Brett Halliday - Murder Spins the Wheel

“Like hell you are.”

Shayne wrenched the club out of her hand. With a sideward thrust of his foot he moved Betty out of the cabin doorway.

And then, with the entrance of three more cops, he realized that the money would have to wait. They had arrived without sirens. They all had their guns out. Seeing three fallen comrades amid the broken bottles and tangled film, they were clearly in a good mood to shoot somebody. “Drop that,” the leading cop told Shayne. Shayne dropped the nightstick. Steve wavered up to the cop, ignoring the drawn gun, and tried to punch him. Missing, he fell down. The photographer popped up with a fresh flashbulb and made another picture.

Shayne was hustled along the dock with the others. The Beach cops used a modified Volkswagen bus for their riot calls, with two rows of facing benches. Except for Maguire, who had been driven off in an ambulance, Shayne knew only one of the arresting cops by sight, and if that man recognized him, he was careful to say nothing about it. Shayne made no attempt to identify himself or to ask for different treatment, which they wouldn’t have given him.

Betty had been permitted to put on more clothes, but her bag had been confiscated before she could comb her wet hair or do anything about her lipstick. The welt left by Maguire’s nightstick showed clearly, even in the dim overhead light, and she kept one hand cupped over her injured ear. She was rocking back and forth.

“I’m going to be sick,” she whispered.

The wagon got underway with a jerk. More police cars had collected, and the officer in charge had decided to go in using their sirens.

“Betty,” Shayne said.

He was sitting across from her, their knees almost touching. He took her free hand and made her meet his eyes.

“We’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Listen to me without saying anything.”

The cop at the end of the wagon leaned forward. “Shut up back there. No talking.”

Shayne nudged Steve, who was slumped beside him, his face a mask of dejection. When he didn’t react at once Shayne nudged him again. He started.

“What do you mean, shut up?” he shouted at the cop. “This is supposed to be a democracy!”

Lee joined in, the cop roared at them both, and all the prisoners but Shayne and Betty began to sing defiantly, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty-”

Under cover of the clamor Shayne went on quietly, “Don’t say anything to anybody about Vince. I want to find out what happened. I can’t do that if we’re tied up in jail. If it’s just drunk and disorderly I think we can get out in a couple of hours.”

She started to say something but he forestalled her. “How drunk are you?”

“Pretty,” she said weakly. “You hit that cop, didn’t you? You took his nightstick.”

“Yeah. Not only that, I didn’t drown Vince. When his body comes up we can find out what went wrong. The way the cops are going to look at it, you were together in a locked cabin, you had a fight and cracked his skull.”

Her eyes widened in protest.

“The way you’ve been waving bottles around,” Shayne said, “they’ll think it figures. I know it didn’t happen like that, but I have other things to go on, things they don’t know about. They’ll figure you put him in his scuba outfit and tipped him out of the window. It was just bad luck that he got tangled up in the ladder. You’re ideal for this, Betty. No money for high-powered lawyers, no connections. The heroin angle makes it bad. They’ll jump at it. I don’t think they can make it stick, but it could mean a pretty rough year and a half.”

She swallowed painfully. “I didn’t-”

He patted her knee. “Just take it as it comes.”

He opened his mouth and bawled with the others, “Land of the Pilgrims’ pride-”

They were still shouting and singing when they arrived at the police station. Their pictures were taken again as they emerged from the wagon. One of the photographers exclaimed, “It’s Mike Shayne!” and ran for a phone.

Inside, they were lined up and booked. Shayne was the only one to ask for a phone call, and for a moment he didn’t think he was going to get it. He called his friend Tim Rourke, the crime reporter on the News, and told him where he was and what lawyer he wanted.

“What did you do this time, Mike?” Rourke said happily.

“Let me see,” Shayne said. “It’s drunk and disorderly to begin with. Then inciting to riot, resisting arrest, striking a police officer, vandalism and malicious mischief. I may have left out one or two.”

“And you only need one lawyer?” Rourke asked.

Shayne laughed. “I’ve got things on the fire, Tim, so get moving.”

Shayne, Steve and the other boy in their party were taken to the open drunk tank, jammed with its usual Saturday evening crowd. Some were already asleep, several were fighting, an old man was sobbing in the corner. Others were sitting around hopelessly, on benches or on the floor, waiting for time to pass. The boy who had come with Steve and Shayne hung back at the grated door and seized the attendant’s arm.

“I want to make my phone call.”

“You had your chance,” the cop said surlily. “Inside.”

The boy held onto the grate and kept the door from closing. “I’m Tom Pike! You’ve got to-”

The nearby prisoners crowded around and joined the protest, and finally the attendant took Pike back to the phones.

“His old man’s the judge,” Steve told Shayne. “It might help.”

Shayne found an unoccupied section of bench. Presently Pike was brought back, looking subdued. He wouldn’t speak to Steve, and stayed at the gate, holding the grating.

Over the next half hour the quarrelsome prisoners began to quiet down, rousing up whenever the gate was opened and new arrivals were admitted. The smells accumulated. Shayne had been in worse jails, and he used the interval to go back to the beginning of the attempt on Harry Bass and sort out what he knew and what he didn’t know. The second category, as usual at this stage, was much larger than the first.

The dozing drunks reared up again at a disturbance in the corridor. Peter Painter strode around the corner, surrounded by a group of police officials. The news of Shayne’s arrest had taken longer to reach him than the redhead had expected.

The chief of detectives was wearing an immaculate white linen dinner jacket, a red carnation in the lapel. He was beautifully shaved, brushed, and powdered, and his little quirky mustache was at its best. A gloating smile played across his lips as he searched among the disreputable drunks for his old enemy, who had beaten him so often, Michael Shayne.

Those of the prisoners who were still awake stared at him sullenly, with open hostility. Those who didn’t know who he was were offended by his dinner jacket. A drunk near Shayne made an obscene suggestion about the carnation and Shayne laughed.

“Shayne!” Painter exclaimed triumphantly as his eye lighted on the big redhead, lounging between a sleeping derelict and a young delinquent in a dirty T-shirt and tight jeans.

Shayne stood up lazily and stretched. Steve watched anxiously from farther down the bench. Shayne winked at him and sauntered over to the grate. Painter’s pungent after-shave lotion could be smelled clearly among the other smells in the tank.

Painter’s smile broadened. “This is a night I’ll remember,” he said, and signed to one of his entourage to unlock the gate.

The officers around Painter were grinning except for Bob Sanderson, a lieutenant who had grown gray and drawn trying to keep the department functioning in spite of his chief’s mistakes. His hands deep in his pockets, he refused to meet Shayne’s eye.