Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 6, May 1963

I stepped outside. You know Buffalo. It was getting colder when I came in, like I said, but it was still bright and sunny. Now the sky was all smoke-gray and the snow was coming down. That’s the way it is up there. It snows before you can drop the hat.

I walked around in it for about an hour and a half. Then I went back into the basement. He was still asleep. There were a few drops left in the bottle. I spilled them over his collar and shirt and laid the bottle by him on the bed.

Then I went just outside the street door and waited. I figured something would happen soon.

It did. Before long I heard the door from the apartments upstairs open and the owner yelled, “Hey, Grimm, what the hell’s going on down there? The place is steaming.”

I let him hear me open the door and came in like from the outside.

“Hello,” I called. “Where are you, Jake?”

“Who’s that?” yelled the owner.

“It’s me,” and I got where he could see me.

“Oh, you,” he said. “I remember you, asking for a job.”

“Where’s Jake?” I asked.

“That’s what I want to know. The place is cooking.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s hotter up there than the hinges of hell. I want to find Jake, so he can see what’s wrong.”

“Come on, let’s take a look.”

I wanted him down to see everything for himself. When he got down the steps I walked over to the control.

“Well, no wonder,” I said in big surprise. “He’s got this thing shoved up nearly to ninety.”

“What?” he screamed.

“See for yourself,” I said. “Here, I’ll take care of it. Man, that could be dangerous. He could blow his boilers that way.”

“Where is he?” he screeched.

I knew he’d find out soon enough, so I let him look for himself. He went to the open door of the room and there was Jake, dead to the world.

The owner went in, saw him, saw the bottle and said, “That does it. I gave him every chance, but he can’t let the stuff alone. When he comes near blowing up the place, he’s finished.”

P. S. I got the job. It was a lousy trick, but I wanted in.

Like he said, it was a real nice, comfortable spot. My little basement room wasn’t anything you’d entertain Queen Elizabeth in, but it was good enough for me. The work was a cinch. All I had to do was regulate the heater, look after a few big lockers where the people upstairs could keep their bags or trunks if they didn’t want them in their rooms, keep the halls upstairs clean and take out the trash every day.

I didn’t even have to worry about the rooms. They had a housekeeper sleeping in the end room on the second floor who did them. She made a pass or two at me the first two days I was on the job, but she was a slob. I let her alone and then she let me alone.

The owner lived in the front apartment on the third floor corner and that was about the only one you could really call an apartment.

I saw it one day when Maggie, the housekeeper, was cleaning it up. A big room with heavy red curtains and one of those big oversize beds with the same heavy red covers, big easy chairs and couches, a 24-inch blond mahogany TV set, leopard skin rugs and things. A fancy bath you could run the four-forty in and a classy kitchenette and dinette.

He was a bachelor, Maggie told me, and a handsome devil as I’d seen for myself — tall, slim, dark hair and eyebrows, very grey eyes, a skin like an Indian’s even in this weather, and that casual way that knocks the women dead. Where he got his money I don’t know but he had it. He stayed off my back as long as I did my work and I stayed out of his way.

The third day I saw the girl on the second floor but she didn’t see me.

The job didn’t pay much but there was no reason it should. The heater control was as simple as any in a home. The control was down in the basement but it worked off a thermostat up in the hall, just about in the center of the building.

I spent most of my time lying around on my bed, reading paperback books and magazines.

The only time I went up into the building was during the early afternoon, when Maggie was finishing up the rooms. She’d leave the trash outside the doors, and I would make sure the halls were clean and take the stuff down and empty it in barrels outside, and bring the containers back upstairs.

There weren’t any rooms on the ground floor. That had a couple of offices and a small bar and restaurant on the corner, but I had nothing to do with them. They weren’t even connected with the upstairs rooms. From the middle of the second floor a long stairway led down between the restaurant and offices into the basement where I stayed.

Going along with Maggie from day to day you’d get some idea of the people in the place without ever knowing them. Maggie was a young, strong woman, a little fat, and she couldn’t move without yakking. Listening to her and even allowing for those she liked and the ones she didn’t like you got to feel as if you knew them.