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

There was no way for him to tell exactly where the bullet fired at him had come from. It could have been fired in or near any one of half a dozen houses. For the moment he didn’t even try to locate the slug and dig it out of the wall. Chief Gentry’s boys could take care of that little chore later on.

The first thing Shayne did was make a tour of the big house. It was discouraging. There were a lot of rooms and all of them were full of furniture, collectible items and just plain hoarded junk.

There were two big, expensive freezer units in the kitchen and another in the back hall on the ground floor. All three were jammed full of food, much of it labeled as expensive cuts of meat. Shayne noted two ten-pound packages of frozen lobster tails.

“He must have thought he’d stand siege in here,” the big man told the empty room. “Enough food here so he could eat himself to death before anybody broke in.”

Shayne knew that to search the house properly he’d have to thaw all that food. Suppose the old man had frozen a packet of hundred-dollar bills in with the lobster tails? It would take an army of men weeks to shake this place down properly. In the end the house might have to be taken apart stone by stone and timber by timber.

For the moment Shayne contented himself with tapping on walls and floors, looking for a sliding panel or hidden compartment. He didn’t find anything. He hadn’t really expected that he would.

When he left the house he took a suitcase full of old books and locked it in the trunk of his own car. “If that guy shot at me is still watching he may think I’ve got the stuff I was after and follow me. If he does. I’ll get him sooner or later.”

His next stop was at the address Gentry had given him for Calvin Harris. It was an apartment in a big old boomtime building. The paint was peeling and the door and window frames rotten with termite tunnels, but the rent was cheap and the rooms high-ceilinged and cool in the south Florida summer heat.

Mike Shayne spotted a police stake-out, a plainclothes detective sitting in an unmarked car watching the building, so he figured Harris probably hadn’t come home yet.

He was right. The apartment door was opened by an attractive young woman who admitted to being Mrs. Sally Harris. She wasn’t about to admit anything else, though.

Shayne gave her an appreciative grin. This young woman would have been a real stunner with new clothes and a few square meals to fill out her figure. He could see that times had been hard with the Harris family.

“No,” she said. “Cal ain’t here. I don’t know where he is and I have no idea when he’s coming back. Now will you get out of here and leave us alone?”

“What are you so mad at me for?” Shayne asked. “You don’t even know who I am. Maybe I just want to help Cal.”

“In a pig’s ear,” she said and gave him a bold and hostile look. “Nobody wants to help Cal. You’re just another one of them fly cops been coming around all day.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“If you ain’t a cop what are you here for? I tell you Cal didn’t kill old John. Not that he didn’t need killing, the way he treated people all his life, but Cal didn’t do it. I ought to know Cal. He’s my man. He ain’t the killing kind.”

“In that case he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“You oughta know better than that,” she said. “Poor folks like us have always got things to worry about. Anything happens like that old S.O.B. gets himself killed — who do the cops come after? Not old Jane Mullen. She’s got some money. Not any of the rich folks old John cheated. No. It’s a poor boy crippled up by that old devil’s meanness. You think I’m going to help you hound my man, mister, you’re crazy in the head.”

Her voice had a ring of sincerity that impressed Mike Shayne. The big man had dealt with enough hundreds of thieves and killers in his time to have developed a pretty reliable instinct for judging people. In spite of her obvious hostility, he liked this young woman.

“Now look,” he said. “I told you I’m not a cop. I might even be able to help you and Cal. Why not let me come in and talk about it?”

“The cops have already searched this place looking for Cal. He ain’t here.”

“I believe you. I said I just want to talk. I might even make you a business proposition.”

“That would be the day,” she said. “I ain’t open to no proposition.”

“Not you,” he said. “Cal.” He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to her. “That’s earnest money. If Cal can help me, there’ll be more. Look, my name’s Mike Shayne. You can check me out. People will tell you I’m no phony.”

“Oh,” she said. “Mike Shayne, huh? I heard about you. Okay, I guess there’s no harm talking.” She tucked the bill into the front of her dress and opened the door wider to let him in.

The apartment was bare, but scrupulously clean. Shayne sat down in one of the two living room chairs, took off his battered felt hat and mopped his brow.

Sally Harris sat in the other chair.

“Okay, Mr. Shayne,” she said. “It’s your dime. Go ahead and talk.”