It was four years before I ran into that redheaded Irishman again. A coincidence? Sure. This story is full of crazy coincidences — the sort that happen in real life but that no writer would dare put between the covers of a book.
It was in New Orleans, and I was four years older and maybe a little wiser. I was broke and jobless, and I wandered into a Rampart Street bar on a foggy night. There he was, sitting alone at a rear table with a bottle in front of him and two water glasses. One of them was half full of ice water, and he was sipping cognac from the other.
He didn’t recognize me, of course, but he did remember the fight in Tampico, and he grinned and gave me a drink of cognac when I thanked him for that time. He didn’t talk much, but he did say he was working as a private detective. He was friendly, and we were getting along fine until a girl walked in and stood at the bar, looking the place over.
I saw his big frame stiffen and the lines in his cheeks deepen into trenches as she walked toward us. His left thumb and forefinger went up to rub the lobe of his ear as she stopped beside our table and leaned forward and said, “Hello, Mike,” in a throaty voice.
That was all. He didn’t reply, and in a moment she turned away and went swiftly out the door. Two men had followed her inside, and they began to move slowly toward us — casually but purposefully.
That’s when he leaned forward and told me swiftly to get out of town fast and forget I’d seen him.
He stood up before I could ask any questions, strolled forward, and the two men closed in on each side of him. They went out in a group and disappeared in the swirling fog of Rampart Street.
That was our second meeting. I didn’t know who the girl and the two men were, or why Mike walked out with them so quietly.
I still don’t know, though I have a feeling that things happened then that had some bearing on the feud between him and Captain Denton of the New Orleans police — a feud which flared up anew during a case described in the book I titled Michael Shayne’s Long Chance.
It was years later when the next act occurred. I had begun writing books (not mystery novels) and was living in Denver, Colorado. I had never been able to put the memory of the redhead out of my mind, and there was a network radio program originating in New York which offered people a chance to broadcast an appeal for information concerning relatives or friends with whom they had lost contact.
Planning a business trip to New York to see my publishers, I wrote the manager of the program and asked to be allowed to tell my story over the air.
I did so, with an astonishing and completely unforeseen result. A few days after the broadcast I was informed from Denver that a man named Connor Michael Shawn, ex-actor, theatrical manager, and private detective, had tuned in my broadcast on his deathbed and declared to his wife that he believed himself to be the man I was describing over the air.
Connor Michael Shawn died the next day, and when I returned to Denver a few days later I immediately visited his wife and discussed the situation with her. Many of the facts of his life as she knew them checked with the dates and places of my story. The photographs she showed me were not conclusive. I felt that Shawn might have been my “Mike,” but I couldn’t be positive.
I wasn’t positive until more than a year later when I was holed up in a one-room log cabin at Desolation Bend, on the Gunnison River in Colorado, trying desperately to write three novels in thirty days (which I did, incidentally).
Mike turned up one day in a cabin near mine on the river. That was when I learned his real name (which isn’t Shayne). He gave no explanation for his presence except that he was on vacation from a lucrative private detective practice in Miami, Florida.
This meeting, I now believe, was not so much of a coincidence as it appeared at the time. From small things he has let slip since then, I believe he had heard about the radio broadcast and, being in the neighborhood, had taken the trouble to look me up out of curiosity.
At any rate, that was the beginning of an intimate friendship that has now endured for more than a decade and has furnished material for twenty books based on his cases.
We drank cognac together in his cabin and mine during the long lazy evenings that followed my stint at the typewriter, and talked about his work as a detective and my unrealized dream of writing mystery stories. There was no real compact reached between us at that time, but when he left to go back to Miami I had an invitation to visit him there whenever I wished.
I followed him South a couple of months later, and he seemed pleased when I turned up in his modest apartment on the north bank of the Miami River, overlooking Biscayne Bay.
That night over a bottle of Martell, he told me he had fallen in love for the first time in his life — with Phyllis Brighton whom he had just cleared of a charge of matricide.
Mike was a lonely and brooding man that night. He had sent Phyllis away, gently but firmly, a few days earlier, and he honestly did not hope ever to see her again. She was too young, he told me over and over again. Too young and too sweet and trusting to waste herself on a man like him.
I didn’t argue with Mike that night. Nor point out any of the obvious things. I did draw him into a discussion of the case just ended, and before the sun rose over Biscayne Bay he had agreed to turn his notes on the Brighton affair over to me for a novel which I called Dividend on Death.
Before this book was published, he had met Phyllis Brighton again (as I have related in The Private Practice of Michael Shayne), and when that case was ended Mike had capitulated.
I was best man at their wedding, and saw them installed in the larger corner apartment above Mike’s old bachelor quarters which he kept and fitted up sketchily as an office.
The next few years, I am positive, were the happiest Mike has ever known. Phyllis worried him sometimes by insisting as acting as his secretary and getting herself mixed up in some of his cases, but there was perfect companionship and understanding between them, culminating in a long-delayed honeymoon trip to Colorado — where Mike managed to get himself mixed up with murder in the old ghost town of Central City. He gave me the details of this case, and I used them in Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask.
Back in Miami, there was one more adventure together before that black night when I sat with Mike in the hospital waiting-room, sweating it out with him while the baby which Phyllis so ardently desired was being born.
I went back to his apartment with him at dawn, and sat across the room from the big redhead in a deep chair while he wept unashamedly. Both Phyllis and the baby were gone, and the doctors didn’t know why.
He swore at that time he would never touch another case that dealt with death, and I think he might have kept that resolution had he not received a telephone call in the night that sent him out on the trail of a vicious gang of black marketeers. I wrote about that one in Blood on the Black Market.
I noted a subtle change in Mike’s inner character after Phyllis’s death. In some ways he became more ruthless and driving and demanding of himself, but the hard outer shell of assumed cynicism was cracked, and for the first time in his life he wasn’t afraid to let traces of gentleness and pity shine through.
I was glad when he closed his office and went to New Orleans (Michael Shayne’s Long Chance), and gladder still after that case was ended and he had met Lucy Hamilton and acquired a new secretary.
People ask me now if Mike and Lucy are likely to be married. I have to answer honestly that I simply do not know. I am sure they understand and respect each other, and that Mike loves her as much as his memories of Phyllis will allow him to love any woman. They are happy together in the companionship and intimacy of dangerous work and that appears to be enough for them at the moment. Moreover, they are back at Mike’s old hunting-grounds in Miami now, and that town is beginning to be known as much for Mike as for its famous climate.