Brett Halliday: The Homicidal Virgin

He gave the driver the name of an inconspicuous, middle-class hotel on a side street in the Northwest section between Miami Avenue and the Boulevard. It was a hotel he knew by reputation only as catering to low-income tourists and natives seeking hotel service at moderate weekly rates.

There was no doorman when he paid off the cab in front, and he carried his suitcase into a square lobby with a few wilted potted palms and half a dozen shabby lounging chairs. A bored bell-captain came out of his cubicle in the center to take his bag, and a prissy little man behind the desk looked at him incuriously as he signed a registration card: Mike Wayne, 1270 Riverview Avenue, Bayonne, N. J.

“I can let you have a nice room with eastern exposure for twelve dollars, Mr. Wayne?” The clerk looked at him expectantly.

“How much of the twelve is for the exposure?”

“Ah… nothing really. That is, if you’d like something cheaper, I have one on the third floor for ten. Or… “

Shayne made an expansive gesture. “Let’s shoot the works on your eastern exposure. Only be a few days.”

The clerk nodded and slid a key across to the waiting bellhop who had been summoned from the rear by the captain. “Take Mr. Wayne to eight-six.”

His guide was a short youth with chubby cheeks and a long, sharp nose. He took Shayne’s bag to double elevators at the rear where an attractive colored girl waited outside an open cage, and they went up to the eighth floor and to a clean and unexpectedly pleasant room with double windows on the east that just cleared the top of adjoining buildings so that a strip of the eastern part of Biscayne Bay and the shoreline of Miami Beach were visible from them.

The boy opened a window and checked the bathroom while Shayne waited patiently. Shayne got his wallet out of his hip pocket and asked, “Can I get a bottle from Room Service?”

“No liquor in the hotel, sir.” The boy paused, his pale blue predatory eyes on the bulging billfold from which Shayne was in the act of extracting a ten. “There’s a liquor store a few doors up the street. I’ll be glad to get what you want.”

Shayne slid the bill out and handed it to him. “A fifth of cognac. Monnet or Martel… or Courvoisier. And a pitcher of ice.”

The lad said, “Right away,” and went out.

Shayne hung his jacket in the closet and checked the desk to see if there was a supply of hotel stationery on hand. There was. He opened his suitcase and began transferring its contents to two bureau drawers, carefully putting the shoulder-holstered pistol on the bottom wrapped in an undershirt where it would certainly be found and reported the first time his room was cased after he went out… if he judged the hotel correctly.

The bellboy came back with a fifth of Martel, a pitcher of ice, and offered Shayne some dollar bills and silver in change. The redhead waved it aside casually said, “That’s okay.” He started to open the bottle and added, “Join me in a small drink?”

“I better not,” the boy said regretfully. “I don’t go off till six.” He started toward the door and Shayne stopped him with one big hand in the air. “What’s the chance getting some sort of action in this dump?”

The boy paused halfway to the door and considered the redhead carefully. “What sort of action? You want a woman…”

Shayne swept his hand downward in a disdainful gesture. “I’ll do my own hustling. Any games running? Friend of mine in New Jersey stayed here last month said he got a fair break.”

The lad’s eyelids shifted downward. “Whyn’t you talk to the night clerk? That’s Dick. Comes on at six. He might know something.”

Shayne said, “Thanks, I will.” The boy went out and Shayne got two glasses from the bathroom and poured a couple of fingers of cognac in one, put ice cubes in the other and filled it with water.

He set the two glasses side by side on the desk, sat down and composed a letter on hotel stationery:

Dear Miss Smith:

You will be surprised to receive this letter after you see that your ad didn’t appear in the Daily News. This is what happened.

The newspaper does not run ads like yours, but my girlfriend that works in the advertising department opened your letter and read it and instead of turning it over to her boss as she was supposed to, she put it in her bag instead and gave it to me at lunch. So I’m the only one that knows about it and you won’t get any other answer but this.

I think I can fill the bill if the price is right. You can reach me at this address any time after nine or ten p.m. Hoping to hear from you,

Very truly yours,

Mike Wayne.

He fortified himself with a long drink of cognac before reading over what he had written, and even at that he shuddered as he came to the end. But he folded it resolutely and sealed it inside a hotel envelope and addressed it to Jane Smith at her Miami mail drop, and then settled back in an easy chair with his feet up on the windowsill overlooking the Bay to take alternate sips of cognac and ice water while he waited for it to be six o’clock so he could go down and confer with the night clerk to start establishing the new identity of Mike Wayne from Bayonne, New Jersey.

By the evening of the third day Michael Shayne had established himself in the routine of the hotel as a regular who was casually accepted by the staff and the other regulars. He left his room promptly each morning and dropped his key at the desk, did not return until nine or ten in the evening when he would be greeted amiably by the night clerk and given the room number in which the game was running that night.

It was a cozy stud-poker set-up, presided over by three residents of the hotel who moved it from one of their rooms to another each night. They played for table stakes with an initial buy of a hundred dollars worth of chips required in order to sit in, and it was a smooth operation designed to milk moderate sums from a succession of suckers as painlessly as possible.

Shayne discovered that much about the game the first night he sat in-the first evening after he checked in. He quickly identified the three regulars as professional gamblers who knew their business, and the two other players who were being set up for the kill. He played his own cards carefully and aloofly while the fat man from New York on his left was efficiently relieved of almost two grand. From conversation around the table it developed that the fat man had been carefully set up for the kill during the preceding three or four evenings, having been allowed to win moderate amounts each evening until he was thoroughly convinced that the game was honest and that they were the suckers ripe to be taken.

And it was an honest game so far as Shayne could ascertain. Within the legal definition of honest poker, that is. They didn’t appear to be using marked cards or doing any manipulating. Such crude methods weren’t needed, of course, with three experienced men playing as a unit against one sucker. By one of them raising lavishly on nothing while one of his partners obviously had the winning hand, the outsider was whip-sawed time after time into losing large pots in which he had no business whatsoever.

It was a familiar enough pattern for such a game, and Shayne cynically won a succession of small pots and stayed put of the big ones, noting that it was the other floater’s third night for being allowed to win, and with a certain admiration for the finesse displayed by the three professionals.

The fat man wasn’t present the second night, but there were two new players to take his place, and all four of the outsiders were allowed to win moderately.

When Shayne sauntered up to the desk at nine-thirty on the third evening, Dick turned to a pigeonhole behind him and withdrew Shayne’s key and a large bulky white envelope. He leaned across the desk and spoke rapidly, “Funny thing this evening, Mr. Wayne. Along about seven a woman called to ask was you in. I told her you never was here before nine. About ten minutes later this chick comes in and asked for you. I can’t swear it was the same one that had just phoned, but I’m pretty sure it was the same voice. When I told her you wouldn’t be in till nine, she slid a ten-spot across to me and started askin’ all these questions. What you looked like, how long you been here, what do you do… all that. You never had told me not to answer questions, so I took her money and told her what she wanted to know. One thing in particular she pushed me hard on.”