Killers from the Keys ms-39

by Brett Halliday

  “The Preacher.”

  “I dunno what you mean.”

  “You’re a liar, McTige. And you stink from the word go.”

  “Now, you look here…” blustered McTige, but Shayne cut him off fast:

  “You look here while I do the talking. I know who your rabbit is and what he’s hiding from. I know you’re fronting for the Syndicate, and I hate the guts of any man who plays ball with them.”

  “Wait a minute, Mike. You got me all wrong.” McTige’s blustering tone changed to a wail. “There ain’t no Syndicate mixed up in this deal.”

  “I say there is.”

  “But look,” pleaded McTige. “How-come you think you know so much more’n I do? Here you sit in Miami and I come in to you all nice an’ friendly with a clean deal. Cash on the barrel-head and no strings attached. And you start talking about the Syndicate. I just don’t get it.”

  “Were you in the Bright Spot with The Preacher the other night looking for Fred Tucker?”

  “I dropped in the joint like I said,” McTige conceded doggedly. “I don’t know about a preacher. I don’t get that angle.”

  “I think you do. You’ve got a client who came to you in good faith and you sold her out for dirty money.” Shayne’s eyes glared across the desk bleakly, and his voice was harshly uncompromising:

  “Miami is my town, McTige, and I don’t like it cluttered up with Syndicate killers or big-mouthed crooks flashing private badges. Get out of my office and get out of town.”

  “I’ll get out of your stinking office, all right,” McTige shouted wildly. “But I’ll stick around Miami as long as I damn well please… and without asking your permission either.” He swung his burly body toward the door, but Shayne stopped him by saying coldly, “Pick up your cigar-butt from my rug before you leave.”

  “Wha-at?” He turned his head, panting like a maddened bull.

  “Your cigar-butt.” Shayne pointed to it on the floor. “I don’t live in a pig-sty, even if you do.”

  “I’ll be double god-damned…” McTige snarled through clenched teeth, hunched his shoulders and started for the door.

  Shayne was in front of him before he took two steps. McTige plowed to a stop and doubled his right fist and cocked it back behind his hip.

  Shayne’s fists remained unclenched, but his eyes were bleak and his lips drew away from his teeth slightly. He said, “Pick it up, McTige.”

  Baron McTige wilted slowly. He blinked his eyes and mumbled something indistinguishable, and turned to pick up the crushed cigar. He dropped it into an ashtray on Shayne’s desk, and then lumbered past the rigid redhead with face averted and eyes downcast.

  Shayne watched the door slam shut behind him, and then went back to his desk and sat down. He was pouring more cognac in the two nested cups when the door swung open violently and Lucy whirled inside. She exclaimed, “Why didn’t you hit him, Michael? He was the most awful lout…”

  Shayne grinned and waggled his forefinger at her. “A man of great perception, I thought.”

  “Michael Shayne!” She stamped her foot angrily. “If I ever told you some of the things he said…”

  “He knows a beautiful secretary when he sees one. Come on and admit you were secretly flattered.”

  “By that… oaf?”

  “All right,” said Shayne pleasantly. “Come out and have dinner with me, and I’ll flatter you.”

  “And then deposit me safely at home and slip off to the Bright Spot without me.”

  “Why, no,” said Shayne, studying her approvingly. “You’re a big girl now. You’re invited, angel, and don’t blame me if you don’t like what you see.”

  6

  The Pink Flamingo Motel was situated a little distance off The Tamiami Trail on the western outskirts of the sprawling city. It had been constructed in the late Forties when land prices were soaring and building supplies were again available after the long period of war shortages, and the city seemed to be inevitably spreading westward.

  Somehow, though, the westward expansion had stopped short of the tract of land on which the motel was built, and there was an expanse of uninhabited, unattractive, palmetto-covered land between it and the garish lights of newer and more attractive motels and roadside spots that clustered along the Trail closer in that marked the real western gateway to the city.

