Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

Murder of a Mean Old Man by Brett Halliday (ghost written by Edward Y. Breese)

Somewhere in that fear-wracked place a man lay hidden. A man who had killed and would kill again this night — unless Mike Shayne got him first...

I

The house was full of a darkness that was almost tangible. The killer had a feeling of swimming in darkness as if it had actual substance. Only the beam of the little pen-sized pocket flashlight punched a thin ray of light into the reluctant dark.

It was enough, and barely enough, to show the ancient, rusted japanned tin dispatch box in the recess behind the panel in the wall.

The killer’s hands grabbed the box and lifted it out. Old as it was, the metal was tough and the rusted lock resisted fumbling fingers. The killer turned. The box could be opened at leisure in a safer time and place. A screwdriver or chisel would turn the trick easily enough.

The beam of the little flash danced across the walls and floor of the incredibly cluttered room. It flicked the twisted face of the old man lying in his blood on the floor, and then moved on as if appalled at what it had revealed.

There was still life of a sort in the broken and bleeding body. When the light passed there was a scuffling sound as a limb scraped the floor and an awful gurgling shadow of a groan.

The killer kicked the old head — hard.

“Shut up,” he said in a thin, malignant whisper. “Shut up, you old devil.”

The old man didn’t hear. He had died in the middle of that groan.

The killer slipped out a rear door and cut through the yard of the house behind to the street. No one saw and no one would have cared if they had.

The big two-story frame and stucco house sat silent and dark. The neighborhood was old and turning into a slum. There was no one on the street and the adjoining buildings were, as usual at midnight, dark and silent too.

The candle the killer had lit just before leaving the house burned lower and lower. After what seemed a long time the flame touched the kerosene soaked rags that had been piled there to be ignited. Then there was light and fire in the house.

The fire engine from the Northwest Miami Station screamed into the street, and men broke down the front door with axes and brought their hoses and chemical equipment. They got the fire out quickly — but there was the body on the floor of the big room.

A prowl car came and the officers looked. Then Sergeant McCloskey of the Miami Homicide Squad came in an unmarked car with his driver.

“I don’t believe it,” McCloskey said when he looked at the corpse.

“Pretty awful, ain’t it,” one of the firemen said.

“Awful is right,” McCloskey said. “Whoever did in this old boy must have hated his guts. He looks like he’d been worked over by a whole tribe of Apaches.”

The sergeant had seen a lot of bodies in his years on the force. He thought he’d gotten hardened to the sight, but this corpse made him shudder in spite of himself.

“I don’t believe it,” Michael Shayne, Miami private detective, told his beautiful private secretary Lucy Hamilton. Shayne and Lucy and ace feature writer Tim Rourke of the Miami News were sitting in the big redheaded detective’s Flagler Street office. Outside the windows hot tropical sunshine beat down on the street, already crowded with mid-morning traffic.

It was still cool inside the high ceilinged office and the three friends were having coffee together. Shayne’s and Rourke’s cups were laced with good French brandy.

“If you don’t believe it,” Tim Rourke said, “then it just isn’t so. It just can’t be so, and by the way what is it that isn’t?”

“You’re fouling up your grammar or syntax or something.”

“A minor detail,” Rourke said. “Very minor indeed. So what are we talking about anyway?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shayne said. “But then I seldom do. What I have in mind is last night’s murder as described on the front page of your own paper this morning.”

“Oh sure. The John Wingren killing. What’s so unusual about another killing in Miami, the Magic City?”

“This one is unusual,” Shayne said. “The killer was really devoted to his work this time. According to the News, the old boy was killed three times.”

“A neat trick if you can do it,” Rourke added, and poured more brandy into his coffee. He considered also adding more coffee and then rejected the idea with a grimace. “Only I always thought it only took one killing for a murder.”

“Usually it does,” Shayne agreed, “only this killer was a real buff. It says here the old man was fatally shot.”

“That usually does the job,” Rourke said.

“Don’t interrupt. He was also stabbed to death.”

“Redundant, my boy. Absolutely repetitive.”