Shayne told him to leave his drink on the bar, say good night to the girl, and come to the eighth floor of the St. Albans, where he would find Shayne filling in the chinks in a story that could be one of the biggest of Rourke’s career. Rourke clicked off. Shayne then signaled for the switchboard girl and asked for Cheyfitz.
When the security man answered, Shayne apologized for disturbing him again.
“Tomorrow night I’ll sleep,” Cheyfitz said. “Or maybe I won’t, depending on what happens tomorrow morning.”
“Do you happen to know if Crowther’s been in Miami Beach lately?”
“Last week, Mike. He stayed here at the St. A. That was before all the noise in the papers, and there was absolutely no fuss or bother. It was billed as a vacation, but I know they did some conferring about the ceremony tomorrow. He went in the pool like anybody else, and nobody took any shots at him.”
Shayne thanked him and hung up. Tim Rourke, coming into the ballroom some time later, found him sitting on the dais in the master of ceremonies’ chair, his heels on the table, swirling cognac. For what must have been the tenth time, he was rearranging his meager supply of hard facts. Again they dropped into the same pattern.
“What are you doing, Mike?” his friend demanded. “Thinking? This is no time for thinking, man. It’s a time for action.”
Shayne waved his glass. “I see a bulge in your pocket. You brought a bottle. Sit down for a minute.”
Rourke was tall, skinny, always sloppily dressed. At the moment he was in serious need of a haircut. His offhand manner concealed a quick intelligence and a consuming curiosity that had made him one of the top reporters in the country.
He took a pint of bourbon out of one pocket, a highball glass containing two ice cubes out of the other. He poured whiskey over the ice and pulled out a chair.
“What’s your opinion of Eliot Crowther?” Shayne said abruptly.
Rourke sat down and drank. “What kind of question is that, at this time of night? You know my opinion of Crowther. I think he’s a bum.”
“Be more specific. Pretend you’re writing his obit, and the paper is letting you be completely honest for once.”
“What is this, a Rorschach test? An obit of Eliot Crowther-that’s a dream assignment. All right, I’ll play the game.”
He considered. “Crowther. A phony, a bigmouth. Nobody with any political sophistication would trust him to mail a letter.”
Shayne continued to look at him hard, and Rourke now said, more seriously, “Let’s assume there’s some hidden meaning in this somewhere. While Crowther lived he was one of the luckiest bastards in American politics. As tricky as they come, but because of his thatch of white hair and Benjamin Franklin glasses he didn’t look tricky. A conniver. He’d do any goddamn thing in the world if he thought it would help his political career, and if he thought he could get away with it. Self-confident. Ambitious. My God, was he ambitious. If he hadn’t been a Protestant he would have wanted to be Pope, and if the College of Cardinals had offered him the job, he would have switched. Some people thought he was brainy. I didn’t. He failed his bar exams twice, and if you really looked into it, I think you might find that somebody was standing in for him the time he passed. Of course I have a reputation for cynicism… Is this the kind of thing you’re anxious to get?”
“Go on,” Shayne said, scraping his chin with a thumbnail.
“Now consider the matter of style. His courtroom technique was greatly admired. All his effects were carefully staged, and my personal feeling was that he overdid it a little. But juries hardly ever thought so. He must have been a pretty good politician because until the day of his death he never lost an election. The odd thing is that I literally don’t know one single person who ever voted for him.”
“That’s the obituary,” Shayne said, still scraping his chin. “What do you think of him as a man?”
“You mean how does he perform in the sack? He still has his original wife, and I’ve never heard about any chicks on the side.”
“I’m thinking about how he’d stand up under pressure. Under threats.”
Rourke said slowly, “He’s a mean cat to have as an enemy. I wrote a piece once he didn’t like-it was about the Felix Steele case, remember-and he sent one of his Mafiosi to sniff around the paper and see if he could get me fired. Certain old charges against me were exhumed. Luckily the publisher knew about them and had already forgiven me.”
“Abe Berger says he worries about being assassinated. Anonymous letters make him shiver and shake.”
“Yeah?” Rourke said, interested. “Then why doesn’t he stay in Washington tomorrow? This medal isn’t a very high-priority thing.”
“That’s one of the things we’ve been wondering,” Shayne said. “The official reason is that he can’t afford to be intimidated by a Miami dentist. Unofficially, he’s hoping to flush out a crazy who may or may not be trying to murder a Supreme Court Justice, among other people, including Crowther himself.”
Rourke’s head shot forward at the end of his long neck. “More on that, please.”
Shayne described the acid-weakened climbing rope, and Crowther’s theory on why it had happened. Rourke listened intently.
“You don’t think Camilla did it?”
“No,” Shayne said. “I think Crowther did it himself.”
Rourke stood up, running his fingers through his tangled hair. He walked to the end of the dais and came back. “Mike, this man is attorney general of the United States.”
“And also, as you pointed out, a conniver, a frustrated ham actor. He’s mean and ambitious, and on top of that, scared. He hasn’t been on page one for months. How did this Freedom Medal come up in the first place?”
“It’s a money-raising lunch, and the medal’s just a gimmick. One of Crowther’s people probably dropped a hint that he was available.”
“And the next step was to leak the news that his law firm is on retainer from U.S. Metals.”
Rourke was skeptical. “Mike, that isn’t all plus.”
“It depends on his next move. He’s been mentioned for the Senate, and he may want the big political contributors to realize that he’s safe, in spite of his civil-liberties background. It guarantees him a nationwide news story. Defying potential demonstrators and ignoring threats on his life, fearless Eliot Crowther-you’d write it that way yourself.”
Rourke snapped his fingers silently. “If we could prove it, Mike-”
“We can’t,” Shayne said. “There’s more, and I know in advance that some of this you’re not going to believe. Camilla Steele has been writing him letters over the years, threatening to kill him in various gruesome ways. Half serious and half joking, and according to Berger they got under his skin. He got her an interesting job. He sent Berger down to lean on her. They had her arrested. She went right on writing the letters. The point is, she’s not exactly crazy. She had a real grievance and Crowther knows it. He got plenty of mileage out of that Felix Steele conviction. I doubt if he felt much remorse when the other confession came in.”
“Somehow I doubt it, too.”
“Nevertheless, it must have set up a few vibrations. He knew he deserved something, if only to be scared by an occasional threatening letter. He’d look silly if he tried to lock her away for good. But she’s been getting more and more unstable, and I have an idea the letters have been getting wilder and more convincing. She’s drinking and dropping pills, and there’s always an outside chance, he must think, that someday she’ll walk up out of a crowd with a gun-”
“Mike!” Rourke poured more whiskey and drank it excitedly. “Are you saying that Crowther set up this assassination himself?”
Shayne corrected him. “Not assassination. Attempted assassination. If he’s supplying the gun he can make sure it’s loaded with blanks.”
Rourke gave an awed whistle. “Let me think about this for a minute.”
“I talked to her boyfriend and her psychiatrist. She’s being treated for recurrent depressions. She tried to kill herself at least twice, and nearly succeeded. Here’s the hypothetical question. If somebody found out about those letters, if this person wanted to kill Crowther himself but was afraid to, if he called Camilla and asked her if she was just kicking the idea around or would she go through with it if somebody else made the arrangements? All right. Both the doctor and the guy think she’d probably say yes.”