Brett Halliday: A Redhead for Mike Shayne

The reporter’s ignorance of hand-guns left him singularly unimpressed by his friend’s recital. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “One bullet from your gun was more than a match for his six. What’s eating on you?”

Shayne continued slowly shaking his head. “I don’t know… really. It’s just… There was something goddamned eerie about my experience last night. If you’d been there… if you’d heard what I heard…” He paused and ran knobby fingers through his coarse red hair and then grinned ruefully. “I sort of got the jitters over it,” he confessed. “I kept looking at this gun and trying to remember where I’d seen one like it before. Then I remembered this picture in the paper…” He broke off and took a long drink of coffee-royal.

“One thing you don’t have to be a gun-expert to notice, Tim. That gun on the table is spanking new. Like it just came from the factory. I don’t know whether that means anything, but… what about this twin in the picture? Did you happen to get a look at it? I wonder if it’s a virgin also.”

Rourke said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t on that story myself. I’ll check if you want.”

“No need,” Shayne told him decisively. “I’ve got a date with Peter Painter this morning, and I’ll have to turn this in to him. Merest oversight that I didn’t do so last night.”

“What about last night, Mike?” Rourke got out a wad of copy paper and a pencil. “The way I got it, you had a tipoff that warehouse was scheduled to be knocked off during the storm and you staked the place out. By yourself, huh? You want me to mention this particular gun in my story?”

“No,” Shayne told him vehemently. “Stay off that angle right now. I want to do some more checking. Just put it down that I got in a lucky shot last night. How’s your cup?”

Rourke lifted his mug to his lips and drained it. “Empty,” he sighed, setting it down in front of him. “Lousy service you got here, Mike.”

Shayne said, “I’ll speak to the management. In the meantime… how about a refill?”

“I’d love one, but I emptied the pot last time.” The reporter’s thin hand snaked out and closed around the cognac bottle. “I can still stand this stuff straight.” He tipped it over his empty mug and splashed in a couple of ounces, then held the bottle out toward his old friend. “Have one on the house?”

Shayne shook his head with a grin. “I’ve still got to beard Petey Painter in his lair and justify last night’s killing.”

He got out a cigarette and looked at his watch. “Joe Hogan is going to be on a spot if I don’t turn up pronto at Beach Headquarters to plead justifiable homicide.”

Timothy Rourke nodded, sipping his straight cognac from the warm mug with gusto. “Keep me informed, huh?”

Shayne nodded, getting up. He casually folded the newspaper Rourke had brought him, and then shrugged into a sport jacket. The reporter leaned back in his chair and watched interestedly while Shayne opened a center drawer of the desk and put flashlight and his own.38 inside, then picked up the other gun and dropped it into a side pocket. The folded newspaper went into the opposite pocket, and Rourke drained his mug and set it down regretfully.

He got to his feet and said, “Lunch?”

Shayne said, “Probably. At Tony’s. If I don’t show up, give Lucy a ring and she’ll know where I am.”

He turned to the door to go out and Timothy Rourke followed him.

From the point where he had left his car parked the preceding night, Michael Shayne made an illegal U-turn in front of the bridge and headed north on 2nd Avenue. He was frowning, in deep thought, as he drove, and he didn’t turn east on either 4th or 2nd Street to get over to the Boulevard. Instead, he continued on to Flagler and turned right, and moved into the first vacant parking space he found on the right-hand side of the street.

He got out and walked briskly to one of the arcades opening off Flagler, turned in and went halfway down to a ground-floor office opening directly off the arcade.

A neat brass plaque over the door said: “Rufus O’Toole, Gunsmith.”

Shayne opened the door onto a small, unadorned reception room with a glass counter at the end of it and several comfortable chairs and smoking stands ranged along the wall.

A bell sounded in the workshop at the rear of the office when Shayne opened the door, and he strolled up to the counter and waited.

In a moment a small, gnomelike man emerged through the curtained doorway at the rear. Rufus O’Toole had a hunched back, a wrinkled, leathery face, and the brightest blue eyes in the world. His eyes twinkled happily when he saw Shayne waiting at the counter, and he said in a lilting brogue, “The top of the marnin’ to ye, Michael me bye. You’re lookin’ well for an old lecher with the years you do be carryin’.”

Shayne grinned and said, “The same goes double for you, Rufe. I need some information.” He withdrew the pistol from his pocket and laid it on the glass counter in front of O’Toole. “Ever see one of these before?”

The gunsmith’s bright eyes studied the weapon for a long moment, and then he reached out for it with slender, strong fingers and turned it slowly, lifting it in both hands and then sliding the butt of it into his palm and holding it caressingly as he tested the weight and balance.

“No, Mike,” he said soberly, dropping his professional Irishness. “I’ve never laid eyes on the like before. Is it for sale?”

“I’m on my way to turn it over to Peter Painter at Beach Headquarters,” Shayne explained. “I hoped you’d recognize it and be able to tell me exactly what the devil it is.”

“Oh, I recognize it all right, Michael.” O’Toole laid it down carefully and then looked at his fingers and rubbed them together, sniffed them and wrinkled his nose slightly. “I merely said I’d never had the pleasure of seeing or handling one before.”

“Some foreign make?” Shayne asked dubiously.

“Indeed, yes. Our mass production economy would never waste the time and money to produce a beautifully tooled precision instrument like this.” He touched it lovingly again with his fingertips. “Not even Germany ever turned out a gun like this. They might have in the old days… if they’d had the modern alloys to work with… this particular metal has several times the strength of steel… has to in order to withstand a muzzle energy of more than two thousand foot pounds.” He paused, screwing up his face in concentration. “Twenty-one hundred and eighty pounds, I believe, to be exact. Though I would have to check before I made a flat statement.”

He tilted his head on one side and saw from the look on Shayne’s face that the figures meant nothing to the detective, and he added gently: “That, coupled with a muzzle velocity of nineteen hundred eighty feet per second and a caliber of twelve-oh-seven millimeters should give you some idea of the tremendous force embodied in this little fellow which weighs only thirty-seven ounces. That’s two ounces less than a Colt forty-five, Michael. Ten ounces less than a forty-four Magnum.”

Shayne leaned his elbows on the glass counter and gazed down at the gun and said slowly, “Translate those figures for me, Rufe. Your muzzle velocities and energies. Remember, I just carry a thirty-eight Special… and that very seldom.”

“Well, your regular thirty-eight Special has a muzzle velocity of about eight hundred feet per second,” explained O’Toole briskly, “and a muzzle energy of less than three hundred foot pounds.”

“As against two thousand and two thousand on this one,” said Shayne, nodding slowly. “How does it compare, for instance, with a forty-four caliber Magnum? That’s the biggest hunk of hand-gun I’ve ever handled.”