Brett Halliday - Murder Spins the Wheel

“All right?”

She reached out defiantly for the bottle. She took a long drink without coughing, then another. He took the bottle away.

“You can get drunk later.”

“I don’t think I was crying for myself,” she said in a low voice. “I suppose I was partly. Harry didn’t think he could get away from those policemen, Mike. He wanted them to shoot him. He knew he didn’t have a chance. He’d be sent to prison for a long time, for the thing he hated most. His friends would think he’d been a hypocrite all these years. What his friends thought was important to Harry.”

Some of her color had come back. She touched her temples with trembling fingers. She felt for a cigarette, and Shayne lit it for her. Then he turned back to the wheel, bringing it up a tick.

“He bought me that car in France,” she said behind him. “The Alfa. Even if I could have afforded it I wouldn’t have driven a car like that before I met him, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It’s custom-built. They kept installing new gadgets the two weeks we were there. Harry wasn’t as interested in sightseeing as I was, and I was off by myself part of the time. I was walking on the promenade-” She faltered.

“I’m listening,” he prompted.

“I saw him with two men at a cafe. One was the garage-man, the man who was working on the Alfa. The other-” She hesitated again, and went on with a rush, “I can’t describe him but oh, he was creepy-looking. There was a package on the table. I didn’t say anything to Harry. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. I suppose I knew that the package had money in it and he was paying the creepy-looking man for something he intended to smuggle back inside the Alfa. We came home separately. He flew and I came by boat, with my new car. And a few days after I was back something funny happened. I park on the street outside my apartment building. Late at night I felt like going for a drive, for no particular reason, just for the feeling of driving at night in a new white Alfa-Romeo. And it was gone! I didn’t call the police. I was afraid they’d ask me how I could afford a car like that on my salary. I called Harry. He said not to worry. He’d put the word around. If a local thief took it, it might come back by itself. And next morning there it was. I thought it showed the advantages of having such an influential friend. Now I know where it was that night-in a garage, being taken apart so they could get at the drugs inside it.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at her clenched hands. “The face of that man in the Nice cafe. Mike, I didn’t like that man’s face.”

Shayne swore to himself. “Well, maybe I’m wrong.” He swung the wheel, brought the throttle up and headed back toward the Miami Beach side of the bay. “I’d better see if Doc Waters is still at Harry’s. I think we can find a place to tie up on Normandy Isle.”

“I’d like another drink, please,” Theo said. “Don’t worry, I’m not getting drunk.”

He handed her the bottle. Over it she said brightly, “I’m sorry for Harry, but don’t think I’m not sorry for myself too, because I am. What am I going to say when the police talk to me? They must already know quite a lot, if they were waiting for Harry in New York. There’s no way out of it for either of us. No way.”

He glanced over his shoulder. She gave him the automatic smile of an efficient, self-possessed secretary. She began repairing her lipstick.

“I’m a newspaper figure from now on. Tim Rourke and his friends will have a field day. I don’t blame them-it’s their job. In plain English, I’m Harry’s mistress. He took me to the Riviera and bought me a five-thousand-dollar car and other expensive presents. I thanked him in the usual way. Will anyone believe I didn’t know there was heroin in the car? And the truth was, I had doubts about that disappearance and reappearance. I didn’t do anything about it so I wouldn’t have to put any serious questions to myself, such as what was I doing hanging around with these people? I wonder how long a sentence they’ll ask for. I wonder if my father and mother will want to attend the trial. They get so little diversion.”

Shayne didn’t like the hysteria in her tight voice, and, as he eased up on the wheel to make the turn around the buoy, he glanced at her again. She had a little automatic pressed beneath her left breast. Her eyes were tight shut, her arms and shoulders were rigid, and there was a look of concentration on her face.

He went sideward very fast. He gave her hand a sharp twist, as though turning a doorknob, and at the same instant he hit her shoulder, breaking her contact with the gun. There was a crisp explosion. She screamed and threw herself back on the gun before Shayne could get it out of her hand. She fired again. This time the bullet hit her. She staggered back against the table, gave a small cry, and all the rigidity went out of her body. He shook the gun out of her hand. The Nugget, coming about in the current, banged against the buoy, sending Theo into Shayne’s arms.

“Mike, it hurts!” she said accusingly.

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.”

He lifted her into a seated position on the table, with her back to the wall. Blood was spreading across the shoulder of her dress, below the collar bone. He ripped the dress down from her shoulder. The bullet had gone in high, an upward angle. Possibly it hadn’t hit the bone.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” he said.

“It was stupid of me to miss.”

He went down for the gun, a little Belgian. 25, put it on safety and dropped it in his pocket. He ripped a piece out of her skirt, which he wadded up and handed to her. “Hold this against it as hard as you can.” He turned back to the wheel. The motor had cut out. He started it again. They had drifted off the buoy, but he could feel an underwater drag, as though he had fouled the rudder on the buoy cable.

“I don’t have any strength,” Theo said weakly, and slumped over to one side.

“I’ll take care of you in a minute.” Shayne reversed, backed all the way to the buoy and came forward at full speed. There was a wrenching and scraping underneath the boat. The motor labored and died. Shayne tried the starter. It ground on and on but the motor wouldn’t turn over.

“I thought I’d get you to a doctor,” he said, “but I guess not. I’m not much of a doctor myself. It’s lucky it isn’t much of a wound.”

“Lucky,” she said bitterly.

“I’ll see if I can find any bandages.” He took the flashlight to the main cabin. In a cupboard beneath the stainless-steel washbasin he found a first-aid kit and a box of sanitary napkins. Probably there were other medical supplies aboard, but he didn’t want her to lose any more blood while he looked for them. He filled an empty whiskey bottle with water.

When he returned he found her lying awkwardly across the table, her eyes closed. She was trying to hold the wadded cloth against the bullet hole, but she couldn’t maintain pressure; all it was doing was catching the blood as it came out. He moistened a sanitary napkin and sponged off her shoulder. There were two wounds, a tiny one in front, a larger one in back where the bullet had come out.

“People sometimes kill themselves with a. 25,” he said, “but you can do a better job with a larger gun. I won’t ask you how long you’ve been carrying this. Why didn’t you ever talk to Harry about what you thought had happened with your car?”

“I tried tonight. That’s when he asked me to marry him.”

Shayne folded one of the napkins and bound it tightly in place with a long strip torn from her slip. “You could have told him you wouldn’t marry him because you suspected him of smuggling heroin.”

She raised her head and said with surprising spirit, “I wouldn’t marry him even if he wasn’t!”