The Postman Brought Murder

Beauty and sudden death were walking hand in hand in that night of horror—and Mike Shayne, caught in the middle of a trap baited with Murder, took his one last chance to live.

by BRETT HALLIDAY

(c) 1971, by Brett Halliday

MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE

I

“YOU’D BETTER be sure,” Mike Shayne said. “You had just better be.” The big Miami private eye turned his car into the street of modest concrete block and stucco homes on the city’s northwest side.

“Right over there, third from the corner on the left,” the man riding with him pointed. “Of course I’m sure, Mike. There’s a hit set for later tonight. Sack 4741. Just like I told you. They passed the word earlier today so all of us would be there and ready.”

“How in hell did they get that sack number?” Shayne said. “I only had it myself less than two hours ago. They’ve just got to have a spotter on the other end.”

“Sure they do,” the man with him said. “This bunch has spotters all over the country. Maybe all over the world. They’re organized like the F.B.I., only on the other side of the law. Every time they know what they want and they take it just as smooth as silk. Never lift the wrong sack. Never miss the right one.”

“I know,” Shayne said. “My bosses on this case say it’s a two hundred and fifty million dollars a year heist. That is on the people they insure alone. Overall it makes even the Mafia families look like kids pitching pennies. Anyway, we ought to be able to tail this one. That is, if nothing goes wrong.”

“I don’t see how it can, Mike,” the other said. Shayne had pulled up in front of one of the houses. “Come on in and have a beer. We’ve got plenty of time to kill.”

“Okay,” Shayne said. “I don’t mind if I do.” The second man was on the big detective’s payroll on a temporary basis. They’d worked together in the past. “You still drink that imported stuff, Smitty?”

“Sure do,” Nick Smith laughed and took out his door key. “Far as I’m concerned it’s the world’s only beer that’s fit to drink.”

He unlocked the door and shoved it open. “After you.”

“You’re in the door,” Shayne said. “Go right ahead.”

He didn’t know it, but he’d just saved his own life.

Smitty stepped into his own living room.

The man standing flattened against the wall of the living room to the right of the entrance put his gun to Smitty’s head and pulled the trigger. No challenge, no warning, no hesitation. He just pulled the trigger.

The gun was a twenty-two target automatic, a Woodsman, with a long barrel made even longer by the silencer on the end. It made less noise than a pin-stuck balloon, but the hollow point, high velocity .22 long rifle slug punched through Smitty’s skull and scrambled the brains inside just as effectively as if it had been a thirty-eight.

Anybody else but Mike Shayne would have taken the second shot right in the temple. The big detective lived by instinct—honed by years in one of the world’s most dangerous professions.

He saw the blue steel pressed to Smitty’s head and knew, before he had time to realize that he knew it, that whoever held the gun would have heard them talking. He’d know there were two men at the door.

Shayne let himself drop to his knees, and the second shot went through empty air where the big man’s head had been a split second before.

Shayne was on his knees across the threshold with Smitty’s body on the carpeted floor in front of him. The killer was against the wall to his right and the partly opened door blocked any movement to the left. A man on his knees is in just about the worst possible position to make a fight. He can’t kick, has absolutely no mobility, and will pull himself off balance if he attempts any violent movement. He can’t even swing an effective punch against any target not directly to his front.

The big man did the only thing he possibly could. He swung his body to the right and grabbed at the ankles of the man standing pressed to the wall. One powerful yank and the killer fell heavily, thrashing his arms and dropping the gun.

He got one leg loose and launched a vicious kick into Mike Shayne’s face. If the kicker had been properly braced the kick would have broken Mike Shayne’s neck. As it was the shoe heel tore open the redhead’s cheek and slammed him back away from the man.

Both of them twisted on the floor like a couple of fighting tomcats, trying to get into position and at the same time groping for the gun. Shayne hit the butt with the heel of his hand and knocked the weapon clear across the room. Then he snatched for the big forty-five in his own belt holster.

Shayne hadn’t time to get out his gun. The man he was fighting was a pro himself. He got up on his knees and a switchblade knife, its blade flickering menacingly in the late afternoon sunlight that slanted in the windows, seemed to blossom in his hand. Then he launched himself forward in a sort of slithering dive with arm out at full length and the knife ripping for Shayne’s gut. The wicked steel ripped a cut in the front of the big detective’s jacket.

It was close. It was very close indeed.

Shayne grabbed for the man’s knife hand with his own left and caught it for a second. He swung a looping right at the man’s head and connected but failed to knock him out. The man rolled clear, got to a sitting position and looped his arm back to throw the knife.

Mike Shayne again did the only thing he could. He got his own gun out and fired from a prostrate position.

The heavy slug took the man in the mouth and blew out the back of his head. Some of his brains made a blue-white mess on the wall where the slug went into the plaster.

II

MIKE SHAYNE looked at the two dead men on the floor of the room in front of him. Then he got very carefully to his feet. He didn’t try to search the house. If the killer hadn’t been alone, Shayne would have known it by now. The fight would have drawn another man.

Shayne pulled his handkerchief out and applied it to his face where the killer’s leather shoe heel had marked him. He didn’t look at the bodies again. Brain-shot men stay dead. He did go to the window, but either the closed windows of the air-conditioned house had muffled the shots or any neighbor who heard had thought they were a car backfiring. Nothing stirred on the street.

He went into the bathroom of the two-bedroom home and washed his face. He applied iodine and an adhesive pad to the cut after it stopped bleeding.

Then he went into the kitchen. That was where he knew Nick Smith kept his liquor—and Mike Shayne needed a drink.

He found himself a bottle of bourbon and poured half a tumbler full. The big man tossed it down with one long swallow after another, rinsed the glass and took a small swallow of tap water for chaser.

The liquor hit his stomach with an impact all its own and a grateful warmth began to spread out from that center. He poured another two fingers into the glass and sat down at the kitchen table.

Mike Shayne had some hard thinking to do.

At the time of his death Smitty had been working for the Miami detective for better than a month. Shayne had needed an operative to infiltrate the operations of a gang and bring him some information. Smitty had just moved back to Dade County after some years in South America. He wasn’t known to any of the local hoods and had seemed like an ideal choice. Apparently that had been a mistake. He’d been spotted and killed.

The case had been begun about six weeks before, when Mike Shayne had gone up to New York to see the head of a major national insurance firm for which he had handled many cases over the years.

That trip of itself was unusual. Mike Shayne usually did business with the vice-president who handled South Florida contracts for the company. That dignitary had a Biscayne Boulevard suite of offices in downtown Miami not far from Shayne’s own Flagler Street office.

This time they hadn’t wanted to handle it that way. Shayne had been asked to fly up to New York to see the top man in person. He wasn’t to go to the executive offices in the insurance company’s building either. The meet was secret and it was held in an East Side apartment that had security guards in the lobby and a couple of Gotham private eyes to escort Shayne to the place itself.

All very hush-hush, top secret classified. At the time it had amused Mike Shayne. He had developed a cynical disbelief in the effectiveness of this sort of elaborate precaution.

The insurance man—his name was Evan Hargrove and he was a millionaire many times over—took the whole thing seriously indeed.

“You don’t realize what you’re up against, Mr. Shayne,” he said over a glass of top-brand French brandy.

“I’ve managed to handle every assignment you’ve given me so far,” Mike Shayne said. He didn’t say “sir” though most other men would have.

“I know,” Hargrove had said. “This one makes the rest of them look simple though. You haven’t any idea.”

“If it’s that bad you better call the police,” Shayne said. “After all I’m just one man.”

“We aren’t fools,” Hargrove said. He said it as if he resented Shayne’s attitude. “We already have the police on this. New York and Miami police. Local police in a dozen other cities. Two of the top national agencies. Even the F.B.I. They have not been able to do the job. Not any of them. Oh, they’ve brought us some information, spotted some of the small-fry concerned, even got us a fair idea of how the thefts are being handled.”

“But not the name of the head man behind it all,” Shayne said quietly.

This time Evan Hargrove looked at the Miami detective with a very real respect. “Exactly. That’s the one thing we have to know—and the one thing they can’t get even close to. You see all of them, even the national outfits, have one fatal weakness when it comes to handling this case. They’re big. They have to be of course. You need a lot of people to police even a medium sized city. Their size makes them effective.

“By the same token the crowd we’re after is big too. This is no penny-ante racket. The take runs into hundreds of millions annually as far as our company alone is concerned. With all its ramifications it may even involve billions on an international scale. We don’t begin to have an idea.”

“Anybody that fat can buy information,” Shayne said.

“That’s it,” Hargrove agreed. “We know they have people inside every major police force in the country in their pay, perhaps even in my own office. That’s why we’re meeting here. Somehow they know every move we make.

