“This is Jo Meister — have you met? Michael Shayne.”
She was some ten years younger than her husband, who had been fifty when he died. She was thinner than Shayne remembered. Her hair had been lightened and cleverly cut. The only times he had seen her had been on public occasions, accompanied by her husband, a big, bald man with a booming laugh. Her habitual expression then had been a self-effacing smile, as though she didn’t believe she belonged on the dais, but down at the less desirable tables among the common people. She hadn’t altogether lost the look, but she was moving in that direction. A few more months out of her husband’s shadow might turn her into a handsome woman.
Shayne said in a carefully controlled voice, “Our arrangement was that you were to be the only contact.”
“You know I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t important.”
“This has to be fast,” Shayne said, sitting down. “It’s a bad time for me to be off the scene. They’re on edge.”
“I can imagine.” MacDougall took a place at the opposite end of the sofa from the woman. “Two things, Mike. First, the girl you went to St. Albans with, Sarah Percival, was Meister’s girl friend the last few months before he died.”
“What?” Shayne exclaimed.
“She worked at the station,” Mrs. Meister said. “And when Hugh mentioned her name—”
“Wait a minute. How much do you know about what I’m doing?”
MacDougall answered. “In a way she’s the instigator of this whole thing. When Sherm’s money troubles started, he applied for a Justicia grant. Naturally, we were interested in what he was doing. Then he was killed. Jo seemed to think we had a kind of obligation…”
“Damn it, Hugh,” she said, “you know you encouraged him.”
“I thought he was performing a valuable public service. I still think so.”
Shayne cut the explanations short. “So long as you both understand that if anything leaks, I’m dead. I’ve got to get off the streets before the cops start looking for me.”
“The cops?” MacDougall asked. “Because of St. Albans? I thought that was taken care of.”
“This is something that just happened. Tell me about the girl.”
“Yes. The St. Albans police couldn’t find her, so I assumed she flew back with you. I vaguely remembered the name, and I checked it with Jo. I thought this was something you’d better know about, and I brought Jo along in case you had any questions.”
“Yeah — but make it brief,” Shayne said, looking at Mrs. Meister. “Are you sure they were sleeping together?”
“I’m not sure, but I think so. It’s a feeling I had, a dozen little things put together. I’m sure he had girls, as a general proposition. He must have, don’t you think? Outgoing, always ready to plunge into some new form of noisy activity. He was often away. I don’t say I enjoyed the idea, but I’m enough of a rationalizer so I think I understood it.”
“Can you give me anything more specific?”
“Just that whenever he said he’d be out of town and I checked, Sarah Percival wouldn’t be answering her phone. I smelled her perfume on his underwear. That’s an embarrassing thing to admit.”
“We went back and checked the payroll,” MacDougall said. “She got the job just after the anti-De Blasio campaign started, and the obvious question is, did they put her in there to keep track of what was happening? And if that proves to be the case—”
“I’ll have to watch my step. I thought I picked her up in a bar. Apparently she’s the one who picked me up. As I remember, the night Meister was shot, he was working at the station with his accountant. Was Sarah there?”
“No,” Mrs. Meister said. “But he’d reserved a table at Mario’s, a table for two. A call came in on his private phone. He went out a few minutes later. It’s possible that she made the call.”
“O.K. That’s the first thing you wanted to tell me. What’s the second?”
“That a New Jersey hoodlum named Bobby Burns is in town,” MacDougall said.
“We get hundreds of people like that every winter. The hotels live on them.”
“This doesn’t sound like a vacation. He has ten or fifteen men with him, maybe more. He had a small union foothold in one of the New Jersey counties — Hudson, I think — and he tried to expand. One of his people died of bullet wounds, and another disappeared, and Bobby was told to get out of the state.”
“What kind of guy?” Shayne said thoughtfully.
“Young and hungry, Mike. No capital of his own, not much in the way of connections. It’s known that De Blasio is under pressure, and wouldn’t this be a good time for an ambitious free-lance to move in and try to pick off a piece of a very rich market?”
“If he was crazy enough.”
“And won’t the De Blasios think it was Burns who set off the bomb in the St. Albans casino last night? I hope so.”
“All right,” Shayne said curtly. “I’ll keep it in mind, and I may be able to use it.”
“One other thing we should talk about, Mike,” MacDougall said as Shayne started to get up. “I know how you feel about this, but I’d like to come back to it. I think we should work out a system so you can give me occasional progress reports. Now, hear me out. I have connections all over the country. I’d like to think I’m contributing something. We’re off to an amazingly good start. You’re inside their lines, and you’re going to be picking up information all the time. I believe—”
“I know. If I get wiped out, you want to have something to show for your money.”
“That’s not what I mean at all. By working together—”
“I’m working alone on this,” Shayne said. “That’s the deal. You don’t want day-to-day information. The FBI has been getting that kind of junk for years, and a hell of a lot of good it’s done. We want to be able to prosecute a few people. Don’t expect anything on the Meister thing. But if you’re right about Burns, if he’s really trying to move in on De Blasio, there are going to be killings. I hope to be there when they happen, so we can go into court with some eyewitness testimony for a change. I’m also hoping I won’t be one of the victims.”
He turned to Mrs. Meister. “And that’s not such a far-fetched idea, so don’t talk about this at the hairdresser’s.”
“My God, Mr. Shayne! You must realize that I have every conceivable incentive to say nothing to anyone. Anything you find out that has a bearing on my husband’s murder — I know the dangers you’re running. I think it was wonderful of you to agree to do it.”
“I agreed to do it for a hundred thousand dollars,” he said, “and don’t hand me any bouquets till I’ve actually done something.”
9
He did some more circling before swinging over to the shore on one of the terraces in the low Thirties. He aimed his Buick at a garage door, and an electronic control opened the door for him.
A dark-haired young woman ran into the garage from the house. She was barefoot, wearing tight yellow slacks and a striped shirt. She sprang at Shayne and embraced him.
“Ugh,” she said, drawing back. “You really are grimy, you know that? Though there’s a certain haunting fragrance, not entirely disagreeable—”
Shayne laughed. “I’ll have to remember to take a shower.”
“I can offer you one now,” she said quickly. “A razor. I’d even be willing to wash that shirt.”
“I don’t have time, Liz. I need the boat.” He touched her cheek. “You’re looking healthy.”
“We’re all supposed to look healthy in this climate.” She gave him another quick hug. Her name was Liz O’Donnell. She had worked as his secretary briefly in the days when he ran that kind of office. Now she divided her time between writing children’s books and skin diving off the Keys. Shayne owned twenty-five percent of her boat, and he kept his diving equipment in her locker.