Murder Takes No Holiday (16 page)

“I swear to God, Luis,” Slater said fervently. “I don’t know how it happened. Nobody knew that trick but me. You’re not the world’s most cautious man. One of your monkeys must have seen it on your desk one of the other times, and put two and two together. I can see how you figure, but you’re absolutely wrong. I didn’t do it, goddamn it!” And he added in a low voice, “But if you want to know something funny, I almost wish I had.”

“Is that funny?” the Camel said dryly. “Your sense of humor is a little deficient, I think. Let us be specific. I was twenty minutes late, through no fault of my own. Where were you between five minutes of eleven and twenty minutes past? Give me the names of two impartial witnesses who can assure me that you were not in a garage waiting for me to arrive so you could knock me on the head, and perhaps you will succeed in convincing me.”

Slater didn’t respond at once. Then he said heavily, “You don’t want much, do you? Between five of eleven and twenty after I was doing something dumb. I left the hotel at ten-thirty and I didn’t get to the airport till quarter of twelve. I suppose I picked up the taxi at about eleven-thirty, but before then I was taking pains not to be seen by anybody. And for a good reason. I sneaked out and put some of the money I made on my last trip in the mailbox of Mrs. Albert Watts.”

There was an expressive silence.

“I know it was dumb,” Slater said miserably. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“Dumb! It was insane! What if somebody saw you? Did you think about that? “

“Nobody saw me. It took time, but I was careful.”

“And why did you feel prompted to do this crazy thing? You are ill, my friend. It is as good as a signed confession.”

“Aah—I was feeling lousy, Luis. She’s pathetic. I snowed her once at a dance, and I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since. It wasn’t her fault that Watts wanted to make himself a dirty buck by turning me in. I could have mailed it to her, but they might have traced it to me. This way was better.”

“It isn’t good. If you go to the trouble of killing somebody, the least you can do is be quiet about it afterward.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Slater said wearily. “Don’t try to act innocent with me of all people, Luis. But he was killed because of something I’d done for money, and all of a sudden that dough wasn’t any good any more.”

“How much did you give her?” the Camel sneered. “Half?”

“I wanted to give her the whole goddamn thing, but when I came right down to it, I couldn’t. I didn’t count it. I just pushed it in the mailbox. Maybe it wasn’t even half.”

“But this is weak, Paul. Very, very weak. Oh, I am quite sure you did it. It is too absurd to be a lie. But I do not think it would take an hour to leave some money in a fat lady’s mailbox. No, I suggest that you felt generous to this creature because you knew you were about to rob me of a matter of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

Powys stirred. The redhead looked at him quickly, and the Englishman made a face to show that the sum impressed him.

The Camel went on. “We are clearing the ground. Now this sudden midnight trip by chartered plane. Your mother is sick?”

His voice was thick with sarcasm, and Slater said defensively, “Maybe she’s not so sick I couldn’t have gone up tomorrow. But my wife’s been putting pressure on me to straighten up. You’ve been putting pressure on me to take one more trip and make enough to retire. At the same time I’ve been getting the pressure from another source you may not know about. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, not that it matters. Martha is a good judge of character. She knew that if you people put on one ounce more of that pressure I’d break. And if that happened, if I took one more wrong dollar, she said she’d leave me. I’ve played around a little, sure, but I worship that kid, Luis.”

“True love,” Alvarez said. “I honor it. But please continue. You expected me to come to see you and urge you once again to be sensible and make some money. And you were afraid you would agree?”

“Well, hell,” Slater said uncomfortably. “I know my limitations. So I thought this cable about Mother was a god-given opportunity.”

“God-given,” the Camel sneered, “but perhaps arranged by someone on earth, eh? I will tell you, Paul. It is no news to me that you have begun to shake and shiver. A little of this pressure you speak about, applied by policemen, and I have feared you would fall apart. When you are nervous, you make me nervous. It is true, I want you to go once more. I have been working up to this one for a long time. And this knock on the head seems to me to fit, Paul. You have been thinking perhaps yes, perhaps no. When you decide at last, you do not choose the sensible, honest way, but the foolish, the dishonest. And why? You are angry at me for this so-called pressure. It will be the last time, you tell yourself, and never again, if you do it this way, will you have to make such an unpleasant decision.”

