Lady, Be Bad

regular eight hours.”

Sparrow waited till Rourke prepared a drink, and then opened a notebook. There was too little light to read what he had written in it, and in the end he used a flashlight.

“First thing subject did, at four-eighteen A.M., was make some phone calls. She had to hunt up the numbers in the book. Then she got a black Ford, license number MK 361, out of the hotel garage. Drove to the vicinity of the Skyline Motel. So long as we were moving along I was fine. Then we had ten minutes of sitting still, and that’s when the trouble started. You came out of an upstairs room with a dame, Mike. White-haired, terrifically stacked-but hell, you know that. I thought my subject might tail you, but no. At four fifty-five A.M. a nice dark-green Eldorado came cruising along, three guys in it. She winked her lights. There was carefulness on both sides. They drove past, they turned around and came back. One guy got in with her-”

“Do you know what Al Luccio looks like?” Shayne said.

“Who runs the big casino in the islands? Was that who? Short little legs, walks like an ex-pug. Snazzy sideburns. This sort of pot on him.”

“Yeah. And that’s when you went to sleep?”

“I didn’t exactly go to sleep. I kept snapping out and drifting back. I honestly don’t understand why I didn’t hear the motors when they left. You’d think on a quiet night like this, but it was like both cars vanished. Go ahead and say it. I goofed.”

“No, you made a connection for me,” Shayne said bleakly. “The girl I dropped at the hotel was definitely the girl who had the talk with Luccio?”

“I can swear to that, Mike.”

“How long have you been working for Maslow?”

Sparrow cut his eyes at Rourke. “We were supposed to keep it confidential, but I guess it’s out now. Six months or so? Off and on.”

“Did you like him?”

Sparrow looked surprised. “I can’t honestly say I did. He had a tongue like a razor. Something like this tonight, where through no fault of my own things didn’t go as planned, he’d still be cutting me up twenty-four hours later. He was no joy as an employer, and the money wasn’t that good, either. But he was a rising man, I had hopes it would lead to something.”

“Did you know he was blackmailing people with the material you collected?”

Teddy rammed his big belly against the bar and swiveled around to look at Shayne.

“Would you repeat the question?”

“You heard me.”

“I heard you, but it takes a minute! You’re damn well told I didn’t know he was blackmailing people, and what’s more I don’t believe it! He was head of the subcommittee, but he didn’t control the hiring and firing of the regular investigative personnel. They sabotaged him, the machine pols, because he was a free-wheeler, and he didn’t care whose toes got stepped on. He was very much anti-Establishment. The orders he gave us, as abrasive as he was to me personally, there were no strings attached. It could be the governor of the state, it could be the president of a corporation, it could be the chairman of the state central committee. If we had any indication of hanky-panky, we were supposed to nail that person, let the chips fall where they may.”

He ran down at the end, sounding less and less convinced of the truth of what he was saying. He broke off and said complainingly, “Is it a fact, Mike? Was that what he was doing?”

“You must have wondered what happened to some of the reports you turned in.”

“Why, not at all,” Teddy said loyally. “You don’t break that kind of story in dribs and drabs. You wait and accumulate enough to make a page-one headline. He kept the whole thing in his own hands.”

Rourke laughed. “But if anybody ever got rapped for blackmail, it wouldn’t be Sheldon Maslow. That I can guarantee.”

They let him think for a moment. Finally he nodded. “When you look at it from that angle, it’s a possibility. That’s as far as I care to go at this time.”

“You have to go further,” Shayne told him. “Did you ever pick up a package for him without knowing what was in it?”

“I guess I may have,” Teddy said, beginning to look worried. “A couple of times anyway, from Phil Noonan for one.”

“Tim, find out if he’s registered here, and if he is tell him we want to talk to him about some hundred-dollar bills.”

Rourke went to the phone. Shayne continued, “Teddy, let’s figure that Maslow wouldn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. He could set up the cash deliveries so it would seem that you or somebody else on his staff was cadging behind his back. The whole operation was secret, and he had control all the way. You may never be charged with anything, but rumors can be just as bad in the private detective business. Let’s bring everything out in the open.”

“I’m for that,” Teddy said fervently, wiping sweat off his forehead with a bar napkin. “What else do you want to know?”

“How did Maslow hear about the party tonight?”

“I told him. A girl I met in a bar, kind of a chintzy accent, she sold me the tip for forty-five dollars, and I guess now that’s going to come out of my own pocket. Old Maz was real excited. Here was our chance for some documentation. We went in early by boat and ditched the boat in the weeds, where we could get away in a hurry. I couldn’t find it later-somebody beat me to it, a little rowboat with an outboard motor. For a couple of hours we hung around in the trees getting bit by mosquitoes. After dark, he skinned up the back roof and in a window. We had a couple of these high-priced Japanese cameras. He didn’t scare easy, because it was risky in there for somebody with a camera, I can tell you. I identified three of Sam Rapp’s goons. We had a system worked out, whereby after he took a few shots through the closet door he tied a piece of twine around the camera handle and let it down and I tied on the other camera with fresh film. That way it could get confiscated and we’d still have something to show.”

Rourke came back from the phone. “Noonan’s on his way.”

“What about the package Noonan gave you?” Shayne asked Teddy.

“It was more of an envelope. I had a piece of luck earlier with somebody in his office. This middle-aged lady cornered me and set up an appointment. She had evidence of a payoff, and she decided it was high time that kind of thing was stopped. Didn’t cost us a penny, a Xerox copy of some bookkeeping entries, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it myself, I just passed it on to Maslow.”

“Did you ever come across anything to connect Maslow and Boots Gregory?”

“As a matter of fact! I saw Gregory coming out of his office-the private one, not the one in the capitol. He rented a place on the way to the airport, where he could meet his informants and so on. He set up the schedule so nobody would run into anybody, but this was just after I started and I had something urgent, which is how I happened to see Gregory. The senator gave me a real ripping up and down, and he even fired me, but he took it back later. I thought it was funny-Boots Gregory, after all, but you know what they say about politics and bedfellows.”

Phil Noonan came in. Usually one of the best-groomed men in the lobbying business, he had pushed a wet brush through his hair and knotted an ascot hastily around his neck, but he still had a long way to go before he could take his habitual place in the second-floor lobby connecting the house and the senate.

“What is it that can’t wait till morning, Mike? I had three hours with the highway patrol-”

He saw Teddy Sparrow, and shifted swiftly to his usual unruffled style. “Which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the opportunity. Is there someplace we can go where we won’t bother anybody?”

“Your problem is a small part of the picture,” Shayne said. “Rourke knows about it already, and Teddy didn’t know there was money in the envelope you gave him.”

“It didn’t even occur to me,” Teddy assured everybody. “I mean, it occurred to me, but I put it out of my mind.”

“Here’s what I wanted you to see,” Shayne said.

He sorted out the three photographs of money passing between Noonan and Grover Kendrick. Noonan looked at all three and slapped them on the bar. He swore explosively.

“It’s been the damnedest legislative session I can remember. Where the hell-”