A Taste for Violence (3 page)

IT WAS late in the afternoon three days later when Michael Shayne made the sharp turn on the gravel drive up to the wide veranda of the Moderne Hotel. There had been no signs along the highway warning him of the hill-top turn. There had, in fact, been no advertisement whatever to advise travellers they were approaching the Moderne. Both he and Lucy Hamilton had been watching for a sign for fifty miles or more through eyes salty with the perspiration dripping from their foreheads and brows. They had decided that the Moderne was not catering to tourists. They had seen the huge wooden board, probably lighted on both sides at night, on the north side of the grounds just in time.

A half dozen elderly guests sat rocking in the chairs on the veranda, languidly waving fans. The hotel was a rambling structure, two stories high. To the left, a dozen or more modern cabins sprawled, separated some ten or twelve feet, all baking under the fierce rays of the Kentucky sun. There was not a tree in sight.

Lucy Hamilton touched his arm as the car stopped with the bumper touching the concrete edge of the porch. “It says up there in the electric curlicues on the sign, ‘Centerville’s Finest’. I wonder what the others must be like.”

“Hotter,” Shayne said, turning to grin into her wide and contemplative brown eyes.

“But you said it would be cool here, Michael. For the last hundred miles you’ve been telling me…”

“That it would be cool when the sun goes down.” He reached over and patted her moist hand. “Besides, we can buy a cool drink in Kentucky… I hope.” He pulled his long legs up, unlatched the door, and stepped from the car. He wore a polo shirt and light cotton slacks. He took a sweat-sodden handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his face and neck, running it along his hairy bare arms.

Lucy had stopped a hundred miles back and freshened her face with cold water, combed her hair, and applied make-up. She looked cool and girlish in her white linen frock when she got out on the other side and went up the steps with him.

The occupants of the rocking chairs stopped fanning and regarded them listlessly, picked up their fans and turned their faded eyes once more upon the thundering, chugging highway traffic.

Shayne led Lucy into a small, dim lobby. An electric fan turned half-heartedly in the ceiling, ineffectually stirring the stale air exuding from cigar and cigarette butts in tall, open ashtrays, and the smoke rising from fresh ones puffed toward the ceiling by the men who were smoking in the four comfortable chairs. Except for a wall-crank telephone, four slot machines, an ancient cabinet radio and two spittoons, there were no other furnishings.

In the rear, knotty pine separated a small office from the lobby. A wide archway on the right opened onto a large, many-windowed dining room. A heavy chain was stretched across the archway with a cardboard sign hanging in the middle of it which read CLOSED. Dinner 5 to 7.

A portly gentleman with a rosy bald head and a sun-reddened face ending in three chins dozed behind the desk, the right side of his face cradled in a pudgy palm. He wore a wilted white shirt opened at the neck, the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. He opened one eye and looked up, startled, when Shayne said, “Good afternoon. What’s the chance of getting a room?”

He got up slowly and came over to the counter. “Welcome, sir,” he said in a high, squeaky voice. “Only one room left. It’s on the southwest corner and so all-fired hot nobody else’d take it, but I reckon you’re mighty lucky to get that.”

The detective had written “Michael Shayne and…” on the register before he finished speaking. He stopped with pen lifted and said, “Only one room? We want two.”

“This is a large double room,” the clerk assured him. “Bath right across the hall. You and the Missus will be mighty comfortable if you can stand the heat.”

Shayne said, “Miss Hamilton is my secretary. Haven’t you got a couple of singles.”

“Secretary, huh?” He sighed and screwed his eyes up tight to look at Lucy. He shook his head doubtfully and said, “Well, I dunno. There’s a cabin. But I’d have to charge her for the double room and you the full price for the cabin, and I don’t reckon…”

“Wait a minute… how about two cabins,” Shayne interrupted.

“H-m-m. Just driving through?” he asked.

“We might stay a few days,” Shayne told him. “If you have two cabins…”

“Well, now, if you’re stayin’ a while, I reckon so.”

Shayne finished writing in the register, “…Secretary, Miami, Florida.”

The fat man turned it around and read the names aloud. “Shayne, huh? From Miami? Would you be a newspaper man?”

Shayne said, “No. Can we see the cabins?”

