Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 3, August 1973

“The killer is here,” the voice said. “You will destroy him with your bare hands. If you lose...” Mike Shayne nodded grimly. He knew only too well what she meant...

I

“That’s the trouble with the whole thing,” the vice president of the Intercontinent Insurance Company said. “That’s the thing that makes me doubt my whole line of thinking in the matter. The man was an absolute nobody.”

“I can see your point, Bradley,” the big man in the dark suit said as he reached for the brandy bottle on the office desk.

The insurance company executive didn’t seem to hear him. It was almost as if he was talking to some secret doubt within himself,

“Socially the man was nothing at all,” Bradley said again. “Achievement-wise he never held anything but pennies-an-hour jobs. He never married. He never really did anything. Financially he was nothing at all.”

“I understand,” Mike Shayne said. “This guy was a nothing from nowhere.” As the big detective spoke he poured a double brandy into the tumbler his host had provided.

What Shayne was really thinking was: “If this Willison was really such a cipher, what am I doing here? What did Bradley call me in for?” He didn’t say it. He figured Bradley would get to the point in his own way and time. Shayne had handled many cases for Intercontinent before. He knew his man.

“His name was Sam Willison,” Bradley said. “Like I said he was a nothing. He took out an insurance policy with us, and named the Friendly Rest Retirement Home as his beneficiary. He was going to move in there on the first of next month he said — only he never got to make the move. Last week he committed suicide.”

“Probably got despondent,” Mike Shayne commented over his brandy. “Lots of the old ones in this town do. Old and alone and no place to go but somewhere like that Friendly Rest.”

“You know the Friendly Rest?” Bradley asked.

“Not any more than I do a dozen of them. I’ve seen it. A cheap joint as those places go. Takes some county patients, and the county can’t or won’t pay for real top care. I wouldn’t ever want to go there myself.”

“I guess’ Willison didn’t either,” the insurance man said. “The question in my mind is why did he think death was better?”

“That isn’t what you’re calling me in to find out for you,” Shayne said. “Your firm doesn’t pay my fees just to satisfy your curiosity. Suppose you get to the point.”

“All right. The point is I don’t think he really did commit suicide. I can’t prove it of course or I wouldn’t need you at all. I simply feel it in my bones.”

“Now we’re getting someplace,” Shayne said. “Go on.”

“There isn’t any more. At least nothing I can put my finger on. This guy was a loner. He had his Social Security and a little pension and a room he lived alone in. No relatives at least none listed on his policy. The policy itself was only for thirty-five hundred dollars. Not enough to make anybody greedy. No enemies we know about.”

“Did something about the way he died look wrong?” the redhead asked. “Something that looked like murder? Was that what started you thinking?”

“Not even that.” Bradley was out of his seat and pacing back and forth between desk and window. “Cause of death was an overdose of barbiturates. The police found the empty bottle by his bed. He got them himself at the corner drugstore. No sign of violence. His wallet was under his pillow with thirty bucks still in it.”

“Lots of people do it that way,” Shayne said. “Pop the pills. Read about it in your daily paper.”

“I know. But I had this hunch—”

“Oh, come on,” Shayne said and finished his brandy.

“I know. I know. An insurance company doesn’t have hunches. It has computers instead. That’s why I kept trying to convince myself it wasn’t just a hunch. The best I could come up with logically though was; why did he do it? This Willison wasn’t sick. We found that out when we insured him. No record as a psycho. No personal problems or enemies. Nothing. That’s all he was. A nothing.”

“So why does a nothing kill nothing?” Shayne wanted to know. “You might have something there, only I just can’t really believe it amounts to much.”

“Then I got this in the mail,” Bradley said. He tossed a piece of cheap pad paper to Shayne.

Someone had printed on it in crude block letters: YOU FIND OUT WHO KILL SAM WILLISON

II

Maudie Kuttner lived only a couple of blocks from the house where Sam Willison had died. That is, if it could be called living.

Maudie had one room that was eight feet by eight. She had a bed and a cheap dresser and one chair over by the window. The window looked into a walkway between two equally ancient and crumbling rooming houses. There was a torn cotton rug on the board floor and tom curtains at the window. There wasn’t even a closet.

Maudie had asthma and a mild-getting-worse case of rheumatoid arthritis and a bad heart.

Right then her mind wasn’t on any of these problems.

At the exact moment when Bradley was handing that note to Mike Shayne Maudie was having her last almost conscious thought on this side of the thin line that separates Miami, Florida, from the world of pure spirit.

There was a pillow over Maudie’s face, and someone with big, cruel hands was holding it there and pressing the fragile old woman down on the bed. Her struggles had gotten very feeble as her body starved for air.

Maudie Kuttner gave one final moan and died.

Her killer moved the bed just enough to get at the loose board in the flooring. He pried it up and got out the tin box that held Maudie’s pitiful life savings in carefully hoarded bills. It came to just a little over eighteen hundred dollars and a flawed diamond ring that had belonged to the woman’s mother.

He took that and’ left the papers and letters when he put the box back under the board and the bed back over that part of the flooring.

Maudie had cashed her social security check only that morning. The killer took eighty-two dollars out of her shabby purse. He left the rest; it might not look like robbery.

Then he went back over to the bed. He took the pillow off the lined old face and checked to make sure that she was quite dead.

When he was sure that no spark of life still lingered, he very carefully put the pillow back under her head instead of over it.

He wanted it to look as if Maudie Kuttner had laid herself down to rest and then died of a heart attack or from her asthma or some other natural cause.

When everything was arranged to his satisfaction he went out of the mean little room, closing the door carefully behind him, and down the stairs and out of the building. He met nobody in the halls.

With any luck Maudie Kuttner wouldn’t even be found for a couple of days. By that time it would be hard to find out exactly what caused her death.

Likely nobody would really care about that anyway.

III

Just about then Mike Shayne was saying to his friend and frequent client Mr. Bradley: “Yeah, I agree with you this piece of paper does change things a bit. What did you find out about it?”

“More nothing at all,” Bradley said. “I showed it to Len Sturgis over at Miami Homicide, and he had his lab check it out just in case. No prints on this or the envelope. That’s all he’d do right now. The police are busy with things more important than a crank tip on a case already marked down for suicide. If you turn up anything though, you know you can count on Len Sturgis to help.”

“Sure I know,” Shayne said. He handed the slip of paper back to the insurance man. “Let me see everything you’ve got in the file on this Willison. I’ll run the ball myself from there on out.”

“At your usual per diem and expenses,” Bradley said. “After all we don’t want to pay out even as little as thirty-five hundred unless we have to.”

“And you don’t like to waste a hunch,” Shayne said as he reached for the thin file on the dead man.

An hour later Shayne had checked in at his Flagler Street office with his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, riffed through the advertisements and bills that made up the morning mail; and walked on over to the downtown section where the late Mr. Willison had spent his last days.

It was an area of rundown rooming houses, barely surviving boom time apartment buildings and a few ancient and decrepit hotels located north of where ground had been cleared for the new downtown division of Dade Junior College.

“If Social Security ever went out of business,” Shayne told himself, “this whole part of town would fall to pieces like the wonderful one hoss shay. These people around here have mostly been dead for years only they don’t know it yet. Still that doesn’t give anybody the right to hurry this Willison along with it.”

Shayne found the address he was looking for without any trouble, and put a big thumb to the doorbell. As he expected, it didn’t ring. He pushed the door open and winced at the blast of stale air that escaped from the dark tunnel of hallway inside.

A hand lettered sign on the door to his left said Manager, and the big man pounded on the door.

After a while it opened a crack and a dirty old woman in an equally dirty dress and shawl squinted out at him.

“What you want?”

“It’s about Mr. Willison,” Shayne said. “The guy who died here last week. I want to talk to you about him.”

“No,” the old woman said with finality. “I awreddy told you cops all I’m gonna say about him. Go away.”

“I’m not a cop,” Shayne said patiently. “I’m from the insurance company that had the policy on him. All I want to do is ask you a couple of questions.”

“Ask somebody else,” she said. “I don’t know nothing about no insurance company. I don’t know nothing about nothing. Go on. Get away from here.”

Mike Shayne would like to have pushed on in, but she had only opened the door a couple of inches and he could see that the strong brass chain inside was still fastened. Even if he’d been willing to risk breaking in without a warrant, the racket would have drawn a crowd for sure.

He heard a door carefully opened down the hall, but no one came out. Shayne was sure at least one person must be eavesdropping.

“There’s nothing to get upset about,” he told the old woman. “Simply a few routine questions that have to be asked.”

No answer. She would have shut the door but the private detective blocked that with the toe of one big shoe.

“Of course I know your time is valuable,” he said then and pulled a rumpled double sawbuck out of his jacket pocket. He held it up so she could see, but carefully kept it out of her reach.

He saw the old eyes light up with greed, and for a moment thought she was about to talk. Then that emotion was replaced by another which Shayne was ready to identify as fear.

She shoved the door against his foot.

“I ain’t sayin’ nothing,” she said. “I don’t know nothing nohow. What I know I tell the cops already. You go and ask them. Now take that big foot outta my door before I start to scream.”

