was leaning back against the house in a chair without arms, with a rifle across his knees.
“How’s the investigation coming?” Waters said sarcastically.
“It’s coming. Where’d they take Harry?”
Waters hooted. “They didn’t take him. He went. Shayne, you’re going to be surprised. Nobody around here can lay their hands on that kind of cash on a Saturday night, so Harry got on a plane and went to New York.”
“Yeah, I’m surprised,” Shayne admitted after a moment’s silence.
He came up on the terrace. Seeing what looked like an array of bottles on a low table, he turned on his flashlight and found that one of them was the same bottle of cognac he had been drinking from before. He emptied the watery dregs of a highball from the only glass, and poured a drink. Then he turned off the flashlight and sat down on the stone balustrade.
“What shape was he in?” he said.
Waters waved. “Hell, it takes more than a bump on the head to stop old Harry. The doctor and that babe, they both told him to go to bed, but Harry knows his obligations. I’ll say that for him. And why not, for Christ’s sake? What else does he do for that two percent? It’s his own damn fault that he’s short. If you knew the businesses he’s been putting dough into lately! He owns a piece of a bank! Did you know that? I don’t mean the kind of bank where you go down and open up the vault when you feel like it. He’s a stockholder. He has to wait till nine A.M. Monday morning like anybody.”
“Who’s he seeing in New York?”
“We’ve got to keep some secrets, Shayne. It’s just up and back. You know these jets. Whoosh! They were going to try to get him on a nine-thirty flight. The babe drove him.”
Shayne drank, not liking this. Harry shouldn’t be walking around.
“Who’s the rifle supposed to be for?”
Waters, embarrassed, reversed the rifle and leaned it against the house. “I don’t know what to expect. Naples is giving a party to celebrate the big win. He wants me to be guest of honor. That’s what you call a sense of humor. First he busts me, then he wants me to get plastered with everybody in the St. A. standing around with a big grin on their face. And I’d have to make believe I enjoyed it. We’re supposed to have ice water in our veins, that’s what it says in the books. Ten o’clock, he said, with the cash. What’ll he do when I don’t show up? Send a couple of characters out looking for me? I don’t know what he’ll do. I know what he did in the old days, but has he changed? Seriously-what have you come up with, if anything?”
“Nothing conclusive,” Shayne said, picking his words. “But I begin to get the feeling that these stickup guys were after more than the dough.”
“What do you mean?” Waters said, worried. “If you take Harry’s word for it, they walked away with two hundred big ones. That would make it worthwhile.”
“First they beat you with a horse and a football player. Then they doubled the take with an armed robbery. Maybe it doesn’t stop there. What if the real object was to show that you and Harry can’t handle a big hit any more?”
“Thanks,” Waters said bitterly. “As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”
Taking out a little plastic container, he shook a white tablet into his hand and swallowed it with a mouthful of club soda. “Tranquillizers,” he explained. “But I’ve got to go easy. You can’t gobble these things like potato chips. Want a theory? I’ll give you a theory. Maybe Harry stuck himself up. Think about it. He’s Daddy Warbucks around here. He’s supposed to keep a reserve. But he’s been getting so goddamn legitimate! The idea of that much cash lying around not earning interest, it would make him sick to his stomach. When you go legit you start thinking about those things. You put it in stocks or in real estate. He’s got it, understand. He’s not like me, I’m hurting and I don’t mind saying so.”
“You think he packed some phone books in a suitcase and paid somebody to set his Cadillac on fire and crack his skull with a gun?”
“Put it like that,” Waters admitted, “and it sounds hard to believe.” He added whiskey and ice to his glass of soda, rattled the icecubes and drank. “But look at the background. The small fry around town have been getting restless. It’s not only me. They want him to pay attention to their problems, and not be tied up with real-estate lawyers all the time. He’s getting shaky and he knows it. I put in a call for funds, which I have every right to do. He knows I’m just getting on my feet after the shellacking I took in the Caribbean. He has to get up that dough or questions will be asked. Burning up a Cadillac is a small price to pay. And who says he was knocked cold? He says. Anybody can stagger around and pretend to have a headache. The doctor? You know how doctors are. They don’t get paid to tell you you’re not sick.”
“I’ll keep that on file,” Shayne said skeptically. “Nobody ever told me what happened to you in the Caribbean.”
“I was flimflammed,” Waters said simply. “They asked me to come in and set up a casino, teach them how to run it. Eighteen months later, when the house was beginning to run in the black, they changed the goddamned government and nationalized me. No revolution or anything, just a couple of different colonels, and I see now it was in the back of their minds all along. I had to pay through the nose before they let me off the island. The State Department wouldn’t lift a goddamned finger. I got out with an extra suit of underwear, that’s about all. I had to hock my right ball, practically, to get back in the business of booking bets.”
Shayne drank thoughtfully. “Do you think Naples has any ideas about getting active again?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s used to running things. Back in Chicago, when he said jump, they jumped. Maybe he misses that. He’s got a stable of horses, a hot-looking wife, a boat. But is it enough? All I know is, if Harry and Al ever really tangle, I want to be somewhere else.”
“What happens if Harry doesn’t come back with the money?”
“He better,” Waters said blackly. “Now don’t quote me-” He interrupted himself and drank, then felt for the container of tranquillizers. “Well, I know you’ll probably quote me, but Harry knows as well as I do that if he can’t lay that cash on the line there’s going to be a little revolution right here in Miami. He’s getting so slow! Six months ago he would have dropped the points on Florida Christian, he would have spotted the play on Ladybug and laid it off. You can’t do that without communication, and communications around here have been getting terrible. When that babe went to work for him, that’s when I date it from. Four and a half percent from a savings and loan, he thinks now, is better than twenty percent in something illegal. All of a sudden some things go and some things don’t go. I’m tired of it, and I’m not the only one.”
Leaning forward, Shayne put his empty glass on the table. “I think it’s about time for me to talk to Naples. Before I forget it, have you run into a kid named Vince Donahue?”
Waters had been about to feed himself a tranquillizer. Slowly and deliberately, he put the cap back on the container, put it away and reached for the rifle. Shayne was on top of him before the barrel was all the way around. He pivoted, lifting, and twisted the weapon out of the bookie’s hands.
“Everybody’s jumpy tonight,” Shayne observed. “What were you going to do, blow a hole in me because I asked a simple question? If you don’t ask questions you don’t get any answers. Something’s happened to your sense of proportion.”
Waters sneered at him. “It’s my experience that certain people only listen when a gun’s pointing at them. All I was going to suggest, don’t mention Donahue’s name to Naples. The kid’s in the sack with the wife a couple of afternoons a week, according to my information.”
“What does he do mornings?”
“That’s all for now, Shayne,” Waters said wearily. “Talk about slow-those pills really slow you down. I’m going to put the phone back on the hook. Harry’ll be calling pretty soon. Why not wait for the call?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know you’ll just stir things up? Al’s sure to be plastered and he’s a fast man at flying off the handle. The last thing Harry wants is Al Naples on his neck. He likes this quiet life.”
Shayne unloaded the rifle. Swinging it by the barrel, he brought it down hard on the balustrade, breaking off the hammer.
“What do you think,” Waters said in his mournful tone, “that I’d shoot you in the back, and let Harry explain what you’re doing on his lawn? I was about to make you an offer. Don’t you even want to hear it?”
“Keep it brief.”
“Twenty-five G’s,” Waters said, “to go out and get drunk.”
Shayne tossed down the useless rifle. “I thought you said you were broke.”
