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

“You mean Esther? She ain’t said anything but she ain’t got enough brains so she’d know it, anyway. Oh, she’s a nice girl, all right. But she’s got the personality of a dead fish. Caddie’s different. She says she ain’t really seen anybody but she can feel somebody’s around. She says she can feel things like that. She’s got imagination, Caddie has.”

“Maybe she’s got too much.”

“No, she ain’t like that. I know it sounds funny but she’s that way, she says she can just feel it even if she ain’t seen him.”

“I’ll keep a look out for anybody,” I said.

“I wish you would, honest. I don’t like to see that sweet little girl so scared.”

That made two of them and it really gave me the green light but I decided to lay off for a few days. I just stayed put in the basement, but it was tough, lying there and thinking about her and the way she looked and walked, her shiny hair and smooth legs, and wondering if she went out with the guys up there.

Finally one night I stood in the basement door to the street and watched her go walking up toward Main Street and I sort of hung around later to see her come back. But I didn’t see her or hear her and I figured she must have come in before I was looking for her.

So I stepped across the street and looked up at her window. But there wasn’t any light in her room and I kept waiting and listening and I never heard her come back. I laid there on my bed but I couldn’t sleep and all I did was think about her.

It was that way all night, until about four o’clock in the morning I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I tiptoed upstairs and listened at the lineman’s door. I could hear him snoring and then I listened at her door but I didn’t hear anything. Then I heard a door open on the third floor.

I scuttled back and from the top of the basement stairs I could just about see the front of the hall on the third floor because it was all open up that side. In the light from the owner’s room I saw them standing there in a clinch and then she kissed him again and turned around and came to the stairs and tiptoed down, holding her dress together with one hand and carrying her shoes in the other.

After that I didn’t try to sleep anymore.

And then I didn’t listen for her anymore or watch for her in the evenings. I just stayed down in the basement and never left it unless I had to, helping Maggie or something like that.

Everything was real quiet around there until four days later. I was ready to move on, just waiting one more day for payday so I’d have some money to take with me. It was early night again, just after the time most everybody went out for dinner when I heard the door to the basement open and the owner and Maggie talking.

“I don’t see how he’d know anything,” she said. “He don’t go out much.”

“I know,” he said, “but we’d better ask him, anyway.”

“I can’t understand it,” she said. “All her clothes and things still up there.”

They were coming down the stairs but I’d heard them and I slipped over to the door to the street and stood just outside it, where I could still hear them but they couldn’t see me.

“Where the hell is he?” he asked and yelled for me.

After a little wait, Maggie said, “He ain’t in his room. Maybe he just stepped out for something.”

“Watch for him, will you? And when he gets back, ask him to come up. But I don’t suppose he knows anything, anyway.”

They started away and then Maggie gave a real loud sniff and said, “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That smell,” Maggie said.

Then he sniffed. “Yeah,” he said. “That is something. What’s he keeping down here?”

“Whatever it is, it’s gone bad,” she said. I heard her walking across the floor again. “It ain’t in his room. It ain’t so bad over here.”

“I wish he’d get back. I want to ask him about this, too. Look around and see if you can locate it.”

They walked around the floor here and there and then he said, “Whoo! It’s terrible over here.”

She walked over and said, “I’ll say it is.”

“It’s in here,” he said. “He must have something in one of these lockers. Help me open it.”

I heard them working on the door and a creaking sound and then I heard my wife fall out on the floor and Maggie screeched.

“Good God,” he said.

“Saints preserve us,” she yelled. “It’s Caddie.”

“With a belt around her neck,” he said hoarsely.

That’s when I left.

So here I am, pounding the Thruway. Heading for New York. It may not be easy getting out when they open up to unload but I’ll just be a bum hitching a ride. Or maybe I can sneak out like I sneaked in.

I was just walking to get away from the place when I came across this van they were loading up on a moving job. I heard them say they were off for New York as soon as they were loaded and when they went in to get one of the heavy pieces, with the thing about half loaded, I slipped in and scrounged down in a little space behind one of the big chairs.

After a long time they got it loaded and locked the doors and we’ve been rolling through the night ever since.