“On the other hand, who can they buy in your organization, Mr. Shayne? Nobody. You haven’t any organization. You can operate secretly for just that reason.”

“That’s all very well,” Shayne said. “I can also be eliminated easy enough once they spot me. They don’t have to read my mail. An outfit that size will just have me killed, and you and I both know it.”

“You’ve pretty well proved your ability to take care of yourself in the past,” Hargrove said. “As you just reminded me a couple of minutes back. Besides, you aren’t going to be on the case that long. I have an idea that might work to locate the brain back of this deal. That’s what I want you to follow through on, that and nothing else.”

“First you better tell me what it’s all about,” Shayne said.

“It’s theft from the mails at airports,” Hargrove said. “Very special thefts. Nothing is taken but sacks of registered mail, and then only those full of negotiable securities or something else equally valuable. Sometimes they get a hundred thousand dollars or more in one sack. They know which ones to take too.”

“Bust the mail handlers,” Shayne said. “But I guess you already thought of that,”

“Of course we did. The men who handle the sacks at the airports have to hand them to somebody. We know which ones do it and who they give the sacks to. If we arrest them, they just get replaced. This gang buys postal employees and airline people like peanuts and popcorn. It’s the guy who really gets the loot we’re after. So far we haven’t got him.”

“With all those cops on the job—” Shayne started, but he was interrupted.

“Somebody was bound to get a lead,” Hargrove said. “Sure. We think five did. One is in Brazil living high on the hog. He won’t come home and he won’t talk. Three have vanished. Gone. No trace at all. The fifth was an F.B.I. man. We found his body floating in the Hudson a week ago. His friends are real eager to know how he got there.”

“If you find me floating,” Mike Shayne said, “send me south for burial. Seriously now, what makes you think I can do any better? I’m no match for the F.B.I. or even the New York cops.”

“I said I had a plan,” Hargrove said. “We’re going to send through one item they are going to have to hit. A piece of jewelry—the Esperance Diamond.”

“That’s interesting,” Shayne said.

“That’s right, Shayne. The million-dollar diamond. Whoever he is, his contacts will tell him about it. He’ll hit that shipment for sure. He can’t possibly resist the idea.

“We’ll take all the normal precautions so nothing will look odd, but we count on the gang to snatch that particular mail sack at Miami International Airport. We never stopped them before when they wanted something, and we won’t now.

“That’s where you come in. You follow that stone. When it’s taken you stay with it. We don’t care how you do it, Shayne. In effect you’ll have a license to kill if that’s what you feel you have to do. The only thing that counts this time will be results. Can you do it?”

“You’ve tried following one shipment before?”

“Yes. They shook our people every time. That’s why we call you in. This time it has to work.”

“There’s only one Esperance Diamond,” Shayne said. He got up and walked over to the big teevy and turned it on. He got the volume up until the room boiled with sound.

Then he went over to Evan Hargrove and spoke close to his ear.

“If your place is bugged,” Shayne said, “that noise will scramble what I want to say. There’s just one thing that might work. Now listen closely. I’ll only say this once.”

III

THE DOORBELL rang in Nick Smith’s kitchen. The buzzer itself was only a few feet above Mike Shayne’s head on the wall and the sudden ring brought him out of his chair and reaching for the gun in its belt holster, all thoughts of the interview with Hargrove temporarily driven out of his mind.

The big man moved swiftly into the living room area. The two bodies were still sprawled on the rug. The windows were closed as the house was air-conditioned and Venetian blinds were partly closed to keen out the afternoon sun. Shayne doubted if anyone looking in the windows could spot the dead men easily.

He doubted even more that anyone who had done so would ring the doorbell calmly.

It rang again.

Shayne kept his hand on his gun and stood close to the door.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

There was no answer from outside the house. Shayne tried again. “Who is it?” Still no answer. The big man waited a long minute. In the closed room it would have been difficult to hear footsteps outside, but he tried without result.

Whoever had been ringing the bell must have gone away when there was no answer. Shayne finally opened the door a couple of inches. There was no one on the step. His own car was at the curb. Down the street a neighbor was shattering the afternoon calm with the peculiarly horrible clamor of a power lawn mower. Otherwise not even a dog was stirring.

The detective decided it must have been a paper boy making his collections or a peddler of some sort. He closed the door again and started back to where he had left his drink on the table.

As he stepped through the door into the kitchen instinct flashed a warning—just a split second too late.

Shayne felt the cool steel muzzle of the gun touch skin just under and behind his right ear.

He heard the voice say; “That’s it, buster. You be a real lover now and make like a wooden Indian. Don’t even move a splinter, see?”

It was a female voice, young and hard and very sure of itself. It wasn’t the sort of voice likely to belong to a woman who would panic or who could be caught off guard. The gun was steady as a rock. A shot fired into that part of the head couldn’t help being fatal.

Mike Shayne stood perfectly still.

He felt a hand flip open the front of his jacket and then the heavy weight of his own forty-five Colt’s lifted as the big gun was eased out of the holster.

The woman’s voice spoke again. “All right, lover. That should make sure the odds stay on my side, just in case you feel like getting tough. I can belly shoot you with that cannon of yours as easy as a man could. Now go on over to the table and sit down and finish your drink.”

“You don’t figure to kill me now?” Shayne asked.

“Don’t be silly, lover. If I had, you’d never have known what hit you. Now go do as you’re told and let me ask the questions.”

Mike Shayne did as he’d been told. He went back to the table and sat down. He was hoping she’d sit across the table from him where he could tip it into her lap if he decided to make a fight of it. She was too smart for that. Instead she pulled the other chair away from the table over against the wall next to the sink where she was out of the line of doors and windows. She sat down facing the back of the chair with her wrists braced on the back, holding the detective’s big gun. The little twenty-five automatic she’d stopped him with was back in the big leather shoulder bag she wore.

Shayne got his first look at her then. She wore a black pants suit, plain and expensive, penny loafers that wouldn’t hamper her movement, and the black leather shoulder bag on a long strap. Her hair was black and lustrous and a little more than shoulder length. Instead of a hat she wore a sort of bright red turban wound about her head. It was the one real touch of color she wore.

Her face was a long triangle, with high firm cheekbones and a small slash of red-lipped mouth. The chin was pointed and strong and there was the thin white line of a knife scar under the makeup across her left cheek. She was slender, but well curved in the right places.

Shayne couldn’t begin to tell her age. It might have been anywhere from a battle-hardened twenty-five to a well-preserved and sensual sixty. That part wasn’t important anyway.

What was important was that she had all the controlled ferocity and the skilled, quick-witted alertness of the killer on the living room floor—or of Shayne himself. This one was a professional.

“Have a good look, lover.” she said scornfully.

“You’re worth looking at,” he said with some genuine admiration.

“Flattery gets you nothing today,” she told him. Then, suddenly and with heat: “Why did you kill Charlie, lover? Why?”

“I suppose that’s Charlie in there on the rug?” Shayne said. “He played rough. He killed my friend. He was going to kill me. What did you want me to do, challenge him to a game of Indian hand wrestling? I didn’t have time. Now suppose you tell me what Charlie was doing here at all?”

“I said I’d ask all the questions,” she said. “You want me to think you were just an innocent bystander defending himself. Well, what were you doing with the rod I just took off you? I suppose that’s what got Charlie?”

Shayne sat there and looked at her, locking his gaze on her two brown eyes. Those eyes looked soft, but they didn’t flick away.

“You aren’t the first to try to stare me down,” she said. “It’ll be a stand-off. Why not just tell me who you really are?”

They both sat silent. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer, she shrugged.

“I can shoot you and then go through your wallet. I will too if you make me. Why not do it the easy way? You’re too fine a hunk of man to waste on mullet bait.”

Shayne decided she meant what she said.

“I use the gun in my business,” he said. “I’m a private detective. My name’s Mike Shayne. If you’ve been around Miami long, you’ve heard of me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve heard of you. So what’s a big shamus like you doing here? Let’s get back to the basics, lover. Why did you kill Charlie?”

“I told you the truth,” Shayne said. “I just happened to get caught in the middle. Smitty, the guy who Charlie killed, was a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years until I ran into him downtown today. He asked me to come back here for a drink with him.”

“Go on, lover. Go on.”

“That’s it. All of it. I didn’t know Charlie from a Boston bus driver. When we came in here Charlie killed Smitty. Then he tried to kill me. Like I said, it wasn’t any time to play patty-cake. What would you have done in my place? What’s this Charlie hombre to you anyhow?” Shayne asked.

