Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974
Murder in My Family
by Brett Halliday
For brave, doomed Ellen Barker there could be only one way back. Mike Shayne would have to make himself a living decoy — a decoy that one trigger blazing second could turn into death!
I
The little black and white spotted puppy dog didn’t belong on Mrs. Ellen Barker’s luxurious Miami Beach estate. He was strictly a runaway from the servants’ quarters of another estate across the street and down the block. He was just a stray puppy following his very young nose in pursuit of new and nameless delights.
He didn’t even see the car as he ran out of the flower bed to cross the winding drive.
Ellen Barker saw the puppy though.
She tramped her foot down as hard as she could on the brake pedal of her very expensive foreign runabout. The brake started to catch and then there was a snapping sound from under the car and all of a sudden she didn’t have any brakes at all.
The puppy was lucky enough not to be in the direct path of the wheels and small enough so the body of the car went right on over without even scratching him.
He gave one startled yelp and took off for home.
Ellen Barker would have yelped right along with the puppy if she hadn’t been a very cool headed and intelligent woman. The car wasn’t going too fast, as it was still in the winding drive. She put it into low gear and then into neutral and let it nose gently into a thick clump of ornamental shrubbery which acted in place of the missing brakes.
Then she got out of the car and walked back to the front door of her home. Once inside she took a good three fingers of brandy from the bottle under the bar in the Florida room of the big house, and then made a phone call.
The mechanic she called had done her work for years. He came up in his wrecking truck and got Ellen’s car out of the shrubbery and jacked it up and went under for a look.
“You’re right, Mrs. Barker,” he said. “The brake line of your car was cut almost all the way through. If you’d tried to brake hard in traffic instead of in your own drive, there’d have been a real crackup. You might not be alive now.”
“Thank you, Pete,” she said. “Are you sure it couldn’t have been an accidental break?”
“Just about as sure as I can be, Mrs. Barker,” the mechanic said. “The marks of the file are still on the metal of the brake line.” After a moment, he went on: “You want I should notify the police, Mrs. Barker?”
“No thank you, Pete,” she said. “I’ll take care of that myself. You tow the car back to your garage and put in a new brake line. If I have to go out I’ll use one of the other cars.”
When the man had gone, Mrs. Barker did take a station wagon from the garage and drove a few blocks to the nearest public corner phone booth.
She was suddenly afraid to use the gold princess phone on the table beside her bed. There were too many extensior phones in that big palace, too many servants, too many ears that might listen. The phone line could have been bugged outside the house.
Ellen Barker wanted this call to be quite private indeed.
The voice that answered the ringing phone belonged to an old and close good friend.
“Tim Rourke here,” said the ace feature writer on the staff of the Miami News from his office in the News tower across the bay.
“Thank God,” she said. “Tim, this is Ellen Barker. I need your help. I think I need it in an awful hurry.”
“Of course, Ellen. You know you can count on me.” Tim Rourke’s voice showed his concern. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“I think somebody’s trying to kill me, Tim,” Ellen said. “In fact I’m damned well sure somebody’s trying to kill me. She tried again not an hour ago. I need help and I need protection, and I can’t call the police.”
“Why can’t you call the police?” Tim Rourke asked her, “and why do you say ‘she’ tried? Do you know who it is?”
“I think I do,” Ellen said. “It’s my sister.”
II
Within the hour Tim Rourke drove up to the door of the big house on Miami Beach. With him in his brand new sports car was his longtime friend, Mike Shayne.
“I don’t really know what it’s about,” Rourke told his friend on the phone. “All I know is Ellen sounded scared and that’s good enough for me. I’ve known her for years and she’s got moxie and a level head. I think she really does need help, and you’re the one to give it. I told her I’d try to get you to take the case, and she approved. Money’s no object by the way. The Barker fortune is one of the biggest I know.”
“So what’s it all about?” Shayne had asked.
“I think I better let Ellen tell you that,” Rourke had said. “I’ll pick you up at your office in half an hour and drive you over to her place.”
Ellen Barker opened the door of the big house when she saw Tim Rourke’s car drive up. She was a striking figure of a woman in her mid forties with a still splendid figure, beautifully coifed black hair and a graceful, vibrant air. Her eyes were black like her hair and her oval face had an aristocratic, almost regal beauty. She wore an expensive, but simple two-piece suit of pale blue linen which set off her beauty to perfection.
“Come right in Tim, and you too Mr. Shayne,” she said. “I’m so glad you could come.”
Inside in the hallway she took both of Tim Rourke’s hands and looked up into his face.
“Thank you, Tim, I am awfully glad you got here so quickly. I guess all of a sudden I got really scared. It’s not a nice thought that somebody’s out to murder you, but — well, all of a sudden I realized that meant kill. I mean somebody wants to kill me. I got scared.”
“It’ll be all right now,” Rourke said as reassuringly as he could make it sound. “I’ve brought you the best man in the world to help with something like this. Let’s go where you can tell Mike here all about it.”
“There’s a summer house out on the back of the lawn facing Indian River,” she said. “Nobody can get close to us there. I’ve already set out the makings for drinks.”
“That sounds great,” Shayne said. “Let’s go there then.”
Before they had crossed the lawn to the little white columned pergola one of the phones in the big house was in use.
A woman’s finger dialed a number on one of the Miami exchanges. When the phone at the other end was answered, the woman said: “I thought you should know. That guy from the paper just came over. He’s here now. She must have called him from outside.”
“You mean Rourke of the News?”
“That’s him. The one you told me to watch out for. He wasn’t alone either. He had another man with him. A big guy with red hair. Real hard looking. Big.”
“You hear the redhead’s name?”
“I think she called him Shell or Shay or something. I couldn’t get close.”
“That would be Shayne. Mike Shayne the private detective. He and Rourke are old buddies. You watch out for that one. He’s smart and he’s tough. If they bring him into this thing we’re going to have to act fast.”
“Oh no,” the woman’s voice said. “You know how I feel about—”
“You know what we have to do as well as I do,” the voice on the phone said. “Now get off the wire before somebody picks up one of the other extensions and hears us. Get on in there and try to hear what they’re saying.”