Killers from the Keys (6 page)

Baron McTige wilted slowly. He blinked his eyes and mumbled something indistinguishable, and turned to pick up the crushed cigar. He dropped it into an ashtray on Shayne’s desk, and then lumbered past the rigid redhead with face averted and eyes downcast.

Shayne watched the door slam shut behind him, and then went back to his desk and sat down. He was pouring more cognac in the two nested cups when the door swung open violently and Lucy whirled inside. She exclaimed, “Why didn’t you
hit
him, Michael? He was the most awful lout…”

Shayne grinned and waggled his forefinger at her. “A man of great perception, I thought.”

“Michael Shayne!” She stamped her foot angrily. “If I ever told you some of the things he said…”

“He knows a beautiful secretary when he sees one. Come on and admit you were secretly flattered.”

“By that…
oaf?”

“All right,” said Shayne pleasantly. “Come out and have dinner with me, and I’ll flatter you.”

“And then deposit me safely at home and slip off to the Bright Spot without me.”

“Why, no,” said Shayne, studying her approvingly. “You’re a big girl now. You’re invited, angel, and don’t blame me if you don’t like what you see.”

6

THE PINK FLAMINGO MOTEL was situated a little distance off The Tamiami Trail on the western outskirts of the sprawling city. It had been constructed in the late Forties when land prices were soaring and building supplies were again available after the long period of war shortages, and the city seemed to be inevitably spreading westward.

Somehow, though, the westward expansion had stopped short of the tract of land on which the motel was built, and there was an expanse of uninhabited, unattractive, palmetto-covered land between it and the garish lights of newer and more attractive motels and roadside spots that clustered along the Trail closer in that marked the real western gateway to the city.

Thus, inevitably, standing isolated and sadly alone, the Pink Flamingo was passed up by the majority of tourists arriving from the West Coast, and its meager clientele consisted of those who turned off at the sagging roadside sign in the hope of finding cheaper accommodations than would be available farther on, and a nightly smattering of local residents attracted by its isolation and absence of bright lights, seeking a discreet rendezvous with illicit love where no questions would be asked and the likelihood of embarrassing encounters with acquaintances would be reduced to a minimum. These latter, of course, invariably arrived to take possession of their cabins after darkness had fallen, so that during daylight hours the grounds were likely to be almost completely deserted.

The man who sat alone in cabin number 3 liked it this way. He had changed his address five times since arriving in Miami three weeks ago, gravitating each time downward to cheaper and less populated living quarters. It wasn’t that Steven Shephard lacked the funds to stay wherever he wished in the city that is notorious for its high-priced living accommodations. Any one of the luxury hotels along Miami Beach’s oceanfront would have gladly welcomed Shephard as a guest to remain as long as he wished.

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.

He had just found out in these past few weeks what mighty fine stuff whiskey was. Before that he had always confined his drinking to parties because that was the only socially acceptable way to drink, and invariably he had drunk too much and made a fool out of himself and suffered the joint hells of a hangover and Emily’s sharp tongue the next day for his disgraceful conduct.

But this slow and carefully spaced solitary drinking was something very different, and he was as pleased with himself for discovering the process as though he had achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough of some sort.

About an ounce every two hours was the ticket. You started early in the morning when you first woke up, and you got that soothing warmth in your stomach that brought on a sort of torpid indifference to the fact that it was another day. So you closed your eyes and dozed for awhile, and dreamed meaningless little dreams, mostly about when you were a little boy.

And then you aroused yourself enough to eat something, maybe. An egg or a piece of cheese and a slice of bread. And then you drank another ounce and dozed some more, and the day went on in a kind of pleasant blur that kept reality at bay and wafted you along to the enveloping darkness of another night.

This would be his last drink in the cabin until he came home later. Much later, he told himself, with restrained gladness. Midnight or three o’clock in the morning, or whenever he damn well pleased. And he must remember to bring another bottle back when he did come because there was only about one more drink left in the bottom of this one and he couldn’t face the thought of going out in the daylight tomorrow to buy another.

