After she said goodnight, Shayne stripped off the Sanitation Department uniform and listened at the closed door. There was no lock but he manhandled the empty bureau in front of it. He went to the window. A room on the ground floor would have been better for his purposes, but there had been no way he could ask for one. He removed the sliding screen and swung out onto the shingled roof of the veranda, which ran around two sides of the house.
The shingles were dry and brittle underfoot. He edged carefully along the wall. The next window was lighted. He dropped to his knees and elbows and wriggled past. The shingles at the edge of the roof had split and peeled. The two-by-six beneath had begun to rot away from the nails. Shayne leaned on it and felt it give.
He heard a mumble of voices from the living room: Michele’s and Szigetti’s. The note of complaint in Szigetti’s voice carried it around the house without bringing any words along with it. While the detective hesitated he noticed a dead branch dangling from the gutter. He might be able to use that.
He freed the branch carefully, then let it down heavy end first and worked the tip inside the copper wire leading to the telephone box. One of the thumbtacks pulled out of the clapboard. Rotating the branch, he caught the wire on a protruding twig and fished it up. Another tack popped out. In a moment, reaching down, he was able to seize the wire and pull it free.
There wasn’t enough slack to reach his window. He unwound more wire from the outside of his battery case and performed a rough splice in the half-dark without tools. A rotten board gave way under his knee and he had to twist sideward to keep from going through.
Somebody had been moving in the bedroom on the other side of the wall. There was an abrupt silence. Shayne froze, spread-eagled on the roof.
Irene’s voice said clearly, “You’re beginning to jump, my girl.”
She came to the lighted window to look out at the night Shayne was too close to the wall to see her, but the shadow she cast was naked.
“Anybody out there?” she said in a low whisper. “If so, come in. No? Too bad, Irene. Another night shot to hell.”
Shayne waited till her light was out. Springs jangled as she climbed into bed, and under cover of the noise he wriggled past. He climbed through his own window and replaced the screen.
On his bed, he doubled his pillow to make a soundproof cave for his tiny phone. He signaled the operator and gave her a number. An instant later the voice of his friend Tim Rourke spoke from the button in his ear.
“Mike?”
“Yeah,” the detective said curtly into his cupped hands. “Tomorrow morning. Watch the ferry and the bridges. Dark green convertible.” He gave the license number. “Read it back.”
Rourke repeated the number. “Anything else?”
“No.”
Rourke said, “Well, Mike, you did it. Sometimes you amaze me. Good luck, buddy.”
Shayne withdrew the point of his screwdriver, breaking the connection. He moved the bureau away from the door. After sliding in under the sheet he put the hearing-aid button back in his ear. He smoked a last cigarette thoughtfully.
Like his friend Rourke, he was surprised at how well everything had gone. As Jake Melnick, the diamond dealer, Rourke had overdone the alarm and dismay, Shayne had thought, and when he had slapped the plastic membrane against his forehead he had produced a huge gush of blood, far more than would have been showing if Shayne had actually slugged him with a pistol. But the girl had been properly scared by it. Inspector Power himself had been the off-duty detective who accosted them in the lobby. The other roles had been filled by detectives from the Confidential Squad-the traffic patrolman outside, the workmen who blocked their escape with the piano, the uniformed cop, checking Michele’s apartment, who had been hit in the face with a wet towel. Shayne smiled in the darkness. Only the plump lady in the flowered hat had not been part of the troupe, and her performance couldn’t have been improved by three weeks of rehearsals. The one thing that had bothered Shayne-it hadn’t seemed to bother Rourke or Power, he noticed-was whether he could convince an intelligent girl that he was capable of stunning a defenseless man with a. 45, and then of putting a second bullet into a wounded cop. He made a wry face and stubbed out his cigarette. Perhaps the dyed hair made the difference.
The next day would be a difficult one. The day after that would be more difficult still. His main problem remained Michele, but he had no shortage of lesser problems. All Szigetti’s early suspicions had come back, during the poker game, and Shayne’s last look of the evening from the dapper former Marine had been hard and searching. Probably, Shayne thought, on one of Szigetti’s vacation trips to Miami or Miami Beach some local companion had pointed Shayne out, and he could make the connection at any time. It was going to be like sitting in the same room with a ticking bomb.
There was a rapid series of clicks in his ear. He sat up, instantly alert, and adjusted the hearing-aid button.
“Yes?” a man’s voice said.
“I found somebody,” Michele’s voice said without preamble.