“That’s pretty cheap psychology. And it’s wrong.”

“This we will learn. Because of one thing I am certain. You will find out tonight what is meant by pressure, and I think you are right—you are not the type to stand up.”

“No. No. But don’t use any muscle on me, Luis. On me
or
my wife. At the same time I’m not a moron. When you pulled me off the plane and said you had Martha, you really jarred me. I would have done anything you said. But then I stopped to think. Consider a possibility, Luis. What if I didn’t steal this dough? Just consider it, that’s all I ask. How can I convince you, by swearing on the Bible? You probably don’t even have a Bible. To you it’s ABC. All I have to do is get up the dough. But I can’t get it up if I don’t have it, can I? So I knocked my few brains together. I know what you do with the people who double-cross you. Crrr!”

He made a choking sound, which he must have accompanied with a gesture, drawing his hand flat across his throat. “And if you killed me you’d have to kill Martha too, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen. So this is the way I worked it. I wrote a letter. It’ll be found in the morning unless I get it and tear it up in the meantime. And if I’m dead I can’t very well tear it up.”

“What is in this letter?”

“Why, the whole damn thing, Luis. Facts and figures. I know you think you can beat a smuggling rap, and maybe you can. So I put in the dope on what happened to Albert Watts.”

“That does not sound so menacing.”

“You think so, do you? I know you covered yourself. You’d be careful about a thing like that. So what I said was that we did it together.”

After a moment’s silence the Camel’s voice said softly, “My God, Paul.”

“I knew it would impress you. I said you told me not to worry about the alibi. You could get plenty of people to swear we were somewhere else that night. But it won’t stand up against a written confession, Luis. I described how we did it. I only drove the car, naturally. You used the knife.”

“And you—signed this amazing document?”

“What good would it be without a signature? And I don’t think it’s bad, for something I thought up on the spur of the moment. If you let us go, you’ll still be all right. But if the cops find me in a ditch with my throat cut, you know what they’ll think. They’ll think you killed me to keep me from confessing, not knowing I’d already written it out and signed it. If you didn’t hang for one murder, you’d hang for the other.”

Alvarez said in disbelief, “Dear God. What if somebody finds this letter before you get it?”

“They won’t,” Slater said with confidence. “And don’t think you can follow me and pick me up again after I have it. I intend to cut your telephone wires and see that your cars won’t start without some extensive repairs.”

There was another moment’s silence. Outside on the terrace, Shayne could feel the tension in the room. Then the Camel gave a muffled exclamation. There was the sound of a blow.

“You imbecile!” the Camel said. “I hope you don’t think you can make a fool of me twice in one evening. I don’t have to cut your throat. I will stop short of that. We will work slowly, so you will have time to appreciate everything fully. Then we will move on to your wife, to José’s delight. You said you worshipped her, I believe? There will be little left to worship when he is finished.”

“The letter—”

“But don’t you understand, Paul? Where you have put this letter is merely one more of the things we must find out.”

He raised his voice to summon the bartender. “Al!”

As Alvarez called, Michael Shayne moved his legs and nodded to Powys. Silently the Englishman began to wriggle backward. When they were around the corner, Shayne crawled across to the balustrade. Turning, he cautiously raised his head. Al had run in from the dining room. He was standing over Slater’s chair, and Alvarez seemed to be tying Slater’s hands.

Shayne and Powys quickly slid over the balustrade. Crouched low, they ran past the dining-room windows. Gaining the protection of the garage, they stopped for a low-voiced consultation.

“This becomes a bit more serious,” Powys said.

“You’re still with me?”

“Definitely. I want to get the Slaters aboard that plane as much as you do. How many men are we up against?”

“The Camel and Al in the living room. Two in the bedroom with Mrs. Slater, two more around the house somewhere. I don’t think we need to count the cab driver. He’s neutral.”

Powys said lightly, “Three apiece. Take them in sequence. I think we can handle them.”

“O.K. Start with the bedroom. I want the one on the bed.”

They circled the house. The kitchen, as they passed, still seemed to be empty. They were careful crossing the lighted strip of turf and the terrace, but once inside there was no further need for caution. The cab driver had turned up the radio to get the full driving effect of a Louis Armstrong solo. Powys followed Shayne quickly along a carpeted hall. The sharp pain in the redhead’s chest was gone, but a dull ache remained, a reminder that he couldn’t press an attack with his usual abandon.

