Shayne put the bottle of ink on the table and dusted his hands. Painter scrambled to his feet.
“You heard that, Sanderson!” he cried. “You heard him threaten me.”
“I did,” Sanderson said gravely. “And he called you a pipsqueak. That’s going to count against him.”
Painter darted him a suspicious look. “Well, I guess we’ve got enough on him already,” he said grudgingly. He glanced up at his big redheaded nemesis. “But if I was disposed to be lenient before, forget it. You want to do this the hard way. OK, that’s the way we’re going to do it.”
The wall phone rang. The stenographer answered.
“For you, Chief,” he said. “The lab.”
Painter came out from behind the table to take the phone. He listened for a moment, his face darkening. “OK,” he snapped, and hung up with a clatter.
“What did they do, test the end of the hypodermic needle?” Shayne asked. “What was it, granulated sugar?”
“Shut up,” Painter said with a vicious look.
Rourke laughed. He was long, thin and disheveled, with an offhand manner which concealed his loyalty to his friends and a passionate dedication to his profession. He waved a big envelope at Shayne.
“The trouble you get yourself into when I’m not around! Wait till you see these pictures. They’re the hottest thing since Sodom.” He slapped the envelope on the table. Picking up the stick of marijuana, he sniffed it. “Mike, you’re branching out.”
“Put that down!” Painter snapped. “That’s evidence.”
Halstead, a gray-haired, sleepy-looking man, observed, “Something you found in my client’s pocket?”
“No-o,” Painter admitted, “but if you think there aren’t various other things we can hang on him, you don’t appreciate the situation. Who let you in here, anyway?”
“To be candid, Peter,” Halstead said, “we had to pull some strings. It seems that one of the boys you picked up is Judge Pike’s son. That greased the skids a bit.”
“Shayne’s in for more than drunk and disorderly, counselor,” Painter said. “You can have young Pike. You can’t have Shayne until we get a medical report on Sergeant Maguire. That won’t be for twelve hours.”
Halstead smiled. “Tim?”
The lanky reporter slipped a sheaf of glossy five-by-eight photographs out of his envelope. “This is the sort of art that sells papers,” he said happily. “You missed the Sunday deadline, Mike, but you and your friends are going to be all over pages one, two, three and the split page on Monday. Believe me. I took one fast squint at the movie film, and I’m going to recommend that we pick out a few of the least lurid frames and use them as stills. I’m volunteering for the assignment. I don’t like to volunteer for anything usually, but I know I’ll enjoy this.”
He slid several photographs across to Shayne. Having been present on the scene, the redhead already knew that the girls at the party hadn’t been unduly hampered by clothes. Rourke pointed out one of Lee, her blouse unbuttoned all the way down, flourishing a gin bottle.
“We’ll have to paste a little strip of tape across that to keep the post office department off our necks. We’re a family paper.”
Shayne laughed. “That photographer deserves a combat ribbon.”
“I didn’t hear him complaining,” Rourke said. “Now I want to show you a sequence of three shots featuring Sergeant Maguire. When we heard what had happened to him we all shed a tear. We’ve followed his career for years, and when we heard his jaw had been dislocated, with a double fracture, we shed a quiet tear that it wasn’t worse.”
He arranged the three photographs in order. The first showed Maguire stooping above Betty, nightstick raised. Betty cowered away. Her face already showed the mark of an earlier blow. Maguire’s face was congested with fury. His eyes bulged. It was a classic photograph of a type of sadistic cop and his helpless victim, and it was sure to be reprinted all over the country. The next picture showed Shayne arresting the nightstick as it came down. In the third, Maguire was reeling back from Shayne’s blow.
“Of course she bit him on the neck first, as I understand it,” Painter said, “but you didn’t bother to take a picture of that.”
“Since when did Maguire need a bite in the neck to slug somebody?” Rourke asked.
Painter looked at the pictures again, one after another, then racked them decisively and tore them across. He slapped the pieces down on the table.
“They’re distorted. They’re one-sided. But I’m a realist, Rourke. They could crucify us. In one day you could destroy the image of the police that I’ve been trying to put across. Give me your word that you’ll withdraw them, and your redheaded pal can walk out of here.”
“And we want Maguire off the force,” Shayne added.
Painter snapped, “If I feel that Sergeant. Maguire has outlived his usefulness, that’s a decision I alone will make.”
Shayne exchanged a look with the gray-haired lawyer. Halstead said quietly, “In that case we’ll take a chance with a jury, Peter. If acquitted, and I assume Mike would be acquitted, I’d advise him to bring suit for false arrest.” In a less formal tone he added, “You know Maguire has been asking for this for a long time.”
Painter ripped the red carnation out of his buttonhole, tore it apart petal by petal and ground it on the floor under his heels.
“One of these fine days,” he warned the redhead, “you’re going to step over the line and I’m going to be standing there with a machete and chop off your feet. You’re shot full of luck, Shayne. If that photographer hadn’t been along, I’d have you. But there’ll be a next time. I’m working night and day on this matter. The minute I can tie you into it, I’ll have you back so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
“Mike,” Sanderson said, “you said something about the Donahue boy being dead.”
“Did I?” Shayne said. “It’s late, Bob. I’m tired. My brain doesn’t seem to be functioning too well.”
Sanderson gave a rueful smile. “I guess I don’t blame you, Mike.”
“What’s that?” Painter demanded. “What did you say? What do you mean by that?”
