The Violent World of Michael Shayne (17 page)

“It’s not really conclusive,” she said. “Two weeks ago I was called into the office of a certain investigative agency. Well, I suppose I can tell you—it was the FBI. I was told that Senator Wall’s financial affairs were under investigation.”

Wall walked up to her and gave her a piercing look. She met it without flinching.

“I’ll go on, Senator, if you’ll back away. I’m not at my best when people are breathing on me.”

He moved off with an angry exclamation.

She continued, “They knew that he and Trina Hitchcock were having an affair. I was asked—quite forcibly, I may say—to take advantage of my occasional presence in the Hitchcock house and plant a small electronic transmitting device, to pick up their conversations. The assumption was, I believe, that Senator Wall might be using Miss Hitchcock to control or influence her father.”

“You filthy—” Trina began.

Wall’s face was puzzled. “I’d like to hear the rest of this, Trina.”

“The thing was,” Maggie said, “it was very much of a longshot, and you couldn’t expect them to put their own agents on twenty-four-hour duty, on the off chance that something important might come over. They thought I’d know when Trina and Senator Wall were together. They were wrong, actually; I wasn’t that much of an intimate of the Hitchcock household. However, last night I gathered from Mike Shayne that various extraordinary things were taking place, and I kept the receiver open. And suddenly, sure enough, I heard Senator Wall. Well, what I was supposed to do was tape what he said, but I couldn’t get the miserable recorder to function. I’m so stupid about anything mechanical. So I took notes.”

Opening her bag, she took out a folded sheaf of pages torn from a stenographer’s notebook. “I got as much as I could, but my shorthand is terrible rusty.” She put on her glasses. “Trina Hitchcock’s voice—now you understand this isn’t verbatim, by any means—Trina said, ‘What are we going to do, Tom?’ And his voice said, ‘I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Let nature take its course. Nobody’s been hurt so far. The profit, my God, it’s fantastic. There’s only one stumbling block, and that’s Bixler. Something’s going to have to be done about him. There’s danger in trying to buy him off. He’ll have an exaggerated idea about how much he deserves. And could we trust him?’” Suddenly Trina sprang out of her chair and raked Maggie’s glasses off her face.

“You’re lying, you dirty tramp! The whole thing is a damn dirty lie!”

She snatched the notes and thrust them at Wall. “Here, Tom!”

Her eyes shining, Maggie clipped her with an awkward right. As Trina staggered, one of her heels broke. She tore off her other shoe and came back at Maggie, who seized a newspaper from the table and flung it in her face. It came apart, blinding her for a moment.

Then they were grabbed from behind.

Trina screamed, “Let go! I’m going to kill that bitch! I swear I’m going to kill her!”

“I’d like to see you try,” Maggie said.

“OK, girls,” Shayne said, stepping between them. “War’s over.”

“Of course she’s been lying,” Senator Wall said. “What interests me is who put her up to it?”

Sam Toby exclaimed, “Hitchcock!”

Everybody looked at the chair near the door, where Senator Hitchcock had been sitting. He was gone.

11:25 A.M.

“WHAT DID YOU THINK THIS RUCKUS WAS ALL ABOUT?” Shayne asked. “Trina wanted to give him a chance to get away.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Trina said icily after divesting herself of the newspaper. “He must have gone to talk to the TV people.”

“Does anybody else think so?” Shayne said.

Senator Wall blustered, “If you’re hoping to convince anybody that Emory Hitchcock had any part in the theft of that diary—”

“It’s hard to tell what people will do before they do it,” Shayne said. “Yeah—there’s no question that Hitchcock is the one who stole the diary and milked it for just about a million bucks, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. He also killed Bixler, not because he’s a homicidal maniac, but because he had to. Bixler was too flighty and unstable, and it wouldn’t have been safe to cut him in.”

“Hitchcock,”
Senator Redpath said. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe it.”

“I only started believing it myself at about five o’clock this morning. He made his big mistake when he didn’t take his daughter into his confidence. He misjudged the girl. He thought she’d be shocked.”

