It had started two days earlier in Miami, when Michael Shayne, the big, hard-driving, redheaded private detective, received a phone call from his friend Will Gentry, Chief of Miami Police.
Gentry wanted to know if he was busy. Shayne looked across his cognac at his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, who was sitting on the sofa where he had left her. He said yes. Gentry said in that case he would put it another way. Could Shayne, as a small return for all the favors Gentry had done for him over the years, interrupt what he was doing and get his ass over to the St. Albans Hotel in Miami Beach on the double? Shayne sighed. He told Lucy he was sorry as hell, and put on his shoes.
He met his old friend in a room on the tenth floor of the hotel. A tired-looking man with a square, rugged face shook hands with him and looked at him searchingly.
Gentry said, “This is Inspector Power from New York, Mike. Sanford Power. I’ve known him since he was a pup. The way it is now with these goddam jets, we’re getting to be practically a suburb of New York. If Sandy and I didn’t work together, we’d hardly ever catch anybody.”
Gentry was red-faced and sad-eyed, a courageous, honest cop who was also one of the finest persons the redheaded detective knew. At the moment he was smiling too effusively, like a used-car salesman in bad need of the commission.
“He wants to borrow you for a week, Mike. Sit down and he’ll tell you about it.”
Shayne said dryly, “I don’t think I’m going to like this.” He waved away the chair he was offered, reversed a straight chair and swung a long leg over the seat. “But you put it so nicely, I’ll have to hear about it before I say no.”
Gentry’s too-anxious smile faded. “I was hoping you wouldn’t take your usual hard-nosed attitude, Mike. This could be one of the biggest things in years.”
“For me or for you or for New York?” Shayne inquired. “Go ahead, Inspector. But I have to warn you-there’s a sign on my office door that says, ‘On Vacation.’”
“This wouldn’t be much of a vacation,” Power admitted, rubbing his eyes. “And I hope you’ll call me Sandy instead of Inspector. I’m a long way out of my jurisdiction. Nobody knows that better than I do.”
“Then if this isn’t official,” Shayne said, “offer me a drink.”
“I’m sorry!” Power said. “This thing has been hammering at me. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I’m a beer man myself, but Will told me what you like.”
He opened a bottle of Hennessey’s. There was a brief interruption while the drinks were poured.
He resumed abruptly, “There may be a certain amount of money for you, Mike, somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand. There’s also a certain amount of danger. And there’s one other thing Will tells me not to stress, but from my point of view it looms pretty large. We have a chance here of crippling the international drug traffic, and it isn’t a chance that’s likely to come again.”
“Every time somebody seizes a few hundred pounds of heroin they say they’ve crippled the drug traffic,” Shayne said. “It still seems to go on.”
Power winced. “I’ve been guilty of that kind of statement once or twice myself. But this is different. It isn’t a few crummy pushers or wholesalers. It’s the men who put up the money, and by money I don’t mean a few thousand dollars. I mean approximately two and a half million.”
Shayne looked up sharply. “I’ve never heard of professionals handling a shipment that large.”
“The circumstances are unusual,” Power said in the same dry tone Shayne had used. “Do you want to say no at this point, or listen to some more?”
Shayne drank some cognac and chased it with a sip of chilled water. “You mentioned a certain amount of danger and a fairly sizable fee. I take it the two things go together?”
“That’s correct. The two and a half million is a retail valuation. A cash equivalent on the primary level would be in the neighborhood of half a million. A ten percent payout would be a justifiable figure for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of et cetera. As far as danger goes, with the right kind of preparation I think it can be minimized. This is very much an undercover assignment. I can’t risk using anybody from New York, even if I had anybody who could do it, and quite frankly, I haven’t. I drink a brew or two with Will whenever I’m in town, and I’ve heard about a few of your exploits, Mike. I think you can handle this job. I’ll go further-I think you may be the one man in the country who can handle it.”
“Good God, Will,” Shayne burst out angrily. “I can see you at these beer-drinking sessions. A cop blows in from the big city, and you think you have to impress him with all the crime we have down here.”
“I didn’t exaggerate,” Gentry said. “And you’re not just a local man anymore, Mike, I might point out. You’ve been known to make the New York papers.”
“And since when did you start believing what you read in the papers?” Shayne made a disgusted face. “And where would this undercover work take place, in southern Florida, where I know my way around, or in New York, where I have to ask directions to find the Latin Quarter?”
