“Sure I know,” Shayne said. He handed the slip of paper back to the insurance man. “Let me see everything you’ve got in the file on this Willison. I’ll run the ball myself from there on out.”
“At your usual per diem and expenses,” Bradley said. “After all we don’t want to pay out even as little as thirty-five hundred unless we have to.”
“And you don’t like to waste a hunch,” Shayne said as he reached for the thin file on the dead man.
An hour later Shayne had checked in at his Flagler Street office with his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, riffed through the advertisements and bills that made up the morning mail; and walked on over to the downtown section where the late Mr. Willison had spent his last days.
It was an area of rundown rooming houses, barely surviving boom time apartment buildings and a few ancient and decrepit hotels located north of where ground had been cleared for the new downtown division of Dade Junior College.
“If Social Security ever went out of business,” Shayne told himself, “this whole part of town would fall to pieces like the wonderful one hoss shay. These people around here have mostly been dead for years only they don’t know it yet. Still that doesn’t give anybody the right to hurry this Willison along with it.”
Shayne found the address he was looking for without any trouble, and put a big thumb to the doorbell. As he expected, it didn’t ring. He pushed the door open and winced at the blast of stale air that escaped from the dark tunnel of hallway inside.
A hand lettered sign on the door to his left said Manager, and the big man pounded on the door.
After a while it opened a crack and a dirty old woman in an equally dirty dress and shawl squinted out at him.
“What you want?”
“It’s about Mr. Willison,” Shayne said. “The guy who died here last week. I want to talk to you about him.”
“No,” the old woman said with finality. “I awreddy told you cops all I’m gonna say about him. Go away.”
“I’m not a cop,” Shayne said patiently. “I’m from the insurance company that had the policy on him. All I want to do is ask you a couple of questions.”
“Ask somebody else,” she said. “I don’t know nothing about no insurance company. I don’t know nothing about nothing. Go on. Get away from here.”
Mike Shayne would like to have pushed on in, but she had only opened the door a couple of inches and he could see that the strong brass chain inside was still fastened. Even if he’d been willing to risk breaking in without a warrant, the racket would have drawn a crowd for sure.
He heard a door carefully opened down the hall, but no one came out. Shayne was sure at least one person must be eavesdropping.
“There’s nothing to get upset about,” he told the old woman. “Simply a few routine questions that have to be asked.”
No answer. She would have shut the door but the private detective blocked that with the toe of one big shoe.
“Of course I know your time is valuable,” he said then and pulled a rumpled double sawbuck out of his jacket pocket. He held it up so she could see, but carefully kept it out of her reach.
He saw the old eyes light up with greed, and for a moment thought she was about to talk. Then that emotion was replaced by another which Shayne was ready to identify as fear.
She shoved the door against his foot.
“I ain’t sayin’ nothing,” she said. “I don’t know nothing nohow. What I know I tell the cops already. You go and ask them. Now take that big foot outta my door before I start to scream.”
That was that. The big man took out one of his business cards and tossed it through the crack into the room.
“You change your mind, you call me,” Shayne said. “Don’t forget, I pay for any information I can use.”
The detective said the last part loud enough so whoever was listening down the hall could hear it. Then he took his foot out of the manager’s door. It was instantly slammed in his face.
Shayne stood quietly for a moment.
As he had hoped, he heard a quick hissing noise from down the hall. When he turned his head a hand was cautiously beckoning from one of the room doors.
Mike Shayne walked quickly back down the hall. The hand grabbed his elbow and almost yanked him through the doorway.
“Come in quick,” its owner said as the door shut. “I don’t want anybody to know I’m talking to you.”
“Don’t worry,” Shayne said. “I won’t tell anybody.”
The man in the room was old and wrinkled. He stood about five-two in his shoes and probably weighed about eighty-five pounds. He wore an old and much mended cardigan sweater which might have been either dark green or brown when it was new, gray and shapeless trousers and a pair of tennis shoes. From the smell he hadn’t bathed in a week.
In spite of all that there was something about him which Mike Shayne took an instant liking to.
The eyes in the small, wrinkled face were bright and sparkling with intelligence and humor and the face itself had an almost elfin quality. The man stood straight as a ramrod in his shoes. His movements were quick and alert.
Old as he was, this man had not given in to the endless drag of loneliness and poverty. Here was a vital human being.
“You said you was from the insurance company,” the little man said. “Prove it. Show me your identification. You got to have some, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Shayne said. He took a couple of I.D. cards from his wallet and showed them to the little man.
The eyes in the old face grew even brighter.
“Mike Shayne,” the man said. His tone changed so that he said it almost reverently. “You the Mike Shayne I read about so many times?”
“I’m that Shayne, I guess,” the big detective said. “What do you want with me?”
“First I just want to look at you,” the other said. “I hear so much about you sometimes I wonder if you’re really so. Now here you stand right in my own room. It’s too good to be true, that’s what it is.”
“What did you want me for?” Shayne asked again.
“I was going to tell you. I read about you all these years. And now—”
“And now what?” Shayne pressed him.
“Now I’m going to help you solve a murder case,” the old gnome breathed ecstatically.
IV
Mike Shayne hadn’t reached the top of his profession on the Florida Gold Coast by being a fool. The face he turned to the little old man was perfectly serious and even respectful.
“Okay, then. Maybe you can help at that. What makes you think so?”
“I’m a detective myself,” the other said. “Oh, not like you are. I’m a student of detecting; all my life. I have a wonderful library on the subject.”
He gestured and Shayne saw that indeed the corners of the room were heaped with old books, most of them paperbacks, and magazines. All of the well known true and fiction detective sheets were represented. There was even a massive hardbound edition of Sherlock Holmes stories.
“I see.”
“I read them all. I read all the cases in the papers. I’ve trained myself to think like a detective. No formal training, you understand, but still I think I’m as good as most detectives today.”
The old fellow’s eyes sparkled as he spoke and he kept taking little darting steps back and forth across the room.
“Well now,” Mike Shayne said seriously, “if that’s the case then you know there’s a regular routine we have to follow if you’re going to help me. There’s questions I have to ask you, and—”