Manners scrawled a message covering half a page. He tore it off and tossed it to Shayne. Shayne read it, nodded and put it away. He kept his face impassive, but all the alarm bells were clanging. They shouldn’t have been so ready to jettison Maggie Smith. Something was wrong here, and he didn’t know what. On the record player another jazz record came down and began to spin. There was an unmistakable note of menace in the air.
“We thought you were working for National,” Manners said. “But you’ve actually been working for Hitchcock’s family, haven’t you? I understand he has a daughter?”
Shayne shrugged and started to get up. Manners went on, “To be candid, I wouldn’t want to hire you away from a competitor, because I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t try to get away with drawing a fee from both sides. But I assume that this wraps it up as far as you’re concerned. We need some background on Senator Tom Wall. We suspect he’s on the National payroll. He’s close to Henry Clark, who handles National’s undercover lobbying. We need proof of this, and we need it in a hurry. The payment schedule would be-two thousand down, eighteen thousand balance on delivery of something we can use.”
Shayne picked up his drink, looked at it with distaste and set it back on the floor.
“That sounds possible. But you’d better get somebody who can find the Washington Monument without having to follow a cab driver. Probably there’s no reason you shouldn’t know-Trina Hitchcock hired me to keep her father out of bed with the Smith woman. And that’s all she hired me to do. I’ve been working on something in Miami the last few days and I’m behind on my sleep. Now I’m going to start catching up. As soon as the hearings adjourn I’m going back to a town where the cops know me and I have friends on the papers. That makes a difference.”
Manners screwed on the top of his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. “Has it occurred to you that you might have been brought to Washington for some other reason than the one you were given?”
“Let’s say it’s occurred to me.” Shayne crossed the uncarpeted floor and added his cigarette butt to the others in the ashtray. “But the hell with it. The day’s over.”
“I’d like to take another minute to give you some history,” Manners said. “Sit down and finish your drink.”
Shayne returned to the sofa. “OK, but I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.”
“One year ago I had my back to the wall. I’d made the mistake of putting too much time into building airplanes and too little into buttering up the generals and admirals. The fat cats at National thought the time was ripe to take me over. Two of their top executives and three of their directors are ex-general officers, and their only company duty is to stay on friendly terms with their ex-colleagues in the Pentagon. I’ve never gone in for that old-buddy crap. I’d never heard the name of Sam Toby. If he’d come into my office and said I needed to hire a Washington influence peddler to stay in business, I would have thrown him out on his ear. Then National took a contract away from me after I’d spent two million on wind-tunnel tests. I had a couple of big loans called, for no good reason. All of a sudden my credit sources dried up. I began to hear that rumors were going around about me personally-my financial position, even my sanity. National made me an offer. The price was ridiculous. I turned it down. They began raiding my stock, and drove it down to below nine dollars a share. All the analysts were predicting I’d be in bankruptcy in six months. They hadn’t seen my books. I had six weeks.”
“And what does all this have to do with me?” Shayne said blurrily.
“Manners common closed this afternoon at one hundred and ten. I have thirty thousand men at work in five states. We’ve had enough delays. We’re finally rolling on this plane, and anything that holds us up now will be bad for everybody. There’s no question of canceling the contract. It’s too late for that. The reason National is making this big effort is to show they still have some political muscle, to lay the groundwork for the next time. No matter how big you are, you have to wade through a certain amount of mud to get a contract like this one. The reason I’m fighting Hitchcock’s investigation is that I don’t want any of the mud splattered on the airplane. Who made what promises, who paid what legal fees, who traded what favors for what phone calls-none of that matters, Shayne. What matters is how far can the plane fly without refueling? How fast? How much load can it carry? How soon will it be operational?”
“Well, as I say-” Shayne said.
Manners put his hands flat on the table and pushed himself erect, and Shayne realized that the industrialist must need sleep almost as much as he did himself.
“You’ve done what you were brought in to do,” Manners said evenly. “Pleasant dreams. Here.” He held out the whiskey bottle, which was still three-quarters full. “Take this with you. The bars close at two and you’ll have trouble getting a drink. What I’m trying to get across is this: Rebman did badly tonight. But he’s a capable man, and don’t underestimate him. Think about my offer. It’ll still be open in the morning. If anybody else tops it, bear in mind that there’s nothing I won’t do, and I mean that literally, to put that airplane into production. Don’t get in the way.”
“Hell,” Shayne said, “I’m getting out of it as fast as I can. I don’t go around looking for trouble.”
“Where do we find the Buick?”
“Around the corner from a spot called the Bijou on Wisconsin. I don’t know the name of the street.”
“Stevens!” Manners called.
The big man came out of the bedroom and Manners said, “Shayne’s leaving.”
Manners and the redhead exchanged a look. They obviously respected each other, but they made no move to shake hands. One of the things Shayne was wondering was who had smoked the cigarettes in Manners’ ashtray. He grinned at Stevens and said, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
He took two long strides and opened the other bedroom door. He heard someone moving and smelled cigarette smoke, but all he could see was a raincoat and a brown felt hat on one of a pair of twin beds. Then Stevens, moving fast, took the doorknob out of his hand.
“Mr. Manners has things to do.”
“I won’t insist,” Shayne said peaceably.
Manners was watching him. The phone had begun to ring, but he made no move to answer it until the redhead half waved and went out. Manners was clearly not finished for the night, and neither was Shayne. He had been watching the polished performance of an accomplished magician; his eye had been misdirected, so he had been looking the wrong way when the substitution was made. If he went to bed now, he would wake up in the morning to find that something surprising and possibly ugly had happened. “Terrific, isn’t he?” Stevens said on the stairs.
“Yeah,” Shayne agreed. “I don’t know if I’d like to have him around all the time. It would be like living with a band-saw.”
“Oh, he’s OK if you do what he says. When you’re working for Manners you don’t sit around wondering who’s boss. He’s got that big company in the palm of his hand, like this.” He clenched his fist, which was the size of a small cantaloupe. “Rebman, now, Mr. Manners is going to take off his hide in strips.”
They said goodnight, and Stevens stayed in the doorway until Shayne got into his Ford and drove away. Manners had obviously been conferring with someone when Shayne arrived, driving the visitor into the bedroom. It was a clear, hot night, with no sign of rain, so why, Shayne wondered, had the visitor been wearing a raincoat?
He circled the block. Turning back onto 16th, he parked across from the Royalton Arms. There was a similar apartment house on the opposite corner, with an equally flossy name, the Pickwick. He went into the lighted lobby, unscrewed the overhead bulb so he couldn’t be seen from the street, and waited.
Presently Stevens came out, squeezed into a compact sedan and drove off, probably to rescue Cheryl and the others from the locked Buick. Shayne dozed, leaning against the mailboxes, snapping awake abruptly as the door across the street opened again. This time it was a short, burly figure wearing the raincoat and felt hat Shayne had seen in Manners’ bedroom. The raincoat collar was turned up, the hat brim was turned down. Not much showed in between except the burning spark of a cigarette.