“In New York,” Power said. “That’s not necessarily a disadvantage. You’re listening, and that’s a start. I’ve been in police work all my life, Mike, a small matter of forty-three years. This is easily the biggest thing I’ve ever come within shouting distance of. Bear that in mind. And I want you to face the fact that if you get out of this room without saying yes, you’ll have to come up with some damned good reasons. Being on vacation is not a good reason.”
“That was mainly my secretary’s idea,” the detective said impatiently. “I suggest we get on with it.”
“Right,” Power said briskly. “Bear with me, Will. There’s going to be some repetition. This is the basic situation.”
He tasted his beer. “It starts in a poppy field in Burma or eastern Turkey, and ends up on West One Hundredth Street in Manhattan. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred we can’t break into the chain any higher than the next to the last link. If not the user, the pusher, the man who supplies him, who’s usually also a user himself. Sometimes the customs people pick up a batch as it comes in, but one of the facts we have to deal with is that most of that information comes anonymously from inside, as a cheap way of getting rid of somebody who’s stepped out of line. Nobody has to tell me none of this does much permanent good. I’m not fooling myself. It’s a war, Mike, and in a war you do what you can. You don’t turn down a shot at an enemy tank because a couple hundred others are over the hill, and what’s one out of a couple of hundred? But I didn’t come down here to sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’”
He reached abstractedly for his beer, and shook it to start the bubbles. “There’s a law against using or peddling, and you do your best to enforce that law. You can’t make an arrest without evidence. You see somebody who’s well known to be a junkie. He’s obviously on the nod, with a fresh needle mark on his arm. That’s not enough. You have to catch him with the needle, with the actual drugs. Sometimes you get lucky, and you’re on the spot when he makes his connection. You put your evidence in a manila envelope, and when you come into court you damn well better bring that envelope or they throw you out on your ear. Well, this happens three or four thousand times a year in greater New York, so naturally we’ve worked up a pretty solid routine. We can usually put our hands on those envelopes. Even after we get a conviction, if we get a conviction, we still hang onto them because the case may go up on appeal, or it may be reopened by a higher court ruling on something else. But a time comes when there’s no point in holding onto the evidence any longer, so what do we do? We burn it. This happens once every two or three years. We go through the property vaults, sort out the dead envelopes and truck them up to the Department of Sanitation incinerator on West Fifty-sixth Street. And it all goes up in smoke. Sometimes there’s a story in the papers about it, and even if there’s not, the news gets around. For a few days all the junkies in New York are very depressed.”
He had finally succeeded in catching Shayne’s interest. The redhead sat forward and said thoughtfully, “Two and a half million bucks worth of junk is a lot of junk.”
“About two tons,” Power said. He took a card out of his pocket. “Here are the figures for the last time. Total value $3,548,000. The heroin alone was $2.7 million. The rest was cocaine, marijuana, goof balls, odds and ends. Total number of arrests, eleven thousand over a three-year period. This time we’re cleaning house after two years, but the retail price has gone up. We’ll have an exact total later. Two and a half million is only a guess.”
“Give or take a million, still it’s something to shoot at,” Shayne said. “And negotiable, as good as cash. But I don’t see your problem. How many cops do you have in New York? About twenty thousand. You ought to be able to move two tons of junk across town without being hit.”
“Now wait. Who thought the Japanese would hit Pearl Harbor? Who expected anybody to rob the Brink’s warehouse? That’s the point. They can assume we won’t expect anything, because who in God’s name would have the gall? The stuff is downtown now, and our security is good there. Nobody’s going to walk in with a few handguns and walk out again alive. The incinerator at the other end is built like a fortress. We’ll have a bunch of people there to certify that the right envelopes are burned. That means the attempt has to take place between those two points. We’ll be out in the open for forty-five minutes and you know we won’t use twenty thousand cops. In the ordinary course of events, two would be enough.”
“Nobody would try it without some good information,” Shayne said slowly.
“Apparently they have it. I have an idea where it comes from, but never mind that now. Let him go on dreaming.”
“What I’d do,” Gentry said. “It’s like any narcotics action-something has to happen before you make an arrest. But hell. Use twenty or thirty plainclothesmen in unmarked cars. Land on them the minute they make their move. You’d have a nice pinch.”
“That was our first idea, Will. But listen.”
