When a murderer strikes from beyond the grave, it means one of three things. Either he is not dead or someone alive is using his name — or a ghost is walking. After a gruesome double killing, it is up to Shayne to find out which.

Mike Shayne pondered. It had all the earmarks of being a domestic case and he normally did not mix in family beefs. He would not have seen her at all if Jim Rourke had not pushed him into it as a favor to a friend.

The woman waited patiently. She was perched in the chair placed strategically in front of the redhead’s desk. She had class, was unpainted and still attractive in middle years. A few treadmarks were visible here and there, but most of her lines and planes remained smooth and she exuded an air of cool confidence and intelligence.

When she phoned in for an appointment at Mike Shayne’s Flagler Street office, she had said her name was Samantha. She was Samantha of Samantha’s. It meant nothing to Shayne, but his secretary had instantly perked.

“She is weddings, Michael,” Lucy Hamilton had said, excitement sharpening her tone. “If you have a posh Miami wedding these days, Samantha is your planner.”

Samantha’s father had not been seen by nor been in contact with her mother since the previous Friday, when he left the family home to go to his office at Brooks and Associates. It meant he had been out of touch for five days.

“Brooks,” mused Shayne. “Those are the land people. Worldwide. Right?”

Samantha nodded. “Father has been with them for years. He is considered an expert in land valuation.”

“You’ve talked to the Brooks people? Are you sure your father has not been sent—”

“They are concerned, Mr. Shayne. They do not understand his absence. Father has an enviable company reputation for attendance.”

Shayne slouched lower in his chair and used a thumb and forefinger to tug an earlobe. It was an habitual gesture when he was thinking hard. “How old is your father, Miss Bums?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“He and your mother get along okay?”

“They are contented people, Mr. Shayne — and, no, father has not scurried off to some corner of the world with a young secretary clinging to his arm. Should you discover that he has, I will pay you ten times your normal fee. You may have a contract to that effect drawn by your secretary.”

The redhead gave her a sharp look from under shaggy eyebrows. “You are perceptive, Miss Bums.”

“I know my father,” she said.

He sat up suddenly, braced large forearms on the edge of the desk, interlocked meaty fingers. “Okay, you got any ideas about where he might have gone, why he might have—”

“None,” she interrupted. Her lips tightened. “It’s totally out of character.”

“How about your mother?” the detective asked.

“She’s almost ill with worry. That’s one of the reasons I have come to you.”

“Another being you have not gone to the police.”

“No,” she said. “I have not. Frankly, I do not want newspaper publicity. More importantly, I want someone concentrating full time on finding Father. I can afford to pay for that service.”

“Have you or your mother considered foul play?”

She took a moment before answering. “Mother hasn’t, I’m sure. But I... well, after five days, Mr. Shayne.” She abruptly waved a ringless hand. “I don’t know. I can’t conceive...”

She let the words trail off.

Shayne reached for the phone. One avenue needed to be explored immediately. The phone could cut a comer.

“City Morgue,” answered the voice. “Zoner.”

“Mike Shayne, Ray. I’m looking for a missing person. He hasn’t been in the newspapers.”

“Got two unidentifieds, Mike, a male and a fe — oops, you said he. Okay, got one male unidentified. Negroid, twenty-eight to thirty—”

“Nope. Caucasian. Sixty-seven, probably well groomed and—”

“Got two of them, too. But they’re freshies, just came in about an hour ago. And kinda weird — they came in together. That part ain’t weird, of course. I mean, they was found staked out in a swamp, the way I hear it. Now, that’s weird, ain’t it? I mean, two guys staked out in—”

“You get them with papers, Ray?” Shayne asked sharply.

“Yep. No trouble with I.D. Blake Thomas Singleton, Caucasian, male, age sixty-six—”

“Nope.”

“Patrick Nole Burns, Caucasian male, age sixty-seven—”

“Bingo!” Shayne said grimly.

“Oh, boy, you do pick the dandies! Like I said, these two boys were found staked out in a swamp, side by side, heads and faces packed in mud. Some alligator hunter fell over them early this morning, I hear.”

Samantha Bums went ashen and shot to her feet when Sayne told her where she could find her father. She did not know Singleton, she said, taut and trembling. She looked as if she could explode at any second.

The redhead hooked a long arm up and over his shoulder, yanked open a drawer of a filing cabinet. He brought out a fresh bottle of Martell, planted it on the desk. His hand disappeared into the drawer again, returned with a glass. The movement had spread his lapels wide, exposed the holstered .45.

Samantha Burns stared at him. “I don’t drink,” she finally managed. “And I must go to mother.” She continued to stare hard for a few seconds, then she seemed to gather herself She took a deep breath.

“Mr. Shayne,” she said coldly, “find my father’s killer.”

“Un-huh.”

“And when you do, use that... that gun!”

Shayne opened the bottle and poured some cognac. He slugged down the drink before he rose and slammed the glass against the desk top.

“Miss Bums,” he said flatly, “I am not a hired gun. I will find and take your father’s murderer to the police! Understood?”

She had recoiled. She suddenly slumped. “Yes,” she said meekly.

Then she turned and walked out of the office.

Shayne busied himself with office cleanup the remainder of that bright Wednesday morning in mid-May. He was stalling. He was restless, anxious to launch the new investigation, but the police needed time to gather loose ends.

The cops could save him hours and miles. Preliminary, routine police investigation of the double deaths — plus autopsies — would swiftly compile information he needed.

Will Gentry, chief of Miami police, looked up from his desk, his eyes narrowed in dark curiosity, when the redhead finally descended. He sucked a breath and sat back, his squat body wider than the leather chair. A black cigar stub, long dead, bobbed in one corner of his clamped lips.

“Mike,” he said. Then he went silent.

Shayne knew why. Gentry was already waiting. They had been acquainted for years, had worked together on many cases. Each respected the expertise of the other. More importantly, they were friends, had an acquired mutual insight. Gentry was now drawing on that insight. He knew the large redhead had not rolled into police headquarters simply because he had heard on a radio about a new double slaying that confronted the police.

Shayne gave Will Gentry Samantha Burns. Minor surprise showed briefly on the bulldog face of the chief as he scratched the name on a yellow legal pad. He sat back again. The cigar butt shot up to a forty-five degree angle.

“Two men murdered,” he said. “They were hit, staked out in a swamp. It’s got a definite odor, hasn’t it?”

“Gangland, yeah.” Shayne nodded, hooking a hip on a corner of the chiefs desk. He thumbed back his hat and lit a cigaret. “But it isn’t.”

“We’ve had feelers out all morning, Mike. Nothing. Nobody in the mob ever heard of Singleton and/or Burns. The hierarchy is as curious as we are. If unknowns from out of town are drifting in, they want to know pronto.”

Shayne picked a strand of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “Ray Zoner down at the morgue tells me the heads were packed in mud.”

“According to the autopsy reports, Singleton died from a skull blow — probably a sap of some kind — while Burns suffocated. Both had swamp mud packed in their throats and nostrils. We’re figuring Singleton was dead before the staking. Bums also had a skull wound, but it didn’t kill him. He probably was unconscious while being packed.”

The victims had been dead approximately five days, give or take a few hours. Pinning the exact time of death was difficult for the medical boys, because the bodies were not in the best of shape after such a long period of exposure to hot sun, dampness, snakes, insects and other parasites. Each victim was fully clothed. Pockets had not been rifled. Wallets had been found on each body. Singleton was carrying $248 in cash and a string of credit cards. Bums was carrying $89 and credit cards. No packets in the credit card folders were empty.

Mugging, robbery as a motive, were out. Their money made that certain.

No vehicles or tire tracks had been found at the death site. Cops had immediately fanned out, searched the police car pound, looked around town for automobiles that had been parked in one spot for days.

Then it had been determined that Singleton was a non-driver and that Bums had called a cab to take him to work last Friday morning. His wife had needed a car to keep a hairdresser appointment that morning and her Vega was in a garage having a muffler replaced.

“The staking, Will,” said Shayne, leaving the desk. “That’s cold-blooded stuff.” He paced the confines of the office, trailing smoke behind him.

“New stakes, fashioned like tent stakes. Hell, you wouldn’t figure there’s that many places a man could get stakes these days — until you start nosing around. There’s the lumber yards, the discount stores with lumber departments, home builders, carpenters — big outfits or individuals — all over the city. Then maybe the killer is a Handy Dan himself who has the saw to make his own stakes.

“The rope — also new, cut in short lengths. It could have been purchased anywhere. All a guy needs is three or four bucks and a sharp pocketknife.

“So, from the materials? No clues. The stakeouts themselves? We get an insight into the killer. He’s a mean goon. He can sap two guys, dig two holes, dump ’em in, cover them. Job done. He doesn’t. He goes to the trouble of spread-eagling them, flat on spines on top of the ground, staking, then packing the air passages.”

Shayne continued to pace. “The alligator man?”

“For now, we make him clean.”

“The Bums woman says she never heard of Singleton,” said the redhead. “I buy that to mean her father and Singleton didn’t bend elbows together. She’d know. She’s a sharp dame, Will, close to the family circle.”

“We’ve got Burns walking out of the Brooks place around two last Friday afternoon. He was mum about destination but that wasn’t unusual, according to his secretary. In one way, he was a loner around there, kept busy but never talked about what might be on the stove until it was cooking.

“So the secretary didn’t even stop typing with the departure. Burns could’ve been going to the water well, home or out to meet a prospective client. When he had something for her, he’d tell her. And that’s when he disappeared, Mike. We haven’t turned up anyone yet who laid eyes on him after he walked out of his secretary’s sight.”

“Phone calls?” Shayne asked.

Gentry shrugged. “The secretary says he probably had a dozen or so on Friday, most of them from inside the building. But there is an hour and a half period — noon to one-thirty — when she wasn’t in. Bums was. He was a brown-bagger, never went out to lunch. He could have had calls in that period.”

Shayne again parked on a comer of Gentry’s desk, took a last drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out. “Okay. What about Singleton?”

Singleton also had been a land expert — but with Tiener South, the conglomerate. Where Brooks and Associates concentrated on land buying, selling and development, Tiener South had many ventures — mining, oil, transportation, the movie industry — and land.

Singleton’s pew had been land. He was considered one of Tiener South’s experts. He had been with Tiener 30 years, was a bulwark, but not irreplaceable. In fact, the replacement prospect was in Tiener South’s immediate future. Singleton had announced plans to retire on July 1.

His wife had died five months earlier, there were no children, and Singleton had informed the people at Tiener’s that it was time for him to pack it in, sit in a chair in the sunshine for the remainder of his years. Tiener people agreed with him. The death of his wife had taken the steam out of Singleton. He was a prime candidate for chair and sunshine.

But he had not been a candidate for murder.

Singleton had been Mr. Straight. He could push, pull, maneuver, be tenacious, but always with a slight smile on his face, always quietly. And he was fair. Secretaries said he was fair. Too, he was careful — he liked things recorded, indexed on cards. For instance, there was a daily record of telephone conversations. They were categorized by the hour and a P for placed, or R for received.

His office routine also included remaining at his desk one to two hours after everyone else had left the building each evening. He reviewed the day’s recordings in this uninterrupted time slot, removed the chaff and put the wheat in proper order for the next day’s attention.

On the other hand, there had been a definite change in Mr. Singleton’s personality and office routine in recent weeks. Mr. Singleton had been down. He no longer smiled, had occasionally had displayed flashes of previously unknown anger, even shouted at a secretary. And the daily record of work moves was no longer complete.

For instance, Mr. Singleton sometimes took and sometimes made phone calls, dictating that the calls not be recorded. He had received one such call early last Friday afternoon. It had come in from a man who had identified himself as a Mr. Jerry Warner. Mr. Warner had asked to speak to Mr. Singleton, stating that Mr. Singleton would recognize his name.

Mr. Singleton had. He also had immediately informed his secretary not to record the call. She had not. But she remembered it for two reasons — it had come in between 2:28 and 2:30 p.m. — because she always took a fifteen-minute coffee break at 2:15 p.m. and she always left the snack bar at exactly 2:25 p.m. At normal pace, it took her three minutes to return to her desk. She also remembered the name because she had once been married to a sailor named Jerry Warner.

No, this was not the same Jerry Warner. She would have recognized the voice.

Yes, the phone call had excited or angered or frightened or done something to Mr. Singleton. After receiving it, he had shot out of the office without a word and no one had seen him since.

Shayne used thumb and forefinger on an earlobe. “Singleton was lured?”

“Sounds like it,” grunted Gentry. “And the timing could fit. We’ve checked it. Burns walks out of Brooks around two. It’s about a twenty-minute haul over to the Tiener headquarters. So knock off ten minutes for a phone call from a pay booth.”

“Whap, whap with a sap,” Shayne mused thoughtfully. “Two guys hauled away in a car?”

Gentry lifted hands. “They were in the same racket — land. For different outfits, that’s all.”

He scowled deeply. “There’s another little twist. The swamp where they were found was up for grabs late last year. Brooks was the successful bidder. Tiener’s had been bidding, too — although they now say their interest was only mild.

“Brooks people tell a different story. They say Tiener people thought they had the swamp deal sewed up, but Brooks moved in in September, knocked Tiener’s off the pedestal. There’s some undisguised joy over at Brooks. The people at Tiener’s are downplaying, not talking loudly.”

“Tell me Burns and Singleton were the chief adversaries in the deal,” Shayne said, his interest undisguised.

But Gentry sighed. “Wish I could, Mike. It might make things simpler for both of us. But the way we get it, there were teams haggling over the swamp. Neither Bums nor Singleton was on the teams, oddly enough.”

“Will, there has to be some damn reason Burns and Singleton were hit and staked as a package.”

“Uh-huh,” growled Gentry, his face darkening. He sat forward suddenly, shuffled papers on the desk. Then he looked up at Shayne from under a cocked brow. “We’ll be looking, too, shamus.”

Unspoken message — the cops were open to help. The chief would reciprocate with new tidbits for a private eye — if and when he had new tidbits.

Every newspaper office has a high producing mine of information tucked in some cranny of its cluttered interior. It’s called a library — a morgue.

The morgue at the Miami Daily News included efficient employees and a couple of semi-private rooms where clippings and photographs could be spread on a table and studied. One of those rooms became totally private when veteran crime reporter Tim Rourke took Michael Shayne into it and closed the door behind them.

Shayne dropped into a chair at the table. Rourke remained standing against the door, his lanky frame loose, his face expressionless, only his eyes mirroring the broiling curiosity inside. Rourke, as a writer, may have had a peer or two around the country. There were none when it came to reporting. In addition, Rourke would trust Shayne to care properly for his latest blonde acquisition and last bottle of rye while Shayne would allow Rourke to handle a loaded and cocked gun in his presence. Rourke and Shayne were friends.

Rourke came to the table, slid the thin, brown morgue envelope to the detective, folded into a chair opposite and looped legs up and across a corner of the table.

“Mike,” he said, “I just finish turning in first edition copy to the city desk about one of the most bizarre murder cases in this city’s history — two well-to-do land men found dead and staked out in a swamp like it’s back in the days of Geronimo out west — and then you come in and want a package on the particular piece of land where these two dudes were found. Okay, what in the hell is going on?”

The multi-million dollar purchase of the swamp land had been large enough to earn one printed story. It was a cold flat story stuffed with names and statistics. Only one paragraph gave an insight into the true vastness of the transaction. There was speculation the swamp land might someday be the site of a new Miami satellite community.

Shayne gave Rourke a sharp look. “I missed this when it appeared in the paper, Tim. Most people probably did. I’ve got a hunch it was buried. No mass appeal.”

“Pablum, agreed,” Rourke nodded. “But the potential is there. The one ’graph, the speculation. And you can bet your kiester Sol has it stored in his craw. Sol Pearbome is probably the best business writer in Florida. He’s working on it, Mike. One of these days it will be a Page One story. There are stories like that. The ingredients are there, but it takes time for jelling.”

“Sol around?”

Sol Pearbome was a small man with a receding hairline and permanent think lines across a broad brow above black rimmed glasses. He also had a keen ear tuned to the underground swells of the business world.

“It isn’t only the swamp that stinks in that deal, Shayne,” he said significantly. “Tiener’s supposedly had it locked up tight and then — bang — Brooks is in. Some people are saying Tiener South was sold out.”

“By someone inside their own organization?”

“The original deal was very hush-hush. But Brooks moved in. The Tiener people were hot, still are. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen over there. Normally, it’s the other way. Somebody has something working and Tiener’s move in — but that was when the old man was alive.”

Shayne looked at Rourke.

Rourke waved a casual hand. “Robert Hume Tiener was a maverick, the roughneck in life and in business, the adventurer, the philanthropist who owned a pair of socks and no more when he found his first gold mine in South Africa. At thirty, he already had the vision and intelligence of a successful conglomerateur of seventy. At seventy, he still maintained the exhuberance, lust and don’t-give-a-damn dare of a twenty-one-year old. Age didn’t exist for Tiener. He was born young, he lived young, he died young — if he is dead.”

Shayne lifted an eyebrow questioningly.

