Brett Halliday - Killers from the Keys

He liked the Pink Flamingo Motel. It suited him perfectly. Now, as he sat despondently on the edge of a rumpled bed in one drab cabin and watched daylight disappear outside the dirty windowpane across the room, he wondered fuzzily if he would ever get up the courage and the energy to leave the welcoming arms of the Pink Flamingo. Because he did feel oddly welcome there. There was a depressing aura about the place that fitted his mood perfectly.

It took him warmly and comfortably into its embrace each night when he returned from one of his increasingly less frequent jaunts into the city’s night-life. With a bottle of whiskey to nibble on (Steven Shephard was not really a drinking man) and with a noisy refrigerator stocked with the simplest of food supplies, a man could comfortably doze away the hot, silent days without recourse to thinking, staying just drunk enough to stifle any active pangs of conscience, and to blank out the fears and the questions that arose when he let himself peer into the uncharted future.

Steven Shephard was a man of about forty. Slightly over medium height, perhaps a little less than medium weight, with light brown hair that receded from both temples. He wore a neatly trimmed mustache and neatly pressed gray slacks and fresh white shirt that he had put on at noon that day after showering, and a neat bow tie.

There were no lines of great character on his face. He looked like a man who had made few decisions in his life, who had drifted somewhat aimlessly but probably pleasantly along middle-class and orderly avenues of existence, not asking or demanding much from life, and therefore suffering few disappointments.

In the open closet beyond the end of the bed, a conservative sport jacket and a light tan summer suit hung neatly on hangers. Beneath them was a somewhat scuffed, brown suitcase and a pair of dark blue bedroom slippers. A pair of brown and white striped cotton pajamas and a black rayon bathrobe were hung on a hook from the closet door and completed all of his wardrobe that was visible.

On the top of a cheap bureau under the window and directly across from where he sat was an almost-empty bottle of expensive bourbon and a small framed photograph of a woman and two small children. The woman was about thirty, pleasant-faced but unsmiling. Her expression wasn’t exactly grim, but there was more than a hint of severity about the tightness of her mouth, the chiseled placidity of her unremarkable features.

Steven Shephard shifted his disinterested gaze from the windowpane that was darkening with gathering dusk to the photograph beneath it. His gaze remained disinterested while it rested on the picture, but he said aloud, moodily, “Bitch.” He appeared pleased with the sound of the spoken word, and a faint smile congratulated himself for his audacity in saying it aloud.

He touched his lips with the tip of his tongue and spoke aloud again, almost wonderingly and certainly with an intonation of pleasurable surprise: “You’re a bitch, Emily. You always were a bitch, and always will be. A well-bred one, of course.” His voice insisted that he was determined to be completely honest even in the aloneness of the cabin where only he himself could hear his voice.

He dropped his gaze from the photograph to the floor between his knees and thought about the young girl dancer at the Bright Spot.

His hands clenched slowly into fists on the bed beside him, and his eyeballs became moist and humid. Strange, atavistic roilings were in his bloodstream. There was a warmth in his loins which slowly spread over his body and took unholy possession of him. He would see her again tonight. For two nights he had stubbornly remained closeted in his cabin, denying the newly-discovered demands of the flesh, drinking sufficient whiskey, hour after hour, to blur the insistent knowledge within him that this was for him: that he, Steven Shephard, after thirty years of carefully-regulated, according-to-the-book, safe-and-sane and socially-correct sexual attitudes, had thrown all this aside and succumbed (happily, by God, and with a youthful fervor that Emily had never known he possessed) to the allure of quivering young flesh that nakedly and unashamedly sought lust for the sheer sake of lust, that traded sweat and torment and passion for sexual release and for nothing else, that knew no other reason for living and sought no other reason.

Shephard heard a scraping sound outside the window and jerked his head up angrily to glare at the, now, opaque glass. That would be Peterson, the motel manager. He was always snooping at the windows. As soon as darkness came, he began his stealthy rounds. Normally, Shephard didn’t mind being spied upon. Alone in the cabin, he had little to hide from Peterson’s pruriently peering eyes. But now, with his heart pounding and with the clear image of Sloe Burn’s lasciviously nubile body searing across his mind, he felt ashamed and trapped, as though the man outside his window had discovered him committing an unmanly and erotic act on his own body.

He stood up and squared his shoulders, walked a trifle unsteadily to the door and jerked it open. The afterglow of twilight lingered in the sky and, as he had suspected, Peterson rounded the corner of his cabin from the windowed side, and shuffled toward him.

The motel manager was a small, gnomelike man, with a bushy-haired head that was too large for the rest of him, and wizened features and humid eyes that refused to meet another man’s gaze directly. He always held his over-sized head cocked slightly on one side which gave him a sly look of cunning.

He said, “Evening, Mr. Tucker,” Coming to an uneasy halt a couple of feet from the figure in the open doorway. “Everything okay?”

Shephard said, “You ought to know, Peterson. Couldn’t you tell by peeking in my window?”

“Now see here now,” protested Peterson with a righteous whine in his voice. “You have absolutely no right to make a statement like that, Mr. Tucker. It’s untrue and uncalled-for and downright libelous. I’m making my evening rounds, as usual, to see everything’s quiet and shipshape. Is it my fault if you leave your shade up so’s anyone can see in your room?”

“You know as well as I do that the shade is broken and won’t come down. I complained about it the first day I was here.”

“Well, now, I don’t recollect that, Mr. Tucker. I sure don’t. I’ll have a man around to tend to it first thing in the morning.”

“That’s what you promised me a week ago.”

“Slipped my mind, I guess.” Peterson shook his head and rubbed his jaw reflectively. “So many little things breaking down all the time here. I keep telling the owners and telling them we got to keep things in better shape if we want to attract the right sort of people, but they’re so tight they hate to spend a nickel on maintenance. Aside from the window shade, you’re cozy and comfortable, huh? Hardly even go out at all, do you?”

His voice had an intimate sort of buddy-buddy quality to it that hinted he was aware of all Shephard’s secrets; it offered soothing assurance that the guest in No. 3 had nothing to fear from him,… and it discreetly invited further confidences any time Shephard felt the need for human companionship.

Shephard said, “I’m comfortable enough,” and stepped back surlily to close the door in Peterson’s face. The interior of the cabin was quite dim by this time, and he pressed the wall switch to light the room with a yellowish glow from the low-wattage bulb in the ceiling.

He was trembling with a listless sort of anger as he crossed to the dresser and slopped half an inch of whiskey into the bottom of a water glass. He turned the tap and ran water on top of the whiskey, wondering disinterestedly why the manager irritated him so.

He took a long swallow of the heavily-watered whiskey and enjoyed the faint warmth of it as it trickled down into his stomach.