She kept watching him. ‘That’s a nice story,” she said ,“but it doesn’t wash so good, lover. No innocent bystander goes ahead and kills people and then sits down for a drink. That’s what you did. If you’d called the cops, they’d be here by now, so you didn’t do that. You sat down for a drink.”

“I was shaken up,” Shayne said. It didn’t sound very convincing even to him.

Obviously, the woman didn’t buy it at all.

“You was shook up in a pig’s ear,” she said. “I’ve heard about how easy Mike Shayne gets shook up. I think you know what Charlie was doing here. I think this Smitty was working for you.”

“I said I hadn’t seen Smitty in years.”

“And the wolf told Little Red he was her grandmother. You got teeth like a wolf, Mike. I think I better take you and turn you over to somebody else higher up on this ladder than me.”

“Maybe he’ll have sense enough to know the truth when he hears it,” Shayne said.

“Don’t you worry about that, lover,” she said. “You worry about this, though. Mr. Jay catches you telling one lie, just one little lie, and you’ll have breakfast in hell with Charlie and Smitty in the morning. You will for sure.”

IV

THEY RODE AWAY from Smitty’s place in Mike Shayne’s own car, with the big private detective himself at the wheel. The woman had his forty-five automatic inside the shoulder bag with the muzzle rammed hard against his right side under the ribs and her finger on the trigger. At that point-blank range the hand-loaded three hundred grain hollow point slug would have torn him in half, and Shayne knew it.

He also knew she was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger at the slightest suspicious move on his part. He drove as carefully as a teenager taking his first driver’s license test.

“That’s good, buster,” she said. “Turn where I tell you and don’t attract attention from anybody.”

The fact that he was driving and so would know exactly where they were going sent a cold chill up Shayne’s backbone. It meant that she didn’t care if he knew where he was going. That in turn meant she didn’t expect him to leave again alive.

The route took them over one of the causeways to Miami Beach and then to an area of expensive homes fronting on Biscayne Bay from one of the small islands abutting the main Beach strip.

The house they were headed for was set in grounds of at least a couple of acres, surrounded by a high rock wall and with big wrought iron gates. There was a guard who looked like a common hoodlum at the gates to let them in. The drive curved through heavy ornamental shrubbery to an old house sitting facing Biscayne Bay.

The woman made Shayne park in front and then took him around the side and in by a kitchen door. The kitchen was big and furnished expensively in old style ranges and appliances, all first quality but twenty years out of date.

Mike Shayne got the impression that the place hadn’t been occupied for some time. There had probably been a caretaker, but the place had a musty, unlived-in smell to it.

There was another man in the kitchen sitting in his shirt sleeves playing solitaire with an old pack of cards. The shirt was very “mod” with wide stripes of purple, buff, and shocking pink. The face over the unbuttoned collar was narrow boned, blue-jawed and feral, the face of a big-town hood.

The woman with Shayne conferred briefly with this man and then they unlocked a door in the kitchen wall and motioned the big man to go through.

“Leave this door alone, Shayne,” the woman said. “There’ll be a gun on our side of it all the time. Just sit loose. We’ll come for you when you’re wanted.”

“You tell him, Nita,” the hood in the awning striped shirt said and laughed.

Then the door closed and Mike Shayne heard the heavy padlock being put through the hasp and snapped locked.

Right at first he could see nothing at all. He was in the heavy, oppressive blackness of a completely enclosed and windowless space. The air was old and musty and thick with the smells of cobweb and layered dust and something else he couldn’t quite place at first.

Some small animal, mouse or lizard, scittered its claws on the stone flooring off to his left somewhere.

Outside of the woman taking Shayne’s gun nobody had bothered to frisk Mike Shayne. The normal contents of his pockets were undisturbed.

They included a tried and razor honed Case XX two-bladed pocket knife that was both tool and a weapon of sorts. Shayne took the knife out of his pocket now and slipped it inside the top of the elastic stretch sock on his right foot. They might miss it there when they finally got around to searching him.

After that he took out his pocket cigarette lighter and flicked the flame into life. An ancient unshielded light bulb with a chain pull was almost directly overhead. The bulb was a small one but the yellowed light let Mike Shayne see where he was. The room was small, stone-floored and lined with shelves. There were other shelves jutting out from the walls. Most of them were empty but a few were not.

Shayne looked again and then broke out in a broad grin. They’d locked him into the old mansion’s wine cellar. Some of the shelves still held old, dust coated bottles, vintages which time had made legendary. What a place to put a prisoner! At least he wouldn’t die of thirst in there.

In other respects, though, the room really was a logical place for a prisoner. It was windowless and the only door opened into the kitchen where the guard was sitting.

At first Shayne was worried about ventilation. Then he realized that air was moving in the room. A sheet metal square pipe came in one wall at the corner and turned sharply upward to disappear through the ceiling. It puzzled the detective until he realized that it must be a vent to carry hot air to the upper floors from a furnace somewhere on the bottom floor. He examined it carefully until he was sure he could break it apart at the joints where the separate pieces were soldered together. For the moment he left it as it was.

He found a bottle of his favorite brandy and worried the cork out with his teeth. A long drink warmed his stomach.

After that he pulled out the light and sat down in the dark. He was directly opposite the door and against one of the shelves which still held some filled bottles. He left them alone though. He didn’t even take a second drink from the brandy bottle.

Shayne was thinking hard. The Esperance Diamond, one of the world’s most famous stones, was due in the Miami International Airport late that night in one of the registered mail sacks coming in from New York. It had been shipped by mail instead of traveling under guard in an armored truck ostensibly so that it would pass unnoticed by potential thieves.

Mr. Hargrove of the insurance combine had been sure, as had Mike Shayne, that the gang they were after would learn of the shipment. Shayne had planted Smitty on the mail handling gang at the airport precisely so that he would get the tip if the gang planned a hit tonight. Smitty, before he died, had confirmed the fact that they did.

Mike Shayne had been prepared, with the aid of some very special equipment, indeed, to stay on the tail of the fabulously valuable jewel until it reached the head man behind the whole operation.

That is, he had been prepared until the woman, Nita, had put the gun to his head and brought him to this wine cellar. He sat in the dark and cursed himself for a fool. She’d rung the doorbell to attract his attention, then slipped quietly around and let herself in the back door to the kitchen. He’d then walked into the trap like any tyro. He should never have assumed that the killer called Charlie had operated alone.

Well, there was no sense crying over spilled milk now. What was done was done.

The big man pulled a bottle out of the rack behind him and hurled it into the far corner of the wine cellar where it smashed with a crash on the stone floor. Then he began to groan as loud as he could.

After a moment he heard the guard from the kitchen at the door. “What’s going on in there?” His voice was muffled by the heavy door.

Mike Shayne shook one of the rows of shelves till the bottles clattered and clanked. He groaned some more.

He heard the snap of the padlock, and then the door into the kitchen swung open. Shayne threw his third bottle. It was a quart of wine in a heavy glass bottle and he hurled it as hard as he could right at the head of the man in the doorway.

The bottle took the guard squarely on the forehead and staggered him back, half stunned, into the kitchen.

Mike Shayne followed the bottle in a lunging rush. His big right hand smashed the guard’s chin and completed the knockout.

He got all the way into the kitchen itself before he even saw the three other men. They were big and tough and much like the one he’d knocked down and they closed in on the big detective with the controlled ferocity of professional fighting men.

One of them got hold of each arm and the third cocked back his fist and slammed Shayne in the face hard enough to rattle his teeth and jar him dizzy.

Shayne reacted by sheer instinct and brought up his knee at the attacker’s groin. The blow only half landed but the man fell back a pace and Shayne brought up a big foot and kicked the fellow in the stomach hard enough to knock him clear across the big kitchen. He hit the table, fell across the top and went down with a crash when one of the table legs splintered.

At the same moment Shayne brought his kicking foot back and out to the right as hard as he could. The heel of his heavy shoe took the man at his right across the ankle. The fellow yelled and let go of Shayne’s arm. He hopped unsteadily on one foot, yelling in pain.

The big redhead flexed his suddenly freed right arm and launched a vicious judo chop with the calloused edge of the powerful hand at the hopping man’s neck. The blow landed solidly and the hood suddenly lost all interest in his bruised ankle. His jaw dropped open, his hands flew out convulsively, and then he went down flat on his face.

That was when the roof fell in on Mike Shayne.

The fourth man let go of the detective’s arm, snatched an old twelve inch iron skillet off the stove and brought it down full force on the top of the detective’s head.

Smashing, blinding pain. Then merciful darkness and peace.

When Mike Shayne began to regain consciousness it was minutes later. His arms were tied behind his back with clothesline which was then tied a dozen times around trunk and arms. His ankles were hobbled with another short length of the clothesline so that when they pulled him to his feet he could stand and take short steps only. His head was an inferno of pain.

