At the Point of a .38 Read online

  Brett Halliday

  At the Point of a .38

  1

  Murray Gold—liquid brown eyes, soft voice with an occasional trace of a stammer, only five feet six and with skin that seemed a half size too large—didn’t look like a criminal, and this had given him an enormous competitive advantage. Seen coming out of a meeting that had just handed down a death sentence, or ordered that somebody’s knees be broken, he looked like some dim Jewish accountant, who didn’t bet, drink, sniff cocaine or commit adultery, who had never experienced any unusual pain or excitement. Headaches, sore throats, hemorrhoids—never any of the glamorous ailments like ulcers or gonorrhea. Worries about car payments, not about being kidnapped for ransom or murdered by hired hit-men in an expense-account restaurant. Jail-house photographers, artists who can make even an Episcopalian bishop look like a child molester, had had a crack at Gold twice, once for robbery and once for suspicious loitering, early raps which he beat without difficulty. To go by the mug shots, the police had been dozing that day, and had arrested the wrong man.

  As a boy, like most others in his generation, Gold began with small neighborhood hold-ups. Few people took him seriously. A delicatessen-owner, confronted by the fierce but unprepossessing figure of Murray Gold, asked first if he meant it, if the pistol he was holding would really fire. Gold showed a mouthful of crooked, yellowish teeth, which he later had capped. The delicatessen-owner then emptied his cash register, but there was something about the way he did it, almost contemptuously. So Gold, two days past his sixteenth birthday, killed him. About to leave with his meager loot, Gold had an idea. Here was an opportunity to establish that he was not quite as inoffensive as he looked. He went behind the counter and stamped on the dead man’s face. At that period boys his age made a practice of wearing steel inserts in their heels. Finally, he stuck a pickle into the bloody mouth. He got no pleasure out of any of this. But unless he could persuade his contemporaries that in spite of his mild, pimpled appearance, he was basically vicious, he knew he could never expect to have much of a career.

  Prohibition at the time had three years to run. Those were the golden years. The market had been divided, and now the survivors could concentrate on making and spending money. Gold never seemed to spend much, but he accumulated vast sums. And this was the best kind of money, the kind that didn’t have to be shared with Internal Revenue.

  Until the very end of his life, Gold never had to kill anybody again. Of course he frequently ordered killings, it was part of the way these people did business. They couldn’t call on the courts to enforce their kind of contract, or to collect a debt. Gold did what was necessary, but in his own style. While others were boisterous and quarrelsome, he was calm. No one was ever allowed to see him angry. At twenty, even his closest associates thought he was thirty. At forty he was already being referred to as the Old Man.

  The others liked to move around in big cars, showing off their power. Gold stayed home in his stocking feet. He told an interviewer years later that the only times he had ever entered a speakeasy had been during the afternoons, to go over the books.

  He handled payoffs and selected judges and D.A.s. He became one of the most skillful political puppet-masters of his era, and if the audience ever caught a glimpse of Gold at the other end of the strings, it was a fleeting one.

  He was receptive to other people’s new ideas, though he rarely had any of his own. Several of the great garment-trade rackets of the middle thirties were manipulated by him. At that time he had two principal rivals for control of New York. One, at the end of the decade, was jailed for running prostitutes—a joke to anyone who knew the man; he had moved on from prostitutes years before. The second was arrested on some minor charge and beaten up and humiliated in jail. When he came out he looked much older, and had lost his authority. Murray Gold was very big from then on. He became known as Chairman of the Board, or Prime Minister, although in his organization there was no real board and certainly no king.

  He was careful not to lock himself into situations. He believed in research and development, long before that term came into common use. He liked to work with politicians from their earliest move, before they won the first election. He kept his money fluid. Actually he was as ignorant in financial matters as in most others, but he had sense enough and money enough to buy expert advice.

  After World War II, gambling became his main source of power and income. At one time he owned the basic racing wire, two Las Vegas hotel-casinos, much of downtown Havana, the big coin-machine companies, numbers in two major cities, a racetrack and a football team—although ownership, again, is not a precise word for his relationship to these properties. The Treasury Department sleuths had become more sophisticated, and on paper, Gold had never owned anything in his life, not even a car. He owned numbers, for example, for just as long as his colleagues acknowledged that he owned them.

  He was never shot at. Nobody tried to blow up his car.

  He came to dislike northern winters, and in a new division in the early 1950s, he allotted himself southern Florida and the Caribbean. He lived modestly, on a manufactured island in Biscayne Bay, between Miami and Miami Beach. His clothes always seemed somewhat wrong, and they fitted him only approximately. He married twice, without success. He enjoyed the company of girls in their late teens, and he usually kept one in the house. They were drab girls, who fitted into his generally unspectacular style, and they mystified his friends; a man in Gold’s position usually picked someone with good looks and a nice figure, and show-business aspirations. Such ill-assorted couples were seen all the time in the Beach hotels or in the clubhouse sections of Tropical Park or Hialeah. But then, Murray Gold didn’t go near those places. He liked the tranquillizing effect of TV in the evenings. The FBI and cop shows gave him great amusement, sometimes causing him to laugh so hard that he ended up coughing.

