“Here’s the report of his arrest. A bare few lines, you see. October twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-eight. He’s described as a wealthy sportsman with a luxurious fishing lodge on the coast below Homestead, and it’s written in a way to give the impression that sex orgies among the rich were a commonplace there. Roy Enders was arrested on the complaint of a sixteen-year-old Cuban girl who had been his mistress for at least a year. It was cut-and-dried. Hell, he’d been living with her and she was under the age of consent. Normally, a man would get about one year suspended sentence for that offense. Enders got seven years.” Rourke thumped his fist down on the file and looked up disgustedly. “John Mason Boyd was the defense attorney, but what could he do except plead his man guilty? He never expected a wallop like that… and he’s been fighting behind the scenes ever since to get a pardon or parole for Enders.”
“What was the background?” Shayne demanded.
“It was all pretty damn well mixed up and we weren’t allowed to print a word of it.” Rourke scowled angrily. “First, you have to know who Roy Enders was. An American citizen who had gone over to Cuba in the early fifties and made his pile in sugar refineries. But he got disgusted with Batista and his police state, and he pulled out in about nineteen fifty-six. With a couple of million in cash, it was rumored, leaving lots more behind him in the hands of Batista. And he began backing any rebel group seeking to overthrow the regime. Not openly, of course, because our government frowns upon private citizens entering into that sort of political activity, but quietly and behind the scenes. He had this big estate down on the Keys, and it was supposed to be a sort of clearing house for rebel intrigues at that time. Then Fidel Castro began emerging as a leader and as the real hope of the Cuban revolutionaries. Nobody knows to what extent Enders financed him in the beginning, but it was probably pretty extensive.
“Anyhow, by the summer of nineteen fifty-eight, Castro was becoming a real menace to Batista, and our State Department just didn’t seem to know which way to jump. Half the time they were proclaiming that there was no Castro menace, and the other half they were admitting that he was scaring the pants off them. Our industrialists, with big financial stakes in Cuba and in Batista’s regime, put all sorts of pressure on Washington to suppress Castro.
“Of course, he was still just a bearded revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and few people thought he was a real menace. But Roy Enders had a private radio broadcasting station down on the Keys that was rumored to keep in direct contact with Castro’s group, and he was known to maintain a couple of helicopters that flew back and forth across the Caribbean landing supplies and reinforcements to Castro in his mountain hideout.
“Well, that’s the way things were in the fall of fifty-eight,” Rourke went on briskly. “Castro had control of no seaports, and about the only way he could receive munitions was by helicopter to his mountain hideouts. And pressure was brought to bear from Washington on our State authorities to halt Enders’ activities on Castro’s behalf any way they could. There was this under-age Cuban girl who gave them the lever they needed. He was solemnly arrested on a charge of statutory rape, and railroaded through to seven years in the state penitentiary. His fishing lodge below Homestead was closed up, his broadcasting station closed down, and I suppose his helicopters (which may or may not have been supplying arms to Castro) were grounded. Does any of that do you any good?” Rourke ended abruptly.
“I think it answers a lot of questions,” Shayne told him promptly. He paused, furrowing his brow in deep thought. “You don’t recall anything back in those days linking Captain Ruffer and his fishing boat, Mermaid, with Roy Enders… or with Cuba?”
Timothy Rourke hesitated for a moment, deep in concentrated thought. “N-o-o,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t think it ever… came up. I see what you mean,” he added. “The dates are about the same. But what has the loss of a fishing boat in a hurricane got to do with the arrest of Roy Enders a week or so later?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about that fishing lodge on the Keys and the helicopters that were supposed to be in contact with Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. What would be their source of the munitions they were supposed to fly to Castro?”
Timothy Rourke shrugged. “If there’s enough money involved, I guess you can find arms for sale without too much trouble.”
Unconvinced, Shayne said, “Yeh. There’s one more thing bothering me, Tim. This story of yours about Captain Samuel Ruffer surviving for three days at sea after the loss of his boat with all hands. Did you believe that story when you wrote it?”
Rourke paused to consider this question a long moment before he replied with a shrug. “It made good human-interest stuff. The tough old sea-captain in his late sixties emerged as a sort of Superman. Where the hell else do you think he had been during those three days following the hurricane if he wasn’t floating around on a life preserver?”
Shayne grinned and said, “I think maybe that’s something we ought to think about.” He paused thoughtfully. “That pair you named, who met Enders at the bus station with Boyd. Pug Slezar and Slim Yancy. Haven’t I seen their names in the papers the last few years?”
“They’ve been in and out of the news. At one time reputed to be mercenary pilots flying for Castro, and later they were both kicked out of Cuba, and they made some claims to being American agents employed by the C.I.A. Nobody knows who’s hiring whom in this whole mess,” Rourke went on bitterly. “Our government has half a dozen counter-intelligence outfits working out of Miami right now, with none of them knowing who the others are. All you have to do is whisper ‘Russia’ and all of them go into an internal tizzy. Slezar and Yancy were Roy Enders’ two helicopter pilots before he was arrested. They’ve never gone on the witness stand and testified exactly what they did for him. A couple of very hard-boiled yeggs,” Rourke ended wryly. “If they smelled an illegal buck I wouldn’t trust either of them as far as I could toss a cow by the tail.”
“What about John Mason Boyd, the lawyer?” asked Shayne.
“Him, I don’t know much about. He’s managed to stay out of the newspapers mostly. On the edges of some shady stuff, maybe, but what practicing attorney isn’t? He keeps his nose clean in public. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a fairly close personal friend of your old buddy, Will Gentry.”
Shayne said, “Yeh. Well, thanks, Tim. This has all been very helpful.”
“Wait a minute” Rourke grabbed his arm as he turned away. “For all this inside information, what do I get in return? What sort of track are you on, Mike? Has this got anything to do with that Russian pistol you were excited about this morning? What was it Molly Morgan called it… Lenski something-or-other?”
“There’s a tie-in,” Shayne admitted cautiously. “I think it’s going to start hatching some eggs by tomorrow morning, but right now I’m going home to sleep on it. You know you’ll be in on it, Tim, the moment anything starts to break. Hang around home tomorrow until I give you a ring one way or the other.”
“Okay,” Rourke said doubtfully. “It’s a date.”
And with that Michael Shayne left him, headed for his hotel as he told the reporter… and what he hoped would be a solid night’s sleep.