1:10 A.M.
The Royalton Arms, a shabby brick apartment house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood, seemed an unlikely place to find Hugh Manners. Probably, Shayne decided, the industrialist didn’t want the public to know that he was sufficiently worried by the Hitchcock investigation to come to Washington to take personal charge of the counteroffensive.
Shayne reviewed quickly the few things he knew about Manners. Before World War II, Manners’ fighter planes had been the fastest in the world. He tested them himself. He had grown up during the glamorous early days of aviation, and he had an obsession with speed. He had walked away from a dozen serious crashes. He ran his company the way he flew his planes-as enormous as it had become in recent years, it was still a one-man business, the last in the industry. His business methods were unorthodox and sometimes brilliant. One year he might make one hundred million dollars, and the next year be in serious danger of losing his shirt. He never gave interviews, believing that his private life was nobody’s business. Nevertheless, he had often been in the headlines with spectacular paternity and alimony suits.
There were twelve apartments in the building. Manners’ name didn’t appear beside the doorbells in the cramped, poorly lit lobby. Curt Rebman was listed as the tenant of a third-floor apartment. Shayne pressed that bell and waited.
There was no answering buzz. Before long he heard footsteps and the door opened. A large man stepped out all the way, closing the door behind him. He was easily six feet six, with the chest-spread of a steer and the relaxed expression of many powerful men. He had been hit in the face various times over the years, by various things that were harder than fists. His eyes were quick and intelligent.
“Michael Shayne to see Mr. Manners,” Shayne said.
The big man looked puzzled. “You rang 3-B. Nobody there by that name.”
“Curt sent me,” Shayne said. “You can give Manners this.”
Inside the last piece of Cheryl’s skirt, the redhead had tied all the trophies he had taken from her little party: the two wallets, her evening bag, the blackjack, the.38, the loose rounds of ammunition. It made an odd-looking bundle. The big man’s eyebrows disappeared in the scar tissue on his forehead. But as he felt the hard outlines of the gun through the cloth, the eyebrows came down in a frown.
“I hope you’re not trying to be funny.”
“Doesn’t Manners have a sense of humor?”
“He hasn’t cracked a smile in years. Wait here.”
He unlocked the door and went in, and was back again in almost exactly the length of time it would have taken him to go up and down two flights of stairs.
“You get in,” he said more pleasantly. “Now don’t take this wrong, but I’ve got to frisk you. That’s the condition.”
“I’m carrying a fountain pen,” Shayne said, “and it’s only fair to tell you that it’s loaded.”
“Will you stop trying to be smart, for your own good?” He extended both his hands toward Shayne’s chest. “OK?”
Shayne spread his arms and let the big man go over him rapidly. He was asked to pull up his pants to show that he wasn’t carrying a knife or a small gun strapped to his calf. He did so, after which the door was finally opened for him. The big man stayed a half-step behind him going up the stairs.
“What was all that stuff wrapped in? Was that the dress the kid had on?”
“Part of it,” Shayne said.
“That’s what I thought. Boy, oh boy. This is something I want to see.”
On the third floor he let Shayne into a short foyer leading to a small living room. There was no rug on the floor and not much furniture. What there was looked as though it had been bought from a secondhand dealer by somebody who wasn’t concerned about anything but the price. Manners, in his shirt-sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, was sitting in a swivel chair behind an unpainted kitchen table. There was a neat stack of manila folders in front of him, a phone, an overflowing ashtray, and Shayne’s little heap of souvenirs. He must be in his middle fifties, Shayne thought, but he looked younger. He was lean and hard, with a heavily ruled face and piercing black eyes.
“Give him a drink if he wants one, Stevens,” he said to the big man. “I’ll let you know when I need you.”
All they had was whiskey. It wasn’t good whiskey. Shayne asked for soda, but they didn’t have soda. He didn’t bother to ask for ice, knowing they wouldn’t have that either. After handing Shayne the warm drink, Stevens went into a bedroom, closing the door. There was one other bedroom; that door was also closed. A jazz record revolved on an open phonograph, the sound turned down to a faint mutter. The TV picture was on, with no sound coming from the set. On the small flickering screen, a tongue-tied Western badman was silently holding up a stagecoach.
Shayne sampled the drink. He had drunk worse whiskey, but not lately.
