The Violent World of Michael Shayne (2 page)

“I’d be terrified! And trust me to mess it up somehow. If Daddy ever found out—and she’d make sure he found out—he’d always hold it against me. Nobody likes to have it proved that they’ve been behaving like an idiotic child. If it could only be managed so he wouldn’t know—but I couldn’t do it, I’m too involved.”

“There must be somebody in Washington who can handle it for you.”

She shook her head quickly. “That’s the point. There isn’t anybody I could trust. This is loaded with political dynamite. I couldn’t give any local person that kind of hold over Daddy. How could I be sure they wouldn’t betray us to Toby? Half the private detectives in Washington have done work for him at one time or another. No, it has to be somebody from out of town. And there’s another factor. If anything does go wrong and you have to talk to Daddy about it—it won’t, but if it does—I know you can make him listen to reason. He has a high opinion of you.”

“I doubt if he even remembers me.”

“You’re wrong! He knows about all your big cases. And there isn’t time to get anybody else. It has to be done today.”

Shayne gave a half-grin. “Miss Hitchcock, I admire your father and the fact is that I owe him a favor. But I’m going to cork off forty-five minutes from now and you couldn’t wake me up with a brass band. If you can wait till tomorrow, maybe. Otherwise—”

“Mr. Shayne! I know this is unfair, but it’s so important. You can sleep on the plane. There’s a two o’clock jet, and I think we can make it. I can phone Bixler from here and have him meet you at the airport. That conversation shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Then Maggie Smith, maybe half an hour. After that you can go to a hotel and sleep as long as you like. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars.”

“Not that I’m going to do it,” Shayne said, “but what makes it so urgent?”

“Because tonight is when it’s going to happen! Sam Toby has been subpoenaed to appear at the hearing tomorrow, so doesn’t it stand to reason that tonight’s their deadline? Daddy has a date with her, needless to say. He’s picking her up at the theatre and taking her to supper at a fancy restaurant outside of Pine Grove. I heard him make the reservations. And that happens to be not just a restaurant but a motel.” She hammered her knee with her fist, and there were tears in her eyes. “You know how these things are worked. Do I have to draw you a diagram?”

The redhead sighed and checked the level of cognac in the bottle. No, she didn’t have to draw him a diagram. He had done very little anti-blackmail work in recent years, but this kind of operation was fairly standard. Toby would spend some money at the motel. When Hitchcock asked for a room, there would only be one vacancy, and the infrared camera would already be in place over the bed.

“OK,” Shayne said heavily. “I hope it turns out to be as simple as it sounds, but we probably can’t count on it. Forget about the fee. I was out of the country last election and I didn’t have a chance to vote for your father. This’ll make up for it.”

“If you knew how much I’ve been counting on you! God, if you’d said no I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Now what’s the guy’s name again who has the information?”

“Bixler, Ronald T. Bixler. He works for the Civil Service Commission now. About how much to pay him. He must know how important this is. Do you think ten thousand would be too much?”

“Much too much. You have to be careful with these people, or they get inflated ideas. He’ll want it in cash.”

“I expected that. I have ten thousand dollars in a dispatch case at the Washington airport.”

He looked at her sharply and she said in a quiet voice, “I knew I’d persuade you, Mr. Shayne. You see, I had to.”

Shayne looked at his watch. “We’re cutting it close. If that two o’clock flight is crowded I don’t think we’ll be back in time to get space.”

“Oh, that’s taken care of. Your secretary’s making the reservations, and she’ll be at the airport with your overnight bag and a clean shirt. She knew you’d say yes.”

Shayne drank from the bottle and said dryly, “I appreciate being allowed to make up my own mind.”

2:00 P.M.

THEY BOARDED THE PLANE WITH TEN MINUTES TO SPARE, too late to find seats together. That was all right with Shayne. He knew Trina Hitchcock had told him all she intended to at the moment, and he hoped it would prove to be enough. He fell asleep wondering about the ten thousand dollars. Where had it come from?

A stewardess shook him awake, to tell him to fasten his seat belt. He stretched all over, putting a strain on the narrow seat, which had been built for a much smaller man.

