Miami Mayhem (Jerry eBooks) (2016)

by Anthony Rome

  Jerry eBooks

  No copyright 2016 by Jerry eBooks

  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  GAMBLING, DEEP-SEA FISHING,

  READING, DRINKING

  Private detective Anthony Rome is

  a very happy man doing one or all

  of the above diversions.

  WOMEN?

  Sure, plenty come his way—but

  Rome just isn’t the marrying kind.

  WORKING?

  It takes money to gamble, keep up

  a boat, buy brandy and books, doesn’t

  it? Maybe it’s squalid, but a private

  eye can’t be too choosy.

  KILLING?

  Not if he can help it, but Rome

  wasn’t a commando for nothing.

  When he took on the Kosterman

  case, Miami became a murder city. A

  stiff was hung on Rome by conviction-

  hungry cops who didn’t even know

  about the other two. But Rome knew

  the killer had him tabbed for stiff

  No. 4—and he wasn’t co-operating.

  This original POCKET BOOK edition is printed from brand-

  new plates made from newly set, clear, easy-to-read type.

  MIAMI MAYHEM

  Pocket Book edition published March, 1960

  1st printing January, 1960

  Copyright, ©, 1960, by Anthony Rome. All rights reserved. Published

  by Pocket Books, Inc., New York, and on the same day in Canada

  by Pocket Books of Canada, Ltd., Montreal. Printed in the U.S.A.

  POCKET BOOK editions are distributed in the U.S. by Affil-

  iated Publishers, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N.Y.

  Notice: POCKET BOOK editions are published

  by Pocket Books, Inc. Trade mark registered

  in the United States and other countries.

  CAST OF

  CHARACTERS

  Ralph Turpin—A double-crosser disliked by everyone, he caused even more trouble dead than alive. He was probably laughing himself sick in Hell watching Tony Rome avenge his murder.

  Anthony Rome—A hard-living, hard-loving private detective, he got his fill of offers from women but always preferred the Straight Pass.

  Rudolph Kosterman—A millionaire whose money bought him everything but the truth, he had fought his way up to the top the hard way and wondered if he would live to enjoy it.

  Diana Pines—Kosterman’s raven-haired daughter, she had always had the best of everything—everything but her family life. To escape her troubles, she went bingeing, and that’s when the real trouble began.

  Darrell Pines—Diana’s handsome blond husband, he couldn’t stand being called a sponging son-in-law- even though it was true.

  Rita Kosterman—A deliciously curved gold digger from New York, she needed all she could get from Rudy Kosterman to keep the truth about her tarnished past out of her gilded present.

  Anne Archer—A lonely, restless redhead sweating out a divorce, she mixed a high life with a low life—and the resulting explosion rocked all of Miami.

  Lorna Boyd—A onetime society girl, she was living out the dregs of her life in the former servants’ quarters of a deserted Miami mansion. And the only way she could endure it was to keep her glass well filled.

  Dr. Boyd—A physician whose license had been revoked, Lomas husband eked out his living from the kind of practice no other doctor would want.

  Jules Langley—A paunchy jeweler with a mouth like a locked purse, he performed services for rich and poor impartially—he cheated them both.

  Nimmo Fern—A tall, dark, fast-talking gambler, he had a way with the ladies despite his scarred face. He was hard to find, but when you found him, you’d also find trouble.

  Catleg—A professional fast gun, short, skinny and dogged by a limp, he was out for blood—and he didn’t care whose.

  Russ Patrick—The Mayport chief of police, he had an expensive home and wife. He hated the way he’d gotten them, but he was tough enough and smart enough to know he had no choice.

  Sally Bullock—A small, curvy tramp from the depths of Miami, she grabbed her happiness wherever she could find it—and it was usually in a shot of heroin.

  CHAPTER

  1

  RALPH TURPIN lay waiting for me on the floor of my office. A bullet had smashed through his forehead and destroyed the brain inside.

  I took one slow, shaky step deeper into the room and stared down at him.

