Michael Shaynes' 50th case ms-50

by Brett Halliday

  They were partners in an automobile agency in Moonray Beach, about thirty miles south of Sunray on the coast, and they were competitors of Marvin’s. They were both good fellows and he had known them for years, and he knew they would demand explanations from him if they realized he was checking out before the end of the convention.

  They were both pretty well plastered at this early hour in the afternoon, bumping into people and making loud remarks to each other about the pretty women they passed. Not lewd remarks or really offensive. Just what they considered good clean fun, and everyone who saw their delegate badges just smiled or shrugged their shoulders and passed them off for just what they were-a couple of typical small-town businessmen winding up a four-day convention away from home.

  They had already seen Marvin standing there and he knew he couldn’t avoid an encounter with them, so he was relieved when the cashier pushed back a receipted hotel bill with some one-dollar bills and silver and he was able to slide it into his pocket before they reached him, so they didn’t realize he had just paid his bill.

  “Marv, old man!” Hal Jackson bellowed, pounding him on the shoulder and almost falling flat on his face in the process. “Whatcha doing here, huh? Run out of mazuma already and stocking up for the night? Trying to talk this sucker into cashing a check for you? Tell you what, Mister.” He leaned past Marvin, supporting himself with an arm about his shoulder, and blew whiskey-laden fumes in the cashier’s face. “Take a tip from me and don’t cash any checks signed Marvin Blake. A dead-beat, that’s what he is. A no-good dead-beat from Sunray Beach.”

  The cashier smiled as politely as he could and pointedly looked past them at some other people waiting to check out, and Marvin pulled the two men aside and Joe Wallis suggested they all go into the bar for a drink, and where did Marv dig up that redhead he had seen him with last night?

  And Hal laughed uproariously and nudged Marvin in the ribs and warned him in a loud voice: “Wait’ll we see Ellie again, by golly. Just you wait, Marv old boy. Will we give Ellie an earful?”

  “That is,” put in Joe with a broad wink, “unless Marv agrees to share the redhead with his old pals tonight. How’s about it, Marv? That’s all we ask from a buddy. Just an ittsy-bittsy share. Anybody can see with half an eye that redhead’s got plenty of stuff to spread around.”

  Blushing, Marvin Blake shushed them as best he could, conscious of the knowing and superior smiles of strangers around them, and he finally persuaded them to go upstairs to their fourth floor suite by telling them he had a date to meet the redhead and would bring her right up to their suite for a drink and to get acquainted.

  The bellboy was waiting with his suitcase near the door, and Marvin waited until Hal and Joe disappeared inside an elevator before he tipped the boy and took his bag and slipped out of the hotel without being noticed by anyone else.

  He stepped quickly into the gift shop next door and set his suitcase inside and asked the lady clerk to let him see the pair of earrings displayed in the window.

  She had another pair just like them in stock, and she set them out on the counter in a square white box with cushiony velvet underneath them.

  Close up, they were even prettier than they had looked in the window, and Marvin told her he’d take them and would she wrap them as a gift, please.

  She said she would be pleased to, and asked if he would care to enclose a card. He hadn’t thought about that, but as soon as she mentioned it he knew Ellie would be pleased if he did, so he asked if she had one he could write on.

  She had an assortment to choose from, and wanted to know if it was for an anniversary or birthday gift, or what, and Marvin felt silly when he had to admit it wasn’t any special occasion but just for his wife as a souvenir of his trip to Miami.

  She gave him a plain white card with an envelope to match, and Marvin puckered up his forehead and thought hard for a moment, and then wrote firmly: “For my very best girl with love from Marvin.” He sealed it in the envelope and the saleslady wrapped the box up in green and white striped paper and tied it with a white ribbon, and he paid her for it happily.

  He slid the box into his inside breast pocket and it pressed against his chest and felt warm and good there as he picked up his suitcase and strode out onto the street again. It was less than a dozen blocks to the railway station and he had lots of time to kill before his train left, so he decided to walk and save taxi fare.

  Actually, when he looked at his hotel bill and the change he’d received from the cashier he had discovered that the bill was several dollars more than he had anticipated, and he tried to think back as he walked down the street with his suitcase to see how he had mentally miscalculated what the bill would be.

  Three days made thirty-six dollars for the room, but he hadn’t thought to add the tax onto that. There had been three breakfasts for an average of about a dollar each, and three lunches for four-fifty or maybe five dollars. But there was only one dinner charged on the hotel bill. That was Tuesday night. But now he remembered that Tom Brent and a girl had stopped by his table at dinner and he’d ordered them a drink and had one himself to keep them company, and so that ran the dinner bill pretty high.

  Oh, he was sure the hotel hadn’t made a mistake, even if the total bill was fifty-four dollars and sixteen cents, and he couldn’t help grinning as he walked along and thought how he had practically beat them out of another twelve bucks by checking out at four o’clock.

  He watched out for a quiet, cheap-looking restaurant as he neared the station, and he found one that looked clean and had a menu in the window that featured Superburgers with all the fixings for 89c. He had a good meal there sitting at the counter and topping it off with a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee which he dawdled over as long as he could make it last, and then he went on to the station and found his train waiting to be boarded, and he bought a News and got on and found a good seat in a smoker before the cars began to fill up.

