The Private Practice of Michael Shayne (3 page)

“By God, can’t you take a joke, Shayne?” Marco whined. He pulled tentatively at Shayne’s coat sleeve.

“Sure. I’m just laughing my head off.”

Shayne went back into Marco’s office and sat in the chair he had just gotten up from. He leaned back and crossed bony knees, fixed a blank stare on the ceiling while Marco lifted a rubber mouthpiece from its hook and spoke into it briefly. He hung up and said with excessive good humor, “Everything’s fixed up. They were just leaving.”

Shayne didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at the big man.

Marco fidgeted and pulled an onyx desk lighter close to put flame to his cigar. In response to a light tap on the hall door, he said, “Come in.”

The door opened to admit Phyllis Brighton and her ruddy, blond escort, Harry Grange, followed by the pallid-faced youth whom Shayne had encountered at the foot of the stairs. A cigarette dangled from his lips. Squinting through smoke, he asked, “You want me, Boss?”

“No. Shut the door.”

Shayne shifted his position to look at Phyllis Brighton. He grinned and said, “Hi, Angel.”

Phyllis wore a silver-fox scarf flung loosely about her smooth shoulders. Her lips were very full, only slightly rouged. Her figure swelled the shimmering silver of her evening gown. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether she was surprised to see Shayne or not. She said, “Good evening,” in a low and beautifully modulated voice.

Grange’s sun tanned face took on an anxious smile. He said, “Well, if it isn’t Michael Shayne,” striving for a heartiness that didn’t quite get over.

Shayne ignored him. His eyes were probing at Phyllis, and she met his steady gaze with an odd admixture of helplessness and angry defiance.

“This young lady,” Marco said heavily to Grange, “happens to be a friend of Shayne’s.”

“Well, well. Is that so? I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I,” Phyllis said. Her small straight nose went up in disdain.

Shayne sighed and looked away from her. She demanded haughtily, “Why have we been dragged up here? We’ve got other places to go.”

“Not with that heel,” Shayne said sharply.

The smile faded from Grange’s face. “See here. You can’t insult me like that.”

“Can’t I?” Shayne leaned back and smiled insolently, meeting Grange’s eyes for the first time. “You’ve been insulted by lesser men—and taken it.”

Grange’s eyes wavered, shifted away from Shayne’s steely stare. Standing close to him, Phyllis said furiously, “Come on, Harry. We don’t have to stay here.”

She put her hand on his arm.

Shayne said, “No,” and Grange transferred his nervous, questioning gaze to John Marco.

The big man shrugged his massive shoulders.

“Shayne has some sort of dopey idea that I’m paying you a percentage to bring in customers, Harry. Rather than have any argument, I am returning the lady’s money—whatever she lost downstairs.”

“I won’t accept it,” Phyllis said evenly. Red spots of anger burned high on her cheeks. “You’d think I was a baby,” she threw at Shayne. “I don’t need you to look after me.”

Shayne’s chuckle was genuine. His eyes were very bright.

“You’re going to be looked after whether you like it or not, Angel. This guy is just a come-on for half the cheap gambling joints in town. He comes back later and collects his percentage of the money that beautiful and dumb gals lose to the house. Be a sap if you want to, but for God’s sake don’t be a sucker.”

“I don’t believe it. Why, Harry lost—right along with me.”

“Sure. That’s the come-on. He gets his money back. Pick up your money from Marco and I’ll take you home.”

“Your pardon, Shayne, but the young lady is with me,” Grange blustered. He flung his head and shoulders back and took Phyllis’s arm. “Miss Brighton hasn’t asked for your protection.”

Shayne got up. He moved forward with big clenched fists swinging low and free.

“You can get your neck broken by that sort of talk,” he said casually, “and you will get it broken if you don’t stay away from this girl.”

Grange’s heroic attitude crumpled. He backed away from Shayne, holding up a protesting hand. With the other hand he fumbled for the doorknob and jerked the door open. Before backing through it, he stopped and spoke past Shayne to Marco, “How about that other matter we spoke about this afternoon? After eleven will be too late.”

Shayne’s eyes traveled swiftly from Grange to Marco, but Marco shook his head and grunted, “No,” and the younger man went out, closing the door.

Shayne spoke irritably to Phyllis.

