Бретт Холлидей - Death Has Three Lives

Now, that was a good thought. It had never happened just that way in the past, but maybe the talk with Michael Shayne had brought it to his mind and made him see just what might happen.

Suppose a private detective like Mr. Shayne, now, was to be hired by the husband of the lady he was going to pick up on 148th Street. Suppose, now, that a private eye like Shayne was to be hanging around her house at two a.m. to see who she came home with.

And he drove up with her in his cab. He. Joe Agnew. He would drop her there and then drive on. And it wasn’t difficult to envision another car following him, forcing him into the curb a short distance from her house, a man like Shayne getting out and talking tough out of the side of his mouth while he demanded to know where the woman had been that evening.

Well, not a private eye like Michael Shayne, Joe Agnew conceded to himself. A man like that had more important cases than just checking on an erring wife. Seemed like he’d read that Shayne didn’t take cases like that.

All right. Some other private eye. One not so famous who did take cases like that.

So... all right. Some other detective pushing him over to the side of the road, getting out of his car, tough and mean, talking out of the side of his mouth. First threatening and then, realizing that threats would get him nowhere, cajoling and offering money (huge sums of money) for the information he wanted.

And Joe Agnew spitting (figuratively) in his face. Joe Agnew explaining concisely that he didn’t run that sort of business. That a client of his who called him out on a special run in the middle of the night expected and deserved confidential treatment. He saw his upper lip curling contemptuously as he explained this to the importunate private eye. No threats, no amount of money, would induce him to divulge a confidence.

And that, by God, was the basis on which he would build the future of the Joe Agnew Cab Company. Complete and utter confidence in any driver furnished by Joe Agnew. The men would be bonded, by God! That was it. He would advertise that. Bonded not to talk under any circumstances.

Our Lips Are Sealed .

That was it! That was the ticket. Once get that reputation, and your fortune would be made. Like tonight. Like this man tonight who had telephoned him and waked him up and got him out of bed instead of phoning one of the regular cab companies.

Why?

Because someone had told him Joe Agnew could be trusted. Someone had told him Joe’s Lips Were Sealed . That no threats of physical violence, no offers of huge sums of money would ever induce him to violate a confidence.

Nossir. He had a sort of sixth sense about that. He knew when it was important to keep a tight mouth and when it didn’t matter. That’s why he was out here tonight, by God. That’s why he was slowing, now, on the Boulevard for the turn-off on 148th. Why his cab was doing the job instead of someone else.

It was a small thing, Joe Agnew told himself judicially as he negotiated the turn off the Boulevard. This thing tonight was just a straw in the wind. But a mighty important straw. No one knew what might develop from it. If he handled this delicate situation right — anything might happen.

He was so absorbed in his own daydreaming that he paid no heed whatsoever to the car that had been discreetly and efficiently behind him ever since he pulled away from the driveway of his house. It slowed down to a snail’s pace behind him as he turned to the right, and his eyes were only concerned with looking ahead for a glimpse of the woman whom he was to gallantly pick up and escort home so her reputation might not be smirched.

He saw the car parked beside the road a short distance ahead, and the man standing beside it. He slowed and pulled up behind, discreetly cutting his headlights as he did so. Let her get in the back seat without being seen by him. That way, he could honestly deny in the future that he recognized her as the woman he had picked up that night.

Things like that were important, Joe Agnew thought smugly. A man like this, now, would recognize the delicate perceptions of the driver of this particular taxi.

He was walking toward Joe’s taxi in the moonlight. He did not appear a particularly romantic figure in his gray suit with a gray felt hat pulled rather low over his eyes. Sort of middle-aged and heavy-built, he looked to Joe.

But that was the kind, he told himself. That was the kind that got into troubles with a married woman and needed Joe’s help to get out of it.

He didn’t see any woman, though. Just the parked car and the man walking toward him. Maybe she was hiding out until the man fixed things up. Maybe, by God, she was lying in the back seat of the parked car with her dress disarranged and—

The man in the gray suit stopped beside Joe momentarily and asked in the same voice Joe had heard over the telephone, “You’re Joe Agnew?”

“That’s right, mister.” Joe tried to make his voice light, but not too light; confidential, but not too confidential. “You wanted me to pick up a fare here?”

The man just grunted. He reached out his hand to open the back door of the cab.

At that exact moment the car that had followed Joe all the way out the Boulevard turned into the side street fast, switching on a powerful searchlight on the turn so the cab and the man were suddenly bathed in bright light.

The man in the gray suit whirled away from the cab and dived for the fringe of underbrush beside the road.

Two things happened at the same moment. The oncoming car jerked to a stop on screeching tires, a man tumbled out brandishing a revolver, shouted, “Halt,” and began firing at the man pinpointed by the searchlight.

At the same moment, the rear door of Joe Agnew’s cab came open from the inside and Michael Shayne’s rangy figure catapulted out from the cramped space in which he had been hiding since picking the lock of Joe Agnew’s garage shortly after two o’clock.

He had a gun in his hand, and he was also shouting, but his voice was directed at the man from the other car, yelling for him to hold his fire, for God’s sake.

Shayne was too late. In the glare of the searchlight mounted on the second car, their quarry was seen to stagger just on the fringe of the underbrush, plunge forward on his belly, and wriggle convulsively a couple of times.

He had stopped wriggling by the time Michael Shayne reached his body. The redhead straightened to glare at the two police officers who came trotting up with drawn guns.

“Goddamn you both to hell for blundering idiots!” Shayne shouted hoarsely. “I’d have had him alive in one more second. Now he’s dead. Of all the fast-triggered bastards—”

“Shut up, Mike!” One of the officers was the same Sergeant Loftus whom Shayne had encountered earlier in front of Lucy’s apartment. “I ordered Powell to shoot. How the hell were we to know you were in the cab waiting to grab him? If we’d known you were there, we’d let you have him. But when we saw him escaping—”

He shrugged and knelt beside the body, rolled him over on his back, and nodded somberly as he put his head down to listen for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

“Dead, all right,” he announced unnecessarily, since half the side of the man’s head was torn off with a soft-nosed slug. “Know who he is, Mike?”

“Never saw him before.” Shayne was breathing heavily, knotting big fists in an effort to control his futile anger at this outcome of his carefully prepared trap. “I think, though,” he went on harshly, “you’ll find out he’s one of your pals from New Orleans. Detective First Class Mark Switzer, to be exact.”

“Yeh,” muttered Loftus defensively, spreading back the gray coat to go through the dead man’s pockets. “Chief said something about a New Orleans cop maybe going bad.”