That was that. The big man took out one of his business cards and tossed it through the crack into the room.

“You change your mind, you call me,” Shayne said. “Don’t forget, I pay for any information I can use.”

The detective said the last part loud enough so whoever was listening down the hall could hear it. Then he took his foot out of the manager’s door. It was instantly slammed in his face.

Shayne stood quietly for a moment.

As he had hoped, he heard a quick hissing noise from down the hall. When he turned his head a hand was cautiously beckoning from one of the room doors.

Mike Shayne walked quickly back down the hall. The hand grabbed his elbow and almost yanked him through the doorway.

“Come in quick,” its owner said as the door shut. “I don’t want anybody to know I’m talking to you.”

“Don’t worry,” Shayne said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

The man in the room was old and wrinkled. He stood about five-two in his shoes and probably weighed about eighty-five pounds. He wore an old and much mended cardigan sweater which might have been either dark green or brown when it was new, gray and shapeless trousers and a pair of tennis shoes. From the smell he hadn’t bathed in a week.

In spite of all that there was something about him which Mike Shayne took an instant liking to.

The eyes in the small, wrinkled face were bright and sparkling with intelligence and humor and the face itself had an almost elfin quality. The man stood straight as a ramrod in his shoes. His movements were quick and alert.

Old as he was, this man had not given in to the endless drag of loneliness and poverty. Here was a vital human being.

“You said you was from the insurance company,” the little man said. “Prove it. Show me your identification. You got to have some, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Shayne said. He took a couple of I.D. cards from his wallet and showed them to the little man.

The eyes in the old face grew even brighter.

“Mike Shayne,” the man said. His tone changed so that he said it almost reverently. “You the Mike Shayne I read about so many times?”

“I’m that Shayne, I guess,” the big detective said. “What do you want with me?”

“First I just want to look at you,” the other said. “I hear so much about you sometimes I wonder if you’re really so. Now here you stand right in my own room. It’s too good to be true, that’s what it is.”

“What did you want me for?” Shayne asked again.

“I was going to tell you. I read about you all these years. And now—”

“And now what?” Shayne pressed him.

“Now I’m going to help you solve a murder case,” the old gnome breathed ecstatically.

IV

Mike Shayne hadn’t reached the top of his profession on the Florida Gold Coast by being a fool. The face he turned to the little old man was perfectly serious and even respectful.

“Okay, then. Maybe you can help at that. What makes you think so?”

“I’m a detective myself,” the other said. “Oh, not like you are. I’m a student of detecting; all my life. I have a wonderful library on the subject.”

He gestured and Shayne saw that indeed the corners of the room were heaped with old books, most of them paperbacks, and magazines. All of the well known true and fiction detective sheets were represented. There was even a massive hardbound edition of Sherlock Holmes stories.

“I see.”

“I read them all. I read all the cases in the papers. I’ve trained myself to think like a detective. No formal training, you understand, but still I think I’m as good as most detectives today.”

The old fellow’s eyes sparkled as he spoke and he kept taking little darting steps back and forth across the room.

“Well now,” Mike Shayne said seriously, “if that’s the case then you know there’s a regular routine we have to follow if you’re going to help me. There’s questions I have to ask you, and—”

“Oh I know,” the little fellow said. “Who am I? I’m Tom Rumbo. R-U-M-B-O. I’m a retired letter carrier. What murder? Why the murder of Sam Willison, of course. The murder of my good friend Sam.”

He paused to catch his breath and his eyes darted to Mike Shayne’s face and caught the expression there.

“Oh, I know that’s just the beginning. Give me time. Time. What makes me feel it’s murder when the police say it was suicide? That’s the next question, isn’t it?”

Shayne nodded.

“Well for one thing, Mister Shayne, Sam was my friend. I knew Sam like I know myself. Sam simply wasn’t the man to commit suicide. No sir, he was not.”

“Somebody else already told me that this morning,” the big man said.

“That would be at the insurance company, wouldn’t it?” Rumbo nodded an answer to his own question. “You was telling her up front the truth. I thought maybe my letter to them would get action. Yes, but I never hoped it would be the likes of Mike Shayne it would bring.”

“So you wrote that note,” Shayne said. “Why didn’t you sign it? Then I’d have come straight to you.”

“You’re trying to trip me up,” Rumbo said. “Trying to see if I know the detective business, aren’t you? It won’t work. In the stories nobody ever signs that sort of note. Do they?”

Mike Shayne looked at the pile of dogeared magazines and then he had to laugh. In those stories he didn’t suppose such notes ever were signed.

Rumbo laughed with him. “You see? Besides I knew if the man they sent was any good he’d find me. If he was too dumb to find me, I wouldn’t want to work with the likes of him anyway. My name’s Rumbo. Not Dumbo. You see?”

“Okay, Rumbo,” Shayne said. “You’re a detective. So get to it. You know a detective has to have more than a hunch to go by. You can say all you want that your pal Sam wouldn’t kill himself, but that doesn’t mean somebody else murdered him. He could have taken those pills by accident.”

“Sam?” Rumbo said. “Not Sam he couldn’t. He wasn’t no pill head that doped himself up all the time. Didn’t like them things anyway. He bought the one bottle and that only after his nerves got to jumping because he was afraid.”

“Now we’re hitting pay dirt,” Shayne said. “Suppose you tell me what Sam was afraid of.”

“Not what. Who.”

“Goon. Who?”

“Why, Big Hans, that’s who. Ever since he signed up to go into that home he started to get mad at that Big Hans and became afraid. He said maybe it was a mistake.”

“Hans who?”

“I don’t know his last name. Big Hans was all Sam ever called him. I never saw him neither.”

“Does this Hans own the Friendly Rest Home?” Shayne asked. “Does he work there?”

“I don’t even know that for sure. I never seen this guy. Sam didn’t really tell me much. Just hints here and there. Nothing definite, but I did get the name. He was afraid of this Hans though. Scared enough so he bought them pills. Scared.”

“I believe you. Scared.” Shayne said.

“I’m scared too, Mister Shayne. That’s one reason I wrote that note and didn’t sign it. If this guy killed Sam, he knew I was Sam’s best friend. Maybe he thinks I know who he is. I don’t like that. I wanted help.”

“Have you reason to think you’re in danger?” the detective asked.

The answer came from the front of the building in the form of a crashing explosion that rocked floor and walls and almost jolted the room door out of its frame.

V

Mike Shayne and Tom Rumbo stood frozen in shock for a long moment while the whole building seemed to rock from the force of the blast. A big piece of ancient plaster fell from the ceiling and broke to dust and fragments on one of the piles of old true detective story magazines.

Shayne was the first to recover. He ran for the door. The explosion had jammed the lock and he had to force it open.

Tom Rumbo was right on the big man’s heels. When they both got through the door they saw that the whole front of the hall was full of plaster dust and acrid fumes from the explosive charge.

The door to the manager’s apartment had been blown to pieces. The door was out in the hall, showing that the blast had gone off inside the apartment.

One glance into the room through the blasted doorway showed Mike Shayne that the Old woman who had refused to let him in only a few moments earlier was very dead indeed. The bomb itself must have gone off right in her hands, or perhaps she had been leaning over it on the table. The table top was gone in a mess of splinters and the upper half of the old woman’s body could barely be identified as human any longer.

Tom Rumbo crowded up behind Shayne to look into the room. Then he pulled away, stepped back into the hall and stood still. His first turned white and then green and he vomited against the wall.

Mike Shayne came out of the room. He caught the little man by the elbow.

“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here in a hurry. That bomb will have the police here any minute and I don’t want you talking to them right now.”

As if to confirm his words they heard the whoop-whoop of a prowl car siren coming closer fast.

Some of the other tenants were beginning to come out of their rooms and approach the bomb-wrecked manager’s apartment. Mike Shayne ignored them. He held fast to Rumbo’s elbow and half propelled, half supported the little man down the hall to the rear exit.

They got out into an alley and then through to the next street. Tom Rumbo was still pale and shaken but he could walk by himself although obviously looking to the big detective for guidance.

“I’m taking you over to my office,” Shayne said. “It’s only a few blocks, but we’ll have to walk it because I left my car. Do you think you can make it without attracting attention?”

“I think so,” Rumbo said. Then his eyes brightened. “That’s why we came out the back. Whoever set off that thing might have been watching the front of the house. I never thought of that.”

“Come on,” Shayne told him. “Time enough to talk when we get there and have a drink to steady us. You drink, don’t you?”

“Of course. I never thought about somebody watching. I guess I’m not much of a detective after all.”

Ten minutes later they were in Mike Shayne’s second floor office looking out over the crowded sidewalks of Miami’s famous Flagler Street.

Lucy Hamilton had poured them each a stiff drink from the brandy bottle, and the big man had one of his private brand long black cigars lit and smoking. He had briefed Lucy Hamilton on what had taken place.

“What do you suppose it means?” she asked.

