Brett Halliday - Win Some, Lose Some

“You’re the number one crime reporter in Miami. If you don’t know, who does?”

“Hell, all the number one crime reporter knows is what people are willing to tell him, and lately some of my friends have been crossing the street when they see me coming. Mike, the thought hit me when this woman was talking. What if that wasn’t a real kidnapping? What if it was only a cover to knock over a Canada man without starting a war? When that kind of high-level argument is going on, there are ways you can milk it. Or you can end up in the middle,” Rourke added, “which has happened to me a few times, as I know you remember, so I’m walking short. Nothing impulsive and sudden, like the old days.” He tapped his forehead. “I’m going to think before I jump.”

Shayne laughed. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Shayne had long experience with Rourke’s extrasensory hunches. They bit him hard, and while he was feeling their effect, he wasn’t open to rational argument. Still, once in a while they paid off, and Shayne had learned not to disregard them completely. Several winters before, with Shayne scoffing most of the way, one of these hunches had carried Rourke into an investigation that led to a Pulitzer prize.

The copy boy came in with a nicely dressed woman wearing glasses, who introduced herself as Chris Maye. In Eddie Maye’s world, the wives seldom get taken to the races or the games, and Shayne was meeting her for the first time. She refused Rourke’s offer of a drink, but accepted a cigarette. When that was out of the way, she said abruptly, “I have twenty-five thousand dollars. I don’t know what you usually charge, Mr. Shayne, but I don’t know who else I can go to. I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time since Eddie-”

The rest of her breath came out in a sob. Rourke was around the desk in an instant. He was surprisingly good with grief-stricken women. He patted her, gave her Kleenex, poured whiskey, and made her drink it. Shayne let him handle it. He had liked her husband, but there was nothing surprising about his early death. Loan sharks have only a slightly longer life expectancy than racing-car drivers.

After a time, Rourke said gently, “Can we talk about it, Chris?”

“We have to talk about it.” She blew her nose hard. “I’m not a weeper and a wailer as a rule. I want to find out what happened to Eddie so it will have some meaning. Or shape. I don’t know how to say it.”

“How much did you use on it, Tim?” Shayne said.

“Couple of paragraphs. Found slain, was about all. Chris, will it bother you if I tell him?”

“In a phone booth outside the Bowl,” she said, looking down at the wadded Kleenex. “A bullet hole in the head. There wasn’t much-mess, considering. He had tape marks on his mouth and wrists. The phone booth was where I was supposed to leave the money.”

“Do you have a ransom note?”

She took out a folded paper, on which the instructions and the usual threats were printed in ragged capitals.

“‘He will be killed,’” she said, quoting. “‘You will never see him again unless instructions are followed, to the letter.’ So I followed instructions, to the letter. The strange thing is that I wasn’t especially scared. It sounded so businesslike, it didn’t occur to me that if I met their price they wouldn’t deliver. I scurried around, saw a few people-”

“Can we stop there?” Rourke said. “Did these people include Larry Canada?”

“Of course. You know how Eddie made a living. He didn’t keep it a secret. But he wasn’t part of any Godfather organization or anything like that. He used to laugh about the stories in the papers. I know you have to simplify things, Mr. Rourke, use labels and so on. ‘Alleged,’ ‘reputed,’ ‘according to law enforcement officials-’ Most of the law enforcement officials I’ve ever run into are morons. Eddie and Larry grew up in the same neighborhood, that’s all it amounts to. Larry took bets, Eddie made loans. I needed a hundred thousand to go with this twenty-five. Larry collected it for me. I don’t know how Eddie would have paid him back, but he’s been talking about selling the business.”

“It says seven o’clock,” Shayne said. “Were you on time?”

“Exactly on time. There was an out-of-order sign on the phone. Eddie was scrunched down on the floor with another note in his mouth.”

She took out another printed message, in the same green ink as the ransom note. This one had been rolled instead of folded. It said: “SORRY, EDDIE TRIED TO SAVE YOU SOME MONEY, HE’LL KNOW BETTER THE NEXT TIME.”

“Eddie,” she said, “my God, I’ve been married to him eighteen years. He wasn’t one of those show-off masculine types. He went along. He rolled with the punches. There were other things in his life besides money. He would have done what they told him, and made a funny story out of it when he came back.”

She had been doing well after a difficult beginning, but now she tightened up and began crying again. “We never had children. We were still trying. Eddie was so good with his nephews and nieces, the kids on our street. Something like a car crash, an accident, I could have adjusted to that. But if it’s some kind of political thing-”

They were watching her closely. She explained, “Not that kind of politics. To get control of those businesses, the gambling and all.”

“That’s what my blips have been telling me,” Rourke said with a glance at Shayne. “And if you can give us some more on that, maybe Mike will reconsider and say yes.”

She shook her head helplessly. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel him lying there with his eyes open, stiff as a board. All he ever said was that he was trying to make up his mind which way to jump. He thought I was better off not knowing about it. I keep puzzling about things. What happened to his car? Why hasn’t it turned up? He was collecting money that day. He had a lot of cash. I saw it-a lot. What happened to it? And if this was an ordinary kidnapping, wouldn’t they try to collect and then throw the body in a canal? Isn’t that what you’d do?”

“That’s been standard since the Lindbergh baby,” Rourke said. “Have you told the cops any of this?”

“Certainly not. And I don’t intend to. I took the note out of his mouth and let somebody else find him. When they called me, I went down and identified him. Eddie Maye, reputed or alleged or reported to be a notorious loan shark, killed by one of his business rivals or by a customer he squeezed too hard. The police in this town don’t solve any of those. One criminal less is the way they look at it. Well, Mr. Shayne?”

She took three packages of bills out of her purse and put them on the desk, squaring them neatly. “This was in Eddie’s safe-deposit box. If it isn’t enough-”

“It’s too much,” Shayne said. “Put it away. I can’t take it. There’s a rule against working for two clients at the same time. Tim’s paper is paying me full rates, and they expect my full attention. But what you’ve been telling us is very interesting. Canada has been refusing to see us, and this gives us a lever.”

The phone rang, and Rourke dived at it.

“Frieda, Mike.”

Frieda Field ran her own detective agency, Field Associates, with an office in Miami Beach and retainers from several of the Beach hotels. The agency had belonged to her husband, who had been killed a few years before. She had elected to continue the business and had turned out to be good at it. Rourke had brought her in to keep track of the comings and goings of Philip J. Gold, the State Highway Commissioner, who might or might not have concealed dealings with Larry Canada, their principal target. Frieda was a handsome woman, dark-haired, slender, with a beautifully coordinated body, and yet to someone worrying about being followed, she was all but invisible. How could such a great-looking woman have the humdrum job of finding out if a certain state official was meeting the president of a certain road construction firm?