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

“It’s not that we don’t completely trust you,” said Mike Medinica. “It’s just that we wouldn’t want to have anything happen to you. So we know you don’t mind if one of us shares a room with you.”

“Not at all.” Malone lied valiantly, still hoping something would turn up. He decided to drop the subject and ride with the punches for the time being. He glanced idly around the room. “Is that the peephole where you got the black eye, Sam?” he asked casually, looking at the heavy door.

Mike Medinica shook his blonde head. “It was in town, at Sam the Finder’s penthouse apartment.” He added, “Same type of peephole, though.”

Mike might be the eleventh best-dressed man in America, Malone observed to himself, but he still carefully put the word “penthouse” in front of the word “apartment,” underlining it ever so little. Ah, vanity...

Malone inspected the peephole. It was a standard type, of a sort installed on a great many doors, a tiny affair that could be slid open to permit a resident to peer out and see who was ringing the doorbell, without being seen by the ringer outside. A roll of papers, though, would slip through very easily. Poke through, he corrected himself — as, of course, would a bullet. And this peephole was a facsimile of the one installed in the door of Harry Brown’s apartment.

Suddenly he knew he had to get back to town, and as soon as possible. Study of the peephole had caused him to remember what had been eluding him at the scene of Charlie Binkley’s murder.

He strolled to the fireside as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He sat down. His hosts, he noticed with satisfaction, appeared to be pleased, even a little relaxed, at his easy acceptance of enforced confinement.

Olive broke the silence by suggesting a drink. Malone agreed that a drink would be both refreshing and timely. An idea had occurred to him. It might not work, and it was going to take almost incredible stamina to make it work but, at the moment, it was the only idea he had.

Mike Medinica flashed a white-toothed grin, chuckled and said, “And you don’t need to worry, Malone, that Charlie Binkley will up in court and swear that he served the summons on Sam the Finder. He’s already been taken care of.”

Malone opened his mouth to speak and closed it again, a gesture that made him feel like a goldfish. The subject was not one he cared to pursue — at least, not just then.

Drinks were poured, and the conversation again lagged. At last, Olive rose, yawned and stretched sinuously, and announced that she was going to bed. One drink later, Sam the Finder solicitously asked Malone if he weren’t getting tired. Malone smiled cheerfully and said that the hour was far too early for him, that he had never felt more wide awake in his life.

Conversation dipped to zero. Finally, Mike Medinica yawned and suggested a little game to pass the time. Malone allowed himself to brighten slightly. However, Sam the Finder, it seemed, didn’t play cards. Parchesi, now...

Malone decided he could learn parchesi. He regretted that he hadn’t brought much money with him, but...

Sam the Finder, waved objections away. He said, “Your credit’s good here, Malone, and we’ll play for very small stakes.”

Malone said that that would be fine, and how about putting the bottle on the table, so they could all reach it.

The sky was growing perceptibly lighter when the little lawyer leaned back in his chair and reflected ruefully that he’d had no idea there were so many intricacies to the parlor game of parchesi, or that it was possible to lose quite so much money at a child’s game in the space of four hours.

However, he had accomplished his purpose. Mike Medinica sprawled on the davenport, one shoeless foot dragging on the floor, his mouth open and snores emerging from it at regular intervals. Sam the Finder had lasted half an hour longer, but now, at last, he was slumped forward on the table, his head, on its final nod, having just missed the overflowing ashtray at the table’s edge.

Putting both men in slumberland had required four hours and a little over three bottles — but neither of them was going to stir much for a while. Malone grinned happily. As for himself — well, he’d know better when he stood up, but at least his head was reasonably clear.

He scribbled an IOU for his $439 losses of the night’s play and propped it up on the table. The money didn’t worry him much. After all, Sam the Finder was a client, and there was going to be an implausably large fee involved, under the circumstances.

He rose and tiptoed — quite unnecessarily — to the closet. There, he retrieved his hat and overcoat, put them on and realized, for the first time since he entered Mike Medinica’s big sedan, that he had had a gun in his pocket all along.

Oh well, he thought, things were better this way. It was hardly considered gentlemanly for an attorney to point a gun at a client. No, not even if the client kidnapped said attorney. Things were much better this way — much better. And it had all been a lot of good, more or less clean, fun, too.

He opened the door quietly and slipped out into the chill, early morning air. His first breath sent his fumed head reeling, and he grasped the doorpost for support. It was just, he told himself firmly, that he wasn’t used to so much fresh air so early in the morning. It had nothing to do with his having had to keep abreast of his hosts throughout the night.

Somehow, he managed to make his way down the driveway, through the soft, wet slush underfoot, weaving only slightly from side to side. At the gatepost, he paused and looked back. The big neo-Colonial house looked and sounded reassuringly peaceful.

It was going to be several hours before anyone woke up and came downstairs. Still, the occasion called for haste, not loitering. Malone wondered what time it was. His watch had stopped hours earlier, and the grey sky told him nothing.

“It gets early very dark out these days,” he remarked aloud. He began slogging bravely along the highway.

It was cold and dreary and damp, and the going was heavy underfoot. Malone’s head felt strangely weighted, but he was happy as the proverbial lark. Indeed, once he was safely out of earshoot of Sam the Finder’s house, he burst into occasional snatches of song. Even a stumble, which toppled him into the ditch, failed to dismay the little lawyer.

There was a total of nine dollars and some loose change in his pocket, but he was cheerfully confidant this was enough to take him back to Chicago. Cabs, he knew, were seldom available here in the country, but he’d manage somehow.

A soft-focus sun was revealing itself through the murk, orange-yellow and discouraged-looking. But Malone saluted it joyously and burst again into song. He was on his way to the city, all was well, and would be even better once he reached the end of this infernal quagmire of a country road.

A perfidious patch of hidden ice toppled him into the ditch again. For a few minutes, he lay there, reasoning that this was as good a place as any to catch a quick forty winks. Finally, however, his better judgment returned a negative verdict, and he climbed out again. If he went to sleep now, Malone well knew, he’d probably sleep until sometime next summer. He recalled gruesome stories of people who had fallen asleep in blizzards and never waked up at all. True, this wasn’t a blizzard — it was merely an ordinary little old Illinois drizzle. But sleeping in a ditch was undignified. Besides, he had promised von Flanagan.

As of the moment, just what he was going to tell von Flanagan wasn’t entirely clear in his mind. Last night when he examined the peephole in Sam the Finder’s door, in a sudden flash of what he still recognized as brilliant reasoning, he had known everything he needed to know, with enough left over for a sizable tip. Now, the thought had fled his wits as completely as though it had never existed at all. But it would come back, he told himself, it would come back.