Tom Rumbo was the first to answer. “I don’t know. I was afraid somebody’d try and get me. But old Mrs. Hanger—”

“Maybe they thought Mr. Willison had talked to her too,” Lucy Hamilton suggested. “They could have been afraid of what she knew.”

“If there hadn’t already been two murders, that would make me laugh,” Rumbo assured them both. “I mean really laugh. The only time that, woman talked to anybody was to ask for the rent money or bawl somebody out for making too much noise. Nobody would confide anything to her. You can believe me when I say that.”

“Oh, but surely she couldn’t possibly have been that bad,” Lucy said.

“I’m inclined to agree with Tom, Angel,” Shayne said. “I only saw the late landlady for a couple of minutes but the personality she showed me could have fitted a gila monster. If she was like that with everybody—”

“She was,” Rumbo interjected.

“In that case,” Shayne finished, “nobody would give her the time of day let alone tell her their troubles.”

“Would the bomber know that?” Lucy Hamilton insisted.

“If he ever met her, he would. Besides I’m not at all sure that blast was meant for her. That’s one reason I got Tom here out the back way as fast as I could. I think it was meant for him and she got it by mistake.”

Rumbo took a mouthful of brandy and choked and sputtered. “Beer’s more my drink,” he said in apology.

“Why do you think it was meant for Tom? You must have a reason, Michael,” Lucy said.

“I’ve got a reason all right. I got a good look in at where that thing went off. She’d been sitting at the table and from the debris I think it’s a hundred to one she’d been sorting the mail.”

“She always did that,” Rumbo said. “Every day she took in the mail and sorted it out before putting it by our doors. She was real nosy and wanted to know who got what mail?”

“Was she ever nosy enough to open up mail addressed to one of the boarders?”

“I don’t know for sure,” the little man answered. “That sort of thing ain’t easy to prove. But there was times— Yes, a couple of times I could almost swear letters to me had been tampered with. They could have been steamed open and then sealed up again. Come to think of it, some of the others used to think so too. Nobody could prove it, of course.”

“That would explain it,” Mike Shayne said. “I think the thing that did her in was one of those letter bombs like they’ve been using in political assassination attempts lately. They put the explosive in a letter rigged so it won’t go off unless the envelope is opened. It looks like a fat letter. Then when the person it’s addressed to rips it open — boom. He has it right in his hands and it can’t miss killing him.”

“Oh my God,” Tom Rumbo said.

“Sure,” Shayne told them. “You were Sam Willison’s best friend. You had it figured they wouldn’t take a chance on letting you talk. So they send you one of those death-in-the-mail-box notes.

“Only, luckily, you did not get to open it. That old woman gets the mail first and decides to see who’s writing old Tom Rumbo about what. Maybe she was wondering about Willison too. We’ll never know for sure now.

“Anyway she decides to take a quick peek into your mail. She’d done the same thing before and got away with it. What harm would once more do? So she opened it up, or started to. Only this time she found out why it pays to mind your own business.”

“I don’t like what you said,” Tom Rumbo said then. “If that’s true, then my life is in danger all the time. That’s funny because I really don’t know all that much to make me dangerous to them whoever they are.”

“They must think you do,” Lucy Hamilton said, “and that’s just as bad from their viewpoint. Or maybe you know more them you think you do. If that’s so it’s a good thing for you that you sent that note to the insurance company.”

“All I know is that my friend got scared about the time he decided to take out that policy. After that he was scared all the time, and somebody he called Big Hans was mixed up with his being afraid. That’s all I know.”

“It’s enough so somebody delivered a bomb,” Mike Shayne said.

“Michael,” Lucy Hamilton asked, “why would Mr. Willison make the retirement home the beneficiary of his policy? Isn’t that unusual? Doesn’t it make them a suspect if he was murdered?”

“That’s a lot of questions, Angel. I asked Bradley at Intercontinent some of them. He says no, it isn’t unusual. Lots of the people who go into these homes need a lot of care and they can’t pay high rates. The home takes them anyway in return for being made their beneficiary. That way everybody gets a good deal. Besides the amount in itself was pretty small to be a motive for murder. It isn’t as if the policy had been for twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”

“There’s folks in this town would cut your throat for loose change,” Tom Rumbo said in an ominous tone.

“I know that. I’m not counting out the thirty-five hundred bucks as a motive. Right now it’s the only motive we’ve got. The next thing I’m going to do is take a look at this Friendly Rest Home. I’m also going to see if I can find this Big Hans guy.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No you won’t,” Shayne said. “I want you off the streets and where I can find you. Why give them another free shot at you? You stay right here with Lucy. Don’t go out for anything. She’ll have food sent in if you get hungry.”

“I’m a detective too,” Rumbo protested. “I want to do something to help.”

“I’m in charge of this case,” Shayne said. “You can help best by doing as you’re told and keeping out of trouble. Later on I may have more for you to do.”

The Friendly Rest Retirement Home was in downtown Miami on the Northeast side, a few blocks from where the late Sam Willison had lived.

At some time in the distant past the building had been a tourist hotel, but that time was long gone. The neighborhood was run down now, an area of sleazy shops selling poor quality goods, of rooming houses catering to the social security people, of warehouses and automobile body shops.

The Friendly Rest was a big building that took up almost half of a small city block. The four sides were built up three stories and enclosed a courtyard entered from the street by an archway closed by wrought iron gates. The paint on the gates had given way to rust and the fountain in the center of the court held only a couple of inches of rainwater.

Inside the gates, to the left of anyone entering, was a heavy oaked door with a sign that said: OFFICE.

Mike Shayne pushed the door open and went in to a big room containing three old oak desks and a number of metal filing cabinets. There were framed photos of boomtime Miami on the walls and what looked like a couple of diplomas, too faded and fly-specked to read.

Only one of the desks was occupied. That was the one with the painted plaque that said; President.

The man behind the desk wasn’t much bigger than Tom Rumbo but he was certainly at least thirty years younger. He had a thin face and an oval skull already beginning to grow a bald streak back along the crown. His nose and lips were thin and his eyes a pale watery grey-green. He wore expensive slacks arid a sport shirt that had to have come from one of the better local department stores.

He looked at Mike Shayne and said: “Good morning.”

“I’m interested in your place,” Shayne said. “Oh, not for me of course. My wife has an uncle living here in Miami. He isn’t really sick or anything, but he is getting pretty old.”

“You’re thinking of putting him in Friendly. Rest? In that case we decide if he’s sick.” The tone was very businesslike. “All our guests have a thorough physical exam before we accept their applications. We aren’t a hospital here, you know.”

“I know that,” Shayne said. “Do you give the exam yourself?”

“No, I’m an administrator, not a doctor, Mister — uh, you didn’t give your name?”

“It’s Kelly,” Shayne said. “From Chicago. Would you mind if I looked around a bit before I decided anything?”

“Not at all, Mr. Kelly. It’s what we’d want you to do. I’ll have someone take you through.” He pressed a call buzzer on his desk. “My name is Amor, Mr. Kelly. Paul Amor. I’m president and resident administrator at Friendly Rest. The guests call me doctor, but it’s only a courtesy title.”

“I understand,” Shayne said with a smile. “Doctor Amor it is to me too then. And thanks for letting me look around.”

He heard the office door open behind him.

“Ah there you are, Nurse Hadley,” Dr. Amor said. “This is Mr. Kelly. His wife has an uncle — I’d appreciate your giving him the tour.”

Mike Shayne turned to face the woman in the starched white nurse’s uniform who stood in the doorway. Long years in the business of private detective, a business in which the unusual and the shocking became routine, enabled him to~ keep a total poker face. It wasn’t easy though.

‘Nurse Hadley’ had the uniform and the air and even a clinical thermometer in her dress pocket and a starched white cap. But she was no more a nurse than Shayne was premier of Bulgaria.

VI

Mike Shayne could not be mistaken. There were the same handsome features, so oddly at varience with the cold grey eyes, the sensuous lips and the high breasted, wide hipped figure exactly as he remembered them from years back. So was the way of standing with her left side a bit advanced and the left hand set squarely against the hip. He knew her all right.

Nurse Hadley was Millie Love, just as all Miami after dark had known her twenty years before. Then she had owned, or at least fronted, one of the lavish and expensive gambling dens and houses of assignation that had studded the Florida Gold Coast in the wild and brazen postwar days.

There had been a scandal and a dead man on the floor, a man of such political and financial prominence that a public trial would have embarrassed or destroyed half of Miami. Instead of a trial there had been an elaborate cover up. In the end the man was buried quietly and Millie vanished from the scene. Mike Shayne had never really known the whole of that story.

Now here she was again in the office of this third rate hostel for the aged and the infirm. She wore her years well, but there was no mistaking her.

She knew him too. He had no doubt of that, and braced himself for what might occur when His Mr. Kelly was unmasked.

The woman looked him right in the face with masked and bitter eyes.

“Why of course, Dr. Amor,” she said in a voice that Shayne remembered well. It was the same voice she had used when she took over as dealer at one of her house’s gambling tables. “I’ll be glad to show Mr. Kelly through. If you’ll just follow me, sir.”