  My mind had gone numb. But it didn’t require much thought to realize that I was in trouble. The worst kind of trouble. Everyone knew there was bad blood between Turpin and me. I could feel something settling around my neck, tightening like a noose.

  I wiped cold sweat from my face and went on looking down at him, trying to think.

  He was unreal as a waxworks dummy now. The abusive violence and unclever trickiness that had been Ralph Turpin were gone. He was just a bulky corpse in a shiny, shabby suit.

  The blood that had trickled from the hideous hole in his forehead past his wide-open staring eyes looked like a dried rivulet of reddish mud. His lips were drawn back tight as rubber bands in a grimace that showed most of his discolored teeth. His stiffly curled hands lay on the floor palms-up. His legs sprawled as though there were no bones in them. His big .45 Government automatic lay near his right shoe.

  No reasons for his murder came to me as I gazed at Turpin’s corpse. But they would have to come.

  Desperately, I stretched my mind back over the events that had led up to finding Turpin dead on the floor of my office. Events that had started with that phone call from him, just the night before. Friday night . . .

  No icy shiver of premonition slid down my spine when the phone rang up on the flying bridge of the Straight Pass early that Friday night. I’m not psychic. I had no ghostly friend to whisper a warning in my ear.

  I was in the cockpit of the boat in my bare feet, wearing dungarees and a pullover sweater, cleaning out the fish box in the stem. I had that good-guilty feeling you get at the end of a stolen day. It was supposed to be a workday, and I should have at least checked in at my office in downtown Miami to see if I had any new clients. It wasn’t as though I didn’t need the business. On that particular day I couldn’t have put together enough of a stake to last me through two hours of bust hands in a dollar-limit poker game.

  But I’d awakened to find a beautiful early March morning waiting for me—the sun warm, the sky clear except for a few patches of cloud scudding along before a northeast wind, the water just choppy enough. Perfect fishing weather.

  I’d been unable to resist the temptation. So instead of driving to my office, I’d cast off from the end of my pier at Dinner Key and sailed out to the Gulf Stream for a day of fishing and skin-diving around the reef.

  That’s the hazard of making your home aboard a boat in southern Florida. Summer or winter, there’s always that blue water of the open ocean out there, pulling you away from the tense, overcrowded land.

  I won the Straight Pass, a thirty-six foot sports cruiser, in a crap game. The game ended a six-month losing streak in which everything had-beaten me—the horses, the dogs, dice, cards. The funny thing had been that I’d sensed the bad streak was over the first time I wrapped my hand around the cubes in that game. The boat had belonged to the owner of a palatial Miami Beach motel—before I made six straight passes. Three weeks later, I’d lost everything else I’d won in that crap game at a Havana roulette wheel. I never again managed to hit it that big, playing small stakes against the odds;
and I couldn’t work up a big enough stake to make it by playing the safer bets for small percentage profits.

  But I hung onto the boat, as an ace-in-the-hole in case my financial situation ever got really desperate. I added outriggers and a swivel fishing chair in the cockpit, renamed her the Straight Pass in fond memory of the way I’d acquired her, and moved aboard. With her big deckhouse and comfortable main cabin, the Straight Pass made a perfect home for a man. I could always take it with me when too much investigating of the undersides of people’s lives made me need the healing solitude of the open sea.

  I’d had a good day out in the Gulf Stream. The fish kept hitting with satisfying regularity, filling the fish box by midafternoon. What little was left of my land tensions by then, I got rid of by going over the side in goggles and flippers, and nailing an amberjack and a hog-fish with the underwater spear gun.

  It was evening when I sailed back to Dinner Key. I moored at my berth at the end of the pier, hooked on the lines for water, electricity and the phone, and sold my catch to people waiting along die dock. I fried a slab of tuna I’d kept for myself and made a meal of it. After washing the tuna down with a tumbler of brandy, I set about lazily cleaning up the cockpit, looking forward to that night’s nickel-and-dime poker session with some of the other inhabitants of Dinner Key.

  Then the phone rang.

