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

So she waited, while the minutes ticked by in slow-march. She made up her mind, if Danny didn’t show by midnight, she’d go to Mike and stay with him and forget about Danny and everything else that had to do with the mess she was in. Just seven more minutes by the tiny platinum-and-diamond watch on her wrist.

Then it came — two quick, soft raps on the door. She called, “Come in,” and Danny was there, with her. She said, wondering why she could no longer stand the sight of him, “Hi, Danny, I hated to bother you, but I had to.”

“You dumb broad,” he said softly. “Who’s the character you had call up Joe this afternoon? You working with the cops or something? Not that I’d put it past you. Anything for a lousy buck.”

“No, Danny — it was just a guy I met in a bar. I didn’t want to call myself in case Joe wasn’t safe.” To her surprise, she found she was crying again.

“You sure it was nobody?” he asked. And, at her nod, “Whatsa-matter, you drunk or something?”

She shook her head, and, suddenly, he was on her. He had a necktie in his hands and then it was around her neck, getting tighter. “I don’t mind your cheating with Peter,” he said fiercely. “It’s the way you funneled back the dough I was milking from him. He had the nerve to laugh about it, right in my face. When I saw that stinking green elephant in your place...”

Wanda tried to scream, but she could hardly grunt. The strong silk of the tie was cutting into her throat, choking off speech as well as breath. She felt her lungs catch fire, knew she was going to die. Her eyeballs seemed to burst from her head.

Then Mike was there, and a couple of other men, and the pressure was off. When her vision returned, Mike was feeding her sloe-gin, and they were taking Danny away. Taking Danny away... “Mike,” she gasped through a raw larynx, “those are cops.”

“Sure,” he said soothingly. “I’m sorry we had to wait so long, but we had to. We not only couldn’t find Danny — we couldn’t figure out why a blackmailer should want to kill the guy who was paying him off. But thanks to you, and the elephant — once we’d located you, we had to use you for a stake-out.” He picked up the green-jade toy, that had been knocked to the carpet in the struggle.

Then he came back to her and said, “Sweet, you’re a nice girl. I wasn’t kidding about wanting to see you, to help you...”

She was up then, all the smells back in her head, the spit-sweat-and-tobacco smell of the station houses, the woman-vomit-and-for-maldehide smell of the detention cells, the lye-soap-and-moldy-paint smell of the house of correction where she had spent two years. All she could remember was that she was Wanda Reese again, with her apartment and her clothes and a few thousand dollars still in her bank account — and that this man was a policeman; a policeman who had made a fool of her and almost gotten her killed.

She said, “I suppose they’ll pin a medal on you for this, copper.”

She had hurt him, and she was glad. He was the enemy, the lifelong enemy. He said, “For God’s sake, sweet, I meant what I said.”

“A novelty, I’m sure,” she told him, her hand at her throat. She extended the other, “Do I get the elephant, or do you get to keep that, too?”

He looked at it, still in his hand, then at her. Then, his face remote and impassive, he tossed it on the bed.

A ruthless, successful man who steals the wife of a worthless failure does not look for trouble. However, weakness can prove a most deadly weapon.

Harlan Wayne had made the trip to Cottstown buoyed by inner certainty that Philip Morrison would never find him there. He hadn’t intended to use the little city, where he had spent part of his youth, as a permanent refuge. His plan had been merely to get Phil off his and Laura’s trail for a breathing spell, until he could work out more permanent plans for the two of them.

Yet, when he went downstairs in the hotel, less than an hour after he and Laura had checked in, there was Phil Morrison, sitting in an armchair under one of the potted palms in the old-fashioned lobby, with a magazine on his lap. As always, Phil looked absurdly innocuous, absurdly inadequate, to be married to a woman as vivid and vital as Laura.

It was not that Phil was unhandsome — if anything, he ran a little too much to good looks in a florid, purposeless way. His was the classic, perennial-sophomore type of non-success in a harsh, post-graduate world. Harlan Wayne had seen hundreds of Phil Morrisons in his forty-odd years.

They were always around, letting the Harlan Waynes pay the checks in expensive restaurants after failing to put over their flawed or untimely deals. They were forever applying at personnel offices for jobs that, for them, would never exist. They were the inevitable failures whose good looks and popularity Harlan Wayne had once bitterly envied, for whom he now felt only contempt.

Finishing the purchase of Corona panatellas that had brought him to the lobby, Harlan Wayne strolled over to where Phil Morrison sat looking at him with a dogged and defeated, yet annoyingly hopeful, look on his too-handsome face.

Wayne stood over him, using the height advantage that found him standing and Morrison sitting down — when both men were standing, the futile Morrison topped him by almost six inches.

He said, “What in hell do you think you’re doing here, Phil?”

Morrison said, “You know as well as I do, Harlan. A husband still has certain rights in this country.”

“You forfeited any rights you have in Laura years ago, Phil,” Harlan Wayne told him brutally. “My detectives have enough on you for her to get a divorce in any state of the union. Why don’t you go back to Chicago and leave her alone?”

“You know the answer to that,” said Phil Morrison. There was unusual determination, as well as a sort of slyness, in his expression. He added, “You have my terms — meet them, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“You won’t get another red cent out of me,” Harlan Wayne said quietly. “How long can you keep this up — following us around the country? I know your financial condition as well as your rottenness.”

“Until you pay off or give up Laura,” was the reply.

“Fat chance you have of getting either out of me,” said Wayne.

Both men had been speaking quietly, and their conversation had attracted no special attention. But Morrison’s voice rose a notch as he said, “There’s another alternative you wouldn’t like, Harlan — an alienation-of-affections suit. You try to run away once more, and your lawyers will be hearing from mine. Put up or shut up.”

For a moment, Harlan Wayne was tempted to hit Phil Morrison where he sat. A one-time almost All-American football player turned into an all-time All-American rat — that was Laura’s husband. Fearing to make a spectacle of himself in the lobby of his home-town hotel, he turned on his heel and walked swiftly, furiously, to the elevators.

Laura was waiting for him in the drawing room of the bridal suite. Brilliantly brunette, slimly yet luxuriantly full-bodied, she was, as always since Wayne had met her, sensitive to his every mood. Regarding him as he entered, she rose swiftly, came to him.

“Something’s wrong,” she said with quiet concern. “Is it Phil?”

“What else?” Wayne countered. “That worthless punk of a husband of yours is sitting downstairs right now. He even had the almighty gall to threaten me with an alienation suit if I don’t pay him off.”

Laura’s slim, strong, exquisite fingers gripped his biceps. Her voice was low, anxious, as she said, “Darling, why not give him what he wants? You can afford it, and, this way, nothing’s any good. I know Phil — he’s weak, but he has the stubbornness of the weak man. He’ll never give up till you pay him — he’ll make trouble for you. And you know I could never bear that. I’d rather go back to him than have him cause you a breath of scandal.”