“Teddy Sparrow! What’s he doing there?”
“The question I asked myself. You understand there’s a block on the gate and the fire truck is the only vehicle they’ve allowed in. Teddy must have been there when the fire started. As soon as I recognized him I got on the phone and left word at various places. Half an hour later he walked in, looking, what’s the word, sheepish.”
Shayne studied the picture. Teddy Sparrow was a private detective from Miami, friendly and eager but totally inept, with a real instinct for the wrong guess and the wrong move at the wrong time. He was tie-less, streaming with sweat. There was something heavy in the side pocket of his jacket. Shayne brought the picture closer to the light.
“It’s a camera,” Rourke said. “He didn’t want to admit it, and he didn’t want to let me have the film. We had a big argument about it. I won.”
He brought a sheaf of glossy photographs out of the envelope. Shayne pulled them toward him.
“What did you do, send him out to follow Jackie?”
“Hell, he can handle a simple follow-job,” Rourke said uneasily. “He’s in the business. I had to be here to take calls.”
Shayne drummed his fingers on the bar, and Rourke said more defensively, “I know what you’re thinking, but if I was doing it I’d do it worse.”
“Was he working for Maslow?”
“He wouldn’t admit it. You can lean on him when he gets back.”
Shayne looked at the pictures. The first showed McGranahan in bed with two girls. His face showed clearly in the middle of the tangle, obviously delighted with everything that was being done to him. In the second picture, Grover Kendrick was accepting a package of money from Phil Noonan, the Savings and Loan Association lobbyist. Other packages had spilled out of an open dispatch case on the bed. The next two pictures were different views of the same transaction. In the first, Noonan was holding out the money and Grover was reaching, in the second Noonan had pulled back his hand and Grover was riffling the bills.
“I used a magnifying glass in the darkroom,” Rourke said. “The top bill in each package is a hundred.”
The final picture showed Anne Braithwaite and an unidentifiable man. The man was behind her. Her handbag was open on the bedside table. Somebody had drawn a white circle around it.
Rourke explained, “You can’t see it in a five-by-seven, but with a magnifying glass one of the things that shows up is a hypodermic syringe. They had something for everybody.”
“What was the light-source, infra-red?”
“Probably. But the girl in the darkroom said she thought it looked like a special kind of fast film. Surveillance film, it’s just been put on the market-with starlight you get a print of studio quality.”
The phone rang at the end of the bar. Rourke pushed off and answered it, and a moment later held it out to Shayne.
“McGranahan wants you, Mike.”
Shayne took the phone.
“There you are finally, Mike. I’ve been calling around.”
“Is the party still going on?”
“The party is definitely not still going on. I lost my pants in the fire, for one thing, and I’ve had to listen to some pretty thin humor about it, some pretty thin humor. I was changing to bathing trunks to go for a swim when the fire broke out, but nobody seems to believe me.”
Shayne laughed. “I don’t believe you.”
“Mike, that’s not friendly. Damn shame about Maslow. I never liked him, but I think I’ll miss the creepy son of a bitch. So he turns out to be a lush. It encourages me.”
“Did he ever try to blackmail you, Matt?”
There was an instant’s silence, and McGranahan said, “Funny you should ask that. Now I remember why I wanted to talk to you. Call off the pressure. I may look like a good-natured slob, but I can be nasty. Anybody who thinks he can capitalize on the indiscretions in my past record is welcome to try.”
“Who’s pressuring you?”
“Colleagues of yours. This very tough voice, vote nay or else. The hell with the bunch of you, is my message! Most of those things he mentioned my wife already forgave me for. You’re not too up-to-date.”
“I’ve just seen an up-to-date picture of you and two girls, but don’t worry about it. Vote as you please.”
McGranahan hesitated. “You mean that?”
“Absolutely. And if you get any more calls, tell them Mike Shayne says to go back to the Caribbean where they own the cops. They’ll get in trouble if they hang around here.”
“You do mean it.”
“How much did Sam pay you, Matt?”
“I deny it. Sam who?”
“I heard ten thousand.”
“Ten thousand? Ten thousand dollars? You’ve got inflated ideas, not that I’m admitting anything. In the days of the pari-mutuel bill, that was different. Those people were spenders. And that’s all on the subject! Goodnight.”
Teddy Sparrow came in while Shayne was returning the phone to its cradle. The fat detective stopped in the middle of the floor, his eyes down.
“Well, I’m sorry to say I lost her.”
“I’ve lost plenty of tails at this time of night,” Shayne said. “How did it happen?”
Brightening slightly, Sparrow moved his bulk to the bar. “Something tall and cool, Tim, with gin in it. I don’t see how you keep these hours. All I did was blink once and they were gone. That never happens when I get my regular eight hours.”
Sparrow waited till Rourke prepared a drink, and then opened a notebook. There was too little light to read what he had written in it, and in the end he used a flashlight.
“First thing subject did, at four-eighteen A.M., was make some phone calls. She had to hunt up the numbers in the book. Then she got a black Ford, license number MK 361, out of the hotel garage. Drove to the vicinity of the Skyline Motel. So long as we were moving along I was fine. Then we had ten minutes of sitting still, and that’s when the trouble started. You came out of an upstairs room with a dame, Mike. White-haired, terrifically stacked-but hell, you know that. I thought my subject might tail you, but no. At four fifty-five A.M. a nice dark-green Eldorado came cruising along, three guys in it. She winked her lights. There was carefulness on both sides. They drove past, they turned around and came back. One guy got in with her-”
“Do you know what Al Luccio looks like?” Shayne said.
“Who runs the big casino in the islands? Was that who? Short little legs, walks like an ex-pug. Snazzy sideburns. This sort of pot on him.”
“Yeah. And that’s when you went to sleep?”
“I didn’t exactly go to sleep. I kept snapping out and drifting back. I honestly don’t understand why I didn’t hear the motors when they left. You’d think on a quiet night like this, but it was like both cars vanished. Go ahead and say it. I goofed.”
“No, you made a connection for me,” Shayne said bleakly. “The girl I dropped at the hotel was definitely the girl who had the talk with Luccio?”
“I can swear to that, Mike.”
“How long have you been working for Maslow?”
Sparrow cut his eyes at Rourke. “We were supposed to keep it confidential, but I guess it’s out now. Six months or so? Off and on.”
“Did you like him?”
Sparrow looked surprised. “I can’t honestly say I did. He had a tongue like a razor. Something like this tonight, where through no fault of my own things didn’t go as planned, he’d still be cutting me up twenty-four hours later. He was no joy as an employer, and the money wasn’t that good, either. But he was a rising man, I had hopes it would lead to something.”
“Did you know he was blackmailing people with the material you collected?”