The Violent World of Michael Shayne (12 page)

Her other brother said warmly, “I was there, for Christ’s sake! I put a newspaper under his head! Oskar didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill him.”

Shayne put in, “Will everybody please stop talking? Personally I think you’re telling the truth, Szep. But if your own sister won’t believe you, don’t be too surprised if a jury won’t. We’ve got a little time before they pick you up. Are you with me so far?”

“I better get in the car and start moving, huh?”

“Not just yet. There’s no identification on the body. No shoes. He’s covered with dirt and blood. He looks like a bum and smells like a bum, and they won’t bother about him much until they take his prints in the morning. They may not hurry with that, but they’re sure to know who he is by noon. I’m beginning to get a few faint ideas, but I need some cooperation, in fact all the cooperation I can get. You can help, Olga. Will you try to remember exactly what Bixler said when he came in?”

She moved a stool out from the bar and sat down, her chin on one hand. “Do we have champagne, and will I drink some with him. I said my brothers don’t allow. Then he said why do I go away from town last year. I said I was scared. He said did anybody else ever ask me about the diary. Then Oskar came over.”

“What did he pay you the three thousand bucks for, a look at Mrs. Masterson’s diary?”

Olga nodded. “That was her name then.”

“What do you mean—she married again?”

“Uh-huh, to that Senator, I forget his name.”

“Redpath?” Shayne said sharply.

“That’s right, Redpath. I saw her picture in the paper.”

Shayne tapped his fingers on the bar and fitted another piece on the puzzle into place. “How long did you work for her?”

“How long, Oskar? Maybe a year. Good pay, but she had so many dinners. Eighteen, twenty people. They never sat down before eight-thirty, it was twelve when you finished the dishes. An hour to go home. Back at eight the next morning. I said to her once, I better sleep at her house the nights she has a party. There’s maid’s room. She said no. I know why—then I might find out who came back to sleep with her after everybody went home.”

“I didn’t want Olga to take that job,” Oskar said, “but try telling Olga.”

“Why did she fire you?” Shayne asked.

“She said I didn’t keep the house clean. Those floors sparkled! The silver, always A-one condition. The bathrooms—perfect.” She gave an indignant sniff. “One night I get home to my house and forget the key. I must go all the way back in a taxicab, or sleep on the sidewalk. You think I try to find out who she has in her bedroom? She can have fifty men if she wants to. I don’t care. I go in by the back door. I know where I leave the key, on the drainboard by the sink. And Mrs. Masterson comes stamping downstairs very mad, in her bathrobe. Oh, she was so mad. What am I doing, spying on her? Some people. She did have a man up there, I see his hat in the hall, one of those army hats.”

Shayne swung around. “Do you remember what color braid? What kind of insignia?”

“What kind of what?”

Oskar explained in Polish, and Olga said, “Some big bird, like an eagle?”

Shayne smiled for the first time since finding Bixler’s body. “Now how about the diary?”

Olga said bitterly, “I wish I never saw that diary.”

Oskar filled Shayne’s glass and poured another shot for himself. “What did you do that was so bad, Olga? He said they were crooks, they were robbing the government, and you had to help so he could stop it.”

“Oh, yes, and I helped him. I turned into a thief myself.”

“You didn’t steal it, you borrowed it! I’ve told you time and again.”

“Steal it, they know it’s gone. Borrow it and put it back, maybe they don’t even know it happened. That’s worse.”

Shayne was pulling at his earlobe. “Bixler told me he didn’t go through with it.”

Olga laughed without humor. “He lied, Mr. Shayne.”

“How did you work it?”

“This diary,” she said, “she kept it locked in a box on the back of a shelf in the bedroom closet. If she didn’t want me to know where she puts the key to the box, the other little key to the diary, she should change her own towels and vacuum-clean and straighten up and make her own beds. In one year, the maid finds out little things. When I tell Bixler I know about the keys, oh, he goes crazy. This was after she fired me, and I had to give her back my key to the house. He got another key for me. He told me what I must do. One day we practiced, to be sure there was time for everything. The day after when she went out to lunch—he knew she was going out to lunch, he had everything worked out—he called the house. The new maid answers, he says it’s the furnace company, go down and get the number off the furnace. There was no number! That was his business, to know how to do those things. So the maid is looking for it in the basement, I unlock the back door very very quietly and walk up to the bedroom, get the keys from the desk, open the box, unlock the diary, put the keys back, the box back, hurry downstairs—one minute, no more.”