Shayne followed her out into the hall. He didn’t dare turn to face Paul Amor on the way for fear his eyes might give him away. When the office door had closed he looked at her again.

To his very great surprise she still gave no sign of recognition, but met his glance apparently openly and unconcerned. Her still beautiful mouth curved in the smile of a business woman eager to make a good impression on a possible client.

“I suppose you’ll want to see some of the guest rooms as well as the clinic and recreation rooms?” she said. “We’ll do those first, then anything else you’d like to see, Mr. Kelly. We want the relatives of our guests to be perfectly satisfied as to their comfort here with us.”

Shayne wanted to say: “Oh come off it, Millie. I know you and you know me and we both know it. I didn’t come here looking for you either so relax. I never was your enemy.”

He didn’t though. Her air was so natural and her composure so perfect that he was almost ready to doubt his own senses.

So all he said was: “Yes. After that I’d like to take a look at the kitchens and the staff area. That sort of thing is important in the care a man gets here.”

Shayne made no attempt to disguise his voice or natural intonations. In fact he emphasized both. If there had been any possible chance that Millie hadn’t recognized him, he wanted to dispel it.

She gave no sign of recognition.

Instead she gave him the complete tour, even looking in on two or three of the guests in their rooms. These last deemed comfortable and at ease. They greeted Nurse Hadley cheerfully.

She even took him up on the flat roof of the east wing of the building. There was wooden flooring here and deck chairs, even a ping-pong table. The improvised sundeck had several large plants set over by the parapet in heavy earthenware pots.

They were alone up there and no one could have overheard anything they said, but the woman still kept her mask unbroken. Mike Shayne let it go at that. He was sure that he couldn’t have been mistaken about her identity, but if she wanted to play games that was quite okay.

When they got down to the kitchens the help, nurses, orderlies and kitchen workers were eating their lunch. Most of them seemed to be either blacks or Cubans. None had any look of a German.

Shayne risked a question. “Do you have a man named Hans something or other working here? Big fellow. A German or a Dane I think?”

“No. Nobody by that name or anything like it. Why do you ask?”

“I’m sorry,” Shayne said. “From something someone said I had thought you did.”

He had watched her very carefully as he spoke and he could have sworn that she showed no sign of recognition or of any special emotion at the name, but then she hadn’t shown any sign of recognizing Mike Shayne either.

Millie Love had always been famous for her iron hard gambler’s mask. By now Shayne was ready to award her an all-time grand master’s gold medal for achievement at the art.

She took him back to the office and left him with Dr. Amor. Certainly Shayne could see no sign of any signal passing between them.

Shayne broke away as soon as he could. He let Paul Amor give him a brochure and a blank application form for registry at the Friendly Rest.

He liked what he’d seen, he said, but of course his wife had to be consulted. She’d probably want to come herself, and bring her uncle for a look around. They wouldn’t want to put the old man anywhere against his own will. The redhead hoped he’d understand.

Paul Amor said that he understood perfectly. Naturally they wouldn’t want to leap into anything as important as the decision they were, he hoped, about to make.

He offered Shayne a drink, which the big man refused, and they shook hands very amicably.

There was no sign of Millie Love either in the courtyard or the entryway as Mike Shayne left the building. He hadn’t really expected that there would be.

Outside on the street he turned East towards the Bay and swung to the right around the corner to walk to where his car was parked.

There was a wild yell of: “Look out!” and a hurtling figure slammed into Shayne and drove him out off the sidewalk into the street.

At the same instant one of the big potted plants from the roof garden of the Friendly Rest crashed onto the sidewalk where Shayne had been seconds before.

VII

If he hadn’t been pushed out of the way of the falling missile, Mike Shayne would have been dead or seriously injured. He looked at the person who had saved his life, and wasn’t particularly surprised to find that it was Tom Rumbo. He’d recognized that eldritch yell.

“I know,” the little man said, looking up at him. “You said to wait in your office. But I’m a detective. You said I could help you with this case. I can’t help by sitting there with my feet up, so I followed you.”

“How did you get out past Lucy?”

“She was busy mopping up the vase of flowers that fell off her desk and smashed on the floor.”

Rumbo said that with a perfectly straight face, and Shayne refrained from asking how the vase had come to fall off the desk. He and Rumbo were beginning to understand one another, and he couldn’t help liking the little old man.

“Aren’t you going to call the cops or go back in there yourself?” Rumbo asked. “Somebody in there tried to kill you.”

“They’d only swear it was an accident.”

“But I saw that thing lifted onto the parapet and then shoved over. I could swear that—”

“You could swear till you were blue in the face and it’d be your word against theirs. It was an accident. You didn’t happen to see who did it?” the big detective asked.

“No face,” Rumbo said regretfully. “Just the hands and forearms. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. It all happened so fast, and I had you to look after.”

“So you did,” Shayne said. “I won’t forget it either, Rumbo. Believe me.”

“It was nothing,” Rumbo said. “Say, what did you find in there? Was Big Hans in that place? I’m sure he’s part of the gang.”

“No Big Hans.” Shayne shook his head. “I did meet an old friend though and I’m beginning to think maybe there could be a Friendly Rest gang. At least I’m a lot more sure than I was before somebody tried to flatten me.”

“Just think of it,” the little man said. “Inside of one hour somebody tries to kill both of us. Me and the famous Mike Shayne. I never thought to live so long.”

“It’s not funny, Rumbo,” Mike Shayne said.

At that moment Nurse Hadley was standing, with left hand on her hip, in front of Dr. Amor’s big desk.

“It’s serious, Paul,” she was saying. “That big guy I showed around isn’t named Kelly and he hasn’t any wife’s uncle to put in here. That was the private dick, Mike Shayne. You’ve heard of him.”

The doctor’s expression showed that he thought it was serious too.

“I’ve heard of him. What in the devil was he looking for?”

“I’m not sure. By the way, one of those big plants fell off the roof as the shamus was walking along.”

Dr. Amor’s face brightened. He said: “How terrible! I hope the poor man wasn’t injured badly.”

“He wasn’t injured at all, Paul. It missed him.”

“Oh, a regrettable accident. I’ll send one of the orderlies out to clean up the mess before some cop notices it and asks questions.”

“Paul,” she said. “Shayne asked me if we had a German or Danish man working here named Hans. A big man.”

“Well we don’t,” Amor said. “If that’s who he’s looking for maybe we don’t have anything to worry about after all.”

“A big man,” Nurse Hadley said. “Big Hans. Paul, you don’t think he could have meant Julio, do you?”

“Since you’re here anyway,” Mike Shayne said to Tom Rumbo, “I guess you might as well trail along.”

“Where are we going now?”

“I want to stop by and see an old friend at Police Headquarters. You don’t mind do you?”

“Mind? Why should I mind? I always wanted to see the inside of a first rate police station. The labs and the morgue and stuff like that. A detective had oughtta know.”

“I’ll see you get the grand tour later,” Shayne said. “Right now I want to talk to an old friend.”

Fifteen minutes later they were seated in the office of Miami Chief of Police Will Gentry, and he was listening carefully to everything that the two of them had to tell him.

“As usual I think you’ve got something there,” the Chief told Shayne when the big man ended his story. “You’re right about it being a letter bomb at the rooming house. I got the homicide report a few minutes ago. A bomb like that self-destructs very effectively. No trace of who sent it.”

“Of course” Tom Rumbo said and looked important.

“As for you,” the Chief said to the little man. “We’ve got you to thank for saving Mike. I don’t think even his head is hard enough to take a tree and a planter without caving in. What’s more I don’t know whether a judge or jury would take your word, but I believe you saw somebody deliberately try to drop it on him. Our boys will have to keep a closer eye on that Friendly Rest place in the future.”

“What do you mean a closer eye?” Shayne asked. “Have you had the place under observation?”

“Not exactly that, Mike. As a matter of’ fact we’ve never really had a serious complaint on the Friendly Rest. Always passes its fire and health inspections — not too good, of course, but as good as most of those places. Never any dope there that we know of. It’s just that some of those homes we like to keep an eye on.”

“You must have some reason, Will.”

“Oh we do — but it isn’t always something you could tell the grand jury, or Tim Rourke, or even your own wife. More like a hunch. In this case there’s too many funerals.”

“Funerals!” Tom Rumbo said. “Dead people. Do you think it’s murders, Chief?”

“If I did, Mr. Rumbo, we’d have raided the place long ago. All the deceased have regular death certificates that name a natural cause of death. Not all by the same doctor either, Mike, in case you were going to ask. The families don’t squawk, where there are families. Mostly there aren’t. The folks who pick a spot like the Friendly Rest to wait to die in our town don’t run to loving families. Mostly they’re nobodies.”

“Like the late Sam Willison,” Shayne said.

“Sam was no nobody,” Rumbo protested. “He was my friend. He was a good guy.”

“Sure he was,” Chief Gentry agreed, “but we both know what Mike means. In this town being a good guy doesn’t make you somebody.”

“It had ought to.”

“Are there any warrants still out on Millie Love?” Mike Shayne asked and changed the subject. “She must have recognized me even though she never let on. She just had to know me, Will.”

