Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

Inspector McGowan paused an instant, then went on slowly: “The phone call l got a moment ago clears everything up. They’ve got the man who killed Gierson through some fast, extremely clever lab work. His prints on the andiron, for one thing, which you wisely didn’t touch. Just one, actually — a bad one — but they brought it out.

“He’s Marty Cauvin, a hired killer. He probably would have silenced Gierson in the usual way, with a bullet, if seeing that andiron hadn’t given him a better idea. Killing him that way, in my apartment, would have made it look bad for me, if all the details of the deal hadn’t been on the record. They are, of course, but he had no way of being sure of that and it probably seemed a gamble worth taking.

“As for Gierson, he thought that he’d completely covered himself, that the organization had no idea that he was going to sing in the courtroom. But he must have suddenly discovered otherwise, and that’s what he meant when he said that everything had gone wrong. Apparently he came to the apartment to warn me and to accuse me of not giving him protection.”

For the third time since he had walked into the office Jimmy found himself unable to meet his father’s gaze.

Inspector McGowan stood up, walked around the desk and put his arm around the shoulders of the small, seated figure.

“It’s all right, Jimmy,” he said. “You thought your old man was in serious trouble and you went to bat for him, all the way. I can’t be angry with you for that.”

Jimmy looked up and gulped. “You really mean it, Dad? You’re not just saying that, to keep me from feeling bad?”

“Of course I mean it son,” Inspector McGowan said. “Suppose we go home now and see what’s on TV. We both need a little relaxation, after what we’ve been through.”

Farewell Message by Jeff Peters

I read the note, and suddenly I knew. I was a dead man. But — dead men sometimes tell.

* * *

The rat gnaws in the wainscoting. He is one of many. I should like to poison them, yet I dare not go to the chemist and say, “I am troubled by rats. I want some poison to get rid of them.” You see, it could be used. I don’t know how exactly but it could be — of that I am sure.

I am hungry, but it is scarcely worth the effort of eating. First I should have to wash my hands with the soap I carry always with me and then unlock the steel trunk to which I keep my food. I chew my pen handle and then I throw it down from me.

Perhaps it is? One simply doesn’t know. It lurks everywhere. Last week I told the milkman riot to call. I use condensed: milk now and I buy my food at a different shop every day and sometimes in the next village.

I get a new pen from the drawer. Think, man, where did you buy it! In London? Yes, I’m sure now. It’s probably all right then. I should have bought a typewriter for correspondence, but it is too late now.

Sometimes I try to paint. Another ten days or so and my masterpiece would be finished. But I cannot settle to it any longer. Perhaps it will never be finished now. Yet I dare to hope it will be.

It started one evening just over a year ago.

“Have another whisky?” asked my next-door neighbor, Richard Parker, screwing up his little eyes, and getting ready to pour

“No, thanks,” I said, a little gruffly. I did not like Parker and I did not want any more of his whisky. I did not know why I had accepted his invitation.

“Go on, have another,” he said, fingering the crystal decanter. “You must have another.”

“I’ve had to drop it,” I said. “The wolf is up the path — if not on the doorstep.”

“Bad luck,” he said. But he did not mean it. He slumped his overfed figure in the arm chair. It pleased me to see he was going bald very quickly. “Still all trials are good for the artist, no doubt. From them often comes his best work.”

It was the usual unthinking, unfeeling business man’s cant and because I had heard it a thousand times now, I should have let it go. Instead, I snapped back.

“You subscribe to the idea of pinching the belly of genius, do you?”

“My dear fellow,” he drawled lazily, moving the plump diamond ring round his finger, “I don’t subscribe to anything. I have no theories about art, though I like it well enough. From time to time I buy a picture, when I see something I like.”

“Is it good for your prestige, then, to be considered a patron of the arts?” I asked.

Parker spun his whisky round in his glass. His fleshy face showed a tinge of color. His lids closed down over his small pale blue eyes as he made an effort to keep his temper. He spoke slowly after a pause of perhaps another half minute. “I say, old chap, are you trying to pick a quarrel with me? I quite like you, you know.”

“When one is rich it is easy to quite like people,” I said hotly, splitting an infinitive.