“How would they work it? They wouldn’t do anything crude, like putting transmitters in each phone.”
“Man, what are you saying? That the phone company would cooperate with government snoops? Our big mission is to preserve the integrity of the customer’s messages; and if some dirty person sneaks in and puts in a crossbar shunt, we don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Can you check?”
“Easily.”
He went back to his truck. Shayne stayed behind him and waited outside while he went into a fortress-like building on Second Avenue. He came out some minutes later, smiling.
“This is actually going to work. We tap in on the tappers. Why not? It’s practically legal.”
“Where’s their setup?”
“In Buena Vista, and I think it’s a street of two-family houses. That’s the easiest kind.”
He moved off in his panel truck, with Shayne behind him. They stopped in a residential neighborhood a block or two from the noisy swath torn through the city by the big north-south expressway.
Lewellyn disappeared between houses with a bag of tools. This was a quiet street, with little traffic. Cars were parked along both curbs. Lewellyn came back into view, unreeling wire. Where it crossed the sidewalk, he ran it into one of the transverse cracks and glued it down with a quick-setting adhesive. After carrying it into the back of his truck, he climbed in to check the installation.
“Couldn’t be clearer,” he said, coming back to Shayne. “If they were all as easy as this, I’d go into tapping full-time. Can you let me know by midnight if you want all-night coverage? I have to work in the morning. I can get somebody else or cut in a tape recorder and sleep in the truck.”
“I have your number. I’ll try to call you.”
Pelican Island, one of the man-made lozenges in Biscayne Bay off the Julia Tuttle Causeway, had been bought by Olson Enterprises and turned into an entertainment complex. After appropriate sums had been contributed to the campaign funds of office holders on both sides of the bay, its name had been changed to Oscar’s Island on the official maps; but everybody still called it Pelican.
It was an island dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. To rent one of the efficiency apartments or a room in one of the motels, it was necessary to be single. Marriage — the word itself was in disrepute here — was cause for expulsion. Naturally the entire operation was regularly denounced from all the pulpits within a hundred miles; but as Lewellyn had pointed out, everything that happened there also happened elsewhere, if less self-consciously.
The Pussycat Club, where Shayne hoped to find Olson, had been built with a vaulted glass roof that emitted light like a beacon for incoming airplanes. Its walls were of concrete, unbroken by windows, with the rough grain of the wood used in the forms still showing on the surface. The entrance was unobtrusive, without a sign or marquee.
Shayne parked and waited until a raucous party arrived in three taxis from the Beach. Several of the men wore badges in the shape of rubber plungers, identifying them as salesmen from the convention meeting in the St. Albans. Shayne joined them. He claimed an acquaintance with a plump, unsteady man whose true home, according to his badge, was Omaha, Nebraska. He was glad to acknowledge Shayne as an old friend, and they all went in together. The two guards inside the door, dark, smiling boys in suits, didn’t notice that the group had picked up a hitchhiker.
Inside, Shayne stopped at the long bar with his new friends and paid for a round of drinks. Then, a brandy glass in his hand, he moved on.
All the female help — and except for the guards all the help seemed to be female — were extraordinarily pretty and well filled out, wearing a minimum of clothing, cats’ tails and unfailing smiles. The murals were semipornographic cartoons by artists whose work appeared in Olson’s magazine. There was a poker room and a dice room, an amplified rock group, and a well-known girl singer. One person at each table, on an average, appeared to be enjoying himself. The others were waiting for the evening to run its course.
Shayne intercepted one of the lightly clad waitresses. “I seem to be lost. Which way to the man’s apartment?”
“Now what man you-all talking about?” she said, giving him a dazzling smile.
“Oscar. We’re old army buddies.”
“Sure enough? You better cut that out, because Oscar Olson never spent a single day in any army.”
“We had our own army. I’m not trying to bust in on anybody. I just want to send my name in so he’ll know I’m here.”
She shook her head, her smile undimmed. “You know that just isn’t possible. If he opened himself up to any old body who wanted to see that revolving bed, I mean he’d be mobbed.”
“Would money persuade you?”
“Certainly,” she said promptly. “It could get me in hot water, too; but I’m not fixing to stay in this job forever. For an old army buddy, I believe I’ll just charge you a miserable twenty-five dollars.”
“That’s fair.”
He counted out the bills. They disappeared in the pocket between her breasts.
“Thanks, honey,” she said. “Now you understand this is just going to get you an interview with one of the secretaries.”
“How much will she cost me?”
“They’re on another level. They don’t take tips. I had a chance to audition for it, but you really have to dig the concept, and I’m not ready to commit myself yet.”
She went off with a flirt of her behind. Presently she was pointing him out to a tall, dark-haired girl in pink-tinted glasses. She was equally gorgeous but more conventionally dressed. She bore down on Shayne, her unfettered breasts like cannon beneath her loose shirt. She was the first Olson employee Shayne had seen without a smile.
He spoke first. “I don’t know him. I’m Michael Shayne, and I’m working for Marcus Zion. That doesn’t automatically make me an enemy. I’m not part of the proxy fight.”
The girl gave him a close inspection. She had gray eyes and looked alert and competent.
“Did you tip her?”
“Yeah, twenty-five bucks.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to find suitable girls. What do you want, precisely?”
“There’ve been a few late developments I don’t think he knows about. She told me not to offer you money.”
“She was right. Hold still.”
Her hands slid under his arms and patted him for weapons. Stooping in such a way that he could see her breasts down to and including the nipples, she ran her hands down both his legs.
“Lucky I’m not ticklish,” he said. “I’ve got a gun in the car if you think I ought to take one in with me.”
She came erect and said coldly, “Oscar doesn’t like private detectives. And that means anybody who works for him doesn’t like private detectives. Michael Shayne. Didn’t I read a piece about you in one of the news magazines?”
“A couple of years ago. It was eighty percent wrong. I’m not that good.”
“I’m Mandy Pitt. Tell me about these late developments.”
“What’s the point?” Shayne said impatiently. “I’m not going to bite off his nose. He’ll want to hear this, I promise you.”
She shook her head. “It goes through me first. That’s the way Oscar wants it to be. He gets certain shots in the evening, and one of the effects is to make him drowsy.”
Shayne broke in. “An actress named Kate Thackera has been offering him a deal on Consolidated proxies. She was killed in her hotel room about an hour ago.”
Mandy Pitt’s breasts lifted as she drew a sudden audible breath, a quick gasp.
“Killed!”
“And tell him I was with her most of the evening. We had a long confidential talk. His name came up a few times.”
She breathed out slowly. “You’re right; that’s news. But why do you think he’ll want to hear about it tonight? He has a hard time getting to sleep.”