This has been hard to write. It’s taken me ages. Because of all my medication lately I’m as weak as a cat. But I’m nearly finished. I’ll make out somehow. And in case everything looks too ugly, I’ve saved up some sleeping pills, more than enough.
I hope I’ve learned something out of it all. I hope I haven’t hurt you too much. I say too much! I want to hurt you a little, because you know you’re a bastard. (Notice I didn’t say prick.)
And I suddenly think I should have been more mush-mouthed about some of the things I’ve said here, if you have to make it public. I hope you won’t, because I think I have everything taken care of, but if it gets out — any of it — I want you to use this letter in ANY WAY that seems right to you.
Shayne looked up. A cop was at the door.
“Mike, your car phone.”
“Yeah.”
There were only a few more lines.
Honey, I went to a double bill at the Warehouse and it was creepy. You may be right about dirty movies! I’m sorry about everything. DON’T LOOK FOR ME. I don’t know why I say that because I know you don’t want to.
The signature was a single typed initiaclass="underline" “G.”
CHAPTER 15
It was Tim Rourke on the phone.
“A kid just brought me the key to the bus terminal locker, Mike. Here I am where I told Gretchen I’d be, at nine thirty. I’m leaving now.”
“Wait a minute. Things are beginning to move, finally. You’ll get there ahead of us. Wait across the street. I’m bringing Will Gentry with me.”
“No media people, please. This is my story.”
“After that bomb in my car, let’s be careful about opening the locker.”
“I don’t insist on doing it,” Rourke said quickly. “I’ll let you.”
“If you see Frankie Capp coming or going, forget about the locker. Follow him. He has a fractured jaw — he’ll be easy to spot.”
He broke off and signaled Gentry, who responded to the urgency of the wave by moving more nimbly than usual. Gentry led the way in his official car, using his siren. Several blocks from the bus terminal, Shayne honked at him from behind and he cut the siren.
Rourke came out of a doorway. “So things are moving, are they? I’m glad to hear it, because the paper’s been trying to get me. They’re under the false impression that I know what’s happening.” Shayne took the key. Entering the terminal, he found the locker, one of a long three-tiered rank in a side corridor. Gentry hovered nearby, not watching Shayne but the people around him. Shayne stood well to one side when he opened the door, using a knife blade instead of his fingers. There was a carton inside. He was equally careful with the carton, examining it closely before cutting the tape.
It contained eight film cans.
“Well, well,” he said softly.
“What did you expect, store cheese?” Rourke said.
Shayne pulled out the uppermost can and read the label taped along its edge: “Domestic Relations, answer print, reel two.”
“Now who do we know with a thirty-five millimeter projector?”
There was one at police headquarters. Rourke left his car and rode in Shayne’s Buick.
“I’ve been patient, Mike? I’ve cooperated to the best of my humble ability? Just don’t forget I’m employed by an afternoon newspaper, and I have a deadline coming up. Did Tucker’s wife really work in a porno movie?”
He opened the top can and unreeled a short strip of the film. Shayne was changing lanes but he knew that something was wrong by the quality of the silence. Stopped by a red light, he glanced at the reporter.
Rourke pulled more film off the reel and held it against the windshield. “Somebody spoiled this. You can’t even see the separate frames. Overexposed is hardly the word.”
They were joined by Gentry in front of police headquarters, and they checked the other cans. All the film was a uniform dark purple.
“What the hell?” Rourke said. “Nobody’s going to pay money to see a sex film shot in the dark.”
“Don’t look at me,” Gentry said. “Look at Mike. He’s the expert on dirty movies.”
Shayne was examining the labels. He unlocked his trunk to compare them with the labels on the cans he had bought from Lester. They seemed identical — the same white tape and slapdash lettering.
“It must mean something,” Rourke said. “Who was Gretchen trying to fool — me? If she was going to use dead film, why bother to put anything at all in the cans? Or anything in the locker? Or send me the key?”
“She must have thought it was the real thing,” Shayne said. “Which means somebody else switched it on her. Let’s see if anything’s come in on Capp.”
The sergeant in charge of running down the names on Shayne’s list had recently been promoted from the street and was still the most conscientious man in the building. The call to pick up Frankie Capp had gone out to all city cruisers and the Highway Patrol. A Beach patrol car had checked his house and found his Cadillac missing from the garage. Maureen Neal had checked out of the Modern Motel at 7:10. Her rented car had been turned in at the Hertz lot at the International Airport at 7:55. The next flight to Los Angeles after that left at 8:30, but no one using the name Maureen Neal had been on board. The Los Angeles threesome, Rizzo and the others, were still on call. A demolition man named Swenson had been picked up at the Palm Beach airport and was being held there. Nothing had come in on the cream-colored Dodge with dealer’s plates, but they were looking. Congressman Pomeroy was still a patient in Jackson Memorial, but he was making a nuisance of himself with demands to be allowed to leave.
“You must know somebody at Jackson, Will,” Shayne said. “See if you can get them to stall. If they have to let him go, be damn sure you don’t let him out of your sight. You’ll want to know why, but I can’t tell you yet. It’s just a feeling.”
“Mike, this Pomeroy’s an important man—”
“I know it, and he may be the key to this whole thing, not Tucker. Let Tucker float. He’ll get in touch with me. Now I’ve got a date at the Warehouse. They’re testing me for a part in a movie. It sounds a little antifootball, and I haven’t decided to do it. This is just a suggestion, Will, and nothing may come of it, but give me twenty minutes with Baruch. Then it might be helpful if you showed up with three or four cars, using your sirens. Really come on screaming. And don’t walk in, bust in. Push everybody out of your way.”
“And let you do the talking?”
“Not necessarily. Give him the warning, and arrest him for conspiracy to commit murder.”
“Who’s been murdered?” Gentry said quickly. “Remember I came in on this cold about an hour ago.”
“Maybe nobody,” Shayne said, “and maybe more than one. Conspiracy to commit has a nice ring. I’m hoping if we hit him hard enough with it, he’ll start telling the truth. Which will be such a goddamn novelty I hope I can recognize it when it happens.”
Gentry wanted to pursue the possibilities, but Rourke told him: “You ought to know Shayne by now. It isn’t quite time to pull all the aces out of his sleeve.”
“Tucker, Pomeroy,” Gentry said. “There’s going to be real heat on this when it breaks.”
“That’s the deadline,” Shayne said. “We won’t be the only ones in a hurry.”