“Doesn’t Manners have a sense of humor?”
“He hasn’t cracked a smile in years. Wait here.”
He unlocked the door and went in, and was back again in almost exactly the length of time it would have taken him to go up and down two flights of stairs.
“You get in,” he said more pleasantly. “Now don’t take this wrong, but I’ve got to frisk you. That’s the condition.”
“I’m carrying a fountain pen,” Shayne said, “and it’s only fair to tell you that it’s loaded.”
“Will you stop trying to be smart, for your own good?” He extended both his hands toward Shayne’s chest. “OK?”
Shayne spread his arms and let the big man go over him rapidly. He was asked to pull up his pants to show that he wasn’t carrying a knife or a small gun strapped to his calf. He did so, after which the door was finally opened for him. The big man stayed a half-step behind him going up the stairs.
“What was all that stuff wrapped in? Was that the dress the kid had on?”
“Part of it,” Shayne said.
“That’s what I thought. Boy, oh boy. This is something I want to see.”
On the third floor he let Shayne into a short foyer leading to a small living room. There was no rug on the floor and not much furniture. What there was looked as though it had been bought from a secondhand dealer by somebody who wasn’t concerned about anything but the price. Manners, in his shirt-sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, was sitting in a swivel chair behind an unpainted kitchen table. There was a neat stack of manila folders in front of him, a phone, an overflowing ashtray, and Shayne’s little heap of souvenirs. He must be in his middle fifties, Shayne thought, but he looked younger. He was lean and hard, with a heavily ruled face and piercing black eyes.
“Give him a drink if he wants one, Stevens,” he said to the big man. “I’ll let you know when I need you.”
All they had was whiskey. It wasn’t good whiskey. Shayne asked for soda, but they didn’t have soda. He didn’t bother to ask for ice, knowing they wouldn’t have that either. After handing Shayne the warm drink, Stevens went into a bedroom, closing the door. There was one other bedroom; that door was also closed. A jazz record revolved on an open phonograph, the sound turned down to a faint mutter. The TV picture was on, with no sound coming from the set. On the small flickering screen, a tongue-tied Western badman was silently holding up a stagecoach.
Shayne sampled the drink. He had drunk worse whiskey, but not lately.
Manners spilled the money out of Curt’s wallet. “You could have helped yourself, Shayne. There’s a couple of thousand here. Wasn’t it enough for you?”
“That’s not how I make my living,” Shayne said.
“All right, what’s the proposition?”
Shayne put the watered whiskey on the floor so he wouldn’t forget what he was doing and drink any more. He was on a battered sofa facing the TV set. The bandit, completing the holdup, swung onto his horse and galloped quietly away.
“First,” Shayne said, “I want you to tell me how you knew where I was going to be so you could pick me up, or try to. Second, I want you to give me Maggie Smith.”
Manners’ eyes, fixed on Shayne’s face, didn’t shift. “Sam Toby told me it would be a good idea to get you out of town. I don’t know why. He said we could catch you as you left Senator Hitchcock’s. That’s your first point. Now who is Maggie Smith?”
“You don’t know?”
“That’s correct. I don’t know.”
“She runs a theatre here, and works for Toby on the side. You know how people like Toby are when they’re being investigated. They feel a lot more comfortable if they can get a picture of the chairman of the committee in bed with somebody he’s not married to. Maggie had that just about organized when I showed up. I’ve got a temporary postponement, but Hitchcock refuses to listen to anything I tell him about the woman. I want it canceled from your end.”
Manners’ face had tightened. “I have nothing to do with any of that.”
“Maybe not. But you’re paying the bills, and if anything goes wrong, it’s your neck.”
After hesitating briefly, Manners said, “All right, you can consider it canceled.”
“Call him while I’m here,” Shayne said. “And just so you won’t call him again the minute I leave, I want a letter of apology from you to Hitchcock. To the effect that you knew nothing about this thing Toby has been setting up, and you’re deeply shocked. You’d rather give up your contract than be a party to anything so slimy. I won’t deliver it unless I have to.”
“Toby won’t like that,” Manners said through thin lips. “He won’t like what he reads in the papers tomorrow morning any better.”
The detective took out the keys to the big Buick and tossed them to Manners, who caught them neatly with one hand. “The three of them are tied up in the back seat. If you don’t want to know where the car is parked, I’ll be glad to tell the cops.”
“Maybe I’ll let you keep them. They didn’t do such a bang-up job on you.”
Shayne explained patiently, “Morrie has a broken arm, an empty shoulder holster and no license to carry a gun in the District of Columbia. It wouldn’t surprise me if his fingerprints are on file. Rebman and the car can both be traced to you. I didn’t have any rope or adhesive tape, so I used Cheryl’s stockings and tore up her skirt. You probably know how much else she was wearing-it wasn’t much. The papers are going to eat this up. It’s mysterious, and there’s sex in it.”
Shayne and Manners had been equally unsmiling so far, but suddenly, at the thought of how the livelier newspapers would cover this story, the redhead gave a hoot of laughter.
“Very funny,” Manners commented.
He thought for a minute, then pulled the phone toward him and dialed a number. On the TV screen, an announcer was holding up a pack of cigarettes, moving his lips in praise of his sponsor’s product. The redhead broke out his own cigarettes and offered one to Manners.
“I don’t smoke,” Manners said brusquely, and snapped into the phone, “Toby? I don’t want to talk on your line. Call me back as soon as you can get to another phone.” He hung up. “Rebman had instructions to hire you if necessary. He decided you were too drunk to be approached on that basis. He was ready to go as high as fifteen. I’ll raise it to twenty.”
“Twenty thousand or twenty million?”
Manners looked pained. “Needless to say, not twenty million.”
“To do what?”
“First are you interested?”
“I’m always interested in that kind of dough.”
The phone rang. “Yes,” Manners said. “All right, Sam. Your idea about Mike Shayne backfired, and backfired badly. Never mind how it happened. We have to pick up the pieces. He’s in a position to make one or two demands. Have you been using somebody named Maggie Smith on Hitchcock?”
He listened, breaking in sharply after a moment. “Don’t tell me about it. I want it scratched. Do it as soon as I hang up. If she doesn’t answer her phone, ring her doorbell, and keep at it till you wake her up. Tell her to stay away from Hitchcock, starting now. That’s all. Keep in touch.”
Shayne motioned to him.
“Hold it,” Manners said into the phone. “What is it, Shayne?”
“Ask him how much he agreed to pay her.”
Manners repeated the question to Toby and hung up after listening to the answer.
“He’s promoting a foundation grant for her theatre,” he said. “It could run as high as thirty thousand.”
Shayne felt an unreasoning stab of disappointment. Even now, he realized, he had been hoping it would turn out that Maggie had been telling the truth and everybody else had been lying.
Manners took a lined memo pad out of one of the manila folders. “I don’t like Sam Toby,” he said, biting off the words, “and this is the last time I deal with him. What do you want me to say to Hitchcock?”
“Put it in your own words,” Shayne said. “Mike Shayne tells you that a woman named Maggie Smith has been working on him, and Toby confirms it. Toby’s arranging some financing for her theatre in return. This isn’t the way you like to work. You gave Toby hell and told him to call it off, and you’re glad you caught it this early, before any harm was done.”