Manners spilled the money out of Curt’s wallet. “You could have helped yourself, Shayne. There’s a couple of thousand here. Wasn’t it enough for you?”
“That’s not how I make my living,” Shayne said.
“All right, what’s the proposition?”
Shayne put the watered whiskey on the floor so he wouldn’t forget what he was doing and drink any more. He was on a battered sofa facing the TV set. The bandit, completing the holdup, swung onto his horse and galloped quietly away.
“First,” Shayne said, “I want you to tell me how you knew where I was going to be so you could pick me up, or try to. Second, I want you to give me Maggie Smith.”
Manners’ eyes, fixed on Shayne’s face, didn’t shift. “Sam Toby told me it would be a good idea to get you out of town. I don’t know why. He said we could catch you as you left Senator Hitchcock’s. That’s your first point. Now who is Maggie Smith?”
“You don’t know?”
“That’s correct. I don’t know.”
“She runs a theatre here, and works for Toby on the side. You know how people like Toby are when they’re being investigated. They feel a lot more comfortable if they can get a picture of the chairman of the committee in bed with somebody he’s not married to. Maggie had that just about organized when I showed up. I’ve got a temporary postponement, but Hitchcock refuses to listen to anything I tell him about the woman. I want it canceled from your end.”
Manners’ face had tightened. “I have nothing to do with any of that.”
“Maybe not. But you’re paying the bills, and if anything goes wrong, it’s your neck.”
After hesitating briefly, Manners said, “All right, you can consider it canceled.”
“Call him while I’m here,” Shayne said. “And just so you won’t call him again the minute I leave, I want a letter of apology from you to Hitchcock. To the effect that you knew nothing about this thing Toby has been setting up, and you’re deeply shocked. You’d rather give up your contract than be a party to anything so slimy. I won’t deliver it unless I have to.”
“Toby won’t like that,” Manners said through thin lips. “He won’t like what he reads in the papers tomorrow morning any better.”
The detective took out the keys to the big Buick and tossed them to Manners, who caught them neatly with one hand. “The three of them are tied up in the back seat. If you don’t want to know where the car is parked, I’ll be glad to tell the cops.”
“Maybe I’ll let you keep them. They didn’t do such a bang-up job on you.”
Shayne explained patiently, “Morrie has a broken arm, an empty shoulder holster and no license to carry a gun in the District of Columbia. It wouldn’t surprise me if his fingerprints are on file. Rebman and the car can both be traced to you. I didn’t have any rope or adhesive tape, so I used Cheryl’s stockings and tore up her skirt. You probably know how much else she was wearing-it wasn’t much. The papers are going to eat this up. It’s mysterious, and there’s sex in it.”
Shayne and Manners had been equally unsmiling so far, but suddenly, at the thought of how the livelier newspapers would cover this story, the redhead gave a hoot of laughter.
“Very funny,” Manners commented.
He thought for a minute, then pulled the phone toward him and dialed a number. On the TV screen, an announcer was holding up a pack of cigarettes, moving his lips in praise of his sponsor’s product. The redhead broke out his own cigarettes and offered one to Manners.
“I don’t smoke,” Manners said brusquely, and snapped into the phone, “Toby? I don’t want to talk on your line. Call me back as soon as you can get to another phone.” He hung up. “Rebman had instructions to hire you if necessary. He decided you were too drunk to be approached on that basis. He was ready to go as high as fifteen. I’ll raise it to twenty.”
“Twenty thousand or twenty million?”
Manners looked pained. “Needless to say, not twenty million.”
“To do what?”
“First are you interested?”
“I’m always interested in that kind of dough.”
The phone rang. “Yes,” Manners said. “All right, Sam. Your idea about Mike Shayne backfired, and backfired badly. Never mind how it happened. We have to pick up the pieces. He’s in a position to make one or two demands. Have you been using somebody named Maggie Smith on Hitchcock?”
He listened, breaking in sharply after a moment. “Don’t tell me about it. I want it scratched. Do it as soon as I hang up. If she doesn’t answer her phone, ring her doorbell, and keep at it till you wake her up. Tell her to stay away from Hitchcock, starting now. That’s all. Keep in touch.”
Shayne motioned to him.
“Hold it,” Manners said into the phone. “What is it, Shayne?”
“Ask him how much he agreed to pay her.”
Manners repeated the question to Toby and hung up after listening to the answer.