Two of the men hauled him to his feet. Then a third hauled off and landed a smashing haymaker that knocked him down again.

Then they repeated the process.

The third time they tried to hoist him up, Shayne made his knees stay limp. He was down on the floor again before he could be hit this time.

One of the men kicked him in the ribs instead.

Given time, they very well might have beaten the big man to death. Fortunately they weren’t given the time.

The woman Nita came back into the kitchen.

“What the hell is going on here?” she asked.

They told her.

“Well, stop your fun,” Nita Nolan said. Her tone was as impersonal as if she’d found them stamping a rat or a snake to death instead of a man.

“Wipe some of the blood off him and take him into the library. Mr. Jay wants a talk with this hero—and he wants it right now.”

They threw a pitcher of water into the big redhead’s face in lieu of washing him off and then hoisted him up to his feet again. He let himself hang limp until he decided they were going to let him walk instead of knocking him down again. Then he planted his feet, but when they let go his arms he almost fell down again anyway.

Even as strong a man as Mike Shayne could take only just so much beating.

“I need a drink,” he said.

“Damned if I don’t think you do, lover,” Nita said. “You’re going to need your strength to talk to Mr. Jay. Give him a swig, Rocky.”

One of the hoods got a bottle from the wine cellar and broke the neck on the iron stove. It was wine. Shayne took a good three swallows from the jagged neck, trying not to cut his mouth on the sharp glass. That amused the hoods. They had a good laugh about it.

After that two of them took his arms and made him follow Nita out of the kitchen.

They went through what had been a butler’s pantry though the shelves and cupboards were now bare and then across a dining room with a table that could seat twenty guests at need. That and the big entrance hall beyond were only about half furnished. Mike Shayne decided he was right in thinking the house had not been lived in for a long time.

The library across the hall had empty shelves and a big rug on the floor. Somebody was sitting in a chair by the windows. Afternoon had become evening. It was dusk outside and the room was full of shadows.

“Here he is, Mr. Jay,” Nita Nolan said.

V

THE MAN IN the chair shifted his position so that he could look directly at the big detective. Even at the distance of ten feet, and in that heavily shadowed room, Mike Shayne could feel the impact of those eyes. It reminded him of a big serpent, a boa or a cobra, looking at a potential living meal brought for his contemplation. The eyes were hooded, jet, serpentine, alive with evil.

Mr. Jay wasn’t a big man physically. Even in shoes with heavy heels he wouldn’t have stood more than five foot six or six and a half inches. He was small-boned and his flesh looked soft from too much easy living, rich food and complaisant women. In a fight he couldn’t have stood up to Nita Nolan for thirty seconds, let alone any one of them in the room.

In spite of that all of them seemed to cower before him.

All of the power of the man was in the eyes.

When they fastened their gaze on Shayne’s face it was almost as if a physical force had been applied. The big man put his shoulders back and returned that look without dropping his own eyes.

If that feat surprised Jay he managed not to show it.

“Has he been searched?” The voice was as vibrant with evil as the eyes.

“Nita took his gun,” the man Rocky said. “We didn’t have time for more.”

“By the looks of you all you had time to get your ears beat back,” Jay said. “Search him now.”

Two of the men frisked Shayne thoroughly and professionally. They got his wallet and all the contents of his pockets. One of them found the clasp knife he had hidden in his sock. They offered the things they had found to Jay who looked at them indifferently.

“Put that junk back in his pockets,” he said indifferently. “All but the knife, that is. Nita, you know what I want. Get it for me.”

The woman swiftly unfastened Shayne’s belt and removed the big silver and copper Western style buckle that he wore. Shayne was glad the suit was a bit tight. This would be no time to lose his pants. Fortunately they rode his big hip bones without slipping.

Nita took the big silver buckle to Jay. She didn’t toss it to him or drop it in his lap. She held her own hand palm up under the Western buckle and offered it to him as if it were some rare and delicate object for his approval.

Jay took it up very carefully in two fingers.

It was obvious to Shayne that both of them knew exactly what they were about. His heart sank. There had been betrayal of his plan and Mr. Hargrove’s. There wasn’t the slightest doubt of that now.

“We all know Mr. Mike Shayne here,” Jay said in his deadly silken tones. “We have a dossier on him as we do on all our enemies. He’s a conservative dresser, normally, that is. I wonder what he’s doing with anything as flashy as this crude artifact.”

Under other circumstances Shayne might have been amused. As powerful as he was, this Jay liked to show off. He was expressing his intellectual contempt for the hoods who served him. It was vanity, and vanity is a weakness. Shayne filed the fact in his memory bank. It was an unconscious process. He was waiting for what else Jay might say.

Jay turned the buckle over in his hand. He went on talking, his tone suggesting that he might be instructing a class of rather backward children.

“Notice this peculiar looking object soldered to the underside of the buckle. It’s a bug. A very special sort of bug to be sure. It receives electrical impulses broadcast by another very special bug, and translates them into beeping sounds, or possibly buzzes and vibrations. Anyone—Mr. Shayne for instance—who is wearing this buckle will know instantly when he is close to the other bug that is doing the broadcasting. He can pick it up a long way off, several hundred yards anyway, and follow it. The beeps get louder as he gets closer. He could follow the other bug.”

Jay paused and looked at them all.

“By this means he could follow, let us say, a regular United States mailbag that contained the proper broadcasting device. That’s right, isn’t it, Mr. Shayne?”

Mike Shayne said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Jay.”

He knew though. He knew that his highly secret plan to keep track of the Esperance Diamond had somehow been made known to this man. With the aid of the sending and receiving bugs he had planned to follow the whole theft. The broadcasting bug had been carefully built into the elaborate setting of which the diamond pendant was a part. Its broadcasting range was up to one-half mile, with the signal growing stronger as the two bugs became closer together.

Shayne intended to let the actual theft of the mail bag take place on schedule and then follow the signals wherever they led. He might even have to take a plane back to New York or to some other city, if the stolen jewel was being carried by courier. There was a packed bag in the trunk of his car parked outside this very building with money, clothing, even a passport in case the trail led outside the country.

Only when he was sure that the Esperance Diamond had reached its final destination would the big detective have tried to close in. All these thoughts went racing through his mind.

Mr. Jay looked at him and laughed a very unpleasant laugh.

“I can see that you know perfectly well what I’m talking about, Mr. Shayne,” he said. “It was a clever plan. Against any other organization than ours it might have had a good chance of success.”

He tossed the big silver buckle from hand to hand. Even in the dim light coming in from the electric fixture in the hallway, the silver managed to sparkle and shine.

“Tantalizing, isn’t it?” Jay asked the big man. “Victory so near and yet so far. Ah well, this world is full of might-have-beens.”

Mike Shayne still said nothing. Jay wanted him to squirm, but Shayne wasn’t about to do that.

Jay kept watching him with a malicious expression, but the big man kept his bruised face from showing any emotion whatsoever. For long moments their glances locked in a quiet struggle of will against will.

Jay was the first to give ground.

“You are a strong man, Mr. Shayne,” he said then. “Strong and clever. The whole scheme was your own plan, I suppose?”

Shayne kept silence.

“A pity,” Mr. Jay remarked. “A real pity to waste a man as strong as yourself. You’re worth five of these men of mine. Such a pity.”

He paused again. Shayne knew exactly what the man meant. Now that he had been captured and the belt buckle taken from him, there was no reason for them to let him live any longer. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of pleading for his life or showing any sign of fear.

Jay couldn’t resist spelling it out to the end.

“It was easy to spot your Mr. Smith,” he said. “We sent Charlie over to eliminate him from the picture before the mail comes in tonight. Fortunately I realized that Charlie wasn’t too smart. I had Nita Nolan go along to keep an eye on him. Nita has brains and uses them.

“When Charlie didn’t come out of the house, Nita looked through the windows. Then she arranged to capture you and bring you here to me. Nita knew who you were and what you were up to, of course.”

He paused again. Then got to his point. “Will you join us now, Shayne? Switch sides. We’ll pay you well, you know. This is the only time I’ll ask.”

Shayne looked at the little man and shook his head: “No.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Mr. Jay said. “I won’t make the offer again. Take Mr. Shayne away and kill him, Rocky.”

VI

THEY TOOK Mike Shayne out by the kitchen door and then turned right toward the Bay. With his arms and hands firmly bound behind him and his feet hobbled by an eighteen-inch length of cord there wasn’t much the big man could do to resist.

He went along with them. The men snickered at the short mincing steps he had to take to keep from falling flat on his face. Nita Nolan kept a hand on his left elbow, guiding him as he walked and once or twice giving him enough support to keep his balance in a tight spot.

