“Of course, I almost changed my mind this morning. When I came to see you here I had to wait ten minutes. I know now it’s because it was you I saw in the bar downstairs with Mr. Buzby. I had to wait while a servant got you back up here. The police will question your servants and find out which one.”
“I wasn’t with Bill,” Della said. “He was having a drink with Sally Peters.”
“She joined us,” Sally said. “I left them together.”
Shayne ignored the exchange. “After I told you I knew who the killer was you excused yourself for a moment. You said it was to answer the phone. I think it was to make a phone call. The person you called tried to kill me in the elevator when I left here, so he must have been close by. Maybe still in the bar.”
Della Peckinbaugh’s calm was really shattered by this time. “You’re accusing me of conspiring with Bill Buzby to kill Harvey and then you! Mr. Shayne you’re out of your mind. It’s a tissue of lies. I had no reason on God’s earth to do such a thing.”
She started to rise, but Mike Shayne waved her back into her seat.
“Hold on there. I haven’t accused you. I’m just stating some facts.”
“I hired you to find my husband’s murderer. I wouldn’t want you killed.”
“I thought of that,” Shayne said. “Only the real killer would. He had to be someone who knew the Key Paradiso home and boathouse intimately. He had to know this hotel and how to get into the elevator shaft. He had to know the financial affairs of all of you, and where Slim kept his yacht, and how to imitate Slim’s voice on the phone to the crew. He had to be in the know on everything that happened, that is, be someone you would confide in at every stage. The only one that fits is Buzby.”
The confidential man kept his poker face. “Your hypothetical killer also had to have a motive, Mr. Shayne. Of all these people I’m the only one without a motive.”
“Oh no,” Shayne said. “On the contrary — you’re the only one of the lot with a motive strong enough to make you kill Harvey. That motive was fear.”
He paused again, and they all watched him closely.
“Somebody offered Tim Rourke two hundred thousand dollars for silence. That’s an odd amount. It should have been much less, or much more. Any of these women could have offered half a million at least, I thought to myself. The killer panicked. He offered all the money he had, or close to it. It was a mistake.
“I made some phone calls today, Buzby. A month ago Harvey Peckinbaugh got suspicious. He ordered an audit of your accounts by a good detective agency. You have a quarter of a million dollars that you shouldn’t have.
“We can check this. I think Harvey had a report that you had been embezzling from him and was going to send you to jail. That, or you had intercepted the report. You quarrelled and he threatened you, so you killed him.
“You might have gotten away with it, if Tim Rourke hadn’t blundered by and you thought he had recognized you. That was a mistake, and so was everything you’ve done since.”
Bill Buzby looked white and deadly calm, but he still managed to keep control. “Theories,” he said. “Words, Mr. Shayne. Nothing but words. You have no proof of anything. If you did, I’d be under arrest now.”
He glared at the big detective.
Shayne looked at him gravely. “I’ve got proof.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a battered lump of metal and let it drop on the table. “This is the bullet you fired at me in the elevator today. This we can trace to the gun and the gun to you.”
Chief Will Gentry and Tim Rourke kept perfectly straight faces, though they knew this was pure bluff on the big redhead’s part. No bullet mashed so badly by its impact on steel could be ballistically assigned to the gun that fired it.
Like most people Buzby didn’t know this, but he still kept his control. “Trace away. I don’t own a gun.”
“You don’t have to own one,” Shayne said. “You fired one. Not twelve hours ago you fired a gun. There’ll still be minute traces of burned powder in the skin of your hand even if you’ve washed that hand. The traces will be there for days. We’re going to test the hands of everyone in this room for powder traces, Buzby. We’ve got you now.”
Bill Buzby was faster than Shayne had counted on. He hadn’t been fool enough to come to the meeting wearing a gun, but there was one in the drawer of the library table where he sat, and he got it out and shoved it to the back of Della Peckinbaugh’s head before they could move.
“I’m leaving here, and she’s going, along as hostage,” he said. “So much as blink an eye and I’ll blow her head off. I mean it. You all stay here for two hours. Nobody moves or phones. At the end of that time you can do as you please. I’ll be gone in a private plane and Della with me. I’ll let her go when I’ve made Cuba. Do you understand?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Keeping Della as a shield he backed across the room and through the kitchen door into the hands of the two detectives Chief Will Gentry had posted there before the meeting started.
“Could you really have found powder residue on his hands?” Della Peckinbaugh asked the men over drinks when Buzby had been taken away.
“No way to tell without trying,” Chief Gentry said. “It’s possible, but we couldn’t know for sure. The important thing is that Buzby thought we could. He didn’t dare test it.”
“Everything he did was a mistake,” she said. “Poor Bill.”
“He was a killer and a fool. The two go together,” Mike Shayne said. “His first mistake was when he stole a dollar from your husband. Everything came from that. At the end everything he did showed me more and more clearly who he had to be. The only real evidence was his own guilt. It had to come out and it did.”
“If I hadn’t blundered onto the killing, he’d have had a perfect crime,” Tim Rourke said.
“There’s no such thing,” Mike Shayne told them all.
Awry in a Parade
by Paul Yawitz
Everyone marches to a different tune, and he knew just the song to make whitie march his way at last!
VIgal knew there was no retreating now.
He was in the fermenting midst of his long-planned hold-up of the rich neighborhood branch of Newcomers National Bank.
An unexpected anxiety clamped his throat as he hurled his slender, agile body over the outer counter of the main office. For days he had steeled his every nerve for the climactic moment. He had been certain they would not waver. It was a prudently devised maneuver to free himself from the gutter of his black ghetto. His own little masterpiece that once accomplished would allow him to walk with equality. Big money was his secret.
Nothing could go wrong, he had assured himself a thousand times. For three weeks he had cased the operation of the bank. It was to be — had to be — a perfect crime executed with a precision that would prove him a pro.
It was a dangerous venture and in a few hectic, but carefully devised, moments it would be over.
In that sliver of a second that he was now suspended in the mid-air leap, the light .22 caliber Smith & Wesson in his free hand felt heavier than he had ever suspected, but his eyes caught the, red glove of the hand on which his body was weighted and it renewed his confidence. It was part of the protection he had planned for himself. No one would ever detect his fingerprints, no one. The anxiety relaxed, and his mind attuned itself instantly to the well rehearsed minutes ahead.