Brett Halliday - Kill All the Young Girls

“You’re lying, Shayne,” Zion said. “And what bothers me most is that I don’t know why.”

“Will somebody stop this?” Oscar shouted. “I want somebody to grab that man. Take his bullhorn away, and I’ll give you five hundred dollars. Anybody.”

“Don’t get excited, Oscar. This is mainly Larry. He called her last night and told her to meet him. But you knew she was selling you out, and you had three men follow her. Turkey Gallagher, George Strickland, and I don’t know the name of the other man. Larry was already there. They waited half an hour and decided something had gone wrong and that she wasn’t meeting anybody. They had orders from you to tap her a few times so she’d be sorry she’d been so greedy. They did that. I ran into the same set of knuckles a few minutes later. Shots were fired. While that was going on, Larry got in with her. She was on the floor of the front seat. He stamped on her head with his walking cast.”

Zion sagged, his teeth clattering against the mike. His eyes seemed all whites. The crowd had become more and more quiet. Shayne was able to lower the bullhorn.

“It was easy,” Shayne said in his ordinary voice. “She was unconscious. He couldn’t see her face. And of course he had to do it. That was the plan, and he had to do it quickly. He left Kate’s hotel key in her purse.”

Zion rocked, his color suddenly very bad.

“Don’t leave us, Larry,” Shayne called. “There’s more. The IRS has a tap on Oscar’s phones. Oscar won’t be glad to hear that. Oscar phoned you to set up a meeting. No names were used, but the voice he was talking to was the same voice that called Mandy and told her to meet him at the drive-in. And we have it on tape.”

Zion’s head rolled, and he dropped out of sight.

Shayne pushed out to the aisle. Shouldering the guards aside, he vaulted up onto the dais. Zion lay face down. Shayne pulled him over roughly. His tan had turned saffron. He was panting like a thirsty dog. He clutched the front of his shirt. The dais microphone had been knocked off the stand as he fell. Shayne moved it between them.

“It’s a good dodge, Larry. Another heart attack. The only way you can get out of answering questions. But do you think your stockholders are going to vote for a man with a weak heart? You’d be taking your own pulse all the time instead of thinking about their dividends. So even if you manage to beat everything else, you’ve lost the company. We can’t get you for Keko. I doubt if we can get you for Kate Thackera. Gallagher was shot in the act of committing a felony, trying to sink a valuable ship; so nobody can blame you for that one. But I really think we’re going to get you for Mandy if the metal brace on your cast fits her abrasions.”

“So it doesn’t matter,” Zion gasped. “Either way.”

“That’s right, Larry.”

Zion fell away from Shayne, the side of his head hitting the lectern. His breath was coming hard, and he looked his full age.

Peter Painter was standing above Shayne. “Honest to God, Shayne. You could fall in an outhouse and come out covered with roses.”

Ignoring him, Shayne came forward on his knees. “Say something, Larry. Kate would have killed you sooner or later if you hadn’t killed her first.”

“I think he’s gone,” Painter said. “A typical Mike Shayne trick.”

“Don’t die just yet, Larry,” Shayne said. “There are still a couple of things we need to know.”

Zion was moving his head, his teeth bared. The upper part of his body arched suddenly, and his face twisted. Shayne was pushed aside, and a young doctor took over.

Shayne came to his feet.

“And I begin to get a feeling,” Painter said, “that you wouldn’t have done it this way if you’d had anything that would stand up in court. If he dies…”

“Get out of my way.”

Shayne brushed past him and sat down on the edge of the platform. Evie Zion was still in her chair, her head down, knitting very fast on the dog’s sweater. She was dropping stitches, probably; but that wasn’t the point. She felt Shayne looking at her and glanced up. He summoned her with a movement of his head.

“Is there any more of that scotch?”

“I brought another flask,” she said. “I thought I might need it.”

She opened it for him. He drank without using the straw.

“He always had a doctor with him, in case,” she said. “He had to pretend to be a masseur.”

She accepted the flask, inserted the straw, and took a long, bracing nip. Behind the lectern, the doctor-masseur had given Zion an injection and was now applying mouth-to-mouth respiration.

Evie spoke: “Mike, how did you know about those bruises on Keko’s shoulders?”

Shayne called one of the mike girls. She was still holding her portable microphone at the end of its long wire, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She had lost her earlier smile.

Shayne took the mike and cleared his throat into it. It proved to be alive.

“Will everybody sit down, please?” he said. “Go back to your places, and sit down. Everybody. The meeting hasn’t adjourned.”

Few people heard him at first, but he went on calling for silence, and gradually the meeting came back to order. On the platform, the doctor continued to work on the unconscious chairman.

“This is still the question period,” Shayne said. “Larry had a heart attack last year which few people know about. The big question in all our minds now is will he make it.” He glanced back. “The doctor’s still working, but he doesn’t look optimistic.”

No one in the crowd seemed to be weeping. He deadened the mike and asked Evie, “Where’s Alix? She’s missing a big scene.”

“I’ll tell you about that later.”

Shayne went back to the mike. “You all read the paper this morning. This is your corporation, and you have a right to know what’s been going on. I don’t know how much of this you heard. Larry’s problem was that if he answered me, if he said anything at all, he’d incriminate himself. But if he took the Fifth Amendment, he’d lose the election. It was too much for his heart to handle. That sounds callous, but did anybody really like Larry Zion? He never wasted much time making himself likable. A heart attack isn’t the same as a confession. But it’s something. At this stage, in an ordinary case, I’d spend a couple of hours with the cops; and we’d go over it a dozen times and work out a story to release to the papers. A partial story, with important parts missing. But we’re going to do something different this time. I’m going to give you my version. I think in places it comes pretty close to the truth. I’ll take questions as I go along. Evie, another drop of scotch, please. I didn’t get much breakfast.”

He drank and lit a cigarette.

“Start with Keko Brannon. This is Evie Zion in the front row. She just asked me how I knew Keko had bruises on her shoulders. I didn’t. But Oscar Olson told me last night, during a drunken conversation—” he glanced up at Olson, who was muttering angrily—“that it was an easy thing to put fingerprints on Keko. In spite of what I said to Larry a minute ago, I don’t think anybody killed her. She was an unhappy girl, and she couldn’t think of any reason to go on living. But she wasn’t a marshmallow, either. She’d been treated badly by most of the men in her life. There were six or seven she really wanted to hurt. They all had a reason for wanting her dead. For example, Olson. He used to hit her in the face when they were having sex. She had pictures of how she looked afterward as well as a diary indicating that she was his daughter.”

This was strong stuff for a stockholders’ meeting. The reporters were making notes. Rourke looked up and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.