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

“Course not, mister. Nobody ever knew old John will be sorry he died. We’ll all be glad. You was talking to old Jane Mullen. I seen you come from her place. Didn’t she tell you?”

“Well,” Mike Shayne admitted, “I got to say she didn’t seem real unhappy about it.”

“You bet she didn’t. Not since he cut her out of his will,” Corporal Smith chortled. “Fight like cats and dogs they did, ever since that.”

“Recently?” Mike Shayne asked.

“Sure. Last night early she was over to his place again fighting with him. Yelling like a couple of wildcats they was. I could hear them going on and on.”

IV

When Mike Shayne left Buck Smith’s house he decided to go downtown and have a talk with his old friend Will Gentry, the rugged and highly efficient Miami chief of police. He needed some background information on the late John Wingren, and he figured the chief might have it.

He didn’t mention to Sergeant McCloskey what Smith had said about Jane Mullen being in the Wingren home the night before. Smith had regretted letting it slip out at all, Shayne had observed. After that one statement the old man had clammed up and said no more. The big detective had preferred to leave without pressing the old soldier any further.

Actually Shayne wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for at that point. After Lucy Hamilton had opened the subject, he had talked briefly to Anna Wingren on the phone. She had engaged him then for the purpose of finding her grandfather’s fortune.

“He’s supposed to be rich,” she had said. “I know he was the sort who never trusted banks. Whether he has stocks and bonds or jewels or cash or what, I don’t know, but I’ll bet any amount he had it hidden around the house.”

“Some folks think that’s safe,” Shayne had said.

“I begged him to keep it in the bank,” Anna said. “He wouldn’t listen to me any more than he did to Mother when she was still alive. He didn’t trust us, I guess.”

“You realize, of course,” Shayne said, “that if there really was a large sum of money in the house, the killer may very likely have found it and taken it away. It’s the most likely thing to have happened.”

“I know,” she said, “but if he did, then surely you’ll be able to find evidence of it. You don’t have to worry about your fee even in that case, Mr. Shayne. I’ll inherit the house and contents and that will be a good sum.”

“I wasn’t worrying,” Shayne said. “Not where any friend of Lucy’s is concerned. I just wanted to know how far you want me to go to find and recover any money your grandfather may have had in the house.”

“Go as far as you have to,” Anna Wingren had said.

That was where they had left the matter. Now Mike Shayne was beginning to think the case would turn out more difficult than he had expected. Old Wingren was widely hated. It meant any number of people would have had a motive to kill him. The motive might not have been concerned with his money. If it hadn’t been, then the money was probably still in the house. In time, a search and inventory would turn it up.

On the other hand, it would be stupid to wait weeks or even days for such a search to be completed. That would give time for the killer to cover his tracks if he did have the money. It boiled down to the fact that, to recover the money, Shayne was going to have to find the killer.

Chief Gentry was in his office and he greeted his old friend warmly. “So you’re looking into the Wingren business, Mike?” he asked. “Come along then. I was just on my way to homicide. Bill Ryan’s taking a statement from the fella that found the body.”

“Why now?”

“He’s a night watchman. We let him go home for his sleep last night and told him to come down for a formal statement this morning.”

When they got to the homicide division office the security guard, Jerry Smulka, had just signed the statement typed out for him by a secretary. He was a dark, slender man in his late thirties with heavy black eyebrows that almost met above the bridge of his nose.

While he waited, Gentry and Shayne read the formal statement. It was simple and apparently straightforward. Smulka had been walking home from his bus stop when his attention was attracted by flickering lights from inside the big house. He went closer and saw that they were flames from the back of the hall. He had pounded on the door and found it ajar, so he ran in calling out to alarm the resident. Then he saw the body on the living room floor. He couldn’t see a phone in the house — Wingren didn’t have one — so he’d run back to the corner to call the fire department.

“What did you do until the engines came?” Shayne asked.

“It’s in the statement,” Smulka said. “I didn’t know whether old John was dead or hurt or passed out, so I ran back into the house to find out. That’s when I saw he was dead. I just stayed there. If the fire had gotten close, I’d have pulled the body out.”

“But you didn’t have to?”

“No. The engines got there in a hurry.”

“You sound like you knew who the dead man was.”