“Tell Marco how much they took you for downstairs and let’s go. Next time—” He moved slowly back toward the desk.

Phyllis didn’t move. She contemplated the distance to the door with wary, half-closed eyes. Abruptly, she said, “You’ve no right whatever to try to boss me, Michael Shayne,” and slid past him like a flash and ran out the door after Grange.

John Marco made the mistake of chuckling aloud. Shayne turned on him with an expression so terrible that Marco seemed to dwindle in size. He slumped low in his swivel chair.

“I’ll take that money.” Shayne stood over him with fists doubled. “An even two grand will make it right.”

“Sure, sure.”

Marco pried himself up from the chair and went to a huge safe in one corner, opened it, and came back with two thousand dollars in fifties held in an outstretched hand.

“That makes everything all right, don’t it, Mike?” he said placatingly.

Shayne was counting the money. He growled, “I told you not to call me Mike,” without raising his eyes.

Marco mopped his face with a silk handkerchief and sank into his chair. He said, affably, “You should try being a father, Mr. Shayne, and then you’d know you can’t talk reason to a girl so young. There’s something about Harry Grange that gets them all that same way. Look at Marsha—much as I’ve told her about him. Sit down and have a drink. I’ve got some nice Napoleon cognac that came over on the ‘Mayflower.’” He chuckled hollowly.

Shayne folded the bills, slipped them in his wallet and said, “Thanks,” shortly; then strode out without glancing back to see Marco’s lips curled out and his eyes stony with hatred.

SHAYNE STOPPED at the checkroom for his hat. The girl looked at his ticket and spoke a number into a microphone which was connected with a loudspeaker at the casino parking lot, then handed his Panama to him. He thanked her, tossed a quarter on the counter, and went out to the door where a tall man wearing a gold-braided uniform touched two fingers to his plumed hat and said, “Good evening, Mr. Shayne.”

Shayne nodded, standing beneath a striped canopy leading out to the curb. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette against the balmy night breeze blowing in from the Atlantic.

He asked, “Did Harry Grange just drive away?”

“I believe he did. Yes, sir.”

“Did he have a girl with him?”

Shayne spun the match away, watching the doorman’s expression keenly.

The man wrinkled his forehead doubtfully.

“Well, sir, now that you mention it, it was sort of funny. I remember a girl came hurrying out after Grange,” he went on candidly, “just as he was starting to drive away like he was in a big hurry, and she called out to him and he pulled up a little way and stopped. Right then a car came up and I went out to attend the patrons, and I sort of thought I noticed another girl too—and when I looked around again they were all gone.”

A long-nosed limousine purred to a stop at the entrance. The doorman muttered an excuse and hurried forward to open the rear door for an ermine-coated dowager and a man in tails and a silk hat. The dowager was very drunk, and her hauteur in attempting to appear sober amused Shayne who lounged against a pole watching. The woman staggered and would have fallen if the doorman had not caught her elbow, but she shrilly announced to the world that she needed no assistance.

Shayne sucked on his cigarette and watched while the short, silk-hatted man got on one side and the doorman on the other, and they half-carried the dowager inside.

Then Shayne thought of Phyllis Brighton, and the incident was, somehow, not amusing at all. He welcomed the sight of his aged roadster when an attendant wheeled up to the curb after the limousine pulled out. The attendant got out and Shayne got in, pulled around the palm-bordered circle into the broad ocean drive leading south toward the business section of Miami Beach.

Walled estates of the wealthy lined the drive on both sides, covered with bougainvillaea and flame vines. Palm fronds shivered in the night breeze, dripping silvery moonlight, moving Shayne to restless thoughts of other nights like this, when there must have been this same beauty and he hadn’t bothered to notice it.

Some of the grimness went out of his face as he breathed deeply of the warm night air permeated with the cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine, yet carrying also the tang of sea salt from waves breaking on sandy beaches.

It was March, with the threat of summer heat already driving the winter tourists northward in droves, but the season that Shayne liked best of all the year in Miami.

He drove in a relaxed posture with big hands gripping the wheel loosely, faintly annoyed by feeling within himself something he had often derided in others, a positive reaction to the moonlight witchery of a Miami night.