“Excellent.”
The half-swallowed consonants went with an upper-class English upbringing, Shayne thought, listening carefully, but there was also something else, a faint whiff of another country.
“I have observed him in action,” Michele said, “and I think he will do well. After Wynanski I thought perhaps we should cancel everything and return to France. This one prides himself on common sense and directness and vulgarity, but there is something else too. I think he conducts himself as he imagines he should. He is flexible, he improvises well, and he unquestionably has courage. He can drink a great deal with little change in his manner. He lost his temper once or twice, but I think deliberately.”
“I see you’ve been watching him closely,” the voice said with a laugh.
“Yes, it was necessary that I do so. I have had to be careful with him. I will tell you about it later. I was in danger for a time. America! Never again, thank you. But I found that the danger stimulated the sexual responses to a surprising extent. Interesting. But I would dislike to have it happen again in just that way.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. He is desirable, this man, and I am wondering if I should take him to Europe with me. Perhaps not. But meanwhile, to be sure of him, I need a passport.”
“That can be arranged.”
“I have never met this precise type, you see, and at times I think he is not so simple. So you should know this. He shot a policeman during a robbery. His name is Francis McQuade. He is also wanted for a robbery in Brooklyn. Are you taking this down?”
“Yes’.”
“And all this gives us a lever. He must do as we say, to leave the country under our auspices.”
There was a doubtful quality about the silence at the other end of the line. She said, “Don’t you agree?”
“It could have that effect,” the man said. “Or it could impair his judgment. There is a time to be reckless, a time to be prudent.”
“Have confidence. If shooting becomes necessary, I want someone who will not hesitate. No shooting at all would be better, I quite agree. I have undertaken to pay him twenty-five thousand.”
“Dollars, not francs, I suppose,” the man said without enthusiasm. “This is becoming expensive. I don’t say that in the way of criticism. The passport should be ready tomorrow at ten.”
“Do you notice a noise on the line?”
“Nothing unusual. Except for those in the USSR, American phones are the noisiest in the world. Till tomorrow.” They hung up. Shayne chuckled to himself. His deal with the girl was for fifteen thousand, not twenty-five. Apparently her moneymaking instincts were as well developed as her sexual ones.
He disconnected the battery case. At the window he tugged at the wire until it pulled out of the telephone box below. He rewound it carefully. In a matter of minutes he was asleep.
Michele awakened him. He blinked up at her, wondering what he had done to deserve the attentions of this cool, elegant girl. Remembering where be was and what was expected of him, he reached out for her. She moved away quickly.
“Not now, darling. Not here. Those bedsprings would wake up everybody within miles.”
“What’s the matter with the floor?” Shayne suggested.
Her nose wrinkled. “I doubt that it has been cleaned since 1910. Put on some clothes and I’ll see about breakfast.”
She was wearing a straight up-and-down white linen dress, put together in a way that called the viewer’s attention to the fact that Michele, inside it, was not straight up-and-down at all. It was no effort for Shayne to look at her with admiring lust.
“I mean it,” she said. “I have an appointment at ten. Meanwhile, we have much to prepare. But sometime today, I promise you! In the bathroom at the end of the corridor you will find shaving things.”
Shayne shaved and dressed. As he left the bedroom he had a feeling that his preparations were incomplete, and he went back for the dummy hearing aid. In the kitchen he found Michele preparing an omelet. She made a face from the stove.
“Orange juice from a can. Coffee in the form of powder. Margarine. How do people live this way?”
“We get used to it.”
“Darling, after this is finished I cook for you. Cooking is an art all French girls are required to know.”
The omelet was light and excellent, and Shayne had it to himself, Michele contenting herself with a half cup of coffee and a bite of roll. Brownie appeared as they were leaving. He regarded them with sad, bloodshot eyes.
“I can’t find the aspirin,” he said accusingly.
“Billy will drive down and get you some,” Michele said. “Tell everyone else to stay inside, and please not to drink so much. It will be nice if no one has a headache tomorrow.”
Brownie mumbled something and watched them go.
Shayne said, “I’d better drive. That’s the way we do it in this country.”
In the car, heading down the long bumpy driveway, he went on, “To get something off my chest right away-this Szigetti is supposed to cover me, the way I understand it. I don’t trust the guy. I know it’s too late to work in anybody else, but I want him over on the other side of the truck so I can keep an eye on him. If he quits on me, I want to know it.”
