He stepped inside, feeling for a switch inside the door and finding one. An unshaded two-hundred watt bulb sprang into brilliant light over the jeweler’s work bench and illuminated the floor beneath and the crumpled body twisted in the confined space between the stool and the open safe.
He lay on his right side, and the left side of his head and face was crushed, a bloody mess of splintered bone and smashed flesh.
Shayne dropped to his knees beside the body and touched a thin, outflung wrist. The flesh was still warm to the touch, and the blood seeping out of his body and along the floor had not yet congealed.
Shayne heard the faint sound of light footsteps on the stairway beyond the open door, and he rose to his feet slowly as the figure of a stooped little old lady materialized in the doorway. She stood very still for a long and agonizing instant with the unshaded light bright on her seamed face, reflecting from rounded and frightened marble-like eyes which stared into his for a moment before dropping to the corpse at his feet.
Then she screamed. A high-pitched, keening scream, and Shayne took one step forward involuntarily, pressing the palm of his big hand against her mouth to cut off the sound, putting his other arm tightly about her frail body and drawing her against him, holding her strongly as she twisted and writhed while he repeated soothingly in her ear:
“Don’t be frightened. Relax and I’ll let you go. It wasn’t I, you understand. I found him. I am the police. Do you understand that?”
He started to release her but she clawed and struck at him viciously, and guttural moaning sounds escaped her lips from behind his palm.
He realized she was completely in shock and probably hadn’t heard a word he said to her, and he kept on holding her tightly while he unhappily tried to decide how to handle the situation, and the tinkle of the entry-bell sounded eerily in the silence, and he turned his head and looked over his shoulder through the lattice-work to see Molly hurrying toward the back of the shop.
“What on earth, Mike? I thought I heard a scream…” She stopped outside the window, breathing hard, and her eyes rounded at sight of the old woman struggling futilely in his arms.
“Come around and help me,” he snapped. “Try to talk to her. There’s been a murder and she walked in on me kneeling over the body. We don’t want the whole neighborhood on our necks.”
Molly took in the situation instantly and she acted with singular competence and clear-headedness. She stepped swiftly through the rear door and around to Shayne’s side, put her arms gently about the shaking old body, crooning softly to her without words like a mother to a frightened child, and Shayne gladly released the woman to her ministrations, watching carefully and vastly relieved when she didn’t start screaming again as soon as he took his hand away from her mouth.
Instead, she began sobbing violently, and a stream of foreign words spilled swiftly from the thin lips.
Molly continued to hold her gently, but she bent her head to listen to the babble of words, and then spoke gently in reply in what sounded like the same language to Shayne.
This brought more sobs and a further surge of incomprehensible words, and Molly backed away slowly toward the door, drawing the old woman with her and keeping her head turned away from the dead man on the floor. Over her bent head, Molly explained in a wondering tone to Shayne. “She’s Lithuanian, Mike. Poor thing. She either doesn’t know any English or else the shock has knocked it all out of her. Yah, yah,” she crooned, bending her head close to the other’s ear, and then spoke on swiftly in cadenced syllables that had the sound of a mountain stream rippling swiftly over pebbles.
“And you just happen to speak Lithuanian?” Shayne demanded incredulously.
“Along with four other languages,” she told him calmly. “But Lithuanian, I learned at my mother’s breast if you’re interested. You call the police. I’m going to take her up-
stairs now.”
He said quickly, “We’re ahead of the police, Molly. Let’s stay ahead. The old man is dead. Nothing can change that. Tell her that I’m a detective and we’re her friends and want to help avenge her husband’s death. Get her to tell you everything. Ask about the Russian guns. She’ll talk to you. Right now, she’ll spill everything to anyone who talks her own language.”
“I’ll see, Mike.” Molly Morgan’s voice was cold. “But if you don’t call the police, I shall.”
“I’ll call them in good time,” he grated. “But take her upstairs and talk to her. If the police come barging in now you and I’ll spend the rest of the night at the police station making statements. As it is, we just might get a jump on her husband’s murderer if she’ll talk to you fast.”
“About the Lenskis… or about murder?” asked Molly coldly.
“Both… I think. Don’t you see there must be a connection? It can’t be sheer coincidence that he was knocked off tonight while we were on our way here to ask him about the pistols. Get the chip off your shoulder and start putting your Lithuanian to use while she’s in a mood to talk to you.”
He turned his back angrily on her, and stared down at the dead man, trying to visualize how the killing had occurred.
It was clearly evident that the murderer had been in the small cage with the proprietor when he struck him down. There was no death weapon in sight. The bloody wounds indicated that several blows had been struck with a heavy instrument… quite possibly the butt or the barrel of a revolver.
Shayne got a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over his fingertips, then cautiously touched the inner edge of the safe door that was standing ajar, and drew it open. He squatted down in front of it to study the contents without touching anything.
There wasn’t very much inside the safe. It appeared that the Liberty Loan Shop did not deal with a great many objects that were valuable enough to deserve locking up inside a safe. There were several small metal lockboxes which probably held precious or semi-precious jewelry, but there were no Russian handguns such as he had hoped to find. He didn’t know, of course, whether such merchandise would deserve a place in the safe, but he had a hunch that is where they would have been found if there were any left in the shop. Not so much because of the intrinsic value, but because of their nature. They weren’t the sort of thing, Shayne thought, that the proprietor of the Liberty Loan Shop would have been likely to keep out on open display.
The only other thing inside the safe of any possible interest was a canvas-covered ledger or cashbook about thirteen by six inches in size. It seemed a curious place to keep an ordinary ledger, and Shayne was tempted to take it out and examine it, but he kept sternly reminding himself that this was the scene of a homicide and it was his duty as a licensed private investigator to leave all the evidence intact until the police arrived and took charge.
He heard the sound of descending footsteps on the stairway outside, and got to his feet hastily and turned from the open safe to face Molly in the doorway.
She exclaimed, “It was two men, Mike. One very tall and the other quite short, is the best Mrs. Wilshinskis can describe them. She looks out the front window, you see, from upstairs and sees people who come in and out of the shop. About half an hour ago, or a little more. They were the last ones before you came, and must have done that terrible thing. She heard them talking down here with her husband, but the conversation was in English and she didn’t understand it, and then they went out together and got in a car and drove off. She didn’t see their faces and couldn’t identify them. And then she saw you come in the front door about ten minutes later and she listened at the head of the stairs, but didn’t hear any talk this time. And that’s why she got frightened and came down to see… and found you kneeling beside her husband’s corpse. Poor, frightened thing,” Molly ended compassionately. “She just sits up there on the edge of the bed rocking back and forth with her hands over her face and sobbing her heart out. She has a niece out in Coral Gables whom I telephoned and who promised to come down at once.”