  Thus, inevitably, standing isolated and sadly alone, the Pink Flamingo was passed up by the majority of tourists arriving from the West Coast, and its meager clientele consisted of those who turned off at the sagging roadside sign in the hope of finding cheaper accommodations than would be available farther on, and a nightly smattering of local residents attracted by its isolation and absence of bright lights, seeking a discreet rendezvous with illicit love where no questions would be asked and the likelihood of embarrassing encounters with acquaintances would be reduced to a minimum. These latter, of course, invariably arrived to take possession of their cabins after darkness had fallen, so that during daylight hours the grounds were likely to be almost completely deserted.

  The man who sat alone in cabin number 3 liked it this way. He had changed his address five times since arriving in Miami three weeks ago, gravitating each time downward to cheaper and less populated living quarters. It wasn’t that Steven Shephard lacked the funds to stay wherever he wished in the city that is notorious for its high-priced living accommodations. Any one of the luxury hotels along Miami Beach’s oceanfront would have gladly welcomed Shephard as a guest to remain as long as he wished.

  He liked the Pink Flamingo Motel. It suited him perfectly. Now, as he sat despondently on the edge of a rumpled bed in one drab cabin and watched daylight disappear outside the dirty windowpane across the room, he wondered fuzzily if he would ever get up the courage and the energy to leave the welcoming arms of the Pink Flamingo. Because he did feel oddly welcome there. There was a depressing aura about the place that fitted his mood perfectly.

  It took him warmly and comfortably into its embrace each night when he returned from one of his increasingly less frequent jaunts into the city’s night-life. With a bottle of whiskey to nibble on (Steven Shephard was not really a drinking man) and with a noisy refrigerator stocked with the simplest of food supplies, a man could comfortably doze away the hot, silent days without recourse to thinking, staying just drunk enough to stifle any active pangs of conscience, and to blank out the fears and the questions that arose when he let himself peer into the uncharted future.

  Steven Shephard was a man of about forty. Slightly over medium height, perhaps a little less than medium weight, with light brown hair that receded from both temples. He wore a neatly trimmed mustache and neatly pressed gray slacks and fresh white shirt that he had put on at noon that day after showering, and a neat bow tie.

  There were no lines of great character on his face. He looked like a man who had made few decisions in his life, who had drifted somewhat aimlessly but probably pleasantly along middle-class and orderly avenues of existence, not asking or demanding much from life, and therefore suffering few disappointments.

  In the open closet beyond the end of the bed, a conservative sport jacket and a light tan summer suit hung neatly on hangers. Beneath them was a somewhat scuffed, brown suitcase and a pair of dark blue bedroom slippers. A pair of brown and white striped cotton pajamas and a black rayon bathrobe were hung on a hook from the closet door and completed all of his wardrobe that was visible.

  On the top of a cheap bureau under the window and directly across from where he sat was an almost-empty bottle of expensive bourbon and a small framed photograph of a woman and two small children. The woman was about thirty, pleasant-faced but unsmiling. Her expression wasn’t exactly grim, but there was more than a hint of severity about the tightness of her mouth, the chiseled placidity of her unremarkable features.

  Steven Shephard shifted his disinterested gaze from the windowpane that was darkening with gathering dusk to the photograph beneath it. His gaze remained disinterested while it rested
on the picture, but he said aloud, moodily, “Bitch.” He appeared pleased with the sound of the spoken word, and a faint smile congratulated himself for his audacity in saying it aloud.

  He touched his lips with the tip of his tongue and spoke aloud again, almost wonderingly and certainly with an intonation of pleasurable surprise: “You’re a bitch, Emily. You always were a bitch, and always will be. A well-bred one, of course.” His voice insisted that he was determined to be completely honest even in the aloneness of the cabin where only he himself could hear his voice.

  He dropped his gaze from the photograph to the floor between his knees and thought about the young girl dancer at the Bright Spot.

