Brett Halliday: The Private Practice of Michael Shayne

Some of the grimness went out of his face as he breathed deeply of the warm night air permeated with the cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine, yet carrying also the tang of sea salt from waves breaking on sandy beaches.

It was March, with the threat of summer heat already driving the winter tourists northward in droves, but the season that Shayne liked best of all the year in Miami.

He drove in a relaxed posture with big hands gripping the wheel loosely, faintly annoyed by feeling within himself something he had often derided in others, a positive reaction to the moonlight witchery of a Miami night.

He had sometimes recognized the same inward stirrings in the past, he reflected, and it had always been a simple matter to rid himself of them with the assistance of the nearest complaisant woman. Curiously, he felt only a vague distaste when he considered seeking the same remedy tonight.

Damn Phyllis! She was too innately decent to waste herself on a louse like Grange. If she was determined to go in for that sort of thing, he might as well When he turned onto the causeway he saw that there was a yellowish phosphorescence on the water. The breeze was stronger, more full-flavored. He allowed his thoughts to return to Phyllis Brighton as she had been that night when he sent her away from his apartment, let speculative memories have their way with him as he drove into Miami.

The scowl remained fixed on his face, but there was no real inward causation for it as he swung around the traffic circle in front of a great department store into the west lane of brilliantly lighted Biscayne Boulevard, and drove on past cool, shadowy Biscayne Park.

Passing the end of Flagler Street, he turned to the right at the next corner, then to the left, and a block farther south he pulled in at the curb, parked at the side entrance to an apartment hotel backed up to the Miami River. He went into a small hallway leading on to a lighted lobby, passed the elevators and climbed a stairway to the second floor to his apartment.

He heard the muffled ring of his telephone as he fitted a key into the lock. He entered unhurriedly and switched lights on a large, comfortably furnished living-room.

The wall telephone continued to b-r-r-r loudly.

He closed the door and tipped his hat back, went directly to a liquor cabinet where he took down a half-full bottle of modestly priced cognac. He pulled the cork on the way to the phone, took down the receiver and said, “Hello,” then tipped the bottle and drank deeply.

A metallic masculine voice said, “Shayne?”

“Talking.”

He didn’t recognize the voice over the wire. A deep crease formed between his eyes. It was evident that the man at the other end was trying to disguise his voice. He tilted the bottle again as he listened to the man saying rapidly, “I’ve got a case for you, Shayne. Something big. Can you come right away?”

Shayne lowered the bottle and held it loosely by the neck.

“How big? Where?”

The tone of his response was one of complete disinterest.

“Plenty big. It’s something I can’t discuss over the phone. Can you come to the beach right away?”

The voice was muffled, as if it came through a cloth over the mouthpiece.

“I suppose I can,” Shayne said dubiously. The crease between his eyes deepened. “Who’s speaking?”

“Never mind. You mightn’t come if I told you.”

Shayne bellowed, “To hell with that,” and slammed the receiver on the hook.

He stood on wide-spaced feet, scowling at the wall, then shrugged his shoulders in dismissal of the affair. He went to the littered table and set the bottle down. Going to the cabinet again, he took a tall wine glass from a shelf and was on his way back to the table when the phone rang again.

He blandly ignored it. He filled the slender glass to the rim with amber fluid, drank it slowly and with whole-souled enjoyment. Not until the glass was empty did he lift the receiver and stop the persistent ringing.

The same voice said guardedly, “Hello. Mr. Shayne? I guess we were cut off.”

“I hung up,” Shayne tossed into the mouthpiece. There was a brief silence.

Then the man said, “I must have misunderstood you. It sounded as though you said you hung up.”

“I did.”

“Oh.” Then the voice continued, “If you have to know my name, it’s Grange-Harry Grange,” in a strange, guttural tone, as if the man’s mouth was pressed tightly against the instrument.

“You don’t sound like Grange to me,” Shayne said flatly.

“You don’t ever know who’s listening in on a damned telephone,” the man snapped. “I’ve got to be cautious.”

“Have it your way,” Shayne said impatiently. “If you’ve got anything worth listening to, spill it.”

There was a hesitant silence.

Then with sudden decision the man said, “It’s about your friend, Larry Kincaid.”

Shayne tensed. “What about him?”

“He’s in a jam. I’m calling for him. Can you come to the beach right away?”

“Yes.”

Shayne’s eyes were very bright. The thumb and first finger of his left hand massaged the lobe of his left ear.

“I’m calling from a place near the Seventy-ninth Street causeway. I’ll meet you down the beach a few blocks-at the end of the first street dead-ending against the ocean. I’ll park my car with my lights shining west so you can’t miss me. How long will it take you?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Good.”

The sound of the receiver being jammed on the hook clicked against Shayne’s ear drum.

He hung up slowly, went back to the table and poured another long drink, put it down in evenly spaced swallows, then opened the front table drawer to get a. 32 automatic.

The gun was not there.

His clock pointed to 11:02. He started to the bedroom, thinking that he might have slipped it under his pillow, turned back and pulled the drawer of the desk all the way out, frowning and poking around in the litter of papers. Dazed and confounded, he set the drawer in the grooves and closed it slowly.

“Now what the hell,” he muttered, casting back to the last time he had seen the pistol. Just a couple of days ago. Steel rusts fast in Miami’s damp climate, and he distinctly remembered cleaning the weapon and leaving a film of oil on the metal two days previously.

Also, he was positive he had returned it to the drawer where he invariably kept it.

He crossed to the phone and asked for the night clerk.

“Shayne speaking. Has anyone been in my room lately without my knowledge?”

“Not that I know of, Mr. Shayne. Except-your friend, Mr. Kincaid. He waited up there for you earlier this evening. You were out when he called-and he asked to wait for you in the apartment.”

Shayne said, “I see.” He hung up.

He stood uncertainly for a moment, gray eyes narrowed to slits. Larry had visited his room this evening-his pistol was gone. Now, Larry was in trouble He went out of the room in long swift strides, down the stairway to his car, made a U-turn in front of the drawbridge and turned into Biscayne Boulevard. He headed straight north, passing both the County and Venetian causeways, getting his battered roadster up to a smooth sixty where the residential section began to thin out and there was little traffic.

Grim-jawed and tense, trying not to think at all, he held the speedometer needle at sixty until he slowed for the traffic light at Seventy-ninth Street and swung to the right. Leaving the lighted boulevard behind, he had the indicator shivering just below eighty when he rolled up on the first bridge of the almost deserted Seventy-ninth Street causeway, holding it at that speed until approaching the sweeping curve near the east end which he made with screaming tires.