Michael Shayne, the well-known private detective, was coming back to Miami after a nationwide chase that had ended in a twenty-four-hour vigil in the hills above San Francisco. He was wearing the same clothes he had started out in. His only luggage was an over-the-shoulder flight bag.
As he came out of the terminal, a voice said, “There he is.”
A photographer stepped in front of him and began taking pictures, which surprised Shayne; he hadn’t expected the California action to make the Miami papers. Two Miami Beach detectives closed in.
“Glad we didn’t miss you, Mike,” one of them said, a fat-faced veteran named Jamieson. “Painter wants to talk to you.”
“I hardly ever talk to Painter if I can help it.” Shayne and Peter Painter, the Miami Beach Chief of Detectives, had made all kinds of trouble for each other over the years, and Shayne usually tried to stay out of the pompous little man’s jurisdiction.
“Nevertheless,” Jamieson said.
“I haven’t shaved in three days,” Shayne said, rubbing his jaw. “I need a little maintenance.”
“It has to be right away, that’s what the man told us. He’s having a press conference, and he wants to be fair, give you a chance to deny everything first.”
“What did I do now?”
“And he went on to say,” Jamieson said, “don’t answer that kind of question. He wants to be the one to break it to you.”
“What did he say after that?”
“To use the handcuffs if we had to.”
“Yeah, that would make a better picture.” He called to the photographer, “Do you know what this is all about?”
The photographer grinned. “Just that this time Painter must think he really has something.”
“I’m too tired to argue,” Shayne said. “My car’s in the garage. I’ll follow you in.”
Jamieson said quickly, “No, Mike. No. You’re coming with us. He wants to make sure you actually get there. And you know he’s got a point, based on experience.”
A Beach patrol car was parked ahead of the taxis, the kind with a grating separating the front and back seats, and no inside handles on the rear doors. Jamieson’s partner opened a door, playing it broadly. He bowed and swept a welcoming arm toward the car’s interior.
“Be our guest.”
Shayne stood still. Two uniformed sheriff’s deputies were nearby, watching. That made a total of four, not counting the photographer, who was presumably neutral.
“Welcome to Miami,” Shayne said.
As he ducked to get in, the photographer took another picture. The detectives used their siren to get through the Forty-second Avenue lights and onto the expressway. Now that Shayne was successfully caged, they were even less talkative. Jamieson said only one thing, as they came off the causeway into Miami Beach. “Want a piece of advice?”
“Not from you, Jamieson.”
“Naturally you’re going to do it your way.”
“It’s too late to change.”
The detectives posted themselves on the sidewalk before releasing Shayne, and kept close beside him as they walked him upstairs, into Painter’s office. The walls were crowded with pictures of the chief of detectives having his hand shaken by politicians, making arrests, posing with entertainers at the Beach hotels. The man himself remained planted in his chair, his hands spread on the desk as though ready to spring at his visitor. Before going into police work he had been a Marine captain, and he had kept the manner. He had put on some extra weight around the middle, but he kept it sucked in hard and sat very straight, to make the most of what height he had. His executive armchair was cranked up as high as it would go.
“They didn’t have to shoot you to get you to come in and answer a few questions. You’re mellowing, Shayne.”
Shayne sat down. “I’m trying to think what crimes I’ve committed lately. I can’t remember any in Miami Beach.”
Painter squinted at him. “How does extortion sound?”
“Serious.”
“I believe it’s serious.” Painter checked the time and said briskly, “I’ve set aside fifteen minutes, and I don’t want to keep our media friends waiting. I’m hoping to make the six o’clock news. Suppose you start by telling me why Max Geary paid you that money.”
“Geary?” Shayne said, puzzled. “What money?”
“Now here we’ve been talking for exactly thirty seconds, and you’re already asking questions. This time I’m doing the asking. What did you have on him?”
“On Geary? Past tense? You mean he’s dead?”
“Yes, you’ve been away, haven’t you. Very conveniently timed. If you really don’t know, he totalled his car at two o’clock Tuesday morning. The blood test showed straight bourbon. He was starting home from the track and just made it out of the parking lot, went off the cloverleaf and piled up on Alton Road. Made a very nice bonfire. They got the foam truck from the track, but he was pretty well singed by the time they got him out.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Shayne said somberly. “I used to like Max. He’s been getting a little hard to take lately, boozed up most of the time. I’ve never been one of his regular customers. I never had him for a client.”
“No, I wouldn’t say this was the regular detective-client relationship.” Painter gave his narrow mustache a quick flick in opposite directions. “Now I want to hear you say it. You never took a penny from him, legally or otherwise. You don’t know what I’m talking about. You let him buy you a drink now and then, but that’s as far as it went.”