He seated himself carefully again on the side of the bed, hunched forward a little with shoulders stooped and both hands nursing the glass. A sedate, nondescript sort of man, and to see him sitting there, sipping pleasurably at the nauseatingly warm and slightly alcoholic drink no one in the world could possibly have guessed that he had two hundred thousand dollars worth of United States bills in his possession.

7

THE BRIGHT SPOT was a large, square, ugly, one-story, stucco building squatting all by itself in the middle of a two-acre palmetto-fringed clearing about half a mile from the Trail and just outside the city limits of Miami.

It got its name from a ten-foot revolving disc of burnished brass mounted on a wooden tower a hundred feet above the ground and lighted at night by two spotlights so that it reflected a dazzling brilliance and was a landmark that could be seen for miles. It was approached by a narrow, twisting road through the surrounding palmetto hummocks, which debouched onto a large parking area capable of accommodating the same number of automobiles as the number of persons who could be squeezed inside the building. This was necessary because at least ninety percent of the patrons who visited the Bright Spot came alone in their cars. It was not a place that encouraged couples or foursomes, and the continuous floor-show from 8:00 P.M. until closing time had not been designed for mutual enjoyment either by mixed couples or even by a group of men friends out for a convivial evening on the town.

The Bright Spot offered a show that was calculated to arouse guilt feelings inside any male who sat through it. It was badly and simply revolting to most women. So men mostly came to the Bright Spot alone, furtively ashamed to be there and thankful for the extremely dim lighting inside which made it next to impossible for them to be recognized even if their best friends happened to be seated at the next table.

The management had planned it that way, and exploited the situation by providing enough B-girls so no man had to remain alone any longer than he wanted to. These girls were of two definite types, to appeal to the inward needs of two sorts of men who came there.

There was a covey of blatantly under-dressed and over-painted young girls, as close to the age of consent as the management was able to hire, whose bare, perfumed flesh was openly for sale and no bones about it. In the smoke-shrouded darkness of the big dining room with only a colored spotlight on the raised platform at one end where strippers did their bumps and grinds and monotonously removed their clothing, sweaty bodies could be glued together for long periods without attracting attention, saliva could be expertly traded between hot mouths and trysts arranged by panted words, and a man didn’t have to bother pretending he had come there for any other reason.

Indeed, in the small, almost entirely enclosed booths lining two walls of the room, which always had a large RESERVED sign on the table when unoccupied which could be removed only by slipping a five to the headwaiter, such trysts were frequently consummated without having to leave the premises. This feat was accomplished by only the most expert of the girls, and their services drew a premium price from men who were in the know and liked their sex served to them in that manner.

Then there was a second type of female employee who appealed to a different kind of patron. These were not as numerous as their young companions, but they had proved to be a distinct drawing card at the Bright Spot over a long period of time. They were older and more experienced courtesans who used every artifice of restrained make-up and careful grooming to appear to be exactly what they were not.

With them, a man who liked to pretend and believe that he was irresistible to otherwise chaste women was allowed to carry on this pretense to his heart’s content. In fact, he was encouraged to do so. This second group did not openly solicit the attention of men. They sat discreetly alone at tables and booths throughout the room, pensively toying with tall drinks, with demurely downcast eyes, yet clearly telegraphing a message to every male within eyesight:
Poor, lonely me. Here I sit, deserted by some brute of a man, ashamed to lift my eyes to the depraved exhibition going on across the room, and yet… and yet, vaguely stirred by it nevertheless. Because I am a woman. Deep down inside, I’m all woman, yearning for a mate. Aching to be seduced and taken by some male who can answer the deep and primitive impulses that stir within me.

In that hot-blooded atmosphere these women were not allowed to sit alone very long. The world is full of men who fondly believe themselves to be Great Lovers and will not pass up any opportunity to prove it. A moderately attractive and half-way modest appearing woman sitting alone in a joint like the Bright Spot is like waving a red flag in front of an enraged bull.

And so the Bright Spot had proved itself a hugely successful operation and was crowded every night of the week with moderate spenders while many of the luxury sucker traps on the Beach were complaining that they couldn’t meet their overhead.

