The Homicidal Virgin Read Free Page A

see that your ad didn’t appear in the Daily News. This is what happened.
    The newspaper does not run ads like yours, but my girlfriend that works in the advertising department opened your letter and read it and instead of turning it over to her boss as she was supposed to, she put it in her bag instead and gave it to me at lunch. So I’m the only one that knows about it and you won’t get any other answer but this.
    I think I can fill the bill if the price is right. You can reach me at this address any time after nine or ten p.m. Hoping to hear from you,
    Very truly yours,
    Mike Wayne.
     
    He fortified himself with a long drink of cognac before reading over what he had written, and even at that he shuddered as he came to the end. But he folded it resolutely and sealed it inside a hotel envelope and addressed it to Jane Smith at her Miami mail drop, and then settled back in an easy chair with his feet up on the windowsill overlooking the Bay to take alternate sips of cognac and ice water while he waited for it to be six o’clock so he could go down and confer with the night clerk to start establishing the new identity of Mike Wayne from Bayonne, New Jersey.

 
2
     
    By the evening of the third day Michael Shayne had established himself in the routine of the hotel as a regular who was casually accepted by the staff and the other regulars. He left his room promptly each morning and dropped his key at the desk, did not return until nine or ten in the evening when he would be greeted amiably by the night clerk and given the room number in which the game was running that night.
    It was a cozy stud-poker set-up, presided over by three residents of the hotel who moved it from one of their rooms to another each night. They played for table stakes with an initial buy of a hundred dollars worth of chips required in order to sit in, and it was a smooth operation designed to milk moderate sums from a succession of suckers as painlessly as possible.
    Shayne discovered that much about the game the first night he sat in—the first evening after he checked in. He quickly identified the three regulars as professional gamblers who knew their business, and the two other players who were being set up for the kill. He played his own cards carefully and aloofly while the fat man from New York on his left was efficiently relieved of almost two grand. From conversation around the table it developed that the fat man had been carefully set up for the kill during the preceding three or four evenings, having been allowed to win moderate amounts each evening until he was thoroughly convinced that the game was honest and that they were the suckers ripe to be taken.
    And it was an honest game so far as Shayne could ascertain. Within the legal definition of honest poker, that is. They didn’t appear to be using marked cards or doing any manipulating. Such crude methods weren’t needed, of course, with three experienced men playing as a unit against one sucker. By one of them raising lavishly on nothing while one of his partners obviously had the winning hand, the outsider was whip-sawed time after time into losing large pots in which he had no business whatsoever.
    It was a familiar enough pattern for such a game, and Shayne cynically won a succession of small pots and stayed put of the big ones, noting that it was the other floater’s third night for being allowed to win, and with a certain admiration for the finesse displayed by the three professionals.
    The fat man wasn’t present the second night, but there were two new players to take his place, and all four of the outsiders were allowed to win moderately.
    When Shayne sauntered up to the desk at nine-thirty on the third evening, Dick turned to a pigeonhole behind him and withdrew Shayne’s key and a large bulky white envelope. He leaned across the desk and spoke rapidly, “Funny thing this evening, Mr. Wayne. Along about seven a woman called to ask was you in. I told her you never was