  Most of his girls were Jewish. Some were able to cook simple meals. One was a skilled masseuse. Gold had really appreciated that massage; unfortunately, she wanted her mother to live with them, a terrible, talkative woman, and in the end he wrote the girl a small check and sent her away.

  He remained important through three wars and five presidents, longer than any major criminal figure in this century. He had learned from the rocketlike careers of men like Luciano and Capone. The famous Al, for a time another winter resident of the Miami area, had become such a publicized star that a whole movie cycle was built around him—not just one movie, but a school of movies. He became a symbol, a myth. Americans who lived through that period would never forget Scarface Al. But the interesting thing about the story was that he had only four good years, and then was picked up and jailed like a common drunk, and died wretchedly, stone broke and without sycophants or friends.

  By living carefully, Gold avoided this kind of dangerous celebrity. The newspapers ignored him, and consequently the police ignored him, while chivvying and tapping and tailing, and in general making life miserable, for the flashier mobsters with their bodyguards and their blondes and big cars. (Gold drove a Chevrolet.) But his secret couldn’t be kept forever. References to him began to appear. When crime reporters asked their newspaper morgues for the envelope on Gold, they were surprised to see how fat it had become. His inconspicuousness became conspicuous, a trademark. His lack of color turned into color. For here was a man with more power than the gaudy Al in his prime, and yet he suffered from swollen ankles and had dowdy, scared-looking girl friends. The story was improved by exaggerating his power, and he was given credit in the papers for deals he had never come near. The crime writers had long ago decided that organized crime was tightly controlled by a small group of fanatical Sicilians, and they were bothered only briefly by the fact that Murray G
old was a Jew, not an Italian. The hamhanded mafiosi obviously knew nothing about corporate finance, and they needed Gold to do that kind of thinking for them. And so in the new mythology, Gold became the Bankroller, the Wizard, who knew how to launder dirty money by shifting it from pocket to pocket and back and forth between countries.

  And at that point his immunity was at an end.

  He had been brought to this country from Poland at the age of six months. While one branch of the Federal government scrutinized his tax returns, another set out to revoke his citizenship and deport him. Poland would undoubtedly decline to take him back, but meanwhile he would be tied up in complex legal proceedings and his affairs would suffer. He was subpoenaed to appear before special grand juries, before this congressional committee and that, and between the Scylla of perjury and the Charybdis of contempt, there was no way Gold could keep from getting wet. Over a period of years, there was hardly a day when his presence wasn’t required in some courtroom or other, or before some investigative body. He was excessively bugged. His phone rang at all hours. His girls were followed and photographed. He himself was convoyed everywhere by state police and highway patrolmen, who maneuvered their cruisers in and out of his driveway all night, with their lights on and their radios squawking.

  All this was overdoing it, of course. He was being punished before being convicted of anything. But only a few professional civil libertarians considered it objectionable. The sad-eyed little creep was unquestionably an important mobster. Everybody said so. He was labelled as such, with none of the usual quibbles like “reputed” or “alleged,” whenever his name was mentioned, which was almost constantly now. The framers of the Constitution hadn’t been thinking of protecting the rights of that kind of unsavory person.

  And it worked. His legal fees were enormous. In Cuba, Fidel Castro moved into Havana and ripped off his casinos, without paying a penny of compensation. With the help of his expensive legal talent he stayed out of jail, but a lot else went. Like Fidel Castro, his old friends and comrades-in-arms, bit by bit and without making a big thing of it, began to foreclose. Scheduled payments failed to arrive in the mail. Gold was too perplexed and harassed to do anything about it. Suddenly nobody liked his suggestions. Judges who owed their robes to a word and a money-filled envelope from Murray Gold now didn’t seem to know him when they saw him on the street.

  Every child on the beach knows the foolishness of building sand castles below the highwater mark. Gold had made this basic mistake, and of course the tide had come in, as it invariably does. His current girl friend moved out. The house itself was listed with real estate agents. He began having trouble meeting his lawyers’ exactions, and he had enough experience with that profession to know that they wouldn’t carry him for long.

  And then one fine day, with no advance notice, where should Murray Gold turn up but in Tel Aviv, Israel, forfeiting bail in excess of a million dollars—to be precise, $1,125,000. None of that had been Gold’s money. The bonding companies had been pleased and honored to write the paper and get a piece of the prestige that goes with being number one.

  He reached Israel on a regularly scheduled El Al flight, having bought a ticket openly, under his own name. He wore a tacky brown jacket and an openwork golf shirt. His pants were several inches too long, and bagged through the seat. His only luggage was a canvas flight bag. His picture in this costume appeared the next morning in most American newspapers, and probably most of the people who saw it said to themselves, “This is the Jewish Godfather? Can you believe it?”

  Gold, in Tel Aviv, did his best to disappear. He rented a small apartment on a side street, hired a local lawyer and applied for refugee status under the Law of Return. He had several thousand dollars in cash, no connections, no marketable skills.

