The redhead briefed Grain on what he had come to suspect during a day and night’s sleuthing.
“If those three sportsmen hadn’t become worried about my presence on Sylvester’s boat,” Shayne said, “and showed it in a number of ways, I might never have suspected anything. They swapped a fish in a jolly drunken way with the men on the Cuban boat, and now I’m convinced they brought in a fish-belly full of dope right under my eyes.”
Grain nodded. “It’s possible. Since Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the stuff has dammed up there. The old smuggling contacts have been broken and it takes time to set up new ones. In the interval, someone from the old regime might well do a little hijacking over there and start a hit-and-run operation of his own.”
“Yes. I barged right into the middle of one. At first I thought it was only a screwy batch of fishermen who had chartered Sylvester’s boat, but after a while the fast, new, dirtied-up engine they’d put in for him and the way they were keeping him drunk all the time began to bother me. And then, when they murdered him-”
“Too bad,” Grain said. “Why do you think they did it?”
“Maybe they thought he had brought me in to check on them, or maybe they thought he knew more than he did. Of course, after they tipped their hands by getting tough with him, he probably did know.”
“So then they figured you knew too, and tried to kill you this afternoon at Madame Swoboda’s.” Grain leaned back and stroked his jaw. “That’s the confusing part of it. It would seem that they get their instructions from her, but is that all she is-a go-between? If so, it’s hard to see why she would be necessary to their enterprise.”
“She seemed like an unnecessary complication to me too at first.” Shayne snubbed out his cigarette, “But there was cabala-those numbers incorporated in one of her messages.”
“Let’s hear it.”
The redhead leaned back, reciting from memory, “… for two hours and thirty-six minutes I have traveled through the forty-eight outer worlds… when I lay dying Friday night I spoke your name eight times…”
Grain’s pen jerked across the paper. “Two hours and thirty-six minutes. That must have thrown you off at first.”
“It did. I tried to relate it to time instead of a point in space-longitude.”
“And forty-eight is the latitude of Miami.”
Shayne nodded bleakly. “Today is Friday, and very soon it will be eight o’clock and Sylvester’s boat-this time without Sylvester-will contact a Cuban boat and receive a gift of another fish with a belly full of dope.”
“But the Coast Guard will be there to take it from them.” Grain’s eyes glowed. “Let’s try to put together a little more of what we’ll be up against. Those three men were recruited by someone, each for his specialty-”
“That ‘someone’ still bothers me. I thought it was De Luca at first, but everything points to his noninvolvement. In fact, the more I investigated, the more it became apparent that this was a carefully worked out freelance operation, as much in defiance of the Syndicate as of the law enforcement agencies. Consider how careful the three were to avoid the slightest contact with organized crime down here. They went to scrupulous trouble to provide themselves with sportsmen’s identities on Sylvester’s boat.”
The vertical lines in Shayne’s forehead deepened. “Madame Swoboda, when I had her in a tight spot, pretended to level with me-and she did, to a point. But she did it in a way to suggest it was a Syndicate operation-which was one of many things which convinced me it was not. In the first place, as an operation in defiance of the Syndicate, her part in it began to make sense. The men on the boat were all criminals of record-but note that they had never been associated with the narcotics racket before. Just one more little item to remove them from suspicion of either the Syndicate or the police.”
“But that involved a way of getting the pick-up information through spirit messages-”
“The shrewdest trick of all. They knew they’d be watched by both the police and local Syndicate representatives, and this way they took no risks of tapped phone wires, opened letters or observed meetings. And still one other thing occurs to me.” Shayne’s thumb and forefinger gently massaged his left earlobe. His eyes were speculative.
Grain waited.
“Let it ride for the moment,” the redhead said. “It’s only a hunch and it won’t, in any way, affect your operations on the high seas. I’ll know in another three hours if I’m right or wrong.”
He rose and stood looking down at Grain with a penetrating stare. “Here’s what I suggest as a first step. Talk to Peter Painter at the Beach-he’s too mule-headed to listen to me-and find out if he’s got a police guard on the Santa Clara. If he has, get him to take it off. Make it easy for that boat to go out tonight.”
“I see.” Grain pushed back his chair.
“They’ll take a chance on this one last pick-up, I think, figuring to come ashore somewhere far up the coast and then skin out for good, so you’ll have to make your pick-up good. There won’t be another opportunity.”
“We’ll take care of it. I’d better start making arrangements with the Coast Guard.”
A slow grin spread over the detective’s lean face.
“Now what have you got up your sleeve?” Grain asked.
“I’m considering making some arrangements of my own. You wouldn’t object to wiping out the loan-shark racket in Miami at the same time, would you?”
Grain grinned back. “It’s a little out of my line, but if it wouldn’t hamper the main operation-”
“Won’t hamper it at all. In fact, I’m thinking of enlisting somebody to do the heaviest part of your work for you. It may well be that all the Coast Guard and the Narcotics Bureau will have to do is stand by and pick up the pieces.”
“It sounds easy, but I don’t get it.”
“I’ll give you a hint. There’s a gentleman once involved in narcotics smuggling who has been forced, as a result of pressures put on him by your office, to take recourse to the loan-shark racket.”
“De Luca?”
“Right. So what do you think would happen if he received a discreet tip that somebody was muscling into his old racket and would be at such a place at such a time tonight taking on a cargo?”
“Mayhem!” Grain said. “An absolute massacre.” He walked around the desk and clapped Shayne on the shoulder. “Too bad you can’t be with us to watch the smoke.”
“It is, but I’ve some voodoo business to clean up tonight. While you’re watching two dope smugglers trying to blast each other’s boats out of the water, I’ll be listening to Madame Swoboda pull voices out of the Great Beyond.”