Thus, at nine o’clock on this night, more than half the tables and booths in the big, semi-dark room were occupied. A five-piece combo (one of three that would alternate throughout the evening) was beating out a slow, corny piece, while the stripper on stage was sinuously taking off her clothes, one lingering garment at a time, to the muted beat of the music which would build almost imperceptibly to a throbbing crescendo at the finale when the statuesque artist would stand briefly revealed in the colored spotlight completely nude (except for three pink rosettes that were glued onto her body not too firmly and might, just
might,
drop from their moorings in the last moment before the light was switched off).

It was early, yet, in the evening, and the minute quantity of alcohol in each drink served had not brought about any general degree of rowdy drunkenness among the early diners such as would be evidenced a few hours later.

At a small table in the corner beyond the spotlighted platform, the featured dance team of the evening were having an acrid argument.

“Don’t you go tryin’ to tell me where to get off, Ralph Billiter. I worked this act up and you know it. If I was to walk off tomorrow, where’d you be.”

“That’s what I’m always telling you, Essie. That’s why you got to get yourself smart an’ quit fooling around on the floor with men between numbers.” Sloe Burn’s companion at the table was as young as she, and muscular. He had tousled hair and a broad, sullen, unintelligent face. He was hunched toward her with heavy forearms on the table, big hands clenched angrily as he glared at her.

She leaned back and puffed contemptuously on a cigarette without inhaling it. “I don’t fool around with men. I get paid for drinkin’ with them, just like the other girls do. You know they pay good money to get me to set at their table.”

“You do more’n just drink at the table with that old goat you’re so sweet on.”

“What if I do? I ain’t your woman, Ralph Billiter.”

He snarled, “Like hell you ain’t. You bin my woman since you first laid with me in the swamp back uh your pappy’s barn.”

“We was just kids then. Freddie’s different, Ralphie.” A softer, yearning note came into Sloe Burn’s voice. “He’s real polite an’ scared, an’ he treats me like I was his own daughter, sort of. Not really, I guess,” she hurried on, looking slightly horrified by what she had said. “I don’t mean he’s the kind… you know… to do with his own girl what he does with me… but it is sort of like that! He’s got respect for me, Ralphie, an’ a lot of money too,” she added naively, taking the cigarette from her mouth and pushing the tip of her tongue out to wet her red lips.

“How you know that for a fact?” Ralph challenged her. “How much real money you done seen?”

“He gimme a hunderd-dollar bill twice, didn’t he?”

“That ain’t
money.”
Ralph spat the word out angrily. “You know how you and me figgered it when we run off up here to Miami. We was gonna make it big. We got the chance, I’m tellin’ you, if you just don’t go an’ spoil it. Our dance is going over bigger every night. We gonna get us a real bigtime manager an’ get us booked up north in Noo York an’ places like that. That’s where the real cash money is. Don’t you be messing it up just when we’re about to get goin’.”

“How’m I messing it up?” she asked innocently.

“You know how.” One of his big hands shot out and caught her wrist in a crushing grip. “I’ll kill you some night, you keep it up. I’ll just pure kill you, Essie. I’ll get to thinkin’ about you an’ that old man, and my guts’ll twist up in a knot and I’ll purely stick that conch shell right in your white belly an’ twist it good.” He was breathing heavily, half out of his chair and leaning over the table.

She slapped his face with her free hand. It wasn’t a dainty, feminine slap. It was a hefty, infuriated wallop, with tempered muscles behind it, and a lot of solid young weight. He grunted, more with surprise than hurt, and released her wrist.

She sat erect and glared up into his scowling face. “You listen to me, Ralphie Boy. Any big talk of killin’, just don’t forget a conch shell’ll slide into your belly just as easy as mine. Aw, let’s cut it out,” she broke out crossly. “We’re a team, Ralph, you and me. If Freddie don’t come across with a wad of money right quick, sure I’ll quit him. Why not? But you ain’t got no cause to be jealous. If you ain’t gettin’ enough…”

“How big a wad?” demanded Ralph sullenly, settling back into his chair.

