“Oh I know,” the little fellow said. “Who am I? I’m Tom Rumbo. R-U-M-B-O. I’m a retired letter carrier. What murder? Why the murder of Sam Willison, of course. The murder of my good friend Sam.”
He paused to catch his breath and his eyes darted to Mike Shayne’s face and caught the expression there.
“Oh, I know that’s just the beginning. Give me time. Time. What makes me feel it’s murder when the police say it was suicide? That’s the next question, isn’t it?”
Shayne nodded.
“Well for one thing, Mister Shayne, Sam was my friend. I knew Sam like I know myself. Sam simply wasn’t the man to commit suicide. No sir, he was not.”
“Somebody else already told me that this morning,” the big man said.
“That would be at the insurance company, wouldn’t it?” Rumbo nodded an answer to his own question. “You was telling her up front the truth. I thought maybe my letter to them would get action. Yes, but I never hoped it would be the likes of Mike Shayne it would bring.”
“So you wrote that note,” Shayne said. “Why didn’t you sign it? Then I’d have come straight to you.”
“You’re trying to trip me up,” Rumbo said. “Trying to see if I know the detective business, aren’t you? It won’t work. In the stories nobody ever signs that sort of note. Do they?”
Mike Shayne looked at the pile of dogeared magazines and then he had to laugh. In those stories he didn’t suppose such notes ever were signed.
Rumbo laughed with him. “You see? Besides I knew if the man they sent was any good he’d find me. If he was too dumb to find me, I wouldn’t want to work with the likes of him anyway. My name’s Rumbo. Not Dumbo. You see?”
“Okay, Rumbo,” Shayne said. “You’re a detective. So get to it. You know a detective has to have more than a hunch to go by. You can say all you want that your pal Sam wouldn’t kill himself, but that doesn’t mean somebody else murdered him. He could have taken those pills by accident.”
“Sam?” Rumbo said. “Not Sam he couldn’t. He wasn’t no pill head that doped himself up all the time. Didn’t like them things anyway. He bought the one bottle and that only after his nerves got to jumping because he was afraid.”
“Now we’re hitting pay dirt,” Shayne said. “Suppose you tell me what Sam was afraid of.”
“Not what. Who.”
“Goon. Who?”
“Why, Big Hans, that’s who. Ever since he signed up to go into that home he started to get mad at that Big Hans and became afraid. He said maybe it was a mistake.”
“Hans who?”
“I don’t know his last name. Big Hans was all Sam ever called him. I never saw him neither.”
“Does this Hans own the Friendly Rest Home?” Shayne asked. “Does he work there?”
“I don’t even know that for sure. I never seen this guy. Sam didn’t really tell me much. Just hints here and there. Nothing definite, but I did get the name. He was afraid of this Hans though. Scared enough so he bought them pills. Scared.”
“I believe you. Scared.” Shayne said.
“I’m scared too, Mister Shayne. That’s one reason I wrote that note and didn’t sign it. If this guy killed Sam, he knew I was Sam’s best friend. Maybe he thinks I know who he is. I don’t like that. I wanted help.”
“Have you reason to think you’re in danger?” the detective asked.
The answer came from the front of the building in the form of a crashing explosion that rocked floor and walls and almost jolted the room door out of its frame.
V
Mike Shayne and Tom Rumbo stood frozen in shock for a long moment while the whole building seemed to rock from the force of the blast. A big piece of ancient plaster fell from the ceiling and broke to dust and fragments on one of the piles of old true detective story magazines.
Shayne was the first to recover. He ran for the door. The explosion had jammed the lock and he had to force it open.
Tom Rumbo was right on the big man’s heels. When they both got through the door they saw that the whole front of the hall was full of plaster dust and acrid fumes from the explosive charge.
The door to the manager’s apartment had been blown to pieces. The door was out in the hall, showing that the blast had gone off inside the apartment.
One glance into the room through the blasted doorway showed Mike Shayne that the Old woman who had refused to let him in only a few moments earlier was very dead indeed. The bomb itself must have gone off right in her hands, or perhaps she had been leaning over it on the table. The table top was gone in a mess of splinters and the upper half of the old woman’s body could barely be identified as human any longer.
Tom Rumbo crowded up behind Shayne to look into the room. Then he pulled away, stepped back into the hall and stood still. His first turned white and then green and he vomited against the wall.
Mike Shayne came out of the room. He caught the little man by the elbow.
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here in a hurry. That bomb will have the police here any minute and I don’t want you talking to them right now.”
As if to confirm his words they heard the whoop-whoop of a prowl car siren coming closer fast.
Some of the other tenants were beginning to come out of their rooms and approach the bomb-wrecked manager’s apartment. Mike Shayne ignored them. He held fast to Rumbo’s elbow and half propelled, half supported the little man down the hall to the rear exit.
They got out into an alley and then through to the next street. Tom Rumbo was still pale and shaken but he could walk by himself although obviously looking to the big detective for guidance.
“I’m taking you over to my office,” Shayne said. “It’s only a few blocks, but we’ll have to walk it because I left my car. Do you think you can make it without attracting attention?”
“I think so,” Rumbo said. Then his eyes brightened. “That’s why we came out the back. Whoever set off that thing might have been watching the front of the house. I never thought of that.”
“Come on,” Shayne told him. “Time enough to talk when we get there and have a drink to steady us. You drink, don’t you?”
“Of course. I never thought about somebody watching. I guess I’m not much of a detective after all.”
Ten minutes later they were in Mike Shayne’s second floor office looking out over the crowded sidewalks of Miami’s famous Flagler Street.
Lucy Hamilton had poured them each a stiff drink from the brandy bottle, and the big man had one of his private brand long black cigars lit and smoking. He had briefed Lucy Hamilton on what had taken place.
“What do you suppose it means?” she asked.
Tom Rumbo was the first to answer. “I don’t know. I was afraid somebody’d try and get me. But old Mrs. Hanger—”
“Maybe they thought Mr. Willison had talked to her too,” Lucy Hamilton suggested. “They could have been afraid of what she knew.”
“If there hadn’t already been two murders, that would make me laugh,” Rumbo assured them both. “I mean really laugh. The only time that, woman talked to anybody was to ask for the rent money or bawl somebody out for making too much noise. Nobody would confide anything to her. You can believe me when I say that.”
“Oh, but surely she couldn’t possibly have been that bad,” Lucy said.
“I’m inclined to agree with Tom, Angel,” Shayne said. “I only saw the late landlady for a couple of minutes but the personality she showed me could have fitted a gila monster. If she was like that with everybody—”
“She was,” Rumbo interjected.
“In that case,” Shayne finished, “nobody would give her the time of day let alone tell her their troubles.”