Brett Halliday - The Violent World of Michael Shayne

After hesitating briefly, Manners said, “All right, you can consider it canceled.”

“Call him while I’m here,” Shayne said. “And just so you won’t call him again the minute I leave, I want a letter of apology from you to Hitchcock. To the effect that you knew nothing about this thing Toby has been setting up, and you’re deeply shocked. You’d rather give up your contract than be a party to anything so slimy. I won’t deliver it unless I have to.”

“Toby won’t like that,” Manners said through thin lips. “He won’t like what he reads in the papers tomorrow morning any better.”

The detective took out the keys to the big Buick and tossed them to Manners, who caught them neatly with one hand. “The three of them are tied up in the back seat. If you don’t want to know where the car is parked, I’ll be glad to tell the cops.”

“Maybe I’ll let you keep them. They didn’t do such a bang-up job on you.”

Shayne explained patiently, “Morrie has a broken arm, an empty shoulder holster and no license to carry a gun in the District of Columbia. It wouldn’t surprise me if his fingerprints are on file. Rebman and the car can both be traced to you. I didn’t have any rope or adhesive tape, so I used Cheryl’s stockings and tore up her skirt. You probably know how much else she was wearing-it wasn’t much. The papers are going to eat this up. It’s mysterious, and there’s sex in it.”

Shayne and Manners had been equally unsmiling so far, but suddenly, at the thought of how the livelier newspapers would cover this story, the redhead gave a hoot of laughter.

“Very funny,” Manners commented.

He thought for a minute, then pulled the phone toward him and dialed a number. On the TV screen, an announcer was holding up a pack of cigarettes, moving his lips in praise of his sponsor’s product. The redhead broke out his own cigarettes and offered one to Manners.

“I don’t smoke,” Manners said brusquely, and snapped into the phone, “Toby? I don’t want to talk on your line. Call me back as soon as you can get to another phone.” He hung up. “Rebman had instructions to hire you if necessary. He decided you were too drunk to be approached on that basis. He was ready to go as high as fifteen. I’ll raise it to twenty.”

“Twenty thousand or twenty million?”

Manners looked pained. “Needless to say, not twenty million.”

“To do what?”

“First are you interested?”

“I’m always interested in that kind of dough.”

The phone rang. “Yes,” Manners said. “All right, Sam. Your idea about Mike Shayne backfired, and backfired badly. Never mind how it happened. We have to pick up the pieces. He’s in a position to make one or two demands. Have you been using somebody named Maggie Smith on Hitchcock?”

He listened, breaking in sharply after a moment. “Don’t tell me about it. I want it scratched. Do it as soon as I hang up. If she doesn’t answer her phone, ring her doorbell, and keep at it till you wake her up. Tell her to stay away from Hitchcock, starting now. That’s all. Keep in touch.”

Shayne motioned to him.

“Hold it,” Manners said into the phone. “What is it, Shayne?”

“Ask him how much he agreed to pay her.”

Manners repeated the question to Toby and hung up after listening to the answer.

“He’s promoting a foundation grant for her theatre,” he said. “It could run as high as thirty thousand.”

Shayne felt an unreasoning stab of disappointment. Even now, he realized, he had been hoping it would turn out that Maggie had been telling the truth and everybody else had been lying.

Manners took a lined memo pad out of one of the manila folders. “I don’t like Sam Toby,” he said, biting off the words, “and this is the last time I deal with him. What do you want me to say to Hitchcock?”

“Put it in your own words,” Shayne said. “Mike Shayne tells you that a woman named Maggie Smith has been working on him, and Toby confirms it. Toby’s arranging some financing for her theatre in return. This isn’t the way you like to work. You gave Toby hell and told him to call it off, and you’re glad you caught it this early, before any harm was done.”

Manners scrawled a message covering half a page. He tore it off and tossed it to Shayne. Shayne read it, nodded and put it away. He kept his face impassive, but all the alarm bells were clanging. They shouldn’t have been so ready to jettison Maggie Smith. Something was wrong here, and he didn’t know what. On the record player another jazz record came down and began to spin. There was an unmistakable note of menace in the air.

“We thought you were working for National,” Manners said. “But you’ve actually been working for Hitchcock’s family, haven’t you? I understand he has a daughter?”

Shayne shrugged and started to get up. Manners went on, “To be candid, I wouldn’t want to hire you away from a competitor, because I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t try to get away with drawing a fee from both sides. But I assume that this wraps it up as far as you’re concerned. We need some background on Senator Tom Wall. We suspect he’s on the National payroll. He’s close to Henry Clark, who handles National’s undercover lobbying. We need proof of this, and we need it in a hurry. The payment schedule would be-two thousand down, eighteen thousand balance on delivery of something we can use.”

Shayne picked up his drink, looked at it with distaste and set it back on the floor.

“That sounds possible. But you’d better get somebody who can find the Washington Monument without having to follow a cab driver. Probably there’s no reason you shouldn’t know-Trina Hitchcock hired me to keep her father out of bed with the Smith woman. And that’s all she hired me to do. I’ve been working on something in Miami the last few days and I’m behind on my sleep. Now I’m going to start catching up. As soon as the hearings adjourn I’m going back to a town where the cops know me and I have friends on the papers. That makes a difference.”

Manners screwed on the top of his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. “Has it occurred to you that you might have been brought to Washington for some other reason than the one you were given?”

“Let’s say it’s occurred to me.” Shayne crossed the uncarpeted floor and added his cigarette butt to the others in the ashtray. “But the hell with it. The day’s over.”

“I’d like to take another minute to give you some history,” Manners said. “Sit down and finish your drink.”

Shayne returned to the sofa. “OK, but I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.”

“One year ago I had my back to the wall. I’d made the mistake of putting too much time into building airplanes and too little into buttering up the generals and admirals. The fat cats at National thought the time was ripe to take me over. Two of their top executives and three of their directors are ex-general officers, and their only company duty is to stay on friendly terms with their ex-colleagues in the Pentagon. I’ve never gone in for that old-buddy crap. I’d never heard the name of Sam Toby. If he’d come into my office and said I needed to hire a Washington influence peddler to stay in business, I would have thrown him out on his ear. Then National took a contract away from me after I’d spent two million on wind-tunnel tests. I had a couple of big loans called, for no good reason. All of a sudden my credit sources dried up. I began to hear that rumors were going around about me personally-my financial position, even my sanity. National made me an offer. The price was ridiculous. I turned it down. They began raiding my stock, and drove it down to below nine dollars a share. All the analysts were predicting I’d be in bankruptcy in six months. They hadn’t seen my books. I had six weeks.”