  His hands clenched slowly into fists on the bed beside him, and his eyeballs became moist and humid. Strange, atavistic roilings were in his bloodstream. There was a warmth in his loins which slowly spread over his body and took unholy possession of him. He would see her again tonight. For two nights he had stubbornly remained closeted in his cabin, denying the newly-discovered demands of the flesh, drinking sufficient whiskey, hour after hour, to blur the insistent knowledge within him that this was for him: that he, Steven Shephard, after thirty years of carefully-regulated, according-to-the-book, safe-and-sane and socially-correct sexual attitudes, had thrown all this aside and succumbed (happily, by God, and with a youthful fervor that Emily had never known he possessed) to the allure of quivering young flesh that nakedly and unashamedly sought lust for the sheer sake of lust, that traded sweat and torment and passion for sexual release and for nothing else, that knew no other reason for living and sought no other reason.

  Shephard heard a scraping sound outside the window and jerked his head up angrily to glare at the, now, opaque glass. That would be Peterson, the motel manager. He was always snooping at the windows. As soon as darkness came, he began his stealthy rounds. Normally, Shephard didn’t mind being spied upon. Alone in the cabin, he had little to hide from Peterson’s pruriently peering eyes. But now, with his heart pounding and with the clear image of Sloe Burn’s lasciviously nubile body searing across his mind, he felt ashamed and trapped, as though the man outside his window had discovered him committing an unmanly and erotic act on his own body.

  He stood up and squared his shoulders, walked a trifle unsteadily to the door and jerked it open. The afterglow of twilight lingered in the sky and, as he had suspected, Peterson rounded the corner of his cabin from the windowed side, and shuffled toward him.

  The motel manager was a small, gnomelike man, with a bushy-haired head that was too large for the rest of him, and wizened features and humid eyes that refused to meet another man’s gaze directly. He always held his over-sized head cocked slightly on one side which gave him a sly look of cunning.

  He said, “Evening, Mr. Tucker,” Coming to an uneasy halt a couple of feet from the figure in the open doorway. “Everything okay?”

  Shephard said, “You ought to know, Peterson. Couldn’t you tell by peeking in my window?”

  “Now see here now,” protested Peterson with a righteous whine in his voice. “You have absolutely no right to make a statement like that, Mr. Tucker. It’s untrue and uncalled-for and downright libelous. I’m making my evening rounds, as usual, to see everything’s quiet and shipshape. Is it my fault if you leave your shade up so’s anyone can see in your room?”

  “You know as well as I do that the shade is broken and won’t come down. I complained about it the first day I was here.”

  “Well, now, I don’t recollect that, Mr. Tucker. I sure don’t. I’ll have a man around to tend to it first thing in the morning.”

  “That’s what you promised me a week ago.”

  “Slipped my mind, I guess.” Peterson shook his head and rubbed his jaw reflectively. “So many little things breaking down all the time here. I keep telling the owners and telling them we got to keep things in better shape if we want to attract the right sort of people, but they’re so tight they hate to spend a nickel on maintenance. Aside from the window shade, you’re cozy and comfortable, huh? Hardly even go out at all, do you?”

  His voice had an intimate sort of buddy-buddy quality to it that hinted he was aware of all Shephard’s secrets; it offered soothing assurance that the guest in No. 3 had nothing to fear from him,… and it discreetly invited further confidences any time Shephard felt the need for human companionship.

  Shephard said, “I’m comfortable enough,” and stepped back surlily to close the door in Peterson’s face. The interior of the cabin was quite dim by this time, and he pressed the wall switch to light the room with a yellowish glow from the low-wattage bulb in the ceiling.

  He was trembling with a listless sort of anger as he crossed to the dresser and slopped half an inch of whiskey into the bottom of a water glass. He turned the tap and ran water on top of the whiskey, wondering disinterestedly why the manager irritated him so.

  He took a long swallow of the heavily-watered whiskey and enjoyed the faint warmth of it as it trickled down into his stomach.

  He had just found out in these past few weeks what mighty fine stuff whiskey was. Before that he had always confined his drinking to parties because that was the only socially acceptable way to drink, and invariably he had drunk too much and made a fool out of himself and suffered the joint hells of a hangover and Emily’s sharp tongue the next day for his disgraceful conduct.

