Brett Halliday - Violence Is Golden

“You’re breathing,” he said. “I knew this wouldn’t turn out to be my lucky day.”

“What are you doing down here, Petey? You ought to be back home finding out who killed Jules LeFevre.”

“I already have a pretty shrewd idea who killed Jules LeFevre. You. I’m hoping you’ll tell me why.”

The passengers and crew of the grounded DC-8 had been brought to Puerto Sao Luis by truck. Shayne gave Rourke the names of the ones he wanted to see, all of them women. While Rourke was rounding them up, Shayne and Carmody did some hard bargaining. The gold from the Persian Gulf theft was already in Treasury hands, but Carmody still didn’t know what had happened to the shipment that had left Miami on the DC-8. Finally he agreed to pay five percent of the combined seizures, and Shayne made him put it in writing.

Christa exclaimed when she saw Shayne, and hurried to the side of the bed. “Thank God you’re all right.”

Naomi Savage, looking frightened, refused Rourke’s offer of a chair. Mary Ocain came last. She raised her camera and a flashbulb went off.

“Tim Rourke’s idea,” she said. “It’s a big story. Everybody’s going to want pictures.”

“All right, baby,” Shayne said wearily. “I’ll take you first. Pay attention, Petey. I don’t want to go through this twice.”

Mary, flushed and defiant, looked almost pretty. Shayne looked at her for a moment in silence.

“I had a long talk with Nikko,” he said. “I was surprised. I heard you tell somebody you’re a virgin.”

A muscle flicked in her face. “That was-a slight exaggeration.”

“Why did you tell me Naomi offered you a bribe to forget you’d seen some extra luggage?”

Mary looked quickly at Naomi, whose eyes remained fixed on Shayne’s face. “I suppose she denies it?”

“Tim,” Shayne said.

“What’s the question, Mike? Why was George sick to his stomach last night? I’m in a position to explain that.” He grinned. “Mrs. Savage told the waitress George hasn’t been doing very well in bed, and she wanted to slip an aphrodisiac in his chili. The girl was glad to help. Only I guess it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. It was a drugstore emetic.”

Naomi murmured faintly.

Painter said, “Will you bear in mind that I don’t know who any of these people are, Shayne? They’re just names to me.”

“Keep listening,” Shayne said. “George is Naomi’s husband. He’s a big good-looking guy, but I think she realizes now that he’s essentially a jerk. Still, she’s married to him, and she wanted to keep him out of trouble, if possible, especially after she realized that the way they had it set up, if anything went wrong, no one would believe she hadn’t been in on it all the way. She fed him something to make him too sick to take part in the action. And it worked. A man named Thompson died. A man named Jaime Sanchez died. Two Japanese gunmen died. But George lived through it. And then she set out to discover exactly what kind of razzle-dazzle this bunch of crooks was trying to pull. She decided she had to get rid of the extra luggage container. She couldn’t tuck it under her arm and walk out with it. Explain something to me, Naomi-where did you get the explosive?”

“From Al Luccio.”

“That’s what I thought, but how did you persuade Al Luccio-”

Her eyes rose to meet his. “I tried a half dozen different stories, and he didn’t believe any of them. Finally I told him”-she hesitated, swallowing-“well, I told him you’d rented a car and I wanted to wire something under the hood, and he said he’d be glad to cooperate.”

Shayne laughed.

Mary exclaimed, “She blew off the compartment door!”

“Yeah,” Shayne said. “A little lump of plastic explosive taped to the inside of the door over the lock. She borrowed a stewardess’s uniform so she could move around the airport without being noticed. She must have had a detonator at her seat. But something jammed, and the container didn’t slide out until later, as I’ve been telling Carmody. All right, all this indicates that Naomi had nothing to do with the smuggling, and Mary’s a liar.”

“But Mike,” Christa objected, “don’t you remember? We heard Naomi talking to George about changes in the plan.”

“We heard a woman’s voice. It wasn’t hers. You were in bed with me at the time, so it wasn’t you. It had to be Mary.”

Mary gave him a pitying smile. “If you couldn’t tell the difference between my voice and Naomi’s, you didn’t hear much, did you?”

Painter’s pencil was eating its way down a page of his notebook. It had barely begun, but Shayne was already tiring of the game. He forced himself to speak slowly and carefully. He was approaching the delicate point, and everything depended on balance and timing.

“It’s been a rough couple of days. Most of the people on the plane were pretending to be somebody else, and I’m still not sure I’ve got everybody checked out. Adam fooled me with a double story. He fooled me badly. He started off as a Negro clergyman. He didn’t do that one too well, but just when I was beginning to have doubts, he pulled out a forty-five and turned into a Treasury agent pretending to be a Negro clergyman. That explained the little mistakes. We had a bank inspector, a travel agent, a couple of phony guerrillas. But the funny thing about you, Mary, is that I think you’re what you claim to be. A schoolteacher, not a professional criminal masquerading as a schoolteacher.”

“Worse luck, you’re right. And, of course, I can prove it.”

“You’re homely and awkward,” Shayne went on bluntly. “You’re ill at ease with men-and with women, too, for all I know. Your hips are too big. You’ve probably never had many dates. You go to the movies, you watch television, you wish something would happen. Last summer in the Middle East, something did. But as you must know by now, that was all manipulated. Nikko only did what he’d been told to do.”

“That’s not true! He-”

Shayne made a rude noise. “I talked to him. You know how men talk when women aren’t around. It was pretty frank on both sides. He seduced you because they needed somebody who could move about without being seen. Needless to say, he didn’t get any enjoyment out of it. And the theft itself didn’t turn out to be very romantic, did it? Just a switch of a few crates. At least it took place in a glamorous setting and you had a cruise on a millionaire’s yacht as the temporary mistress of the handsome Greek captain. And after that, you went back to Milwaukee.”

“And I found it dull,” she said. “I found it very, very dull.”

“So when they made you another proposition, you jumped at it. And it’s been anything but dull, even though you’ve missed most of the real excitement, the bullets flying around, the dead bodies.” He reached for a cigarette. “I was very much in your way. The hijacking could only work with no armed opposition. You’d established yourself as an amateur busybody. I fell for that because it was so near to the truth. You fed me a few facts-what difference did it make if I knew about La Guaira? You didn’t intend to let the gold get that far. When you pretended to be kidnapped, naturally I raced off after you. You timed it all very well, the horn in the parking lot, the escape in the mountains. Adam wanted me dead, but not quite yet. He came after me. After the dust settled, I hid on the plane. One small thing-that twenty-two you pulled when I was wearing the monster mask. Why would you want to shoot your own monster? Sanchez told everybody to look straight ahead, but that wouldn’t apply to you, would it? You must have seen me slug him. Let’s see. Does that cover everything?”

Several voices began clamoring at once. Shayne held up his hand.