Brett Halliday: Michael Shaynes' 50th case

But why, he wondered. In the name of God, why? Taken all in all, he and his fellow delegates were a fairly representative sector of the American way of life. What sort of kick does a decent guy get out of sitting in the darkness with a lot of other men and watching that kind of stuff on a screen?

Then he wondered if he was being a bit of a prude. He didn’t think of himself as prudish. Actually, he was all for sex. He thought sex was wonderful. He was thirty-five years old and normally masculine, and he defied any man to get more pleasure out of sex than he did.

With the right woman… at the right time.

But he didn’t anticipate any sexual pleasure from sitting through the sort of display that was slated for the delegates tonight. He considered it abnormal. A perverted sort of thing. But he knew that if he dared express his opinion out loud he would be hooted at all over the place by his friends. It would be he who would be considered abnormal. Somehow or other, he decided, it has come to be considered one of the marks of robust American masculinity to enjoy such exhibitions.

And he wondered vaguely how that had come about. Had it always been so, or was it one of the newer and more unpleasant aspects of modern living? And he wondered if American males were different, or if it was the same throughout the world when men go out together and don’t have to answer to their womenfolk.

Anyhow, he supposed he’d better attend the thing. A man has to go along and pretend to be one of the boys. And suddenly he caught himself wondering how many of the others felt about the coming evening as he did. It was interesting to speculate on that. How many of the others were simply going along to be Good Sports? If a secret poll were taken and the real truth arrived at, he wondered how many others would prefer to have the convention end right now so they could go on home to their wives and children without spending this final night in Miami.

While he was asking himself that question without getting any answer, he caught himself studying a printed warning lying on the table beside him. In large black letters, it said:

CHECK-OUT TIME AT THIS HOTEL IS 4 P.M.

He looked at his watch without quite knowing why he did so. It was 3:22. In thirty-eight minutes the official hotel day would end and another would start. Another twelve dollars charged to him for the room he was sitting in.

The whole trip, darn it, had been quite expensive. Like twelve dollars for a dinky little hotel room. And that was a special rate for the delegates, of course. You could get a larger and much nicer room at the new Sunray Motel for eight dollars a night. And that was the regular rate. And everything else in Miami was more expensive in proportion. Breakfast cost from seventy-five cents to two dollars, depending on how hungry you were, with an extra service charge and a tip if you felt lazy and had it brought to your room. Cocktails were a dollar each in the Starroom downstairs, and dinners from three dollars up.

He hadn’t kept track of every penny he’d spent in four days, but he knew it was a little over thirty-five dollars in cash on top of his hotel bill. Plus the chits he had signed. Say, forty-five dollars at least. And in exactly another thirty-eight minutes there would be another twelve-dollar room charge added to that. More than eighty dollars, at least, and by the time the evening was over and next morning’s breakfast it would be a hundred dollars easily.

That wasn’t so bad, actually, Marvin reassured himself. He had warned Ellie in the beginning that the trip was likely to cost at least a hundred dollars. She insisted that they could afford it. And she had made him bring along another fifty dollars in cash for “extras.”

So he had plenty of money, all right. But it bothered Marvin to spend so much on himself and have nothing to show for it. Oh, he had a small present for Sissy in his bag. A father can’t go away to the city on a four-day trip and not take a present back to his six-year-old daughter. Not if he wanted her to go on thinking he was the most wonderful Daddy in the world. And he had bought a nice box of chocolates for Ellie. Just something so she would know he had thought about her while he was away.

But he did wish he felt he could afford to buy the earrings he had seen in the little gift shop next door to the hotel. They were really beautiful, and just right for Ellie. They were large and shaped like flowers, each petal inlaid with mother-of-pearl and rimmed with gold. The mother-of-pearl caught the light and reflected it in iridescent colors. Sitting there in the hotel room, he could visualize the earrings fastened to Ellie’s pretty ear lobes, contrasting with her thick, black hair which curled around her face and formed the perfect background for the gleaming mother-of-pearl. They would be for the times she wore an evening gown. That was only on special occasions, but those earrings were just what she needed to add the finishing touch for those occasions.

He was tempted again as he sat there and thought about the earrings. But he knew he’d better not buy them. Ellie would love them all right, but she’d know right away that they must have been awfully expensive and she’d never let up on him until she found out how much they had cost. And when she did find out she would more than likely put them away regretfully in a drawer because she’d feel guilty wearing anything that cost that much… and so what would be the good of his splurging on them?

Twelve dollars for one night in a hotel room, he thought, and the earrings that were too expensive to buy for Ellie only cost twenty-eight dollars.

Then the brilliant idea came to him, and he sat upright excitedly while he thought it all out. Ellie wouldn’t mind his spending so much on a gift for her if he could prove that he had saved it somewhere else. A minute ago he had figured he must be out about eighty dollars already on the trip. Not counting his railroad ticket. And his room and everything tonight would run another twenty at the very least.

But it wasn’t four o’clock yet. It was still almost thirty minutes before another hotel day started. And there he was, sitting around dreading the evening to come. An evening that was going to cost him twenty dollars or even more! And he couldn’t afford to spend twenty-eight dollars for a wonderful present for Ellie that would cause her eyes to light up and get all warm and loving when she saw them.

The heck he couldn’t! Wasn’t there a late afternoon train to Sunray Beach? Leaving Miami about six o’clock and getting in between ten and eleven?

He got up swiftly and went to the closet where he dragged out his suitcase and got out the railroad timetable. He was right. There was a train leaving at 6:32 and arriving at Sunray Beach at 10:20. There was a little g in front of it and he had to check the list of symbols to see what a “g” meant.

Stops only to discharge passengers.

Well, that was all right. He had a return ticket to Sunray so they’d have to stop and let him off. It was pretty late to be getting home and there wouldn’t be any taxi at the station because that train didn’t stop very often. Probably no one else getting off either who could give him a ride home.

Of course, he thought, he could telephone Ellie to tell her he was coming, and she’d be at the station to meet him. She didn’t expect him back until tomorrow afternoon, and he thought to himself how happy her voice would be if he told her he was homesick for her and Sissy and was coming home tonight instead. She’d be there at the station to meet him, all right. And with Sissy, too. For a special occasion like this, Ellie was the kind of wife and mother who’d break all the rules and keep Sissy up for the fun of going to the station and meeting her Daddy.