“Did you look in the diary?”

“I had no time. Everything was all hurry, hurry.”

“Olga, you know you looked in it. You’re human.”

“I opened it, but it was in this tiny writing, you’d need hours to read one sentence. Every day she put down names for lunch, names for dinner, and numbers, like two hundred dollars, five hundred dollars.”

“You couldn’t make out any of the names?”

“You try reading something that little in a taxi sometime. Bouncing around. And I was
scared.
I couldn’t keep my mind on it. I put it in a locker at the Greyhound depot. I went back and watched the house to be sure she didn’t come home early. One hour later, back to the depot, get the diary. The three thousand dollars was in an envelope. We spent it to air-condition this place for Oskar, the down payment on the mortgage.”

“Wait a minute. How did Bixler get the key to the locker after you left the diary in it?”

“That part I didn’t tell. He sent me the key in the mail the day before. He had another, see? Then he called the maid and talked to her on the phone in the kitchen and I walked in the front door, as bold as you please. All over. Then he said I should move to another house and be careful. I thought, if he says be careful, I’ll be extra careful, so I went to my other brother and sister-in-law in the Bronx, New York. I stayed four months.”

Shayne said slowly, “Are you sure it was Bixler who arranged all this?”

She looked at him as though he had challenged some basic religious belief. “He said he was Bixler, Ronald Bixler.”

“OK,” Shayne said. “This sounds simple because it worked, but it was really pretty complicated. From the depot he’d have to take the diary to an office, and back to the depot. Even with a high-speed copier, say a late-model

Zerox, the timing would have to be close. How did he work it all out with you, on the phone?”

She shook her head. “No, I saw him. He came to my house once, once I met him in a cafeteria. After that it was on the phone. The keys, I told you, in the mail. He fixed it so the day it happened nobody saw us together. He said there was dangerous, danger. I was the one he was thinking about, so I wouldn’t go to jail for stealing when all I did was borrow for two hours. He didn’t have to tell
me
to be careful. I was careful, believe me.”

Oskar said, “Notice that only one person ran any risks, and it was Olga? What did
he
do besides get a couple of keys made and call the house? If anybody had asked me, which they didn’t, I’d say don’t settle for a measly three grand. That’s a three-to ten-year rap for burglary right there. To tell the truth, it’s the main reason I clipped him tonight. That always griped me.”

“The thing that bothers me,” Shayne said, “is where did he get his hands on three thousand bucks?”

They looked at him blankly. He explained, “That’s a lot of cash in one lump for anybody at his level.”

Pete said scornfully, “That’s how much you know. You should see the roll he was flashing tonight.”

“I’m not talking about tonight,” Shayne said. “Tonight he had hundreds sticking out of his ears. You must know by now that this thing was never legitimate. Whoever got hold of the diary has been using it for blackmail. A year ago Bixler was trying to live on his salary, and just getting by. If he was the one who laid out that three thousand, it means somebody else was bankrolling him. And maybe they didn’t bother to use him at all. Think about it.”

Olga seemed disturbed and upset. “I could tell his voice on the phone! That way he said ‘s,’ like he sort of stuttered.”

“That wouldn’t be hard to imitate.” He rapped abruptly on the bar. “All right, Pete, let’s see what you took off him.”

Pete stepped backward, a denial forming on his lips. “So help me God—”

Ignoring him, Shayne looked at his older brother. “What do they use for executions in Washington, the gas chamber? If I knew what he had in his wallet, it might help.”

Oskar moved along the bar toward Pete and said dangerously, “Is that what you did when you went back to put a newspaper under his head?”

“No!”

When Oskar continued to advance he said hastily, “OK! OK! I’ll give it to the Red Cross or somebody. What was I supposed to do, leave him lying there, with all that dough in his pocket, for the first wino who came along? What kind of sense would it make?”

“What a family,” Olga said.

“Do what Shayne says,” Oskar told him. “Dump it out on the stick, all of it.”