“No warrants,” Chief Gentry said firmly. “Matter of fact I never even heard you mention that name. That dame knows where too many bodies are buried, and not the kind that get funerals either. If it was her you saw, she’s real smart not to admit who she is.”

“Her type might use a place like that for a cover for all sorts of shenanigans,” Shayne added.

“She might, but if you think so you better have plenty of proof. That’s such a hot potato nobody will want to touch it with a ten-foot pole unless you got ironclad hanging evidence. Don’t ever make any mistake about that, boy. I wouldn’t touch Millie Love for anything less.”

“I guess that woman must be what you all would call a somebody in this town then.” That wasn’t a question. It was a statement from Tom Rumbo.

Both of the big men looked at the little old man and tried to decide whether or not they were angry.

The phone rang then and broke the tension. Chief Will Gentry picked it up, spoke briefly, and then put the instrument back in its cradle.

“That was the rundown I had the boys do on this Big Hans you were talking about,” he said to the other two. “None of the boys ever heard of him. Neither did our computor. They’re doing a long distance double check on the F.B.I. files, but if he’s ever been in our town he must be whiter than a field of lillies, or we’d have something on file.”

“I guess so,” Shayne said. He turned to the little man. “Are you sure that’s the name Willison used before he died? I mean absolutely sure and not just you think or you guess or something like that?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Rumbo protested. “I told you I been practicing to be a detective. Detectives don’t guess.”

Gentry snorted with sardonic laughter. “I wish none of mine did.”

His evident amusement put Tom Rumbo more at ease.

“I’m absolutely sure about that,” he said, “because I’d never heard Sam afraid of anybody or anything before. He said he was afraid of Big Hans. Big Hans might be after him. He said Big Hans made him nervous, but he wouldn’t ever explain. When I tried to ask, he’d clam up tight.”

“He sounds like he’d thought there was a Big Hans,” Will Gentry said.

“Okay then. If there’s such a guy anywhere in this town, I guess I better find him.” Shayne got to his feet and reached for his hat. “Come on, Tom. I’m going to take you back to my office and handcuff you to the desk or Lucy, for safekeeping. Then I’m going out and turn over rocks till I find this Hans. I want a talk with him for sure.”

VIII

Mike Shayne took Tom Rumbo back to the Flagler Street office by the direct route, making certain that the little man had no chance at all to give him the slip.

Rumbo didn’t like it. “I’m a detective too,” he protested. “Didn’t I push you out of the way of that potted plant? Mr. Shayne, I hate to put it this way, but you owe me a chance to be in on the whole of this case. You really do, you know.”

Shayne wouldn’t give an inch. “I hate to put it this way too, Tom, but what I really owe you is protection. I owe it to you to see that you’re safe.”

“I couldn’t be safer than with you.”

“Sure you could. You will be safe with Lucy. I may have to go into some pretty tough places, and you may be a detective — I don’t say you aren’t — but you’re no professional fighter.”

Tom Rumbo gave that some serious thought. “I guess you could be right about that last,” he said finally.

After that he was silent until they had parked the car and were walking the last block to the office. “Mr. Shayne—” he said then.

“Yes.”

“There’s just one more thing. Maybe I should have told you and Chief Gentry, but you know how it is with us detectives. We like an ace in the sleeve — I mean in the hole. Anyway I thought I’d tell you later, and I am telling you now.”

He paused.

“Go on,” Mike Shayne said. “What is it, Tom?”

“Well. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t important. Just something I remembered Sam said once.”

“You let me judge whether it’s important or not,” Shayne said. “Tell me what it was.”

“Only something Sam said. Once when he was talking about being scared he said: ‘Maybe I could handle Big Hans if I could speak Spanish.’ What do you think he meant by that?”

“The only thing that comes to mind right off is that maybe Big Hans spoke Spanish. Only Hans isn’t a Spanish name. It’s German or Scandinavian. I don’t know—”

“It could be important though?” Rumbo asked.

“It could be. We’ll know later. Thanks for telling me.”

By then they were on the stairs leading up to Mike Shayne’s second floor office.

Inside the office Lucy Hamilton greeted them warmly.

“I’m sorry Michael,” she said, indicating Rumbo. “I wasn’t looking for him to go anyplace. He slipped out on me. Anyway you found him.”

“He found me,” Shayne said and told her how the little man had probably saved his life.

“We both owe you for that then, Mr. Rumbo,” Lucy Hamilton said. “Oh, Michael, there was a phone message for you about twenty minutes ago. I think it’s important. The caller said if you want to find Big Hans he can take you to him. He said to meet him at eight o’clock tonight and left directions where.”

“Yes,” Shayne said. “That is important. Who was it called?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t leave any name. The voice sounded muffled or disguised or something. As a matter of fact I’m not even sure whether it was a man or a woman. Anyway I made him repeat the time and place so I could write them down.”

She handed Shayne a slip of paper off her notepad. He put it in his jacket pocket.

“I’ll make the meet anyway,” he told them both. “While I’m waiting for the time we can take it easy and then get something to eat.”

He was as good as his word. During the rest of the afternoon Shayne made phone calls to some of his contacts, both official and unofficial, to try and find out more about the Friendly Rest Retirement Home. He learned nothing that really pointed to a solution of the case he was working on.

The Home had been in operation at the same address for more than twenty years, in which time it had had at least three sets of owners. Amor had bought in about five years back. He was an out-of-town investor from Chicago and not too well known locally. Nobody Shayne talked to even hinted at a knowledge that Nurse Hadley was anything other than that.

There were no scandals connected with the Friendly Rest. As a matter of fact it had apparently a good reputation for a place of the sort.

Shayne called Will Gentry again, but the Chief couldn’t give him much more than he already had. Yes, it did seem that there had been a lot of funerals from Friendly Rest, but wasn’t it a place where people went to die. Most of the guests expected to leave in a hearse and not a limousine. No there wasn’t any evidence of murder. No knifings or poisonings. Various doctors signed the death certificates. Amor never did so.

Some of the guests who died there had carried insurance policies naming the Home as beneficiary. That wasn’t unusual either. It was one way a person on a small pension could make delayed payment for care he otherwise couldn’t have afforded. In itself it wasn’t illegal and none of the bequests on record were in suspiciously large amounts.

All in all it wasn’t much to goon.

Late in the afternoon Shayne gave up calling and took Lucy Hamilton and Tom Rumbo out to dinner at one of his favorite downtown steak houses.

It was obvious Tom Rumbo hadn’t had a meal like that in a place like that for a good many years. He over-ate shamelessly.

After dinner Shayne took Lucy home and Rumbo back to his office and started out to make the meet with his mysterious phone caller of that afternoon.

The place appointed by the caller was on the near North-East side in one of the buildings of the old Florida East Coast Railway freight and loading yards. The yards hadn’t been used since the big strike of the nineteen sixties. New facilities had since been set up in the Hialeah area to take their place. The old buildings had been neglected and were in very poor condition, most of them about to fall down.

Mike Shayne parked his car on Thirty-Sixth Street and walked into the abandoned yards past what was left of the old roundhouse.

Once away from the street there was no direct lighting, but enough reflected light from the streets and buildings of the metropolitan area to let the big man see where he was going. He continued on past office and repair shops in all stages of decay until he found the building to which he’d been directed.

Once it had been an office, but window glass had been broken and boarded over and there was even a sizeable hole in the sagging roof. The front door had once been boarded up too, but someone had recently broken it open. It hung, gaping wide, supported only by the top hinge. Inside was blackness like that of a cave.

Shayne circled the exterior of the building. As far as he could see all other openings were securely boarded. No one could get in or out except by the front door.

Mike Shayne listened carefully outside the front door of the ruined building. Back here the traffic noises of the great city were muted. He figured he could have heard even a mouse moving inside. There was no sound at all.

The big detective loosened his gun in its belt holster back of his right hip and stepped into the darkness. He couldn’t see or hear anything at all.

After a moment he took out the pocket-sized, pencil type flashlight he always carried and flicked on the beam. Right in front of him on the floor where he would have fallen over it in another step was a body.

It was a very dead body indeed.

IX

Mike Shayne swung his flashlight beam swiftly around the rest of the room. He and the body were quite alone there.

Shayne put the light back on the corpse.

The man was lying on his face. He was a small man of slender build and he looked as if he had been either struck by a speeding car or beaten unmercifully by several savage and powerful assailants.

His clothing was soaked with blood and both arms and one leg were so twisted that they must have been broken. The neck was bruised and pulled out of shape. Whoever he was, the man had been strangled in such a way that his neck was broken and the head almost torn off his shoulders.

Shayne scanned the figure thoroughly with the aid of his little pocket flash before touching it at all. The figure lay as if it had been carried in and slammed down on the floor, either that or killed right there in the room with very little struggle on its own part involved. There was no trail of blood from the door, and though the clothing was soaked, most of that blood was already dried or close to it.

The body had been beaten terribly. Only a few of the blows Shayne could see evidence of would have killed the man by themselves.

He leaned down and turned the head so that he could see the features.

The dead man was Paul Amor!