“It seems to me I usually paid for the drinks. Aren’t you forgetting something? You haven’t given me the warning.”
“You don’t need that, for Christ’s sake. But all right. You’re entitled to have a lawyer present, and anything you say may be used against you. Now answer the goddamn question.”
“This isn’t boot camp, Petey. Look at it from my side of the desk. You went to the trouble of finding out where I was and what plane I was coming in on. You sent two guys out to grab me, and you made sure a photographer was there to get a picture of Mike Shayne being busted, or of Mike Shayne breaking somebody’s jaw. Now you tell me to waive my constitutional right to keep silent until I’m confronted with some evidence. Go to hell.”
Painter’s lips tightened, but he tried to speak evenly. “What happened the last time I asked you to come in and talk about something? You were gone for four days. And when you finally surfaced, you had the guy we were supposed to be looking for. You made us look bad, and not by any means for the first time, I’d like to point out.”
“If we’re thinking about the same case, there was a deadline and I couldn’t stop to explain it to you in advance. Petey, come on. Extortion is a bad label to hang on a private detective. It might give my clients the idea that it’s a mistake to trust me. You’ve got something connecting me with Geary, or with the dog track. It has to be more than a rumor but it can’t be much more or you’d be convening a grand jury. What is it? If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll try to catch your press conference on TV.”
He leaned forward to get up. Painter clamped his lips more tightly together, took a small notebook out of the central drawer, and spun it across the desk.
It was so small it fitted easily into the palm of Shayne’s hand. The leather cover was charred, but it is hard to burn a tightly closed notebook, and this one had come out of the fire in time for the writing on the inside to be legible. Shayne turned the pages slowly. There was nothing on them but a long list of names, dollar amounts and dates, going back six years.
“You found this on Geary?”
Painter was watching him closely. “Not right away. He was wearing it in a kind of money belt, around the upper part of his leg, under his underwear. Also two folded thousand-dollar bills, emergency money, and a safe-deposit-box key. The book was tucked back in under his balls, so it wouldn’t show. Skip the early pages. Start at the end and read backward.”
The last entry had been made the previous weekend, the name of a Miami lawyer against the sum of $1500. A flake of charred paper drifted to the floor.
“Tiny writing,” Painter observed. “If you’re having trouble I can give you a magnifying glass.”
Shayne turned a page, and his own name came out at him: Mike Shayne, $3000. He met Painter’s eyes. His old adversary gave him a tight smile.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Read on. You’re in distinguished company.”
Shayne returned to the book. He recognized most of the names that recurred at regular intervals. Before Christmas every year there were a dozen that didn’t appear at other times. There were a few police officers among the regulars, the majority leader at Tallahassee, several other Senators and representatives, a zoning official, a building inspector, the head of a Teamsters local. Some of the earlier Shayne entries gave his full name, some only his initials.
“This is dynamite,” he observed. “Are you in it?”
“I am very definitely not in it,” Painter snapped. “That’s a payoff list. I’ve never taken a payoff in my life.”
“Maybe that’s what makes people think you’re a little inhuman,” Shayne said. “How far have you got with this? Who’s Wolf? Five thousand.”
“He used to be the state’s tax man at Surfside. From the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering. Most of the Tallahassee people have something to do with allocating racing dates. There’s an ex-director of the Board of Business Regulation, a chief inspector, some racing judges. There are also a few cops there, I’m sorry to say, and one of the things I’m going to announce is their immediate suspension without pay.”
“Ben Wanamaker? Is that the guy on the News?”
“Sports editor. How far back have you got? Turn the page.”
“Tony Castle!”
“I thought you’d be interested. For eight thousand, and that’s annual. He’s not supposed to have any mainland connections anymore. That’s what I get from the FBI, and I still like to think they know what they’re talking about.”
Castle’s true name was Castalogni. At one time he had been an important figure in the Miami criminal world, but as a result of an investigation run by Tim Rourke of the News, using leads provided by Shayne, he had considered it prudent to get out of the country. The payments from Geary had started the following year. He owned a casino in the Bahamas, and as far as Shayne knew, he had never been back.
“And what does Castle do, if anything,” Painter said, “to earn that eight thousand a year? It’s one of the things I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
“It baffles me, Pete. But I seem to have my own problems here.”
“You do, don’t you?” Painter said with immense satisfaction. “A little crude, Shayne. Some of those teenage fans of yours are going to be painfully surprised.”
“Crude? Not necessarily. Because why would Geary keep a payoff book?”
