Brett Halliday: The Private Practice of Michael Shayne

Here again he waited in an attitude of hopeful expectancy, half-turned back toward the office.

The door of Larry Kincaid’s office remained closed, and the elevator rattled to a stop in front of him. Shayne shrugged his big shoulders in resignation, and got in to be lowered to the ground floor.

Shayne clicked the dice gently in his big fist and rolled them out on the green table. Under the soft diffused light they came to a stop showing a five and a four up.

The houseman shoved them back to him with his ivory stick and Shayne clicked them again, then sevened out. He lifted his shoulders with negligent disapproval and relinquished the black-dotted cubes to the gambler on his left.

The gambling hall was long, low-ceilinged, richly carpeted. Brilliant lights reflected on the tables from dark-shaded bulbs. Two crap layouts were deserted, and of the three roulette tables, only one was in operation this early in the evening.

Against a background of ornate furnishings, men in evening clothes and women in backless gowns made no effort to dissemble feverish intentness as the ivory ball jumped erratically around the spinning wheel. Sharply indrawn breaths exhaled in an almost inaudible “ah-h-h” when the ball stopped in its niche.

Shayne, completely at ease in a double-breasted suit of white poplin which gave a deceptive trimness to his tall, rangy figure, bet his last twenty-dollar marker that the shooter was wrong, and gravely watched a couple enter the room and go to the roulette table.

Phyllis Brighton was very young, with intensely black hair upon which the soft light fell in a lustrous sheen. Her dark eyes were bright with inner excitement.

Her escort was blond and full-faced, with a ruddy glow of health on tanned cheeks and a big mouthful of white teeth. His hair was a smooth pompadour. He held the girl’s arm as though it was something delicately fragile.

The man on Shayne’s left rolled a natural, and the redheaded detective stepped back as the houseman took in his last chip. Ragged red brows came down sharply when he intercepted a fleeting look of understanding between the roulette croupier and Phyllis Brighton’s escort.

His brows stayed down, giving a somber touch of anger to his square-jawed face, when Phyllis dumped a pile of hundred-dollar chips in front of her and began betting them on number twenty-seven. Her outdoorsy-looking escort matched her play with ten-dollar markers.

Shayne stood back from the crap table, dragging on a cigarette and watching the girl lose her money. She had not seen him, at least gave no sign that she saw him.

The after-theater crowd drifted in, and another table went into action.

In Shayne’s deep-set eyes brooding anger flamed. The wheel went around twelve times while he stood there, undecided. Phyllis Brighton had dropped twelve hundred dollars, slightly more than half the stack of chips in front of her.

Shayne thrust knobby hands into his coat pockets and strolled noiselessly toward the door, big feet sinking into the rich red carpet.

He met Chuck Evans and a female companion in the doorway. Chuck looked vaguely uneasy and uncomfortable in a well-fitted tuxedo and black tie. His blue eyes lit up when he recognized Shayne.

“Leaving so early?” Chuck asked.

“They took me.”

Shayne glanced at the round face of Chuck’s companion. He did not smile. Every inch of her was dowdy, the direct antithesis of the elegant women who frequented Marco’s Seaside Casino, from her over-rouged cheeks to the lacy gown which revealed every lumpy contour of her short figure. Heavy breasts were inadequately hidden, but there was a flame of defiant bravado in her elongated eyes.

Shayne said, “Hi, Toots,” through tight unsmiling lips.

She said, “Hello, Red,” but her eyes slid evasively away from his and she brushed past him into the discreet magnificence of the inner room.

“Well,” Chuck said nervously, “we’ll be seein’ you, I reckon,” and followed the woman.

Shayne said, “Sure,” over his shoulder, and went on down a long hall. He kept his hands hunched in his coat pockets, and his lean, hard-jawed face immobile.

At the end of the deeply carpeted hall a wide stairway curved upward. A youth with shifty eyes lounged against the balustrade. A cigarette dangled from his colorless lips.

Shayne stopped in front of him and asked, “Marco upstairs?”

“Yeh. Whaddo you want, an’ I’ll tell him?”

“I’ll tell him myself,” Shayne said with good-natured contempt, and started up the stairway.

“Hey,” exclaimed the youth, “you can’t do that.”

Shayne went on up the steps without a backward glance. At the top he turned to the right down a narrower, paneled hallway, past the closed doors of private dining rooms, to the end where silver letters on a

door read: NO ADMITTANCE.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open soundlessly.

A big man sat at a clean flat-topped desk, his back toward Shayne. Overhead lights shimmered on his oily bald head. He was pointing ah unlighted cigar at a girl wearing a red dress who sat across the office in a leather and chromium chair against the wall. Her thin legs were crossed and the red skirt fell away from her knees. Her short hair looked too alively new-copperish to be natural, and the tint was reflected in green-gray eyes. Her features were sharp and discontented, thin lips were twisted in moody disdain.

The bald man with the cigar was saying,

“-come out of it and act your age. God knows there are other men in the world. There’s Elliot Thomas-what’s the matter with him?”

“Sure.”

The girl’s eyes rested mockingly on Shayne’s angular face and bristly red hair. They slanted upward a trifle at the outer corners, or, perhaps, curiously formed brows made them appear to slant.

“Mugs!” she spat out angrily.

“Now, by God, Thomas isn’t any mug. You-”

“I think the lady is referring to me,” Shayne interrupted.

John Marco swung his heavy body about in the revolving desk chair at the sound of Michael Shayne’s voice. His cheeks were puffy without being soft and he had an incongruously tiny rosebud mouth. He stared at the tall detective for a moment with opaque china-blue eyes, then moistened his ridiculous little mouth with the tip of his tongue.

“What are you sneaking around here for, Shayne?”

“I walked in through the door, Marco.”

“Well, walk out again. Can’t you see-?”

Shayne said, “Go to hell,” very softly. He walked past John Marco, deliberately putting his back to the bald-headed man.

The girl in the red dress clapped her hands merrily.

A lot of the discontent had gone out of her face, and the reddish tint of her eyes was intensified.

“Goody!” she cried, “you’re one of those hard-boiled he-men, aren’t you?”

Shayne stopped in front of her, hands still deep in his pockets. He looked briefly down into her face, then lifted his left eyebrow in quizzical amusement, shaking his head.

“I’m not really hard-boiled. Calling Marco’s bluff is no criterion. Any punk can do that and get away with it.”

“By God, Shayne, do you want to go out on your own feet or be thrown out?”

Shayne paid no heed to the booming voice behind him. He was looking into the girl’s eyes and she was looking back into his. She was about twenty-five, but her face was immature, almost childish.

Shayne shrugged and turned slowly to face the big man whose fat hand was hovering over an electric button on his desk.

“Don’t do anything you’re likely to regret, Marco,” he advised in a remotely gentle voice.

He held Marco’s angry gaze serenely, hooked a toe around the chromium runner of one of the chairs and dragged it forward.