“He’s English. What did he say?”
“Oh, about this country, how bad we do with the black people, and Americans claim they stand for justice. He was juiced, it sounded like. I thought one of the sisters brought him in for a little jazz, and maybe she was planning to roll him, you know, but I don’t believe in that kind of thing. I don’t believe in going out of my way either, so I played possum and kept my opinions to myself.”
“Did you hear the other person say anything?”
“It was only a mumble-jumble. They went upstairs and he kept going on and on about the race question. Then he sort of grunted and somebody fell down. I dodged back inside. When I see that kind of trouble coming toward me I want no part of it. I heard some footsteps, but whether they were coming or going I couldn’t tell you.”
“Did you go up to see what had happened?”
“Climb those stairs? They’re too rickety. But a little spell later, a young sprout came skinning down with some things in his hand. I got the bottle and the watch and he dropped the shoes when I chased him. Now that’s God’s own truth, every last bit of it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mrs. Minnie Fish, and I can prove that because I’ve got some government mail right here.”
“All right, Mrs. Fish. You’ll hear sirens, probably, but don’t let them bother you.”
He returned to the hall. Letting a little light escape from his covered flashlight, he inspected the stairs and started up, keeping close to the sweating wall.
As he turned at the top of the stairs, he saw a shadowy bundle flung down across the nearest doorway. It was a man’s body, shoeless, with only one arm in a sleeve. Shayne turned it over.
Some of the tension lines in Little’s face had been smoothed out by death, and he seemed almost peaceful. His skin was the color of dead ashes under the faded sunburn. One of his hands still grasped the handle of a knife that had been driven into his abdomen at a steep upward angle.
Chapter 10
All the pockets had been rifled. A few British coins were scattered about on the floor. Little’s glasses had been partially dislodged. Shayne fitted them back, and straightened.
After a moment he went to the front window, where only a few jagged slivers of glass still adhered to the dried putty. Flattening himself against the wall, he saw the black Dodge still waiting. Somewhere overhead, he heard the beat of a helicopter.
He lit a cigarette, careful to keep the flare of the match from showing.
Clearly the tall man who had taken the Bentley had been Dessau, Little’s fellow conspirator. The keystone of the plan, as Little had described it, had called for a denunciation from Dessau, which would have permitted the Customs to seize the Bentley and Dessau to file for the $500,000 reward. Nothing of the kind had happened, and that had already caused Shayne to conclude that Dessau was hoping to raise more than $500,000. The Bentley, of course, was now very hot. He would want to pull out the gas tank as quickly as possible, so he could jettison the car. And as soon as he found that he had the right car but the wrong gas tank, he would believe that the naive scientist who had seemed so easy to fool had actually been a step ahead of him all the time.
So he would be back.
A boy and a girl, their arms around each other, came along the sidewalk and stopped in front of the building, their linked figures partially concealed by the chinaberry tree. The boy was trying to persuade the girl to come inside. When she consented finally, Shayne moved to the top of the stairs.
They came in laughing. Shayne chunked a hard piece of plaster down the stairs and growled, “Get out of here, fast.”
The couple jumped outside and hurried away.
Shayne finished his cigarette, beginning to feel the pressures. An alternative to waiting would be to look for Max Wilson, the black detective who was somewhere nearby, and arrest the men in the parked Dodge. He snapped his fingers silently. There was still too much he didn’t know; he couldn’t be sure of his reasoning.
Another car, a Mustang, pulled up ahead of the Dodge. Two men came out. One was ordinary height, and he seemed familiar to Shayne. The other was very tall, with a mincing, pigeon-toed walk. The shorter man spoke to the driver of the Dodge, and he and his tall companion came toward Shayne’s building.
As soon as they committed themselves to enter, Shayne moved back to the top of the stairs.
A lighter flared in the downstairs hall and was carried toward the missing rear door.
“That’s what the bugger did,” a voice said. “Walked right out the back.”
Shayne leaned forward, peering into the darkness. It was Jerry Diamond’s voice.
The other man swore viciously and kicked at a broken board. “I’ll kill him when I catch him, and I promise I’ll catch him. He had it all planned, the street lamp, empty building. We should have twigged.”
The unsteady flame returned to where Shayne could see it.
“Never mind that,” Diamond said. “It’s the next step we’ve got to talk about.”
“I wanted to crowd him over right away, you remember, as soon as I saw there was somebody with him. That wasn’t in the program. As soon as he went straight through the light instead of taking the left — But I was outvoted, remember. I want it on record.”
“It’s on record.”
“Now think, Jerry. You had one glimpse of the other guy. This Mike Shayne from the ship. Was there anything about the silhouette so we could rule him in or out.”
“I told you, it was as dark as the inside of a pocket. Little was in the way.”
“That’s it, then.”
“It’s still somewhere in Miami. What we have to do is make a connection, and work backward, work sideward. They have to be ad-libbing with some of this.”
“I don’t see it,” Dessau objected. “They switched tanks on the ship, right? That was the hard part. From then on it was downhill.”
“Do you think Little was acting when the Customs inspector passed him? That wasn’t acting. But wait just a minute now, maybe you’ve got something. Shayne could have worked it.”
“I thought you said the girl, Anne whatever her name is—”
“Not by herself. Shayne’s known in this town. We can find him.”
They were leaving. Shayne groaned heavily. The sound stopped them.
Groping in the darkness, he located Little’s body and loosened the knife, feeling a warm gush of blood over his hand. He worked the knife free, slid it in through the nearest door, and drew his own knife, the one he had used to cut up Diamond’s passport. He found the stomach wound with the point of the blade and rammed it home. He smeared his bloody hand over his forehead.
The men below were conferring cautiously.
“We’d better find out.”
Diamond disagreed. “Leave it alone. It can’t be Little. He’s gone.”
“Unless — you know, they wanted to get off without paying him. This would be a good place to do it, the best.”
“No, they wouldn’t leave him half conscious,” Diamond said.
“I’m going up and find out.”
A stair creaked.
“Pierre,” Diamond said softly but firmly. “I said leave it alone. Let’s not get ourselves sandbagged. This has to be something else.”
“I still say—”
Shayne tipped Little’s body to the top of the stairs and nudged it over. It somersaulted down, end over end, like a loose-jointed stunt man.
Dessau was on the second step from the bottom, peering past the flame of his cigarette lighter. The tumbling body struck him across the thighs and bowled him backward. The lighter flew out of his hand and went out. He landed on his back with a crash that shook a chunk of plaster off the ceiling above Shayne, narrowly missing him as it came down.