Mike Shayne switched his flash off then. He’d seen all that he needed to at the moment. Let the police and the coroner’s men check the body and go over the room for prints or other clues later oh.

The body definitely tied in the Friendly Rest Retirement Home with the death of Sam Willison. Whether Paul Amor or someone else had called to bring him to this grisly rendezvous wasn’t so important any more. From now on every one at the Friendly Rest was suspect.

Shayne decided to get out of the old railroad shack.

He started out the door with a swift, silent stride, but the big private detective never made it. As he cleared the door, he fell forward onto the hard ground with force enough to knock the wind out of him. For the moment Mike Shayne was very much hors de combat, out of the picture when he needed his wits and his strength the most.

Shayne didn’t know it then, but he’d fallen for one of the oldest and most effective of a man hunter’s booby traps. Earlier in the night somebody had nailed or tied a length of rope to the building about a foot off the ground, and left it lying there limply, stretching to the corner of the shack. In the dark the redhead hadn’t noticed it.

After he had gone into the shack his ambusher had come out of hiding and pulled the rope tight and held it. When Shayne came out again he tripped and went down.

It was that simple.

Mike Shayne lay there and fought to pull breath back into his tortured lungs.

He heard a step on the hard ground over by the corner of the little building, but there was nothing he could do about it. He tried to brace himself against a* blow or a bullet tearing into his flesh, but neither came.

The voice behind him said: “You lay there real quiet like, Shayne. I got a gun at your back, but I won’t fire it unless you make me. I want to talk instead of kill you. I mean it. I want to talk, but if you try anything, I’ll have to shoot you.”

Mike Shayne knew that voice even as he berated himself for having fallen for one of the oldest tricks in a deadly game. What an idiot he’d been! But the sight of that awful corpse had shocked him out of his usual caution.

He fought for breath and finally managed to talk, still lying face down in the dirt and cinders of long gone freights.

“Okay, Millie. We’ll talk. What did you kill him for? Wasn’t he your partner?”

“I didn’t lull him,” Millie Love said. “You can get up now, Mike. But take your gun out real careful like with two fingers and leave it on the ground. Then move over and sit with your back against this shack.”

Mike Shayne did as he was told.

Millie didn’t look at all like Nurse Hadley at the moment. She had on a dark knit sweater that hugged her still beautiful figure, loose dark slacks and a denim jacket with big side pockets to hold things like a gun and a length of cord. Instead of the starched nurses’ cap, she had a brightly printed scarf tied around her head.

The gun in her hand was a police positive thirty-eight with a two inch barrel and she held it like a pro. The way she held the gun said she could shoot, and the look in those steely eyes even in the half dark of the old railroad yard said that she would.

They looked at each other for a long moment, two pros taking each other’s measure.

Mike Shayne was the first to speak. “Okay, Millie. It’s your gun and your dime. Suppose you tell me what you want me for. I’m listening.”

Her thin lips flicked in a half smile. “Sure you are, Mike. Men listen good when they’re under the gun. First of all, I didn’t kill Paul. He was my partner. At least he was up to a point. Right now I’d rather have him alive than the way he is, particularly since you won’t be the only one to jump to the idea it was me did him in.”

“I didn’t think you did it yourself, Millie,” Shayne said. “You’d use that gun or a knife. Maybe even judo. That body in there looks like it was run over by a mad grizzly bear. You might have somebody do it that way, but not yourself.”

“Now you’re showing some sense,” she said. “Only I didn’t have it done either. If the man that did could come up with me, he’d give me some more of them same. Paul was afraid of him, so he wanted to make a deal with you. He was scared enough to talk.”

“Why didn’t he come on down to my office?” Shayne asked her. “We could have sat down with a drink and he could talk all he wanted. Instead he has to set up a meet in a place like this. That was almost asking for what he got.”

“He was a fool,” she said with venom in her voice. “A coward and a fool. He should have trusted me, and he’d be alive right now. He didn’t tell me he was going to call you, but the fool used his office phone. Anybody can overhear that. I did and so did his killer. I didn’t know that for sure, but I was afraid of it. I followed Paul out here to listen and take care of you if he spilled too much.”

“By the time you got here he was dead,” Shayne suggested.

“That’s right,” Millie Love said. “Paul was dead, like you found him. I didn’t figure you did it. I was scared cold. I decided to wait and see if you showed up and make a deal.”

“You picked one hell of a way to attract my attention,” the big man said. He could see holes in her story, but he wanted her to feel free to go on talking.

“It’s your reputation, Mike,” she explained. “You’re a dangerous man. I wanted to set up this little chat my way.”

“I don’t suppose that includes telling me the name of the killer?” Shayne said. “I don’t suppose you’d go that far to make an old friend happy?”

“Sure it does,” she said, and then had to laugh at the astonishment that showed on his face in spite of himself. “I’m going to do more than that, Mike. I’m going to give you the killer. Hand him to you all wrapped up like a present where you can turn him in to the cops.”

“All right. Who is he?”

“He works at the Friendly Rest,” Millie said. “At least you might say he did work there till he took it into his head to kill his boss. You didn’t see him when you were there today because he wasn’t in. He was the head orderly. A big guy. A real big guy who liked to kill people.”

“For you and the doc?”

“Don’t be a fool, Mike. Of course not. We didn’t have to kill people. In our business we let them pay us while we waited for them to die of natural causes. Oh, I won’t say Paul was above talking them into taking out an insurance policy in his name or the Home’s. He might have done that once in a while when he knew the old shmoe was going to die pretty soon anyhow, but what’s wrong with that? I don’t even think it’s illegal and it sure ain’t murder.”

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“I’m coming to that. He killed old folks for himself when they had a few bucks stashed away and he could make it look like a heart attack or a accident or something. He killed an old dame this morning for six hundred dollars she had hid in her room. Enough to look like money to him, I guess. Besides, killing punks like that was fun for him. You know that’s not my style, Mike. I’m no angel and Paul wasn’t neither, I admit that. But killing old sick folks for a couple of C-notes each? Pah.” She spat on the ground.

Mike Shayne sat there and waited.

“This citizen is named Julio,” Millie said. “Julio Sanchez.” She pronounced it Hooo-leo in the Spanish way. “He’s got a dozen killings on his head for sure, maybe a lot more that I don’t know about.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll testify to the State’s Attorney about those?” Shayne said ironically.

“I’ll testify to nothing,” she told him. “Even if I was willing there’s folks in this town would kill to keep me off the stand and away from a Grand Jury. You know who I am, so you know why.”

“Then how do we hang this Julio?” the detective asked.

“You hang him for killing Paul,” she said. “I’ll give him to you like I said. His marks are on Paul’s body and clothes. Besides that, I’m going to give you absolute proof that he killed Paul. Hanging proof, Mike Shayne.”

“I don’t suppose you turned honest citizen and want to do your duty by the Law,” Shayne said. “This big yen to cooperate with the cops wouldn’t stem from fear for your own neck, would it?”

“You know damned well it would, Mike. Now that he’s killed Paul, whatever the reason, I probably have to be the next name on his list. That’s why I want him out of the way and you know it. I can’t very well go to the cops myself, not with my record in this town. You were already in this thing. Paul was waiting here for you to show up when he was killed. So I decided to wait for you and give you Julio.”

There was a moment when they were both silent. Then she went on.

“Besides, Paul was my partner,” she said then in a different tone. “He was a fool, but we were together a long while. Long enough for the honeymoon to wear off.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself then. “I swear I was kind of fond of him still, in spite of everything. I owe it to him to see that Julio hangs. I swear I owe at least that much to Paul and I pay my debts.”

Again a long silence.

Then: “Well, let’s get this show on the road. Stand up Shayne. Real easy now. We’re getting out of here. I’ll tell you which way to go and how to behave, and I’ll be right in back of you with this cannon pointed where it can blow out your kidneys or break your back if you even think wrong. You get me?”

“I get you,” Shayne said. “Only one thing, Millie. If I’m going to take this Julio, I need my own gun.”

“You leave your rod lay right where it is,” she commanded harshly. “If and when you need a roscoe, Mike, I’ll see that you get one. Now step along out, big man.”

X

Millie Love had the gun and there was nothing Mike Shayne could do about it. He certainly didn’t like this one. Here she told him she was going to give him this Julio — a murderer many times over and a powerful and dangerous man — and then wouldn’t let him have his own gun. Shayne began to wonder who was about to be given to whom.

“At least bring it along,” he said and indicated his own forty-five on the ground. “When I need a gun, I can do a lot better with my own than with one I’m not familiar with. You carry it, if you don’t trust me now. Give it to me later.”

“Get on with it,” was all she said.

“If the cops find Paul,” he tried again, “and my gun near him, they’ll think I did him in.”

“That’s your worry, not mine,” Millie Love said. “Anyway the fuzz are your friends. When you bring in Julio they won’t bother you about Paul. They’ll have their killer.”

That much was true enough — if he could bring in Julio without a gun.

“I’m not going to say it again,” she said. “Get going, Mike?”