Swearing, Pete emptied his pants pockets in front of Shayne: a wallet, keys, change, a fountain pen, a wrist-watch. Shayne counted the money. It came to over nine hundred dollars. Carrying that much cash in this neighborhood, and letting it be seen, had been a good way to invite a knock on the head. Shayne emptied the card pockets of the wallet. The dead man had belonged to the Diners’ Club, Carte Blanche, the American Legion, the American Rifle Association, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the Elks. The membership cards gave him an identity that he had seemed to lack in real life. There were a number of girls’ names and phone numbers, and he had carried a color photograph of an older woman, probably his mother.

“Any of that mean anything?” Oskar asked anxiously. Only one thing appeared to be current. It was a note scribbled on ruled paper and stuck into the money compartment: “Week of June 25—check safe deposit boxes, all Washington banks.”

“Can you give me the date when you took the diary?” Shayne asked Olga. “I know it was last year, but when last year?”

“In the spring,” she said doubtfully. “May, June?”

“End of June,” Oskar said. “I was only out of the can a month.”

Shayne put Bixler’s watch on his right wrist. Everything else he stuffed back in the wallet and snapped a heavy rubber band around it.

“This goes to the cops tomorrow noon, along with the names of the four witnesses who saw you bounce him. That gives us—” he consulted his own watch—“seven and a half hours.”

“Man, anything we can do—” Oskar said.

“I might think of something,” Shayne said dryly. “This has all been pretty one-sided so far.”

“Anything,” Oskar repeated, planting both hands on the bar and looking directly at Shayne. “I mean it.”

4:35 A.M.

USING THE PHONE BEHIND THE BAR, SHAYNE DIALED THE Hotel St. Albans, where he had checked in the previous afternoon.

“Michael Shayne, please. Room 1232.”

Oskar Szep looked around in surprise. “Didn’t you say that’s your name?”

Shayne silenced him with a wave. The switchboard girl soon told him there was no answer from that room. He said to keep ringing. Finally Shayne heard a click and a man’s voice said gruffly, as though surfacing out of a heavy sleep, “’Lo.”

“Rebman?” Shayne said sharply, his mouth several inches from the phone.

“Yes,” the voice said more alertly. “Shayne hasn’t come back yet. The way it begins to look, he’s sleeping out. But all his stuff is still here, and there’s a chance he may be in to shave before breakfast. We’ll be ready for him, don’t worry.”

“There’s been a change of plans,” Shayne said in his ordinary tone. “Forget about Shayne. Everything’s starting to fall apart. Get the hell to the airport and catch the first plane out.”

There was a pause, and Rebman said, “Is that you, Shamus?”

The redhead laughed. “You boys always do the obvious thing. Waiting in my hotel room, for God’s sake! I hate to think how much it cost you to get in.”

“It didn’t cost too much,” Rebman said. “This is the second time you’ve suckered me. There won’t be a third. I’ve got new instructions, and they don’t leave me any leeway. The money offers are out. If you want to go home, fine, nobody’ll come after you. But leave your suitcase here and send for it. Am I making myself clear?”

“Sure. Now will you give your boss a message? Tell Mr. Manners he’s going to be under a different kind of pressure starting tomorrow morning. Maybe he’s the one who ought to go home. Bribery and blackmail don’t seem to mean anything any more—it’s like drinking hard liquor during Prohibition. Murder’s something else. Questions about a murder always have that little extra bit of steam.”

“Who’s been murdered?”

“If you don’t know, Rebman, I think I’ll let you find out for yourself. Give him the message.”

Shayne hung up abruptly.

“Say,” Pete said as Shayne turned, “I just thought of something. One of our regulars came in right after Bixler, Billy, we call him. Like he was plastered, but maybe he saw if the guy came in a cab, or what. He lives down the street, and what I’m going to do, I’m going to wake him up and ask him.”

He went out at a quick walk. Shayne took his glass and the cognac bottle to a table and asked Olga to sit down with him.

“Let’s go through the whole thing again, starting with the first time Bixler got in touch with you. What he said, what you said, the whole thing.”

She lowered her voice so her brother, who had stayed at the bar, wouldn’t hear her. “You really think they left him in front of the movie? And somebody else came along and killed him?”

“He was hit when he was already out,” Shayne said. “I don’t know what with—a tire iron or the blunt end of a railroad spike. It was a funny-shaped wound. Does that sound like Pete and Oskar?”