Killers from the Keys ms-39 Page 3

  “Sure I know it. And even if you are sitting there egging me on to pulling your chestnuts out of the fire for you, I’ll do it just to keep Miami clean. Who are these two characters you’re talking about?”

  “Hell, you don’t expect me to provide names and complete descriptions do you? All I know is they’re here… walking the streets openly and ready to gun down this scared little citizen who thought he’d get protection by coming here.”

  “If he wants protection why hasn’t he come to us?” thundered Gentry.

  “He’s afraid to,” said Shayne sadly. “Living in Chicago, you know what sort of opinion he has of the police.”

  “Then what can I do?”

  “Pick those two goons up.” Shayne pounded the desk with his fist. “Put the fear of God in them so they’ll never come back to Miami. You’ve got a couple thousand men walking the streets, and you’ve got a pretty complete file of all the known Syndicate hoods on the Chicago payroll. Get the word out. Hell, if your men are half as efficient as I think they are, they’ll have that pair hogtied in twelve hours.”

  Again, his carefully calculated blarney had exactly the effect Shayne hoped to produce in his old friend.

  “Don’t worry about my men,” he growled in a mollified tone. “But what have we got to go on? We can’t go around shaking down every tourist from Illinois walking the streets.”

  “I’ve got a vague description of them, and within a few hours I can probably give you more details. Take this down for a start: One is big and tough and mean-looking. I know that’s not much,” Shayne defended himself hastily as Gentry snorted, “but coupled with a description of his partner they make an ill-assorted pair that might mean something to your goon-squad. The other is thin and sorta sad… wears a black suit like a preacher.”

  Will Gentry jotted down this meager information and grunted noncommittally, pressed a button on his desk and said into the intercom, “Send Jackson in.” He took a fresh cigar from the center drawer and rolled it under his nose, sniffing disdainfully, then bit one end off and put fire to it.

  A young, intelligent-looking man with a balding head entered through a side door and stood quietly at attention beside his desk.

  Gentry billowed out a cloud of noxious smoke and said, “You know Mike Shayne, Jackson.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jackson glanced across the desk at the redhead and nodded slightly.

  “He’s got word that a couple of Syndicate enforcers are in town from Chicago to do a job on a guy that ran out on a gambling debt. Here’s the only description our brilliant Shamus can give us, but he figures you’re smart enough to go through the files and get a make on them.” He handed Jackson the sheet of paper on which he had scrawled the information Sloe Burn had given Shayne about the two men who had been in the Bright Spot looking for her Freddie. “Think you can?”

  “It’s pretty vague, sir.”

  “Do what you can. And get out a departmental memo. Every known hood from the Midwest to be pulled in fast and grilled. Throw a charge at any one with any hint of Syndicate connections.”

  “We keep a pretty close file, Chief,” Jackson began diffidently, “and I don’t recall…”

  “I don’t care what you recall. Keep a closer track. If the Syndicate thinks it can send hired gunmen to Miami, it’s up to us to show them different. Get going.”

  Jackson said, “Right away,” and faded out through the side door.

  “Now then, Mike,” Gentry said heavily. “Give me the whole story. If you really want to protect your client, you know we’re in a position to do a hell of a lot better job of that than you are.”

  “I wish it was that easy, Will,” Shayne told him honestly. “I’d put him right into your hands for protective custody if I could… even though it meant violating a confidence by doing so. All I know is what his wife told me this afternoon. His name is Renshaw and he phoned her three days ago from Miami saying he was in hiding here under the assumed name of Fred Tucker.”

  He went on to give Gentry the gist of what Mrs. Renshaw had told him, holding back only the information he had received from the young dancer from the Florida Keys. In telling it, he managed to give the impression that the vague descriptions he had given Gentry had come from Renshaw’s wife, and he ended by spreading his hands wide and saying honestly, “That’s everything the woman could tell me, Will. You can see why I came to you for help.”

  “You always do, don’t you?” Gentry’s good humor had returned. “How else would you collect those fat fees you’ve been banking for years?”

  Shayne shook his head sadly. “I don’t see a fat fee in this one.”

