The Violent World of Michael Shayne (11 page)

Shayne reached inside his coat. Pete twitched toward him. Moving slowly, the redhead took out his wallet.

“I want to pay for Eddie’s drink.”

He put a dollar on the table. Oskar said, “That’ll be two and a quarter.”

“Pour him a dollar’s worth,” Shayne said, standing up. Olga, nervously plucking at her white collar, refused to meet his eyes. The jukebox was still playing, but no one was dancing.

“I’ll tell you what I think happened,” Shayne said. “I think Wall barged in here with his mustache going up and down and tried to get Olga to tell him what happened with Mrs. Masterson’s diary. That seems to be a hot subject around here. Maybe he didn’t tell you he was a Senator, or maybe you didn’t believe him. You told him to shut up and go home. No Senator likes being talked to like that. They take themselves seriously. So you probably had to slug him, didn’t you?”

“There wasn’t any Senator,” Olga repeated.

“OK, there wasn’t any Senator. Give Eddie his drink.”

“Why don’t you go on ahead?” Eddie said. “I’ll stick around and enjoy it.”

Shayne shook his head curtly. He was badly outnumbered, about to be bounced, but Eddie stood up without hesitation. Oskar returned to the bar and filled a shot-glass with whiskey, which Eddie knocked back in one swallow. Pete went with them and waited till the cab was moving before going back inside.

“I told you,” Eddie said. “You have to be careful with those guys.”

“I was careful. Let’s look around. Just cruise.”

“You really think they bounced a
Senator
?”

“They bounced somebody. The blood on his knuckles isn’t dry yet. That happened in the last half-hour.”

Eddie drove slowly to the corner. At a signal from Shayne he turned off into Ninth Street. Shayne studied the cheap storefronts and hallways. Two middle-aged women holding beer cans sat on a low stoop, talking. A drunk lay curled up on newspapers in front of a dark candy store. Eddie turned again at the next corner.

“They wouldn’t bring him this far.”

Shayne pointed to a narrow opening between a warehouse and a blighted tenement. “What’s in there?”

“Don’t ask me. And I’m not going in to find out.”

“I want to take a look. I’ll need your headlights.”

Eddie maneuvered the cab around and flicked his lights up to high beam when they pointed into the opening. It was five feet wide, littered with bottles, old tires, parts of cars and other debris. Ten feet or so in, Shayne saw what seemed to be a long heap of rags.

“If you get in any trouble,” Eddie said as Shayne got out, “don’t expect me to wait for you. I’m taking off.”

The detective’s enormous shadow filled the opening. A huge gray rat leaped at him from the shadows, scraped his leg, and was gone. His foot clanged against a rusty oil drum. As he moved closer to the pile of rags it turned into a man’s body, fully dressed but without shoes. One of the feet pointed straight upward, the other was twisted at an awkward angle.

Shayne had been in the presence of violent death often enough so he knew at a glance that this was no sleeping drunk. Glass crunched under his feet. The smell of liquor was very strong. He squatted beside the body, taking his lighter out of his coat pocket. He spun the wheel and a little flare of light fell on the dead man’s face.

It was Ronald Bixler.

3:35 A.M.

SHAYNE’S EYES WERE HARD AND DANGEROUS. IF HE HAD moved faster, if he had told Bixler flatly to be satisfied with what he had cleared and not try for any more, the little man might still be alive. Shayne checked his watch to see how much time had passed since he left Bixler being sick in the bathroom. Half an hour at the most.

Bixler’s face was bruised and there was a smear of drying blood beneath one eye, another bloody area on the side of his head. Shayne brushed his fingers lightly across the temple, turning the head so he could examine the wound. It was several inches long, with clearly marked edges, deep enough to have driven bone-splinters into the brain. It had been inflicted with something long and flat, with a blunted cutting edge.

He moved the lighter. The dead man’s pants pockets had been turned inside out. A pale stripe around the wrist of one of the outflung arms showed where his watch had been. The redhead searched all the pockets carefully, finding nothing.

He stood up, letting the lighter flame wink out. Eddie was on the sidewalk watching. Behind him the cab’s motor idled loudly.

“Senator Wall?” the driver said hoarsely as Shayne reached him.

“No. Now I need a phone.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yeah,” Shayne said wearily, getting into the front seat of the cab.

