him as he comes bounding up to me across the grass. He’s made it out of the building! Cory has made it safely away!

A big, oval friendly face with a mouth as wide as the Sea Lion Caves of Oregon. My hand is covered with wet, sloppy kisses and then like a red missile he is off and away after a plump squirrel.

There are left just fifteen seconds, time enough to write these final words in my diary. There is, alas, no time to run. There is only time hurriedly to write the epitaph of a man who for the briefest time, enjoyed the exhilaration of the possibility of turning the perfect murder.

But it is not to be. For Cory, faithful Cory, has seen fit to bring me an item of which I am always forgetful.

It is at my feet, silently whirring off seconds inside. It is my atta...

Faceless, alone, he waited on the rim of hell. For he knew, only too well, that for a man who has betrayed the Mafia there can be no tomorrow-only slow, cruel death in the night.

They said they would give him immunity in exchange for his testimony at the trial of Herman Ventura.

“Immunity from what?” Steinbach asked.

“Immunity from prosecution,” they said, the U.S. attorney named Esmond doing most of the talking.

“That won’t buy me much time,” he said.

“We’ve got enough on you right now, Sol, to salt you down for a good ten years.”

“Sure you have. That’s not the kind of time I’m referring to.”

“We’ll give you protection around the clock.”

“For how many years?”

“Until we feel you’re fairly safe,” Esmond said.

“If I sing, I’ll never be safe, Mister Esmond. You know that as well as I do.”

“Is that your last word, Sol?”

“I sure hope not.”

Esmond’s heavy eyebrows lowered in iron-gray menace as he turned to the deputy U. S. marshal. “Take him back where he came from, George. And throw the key away.”

They let him stew in a cell for a week without exercise and then they had him out again for an airing.

Esmond was sitting at his big desk reading a newspaper. His assistant, a frowzy-haired pipsqueak called Herbert O’Hara, was drawn up to his full height of five feet three before a window, as if on the verge of addressing a jury. Also present was a man new to Sol Steinbach, a tall wiry-looking man with a long sallow face and black patent-leather hair parted in the middle. He was sitting on the edge of the conference table.

“How are you feeling this morning, Sol?” O’Hara asked.

“Like seven days in Vegas with none of the fun,” he said.

“Meaning exactly what?”

“Meaning his throat’s dry and raw from too many cigarettes,” Esmond said, glancing up from the newspaper.

“Right,” Steinbach said.

“Meaning he hasn’t been sleeping any too well,” Esmond continued. “Look at those red eyes, Herb.”

“Now that you mention it,” O’Hara said.

“Peckish appetite. Am I right, Sol?”

“The menu’ll never win any blue ribbons,” Steinbach said curtly.

“Nerves edgy. Notice how he keeps rubbing his fingers together.”

“All right already. I plead guilty.”

“And I bet you’re constipated too.”

Steinbach kept silent, trying not to fidget.

“The Vegas syndrome, Herb,” Esmond said, smiling his mean smile. “Classic example.”

Sol Steinbach found his fingers playing with a button of his shirt. He willed them to stop. The sallow-faced man was watching him like a bird of prey.

“Well, to change the subject,” O’Hara said, gliding slowly away from the window, “your playmates are showing a profound interest in you. Just an hour ago Harold Fitzroy, the great mouthpiece, was nosing around on the matter of bail.”

“How about that? What is my bail anyhow?”

Moving along the wall as if pacing out the dimensions of the room, O’Hara said, “There is no bail.”

“No bail? How come?”

“Fitzroy asked the same question in about the same tone of voice,” Esmond said.

“We told him we were holding you as a material, witness,” O’Hara said from somewhere behind him. “Incommunicado, for your own safety.”

Fear began to gather in his-belly like nausea. “You can’t do that, man. It’s against the law.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Sol,” Esmond said, far from laughing. “We’re already doing it.”

“I got certain rights. Fitz will get a writ of habeas corpus or something and spring me. Sure he will.”

“Very likely,” Esmond said.

“Good, good.”

“Maybe not so good,” O’Hara said, coming to a stop at the wall opposite the window from where he’d started. “Mull it over a little, Sol.”

“What’s to mull?”

“You’re not a blood brother,” Esmond said, carefully folding the newspaper. “You’re not a soldier in the Scarpino family. All you are is a useful associate, a bookkeeper retained through the sufferance of Herman Ventura.”

“So I do a little work for Herman.”

“You do a lot of work for Herman. You have facts and figures on his loan-sharking operation right at your fingertips, facts and figures that Herman himself would have to check out with you before he passed on Scarpino’s cut.”

“I don’t admit any of this,” Steinbach said. “Not an iota.”

“Not yet.”

“Not ever.”

“You’re no clam, Sol. You talk in your sleep. It’s common knowledge.”

“Who says?”

“Ventura says. One-eye Ollie says. A lot of mugs say. You’re kind of a computer brain, Sol, but you’ve got the sort of spine that makes you wobble when you walk.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“I have another opinion too,” Esmond said. “Twelve hours after you leave our custody, Sol, I think you’ll be a dead man.”

“You bastards are trying to connive me into a comer.”

“It’s just part of our job,” O’Hara said, on the slow move again. “One of the pleasant parts.”