Trina smiled from across the aisle. “I’ve never seen anybody sleep quite that hard.”

“It didn’t go on long enough,” Shayne said.

He put a cigarette in his mouth, lighting it in the mobile lounge as soon as it had fastened itself to the great plane. The plane emptied and the lounge moved across the asphalt to the arrival building.

Trina, beside him, said in a low voice, “Now we have to start being careful. In many ways Washington is the smallest town in the world. Probably it wouldn’t matter if anybody saw us together, but let’s not chance it. The money’s in a locker, and I’ll give you the key. Use as much as you need, but of course I hope you’ll have some left over. And I’ve been thinking: maybe you ought to offer some of it to Mrs. Smith, to make absolutely sure? What do you think?”

“I’m still half-asleep,” Shayne said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

“I know you’ll be playing it by ear, pretty much. I just thought I’d mention it. The first thing is Bixler. I don’t see why he couldn’t meet you some simple place, like here or your hotel room, but if he wants to be melodramatic we’ll have to do it his way. He sounded terribly impressed on the phone when I told him he was going to be meeting Michael Shayne.”

“Fine,” Shayne commented. “Maybe he’ll cut his price.”

“Oh, I doubt that. You’ll call me? I’ll be home all evening.”

Shayne nodded.

“Then good luck, Mr. Shayne.” She put out her hand, looking at him directly, and let something personal come into her eyes for the first time. The worry-lines had deepened, but what she seemed to be worrying about now was whether he liked her. The tip of her tongue appeared briefly between her lips. All she said was, “I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

Swallowing a yawn, Shayne watched her click off through the crowd. She looked more at home in this setting than she had on the deck of Captain Prideaux’s charter boat. He checked the number of the key she had pressed into his hand, found the locker, and took out an almost-new dispatch case. Then he rented a new Ford and drove to the St. Albans, the airport hotel. After checking in he bought an afternoon paper and went up to his room to shower and shave. He was glad to see that Lucy Hamilton, his efficient secretary, had packed a fifth of cognac.

He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives. He sorted out two thousand dollars, wrapped it neatly in newspaper, and snapped a rubber band around it. He put the rest back in the dispatch case. It was too large a sum to leave in his room, and he checked it downstairs before going out to pick up his Ford.

He wheeled in beside an empty taxi at the cabstand in front of the hotel. “I want you to show me the way to Rock Creek Cemetery,” he told the driver. “Will two bucks cover it?”

“As far as that goes,” the driver said. “You want to go in your own car? OK, it’s your dough.”

The driver took his money and drove off, with Shayne following closely. The other times he had been in Washington, his business had always kept him close to Capitol Hill.

He watched the street signs, but he didn’t expect to be here long enough to learn his way around. He had to buy some information and deliver a message. That was all.

They were driving south on North Capitol Street when the driver in the taxi ahead blinked his directional signals. He pointed out the open window, turning all the way around to be sure Shayne understood, honked twice, and then pulled away. The redhead began looking for a place to park, and found one within a block. He locked up and walked back to the cemetery. He was a minute ahead of the time Trina Hitchcock had appointed with Bixler when she called him from the Miami airport.

Bixler’s instructions, delivered in a muffled whisper, had been for Shayne to meet him in front of the famous Saint-Gaudens statue, “Grief.” So that Shayne would recognize him, he had promised to carry a paperback copy of one of Michael Shayne’s own adventures, put into novel form by Shayne’s friend Brett Halliday.

The cemetery was a big one, crowded with memorial statues, fine trees and clumps of tourists, most of them busy taking pictures of gravestones. Shayne strolled toward the spot where the largest crowd had collected, and in a moment saw a great bronze figure of a seated woman, in a grove of evergreens. Bixler, on the fringes of the crowd, was nearly as conspicuous as the statue itself. Shayne could have identified him even without the paperback book, which he was holding awkwardly, so no one could miss seeing the front cover. He wore a three-button suit with all the buttons buttoned, dark glasses and a hard straw hat. He had a round face and a gray complexion, as though he spent his days indoors under fluorescent lights in air-conditioned buildings.

