Brett Halliday: Michael Shaynes' 50th case

The ping of a bell from the kitchen drew her attention, and she returned with a tray loaded down with more breakfast than Timothy Rourke had looked in the face for many years.

The toast was a beautiful golden brown and each slice was inundated with fresh country butter. The sausage patties were darkly crisp on the outside and tenderly tangy underneath; the eggs were, indeed, gently and lovingly scrambled to a creamy and fluffy deliciousness, and the hashed-brown potatoes were definitely a culinary triumph.

After setting the dishes out in front of him, Mabel had to go to the cash register to ring up the bill for the young couple and their two children who were leaving, and Rourke had an opportunity to sample each item and miraculously discover that his appetite was unimpaired before Mabel returned and stood before him again and asked, “You going to write up a story about it, for your paper in Miami?”

Rourke chewed fast and swallowed deeply and gulped some hot coffee. He said firmly, “Anything that will give me the slightest excuse to linger in Sunray for another night and expose me to food like this tomorrow morning will be a gift from the Gods. Certainly, I think the Miami News needs a special correspondent to handle the Blake murder case, and I just happen to be it.” He demolished another slice of toast and forked more scrambled egg into his mouth and chewed vigorously. “Where do I find your local police department?”

“Right down the highway four blocks and turn to your left on Main Street. It’s right on your left… the City Hall and all. Gee, it’s exciting, isn’t it? Will my name really be in the paper?”

“Mabel Handel,” Rourke assured her, “will be prominently featured as this reporter’s most reliable source of information. Now then. How about some more background on the Blakes? Marvin and Ellie? And you call the little daughter Sissy? Did you say she’s six?”

“Everybody calls her Sissy,” Mabel told him vaguely. “I suppose she has another name, but I never heard it. Ellie and Marvin… they were sweethearts in high school, and got married a couple of years after he graduated and went to work in Mr. Harper’s garage. That was Ellie’s papa. But it wasn’t like he married the boss’s daughter trying to get ahead in the world,” she hurried on. “Right after they got married, Marvin leased a shop of his own, and then got the Ford Agency. He’s done real well, I guess. Everyone likes him… and Ellie, too. They’re about as much as what you might call society as Sunray Beach has, I guess. Were, I should say. My goodness, I just can’t get it through my head that Ellie is actually dead. When I think of poor little Sissy without any mama any more, it just about breaks my heart.” Big tears welled out of her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She sniffled loudly and put her apron up to her face and turned her back on Rourke with heaving shoulders.

He continued munching on his food, but it tasted not quite as good as it had in the beginning. Mabel returned in a moment, her eyes red-rimmed, to refill his coffee cup, and he pushed the half-emptied plates away from him with a sigh. “I haven’t eaten as much of anything as good for years, Mabel. Tell your cook so, will you?”

“I sure will.” She smiled at him diffidently. “You never did tell me your name.”

“Rourke. Tim Rourke.”

“You staying here at the motel?”

“As long as I’m in town. Depends on what I find out down at the police station. In the meantime, you keep your ears open for any news, huh? I’ll be back.”

“I sure will, Mr. Rourke.”

“Tim… if you’re going to be Mabel,” he told her with a grin as he slid off his stool.

“Sure… Tim.” She walked down behind the counter to the cash register, totalling up his bill on her pad with a worried frown, and she handed it to him hesitantly, saying, “Prices sure are sky-high, but I got to charge what the boss says.”

Rourke grinned cheerfully when he saw that her total was less than a dollar and a half. He put two ones on top of it and told her, “The expense account will go that far, Mabel.” He turned toward the door and paused to ask with assumed disinterest, “There is a bar in town, isn’t there?”

“Right on Main Street just past City Hall. But it won’t be opened until twelve o’clock.”

“Naturally not,” said Rourke, trying to repress his bitterness. “And I bet it closes at ten o’clock at night, too.”

“It sure does. They say Sunray’s pretty much a ten o’clock town.” She laughed lightly. “How’d you guess?”

Rourke said, “It just feels like that sort of town, Mabel,” and went out the front door with a wave of his hand.

Chief of Police Ollie Jenson was a harassed and unhappy man. He had a stomach ulcer which he had lived with for going-on twenty years, and which he had learned to keep under pretty fair control by nipping gently throughout the day on a bottle of Indian River moonshine which he kept concealed in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk at police headquarters. By trial and error he had determined many years ago that legal, bonded whiskey was no good for that medicinal purpose. He had his own private theory that the coloring matter added after distillation was an irritant that caused a man’s ulcer to act up. Besides, the moonshine cost him nothing; a prerogative of his official position.

Chief Jenson also had a sharp-tongued and nagging wife whom he had lived with for slightly more than twenty years. He couldn’t keep her under control by nipping at moonshine at home because she was rabidly Temperance and there hadn’t been a drink in their house since that memorable day nineteen years ago when she had mistakenly poured a cup of colorless fluid out of a Mason jar standing in plain sight on one of her kitchen shelves (the purloined letter technique) into a pot of shredded cabbage, thinking it was vinegar. The local pastor and his wife were guests at dinner that night, and the shredded cabbage did not get eaten. Neither did Ollie Jenson ever bring another innocent-looking Mason jar home with him.

Ollie also had a sprightly, teen-aged daughter named Mary Lou. She was not overly bright, but Nature had compensated for that lack by endowing her with a pair of superb physical appurtenances which had been widely admired and discussed by the male youth of Sunray since Mary Lou reached her fifteenth year. While vaguely aware of this situation, Chief Jenson had not been unduly worried by it until the past few months when Mary Lou had begun staying out too late and too often with the son of the local banker who owned a hot-rod flivver. Ollie was not an overly suspicious father, and he had an indulgent idea that kids would be kids no matter what a parent said or did about it, but he suspected (privately and unhappily) that neither his daughter nor the banker’s son had a thorough grounding in the theory and use of contraceptives, and he saw no way to provide them with such knowledge.

It was not a matter he could discuss with his wife.

On top of those harassments of more-or-less long-standing, this morning now, there was this murder dumped in his lap. It was the first murder that had ever occurred in Sunray Beach, and it was a real nasty kind of thing.

That nice Ellie Blake. Strangled in her own bed in the middle of the night, and not one single clue to the perpetrator of the foul deed that you could lay your hands on. It had to be some stranger, of course. Some hitchhiker or bum passing through town. It couldn’t be a local resident. Why, Ollie reckoned Ellie Blake was just about the most-respected and best-liked woman in town. And old Marv!

Everybody liked Marvin Blake. He didn’t have an enemy in the world. Look at the way he ran his garage and automobile agency. Always gave a man a fair deal for his money, and leaned over backward to give a little bit more on a trade-in than the book allowed. Good, upright, church-going people, with money in the bank and a decent mortgage on a nice house that was getting paid off regular every year.