Murder Spins the Wheel (13 page)

“Don’t be dumb,” Shayne snapped. “Haven’t you been around long enough to spot a frame when you see one?”

17.

HE HUNG UP.

“Here,” he said, extending the cognac bottle to Theo. “This may help.”

She almost dropped the bottle but succeeded in downing a mouthful of cognac.

“It’s not a frame-up,” she whispered. “The horrible thing is that it’s true.”

“True that Harry was selling heroin to get Doc Waters out of a hole?” Shayne said. “I don’t believe it.”

Her lips trembled. “I’m so sorry, so sorry. He hated the drug business. Mike, don’t you see? It must mean he was afraid he couldn’t raise the money on Monday. I knew things were bad, but not as bad as this. He’s lost money in grain futures. In the big real estate deal I’ve been working on there’s been delay after delay. I should have realized no one would loan him that amount of money without security, old friend or not. They don’t trust each other that much.”

“Theo, are you trying to tell me he kept a reserve of heroin to fall back on when he needed cash?”

She nodded slowly. “And I helped! Not knowingly, but there I am, right in the middle of it.”

“All right, Theo,” Shayne said. “Take your time.”

Suddenly her face went to pieces. It started quietly, but in a moment it took hold and she was weeping wildly. Shayne, one hand on the wheel, keeping an eye on the buoy, left her alone. As her sobs became more violent, she slipped off the table and crumpled to a heap on the floor.

He waited till the first paroxysm passed. Then he said harshly, with the brusqueness that is often more effective than sympathy, “Get up now, Theo. You must have known when you let Harry make love to you that it wouldn’t be simple.”

She took a despairing breath. “Why can’t it be?”

“The only time sex is simple is when you don’t see each other again after it happens, and that has drawbacks too. Get up and blow your nose. I want to hear what happened in France.”

She was quieter, but when she still didn’t move he said with deliberate roughness, “Get up, Theo. It won’t be pleasant for you, but it’s worse for other people. So long as that narcotics man is alive, Harry has a chance. Stop sniveling and tell me exactly what you know.”

She gave him one white, frightened glance, and came to her feet. Her glasses were askew and her face was streaked. She tottered against him. He gave her a little shake and kissed her lightly.

“All right?”

She reached out defiantly for the bottle. She took a long drink without coughing, then another. He took the bottle away.

“You can get drunk later.”

“I don’t think I was crying for myself,” she said in a low voice. “I suppose I was partly. Harry didn’t think he could get away from those policemen, Mike. He
wanted
them to shoot him. He knew he didn’t have a chance. He’d be sent to prison for a long time, for the thing he hated most. His friends would think he’d been a hypocrite all these years. What his friends thought was important to Harry.”

Some of her color had come back. She touched her temples with trembling fingers. She felt for a cigarette, and Shayne lit it for her. Then he turned back to the wheel, bringing it up a tick.

“He bought me that car in France,” she said behind him. “The Alfa. Even if I could have afforded it I wouldn’t have driven a car like that before I met him, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It’s custom-built. They kept installing new gadgets the two weeks we were there. Harry wasn’t as interested in sightseeing as I was, and I was off by myself part of the time. I was walking on the promenade—” She faltered.

“I’m listening,” he prompted.

“I saw him with two men at a café. One was the garage-man, the man who was working on the Alfa. The other—” She hesitated again, and went on with a rush, “I can’t describe him but oh, he was creepy-looking. There was a package on the table. I didn’t say anything to Harry. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. I suppose I knew that the package had money in it and he was paying the creepy-looking man for something he intended to smuggle back inside the Alfa. We came home separately. He flew and I came by boat, with my new car. And a few days after I was back something funny happened. I park on the street outside my apartment building. Late at night I felt like going for a drive, for no particular reason, just for the feeling of driving at night in a new white Alfa-Romeo. And it was gone! I didn’t call the police. I was afraid they’d ask me how I could afford a car like that on my salary. I called Harry. He said not to worry. He’d put the word around. If a local thief took it, it might come back by itself. And next morning there it was. I thought it showed the advantages of having such an influential friend. Now I know where it was that night—in a garage, being taken apart so they could get at the drugs inside it.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at her clenched hands. “The face of that man in the Nice cafe. Mike, I didn’t like that man’s face.”