  “So that’s why you toss it in my lap,” Gentry contradicted himself cheerfully. Then he became businesslike again. “You got any leads at all where this Renshaw is hiding out?”

  Shayne hesitated, wondering suddenly just how honest he was in stating he didn’t see any fat fee in the case. How much, actually, did he believe of Sloe Burn’s story about her Freddie Tucker who was loaded with money to the extent of proposing that they take off for some deserted island together? According to Mrs. Renshaw, her husband must be pretty well strapped; yet Sloe Burn had lightly tossed off the statement that Fred Tucker had given her a hundred dollars on occasion. There was some discrepancy here, and yet… it almost had to be the same Fred Tucker.

  He told Gentry, “His wife swears that he didn’t give her a single clue over the telephone that would help locate him,” and salved his conscience for withholding the entire truth by telling himself that he was likely to learn a lot more by going around to the Bright Spot by himself than by having a squad of police officers descend on the place and start asking questions.

  Oddly enough, Will Gentry himself encouraged this decision a moment later by saying reflectively, “You’ve changed, Mike.”

  “In what way?”

  “A few years ago,” rumbled Gentry, “you wouldn’t have been sitting in my office on your dead ass waiting for me to handle a thing like this for you. You always boasted that you had your own ways and methods for getting information or locating a missing man in the city, and you laughed at me because I had to go by the rules and stay within legal limits.”

  “I was younger then,” Shayne parried uncomfortably.

  “Nuts. You were hungrier.” Gentry regarded him benevolently over the smouldering end of his cigar. “I had more respect for you then, goddamit. You weren’t afraid to stick your neck out, and by God, you did get results with your methods that I couldn’t get with all the manpower I had under me. You’re worried about this little Renshaw getting gunned down by a couple of Chicago hoods, but you aren’t worried enough, by God, to…”

  He was interrupted by a buzz from his intercom. He glanced at a lighted button and pressed a switch and said, “Yeh, Jackson?”

  A voice said metallically: “A quick run-through, Chief, turns up a known Syndicate killer in Chicago two years ago who had the monicker of The Preacher because he looked like one and always wore a black suit when he was working. Last heard of he was paired up with Little Joe Hoffman, but that was before Little Joe got sticky fingers and took it on the lam from the mob. Last we had on him, he was making book on the Beach.”

  “Yeh, I know about Hoffman,” grunted Gentry into the grilled mouthpiece. “Keep on looking, Jackson.” He flipped the switch and told Shayne irritably, “If your man is an old pal of Little Joe’s, it could be there’s a lead. But that’s out of my jurisdiction. We chased Little Joe the hell out of Miami when he tried to settle here, and he’s stayed pretty well on the other side of Biscayne Bay ever since. Painter isn’t so hard to please, and half his dicks go around with their hands out most of the time.”

  Shayne got to his feet slowly. “Yeh. If it is The Preacher on a job, it could be he’d look up an old pal to help him line things up at this end. So, thanks for everything, Will,” he ended off-handedly. “We’ll be in touch, huh?”

  Will Gentry said, “Sure, Mike,” and settled back placidly in
his chair with a quizzical expression on his beefy face as the rangy redhead sauntered out.

  Five years ago, he told himself, he’d have hated to be in Little Joe Hoffman’s shoes right now. But today, he didn’t know. Had Michael Shayne changed so much in those years of increasing prosperity and in light of the increasing public respect that was accorded him? Well, men did change and grow soft. But who in hell would ever have thought that Mike Shayne…?

  Gentry broke off his cogitations abruptly and got up and clamped a hat on his head. It was the end of a day and he was getting older too, and a couple of Syndicate mobsters were no personal affair of his.

  4

  The late afternoon sun was a vivid orange ball hanging low above the horizon behind him as Michael Shayne drove eastward across the Causeway. It cast shimmering lights on the placidly blue surface of Biscayne Bay, and touched the fringed tops of palm trees lining the shore in front of him with a faintly golden glow.

  He drove with the late afternoon traffic at a moderate speed, big hands lightly on the wheel, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, with eyes slitted to exclude the smoke spiralling upward past them.