“Shayne,” Senator Redpath said, “we don’t want to be too leisurely, do we? When you said you were sending a man to look for the Manners stock at Trina Hitchcock’s, wasn’t the object of that to alarm Emory?”

“Sure,” Shayne agreed. “And the fireworks started a minute later, which probably means that the stock is hidden somewhere in the house. But let’s give him another couple of minutes.”

“Will you explain something, Mike?” Maggie Smith said. “What was the point of that whole business with me, or wasn’t it connected?”

“Of course it was connected,” Shayne said. “Wall, for his friends in National Aviation, had begun to look into the old investigation of Toby. Probably Hitchcock had pulled everything out of the files, but he couldn’t keep Bixler out of town indefinitely without calling attention to his interest in the jerk. Sooner or later Wall was going to add everything up and decide that one of his colleagues had been up to some dirty work, and had taken over the theft of the diary after sending Bixler out of town. But he couldn’t conceivably suspect Hitchcock, because the old man had arranged something very clever. Maggie Smith did a job once for Toby. We can skip the details. Just because somebody does a certain kind of thing once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again. I’ve known that for years, but it slipped my mind. Toby, you understand, was the only person who had to know that Hitchcock was pulling the strings. Manners didn’t know it, Oulihan didn’t know it, Mrs. Redpath didn’t know it. Hitchcock got Toby to suggest a woman who could be linked to some one of Toby’s operations in the past, and Toby arranged the dinner where Maggie and Hitchcock met. She wasn’t the aggressor in this, Hitchcock was. It was the perfect red herring, except that it worked too well. It scared Trina into hiring an out-of-town detective to break it up. She tried to fire me when she found out how much money her old man had cleared, but by then it was too late. I was a little rough with Maggie, and it didn’t bother me at all. She denied it, of course. And then it struck me that the whole case against her depended on the say-so of one man, Toby, who isn’t exactly famous for honesty and square-dealing.”

“Now, Shayne,” Toby said.

Senator Redpath said, “The diary, perhaps. Emory’s always been conscious of being the poorest man in the Senate. He couldn’t save anything out of his salary. He tried to get more insurance, and they turned him down because he was a cardiac patient. But
murder—”

Shayne looked at his watch. “He didn’t know that was where it would end. Everything else worked like a charm. Then Bixler came back, sold Wall the story of the diary, and stirred everything up again. Wall made certain deductions. We invented that conversation between Trina and Wall, but it probably wasn’t too far off. My guess would be that Wall settled for half, which was more than he could ever expect from National. If he ever married Trina, the other fifty percent would make a nice dowry. But Hitchcock still thought he’d better talk to Bixler. To be on the safe side, he used Wall’s car. And Bixler had had a hunch, which he was happy to share with an important Senator like Hitchcock. Wouldn’t whoever stole the diary put the copy in a safe-deposit box? It probably wouldn’t be his regular box—the diary was too hot. I found a note in Bixler’s wallet. He was going to start checking the banks this morning. And Hitchcock couldn’t allow that, because he himself had rented a box in the Second Federal on June 24th, the day before the diary was stolen.”

“Is that where we’ll find it?” Redpath said hopefully.

“Not any more. It was too dangerous to keep. He only rented the box for three months. My guess is that he burned the copy as soon as the deal was underway. He was a cautious man. And being a cautious man, he had to do something about Bixler. He persuaded him to go to the joint where the maid was working, to question her further. He made sure that Bixler was carrying plenty of cash. He could be fairly sure what would happen. Bixler had been tossed out of there before. He was drunk and cocky, and if the woman was slow about answering, as she was bound to be, Hitchcock knew that he would try to see what a little bullying would do. Of course, he was bounced by her brothers, in front of fifty witnesses, and left lying unconscious on the sidewalk. Then all Hitchcock had to do was load him into the car, kill him and dump him a couple of blocks away. Bixler had already been rolled, and Hitchcock took off his shoes to make it look even better. He didn’t have to douse him with liquor. Bixler had already done that himself.”

Trina was sobbing helplessly. “He couldn’t have done that. My father. You don’t know him.”

“You didn’t really know him either, did you?” Shayne said. “I think he’s had about enough time.”