“Yes-s,” she said doubtfully. “See what you think when we get there.”
Shayne drove through the electric eye at the gate and turned left. New houses were going up everywhere. At the first crossroads, there were a few stores, a bar and grill, a gas station.
“Left again,” she said.
“I want a paper.”
“We’re in a hurry, darling. Get one in the city.”
“I want to see what kind of story they gave me.”
He swung onto the asphalt apron in front of the grocery store. There was a rack of New York newspapers on the front step.
“Give me a News,” he called.
A woman tending the stand whipped a Daily News out of her stack and brought it to him. He tossed it in Michele’s lap and drove on.
A jet had crashed near Kennedy Airport, killing 83, so Shayne’s small-scale act of violence hadn’t been given a page-one headline. Michele found the story on page three and read it in silence. Shayne, of course, already knew what it said. Rourke had written the story and Power had persuaded the editor of the News to plant it in one copy of one edition, in return for a promise of an inside track on later developments. And then the single doctored copy had been planted on the Staten Island rack and the woman had been told to sell it to no one but a big black-haired man driving a green Chevrolet convertible.
“But he wasn’t a policeman at all!” Michele exclaimed.
“What?”
“For twenty years he was a policeman, then he had to resign because of a gambling scandal. Edward Farrell, fifty-six. The last two years, he has been wandering about the city hoping to see some criminal to arrest, so the police would take him back. It is a de Maupassant story!”
“My heart bleeds,” Shayne said. “What’s it say about Melnick?”
“In a coma still.”
“He better stay in a coma.”
“Condition critical,” she said, reading. “That means serious? Perhaps by the time he comes round you and I will be in a country where few people can speak English.”
“Knock on wood,” Shayne said.
On the plane between Miami and New York, he had studied New York and Long Island road maps, and he knew that there were four possible ways for a car to get off Staten Island. When Michele gave him another left, in the direction of Port Richmond, he knew they were going by ferry. Victory Boulevard took them into St. George. This was a bad time of the day for automobiles. They inched down to the ferry slip. After a ten-minute wait they were permitted to crawl aboard a Manhattan ferry. They stayed in the car, and Shayne read the Daily News story.
“The things they always get wrong,” he said, and paged through the paper until he came to Dick Tracy, the world’s most preposterous sleuth. He snorted again a moment later, wadded the paper up and threw it in a trash basket as they arrived at the Battery. From here he was expected to know the way by himself. Concentrating hard, he pulled an imaginary map into focus, with its tiny street designations and little blue arrows. “What do we want, the West Side Highway?”
“I think so. The quickest way to Sixth Avenue and Twenty-seventh.”
Most of the traffic was moving north on Whitehall Street, and Shayne moved with it. In addition to street signs and traffic signals, he watched for illegally parked cars. He saw what he was looking for, an unmarked black Ford at a bus stop, where it could swing left on Whitehall or take the East Side elevated highway. Two men were in the front seat, and one of them was Jake Melnick, no longer in a coma, the blood washed off his face, and changed back into Shayne’s friend Tim Rourke.
Shayne slowed and changed lanes, letting the Ford get in behind him. He turned off at Bowling Green, swinging the wheel with a show of confidence he was far from feeling. Several blocks later, he stumbled on an inconspicuous ramp leading upward to the West Side Highway. He left at Twenty-third Street, the black Ford still right behind him. He passed Eighth Avenue, then Seventh, and came to the Avenue of the Americas. Here a red light stopped him.
“Our Sanitation truck,” Michele said, looking down the avenue, “will come all the way uptown on Sixth. We have timed the distance, five days in a row. To be safe we should leave a thirty-minute margin.”
Now Shayne remembered that the Avenue of the Americas was the official name for Sixth, and he turned north when the light changed.
“You’re sure of the route?” he said.
“Very sure.”
As they approached Twenty-seventh Street she said, “Now stop a bit.”
Shayne double-parked short of the corner. There was a solid line of parked cars in the metered spaces against the curb, and the second line was also nearly solid.
“Billy is to fix the light this afternoon,” Michele said. “Brownie and Irene will come from there. Ziggy from there.” She pointed, and explained what would happen when the truck halted at the corner. It wasn’t simple, but it was less complex than the average football play on the college level. Shayne’s only reservation was that the play would be executed by a pickup team of misfits and malcontents.
“Now if you want Ziggy to do anything different-” she said.
“No,” Shayne said slowly. “I won’t make my move before he commits himself. It looks good, kid. Somebody put a lot of brain work into this.”
