Six Seconds to Kill

Shayne brought Paul London in with a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. London had several ideas about where Camilla might be spending the night.

Leaving them conferring, Shayne looked up the phone number of Dr. Irving Miller, the psychiatrist whose unpaid bill for $950 Shayne had found on Camilla’s bureau. An answering service gave him another number, where the doctor was spending the evening. Twenty minutes later, Shayne dropped off the Venetian Causeway onto one of the Venetian Islands and found the house, an expensive modern dwelling belonging to another psychiatrist. Most of the guests that evening drove Cadillacs, Shayne noted. After giving a maid his name and telling her that he wanted to talk to Dr. Miller, he walked around the house to a terrace overlooking the bay. The moon was in its final quarter.

Dr. Miller proved to be a sharp-nosed, nearsighted man in a white dinner jacket. He had been drinking. For obvious professional reasons, he explained to Shayne, he found it impossible to discuss his patients, ever. Shayne told him bluntly that this particular patient was involved, in some unexplained fashion, in a conspiracy to assassinate a high government official, and unless he discussed her now, he would find himself discussing her in front of a grand jury.

Dr. Miller’s breath came out as though Shayne had hit him in the stomach. He threw his cigar into the bay and sat down on the flagstone railing. Shayne explained the situation. Presently Dr. Miller went back into the house and returned with drinks. His training had conditioned him to attach labels to people, to divide them into categories according to the symptoms they had in common, but behind the bristling manner and professional jargon, Shayne thought he saw concern and a genuine liking for Camilla as a human being. They talked for more than an hour.

From there Shayne continued to Miami Beach.

At the St. Albans, as he expected, he found Johnny Cheyfitz, the head security officer, awake and worrying. He was glad to get an outsider’s opinion of the security arrangements, which had been worked out jointly with Peter Painter and the army, and okayed by Berger before he flew back to Washington. Cheyfitz had an uneasy feeling that they had overlooked something. Though it was no longer really his responsibility, he didn’t want any blood to be shed in his hotel.

“That’s the one thing you can’t get out of carpets,” he said. “You have to take them up and burn them.”

He turned on all the lights on the ballroom floor. After a time Shayne told him to go to bed. But if Cheyfitz didn’t mind, Mike would hang around a little longer.

“Glad to have somebody else involved, Mike. This I’m not possessive about.”

He said good night. Soon afterward a room service waiter brought up a bottle of cognac, a glass and a pitcher of ice water.

“Compliments of Mr. Cheyfitz.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Shayne said absently, dropping a bill onto the tray.

He poured a slug of cognac and went on prowling about the ballroom and the corridor between the ballroom and the elevators. There was a ten-foot gap between the raised dais and the nearest tables. Secret Service men would line up shoulder to shoulder in the interval, facing outward. Shayne checked the sight-lines from the front tables and the low television platform, which was placed at the ballroom entrance, where the cameras could cover Crowther’s arrival, and then swivel around to follow him to his place on the dais.

Half an hour later, Shayne called the Three Deuces, where he had told Tim Rourke to wait.

“Hey, Mike,” Rourke said genially, “what happened? I’m three quarters smashed. I’ve been drinking bar bourbon and whispering to a chick who pretends I’m slurring my words so she can’t understand me. She understands me, all right. I just watched the news. This is a hell of a story, and do you realize I don’t know anything more about it than I saw on that tiny screen? I shouldn’t be sitting here. I ought to be out talking to people.”

Shayne told him to leave his drink on the bar, say good night to the girl, and come to the eighth floor of the St. Albans, where he would find Shayne filling in the chinks in a story that could be one of the biggest of Rourke’s career. Rourke clicked off. Shayne then signaled for the switchboard girl and asked for Cheyfitz.

When the security man answered, Shayne apologized for disturbing him again.

“Tomorrow night I’ll sleep,” Cheyfitz said. “Or maybe I won’t, depending on what happens tomorrow morning.”

“Do you happen to know if Crowther’s been in Miami Beach lately?”

“Last week, Mike. He stayed here at the St. A. That was before all the noise in the papers, and there was absolutely no fuss or bother. It was billed as a vacation, but I know they did some conferring about the ceremony tomorrow. He went in the pool like anybody else, and nobody took any shots at him.”

Shayne thanked him and hung up. Tim Rourke, coming into the ballroom some time later, found him sitting on the dais in the master of ceremonies’ chair, his heels on the table, swirling cognac. For what must have been the tenth time, he was rearranging his meager supply of hard facts. Again they dropped into the same pattern.

“What are you doing, Mike?” his friend demanded. “Thinking? This is no time for thinking, man. It’s a time for action.”

Shayne waved his glass. “I see a bulge in your pocket. You brought a bottle. Sit down for a minute.”

Rourke was tall, skinny, always sloppily dressed. At the moment he was in serious need of a haircut. His offhand manner concealed a quick intelligence and a consuming curiosity that had made him one of the top reporters in the country.

He took a pint of bourbon out of one pocket, a highball glass containing two ice cubes out of the other. He poured whiskey over the ice and pulled out a chair.

“What’s your opinion of Eliot Crowther?” Shayne said abruptly.

Rourke sat down and drank. “What kind of question is that, at this time of night? You know my opinion of Crowther. I think he’s a bum.”

“Be more specific. Pretend you’re writing his obit, and the paper is letting you be completely honest for once.”

“What is this, a Rorschach test? An obit of Eliot Crowther-that’s a dream assignment. All right, I’ll play the game.”

He considered. “Crowther. A phony, a bigmouth. Nobody with any political sophistication would trust him to mail a letter.”

Shayne continued to look at him hard, and Rourke now said, more seriously, “Let’s assume there’s some hidden meaning in this somewhere. While Crowther lived he was one of the luckiest bastards in American politics. As tricky as they come, but because of his thatch of white hair and Benjamin Franklin glasses he didn’t look tricky. A conniver. He’d do any goddamn thing in the world if he thought it would help his political career, and if he thought he could get away with it. Self-confident. Ambitious. My God, was he ambitious. If he hadn’t been a Protestant he would have wanted to be Pope, and if the College of Cardinals had offered him the job, he would have switched. Some people thought he was brainy. I didn’t. He failed his bar exams twice, and if you really looked into it, I think you might find that somebody was standing in for him the time he passed. Of course I have a reputation for cynicism… Is this the kind of thing you’re anxious to get?”

“Go on,” Shayne said, scraping his chin with a thumbnail.

“Now consider the matter of style. His courtroom technique was greatly admired. All his effects were carefully staged, and my personal feeling was that he overdid it a little. But juries hardly ever thought so. He must have been a pretty good politician because until the day of his death he never lost an election. The odd thing is that I literally don’t know one single person who ever voted for him.”

“That’s the obituary,” Shayne said, still scraping his chin. “What do you think of him as a man?”

“You mean how does he perform in the sack? He still has his original wife, and I’ve never heard about any chicks on the side.”

“I’m thinking about how he’d stand up under pressure. Under threats.”

Rourke said slowly, “He’s a mean cat to have as an enemy. I wrote a piece once he didn’t like-it was about the Felix Steele case, remember-and he sent one of his Mafiosi to sniff around the paper and see if he could get me fired. Certain old charges against me were exhumed. Luckily the publisher knew about them and had already forgiven me.”

“Abe Berger says he worries about being assassinated. Anonymous letters make him shiver and shake.”

“Yeah?” Rourke said, interested. “Then why doesn’t he stay in Washington tomorrow? This medal isn’t a very high-priority thing.”