“Yeah. I didn’t know you’d moved on into dope.”
“That was Jane’s contribution. She doesn’t believe in drinking.”
“It’s the worst thing for you,” she said. “Like you, Tim — your eyes are bloodshot; you have no muscles that I can see; you’re terribly, terribly underweight…”
“I know,” Rourke agreed affably, producing an unopened pint of bourbon from his side pocket. “How are we fixed for glasses? If you’ve only got one, I’m willing to drink from the bottle.”
“Go ahead if you want to poison yourself.”
She rummaged in her purse and brought out another joint. Shayne came back from the bathroom with two glasses. Rourke poured and took his glass to the foot of the occupied bed, where he sat down gingerly.
“Mike Shayne, all right,” he said. “You started the night with one girl; and when that didn’t work out, you moved across the hall.”
“Jane’s down on vacation, and she hasn’t met many people,” Shayne said, “so she decided not to scream.”
“You threatened to knock out my teeth, if I remember,” she pointed out. “You were leaving wet footprints on the carpet, and you looked pretty murderous. Knots of muscle at the hinges of your jaws. Naturally I didn’t scream; and on the whole, I’m glad now that I didn’t.”
She gave Shayne a relaxed smile, which he returned.
“Jane’s a gym teacher — excuse me, a phys ed teacher — and the only other thing I know about her is that she gets queasy if you mention blood. It’s going to be hard to tell you what happened without doing that because there was a lot of it.”
“I’m better now,” she said. “Blood. See — I can say it.”
“Who was she; who was she?” Rourke said impatiently. “I thought you were in such a hurry.”
“Kate Thackera. An actress.”
“Did you say Kate Thackera?” Jane exclaimed. “I’ve seen every picture she ever made.”
“A bomb went off in her face. Have any of the demolition people got here yet?”
“They wouldn’t let me in, Mike. I had enough trouble getting off the elevator.”
Shayne swirled the bourbon in the hotel tumbler, drank it at a gulp, and waited for it to hit him. He was still too restless to sit down.
“You’ve always done a lot of complaining about how I don’t tell you things as they happen,” Shayne said. “I keep it all to myself so I can tie it up in a neat package and throw it at somebody.”
“That’s your pattern, man. And it’s infuriating, believe me. Don’t tell me you’re about to change the tactics of a lifetime.”
“I read that you’re covering the Consolidated-Famous story. You must have done some advance work on it. At this point, you probably know more about this than I do.”
“Consolidated-Famous. Kate Thackera. Keko Brannon. This is heady stuff for a newspaperman. Do go on.”
“And we mustn’t forget the other big event of the day: Larry Zion’s accident on Interstate 95.”
Rourke leaned forward in growing excitement. “That red convertible. Was that Thackera?”
“That’s one of the few things everybody agrees about. They don’t agree about what she was up to. She pulled up alongside at eighty or ninety miles an hour and pointed a pistol at him. She said she wasn’t really trying to kill him, she was only trying to convince him that she was crazy enough to kill him. She tried to explain that there’s a difference. He has a bad heart, which nobody’s supposed to know about. She knew about it because he had the heart attack in her bed. To the Zions, it looked like a murder attempt which came pretty close to succeeding. He ran into an exit abutment. That isn’t the kind of activity the heart doctors recommend.”
“Did anybody tell you why she did all this?”
“She wanted the lead in The Last Buccaneer. If you read the movie page today, you know about it. The director wants her; and according to Marcus, he’d have enough clout to get her in if Larry were out of the way. By out of the way, he didn’t mean in a coma or multiple traction. He meant dead. If this all sounds very unlikely, all I can say is that these seem to be unlikely people.”
“Who’s your client?”
“Marcus. Larry had recognized Kate, and now they were both going to be gunning for each other. If I’m moving too fast for you, ask questions. She tried to make me believe she’d given up, but there was a glitter in her eye when she said it. She was thinking in terms of giving me so much sex and bourbon that I’d fall asleep, and she could sneak out. If that didn’t work, she would have tried some other ploy in the morning. My game-plan was to stay awake and get her into my car after breakfast, handcuff her to the dashboard, and keep driving.”
“And instead of that, you lost her.”
“I lost her,” Shayne agreed bleakly. “The bomb was planted in the room before I got there. Maybe I should have spotted it; I don’t know. It was camouflaged in a gift package of bourbon. How many people could have known that Old Grand-dad was her favorite brand? She didn’t think there was anything funny about it, and neither did I. Do they still have that same jerk doing bomb work here on the Beach?”
“Sergeant Lovejoy. Head of the bomb squad,” he explained to the girl. “He only has one finger left on his right hand, and people give him plenty of room when he works.”
“Ugh,” Jane said. “You guys have nice friends.”
“It’ll take him hours to figure it out,” Shayne said. “Maybe you can help. There are little scraps of red paper scattered around, and there was a gold label on the package. She had her own bottle. We finished that first. She made a couple of passes at opening the hotel bottle, but she wanted to be sure I’d help her drink it. I was leaning over getting ice when it blew. Thirty seconds later and I would have been in the same bed, or sitting on it. So that gives me a personal incentive.”
“It sounds simple, Mike. Larry Zion. Retaliation. You don’t try to kill Larry and stay rich and healthy.”
“He’s been in the hospital. I know that doesn’t mean anything — he could have gotten it underway as soon as he heard she was in town. She’d already threatened him. Marcus made sure I’d catch all these implications. However…”
He had left his pants in the bathroom. He brought back the eleven-year-old gatefold and showed it to Rourke, who recognized it at once.
“Hey… with the pubic hair, proving that Keko wasn’t a natural blonde. I remember it well.”
Shayne repeated Kate’s story of how the magazine had come into her possession.
“What was she doing — blackmailing somebody? Who knows? I think I’ll have to show it to Olson and see if he gulps and changes color. But first, I need a quick briefing on this proxy fight.”
“How quick? There are lots of angles.”
“Quick. These are important minutes before they sort out what happened. I left most of my clothes in the back of the closet, and some nosey bastard is going to notice them sooner or later. I was with her in the bar downstairs. That’s going to be reported. I was seen coming out of the room after the explosion. As soon as they put these items together, I’m going to be in demand and I won’t have room to maneuver. What do the experts think? Does the Olson slate have a chance to win?”
“Experts? What experts? The guys at the paper are as mystified as anybody. There are so damn many scattered holdings, nobody really knows. The Zions together have something like twenty-eight percent. In ordinary circumstances, that would be more than enough to give them working control. But Olson’s been buying for a couple of years through different kinds of fronts and nominees, and some of that was tricky and possibly illegal. The SEC and the Internal Revenue are both interested. He’s put together a pretty impressive coalition — TV money and so on. Both sides have been making the usual accusations…”