Eddie came around and got in beside him. “Hacking nights, you run into things. But I’ve got a policy—go to sleep and forget it. Why don’t we let somebody else find him?”

“A phone, Eddie,” Shayne repeated. “He didn’t die of smoking cigarettes. Somebody killed him. This is for the cops.”

“Well, sure, as a rule. But do you have any idea of the red tape you can get involved in? The company will have to know I knocked off back there for a drink. That’s one example.”

“Eddie,” Shayne said more sharply.

“OK, but do you mind telling me who you are? I know you’re a pro, but who do you work for?”

“I’m a private detective,” Shayne said, “and when I come across a dead body I notify the cops. It’s a habit you get into.”

He checked the address of the battered tenement. Returning to Ninth Street, Eddie drove two blocks and stopped at a cheap hotel.

“I’ll keep the motor running. Don’t let them tie you up in a long conversation while they trace the call.”

“Stop worrying, Eddie. Nobody’s traced any calls since the dial system came in.”

He climbed a flight of worn steps between a store and a shooting gallery. The hotel lobby was nothing but a desk and a few chairs in a corridor. An old man came out of an inner room while Shayne was leafing through a phone book hanging from a nail beside the wall phone.

“Using your phone,” Shayne said.

He found fourteen precincts listed, and he chose one with a Northwest address, without being sure he was actually in that part of town. When a voice answered he said brusquely, “I’m reporting a killing. I thought it was a drunk at first, and he certainly stunk of liquor, but the guy is dead, all right. Slugged and robbed.”

“What’s the address?” the voice said calmly.

“Thirty-seven and a half Fortescue Street, just off Ninth. In a little open space alongside the house. It runs all the way through, a place where people throw their junk, and he’s about ten feet in. I won’t give you my name. I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait a minute.”

Shayne hung up. The old man at the desk continued to regard him impassively. Shayne nodded to him.

Returning to the cab, he told Eddie, “Drop me at Oskar’s. You don’t have to come in with me if you don’t feel like it.”

“You’re an optimist, I must say,” Eddie said. “What makes you think they’ll let you in?”

“They’ll let me in,” Shayne assured him.

Eddie drove back to Larue Place, staying at the wheel after Shayne got out in front of No. 17.

“What do I owe you?” Shayne said.

“Oh, hell!” Eddie said, disgusted. He turned off the ignition and joined the redhead on the sidewalk. “It’s against my principles, but they won’t take just your word for it.”

“Let’s wait till we hear the sirens.”

That took less than a minute. When the first siren began to wail Eddie went down from the sidewalk and rapped tentatively. Shayne reached past him and gave the door three hard knocks, which brought Pete in a hurry. Seeing who it was, he stepped out into the little areaway.

“Man, you guys are really asking for it.”

“He’s dead!” Eddie said excitably.

Another siren joined the first, coming fast. Pete moved toward the street, then checked himself.

“Who’s dead? Some more Senators?”

“I have to apologize about that,” Shayne said. “I told you he was a Senator, but I was wrong. His name’s Bixler. He was
sent
by a Senator, and that’s almost as bad. I better talk to your brother.”

With a scowl on his face, Pete listened to the screams of the sirens. “I’ll go in and find out.”

Shayne felt a sudden hammering in back of his eyes. “Goddamn it, open that door or I’ll take it to the cops and let them ask the questions.”

Pete stepped back, still undecided but being worked on by the sirens. When he opened the door, Shayne pushed it out of his hand and walked through. Oskar was on his way from the bar. The sirens had reminded his customers that they were breaking the law, and the atmosphere was no longer even partially festive.

“What’s going on out there?” Oskar demanded.

Pete spoke to him in an undertone. The sirens were dying as the police cars converged around Bixler.

“Take it easy,” Shayne said. “They aren’t interested in you yet. I told them where they could find the body. I forgot to say he was drinking in here before it happened.”

“He’s dead for sure?”

“If you don’t want to take my word for it,” Shayne said, “you know where you left him.”

“Goddamn you, if this is a frame—”

Shayne interrupted. “Sure. I could have found him sleeping off his drunk and caved in his skull so I could get you to answer a few questions. Anything’s possible. But I’d say the blood on his face has been drying about as long as the blood on your knuckles. We can get the cops to give us an expert opinion. A better idea might be to close up for the night and talk about it.”