She noticed the grateful look he gave her.

“I’m not writing you off yet, lover,” she said so softly that the others couldn’t hear. “Maybe you’ll do the same for me some time.”

In that context the remark was completely out of place. It set him to thinking, both then and later on. At the moment he only managed a grin and a wink in return.

There was a sea wall fronting the estate where it touched Biscayne Bay, and this was cut into by a docking slip which had a boathouse at the landward end.

They led Shayne into the boathouse and made him get into a sixteen foot lapstrake skiff tied up there. When he tried to balance so that he’d keep his feet one of the men hit him in the face. Shayne fell full length into the bottom of the skiff up toward the bow. The center seat had been taken out so he was lying in dirty seepage water along the keel.

He expected the men to shoot him or club him to death as he lay there.

Under the circumstances it would have been a smart thing to do, but they didn’t do it.

Rocky got into the stern of the skiff and hitched up a portable tank of gasoline to the outboard motor. He had trouble starting the motor, and the others laughed at him, but he finally got it going. He cast off the line and steered out of the boat slip into the open water.

“Put him down deep,” one of them called out. “Let the crabs eat on him tonight.”

Shayne didn’t struggle. It was already dark on the water and no one from shore would see or care if they did. People were always acting crazy in boats.

Rocky steered straight out toward the channel where the Intracoastal Waterway buoys marked a deep cut in the Bay bottom.

When he was in the deep water Rocky cut the outboard’s motor back to idling speed. He got a couple of heavy concrete blocks that he’d put in the boat at the dock and tied them together with a length of rope. Then he stood up and took a step forward toward where Shayne lay.

It was obvious he was going to tie the other end of the rope to the big man’s feet to sink the body after it was put into the water. He’d probably shoot the detective first and then throw the body out of the skiff.

Mike Shayne wasn’t the man to wait to be killed like a boar on hog-killing day.

As Rocky stood up to step forward Shayne twisted suddenly over on his back. He bent his knees and then arched his whole body and launched a terrific kick with both feet as Rocky bent forward to reach for him.

If that kick had landed squarely it would have broken the hood’s neck.

He saw it coming though, twisted his own body and tried to pull back. He wasn’t quite fast enough.

Shayne’s feet hit Rocky squarely on the upper chest with a heavy thud and lifted him backward and right over the gunwale of the skiff. He hit the water with a splash like a leaping tarpon going back into the water.

Shayne scrambled wildly in the bottom of the boat. In a moment he managed to get upright and hunched himself to the stern, where he could get his hands on the controls to the outboard motor.

He got the power control lever shoved over to full speed, and after that it was easy. Even with his hands tied behind his back it was simple to grasp and guide the tiller.

Shayne steered right across the bay for the lights on the Miami side. A long way behind him he thought he could hear Rocky floundering in the water, but he had no intention of going back to investigate.

It was fifteen minutes before Mike Shayne managed to guide the outboard skiff to the landing dock of a boat rental place on the Miami side of the Bay.

The night watchman in the boat slip had seen the big private detective’s picture in the Miami News and luckily remembered that fact. He cut the big man loose and let him use the phone in the establishment’s office.

The first call Shayne made was to the office of his long-time personal friend, Miami Chief of Police Will Gentry. The chief was in his private office smoking a long black cigar when the call came in.

“Thank God it’s you, Mike,” were his first words. “I was beginning to think you’d run into something you couldn’t handle.”

The Miami police were in on the case of the registered mail robberies, as were the authorities of a dozen other jurisdictions. On this occasion they’d agreed to keep hands off unless called in by the redhead himself.

Mr. Hargrove and the insurance syndicate he represented had political weight on a nationwide scale. They had convinced the police that the arrest of small time hoods would accomplish nothing compared to a chance to find and identify the kingpin of this deadly racket.

Chief Gentry accepted the reasoning. However, he and his men were standing by to assist in any way possible.

“I almost did.” Shayne said. “They’re on to this caper, Will. They got Smitty.”

“That’s rough,” Gentry said. “Any idea who hit him?”

“You send a car to Smitty’s place,” Shayne said, “and you’ll find the contract man right beside him on the living room floor. His name was Charlie, and he worked for a Mr. Jay on the Beach.”

Shayne described Jay and gave the street number he’d seen on the iron gates of the old Beach estate.

“Jay’s no local,” Gentry said. “You’d know him or I would. You want me to tip Petey Painter to raid that house?”

“It would be a waste of time,” Shayne said. “Jay doesn’t live there. He and his boys borrowed it for a while. They were going to snatch me at the airport and take me over there. I saved them the trouble by turning up at Smitty’s. By the time Petey’s boys get there the joint will be empty.”

“What do you want us to do? Put an army around that rock when the plane lands?”

“Not a bit of it. Leave me alone, like the original plan called for.”

“I don’t know if we can do that, Mike,” Gentry said with a serious note in his gruff voice. “That was before we thought they knew you were in on this thing. If they know that, how much else do they know? We can’t risk letting them get clean away with that big diamond. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort. Will, we’ve got to let them think they’re one up on us and go ahead and make their play. Otherwise we keep the Esperance Diamond. Sure, but Mr. Big is still as safe as ever. He goes right on raiding the mails just like before.”

“Let Uncle Whiskers worry about that,” Gentry said. “My neck will go under the chopper if that sparkler is lifted in my front yard. I have to have that stone tonight.”

“Call Evan Hargrove in New York,” Shayne said. “He’ll tell you the same thing I do, and his people are big enough to make it stick. Nothing is going to do any good in this case except to come up with the name of the top man. If we don’t manage that, then they just go right on operating like numbers or dope or prostitution. No matter how many small fry get picked up, they can always be replaced.”

“You don’t think this Mr. Jay is the top man?” Gentry asked.

“No,” Shayne said, “I don’t. That would be too easy. They wouldn’t take me to him if he was really important. As a matter of fact, Will, they wouldn’t let me get within a mile of him. No, this Jay character is a fall guy or a front man of some sort. Anyway, you call Hargrove in New York and get me a green light to go ahead with this in my own way.”

“I won’t have to call New York,” Gentry said.

“Just what does that mean?”

“Your man Hargrove is in town. He’s got a suite at the New Imperial so he can be right here for this operation. I can call him there in a minute. Where can I ring you back when I hear what he has to say?”

“You can’t,” Shayne said with sudden decision. “I know what he’s going to say. Just stay out of my way and let me do the job I was hired for.”

“Now look, Mike. I don’t know about this. I’m not sure you ought to be running loose the way you go wild on a case. There’s two men dead already, and maybe another floating in the Bay.”

“Hargrove said I had a license to kill,” Shayne told his friend, “so don’t worry about it. And don’t try to contact me. I’ll call you.”

He hung up the phone.

The next call Mike Shayne made was to his confidential secretary, Lucy Hamilton.

“I’m okay,” he told Lucy. “Had some trouble but perfectly okay now.”

Shayne told Lucy to take an emergency bag containing money, a gun, some clean clothes which he kept at the office, and bring them to him at the boat rental place. From there she could drive him to a nearby car rental so that he could get transportation. His own car was still parked where he’d left it in the driveway of the big Miami Beach mansion. At least it was if Jay and his people hadn’t decided to dispose of it.

In any case Shayne hadn’t the least intention of going back to find out. Unless Rocky had managed to swim ashore and call the big house, Jay probably thought the detective was dead and at the bottom of the Bay. That would have suited Mike Shayne perfectly. He didn’t want to call attention to himself at the moment.

On the other hand he wasn’t at all sure that Rocky was dead, or indeed that Rocky and the rest of them hadn’t been doing some very elaborate play-acting there at the end.

If Mike Shayne had been in Mr. Jay’s place, with a prisoner who was known to be very dangerous indeed to dispose of, he would have done it very differently. The logical thing would have been to kill Shayne right there in the mansion with a bullet, a knife or a club. Then, but only then, put the body in the skiff to be sunk in the Bay at leisure. They had him. He could have been killed. Nobody need worry about a corpse kicking Rocky overboard and escaping.

On the other hand, if they hadn’t wanted Shayne dead they could have just left him tied up in the wine cellar—or for that matter driven him some place and turned him loose.

Why go through an elaborate charade in order to let him make his escape?

On the surface none of it really made sense.

Mike Shayne was smart enough, though, to know that a man like Mr. Jay was no fool, no matter what he might let himself appear to be. Whatever he had done was for a purpose.

Shayne had a strong idea his own life might depend upon his ability to figure out what that purpose was.

All these thoughts ran through Mike Shayne’s head while he waited for Lucy Hamilton. It wasn’t long that he had to wait. Lucy was an experienced and capable woman. When she was assisting her boss on a case, she didn’t waste any time.