He heaved up out of the chair and began to pace. “This is no nickel-and-dime operation, two or three crazy amateurs shooting for a big score. A couple of tons of narcotics-you need an organization to market it. Maybe the organization. And if you want to find guys who are willing to take on two armed cops in city traffic, you have to spend some money. You’ll need a minimum of six people. Three or four vehicles. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t want to pull in the small fry this time. I want the man or the men who hired them, who can always hire somebody else. And this time, damn it, I have a chance! I used to be in charge of Narcotics. I inherited the usual complement of stoolies, and I developed some of my own. About three weeks ago I began to get indications that something big was in the offing. A gun named Tug Wynanski turned down a job for a certain date, and that was the same day we’d reserved time at the incinerator. I hate to use shoo-flies, but sometimes you have to. I put men on every clerk in the property department, and seventy-two hours later I had the leak. We watched him around the clock. We put men on Wynanski. For a week now I’ve known exactly how many people are in it. I have their names and records. They’re holed up in a rented house on Staten Island, which I have under surveillance. How many times has it happened in your experience, Will, that you know in advance that a crime’s going to be committed, who’s going to commit it, and where you can put your finger on them whenever you like? As far as I’m concerned, it’s never happened!”
“If your surveillance is that good,” Gentry put in, “you should be able to tie in the higher-ups without using Mike. No?”
“Not unless I let them pull off the heist exactly as planned. That gets too risky. If we lost track of them somewhere along the line, I’d have some serious explaining to do to the Super.”
He took a quick pull at his beer. “Wynanski’s been tagged once or twice, always for small things. What he’s supposed to be good at is putting together a package. You bring him an idea and he handles the details. There’s one trouble with him, he has a temper and he likes to drink. He drives over to Manhattan every day, and on the way back to Staten Island he’s likely to stop at a bar. Here’s how I think we can get Mike in. Two days before D-day, we’ll pick up Wynanski for assault. They’ll believe it. He’s the main guy on the execution level. It’ll leave a large hole.”
Shayne snorted. “You’re out of your mind. What do I do, knock on the door and say I’ve heard on the grapevine that they need a man?”
“What I haven’t told you yet is that there’s a girl, a French girl named Michele Guerin. She’s the one who’s been handing out the advances. She has an apartment in Manhattan. According to her dossier, it’s her first time in this country, and she probably has the usual foreigner’s idea of how much everyday violence there is on the streets of New York. Now imagine this scene. She’s driving down Fifth. Shots are fired. A big redhaired hoodlum-no, we better dye your hair, Mike, that thatch of yours is too well known-not a red-haired hood, a black-haired hood, backs out of a bank with a gun in his hand. He shoots an off-duty detective and commandeers the girl’s car. Why wouldn’t she fall for it? She saw it happen.”
Gentry said, “One thing I don’t like about that idea. It’s too public. Too many things to go wrong. Because what if Mike runs into a real off-duty detective, shooting real bullets? How would you time it so the car would be there at the right moment, and then wouldn’t get jammed up in traffic? I think it ought to be inside. You’d have more control.”
Shayne looked at his friend in amazement. “Will, do you mean he’s already sold you on this pipe dream?”
Gentry’s eyes moved uneasily. “It sounds far-fetched the first time you hear it, Michael, but it takes hold. It could be worked. The way I see it, it’s in an elevator. No problem about the timing-you simply wait till the girl shows up. You only need two men. Your straight man comes in with her. Mike’s waiting. All three of them get in the elevator. If somebody else gets in, no matter. Mike pulls his gun. The straight man-say he’s a gambler, carrying a real roll. Mike has to slug him. He can use the old cackle-bladder routine from the con games-a plastic membrane filled with chicken blood. He has it in the palm of his hand, and claps himself on the forehead and all at once starts bleeding like a damn pig. Then Mike shoots the off-duty detective, on the way out. He grabs the girl and backs into the elevator and lays up in her apartment. A few prowl cars circulate around with their sirens going. That’s all the atmosphere you’ll need. The girl needs somebody like Mike. She offers him the job. Why not? We can think of a few refinements, but basically it’s all right there.”
Shayne shook his head morosely. “How many beers had you put away before I got here?”
“Quite a few,” Gentry said, “and every time I have one more it looks a little better. Where’s the hole in it, Mike? All we want to do is establish you as a gunman in trouble, and it shouldn’t be hard. She won’t know you’re shooting blanks.” Suddenly he smiled broadly. “Sandy, show Mike the picture of this doll in a bikini. He’ll stop arguing.”
Shayne said impatiently, “If she looks that good in a bathing suit, aren’t there any easier ways she can make money?”
“She’s definitely not routine,” Power said, “but none of the rest of this is, either. I’ll tell you what Interpol has on her. She’s thirty-two, and well preserved. For three years, maybe longer, she was the mistress of a Greek shipowner. She went along on yacht trips with some highly placed people. She spends money freely. They think she carried some stolen bonds from Paris to Macao a year ago. She was suspected of blackmailing the younger son of a minor king, and that’s all, except for one small fact. During the bond investigation an agent heard her phoning somebody named Adam.” He looked at Gentry. “Does that name mean anything to you, Will?”
