Brett Halliday - Million Dollar Handle

“It baffles me, Pete. But I seem to have my own problems here.”

“You do, don’t you?” Painter said with immense satisfaction. “A little crude, Shayne. Some of those teenage fans of yours are going to be painfully surprised.”

“Crude? Not necessarily. Because why would Geary keep a payoff book?”

“For his own protection, obviously.”

“How does it protect him? There’s something peculiar about it. What do you get for a total?”

“Two hundred and ten thousand the last year. You don’t exactly take care of that by dipping into the petty cash. Your own three-year total, not that I’m telling you anything, is eighty thousand, an impressive figure. Now I’m going to repeat my initial question: What did you do to deserve it?”

“If he died Tuesday, I’m not the first person on the list you’ve asked that. What do the others say?”

“Most of them are saying it’s a damn lie.”

“And with Geary dead, that leaves you with no witness. Are you releasing the whole list?”

“Selected names. I’ve been having an argument with the state’s attorney. I’ll be candid with you, Shayne. I’ve often tried being candid with you, and I’ve usually ended up regretting it. However. One school of thought is advocating just the course of action you mentioned-impanel a grand jury, subpoena everybody, if they deny receiving any money from Geary, indict them for perjury. But could we make it stick? Probably not. So now we’re leaning toward media exposure, and letting the legislature handle it. Make it an investigation of the whole dog-racing picture, not just Surfside. Maybe end up with a revamp of the entire racing scene, dogs and horses, which is long overdue, in my opinion. But I kind of hate to see it go that way.”

“The name Painter would drop out of the story after the first day.”

“Interpret it that way if you like,” Painter said kindly. “But the person I want to get my fingernails into is Castle. All these bureaucrats, these petty union officials-they’re minor league. Most people don’t know this, but I’m thinking about retiring. If I could bring in Tony Castle, it would be a nice capper to my career. That’s why I was so determined to talk to you before the publicity.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“I notice an interesting pattern in those payments you got. I’ll take the book back now, if you don’t mind.” Shayne slid it to him. “Three thousand regularly on the twenty-fifth of each month. Suddenly they drop to one thousand for a few months, and then stop altogether. Several months later they begin again, and continue to the present. You and I have had our little fallings-out, and some of them, regrettably, have been reported by your friend Rourke in the press. But I’ve always known that sooner or later you’d slip, and I’d nail you. I’m not vindictive!” He raised a finger. “You’ve expressed your scorn and contempt for me openly and often, but that’s one of the unfortunate byproducts of public service. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to say what you like and think what you like. But that cuts both ways. I’m entitled to freedom of speech too. I happen to believe that your free-wheeling methods, your disregard for the legal niceties, have had a lot to do with the decline in respect for constituted authority in this city-”

Shayne said impatiently, “I think you’re a horse’s ass and I’ve never concealed it. What has that got to do with this?”

Painter was thrown slightly off-stride. “You’ve made me lose track of what I was about to say. If you can keep a civil tongue in your head for one minute, and remember that maybe the other fellow has some feelings. You know where I’d like to see you. In jail, with your license revoked. Be that as it may! I’m willing to work with you for the common good. And this time, by God, I’m talking from strength! Your name on that list would be enough. But I’ve got something else and I’m going to tell you about it right now.”

“All right, Petey. That’s enough of a buildup.”

“Just wait one minute and you may not be quite so flippant. What is your impartial observer going to conclude when he looks at that sequence of payments? Three thousand, three thousand, one thousand, one thousand, nothing, three thousand. Well, maybe Geary was temporarily short of funds. He had to go on paying those other guys, but you’ve got money in the bank from all those huge fees you’ve been drawing down from gullible people. So Geary came to you and said, Mike, I’m a little short, what do you say, ease up for a couple of months. And you went along with it because as I say, you don’t have to scrimp and scrape on a city salary. And when the winter meeting was underway and his income picked up, you went back to your old arrangement. That’s the way it looks. But I know different!”

“Petey, you get more long-winded every day.”

“Then I’ll come right to the point. People know you’re one of the high-priority items in this office, and when they hear about anything where your name is involved, they bring it to me. In October of last year, the third month you weren’t getting your slush, I was told that a nurse at Jackson Memorial had a Mike Shayne story I might want to add to the collection. That’s out of my bailiwick, but I made arrangements to see her. Geary was in the hospital-mugged outside the stadium after a Dolphins game. According to the official version, he was drunk, and when the man with the knife asked him politely if he had any change, he put up a fight. Broken nose, bruised larynx, concussion. I have her notarized statement, with two witnesses, and I’ll give it to the papers if you decide that’s the way you want to play it. The statement is as follows. Getting long-winded, am I? She was the night nurse on duty. He called her over and grabbed her wrist and told her it wasn’t some junkie who did this, it was no less a celebrity than Michael goddamn Shayne.”

Shayne regarded him steadily.

Painter gave his mustache another little flick, and went on. “An argument about money, and Shayne went out of control. Kicked him. Banged his head on the pavement. Left him there bleeding. King Kong stuff, and Geary was too scared to take it to the cops. But he wanted the nurse to make note. If anything happened to him, if he ended up on the obit page under suspicious circumstances-”

“Wait a minute. Are you wondering if that crash he died in was an accident?”

“No, that’s open and shut, as far as that goes. Hold the interruptions. I’m almost finished. He wrote her a check for three hundred dollars. I’ve got a photostat of that canceled check, with the right date on it, the night when he’d been beaten up and he was supposedly too drunk to hold a pen.”

“This is all bad news.”

“Not to people who don’t make a practice of beating up drunks. Not to people who don’t take high five-figure payoffs. I’ll tell you what I did a few days later. Geary was home, getting over his concussion. I told him it was silly to be scared of a private detective who was on the skids anyway. I pleaded with him to give you to me for assault with intent to kill. I couldn’t get anywhere with him. He maintained that he didn’t have any recollection of who mugged him, or of talking to the nurse.”

“I think I see your theory, but you’d better tell me anyway.”

“Obvious on its face!” Painter was enjoying himself. “He was trying to get out of that regular payment, and you gave him a taste of the law of the jungle. After that you’ll notice he was always prompt. So that’s the situation, and I can’t begin to tell you what satisfaction it gives me. My first impulse, my first impulse was to walk out and lay the entire sordid story in front of the press, and lick my lips while they crucify you. If there was ever any bastard who deserved it, it’s you. But what does it amount to, after all? A little petty extortion. True, as you said yourself, that’s a bad tag for somebody in your dubious profession. You’d probably have to move to a different location, but I assure you, after a couple of weeks we’d stop missing you. It took me a sleepless night to come to this decision, but I’m going to give you a chance to unhook.”