Brett Halliday - Murder Takes No Holiday

“Don’t touch her!” Shayne said roughly as the truck driver stooped to lift her onto the sidewalk. “Call an ambulance. The V. A. hospital’s nearest. Then call police emergency. Get moving.”

“How did you know I would come here?” Martha said.

“It wasn’t too hard to figure,” Shayne said. “The P amp; O had a cruise ship coming in tonight that touched at St. Albans this morning. I got a list of the passengers who went aboard at St. Albans, with their baggage declarations. These people were the only ones who brought back an English bicycle. You’d better not talk.”

“I want to. The strange thing is that I have no feeling anywhere at all. That means it’s serious, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll see when the ambulance gets here.”

“Has there been any news about Paul?”

“He’s dead.”

A spasm of pain twisted her face. “How horrible.”

Shayne looked down at her and said gently, “But if you were going to feel bad about it, you shouldn’t have shot him.”

Her eyes widened. “Michael, you know me! You know-”

“I’m beginning to think I don’t know you very well. There was a lot of wild shooting last night. One of those stray shots might have pinked any one of us. But not three shots in a row. I told you to throw away the guns, but you kept one of them, didn’t you? When the lights went out you called for your husband. He answered you. You took his hand, put the gun against his stomach and shot him three times.”

She turned her face away. “How can you think such a horrible thing?”

“Come on, Martha. Stop acting. What’s in the bike frame?”

“Diamonds. That doesn’t mean-”

Shayne looked up. A circle of people was standing around them. One was a cop whose face looked vaguely familiar.

“Anything I can do, Mike? The ambulance call is in.”

“Better clear the lane so it can get in against the curb.”

“Michael,” Martha said in a low voice, “talk to me about it. You owe me that much. The pain will be too bad later. I have to make plans.”

“I don’t owe you anything except one pound,” he said.

Reaching out, she found his hand. “Michael. I knew about the diamonds, but that’s absolutely all.”

“The hell it is, Martha. Paul didn’t make those arrangements last night. You did. You knew about the trick with the radio programs. You made the appointment with Alvarez. You arranged with someone up here to send the cable about Paul’s mother. You talked him into chartering the plane. And if he’d actually taken off, it would have worked. It was a pretty good try. You only missed by thirty seconds.”

She threw her head from side to side, keeping a desperate hold on his hand.

He said, “The cable was in his pocket when they brought him in. He wouldn’t have to send a cable to himself-he didn’t show it to anybody.”

“Damn you, Michael. The minute you came into that room I knew it was over. I have to know. Why do you think I should shoot Paul?”

“The minute Alvarez told him how the appointment had been made, he knew who made it. He probably guessed that the cable was a phony. He wouldn’t have the guts to pull a trick like that himself, but he was willing to cover up for you, and divide the profits. And it wasn’t part of your plan to divide with anybody. And there were other things. He thought he was the one who started the smuggling. I doubt it. I think it was your idea, and like a good wife you persuaded him that he’d thought of it first. Of course he was the one who’d go to jail if anything slipped. He wasn’t the world’s biggest brain, but in time he would have figured it out. You didn’t want that, because he might figure out at the same time that you’re the one who put the knife in Albert Watts.”

“Michael. Stop.”

“I’d just as soon stop. This wasn’t my idea.”

“No, no, I have to know what you think. But it’s insane!”

“Look at it one way,” Shayne said, “and every murderer’s insane. Paul thought it was Alvarez or one of his people who killed Watts. Alvarez thought it was Paul. They both had the same reason. It was a good one, but yours was better. Because why didn’t Watts give information against you as well as Paul?”

She frowned.

Shayne went on, “You were the link, Martha. I’ve had since six tonight to work it out, and I think I’ve got it. Neither Paul nor you did any actual handling. You planted the stuff on people who didn’t know you existed. This afternoon Malloy reminded me that after the Camel was slugged I didn’t hear a car. Whoever did it must have got away on a bicycle. And it dawned on me. Everybody on St. Albans rides bicycles. The tourists rent them. Some of them take one of them home, if they’ve got any of their five hundred dollars left. I don’t know if they get as good a break on the price as on jewelry or liquor-”

“Just about,” she said tonelessly.

“All you had to do was find out who’d bought a bicycle to ship home, and borrow it for a few hours. That would be easy. Nobody locks up bicycles down there. You take off the handlebars and drop the little packages in the hollow frame. You put the bike back where you got it. A month later, or six months later, after the tourist is back in the States with all his wonderful bargains, you borrow the bike again. You take out the packages and have it back before the owner knows it’s missing. And there’s never any connection between you and Paul and the people who carry the stuff in for you. You keep to tourists who live in southern Florida, which is also easy because if they live farther away they don’t take a bicycle home. It’s a clumsy thing to carry in a car.”

“You should have been a criminal,” she said bitterly.

“Watts handled baggage at the agency,” Shayne went on. “He’d know who bought what, and when they were leaving. Paul tried Vivienne on him first. She scared him. But you wouldn’t scare him, Martha. Did you pay him with money or something else? Hell, maybe you didn’t have to pay him at all. But he found out what was going on. He didn’t denounce you both, just Paul. I think he saw Paul in jail for a long term, and Albert Watts and Paul’s wife on some other Caribbean island spending those nice thousand dollar bills. A dreamer, in short. But that was his dream, not yours. You couldn’t afford to have him alive with the big one coming up.”

A siren began rising and falling in the distance.

“I was across the island when he was killed,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so, Martha. He gave his wife a long excuse about why he wouldn’t be home for dinner, the kind of elaborate excuse a married man uses when he has a date with another girl. You were driving a rented car. You probably did some business on the other side of the island, counting on the natives to be vague about the time if anybody ever asked them. Watts walked out of town to some lonely spot, where you picked him up after dark. You did some hard drinking together, and he probably did some more dreaming. On the way back to town, you pulled off the road for one last kiss. You stabbed him three times, the same number of bullets you put in Paul. You took his wallet, to make it look like a robbery, and pushed him out in the native quarter. You knew the natives wouldn’t come out to help a white man with his well known views on the subject of natives. He bled to death.”

“Nobody else thinks-”

“Martha, he’d denounced a smuggler, and the man had reappeared on the island. At a time like that he wouldn’t go drinking in native bars. He wouldn’t be alone with anyone he didn’t trust.”

“Is that all?”

“I think it’s about all.”

The siren was coming rapidly nearer. Martha said, “Then it’s not very much. I’m going to fight it. I won’t give you an inch.”