They found him in the study of his Georgetown house. He had slipped partly off a leather chair, his eyes glazed. He was breathing heavily.

A .38 caliber revolver lay on the carpet beside him. Shayne had given him time enough to use it, but the heart attack had felled him with the gun in his hand. For eighteen hours he had been in a state of increasing tension and anxiety. He hadn’t allowed himself to relax for an instant. The showdown with Wall, then the killing, the increasing terror as Shayne closed in, finally the desperate rush from Capitol Hill to burn the stock certificates that would convict him of murder—Shayne was surprised his damaged heart had held out as long as it had.

Trina ran to him, screaming. If he recognized her he gave no sign.

Wall dialled a hospital and ordered an ambulance. Shayne carried the dying man to a leather sofa. Trina covered him, and after that there was nothing to do but wait.

A dozen or so of Hitchcock’s handsomely bound volumes, wrenched from the bookshelves, lay strewn about the floor. Shayne examined one. It wasn’t a book, but a box disguised as a book. A heap of ashes still smoked in the fireplace.

Seeing the National Aviation lobbyist, Henry Clark, in the corridor, Shayne had brought him along. Clark conferred briefly with Manners at the far end of the study. Coming up to Shayne, he said in a hushed tone, “He’s willing to give us the subcontract. Redpath says he’ll set up a conference in the Pentagon and back us on recovering our expenses, and he’ll see to it that some Air Force colonel—I didn’t follow this part—will suddenly find himself a civilian. It looks as though your fee’s in the bag. Congratulations, very fancy footwork.”

“Make out the check to the Washington Little Theatre Club, or whatever the hell it’s called.”

“Mike!” Maggie said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Don’t talk him out of it,” Clark said. “That’s an educational contribution. That kind of check is deductible.”

Manners met Shayne’s eyes. Looking at the ashes in the fireplace, he shrugged slightly. “For somebody who doesn’t know his way to the Washington Monument, you did fairly well, Shayne. But you were wrong about one thing. Toby wouldn’t let me pay him in stock, which we would have to register under some phony name. These were bearer bonds. The price swing hasn’t been quite so extreme—from 33 to 97. It’s a break for us, because now the company won’t have to redeem them.”

“I didn’t plan that,” Shayne said ironically, pouring himself a cognac from the bottle Hitchcock had brought out the night before.

Redpath came over to join him. “How much publicity will there have to be?”

“That’s up to you. If you try to keep it in the club, two friends of mine, Oskar and Pete Szep, will take a lot of hell from the cops. But Hitchcock doesn’t look as though he has much time, and if you can get the Szep boys off the hook, I’ll go along with anything else you decide.”

“In other words,” Senator Redpath said carefully, “if the police agree to call Bixler’s death an ordinary robbery with violence, and list it as unsolved—”

“Yeah. And I’ll stay around a few days to be sure that’s the way it’s handled.”

Shayne took a long drink of cognac as Senator Redpath went on to talk to Wall. He knew he would need more than one drink to get the taste of these people out of his mouth.

Maggie said, “Will you come back to my house for breakfast when it’s over, Mike?”

“No,” the redhead said. “It wouldn’t stop with breakfast.”

She glanced at the unconscious man on the sofa. “This isn’t the ideal place to say it, but would that be so terrible?”

He drank again. “It might be very damn nice. Thanks for the performance a few minutes ago. But I have to say no to the invitation.”

“It’s that awful thing eight years ago,” she said. “I buried it as deep as I could, but I knew it wouldn’t stay buried.”

“It’s that,” Shayne said, “and it’s this flirtation with Hitchcock. He started it, he kept it going, but you could have stopped it any time you wanted to by saying no.”

“That’s true,” she said sadly. “I owe the government three thousand dollars in back taxes. Everybody’s been nice about extending me credit, so now they’re talking about suing me. Some days, if nobody calls me, I skip lunch and dinner. God help me, if he’d asked me to marry him I would have said yes. I’d make a good Senator’s wife. Well, if you’re ever in Washington again—”

“Yeah, if I’m in Washington again—”

He didn’t finish. Two interns came in with a stretcher.