Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 11, November 1982

The City Editor wasn’t too happy to hear the detective’s voice, but then Shayne thought, it was poetic justice — didn’t Dirksen call Tim at all hours of the night?

“Don’t give me that freedom of the press crap, Carl. I’m not prying and I’m not the law — I’m Tim’s friend and he’s in trouble.”

From that point on the newspaperman was cooperative. He narrowed down the stories Rourke might have been working on to three: he had been looking into rumors of a hit squad in Fort Lauderdale; doing a fluff piece on the nouveau riche of the Gold Coast; and following up a lead on how the organized mob was hiring recent refugees.

But which one had he been working on tonight? The redhead refilled his cup and returned to the phone.

“Hi, Angel.”

“Mike,” she answered lazily. “How were the Keys?”

“Great, but listen.” He explained the phone call to her. “Has Tim called the office or come by the last few days that I’ve been out of town?”

When she could remember nothing, Shayne told his beautiful secretary to go back to sleep. Then he dialed Tim’s best friend at the Miami Daily News. It rang seven times. Shayne hung up and dialed again. No answer.

“Damn,” he said to no one in particular. Now where?

Another thing bothered the detective. Scraping his thumbnail across the harsh, reddish stubble on his chinline, he wondered what Tim had meant by “Knee high.”

He could call the police, but there was no guarantee Tim was in trouble in the Miami area. Still...

The Miami Chief of Detectives wasn’t much happier than Dirksen to hear from him. Shayne waited while Will Gentry went to the living room phone so he wouldn’t disturb his slumbering wife. “Christ, Mike, if I sent out a team every time Tim got in water over his head, I wouldn’t have enough men left to keep up with the penny-ante stuff like murder, junk dealing, and bank robbery.”

“Dammit, Will, just make a couple of calls for me,” Shayne said, trying to restrain his anger.

Gentry sensed the urgency in his friend’s voice. “O.K., give me a few minutes.”

Half an hour later, Shayne picked up the phone in mid-ring. “Sorry, Mike. Nothing. I even called some of my friends at the Beach. At least, there are no reports of his body being found. A lot of people are on the lookout for him.”

Shayne hung up and poured the rest of the coffee down the stained sink. It tasted bitter now. Five o’clock. It would be light soon. He could go down and prowl the beach front, but that would be like trying to catch a minnow in a trawling net.

He picked up the Miami phone book. The classifieds had nothing listed under “knee high.” He’d half expected to find some listing for a children’s store or...

He dialed Joe Roberts again. Twelve rings this time and nothing. One last chance. But that fizzled. Pat, the bartender at the Beef House, hadn’t seen Tim since that night a week ago when the three of them had closed the place.

The detective barely had the receiver back in the cradle when exhaustion finally caught up with him.

Shayne felt the warm sun on his shoulders. He woke with a start, mad at himself that he could have dozed off with so much at stake. The case in the Keys must have taken more out of him than he had thought. At least he had been by the phone the rest of the night in case Will or Tim or anybody called.

He put the skillet on the stove, threw in some corn beef hash and eggs. Shaving hurriedly, he donned afresh shirt, then wolfed down his food — it might be the last he’d have for awhile. As he finished the last of the hash, it struck him that he’d overlooked the obvious.

Shayne pulled the Buick up in front of the apartment building near Flamingo Park. He headed through the lobby and up the self-service elevator to the fourth floor. The lock was a piece of cake.

The Irishman’s apartment was more of a mess than usual. The place could have been tossed and no one would have noticed the difference. In the bedroom he found the closet door open and some hangers parted. A search of the medicine cabinet showed both the razor and shaving cream were missing. Tim was obviously on a trip, but where? There were no brochures, nothing written on the pads that sat beside both phones, and not a single piece of writing on the reporter’s desk.

Half an hour later Shayne was at Tim’s desk in the corner of the Daily News. He had found out why Roberts never answered his phone. The kid was vacationing with his parents in Disney-world. Dirksen had nothing new to contribute, so Shayne found himself going through the reporter’s desk. The bottom left drawer yielded a video cassette. Of course, for the Betamax Tim had been so excited about last Tuesday. Anita, a frail brunette whose eyes crossed behind her coke-bottle glasses, took him to the file room and plopped the cassette in the new machine.