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

Nor did Wanda need to open the saddle-stitched leather shoulder-bag on the bed beside her to know what it contained. It held make-up gear, a scattering of bobby-pins, matchboxes, movie-ticket stubs, a small mirror, a lipstick-stained lace handkerchief, a checkbook, some cleanex and, in the purse, eleven dollars and sixty-seven cents in cash.

With the green jade elephant that lifted a defiant trunk at her from the yellow oak table in front of the bed, the room contained everything Wanda owned in the world. At any rate, it held everything she dared claim as her own. She had been in the hotel four days now — she had paid rent for a week in advance. She had to figure out some way to get in touch with Danny in the next three days, or she’d be out in the street.

Wanda was incognito, in hiding, on the lam. Some ninety-nine hours earlier, Peter Corell had been garroted on the gentle curve of the sectional sofa in his East Sixty-third Street apartment. When she heard the news of his murder, Wanda had been sitting in a bar off Madison Avenue, drinking a sloe-gin fizz and waiting for the eleven-o’clock television news to pass, so she could ease around the corner to join him. The green jade elephant had been in her bag. It was the eve of Peter’s birthday, and the elephant was to have been a present. A girl got tired of giving only money to a man she was fond of.

Just how fond she had been of Peter, Wanda hadn’t given herself a chance to find out since the story came over the telenews. It was the last line of the dispatch, as uttered by the announcer, that had frightened her. “... and police expect to find the motive for Corell’s murder either among his business associates or business rivals, or among his lady-friends, who are said to be numerous.”

If the cops got hold of her, Wanda Reese was a very dead pigeon. She had had her troubles with the cops as a kid, before she had gotten smart. She could still remember the smells — the spit-sweat-and-tobacco smell of the station houses, the woman-vomit-and-formaldehyde smell of the detention cells, the lye-soap-and-moldy-paint smell of the house of correction where she had spent two years.

Cops! The thought of them curdled her now, as it had curdled her four evenings earlier, in the Madison Avenue bar, as it had curdled her when she was still a runny-nosed alleycat, stealing from markets and dime stores. Once they got hold of her, she was finished as surely, and a lot less cleanly and quickly, than Peter had been. If they caught her. they’d crucify her.

She couldn’t bear thinking about them, even now. And she couldn’t do much about keeping away from them for long if she sat in this crummy side-street hotel room until her dough ran out and the manager booted her out. The laugh was that she had plenty of dough in the bank — enough to take her almost anywhere she wanted to go. But she didn’t dare write a check. She had a comfortable East Side apartment with plenty of dresses hanging in the closets, plenty of food in the refrigerator, plenty of bottles in the little bar Danny had had her put in — plenty of bottles, that is, if the lousy cops hadn’t drunk them all empty waiting around for her to show up.

It was a laugh, all right, but it wasn’t funny. Her situation reminded her of an old movie she had seen once on teevee. It was about a nutty old millionaire who had hated his relatives and given his dough away, a million bucks at a whack, to people he picked at random from the phone book. One of them was George Raft, and he had been a professional check forger. So, when he got the good check for a million, he hadn’t been able to cash it. If I Had a Million — that was the name of the movie.

Who the hell cared what the name of it was? Wanda wanted a drink. She couldn’t think while she was alone. All her thoughts did was go ’round in circles. She needed someone to talk to, to listen to, to get her brain functioning. The trouble was, Danny had lammed, too. He’d done some sort of business with Peter — that was how Wanda had met Peter in the first place. She didn’t know too many of Danny’s friends very well — and she didn’t know any of them she dared trust. She knew, without a shred of proof, that Danny had strangled Peter Corell.

At any rate, she needed a drink and some companionship — the crummy hotel didn’t have a TV in the room. It didn’t even have a lousy radio. The bar downstairs was full of creeps and dead horseplayers, and she didn’t dare go to any of her regular places, or to Danny’s. But right now, it was better than nothing. She got up and took the things off the windowseat. The panty-girdle was still slightly damp, and there was a runner in one of the stockings...

The bar was dim and dirty and dull. The television screen, set cat-a-corner under the ceiling at one end of the bar, was on, with the sound turned low so as not to interfere with the juke-box, which was blasting a rock-and-roll dirge by a trick-voiced girl singer. At the red-check-covered tables in the rear, one drab threesome and an even drabber couple were seated. The mouse-grey males and a middle-aged woman with unwaved hair and too much rouge sat midway along the bar itself. Wanda moved to one end, to be as far away from them as possible, and noted the man alone.

At least, she thought, this one looked like a man, not like an aging insect from whom some spider had long-since sucked all the juice. She wondered what had brought him to a dump like this. Charlie, the bartender, came up and said, “What’ll it be tonight, miss?”

Wanda ordered a sloe-gin. She didn’t care a hell of a lot for the taste of alcohol — too bitter for her liking — but she liked its effect inside her. Sloe gin was at least halfway sweet. When she rummaged in her bag for money, Charlie waved a hand in front of her. “No dice,” he said. “The gentleman’s paying.”

“No fooling?” said Wanda, her suspicions mounting. For a moment she was tempted to turn it down. But the pitiful amount of cash in her bag stopped such foolishness. Hell, she thought, maybe the jerk was just lonely, like herself. He’d sure picked the right place to be lonely in, if he was looking for action. But she couldn’t afford to take chances. “Who is he, Charlie?” she asked.

Charlie shrugged and swabbed the bar with his towel. “Never saw him before tonight,” he replied, disinterested. “He’s staying upstairs, that’s all I know.”

Wanda tried to get her thoughts in order. When she didn’t answer, Charlie said, “Well, what’ll I tell him?”

“Oh hell, tell him to come on down,” said Wanda. It had occurred to her that, if the stranger was a cop, she had nothing to lose — since it would be already too late. Maybe he was okay — anyway, he’d be somebody to talk to.

He looked okay on closer view, as nearly as she could tell in the half-light. He had good shoulders that weren’t all padding, like Danny’s, and his face was square and almost handsome. She said, “Thanks for the drink, mister...”

“Byrne,” he said, “Michael Byrne — with a y and an e and no s. A pleasure.” He had, she noted, a sort of out-of-town accent, like some of Danny’s friends from St. Louis or Chicago.

She said, “Charlie tells me you’re staying upstairs, Mr. Byrne. What’s the matter — couldn’t you get a room at the Ritz Towers?”

He grinned — Michael Byrne had a nice grin that showed white teeth that looked real. He said, “Believe it or not, I was lucky to get a room in this dump. New York is full to here.” He drew a line across his forehead, added, “Conventions.”

Wanda said, “No kidding?” She knew about conventions. Before she met Danny and got set, she’d been on call to serve conventions, as she had been on call for other services. Nightmare jobs, she and the other girls had called them. Nightmares of hairy bellies and hairless heads, of clutching hands and slapping hands and crude innuendo, when all you were supposed to do was smile and drink and deliver on demand — but profitable nightmares. She said, “You with one of them — conventions, I mean?”