Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

“He was angry, Dad. Sort of threatening. I think he was frightened as well, or he never would have said what he did. It was as if I’d just sort of... well, faded out for a minute and he forgot that you weren’t there, and that I was listening with both ears. He said that everything had gone wrong, that he was in trouble, and you would be, too. He said it might be too late to stop what he was afraid would happen.”

“Talking to himself, you mean, ranting and raving and putting most of the blame on me. Is that what you’re trying to say, son?”

Jimmy nodded. “That’s the way it was, I guess. But only for about a minute. He calmed down a little when he saw me looking at him as if I didn’t know what it was ill about. I knew how important it was to give him that idea. He grabbed me by the shoulder and said: ‘All right, I’ll phone your father from here. Get lost. Go for a walk and come back in twenty minutes.’

“I didn’t want to leave him alone in the apartment. But what could I do? He’d have made me go, no matter what I said. So I went.”

“He must have spent a few minutes thinking over what he was going to say to me on the phone,” Inspector McGowan said. “No call came through. What did you do when you left the apartment?”

“I just drifted around the neighborhood for fifteen or twenty minutes,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t have a dime to phone you with. Anyway, talking about him didn’t seem such a good idea, with Sergeant Bergor or someone else listening in.”

“You’d just about decided to stop giving me the benefit of the doubt. Was that it? The money, on top of what you’d heard Gierson say—”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“What did you do when the twenty minutes were up?” McGowan asked, staring past his son at the harbor view far below.

“I went back to the apartment.”

“And when you got there?”

“He was lying by the fireplace with— It was awful, Dad, like I said. There was blood on the andiron and blood on the rug. I could have picked the andiron up and left my fingerprints on it, but I didn’t touch it. I was going to say I’d killed him, and you’ve told me that if you want to be believed tampering with the evidence is the worst thing you can do. You pile up complications for yourself.

“So I just kept going over in my mind what I was going to say when I had to make a statement, as I knew I’d be asked to do. I knew I’d have to be careful and not talk too much. They didn’t scare me, Dad. I don’t know why exactly. With you it was different—”

“Was the door ajar when you left the apartment?” Jimmy’s father asked. “I mean, did you forget to slam it after you?”

“I may have, Dad. After Gierson told me to get out I was too worried to think about it. I just remember getting into the elevator and going down to the street.”

“So anyone trailing him could have walked in without ringing, and picked up the andiron. A minute or two after you went down in the elevator.”

“I guess it could have happened that way,” Jimmy said.

Inspector McGowan looked at his son steadily for a moment. “When you finally did phone me I got there in about twenty minutes, with the siren wide open, and you told me you’d struck him three times with the andiron and killed him dead. Why did you make up that kidnaping story? The truth now. Whom were you trying to protect?”

“You, Dad,” Jimmy said. “I thought you knew.”

“I know now, yes. But I didn’t when you walked into this room a few minutes ago.”

Inspector McGowan did not remove his eyes from his son’s stricken face. “I was right here all morning. How could I have had anything to do with—”

“There are lots of ways, Dad,” Jimmy said. “You’re an inspector of police. You could have—”

“All right, son, say it. What I said about the truth still goes.”

“You could have arranged to have it done. If the whole police department is shot through with corruption—”

A look of sadness came into Inspector McGowan’s eyes. “Listen to me, son,” he said. “Listen carefully, and ten years from now maybe — just maybe — you’ll still want to be a policeman, despite what you’ve just said.

“Gierson wasn’t bribing me to drop the investigation, and it wasn’t payoff money you saw me counting. But sometimes a police department that isn’t corrupt — and the D.A. as well — has to make what is known as a deal. There’s no other way of securing convictions. We’d gathered enough evidence to send Tony Gierson to the chair. But he’d agreed to testify in court against the entire organization, including two Mr. Bigs, one who dwarfed him and one who was just about on his level.

“As for the money, it was their last big take. He turned it over to me last night. I immediately notified the D.A. It’s downstairs now in the vault, to be returned to the rightful owners, when certain legal technicalities have been cleared away. The D.A. felt that if I got downtown with it early this morning it would be all right to keep if in the wall safe overnight. Not really overnight, just from two to seven. That’s why I left the apartment so early this morning.”