Maybe I dozed. When I opened my eyes there was a figure in the doorway.
“Burnsie!” she said softly.
I went to her. The night had cooled. She looked ridiculously young in the moonlight. And when she talked in that low tone her voice wasn’t harsh.
From my arms she said, “Does a lady get invited in, or do we stand out here all night?”
It seemed a time for memory. Silly memories. The years had not treated us delicately. But the clock had been turned back. The walks we used to take when she’d tell me how she was going to become a famous dancer and go to Hollywood. The amusement park. We bet kisses on our shooting gallery score. It was one game she won easily; she was good with those guns. But those years were dead. Snowed under. Way in the front of the book.
This glow of her cigarette was a slow arc which I could trace each time she lifted it to her lips. When she dragged the smoke into her lungs, the end glowed more brightly, and I could see the prominent cheekbones, the violent red of her lips.
She said, “I guess I can’t add much, Burnsie. The syndicate had a tie-up with the police in such a way that you paid off or had to follow a hundred ridiculous ordinances that no one ever heard of. If you still stayed stubborn, they’d send around a few muscle men to start a brawl at the bar, or break up the show. The syndicate wasn’t really strong until after I went into business.”
“Schaegan cleaned the syndicate?’”
“I guess he took most of the ready cash.”
“What did he do with it?”
“Don’t ask me, Burnsie. He keeps plenty with him. He isn’t exactly liberal with pocket money for me. I guess he’s afraid I’ll run out on him.”
“How did he get hold of it?”
“It was kept in a private time vault. There was enough to fill two big suitcases. Schaegan knew everybody’s habits. He sapped the guard and got out again in five minutes.”
We were silent for a little while. We sat facing each other in the deep cane chairs.
I said, “We have enough to go on to grab the head of the syndicate for fraud if we can lay our hands on him. If we could find out who he is. He’s a good administrator. A very hard and efficient apple. He put the syndicate into bigtime operations in 1945. Before that it was just a game for peanuts.”
“I don’t know who was at the head of it, Burnsie.”
“But Schaegan knows.”
“Yes, Schaegan knows. And I don’t think he’ll tell you, Burnsie.”
I sighed. “I’m going to proposition him, Beth. I’m going to ask him to write out the story and arrange it so that, should he die, it will be forwarded to me immediately. That can’t lose him anything, and it might appeal to him from a revenge angle. If I can’t get him to come out with it, I have hopes he’ll fall for the second alternative. What do you think?”
“He might do that. And you might have to wait a long time to get the information. Civil service might have retired you by the time you get it.”
I laughed without humor. “You wouldn’t let me warn him. He might be getting it right now, Beth. In the head.”
She said, “Did you ever think, Burnsie, that the head of the syndicate had to split the take up so many ways that he never made a big pile out of it?”
“Big or little, we can prove at least a thousand a month unreported income. And even if it were only fifty a month unreported, we could still make fraud stick.”
She came quickly over to me. She said huskily, “Burnsie, isn’t this kind of a crummy time to be working on a case? Do they pay you overtime? Don’t you think somebody ought to change the subject?”
Just outside the open door a stone rattled under a careless foot. She stiffened in my arms and stopped breathing. As she stood up, I went quickly for the door.
My eyes were used to the darkness. The moistness of the night made the gun steel sweat against my hand. I saw a bulging shadow under a small twisted palm.
I kept my eyes on the shadow, grabbed the slide of the automatic, yanked it back and let it slam forward. The metallic noises seemed as loud as a shot in the night stillness.
There was a crash of shrubbery, the slap of a shoe-sole against stone. The shadow moved quickly off into the night.
I turned to Beth and said, “The time grows short, princess. You’d better head back and see if there are any holes in your husband.”
I walked with her. Their cottage was dark. Her key clicked in the lock, grated slightly. The door swung open. The deep, stentorious sound of Schaegan’s snoring floated from the bedroom.
She turned into my arms, kissed me hard, whispered, “Good night, darling.” I stood outside the door until I heard the click of the lock. Then I walked slowly back to my place. I looked toward the east, saw the faint grayness of dawn beyond the mountains. I yawned and stretched.
Back in the cottage, I took a long shower and fell, drugged with weariness, into bed.
Chapter Three
Bullets to Spare
At ten o’clock I was on the upper terrace of the hotel proper, eating breakfast, carefully watching cottage eighteen. After breakfast I drank one slow cup of coffee after another. It was quarter after eleven when Beth, a cape around her shoulders, her legs, long and slim and brown, accentuated by the white two-piece swim suit, came out and walked slowly toward the pool.
I caught her at the pool edge just as she was about to dive in.
There were shadows under her eyes, but she looked wide awake and alert. Her fingers were strong on my wrist. “I couldn’t sleep, Burnsie. I kept thinking about a divorce. How much did you mean it about that three-room apartment?”
“I never get emotional before lunch. Princess, would you please be a good girl and stay the hell away from the cottage? I want a heart to heart talk with Schaegan. A nice long talk. I have a new idea.”
She gave me a level stare. “You wouldn’t be thinking of—” She doubled a brown fist and gave a respectable version of a left hook.
“How could you think such a horrible thing!” I said, grinning.
“He’s tougher than you might think.”
A man in swimming trunks sat on the edge of the pool on the other side, watching us. I remembered him from the day before. He was average looking, but with the flat, opaque, unreadable expression of a very rough citizen. I stared at him and he looked away. I wondered if he were the visitor in the night. Or maybe he just liked Beth’s looks.
“I’ll chance it,” I said.
Schaegan’s heavy chest was bare. He wore baggy slacks and a heavy beard and even his neat little mustache was rumpled.
“Go away, Burns,” he said in a scratchy voice. “Go hide.”
I reached almost straight up in the air with my left hand. His hands instinctively lifted. As they did I pivoted and put my full weight into a short right hook that traveled eight fast inches and ended with a sound, half splat and half thud, against his bare diaphragm.
His mouth sagged open and his eyes rolled half out of sight. He held the door frame in both hands and sagged slowly to his knees. I grabbed him under the arms, kicked the door shut, lugged him over to a chair. He was fighting for each breath.
I had previously noticed a portable radio on the table. I dropped the front open, found some Cuban music and turned it up.
He looked greenish around the mouth. He said, “I didn’t care for that, Burns. You killed any chance you might have had.” He had to talk up to be heard over the music.
I had my personal hunch that he would crack wide open if I could convince him that it was my firm intention to spoil his face for all time. I was banking on his basic vanity.