“I despise them.”
“That’s the feeling I get. If he turns up tomorrow with a good-sized contingent, your uncle and his people will get their heads bashed. Why should you want that? On general principles? Because fighting in the streets turns liberals into revolutionaries?”
“I don’t dare talk about it. Look at the mess I’ve made. Now I’m going to start using my head. I’m just going to shut up and get out of this car.”
“Go ahead!” he exclaimed. “You’ve been acting like a goddamn child, and you don’t want to do anything sensible this late in the afternoon. That would be inconsistent. My God! Your uncle thought all he had to do was bring in Michael Shayne and pay him a fee, and his troubles would be over. I’d bare my teeth at Vega and the man would curl up and die. Think about it for a minute. What can I really do? Beat him up? Scare him? How can I prove whose money he’s spending? All I can do is plow ahead with my eyes closed, and hope somebody else will make the mistakes. And you made them. You worked out a complicated scheme to shanghai me. You exposed three or four of your people, you tried to put a.38 slug in my knee, you had sex with me-and that wasn’t ninety percent lust, baby, it was ninety percent calculation. You’re right. So far you’ve done a lousy job. And it was all totally unnecessary. I’m not Clark Kent or Mighty Mouse. Why not start over and tell me what’s really happening? I know Crowther and I don’t like him. If I knew more about Colonel Caldera I probably wouldn’t like him either. Ruiz is probably OK. He just doesn’t take a good picture.”
She hesitated, her hand on the door handle.
“You’re preparing something,” he went on. “If it’s not too illegal I might give your uncle his thousand dollars back and go up to Pompano and see if I can make some money on the trotters.”
She moved toward him swiftly and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I can’t tell you, Mike. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
He made no effort to stop her. She got out of the car and walked away-a very nice-looking girl, whether coming or going.
Shayne was learning things all the time, but unfortunately not fast enough. He put the Buick in gear and drove off without hurrying. The moment he was around the corner, where he could no longer be seen by Adele, he shot ahead.
He had picked his spot carefully. Three quarters of the way along the block he turned abruptly, without signaling, and plunged down a ramp into an underground taxi garage. A few years before, the owner of the cab company, one of the biggest in Miami, had had a valuable painting stolen. Shayne had recovered it for him. Now Shayne had a standing deal permitting him to borrow a cab whenever he needed one.
The dispatcher looked out of his office. “Another handkerchief switch, Mike? Take that one. It’s gassed up.”
Shayne left his Buick in a parking slot and transferred to the cab. As he passed the office, the dispatcher handed him a cap, which he put on. It was much too small.
Wheeling out of the exit ramp, he headed back to 15th Court, an address which Adele had blown when she thought she was threatening Shayne with a loaded gun. He was improvising. He had told her the truth-he had no plan at all.
Soon he was cruising down 15th Court. The blue panel truck was still parked in the driveway. He checked the time. Three and a half minutes had elapsed since he changed cars. Finding no money in her purse, Adele would be unable to phone. It would take six or seven minutes to cover the distance on foot.
He pulled into a gas station at the corner and checked his tire pressure, then got back behind the wheel and glanced at a copy of the News left by a previous driver. The next day’s anti-Crowther demonstration by Dr. Galvez’ group had been given the big headline.
A moment later he saw Adele run across the street and enter the house by a back door. Her friends inside wasted no time. Shayne heard a door slam. The panel truck roared back out of the driveway. It proved to be easy to follow. It went west on 8th Street. At Ponce de Leon Boulevard, it turned south into Coral Gables.
There was less traffic here, and Shayne dropped back. On one of the curving drives near the university, the truck’s brake lights flared. Someone jumped out, a slender young man who somehow gave the impression of having slept in his clothes. He started up the walk toward a four-unit apartment building. He glanced around, hearing Shayne’s motor, and Shayne got a flash of dark glasses, large moustache, prominent front teeth. He noted the address and continued to follow the truck, which led him to Route 1 and back into Southwest Miami.
On 17th Avenue it swung north. Before long it stopped at an outside phone booth. Another young man jumped out. Shayne thought he was the boy he had seen run out of Dr. Galvez’ office, but he was wearing slacks instead of the checked shorts.
Shayne worked fairly close to the booth before parking. The boy stayed at the phone, making call after call, and at one point he had to go into a stationery store for change. Finally he hung up and waited.
Presently the phone rang. He talked briefly, then returned to the truck. It drove off, with Shayne still behind it.
It parked in front of a loft building between the railway tracks and South Miami Avenue. Shayne was in a good vehicle for a pursuit. A cab is hard to see when it is moving, but conspicuous standing still. He parked three blocks away, in front of a luncheonette. Leaving his cap in the taxi, he walked to the next corner.
There were two men in the front seat of the truck.
He was still feeling his way, but a few things seemed obvious. If Lorenzo Vega was to the right of Dr. Galvez, Adele and her friends were certainly to the left. After her blunder with the unloaded.38, the 15th Court address had become dangerous. She had warned its occupants, and they had promptly scattered. For some reason that was not yet clear to Shayne, they considered it important to keep him away from Vega. Luckily, like Galvez himself, they had an exaggerated idea of how much one private detective is able to do. If Vega had gone into hiding, Shayne, they thought, with his many Miami sources, would be able to find him. So they decided to find him first. Then all they had to do was position themselves and wait for Shayne to show up.
The boy who had done the phoning stepped out of the truck and concealed himself in the next doorway. Shayne instantly dropped into a new personality. Completely relaxed, he shambled up to a well-dressed man with a briefcase and asked for some change for busfare. The man shook him off irritably. Shayne panhandled his way back to the luncheonette, earning twenty cents on the way.
He used the dimes to make two phone calls. One was to Tim Rourke. He passed on the information he had picked up, and gave his friend instructions about what to say in case he received another call, which Shayne thought he might be able to set up.
After that he called the mobile telephone operator, who handled service to and from the radio-phones in moving automobiles, such as the one in Shayne’s Buick. He had never met this girl, but he had talked with her frequently. She listened carefully to what he wanted.
“One of these fine days, Mr. Shayne,” she said reluctantly, “I’m going to lose my job on account of you. Deceiving people, you know, isn’t company policy.”
“If you don’t want to do it I’ll arrange something else.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t do it? I know you wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t important.”
He went into the luncheonette and ordered coffee, and found an empty booth from which he could watch the truck.
He was into his second cup when he saw the boy step out on the sidewalk menacingly. Two men who had come out of the loft building retreated quickly into the lobby.
Shayne returned to the cab. He started off fast, clapping on his taxi-driver’s cap and dousing the off-duty light. He had no doubt that one of the two men was Vega. If they needed transportation, he was ready to provide it.