“I remember, Mike, because I covered it top to bottom. Three months ago, February twenty-seventh, the Coast Guard found Tiener’s yacht adrift at sea, no one aboard. He had gone out alone a day earlier. There are those who say he was washed overboard in a quick storm, drowned, while the yacht survived. There are those who say he lives and simply wanted to disappear, that it was his way of dropping out of sight. Take your pick.”

“If I picked he dropped out of sight,” Shayne said “Tiener had a reason, I assume.”

“Maybe,” Rourke shrugged. “He was seventy, he had a young wife of twenty-seven. They were married about a year, and then she was killed. I told you he was great on young people. He surrounded himself with young people — in business and at play. He was a big giver to colleges and universities. Anyway, he married this young chick and then in January of this year she was killed in the crash of a private plane.

“The only trouble with that is, the pilot of that plane was Vernon Dobbs, thirtyish, the communications rich boy, all inherited. Tiener was in South Africa on business at the time. Dobbs’ wife was in Europe. Dobbs and Mrs. Tiener had gone out to his hunting lodge in Wyoming, been there a week or so, were returning when they crashed in a snowstorm someplace in Oklahoma.

“She was killed and Dobbs is in a wheelchair for life. There are those who will tell you that little episode rocked old Robert Hume Tiener right out of his shoes, shook his faith in youth. Then there are those who say, ‘Bull!’ ”

Shayne eyed Sol Pearbome again. “This speculation about someone at Tiener’s selling out to Brooks — what do you think?”

Pearbome adjusted the glasses on his nose. “Could happen.”

“Singleton?”

“The guy who was found dead this morning? Yeah, maybe. He supposedly wasn’t involved in the deal, but he’d be in a position at Tiener’s to know about it.”

“The cops say he was about to retire.”

Pearbome pulled his lower lip in thought. “Okay, so maybe Singleton was looking for some feathers for his retirement nest. I’d say Brooks would pass a rather handsome bundle under the table for the swamp kind of tip.”

“Then there’s Burns,” mused Shayne with a frown. “Where does he fit?”

“Shayne, look.” Pearbome sighed. “Over the years, you will find that Brooks has lost a few deals to Tiener’s, and here and there you will hear that Tiener always had a man inside at Brooks, a spy, someone who keeps Tiener’s advised about what’s going on at Brooks.

“You’ll hear that vice versa, too, but I’d put more credulity in the spy being inside Brooks. Old man Tiener was that kind of operator — turn any trick, clip any corner for gain, or sometimes just for fun. I hear he liked to hear people howl.

“Okay, you want to put Burns, a longtime Brooks employee, in the role of being a spy for Tiener? Be my guest. Or Singleton in that role for Brooks at Tiener’s? Again be my guest. It’s all possible.”

“They were found dead side by side on swamp land that once was a high prize. What would you say that means, Sol?”

“That, Shayne, is for detectives to figure out,” Pearbome replied significantly.

Brooks and Associates occupied the seventh floor of a gleaming building in middle Miami. The floor was a posh and dimly cool oasis out of the mid-afternoon heat. Shayne was given a Mr. Morgan, who professed to know most things transpiring at Brooks and Associates.

Mr. Morgan had twenty spare minutes. He was due on the first tee at 4:30 p.m.

Mr. Morgan also said that Brooks and Associates were saddened and disturbed by the double murder, especially the loss of Mr. Burns. Mr. Burns had been a valued and trusted employee. There had already been a discreet inner office investigation of Mr. Burns’ accounts and everything was in proper order as expected.

“You people scored one, I guess, with the recent purchase of a swamp,” said Shayne.

“It was a coup, Mr. Shayne!” Mr. Morgan, fingered a pencil moustache that had been out of style for ten years.

“The same swamp where Bums died.”

“Well, yes.”

“But Burns wasn’t involved in the swamp transaction.”

“No.”

“How about Singleton over at Tiener South?”

Mr. Morgan became cool. “We are not acquainted with Mr. Singleton or his work. We do not understand why Mr. Bums and Mr. Singleton were found as they—”

“It’s my understanding,” Shayne interrupted, “that Tiener South was in the saddle on the swamp purchase, then you people got a hand in at the last minute.”

“That happens,” Mr. Morgan nodded.

“With outside information, I assume.”

Mr. Morgan became stone.

“Where did you get that information, Mr. Morgan? In this case, from Singleton? The guy was about to retire. Maybe he was after a little extra cushion.”

“I think, Mr. Shayne, I am expected at the country club sooner than—”

“What was Bums working on last week?”

The abrupt switch in focus briefly jarred Mr. Morgan. He stirred in his chair, reached for a pen that wasn’t there, then settled back and restroked the pencil moustache. He frowned. “If you must know,” he said, “Mr. Bums has been in Hawaii for the most part of the last six weeks. We have a transaction in progress. Mr. Burns has been handling that transaction — almost solely.”

“So he wouldn’t have been aware of the swamp deal?” the detective asked.

“There is no reason he would have been.”

“He wouldn’t have any contact with Singleton?”

“Not unless they knew one another socially.”

“They didn’t.”

Mr. Morgan lifted both hands in a helpless gesture. He had regained his confidence.

“Burns is above suspicion?”

Morgan immediately frowned. “Suspicion of what? I told you, Mr. Shayne, we already have conducted—”

“Have you people ever suspected you might have a spy in your midst, someone who kept the competition informed about various transactions here?”

Mr. Morgan seemed shocked. “Good God, that’s absurd thinking!”

“Could be,” agreed Shayne with a jerky nod. “Unless you happen to be looking for a reason two land men are found dead together in a swamp.”

Morgan sat with his mouth hanging open.

“Singleton, an employee at Tiener South, didn’t just happen to be keeping an ear to the ground for you people over there, did he?”

“That’s all!” Morgan shot to his feet behind the polished desk. The pencil mustache quivered. “This interview is terminated!”

Shayne stood, too, eyed Morgan hard. “Pal,” he said, “if Burns and Singleton were spies, or double agents, or guys who’d occasionally sell out for a few bills, I could have a possible tie for their being found dead together in a swamp — right?”

Morgan’s cheeks had deepened in color. His stare was piercing. He curled a comer of his mouth and snapped, “Pursue that absurd line of thinking, Mr. Shayne, cast a shadow on Brooks and Associates, and you are on very dangerous ground!”

Shayne cocked an eyebrow. “You’ve got a short fuse, Morgan,” he said.

He strode out of Brooks and Associates. Thirty minutes later, he was inside Tiener South, another opulent oasis. There was hurry-scurry also inside Tiener South, handled with soft tones of voice and quick footsteps that were soundless upon thick carpeting.

But Shayne’s practiced eye noted that was where the similarities between Brooks and Associates and Tiener South ended.

Brooks had been rich in polished dark paneling and gleaming dark desk fronts, dark plants and paintings, brass wall decorations and ornaments, efficient employees in conservative dress and pampered gray-black hair.

Tiener South, on the other hand, was open, airy, colorful. Bright colors prevailed on walls, floors, appointments and in the dress of most of the scurriers. Hair coloring did not include gray. Wigs or artifical coloring covered or fashionable pure white prevailed.

Shayne towered over one of the predominantly yellow blondes who was vivaciously cute in brilliant purple pantsuit as she sat at a white typewriter behind a small, bright-orange desk.

“Hi,” she said perkily. “My name is Carole Ayers. What can I do for you?”

Tim Rourke, who had an affinity for blondes, would have been shuffling around with ants under his toes. Shayne didn’t shuffle, but he turned on a crooked grin. The blonde was infectious.

“Want to see someone, honey, who will talk to me about your Mr. Singleton who was found dead in a swamp this morning,” the redhead said bluntly, purposely exuding casualness.

The blonde was a test. Had Singleton’s murder rocked Tiener South? Or had it been worth little more than ten minutes of excited rap over a can of cola and then put aside for more important things — like the next appearance of Bob Dylan in the city.

Light blue eyes brightened. “Wow! You, too? You’re another pi... er, police detective? We’ve been invaded today. Old Singie goes out and gets blown away and—”

“I’m a private investigator,” Shayne interrupted. “Point me to the inner sanctum. I can see this is Cola and Dylan territory.”

The blonde head became cocked in pure curiosity. “Cola and Dylan? I’m not on that wave length, Red. You want to lay a little explanation on me?”

“I’d rather hear about Old Singie.”

“Cute, but Dullsville,” said the blonde with a slight shrug. “I’ve heard he was born in 1776 with a flag in his hand. If he was, it’s too bad he had to get hi own away just after the big birthday party, don’t you think?”

“Un-huh,” agreed Shayne.

“But Singie was okay,” said the blonde. “Don’t misunderstand.”

“Some age here and there is tolerable, I guess.”

“Well, sure!” The blonde brightened again. “Now, take you, Red. You’re—”

“I’m ageless, honey. These lines on my face represent miles. How come Singie was okay?”

“Well...” She seemed to ponder. “I didn’t know him, understand, But... well, he was just okay! Did his thing and let other people do theirs. No coming on heavy with the scorn — like young people don’t know sh... er, things, are dumb.”

“Like?”

“Like?” She cocked her head, looked up at Shayne quizzically for a couple of seconds. Then she sighed and lowered her voice. They suddenly seemed to be conspirators. “Mind if I lay a little something on you?”

He shrugged.

“I’m about to send you to Miss Scorn. Sorry, man, it’s the only route to the Inside around here. Just figure you’re on a mountain, almost to the peak. There’s just thing one road and you’re sailing along, okay, see. Then you round this curve and there it is, a roadblock. Her name is Elizabeth Stewart.”

The blonde smiled suddenly, sat back and took a deep breath. “Of course,” she said, “the alternative is you could stand here and we could rap for what little there is left to this working day — which is about ten minutes. Then we could go down the street to this place I know and have a cocktail or two and you could explain this Cola-Dylan jazz to me and—”

Shayne made his grin large as he cut in, “Roadblocks fascinate me.”

She shook her head. “Okay, so pass around me, go down that corridor you see behind me — but when you get there tell her you raped me to get in. I’m not supposed to let anymore of you guys past this desk.”

Elizabeth Stewart was fortyish, thin, prim, hair a glistening artificial brown color, eyes gray slate. There was a large, polished closed door behind her which she was guarding with her life.

Shayne displayed identification and said, “You didn’t get a call from the young lady out front because I scared hell out of her.”

“The fact that you found one of the young ladies at her desk surprises me, Mr. Shayne,” Elizabeth Stewart said coldly. “Normally, they are congregated at the drink-dispensing machine. Your business?”

“Old Singie.”

She became an iceberg. “I’m not at liberty to discuss Mr. Singleton.”

“Is anyone around here?”

“No.”

“I bet I want to talk to the guy hiding in the office behind you,” said Shayne.

“No one at Tiener South hides, Mr. Shayne,” she said frostily. “Nor is anyone in — which happens to be the truth at this hour. However, I would tell you the same thing if it were ten o’clock in the morning and each member of the board of directors was congregated in plain view behind me.”

“Why?”

“Because we at Tiener South know absolutely nothing about why Mr. Singleton was murdered. It had to be for a reason totally without association with this company. Too — what information we do have has already been passed to the proper investigative authorities, the police.”

“The cops ask you people anything about Burns over at Brooks and Associates?”

She remained stone. Only new light in the gray eyes mirrored the jolt. Then her lips thinned and she said, “We are not acquainted with Mr. Bums.”

“He didn’t happen to be doing some work for you people over there?”

“Please leave, Mr. Shayne!”

He felt as if he were spinning wheels in a beach rut. He suddenly went around Elizabeth Stewart to the polished door. He opened it, poked his head into a vast office. The office was empty. He closed the door, moved past the startled woman again.

“See you,” he said.

Carole Ayers was still at the orange desk out front. Shayne went past her on long strides, growled out of the comer of his mouth, “You were raped, honey.”

“Thanks,” she called after him. “And I’m still curious about Cola and Dylan.”

“Another day,” he said over his shoulder.

“Make it a night, Red. At four-five-three-two Palm Tree Road. It’s small, but it’s cozy and I live alone. You can...”

Mike Shayne lost the rest of her words as he moved out of range. Outside the building, he lit a cigaret, sucked deeply on it and got into the Buick. He sat for a moment, thumping the steering wheel, then moved to kick on the motor. Shayne stopped. Elizabeth Stewart had come out of the building and turned down the sidewalk. She was moving away from him. Sixth sense came alive in him. The woman was in a hurry. Why?

She turned into a pay parking lot, drove out in a bright blue Volkswagen. He trailed her. She had a heavy foot. The Volks darted in and out of the lanes, using holes in traffic too small for the Buick. But he managed to keep her in sight. Finally she turned into a crowded parking lot at a supermarket, found a slot and braked into it.

Shayne was forced to move into the next traffic aisle. He inched along. No parking holes. He cursed under his breath, stopped, opened the door, hooked a hand under the edge of the Buick roof and stood on the edge of the floorboard. A woman driver behind him slapped a hand on a horn button.

He waved to her, looked out over car tops. Elizabeth Stewart had stopped at a public phone stall in the lot. The detective saw her dial without looking in the phone book. He dropped back inside the Buick and drove it around behind Elizabeth Stewart. She was talking.

He inched on down the aisle. No cars behind him at the moment. He stopped, watched Elizabeth Stewart in the rearview mirror. She hooked the phone and went on into the supermarket without looking to right or left. A driver to Shayne’s right blasted a horn. He sat twisted in the front seat of a station wagon, wanted out of a parking hole. The Buick was blocking him.

Shayne eased out to the busy avenue, cruised along, driving reflexively. Elizabeth Stewart’s use of a public pay phone in a supermarket parking lot didn’t have to figure in his investigation of a double murder. Actually, it could be a pretty damn simple daily routine — woman leaves work, stops at a grocery store, phones husband, daughter, son, mother, apartment roommate, says, “Start mixing the cocktails. I’m on my way.”

Everyone is in a hurry in 1976. So the rapid walking pace leaving the office, the zipping in and out of traffic lanes, didn’t have to mean anything either.

Except...

Elizabeth Stewart was implanted at Tiener South. Elizabeth Stewart could use a Tiener phone to make personal calls. So why go to a parking lot pay telephone booth? Two possibilities — Elizabeth Stewart had had a sudden thought while driving. Or she didn’t want the call to go through a switchboard, even though it might be a computer switchboard.

All right, if the latter were so, she could make the call from home. That is, if she lived alone...

Or could it be necessity that made it imperative for her to make a private phone call as soon as possible after walking out of Tiener South?

Shayne spotted a bar, parked the Buick, went inside. Over a cognac and ice-water chaser, he decided he was reading too much into Elizabeth Stewart. After all, she was only a secretary-receptionist at Tiener South, not privy to all inner workings at the conglomerate even though she might live with that fantasy, waft it over secretaries of lesser stature. And it just could be, just could be...

...Elizabeth Stewart was a double personality. Miss Cool, Miss Efficiency, Miss Thin Lips, Miss Straight Spine, Miss Conservative at Tiener South, Miss Uptight.

Until 5 p.m.

At 5 p.m. daily, Elizabeth Stewart could become Miss Hot-To-Trot, Miss Uninhibited, a woman who wore gold-spangled pants and no more when she answered a maintenance man’s knock.

Shayne put Elizabeth Stewart aside with a second cognac and concentrated on two dead men. Their unknown relationship to one another tormented. He gave brief thought to a steak somewhere, dumped the thought and went to his apartment, where he stuffed a TV dinner into the oven, poured cognac into a glass and took the glass into the bath. He put down the lid of the toilet. The drink was handy while he showered.

Thirty minutes later, Shayne stood at a window in the front room of the apartment. He wore a white toweling robe belted at the waist as he stared out on the evening that had just darkened. The hot TV dinner was on a kitchenette counter, forgotten. Shayne had a fresh drink in his hand. Burns and Singleton. Singleton and Bums. There was a tie no matter how a man looped it.

Okay, swampland is for sale, Tiener South is buying. It’s a multi-million dollar deal, hush-hush. Singleton is not involved. But Singleton is in a position at Tiener South to hear about the pending swamp sale. And Singleton is on a downer, his wife has died, he’s lost his zip, he has decided to hang up the straps.

Singleton has been doing okay financially all of these years at Tiener South, but suddenly here is an opportunity to pad a nest so deep a man doesn’t even have to think about Social Security.

Singleton puts out a feeler to Brooks, gets a nibble, puts out more, gets a bite. Brooks is a very legit outfit, very up-and-up, but not above placing cash in a safety deposit box for choice tidbits of information.

Did Brooks know they had a Tiener spy inside their organization, a man who had been keeping Tiener South abreast of Brooks’ interests for years, asks Mr. Singleton.

Impossible!

Not at all, says Mr. Singleton. Try Mr. Burns. Mr. Singleton was in a position at Tiener South to know that Mr. Burns was in a position at Brooks to feed Tiener South anything they wanted to know about Brooks — for a cash remuneration naturally. Mr. Singleton had been assigned to some of the feeds.

“Oh, Christ, no wonder we’ve lost out on some deals!”

“That information costs extra, of course — or I call Mr. Brooks, himself, in the morning and inform him...”

“No, no, Mr. Singleton. Your information is valuable. We’ll take care of you. If Mr. Brooks should learn that we have allowed a spy to penetrate — well, we could all be on food stamps tomorrow!”