  My, but he felt good and sort of smug sitting there waiting for the train to pull out and take him back to Sunray Beach and to Ellie… and Sissy. The square box kept pressing against his chest under his coat so he was conscious of it, and he kept thinking about how Ellie’s face would light up when he handed it to her and she opened it up. He’d do it that night, he decided happily. He wouldn’t put it off until the next day. There would still be the box of chocolates that he could give her when he gave Sissy her present next morning, but the earrings were special.

  They were for this first night.

  Then the train started and he sat back comfortably in his seat and thought about all the others still back at the hotel, Hal and Joe and all the rest of them, getting drunk tonight and watching a smutty movie and waking up with Godawful hangovers the next morning, and he felt sorry for them because most of them didn’t have a wife like Ellie to go home to.

  He knew Hal and Joe didn’t, for instance. He’d met both their wives at parties in the past, and had to admit to himself that if he were married to either one of them he wouldn’t feel like hurrying home either. No, sir. He knew deep down inside himself that he’d be staying in Miami until the last dog was hung and get as soused as a field hand on Saturday night and do his best to forget about the little woman waiting for him at home.

  Little woman! He had to grin at that expression as he thought about Hal’s and Joe’s wives. Mrs. Jackson was tall and horse-faced. She looked years older than Hal, and a lot of people said that the only reason he ever married her was because she had money to put into the business which made up enough for him to go into partnership with Joe Wallis.

  Well, he told himself indulgently, you pay for whatever you get in this world. Hal had got himself half-share in a thriving automobile agency, but he had to live with that woman to pay for it. It was difficult to imagine Hal and his wife in bed together. She’d be bony, and she wouldn’t like it, Marvin thought. She’d consider it was her duty, and she probably rationed poor old Hal to so many times a week.

  Or so
many times a month was more like it.

  Joe Wallis’ wife was different, but just as bad, it seemed to Marvin, in her own way. Suzy, he remembered her name was. Round-faced and with fluffy hair that Ellie declared was dyed. And a flirt if there ever was one. Ellie often said she didn’t see how Joe could stand the way she acted, and Marvin had to agree that he didn’t either. Not that she ever did anything, likely. He’d told Ellie that, right out, and she’d sort of agreed with him, though she still had certain reservations on the subject.

  But she would insist on rubbing up against a man when she danced with him at a party, and she’d sort of accidentally let her knee touch his if they sat at table together, and little things like that. And she had a way of getting a man to go out in the kitchen with her alone at their house to help make drinks at a party, and she’d drop remarks that had double meanings if you looked for them. And kissing you behind the kitchen door if you’d had enough to drink and didn’t push her away in disgust.

  That had happened to Marvin once several years ago, and he still remembered it vividly and felt a little squirmish inside when he did. He never would forget the look on Ellie’s face that night when he and Suzy finally came back out of the kitchen with a tray of drinks, but she didn’t say a word to him about it right then. However, they were hardly out of the house and started for home when Ellie had lit into him, demanding to know just what he and Suzy had been doing alone in the kitchen all that time.

  He hadn’t dared tell Ellie the truth. How Suzy had caught him unaware and pushed her body against him and lifted up her face with parted lips, and how something had come over him and he’d kissed her. He was heartily ashamed of the incident mostly because he had really enjoyed it while it was going on.

  He had puzzled about that for a long time afterward. He just couldn’t understand how a supposedly decent man could enjoy kissing another woman while he was very much in love with his wife at the same time. That is, really like it, the way he had with Suzy that night. He knew, as honestly as he knew anything, that he didn’t really want another woman sexually. Yet, for a minute or so he had wanted Suzy. He had finally decided it had been too much liquor that was to blame. And after that he had been careful not to take more than two or three drinks in any one evening, particularly if Suzy was around.

  At home alone with Ellie it was different, of course. Neither one of them were prudes about drinking or sex. Several times since they’d been married they had cut loose in the evening and got good and tight together at home, and the results had been wonderful. They had done all sorts of wild and crazy things in bed, things that a lot of people would probably call indecent, but neither of them had been the slightest bit ashamed of it the next day when they sobered up and remembered what they had done. They had actually talked about it, and agreed that it was a good thing for married couples to do once in awhile, and Marvin felt sure that if more people did it there’d be less fooling around outside the home.

  It was dark outside by the time he had finished these thoughts, and the fast train was rolling smoothly up the coastline toward Sunray Beach and Ellie, and Marvin felt warm and good and smugly self-righteous when he thought about what the other delegates were doing back in that Miami hotel. The car wasn’t crowded and he had a whole seat to himself, and he opened the newspaper and glanced at the headlines, and he was dozing off a little when the conductor tapped him on the shoulder for his ticket.

  He gave it to him and chuckled as he said, “Sorry to cause you so much trouble, but I guess you’re going to have to stop and let me off at Sunray.”

  The conductor punched the ticket with a smile and assured him they didn’t mind stopping, and that if Marvin wanted to take a little snooze to go on and do it because the conductor would promise to wake him up personally in time to get off.

