She carried the suitcase to the nearest ladies’ room. The booths were coin-operated. She had given the taxi driver her last loose change. Instead of going back to the concourse to break a bill, she made a bet with herself.
There was no one around. She decided to open the suitcase there and see if it did, in fact, contain a gun, as promised. If somebody came in and saw her, that would be a sign that the bad luck was running, and she could stop thinking of herself in terms of Charlotte Corday, and return to her idle life in the Miami Beach bars.
The key worked stiffly, but at last the suitcase opened. Inside, she found a handbag packed in crumpled newspaper. Inside that, there was a neat, blue-black automatic. It was surprisingly small, almost pretty, with a funny kind of metallic attachment at the end of the barrel. A silencer?
It fitted nicely into her palm. Looking up, she saw her reflection in the mirror-Camilla Steele, thirty (thirty!), in her best black cocktail dress, with a heavy gold necklace given her by a man whose name she could no longer remember, holding a firearm, no less deadly for being so small. The picture was so exactly right, as though all her life she had been needing a gun to complete her personality, that she doubled forward suddenly and retched into the basin.
There was a sound behind her. When she straightened and looked in the mirror again, she was still alone, but the door was swinging slightly.
Now, of course, she had to hurry. She thrust the gun in the handbag. Leaving the empty suitcase lying open on the floor, she went back to the busy concourse. A voice on the public address was clamoring about planes that were about to depart. One of her sudden impulses hit her. Perhaps she should take that flight, no matter where it was going. She had money. When it landed, she would hunt up a cocktail lounge and order a drink.
The announcement came again-a Pan-American plane headed somewhere or other.
She started for the Pan-Am ticket counter. She saw a woman talking excitedly to a uniformed guard. She swerved and went down into a big kitchen. She thought she heard footsteps behind her. A surprised face under a chefs hat looked around, and somebody shouted. At an open door, an Eastern Airlines food truck was being loaded from rolling carts.
“What are you-” a voice said, and she ran past the food truck and out onto the loading apron.
A power cart was blowing air into one of the engines of a big jet. A sudden exhaust spumed toward Camilla as the engine came alive. A truck carrying baggage bore down on her. Blinded by the lights, she leaped aside.
In an upstairs bedroom in an imitation Moorish apartment building in Coral Gables, a dark young man with pale green eyes, which seemed darker in photographs, moved the curtain a quarter of an inch and looked out carefully.
“Si. Son policias.”
There were several others in the room, including a girl. The young man at the window asked a slightly built teenager a question. The boy assented eagerly. The others fitted him out with a disfiguring set of front teeth, a false moustache and sunglasses. He emptied a glass of wine, went out to the street and sauntered north. Two detectives followed.
Soon afterward the young man and the others left the building by a rear door. They removed to another house some distance away. After making sure that they hadn’t been followed, they loaded two dozen Winchester sporting rifles into the trunk of a Pontiac convertible. The girl parked it two blocks away, checked twice to be sure it was locked, and walked back to the house.
The meeting was held in a conference room in City Hall.
The mayor of Miami was present with two of his aides. They remained silent. Will Gentry, Miami chief of police, had called the meeting. Peter Painter was there, representing the Miami Beach police. Abe Berger, the Secret Service agent charged with the protection of cabinet members, had flown in from Washington. General Matt Turner, of the U.S. Army, was sitting beside Michael Shayne.
Gentry opened the meeting, outlining the security situation as it had seemed that morning, and asked Shayne to take it from there.
There was a small flurry at the door and another man arrived. He was short and plump, with a nervous moustache which he dabbed at anxiously when he saw that everybody in the room was looking at him. “Am I late? Teddy Sparrow. I’m standing in for Mr. Devlin.”
Larry Devlin, a tough, competent ex-cop, commanded the International Protective Agency contingent at the International Airport, a uniformed force of thirty or forty private guards. Sparrow until recently had operated his own one-man private detective business in Miami. He had tried hard, but he was almost completely inept, and he had finally closed his office and gone to work at the airport. “Devlin said he’d be here,” Gentry said.
“He was called away, you might say. He’s in Oklahoma on private business. But he left me explicit instructions and I’m glad to report that the situation at International Airport is well in hand.”
He pulled out the chair next to General Turner, and the corner of the chair caught the general in the knee. Flustered, he apologized too profusely, and sat down. He laced his fingers, broke them apart and laced them again.
“Shayne’s going to fill us in on the background of this thing,” Gentry said. “Go ahead, Mike.”
“I’d like to ask what made Devlin take off for Oklahoma on such short notice,” Shayne said.
Sparrow looked startled. He tightened his necktie and looked around the table with an ingratiating smile.
“I find myself in pretty fast company, is all I have to say. I didn’t realize this was going to be on such a rarefied level.” He closed off his smile and looked serious. “I did promise Devlin before he left that I wouldn’t noise it around, but if he was here himself I think he’d give me the all-clear. It’s his son, Lawrence, Junior. He wired his father to come at once and bring six hundred dollars in cash, and not to say anything to the boy’s mother. And that indicates to me that it’s something embarrassing, but I more or less felt I had to leave it at that. I wish it hadn’t happened at just this juncture. But we’re a team out there, gentlemen. We finish each other’s sentences, so to speak. I’ll just ask myself what Larry Devlin would do in my shoes, and I don’t think I’ll go very far wrong. Every man on the regular force will be working tomorrow, plus twenty specials at double-time.”
“Do you have a number where Devlin can be reached?” Shayne said.
“He’s going to call me. We didn’t understand it was that much of an emergency.”
Shayne and Will Gentry exchanged a look. Gentry said calmly, “Continue, Mike.”
Shayne described Vega’s plan to disrupt the Galvez demonstration, and he played the tape Vega had given him. Parts of it were inaudible.
“I made a rough transcript,” Shayne said, “and you can pick up a copy before you leave. Now here’s a conversation I had with Vega a couple of hours ago. I have the man himself on tap in North Miami if anybody wants to talk to him.”
They listened closely. Abe Berger, the Secret Service man, shot Shayne a sharp look when Vega called what he had been persuaded to believe was a Washington number.
“You’re a sharpshooter, Mike.”
“Yeah. Now here’s the phone call I got about the assassination.”
On this hearing, it seemed to Shayne that the Latin accent was too careful to be real.
“He used a filter to change the pitch,” Abe Berger said slowly. “I’d better take it back and let the lab boys fool with it.”