“No offence, stranger.” He struck a bell on the desk and a colored man came through a door in the rear. He took two keys from a hook and said to the porter, “Show these folks nine and ten.”

“Just a minute… how about some ice and a drink?” Shayne asked.

“Well, sir, we don’t have any ice and we don’t sell liquor here at the hotel. Plenty of that down in Centerville, though.”

Shayne turned to Lucy and made a grimace of disgust and said, “Come on,” and they followed the porter outside. Shayne got in his car and started the motor. Lucy walked across the grounds behind the Negro while Shayne drove slowly over the baked and rock-covered distance from the hotel to the cabins.

When they reached nine and ten, the porter handed Shayne the key marked “9” and went on to open number ten.

Shayne got out and unlocked the door and was struck by a sickening and sultry blast of heat that had been accumulating all day inside the tightly closed cabin. He hastened to open both windows, looked behind a flowered curtain in one corner and found a concrete-floored shower stall and lavatory and toilet.

He went out to get his bag from the car. The porter had already taken Lucy’s. He glanced over at her cabin to see the windows opened and the door ajar.

Back in number nine, Shayne tossed his bag on the bed, opened it and took out a clean polo shirt and a fresh pair of slacks and clean underwear. He peeled off his sticky clothes and ducked into the shower. The water was lukewarm at first, and he felt slightly nauseated, but it ran cooler after a while. He came out drying himself with a towel which he gloomily estimated might dry the body of a debutante who had been dieting for six months in preparation for her coming out party.

His rangy body was still wet when he put on his clothes, but he felt refreshed and cooler. He hastily ran a comb through his unruly stubble of red hair and went out. He hesitated about closing the door and locking it, decided against it on the chance that it would catch a little more of the evening air.

He walked over to the hotel and appreciated the comparative coolness of the dim lobby when he stepped inside.

The clerk looked up and said, “I reckon it’s almighty hot out there.”

“It might help,” said Shayne, “if you’d leave the windows open so your guests wouldn’t be roasted before they could get to them.”

He chuckled. “It don’t help. We tried it. When it gets hot in Kentucky, it gets by god hot.”

Shayne went to the telephone and read the hand-printed sign pasted on it, LIFT RECEIVER BEFORE TURNING CRANK.

Shayne lifted the receiver and turned the crank. When the Centerville operator answered, he asked for number 340. She said, “Thank you,” in a sweet southern drawl, and rang the number.

Shayne leaned against the wall with the receiver to his ear and massaged his left earlobe. His gray eyes were half-closed, his wide mouth relaxed. He glanced over at the fat clerk. He was leaning on the counter with his mouth open, as though he expected to eavesdrop through it instead of his ears.

A soft, slurred feminine voice spoke in Shayne’s ear, “Yessuh?”

“I want to speak to Mr. Charles Roche.”

“Mistuh
Charles Roche, did you-all say?”

“That’s right. Is he in?”

“Jest a minute,” the Negress said doubtfully.

While Shayne waited, he glanced again at the clerk. His mouth was open a little wider, and a faint wheeze came from him as if he were about to snore. His eyes were nearly closed.

Presently a man’s voice came over the wire. “Who is this calling?” His tone was gruff and slightly irritable.

“Mr. Roche?”

“What do you want with him?”

“I’d like to speak to him personally,” Shayne said gently.

“Would, eh?” the voice said. “What about?”

“I prefer to tell Mr. Roche that.”

“Where you calling from?” The tone was curt now, and definitely irritable.

“Is Mr. Roche there?” Shayne asked.

“No. Give me your name and…”

“I’ll call back.” Shayne banged up the receiver and mopped his face. He stood for a moment rubbing his angular jaw, then felt in his pocket for some coins. His hand came out clutching several, and he walked slowly along the four slot machines looking at the combinations showing. He selected the half-dollar machine, inserted the fifty-cent piece and pulled the handle.

The screen door opened and a man stepped inside as the tumblers whirred and the cylinders revolved. The first cylinder to stop showed a lemon, and he turned to the quarter machine. He fed it twice without getting a paying combination, and glanced aside with a shrug of his wide shoulders at the newcomer who was silently watching him.