He counted doors, remembering the layout of the wing as he had seen it from outside. He stopped and exchanged a look with Powys. The Englishman tapped his pipe against his heel and stuck it into his breast pocket.

Shayne turned the knob slowly, holding it in both hands. His shoulder muscles were knotted. When the knob was all the way around, freeing the latch, he drew back slightly and slammed his shoulder hard against the door. It came open violently. The man on the other side was hurled forward, and the chair fell on top of him.

Shayne left him to Powys. On the bed, José’s face had gone blank with surprise. Martha, too, halfway between the bed and the door, had frozen as Shayne burst in. The redhead had to break stride to go around her, giving José the fraction of a second he needed. He scrambled up higher on the bed, but didn’t have time to get out of a sitting position. As Shayne came around the bed he rolled forward and kicked out hard with his right foot.

The pointed toe of his shoe caught the detective in the side with stunning force. Six inches farther forward, and Shayne would have gone nowhere the rest of the night under his own power. He was probably unconscious for a moment. He fell, landing across the smaller man’s body, and his fingers fastened in the front of José’s coat. Momentum carried him across the bed. As he fell to the floor he dragged José with him.

His brain cleared in time to see that José had managed to take out a gun. This wasn’t Martha’s little automatic, but an ugly short-barrelled revolver. Shayne grabbed for his arm, but he was rolling away, bringing the gun up between them. Shayne let go of José’s coat and batted him awkwardly across the head with his loosely clenched fist. It was more of a push than a blow, but it knocked the Latin’s head back against the metal framework of the bed, dazing him for an instant.

In that instant Shayne recovered. He clamped a crushing grip on José’s right wrist. José stabbed out at his eyes with his free hand, his fingers bunched and rigid, but Shayne jerked his head and the dangerous fingers passed harmlessly across his cheekbone. He had discovered that he couldn’t lift his left arm. He increased the pressure with his right as José tried to get away. Straining against each other, they came to their feet slowly. José’s face was contorted with effort. José managed to turn so Shayne was behind him. Shayne was putting forth his full strength to keep the small man from twisting his wrist upward.

No more than several seconds had elapsed. The fat-faced youth, who had been sitting tipped back against the door, now lay sprawled on his back, arms and legs outflung. He was unconscious, and it seemed to Shayne that his jaw was broken. Powys was sucking the knuckles of his left hand. He stooped swiftly and took a gun from somewhere inside the unconscious man’s clothes. There were running footsteps outside in the corridor. Turning, Powys ran out, holding the gun behind his leg.

José squirmed, kicking back viciously at the detective’s leg. Shayne was slowly forcing his adversary in against the bed, smothering him with his superior weight and size. But his left arm still dangled uselessly.

“Michael, you’re hurt!” Martha cried.

“Get back,” Shayne grated through his clenched teeth.

Martha looked desperately for something to use as a weapon. José spat out something in Spanish. In the next bedroom, the Louis Armstrong record came to a blazing climax, and an American with a Georgia accent began telling his listeners how easy it was to borrow money from the friendly finance company that was sponsoring the program. Sweat poured down Shayne’s face, and his hand began to slip.

A man appeared in the bedroom doorway—Pedro, José’s brother. He looked stupidly at the scene, and it took him a moment to understand the meaning of what he saw: Michael Shayne, left bound and gagged behind the Half Moon for the police, no longer behind the Half Moon or in jail, but struggling with José for a gun. He started forward, shouting, and at that same instant Shayne’s hand slipped on José’s wrist, the gun came up and fired.

Shayne chopped at José’s head with his right. He was able to put a little beef behind this blow, and it caught the small man on the ear and sent him sprawling. Shayne stamped at the gun. He missed. He tried again, moving quickly, and his foot came down hard on José’s hand. José’s finger was still curled around the trigger guard. He screamed as the finger broke. He had one knee beneath him, trying to rise. Martha ran across a room, lifting a lamp over her head. She brought it down. It shattered over his shoulders; the heavy bronze base caught the top of his head and he went over sidewards.