Gentry shook his head. Power went on, “It meant something to me, and it meant something to the agent who put it in the dossier. Actually we know quite a bit about the man, considering that we don’t know if Adam is a first or a last name. He’s English, probably not by birth. What we all agree on is the nature of his business. He finances the international movement of guns, drugs, gold, stolen paintings-you name it. He may or may not use an actual bank, nobody knows. We don’t know if he’s one man or a group. We don’t know where his headquarters is. It could even be some kind of a code name, though that I really do doubt. Well, I haven’t put away quite enough beer to give you my lecture on international underworld finance, and I don’t know such a hell of a lot about the subject anyway. But if you’re in the legitimate export-import business, shipping goods from one currency system to another, you need a legitimate banking connection. And if you’re in a crooked export-import business, you need a crooked connection.”
Shayne shrugged. “You’d do better to take this to the FBI. Everybody there has to be either a lawyer or an accountant.”
“That’s not what I need,” Power told him. “I need somebody to get this girl’s confidence. I ought to mention that when she isn’t working, she seems to prefer large, rugged men.”
“Which is why you thought of Mike,” Gentry said gravely.
“Hell, we need everything going for us we can get.”
“Christ!” Shayne said.
Power opened a folder on the bureau and handed the detective a six-by-eight glossy photograph of a girl in a two-piece bathing suit, standing in a stiff breeze on the bow of a sail boat. Shayne studied it for a moment.
“About the fee,” he said, “I’ll want that in writing.”
Power laughed. “You can have it in writing. I had a feeling you’d like her looks. Now how could a lovely girl like that get involved in something like this?” He picked up his beer again and looked into it as though if he stared hard enough a scene would take shape. “I think they were sitting around somewhere in the south of France, she and our Mr. X-Adam something or something Adam. He mentioned a proposition he’d heard about in New York. A hundred-thousand-dollar investment, a couple of million in return. And what a coup for their side! The poor underpaid cops worked and slaved for two long years, picking up a dribble of heroin here and a dribble of marijuana there, and then they lose it all in one afternoon. He’s toying with the idea, but he can’t use any of his regular connections in the business because he’s afraid they’ll throw it away. And the girl, who’s tired of running penny-ante errands, says, ‘Let me!’ Adam likes to work with gorgeous girls, it’s one of his trademarks. He gives her the name of a New York gun, Tug Wynanski, who will do all the donkey work. Now cops always go by likelihood and percentages. How many would believe this girl was the contact on a big-time stickup? I’m retiring next year, Mike. This would make a nice thing to retire on. Listen-even if you can’t get anything conclusive on him, find out his name! Blow his anonymity and he’s more or less through. Sure, somebody else will come along six months later, but that’s the condition of police work. It goes on.”
Shayne poured himself some more cognac. Both men watched him.
“And what if I do succeed in getting in without getting myself killed? I’ll be at the bottom. How do I find out anything about this banker you don’t already know?”
“We can bypass the girl. Say they have a series of ten steps. You carry out the first nine, and then pull a fast switch that puts you in possession, you personally. Then you can make him come to you. That’s only the outline. It needs a lot of work.”
“I’ll say it needs work,” Shayne said. “What do you think about it, Will?”
Gentry said impassively, “I wouldn’t have asked you over if I didn’t think you could swing it, Mike. You’ll be in touch with Sandy all along, and he’ll have his men within shouting distance. There’s a risk, but maybe it’s no worse than some of the jams you get into under your own steam. You know what I think about the heroin business. I think everything about it stinks.”
“If you want to stop it,” Shayne said evenly, “all you have to do is change the law.”
“Mike, I know you think doctors ought to handle the problem instead of cops, and it could be I agree with you. But that’s not in the cards right now and you know it. Personally I don’t like the idea of these creeps thinking they can make monkeys out of the New York police. My God, if anything went wrong no cop anywhere could show his face in public for weeks.”
Shayne thought about it while he finished his drink, balancing inevitable dangers against possible results. It was wild and improbable; common sense told him that the odds against coming to grips with the shadowy banker were very long. But Shayne had always done his best work against the odds, and he found himself calculating how much luck he would need to bring it off.
“I just hope they don’t ask me the way to the Empire State Building,” he said, and reached for the phone. “I’ll see if Tim Rourke can talk his paper into giving him a few days off on speculation. He’s a born ham. Nothing he’d like better than hitting himself in the face with a cackle bladder.”