Brett Halliday: Win Some, Lose Some

“What other loose ends are you worrying about?”

“The Eddie Maye thing. Money there, too. I missed your briefing, but you did say, didn’t you, that Eddie was out collecting money the night he was killed? What happened to it? And there’s one major character still unaccounted for. Mike, this isn’t a criticism, you know that. Two groups of people, and you certainly disposed of the big majority. But you said at one point that Eddie Maye was being followed by a cop, and as I understand it, you were aiming at a cop in a couple of those moves. Well, he’s still walking around with a gun and a badge, and I admit it bothers me.”

Frieda started to speak, but Rourke rode her down.

“And I’m willing to swear that somebody put a bullet in that kid before he dropped off that belt. You didn’t see it from up above in the payloader. I saw him jerk. That was a bullet,” he insisted. “I suppose he’s too mangled up now to be sure, but I’m going on claiming he was shot. There were all kinds of cops out there, all of them with guns. Our cop didn’t want the kid to be taken, the only one left who could nail him for kidnapping and murder.”

“I have a list of every police officer on the scene at the time,” Shayne said. “Believe it or not, there were sixteen. All right, which one? That’s why I leaned so hard on the money Eddie Maye was collecting for DeLuca. I said it could go as high as a hundred thousand. I pulled that figure out of the air. We have no way of knowing. But people who are in the business of making illegal loans need some system for carrying money so they won’t be hit before they can get it to the bank. Eddie had an old Volkswagen. He went on driving it long after you’d expect him to trade it in. Maybe that was because he’d had some custom body work done on the car.”

Rourke said slowly, “I think I’m beginning to see-”

“Like an extra compartment across the back of the trunk. In a bug, that’s under the dashboard. A concealed opening from the driver’s side so he could slip in packages of bills. And if he was making the rounds that night, putting the arm on people for the DeLuca campaign, that’s where it would go. Eddie’s body turned up a day later, but where’s the car? That’s the question I left open when I was explaining this stuff to the cops. Maybe the kidnappers were seen in that car, and they decided they had to get rid of it.”

“Then it’s at the end of some swamp road somewhere.”

“If so, it won’t help us tie off the last loose end. A better place would be a junkyard. One of those standard VW’s is cannibalized in a matter of weeks. Engine, rear end, transmission-pretty soon nothing’s left but the frame, and they scrap that. The point is-”

“I see the point,” Rourke said. “Finally. Nobody knows where that VW is except the guy who put it there.”

“And he hasn’t cleared anything out of this so far. He knows I was guessing about the hundred thousand, but wouldn’t he want to check? I called all the main junkyards and said if anybody came in to look at stripped VW’s, to notify me at the courthouse, and every sighting was worth fifty bucks.”

They had crossed the Miami River and now they were moving north on the drive. Where it dead-ended, they circled on side streets, coming back under the expressway to the largest of the riverside junkyards. The youth who had come for Shayne was waiting at the gate. He pointed. They drove down a wide alley between junked cars toward a man who was examining a VW without headlights or front bumper. Shayne picked a gun off the floor.

Frieda stopped the van, and Shayne stepped down. The man turned.

“Downey,” Shayne said, “I had an idea it might turn out to be you.”