  There was a look of preoccupation on his face, of inner questioning, which deepened the trenches in his cheeks and tightened the firm line of his jaw. Was Will Gentry right, he wondered. Was he getting soft and complacent? Had Mike Shayne turned into a fat-cat during these recent years, more preoccupied with cases that offered a big fee than in fighting injustice and corruption?

  He didn’t want to think so. And yet…? Life could be very pleasant in semi-tropical Miami. A man could drift pleasantly with the tide of sunfilled days and moonlit nights, lulled into complacency by the Lotus Song of the tropics.

  Well… he straightened behind the wheel, squared his wide shoulders aggressively as he rolled down the long curve off the Causeway onto Fifth Street. Here was a chance to find out just how soft he had become. If there was an acid-throwing Syndicate killer from Chicago strolling the streets of Miami in search of a victim, he represented a challenge that should stir any man out of his shell of complacency.

  Shayne spat his cigarette out the open window and swung the big sedan off to the right, southward on the Peninsula, away from the luxury hotels and swanky Lincoln Avenue toward a rowdier and lustier section of the Beach which he had once known intimately.

  Things were changed now, he noted as he drove slowly, looking for remembered landmarks. New and smarter apartment buildings had replaced many of the rundown rooming houses that had formerly lined this street, and yet the overall impression remained much the same. There were dingy bars and glittering souvenir shops, unkempt winos in shady doorways, and over-young and over-painted girls in over-tight dresses parading their wares on the streets as before.

  He hadn’t consciously decided what his destination was, but instinct or a hidden memory came to his aid when he reached a certain corner, and he braked hard and swung to the left without quite knowing why he did so.

  Then his gaze picked up a sidewalk sign half a block ahead, and suddenly he was oriented again like a homing pigeon. He squeezed into a parking spot at the curb just beyond the ancient sign that said Pirelli’s Bar, stalked back and pushed through the swinging doors into the hazy, smoke-laden atmosphere of a bar-room that smelled as though it hadn’t been aired out in all the years since he had last been inside.

  He couldn’t recall whether it was the same bartender or not, but the ferret-eyed man in the dirty apron had buck teeth and a receding jaw, and fitted into the background as though he had been specifically designed by nature to tend bar at Pirelli’s.

  The four men who sat on bar stools in front of him also had the look of habitues from years back. The one nearest Shayne had an aggressively young and flat-featured face and wore a tight-waisted silk jacket of black and white stripes with the shoulders padded so heavily that they were wider than Shayne’s. Beyond him was a thin-faced elderly man wearing a conservative summer suit and a neat bow tie, with the undefinable, shifty aura of a pervert clinging to him.

  Beyond that couple, with one empty stool intervening, were a pair of blank-faced young hoods whose main source of income was most likely the rolling of drunks in alleyways behind bars like Pirelli’s. Behind them, one of the four booths along the wall was occupied by a very young girl and a very drunken middle-aged man whose shabby suit was mussed as though he had slept in it for several nights and whose face wore a two-day growth of beard.

  Shayne stopped just inside the swinging doors and stood flat-footed while he mentally catalogued the occupants of the barroom. If there had been any conversation going on before his entrance, it had died to silence before he was well inside. As though all were actuated by the same string in the hands of a puppeteer, all seven heads swiveled slowly in his direction.

  The same expression was discernible on all the faces in varying degrees. It was not actively antagonistic, but it certainly was not welcoming. There was a suggestion of bored interest, of withheld individual judgment until the alien newcomer did or said something to place himself more clearly in their personal frames of reference.

  Shayne walked to the end of the bar and leaned both elbows on it. The bartender shuffled toward him and asked in a nasal whine, “What’ll it be, Mister?”

  “Is Pirelli around?”

  “Naw. The boss ain’t been in today.”

  “Know where I might find him?”

  “Who’s askin’?”

  Shayne said evenly, “I am.”

  “Friend of his?” The bartender shifted his eyes away from Shayne’s hard gaze and aimlessly swiped at the bar in front of the detective with a dirty towel.