Shayne put on a clean shirt when she arrived, put money in his wallet—his own had vanished when Jay’s hoods had frisked him—and put a gun back in his holster. He found a fresh belt and used it to replace the one from which the bugged buckle had been taken.

“I feel like a whole man now,” he told Lucy Hamilton.

She laughed at him. “I never realized a belt made so much difference to a man.”

He laughed too. “You know it was the gun I was talking about, Angel.”

“Of course, Michael. I mean, if you say so, yes. What are you going to do now?”

“We’re going to eat,” Shayne said. “Drive me over to Galagher’s on the Boulevard and we’ll each put away a big thick steak. After that take me to a car rental and I’ll hire my own wheels.”

“That sounds good,” she said. “After that where do we go?’

“After that you go on home to your place and double lock the doors and get a good night’s sleep.”

“I want to help, Michael.”

“The best way you can help right now is stay out of trouble so I don’t have to worry about you. We are up against some real tough cookies on this one, Angel. Tough enough so I want you out of the line of fire.”

She knew better than to argue with her boss about that. “Oh, Mr. Hargrove called you at the office about half an hour ago. He’s on Miami Beach and wants you to call. He wants me to let him know if I hear from you. What should I do?”

“From now on for the rest of tonight you never heard of me,” Mike Shayne told Lucy Hamilton. “Don’t tell Will Gentry anything. I mean that. Not a thing. Above all, don’t tell Hargrove you even heard from me. You don’t know where I am.”

VII

LUCY HAMILTON waited until she and Mike Shayne had been served huge blood-red steaks with all the trimmings at the famous Biscayne Boulevard restaurant before making any further comment. Then she took up right where the conversation had broken off before.

“Do you want to tell me the reason for so much secrecy, Michael?” she asked then. “I know you trust Will Gentry, and the police are on your side tonight. I thought you trusted Mr. Hargrove too.”

“I do and I don’t,” Shayne said. “I thought only Hargrove and I knew about that trick belt buckle and the bug in the setting of the diamond. Only I was wrong. This Mr. Jay character knew about it. He didn’t just find it when I was searched, Angel. I’m positive he knew in advance what he was looking for.”

“And you think Hargrove told him?”

“I don’t know what I do think. Somebody told him, and who else knew about it? I didn’t talk and you didn’t.”

“Somebody had to install the bug in the setting of that diamond,” Lucy reminded him. “I don’t suppose Hargrove could do that himself.”

Shayne took a big bite of steak and followed it with a piece of garlic bread dipped in the steaming red juice on his plate.

“No, I don’t suppose he’s a jeweler, but I am sure he should have been plenty careful who did the job. The F.B.I. must have people who can do that sort of work. Anyway, I’m going to try and find out once and for all tonight.”

“Do you really think they’ll go ahead with the robbery after they know you escaped?”

“I don’t know whether they know I escaped, Angel,” he said. “Maybe Rocky did drown. Maybe they knew all along I was going to escape and planned it that way. So far all the way they’ve managed to stay one long step ahead of me.”

“They might kill you next time.”

“I might get struck by lightning,” Shayne said. “At least I think from here on in I’m going out in front. I’ve got at least one trick up my sleeve I don’t think they know about.”

“What’s that?”

“You know better than to ask. You go on home and get a good sleep.”

“Fat chance of that.”

“I said go on and get a good sleep. It’s nine o’clock now. The plane with that stone on board isn’t due to land until one-thirty in the morning. I’m positive they’ll heist the registered mail bag exactly as they planned. I’m going to try and pick up the trail then, exactly as planned too. From there on I’ll play the cards as they fall. If you don’t hear from me by noon tomorrow, call Will and tell him to get everybody out looking for me. By then I’ll know or they’ll have me.”

When Mike Shayne had picked up his rented car, Lucy Hamilton drove on back to her own apartment.

The big detective drove out to the Miami International Airport. After showing credentials, he was ushered into the private office of the chief of airport security. Will Gentry was there, and Sheriff Burdick of Metropolitan Dade County and a couple of quiet, dark suited men introduced only as Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones.

Mike Shayne assumed that these two represented the federal government agencies involved.

“I take it that our original plan to follow the diamond is off now,” the airport man said.

“Don’t take it,” Shayne said. “Just let it be. Follow the procedure we originally decided on. It’s the only chance we have.”

“You can’t let them take the Esperance Diamond,” one of the men said. “Not after what’s already happened.”

“That’s exactly what I do mean,” Shayne said. “Particularly after what happened. Let them take it. You know the procedure now. That sack will be passed to someone when the plane’s cargo space is unloaded. Follow that someone until the stone leaves the airport. When it does call me. Give me a walkie-talkie set. I want to know which gate the stone is leaving by and in what sort of car or cover. You can tail it that far. You’ve done worse before. After it leaves the airport take your men off the tail. Let me have it.”

“How can you follow the stone then?” Gentry asked.

Shayne knew that he was thinking of the lost directional indicator bug.

“I’ve got a sixth sense,” Shayne said. “You know it’s the only chance. They’ll let your tail stay on to the gates. Beyond there, if their courier can’t shake you, he’ll let himself get caught. What good is that? You can jail small-fry again, but Mr. Big stays safe and hidden. You have to bet I can nail him.”

“How good a bet is that, Mr. Shayne?” one of the government men asked quietly.

“I think I can do it,” Mike Shayne said seriously. “You know I can’t guarantee anything till all the chips are down, but I’m willing to try. I think I know a couple of things the rest of them don’t know I know. I think I’ve got enough of an edge to pull it off.”

“You had better be right,” the same quiet man said.

“I’m betting my life that I am,” Mike Shayne told them all. “I’m betting my own life, gentlemen.”

VIII

MIKE SHAYNE sat in his rented car in the main parking lot of the Miami International Airport and listened to the walkie-talkie set on the seat beside him.

The sending unit of the set was in the office of the airport security director. Agents all over the field reported to that office by phone or by sending sets of their own and the meat of their reports was forwarded to Shayne where he sat and listened.

The plane from New York which carried the Esperance Diamond in its registered mail shipment was only about fifteen minutes late on the long landing strip.

“Plane taxis to stop on ramp near passenger ramp,” the walkie-talkie said impersonally.

Then; “Passengers from New York debarking and walking to exit ramp.”

Shayne knew that, as an added precaution and for this one arrival only, each passenger and the luggage he carried was being photographed at long range by special cameras equipped with telescopic lenses. Later on the photos would be checked for identification.

“Service truck approaching plane,” the voice said in Shayne’s ear.

There would be a truck from the catering firm which supplied food to the passengers to remove dishes and other things left over from the trip. Another would bring linens, pillows and the like and remove those used by the passengers.

Above all would be the trucks to take off baggage. Included in the baggage would be the mail sacks.

The actual theft of the registered mail sack wasn’t made until the truck carrying it was in the maze of passageways under the main ticket levels of the airport building and on its way to the spot where a mail truck from the local post office would pick it up.

A caterer’s truck collided with the baggage truck from the plane. Nobody was hurt, but suitcases and mail bags were strewn in the corridor. When the baggage truck was reloaded the registered mail sack had been switched with a dummy.

“The mail sack you want has been put in a large brown trunk and reloaded on the baggage truck,” the walkie-talkie said.

Later: “The trunk you want has been claimed by a man who had the proper claim check but was not—repeat not—a passenger on the plane. He is carrying the small trunk out of the baggage room. Now he’s hailing a cab. The driver helps him put the trunk in the cab. Now the man walks over to a vending machine and buys a pack of cigarettes.

“He’s lighting a cigarette. Now he walks back and gets in the cab. No. Correction. No. He gets in the cab behind the one in which the trunk with the mail bag was loaded.

“Here are the license numbers of both cabs. The cabs are pulling out. They’re headed for the main exit gate of the passenger car parking lot. Apparently headed for the LeJeune Road exit on the East-West Expressway to Miami Beach.

“We are cutting off surveillance at this point.”

Shayne started the motor of his rented car and pulled quietly out of the parking space toward the exit gate.

For the past few minutes he’d known where the diamond was, or approximately where it was, without needing the soft words over the walkie-talkie.

When Mike Shayne had said earlier that he had a trick up his sleeve he hadn’t been kidding. It was inside the watch he wore strapped to his left wrist and it was a duplicate of the highly sophisticated “bug” that had been mounted inside his belt buckle.

Shayne was getting a steady “bzz-bzz bzz” vibration through the back of his watch against his wrist. As the two cabs drew closer the vibration got stronger. He pulled into the line of cars behind them heading for the exit gate. Once through the gate the two cabs did an “in and out and switch places” routine in the heavy traffic that was designed to confuse anyone trying to follow.

