Michael Shaynes' 50th Case

  Brett Halliday

  Michael Shayne’s 50th Case

  In recording the 50th Case of the redheaded private detective from Miami, Florida, and in celebration of his 25th year in print, Brett Halliday has diverged widely from the pattern set by 49 previous books.

  Here, the emphasis is upon character and motivation rather than detection and deduction, and in so doing Mr. Halliday has produced his finest and most powerful novel.

  Long-time fans of Michael Shayne will not be disappointed, and new readers will discover that an important dimension has been added to the routine novel of mystery and suspense.

  Twenty-five years ago my first book DIVIDEND ON DEATH was dedicated as follows:

  For MONTY because he likes this story.

  Today, I am proud to dedicate my 50th book to:

  Rutherford G. Montgomery

  and a friendship that has endured thirty years.

  1

  It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon and Marvin Blake sat alone in his hotel room in Miami looking forward to the evening that lay ahead of him with a certain amount of distaste. Perhaps there was a bit of dread mixed with his distaste, although that is a strong word for what Marvin was feeling.

  Certainly, he wasn’t looking forward to the night with any eagerness or anticipation. Thus far, he conceded to himself, it had been a good convention. This was the final day of it and he had just come back to his room after attending the last formal meeting on the agenda.

  Tonight was the night for making whoopee. The night for cutting loose from all restraints and raising hell just for the pure fun of it. The night, in fact, that most of the delegates looked forward to with enthusiastic anticipation. The reason most of them had come to the convention in the first place.

  Many of the delegates, of course, had been whooping things up ever since they had been in the city. But tonight was the big one. Tomorrow they would all disperse and go back to their humdrum lives at home. Most of them would go back to small communities like Sunray Beach, which was Marvin Blake’s home-town where they were solid and respected citizens, members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Elks or the Lions, good husbands and fathers, sober and dependable taxpayers who helped to keep the National Economy in gear.

  But tonight they were going to be anonymous John and Bill and Henry and Mike, according to the labels pinned to their lapels. Tonight they were going to be on the town, and they were all set to raise merry hell because they couldn’t raise hell at home without everyone in town knowing about it. Because they were just adolescents at heart and never really had grown up, and were all loaded down with frustrations and repressions and sublimations that called for some sort of outlet when the opportunity arose.

  And Blake knew he would have to be “Marv” along with the rest of the boys. He would be expected to drink too much, and laugh too often and too loudly, and kiss the party girls who would be provided, and try to get some sort of erotic thrill out of the pornographic movie that would be shown in the Grand Ballroom as a fun-making climax to the four-day convention.

  Marvin Blake didn’t like to drink too much, but he glumly knew that he would do so tonight. He knew he’d start out promising himself he’d have only two or three, and he’d gulp down those two or three, and then another and just another, and pretty soon he’d be snatching a glass from every loaded tray that went by and things would begin to get a little blurred… and there he’d be!

  And the next morning he’d wake up (alone in his own hotel room if he was lucky) with a head as big as a balloon and an awful taste in his mouth and little men hammering on the inside of his skull with croquet mallets, and wondering why in hell he had done it, and just what had happened after he passed out.

  And if he wasn’t lucky, there’d maybe be a floosie in bed with him when he woke up, or lipstick stains on the pillow and the pervasive stink of perfume and passion in the room. And then, along with the hangover there’d be a dreadful feeling of guilt and remorse that he’d carry away with him and take back home and have to learn to live with for all the years to come.

  He shuddered with revulsion at his imaginings, and tried to put them away from him. Up to this point it had been a darned good convention. He was glad he had come even if the trip had turned out a little more expensive than he had anticipated. Ellie had been right when she insisted that he must attend it. A man does need to get away from home once in a while. Does him good to get together with other fellows and talk business and how the last sales campaign went, and why it didn’t go better, and what the economic outlook for the coming year is and things like that. It broadens a man’s horizons and makes him realize that all over the country other fellows face the same sort of problems he faces.

  Yes, Marvin was glad he had come, all right. He told himself that Ellie had been wonderful the way she insisted he just take the money out of the savings account and go, even if he had felt he couldn’t afford it. Just thinking about Ellie made him feel warm and good. She had insisted that she could get along fine without him for just four days. My goodness! why shouldn’t she? Didn’t she get along all right every day with him away at the office?

  Thinking about Ellie brought a twinge of guilt feelings to Marvin. Why had he fooled around with that redhead up in Tom Connors’ suite last night? Well, he asked himself angrily, why had he? She was common and coarse, and nothing but a damned gold-digger. Anyone could see that with half an eye. Why does a man do damn fool things like that when he has a wife like Ellie waiting for him at home? And a sweet little daughter like Sissy. Both of them believing you’re the salt of the earth and that you’re completely to be trusted away from home.

  It hadn’t been much, of course. Not anything, really. He hadn’t actually kissed her, but you can’t pull away and make a scene in front of the other fellows when a pretty girl wants to kiss you. Not unless you want to get laughed at.

