“Shayne. Where are you, Tim?”
“Going into the bus terminal,” Rourke told him. “She’s right ahead. There’s a garage on the roof. How come she dropped you?”
“She has a ten-o’clock date with the guy we’re after. She said she’d be back in an hour. How about the cop they gave you, does he seem OK?”
“So far, but how can you tell? When she parks, you want him to follow her?”
“Right. He has to be the one to do it. You’re supposed to be in the hospital with a fractured skull. Tell him not to lose her. This is our best chance, maybe our only one.”
“There she goes!” Rourke said. “Hold on.”
Shayne heard the roar of buses and other automobile noises from the other end of the connection. Rourke spoke in a low voice to the driver of the Ford. The toll operator cut in to tell Shayne she needed more money, and he put in another coin.
Rourke said, “It’s underway. She’s waiting for the elevator and Jamieson’s right behind her. He’ll call back on this phone as soon as he puts her in anywhere. I’m in touch with Power.”
“Let’s not tie up the phone, then,” Shayne said. “How far away are you?”
“Next block. A big hunk of concrete. You’ll see it.”
Shayne decided to stay in the arcade another few minutes, to give Michele time to get out of the neighborhood. He paid a dime to send five rubber balls tumbling into a maze of baffles and holes. As each ball dropped, a playing card lit up on the backboard. It turned out that Shayne had rolled a full house and won a stuffed panda, to his disgust. He gave it to a Puerto Rican girl who was watching the play, and returned to the street.
At the big Port Authority bus terminal on Eighth Avenue and Forty-first Street, an elevator took him to the parking garage on the top floor. Rourke, standing beside the Ford, saw him and waved.
The reporter grinned happily as he approached. “That hair, Mike. You could walk down Biscayne Boulevard and nobody’d know you.”
“How’s your skull?”
“The skull’s fine,” Rourke said. “It’s my belly that’s sore. You were supposed to pull that punch.”
“I wanted you to make a convincing noise. I thought you did it very well.”
“That wasn’t acting,” Rourke said sourly. “All I’ve got to say, it’s lucky I’m in top shape physically.”
Shayne exchanged an amused look with his friend, who had taken no exercise for years and who lived almost entirely on cigarettes, bad whiskey and delicatessen sandwiches. Some day he would probably fall apart. Meanwhile he wasn’t letting it bother him.
Shayne folded his big frame into the front seat of the Ford. Rourke came in beside him.
“That babe is really something,” Rourke observed. “I suppose you’re making out all right?”
“Within reason,” Shayne said shortly.
“She surprised me, you know? She’s got too much class for this job, like a stakes winner in a claiming race. What makes a doll like that tick? I’ll never know.”
“She wants to make a million bucks,” Shayne said. “Don’t ask me why. Where’s Power?”
“Downtown. He’s keeping a phone free. I don’t suppose you read the morning paper?”
“All about the sudden death of an ex-cop? Yeah, I read it on the ferry. There were a couple of Tim Rourke touches there I liked.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He reached into the back seat for a Daily News, which was folded open to an inside page. “And this one ran in all copies of all editions.”
Frowning, Shayne took the paper. It was a small item, alone on a page with a department-store ad and headlined, SPURNED COP SLAYS SELF. Sergeant Herman Kraus, 33, the police department’s chief property clerk, had been found in his Bronx apartment, his service revolver beside his bed, a bullet in his brain. He had been in the department nine years, a sergeant for three. He had served two years in the Army. He was survived by a married sister in Ashtabula, Ohio. Friends said that Kraus, a bachelor, had been despondent since becoming estranged from his fiancee. They had quarreled over her friendships with other men.
Shayne let out his breath in a soundless whistle.
“Yeah,” Rourke said. “Quite a coincidence. He’s the guy who handled the bookkeeping on the narcotics evidence. When an envelope went to court, he signed it out. When it came back, he signed it in. He had charge of the whole operation tomorrow. The key man, in short. This all comes from Power. One important thing he didn’t tell me. Apparently there’s a suicide note. I’m a friend of yours, so I must be reasonably kosher, but I’m also a newspaperman, and he’s keeping that in mind. But it happens I know a rewrite man on the News, I’ve known him for years. He told me about the note.”
“What’s in it?”
“Mike, you know the way the cops are when another cop knocks himself off. It’s usually not because of sweetheart trouble, and the lid goes on. They call in the department heads, and decide how much has to come out. Preferably nothing. Then they let it out with an eyedropper, one drop at a time. They’re saving that note till they see how it goes.”
Shayne read the uninformative little story again. “Nobody in his right mind would try anything like this tomorrow without an inside man. And my Michele is definitely in her right mind. Quite a coincidence is right.”
“That’s the impression I get,” Rourke said. “Maybe Kraus sold it to her, and then got cold feet at the last minute. Maybe somebody else found out about it and gave him the gentleman’s choice-suicide or a public jam.”
“Power can’t hope to sit on it forever.”
“No, but through tomorrow? The way I get it, and you never did start with A and go right through to Z, he wants the stickup to go off without a hitch. The wrong kind of newspaper story would kill it. It’s bad enough as it stands. If your babe has really been doing business with Kraus, she’s going to stop and do some hard thinking. What if he blew the whole thing to somebody before he pulled the trigger?”
Shayne considered. “Did it make all the papers?”
“Not the Times or the Trib. It’ll be in the afternoons. Oh. I see what you’re getting at. She didn’t see the News. If you can keep her occupied, so she doesn’t look at the papers-yeah. Now how will you manage that, I wonder?”
“Maybe I can think of something.”
Rourke grinned. “Is it too late to change places? You be Melnick, the diamond man. I’ll be McQuade.”
The phone rang. The reporter was wound up tight; he leaped at it and got it before the ring was complete.
“Rourke.” He listened for only a moment. “Tell it to Shayne. He’s right here.”
He passed the phone to Shayne. “Go ahead,” the detective said.
“Jamieson. I’ve lost her, and what am I supposed to do now?”
Shayne felt a sudden pounding behind his eyes. “What do you mean, you’ve lost her?”
“She’s in a building, and I can only cover one exit at a time.”
Shayne swore under his breath. “Where are you?”
“Downtown. We came down on the Eighth Avenue. She went in a bank on William Street, across from the Chase Manhattan. Geneva Credit and Deposit. That was at ten-twenty. It’s a funny bank, Shayne-you go in and there’s a kind of living room, with easy chairs and a fireplace yet. This senior citizen sitting at a desk with black cuffs. No sign of the woman. I told him I was looking for a place to cash a check and pulled the hell out.”
“How many exits?”
“One other I can’t see. But there are tunnels everywhere in this part of town. If she wants to leave me sitting here, God knows she can do it. She did some hanging around looking in windows before she went in. Whether she spotted me or not, I couldn’t tell you.” He added abruptly, “Here she comes.”
The phone clattered in Shayne’s ear. He looked at his watch.
“Get anything?” Rourke asked.
“An address. What’s Power’s number?”
Rourke told him. “That’s a direct line. He doesn’t want any news from you or me coming in through the switchboard.”