Dolls Are Deadly (13 page)

“We’re not through yet, babe.”

“No?” She widened her eyes provocatively and moistened her full lips.

“You’re not to leave town,” he said harshly. “Understand? And I want you to run another séance tonight.”

“Why?” She put out her slim hand and touched his cheek gently, invitingly, and moved closer.

“Because I say so,” he snapped, picked up his hat and went out the door.

Outside, he leaped into his car and sped to the
News
building. There were no tails behind him and it seemed almost lonesome.

He parked, entered the building, strode through the lobby and took the elevator up to the editorial floor, long-legging it through the desk-filled room till he reached Timothy Rourke’s office.

The gangling reporter was typing with two fingers, a green eyeshade on his forehead and a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth.

“I’d like to listen to that tape you made last night, Tim,” Shayne said.

“O.K.” Rourke stopped typing, opened a drawer and handed Shayne the spool.

“Where can we play it back?”

“Here, if you want.” Rourke’s bony hands swept a clear place on the desk. He rose, lifted a compact recorder-player from a precarious balance on top of a file case, and brought it over. He inserted the spool of tape and plugged it in. They rewound it quickly, then snapped it on “play” and bent together over the machine.

Once again the voice of Madame Swoboda came, rasping and mechanical on the imperfect pick-up. The words were recognizable, however, and the sound intelligible. First the intoned psalm to set the spiritual atmosphere as eerie as it had been last night…
He hath done marvelous things…
then the message from beyond…
Sharon, my marriage was a mistake…
and finally Jimsey’s voice speaking to Mother and Daddy…
it is so far…
for two hours and thirty-six minutes I have traveled…
through the forty-eight outer worlds… I am happy—but when I lay dying Friday night I spoke your names eight times
…

“Same old gobbledegook it was the first time,” Rourke observed cynically.

“I’m not so sure it’s gobbledegook.”

The redhead played it through once more, listening with strained and sober attention. Rourke went back to his typing, looking up as Shayne snapped off the recorder and rose with a faint, grim smile of satisfaction. “Guard that tape with your life, Tim. It might be Exhibit A.”

“What’s cooking?”

Shayne strode across the room. “Haven’t time to explain. Tell your boss to keep the presses open. The
News
might get one hell of an exclusive. Oh—and Tim—” He stopped half through the doorway—“Meet me at Swoboda’s a little before eight.”

“That tape recording must have been good,” Rourke said as the door swung shut.

Shayne stopped at a bar, ordered a double cognac and carried it with a tall glass of ice water to the phone booth where he dialed Will Gentry’s private number.

“Did the mug I sent you open up, Will?” he said when the connection was made.

“He
was
open. You did a good job.”

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“No, just a few shattered ribs.”

“What’s the dope on him, Will?”

“He’s no one on record.”

“Who hired him to go gunning for me?”

“A stranger came up to him in a bar and bought him for the tailing job—he said.”

“That’s the story he told me.”

“He really seems to be some sort of screwball independent as he claims,” Gentry said. “There’s no Syndicate affiliation that we’ve been able to uncover, at least. He claims he shot at you in self-defense. How about that?”

“Nuts!”

“O.K. Suppose you brief me a little, though. How come it happened in off-hours at a spook house? What was it—a love triangle? Are you courting the Madame?”

“Not exactly, but it’s an idea.” Shayne paused, took a sip of cognac and followed it with water. “You might have a man at tonight’s séance, Will. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what? We’ve checked Madame Swoboda. She’s clean.”

“Maybe so. I haven’t got it all added up yet.”

“Well, while you’re figuring, I’ll keep my men on tap here. By the way, I hear you’re in trouble over at the Beach.”

“That’s nothing unusual. As long as Painter warms the chief’s chair, I probably will be.”

Gentry chuckled. “All right, Mike. I’ll let you know if anything develops here.”

Shayne hung up, broke the connection, dropped in another coin and called his office, finishing the cognac while he waited for Lucy to answer.

“Did Bill Martin call, angel?”

“Yes. There’s nothing threatening Clarissa Milford so far.”

“I only hope that eager-beaver knows a threat when he sees one,” Shayne said somberly. “On his next report, tell him to tail Clarissa when she goes to the séance tonight.”

“Are you going, too?”

“Yes, but I think that’ll be it. She’s closing down.”

“Good. No more voodoo threats for anybody—especially you.”

“Nobody’s put a hex on me.”

“Maybe not, but Will Gentry called earlier this afternoon and I know about Swoboda putting that gunman on you.”

“Who says it was Swoboda?”

“I do.”

“She’ll sue you for slander.”

“Michael—” her voice grew suddenly small—“please be careful.”

“I will, angel. See you later.”

He hung up and went out to his car. It was exactly five minutes to five when he arrived at the building which housed the Federal Narcotics Bureau. He parked in front, bounded up the stairs and into the marble lobby, crossing it without slowing his stride. He by-passed the long, wide stairway and long-legged it down the hall.

When he burst through a door at the far end, he found his friend, Steve Grain, standing in the outer office at the water cooler.

“Hello, Mike. What’s the rush?” Grain dropped the cup he held in a basket and extended his hand. “I’m about to call it a day. Shall we go down and have a drink?”

Shayne shook his head. “No, let’s go into your private office. I’d like some information, and I may have some that will interest you.”

Grain led the way down a door-lined corridor to an office at the end. Inside, he motioned Shayne to a chair, closed the glass-paneled door behind them, and tilted back in his own swivel chair, pushing cigarettes and a lighter across the desk to Shayne.

Grain was not what is commonly called a self-made man, but rather a keep-what-you’ve-got man. A career man in the narcotics service, he had started at the top and stayed there. His face was austere and pale and he regarded Shayne through silver-rimmed glasses with old-fashioned wire hooks over his ears. Shayne had worked with him on previous occasions and had found him capable, honest and intelligent, dedicated to his chosen task of combating the drug traffic.

Shayne crossed his long legs, lit a cigarette and said, “I know you cut off the flow of dope into the Miami area a few months back. Has it stayed cut off?”

Grain’s forehead wrinkled. “It’s still tight as a drum. We’re covering every wharf and inlet. The big operators have either been jailed or run out of town or, as in the case of De Luca, kept under such strict surveillance that they’re inoperative.” He laughed shortly. “They tell me De Luca’s had to hedge by moving into the loan-shark racket.”

Shayne nodded. “And very successfully, I believe. So you’re sure he’s not actively involved at present with narcotics?”

“Absolutely. We’ve got the Syndicate stopped short here.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It confirms my opinion.”

“Which is what?”

“That what I have to discuss with you is a wildcat operation.”

Grain frowned. “You think dope is coming in?”

“I’d stake my license on it,” Shayne said.

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.”