“Just a punk who couldn’t hold his liquor. Take him out and dump him, Johnny. You stick around, Donk.”
Shayne watched with a saturnine smile twitching his swollen lips while Johnny got hold of the young man and dragged him out the rear door. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and mashed it out with his toe, lit another one. “You knew I’d be dropping around tonight,” he mused. “What were you afraid I’d find if I nosed around?”
Bugler said, “I don’t like my place stunk up with private dicks.”
“It’ll smell worse,” Shayne told him softly, “if you keep any bodies lying around.”
Bugler stiffened. His opaque, lidless eyes bored across the desk at Shayne. He didn’t say anything for thirty seconds. He finally spoke with no perceptible movement of his lips.
“You’d better get out, Shamus.”
Shayne shrugged. He took a slow drag on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, then let it out of his nostrils. He nodded and got up, went to the door and out without looking back.
Donk was twenty feet behind him when he went into the cocktail bar. He waved to the bald-headed bartender and kept going. Donk followed him to the entrance gates where he stopped and stared after the detective wishfully.
Shayne winced with pain as he got into his car and backed away from the curb. Passing by the entrance gates he leaned out and waved a long arm to Donk, who was still standing there looking unhappy.
He drove south along the ocean drive until he reached a drugstore with a public-telephone sign. He called Timothy Rourke’s home address and, after a long wait, got the reporter on the line. Rourke swore softly when he heard Shayne’s fuzzy enunciation. “You sound like the cat got your tongue.”