Shayne lit a fresh cigaret, drew deeply on it, continued to stare out of the window without seeing anything.

But what if Singleton had been an honest working man all his years, loyal to Tiener South, contented with a nest egg accumulated through diligence, intelligence, gradual advancement? Why did he have to be a Bad Guy?

And what if Burns was his opposite number at Brooks? What if both were exactly what they seemed to be on the surface? What if each was a real estate expert, knew the name of the other because of the similarity of their business, but that was where it ended? What if Bums and Singleton had met on a few occasions, but were not acquainted?

And then — what if this spy — counterspy — business was all something a detective was manufacturing because a newspaper business writer had suggested the possibility?

Shayne dipped to his right to dump cigaret ashes into a lamp table tray and the bullet whined past his ear. Shattered window glass sprayed him.

Mike Shayne rolled to his right with the crack. He spun into the lamp table and sent the lamp flipping to the carpeting as he plastered himself against the wall. The shade bounced from the lamp, but the base and bulb remained intact, the bulb coating him in its garish light.

He sucked a deep breath, glanced down his front. The white toweling robe glittered here and there. Splinters of glass protruded from the loose fabric.

He blinked cautiously, testing. They seemed okay — no slivers of glass embedded. But there was a spot that tingled high on his left cheekbone. He touched the spot with a fingertip. Glass — and the fingertip was stained red.

Across the room, wall plaster had split in thread-like jagged lines. There was no definite pattern. Only a center point where all the cracks began, made by a large bullet hole in the wall.

The main light switch was on the other side of the shattered window. Shayne went down on hands and knees and moved gingerly through the glass below the window edge. It was unlikely the sniper was still hanging around out there in the night somewhere. He probably was tracking fast. But Shayne wasn’t making a second offering as a target.

He slid a hand up the wall and snapped out the light in the room. He realized that if the sniper did happen to be rooted, the light blinking out was the tipoff to failure. But the sniper was going to know anyway within a few hours because he was going to have an angry redhead on his tail.

Shayne eased to the window opening, looked outside. The night was warm, quiet. There was scattered light. Down below, people were stirring, clusters were forming. The sound of the gunshot had attracted attention. Far in the distance, there came the wail of a siren. Someone already had called the cops.

The detective padded back to his bedroom. He had left the bathroom lights on and the door open. The light spilled into the bedroom, cast an eerie glow. He shrugged out of the toweling robe, dropped it in a heap, padded naked into the bath. Arching forward slightly, he studied his face in a huge mirror. A tiny triangle of glass protruded from his cheek. A trickle of blood had inched down from it.

He plucked the triangle out, dropped it in a wastebasket, got out a plastic bottle of medical alcohol, daubed the skin break. He cleaned away the blood and slapped on a Band-Aid.

He dressed, thoughts clicking fast as he speculated. Someone obviously didn’t want him poking into the double murder. But if a sniper was going to float around the city this balmy night, taking shots at everybody who was investigating, he was going to be a busy gun. Will Gentry probably had at least five detectives working on the case — and twenty in reserve.

So the investigation itself hadn’t brought out the sniper. Anybody who killed and left bodies in full view would expect an investigation. Therefore the reason for the window blast went deeper. Somebody had jangled a nerve somewhere. Somebody — perhaps just bumbling along — had turned up a stone that exposed supposedly concealed worms. And since a private eye had been a target for the killer/sniper, it seemed logical to figure the eye had kicked over the stone.

Who had the shamus scared? Brooks and Associates? Or Tiener South? They were the only territories he had penetrated thus far.

Brooks had acquired the swamp. There was undisguised pleasure at Brooks. Morgan had tabbed the transaction a coup. True, one of their employees had been found dead on that land, but that’s where the tie seemed to end. Burns hadn’t even been working on the swamp project.

On the other hand, Morgan had gone icy at the suggestion Brooks might have made the acquisition via inside info from Singleton at Tiener South.

Was that suggestion a worm? Had speculation on the part of a private detective sent messages crackling along the hot line inside Brooks and Associates? Had the word gone out — knock off Shayne before he pursues this speculation? He’s dangerous to us!

Shayne took a moment to fantasize the image of an unknown dictator inside Brooks barking out the order. Then he yanked up his trousers, zipped them closed and concentrated on Elizabeth Stewart at Tiener South.

He took a shoulder rig and a .45 from a bureau drawer, shrugged into the rig, checked the .45 and jammed it into the holster. Elizabeth Stewart had made a dash to a parking lot telephone. Had it been to tell someone about a red-haired private detective who was aggressive, abrasive and had to be stopped before he got started?

Stopped from doing what? Investigating the murder of a Tiener South employee?

Or stopped because he had asked about Burns over at Brooks and Associates, had even suggested that Burns might have been a spy for Tiener South?

Shayne put on a coat, returned to the living room, snapped on the lights. A gentle breeze wafted through the shattered window. But no one waiting to take a second shot was outside now. People had grouped around a police patrol car below. The two patrol boys were braced against the car, asking questions, looking around, gesturing with arms.

Shayne went to the bullet hole in the wall, bent down and took inventory. The slug was in there. He got a knife from the kitchen and dug it out. It obviously had come from a high-powered hunting rifle. Had it hit him between the eyes it probably would have put his head in the wall.

He dug out the phone book. No Elizabeth Stewart was listed. He muttered an oath, flipped pages. There was only one Carol Ayers listed. And the address was 4532 Palm Tree Road.

She was home, she sounded perky, but she was bored. TV was horrible.

The Scorn Machine? Yeah, she lived in the Towers. “Hey, man, what’s with you? You got a hangup on the Stone Age?”

“Vintage can be beautiful.”

“Sh—”

Shayne had dropped the receiver in its hook on the expletive and was rolling. The corridor outside his apartment was empty. He moved on long strides to the elevator doors. The cops were still checking apartments below, asking questions. It was a good place for them to be. He didn’t need them. He’d get a discreet job done on wall and window in the morning. It wouldn’t be the first time. He had lived in the building for years and management was used to him — and used to occasional violence in his joint.

The Towers was an old, solid, conservative apartment house. After nine of an evening, silence and only occasional stirring by a resident prevailed. Large rugged-looking strangers eyeing lobby mail box names and numbers made a pale desk clerk nervous.

“C-can I be of assistance, sir?” asked the desk clerk politely.

“Yeah,” said Shayne. He put a business card on the counter. “You can call upstairs and tell Elizabeth Stewart I’m coming her way — and that I’ll buzz her buzzer until she answers.”

The clerk danced to the phone and Elizabeth Stewart stood in an apartment doorway down the corridor when Shayne walked out of the elevator. She was pale, unpainted, wore a flowing housecoat, and her hair was a chopped off gray-black, the gray dominating. Her glistening brown coif was being shaped for tomorrow’s wearing at Tiener South.

“P-please, Mr. Shayne,” she stammered, even before he reached her. “Go away!”

“You called someone from a parking lot pay phone this afternoon,” he asked her. “Who?”

She blanched and recoiled. He put a foot against the door, stopped its closing.

“P-please...” she stammered.

“You alone?”

Her eyes widened. “Y-yes.”

“Let’s talk.” He took a step forward.

But she put her body against the door. “No! Go away! I don’t want you here!”

Then he lifted his foot and the door was slammed in his face. He heard the lock click home. But he didn’t move. He stood scowling in thought, without seeing the wood that was only an inch from his nose.

She was frightened by his presence. Why?

Was he supposed to be dead?

He walked slowly to the elevator and rode down, his thoughts whirling. A young well-dressed man was waiting for the elevator in the lobby. He said nothing, stepped aside politely for Shayne.

The detective moved halfway across the lobby before stopping. He turned and stared at the closed elevator doors. Something about the young man tingled his nerve-ends. He couldn’t tag it. He attempted to remember the face. Smooth, almost boyish, eyes bluish, full head of pale yellow hair styled by a dresser, no scars.

He went to the desk, eyeing the elevator indicator. The needle hand had stopped on Elizabeth Stewart’s floor. He gave the desk clerk a hard look. “The man who just went up,” he said. “He’s a resident?”

“No, sir.”

“Who’s he going up to see?”

“I don’t know, sir. He didn’t stop at the desk.”

“You didn’t stop him?”

“People can come and go at the Towers.”

“You ever see him before tonight?”

“Yes, sir. This is the third occasion — and if he follows the pattern of the other two visits, he will be leaving soon.”

But Shayne waited an hour in the Buick. And the man didn’t come out of the Towers. He was on edge without knowing why. He had searched his memory repeatedly, attempted to fit the guy into some past investigation. No success. The face didn’t register. Yet he had the feeling the man was important to him.

He took a deep breath, fired an umpteenth cigaret butt off into the dirkness and left the Buick. Hell, the guy could be visiting anyone in the building. It didn’t have to be Elizabeth Stewart.

Shayne went past the desk clerk without a word and upstairs. He put a thumb against Elizabeth Stewart’s buzzer and kept it there. Nothing. He tried the door knob. It was locked.

He returned to the lobby in the elevator, motioned to the clerk from the doors. “Bring the house keys, buster.”

She lay sprawled on the carpeting of the neat front room. The sole indications of violence were the twisted body and the blood that had stained her dislodged dentures.

Elizabeth Stewart had been strangled to death.

The desk clerk dashed across the room and into a bath. Shayne stood listening to his spastic reaction to the murder, then stuck a cigarett into a comer of his mouth and called out, “When you get finished, buster, call the cops.”

Shayne moved out swiftly. He lit the cigaret while riding the elevator down to the lobby, yanked the Band-Aid from his cheek. Outside he stood at the Buick door for a few seconds and stared up at the apartment lights. Was a killer still inside the building or had he faded down a dark fire escape?

Shayne pointed the Buick downtown. A mental image of the man with the boyish face loomed. He couldn’t seem to shake the man. Yet there was nothing about the man to tag him important. He didn’t have to be the killer just because he got off the elevator on Elizabeth Stewart’s floor. There were other apartments on that floor. The man could have been going to any of them, could still be inside and unaware that there had been a murder in the building.

Shayne shook his head in an attempt to put the man out of his mind. A hunch about someone was nothing to go screaming to the police about. Even if the man hadn’t lived up to pattern. The desk clerk said he had made two previous visits to the building. Both visits had been short. Tonight the man had not reappeared.

Shayne drew deeply on the cigaret, snapped the butt out the window. He spotted a greenish neon sign ahead. A watering hole. He braked the Buick, went inside. It was a small, dark untidy joint with only a scattering of customers. He straddled a stool away from the others and got a cognac with ice-water chaser. The muddy looking bartender slid change back to him.

“I’ll appreciate it, Mac, if you keep the heat packed,” he said, staring straight at the slight bulge in the detective’s coat.

“I’ve got paper for it.” Shayne waved him off and pinned his thoughts on Elizabeth Stewart. She had been frightened by his appearance at her door. How come?

She hadn’t been frightened of him at Tiener South in the afternoon. So something had changed for her from afternoon to evening. What? Did it have anything to do with her making a phone call from a supermarket parking lot? Had she tipped someone about his poking at Tiener South? But who the hell would she tip?

Shayne spotted a phone booth in a dark comer. Carole Ayers was still hooked to the TV, was still bored. “Stone Age action too slow for you?” she inquired.

“Elizabeth Stewart is dead,” Shayne said flatly.

“Wh-at? You’re sh—”

Shayne cut her off. “Strangled.”

“Oh, God! Heavy, man!”

“Point, honey. Just how heavy was she around Tiener South? How much pressure when she leaned?”

“Well, plenty. I mean she has — had weight. She’s — was, hey, man, it’s tough talking about the Scorn Machine in past tense. Anyway, she is/was Left Arm for T. J. Johnson. And T. J. Johnson is a southpaw, used to pitch for the Giants or somebody. T. J. Johnson also belongs to the Inner Circle. He’s a tribal chief. When Old Man Tiener was still around he called a periodic powwow of his chiefs. T. J. Johnson squatted in that circle, smoked the pipe.”

“How about Tiener and Elizabeth Stewart?” the detective asked.

“Oh, yeah. Close. I don’t know from where. Maybe they once slept together or something. She lays that — laid that closeness bit on us every so often, too.”

“Tiener is dead, huh?”

“Yeah. Fell off his yacht. Some shark fisherman will turn up his dentures someday.”

“I’ve heard some people think that was an act, that Tiener is alive and in hiding.”

“Un-huh. So the music goes here and there, but I don’t happen to be on that wave length.”

“If Tiener is in hiding, might Elizabeth Stewart have had a line to him?”

“Oh, Lordy, I dunno! It’s possible, I suppose. She’d tell you she did have, that’s for sure. But — hey, that’s real far out thinking, man!”

“Get a good night’s sleep, doll. I’ve got a hunch it’s going to be a tough day at Tiener South tomorrow. The joint is gonna be littered with cops.”

“You hanging up on me now, Shayne?”

“Yep.”

“Man, you’re — frustrating!”

He nursed a second cognac. Tiener was the kind of man to have the clout to hire a sniper — if he got the word that somebody was upsetting his applecart.

Question: Was Tiener alive, wielding clout?

Question: What was his applecart?

Question: If Tiener was alive, if he had an applecart, if he had been informed by a secretary that a private detective was pushing on that cart, if he had sent a sniper, if the sniper had failed — why kill the hand that had fed?

Or maybe Elizabeth Stewart’s death was independent reaction to failure. Maybe the sniper had trailed the detective to the secretary after the failure, might have panicked and killed. One mouth closed, one to go.

Shayne was acutely alert as he piloted the Buick back to his apartment building. Headlights occasionally hung in his rearview mirror for several blocks, but all eventually disappeared. He turned down the ramp into the basement garage knowing that he had not been trailed.

Inside his apartment, the gentle breeze continued to flow freely through the shattered window, and the cracks in the opposite wall were mute reminder, but the apartment was empty and he didn’t find any bombs ticking away under his bed.

He catnapped most of the night. During the waking periods he swept the cognac bottle from the table beside the bed, had a slug, then settled against the propped pillows and attempted to put together a mental image of a living Robert Hume Tiener.

His phone jangled at 7:30 in the morning. It was Will Gentry. “Get your tail down here, shamus,” the police chief growled.

Shayne rolled. Not because Gentry had summoned. He knew why Gentry had called — a business card had been passed from desk clerk to cops. He rolled because the cops had had enough time to clean up the preliminaries in their investigation of the murder of Elizabeth Stewart and he could get information from their same reports.

Hell, if the man with the boyish face had been the killer, if he had still been inside the building, maybe the police had the case wrapped up.

They did not. They had a mystery on their hands. Ninety per cent of the violent deaths that occurred were cut and dried — victim and murderer often in the same room when the cops arrived. Ten per-cent were mysteries. And policemen hate mysteries. They have enough work to do just sorting out the details of the open murders.

Gentry was in a dour frame of mind. He snapped, “You weren’t dodging, Mike. You left a calling card. So all I want to know is how come you went to see Elizabeth Stewart and what took you where after you found her dead.”

Shayne put a package together for the police chief. It included his visits to Brooks and Associates, to Tiener South, the shadowing of Elizabeth Stewart, a sniper’s shot and the speculation that had sent him to the Towers.

“She was alive, Will — scared but alive. But when I went back up to her place an hour later she was dead.”

“This man,” scowled Gentry, fingering the open folder on his desk. He rifled pages. “This is everything we’ve put together on the case and I don’t have a single thing in here about him.”

Shayne yanked an earlobe with thumb and forefinger. “He could be a dead end, he could be damned important. I haven’t got him tagged yet.”

“There’s some reason the guy is bothering you, Mike.”

“Hunch, Will. No more.”

“I gotta have more.”

“So you go your way. I’ll go mine.”

Gentry sat back then, his body width spreading beyond the lines of the leather chair. “Two men found dead in a swamp, a woman killed in her apartment. Two of the three victims are employees of Tiener South. You go out to Tiener’s, ask questions, then somebody takes a shot at you. It makes Tiener South a focal point, doesn’t it?”

“Is old man Tiener really dead, Will?”

He looked out from under thick eyebrows. “How the hell would I know? I wasn’t on his yacht. Go ask his sister.”

“Sister?”

“Lisa Hume Montgomery, a widow.”

Lisa Hume Montgomery lived many notches above squalor and maybe six below elegant splendor. The house probably had been constructed within the last ten years but presented a leaning toward English castle architecture.

Behind it, carved out of the expanse of green grass, was a 1976 swimming pool designed after a playing card club symbol. The blue pool water sparkled. So did the fingers of the sunbrowned, leathery looking woman who gazed up curiously at Shayne’s approach from a comer of the house. She wore several diamond rings.

Shayne stopped in his tracks as a young man shot up from a webbed chair near the woman. The young man left her fast and faded into the house. Shayne stared after him.

The woman looked from Shayne to the house door, back at Shayne. “You seem to have startled Tony. Are you two acquainted?”

“In a sense I think we might be,” responded the redhead.

Lisa Hume Montgomery wore a one-piece pink bathing suit. She was sixty to sixty-five years of age. The leathery look was a product of many hours in the wind and sunshine. She wore it as most other women her age and financial stature flaunted mink on lotion pampered skin.

“Mr. Shayne?” she said curiously from the propped layback chair.

