Robert Bloch - Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 1. September 1956

“So,” Sam the Finder said, “I’m going to need your services, Malone.” He added, “This time Charlie has gone too far.”

The little lawyer’s eyebrows rose another half-inch at that one. Lawsuits were hardly what he expected from Sam Fliegle, not in such a case. A thorough going-over in an alley with brass knuckles and saps, yes — a hair-combing with a baseball bat, perhaps. Sam had just the boys who could tend to such chores. But a lawsuit — never. Sam the Finder just was not the type.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Sam the Finder said, in that shockingly beautiful voice. “I’m not going to sue him. Charlie will be taken care of, never fear, but not in the courts of law. I want your services for something else.” He smiled, and Malone, for some reason, didn’t entirely like the smile. Sam the Finder added, “Tomorrow morning, at your office?”

Malone nodded. A client was a client, especially just then. Not only were the John J. Malone finances rapidly plunging toward what threatened to be an all-time low, but life had been entirely too quiet of late. Besides, he liked the little man — even littler than himself.

“Tomorrow morning will be fine,” he said.

Malone finished his drink and put the glass down on the bar. He was bored with the Blue Casino, had, in fact, been regretting the treachery of fate that had brought him there in the first placed when Sam the Finder had appeared. He had come with a party of five, a party that included a tender-eyed, slender-thighed blonde from a new show in town. His head had buzzed with plans, and his spirit soared with expectations for turning it into a party of two as the evening went along.

Fate in the shape of one of his companions — male — had tricked him, and things hadn’t worked out that way. Hence, a party of one and very tired of it, he had been making up his mind to abandon the Blue Casino for Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar, where at least he could be bored and lonely on the cuff.

Therefore, Malone said goodnight to his new client and moved toward the door. Sam the Finder trailed along, saying, in his impeccable accents, “I’m leaving myself, Malone. Delighted to drop you wherever you’re going.”

Malone, too, was delighted. Outside, it was a dreary, dismal night. Indeed, even in good weather, he preferred to confine his pedestrian activities to crossing sidewalks.

In spite of Sam the Finder’s Skid Row apparel, the car that was brought around to the door by a uniformed chauffeur was a satisfactorily splendid black Cadillac limousine. Malone eyed it approvingly. This was the way he preferred to see his clients transported. He remembered, also with approval, that Sam the Finder was known to be anything but a miser. Certainly, Sam was not a poor man. His choice of clothing was therefore a matter of either preference or indifference. Malone considered it his client’s own business, like the black eye, which almost matched the paint job on the Cadillac.

However, the eye became again the topic of conversation as the big car slid noiselessly away from the curb. “Charlie poked it with the papers he was trying to serve,” Sam the Finder said. For the third time, Malone looked at him with mild surprise.

“He’d been chasing after me for two days, trying to serve me,” Sam continued. “Finally, he decided to do it the easy way and came out to the house and rang the doorbell. I opened the peephole to see who was at the door. He got very smart indeed, rolled up the papers quick and shoved them through the peephole — right in my eye!”

“Legal service,” Malone said. “The papers must touch the person of the party being served.”

Sam the Finder flashed him a quick glance, then said, “The law also states that the party serving the papers has to be able to depone, or testify, that they reached the right person. Which Charlie cannot do. I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.”

Malone thought that over, decided Sam the Finder was right. “What are you planning to do about it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Sam the Finder said. “That’s the whole point. When the hearing comes up tomorrow, to decide whether or not Harry Brown got a bad deal when Mike Medinica sold him the All-Northwest Chicago Boxing and Wrestling Club, I’m not going to be present.”

“Legally—” Malone began.

“Legally, Harry Brown can’t ’ prove a thing,” Sam the Finder said. “I’d be out of Chicago right now, except that I’ve got a little business to tend to first.” The big car slid to a stop in front of Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar. “I’ll be in your office in the morning, and then I’m leaving on a business trip — a long business trip.”

The shabby little man opened the Cadillac door and smiled amiably at Malone. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a simple little matter, easily handled. I just want to leave certain things in the hands of a lawyer when I go on that business trip.”

Sam the Finder might at least have made it “good lawyer,” Malone reflected wistfully. But he managed to smile an equally amiable goodnight as his new client drove away. This was no time to argue with a client, new or otherwise. Besides, Sam the Finder was not a person to argue with at anytime anyway.

Joe the Angel noted the size and splendor of the car that delivered Malone. He, too, smiled amiably and said nothing about the size of the bar bill.

“Sam the Finder,” Malone said, saving Joe the Angel the trouble of a question. “Wants me to handle a little matter for him. I’ll take rye.”

“A big man,” Joe the Angel said with a certain reverence.

Malone nodded gloomily, and sighed deeply over his whiskey. He was worse than bored, he was bored with being bored. The recent quietness of life, with its consequent, concomitant lack of clients and equally concomitant lack of funds, was getting on his nerves. Not so much the lack of funds — he was used to that problem and would inevitably find a way to meet it.

There was, for instance, a poker game tomorrow night at Judge Touralchuk’s duplex apartment that ought to help materially. It was the very quietness itself that bothered him. Malone to be happy, needed a certain amount of action around him.

He thought about Sam the Finder. A strange little man, and Malone remarked as much to Joe the Angel. Joe the Angel went on polishing glasses and said, “My cousin Louie says Sam the Finder learned to talk so good from his father, a college teacher.”

“Your cousin Louie should go soak his head,” Malone said amiably.

It made, he thought, a pleasant story, that Sam the Finder’s father had been a professor of English who discovered, during Prohibition, that bootlegging to his students offered far greater profits than guiding them through the intricacies of Henry James’ subordinate clauses. Actually, Sam the Finder had been born back of the yards, just like John J. Malone.

He hated to disillusion Joe the Angel, but truth was truth — outside of a courtroom. He said, “Sam got hold of a correspondence course in better English on a bad debt, and didn’t want to waste it. So he studied it himself, including the phonograph records.”

Not, he reflected again happily, that the little man was a miser. Sam the Finder had a large, luxurious suburban home, as well as a huge country place in Wisconsin. His lovely young red-haired wife wore diamonds as good, and at least as large, as any lady in town. It was a known fact that there was not merely the one, but several Cadillacs. Sam dressed the way he did because he always had, and because his apparel had come to carry, at least in the wearer’s eye, a certain mark of distinction on a level trademarked by Brooks Brothers suits and Countess Mara ties.

Malone was still meditating on Sam the Finder’s personal life, habits and fortune, with a certain emphasis on the amount of the retainer he would probably get in the morning, when the telephone rang. The call was for Malone. The caller von Flanagan — a decidedly anquished Captain von Flanagan.