  Marvin thought that was nice of him, and he did doze off some more, and the next thing he knew the conductor was tapping him on the shoulder again and the train was beginning to slow down. Marvin yawned and looked out the window and saw the big neon sign of the Sunray Motel sliding past, and suddenly he was wide awake and excited to be getting home. He got his suitcase down from the overhead rack and went back and was waiting in the vestibule for the door to be opened when the train ground to a protesting stop.

  He stepped down onto the cindered walk quickly, and there was bright starlight and a little sickle of moon in the sky, and he breathed the good fresh air deeply into his lungs and it smelled good after sitting in the smoker so long.

  The train just barely came to a full stop, then picked up speed and glided away and he stood there and watched the lighted cars slide past until there were just the twin red lights receding and fading into the night.

  Just as Marvin had anticipated, he was the only passenger to get off the train. There was a dim light inside the waiting room and he walked up there and looked in, but wasn’t surprised to find it empty. It was well past ten o’clock and that meant that all the business places were closed up tight and all the residents were asleep or at least snugly inside their own homes.

  He walked around the waiting room and there wasn’t any taxi, of course, but he didn’t mind at all. The six-block walk to his home was exactly what he needed to clean the city air out of his lungs.

  Pleasant Street, leading away from the depot, was tree-lined and lighted with street lamps at every second corner. Marvin walked along it briskly, glancing pleasurably at the well-kept lawns and houses as he passed them. The Burkes and the Chadwicks and the Evanses. Solid, substantial homes with neat, palm-shaded driveways and carefully-tended tropical shrubbery in the yards. All of them dark, now, except Dr. Higgens’ three-story house on the corner of Pleasant Street and Starfish Lane. There was a dim light downstairs as Marvin went by, and another in a third floor bedroom.

  He wondered if someone in town were sick and hoped it wasn’t serious, and then he quickened his pace just a little as he recalled that he had been away from home four whole days without any word, and that Sissy had sniffled a little the morning he left and Ellie had said she thought she’d better keep her home from first grade for a day or so just in case it did develop into something the other children could catch.

  He knew it was foolish to let a night light in the doctor’s house worry him about Sissy, but he pushed on a little faster anyway, turning into Lily Lane three blocks from the depot. It was a winding street in a newer part of town, and all the houses were modern and had larger grounds than in the older part of Sunray, each with private driveways leading up to secluded houses that were set well apart from their neighbors.

  As he climbed the slope toward his own driveway, Marvin thought pleasurably how it would be when he got home. He had his latch-key, of course. Ellie and Sissy would be sleeping soundly in the adjoining bedrooms upstairs and he wouldn’t have to wake them to get in. They both slept very soundly and they weren’t expecting him.

  He’d leave his suitcase downstairs in the hall, he decided, and go into the kitchen quietly and get two glasses and the bottle of imported cognac that Ellie kept pushed back on the top shelf for special occasions.

  Then he’d go upstairs on tiptoe and into the big front bedroom where starlight would be shining through the two open windows and making enough light to show Ellie lying asleep in bed.

  She mostly slept on her left side with her cheek pillowed on her arm, and the cover was always slipping down from her right shoulder and leaving it bare.

  He’d kneel beside the bed, he thought happily, and waken her with a kiss on her bare shoulder, and she’d lift up her head sleepily, not quite knowing who it was or what was happening, and then he’d kiss her hard on the mouth and she’d come fully awake and cling to him and kiss him back.

  Then he thought of a better way. He’d close the door through the bathroom into Sissy’s room and lock it first, and then he’d undress without turning on a light and go around the bed and slip under the covers on the other side of Ellie without waking her.

  There was a sort
of good animal smell that came from Ellie’s body when she was asleep. Different from when she was awake. Marvin always thought of it as a sensuous smell. He often waked up in the night with her lying close beside him, and he’d smell her smell and snuggle a little closer to her and bury his face under the covers against her back and breathe in deeply of the lovely fragrance that was his wife.

  And almost always it had a powerful stimulating effect on him. He didn’t intend to waken her and he tried not to, but generally she’d seem to sense how he was feeling, even in her sleep, and she’d turn slowly and languidly to him, and sometimes he thought she didn’t even wake up fully even when it was all over, but he didn’t mind that because she was loving and willing whenever he wanted to, and he considered that all a man should want from his wife in the middle of the night.

  He reached their driveway and it wound up between a double row of hibiscus to the front of the house which he could scarcely see from the street. He followed the drive up and around, and stopped suddenly when he saw a dim light behind drawn shades in the front bedroom window.

  He saw at once that it wasn’t in Sissy’s room, and he stopped being frightened. It wasn’t actually very late and there was no reason in the world why Ellie shouldn’t still be awake and up. She might even be reading in bed, which was something she had given up after she married Marvin.

  He went on up the drive to the last turn where he could see the lower front of the house clearly, and there he stopped again.

  There was a car standing in the darkness under the porte cochere directly in front. For a brief moment he was irritated by the sight of it there. Ellie knew how he felt about automobiles. He always said that garages were built to protect cars from the damp night air, and he never allowed one to sit out at night.