He sat in the chair the young man had vacated at her feet. He was in the shade of a table umbrella. Shayne wasn’t a sun nut.

“I knocked,” he said to her.

She nodded. “I do not have domestics. I prefer to take care of myself and my home.” She paused, frowned slightly. “But who are you? Why are you here? Why did your appearance surprise Tony?”

“How do you know my name, Mrs. Montgomery?” he countered.

“Tony spoke it when you appeared.”

“Who is he?”

She contemplated briefly. “Anthony Andrews. He is in the employ of my brother, Robert Hume Tiener.”

Shayne ran a thumbnail along his jawline, fixed her with a steady look. “I understand your brother is dead.”

She smiled. “Some people think so. I do not. Robert has seen fit to disappear for the moment, but he isn’t in a grave — most certainly not in a watery grave.”

“How come?”

“Well, falling off a yacht is hardly Robert’s way to die. You’d have to know my brother to understand that, of course. But when Robert dies, he will have been killed violently or he will have taken his own life — just for the experience. Violence and death, people getting killed, have been a part of his life, Mr. Shayne, linked to most of his many ventures and adventures. It’s the way Robert will die.”

“Tumbling over the side of a yacht would be a little pale for him?”

“Yes.”

“But how about if he got knocked from the yacht by a huge wave in a storm?”

She shook her head. “There are two things wrong with that thinking. One, Robert went out alone. Two, he is an expert yachtsman, wise to the sea. Therefore, it follows, logically, that he is not dead.”

“Logically?” Shayne cocked an eyebrow.

She sighed. “Mr. Shayne, should Robert someday choose to die by his own hand, he will not be alone during the act — he will have an audience. Perhaps me, perhaps you, perhaps anyone. That’s just my brother. And, as to the other premise, if there was a storm the night Robert went out, the yacht survived. That means Robert survived.”

Shayne lit a cigaret, drew on it.

The woman extended a palm without getting up from the chair. “Please?”

Shayne started to lean into her, but she said, “No. Toss it.”

It was a challenge. He tossed the cigaret. She caught it deftly in her palm. She picked it up with her other hand, smoked.

Shayne grunted. “You Tieners are tough nuts, huh?”

“Very tough,” she said softly, suddenly staring at her bare toes. She wiggled the toes, but Shayne had a hunch she didn’t see the movement. “Which is the reason Robert isn’t dead,” she continued, sounding as if she was reassuring herself once again.

Shayne took time to light another cigaret. “Okay, so where is your brother today?”

She looked up. “Oh, I don’t know that!”

“No contact between you and him, huh?”

“Certainly not!”

“Got any ideas about why he wanted to disappear for a while?”

“It probably fits into some money-making scheme he has concocted. All of Robert’s ventures make money, you know. But as to details...” She shrugged, smoked, added, “I wouldn’t know.”

“He hasn’t holed up in remorse? I understand he recently lost his wife.”

She stiffened, said coldly, “Jane was a tramp!”

“She overpowered your brother? Had him taken to the altar in chains?”

Mrs. Montgomery snapped her cigaret into the blue-watered swimming pool. “Robert has had four wives. Three of them have been nice girls. They are living quite comfortably today, enjoying young men their own age because they were patient with Robert. But Jane couldn’t wait. She had to have another man while still with Robert. The consequence is obvious. She is dead and the man will be an invalid the remainder of his years. Fair enough, I say. Of course, Robert has said nothing and never will. He will talk about the loss of his dog, but not the loss of his wife.”

“What happened to his dog?”

She waved a hand, her rings flashing in the sunshine. “The dog was poisoned. Someone threw poisoned meat into the yard. Strychnine. Robert’s dog ate it and died. Robert was so furious, he immediately went to Angola.”

Shayne frowned and she waved her hand again. “He was going there anyway — some business trip or something. He merely went a week earlier. He had it settled when he returned, so it was a good trip for him.”

She paused, abruptly was calm again. She smiled. “Actually, it was one of his more productive journeys. He returned with Tony. I like Tony. He is considerate, dependable. I think he is a much better man than Lou Crawford.”

“And who is Lou Crawford?”

“Oh, he used to be Robert’s boy, but he got into some kind of trouble in Angola and his head was lopped off, I understand. Robert never did explain fully. All I know is, he returned with Tony as a replacement for Lou. Tony was fighting in some kind of war down there.”

Shayne yanked an earlobe. “Tony know where your brother is?”

“Certainly. He’s Robert’s contact with the world. It’s one of the reasons Robert has a young man. You must understand, Mr. Shayne, this is not the first time my brother has dropped out of sight for one reason or another.”

“Yeah.” The detective nodded from deep thought. “How come he does that, Mrs. Montgomery? Why does he occasionally go underground?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Nor do I question Robert’s behavior. He provides for me without question or quibble. I reciprocate by not being inquisitive. But I must admit I’m curious about you, your presence. And you are not a provider, so why are you asking questions about my brother?”

“I’m investigating three murders.”

“Three. My goodness!”

“Two of the victims were employed at Tiener South.”

“Tiener South employs thousands of people around the world, Mr. Shayne, and I’d venture that some of those people die daily, some by accident, some by foul play, some—”

“These victims lived here, Mrs. Montgomery, and at least one of them may have enjoyed a close relationship with your brother.”

“That would be Miss Stewart, of course. Robert always thought a lot of Miss Stewart. She was quite efficient, I understand and closed-mouth, which is important to my brother. I was startled when I heard the news of her death on radio this morning. I summoned Tony immediately. Robert had to be informed, of course.”

“And Tony said?”

She smiled. “He already had been in contact with Robert. See? I told you Tony is a good boy for Robert.”

“I ran into Tony over at Miss Stewart’s apartment building last night.”

“My! What were you two doing there?”

“I was investigating one of the other murders. I don’t know about Tony. The next time I see him, I’ll ask.”

“So will I.” She nodded.

Then she stood up, looked down on the detective, smiled. “Good day, Mr. Shayne. You are an interesting man, but please do not return to my home. I have a very strange feeling about you.”

She went to the pool’s edge, knifed cleanly into the water. Shayne watched her glide the length of the pool without surfacing. She finally stood in the water at the far end, spine to the detective. She did not turn around.

He went around the comer of the house and found Tony Andrews braced against the front door of the Buick. Andrews didn’t stir as Shayne approached. Only when the detective stopped about two feet in front of him did Andrews step away from the car, giving Shayne ample room to open the door.

He said, “She’s wacky, Shayne.” He tapped the side of his head. “No longer packed tight up here.” His voice was flat, soft. He showed no emotion. “The Old Man is dead. She won’t accept.”

“So who are you working for these days, pal?”

He was cold. “The company.”

“You strangle the Stewart dame for the company?”

“I went to see her last night because late yesterday afternoon she called and said she had something important to the company to relate.”

“And?”

“She did not answer my ring at her door, naturally. You had been there. You came out of the elevator before I got on. I assume you killed her. Why did you kill her? If it doesn’t have anything to do with the company, I’m not interested. I have other things yet to do today. But if—”

“You stake out Burns and Singleton in a swamp a few days ago, Tony?” the redhead cut in.

Andrews didn’t flick a cheek muscle. He stared at the detective from dead eyes. Then he said, “You’re wacky, too, Shayne.”

He turned and walked down the drive. He moved at a steady pace, shoulders squared, spine straight. Shayne stood slightly spread-legged at the Buick, taut, fingers working reflexively. He itched to stop Andrews. The .45 in the shoulder rig was a weighty temptation.

But he dropped inside the Buick, gunned the motor. Andrews had turned from the drive and moved along a street sidewalk. Shayne moved the car into the street, eased along beside the walking man. Andrews didn’t look to right or left, finally reached the high, white stone wall of a mansion.

He moved along the wall to a wide drive, turned in and went up toward a magnificent house that stretched out of the detective’s sight. There was a black plaque on the wall at the entry. Brass colored letters, spaced in three tiers on the plaque, spelled out the name Robert Hume Tiener.

Andrews disappeared from Shayne’s sight. The detective studied the wide entry to the Tiener estate, what he could see of the grounds and house. The entry tempted. What would he find if he wheeled up to the house, banged on the door? Was Robert Hume Tiener holed up somewhere deep inside the house, pulling strings on murder?

Or was Tiener long digested in a fish belly?

Shayne slapped the steering wheel and drove toward downtown Miami. He was floundering in theories, speculations. He needed a sounding board.

He stopped at The Beef House on Miami Avenue. It was eleven-thirty. But Tim Rourke was not camped in his favorite back booth. Shayne called the newspaper office. Rourke was out to lunch. No one knew where, maybe The Beef House.

Shayne scowled and ordered a cup of black coffee laced with two jolts of cognac. He sat in the back booth and attempted to put some order to the speculations tumbling through his skull. A long shadow suddenly loomed over him. He looked up. Rourke’s grin was one-sided and curious.

“Sit and open an ear,” said Shayne.

Rourke ordered a rye and a cottage cheese salad. He nursed both while Shayne talked. When the redhead finally clammed, Rourke grunted and ordered another rye. He twirled the shot glass slowly in his long fingers, making a tiny whirlpool.

Finally he said, “I have an editor who is fond of saying, ‘You’ve got a helluva story here, Rourke. I’d like to print it — if you’ll go out and get me some facts to substantiate it!’ ”

Shayne sat back in the booth and squinted in thought. “You don’t get a smell of anything I’m missing?”

“Nope.” Rourke tossed off half the rye.

“Watching Andrews walk down the driveway out there at the Montgomery place this morning, I know I was watching a cold-blooded killer move out.”

“Could be,” Rourke agreed. “A mercenary, those kind of guys gotta be a special breed. But prove he spread two guys in a swamp, prove he strangled the woman.”

“Is Robert Hume Tiener dead or alive, Tim?” said Shayne. “That’s the key to the whole problem.”

Rourke nodded. “The way you’re putting all of this together, yep.”

Shayne gave him a hard look. “You see another pattern?”

Rourke shrugged. “Nope, but so far you’ve concentrated on Tiener South, their people. What about the Brooks operation? No bad guys over there?”

Shayne pulled an earlobe in thought. “I haven’t looked,” he admitted.

A waiter appeared at the booth with a portable phone in hand. He plugged in the wire, put the phone before Rourke. “Your office.”

Rourke listened, then jerked straight. “Right,” he snapped. “On my way.”

Shayne was alert, curious as Rourke scrambled out of the booth. “Come on, Mike,” said the newspaperman. “Vernon Dobbs has been murdered.”

Vernon Dobbs once had been a real-life version of the affluent, athletic, mod sportsman pictured in men’s magazines, the kind of guy who could turn a feminine eye, cause young housewives to toss caution to the Biscayne winds. When Shayne lifted an edge of the white covering he found a grotesque corpse, jaw slack, mouth open, tongue a glob, the face and neck and bare upper torso splattered with dried blood and foreign matter. Somebody had closed his eyelids. They were the only peaceful things about Dobbs. A strip of his skull — beginning high on the forehead and furrowing back on the right side — was gone.

Dobbs had been shot out of his wheelchair while sunning in the front yard of an expensively modernistic home.

Shayne dropped the covering and stood. “Thanks, Jack.”

Jack Leonard was one of Will Gentry’s best detectives. He stood across the corpse from the redhead, opened a fresh stick of gum and folded it into his mouth. “You and I need to rap, Mike?”

“No.”

Shayne knew Leonard was curious about his presence. He got out a cigaret, lit it, pulled deeply on it. “Gentry already has anything concrete I might offer, Jack.”

“Okay. Saves me time.” Leonard waved to the morgue men and turned away as they approached. He stood staring out toward the street. It was a quiet street, a picturesque combination of green things, sunshine and shade. Directly across it was another testimonial to modern architecture, a sprawling mass of white stone and glistening glass set far back on bright green grass.

“The people who live over there, Mike, are in India,” said the police detective. “And the next homes are a quarter mile down the street in either direction.”

“Un-huh,” grunted the redhead thoughtfully. “No witnesses.” He twisted and looked up at the Dobbs’ home.

“Dobbs’ wife is inside,” Leonard said. “Some friends are with her. She’s pretty well broken up, not much help to us. She says she was in the house alone, the only servant, a combination maid-housekeeper, is out grocery shopping somewhere. I’m waiting for her return.”

“The wife didn’t see or hear anything?”

“She heard the shot,” said Leonard. “It brought her out here where she found her husband. She says she didn’t see anything else, no cars peeling out.”

Shayne looked around, inventorying the entire scene again, sucked a deep breath. “A man has to figure the shot came from the street, and probably from a car. Now, if the killer is a loner, it figures he had to be parked out there somewhere, taken his pop and cut. But if there are two or more persons involved, then the shot could’ve come from a cruising car.”

Leonard nodded, munched hard on the gum. “Yep. That’s how we’re looking at it.”

“This sunning by Dobbs, was it part of his daily routine?”

Leonard continued to nod. “So his wife says. It was his habit to lunch, then come out here for an hour, hour and a half.”

“Pro killers live on habits, Jack.”

The police detective gave the redhead a quick side glance. “Un-huh, and friends know habits.”

Shayne used a thumb and forefinger to tug an earlobe. “Bright day, early afternoon, quiet street, guy sunning in his own front yard — it totals to the least likely time and environment in which to kill. But bang. I’ll take pro, Jack. Amateur killers do their stalking at night.”

“So lay a little motive on me, too, Mike. How come a guy sunning in a wheelchair gets knocked off by a pro?”

“Maybe he was a gambler, maybe he dabbled in narc running, maybe he—”

“Bull!”

“—or maybe an old love affair finally reached up and stiffed him.”

Shayne gave the police detective speculation. Leonard listened intently, his jaw working faster on the gum as the redhead talked. When Shayne had finished, Leonard breathed, “Holy Christ, you’re telling me that a guy who is dead really isn’t dead, that this Tiener finally sent an avenger? Shayne, get the hell out of here! Please? I’m already up to my knees in confusion and now you give me—”

“Jack?” Shayne interrupted.

“Yeah?”

“What do you figure Dobbs got hit with?”

“Rifle, high-powered. I’ll know tonight. The lab reports will be in by—”

“Can I talk to Mrs. Dobbs?”

“You can not. A doctor is with her.”

Shayne moved out toward his Buick abruptly. His strides were long, heels planted hard as he moved. He fired the cigaret butt off into the green grass. He could feel Jack Leonard’s eyes on his back. He got into the Buick, gunned the motor. Tim Rourke had already cut for the News office, probably was rattling a typewriter by now.

Shayne kept one eye hooked on the rearview mirror as he piloted the Buick. He picked up followers when he hit the busier thoroughfares, but he didn’t spot any car driving out of a secret nook to slide in behind him.

Still, he remained acutely aware. A sniper had snapped a shot at him from a high-powered hunting rifle. A sniper had killed Vernon Dobbs, the slug from a powerful rifle ripping open the man’s skull and spilling him from a wheelchair.

The Tiener Estate was silent and brilliant when Shayne arrived. Windows glistened in the sunshine. There were no cars in sight. Shayne sat for a moment and studied the area, looking for lurkers, someone eyeing him curiously. He spotted no one.

A pert maid at the front door informed him that Tony Andrews was out for the day and she did not know when he would return. Only domestics were in the house.

Shayne returned to the Buick, inventorying windows of the house. They remained blank. No drapes moved, no shadows drifted out of sight.

He drew the same blank at the Montgomery place. No one answered his knock. When he moved around to the swimming pool area, he found only a sparkling unoccupied vastness.

He headed downtown. His scowl was heavy as he chain-smoked. He wanted Tony Andrews.

The sharp crack doubled him over the steering wheel. He tucked tight and battled the wrenching of the wheel, struggling to bring the Buick under control. He spotted an open slot at the curbing, yanked the car into it and jammed on the brakes. He flipped off the ignition key and remained low in the seat for a few seconds. There were no more loud cracks. And a sniper could be pumping rifle slugs into the Buick, making sure he hit his target this time.

Shayne sucked a breath and rolled from the seat. Outside, he squatted and stared at the front wheel. The tire was flat. He found the split in it with his fingertips. The split had not come from a rifle bullet. He’d had a simple damn blowout.

Cursing, he went around to the trunk and dug out the jack and spare.

The vivacious blonde came out of Tiener South and turned along the sidewalk. She was tall and straight and flowed smoothly. Suddenly she curved across the walk, bent at the open window of the Buick and looked across the seat at Shayne. Her smile was genuine. Mischief lurked far back in her eyes.

“Hi,” said Carole Ayers and dropped onto the seat beside the detective without being asked. She crossed long legs. “My place or yours?”

“Point to a watering hole,” he told her.

“Hmm. Maybe this isn’t going to be as interesting as I briefly anticipated. Two blocks down. It’s small, dim. The tables are tiny, we can rub knees, the wine is inexpensive — and my car is in the parking lot next door.”

Then over the drinks she said soberly, “Shayne, I’m getting bad vibes from you, I think.”

“Old Man Tiener and Elizabeth Stewart...” He extended two fingers and rubbed one against the other rapidly. “...last night you intimated they might have been like this. For real or not for real?”

She seemed to think for a moment before she said, “Office gossip. I don’t think they were making it, never did — mostly because the Scorn Machine wasn’t his type.”

“His type being?”