  What to do about his application was discussed more than once on a cabinet level. Certainly he looked more like a refugee than most of the refugees who came in through that airport, but was he legit? Was it really possible that those millions and millions of dollars had melted away in so short a time? Someone in Shin Bet, the Israeli counterintelligence, devised a test. The Consul General of a hard-up Central American republic was induced to approach Gold secretly and offer a passport and an ironclad guarantee against extradition, in return for the token sum of $500,000, less than the annual skim from just one of his casinos. Gold seemed interested. He fired off a flurry of letters, and called a few people collect. The answers were all noes. But the strategists wondered if he had arranged those noes himself, as part of an elaborate con. Was he up to something in Israel? The government had begun to worry about the crime rate. They already had criminals enough, without importing new ones. Prostitutes were openly walking the streets. Kif was being smoked by alienated young people. Policemen had been caught stealing from appliance stores, as in all the more advanced countries. Probably Gold hadn’t led an entirely blameless life, but leaving newspaper talk aside, he had literally never been convicted of anything. Lying to Senators and showing contempt for a Federal grand jury—from the other side of the Atlantic, these niggling charges had a trumped-up look. Not for the first time in the history of the world, the Jew, perhaps, was being made the scapegoat? In his prosperous days, Gold had been a good friend of Israel, buying development bonds and contributing to money-raising projects, as long as he had money to give. Why send him back so the Americans could have the satisfaction of revoking his citizenship and deporting him? He was willing to renounce that citizenship, and he was already here. Look at those eyes. Were they the eyes of a killer?

  While the authorities pondered, his tourist visa was renewed, and renewed again. He took a part-time job as a hospital orderly. And then, quite suddenly, he was arrested at two o’clock one morning.

  Israel was still in a state of war with the neighboring Arab nations. Under Emergency Regulations inherited from the British, the military authorities had power to arrest any suspicious person and hold him without trial indefinitely, if necessary forever, on the vague charge of conspiracy—“conspiracy to commit, or to aid and abet those conspiring to commit, terrorist acts against the state.” These weren’t prisoners in the usual sense. They were “administrative detainees,” and how Murray Gold or anybody else got on the list was a bit uncertain. It was supposed that there was some shadowy committee in the Shin Bet, which conducted whatever investigations were thought necessary. From the decisions of this committee there was, of course, no appeal. A lawyer was no good here. Many months later, the detainee might be released, with no more explanation than he had been given when he was arrested. Presumably he would be a little more careful from then on.

  Gold was taken to Ramleh Prison, in a little village near the foot of Mt. Tabor. Most of the other detainees were Arabs. Of the thirty or so Jews, about half were considered to be harborers of dangerous political opinions. The others were criminals, who could be counted on to engage in illegal activities if allowed to remain at large. This must have been the category that included Gold.

  As always, he was calm and uncomplaining. To be realistic, where could he address a complaint? He was questioned frequently by police and intelligence agents. An Arab believed to be a Shin Bet informer was assigned to the next bed. Later it was learned that Gold had organized a handbook, and had done a small business in contraband cigarettes.

  He remained at Ramleh for five and a half months.

  One night a party of Palestinian commandos, which had infiltrated across the Syrian border, assembled in a dry ravine two kilometers from the prison. They had brought demolition charges and a 4.2 mortar. Most were experienced men who had taken part in these raids before. By starlight, their faces and hands soot-blackened, they picked their way to the prison wall. The charges were placed and exploded. Inside, the Arab members of the guerrilla organization broke out of their barracks, killed as many guards as they could get their hands on, joined the attackers, and they were all back across the Syrian border before dawn. In the confusion, a number of non-political prisoners
also escaped. When the count was taken the next morning, Murray Gold was among the missing.

  But he would be quickly recaptured, the authorities thought, if he were truly without money or Israeli connections.

  2

  Michael Shayne, the private detective, left Mercy Hospital in Southwest Miami by the emergency dock. He was a big man, ruggedly built, red-haired, with a lined face. Even now, with one arm in a sling, he moved with a gymnast’s grace and power and precise control.

  His Buick was where he had left it, with the key still in the ignition and the lights on, the door not fully latched. He had brought it in with one arm, in considerable pain. The bumper nudged a utility stanchion. On an ordinary Detroit car, this small knock would have crumpled some of the front steel. But Shayne, who spent a great deal of time in his car and depended on it, had replaced the stock bumper with one of his own design. On more than one occasion, he and his Buick had contended with another car for the same patch of highway. So far these arguments had always been won by Shayne.

  Three hours earlier, he had been involved in a collision of a different kind, crashing the Buick into a Cessna four-passenger airplane that was at tempting to take off from an old wind-sock airstrip south of Miami. There were two men in the plane, the Argentine pilot and a slick Italian who was a salesman for a shoe company when he worked legally. Their hand-luggage was double-lined, and forty kilos of unpackaged heroin were recovered from the wreck. Both passengers survived, and would have fifteen or twenty years to wish they had picked a more difficult way to make money. The heroin trade, of course, would continue.

  Shayne’s right arm had been broken in two places, above and below the elbow. The lower break was the bad one, and had been set under traction. The hospital had wanted to keep him overnight, but Shayne disliked hospitals and left them as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in his business it was hard to avoid them entirely.