Brett Halliday - Million Dollar Handle

“Can I talk now, Mike?” Rourke said. “Ever since his name came up I’ve been choking on this.” He came around to the bottle. “I got it from Wanamaker. He was doing a story on the big concession empires-you know, the companies that sell hot dogs and beer at the stadiums and ballparks. He queried Sports Illustrated on it, and they said they were interested. And there are some tricky angles. Two or three outfits have everything locked up, nationwide. There’ve been rumors about mob connections, and that’s what Wanamaker was trying to develop. J. T. Thomas has the Surfside business. Wanamaker went all the way back and found out that J. T. Thomas-not the man, he died in the twenties, but the company-may have put up some of the cash Geary used to get control in the first place. Going even farther back, he found a reference to a couple of characters who were involved in a power fight inside the Thomas company. One of the names still rings a bell-Tony Castagnoli.”

“That’s been pretty well hidden.”

“It had to be, because Geary has been selling purity all these years. The concession deal is very one-sided, I mean one-sided against the track, according to Wanamaker, but hard figures are almost impossible to get. So he took it to Geary, to confirm or deny. Geary asked him not to pursue it, and offered him a phony research project that would pay a few hundred more than he’d get from Sports Illustrated if they bought the story, which they probably wouldn’t because all he really had was some twenty-five-year-old rumors. Well, if you can prove you never got any Geary money, you’ll help everybody else on the list. Wanamaker can claim he went on those trips in the best tradition of investigative reporting, to get close to the victim so he could cut him down. And the paper might buy it, and give him the job back. So if there’s anything he can do to help, he’ll work his ass off, and from the way it looks to me, you need all the help you can get.”

After immobilizing Pedro, Rashid returned to saw the cast off Shayne’s leg.

“That mended quickly,” he said. “A triumph for Western medicine. As for the arm, if you are going to do much moving, it will be better in a sling. I assume that for you the night is not over.”

“If you wake people up after midnight, they know it’s important. Don’t forget the ear.”

“It’s waiting. A nurse saw me insert the hoop, and she gave me a look of real horror. What is the sinister Asian up to now? I assured her it was merely one of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen when Michael Shayne is a patient here.”

The ear was wrapped in three layers of foil. Frieda accepted it with a grimace.

“I once had an offer to be office manager of an insurance company. Clean, respectable inside work. Sometimes I wish I’d said yes.”

Rourke was late for his middle-of-the-night radio show. Electing to continue with Shayne, he called in to tell them to give the guests another drink and put on a discussion he had taped the previous week with several Beach call girls and their dispatcher. Shayne was silent as they drove south on Collins, past the procession of gaudy hotels. He had accepted Rashid’s offer of a sling, and he was steadying the wheel with the back of his hand. Rourke glanced at his friend from time to time, but said nothing.

Shayne double-parked outside the Miami Beach police station. Rourke went in with him. The night sergeant looked at them with that special wariness Miami Beach cops always reserved for Shayne.

“I thought you were supposed to be in the hospital with a gunshot wound in the leg.”

“It was a knife wound in the arm,” Shayne said. “That station never gets it quite right. I want to talk to the guys who handled the Geary crash. Are they working?”

The sergeant, hesitating, glanced from Shayne to Rourke. “I guess that’s information the public’s entitled to have. Yeah, Parker and Hamzy. They’ll be off in half an hour if you’d like to stop back.”

“Find out where they are and we’ll meet them. Just a couple of questions-I was away when that happened.” The dispatcher put a call on the air. There was no immediate reply.

“I know those guys,” Rourke said. “Sleeping.”

The dispatcher kept trying, and finally a voice answered, giving the cruiser’s location.

“We’ll meet them at Lummus Park,” Shayne said. Shayne and Rourke arrived first. The cruiser pulled in and Shayne walked around to the driver’s side. Hamzy was a plump youth with glasses who had been on the force for less than a year. Parker, at the wheel, was the veteran.

“Shayne?” Parker said. “They didn’t say it was you. We have an unwritten rule in this department, I don’t know if you know about it, that we don’t put ourselves to extra trouble where Mike Shayne is concerned.”

“That’s all right. We just want to find out if you know anything about a dispatch case with six thousand dollars in it. Turn off the motor and talk to us.”

Parker came out of the car at once. “What dispatch case? Where?”

The porches of the family hotels on the other side of the avenue were still brightly lighted, although the guests who usually sat there had long since gone to bed. Shayne perched on the seawall.

“Relax,” he told the younger cop, whose hands were flying. “The chances are very good that it burned up in the fire. Even if it didn’t there’s no reason we can’t work something out.”

“Work it out with me,” Parker said, “not the kid. To begin with, we don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You realize that today I’m in no position to make moral judgments. And Painter has his own theories-he won’t want to listen to mine. At the same time, it’s just as good not to let rumors get started. Then the money gets harder to spend. You can’t take an ordinary vacation without people making remarks, especially if the bills are a little singed.”

Hamzy’s hand jerked, and to prevent it happening again, he put it in his pocket.

“I know Geary had that dispatch case when he left the track,” Shayne said, “but nobody else has mentioned it, and there’s no reason it has to be in Tim’s story tomorrow.”

“No reason whatever,” Rourke said, “and besides, I don’t know what you’re talking about, either.”

Hamzy took his hand out, made it into a fist and said hotly, “I don’t like this hinting! Let me tell you-” His partner put a hand on his arm, and said quietly, “Why don’t we let Shayne finish?”

Shayne said, “Do you think it’s possible there was somebody in the back seat, who was thrown clear?”

“The car would be rocking coming off the embankment. It turned over when it hit the palm tree. Geary had his belt on, which had the effect of keeping him inside. But we didn’t see anybody-did we? — and you have to remember that the way that fire was burning, it was bright as daylight.”

“But if you were busy picking up money-”

“Goddamn it!” Hamzy burst out. “Just because we’re cops does that mean we don’t have any rights?”

His partner looked at him in amazement. “Boy, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“Don’t bicker,” Shayne said. “You’ve got to go on living together. The suggestion’s been made that there was another car in the accident.”

Both cops looked at him, and Parker said, “Are you talking about deliberate?”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Meaning homicide,” Parker said softly. “Which would take it out of our hands.”

“That’s the way it seems to be going. I want to hurry it up. A vague recollection of a couple of taillights, moving too fast. Does it begin to come back? You didn’t say anything to anybody, it wasn’t that definite. You did some quiet detective work in the neighborhood, and turned up a witness who remembers hearing a first crash, like two cars colliding, before the big one.