“Me, and the thousands like me. Young girls, I think we’re called.”

Shayne yanked his ear. “He had four wives, all young. You happen to know any of them?”

“Sure,” she nodded. “The last one — Jane. There was a day when she occupied a chair four desks down from mine. That was before she professed an interest in yachting, of course.”

“And after she did?”

“Summoning vibes came regularly from the Crown Room.”

“From where Tiener ruled?”

“Right on.”

“How did Elizabeth Stewart react?”

“Stone.”

“Jane Tiener was killed in an airplane crash.”

“Un-huh.”

“You know Vernon Dobbs?”

“Hey, man, I’m just a little ol’ clerk-typist-receptionist.”

“So was Jane Tiener once.”

“The dif being she had universal interests. I don’t. I lean only to rugged looking redheads who wear guns in a shoulder pouch — or something. You take that thing off before you go to bed, don’t you?”

Shayne waved her off. “Dobbs.”

“Never have laid eyes on him. If I have, I didn’t know it. He could sit down here in the next thirty seconds and I wouldn’t—”

“He is dead, Carole.” Shayne explained briefly.

“Lord!” she took a deep breath. “You’re getting scary. Don’t you know any live people?”

“Yeah. Guy named Tony Andrews.”

She frowned deeply. “Never heard of him.”

“Lisa Montgomery.”

She shook her head. “No. Next?”

“Lisa Montgomery is Tiener’s sister.”

“Hmm. I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“Your car is in the parking lot next door?”

She sat back in her chair. “Shayne, don’t you ever relax? Listen to music — or something?”

He turned on a quick crooked grin for her as he rose. “Seldom. And when I do, I, too, have a clerk-typist-receptionist-secretary — and friend.”

“Oh!” She seemed to consider it. Then she lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug and sat forward. She smiled, but her eyes already were inventorying the male population of the small lounge. “Well,” she said, “if she ever dies, remember me. I’m heavy on typing. Really, I am.”

Shayne wheeled to the Miami News office and found Sol Pearbome stuffed inside a tiny cubicle off the main editorial room. The cubicle was cluttered with filing cabinets and overflowing wire baskets. Pearbome sat back in an ancient swivel chair, fishing through a wire basket on his lap, glasses on the end of his nose.

“Damn government safety regulations!” he mumbled. “I live for the day spikes are back in style. Then a man can find what he is looking for. What’s with you, Shayne, Vernon Dobbs Communications?”

“Tiener South and Lisa Hume Montgomery.”

Pearbome frowned over the top of the glasses, popped the basket on his desk and sat forward. “The Montgomery women is Tiener’s sister, but she doesn’t fit in Tiener South.” He steepled fingers, stared at them. “You sort of lit a fire for me yesterday, fella. I’ve been doing a lot of sniffing in the last twenty-four hours. You got me thinking, you know — Tiener supposedly dead — what did it do to the corporate structure? Well, I can tell you the structure is the same and functioning smoothly just like it was ten years ago.”

“But with no Lisa Montgomery involved, right, Sol? She’s my interest.”

He wagged his head. “She’s Tiener’s sister. Period. She doesn’t figure in the corporate structure.” He paused, then said significantly, “Probably because she’s supposed to be a little light upstairs, got a few loose marbles, people say. Not serious enough to consider institutionalizing, I’m told, but enough that she is no more than a shadow in the background.”

Pearbome looked up and past Shayne, alerting the detective. “Rourke,” he said in flat greeting.

Shayne twisted and shot a look at his friend. Rourke lounged in the doorway. “Saw you heading back here, Mike. What’s up? But make it sane, huh? I’ve had enough weirdos for today. Rich playboy shot out of his wheelchair by a street sniper and some alcoholic found murdered at his kitchen table, bottle in hand, the only problem being the booze had been laced with strychnine. That’s a full day in my book.”

A tiny light flickered inside Shayne’s skull. He stared hard at Rourke. “What’s the pitch on the poison case?”

Rourke showed mild surprise. “Man found dead in his two-by-four home by a neighbor. The neighbor called the cops. The poor devil lived alone, was a bachelor, name was Carter Lincoln. He was a TV repairman by day, an alcoholic by night, worked every day, got drunk every night.

“At home— Never went out. Just got off work, went home, got out his bottle and the ice cubes and sat at the kitchen table. Sometimes he slept there, sometimes he made it to bed. But last night he got pinned to his chair good.

“Cops are speculating he got the laced bottle by special messenger early last evening. The reason being the neighbor saw a messenger hit Lincoln’s front door around seven, saw Lincoln accept the package, sign for it. Cops got back to the messenger service.

“Their records show a guy who signed a ticket as an Anthony Spear paid to have the package delivered to Carter Lincoln. But that’s where it ends. The girl down at the messenger service doesn’t remember anything in particular about this Spear other than he was a man probably about thirty, had blonde hair.

“Lincoln in business for himself?”

“No. Worked for Palm TV. It’s an independent operation — small. Owned by an ex-chain outfit TV repairman who finally went on his own, built a trade, has hired three employees along the way, Lincoln being one of them. How come you’re so damned interested, Mike?”

Shayne stomped past Rourke and out of Pearbome’s cubicle, not offering an answer. He stopped in the news room and used the City Directory. He found an address for Palm TV, the name of an owner — Alfred Bannister.

Bannister was working late. It was past the normal closing hour for the small shop, all of the employees had gone home, but Bannister was up to his elbows in TV repair work. He had lost a repairman the previous day, a man named Carter Lincoln. Lincoln had been murdered. He still couldn’t believe it. Murder was big — but even-bigger was the repair load Bannister suddenly found on his shoulders.

Had Palm TV ever had a service call from the Robert Hume Tiener Estate?

Bannister thumbed through small cards in a box. Yep. He had a call recorded for a Tiener. It had been a home call and the service had been minor, replacement of a small tube in a color set. Carter Lincoln had handled it.

Carter Lincoln had filed a complaint after the call. When entering the Tiener grounds he had been attacked and claimed to have been bitten by an unchained dog.

What had Bannister done about the complaint?

Called the Tiener place, talked to somebody out there who admitted the dog had attacked. Compensation was forwarded — five hundred clams. Bannister said he had handed Lincoln the five bills.

“But did you?” asked Shayne.

Bannister bristled. “Lincoln went on a ten-day drunk! And that’s answer enough if you’ve investigated Lincoln!”

“Lincoln was an alcoholic,” said Shayne. “So how come you kept him?”

“Drunk, Carter Lincoln was a better TV serviceman than most men are sober, that’s why!”

“Who killed him, Bannister?”

“Hell, I dunno! All I do know is, the killer went the best route. If you wanted to kill Lincoln give him a jug saturated with poison. He’d drink it because it had a booze label on it. Taste wasn’t important to him.”

Shayne went to the bar, ordered a cognac and ice water chaser, took both to a corner table where he was out of the flow of bar traffic and away from the other table customers. He did not want to be disturbed. It was skull time.

He had five deaths — Burns and Singleton staked out in a swamp, Elizabeth Stewart strangled in her apartment, Dobbs shot out of his wheelchair and Lincoln poisoned at his kitchen table. There was at least one common tie — Robert Hume Tiener or Tiener South. Add an ex-mercenary, a man who on the one hand seemed totally subservient to a master and on the other had the ingredients of a cold-blooded killer.

Shayne lit a cigaret. Okay, five murders, one killer. Cozy package if it held together. So what was the glue?

Burns and Singleton. Each had been a land expert, employed by competing firms going after the same piece of swampland. Brooks and Associates had won, Tiener South had lost. Then Burns and Singleton had been found staked out on the same piece of swamp.

Dobbs, a sportsman who had taken Tiener’s wife on a tryst to a Wyoming hunting lodge — Dobbs, killed by a slug from a hunting rifle ripping across his skull.

Lincoln, an alcoholic TV repairman who had been attacked by Tiener’s dog, the dog later found dead, poisoned by strychnine. Then Lincoln dies. Strychnine in a bottle of booze.

Each had burned Tiener. Burns and Singleton — money. Dobbs — the man’s wife. Lincoln — the man’s dog.

Shayne shuffled his feet and smoked rapidly as he savored the smell of eye-to-eye vengeance.

Problem.

Shayne stopped shuffling, scowled. Where was the vengeance in the strangulation of Elizabeth Stewart?

Answer — her death simply didn’t fit.

Shayne finished the cognac, sat twirling the ice water without drinking. And who was pulling Tony Andrews’ string? Robert Hume Tiener, a fantastically wealthy eccentric with a history of occasionally crawling into a cave and pulling the opening in after him?

Or was Lisa Hume Montgomery a super shrewdie, had she been one all her years? Her brother was dead, really dead this time out. Lost at sea. And now Lisa was pulling strings? On her brother’s behalf?

Shayne butted the cigaret and walked out of the bar on long strides, his heels digging in, his jaw squared, his eyes hard. An ex-mercenary had answers.

Mike Shayne was going hunting.

The pert maid at the Tiener front door cocked her head slightly in recognition and said, “I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Andrews has not returned.”

“Un-huh,” said Shayne, running a thumbnail along his jaw line. He twisted and looked over his shoulder at the plain, cream-colored sedan braked ahead of his Buick in the drive. It was the only car he had ever seen at the Tiener place.

When he turned back to the door, he found it closed. It looked solidly in place. His blood pressure went up and he raised a fist to hammer it, then dropped his arm.

He stomped to the Buick and rolled away from the house. But a hundred yards down the street, he made a U-turn and braked at the curbing. The Tiener entry was in sight. Evening was dusk, but he had a clear view. He slouched behind the steering wheel and settled down for what could be a long night. The next time the plain sedan left the estate, he’d be on its tail.

The sedan popped into view and turned away from him in just twenty minutes.

He rolled cuatiously keeping plenty of distance between himself and his tailee. The streets were quiet, no other cars to hide behind until the sedan turned onto a busy boulevard.

Shayne applied pressure to the Buick’s accelerator, closed the distance. There was a station wagon immediately ahead of him, then a dented pickup truck, a glistening sports car. The sports car was riding the sedan’s tail.

Suddenly it zoomed around the sedan and the gap closed. Shayne eased off, allowed another car to get into the lane ahead. The line rolled smoothly for three miles, then the sedan drifted into the right lane and turned off at the next intersection.

Shayne made the turn cautiously. The sedan had shot away from him. He gunned the Buick, dodging in and out of two lanes of light traffic. They were in the university area. Pedestrians became a problem. Clumps of students moved along the sidewalks, intersections had a lot of foot traffic and occasionally students popped across the street in mid-block, seemingly paying no heed to moving vehicles.

The sedan turned abruptly into a small parking lot that adjoined a pizza and beer place. Shayne stopped out in the street, left the Buick, waved honking traffic around him. He threw up the hood of the car and bent over the motor. Under his arm, he watched Tony Andrews come out to the sidewalk and enter the pizza and beer joint.

He found an empty slot beside the sedan in the parking lot. Leaving the Buick again, he adjusted his shoulder rig, then moved out to the sidewalk. The building was low slung with a large front window. Sidewalk traffic — if interested — could watch flying pizzas.

Shayne entered the place. The smell of pizza filled his nostrils and the din of babbling students assailed his ears. Five yards straight ahead lay a vast open room with old-fashioned high-backed booths lining the walls and wooden picnic tables slapped haphazardly between them — also a tiny dancing area. Beer pitchers were filled in a back wall.

Shayne threaded through the mass of youthful humanity, his size and age drawing little more than a curious glance here and there as he searched the booths. He spotted Tony Andrews sitting beside a man in a back booth.

Shayne dropped into the booth opposite. Andrews said nothing. He wore a tight smile. Beside him was a wide solidlooking man of at least 70 years. His skin was tight and had been browned by many suns. Pure white hair was shaggy, eyes a steely gray-blue. He wore a cheap gray sports shirt open to his solar plexus. A brass necklace with a huge brass coin hung from his neck. His interlocked fingers were thick and ringless.

And most of the young people in the place called out greetings to him. “Hi, Pops.”

He acknowledged each with a nod of the head, a hand wave, an amiable grin, in most cases a name.

“My friends, Mr. Shayne,” he said from across the room. “My true friends in this world.”

Then he snapped back and lifted a half filled pitcher of beer. “Need a glass?”

“No.”

“Good.” He filled his glass and drank. “You want?” he said suddenly. His eyes had become shiny like cobalt. He still looked relaxed, but Shayne knew that inside Robert Hume Tiener was taut as an archer’s string.

“You told your boy Andrews to bring me,” countered Shayne. “He did. So I want to know why you wanted me.”

“You want?” Tiener repeated, his tone flat, his eyes bristling.

Shayne shrugged. “I was hired to find the killer of Patrick Burns. Along the way I ran into four more murders. All five point to you and your boy. So I’m here.”

Tiener stared at him hard. “That’s simply put,” he said. “I like that. I wish we had met under different circumstance, Mr. Shayne. I think I could have used you.”

“Nobody uses me, Tiener.”

The old man chuckled. It sounded more like a belch erupting. He drank beer. Then he said darkly, “Bums screwed up. I had him over there at Brooks for years, and he was a good man, but he screwed up on the biggest deal of all.”

“Bums was a spy.”

“And Singleton sold out. The bastard! He shouldn’t have done that. I was good to him over the rough times. But he sold out and Bums didn’t catch it.”

Shayne grunted and said bluntly, “Dobbs got your wife and Lincoln your dog.”

Tiener didn’t stir, but he flushed. His hand on the beer glass tightened until the knuckles were white.

“But that leaves Elizabeth Stewart,” said Shayne.

Tiener stirred. He sat up, stared into the beer glass. “Poor judgment on Tony’s part. You had been to the office, then you were up to her place. Tony didn’t know Elizabeth like I did, so under the circumstances he acted. It was a defensive act of sorts, I guess — although I wish he hadn’t killed Elizabeth. I liked her. Still, he acted according to circumstances. I can see that. Tony and I have discussed the matter. It is finished.”

“So are you, Tiener.”

“Oh, I don’t really think so, Mr. Shayne. You see, Tony is holding a gun under the table. The muzzle is trained straight at your gut.”

“I know,” said the redhead quietly.

Tiener almost looked surprised. “You’re not frightened?”

“He isn’t going to stiff me here. All that would do is wipe out your hideaway, make all your young friends leery of you — and bring the cops. None of which you want.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Shayne.” He nodded. “I do wish we could have become associated under different circumstances. I like the way you think.”

“Enough to trade?”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Me for Tony?”

He laughed suddenly. It was a genuine burst this time.

“Hell, man,” said Shayne, “you traded Lou Crawford for Tony.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” breathed Tiener. “You know about that, too? What the hell — have you been my shadow all these years?”

“I piece things together, Tiener. It’s my business.”

Tiener emptied the contents of the beer pitcher into his glass. He drank. “No, no trade, Shayne.”

“Because Tony suddenly has the gun trained on your gut?”

He finished the beer. “You’re something, Shayne! I do like you! Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“What if I don’t move?”

Tiener became cold and hard again. “Oh, you’re going to move, Shayne. Most men don’t like to die. Most men will squeeze out any breath they can grab, by any means. And you’re one of that kind.

“You can sit there and die. Or you can get up, we’ll all walk out of here, and you’ll be breathing in those next fifteen minutes from now, but you’ll be breathing. You may not be breathing fifteen minutes from now, but you’ll be breathing in those next fifteen, and you like that idea. It gives you a little more time to see if you can ourmaneuver me.”

Shayne and Tiener walked side by side out of the joint and down the sidewalk, Andrews trailing.

“Think he can hit me at this distance?” Shayne asked out of the side of his mouth.

“Oh, I think so,” Tiener said easily.

“He missed with a rifle.”

“I wish he hadn’t. You’ve complicated things for me.”

Shayne grunted. Last piece in place.

They moved along the sidewalk at a rapid pace, Tiener matching Shayne’s long strides. He plunked scruffy boots down in step with the detective. Shayne changed step. Tiener changed, shot him a side glance and a one-sided grin. Then he thumbed a squat, two-story stucco building and curved toward an entry that revealed steps. Shayne went up, Tiener immediately behind him, Andrews trailing. There was a short entry area at the top of the steps, then a closed door.

Tiener said, “Okay, now freeze, Shayne.”

The redhead stood rooted. Tiener moved around him, fished a ring of keys from a baggy pants pocket. He fitted a key in the lock and swung the door open. Reaching inside, he snapped on lamplight. Shayne saw a sparsely furnished but comfortable apartment living room.

Tiener faced him. He was stone again, his eyes brilliant. “One moment,” he said. He reached up and slid a hand inside Shayne’s coat, fingers closing over the butt of the .45.

Shayne knew Andrews was immediately behind him, probably still on the top step, the gun trained on his spine, but it was now or never. With Tiener’s hand removing the .45, the detective went down on his haunches hard and threw up his legs.

The sound of the shot triggered by Andrews was deafening and Shayne felt a stinging sensation across the top of one shoulder. Tiener yelled hoarsely as he was pitched over the redhead. It was a combination of surprise and pain.

Shayne rolled and went up on his knees. The flying Tiener slammed Andrews against the wall. Shayne shot forward from his knees and caught Andrews’ gun wrist as Tiener bumped down the stairwell. The detective jerked, pulling Andrews over him. He lashed upward with an elbow, that caught Andrews’ body and brought a grunt from the gunman.

