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

“I brought you a set of keys to the house, Mr. Shayne,” she said. “I got them from Grandfather’s lawyer and told him you were fully authorized to come and go as you please.”

“That’s fine,” Mike Shayne said. He sat down behind his big office desk and let Lucy Hamilton mix him a drink. “This may be a complicated case, Miss Wingren. In the first place, do you have any real reason to believe Mr. Wingren kept large sums of money on the place?”

“I think I have,” she said easily. “Ever since I can remember he’s said he has. He used to say he didn’t really trust any bank. It would make a nice treasure hunt for the family after he died, he’d say. I suppose he thought he was being funny.”

“Could he have been just kidding?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, no. He wasn’t that kind when it came to money. Besides, his lawyer believes it too. He says he has some of the old man’s property deeds and things like that in his vault, but not even all of those. Grandfather kept a small checking account for convenience, but the lawyer also believes there were very large sums of cash he hoarded somewhere”

“Any idea how large?” Mike Shayne said.

“Well, the lawyer. Mr. Roberts, made what he called an educated guess. The amount he named was around a quarter of a million dollars. I have to admit it shocked me.”

“Whew!” Mike Shayne said. “I don’t wonder. That much cash stashed some place in an old house is enough to bring all sorts of killers around. If that figure was talked about, it’s a wonder your grandfather lived as long as he did.”

“I’m afraid it wasn’t really a secret,” Anna admitted. “Mr. Roberts said he had the same sum mentioned once by Mrs. Mullen, who was grandfather’s housekeeper.”

“That would be Mrs. Jane Mullen who lives next door?”

“The very same. She worked herself to the bone taking care of grandfather for years and years. I’m afraid he treated her very shabbily too. All the while instead of paying her decent wages, he kept promising to leave her a fortune when he died. She isn’t even mentioned in the will. When she found that out, there was an awful fight between them.”

“That’s just fine,” Shayne said. “She already knows enough to tell people he has two hundred and fifty gees stashed in the house, and he goes and has a fight with her. Your grandfather was a real sharp man for a dollar, but I can’t say I think much of the rest of his brains.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve had to live with that thought all my life. That’s the way he was though. Mr. Shayne, I know you have a rough job ahead of you. I’m offering you ten percent of any money you can recover for me. Is that satisfactory?”

Mike Shayne thought of ten percent of a quarter of a million dollars.

“That sweetens the pot,” he said.

“Michael would do his best anyway,” Lucy Hamilton told her friend, “but I think that’s very generous of you, Anna.”

Mike Shayne drove back uptown to the Wingren house. He got there before the afternoon traffic had really begun to build up on the streets. The house looked peaceful in the rays of the westering sun. The fire hadn’t burned enough to show from outside and the police who had been there a few hours before had gone about their business.

The door was the old-fashioned port, with a solid lower half and then a big pane of heavy plate glass so anyone inside could see who was on the step.

Mike Shayne put the key Anna had given him into the lock. It turned easily and the door began to swing open on well-oiled hinges.

The pane of plate glass showed an intricate network of spider-web cracks centered on a neat round hole. A split second before there hadn’t been any cracks. Then the glass broke into a thousand shards that flew into the hall.

The big redheaded detective reacted by sheer animal instinct, the same lightning fast reflexes that had saved his life many times before.

He finished pushing the door open and literally dove into the hall as if he were going into a pool His body lit flat on the carpet and he rolled to the side, pulling his big, black forty-five automatic from its belt holster as he did so. Before the door was fully open, his body was back against the side of the hall where it couldn’t be seen from the outside.

Shayne hadn’t heard the shot, but a big jet plane from the Miami Airport was thundering overhead at the time, and that would have masked the firing of a cannon.

Through the open door the street looked perfectly peaceful in the afternoon sun. There were no cars in sight anywhere. In fact, nothing moved at all but a couple of feisty little dogs chasing each other back and forth on the far side of the street.

Shayne made sure nothing moved before he got to his feet and brushed splinters of glass off his suit.

“I hadn’t expected that in broad daylight,” he told himself. “There’s sure somebody doesn’t want me nosing around in here, and that has to mean that if there’s a treasure at least he didn’t get to it yet.”