Гэри Бранднер: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 3, August 1973

“The killer is here,” the voice said. “You will destroy him with your bare hands. If you lose...” Mike Shayne nodded grimly. He knew only too well what she meant...

“That’s the trouble with the whole thing,” the vice president of the Intercontinent Insurance Company said. “That’s the thing that makes me doubt my whole line of thinking in the matter. The man was an absolute nobody.”

“I can see your point, Bradley,” the big man in the dark suit said as he reached for the brandy bottle on the office desk.

The insurance company executive didn’t seem to hear him. It was almost as if he was talking to some secret doubt within himself,

“Socially the man was nothing at all,” Bradley said again. “Achievement-wise he never held anything but pennies-an-hour jobs. He never married. He never really did anything. Financially he was nothing at all.”

“I understand,” Mike Shayne said. “This guy was a nothing from nowhere.” As the big detective spoke he poured a double brandy into the tumbler his host had provided.

What Shayne was really thinking was: “If this Willison was really such a cipher, what am I doing here? What did Bradley call me in for?” He didn’t say it. He figured Bradley would get to the point in his own way and time. Shayne had handled many cases for Intercontinent before. He knew his man.

“His name was Sam Willison,” Bradley said. “Like I said he was a nothing. He took out an insurance policy with us, and named the Friendly Rest Retirement Home as his beneficiary. He was going to move in there on the first of next month he said — only he never got to make the move. Last week he committed suicide.”

“Probably got despondent,” Mike Shayne commented over his brandy. “Lots of the old ones in this town do. Old and alone and no place to go but somewhere like that Friendly Rest.”

“You know the Friendly Rest?” Bradley asked.

“Not any more than I do a dozen of them. I’ve seen it. A cheap joint as those places go. Takes some county patients, and the county can’t or won’t pay for real top care. I wouldn’t ever want to go there myself.”

“I guess’ Willison didn’t either,” the insurance man said. “The question in my mind is why did he think death was better?”

“That isn’t what you’re calling me in to find out for you,” Shayne said. “Your firm doesn’t pay my fees just to satisfy your curiosity. Suppose you get to the point.”

“All right. The point is I don’t think he really did commit suicide. I can’t prove it of course or I wouldn’t need you at all. I simply feel it in my bones.”

“Now we’re getting someplace,” Shayne said. “Go on.”

“There isn’t any more. At least nothing I can put my finger on. This guy was a loner. He had his Social Security and a little pension and a room he lived alone in. No relatives at least none listed on his policy. The policy itself was only for thirty-five hundred dollars. Not enough to make anybody greedy. No enemies we know about.”

“Did something about the way he died look wrong?” the redhead asked. “Something that looked like murder? Was that what started you thinking?”

“Not even that.” Bradley was out of his seat and pacing back and forth between desk and window. “Cause of death was an overdose of barbiturates. The police found the empty bottle by his bed. He got them himself at the corner drugstore. No sign of violence. His wallet was under his pillow with thirty bucks still in it.”

“Lots of people do it that way,” Shayne said. “Pop the pills. Read about it in your daily paper.”

“I know. But I had this hunch—”

“Oh, come on,” Shayne said and finished his brandy.

“I know. I know. An insurance company doesn’t have hunches. It has computers instead. That’s why I kept trying to convince myself it wasn’t just a hunch. The best I could come up with logically though was; why did he do it? This Willison wasn’t sick. We found that out when we insured him. No record as a psycho. No personal problems or enemies. Nothing. That’s all he was. A nothing.”

“So why does a nothing kill nothing?” Shayne wanted to know. “You might have something there, only I just can’t really believe it amounts to much.”

“Then I got this in the mail,” Bradley said. He tossed a piece of cheap pad paper to Shayne.

Someone had printed on it in crude block letters: YOU FIND OUT WHO KILL SAM WILLISON

Maudie Kuttner lived only a couple of blocks from the house where Sam Willison had died. That is, if it could be called living.

Maudie had one room that was eight feet by eight. She had a bed and a cheap dresser and one chair over by the window. The window looked into a walkway between two equally ancient and crumbling rooming houses. There was a torn cotton rug on the board floor and tom curtains at the window. There wasn’t even a closet.

Maudie had asthma and a mild-getting-worse case of rheumatoid arthritis and a bad heart.

Right then her mind wasn’t on any of these problems.

At the exact moment when Bradley was handing that note to Mike Shayne Maudie was having her last almost conscious thought on this side of the thin line that separates Miami, Florida, from the world of pure spirit.

There was a pillow over Maudie’s face, and someone with big, cruel hands was holding it there and pressing the fragile old woman down on the bed. Her struggles had gotten very feeble as her body starved for air.

Maudie Kuttner gave one final moan and died.

Her killer moved the bed just enough to get at the loose board in the flooring. He pried it up and got out the tin box that held Maudie’s pitiful life savings in carefully hoarded bills. It came to just a little over eighteen hundred dollars and a flawed diamond ring that had belonged to the woman’s mother.

He took that and’ left the papers and letters when he put the box back under the board and the bed back over that part of the flooring.

Maudie had cashed her social security check only that morning. The killer took eighty-two dollars out of her shabby purse. He left the rest; it might not look like robbery.

Then he went back over to the bed. He took the pillow off the lined old face and checked to make sure that she was quite dead.

When he was sure that no spark of life still lingered, he very carefully put the pillow back under her head instead of over it.

He wanted it to look as if Maudie Kuttner had laid herself down to rest and then died of a heart attack or from her asthma or some other natural cause.

When everything was arranged to his satisfaction he went out of the mean little room, closing the door carefully behind him, and down the stairs and out of the building. He met nobody in the halls.

With any luck Maudie Kuttner wouldn’t even be found for a couple of days. By that time it would be hard to find out exactly what caused her death.

Likely nobody would really care about that anyway.

Just about then Mike Shayne was saying to his friend and frequent client Mr. Bradley: “Yeah, I agree with you this piece of paper does change things a bit. What did you find out about it?”