He heard the clatter or the gun skittering across the floor, and then he whirled and flipped Andrews onto his spine. He came down hard with a knee against Andrews’ chest. Andrews writhed. Shayne looped a solid uppercut against his exposed jaw.

Andrews went limp. He twitched on the floor, but his lights were out. Shayne plunged down the stairsteps and slapped both big hands on Tiener’s shoulders. He yanked Tiener up and propelled him back up the steps, slammed him against the wall. Tiener was bleeding from a shoulder wound.

Shayne found both guns on the floor, scooped them up. Andrews was coming around. He sat up groggily. Shayne nudged him with a toe. “Inside!” he growled.

Andrews got to his feet, bobbed unsteadily. Shayne stuck the .45 against the back of Andrews’ head and pushed him forward into the apartment. He yanked Tiener from the wall and propelled him inside.

Tiener pitched to a wall, slammed his hands against it at the last second. He hung for several moments, then slowly twisted. He put his spine against the wall and slid down it to his haunches. His knees came up and he sagged, breathing harshly. The blood spot on his shoulder had widened.

Tiener was out of it. Shayne faced Andrews. The exmercenary was slumped in a deep chair, but he was swiftly regaining his senses. He knew where he was now, the situation. He pulled himself up slowly, eyes narrowed to buttons and hard. He was being very careful with his moves.

Shayne held the .45 loosely, wiggled it in reminder. “Call the cops, Andrews,” he growled.

Andrews stiffened. But his glance had gone beyond Shayne. His eyes widened abruptly. “Hey!”

Shayne whirled. Tiener had lifted his head. He was smiling. He also was drawing a derringer from a small packet in the side of his boot. Shayne brought the muzzle of the .45 up, steeled himself.

But all Tiener did was grin. “It’s finally finished for me, gentlemen.”

“No!” yelled Andrews as Tiener put the muzzle of the derringer into his mouth.

After the shot, Shayne stood frozen for several seconds, remembering Lisa Hume Montgomery’s forecast that her brother would die violently. Should he take his own life, it would be with a gun — just for the experience.

And he would have an audience!

Shayne cursed, then reached for the phone. It was time for the police. Then it was time he called Samantha to tell her the job was done.

Salvatore Giancana lived the good life for many years as a Mafia big shot. He was mean, he was ugly, but his attraction for women was fantastic. In Miami and in Las Vegas, he had his pick of the crop. But in time his usefulness ran out and he wound up on a morgue slab.

It is doubtful that Salvatore “Momo” Giancana ever knew the real flow of friendship and companionship. By measurement of the human equation in which man’s virtues are weighed, Gianacana rated zero-minus. He was an abysmal and amoral outlaw, an enemy of society and the social order from his early teens. The surging, soaring kind kind of violent acts he practiced were frightening.

He killed without qualm or compunction. He killed on orders of Capone himself or of those who came into power after Capone was jailed for income tax evasion. On occasion he killed because he didn’t like the way some hood looked at him. Ferret-faced, balding, short of stature, he wore a perpetual frown, hatred against all mankind alive in his eyes.

Life was running out for him in the next few minutes, something he least expected as he regarded the sausages that were cooking in the pan, inhaling the aroma of the seasoning that floated to his senses.

The frayed and violent death that awaited him was something he had experienced many times — but only as the assassin, not as the victim. How would he react to it? With defiant rage exploding in a stream of curses? Pleading for his life? Trying to make a deal with a large sum of money? Or would he face the gun turned on him with a paralyzing fear, quivering, his face ashen-white, an avalanche of regret washing over him for all the things that had brought him to this moment?

There were many who said and believed that Giancana got what he deserved. Yet in our society the rules say that all violators of law and order must be given a fair and just trial before a jury of their peers. Who were, in truth, the peers of Sam Giancana? Not anyone in the vast stream of men and women who were honest and law-abiding, legitimate, socialized human beings.

No, his peers were the hoodlums and gangsters, the hitmen, the vengeful assassins, the paid killers of organized crime. The contract goes out — hit Anastasia, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll, Willie Moretti, Buggsy Siegel, dozens, hundreds of others. The deed is done, efficiently and in cold blood. Pole-axe a steer, shoot a game animal in its haunts, butcher lambs — it’s all the same.

The crime bosses condemn one of their own for one reason or another, for a violation of the Code of Omerta, the Law of Silence, for a double-cross, for holding out a part of the proceeds of a robbery, a burglary, a deal in stolen securities — or for attempting to muscle in on forbidden territory.

There are other reasons — some valid, as the mobsters regard them, some merely to destroy competition as in the case of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre or the murders of Big Jim Colosimo and Dion O’Bannion, who stood in the way of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone in their rise to the top of the Chicago underworld. Why was Sam Giancana murdered?

There were several angles that needed inspection. He was in a plot to murder Fidel Castro as an agent for the CIA? Bizarre? The CIA record is filled with bizarre incidents. Again, Giancana was getting too hot for the mob to handle. There was reason to believe he might testify before a Senate Investigating Committee and spill his guts. Still another angle, he stood in the way of the young hoods who wanted to take over. One of those could fit the puzzle — or none.

How did Sam Giancana come to this moment in his life and the fury of jarring death? His life story follows closely that of many other notorious gangsters. The pattern is the same in almost every way. He was born 67 years before in the Little Italy section of Chicago’s West Side. His parents were poor but honest folks in the tradition of the old movie melodramas, eking out a living in a small grocery store.

Basically, it had the theme of an Horatio Alger story. In an Alger story, the hero is a poor boy who shines shoes, peddles newspapers, runs errands and does other odd jobs, saves his money and, by dint of hard work and adherence to the principles of honesty and ethics, becomes successful.

In Giancana’s case, the fates rewrote the script. He was a thief in his youth. He stole anything and everything he could get his hands on. He was a burglar, an auto thief and, before he was twenty-one, was a prime suspect in three murders.

During the days when Al Capone was in power, Giancana, astute in his way, was able to get a job as a wheelman, the driver of a getaway car from a heist or a murder contract. He was good at it. He also knew how to keep his mouth shut. Detectives who tried to get any information from him any time he was taken into custody wound up talking to themselves and bursting with frustration.

Detective Austin Young, who had Giancana in custody several times said, “That guy wouldn’t give you the time of day if he owned Big Ben. Further, he was just about the nastiest, surliest bastard I ever put cuffs on. Ask him a question and he would spit on your shoes. I knew even then he was headed for a lot of trouble but not until he gave us more trouble than we ever had from anyone in any of the mobs in Chicago.”

Before the Escobeda and Miranda cases, when the Supreme Court ruled that a suspect had to be read his rights and have an attorney present before he could be interrogated, detectives would beat some suspects insensible in order to wring a confession from them. They succeeded in a great many instances. Detective Austin Young and Lieutenant of Detectives Charles Lavan said that beating Giancana would be useless.

“The only thing you would get beating him,” Detective Lavan said, “would be sore knuckles.”

It would be difficult to describe Giancana physically. He had regular features that somehow gave the impression they were picked at random from a human refuse dump. He was once described by a reporter as having “the face of a gargoyle and the disposition of a viper.”

Despite his unprepossessing appearance, Giancana was always seen in the company of attractive women, among them Phyllis McGuire of the three McGuire Sisters, who won fame as a trio in a singing act. For a time, according to informed sources, she was his mistress. It isn’t far-fetched. Some of the ugliest gorillas in the underworld had good-looking gals as mistresses. Some of the girls were real beauties. The handsome gangsters like Bugsy Siegel had them in droves. There is something about thugs and killers that fascinates women.

Giancana came to the attention of Capone about a year or two before Capone took a bust for income tax evasion. Capone gave him odd jobs at first and gradually promoted him to more interesting activities, such as mayhem and murder — the first to bring stubborn miscreants who annoyed Big Al into line, the latter to dispose of those who wouldn’t get into line. Giancana was good at both. Capone thought well of his new protege’s work. Giancana moved another step up the ladder toward the inner, inner circle, the true hierarchy of The Syndicate.

When Capone was indicted for income tax evasion and it became known that the two bookkeepers who had charge of accounts in his two Cicero gambling joints and the various brothels were being sought as witnesses against him by the IRS, Giancana offered to get rid of them.

“Just give me the word, Al,” Giancana said, “and I’ll find them two jerks and dump ’em.”

Capone demurred, assuring Giancana that he had everything under control. “No sweat on this, Momo (Giancana’s nickname). The worse I’ll get is a fine and maybe thirty days in jail.”

He was dead wrong. He got eleven years and was fined sixty thousand dollars. Before he surrendered to federal authorities for his trip to the Atlanta Penitentiary, Capone assigned the top spot to Frank Nitti with instructions that “Tough Tony” Accardo be put second in command and Giancana be given “consideration”. In the parlance of the underworld this meant favor in every respect.

Tough Tony Accardo was not only tough but shrewd and very intelligent, an organizer along the lines of Capone himself and Meyer Lansky. Of all the big-time mobsters, he is the only one who comes to mind as never having spent a single minute in a jail cell.

Nitti was hard but not tough in the sense that Accardo was. Accardo wouldn’t allow himself to be placed in any position or situation that would put his liberty in jeopardy. He was alert at all times to any potentiality that might involve him with the police, not only on an actual charge but suspicion as well.

Giancana saw that Accardo was going to be the top man sooner or later and played up to him. He constantly asked Accardo for advice, instructions, a way to do things. It pleased Accardo, up to a point. He wasn’t fooled by Giancana’s fawning and waited to see just how far Giancana would go before he had to clip his wings.

One of Giancana’s shortcomings was that he often underestimated men or overplayed his hand. Accardo recognized that failing in him.

Nitti, on the other hand, believed himself completely invulnerable against arrest on any charge. He paid off to cops, detectives, high police officials, district attorneys, judges, state senators and congressmen. His influence, like Capone’s, was powerful, and because of that he was careless.

He became involved in the sensational shakedown of top motion picture producers and studio owners. When the smoke cleared, eight of the top Chicago mobsters were indicted on the testimony of Willie Bioff and George Browne, who started it all. Nitti was trapped in the net.

For him it was all over. He was found dead beside a railroad siding in a lonely and deserted section of Chicago, a .38 caliber pistol beside him. A single slug had been fired from the weapon. The shot had smashed into Nitti’s right temple. Suicide? Or mob execution?

Detective DeLallo and Austin Young termed it a suicide, but not so Assistant District Attorney Paul F. Crisler who demanded a thorough investigation.

DeLallo regarded the D.A. quizzically. “Who would you suggest we talk to — the gun?”

Crisler shot back angrily, “Not a bad idea. The least you can do is to trace the gun’s ownership. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Under other circumstances, Mr. Crisler,” DeLallo said, “I would consider what you said slightly cracked. But you’re good at your job and so am I. I checked out the gun. No trace — a hot pistol. No one owned it. That’s how these things get into the hands of hoods.”

“Okay, then who made it? It must have been sold to a local dealer. Start there. You may find something.”

“Okay, Mr. Crisler, we’ll give all our attention to finding out who or what dealer first got it. It may take weeks.”

“Don’t put me on any spot!” Crisler shouted as DeLallo and Young went out.

No one was ever charged with the murder and DeLallo and Young never learned where the gun came from or to whom it was sold first — and there the investigation ended.

The grapevine, however, said Nitti’s death was not a suicide but an execution, done neatly and with dispatch. Had the police checked Nitti’s hand for telltale evidence that he had really put that bullet into his head or reasoned why he traveled to that lonely and deserted spot to kill himself the report would have read a lot differently. There are some things the police would rather not check into too much. Frank Nitti? Who the hell cared?

Accardo now took over and chose Giancana as his lieutenant. Before doing so he had a short, pervasive talk with him.

“Stay in line, Momo. Use your brains not your muscle. I know you’ve got more muscle than brains but my advise is to do a switch. That’s it. We’ve gone over all the other matters so you know what to do.”

Giancana nodded. “No sweat, Tony. I know what you want.” He did but he just couldn’t follow orders. Moreover, he was greedy. He wanted the big money. He didn’t yet have it, not even as Accardo’s lieutenant. The small rackets he was given didn’t come within a country mile of the money raked in by Accardo and others in the inner circle of the Council who had been with Capone and Accardo for years before Giancana came into the Syndicate.

Being Accardo’s lieutenant meant only that he conveyed Accardo’s orders to underlings as his own. Accardo’s name was never to be mentioned under any circumstances. Some of the hoods in the mob held Giancana in contempt. He was too crude, too loud, too bossy.

On the other hand, there were those who felt that sooner or later Giancana would be elevated to the top spot and so courted his favor. They brought him information of the men who were against him, who spoke badly about him. Giancana marked their names in his mind. In Machivellian style, he set up each of them and either killed them himself or had them killed and made to look like executions by rival hoods.

How many were there? Six, eight, ten? Their murders were mixed in with men actually slain by opposition gangsters. All never was honey and spice inside the Syndicate. It was Al Capone who once said in referring to the hoods in the Organization, “Trust ’em? Listen, the only honest face I ever saw was on a dog!”

Giancana added his own rackets to those given him by Accardo. It was a foolish thing to do because in case of a bust on any of the rackets he would be on his own. He could expect no help of any kind, financial, legal or political, from the Syndicate.

Accordingly, in 1939, he took a fall on a moonshining rap and drew a four-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Had he had the influence of the Syndicate there would have been no charges, or at the very worst a Nol Prosse of the case. The Syndicate had some of the best and highest priced lawyers in Chicago on a yearly retainer. With this, they had contacts with agents of all the federal bureaus as well as district attorneys.

Giancana turned his sentence to advantage because he met Eddie Jones in prison. Jones was the policy king of Chicago, a numbers racket that netted him two million dollars a year.

When Giancana learned this through the prison grapevine he made it a point to meet Jones, become friendly with him. He picked Jones’ brains about the policy racket. Jones felt there was nothing to lose in talking about the policy racket, since he controlled the Black neighborhoods. A Whitey had no chance to muscle in. He didn’t know Giancana or the strenth of the mob behind him. Jones made a fatal mistake.

The Syndicate is all-powerful in Chicago. The gangs of thieves, robbers, muscle-men and killers have got away with murder for more than half a century. In the decade between 1920 and 1930, when Johnny Torrio and Al Capone were in power, a thousand men were killed in the city and only one, Dan Brothers, a St. Louis hood, was ever convicted. That was for the murder of a Chicago Tribune reporter, Jake Lingle. It was a bum rap for Brothers and he was released after serving ten years.

When Giancana was released from prison he was welcomed back into the Syndicate, after a serious talk with Accardo and the approval of the Council. He told Accardo about Jones and the enormous profits to be made from the policy racket. A meeting was held to discuss the matter and it was agreed that Giancana should set things up. He was to receive a straight thirty per cent of the net.

He was put in full charge and told not to bring any of his problems to the Council.

“You pick your own men,” he was ordered. “Organize it, take over. We’ll take care of the payoffs to any and all parties necessary. Understand?”

Giancana picked for his number one man a smooth, soft-spoken, handsome member of the Syndicate named John Roselli. From the mob he chose the toughest hoods, muscle-men and killers.

The mob moved in. First they killed Eddie Jones. Then they muscled all the writers, pickup men, collectors and payoff men. It was not a simple takeover. There were innumerable beatings of men and women, with broken kneecaps, broken arms, faces smashed beyond recognition. Others were killed and left lying in the streets or tossed out of speeding cars or slain as they walked the sidewalks or machine-gunned in their homes. When it was over, Giancana had control of the policy racket in Chicago.

The money rolled in — the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters — the pitiful small change of the hopeful looking to win a few dollars with which to buy food, bread, milk, a piece of meat for a stew. They were cheated and robbed unconscionably. If there was a big payoff, the numbers were rearranged so that only winners of a few dollars were paid off. Giancana was smart enough to pay a hundred winners at five, ten or twenty dollars instead of one at five-hundred or a thousand.

With the policy racket under control and running smoothly, Giancana decided to have a look at Las Vegas, the dream that Buggsy Siegel brought to reality when he built the Flamingo Hotel, the first plush hotel and gambling casino on what is known today as The Strip. He sent John Roselli there to look things over. This was Giancana’s first big move as a preamble to the day when he would take over from Accardo.

Tough Tony Accardo had mellowed. He had a beautiful blonde wife, a family, a mansion in a suburb of Chicago and all the money he would ever need in a dozen lifetimes. The truth was that he wanted to retire, to get out of the rackets and live a quiet life, enjoy the fruits of his twenty-five years association with the Syndicate. He wouldn’t have to be pushed out, as Giancana thought.

Moreover, when he stepped down from active control, he would do so as a sort of Chairman of the Board and all those under him would be subject to his control. That was one thing that Giancana did not consider. Another was the fact that Accardo had a close working alliance with Carlo Gambino in New York, and Gambino was the Capo di Capi, the Boss of Bosses. Accardo had more brains in his feet than Giancana had in his head.

Giancana wasn’t the best choice for the top slot but he was the best around at the moment and the Council had voted him in.