  I was feeling good, completely relaxed and pleasantly muscle-weary. I climbed the ladder to the flying bridge and picked up the phone. The voice at the other end brought me back to land—to things about the land I liked least.

  “This is Turpin,” the man’s voice on the phone said. “How’re you, Tony?”

  “Fine,” I said tonelessly, and waited.

  My lack of enthusiasm didn’t bother Turpin. “I’m working as a house dick now,” he said. “The Moonlite Hotel. Know it?”

  The Moonlite was in one of Miami’s unsavory pockets of cut-rate gin mills and strip joints. “I know it,” I told Turpin. “And its reputation. You must feel right at home there.”

  That didn’t bother him either. “I need your help, Tony. Real quick like.”

  “For what?”

  “Show you when you get here. You can make it in twenty minutes easy from where you are.”

  “Sure. But why should I?”

  “I told you. Because I need some help.”

  I didn’t like Turpin. He knew that. But I still had the annoying feeling that I owed him something. He knew that too.

  “Be there in half an hour,” I snapped, and slammed the phone down, cursing myself for being soft in the head and letting Turpin spoil my evening.

  I went down to the cabin, took a quick shower in the tiny bathroom, changed to a black polo shirt and a blue wash-’n’- wear suit. Pulling on socks and a pair of dark blue tennis sneaks, I left the Straight Pass.

  Halfway along the pier, Jack McComb was waiting for me in the cockpit of his charter fishing boat. McComb always stuck pretty much to his boat, even when he wasn’t taking customers out to fish. Ashore, his missing leg was a handicap, and he had to use crutches. Aboard his boat, using handholds, he was as agile and competent as any sailor. I told him I’d have to skip the poker game on his boat that night, and strode onto the cement dock walk. Old Mr. Cohen, off the yawl Ibis, was taking a last slow stroll for the night with his granddaughter. We exchanged hellos.

  At the next pier, occupied mostly by middle-class families who lived aboard their vessels on pensions or the income from jobs ashore, parents were yelling at their kids to stop racing their bikes up and down the pier and come aboard for bedtime. At the pier beyond that, cocktail parties were in progress on several of the big yachts.

  The dock area at Dinner Key always tugged at me when I had to leave it. It was a friendly, self-sufficient little community, made up of all lands of people of different interests, incomes, ages—but knit together by a common, barrier-dissolving love of boating. You could find almost any kind of companionship you were in the mood for there, along with a way of life that got a hold on you. I rarely left the place any more, except for business or gambling.

  Tonight it was business. What kind of business exactly I’d find out. One thing I knew for sure. With Ralph Turpin involved, it was bound to be dirty.

  I got into my gray Oldsmobile, pulled out of the parking area, and drove north along the Bay Shore Drive into the nervous, noisy heart of Miami.

  The girl sprawled across the bed was young. Not more than twenty-two. But she didn’t look the way girls of her age and breeding were supposed to look. Not at the moment.

  The odd thing was that despite her condition the breeding showed. And the youth. There was a not-quite-finished softness to the pretty, snub-nosed face, framed by the tangle of raven hair fanned out on the wrinkled pillow. Her figure, in a low-cut, rumpled black cocktail dress, was slim. So were her long, nylon-sheathed legs, revealed by the twisted-up hem of the dress. Her face, and the rest of her skin that showed, glowed with the even golden tan that is the badge of the year-round resident.

  A girl like her didn’t belong there, passed out on a bed in a cheap hotel, with an empty fifth of whisky for a bedmate, breathing harshly through a slack, lipstick-smeared mouth. Especially not a girl who could afford to carelessly drop a silver-blue mink in the middle of the not-so-clean rug.

  “She came in early this morning,” Turpin said. “Little after five thirty.”

  I turned my head slightly to look at him. Turpin was a burly man, with stiff, thick gray hair cut close to his round, solid skull. His eyes had that peculiar emptiness achieved by men who’ve learned to meet your gaze directly without revealing the corruption of the thought processes behind them. His fleshy face was florid, with tiny broken blood vessels showing under the skin of his cheeks and nose. It was a year since I’d last seen Turpin. The year had treated him as badly as he’d treated it.