“He’s promoting a foundation grant for her theatre,” he said. “It could run as high as thirty thousand.”
Shayne felt an unreasoning stab of disappointment. Even now, he realized, he had been hoping it would turn out that Maggie had been telling the truth and everybody else had been lying.
Manners took a lined memo pad out of one of the manila folders. “I don’t like Sam Toby,” he said, biting off the words, “and this is the last time I deal with him. What do you want me to say to Hitchcock?”
“Put it in your own words,” Shayne said. “Mike Shayne tells you that a woman named Maggie Smith has been working on him, and Toby confirms it. Toby’s arranging some financing for her theatre in return. This isn’t the way you like to work. You gave Toby hell and told him to call it off, and you’re glad you caught it this early, before any harm was done.”
Manners scrawled a message covering half a page. He tore it off and tossed it to Shayne. Shayne read it, nodded and put it away. He kept his face impassive, but all the alarm bells were clanging. They shouldn’t have been so ready to jettison Maggie Smith. Something was wrong here, and he didn’t know what. On the record player another jazz record came down and began to spin. There was an unmistakable note of menace in the air.
“We thought you were working for National,” Manners said. “But you’ve actually been working for Hitchcock’s family, haven’t you? I understand he has a daughter?”
Shayne shrugged and started to get up. Manners went on, “To be candid, I wouldn’t want to hire you away from a competitor, because I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t try to get away with drawing a fee from both sides. But I assume that this wraps it up as far as you’re concerned. We need some background on Senator Tom Wall. We suspect he’s on the National payroll. He’s close to Henry Clark, who handles National’s undercover lobbying. We need proof of this, and we need it in a hurry. The payment schedule would be-two thousand down, eighteen thousand balance on delivery of something we can use.”
Shayne picked up his drink, looked at it with distaste and set it back on the floor.
“That sounds possible. But you’d better get somebody who can find the Washington Monument without having to follow a cab driver. Probably there’s no reason you shouldn’t know-Trina Hitchcock hired me to keep her father out of bed with the Smith woman. And that’s all she hired me to do. I’ve been working on something in Miami the last few days and I’m behind on my sleep. Now I’m going to start catching up. As soon as the hearings adjourn I’m going back to a town where the cops know me and I have friends on the papers. That makes a difference.”
Manners screwed on the top of his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. “Has it occurred to you that you might have been brought to Washington for some other reason than the one you were given?”
“Let’s say it’s occurred to me.” Shayne crossed the uncarpeted floor and added his cigarette butt to the others in the ashtray. “But the hell with it. The day’s over.”
“I’d like to take another minute to give you some history,” Manners said. “Sit down and finish your drink.”
Shayne returned to the sofa. “OK, but I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.”
“One year ago I had my back to the wall. I’d made the mistake of putting too much time into building airplanes and too little into buttering up the generals and admirals. The fat cats at National thought the time was ripe to take me over. Two of their top executives and three of their directors are ex-general officers, and their only company duty is to stay on friendly terms with their ex-colleagues in the Pentagon. I’ve never gone in for that old-buddy crap. I’d never heard the name of Sam Toby. If he’d come into my office and said I needed to hire a Washington influence peddler to stay in business, I would have thrown him out on his ear. Then National took a contract away from me after I’d spent two million on wind-tunnel tests. I had a couple of big loans called, for no good reason. All of a sudden my credit sources dried up. I began to hear that rumors were going around about me personally-my financial position, even my sanity. National made me an offer. The price was ridiculous. I turned it down. They began raiding my stock, and drove it down to below nine dollars a share. All the analysts were predicting I’d be in bankruptcy in six months. They hadn’t seen my books. I had six weeks.”
“And what does all this have to do with me?” Shayne said blurrily.
“Manners common closed this afternoon at one hundred and ten. I have thirty thousand men at work in five states. We’ve had enough delays. We’re finally rolling on this plane, and anything that holds us up now will be bad for everybody. There’s no question of canceling the contract. It’s too late for that. The reason National is making this big effort is to show they still have some political muscle, to lay the groundwork for the next time. No matter how big you are, you have to wade through a certain amount of mud to get a contract like this one. The reason I’m fighting Hitchcock’s investigation is that I don’t want any of the mud splattered on the airplane. Who made what promises, who paid what legal fees, who traded what favors for what phone calls-none of that matters, Shayne. What matters is how far can the plane fly without refueling? How fast? How much load can it carry? How soon will it be operational?”