Accardo saw the inevitable end coming sooner or later and sat back with a satisfied smile on his face. Giancana! A hood all the way with no style, no class, no common sense. He moved with the force of a tornado, blowing down everything that stood in his way. If Giancana didn’t know it then, Accardo did — that the irresistible force he had created would take him along in its fury because sure as hell he was not the immovable object.

Giancana set things up in Los Angeles, just as Siegel did with the exception that the wire service broadcasting races all over the country to bookie joints was controlled by the Syndicate. All other rackets he took over. Roselli came back with the report that Las Vegas had “spots open” that could be had.

It was bad information. After Siegel was assassinated, the big boys moved in because of the Las Vegas potential. The Fischetti brothers, cousins of Capone, Moe Dalitz of Cleveland, Dave Berman of Los Angeles, Benny Binion of Dallas, Texas, Lefty Clark of Detroit, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis of New York, and Jimmy Hoffa, murdered in 1975, moved in with heavy investments. Hoffa had loaned millions to the mobs and was given “consideration”.

Giancana flew into Las Vegas like an Arab Sheik. He took a palatial suite in the Flamingo Hotel.

Almost immediately telephone calls were made to Accardo, asking questions as to the whys and wherefores of Giancana’s visit.

“No reason,” Accardo replied. “Let him alone. Maybe he wants to do a little gambling and relax with some of the cuties in town. Until he makes a bad move don’t bother him.”

In the next several days, there were other calls to Accardo. The calls annoyed him. He called The Flamingo and asked for Giancana’s suite. Giancana was relaxing amid the splendor of the suite’s appointments. A portable bar had been set up and was stocked with a variety of assorted liquors.

In a chair opposite him sat a tall, luscious blonde showgirl, smiling, ready for his pleasure, whatever form that might take. Giancana had a self-satisfied smile on his face. He told himself he had arrived. He was at the top. Well, almost.

The jangling sound of the phone brought him to his feet. He rose from his chair, gave the blonde a quick smile and picked up the receiver.

The voice at the other end crackled. Accardo quickly brought home to Giancana the realization that he was not yet at the top or anywhere within a mile of it.

“Momo,” Accardo said, “I haven’t received all the information on the setup in L.A. Nor an accounting. Something like a hundred big ones. Am I right, Momo? I want to hear you say it!”

“Something like that, Tony. Yeah.”

“No, Momo, not something. Exactly.” There was a moment of silence, then. “How much over the figure?”

Giancana paused, looked over at the blonde, put his hand over the phone, said, “Honey, go into the bathroom and turn on the shower.”

“Sure thing.” She made it in five quick steps.

Giancana said, “Over.”

“Over what, Momo? How much over?”

“Seven big ones.”

“How about twelve?”

“Seven. I had expenses.”

“Just exactly what are you doing in Vegas, Momo?”

“Relaxing — having a tood time.” Then explosively, his anger rushing to the surface, “What the hell’s eating you, Tony?”

“You know what the hell’s eating me, so asking me is just a lot of crap. I’ll tell you anyway. If you’re thinking of stepping on a few people’s toes so you can move in, don’t! That’s the word. You understand? Don’t!”

“I wasn’t thinking about it,” Giancana lied.

“The hell you weren’t! I’ve got it straight, so don’t lie to me. One bad move, Momo, is all it will take. The Council has had a meeting on you already. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear,” Giancana answered shortly, resentment and anger coloring his words.

“Okay, have your fun. Stay as long as you like. I don’t need you here.” Accardo hung up.

The last five words stung him like acid. He banged the phone down on the cradle with a stream of curses.

The blonde came out of the bathroom, stood in the middle of the room and waited for Giancana. He looked at her, wanted her, but all desire had been washed out of him. He was too upset. The turmoil inside of him was turning with the speed of an electric motor at its highest revolution. He nodded to her and she came to him. He handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

“Maybe next time,” he said. “Okay?”

She smiled provocatively. “Sure, honey, anytime.” She tucked the bill into her bra and left.

Giancana poured himself a drink, waited about ten minutes, then went down to the casino. The place was packed with players at all the games. He walked around, looking things over. At one of the roulette tables he saw two young women. One of them was Marjorie Pettibone, a Palm Beach society beauty. The other was a dark-haired, extremely attractive woman who reminded Giancana of a movie star.

“Could be,” he said to himself.

She wasn’t. Her name was Rosanne Ricotta. The two women had met at the swimming pool and became friends. Giancana stood behind them as they played, losing two bets in a row.

He leaned toward them and said, “Put all your chips on the black.”

Marjoire Pettibone gave him a quick look. “Really? I was thinking of red. How about you, Rosanne?”

“Just what I was thinking,” Rosanne agreed.

They placed their chips in four neat piles on red. Red came up and a dealer matched their chips.

“I think we’ll just leave it there,” Rosanne said. “What do you think, Marjorie?”

“I agree.”

Giancana said. “You’ll blow your money, I tell you; Take the black.”

They ignored him. When the wheel stopped spinning it did so on a red number.

“Well, Marjorie,” Rosanne said, “I think that puts us ahead. Shall we go?”

The two women picked up their chips and started from the table. Giancana followed them a few steps.

“So I misjudged the wheel.” He gave them his best smile. “I’d like to buy you two a drink.” He looked toward Miss Pettibone. “So you’re Marjorie, eh? Hello, Marjorie.” He looked toward Miss Ricotta. “What’s your name, Gorgeous?”

“Ann-Margret.”

“Could be. How about that drink?”

“We never drink with strange men,” Marjorie Pettibone said bluntly. “Besides, you’re not our type. Is he, Ann-Margret?”

“No, he isn’t,” Rosanne agreed.

Giancana’s temper rose but he managed to control it. “Very funny. Do you know who I am?” he asked.

The question was a mistake. Rosanne Ricotta cut him down with a sharp reply.

“Sure, we know,” Rosanne snapped. “You’re the guy who gives wrong tips to women. You’re a shill for the house.”

Giancana’s eyes narrowed. “I’m Sam Giancana,” he growled. “I run this place,” he lied, seeking to win some respect in their eyes.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Marjorie Pettibone said, “why don’t you run along. You’re tiresome.”

“They started away from him and Giancana took hold of Marjorie Pettibone’s arm.” He held on, tightening his grip. “Let go, you filthy beast!” she said shrilly.

The pit boss looked over to where the three stood and glared at Giancana. He let go her arm.

“If you ever annoy me again,” Marjorie Pettibone said angrily, “I’ll slap that ugly face or have you arrested. Do you understand?”

The two women walked into the bar and sat at a table. The pit boss came over and apologized for the incident.

“I’m sorry, ladies,” he said. “That was unpardonable. You’re guests of the hotel?”

“Yes, we are,” Rosanne said. “That man frightened us.”

“It won’t happen again, I assure you. Look, why don’t you have some champagne — on the house. I insist.” He nodded to a waitress. “A bottle of champagne for the ladies.” He made a quick gesture with two fingers. No tab. “You’ll forgive us?”

The two women nodded. When they went to their rooms later they found a bottle of champagne cooling in a bucket, a bowl of fruit and a beautiful bouquet of flowers in a vase. There was a card. It read Enjoy everything. The Management.

Two days later, Tony Accardo came to Las Vegas unannounced, in company with three of his lieutenants. He checked into a suite in the Flamingo and shortly afterward summoned Giancana to him.

“Sit down, Momo,” Accardo said and pointed to a chair. “There!”

Accardo remained standing, as did the other three men. He came right to the point. That was his way — direct. He had come up through the ranks under Capone, Nitti, Cherry-Nose Gioe, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and the Fischetti brothers, all on the inside, next to Big Al.

He had outlasted them all by playing the game in strict adherence to the code. He carried tremendous weight with the National Council.

He said, “Momo, this is going to be a lesson in ethics as the Syndicate practices it. I’m going to lay it on the line. You take it or leave it. It will be your choice. You’ll go up or down, depending on how you decide.”

“What the hell did I do now?” Giancana asked angrily.

“You’ll talk when I’m finished, Momo. So for now, just keep quiet. The Syndicate, every unit, everyone connected with it, is tied together like this.” He interlaced his fingers tightly for emphasis.

“There are a thousand eyes and a thousand ears in this town, watching and listening to everything that goes on. Information on everyone who might have any ideas about muscling, heisting a joint, pulling off a gimmick that would throw the machinery out of gear, is reported daily. The town is clean and everyone wants it that way. No mayhem — no shootings, no killings, nothing to affect the flow of visitors, scare them or give the town a bad name.

“This isn’t Chicago or L.A. There are hundreds of millions of dollars invested in hotels and casinos. You made a very bad move a couple of days ago when you tried to pick up a couple of women at the roulette table. One of them has political connections in Palm Beach and Washington. You got that?

“We checked her out — Marjorie Pettibone, A society gal. The other one is Rosanne Ricotti, associated with the Corrections Department in Pennsylvania. Either one could throw more heat on this town than we care to think about. Both of them would burn the town up.”

“I was just trying to be sociable,” Giancana interjected.

“Yeah, sure. The word is that you are to stay away from the tables. You’ve two bad moves here against you. There won’t be a third. This is good advice, Momo. It isn’t a threat in no way, just to sharpen your mind in certain areas. That’s it. You can talk now. Go ahead.”

“I’ve got nothing to say, Tony. I got the picture.”

“Okay, I’m glad we understand each other. You intend to stay longer?”

“Nope. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Accardo repeated. “There’s a lot of things in Chicago that need attention. I’ll be back in a week.”

World War II broke out and Giancana was called before his draft board in Chicago. He was asked, “What do you do for a living?”

His reply was typical of his arrogance and total disregard of the law. He stared at the members of the Board and snapped, “I steal!”

The Board promptly rejected him for army duty. He was described, fittingly, by a psychologist on the Board as “a constitutional psychopath with an inadequate personality and strong anti-social trends.”

Giancana’s wife died in 1954 and left him with three daughters. They were attractive, genuinely sweet young women who knew of their father’s background and association with the Syndicate and deplored it but were powerless to do anything about it. In his favor, the only instance a thorough search of his life revealed, was that he lavished affection and love on them, protected them, kept them well dressed and gave them every comfort he could in the modest home he owned in Oak Park.

Although he lived modestly during the years his wife was alive, he ran wild when he vacationed in Miami Beach or other resorts. Then his spending rivaled that of the richest men in the world. Suites of rooms, good-looking women — some of them wives of legitimate businessmen on vacation sprees away from home and husband — others widows, divorcées or playgirls living the gay life by giving up what nature gave them for what any man with money and a willingness to spend it could give them in return.

In Miami Beach, Giancana was usually seen with three or four attractive women at the same time. His attraction to women was volatile for the good reason that he was just that, a menacing, explosive creature who generated excitement in some feminine hearts.

His ego told him that, if he had three or four women around him at the same time, they would fight each other for his favor. All he would have to do would be to crook his little finger and point to the bed and the favored one would leap into it. He wasn’t far wrong.

What he refused to consider was that he attracted as much attention from honest police officers and federal agents as he did from women. The IRS became interested in him, too. The question in their minds was how and where did he get his money and did he give Uncle Sam his rightful share under the law?

He made trips to Paradise Island, taking along a blonde, a redhead and a brunette, indicating little preference as to the color of a woman’s hair. All that mattered to him was, would she? She would and did.

When he made trips to Europe he was under the scrutiny of Interpol on the advice of the Narcotics Division of the federal government. Lucky Luciano was still alive and very active in the narcotics and hot bonds traffic. Luciano’s worldwide connections in heroin made him a continuing formidable figure in the Mafia in the United States as well as in Europe.

Giancana met with Luciano in Rome and their meetings were duly reported to the federal government’s narcotics division in the United States by Interpol.

Finally, in the 1960’s, Tough Tony Accardo stepped down as the head of the Chicago Syndicate and named Giancana as his successor. Things began to happen almost immediately as Giancana began to throw his weight around.

The mob had the feeling its members were living on the lip of destruction. No one was safe from Giancana’s imagined feelings that one or another hood was against him or plotting against him. He had become paranoid on the subject. His position as head of the mob had gone to his head.

He was now the king, all-powerful, living portrait of a man possessed by a demon. There were several killings, uncalled for, in the ranks. Ironically, the hoods and assassins who killed in cold blood lived in a state of recurring terror.

They began to fear and hate Giancana but he was too egotistical to see it. His sudden flarings of temper were more frequent now and erupted on the slightest provocation. Loyalty to Giancana had dropped to zero.

In contrast, and because the men in the mob feared him, they were anxious to please him, to execute his orders whatever they were. He expanded prostitution, loansharking, bookie joints, gambling joints, most of them crooked, set up to fleece anyone who got into the games. Opposition hoods were beaten unmercifully, many of them killed.

Following in Johnny Torrio and Meyer Lansky’s footsteps, he invested mob money in legitimate businessess, taking many of them over with little investment. But he wasn’t as smart as Torrio or Lansky, and his way of moving in on legitimate businessmen soon brought him to the attention of the Chicago Crime Commission.

Again, Accardo stepped in to dress Giancana down.

“Who the hell do you think you are, Momo? You want to take over the whole damn city, lock, stock and barrel? I got word that the Crime Commission is very much interested in you and what you have been doing? There have been complaints, a dozen of them — twenty of them. You stop that crap right now or you’re going to find every damned whorehouse, bookie joint, gambling joint, everything, locked up tighter than a drum. You got it?”

Giancana smarted under Accardo’s attack but, fortunately for him, took it without a retort.

“Okay, Tony,” he said placatingly, “maybe I did move too fast. I’ll just let things stay as they are. No more taking over any of the legit businesses.”

“There’s one more thing. You’ve got most of the boys in the Organization walking on glass chips. The word is that every guy in the top spots is dissatisfied with the way you’re running things. You’ve put too much pressure on them.

“My advice to you is to take it off. Level off. Hold a meeting and give them some reassurance that you’re with them — with them. You got the point. I’m giving you one week to put this house in order, Momo. That’s it.”

Giancana held a meeting and took off the pressure. The men running the bookie joints, gambling joints, whorehouses, and shylocking, as well as all the other rackets, began to breath easier.

At this time, in the waning days of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA approached Robert A. Maheu, a former aide to Howard Hughes, and allegedly asked him to contact an important figure in the underworld for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

The CIA proposal to draw the Mafia into the assassination of a foreign head of government had a Godfather-like flavor in the fact that they actually let out a contract on Castro. Since that time a great deal of information has come out by investigative reporters who went into the matter, confirming the plot. According to documents held by the FBI, Maheu, on the suggestion of the CIA, contacted Sam Giancana. Giancana was intrigued by the idea of working for the CIA.

Giancana, according to official sources, first contacted one of the “most nimble and conniving figures in the Mafia,” Richard Cain, who had been a Mafia agent while he was a member of the Chicago police force as a detective.

Among his many other accomplishments, Cain spoke Spanish fluently. According to Intelligence sources, Cain, with the consent of the CIA, began recruiting Spanish-speaking hoods on Chicago’s West Side.

Giancana then enlisted the aid of John Roselli in the plot. He made extravagant demands on the CIA which were met.

Giancana set up headquarters in a plush suite in one of Miami Beach’s most expensive hotels. His arrogance increased because he now had the tremendous power of the United States Government behind him. The truth is that the Government thought little of Giancana’s role in the Castrol plot and in 1964 he was haled before a federal grand jury which wanted information on the Syndicate’s operations in Chicago.

Giancana refused to testify and was jailed for contempt. He served twelve months and when he was released went to Mexico until the heat on him diminished or died entirely.

Richard Cain liked to brag a great deal and boasted that he had led raids, commando style, on Cuban power stations. Intelligence officials declared that they doubted a single guerilla from Chicago ever set foot on the island. Cain, at this time still a member of the Chicago police Department, was forced to quit the force after he was caught spying on Mayor Daley’s Commissioner of Investigations.

Incredibly, he was hired in 1962 by Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie in 1962 as a special deputy sheriff. Ogilvie later became governor of Illinois. Cain resumed his spying for the Mafia after he was discharged by Ogilvie. In 1968 he was imprisoned for his part in a Mafia swindle. He was becoming a problem to everyone, including the Mafia and police authorities.

On December 20, 1973, two men wearing ski masks and carrying a walkie-talkie walked into Rose’s Sandwich Shop, a sleazy lunch room that was plastered with color stills from The Godfather. One of the men held a 12-gauge shotgun under Cain’s chin, in full view of a dozen diners, and blew off his head.

Prior to that, in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was junior Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy became involved with a cast of characters that would rival the imaginative creation of any writer for Playboy, Penthouse or any of the other magazines featuring clinical sex.

The group included, besides the future president, his brother Ted, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, then a Kennedy brother-in-law, and other members of the famous Sinatra Rat Pack. Also present were Sam Giancana, John Roselli and a few assorted party girls. The group was assembled in a plush suite in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

One of the party girls present was Judith Campbell, who later married a man named Exner and recently drew a great deal of space in newspapers with her story of an affair with Kennedy before and after he became President of the United States.

Judith Campbell was a typical Hollywood-type party girl found around cinema city or in the many hotels in Las Vegas. Kennedy was in the early stages of his campaign for the presidency. Judith’s story is that she was introduced to Senator Kennedy by Sinatra. That can be taken with a certain skepticism, because Ol’ Blue Eyes steers shy of any involvement with the gals on the make.