“For his own protection, obviously.”
“How does it protect him? There’s something peculiar about it. What do you get for a total?”
“Two hundred and ten thousand the last year. You don’t exactly take care of that by dipping into the petty cash. Your own three-year total, not that I’m telling you anything, is eighty thousand, an impressive figure. Now I’m going to repeat my initial question: What did you do to deserve it?”
“If he died Tuesday, I’m not the first person on the list you’ve asked that. What do the others say?”
“Most of them are saying it’s a damn lie.”
“And with Geary dead, that leaves you with no witness. Are you releasing the whole list?”
“Selected names. I’ve been having an argument with the state’s attorney. I’ll be candid with you, Shayne. I’ve often tried being candid with you, and I’ve usually ended up regretting it. However. One school of thought is advocating just the course of action you mentioned-impanel a grand jury, subpoena everybody, if they deny receiving any money from Geary, indict them for perjury. But could we make it stick? Probably not. So now we’re leaning toward media exposure, and letting the legislature handle it. Make it an investigation of the whole dog-racing picture, not just Surfside. Maybe end up with a revamp of the entire racing scene, dogs and horses, which is long overdue, in my opinion. But I kind of hate to see it go that way.”
“The name Painter would drop out of the story after the first day.”
“Interpret it that way if you like,” Painter said kindly. “But the person I want to get my fingernails into is Castle. All these bureaucrats, these petty union officials-they’re minor league. Most people don’t know this, but I’m thinking about retiring. If I could bring in Tony Castle, it would be a nice capper to my career. That’s why I was so determined to talk to you before the publicity.”
“You’re talking to me.”
“I notice an interesting pattern in those payments you got. I’ll take the book back now, if you don’t mind.” Shayne slid it to him. “Three thousand regularly on the twenty-fifth of each month. Suddenly they drop to one thousand for a few months, and then stop altogether. Several months later they begin again, and continue to the present. You and I have had our little fallings-out, and some of them, regrettably, have been reported by your friend Rourke in the press. But I’ve always known that sooner or later you’d slip, and I’d nail you. I’m not vindictive!” He raised a finger. “You’ve expressed your scorn and contempt for me openly and often, but that’s one of the unfortunate byproducts of public service. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to say what you like and think what you like. But that cuts both ways. I’m entitled to freedom of speech too. I happen to believe that your free-wheeling methods, your disregard for the legal niceties, have had a lot to do with the decline in respect for constituted authority in this city-”
Shayne said impatiently, “I think you’re a horse’s ass and I’ve never concealed it. What has that got to do with this?”
Painter was thrown slightly off-stride. “You’ve made me lose track of what I was about to say. If you can keep a civil tongue in your head for one minute, and remember that maybe the other fellow has some feelings. You know where I’d like to see you. In jail, with your license revoked. Be that as it may! I’m willing to work with you for the common good. And this time, by God, I’m talking from strength! Your name on that list would be enough. But I’ve got something else and I’m going to tell you about it right now.”
“All right, Petey. That’s enough of a buildup.”
“Just wait one minute and you may not be quite so flippant. What is your impartial observer going to conclude when he looks at that sequence of payments? Three thousand, three thousand, one thousand, one thousand, nothing, three thousand. Well, maybe Geary was temporarily short of funds. He had to go on paying those other guys, but you’ve got money in the bank from all those huge fees you’ve been drawing down from gullible people. So Geary came to you and said, Mike, I’m a little short, what do you say, ease up for a couple of months. And you went along with it because as I say, you don’t have to scrimp and scrape on a city salary. And when the winter meeting was underway and his income picked up, you went back to your old arrangement. That’s the way it looks. But I know different!”
“Petey, you get more long-winded every day.”
“Then I’ll come right to the point. People know you’re one of the high-priority items in this office, and when they hear about anything where your name is involved, they bring it to me. In October of last year, the third month you weren’t getting your slush, I was told that a nurse at Jackson Memorial had a Mike Shayne story I might want to add to the collection. That’s out of my bailiwick, but I made arrangements to see her. Geary was in the hospital-mugged outside the stadium after a Dolphins game. According to the official version, he was drunk, and when the man with the knife asked him politely if he had any change, he put up a fight. Broken nose, bruised larynx, concussion. I have her notarized statement, with two witnesses, and I’ll give it to the papers if you decide that’s the way you want to play it. The statement is as follows. Getting long-winded, am I? She was the night nurse on duty. He called her over and grabbed her wrist and told her it wasn’t some junkie who did this, it was no less a celebrity than Michael goddamn Shayne.”