“Big enough so we can make that trip to New York or wherever, and make it right. So’s they’ll sit up and take notice when we hit town. Anyhow,” she ended dispiritedly, “he ain’t been around for a couple of nights. Not since those two men was looking for him. I reckon maybe they found him, so what’re you gripin’ about?”

“Yeh… well…”

“Miss Piney.”

Ralph’s mouth fell open when he heard the words precisely spoken just behind him. He twisted his chair around slowly as Sloe Burn exclaimed delightedly, “Freddie. We was just talking about you. Ralph an’ me. Ralph Billiter. My dancin’ partner. I don’t know you met him or not.”

Steven Shephard said, “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” He smiled thinly and held out his hand. Ralph got up and mumbled something and took the other’s fingers and dropped them quickly and shambled away to the rear of the stage.

Shephard looked after him admiringly. “Really a magnificent specimen.” He staggered only slightly as he turned Ralph’s chair back and sat in it. “I’ve meant to ask you, Miss Piney.” He fingered his mustache nervously. “Watching you two dance together… uh… makes me wonder.”

“He’s just a boy I’ve knew from down on the Keys when we was both kids,” she told him with a toss of her head. “I been
worried
about you, Freddie. When you didn’t come back a-tall after them two men was in lookin’ for you, I got scared they maybe found you.”

He blinked near-sighted eyes at her. “What two men, Miss Piney?”

“Right after you was here last time. They scared me. Real tough an’ asking all sortsa questions. But they didn’t get no change outta me, Freddie.”

“Two men?” He compressed his lips tightly. “Yes, I’ve… I’ve been thinking… could we have a drink, Miss Piney?”

“Why not? You got the money to pay, aintcha?” She turned and snapped her fingers and a waiter materialized from out of the semi-darkness. “Bourbon on the rocks for me. Scotch an’ water for my friend,” she ordered.

“Yes, I… have money to pay.” Steven Shephard smiled happily as he got out his wallet. He carelessly took out a twenty-dollar bill and placed it on the table between them. It had been less than two hours since his last drink and he was floating nicely, but he felt he needed reinforcements for what he was about to say. He seized his glass when it came and took two gulps of the liquid which was even weaker than the drinks he made for himself in the motel.

He said, “We did talk about going away together. To some distant place. Perhaps you doubted my sincerity, Miss Piney. I beg you not to. I… uh… will you go away with me?”

“That takes money,” Sloe Burn told him coldly. “Lots of money, Freddie.”

“I have lots of money.” He stated the fact flatly and precisely. “More than you ever saw or dreamed of seeing. And if there are men in Miami looking for me…”

“Gee, oh, God, Freddie!” She was looking past him into the hazy dimness. “Talk about the devil! There they come now. To this table. You gotta get out quick.”

She kicked back her chair and flashed around to his side and caught his arm and tugged him desperately upward. “You come with me.”

With her arm around his waist, she half-pulled and half-carried him past the end of the platform where the stripper was at long last getting down to bare skin, and into the wings where Ralph was standing in a position where he’d been able to watch their table.

“Take him out back an’ help him get away, Ralphie. I don’t know where he’s staying…”

“Pink Flamingo,” mumbled Shephard, dazed and frightened, and leaning on Ralph’s strong right arm.

“I’ll go back an’ string them guys along.” Sloe Burn paused to give Ralph a hard look. “Take care of Freddie, you hear. I got somethin’ real important to tell you.”

She whirled away from them and ran back onto the floor where the spotlight had just been turned off as two of the rosettes dropped from the stripper’s body.

She drew in a deep breath and slowed to a walk, thrusting her breasts out and stepping mincingly so her buttocks did a slow roll with each step.

There was no one at her table when she returned to it, and she seated herself composedly and gathered up the change the waiter had left from Freddie’s twenty. As soon as the spotlight came on again for the next number, she was pretty sure the mean-looking younger man and the sad-looking older one in the black suit would be sitting down with her to ask questions.