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

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Shayne said. “I figured more than you think. You’ve been prowling around here watching this place for a long time to see where John hid his money. Only you never found out. Old man Smith saw you, though, and took a couple of shots at you. That hurried you up. Last night right after dark you climbed the oak tree outside the bedroom upstairs and shot the old man with a twenty-two. That’s too small a gun except for a crack shot.

“He was wounded by the ricochet. Then he fooled you. He went and called Mrs. Mullen. While you watched, she came up and fought with him. After that she went away, but you didn’t dare break in right then. It was still early and somebody might see.

“You went off to your job for a while. You work alone and nobody knew you got there late. Probably you figured you’d have to try another night. Am I right?”

“Just go on talking, shamus,” the masked man said. “I ain’t talking. You are.”

“Then you came back by here on your way home. What happened? Did you break in again?”

“You know so much I might as well finish it for you,” the killer said. “You ain’t going to tell nobody anyway. The old fool was hurt and scared. He saw me on the street and called me to come in and help get him to a doctor. I helped okay. I put him out of his misery.”

“You beat and stabbed him to death,” Shayne said, “but you were still scared of the neighbors. You set that fire so you’d have an excuse to be in the house. You went back out and discovered the fire, didn’t you? It gave you your alibi for the killing. Then you figured to come back tonight for the money. You even fixed a window so you could get in. Right?”

“You know too much,” the man said. “Now you all know too much.” He leveled the gun at Shayne.

“He’s going to kill us all,” Cal Harris said.

“Oh,” Shayne said, “Mr. Smulka only thinks that’s what he’s going to do.” Under his breath he hissed at them: “Scream.”

“What did you say?” Smulka asked. “You’re going to die, shamus.”

Sally Harris caught on fast. She opened her mouth for a wild, eldritch screech that roused every cat and dog for a mile around. When that girl screamed, she was a champion.

In spite of himself Smulka jumped. Shayne jumped too.

The big man bent his knees and dove for the killer — going in low like a football tackier.

Smulka got off one shot. He was used to a twenty-two, not a forty-five and the heavy recoil of Shayne’s souped-up handloads almost broke his wrist. The slug went high and smashed the nose of the hanging moose head. The head fell off the wall.

Shayne’s tackle cut Smulka down like an all-American taking out a high school substitute. One big hand got the man’s wrist and twisted until the bones cracked and the big gun fell from nerveless fingers. Then Shayne sat up and slugged the killer with an overhand right. Smulka went out like a light.

“My God,” Sally Harris said.

She wasn’t looking at Smulka on the floor. The wild shot had smashed the nose off the moose head. Tightly wrapped bundles of currency were falling out of the cavity onto the rug where the big head lay. Some were fifties, some hundreds, and some thousand dollar bills. The head must be full of them, the big redhead thought.

Mike Shayne said to Cal Harris, “I guess you were right, boy. I reckon old John Wingren really did pray to the moose.”

The Execution of Barbara Graham by David Mazroff

Unwanted, unloved, she certainly was. She would sell her body for a fix, her soul for a hoodlums smile. But — did Barbara Graham go to the gas chamber in San Quentin for a murder she didn’t commit? Here are some never-before-told answers to a murder riddle that has baffled crime experts for decades.

* * *

The last woman to be executed in the United States for a capital offense was attractive, dark-haired Barbara Graham, who died in the gas chamber in California’s San Quentin Prison on June 3, 1955.

She was followed in death by Jack Santo, fifty-four, a thin-lipped, sallow-faced, hard-bitten gunman and hoodlum, and Emmett Perkins, forty-seven, a weasel-featured, heartless thief and all-around bad man.

The three were convicted of the murder of Mrs. Mabel Monohan, a well-to-do, elderly, crippled widow who lived alone in a corner house in a middle-class neighborhood in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles, the site of the Warner Brothers Pictures studios where most of the gangster films were made in the heyday of Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, George Raft, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson.

None of these ever killed in their film roles as viciously as did the perpetrators of the murder of Mrs. Monohan.