When her story appeared in the newspapers regarding her affair with Kennedy, and the statement that Sinatra had introduced her, Sinatra, through his press agent declared that “Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.”

Miss Campbell, or Mrs. Exner, at this time did have a literary agent who was trying to peddle her sensational allegations of a torrid romance with Kennedy. She told an interviewer that she had a four-day tryst with Kennedy at the Plaza Hotel in New York that was followed by passionate interludes with him in Palm Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles and in Kennedy’s Georgetown home when Jackie was out of town.

What is again bizarre about the Exner affair is that she also was meeting Giancana and John Roselli, with whom she carried on boudoir affairs. Her choice of lovers ran the gamut from gangsters and killers to a United States Senator, later a President of the United States, if she can be believed.

Her affair with Kennedy, according to informed sources, was suddenly and dramatically broken up when J. Edgar Hoover informed President Kennedy of Judith Exner’s ties with the Mafia.

If her affair with Kennedy had any romantic tie, it was never as strong as her affairs with Giancana and Roselli. Gangsters and killers intrigued her to the point where she underwent the same kind of excitement simply by being in their company as if she were experiencing a wild and abandoned bedroom climax.

There was a story making the rounds that President Kennedy broke with Sinatra on the advice of FBI Director Hoover because of his friendship with Giancana which cost him his license in a Reno casino. That was entirely untrue. The Los Angeles Times reported in a January 1976 edition that Kennedy continued his friendship with Sinatra long after he was warned about Sinatra’s alledged gangland connections. That, too, was unfair.

Every night club and café entertainer inevitably meets many men who are either directly or indirectly associated with underworld figures. In agreement with the story in the Times, documents in the John F. Kennedy library in Waltham, Massachusetts, and statements by long-time Kennedy aides, confirmed that the friendship continued. Kennedy aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers denied reports that Kennedy was more careful about seeing Sinatra because of warnings from his brother, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was to have stayed with Sinatra during a March 1962, visit to California, but the accomodations were changed at the last minute because of security problems, not because of “political reasons,” O’Donnell said.

Powers was quoted as saying that Sinatra had been instrumental in the 1960 presidential victory in Nevada. How much Giancana or Roselli, or Accardo had to do with garnering votes for Kennedy in Chicago and outlying suberbs is not known.

When the story broke on Giancana’s involvement with the CIA in the plot to kill Castro, it was revealed that the CIA had considered killing Castro on several occasions. Informed Washington sources estimate there were from six to thirteen actual attempts.

There is no denying the truth of the CIA’s connection with Giancana. The FBI holds documents to the effect that the CIA, acting in a role akin to that of a Don, did let out a contract on Castro and did approach Giancana through Maheu to carry it out.

Early in 1975, former CIA Director Richard M. Helms declared flatly at a press conference, “I do not know of any foreign leader that was ever assassinated by the CIA.”

This statement was hurled at a Washington newsman who questioned him. Helms further blew his cool to yell at CBS’s Daniel Schorr, since discharged by that network for selling or handing over without pay (doubtful) information to the Voice, a newspaper printed in Greenwich Village, New York, calling Schorr a sonofabitch and a killer, and to apply one of the filthiest sexual epithets to Schorr.

Helms’ statement has to be considered as no more than an artful technical denial.

Although it is probably true that no American CIA official ever actually murdered a foreign leader there is plentiful material to suggest that foreign nationals employed by the CIA have attempted to assassinate, and sometimes succeeded in assassinating, key figures overseas, acting on orders from Washington. The name of the game seems to be Murder by Proxy.

Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller’s investigation of the Castro plot also revealed plots linking the CIA to assassination schemes against the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, killed May 30, 1961, and Vietnam’s Ngo Din Diem, shot to death November 2, 1968.

By and large, there is little doubt then that Giancana was involved in a plot to kill Castro and that the CIA was behind it. However, all evidence points to the fact that Giancana had neither desire, nor intention of involving himself in the plot. He took the money the CIA agreed to pay, lived in opulence splendor on the taxpayers’ funds and laughed up his sleeve.

If Detective Cain bragged about his imaginary exploits, and he did, Giancana took delight in saying he had slept many times with the same woman as did President Kennedy. He was careful to add that it wasn’t Jackie.

The Castro plot over and done with, Giancana returned to Chicago. “Was summoned” would be a better phrase. Ac-cardo was getting a little tired of Giancana’s absurd involvements with one thing and another and bringing continued heat on the Syndicate. In all the years that Accardo was boss of the Syndicate there was little heat. He ran things smoothly and saw to it that the hundreds of hoods under him followed his dictums of staying clear of anything not concerning Syndicate business.

The government at this time began efforts to deport Roselli to Italy, where he was born in 1905. Mob money and lawyers went to his aid and appeal after appeal was filed on his behalf to stall the deportation proceedings. In order to enchance his position against deportation, Roselli sued to have his service discharge changed from undesirable to honorable. Both cases are still pending at this writing.

When Giancana returned to Chicago, Roselli told him he would have to “lay low” and avoid any complicity in Syndicate affairs that would jeopardize his stay in the United States.

Giancana argued that the Syndicate had too much money and too much power in official circles to worry about deportation.

“Like hell!” Roselli exploded. “They deported Luciano, Adonis and a dozen others — twenty, fifty. I’m staying clean so you can forget about me.”

“I need you,” Giancana argued.

“That’s just too damn bad. I’ve had it!”

Roselli did stay out of any involvement with Giancana and the Syndicate but was convicted in 1969 of a card cheating scandal at the Friar’s Club in Los Angeles and sentenced to five years in prison. He is out of prison but not out of trouble. His police record includes sixteen arrests on charges of carrying a concealed weapon while he was a member of the Capone gang.

He is very sharp in many areas of crime but certainly lacking in the kind of intelligence that tells him he’s a mark for arrest any time an honest detective can get something on him. Contrary to popular belief, there are some honest and dedicated police officers in Chicago. They are often handicapped and stymied by district attorneys and judges on mob payrolls but manage somehow to keep local hoods in line.

Accardo finally got fed up with Giancana and, at a meeting of the Council, Sam was removed as head of the mob. He went to Mexico, where he stayed for a protracted period, but finally the Mexican authorities expelled him as undesirable and he returned to his home in Oak Park.

He was summoned before a Federal grand jury in February 1975 and questioned about Syndicate activities in Latin America. He denied, according to informed sources, any knowledge of mob infiltration in any Latin American country.

Sometime later he went to Houston, Texas, and checked into the Methodist Hospital there, where he underwent surgery for a gall bladder condition. He returned to his home and lived quietly but the storm clouds were gathering about him. Somewhere in the vast labyrinth of the mobs and the CIA, by someone with authority to speak, he was marked for death.

There was no appeal.

It was June 19, 1975. The bright orange sun that had filled the sky had long ago disappeared. Now there was night, dark, starless, somehow sinister. Inside his Oak Park house, Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, nicknamed Momo, was saying good-night to the last of the guests who had gathered there for a welcome home party.

He was hungry. He had eaten none of the food spread out on tables for his guests, nor had he had a glass of wine in the many traditional toasts to his health. He went downstairs to the basement, where there was a large kitchen, and began to prepare a pan of Italian sausages and peppers.

He stood over the stove, stirring the contents and inhaling the flavor of the herbs and spices he had mixed together with the sausages and peppers, savoring the aroma as he anticipated the meal with a relish.

He was at peace with the world. His operation had been successful. He was feeling good. He was glad for the first time in his life to be out of the rackets. Age had mellowed him despite the fact his entire life had been devoid of balance, evaluation or judgment, barren in the atmosphere of luxury blood money had bought.

Outside the house, two police officers in a patrol car had sat and watched everyone who went into the house and came out of it that evening. They waited another ten minutes and drove away.

Minutes later, two men entered the basement where Giancana stood over the stove. They were strangers to him. A wave of panic swept over him as he saw the guns in their hands, then came a fierce reaction born of his days as a hoodlum, gangster, an animal who had killed without compassion.

He reached for a large knife on a nearby table. The guns were leveled with deliberate aim. The first shot tore into his head. His eyes still reflected the anger and fury of his rebelliousness at this effrontery to him.

He was a Don. Who the hell were these two nobodies who dared to take his life? Another shot ripped into his skull. The knife fell from his hand. There were more shots, four, five. They tore what had been Giancana’s brain to shreds.

A sudden stillness prevailed then as Giancana lay on the floor, a puddle of blood flowing freely from his head, mouth and ears. The sausages and peppers burned and what had once been aromatic scent had been reduced to ashes.

Joseph DiPersio, the caretaker, and his wife were in their apartment on the upper floor of the one-and-a-half story bungalow. Their window air-conditioner was running and they were watching television.

According to detectives, Mr. DiPersio went downstairs and called to Giancana, asking if he was all right. This was at 10:30 P.M. Giancana replied that he was. DiPersio said he went down again at 11:00 o’clock. This time Giancana did not answer. When DiPersio went to the basement, he found Giancana lying face up in a pool of blood on the floor of the kitchen. Six .22 caliber shell cases were found near the body. Giancana had been shot seven times in the head and neck.

Oak Park detectives said later that DiPersio’s call for help didn’t come until 11:53 P.M. They assumed that DiPersio, who was once questioned about an earlier gang slaying, had first phoned Giancana’s two married daughters, who live in Oak Park. DiPersio told police neither he nor his wife heard the shots, nor had they heard anyone entering the bungalow.

Oak Park Chief of Detectives, Harold Fitzsimmons, said that it would have been simple for someone to enter the basement from an outside stairway without the caretaker hearing the noise above that of the air-conditioner and the television.

A Justice Department source in Washington said that while Giancana had slipped to a low level in the crime syndicate’s hierarchy since his return from Mexico, there were enough old scores to settle that “one of his own” could have shot him.

He noted that one bullet had struck Giancana in the mouth. This was often the gangsters’ way of showing that their people who talked to grand juries did not live long afterward.

Who killed Salvatore “Sam” Giancana?

Chicago and Oak Park police speculate that Giancana was ordered killed by syndicate leaders who were concerned lest he trade underworld information sought by federal prosecutors in exchange for the dropping of a possible perjury indictment.

Peter F. Vaira, head of the Justice Department’s Strike Force on Crime in Chicago, revealed that the Federal Government had been developing a perjury case against Giancana in connection with his replies about his activities in Mexico.

Oak Park police discount robbery as a motive since $1458 was found on Giancana’s body although his wallet was empty. Detectives express doubt that the killing was syndicate-ordered because of the small-caliber pistol. Most gangland slayings have involved larger-caliber handguns, shotguns, or machineguns.

However, police theorize that the assassin or assassins might have used a small-caliber gun because it was easier to conceal and because police would theorize, as they did, that it was not a gangland killing.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho, told reporters at a news conference in Idaho that there was “absolutely no credence” to any notion that the CIA might have profited from Giancana’s death.

Accardo could not be reached for a statement by either police or reporters. Even if he could have been his reply, always laconic, would have been a shrug of his massive shoulders and a terse “Who knows?”

The underworld grapevine however, indicates that Giancana had become a nuisance, a threat to the safety of Syndicate members, and his death was on a contract let out after a long meeting of the Council. Talk. There may be a great deal of truth in it. But who is going to come forward with valid substantiating testimony?

Giancana’s funeral was simple. A dozen cars were in the cortege, most of them driven by men wearing dark glasses and inscrutable expressions. It was a far different funeral from that given to Tony D’Andrea and Dion O’Bannion, North Side chieftains.

Then thousands upon thousands lined sidewalks, stood on fire escapes, on roofs, as more than a score of cars filled with flowers and 122 funeral cars, twenty or more private cars and the hearse carrying the silver and bronze caskets of both rolled slowly through the streets where all traffic was halted. Conspicuous by their absence were the usual old friends of the deceased, for the very good reason that they had put him there.

A short distance from the grave site were several detectives from the Chicago and Oak Park police departments, all of them assigned to the homicide division. They were Captain Donald Steward, Lt. Stanley Gabriel, Sergeant Charles Lavan and Sergeant Thomas Martin. They were thoroughly familiar with most of the Syndicate hoods. They kept looking around for familiar faces.

“I guess Giancana just lost all his old friends,” Sergeant Lavan said.

“He never had any,” Lieutenant Gabriel snapped.

“With his disposition,” Captain Steward observed, “it’s a wonder he wasn’t killed years ago.”

“He was supposed to be,” Sergeant Martin recalled. “I had it pretty straight he was saved on two or three occasions by the Council. Those guys felt there would be too much heat on the Syndicate if he were killed. After all, he was a Don.”

“He was a piece of garbage,” Sergeant Lavan retorted. “What’s the word, anyway? Who were the hit men?”

“It’s all under investigation. There are some witnesses who saw two men in dark suits near the house shortly before Giancana got it. Could have been the two officers assigned to watch the house.”

“You think the CIA may have been involved, Captain?” Sergeant Martin asked.

Captain Steward shook his head. “I doubt it. They had nothing to gain by it. He was scheduled for an appearance before a Senate Investigating Committee on the Castro deal. What the hell, he couldn’t tell them a thing because he didn’t know anything. My guess is that.it was any one of the many guys who hated him. Or, maybe the Syndicate itself. Like the Hoffa case, it’s very apt to go unsolved or, at the least, for a long time.”

Sergeant Lavan looked to his right and saw two attractive young women standing together. He said, “Look over there, those two young women. I think I’ll have a talk with them.”

“If they’re free,” Lt. Gabriel said, “we’ll make it a foursome.”

“You don’t play golf,” Sergeant Lavan shot back.

The two women were Marjorie Pettibone and Rosanne Ricotta, who just happened to be on a visit to Chicago, read of Giancana’s murder and decided, on a dare, to go to the cemetery. Sergeant Lavan introduced himself.

“You knew Giancana?” he asked.

“We met him in Las Vegas,” Marjorie Pettibone said.

“You were friends?”

“Hardly,” Rosanne Ricotta replied. “Miss Pettibone threatened to slap his face or have him arrested. Oh, this is Marjorie Pettibone and I’m Rosanne Ricotta. That man annoyed us when we were playing roulette. He tried to pick us up, but first he gave us a wrong number.”

“A wrong number?” Sergeant Lavan asked.

“Yes. He suggested we play the black but we put our chips on the red and the red won. He got a little nasty after we turned down his offer of a drink.”

“And you came here to pay your last respects?” Sergeant Lavan asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Marjorie Pettibone said. “We’ve never seen a real honest-to-goodness gangster buried and since we did have a slight acquaintence, we thought it would make a good topic of conversation.”

Sergeant Lavan looked toward the gravesite. “They’ve lowered the casket into the ground. So, you’ve seen a gangster buried. By the way, how did you two get all the way out here?”

“In a taxi,” Rosanne Ricotta said.

“Well, to complete your day and add to your topic of conversation, how would you two like to be driven back to town in a police car?”

“With sirens, of course,” Marjorie Pettibone said.

“Sure. Why not? Come along.”

“By the way,” Rosanne Ricotta asked, “are those people the only friends Mr. Giancana had?”

“No. Those aren’t his friends. They’re family.” He grinned. “You two are the only friends of his here. The others are buried all over this place.”

The two women followed Sergeant Lavan to where the other three officers stood waiting.

Lavan said, “These two gun-molls had an argument with Giancana in Las Vegas. I’m taking them in for investigation.”

“I think this is a case of search and seizure,” Lieutenant Gabriel said. “I’m the officer in charge of that, ladies.” He gave them his best winning smile.

Roseanne Ricotta said, “Lieutenant, I have a very dear friend in Wilkes Barre, Judge Janet Wydo. She would be happy, if I so recommended it, to throw the case and you out of court.” She smiled at him. “Maybe next time, Lieutenant. Next year?”

“I’ll wait,” he said. “Just tell me the time and place.”

“In Judge Janet Wydo’s court, of course.”

Marjorie Pettibone asked Captain Steward if he knew who the assassins were. “Do you know who killed Mr. Giancana, Captain?”

“Two hoods with guns,” Sergeant Lavan interposed.

“Was he really a bad man, Captain?” she asked, ignoring La van’s humorous remark.

“Not really,” Captain Steward said. “Our information is that in many repsects he was a good guy.”

“Really?” Marjorie said.

“Sure,” Captain Steward said, a trace of sarcasm in his tone, “not once, so far as we know, did he ever beat his wife.” He turned to Lavan. “Take the ladies home, Sergeant — straight home. I want to see you at the station.” He nodded to the two women. “It was a pleasure. Good day.”

The investigation into the killing goes on, not because the police care too much about Giancana or the fact that he was killed, but the death of a Don in gangland circles could trigger a power struggle that would result in multiple killings before someone rose to the top spot with blood on his hands.

It has been six months now, and there are no clues, numerous arrests, almost everyone and anyone who might have information, stoolies, hoods, call-girls, interrogations of cops who were close to the areas of gangland operations.

Who is on top at this writing? No one. But whoever he may be, when he takes over, he will have to reflect on the fact that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. It has been proven over the years — Albert Anastasia, Legs Diamond, Frank Nitti, Willie Moretti, Buggsy Siegel. They believed themselves too big, too strong, impregnable. Their obituaries were the same—

The death of a don.