He had sometimes recognized the same inward stirrings in the past, he reflected, and it had always been a simple matter to rid himself of them with the assistance of the nearest complaisant woman. Curiously, he felt only a vague distaste when he considered seeking the same remedy tonight.

Damn Phyllis! She was too innately decent to waste herself on a louse like Grange. If she was determined to go in for that sort of thing, he might as well—

When he turned onto the causeway he saw that there was a yellowish phosphorescence on the water. The breeze was stronger, more full-flavored. He allowed his thoughts to return to Phyllis Brighton as she had been that night when he sent her away from his apartment, let speculative memories have their way with him as he drove into Miami.

The scowl remained fixed on his face, but there was no real inward causation for it as he swung around the traffic circle in front of a great department store into the west lane of brilliantly lighted Biscayne Boulevard, and drove on past cool, shadowy Biscayne Park.

Passing the end of Flagler Street, he turned to the right at the next corner, then to the left, and a block farther south he pulled in at the curb, parked at the side entrance to an apartment hotel backed up to the Miami River. He went into a small hallway leading on to a lighted lobby, passed the elevators and climbed a stairway to the second floor to his apartment.

He heard the muffled ring of his telephone as he fitted a key into the lock. He entered unhurriedly and switched lights on a large, comfortably furnished living-room.

The wall telephone continued to b-r-r-r loudly.

He closed the door and tipped his hat back, went directly to a liquor cabinet where he took down a half-full bottle of modestly priced cognac. He pulled the cork on the way to the phone, took down the receiver and said, “Hello,” then tipped the bottle and drank deeply.

A metallic masculine voice said, “Shayne?”

“Talking.”

He didn’t recognize the voice over the wire. A deep crease formed between his eyes. It was evident that the man at the other end was trying to disguise his voice. He tilted the bottle again as he listened to the man saying rapidly, “I’ve got a case for you, Shayne. Something big. Can you come right away?”

Shayne lowered the bottle and held it loosely by the neck.

“How big? Where?”

The tone of his response was one of complete disinterest.

“Plenty big. It’s something I can’t discuss over the phone. Can you come to the beach right away?”

The voice was muffled, as if it came through a cloth over the mouthpiece.

“I suppose I can,” Shayne said dubiously. The crease between his eyes deepened. “Who’s speaking?”

“Never mind. You mightn’t come if I told you.”

Shayne bellowed, “To hell with that,” and slammed the receiver on the hook.

He stood on wide-spaced feet, scowling at the wall, then shrugged his shoulders in dismissal of the affair. He went to the littered table and set the bottle down. Going to the cabinet again, he took a tall wine glass from a shelf and was on his way back to the table when the phone rang again.

He blandly ignored it. He filled the slender glass to the rim with amber fluid, drank it slowly and with whole-souled enjoyment. Not until the glass was empty did he lift the receiver and stop the persistent ringing.

The same voice said guardedly, “Hello. Mr. Shayne? I guess we were cut off.”

“I hung up,” Shayne tossed into the mouthpiece. There was a brief silence.

Then the man said, “I must have misunderstood you. It sounded as though you said you hung up.”

“I did.”

“Oh.” Then the voice continued, “If you have to know my name, it’s Grange—Harry Grange,” in a strange, guttural tone, as if the man’s mouth was pressed tightly against the instrument.

“You don’t sound like Grange to me,” Shayne said flatly.

“You don’t ever know who’s listening in on a damned telephone,” the man snapped. “I’ve got to be cautious.”

“Have it your way,” Shayne said impatiently. “If you’ve got anything worth listening to, spill it.”

There was a hesitant silence.

Then with sudden decision the man said, “It’s about your friend, Larry Kincaid.”

Shayne tensed. “What about him?”

“He’s in a jam. I’m calling for him. Can you come to the beach right away?”

“Yes.”

Shayne’s eyes were very bright. The thumb and first finger of his left hand massaged the lobe of his left ear.

“I’m calling from a place near the Seventy-ninth Street causeway. I’ll meet you down the beach a few blocks—at the end of the first street dead-ending against the ocean. I’ll park my car with my lights shining west so you can’t miss me. How long will it take you?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Good.”

The sound of the receiver being jammed on the hook clicked against Shayne’s ear drum.

He hung up slowly, went back to the table and poured another long drink, put it down in evenly spaced swallows, then opened the front table drawer to get a .32 automatic.

