Chapter 10
Rourke started to say something, but Shayne cut him off.
“If it’s a question, save it. I want Pete to concentrate. I haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do with him.”
“You’re going to let me go,” Pedro assured him.
“I don’t think we can do that,” Shayne said seriously.
The pain was getting worse. After a time Shayne gave him permission to go to the bathroom and soak the hand in cold water. He sat on the toilet seat with his head on the washbasin.
“Angelo. You want to know about Angelo? I know the phone number, the phone number is all. Mr. C? He has big office, big shining desk. You go in. Sit down. He says what he wants. Work out, he says. Don’t get caught, but if you do forget who sent you. Mr. S., if he know I talk to you, he send fellows after me and they dead me dead. Before he do that, I want you get him. I do want that.”
As he moved his head, the hoop rang against the porcelain.
“Don’t talk for a minute,” Shayne said. “I’m beginning to get an idea.”
In a moment more: “O.K., let me have the hoop.”
Pedro clapped his hand to his ear. “That twenty carat gold. That my lucky thing.”
“Maybe it’ll bring us all luck. Take it off.”
“Mr. S.-”
Shayne took out the. 45. “Or I’ll shoot it off.”
Pedro began fumbling with the catch. He couldn’t do it with one hand, and Frieda came in to help.
Shayne called to Rashid in the other room, “Do you happen to have a cadaver lying around?”
Rashid laughed. “A cadaver? We do, yes, several in the freezer for the anatomy classes. I think one is being defrosted for tomorrow.”
“Would the students mind if they had to work on a body without one ear?”
“An ear!” Rourke exclaimed.
“We can cut off one of Pete’s,” Shayne said, “but I don’t think it’s necessary. Castle wouldn’t recognize it, but he ought to recognize the earring.”
“I see it!” Rourke said. “Mike, that’s without a doubt one of the grisliest ideas you’ve ever come up with. You’re going to cut an ear off a corpse and send it to-”
“Yeah, with Pete’s earring in it. I think it may work. Castle’s grandfather was Sicilian. That’s the kind of message a Sicilian understands-a lot more personal than a phone call.”
Pedro had been following this with quick turns of the head. “Yes!” he said. “You are genius, Mr. S. I gladly give you the earring, though I had it from my sixteenth birthday. He will think I am dead. I go to New York. I thought I would like to do that sometime.”
“Not right away,” Shayne said. “Rashid, I want to ask another favor. I’d like to have him disappear for a few days.”
“I can do that,” Rashid said thoughtfully. “A broken back, perhaps.”
“Wait!” Pedro cried.
“It won’t be necessary to break the actual back. A body cast, a shot every six hours to help against the pain.”
“Blessed Virgin,” Pedro moaned.
“He can use my bed,” Shayne said.
“No, for Jesus’s sake! Somebody else may come to dead Mr. Michael Shayne. Please. The fingers first. Then some faraway room.”
Rashid and Pedro left. Shayne asked Frieda if she would like a few days in the Bahamas.
“If you can take it over tomorrow, we can be sure it’s delivered. There’s an eight o’clock breakfast flight. ‘From Mike Shayne-Personal.’ Put a note inside-‘Stay out of Miami,’ something like that. Hire somebody off the street to take it in, and be very careful about that part. Now let’s do some guessing. When he sees my name on the wrapper, what’ll he think?”
“That’s it’s been booby-trapped,” Frieda said. “He’ll give it to somebody else to open.”
“I think so. Then Castle can’t wrap it up again and pretend he never got it. His people will know I’m making it a personal thing, and he’ll have to do something about it or lose respect. That’s the way they act in the movies, anyway, and he probably goes to the movies like anybody else.”
“Can I talk now, Mike?” Rourke said. “Ever since his name came up I’ve been choking on this.” He came around to the bottle. “I got it from Wanamaker. He was doing a story on the big concession empires-you know, the companies that sell hot dogs and beer at the stadiums and ballparks. He queried Sports Illustrated on it, and they said they were interested. And there are some tricky angles. Two or three outfits have everything locked up, nationwide. There’ve been rumors about mob connections, and that’s what Wanamaker was trying to develop. J. T. Thomas has the Surfside business. Wanamaker went all the way back and found out that J. T. Thomas-not the man, he died in the twenties, but the company-may have put up some of the cash Geary used to get control in the first place. Going even farther back, he found a reference to a couple of characters who were involved in a power fight inside the Thomas company. One of the names still rings a bell-Tony Castagnoli.”
“That’s been pretty well hidden.”
“It had to be, because Geary has been selling purity all these years. The concession deal is very one-sided, I mean one-sided against the track, according to Wanamaker, but hard figures are almost impossible to get. So he took it to Geary, to confirm or deny. Geary asked him not to pursue it, and offered him a phony research project that would pay a few hundred more than he’d get from Sports Illustrated if they bought the story, which they probably wouldn’t because all he really had was some twenty-five-year-old rumors. Well, if you can prove you never got any Geary money, you’ll help everybody else on the list. Wanamaker can claim he went on those trips in the best tradition of investigative reporting, to get close to the victim so he could cut him down. And the paper might buy it, and give him the job back. So if there’s anything he can do to help, he’ll work his ass off, and from the way it looks to me, you need all the help you can get.”
After immobilizing Pedro, Rashid returned to saw the cast off Shayne’s leg.
“That mended quickly,” he said. “A triumph for Western medicine. As for the arm, if you are going to do much moving, it will be better in a sling. I assume that for you the night is not over.”
“If you wake people up after midnight, they know it’s important. Don’t forget the ear.”
“It’s waiting. A nurse saw me insert the hoop, and she gave me a look of real horror. What is the sinister Asian up to now? I assured her it was merely one of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen when Michael Shayne is a patient here.”
The ear was wrapped in three layers of foil. Frieda accepted it with a grimace.
“I once had an offer to be office manager of an insurance company. Clean, respectable inside work. Sometimes I wish I’d said yes.”
Rourke was late for his middle-of-the-night radio show. Electing to continue with Shayne, he called in to tell them to give the guests another drink and put on a discussion he had taped the previous week with several Beach call girls and their dispatcher. Shayne was silent as they drove south on Collins, past the procession of gaudy hotels. He had accepted Rashid’s offer of a sling, and he was steadying the wheel with the back of his hand. Rourke glanced at his friend from time to time, but said nothing.
Shayne double-parked outside the Miami Beach police station. Rourke went in with him. The night sergeant looked at them with that special wariness Miami Beach cops always reserved for Shayne.
“I thought you were supposed to be in the hospital with a gunshot wound in the leg.”
“It was a knife wound in the arm,” Shayne said. “That station never gets it quite right. I want to talk to the guys who handled the Geary crash. Are they working?”
The sergeant, hesitating, glanced from Shayne to Rourke. “I guess that’s information the public’s entitled to have. Yeah, Parker and Hamzy. They’ll be off in half an hour if you’d like to stop back.”
“Find out where they are and we’ll meet them. Just a couple of questions-I was away when that happened.” The dispatcher put a call on the air. There was no immediate reply.