They went in Mike Shayne’s own car. Millie Love might have her own parked nearby, or she might have walked up to the old railroad yards from the Friendly Rest Home. It was only about a mile.

Millie got in the back seat where she could keep Shayne under the gun.

“Just drive where I say,” she ordered. “I’m taking you to Julio’s place. Believe me, you couldn’t get in by yourself. Not in a million years. He has friends to warn him and stop you while he cuts out.

“If they see me bring you under the gun, though, nobody’ll bother us. They know me. When we get inside, you go ahead and take him. I’ll show you where he has money hidden. Jewelry and papers and stuff to tie him to the old folks he killed. You can take a suitcase full of evidence to your pal Gentry.”

“Why would a killer keep that sort of stuff?”

“Because he’s a fool,” she said. “Because he feels safe. Why shouldn’t he? All this time the Law never came near him. If he hadn’t killed Paul, he would be safe now.”

“Suppose I don’t take him,” Shayne asked to see how she would answer. “Suppose he takes me? What about you then?”

“I brought you to him under the gun, didn’t I? He won’t know I’m not on his side. Besides I’ll still have the gun. You and Julio are both big men, Mike, but I never yet seen any man was bigger than a gun.”

“You play both ends against the middle, don’t you?” Shayne said as he drove. “You’re like this Julio. You figure you can’t lose either way?”

“I’m not like Julio,” she said. “I think things out where he just hopes and guesses. I think with my brain, but Julio does it with his gut. You going to play it my way, Shayne, or do I let you have it in the back of the head right now? Make up your mind!”

Mike Shayne was doing a lot of fast thinking. He had to decide how much of her story to believe and how much had to be reinterpreted. On the surface, what she had told him this night could be true. At least he figured some of it was. He was trying to think ahead of her and fill in the other parts correctly. His life depended on his ability to do it. He was under no illusions about that.

“I’ll go along with you, Millie,” he said. “Put the gun away. We’re in the middle of town. If I wanted out, all I have to do is crash this car into something. You’re going to have to be honest with me though.”

“I have been honest, Mike.”

“Most of your story I buy. Only one thing I have to know. You know you could have given me my gun and an address, and ~ I could get to this Julio if he had an army guarding him. You aren’t coming along to protect me, but because you have to be there when I take him. Why?”

“You’re so smart, you tell me.”

“I’ll trade you for the truth, Millie. I think this guy Julio has something you have to get your hands on before the Law shows up. That’s why you have to be there when I take him.”

Millie Love said nothing.

“Okay then,” Shayne said. “I’ll make a deal. I don’t care what you want. Evidence against you and Paul for something, I suppose. I’ll help you get it, but I want one thing in return. I want to know if Julio killed a man named Sam Willison, and I want to be able to prove it. Deal?”

She burst into laughter. “So that’s why you came into this and got Paul killed. My God, Mike! For a nothing like that Willison! Yeah, Julio killed him. He forced him to eat a whole bottle of pills. He was so scared of Julio he wouldn’t say no even if it killed him.”

“Thanks,” Shayne said bitterly. “How do I prove it?”

“Julio was a worse fool than you could believe,” she said. “He kept a diary. It’ll be there in his own writing.”

XI

Julio Sanchez lived in the central section of the City of Miami proper which had come to be called Little Havana since the great air lift migration of Cuban refugees had poured literally hundreds of thousands of Spanish speaking people into the metropolis. Most of the new arrivals were respectable, ambitious and hard working men and women who were both an asset and a credit to the community.

A minority were not, and this minority tended to cluster together in rundown sections close to the river. It was into the worst and most notorious of these inner cities that Millie Love directed Mike Shayne. The area wasn’t exclusively Spanish, of course. Some blacks and Anglos lived there too. It was exclusively hoodlum and extremely dangerous for an outsider to go into.

Mike Shayne knew the section from the old days, but even he was astounded at the extent to which it had deteriorated. Many of the buildings seemed about to literally collapse inward upon themselves. Small grocery stores with Spanish language signs, disreputable eating places and bars. The few people on the streets were either furtive or brazen in their manner.

Millie Love told Shayne where to park. As he did so another car pulled to a stop a block behind them. No one got out. Shayne wondered if he was being followed, or if Millie was. If so he hardly dared hope that the shadower was anyone friendly to himself.

The woman didn’t give him any time for speculation, but pointed him down a narrow alley between two decrepit tenements. Back of that was an empty, weed-grown lot where rats scurried out of their way. Across the street from the lot was a fenced junkyard heaped with rusted old car bodies, and a house. Both backed up to the slow, murky waters of one of the little canals that branched out of the Miami River in this section of town.

Millie pointed to the house. “That’s where we’re going.”

It had once been a comfortable, even expensive, frame two-story bungalow with a sloping shingled roof and a wide porch in front for Sunday afternoon lemonade and sitting out. Now it was sadly run down.

There were lights in the ground floor rooms, but heavy drapes had been drawn so that it was impossible to see inside. A heavy and brooding air of menace seemed to shroud the whole place.

Millie Love came up on the wide old porch with Shayne and knocked on the door, a quick, rhythmic tattoo that the big detective was sure must be a code known to the man inside.

He heard heavy footsteps inside and someone opened the door just a crack and held it there.

“It’s me, Julio,” the woman said. “I’ve brought the goods you wanted.”

Mike Shayne didn’t wait any longer. He raised one big foot and kicked against the door as hard as he could.

If the man inside had been braced to resist, Shayne might have broken his ankle. It would have been trying to kick down a log stockade.

Julio wasn’t braced though. He had begun to pull the door inward to open it for the woman, and the sudden and smashing attack caught him completely offguard. He was forced back two or three steps, and Mike Shayne got into the room.

He whirled round to face the man and almost gasped in surprise. Julio was big all right. He stood at least six foot six in the white tennis shoes he was wearing. Besides the shoes he had on white hospital pants and a sport shirt that was size extra-large and still bulged over his chest till the buttons were ready to pop. His arms and biceps were at least as big and muscular as those of a champion weight lifter.

The hands were immense, with powerful, hooked fingers, nails almost like claws and a mat of black hair on the back of each. The face was square, brutal and gaping in surprise. He wore his greasy black hair in a shoulder-length tangle.

Mike Shayne got a quick glimpse of course. He hadn’t time to analyze what he saw as he swung a terrific, looping right hand punch at the man’s jaw. One of Shayne’s long rights would normally knock down a bull.

It didn’t knock down Julio. He didn’t have time to roll away from the punch? Maybe he didn’t even see it coming.

Shayne’s fist connected solidly with a force that came close to breaking his own wrist. It was like slugging the bronze statue of Columbus over in Bayfront Park.

Julio didn’t stagger or even give back a step. He stood there and took the punch without flinching. The pain that flashed up the detective’s arm from that blow almost paralyzed it, but as far as Julio was concerned, he might have been slapped with a wet towel.

The two immense hands hooked up and in towards. Mike Shayne’s face, but he wasn’t punching. He was taking a judo hold with a skill born of long experience. Shayne recognized it instantly as a hold long thought to be unbreakable.

Julio crossed his arms as he went for Mike Shayne’s throat. With his right hand he gripped the right side of Shayne’s coat collar; while his left, which had crossed over the right wrist, gripped the left side of the collar.

This was a classic example of the judo master’s way of gaining holds on his victim’s clothing. But the tightening of the coat collar to make it a garrote was not the only part of this attack.

Julio applied strangling force by drawing his fists together, but in so doing, he supplied cruel and steadily increasing pressure on Shayne’s throat with his right forearm.

Shayne knew that once that hold was applied it was virtually impossible for him to get at his attacker’s hands to break the hold. The fingers had more than a throat hold, they were also twisted into the cloth of the coat collar.

The crossed arms let Julio press his elbows so close against the detective that they were safe from an edge-of-the-hand hack that might have hit the nerve.

Similarly his own big chest was so close to his folded arms that his foe had no possible way of worming his hands up between the arms for the standard hold break.

Julio also tried to pump his knee up into Shayne’s groin or abdomen for a paralyzing blow, but the detective was able to throw a block with his own knee.

That still didn’t give Shayne any grace as far as the throttling tactics were concerned. That terrible pressure grew more and more and he knew that the time before he would black out and then die was growing short.

There was still one possible way of nullifying this awful attack. Mike Shayne had seen it demonstrated by a professional Black Belt wrestler years before and he tried it now.

He arched his own body back as far away from the giant Julio as he could make it go. Then he got his right hand in between them, pointed the hand by joining and stiffening his fingers and driving the pointed hand with a mighty and convulsive counter jab right into Julio’s solar plexus.

The big strangler must have been overconfident. He hadn’t been ready for that counter and Mike Shayne had delivered it perfectly. Julio’s wind went out and he was briefly shocked into paralysis.

Mike Shayne didn’t waste a single split micro-second of the time his sudden counter attack had gained him. As the jab made Julio lease his hold and bend forward instinctively, Shayne’s own two big hands locked behind the head and forced Julio’s face forward and down. As he did so Shayne brought up his own knee and slammed it against the dazed and gasping giant’s left ear.