He saw Shayne at once. Shayne turned on his heel and walked away, letting Bixler overtake him.

“On the dot,” Bixler said breathlessly. “I like punctuality. It’s getting rarer and rarer. I was worrying about not recognizing you, but I knew who you were right away. You look exactly the way I expected.”

“You can get rid of the book now,” Shayne said.

“I’m certainly not throwing it away, if that’s what you mean.” He stowed it in his hip pocket. “I’m not finished with it. I thought afterwards it was a mistake, a bit too much, because somebody might notice it and look at you and do a double take. I don’t mind telling you I was flustered on the phone. This is a grand moment for me. I’ve always hoped our paths could cross someday.”

“Where do you want to talk?” Shayne said. “I could use a drink.”

“Oh we couldn’t go to a bar,” Bixler said. He had a slight lisp when he talked fast. “That’s the wortht pothible place to transact confidential business. I could suggest sitting in my car, but I want to be fair—you couldn’t be sure I hadn’t bugged it, could you? And the same could be said for your car, looked at from my point of view.”

Shayne’s ragged red eyebrows came together impatiently. “You don’t know Washington,” Bixler said. “Maybe you can get away with being slapdash in places like Miami, but this is the counterintelligence capital of the world. Maybe Miss Hitchcock didn’t tell you how much money is involved. One billion dollars.” The sum pleased him so much that he repeated it. “One—billion—dollarth.”

“I hope your price is going to be lower than that.”

“My word, yes! I’m not in that bracket, not by a long shot. I’m the low man on the totem pole, and to tell you the truth, that’s how I like it. Nobody’s been killed yet to my knowledge, but some violent people are mixed up in this and, with a billion dollars at stake, who knows what can happen? Let’s just sit on one of these benches. You pick, and then you can be sure there’s no recording device planted underneath it. OK?”

Shayne motioned to a backless stone bench. “Does everybody operate like this up here?”

Bixler looked around carefully before sitting down. “If they want to survive. I’m not afraid of being followed. I’m an old hand, and there isn’t a tail in the business who can stick with me if I really want to lose him. The thing I worry about is coincidence. That’s the trouble with going to a bar.
Anybody
can be in a bar. But nobody comes here but tourists.”

“Maybe you’d better show me what you’ve got on Maggie Smith and then we can talk about how much it’s going to cost.”

“Show you!” Bixler exclaimed. “I have nothing to
show
you. I wouldn’t think of making copies of confidential file material. This has to be entirely verbal. I thought I made that clear to Miss Hitchcock.”

“Then let’s hear it,” Shayne said, trying to be patient. “But if you don’t have any documentation it’s going to affect the price.”

“No, excuse me,” Bixler said. A group of nuns approached, and he remained silent until they were out of earshot. “You have your methods, and I won’t deny that they work, nine times out of ten. Even ninety-nine times out of a hundred. I wish I could be as free and easy as that, but I can’t. I’m on a payroll. I have to charge you—” he glanced at Shayne quickly—“eight thousand for what I’m going to give you, so let me fill you in with a little background to justify the amount.”

Shayne laughed easily. “Never mind.”

“What do you mean, never mind?”

“We’re in no hurry. I’m at the St. Albans. I might go as high as fifteen hundred, depending on how solid the stuff is, but that’s where it stops. Call me if you change your mind.”

“You’re in no hurry!” Bixler said as Shayne stood up. “Mr. Shayne, I’m sorry to have to say that I don’t think you understand this at all. Miss Hitchcock didn’t fly to Florida and back because she’s in no hurry. Why quibble?—it’s not her money, they’ll just charge it off to miscellaneous and collect from the government. Sit down. Please don’t argue. Make it six thousand.”

Shayne pulled at his earlobe, studying the anxious little man. “I don’t like to buy a pig in a poke.”

“I appreciate that. What I mean is, you’re not just buying an episode out of a file. You’re buying my know-how. Would you agree to that as a statement of principle?”