“Thank you,” she said with a blinding smile.
“How long does the light stay red?”
“Forever, until a repairman finds the button. Billy’s plan is to attach it to the back of the one-way arrow. It will be hard to find. Are we finished here?”
Shayne looked over the terrain once again. As soon as the Sanitation truck began to move, the group on the sidewalk would fade into nearby buildings. In back, there was a low wall to climb. Two parked cars would be waiting on Twenty-sixth Street. They had worked out two alternate routes in case anything happened to this one.
“Now,” she said, “what you are to do, darling, you go through the red light and turn right.”
“You mean left.”
“No, right, against the arrow. What will happen, the moment the light changes here when Billy pushes the button, a truck will back out halfway to Broadway, to block both lanes. All the cars between there and here will drain off on the green light. There will be nothing in your way. Take me around and I show you.”
He went on to Twenty-eighth, where he made a legal right turn and turned right again on Broadway. On Twenty-seventh he went west, toward Sixth.
“Here,” she said. She pointed into a sloping delivery alley between two loft buildings. “Leave the car and walk in and see.”
He went into a paved yard behind the buildings. A wall of steel posts and panels barred the way at the property line.
He returned to the girl. “It’s blind. A hell of a place to unload.”
“We do not unload here, my love. You are concerned about the wall? Simply put the truck in low, point at the wall and keep going. The uprights have been cut. They are held in place now by aluminum brackets. A child’s perambulator could knock it over. No, not a perambulator, but a large and powerful garbage truck, certainly. There is another alley exactly beyond. Drive through to Twenty-eighth, turn right with the traffic. Thus we confuse everybody.”
Shayne was grinning broadly. “Baby, you’re in the wrong line of work. You should be a lady professor. What if another truck is already down in there?”
“The lofts in this building are all vacant,” she said. “It is soon to be taken down. And we have two wooden barriers. ‘Police Department, No Passing.’ We put one here, one on Twenty-eighth. They are of flimsy wood. You knock them over and drive on. More questions?”
“No more questions,” he said, still grinning. “Honey, I think we’re going to take these people!”
“Of course we are,” she said simply. “Now I show you where we truly unload.”
Shayne circled the block again and headed down Broadway, shifting to Fifth where Broadway crossed it at Madison Square. She pointed out an excavation for a new building on Twenty-first, between Fifth and Sixth. A wooden wall had been thrown up along the sidewalk. The site could be entered by a sloping dirt roadway.
“We borrow this place,” she said. “No one will be working. Change clothes while they unload. Then leave the truck on another block. Take a taxi to LaGuardia Airport. There I am waiting.” She looked at her watch. “Now I am late, dear. Go uptown to Forty-second Street.”
Shayne turned again on Sixth. In a moment more they passed the corner of Twenty-seventh, where, if everything went well, there would be a certain amount of activity the next day.
“One thing you haven’t covered,” Shayne said. “How about the two men in the cab, where do we dump them?”
“Billy will carry four sets of handcuffs. As soon as you are out of sight behind the building between Twenty-seven and Twenty-eight, put handcuffs on their wrists and ankles, and leave them.”
Shayne shook his head. “Kid, why aren’t you a millionaire?”
“I intend to be,” she said.
At Forty-second Street she told him to turn west. During all the weaving and circling, the black Ford had clung to their tail. It made the turn behind them.
“You need a picture for the passport,” she said. “I think I remember a sign-yes, there.”
She pointed to an arcade filled with low-cost entertainment devices, including a photo booth. She waited while Shayne ducked inside, coming back a moment later with a strip of four shots of a glowering, unprepossessing face which bore very little resemblance to his real one.
“Frightful,” she said. “But never mind. Now I must be apart from you briefly, darling. It is to collect some money, so be patient. I will leave you at a cinema, and come as soon as I can. I hope in an hour’s time.”
She scanned the marquees of the double-feature houses they were passing. “These are all dreadful! Well.” She pointed to a theatre showing two of the dubbed Italian spectacles which Shayne was always careful to avoid. “That one. I need some money. Give me some please.”
Shayne counted out five twenties and gave them to her. He kissed her cheek and got out. She moved over behind the wheel, sliding the seat forward.
“If there’s no smoking downstairs I’ll be in the mezzanine,” he said.
Crossing the street, he bought a ticket at the glassed-in booth. Michele’s Chevy still hadn’t moved. He waved at her and went in.