Shayne handed back the photograph. “Was there a letter in the envelope?”
“A note about theater tickets. I phoned a contact of mine in Nice and asked him to look into it, and I got the answer in Bermuda. Anne Blagden has been Sam’s girl for the last year.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Sam? Very relaxed. Nice tan, about six feet one. A good build, black hair, an up-and-down wrinkle on his forehead between his eyebrows.”
“Is this important enough to him so he might be here in Miami?”
Diamond reflected. “Ordinarily I’d say no. But I really stung him that time, and if he could lever me out of this, and make money on a zero investment, I’d say yeah, he might come over. He has the Hemingway virus. Flies his own plane, shoots lions in Kenya — that kind of schtick. Tell me why you ask.”
“He sounds like the guy who met Anne at the ship.”
“Then damn it, Shayne,” Diamond said excitedly, “why don’t we take him? There’s eighteen thousand in that package. I know you said twenty, but eighteen was all we could come up with. Get the tank back for me and I’ll multiply that by three. That’s a promise.”
“Let’s talk some more about Geller. Does he kill people, or only lions?”
“You mean was he the third man in that fight — you, Little, and whoever? I doubt if Sam Geller in person, all by himself, would go into that building at that time of night. Not when you can buy the service for a thousand bucks.”
“And while we’re on that subject,” Shayne said, “how did Anne Blagden make it as far as Miami?”
“It does seem strange, doesn’t it? We knew who she was from Bermuda on. But I only had one man with me. You remember we made a half-hearted attempt to mug you after that poker game. Mug you, Shayne — we weren’t trying to bury you at sea. We wanted to stow you away in a safe place for twenty-four hours. And when that fell through, my guy sat in Anne’s cabin waiting for her to come in.”
“She must have come in to pack.”
“I suppose she did,” Diamond said dryly. “I can’t say for sure, because my man hasn’t turned up yet.”
“Quite a girl,” Shayne commented.
“So it seems. She stayed close to Little all day, and he was already shaky enough. If she hadn’t been around to give him that big kiss when we got in, God knows what would have happened. I wanted him to drive that Bentley onto American soil with his own hands and feet.”
“How many people do you have now?”
“Just the four. I can get more.”
“That ought to be enough. Do you trust Dessau?”
Diamond’s expression congealed. “I don’t trust anybody all the way. Why?”
“I’m thinking of something Little told me. It doesn’t fit his other story about being an innocent victim of evil smugglers who borrowed his car, but by that time he’d stopped trying to be consistent. Dessau may have been the only real criminal Little ever met, and Little was puzzled by him. He seemed so ordinary in many ways. Finally, Little thought, he found the key. Dessau wanted to be number one. He wouldn’t take orders or suggestions. I’m not trying to make trouble, you understand — I just want to be sure where I am.”
“Shayne—” Diamond began, his eyebrows lowering.
The phone clanged. Shayne slid the paper-wrapped parcel out from under Diamond’s hand and stood up.
Diamond said, “I assume you’re going to let me listen in on this one.”
“Absolutely. We’re partners, aren’t we?”
Chapter 12
The phone clanged again, and Shayne picked it off the hook. He saw Max Wilson get up without hurrying and move toward the table Shayne and Diamond had left, to beat the busboy to Diamond’s coffee spoon. Diamond squeezed into the doorway of the booth, looking tense.
“Mike?” Gentry’s voice boomed. “Just heard from the Coast Guard. They haven’t picked up a thing, and they want to know if it’s all right to come in. They’ve covered a lot of territory, all the way up to Pompano.”
“I guess we can knock that off,” Shayne said with regret. He glanced up at Diamond in the doorway. “Do you have anything on the passport picture?”
“No, and unless you can supply us with fingerprints to go with it, I don’t expect we will. Mike, I want to talk about something else. We’ve got a corpse. And we’ve got a witness named Minnie Fish. The corpse has a letter in his pocket from the president of an American aerospace firm that even I have heard of. The witness gives us a description of somebody who sounds like you — the hair, the shoulders, the same striped suit I saw you wearing on TV earlier this evening. There was blood on this man’s face, according to the witness. There’s going to be a certain amount of attention paid, Mike.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Shayne said.
“And add that to a couple of things Tim Rourke has passed along, and I think it’s time for the police to start playing this by the book. I need the answers to a few questions.”
“I’ll stop by as soon as I have time,” Shayne said. “Right now I’m tied up.”
“Mike,” Gentry said patiently, “I want you to rearrange your schedule and spare the time. Usually I let you play by your own rules, and by and large I think it’s worked out well. You’ve done various things I’m glad I didn’t know about in advance. Ordinarily I’m glad to sit in my office reading Playboy while you’re out on the streets taking your lumps. My big ambition is to get through another dozen years with my skin intact, and start collecting the pension.”
“I’ve got to hang up now, Will. Go home and relax. I’ll call you if I get a chance, but don’t wait up for it.”
Gentry’s tone sharpened. “Mike, listen. When a British scientist who’s just been hired by a big defense contractor ends up knifed in a black neighborhood, that’s news, by any definition. The FBI has a sneaky habit of going back over the early hours and seeing what the local people were doing in a big case. If I have to tell them that a certain private detective, who also happens to be a duck-shooting friend of mine, told me to go home and he might call me, I’m going to be given some funny looks. And it could be more than looks. I’ve got to know what’s going on. I happen to mean that.”
“Then find out for yourself,” Shayne said angrily. “And I happen to mean that. I’m getting tired of doing your work for you.”
Gentry was slow-moving and slow-speaking, but there was nothing slow about his mind. He had a long-standing working relationship with Shayne, and Shayne had never before used that tone. After only a second’s pause, Gentry picked up the cue.
“Goddamn it, Mike! That publicity you’ve been getting has gone to your head. You don’t own this town!”
Shayne said evenly, “Don’t push me, Will. I’ll come in and see you when I’ve got something to bargain with. Meanwhile, why don’t you get off your fat ass and come out where the action is? You might even enjoy it.”
“This is the only warning you’re going to get from me—”
“Will, you begin to worry me. Why not retire now and make room for somebody who can do your job?”
He broke the connection. “Look up the number of the Opa-Locka Airport,” he told Diamond.
“The—”
“Opa-Locka Airport,” Shayne repeated with a peremptory gesture.
He dialed a random digit, to block incoming calls. Max Wilson strolled up to the cashier’s counter, paid his check, and went out with a toothpick between his teeth. When Diamond read a number from the book, Shayne closed down the phone to get a dial tone, and dialed.