  Shayne slapped him with his open palm. The sound of flesh against flesh was loud in the silence. He staggered back under the impact with one hand going to his cheek, and there was a collective, sibilant, indrawn sigh from the other six people in the room.

  Shayne didn’t shift his gaze from the bartender, nor raise his voice. He asked again, “Where is Pirelli?”

  The bartender took his hand away from his cheek and looked at it curiously as though he expected it to carry the imprint of Shayne’s hand. Then his ferrety eyes grew hot and he sidled away, pressing close to the bar and groping beneath it.

  Shayne said, “Don’t try it, punk. Just tell me where to find Pirelli, and stay as healthy as you are.”

  The man hesitated. He ducked his chin and glanced sideways and upward at Shayne with a little drool of saliva showing on his lips. Then he turned his head to look at the four men who sat on stools at the bar. Their faces were stony and they looked directly to the front and gave him no encouragement. He turned back and licked the spittle from his lips and said querulously, “Ain’t no need for you to get tough, Mister. Think you can walk in here an’…”

  “Ask a civil question and get a civil reply,” Shayne interrupted him.

  “I dunno where he is. Might be in later an’ might not.”

  Shayne said, “If you’d told me that in the first place, it would have made things easier. I’ll buy a drink,” he went on abruptly. “Pour yourself a double, and if you’ve got any cognac around this dump I’ll drink one with you just to show there’s no hard feelings.” He got out his wallet and slid a five-dollar bill on the bar as he spoke.

  The bartender hesitated momentarily. You could almost see him making up his mind. There was an inner need to assert himself and efface the insult to his manhood in front of his friends which fought a losing fight with the craven fear that possessed him. Offered the very slightest of face-saving gestures, he grabbed at it weakly. “Make it a round for the bar, huh, an’ we’ll call it even.”

  Shayne said, “Fair enough,” making his voice amiable, but carefully keeping all contempt out of it. He got out a pack of cigarettes and lit one while the bartender hurried to replenish the others’ drinks, ostentatiously poured himself a double slug and, without meeting Shayne’s eyes, set a dusty bottle of cognac and an empty shot-glass in front of h
im.

  “Reason I want to find Pirelli,” said Shayne in a clear and reasonable tone, “is because I thought he’d know if Little Joe Hoffman is operating around this part of town.” He poured cognac to the brim and lifted the shot-glass to his lips. “I’ve been out of touch for a long time.” He pushed back a dollar bill and some change the bartender put in front of him.

  “Little Joe? I ain’t seen him around for months.” The bartender was now effusively anxious to please. “Any you guys know?” He turned to look at the others.

  There was a slow shaking of heads and a low murmur of negatives. They were drinking the liquor Shayne had paid for, and they were willing to go along with the bartender if that was the way he wanted it, but they weren’t warming up to Shayne.

  Shayne swallowed his drink slowly and set the empty glass down. He said, “I want to see Hoffman tonight,” speaking to the bartender, but loudly enough for the others to hear him clearly. “Tell Pirelli that when he comes in. Ask him to pass the word around. And you’ll be doing Hoffman a favor if you do the same. I’ll be at the Bright Spot in Miami later on tonight. Hoffman will be doing himself a favor if he looks me up there. Pass that word around, huh?”

  “Who should I tell Pirelli was in?” asked the bartender anxiously.

  Shayne laughed. “I have been out of touch too long. Tell him Mike Shayne. And tell Little Joe the same thing. The Bright Spot tonight.” He dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his toe, turned his back and walked out into the fading sunlight.

  His next stop on the Beach was farther north on Collins in front of an imposing new office building. He entered the lobby and looked at the directory, then went up in an elevator to the Fourth floor. He went down the corridor to a door with frosted glass which carried the legend: MASON and BURNS. Investment Counselors.

  A wry grin twitched his lips as he read the words. Light showed behind the frosted glass. He pushed the door open onto a spacious reception room with wall-to-wall carpeting and at least a dozen chairs ranged along each wall opposite each other. They were all vacant at this hour, but at the end of the room a blonde receptionist sat erect behind her desk and surveyed him with interest.