Shayne swore to himself. “Well, maybe
I’m
wrong.” He swung the wheel, brought the throttle up and headed back toward the Miami Beach side of the bay. “I’d better see if Doc Waters is still at Harry’s. I think we can find a place to tie up on Normandy Isle.”

“I’d like another drink, please,” Theo said. “Don’t worry, I’m not getting drunk.”

He handed her the bottle. Over it she said brightly, “I’m sorry for Harry, but don’t think I’m not sorry for myself too, because I am. What am I going to say when the police talk to me? They must already know quite a lot, if they were waiting for Harry in New York. There’s no way out of it for either of us. No way.”

He glanced over his shoulder. She gave him the automatic smile of an efficient, self-possessed secretary. She began repairing her lipstick.

“I’m a newspaper figure from now on. Tim Rourke and his friends will have a field day. I don’t blame them—it’s their job. In plain English, I’m Harry’s mistress. He took me to the Riviera and bought me a five-thousand-dollar car and other expensive presents. I thanked him in the usual way. Will anyone believe I didn’t know there was heroin in the car? And the truth was, I had doubts about that disappearance and reappearance. I didn’t do anything about it so I wouldn’t have to put any serious questions to myself, such as what was I doing hanging around with these people? I wonder how long a sentence they’ll ask for. I wonder if my father and mother will want to attend the trial. They get so little diversion.”

Shayne didn’t like the hysteria in her tight voice, and, as he eased up on the wheel to make the turn around the buoy, he glanced at her again. She had a little automatic pressed beneath her left breast. Her eyes were tight shut, her arms and shoulders were rigid, and there was a look of concentration on her face.

He went sideward very fast. He gave her hand a sharp twist, as though turning a doorknob, and at the same instant he hit her shoulder, breaking her contact with the gun. There was a crisp explosion. She screamed and threw herself back on the gun before Shayne could get it out of her hand. She fired again. This time the bullet hit her. She staggered back against the table, gave a small cry, and all the rigidity went out of her body. He shook the gun out of her hand. The
Nugget,
coming about in the current, banged against the buoy, sending Theo into Shayne’s arms.

“Mike, it hurts!” she said accusingly.

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t do it.”

He lifted her into a seated position on the table, with her back to the wall. Blood was spreading across the shoulder of her dress, below the collar bone. He ripped the dress down from her shoulder. The bullet had gone in high, an upward angle. Possibly it hadn’t hit the bone.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” he said.

“It was stupid of me to miss.”

He went down for the gun, a little Belgian .25, put it on safety and dropped it in his pocket. He ripped a piece out of her skirt, which he wadded up and handed to her. “Hold this against it as hard as you can.” He turned back to the wheel. The motor had cut out. He started it again. They had drifted off the buoy, but he could feel an underwater drag, as though he had fouled the rudder on the buoy cable.

“I don’t have any strength,” Theo said weakly, and slumped over to one side.

“I’ll take care of you in a minute.” Shayne reversed, backed all the way to the buoy and came forward at full speed. There was a wrenching and scraping underneath the boat. The motor labored and died. Shayne tried the starter. It ground on and on but the motor wouldn’t turn over.

“I thought I’d get you to a doctor,” he said, “but I guess not. I’m not much of a doctor myself. It’s lucky it isn’t much of a wound.”

“Lucky,” she said bitterly.

“I’ll see if I can find any bandages.” He took the flashlight to the main cabin. In a cupboard beneath the stainless-steel washbasin he found a first-aid kit and a box of sanitary napkins. Probably there were other medical supplies aboard, but he didn’t want her to lose any more blood while he looked for them. He filled an empty whiskey bottle with water.

When he returned he found her lying awkwardly across the table, her eyes closed. She was trying to hold the wadded cloth against the bullet hole, but she couldn’t maintain pressure; all it was doing was catching the blood as it came out. He moistened a sanitary napkin and sponged off her shoulder. There were two wounds, a tiny one in front, a larger one in back where the bullet had come out.