Sanderson put out his cigarette slowly. “Not a thing, Chief. Just talking to myself.”
“Well, don’t do it around me!”
Halstead said, “There’s no point in putting Mike back in the tank. You’ll be getting the papers in another few minutes. They’re being typed now.”
“No favors,” Shayne said firmly. “We all came in together and we’ll go out together.”
He kept his lawyer from protesting with a curt shake of his head. Tim Rourke fell in beside him as they went out.
“Mike, you’ll want a drink to get the taste of this place out of your mouth. By a strange coincidence I have a pint of cognac in my car. I’ll trade it for an explanation.”
“There are too many things I can’t explain myself yet, Tim. I may need some more help. I’ll meet you at your place if I can. Otherwise I’ll call you.”
“If you insist. Marijuana, granulated sugar, dirty movies. I look forward to it. First I want to get that chick’s phone number, the one in the picture. Lee something. Thin and wild is the way I like them.”
At the gate into the drunk tank he said, “Which of those dolls was yours, Mike? The one in the blouse and no bra, the one in the bra and no blouse, or the one in neither blouse nor bra?”
Shayne grinned at him and went in. The gate clanked shut. Steve was watching for him, his parted lips and quick breathing showing his anxiety.
“Do you mean to say you’re Mike Shayne?”
Shayne lifted a sleeping drunk off the bench beside him, and deposited him on the floor. The drunk didn’t wake up.
“You didn’t tell me your last name was Bass, either,” he said, sitting down. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since you had braces on your teeth.”
The boy groaned. “I told them I was Joe Taylor. I knew it wouldn’t work.”
In spite of the oppressive heat in the huge cell, the boy was shivering. The short ride in the patrol wagon and the shock of finding himself in jail had driven the gin out of his head. He kept picking at the crease in his slacks and yawning nervously.
“I haven’t any right to ask you,” he said, “after throwing all that film on you and socking you in the jaw and everything. But will you tell Dad I didn’t smoke any of the pot? I never even sampled it. I was scared to.”
“Right now Harry has other problems.”
Steve shook his head gloomily. “This is going to take precedence. I know from experience. He wanted me to go to college. He didn’t finish eighth grade himself, but he thinks there’s something sacred about having a B.A. So I went to college. I squeaked through. Now he wants me to get a job in some big company and sit in an air-conditioned office with the light on all day, and do what they tell me. And look glad. I just don’t see the point. I only have one life. I know I’m driving him out of his mind, but he’s driving me out of mine.”
“I want to ask some questions, Steve,” Shayne said. “Do you remember any of the things I said about Vince?”
His fingers roved uncertainly across his forehead. “Something about a stickup? Mr. Shayne, it’s not possible.”
“It’s not only possible, it happened. And then somebody drowned him, a hard thing to do to a semipro swimmer. How well did you know him?”
“He used to hang around the Lambda Phi house at college. He knew some of the brothers. The last couple of months I’ve been running into him all the time. I never went on a party with him before. That’s what I’ve got to convince Dad of. I guess somebody backed out at the last minute. He called up and wanted to know if I was busy. I didn’t know there was anything but liquor involved. But who’s going to believe that?”
“Your father may,” Shayne said. “He’s the one Vince and his buddies robbed. Vince wanted you at the party to give him an alibi. Not for the cops. For Harry. If you said you knew for a fact that he was locked in that cabin while the stickup was taking place, your father would take your word for it. That was the reason for the movies-so you’d stay put.”
Steve had begun shaking again. “I don’t know if you ever noticed Dad’s secretary?”
“Theo Moore? I met her tonight.”
“Those damn movies. Every time I think of the way I let myself get hypnotized-I can’t expect Theo to stop reading the newspapers all of a sudden. And that will be that.”
Remembering the kiss Theo had given Steve’s father, Shayne said carefully, “Have you been dating her?”
“I’ve been trying to. She puts in a lot of overtime. I doubt if she’ll be too impressed with somebody who puts in a whole evening looking at a dirty movie, when the real thing was right there under his nose. It isn’t healthy. She’ll think I’m some kind of creep.”
Shayne felt a grin trying to break through. He forced himself to say seriously, “I think I may have an out for you, Steve. Your father lost two hundred thousand bucks tonight, and naturally it rankles. If I can locate it and find out what happened to Vince, it’s going to take off a lot of the heat. In fact, I’d be willing to tell your father you worked with me on it. If he wants to figure that’s why you went to Vince’s party, I won’t disillusion him.”
Steve’s face cleared. “Mr. Shayne!”
“Wait a minute. If you actually contributed something, it would sound more convincing. I need to know who Vince has been seeing the last week or so. How about Betty? Would she know?”
“I can sure as hell ask her!” Steve said enthusiastically. “I don’t know if they were shacked up, but I think so. How should I go about it?”
“They’re going to turn us loose in a few minutes. Catch her before she disappears. Give her one drink and let her talk. If you find out anything, call me on my car phone-you can get the number from the mobile operator. Or try Tim Rourke. It’s the only Timothy Rourke in the book. I want to know about Vince’s drug habit-how long he’s had it, how much it’s been costing him, if he was pushing the stuff himself. I want to know if he’s been having conferences with anybody out of the usual run. This thing took a lot of planning, and it wasn’t worked out on the phone. They probably had to run at least one rehearsal. Nobody I’ve talked to seems to think that Vince did the staff work himself.”
“I don’t think he did either,” Steve said. “He wouldn’t want to go to that much trouble. That I’m sure of.”