The clerk laughed musically, showing a mouthful of decaying teeth that seemed to go with the hotel. “Anybody he wanted to see would know where to find him.”
“Is there a manager on duty?”
“I’m the night manager,” the clerk said coyly. “Come in during the daytime and you can speak to the day manager.”
“All right,” Shayne said patiently. “There must be somebody on the staff who knows where he moved to. Or how about another guest? Who knew him?”
The clerk put his fingertips on the counter and leaned forward. “Don’t private detectives usually offer a ten- dollar bill for such information?”
“Why should we?” Shayne said coldly.
“Well, I’ve got a brother-in-law in the police department here, and I happen to know for a fact that you never undertake a case unless you stand to clear thirty or forty thousand dollars. And he says that’s conservative! Per case! And maybe you wind it up inside of twelve hours. But of course you’ve got those terrific expenses. You go around to hotel people and restaurant people and lay out a ten here and a ten there, and at that rate you can spend as much as a hundred dollars an evening.”
“What’s eating you?” Shayne said.
The V-lines on Shayne’s eroded face were deeply etched. The clerk tried to look away, but Shayne held his eyes. The clerk didn’t like what he saw there. He took a half step backward.
“I’m warning you, if you hit me-”
Shayne made a disgusted face. “Would you have any objection if I bought a drink in your bar?”
The clerk moistened his lips and looked down. “Be our guest,” he murmured.
Shayne went into the bar through the lobby entrance. A line of unsmiling drinkers was watching a comic on television. The detective joined them, sliding onto a stool at the heel of the bar. When the bartender came over he said, “What’s the matter with the guy out there?” tipping his head toward the lobby and sketching a small beard on his chin.
The bartender laughed. “He’s like that. What’ll it be?”
Shayne told him, and the bartender brought him cognac in a four-ounce wineglass, with a glass of ice water on the side.
“All I did was ask him about a kid named Vince Donahue,” Shayne went on, “and you’d think I’d insulted the flag. You must have had Donahue in here. He probably stopped in for a nightcap most nights.”
“Donahue?” the bartender said thoughtfully. “To tell the truth I don’t get too many regulars. They come, they go. You can listen to a customer tell you his troubles every night for six months and in all that time you may never hear anybody call his name.” He met Shayne’s disbelieving look with a smile. “Excuse me. A man seems to want a beer.”
After drinking half his cognac and chasing it with a long sip of ice water, Shayne turned his back on the bar and looked the room over. There were two waitresses. One was brown-haired, with an apologetic manner. The other wore extravagant eye makeup and had prominent breasts and red hair. It was hard to tell about the breasts, but the color of her hair was probably not natural. When she came over to the bar with a tray of glasses Shayne grinned and said hello.
“Hi!” she said cheerfully, and looked up at his red hair. “Copycat.”
“I’ve had it all my life,” he said.
They went on from there, and Shayne was about to ask his question about Donahue when the bartender came over.
“To give an example,” the bartender said. “You didn’t tell me your name when you sat down, did you? I didn’t tell you mine, and that’s the way it goes. We were talking about not remembering people,” he explained to the waitress. “For some reason I don’t think he believed me. What was the guy’s name again?”
“Vince Donahue,” the redhead said to the waitress. “A good-looking boy. A diver. He drove a Jag for a while. But I don’t suppose you remember him either?”
“Gee-” she said regretfully.
“I didn’t think so. Of course I might be bringing him news about a legacy, except that that kind of kid doesn’t get legacies.”
He went back to his drink, and shook his head shortly when the bartender asked if he wanted another. He picked his change off the bar. Turning, he found the plainer waitress, the one with the brown hair, trying to make up her mind whether or not to speak to him.
She said with a rush, twisting the belt of her apron, “I might be able to tell you something, but first you have to tell me why you want to know. Go over to one of the booths. I’m not supposed to sit down in my uniform, but I’ll put on a raincoat and come back.”
Shayne paid for another cognac and carried it to an empty booth. In a moment the waitress came back through a door marked “No Admittance,” wearing a raincoat over her uniform. The bartender spoke to her. She shook her head stubbornly. Coming over to Shayne’s booth, she slid in across from him. The red-haired waitress brought her a mixed highball.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Rose.”
Rose pulled nervously at her drink. “I’d better find out what I am doing. I hear you’re Mike Shayne. Why do you want to talk to Vince, Mr. Shayne?”
Over the second cognac, Shayne had been thinking. Given what he already knew about Vince Donahue, which of the two waitresses would the boy pick? The one now sitting opposite Shayne would give him uncritical admiration, money when he needed it, sympathy when he needed that, she would always be waiting for him, she would pretend to believe his stories. To hang onto him she would do anything he demanded. She would probably feel flattered that he had any time for her at all. And giving her a closer look, Shayne saw something warm and appealing beneath her surface awkwardness. All she needed was to sit up straight and have a professional do something about her hair.
He said carefully, “You won’t be too surprised to hear that he’s in trouble.”
“Well, no,” she admitted.
“He’s stepped on some people’s toes,” Shayne continued. “They’re middle-aged and settled. They wear white suits and neckties, and to somebody like Vince they probably look pretty harmless. They’re anything but.”
“That sounds like him. He just doesn’t give a damn. But you’re going to have to be more specific.”
Shayne continued feeling his way. At the first wrong approach, he knew the girl would take off her raincoat and go back to work.
“He’s mixed up in a football fix,” he said. “He rigged something, or helped rig it, and it cost his friendly neighborhood bookie somewhere around a couple of hundred thousand bucks. I don’t mean Vince got all that, or even much of it. But so far he’s the only name I’ve heard mentioned.”
“I knew it was something like that,” she said miserably. “Does that mean he’ll go to jail?”
Shayne studied her. “There’s a law against blackmailing football players, and conceivably he might go to jail. But to be honest about it, I don’t know. People in the gambling business don’t like to let the courts handle their discipline problems. I might be able to influence what happens. If nobody cooperates I won’t have much of a chance. There was also a stickup, incidentally. I don’t know how much he had to do with that.”
She made a quick joyless grimace and drank some more whiskey. “Oh, that’s great. If he had anything to do with a stickup, it wouldn’t be a gas station or a delicatessen, would it? It would be somebody important.”
“That’s the picture of Vince I’m beginning to get,” Shayne said. “I still don’t know much about him.”
She drew a deep breath. “I-lived with him, Mr. Shayne. You’ve guessed that. Everybody in the hotel thought it was foolish of me. They think it’s foolish to go on feeling the way I do about him now, but that doesn’t mean I can turn it off, like a faucet. When you came in, everybody automatically protected him because I guess they feel sorry for me. I’ve done my share of protecting Vince Donahue and pretending I didn’t know where he lived. But now I’m beginning to think that maybe-well, maybe if it’s not too serious, a little time in jail-”
She met his eyes and said quickly, “Not because he walked out on me. I’m not trying to get back at him. But he has to realize! With most people, it’s easy to get into things and hell to get out. But Vince always manages to get out just as easily as he gets in. Nothing bad ever seems to happen to him. Maybe going to jail won’t work. I guess it doesn’t, usually. But it would get him away from Miami Beach before the roof caves in. He’s-terribly handsome, Mr. Shayne. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him, but he’s one of the best-looking people. The way he