  But this slow and carefully spaced solitary drinking was something very different, and he was as pleased with himself for discovering the process as though he had achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough of some sort.

  About an ounce every two hours was the ticket. You started early in the morning when you first woke up, and you got that soothing warmth in your stomach that brought on a sort of torpid indifference to the fact that it was another day. So you closed your eyes and dozed for awhile, and dreamed meaningless little dreams, mostly about when you were a little boy.

  And then you aroused yourself enough to eat something, maybe. An egg or a piece of cheese and a slice of bread. And then you drank another ounce and dozed some more, and the day went on in a kind of pleasant blur that kept reality at bay and wafted you along to the enveloping darkness of another night.

  This would be his last drink in the cabin until he came home later. Much later, he told himself, with restrained gladness. Midnight or three o’clock in the morning, or whenever he damn well pleased. And he must remember to bring another bottle back when he did come because there was only about one more drink left in the bottom of this one and he couldn’t face the thought of going out in the daylight tomorrow to buy another.

  He seated himself carefully again on the side of the bed, hunched forward a little with shoulders stooped and both hands nursing the glass. A sedate, nondescript sort of man, and to see him sitting there, sipping pleasurably at the nauseatingly warm and slightly alcoholic drink no one in the world could possibly have guessed that he had two hundred thousand dollars worth of United States bills in his possession.

  7

  The bright spot was a large, square, ugly, one-story, stucco building squatting all by itself in the middle of a two-acre palmetto-fringed clearing about half a mile from the Trail and just outside the city limits of Miami.

  It got its name from a ten-foot revolving disc of burnished brass mounted on a wooden tower a hundred feet above the ground and lighted at night by two spotlights so that it reflected a dazzling brilliance and was a landmark that could be seen for miles. It was approached by a narrow, twisting road through the surrounding palmetto hummocks, which debouched onto a large parking area capable of accommodating the same number of automobiles as the number of persons who could be squeezed inside the building. This was necessary because at least ninety percent of the patrons who visited the Bright Spot came alone in their cars. It was not a place that encouraged couples or foursomes, and the continuous floor-show from 8:00 P.M. until closing time had not been designed for mutual enjoyment either by mixed couples or even by a group of men frien
ds out for a convivial evening on the town.

  The Bright Spot offered a show that was calculated to arouse guilt feelings inside any male who sat through it. It was badly and simply revolting to most women. So men mostly came to the Bright Spot alone, furtively ashamed to be there and thankful for the extremely dim lighting inside which made it next to impossible for them to be recognized even if their best friends happened to be seated at the next table.

  The management had planned it that way, and exploited the situation by providing enough B-girls so no man had to remain alone any longer than he wanted to. These girls were of two definite types, to appeal to the inward needs of two sorts of men who came there.

  There was a covey of blatantly under-dressed and over-painted young girls, as close to the age of consent as the management was able to hire, whose bare, perfumed flesh was openly for sale and no bones about it. In the smoke-shrouded darkness of the big dining room with only a colored spotlight on the raised platform at one end where strippers did their bumps and grinds and monotonously removed their clothing, sweaty bodies could be glued together for long periods without attracting attention, saliva could be expertly traded between hot mouths and trysts arranged by panted words, and a man didn’t have to bother pretending he had come there for any other reason.

  Indeed, in the small, almost entirely enclosed booths lining two walls of the room, which always had a large RESERVED sign on the table when unoccupied which could be removed only by slipping a five to the headwaiter, such trysts were frequently consummated without having to leave the premises. This feat was accomplished by only the most expert of the girls, and their services drew a premium price from men who were in the know and liked their sex served to them in that manner.

  Then there was a second type of female employee who appealed to a different kind of patron. These were not as numerous as their young companions, but they had proved to be a distinct drawing card at the Bright Spot over a long period of time. They were older and more experienced courtesans who used every artifice of restrained make-up and careful grooming to appear to be exactly what they were not.