His customers were hurrying out. Shayne closed the door and put his back against it. Everyone was trying to talk at once. Shayne smiled good humoredly and raised his voice.

“You don’t want to attract attention by piling out of here all at once. Settle your tab and leave two or three at a time.” He picked the four bar-customers who looked most sober, and took their names and addresses. They didn’t like it, but they weren’t backed by the management; Oskar left them to Shayne. Oskar had gone back behind the bar and was flexing his shoulders nervously. His sister, at a table for two, stared hopelessly at her blunt fingernails.

Oskar waited till all the customers had left, then burst out, “Where did you find him?”

“On Fortescue.”

“On Fortescue! We left him right down the block, outside the movie.”

“Not that anybody would believe you,” Shayne remarked. Oskar grunted. “What did you say your name was?”

“Michael Shayne. I think I’m working for Senator Hitchcock, but I haven’t been able to get through to him recently to find out. The guy who was in here, Bixler, used to investigate for Hitchcock’s committee. Everybody in the joint saw you walk out with him, and you weren’t being too gentle, were you?”

“We tagged him, sure,” Oscar said uneasily. “He started calling Olga names—Polack, Hunky, and like that. Nobody gets away with that stuff in here. That don’t mean we killed him.”

Shayne looked at the cab driver. “I appreciate your help, Eddie. Ten bucks ought to cover it. Now Oskar’s going to pour you a nightcap on the house.”

Eddie protested, “I thought I was going to find out what this is all about.”

“You don’t want to know,” Shayne told him. “Bixler knew, and look where he ended up.”

“Something in that,” Eddie admitted.

He tossed off the whiskey Oskar poured him, said goodnight, and left. Shayne pointed to a bottle of cognac on the back bar. Oskar served him, leaving the bottle within reach. His upper lip was beaded with sweat.

“I’m not running a tearoom,” he said. “I get a good class of customer, government people, and the way I keep them, I slam down fast when anybody gets noisy. This guy, we didn’t land on him too hard. He passed out, more. He was carrying a load when he walked in here. All I wanted to do was jolt him, keep him walking, and he caved in on me.” He reached for a shot-glass and a bottle of sour mash and went on. “What was I supposed to do then, give taxi service? Pete and me, between us we walked him down to the corner. They have a kind of iron gate in front of the movie, we left him against that, sleeping like a baby.”

“Which means,” Shayne said, “that somebody was watching, probably from a car, and as soon as you were out of sight they picked him up, whacked him hard enough to make sure he wouldn’t go on sleeping like a baby, and drove him a couple of blocks and dumped him. He wasn’t likely to be found before morning, if then. OK. You heard how it sounds. Do you think the cops are going to buy it?”

Oskar filled the shot-glass with whiskey, his hand steady. “Why not?”

“Because anything like that might get them involved with important people. I mean Senators, a big lobbyist, the president of an airplane company. You’re the perfect quick solution. No toes stepped on, nothing much gets in the papers. You’ve got a Polish name. You run an illegal joint in a bad neighborhood. The jury wouldn’t be out more than thirty seconds. That’s why you’ve got to talk to me.”

“I’m talking,” Oskar said.

“And why your sister has to talk to me.”

“No!” He drank the whiskey and looked down into the empty glass before setting it back on the bar. “Olga, she has nothing to do with it.”

Olga exclaimed impatiently and came over to the bar.

“I have nothing to do with it? I have everything! The bad thing, Mr. Shayne, the way it started, I took the money from Bixler last year, that three thousand dollars. I knew I shouldn’t. But I did. And now see.”

3:55 A.M.

“OLGA, YOU GO TO BED,” OSCAR SAID. “WE’LL HANDLE THIS.”

“Yes, the way you handle that little man! You only know one thing, you and Pete. Throw him on the sidewalk, beat him. That’s all you know, beat, beat.” She turned to Shayne. “My brother Oskar, he comes out of prison. He got in fist fight about some cheap girl, the other fellow died. He was in three years. Now, who will believe he takes this Bixler out and only just taps?
I
don’t believe!”

Oskar raised his hand. “Olga, by the memory of our mother, I’m telling you—”

Olga sniffed. “It was all right when I took his money. That was fine. Now he wants to talk to me, you take him out and kill him.”