He was a tall, bony-faced man with leathery skin and white bushy brows. He wore a sweat-streaked gray cotton shirt, and denim trousers held up by faded suspenders. He met Shayne’s gaze and said, “That’s the price of a meal you’ve wasted, Mister.”

“Or a couple of drinks,” Shayne agreed. He turned to the dime machine. It absorbed four dimes, giving him three lemons in succession, then gently slid off a five-pay combination after hesitating on it for an instant.

Shayne knew, then, what he was bucking. He tightened his wide mouth and moved on to the nickel machine. Lemons showed on one or more of the cylinders, two pulls out of three, and twice more a paying combination slid off just before clicking into place.

Stepping back with his hands empty, he said disgustedly, “Gimmicked to hell and gone. I’ve never seen worse in Juarez or Tia Juana.”

“What did you expect?” asked the gaunt-faced man. “This is Centerville.” He spoke without rancor. Flatly. As though being in Centerville, Kentucky, explained everything. This was the first time Shayne had heard those three words, “This is Centerville,” spoken, but it wasn’t the last time he was to hear them, always with that flat assumption of dogmatic acceptance. He was to discover that it explained so many things which could not otherwise be explained.

He shrugged and admitted, “One generally expects to get a little play from his money, even from these one-armed bandits. Thirty or forty per cent return, at least. It’s just good business. To have them pay off a little would encourage the suckers,” he went on irritably. “The people who gimmick these things so tight are just cutting their own throats.”

The shabby man said, “Folks play ’em anyhow. Here in Centerville, they do. Some play ’em for fun… and some play ’em hopin’.” He trudged over to the desk and bought a package of rough-cut from the three-chinned clerk. He leaned both elbows on the counter and talked to him in a low voice while Shayne strolled to the screen doors and onto the porch where he watched and listened to the heavy traffic on highway 90.

The noise was deafening. Coal trucks, one after the other, chugged up the steep hill, back-firing like small cannons exploding when they started down the hill on the other side. Cars honking, swerving in and out, struggling to pass before they lost momentum. Of all the places in the world, he decided, the Moderne had picked the noisiest spot for a hotel.

He couldn’t hear what the men in the lobby were saying. He realized that they were discussing him, but he didn’t care. He was wondering whether Lucy would be able to sleep tonight, with the heavy trucks shaking the very earth, the horns, the backfiring and the chugging.

Walking to the end of the porch, he saw Lucy standing in front of her cabin, looking around. He long-legged it across the rocky grounds, calling to her and waving. When he reached her he took both her hands and pushed her away at arm’s length. She had changed into a blue summer frock with short sleeves falling in soft folds over her upper arms, the bodice accentuating her slim waist and hips, then falling into graceful widening gores around the calves of her shapely legs. Her lips were freshly rouged, her face glowing and unpowdered.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I tried to powder, but it just stuck in cakes, so I wiped it off.”

Shayne’s eyes twinkled. He said, “You don’t need powder.”

“Have I kept you waiting?”

“Not long. How’s your cabin?”

“Hot as hell… when I left.” She chuckled, looking up at him.

“Such language,” Shayne chided. “So was mine.”

“Did you phone Mr. Roche?” She tucked her arm in his and they walked over to the car which was parked in front of number nine.

“I called, but he wasn’t in.” Shayne frowned. He didn’t tell her about the obtrusive manner in which some man had tried to find out what his business was with Roche.

They got in the car. Shayne backed around and headed toward the highway. It was easy to edge into the traffic on this side. The sun was sinking beyond the range of mountains, but the heat was stifling, giving no sign whatever of abating. The main highway was jammed with traffic, cars stalled trying to get up the hill without momentum.

When they came to a turn-off at the foot of the hill, Shayne said, “I’m going to take this road. It must be the old one leading into Centerville.”

“Are… you sure, Michael?” She laid her hand lightly on his bare arm.

“Pretty sure.”

The old road was free of traffic. It curved to the left continuously, and they could see the lights coming on in the village below. Dark came quickly to the canyon when the sun went down.

The whiplash of a shot jarred the evening silence as they rounded a curve in the old, crooked road. Then, two more. The sound of a racing motor followed almost immediately. There was another sharp curve ahead, and before they made it they heard a crashing noise as if two cars had hit in a head-on collision.