“Private detective. Private detective! And now I want to know what happened on the plane. No lies! No lies, Mr. Shayne!”
Breathing hard, he filled a small cup with coffee from a silver urn.
“No lies,” he repeated. “Tell me the truth about the gold and we may not kill you.”
“I’ve already told you I don’t know a Goddamn thing,” Shayne said, dropping onto the arm of an upholstered chair. “I had a fight with Thompson outside the St. Albans casino. He lost. In fact, he’s dead. That left the operation one man short. I didn’t want to hang around and stand trial for manslaughter. The lady asked me if I could use a thousand bucks.”
“What lady?”
“Let’s not quibble about things you already know,” Shayne said impatiently. “You’ll want to know why I was in St. Albans. I was tailing Moss. I picked up a tip that he was involved in that gold job at LaGuardia. That puts me at the wrong end of the gun, I realize, but don’t tell your boy to blast me yet. There really was an explosion on the plane. You’ll want to check that with your own people, or maybe you won’t, I don’t know. Somebody’s trying to pull a switch here. Until you find out who it is, it might be a good idea to watch your step. The plan was-am I going too fast for you?”
“Go faster. The plan was-”
“To blow the door, then tip the airplane and dump the container where they could find it later. So I have something to sell you. I know exactly where it went in, give or take a couple of hundred yards. It’s between a wooded point and the mouth of a river. In a certain light, you might be able to spot it from the air.”
Nikko muddled his coffee vigorously with a little spoon. “Who was flying the plane?”
“Joe Lassiter. Pan American fired him for drinking and gambling and getting in trouble with too many women. All he had to do was heel over hard at a certain time. He’d do it for whiskey money, without asking questions.”
Nikko considered, his handsome dark face screwed up uncomfortably. Suddenly he cocked his head.
“Helicopter!”
He snapped a command to the sailor and ran on deck. The other sailors collected quickly and began pulling the luggage containers undercover. When the helicopter came over, the deck was empty.
Shayne, in the salon, indicated by gestures that he wanted a drink. The sailor warned him away from the bar with a shake of his head. Shayne waited a moment. Without asking permission, he helped himself to coffee.
The helicopter went over, hesitated, and came back. It was possible, though not likely, that Tim Rourke, at Maiquetia airport, had persuaded the Venezuelan police to send this helicopter, but Rourke had no way of knowing about Adam’s yacht or that it had anything to do with the DC-8’s unscheduled landing in the oilfields. And yet it was clear that the people in the helicopter were curious about the Paladin. As the yacht changed course, the helicopter followed, hanging several hundred feet above the stern, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.
Shayne began wandering about the room, trying to think of some way to call attention to the fact that the Paladin had prisoners aboard. Seeing his wallet on the table where Nikko had dropped it, an idea hit him. Ward’s remark about the needles had been picking at the edge of his consciousness, but Clancy had given him only two and he had used them both. As he arranged the identification cards that Nikko had scattered, his mind jumped back thirty-six hours.
Two nights before, an unknown person had planted a square of blotting paper in LeFevre’s wallet, with the obvious aim of implicating Shayne in a hallucination murder. To complete the picture, to make it totally convincing to the police, there also ought to be-
He ruffled quickly through the cards without finding anything. He checked the other compartments in the wallet: nothing. Finally, ready to conclude that the idea was more wishful then realistic, he pulled his Florida driver’s license out of its transparent plastic cover. A scrap of blotting paper fluttered to the floor.
The sailor with the tommy gun was watching closely, frowning. He was a strong young boy, with heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes. Shayne grinned at him. He returned the wallet to his hip pocket, buttoning it in, and picked up the blotting paper.
Tasting the thick, bitter coffee, he made a face.
“Cold.”
Shielding the movement with his body, he dropped the blotting paper into the cup. Again without asking permission, he poured the coffee back and turned up the heat beneath the urn.
After another moment, he refilled his cup, filled another for the sailor and took it across to him.
“Hell, let’s be friends,” he said cordially. “When this is over, we’ll all be rich.”
The sailor looked at him suspiciously, thought about it, and finally accepted the cup. Shayne gave him an encouraging wink.
“Nothing like coffee. I know we’re all worried about that chopper, but they’ll go away in a minute. Everything’s going to turn out all right.”
The sailor stirred in sugar and took a noisy sip, still without taking his eyes off Shayne.
“Greece,” Shayne said. “It must be a great place. I admit I don’t like the liquor much, and I can’t say much for the coffee, but drink up, will you? We don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”
He motioned with his cup and put it to his lips. The boy went on drinking, his eyes alive with suspicion. With LeFevre, Shayne remembered, a vague, foolish look had spread over his face when the drug took hold. It had happened suddenly, as though a switch had been thrown. The boy sipped his way through the coffee and tipped the cup to get the dregs at the bottom. Overhead, the helicopter fell away and came back.
Shayne was on the point of deciding that the blotting paper hadn’t been in the urn long enough to affect the coffee.
Suddenly the boy rose several inches in his chair. The look on his face was a duplicate of the one Shayne had seen on LeFevre’s. He drew a deep breath, and as he breathed out, all his tension left him.
“Nice gun,” Shayne said, pantomiming taking an imaginary tommy gun off his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”
He held out his hand. Without hesitation, the boy closed the safety and handed him the weapon.
Shayne snapped out the clip and cleared the chamber. He shucked the forty-five rounds into a drawer in the table, returned the empty clip to the gun, and clowned with it for a moment, wiping out imaginary enemies. He opened the coffee urn and stirred the coffee with the barrel, to the boy’s amusement. Shayne gave the gun back, dripping coffee.
The helicopter dropped away behind them, but Shayne could still hear the rotor thumping steadily in the distance. The sailor was still laughing when Nikko came in.
“You can’t laugh your way out of this, please believe me,” Nikko told Shayne. “You think you’re safe because of so many witnesses. Put it out of your mind. I take only relatives and fellow townsmen as members of my crew. This is my nephew Chris. If I say the word, he will shoot you like a rabbit and drop you over the side with weights fastened to your ankles. I am not talking big, just telling you the facts.”
Glaring at Shayne, he drew a cup of coffee.
CHAPTER 18
He stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar and began to drink without sitting down.
“Who is responsible for this helicopter?”
“Adam, naturally. You know that.”
Nikko’s eyebrows came down. “I see. Are you working for him?”
“I’m a free agent. But I’m always looking for this kind of situation. After the fighting stops, there’s usually something left over for me.”
“So the other story, about following Moss to St. Albans, that was a lie. I told you not to tell lies. You’ll regret it. What do you know about Adam?”
“Not enough,” Shayne said curtly. “But you couldn’t bring the Paladin across the Atlantic on your own responsibility. He must be somewhere around. His original idea was to transfer the gold to a helicopter and fly it down to La Guaira. That was before everybody started thinking up variations. We radioed Maiquetia before we landed. His obvious move as soon as he heard about the hijacking was to get the chopper in the air and come looking for us. Of course, he’d recognize his own boat.”