Shayne regarded him steadily.
Painter gave his mustache another little flick, and went on. “An argument about money, and Shayne went out of control. Kicked him. Banged his head on the pavement. Left him there bleeding. King Kong stuff, and Geary was too scared to take it to the cops. But he wanted the nurse to make note. If anything happened to him, if he ended up on the obit page under suspicious circumstances-”
“Wait a minute. Are you wondering if that crash he died in was an accident?”
“No, that’s open and shut, as far as that goes. Hold the interruptions. I’m almost finished. He wrote her a check for three hundred dollars. I’ve got a photostat of that canceled check, with the right date on it, the night when he’d been beaten up and he was supposedly too drunk to hold a pen.”
“This is all bad news.”
“Not to people who don’t make a practice of beating up drunks. Not to people who don’t take high five-figure payoffs. I’ll tell you what I did a few days later. Geary was home, getting over his concussion. I told him it was silly to be scared of a private detective who was on the skids anyway. I pleaded with him to give you to me for assault with intent to kill. I couldn’t get anywhere with him. He maintained that he didn’t have any recollection of who mugged him, or of talking to the nurse.”
“I think I see your theory, but you’d better tell me anyway.”
“Obvious on its face!” Painter was enjoying himself. “He was trying to get out of that regular payment, and you gave him a taste of the law of the jungle. After that you’ll notice he was always prompt. So that’s the situation, and I can’t begin to tell you what satisfaction it gives me. My first impulse, my first impulse was to walk out and lay the entire sordid story in front of the press, and lick my lips while they crucify you. If there was ever any bastard who deserved it, it’s you. But what does it amount to, after all? A little petty extortion. True, as you said yourself, that’s a bad tag for somebody in your dubious profession. You’d probably have to move to a different location, but I assure you, after a couple of weeks we’d stop missing you. It took me a sleepless night to come to this decision, but I’m going to give you a chance to unhook.”
“If I tell you everything I know.”
“You’ve got it.” He ticked a fingernail against the desktop. “Frankness, Shayne. I want complete openness and frankness and candor. In return, nothing will be said publicly about the nurse’s statement or the canceled check. And I’ll go one long step farther. I don’t like to make deals, I never have, but that’s the way the world seems to be organized. If you can deliver Tony Castle to me for a felony prosecution, I’ll suppress that eighty-thousand-dollar payoff. I’ll have to wave the book, but I won’t let it leave my hand. I don’t have to release all the names, I can get away with that. I want to make sure I don’t injure any innocent parties, and so on.”
“All you want right now is a promise?”
“And a few morsels to show good faith. As I keep saying, I don’t have a great deal of time. I’m not asking for immediate miracles, as far as Castle’s concerned. I’ll let you have a couple of weeks. But before I go out to face the TV cameras, I want to know what’s been going on over there at the Surfside Kennel Club.”
Shayne shook his head. “It’s too open-ended. Any time you aren’t satisfied with my performance, you can always call another press conference-you don’t know how you overlooked it the first time, but all of a sudden you’ve noticed my name on the list.”
“Sure-I’ve got something to hold over you for a change, and I’m not so saintly that I don’t like the feeling. No more stalling, please. A simple answer to a simple question. Three thousand bucks a month from Max Geary. For what?”
“I’d like to think about it for two minutes.”
“No more time. What’s there to think about? You’re in a jam this time, baby, and you’ve got one way out.”
“I always hate to have people say that,” Shayne said, standing. “It makes me feel crowded.”
“Who cares how you feel? You’ve got no choice in the matter.”
“I can always tell you to screw yourself.”
Painter dodged back, as though Shayne had swung at him. “You won’t do that.”
“I just did it.”
“You’re out of your mind! Alienating me is not in your own best interests, believe me. I’ll have no recourse except to include your name with the others I intend to announce, and make the nurse’s affidavit part of the record. Go ahead and deny it. How many of your friends will believe you?”
“I haven’t denied it. I don’t have to plead until I’m charged with something.”
Painter’s mouth opened and closed. “Come now, Shayne-”
“Unless you want to book me.”
“Not yet! Not yet! There are people on that list who were involved in the day-to-day operations, and I’ll make them the same offer I made you. They’ll cop, don’t worry. All I need is one living witness, just one, and you’ll be out of my hair for a long time to come. You may be surprised by the public reaction. I think you’ll find that the general beer-guzzling public will be delighted to learn that Mike Shayne is on the take, like everybody else.”
“Do your duty, Petey.”
“More sarcasm. And after I leaned all the way over backward, tried to give you a break-”
Shayne walked out on him.