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

“Oh, no, you didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me you were over at John Wingren’s house last night?”

“You didn’t ask,” she protested feebly.

Shayne didn’t even honor that with an answer.

“Why you people lie like you do is past me,” he said. “You ought to know your own neighbors. Somebody sees everything you do. You can’t sneeze without somebody makes a note, and they talk. I know you were over there, and I know you and the old man had an awful fight.”

“Who says we did?”

“People who saw you and heard you.” The big man wasn’t averse to stretching the point a bit. “People who’ll swear you were beating him up. They’ll go on the witness stand and swear it.”

“Then they’ll lie,” she said.

“You can say that to me,” Shayne said. “I’m not a judge. I’m not a tough state’s attorney throwing questions at you. Oh, you can lie to me easily enough, Mrs. Mullen. But when your own neighbors get on the stand and throw those lies in your teeth, what can you do then? Can you lie to a jury? Well enough so a jury will believe you? Can you do that and will you bet your life that you can?”

“It ain’t no lie,” she yelled back at him. Her old face was contorted with a mixture of anger and fear. “I don’t care what nobody says. I didn’t kill John and I didn’t beat him up. How could I? An old woman like me—”

“Suppose you tell me what you did do then,” Shayne pressed her. “You were in the house all right. Don’t you try to deny that. If it wasn’t what they say, you better tell me now, and tell me the truth. Mind you. The truth.”

“All right,” she said. “I suppose I might as well. No telling what them lying neighbors will do to me if I don’t. I was up to the house, Mr. Shayne. It was early in the evening. Right after dark it was and John was alive when I got there and when I left.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Of course I am. It wasn’t me shot him, Mr. Shayne. I got no gun anyway.”

“Oh,” Shayne said. “So it wasn’t you that shot him. What do you know about his being shot?”

“Because that’s why he called me up there, you tarnation fool. Why do you think he’d let me in the house unless he was hurt first?”

“I don’t know,” Shayne said. “You tell me.”

“He came down here and told me to come. He needed help. I went back up to the house with him. He said somebody shot at him through the window. They missed him but the shot hit the heavy iron fire dog in the upstairs library and part of the bullet broke off and hit him in the back.

“I looked and sure enough there was a hole in his back. Twarn’t bleeding much though. I told him he needed a doctor. All he’d done was tie a towel around himself to stop the bleeding. He wouldn’t listen. Said he didn’t trust no doctor and one would charge him a fortune for tying up the wound, which I could do just as well.”

“The bullet was in his liver,” Shayne said. “Sooner or later it would have killed him unless a doctor took it out.”

“I thought something like that. I tried to tell him. The stingy old fool wouldn’t listen. That’s what we were hollering at each other about. I got real mad. I said he’d cheated me often enough. He could call a doctor now or die. I didn’t care.”

“But you didn’t think about helping him die?”

“Of course I didn’t. We was in the upstairs bath where he kept the medicine chest. I started to leave. He ran at me on the stairs to stop me and somehow he slipped and fell down to the landing. That’s all happened. I went on out. He was laying there cussing and groaning, but he sure wasn’t dead.”

Mike Shayne had a pretty good notion that old John Wingren might have been pushed down the stairs rather than “slipped and fell” but he wasn’t going to make a point of it right then.

The rest of the old woman’s story sounded reasonable to him, even the part about the wound feeling much less dangerous to the old man than it actually was. Besides, if she hadn’t been telling the truth, she probably never would have admitted knowing anything at all about the shooting part. That wasn’t the sort of story an old woman of her type would be likely to make up out of whole cloth.

“Suppose I believe you,” he said to her. “Not that I’m sure I do, but just suppose.”

“You better believe it,” she said. “I swear it’s the truth.”

“People swear all sorts of things to me,” Shayne said. “They been doing it for years. Did old John know who shot him?”

“He said he did, but he didn’t tell me. Said he’d settle that young feller’s hash by himself.”

“You sure he said a young feller?”

“Them was his exact words,” she insisted. “ ‘I’ll settle that young feller’s hash’ was his exact words.”

“Do you know if he had money of his in the house?”

“Everybody always said he had,” Mrs. Mullen said, “but Lord knows I never seen none. If he had it, then it was well hid for sure.”

“You say everybody thought he had it, though.”

“Sure. You know how people talk. You do believe me, don’t you, Mr. Shayne? I didn’t kill that mean old man. Maybe I thought about it a few times in the years gone, but I’m not a woman could go ahead and kill.”