  The redhead was part of his worry about the coming evening. The last thing she’d whispered in his ear before the party broke up at midnight was that she was looking forward to getting better acquainted tonight.

  Marvin Blake didn’t want to see the redhead again. He didn’t even like her because, my goodness, how can a man like a girl like that if he’s married to someone like Ellie?

  Thinking about Ellie made Marvin want to telephone her. It would be reassuring and good to hear her warm throaty voice over the telephone telling him that Sissy was perfectly wonderful although she missed her Daddy dreadfully, and that they were absolutely all right at home and hoped he was having fun in Miami.

  But Ellie had made him promise not to telephone her from Miami. She said that after they had been married eight years it was just foolish to waste money on long distance calls. She had made him promise to send her a ten-word telegram the minute he arrived safely at the hotel, and then not to waste money phoning her. “You go out and spend that extra money on cocktails,” she’d told him with a laugh. “Goodness knows, you deserve an outing every year or so. You just have a real good time in Miami and don’t you worry about Sissy and me.”

  So he knew he’d better not telephone her. A long distance call would just frighten her and he’d have a hard time explaining that he’d just called on an impulse because he wanted to hear her voice. She’d remind him that he was coming home the next day anyhow, and she’d wonder why he couldn’t wait one more day.

  He could get out of the shindig tonight, of course. He could slip out of the hotel before five o’clock and go some place to have dinner alone and then maybe to a movie. He knew very well that no one would really miss him. Not even the redhead. He knew that well enough. She would find plenty of other men to cuddle up to. Oh, some of the fellows might wonder where Marv w
as, but not for long. Not after four or five drinks. And it wasn’t as though it would do him any good in a business way. He had already made all his contacts and got all the real good out of the convention that there was. Tonight was strictly for fun.

  For fun! He sat disconsolately in his hotel room and shuddered as he envisioned the main event in the Grand Ballroom after the delegates had lapped up all the liquor they could hold and were ready for it.

  He wondered where they got hold of movies like the one that was promised for tonight. Who makes them, and who really wants to see them? Well, he had to reluctantly admit to himself that apparently a majority of the delegates to conventions such as this one do enjoy looking at that sort of smut. He’d been to other conventions in the past and seen how they crowded in.

  But why, he wondered. In the name of God, why? Taken all in all, he and his fellow delegates were a fairly representative sector of the American way of life. What sort of kick does a decent guy get out of sitting in the darkness with a lot of other men and watching that kind of stuff on a screen?

  Then he wondered if he was being a bit of a prude. He didn’t think of himself as prudish. Actually, he was all for sex. He thought sex was wonderful. He was thirty-five years old and normally masculine, and he defied any man to get more pleasure out of sex than he did.

  With the right woman… at the right time.

  But he didn’t anticipate any sexual pleasure from sitting through the sort of display that was slated for the delegates tonight. He considered it abnormal. A perverted sort of thing. But he knew that if he dared express his opinion out loud he would be hooted at all over the place by his friends. It would be he who would be considered abnormal. Somehow or other, he decided, it has come to be considered one of the marks of robust American masculinity to enjoy such exhibitions.

  And he wondered vaguely how that had come about. Had it always been so, or was it one of the newer and more unpleasant aspects of modern living? And he wondered if American males were different, or if it was the same throughout the world when men go out together and don’t have to answer to their womenfolk.

  Anyhow, he supposed he’d better attend the thing. A man has to go along and pretend to be one of the boys. And suddenly he caught himself wondering how many of the others felt about the coming evening as he did. It was interesting to speculate on that. How many of the others were simply going along to be Good Sports? If a secret poll were taken and the real truth arrived at, he wondered how many others would prefer to have the convention end right now so they could go on home to their wives and children without spending this final night in Miami.

  While he was asking himself that question without getting any answer, he caught himself studying a printed warning lying on the table beside him. In large black letters, it said:

  CHECK-OUT TIME AT THIS HOTEL IS 4 P.M.

  He looked at his watch without quite knowing why he did so. It was 3:22. In thirty-eight minutes the official hotel day would end and another would start. Another twelve dollars charged to him for the room he was sitting in.

  The whole trip, darn it, had been quite expensive. Like twelve dollars for a dinky little hotel room. And that was a special rate for the delegates, of course. You could get a larger and much nicer room at the new Sunray Motel for eight dollars a night. And that was the regular rate. And everything else in Miami was more expensive in proportion. Breakfast cost from seventy-five cents to two dollars, depending on how hungry you were, with an extra service charge and a tip if you felt lazy and had it brought to your room. Cocktails were a dollar each in the Starroom downstairs, and dinners from three dollars up.

  He hadn’t kept track of every penny he’d spent in four days, but he knew it was a little over thirty-five dollars in cash on top of his hotel bill. Plus the chits he had signed. Say, forty-five dollars at least. And in exactly another thirty-eight minutes there would be another twelve-dollar room charge added to that. More than eighty dollars, at least, and by the time the evening was over and next morning’s breakfast it would be a hundred dollars easily.