  “Under her own steam?” I asked him.

  “Uh-huh. But she was already pretty far gone.”

  “Turpin!” the hotel night manager snapped warningly. His name was Welch. He was a small man with a pug nose and a receding hairline that left a lot of forehead to furrow when he got worried. The way it furrowed then. “You don’t got to tell every damn little thing that—”

  “Yes, I do got to,” Turpin informed Welch heavily. “We want Tony to help, we got to level with him.”

  He looked at me again. “The way I figure it, she musta been in some bar trying to drink herself under the table. Most of the bars close at five in the morning, and her still being able to navigate she must’ve bought that bottle and come here to finish her fun in private. She was plenty drunk when she checked in, but so what? Anybody could see she wasn’t under age.”

  “Not,” I drawled, “that it would have bothered anybody around here if she were.”

  Welch tried to rise to anger. “What kind of crack is—”

  “Cut it out,” Turpin ordered Welch. “Tony’s right. I know it and you know it. And so does he know it. But that don’t figure this time. This particular broad ain’t under age.”

  I felt myself smile, stiffly and unpleasantly. “Then why call me in on it?”

  “Because,” Turpin said, “we can’t afford no trouble. Even if we didn’t do nothing wrong this time. You know that.”

  I nodded slowly. The Moonlite Hotel got a lot of its trade from college kids shacking up with each other overnight and on weekend dates. I looked down at the girl on the bed again, felt an edgy, undirected anger rising inside me. Taking the hem of her black dress between my thumb and forefinger, I plucked it down to cover her knees—a meaningless gesture called forth by her vulnerability and by the things about her that showed through despite her condition.

  I glanced at my wrist watch. It was a few minutes past nine P.M. “When’d the police phone?”

  “About an hour ago,” Turpin told me. “Missing persons. There’s this guy up in Mayport, a big wheel. Name’s Kosterman. His daughter left the house last night sometime, headed down h
ere to Miami. He thinks. And he ain’t heard from her since. So he gets worried, calls his local cops. They call the Miami police.”

  I looked at the plain gold wedding band on the finger of her left hand. “Strange it was her father. Ordinarily her husband would be the one calling around for her.”

  Turpin shrugged. “Maybe she’s divorced, or getting one like half the broads in this town. Anyway, missing persons starts phoning all the hotels and motels, here and in Miami Beach, asking for her. The routine. Soon as they describe her to me, I remember this dame. She signed the register Diana Jones, but that don’t mean anything.”

  “Not here, it doesn’t. You didn’t tell the cops about her, I take it.”

  “Hell, no. The cops’ve been handing us enough trouble lately without us giving ‘em something like this to bug us about. But when they rung off, I came up here to check on her. She didn’t answer the door, so I just came on in. She didn’t wake up when I shook her, so I had a look at the stuff in her handbag. Her right name’s Diana Pines, like I figured. The name of Kosterman’s daughter. So I had a talk with Welch here, and we decided to call you in. You’re the cool kind. You can pull it off easy.”

  “It’s not my kind of job.”

  “What the hell. You’re a private detective. Like me.”

  “Not quite.”

  Turpin got out a cigar, stripped off the cellophane. He mashed the wrapping into a tiny hard wad inside his fist, tossed it at the wastebasket under the dilapidated dressing table, bit the end off his cigar, and spat that into the wastebasket. I waited.

  “Okay,” he said, his anger under control. “So you’ve done better’n me since we split up. You don’t have to touch some of the dirty jobs these days. But I know you a long time, Tony. You can do this for me. Just this once.”

  I grinned at him. “You mean for a favor?”

  Welch, the little night manager, snapped: “For two hundred bucks!”

  “Still not for me.”

  Welch switched his frown to Turpin. Without taking his empty patient eyes off me, Turpin clamped the cigar between his discolored teeth, lit it with a kitchen match he set aflame with a scratch of his thumbnail. It smelled vaguely like a damp, dirty rag burning.