“Aah-I was feeling lousy, Luis. She’s pathetic. I snowed her once at a dance, and I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since. It wasn’t her fault that Watts wanted to make himself a dirty buck by turning me in. I could have mailed it to her, but they might have traced it to me. This way was better.”
“It isn’t good. If you go to the trouble of killing somebody, the least you can do is be quiet about it afterward.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Slater said wearily. “Don’t try to act innocent with me of all people, Luis. But he was killed because of something I’d done for money, and all of a sudden that dough wasn’t any good any more.”
“How much did you give her?” the Camel sneered. “Half?”
“I wanted to give her the whole goddamn thing, but when I came right down to it, I couldn’t. I didn’t count it. I just pushed it in the mailbox. Maybe it wasn’t even half.”
“But this is weak, Paul. Very, very weak. Oh, I am quite sure you did it. It is too absurd to be a lie. But I do not think it would take an hour to leave some money in a fat lady’s mailbox. No, I suggest that you felt generous to this creature because you knew you were about to rob me of a matter of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”
Powys stirred. The redhead looked at him quickly, and the Englishman made a face to show that the sum impressed him.
The Camel went on. “We are clearing the ground. Now this sudden midnight trip by chartered plane. Your mother is sick?”
His voice was thick with sarcasm, and Slater said defensively, “Maybe she’s not so sick I couldn’t have gone up tomorrow. But my wife’s been putting pressure on me to straighten up. You’ve been putting pressure on me to take one more trip and make enough to retire. At the same time I’ve been getting the pressure from another source you may not know about. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, not that it matters. Martha is a good judge of character. She knew that if you people put on one ounce more of that pressure I’d break. And if that happened, if I took one more wrong dollar, she said she’d leave me. I’ve played around a little, sure, but I worship that kid, Luis.”
“True love,” Alvarez said. “I honor it. But please continue. You expected me to come to see you and urge you once again to be sensible and make some money. And you were afraid you would agree?”
“Well, hell,” Slater said uncomfortably. “I know my limitations. So I thought this cable about Mother was a god-given opportunity.”
“God-given,” the Camel sneered, “but perhaps arranged by someone on earth, eh? I will tell you, Paul. It is no news to me that you have begun to shake and shiver. A little of this pressure you speak about, applied by policemen, and I have feared you would fall apart. When you are nervous, you make me nervous. It is true, I want you to go once more. I have been working up to this one for a long time. And this knock on the head seems to me to fit, Paul. You have been thinking perhaps yes, perhaps no. When you decide at last, you do not choose the sensible, honest way, but the foolish, the dishonest. And why? You are angry at me for this so-called pressure. It will be the last time, you tell yourself, and never again, if you do it this way, will you have to make such an unpleasant decision.”
“That’s pretty cheap psychology. And it’s wrong.”
“This we will learn. Because of one thing I am certain. You will find out tonight what is meant by pressure, and I think you are right-you are not the type to stand up.”
“No. No. But don’t use any muscle on me, Luis. On me or my wife. At the same time I’m not a moron. When you pulled me off the plane and said you had Martha, you really jarred me. I would have done anything you said. But then I stopped to think. Consider a possibility, Luis. What if I didn’t steal this dough? Just consider it, that’s all I ask. How can I convince you, by swearing on the Bible? You probably don’t even have a Bible. To you it’s ABC. All I have to do is get up the dough. But I can’t get it up if I don’t have it, can I? So I knocked my few brains together. I know what you do with the people who double-cross you. Crrr!”
He made a choking sound, which he must have accompanied with a gesture, drawing his hand flat across his throat. “And if you killed me you’d have to kill Martha too, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen. So this is the way I worked it. I wrote a letter. It’ll be found in the morning unless I get it and tear it up in the meantime. And if I’m dead I can’t very well tear it up.”
“What is in this letter?”
“Why, the whole damn thing, Luis. Facts and figures. I know you think you can beat a smuggling rap, and maybe you can. So I put in the dope on what happened to Albert Watts.”
“That does not sound so menacing.”
“You think so, do you? I know you covered yourself. You’d be careful about a thing like that. So what I said was that we did it together.”
After a moment’s silence the Camel’s voice said softly, “My God, Paul.”
“I knew it would impress you. I said you told me not to worry about the alibi. You could get plenty of people to swear we were somewhere else that night. But it won’t stand up against a written confession, Luis. I described how we did it. I only drove the car, naturally. You used the knife.”
“And you-signed this amazing document?”
“What good would it be without a signature? And I don’t think it’s bad, for something I thought up on the spur of the moment. If you let us go, you’ll still be all right. But if the cops find me in a ditch with my throat cut, you know what they’ll think. They’ll think you killed me to keep me from confessing, not knowing I’d already written it out and signed it. If you didn’t hang for one murder, you’d hang for the other.”
Alvarez said in disbelief, “Dear God. What if somebody finds this letter before you get it?”
“They won’t,” Slater said with confidence. “And don’t think you can follow me and pick me up again after I have it. I intend to cut your telephone wires and see that your cars won’t start without some extensive repairs.”
There was another moment’s silence. Outside on the terrace, Shayne could feel the tension in the room. Then the Camel gave a muffled exclamation. There was the sound of a blow.
“You imbecile!” the Camel said. “I hope you don’t think you can make a fool of me twice in one evening. I don’t have to cut your throat. I will stop short of that. We will work slowly, so you will have time to appreciate everything fully. Then we will move on to your wife, to Jose’s delight. You said you worshipped her, I believe? There will be little left to worship when he is finished.”
“The letter-”
“But don’t you understand, Paul? Where you have put this letter is merely one more of the things we must find out.”
He raised his voice to summon the bartender. “Al!”
12
As Alvarez called, Michael Shayne moved his legs and nodded to Powys. Silently the Englishman began to wriggle backward. When they were around the corner, Shayne crawled across to the balustrade. Turning, he cautiously raised his head. Al had run in from the dining room. He was standing over Slater’s chair, and Alvarez seemed to be tying Slater’s hands.
Shayne and Powys quickly slid over the balustrade. Crouched low, they ran past the dining-room windows. Gaining the protection of the garage, they stopped for a low-voiced consultation.
“This becomes a bit more serious,” Powys said.
“You’re still with me?”
“Definitely. I want to get the Slaters aboard that plane as much as you do. How many men are we up against?”
“The Camel and Al in the living room. Two in the bedroom with Mrs. Slater, two more around the house somewhere. I don’t think we need to count the cab driver. He’s neutral.”
Powys said lightly, “Three apiece. Take them in sequence. I think we can handle them.”
“O.K. Start with the bedroom. I want the one on the bed.”
They circled the house. The kitchen, as they passed, still seemed to be empty. They were careful crossing the lighted strip of turf and the terrace, but once inside there was no further need for caution. The cab driver had turned up the radio to get the full driving effect of a Louis Armstrong solo. Powys followed Shayne quickly along a carpeted hall. The sharp pain in the redhead’s chest was gone, but a dull ache remained, a reminder that he couldn’t press an attack with his usual abandon.