The gun was not there.

His clock pointed to 11:02. He started to the bedroom, thinking that he might have slipped it under his pillow, turned back and pulled the drawer of the desk all the way out, frowning and poking around in the litter of papers. Dazed and confounded, he set the drawer in the grooves and closed it slowly.

“Now what the hell,” he muttered, casting back to the last time he had seen the pistol. Just a couple of days ago. Steel rusts fast in Miami’s damp climate, and he distinctly remembered cleaning the weapon and leaving a film of oil on the metal two days previously.

Also, he was positive he had returned it to the drawer where he invariably kept it.

He crossed to the phone and asked for the night clerk.

“Shayne speaking. Has anyone been in my room lately without my knowledge?”

“Not that I know of, Mr. Shayne. Except—your friend, Mr. Kincaid. He waited up there for you earlier this evening. You were out when he called—and he asked to wait for you in the apartment.”

Shayne said, “I see.” He hung up.

He stood uncertainly for a moment, gray eyes narrowed to slits. Larry had visited his room this evening—his pistol was gone. Now, Larry was in trouble—

He went out of the room in long swift strides, down the stairway to his car, made a U-turn in front of the drawbridge and turned into Biscayne Boulevard. He headed straight north, passing both the County and Venetian causeways, getting his battered roadster up to a smooth sixty where the residential section began to thin out and there was little traffic.

Grim-jawed and tense, trying not to think at all, he held the speedometer needle at sixty until he slowed for the traffic light at Seventy-ninth Street and swung to the right. Leaving the lighted boulevard behind, he had the indicator shivering just below eighty when he rolled up on the first bridge of the almost deserted Seventy-ninth Street causeway, holding it at that speed until approaching the sweeping curve near the east end which he made with screaming tires.

He eased onto the peninsula, over a high-arched bridge spanning a canal, and the clock on his dashboard said he had been driving sixteen minutes when he turned south on the ocean drive, past hamburger stands and beach cabins, driving slowly and watching for a dead-end street with a car parked near the ocean with headlights facing out.

He found it after a few minutes, a palmetto-lined pair of sandy ruts. The headlights of a parked car burned brightly at the end where a sloping cliff broke down to the shore.

There were no houses near in either direction, and the only sound in the night stillness was the crash of waves below. He cut off his motor just in front of the parked car.

He got out, blinking into the blinding lights, waded through loose sand over his shoetops, and made his way to the shiny coupe with a single figure in the driver’s seat. The man was slumped down over the wheel as though he had passed out.

Shayne said, “Hello,” and put his hand on the man’s shoulder to shake him.

He didn’t shake him. He knew there wasn’t any use.

Harry Grange was dead.

By the faint light on the instrument board Shayne saw that blood oozed slowly from a small bullet hole in the side of Grange’s head.

Shayne removed his hand from the dead man’s shoulder and lit a cigarette.

He heard a faint whine above the rustle of palmetto fronds and the crash of ocean waves. It died away, then came more clearly. The shrill moan of a siren on a speeding car. Momently the siren grew louder—sped nearer.

Hastily, Shayne peered into the front seat of the coupe. One of Harry Grange’s limp tanned hands lay on the seat close to his thigh. A blur of white showed under the lax fingers.

Shayne pulled a lacy, feminine handkerchief from under the dead man’s hand as the noise of the siren died from a crescendo to a low moan.

He slid the handkerchief into his coat pocket and stepped back to make a quick search around the car. His eye caught the gleam of moonlight on blued steel lying on the ground just under the running board.

He picked up a .32 automatic. The retracting carriage stood partially back, showing that it had been jammed after being fired.

The wail of the approaching police siren came nearer as he held the muzzle of the gun to his nose and caught the acrid odor of burned powder.

Hurriedly he examined the weapon, looking for—and finding—a small nick in the wooden butt.

The pistol which was missing from his drawer had an identical nick in the butt.

He didn’t have time to think. The police car was fast approaching the rutted turnoff from the pavement.

He whirled to face directly south, drew back his arm and threw the pistol overhand with all his strength into the thick palmettos.

He turned at the screech of brakes and watched a red-spotlighted police car lurch into the ruts directly toward him.

Shayne stepped into the headlights as uniformed officers swarmed out of the riot car before it reached a full stop.