“People sometimes kill themselves with a .25,” he said, “but you can do a better job with a larger gun. I won’t ask you how long you’ve been carrying this. Why didn’t you ever talk to Harry about what you thought had happened with your car?”

“I tried tonight. That’s when he asked me to marry him.”

Shayne folded one of the napkins and bound it tightly in place with a long strip torn from her slip. “You could have told him you wouldn’t marry him because you suspected him of smuggling heroin.”

She raised her head and said with surprising spirit, “I wouldn’t marry him even if he wasn’t!”

He bound the ends of the improvised bandage under her shoulder. She wanted another drink and he held the bottle for her so she could get it down.

He lifted the radiotelephone and summoned the operator.

“Mike Shayne again,” he said.

“I was wondering if you’d call. I’ve been sitting twiddling my thumbs.”

“I need the Coast Guard,” he said. “I seem to be hung up on a buoy at the entrance to the La Gorce canal.”

“Mr. Shayne! How did you manage to do that?”

“It was easy,” Shayne said with disgust.

18.

AFTER NOTIFYING THE COAST GUARD air station of Shayne’s predicament, the operator rang Tim Rourke’s number for him. The reporter answered.

“Nothing more, Mike,” Rourke said. “The AP here in town has the story, but just the lead. The New York guy won’t admit he was expecting Harry. Says he hardly knows him, hasn’t heard from him in years.”

“And I bet the cops believed that,” Shayne said.

“Steve Bass called me, Mike. Harry’s boy. He’s been talking to a girl named Betty something. Don’t forget I’m in the dark about this. I told him to bring her over and you’d show up sooner or later.”

“That’s fine. Don’t give the girl much to drink or she’ll pass out before I can talk to her. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up. Theo said weakly, “Who’s Betty?”

“No one you know. She was in jail with me. It’s a long shot, but I’m playing the long shots tonight.”

She was breathing quickly. “Poor Mike. It’s embarrassing. Bumping into a buoy. And all for nothing, because next time I’ll make sure you’re not around to stop me. You know that, don’t you?”

“That’s your business. But if it turns out that somebody planted those drugs on Harry you won’t have to kill yourself, will you? Of course he’ll still have to answer for slugging the narcotics cop and I know you’re sorry about that. I doubt if you’re sorry enough to shoot yourself.”

“You’re not very sentimental, are you?”

“I hope not,” Shayne said.

He finished the bottle. He hunted for another, but apparently that was the only one that had survived the battle between Vince Donahue’s guests and the police.

A Coast Guard cutter came alongside, hooting. A young ensign leaped aboard to confer with Shayne. They decided to transfer Theo to the cutter, leaving a Coast Guardsman aboard the
Nugget.
They would return in daylight, with a diver to disentangle the rudder.

Three young sailors swung Theo across the rail. The cutter took them into Indian Creek and put them ashore near the 63rd Street bridge on Allison Island. St. Francis Hospital was a block away.

Shayne explained the situation to the interne on duty and helped fill out the police form required of every doctor treating a gunshot wound. While the temporary bandage he had applied to Theo’s shoulder was being replaced, he made two phone calls from a booth in the waiting room. The first was for a taxi. The second was to the Lambda Phi house at Florida Christian, where he had met the All-American quarterback, Johnny Black. It rang a long time, and finally Black himself answered. Shayne told him what he wanted.

“I signed with the Warriors at a nice bonus,” Black said. “I’ve got their check in my wallet, but I remember what you said about how easy it is to stop payment. I guess I have to do what you say. I’ll borrow a car.”

Theo came out, her lipstick a bright slash of color in her pale face. She had washed and brushed her hair, and even with her arm in a wrist sling she looked her usual neat, well-organized self. They had worked fast, for a hospital, but not fast enough for Shayne. His mind was racing.

“Let’s go,” he snapped.

She lived in a new high-rise apartment building in the low 70’s, two blocks from the ocean. As the taxi started she swayed over against Shayne.

“My head’s going around. Mike, hang onto me for a minute.”

He put his arm around her. “Did they give you sleeping pills?”

“Tons. And on top of that cognac—I don’t know.”

As the taxi turned onto Indian Creek Drive, she pivoted with it and nearly went off the seat. His hold tightened.