“Kill the series.”
Rourke stared at him. “You’re nuts.”
“You’ve written the same articles before, and what good did they ever do?”
“What good?” Rourke said excitedly. “They informed people. Told them what municipal politics are really like. A few of the worst abuses actually got corrected. All that extortion in the building trades — I blew that sky-high.”
“You’re saying there’s no graft or corruption in the building business anymore?”
“No, I didn’t say that. I sent a few people to jail. A couple of others got deported. Kill the series! Christ, man — who are you acting for?”
“Myself, as usual. You know already that I’m in a jam. If you don’t want to help me, the hell with you.”
“Mike, talk sense. It’s announced for ten installments. Today’s the third.”
“Stay home and call in sick. Then tell them you’ve lost interest.”
“Mike, if it’s that important… I don’t know, maybe I could work it—”
“And so they won’t give your notes to a rewrite man, I’ll take them with me.” He raised his voice to override Rourke as he started to speak. “I’ll keep them in a safe place. And I want your Mafia folders.”
Rourke’s hands shook. “Impossible.”
For a moment their eyes held. Then Shayne said wearily, “I knew you’d say that, but I thought I’d ask you.” He stood up. “I think I’ll use your facilities while I’m here.”
Rourke, in the habit of trusting Shayne, accompanied his friend to the men’s room.
“I know how you lean on that damn file,” Shayne said. “Have you ever considered it might do you good to get out in the world and start reporting things you see with your own eyes?”
“I’ve spent years building that file.”
“I know — people call you up from all over the country to get your opinion, and it’s great for the ego. But it’s all a fantasy. Guesses and hearsay, Tim. Somebody whispers something in a bar, and you pop it into the file. And those Mafia experts on the cops and the FBI. What you don’t seem to realize, they have a stake in the damn thing. They—”
And he slugged Rourke without warning.
His strange request had made the reporter wary. Trying to get out of the way of the blow, Rourke ducked into it. His nose collapsed in an explosion of blood. He grabbed at Shayne, his eyes hurt and uncomprehending. Shayne hit him again, spinning him back against the urinal. Rourke snatched the handle of the urinal as he came around, and it flushed. Shayne hit him once more as he began to slide, and that blow broke Rourke’s jaw.
Shayne caught him before he was all the way down, and worked him into an empty booth, where he wedged him into a corner, jackknifing his long legs so they couldn’t be seen from the outside. Then Shayne latched the door, stepped up on the toilet seat, and swung himself up and over.
Leaving the men’s room, he snapped his lighter and lit his cigarette.
People were used to seeing him in the city room. Nobody paid any attention when he sat down at Rourke’s desk and cranked the unfinished page out of the typewriter. He took the Mafia folders out of the file drawer. Then he slid a sheet of yellow copy paper into the typewriter and typed quickly: “IMPORTANT — call M.S. exactly at 8:00. Has information. Names. Careful, phone may be bugged. Must pay $250.”
He looked up Musso Siracusa’s phone number and added that to the note. He buried the sheet in one of the folders. Then he slid the folders into a large envelope and left the city room without hurrying.
8
Downstairs, he looked for Siracusa and the others. The Chrysler was not in sight, but the low-slung strongarm named Skeets was standing on the corner. Shayne passed him, swinging the envelope.
In an outside phone booth across the street, Shayne dialed the Daily News and asked for the city desk. When a voice answered, he said easily, “If you’re looking for your hot-dog reporter, you’ll find him in the last booth in the cafeteria john. Hurry it up, because he’s losing blood.”
Ringing off, he took out a felt-tipped pen and printed across the front of the envelope in block capitals: “WAIT HERE FOR CALL.”
Skeets was now against the building line a few steps away. Shayne walked out of the booth, leaving the envelope on the shelf beneath the phone. Skeets headed for the booth, feeling in his pocket for a coin.
The parking attendant brought out Shayne’s Buick. Shayne went out the lot’s side exit and had his operator dial the number of the phone booth. Skeets picked it up in mid-ring.
“Where’s Siracusa?” Shayne asked.
“Around the block. The goddamn fuzz is keeping him circling.”
“O.K. You see that envelope. Tell Musso to get back to Ponce de Leon with it in a hurry. Never mind about me for the time being. I had to put the slug on a guy, and he wasn’t looking too healthy when I left.”
“Rourke? You mean you dropped him?”
“I didn’t take his pulse. He won’t be talking for a couple of days, anyway. Let’s be careful. I may have picked up some heat on the way out. You people don’t want any part of this — it could be rough. I’ll find out how bad he’s hurt, and whether anybody’s looking for me. Give me twenty minutes. If it’s bad news, I’ll get a message to you. I may need help getting out of town.”
“Hey, talk to Musso, will you? He’ll be back in a minute. We were supposed to stick right with you, not let you pull anything.”
“I’ve got to hang up now,” Shayne said curtly. “When they see that envelope, we’ll all get a bonus.”
He broke off. He had crossed Miami Avenue and was driving west on 8th Street. He took out his flask and tossed it on the seat beside him. It was warm to the touch. An ingenious radio receiver, tuned to a little-used frequency on the citizens’ radio band, had been built into the bottom third of the flask. A signal broadcast on this frequency tripped a switch in the receiver and activated a coil which warmed the flask — and the cognac as well, making it undrinkable.
For this call, Shayne didn’t want to use his operator. He stopped and made it from a public phone.
“Shayne,” he said when a man answered. “Five minutes.”
After that he did some careful driving, playing games with the one-way traffic patterns around the County Courthouse and the railroad station. Then he picked up the North-South Expressway. He continued to watch the mirrors as he headed north, and swung off on Thirty-eighth Street toward the bay.
Six weeks earlier, a man named Hugh MacDougall had called from Washington to find out if Shayne would be interested in hearing about an assignment that carried a guaranteed hundred-thousand-dollar fee. To his surprise, Shayne’s answer had been a flat and immediate no.
The same day MacDougall phoned, Shayne had decided that he needed a change of scene and a complete change of pace. A woman who had been charged with first-degree murder, on the basis of evidence painfully accumulated by Shayne, had been found not guilty. After hearing the jury’s verdict, Shayne had walked to an airline office and bought two round-trip tickets to Hawaii. Back at his office, he was about to start phoning girls, to find one who wanted to use the second ticket. MacDougall persuaded him not to make those calls, and flew down.
Shayne knew his reputation. He had been a professor of criminal law at a New England university, and he had retained an academic manner, which combined agreeably with enthusiasm for his new job. He was executive director of the little-known Justicia Foundation. Originally established under the will of an ex-Attorney General, it had been fattened by grants from larger general-purpose foundations. Its stated aim was to advance the general welfare by financing innovative projects in the field of crime prevention. MacDougall’s grant program had been freewheeling and often wildly imaginative. In Denver, a Justicia grant had made possible saturation patrolling of a high-crime area, turning it overnight into a low-crime area. In San Francisco, another grant had financed a computerized system of closed-circuit-TV coverage in the principal banks, and San Francisco had quickly become known as a bad town for bank thieves.