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.
Beyond that couple, with one empty stool intervening, were a pair of blank-faced young hoods whose main source of income was most likely the rolling of drunks in alleyways behind bars like Pirelli’s. Behind them, one of the four booths along the wall was occupied by a very young girl and a very drunken middle-aged man whose shabby suit was mussed as though he had slept in it for several nights and whose face wore a two-day growth of beard.
Shayne stopped just inside the swinging doors and stood flat-footed while he mentally catalogued the occupants of the barroom. If there had been any conversation going on before his entrance, it had died to silence before he was well inside. As though all were actuated by the same string in the hands of a puppeteer, all seven heads swiveled slowly in his direction.
The same expression was discernible on all the faces in varying degrees. It was not actively antagonistic, but it certainly was not welcoming. There was a suggestion of bored interest, of withheld individual judgment until the alien newcomer did or said something to place himself more clearly in their personal frames of reference.
Shayne walked to the end of the bar and leaned both elbows on it. The bartender shuffled toward him and asked in a nasal whine, “What’ll it be, Mister?”
“Is Pirelli around?”
“Naw. The boss ain’t been in today.”
“Know where I might find him?”
“Who’s askin’?”
Shayne said evenly, “I am.”
“Friend of his?” The bartender shifted his eyes away from Shayne’s hard gaze and aimlessly swiped at the bar in front of the detective with a dirty towel.
Shayne slapped him with his open palm. The sound of flesh against flesh was loud in the silence. He staggered back under the impact with one hand going to his cheek, and there was a collective, sibilant, indrawn sigh from the other six people in the room.
Shayne didn’t shift his gaze from the bartender, nor raise his voice. He asked again, “Where is Pirelli?”
The bartender took his hand away from his cheek and looked at it curiously as though he expected it to carry the imprint of Shayne’s hand. Then his ferrety eyes grew hot and he sidled away, pressing close to the bar and groping beneath it.
Shayne said, “Don’t try it, punk. Just tell me where to find Pirelli, and stay as healthy as you are.”
The man hesitated. He ducked his chin and glanced sideways and upward at Shayne with a little drool of saliva showing on his lips. Then he turned his head to look at the four men who sat on stools at the bar. Their faces were stony and they looked directly to the front and gave him no encouragement. He turned back and licked the spittle from his lips and said querulously, “Ain’t no need for you to get tough, Mister. Think you can walk in here an’…”
“Ask a civil question and get a civil reply,” Shayne interrupted him.
“I dunno where he is. Might be in later an’ might not.”