“Well, as I say-” Shayne said.
Manners put his hands flat on the table and pushed himself erect, and Shayne realized that the industrialist must need sleep almost as much as he did himself.
“You’ve done what you were brought in to do,” Manners said evenly. “Pleasant dreams. Here.” He held out the whiskey bottle, which was still three-quarters full. “Take this with you. The bars close at two and you’ll have trouble getting a drink. What I’m trying to get across is this: Rebman did badly tonight. But he’s a capable man, and don’t underestimate him. Think about my offer. It’ll still be open in the morning. If anybody else tops it, bear in mind that there’s nothing I won’t do, and I mean that literally, to put that airplane into production. Don’t get in the way.”
“Hell,” Shayne said, “I’m getting out of it as fast as I can. I don’t go around looking for trouble.”
“Where do we find the Buick?”
“Around the corner from a spot called the Bijou on Wisconsin. I don’t know the name of the street.”
“Stevens!” Manners called.
The big man came out of the bedroom and Manners said, “Shayne’s leaving.”
Manners and the redhead exchanged a look. They obviously respected each other, but they made no move to shake hands. One of the things Shayne was wondering was who had smoked the cigarettes in Manners’ ashtray. He grinned at Stevens and said, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
He took two long strides and opened the other bedroom door. He heard someone moving and smelled cigarette smoke, but all he could see was a raincoat and a brown felt hat on one of a pair of twin beds. Then Stevens, moving fast, took the doorknob out of his hand.
“Mr. Manners has things to do.”
“I won’t insist,” Shayne said peaceably.
Manners was watching him. The phone had begun to ring, but he made no move to answer it until the redhead half waved and went out. Manners was clearly not finished for the night, and neither was Shayne. He had been watching the polished performance of an accomplished magician; his eye had been misdirected, so he had been looking the wrong way when the substitution was made. If he went to bed now, he would wake up in the morning to find that something surprising and possibly ugly had happened. “Terrific, isn’t he?” Stevens said on the stairs.
“Yeah,” Shayne agreed. “I don’t know if I’d like to have him around all the time. It would be like living with a band-saw.”
“Oh, he’s OK if you do what he says. When you’re working for Manners you don’t sit around wondering who’s boss. He’s got that big company in the palm of his hand, like this.” He clenched his fist, which was the size of a small cantaloupe. “Rebman, now, Mr. Manners is going to take off his hide in strips.”
They said goodnight, and Stevens stayed in the doorway until Shayne got into his Ford and drove away. Manners had obviously been conferring with someone when Shayne arrived, driving the visitor into the bedroom. It was a clear, hot night, with no sign of rain, so why, Shayne wondered, had the visitor been wearing a raincoat?
He circled the block. Turning back onto 16th, he parked across from the Royalton Arms. There was a similar apartment house on the opposite corner, with an equally flossy name, the Pickwick. He went into the lighted lobby, unscrewed the overhead bulb so he couldn’t be seen from the street, and waited.
Presently Stevens came out, squeezed into a compact sedan and drove off, probably to rescue Cheryl and the others from the locked Buick. Shayne dozed, leaning against the mailboxes, snapping awake abruptly as the door across the street opened again. This time it was a short, burly figure wearing the raincoat and felt hat Shayne had seen in Manners’ bedroom. The raincoat collar was turned up, the hat brim was turned down. Not much showed in between except the burning spark of a cigarette.
When he went around the building, Shayne left the lobby and slid into his Ford. A moment later he heard the roar of a powerful unmuffled motor. A squat black English sedan came out of the driveway. The man had taken off his disguise getting into his car. The raincoat had concealed an Air Force uniform. Light glinted from the insignia on his shoulders; they were eagles.
Shayne waited a moment so the colonel wouldn’t know he was being followed. That was Shayne’s only hope, for the English car had a fast acceleration and considerable power. Shayne managed to hang on for several miles, while they made their way north and west, toward Virginia. He could not work close enough to be sure of the license number.
On Connecticut Avenue, Shayne was held up for a moment by a turning truck. It was a big tractor and trailer, and there was nothing Shayne could do but wait. While it was inching out of his way, the colonel turned off to the right into a maze of side streets. There Shayne lost him.