Shayne wasn’t in any doubt. The walkie-talkie had given him the right license tag number and the wrist buzzer confirmed it as being accurate.

Once out at the LeJeune Road ramps of the expressway system the two cabs separated. The one with the passenger went north and got on the expressway of Highway 1-95 that could take it either east to Miami Beach or north to Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale.

Mike Shayne let it go. The cab he was after went south on LeJeune Road and then east on North West Twentieth Street to North West Twenty-Seventh Avenue and then north again. After a few blocks it pulled into a darkened garage back of a service station.

Shayne put his car in the parking lot of a bar and grille a few doors south of the garage. He turned off the lights and waited.

In about five minutes two identical appearing cabs pulled out of the garage and body shop. One turned north on Twenty-Seventh Avenue and the other south.

Mike Shayne paid no attention to either of the cabs. The buzzer strapped to his wrist was still sounding off loud and strong. That meant the jewel with its sending bug was still inside the darkened, now apparently abandoned garage. The service station out front was locked and closed for the night. Nobody showed.

No one went in or out of the garage, but the buzzer continued to give out its strong and steady signal.

Shayne waited ten minutes, fifteen. Still nothing happened.

If he had wanted, he could have picked the lock to the garage door easily enough and then let his wrist buzzer locate the jewel for him even in the dark and cluttered space. He didn’t. His job wasn’t to recover the stone until it was in the hands of the Mr. Big of the whole robbery ring.

The wait stretched out to half an hour. A few people went in and out of the bar in front of which the detective was parked. Nobody went near the garage and service station.

Of course Shayne couldn’t watch the whole place from his car. Someone could have sneaked in the back entrance where the detective couldn’t see him. He couldn’t have moved the bugged jewel, though, without its being known. As long as his buzzer was operating Shayne had only to wait where he was.

He didn’t like it, though. The wait was stretching out beyond the length of time the big private detective thought was reasonable. He was worried back at deep conscious level where his instincts lived.

The Esperance Diamond was worth a million dollars in United States money. Nobody, but nobody, leaves a cool million lying around a crummy garage in the edge of a slum. It just doesn’t check out with any sort of logic to do a thing like that.

Not with a million dollars.

Not unless somebody has a very special reason, that is.

Mike Shayne felt the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck just above the shirt collar. It was a feeling he got when he knew he was being watched or followed by a tail. Somebody had him under observation.

He sat there and wondered if a bullet would smash through the windshield in front of his face or come in the open window to where he sat in the car.

He was beginning to be very unhappy indeed.

A man and two women came out the door of the bar and started to walk toward the end of the line of parked cars. The man was staggering a bit. He had his arm around one of the women and she was giggling and whispering something into his ear.

The three of them went around behind Shayne’s car. The man and woman went on down the line of cars.

The second woman didn’t quite pass. She went to the rear of the car, then, swift as a ferret, doubled back to walk up to the driver’s side and level a gun at Mike Shayne over the top of the door and through the open window.

Fast as she was she wasn’t quite fast enough. Shayne had no intention at all of being caught napping for a second time that night.

The woman looked over the barrel of her own automatic into the muzzle of the detective’s big Colt’s forty-five. At that range it was like looking into the mouth of a cannon.

“Hello. Nita,” Mike Shayne said.

They looked at each other over their own guns. Both of them had good poker faces. Both were willing to shoot if they had to, and neither one underestimated the other.

“It’s another stand-off,” Nita Nolan said finally.

“So it is,” Shayne said then. “That doesn’t surprise a smart girl like you, does it?”

“No.” she said, “I’ll be damned if it does, at that.”

They looked at each other for another long moment and then burst out laughing almost simultaneously. It was a laughter of genuine mirth, of two almost equally matched opponents who could agree on the humor of the situation.

“Let’s us put these fool things away,” Nita said finally. “Honestly, Mike, I’d rather switch than fight right now anyway. You know how it is with a woman, lover. If we don’t have the drop on the man we won’t play.”

“Suits me,” Mike Shayne said. “I don’t think you came for anything but talk anyway. If you’d wanted to kill me, you’d have started shooting while you were still behind the car.”

“Shoot you in the back? Of course I would have. I don’t know why I pulled this fool gun anyhow. Simply an overgrown sense of the dramatic, I guess.”

They looked each other over for another moment and then both put their guns out of sight.

“How did you guess, lover? I thought it was such a good idea coming out with those two mooches as if I belonged with them.”

“When I’ve once seen a beautiful woman,” Shayne said, “I always recognize her the second time.”

It was the only answer he’d give. It flattered her, as he knew it would.

“Come on. Get in the car,” he said. “No sense standing there in the night air for the mosquitos to chew on.” There weren’t any mosquitos and they both knew it.

“Tell me what you wanted to talk about,” the big man continued. “I think you want some sort of deal. Maybe we can trade.”

“I hope we can,” she said. “Really and truly I do, Mike Shayne. It’ll be so much nicer and easier for everybody.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Shayne said. “How did you know I’d be here when you wanted me?”

“Rocky’s a good swimmer,” Nita said and watched the redhead out of the corner of her eyes.

Shayne gave her a wide-mouthed grin.

“I figured that,” he said. “It didn’t take more than a bitty sort of push to put him in the Bay. That’s why he was the one sent out to put me on the bottom, isn’t it?”

“You’re as smart as we thought you were,” she said. “What else do you know?”

Shayne took out a cigar and lit it.

“What else am I supposed to know? And why don’t you start by telling me who’s ‘we’? I think I ought to know that before you and I get any further into this.”

“I guess we owe you that much,” she said and let herself slide closer to him on the seat of the car. “Mr. Jay and I and Rocky are working together. We’re the ones who can make you a deal if you’re willing to go along.”

“I take it by that that Jay isn’t the man I’m after? Because any deal I make includes getting that man and Jay doesn’t look like the give up easy type.”

“He isn’t, lover. He isn’t a quitter. If he was the man you wanted, my orders would have been to kill you. Rocky would have shot you in the boathouse and dumped dead meat in the Bay. You’ve got to have that figured out.”

“I did,” Shayne said. “I was sure of it after Rocky took his dive. On the other hand, you folks aren’t just playing patty-cake either. The fact you showed up here means you know there’s a million clams worth of flawless blue-white within a hundred yards of where we are right now.”

“We know it,” Nita nodded. “We figured you’d be smart enough to follow the stone this far. We know all about how it was tailed through the airport too. That’s why the boys on that end were told to make it easy to watch. It didn’t take any genius to spot the fuzz all over the place. Besides we knew what they were there for right from the beginning, like we knew who you were and what you were carrying before I ever collected you at the house of that dumb schmoe who worked for you.”

“He was no schmoe,” Shayne said. “He was a friend of mine. Was Charlie on your team too?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I mean yes and no. Charlie was part of the varsity, you might say. but not Mr. Jay’s team. Charlie took his orders from the man you really want. He would have pulled the trigger on you if you hadn’t made out to lower the boom first. I mean, if it’d been Charlie in the skiff, things in the water would be eating your face right now. Are you starting to get the point, lover? I hope you are, I mean.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” Shayne told her. He felt her hand rubbing along his thigh. She was an attractive woman. “I begin to see. Your Mr. Jay wants me to find Mr. Big. He can’t come right out and turn the boss in himself, but he wants me to do it for him. So he and you and Rocky keep me alive and let me get away from you on the beach. So what comes next? You sell me Mr. Big’s name? Or maybe it’s his name plus your help in getting back the big rock.”

“Something like that, lover.”

“All right. Why and for what price? Let’s go over the why part first.”

“Simple,” she said. “Jay hates the bastard. He hates him enough to turn him in.”

“I don’t buy, beautiful. In your business everybody hates somebody. It’s part of the job. Nobody turns a man in only for hate. There’s no money in it.”

She had her head on his shoulder by now. “That’s right. It’s not for hate. Jay’s scared, I think. Even in his job he’s got millions out of this caper. He knows it can’t last forever. Now they got you—plus all those Uncle Whiskers’ boys. Who next? Sooner or later somebody will get the right answer. Then what happens to people like Jay and me?”

“So what?” Shayne said. “It’s an occupational risk.”

“Up to a point, lover. Just up to a point. Jay’s no fool. He’ll give you the big man now, and cut out with what he has already. God knows it’s enough for ten lifetimes. The game can’t last much longer anyway. They kill you tonight if they can, okay, but who shows up tomorrow? We’ll take you to Mr. Big. I think you can guess who he is.”

“I can guess,” Shayne said. “I can see the fingers point.”

“We’ll give you proof. Then you take him and leave us be.”

