“You always do, don’t you?” Gentry’s good humor had returned. “How else would you collect those fat fees you’ve been banking for years?”
Shayne shook his head sadly. “I don’t see a fat fee in this one.”
“So that’s why you toss it in my lap,” Gentry contradicted himself cheerfully. Then he became businesslike again. “You got any leads at all where this Renshaw is hiding out?”
Shayne hesitated, wondering suddenly just how honest he was in stating he didn’t see any fat fee in the case. How much, actually, did he believe of Sloe Burn’s story about her Freddie Tucker who was loaded with money to the extent of proposing that they take off for some deserted island together? According to Mrs. Renshaw, her husband must be pretty well strapped; yet Sloe Burn had lightly tossed off the statement that Fred Tucker had given her a hundred dollars on occasion. There was some discrepancy here, and yet… it almost had to be the same Fred Tucker.
He told Gentry, “His wife swears that he didn’t give her a single clue over the telephone that would help locate him,” and salved his conscience for withholding the entire truth by telling himself that he was likely to learn a lot more by going around to the Bright Spot by himself than by having a squad of police officers descend on the place and start asking questions.
Oddly enough, Will Gentry himself encouraged this decision a moment later by saying reflectively, “You’ve changed, Mike.”
“In what way?”
“A few years ago,” rumbled Gentry, “you wouldn’t have been sitting in my office on your dead ass waiting for me to handle a thing like this for you. You always boasted that you had your own ways and methods for getting information or locating a missing man in the city, and you laughed at me because I had to go by the rules and stay within legal limits.”
“I was younger then,” Shayne parried uncomfortably.
“Nuts. You were hungrier.” Gentry regarded him benevolently over the smouldering end of his cigar. “I had more respect for you then, goddamit. You weren’t afraid to stick your neck out, and by God, you did get results with your methods that I couldn’t get with all the manpower I had under me. You’re worried about this little Renshaw getting gunned down by a couple of Chicago hoods, but you aren’t worried enough, by God, to…”
He was interrupted by a buzz from his intercom. He glanced at a lighted button and pressed a switch and said, “Yeh, Jackson?”
A voice said metallically: “A quick run-through, Chief, turns up a known Syndicate killer in Chicago two years ago who had the monicker of The Preacher because he looked like one and always wore a black suit when he was working. Last heard of he was paired up with Little Joe Hoffman, but that was before Little Joe got sticky fingers and took it on the lam from the mob. Last we had on him, he was making book on the Beach.”
“Yeh, I know about Hoffman,” grunted Gentry into the grilled mouthpiece. “Keep on looking, Jackson.” He flipped the switch and told Shayne irritably, “If your man is an old pal of Little Joe’s, it could be there’s a lead. But that’s out of my jurisdiction. We chased Little Joe the hell out of Miami when he tried to settle here, and he’s stayed pretty well on the other side of Biscayne Bay ever since. Painter isn’t so hard to please, and half his dicks go around with their hands out most of the time.”
Shayne got to his feet slowly. “Yeh. If it is The Preacher on a job, it could be he’d look up an old pal to help him line things up at this end. So, thanks for everything, Will,” he ended off-handedly. “We’ll be in touch, huh?”
Will Gentry said, “Sure, Mike,” and settled back placidly in his chair with a quizzical expression on his beefy face as the rangy redhead sauntered out.
Five years ago, he told himself, he’d have hated to be in Little Joe Hoffman’s shoes right now. But today, he didn’t know. Had Michael Shayne changed so much in those years of increasing prosperity and in light of the increasing public respect that was accorded him? Well, men did change and grow soft. But who in hell would ever have thought that Mike Shayne…?
Gentry broke off his cogitations abruptly and got up and clamped a hat on his head. It was the end of a day and he was getting older too, and a couple of Syndicate mobsters were no personal affair of his.
4
The late afternoon sun was a vivid orange ball hanging low above the horizon behind him as Michael Shayne drove eastward across the Causeway. It cast shimmering lights on the placidly blue surface of Biscayne Bay, and touched the fringed tops of palm trees lining the shore in front of him with a faintly golden glow.
He drove with the late afternoon traffic at a moderate speed, big hands lightly on the wheel, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, with eyes slitted to exclude the smoke spiralling upward past them.
There was a look of preoccupation on his face, of inner questioning, which deepened the trenches in his cheeks and tightened the firm line of his jaw. Was Will Gentry right, he wondered. Was he getting soft and complacent? Had Mike Shayne turned into a fat-cat during these recent years, more preoccupied with cases that offered a big fee than in fighting injustice and corruption?
He didn’t want to think so. And yet…? Life could be very pleasant in semi-tropical Miami. A man could drift pleasantly with the tide of sunfilled days and moonlit nights, lulled into complacency by the Lotus Song of the tropics.
Well… he straightened behind the wheel, squared his wide shoulders aggressively as he rolled down the long curve off the Causeway onto Fifth Street. Here was a chance to find out just how soft he had become. If there was an acid-throwing Syndicate killer from Chicago strolling the streets of Miami in search of a victim, he represented a challenge that should stir any man out of his shell of complacency.
Shayne spat his cigarette out the open window and swung the big sedan off to the right, southward on the Peninsula, away from the luxury hotels and swanky Lincoln Avenue toward a rowdier and lustier section of the Beach which he had once known intimately.
Things were changed now, he noted as he drove slowly, looking for remembered landmarks. New and smarter apartment buildings had replaced many of the rundown rooming houses that had formerly lined this street, and yet the overall impression remained much the same. There were dingy bars and glittering souvenir shops, unkempt winos in shady doorways, and over-young and over-painted girls in over-tight dresses parading their wares on the streets as before.
He hadn’t consciously decided what his destination was, but instinct or a hidden memory came to his aid when he reached a certain corner, and he braked hard and swung to the left without quite knowing why he did so.
Then his gaze picked up a sidewalk sign half a block ahead, and suddenly he was oriented again like a homing pigeon. He squeezed into a parking spot at the curb just beyond the ancient sign that said Pirelli’s Bar, stalked back and pushed through the swinging doors into the hazy, smoke-laden atmosphere of a bar-room that smelled as though it hadn’t been aired out in all the years since he had last been inside.
He couldn’t recall whether it was the same bartender or not, but the ferret-eyed man in the dirty apron had buck teeth and a receding jaw, and fitted into the background as though he had been specifically designed by nature to tend bar at Pirelli’s.
The four men who sat on bar stools in front of him also had the look of habitues from years back. The one nearest Shayne had an aggressively young and flat-featured face and wore a tight-waisted silk jacket of black and white stripes with the shoulders padded so heavily that they were wider than Shayne’s. Beyond him was a thin-faced elderly man wearing a conservative summer suit and a neat bow tie, with the undefinable, shifty aura of a pervert clinging to him.