over, or should I ask her to notify the police?”
The bed jangled as Thorne got up. “Hell with it,” he mumbled. “Don’t pull any more goddamn guns on me, that’s all.”
The woman resumed. “I am sorry. We’ll be quieter. Would you relay our apologies?”
Shayne heard the phone go back on its cradle. Thorne made some remark, but he had moved back to the dead spot and his words were muffled.
The woman said clearly, “You incredible fool. I was under the impression that this had a certain importance, that whether it works or not made some slight difference to you.”
She too moved. Shayne lost her. He shifted the amplifier to a new position. That was no better, and he moved it again. Still he couldn’t succeed in picking up more than an occasional word or phrase: “… meet here at midnight to divide…”, “… if you take care of the favorite…”, then a longer snatch: “… take ten tickets apiece. Our, payoff should be better than eighty thousand, forty apiece. With two long shots out of four…”
That was the woman talking. After that Shayne heard nothing but mutters till they said good-bye.
“I wish it hadn’t happened this way,” she said coldly. “Things were already complicated enough. Once a bastard, always a bastard.”
Shayne heard Thorne’s parting word clearly. It was obscene.
Watching through the closed Venetian blinds, Shayne saw Thorne’s red convertible roar away from a drag- race start. The door of No. 18 opened again a moment later. Shayne put the amplifier in his pocket and waited at the door until he heard the sound of the Mercedes’ starter. He went down the outside flight of stairs while the woman continued to wear down her battery. He glanced at her briefly as he passed, then turned back after a few steps and listened critically.
“You don’t seem to be getting gas,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
“That’s slightly obvious, isn’t it?” she said curtly without looking up.
She continued to grind away at the starter. Her voice was clipped and pleasant, without the abrasive quality it had picked up on the way through the amplifier. The resilience of women often surprised Shayne, and this one didn’t look as though she had just come close to being raped by a harness-racing driver in a motel room. She didn’t wear a hat. Her hair, which was ash-blonde, was cut in an intricate and casual style, down almost to her eyes on one side. Her eyes were dark, carefully but not excessively made up. It was a cool, lovely face, with well-marked cheekbones and a proud mouth. Her body was slender. She was wearing a pale rose suit. Like the Mercedes, it had clearly come a long way and cost a good deal.
“Move over,” Shayne said agreeably. “I used to have a Mercedes. I remember you had to catch it just right.”
She gave an explanation of well-bred annoyance. “It always starts.”
She shifted across and Shayne slid behind the wheel. He ground the starter with his foot all the way down, a listening expression on his face. “I doubt if you’re getting any spark.”
He pulled the hood-latch. Getting out, he raised the hood, which concealed him from the woman in the front seat. He took off the distributor cap and dropped in the rotor, closed the hood and returned to the wheel. This time, of course, the motor started instantly.
“Magic!” she exclaimed. “I had visions of tow-trucks and baffled mechanics and standing around in garages the rest of the afternoon. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
“Seems to be OK now,” Shayne said, listening to the quiet purr of the powerful motor, “but let it idle for a minute. We’ve met, haven’t we? Don’t you have something to do with the harness track over here?”
“I watch the races occasionally.” She gave her watch a covert glance. “It seems to be running beautifully. Again, I certainly do thank you.”
“I can’t remember who introduced us,” Shayne went on. “I thought they said you had your own stable. What I was thinking-if you’d called a garage, they would have charged you twenty-five bucks or so to answer the phone. And how many mechanics around here have ever looked under the hood of a Mercedes? They have a hard enough time keeping up with Ford and General Motors.”
She reached for her bag. “Forgive me. I didn’t-”
“No!” Shayne said hastily. “That’s not what I meant. I have a soft spot in my heart for anybody who owns a Mercedes, and I wouldn’t take any money for a favor like this. But I just can’t seem to pick a winner at Surf-side. My wife has been giving me a hard time. The minute I recognized you-I still can’t think of your name, but it’s on the tip of my tongue-I thought maybe you had a horse you can give me.”
She considered a moment. “I don’t know what harm it would do.” She looked at her watch again, openly this time. “You might take a small flier on My Treat, in the ninth.”
Shayne’s eyes opened. “In the ninth! Listen, thanks for the tip, I appreciate it, but whenever I hear about anything good in a twin-double race, it starts me going on a pet project of mine. I know you’re in a hurry, but give me a minute. I’ve worked it all out. If you only had one other winner- one other winner — in the other three races, you could clean up. I’ll explain it to you. You wheel your horses with all sixteen entries in the other two races, at a cost of a hundred and twenty-eight bucks. And the point is, you don’t drive down the odds! That’s the beauty of it.”
He was trying to unsettle her, and to judge by the look on her face, he had succeeded. At that moment the phone rang stridently in his Buick. It was an unexpected sound, coming from a parked car, and her hand jerked.
“That’s the call I’ve been waiting for,” Shayne said. “I want to tell you more about this twin-double idea. It’s sensational.”
He turned off the ignition and took the key with him. Leaving both front doors open, in the Mercedes and his own car, he answered his phone.
“Mike,” Rourke’s voice said when Shayne said hello. “Can you talk?”
“Briefly.”
“That license number you gave me. I had Lucy do the phoning on it while I checked the billiard parlor. It’s registered to Mrs. Claire Domaine.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Now we’re beginning to move, right? I’ve got to get out of this goddamn hospital before you wrap it all up by yourself. The billiard parlor. Guys and Dolls-what a corny name. It’s all prettied up, they tell me, bright lights, coke machines, no spittoons, so they can get the local family business away from the bowling alleys. Pretty soon there won’t be a place left where a guy can go to get away from women. The thing about it, the manager still does some loan-sharking on the side. His name’s Pudge Temkin, or Tomkin, if it matters. Now am I allowed three guesses?”
“One should be enough, Tim.”
“OK. Is Paul Thorne borrowing betting money for tonight and paying Shylock interest on it?”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Then why don’t we spoil his bet for him and get him into real trouble? After all the blood I’ve lost, I have no charitable feelings about the guy. Mike, they’re giving me some crap about changing the dressings and keeping me for observation. Can you come over and serve them with a habeas corpus or something so they’ll let me out? I’ve got something I want to tell you. Thorne’s wife made some kind of crack about Paul and a nurse’s aide. The ball was going back and forth pretty fast right then, and I didn’t get much of it. But my friend Miss Mallinson, the cute nurse I told you about, sneaked me out the list of women who do volunteer duty here-Uh-oh,” he said abruptly. “I’ve got to hang up. Head nurse. She thinks I ought to be more helpless.”
Shayne put the phone down thoughtfully and returned to the Mercedes. While he was talking to Tim, the woman had slid back behind the wheel.
“I’m terribly, terribly late,” she said pleasantly. “And I’m afraid I haven’t time to discuss your betting system. If I may have the key?”
Shayne went around and got in beside her. “I’ll give it to you in a minute. First I’d like to ask for a little