  That wasn’t so bad, actually, Marvin reassured himself. He had warned Ellie in the beginning that the trip was likely to cost at least a hundred dollars. She insisted that they could afford it. And she had made him bring along another fifty dollars in cash for “extras.”

  So he had plenty of money, all right. But it bothered Marvin to spend so much on himself and have nothing to show for it. Oh, he had a small present for Sissy in his bag. A father can’t go away to the city on a four-day trip and not take a present back to his six-year-old daughter. Not if he wanted her to go on thinking he was the most wonderful Daddy in the world. And he had bought a nice box of chocolates for Ellie. Just something so she would know he had thought about her while he was away.

  But he did wish he felt he could afford to buy the earrings he had seen in the little gift shop next door to the hotel. They were really beautiful, and just right for Ellie. They were large and shaped like flowers, each petal inlaid with mother-of-pearl and rimmed with gold. The mother-of-pearl caught the light and reflected it in iridescent colors. Sitting there in the hotel room, he could visualize the earrings fastened to Ellie’s pretty ear lobes, contrasting with her thick, black hair which curled around her face and formed the perfect background for the gleaming mother-of-pearl. They would be for the times she wore an evening gown. That was only on special occasions, but those earrings were just what she needed to add the finishing touch for those occasions.

  He was tempted again as he sat there and thought about the earrings. But he knew he’d better not buy them. Ellie would love them all right, but she’d know right away that they must have been awfully expensive and she’d never let up on him until she found out how much they had cost. And when she did find out she would more than likely put them away regretfully in a drawer because she’d feel guilty wearing anything that cost that much… and so what would be the good of his splurging on them?

  Twelve dollars for one night in a hotel room, he thought, and the earrings that were too expensive to buy for Ellie only cost twenty-eight dollars.

  Then the brilliant idea came to him, and he sat upright excitedly while he thought it all out. Ellie wouldn’t mind his spending so much on a gift for her if he could prove that he had saved it somewhere else. A minute ago he had figured he must be out about eighty dollars already on the trip. Not counting his railroad ticket. And his room and everything tonight would run another twenty at the very least.

  But it wasn’t four o’clock yet. It was still almost thirty minutes before another hotel day started. And there he was, sitting around dreading the evening to come. An evening that was going to cost him twenty dollars or even more! And he couldn’t afford to spend twenty-eight dollars for a wonderful present for Ellie that would cause her eyes to light up and get all warm and loving when she saw them.

  The heck he couldn’t! Wasn’t there a late afternoon train to Sunray Beach? Leaving Miami about six o’clock and getting in between ten and eleven?

  He got up swiftly and went to the closet where he dragged out his suitcase and got out the railroad timetable. He was right. There was a train leaving at 6:32 and arriving at Sunray Beach at 10:20. There was a little g in front of it and he had to check the list of symbols to see what a “g” meant.

  Stops only to discharge passengers.

  Well, that was all right. He had a return ticket to Sunray so they’d have to stop and let him off. It was pretty late to be getting home and there wouldn’t be any taxi at the station because that train didn’t stop very often. Probably no one else getting off either who could give him a ride home.

  Of course, he thought, he could telephone Ellie to tell her he was coming, and she’d be at the station to meet him. She didn’t expect him back until tomorrow afternoon, and he thought to himself how happy her voice would be if he told her he was homesick for her and Sissy and was coming home tonight instead. She’d be there at the station to meet him, all right. And with Sissy, t
oo. For a special occasion like this, Ellie was the kind of wife and mother who’d break all the rules and keep Sissy up for the fun of going to the station and meeting her Daddy.

  He started across the room to the telephone to call Ellie, and he picked it up before hesitating and putting it down again. He wasn’t going to do it. How much more fun to surprise her! It was only six blocks from the station to their house. He could walk it easily, and his suitcase wasn’t very heavy.

  He knew he was going to do it, all through the couple of minutes that he stood in the middle of the hotel room and tried to think up some good reason for staying the night in Miami instead.

  There weren’t any good reasons. He reminded himself that he had even contemplated slipping out and going to a movie by himself. Why pay the hotel twelve dollars for the privilege of seeing a movie? He could go to the movies at home with Ellie.

  He didn’t have to tell anyone he was checking out. If any of the fellows did see him in the lobby and asked any questions, he could tell them he’d had a message from home.

  His little girl was ill. An emergency. And anyway, why did he have to explain himself to a bunch of drunks?

  He’d check out right away and have plenty of time to pick up the earrings for Ellie. Then he’d go on to the station and have time to stop on the way at some cheap restaurant and get some supper before boarding the train, and avoid the high prices they charged in the dining car.

  And if he was hungry again by the time he got home to Sunray Beach, Ellie could fix him a snack. It would be fun slipping down to the kitchen about midnight with Sissy sound asleep, and maybe both of them having a drink together first, and then some scrambled eggs or something.

  Ellie with her black hair braided and wound around her head like she did at night, and her black eyes sparkling with excitement and happiness on account of the earrings and about his coming home unexpectedly and ahead of time.