Shayne sat down. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Senator Hitchcock, Maggie Smith, Sam Toby. That’s the sequence. I know the Senator well. I worked over two years for his subcommittee. He was a very good boss. As a matter of fact, I was running down a lead on Sam Toby a year ago when I got the Civil Service Commission offer, at a big jump in grade. That’s not the coincidence it sounds, because we were always trying to prove something on that son of a bitch, excuse the expression. The man who puts Sam Toby out of circulation is going to be made. But it may not happen in my time. He’s cagy. He’s tough. He’s slippery as an eel. Well, I always comb the society columns because you never know what you’ll find. I read where Senator Hitchcock went to an opening at the National Theatre with somebody named Maggie Smith. A week later they were both on the guest list at so-and-so’s dinner. I said to myself, ‘Who is this woman? The name rings a bell.’”

“Miss Hitchcock says she used to work for Toby,” Shayne said, trying to hurry him up.

“Maybe she said that,” Bixler said. “I never did. I stick to facts and let other people draw the conclusions. I have a phenomenal memory for names. I fed Maggie Smith into the Bixler computer.” He tapped his forehead, to show where the Bixler computer was located. “Nothing came out. I tried Margaret Smith. Yes! I looked it up and verified it. A Margaret Smith applied for a job with a theatrical company that was going overseas for the State Department, and we ran a routine check on her. We turned her down on grounds of moral turpitude, and Sam Toby’s name was mentioned.”

“In what connection?”

“This was eight years ago. One of his clients—call it Company X—needed a decision out of a certain administrative agency. The key man on the decision was Mr. Y, and Mr. Y’s decision was no. Toby introduced Mr. Y to Maggie Smith. They went off on a joint vacation in the Caribbean. When they came back, Mr. Y canceled his no decision and made it yes. Those are the facts.”

“Is this all on the record?”

“It’s
in her file.
You can’t expect documentation on a deal like that. Toby didn’t get where he is by putting things in writing. The way we do—we get this kind of story on strict condition that the source isn’t named. But the agent gives the source a believability rating. This one was excellent.”

“I still don’t know what I’m buying,” Shayne said. “Eight years ago—it’s pretty stale. Your anonymous source was obviously trying to damage the woman. The whole thing sounds very flimsy.”

“How can you say it sounds flimsy?” Bixler exclaimed. “It wouldn’t stand up in court, but that’s not how it’s going to be used. You’ll notice she didn’t get that State Department job, and they didn’t have to give her a reason. They just said no. I’ll tell you what you’re buying, Mr. Shayne.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “The name of Sam Toby’s client. The date. The real name of Mr. Y. The name of the cruise ship and the cabin numbers. I don’t have to tell
you
what to do with that kind of information.”

“I don’t know my way around in this town,” Shayne said mildly. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Bixler said suddenly, “Would it be all right with you if I call you Mike?”

“Go ahead, if you feel like it.”

“And it certainly would mean a lot to me if you could see your way clear to call me Ron. Well—if I can be of any assistance, I want you to know it would be an honor. It’s true, I’m not exactly a novice.”

He drew a deep breath. “What we want to do is to give this Maggie Smith a scare she won’t forget in a hurry. Right? That Caribbean trip was so long ago she probably thinks it’s forgotten. When you broach it to her she’s going to be startled, to say the least. It goes without saying that she’ll make herself scarce as far as Senator Hitchcock is concerned. If you tell her to get out of town for a while, she’ll get out of town. That’s one way to use the material. What I say is, go on the offensive with it. Tell her that unless she cooperates you’ll call her to testify in open hearing and bring out the full facts about her old Sam Toby connection.”

“Unless she cooperates in what way?”

“By testifying that Toby hired her to see what she could get on Senator Hitchcock. It wouldn’t hurt her reputation too much. There are ways she could put it. After she’d gone out with him a few times, she realized she was doing the wrong thing, and now she wants to defect. This would be very damn good for National. You can see that. That’s why I don’t think I’m swindling anybody when I set the price at eight thousand.”

“Don’t forget I’ve only been here half an hour,” Shayne said. “National who?”

“National Aviation!” Bixler said, surprised. “They’re the unsuccessful bidders. I didn’t know you hadn’t been briefed. That’s where the eight thousand I’m charging you is going to come from. And that’s why—”