That night over a bottle of Martell, he told me he had fallen in love for the first time in his life — with Phyllis Brighton whom he had just cleared of a charge of matricide.
Mike was a lonely and brooding man that night. He had sent Phyllis away, gently but firmly, a few days earlier, and he honestly did not hope ever to see her again. She was too young, he told me over and over again. Too young and too sweet and trusting to waste herself on a man like him.
I didn’t argue with Mike that night. Nor point out any of the obvious things. I did draw him into a discussion of the case just ended, and before the sun rose over Biscayne Bay he had agreed to turn his notes on the Brighton affair over to me for a novel which I called Dividend on Death.
Before this book was published, he had met Phyllis Brighton again (as I have related in The Private Practice of Michael Shayne), and when that case was ended Mike had capitulated.
I was best man at their wedding, and saw them installed in the larger corner apartment above Mike’s old bachelor quarters which he kept and fitted up sketchily as an office.
The next few years, I am positive, were the happiest Mike has ever known. Phyllis worried him sometimes by insisting as acting as his secretary and getting herself mixed up in some of his cases, but there was perfect companionship and understanding between them, culminating in a long-delayed honeymoon trip to Colorado — where Mike managed to get himself mixed up with murder in the old ghost town of Central City. He gave me the details of this case, and I used them in Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask.
Back in Miami, there was one more adventure together before that black night when I sat with Mike in the hospital waiting-room, sweating it out with him while the baby which Phyllis so ardently desired was being born.
I went back to his apartment with him at dawn, and sat across the room from the big redhead in a deep chair while he wept unashamedly. Both Phyllis and the baby were gone, and the doctors didn’t know why.
He swore at that time he would never touch another case that dealt with death, and I think he might have kept that resolution had he not received a telephone call in the night that sent him out on the trail of a vicious gang of black marketeers. I wrote about that one in Blood on the Black Market.
I noted a subtle change in Mike’s inner character after Phyllis’s death. In some ways he became more ruthless and driving and demanding of himself, but the hard outer shell of assumed cynicism was cracked, and for the first time in his life he wasn’t afraid to let traces of gentleness and pity shine through.