Then he stepped back swiftly, letting go his hold. As Julio fell forward, Shayne brought up his foot in a kick like a football player attempting a field goal. The kick to Julio’s head almost tore it off his shoulders.

That ended the fight. Big Julio was down and unconscious on the floor.

Shayne himself was still shaken and gasping for air. He stood there swaying back and forth on his feet. It was as narrow an escape from death as Shayne had had in a long while and he knew it. If he hadn’t happened to have seen the demonstration of the one possible way to break that unbreakable strangler’s hold, Big Julio would have one more entry to make in his diary of death.

The thought of the diary made him turn towards Millie Love. She had followed him in off the porch and stood there with the police positive thirty-eight revolver still in her hand. She was looking at them both and her face held the same expression of cruel glee that Shayne had seen on the visages of spectators at bull fights arid cockfights?

He had the irrational impression that he ought to cut off one of Julio’s ears and give it to her.

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” he asked. “You could at least have broken his leg or shoulder or something. He almost had me there for a moment?”

“I know that,” she said, “but you told me you could take him. I wanted to let you prove it. Besides you did in the end.”

“This is no spectator sport,” Shayne said. “Next time anybody gets that close to me, you shoot him.”

She bared her teeth in a grin like a fox’s. “Maybe I’ll shoot you instead, Mike. Why should I love you? If this hadn’t been the one who killed my Paul, maybe I’d have shot you this time. Anyway stop your beefing. You got him for fair.”

She had a point there.

“Okay,” he said then. “I won’t argue it. Where’s that diary you promised me? And whatever it is you want. Let’s get them so I can call in the cops before some of this big grizzly bear’s chums come looking for him.”

“Nobody’s coming,” she said. “Everybody ever met Julio hates him. Everybody. He has no friends.

“What you’re looking for, Mike, is an old fashioned tin dispatch box about twelve inches by six by four deep. The diary and what I want are both in it. You find it for me, Mike. Start by searching this room, and remember I still have the gun.”

He began by searching the area in which he had fought big Julio. He did a thorough job, even pulling the couch apart by sheer strength, but he found no tin box and ho hiding place big enough to hold one.

“Try the front bedroom next,” she said. “Me and my gun will be right with you.”

“How about him?” He jerked his thumb at Julio on the floor. “Suppose he comes to?”

“He won’t wake up for a week after that kick you gave him,” Millie Love sneered. “I think you broke his neck. Anyway, I still have the gun, don’t I?”

She indubitably did.

Mike Shayne didn’t find any tin box in the front bedroom. Millie stood in the doorway with the gun and watched him to make sure.

He did find that the carpeting over between the bed and the window had been soaked with blood. The blood was mostly dry, but there had been an awful lot of it. Julio had pulled the bed over to cover part of the stain. He didn’t say anything about the blood, and he couldn’t tell if Millie could see it from way over by the door. If she did, she didn’t comment either.

The hiding place he was looking for was in the floor of the closet in the second bedroom.

“They all think they’re so smart,” Shayne said as he lifted the home made trap door from the floor, “but I’ve yet to see one of them think of a really new place to hide anything. Not even a half-way decent hiding place.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Millie Love said from the doorway of the bedroom. “Is the box I want down there in that hole?”

“Millie,” Shayne said as he got back up from the floor with the tin despatch box under his arm. “Millie, I think maybe it’s time you told me the truth for a change.”

“I’ve told you the truth, Mike. Hand over that box and you’ll see I meant everything I said.”

“There isn’t any diary in this box,” Shayne said. “There never was. Not even that big ape in there on the floor could be dumb enough to take notes that will hang him. You knew that all along.”

“Why would I tell you there was a diary if there wasn’t?” she asked. “You look and see if there isn’t one.”

“If I look in this box, I’m dead,” Mike Shayne said. “What’s in here is the evidence to tie you and Paul Amor to the killing of a lot of helpless old nobodies. That and maybe cash or bank books. That’s why you brought me here. You figured I could maybe take this Julio for you. Even with a gun you weren’t quite sure you could do it by yourself, so you brought old Shayne along to do the fighting.”

“You’re crazy, Mike. It was just what I said.”

“Not a bit of it.”

She looked at him for a minute as if thinking over what he’d said. Then: “Okay. If you’re so smart, you tell me what the truth is.”

Shayne watched her closely, hoping she’d let her guard down for an instant and give him the opening he needed. He was talking for his life now and he knew it perfectly well.

She didn’t relax. The gun in her hand still covered him every second.

“I’ll tell you, Millie,” Shayne said. “You and this Paul Amor had a good thing in the Friendly Rest, but you were thieves and you couldn’t let well enough alone. I guess it started with getting your guests to take out insurance policies for you. Then you got tired of waiting for them to die. It didn’t take much. A dose of the wrong medication maybe, or not giving doses that were needed.

“I don’t suppose it even seemed like murder to start with. Just letting something happen that was going to happen anyway. You probably thought you did some of them a favor by putting them out of their pain. That sort of thing starts small and gets big like a landslide.”

She said nothing but he could see by her eyes that his words were scoring.

“Then along came Julio,” Shayne continued. “He did the dirty work from then on. He loved it, and you paid him well. Only Julio got greedy too. Like with Willison, he couldn’t even wait till the man checked in, and there were other jobs he did on his own. You figured too.he was holding out some of the take on you.

“You’re smart, Millie. You knew things were getting to a danger point. The dead were nobodies, but sooner or later somebody would smell a rat. It scared you.

“Well, somebody did. Willison’s insurance firm called me in. When I showed at the Home you knew me, and it scared you worse. It scared Amor when you told him. He never did have your nerve. He was going to panic and cut out on you, I suppose. You had to figure an out to save yourself. Am I right?”

She said, “Tell me the rest.”

“You called my office and set up the railroad yard meet. Lucy said the voice might have been a woman’s. Then you told Julio that Paul was running out. The first thing Julio did was grab this box I’m holding and bring it here. You hadn’t counted on that, but it didn’t stop you. You or Julio got Paul to come to this house and Julio killed him in the front bedroom. If it hadn’t been for the box being missing then you’d have cut out right away, but you had to have that box.

“You decided to trick me into getting it for you. You had Julio dump Paul’s body in that shack and then sent him back here to wait for you. You said you’d call the cops when I showed up to meet Paul, and have me blamed for his murder. That’s why you left my gun there, just in case. Julio fell for it. Maybe he didn’t know you knew he had the box. If you’d come back here alone, he would probably have killed you and put your body in the canal. Instead you brought me to take him.”

Millie Love almost smiled then. “You see, Mike, I had no choice. I needed you to get the box and get rid of Julio for me. Just like I’ve no choice now. I have to shoot you and finish off Julio. When the cops find you both dead here, they’ll figure you killed each other. No hard feelings, Mike. I hate to kill anybody man enough to take Julio like you did. I simply have to do it is all.”

“It won’t work,” Shayne said and hoped he sounded convincing.

“Oh, but it will.”

There was a crash that made them both jump. Something smashed through the glass of the bedroom window, scattering knife edged slivers of glass all over the floor.

Millie Love shifted her hand and pumped three thirty-eight slugs through the window.

Shayne got only a glimpse of the object that had been hurled through the window, but he jumped and caught it almost before it hit the floor.

It was a black forty-five Colt’s. His own gun.

He had it levelled at Millie Love before she could recover enough to swing her own gun back in his direction.

She saw the look on the big man’s face. She dropped her gun to the floor.

“Whoever you are out there, come in,” Shayne said. “And thanks.”

The face of Tom Rumbo appeared at the window. “Think nothing of it, Mr. Shayne,” the little man said. “Us detectives has got to stick together.”

An hour later Rumbo and Shayne were back in Chief Will Gentry’s office and the brandy bottle was on the desk.

“I couldn’t let Mr. Shayne go into danger like that,” Tom Rumbo was explaining. “Between one detective and another it wouldn’t be ethical. Besides I remembered something else I had to tell him.

“When Miss Lucy had to go to the washroom I took her car keys and slipped out. Mr. Shayne had told us where he was to meet the man so I went there. I saw the woman capture him and I listened to what they said. Then I followed them to Julio’s house in Miss Lucy’s car and listened outside. When I saw she was going to shoot Mr. Shayne, I had to do something.”

“Why didn’t you shoot instead of throwing in the gun?” Gentry asked.

“Chief,” the little man said, “I never handled one of them guns before. I didn’t know how to take the safety off.”

Both big men roared with laughter. Then Shayne said: “You did fine, Tom. But what was the thing you had to tell me that was so important?”

“I kept thinking,” Rumbo said. “You were after Big Hans. Well it suddenly come to me that Sam Willison didn’t always talk so clear. You hadn’t found no Hans, but could it have been Big Hands he said all along? H-A-N-D-S? Hands?”

Shayne and Gentry looked at each other. “That character you put in the prison ward at the hospital sure has the biggest hands I ever saw on a human being,” Gentry said.

“Tom,” Mike Shayne said to the little old man. “You’re a real detective. You think like one. Have another snort. You earned it this day.”