“Big talk,” Mike Shayne said. “When does the action start?”

“Right now,” she said.

A car had just pulled into the closed and darkened gas station and garage up the block.

IX

MIKE SHAYNE and the woman, Nita Nolan, sat perfectly still in the front seat of the rented car.

A hundred yards down the block the other car parked and its lights blinked off. Mike Shayne could see that there were two men in the front seat.

After a moment one of them got out and walked over to the side door of the locked and darkened garage building. He must have had a key because he went right on in. He wasn’t there more than a couple of minutes—and when he came out Shayne could tell by the way the buzzer in his watch acted up that the man was carrying the Esperance Diamond.

The second hand on the watch was a direction indicator. Instead of making regular sweeps it pointed to the location of the impulse that activated the buzzer.

Nita saw Shayne look at his watch. “So that belt buckle wasn’t the only bug,” she said. “I figured you had to have another one, but I didn’t think of the watch.”

“Never underestimate an honest ruffian,” Shayne said.

The man carrying the diamond got back into the car and it started to pull out of the service station.

Mike Shayne started his own motor and prepared to follow. “Suppose they spot me tailing them?”

“They won’t,” Nita said. “Rocky is doing the driving. He has orders to make sure he doesn’t lose you if the traffic gets thick. He’s going where you want to go, and Jay means for you to get there. So don’t worry. Just tail him.”

“Officer, follow that car,” Shayne said and laughed.

The car ahead made directly for the nearest causeway to Miami Beach, and Mike Shayne had no trouble following. Even without his directional bug in the wrist watch it would have been easy enough. At this time of night there was still plenty of traffic on the main arterial streets and expressways, so he managed to keep at least a few cars between himself and his quarry.

It was all very well to know that Rocky expected to be followed, but presumably the other man in the car, the one actually carrying the million-dollar diamond, wouldn’t be so complacent. If he became suspicious of a tail, he could take sudden and drastic action to interfere.

Once on the Beach the lead car turned north and Mike Shayne followed until they got into the section of the newest, biggest, gaudiest and most expensive of all the hotels. On “Billion Dollar Row” he saw his quarry head into the parking lot of the tallest tower of them all.

Shayne pulled his own car into the drive of the hotel next to it and accepted a parking check from the attendant. He and Nita Nolan got out to walk back down Collins Avenue.

The buzzer on Shayne’s wrist was still sending out its steady vibrations and the second hand of the watch swung and then held steady like a compass needle.

The hotel they were entering was the New Imperial.

“Surprised?” Nita asked.

She walked along beside Shayne matching him stride for stride but with an effortless grace the big man could never hope to equal. In the bright lights of the hotel lobby she was a beautiful woman and heads turned to watch them pass.

More than one northern millionaire envied Mike Shayne his companion that night.

He looked down at her and grinned.

“Surprised, lover?” she asked again.

“Of course not,” Shayne said. “It’s the penthouse suite, I guess.”

“No,” she said. “This is on the fifteenth floor. You can guess the name.”

“Of course I can guess the name, beautiful,” Shayne said. “Every finger has been pointing right to that one name all night. The big question is, how do we get in? He has to be guarded.”

“Sure he is,” she nodded. “A couple of his boys are watching everybody that comes into the lobby. Only one thing, though. They know me. I’m your passport tonight. Where I go, you can go. Just don’t make any moves until I tell you, though. We go up nice and easy and knock on the door like a couple of friends come up from the Surf Club for a cocktail.”

“And when they let us in—”

“There’ll be guns inside, lover, but don’t forget Rocky will be there too. This time he’ll be on our side. He’ll be posted where he can cover the rest of them from behind. You and I both have guns too and can take care of ourselves. Check?”

Shayne said, “Check, beautiful.”

He said that much out loud. In his mind he thought: “And maybe double check. Double cross and double check. How big a fool do you think I am, beautiful? Maybe a damn fool, but not a dead damn fool. Not tonight.”

They crossed the huge lobby toward the bank of elevators and Shayne felt his feet sink into the soft, deep pile of the luxurious carpeting. Old men with diamond shirt studs and diamond rings on their hands sat in the chairs and watched the lovely woman on his arm as buzzards might watch a lamb before they stooped and struck.

Mike Shayne knew who he was going to find in the apartment on the fifteenth floor of the New Imperial Hotel in Miami Beach. All day the fingers had pointed more and more convincingly in one direction—and it was the direction in which the big private detective least wanted to go.

According to all the evidence he was going to have to turn in the one man against whom it would be impossible to make a case stick, not because of lack of evidence but because all of that evidence would be circumstantial in nature and because too many people in high places would want to see Mr. Big go free again.

Of course, once Mr. Big got himself cleared of this charge he could continue to operate as usual. He might even have set up this confrontation deliberately in order to clear himself because he had begun to feel the net of the law closing in.

There was nothing Mike Shayne could do, though, but get into the elevator and ride to the fifteenth floor.

X

NITA NOLAN TOUCHED the bell of the apartment on the fifteenth floor. Her finger bounced in and out as she rang what had to be a code. A moment later the door swung open.

This was an elaborate and expensive apartment. There was even a small vestibule with a table topped by a Ming Dynasty jade statuette. Beyond the vestibule was a living room as big as the floor area of the average Miami home. Big picture windows looked out over the Atlantic Ocean at the far side of the room.

The man who had opened the door was big and broad-shouldered with the large, brutal face of a professional hood. He wore a three-hundred dollar suit with a bulge under the left shoulder where he packed a gun. His shirt had cost forty-five dollars and was dirty and soiled by sweat around the collar. He was balding and one ear had been almost torn loose in a fight. It had healed into a knot of scar tissue.

He gave them what he probably thought was a smile and stood aside to let them come in.

The second man inside the doorway to the big room could have been a carbon copy of the first except that both his ears were normal.

The man Rocky whom Shayne had last seen flipping over backward into Biscayne Bay was at the far end of the room, leaning one elbow on a white and gold grand piano. He gave the big man a wolfish grin. Shayne didn’t like that grin.

There were two other men in the room.

One was a little fellow with a nose that kept twitching like a weasel on the hunt and two black obsidian marbles for eyes. Shayne recognized him as a well known “contract man”—killer for hire—from the Detroit area.

The other man was Evan Hargrove, the insurance executive. He was the first to speak.

“My God, Shayne,” he said, “what in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here?”

“Why I thought you knew, Mr. Hargrove,” Mike Shayne said. “They brought me up here to arrest you.”

“Arrest me?”

“What in hell is going on here?” said weasel-nose.

“Everybody freeze!” That was a shout from Rocky at the far end of the big room.

Rocky had his gun out. It was a .357 magnum revolver with enough power to smash a man’s head to a pulp or break him in half with a belly shot.

Nita had pulled a gun out of her shoulder bag. It was only a thirty-eight police positive that looked like a toy beside Rocky’s cannon, but she used it to herd the thug in the vestibule into the big room.

“The jig’s up, boss,” she said to Hargrove. “You’d better turn the diamond over to Shayne.”

“You don’t believe this damned nonsense, do you, Shayne?” Hargrove asked. He looked white-faced and strained.

“What should I believe?” Shayne said. “What should I believe, Mr. Hargrove?” He took a few steps over toward the insurance president, acutely conscious of the two guns at his back. “You do have the diamond, don’t you, Mr. Hargrove?”

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Hargrove said. “I can explain.”

“He has it,” Nita said. “You know he has it, Shayne. You tailed it here from the airport yourself. That’s fact. Anything he says is just words.”

“I know,” Mike Shayne said. “Words.”

“I’ve got a right to explain,” Hargrove said. “Half an hour ago this man”—he jerked a thumb at weasel-nose—“came up here. He said the diamond had been stolen, but he could make a deal to sell it back to my insurance syndicate. He said you couldn’t tail the stone and he showed me your belt buckle with the bug in it to prove you couldn’t.

“I didn’t know what to think, so I stalled. I said if he could really produce the Esperance stone I had to see it first before I could talk any sort of deal. He made a phone call and said that the diamond was on its way here.

“A few minutes ago these other three men showed up. They had the Esperance Diamond with them and they showed it to me. It’s in my pocket now, and I’m convinced it’s the real stone.”

The bug on Mike’s wrist confirmed that fact, but he didn’t say so.

“Then this woman brings you in,” Hargrove said. “I don’t know what this is all about. Unless you’re part of this mob, Shayne. Have you sold me out?”

“Shayne hasn’t sold anybody out,” Nita said. “He did what he was hired to do. You thought he couldn’t when you tipped us about the bug in his belt buckle and how to find it. You underrated him, boss. He’s an honest man.”

“She’s crazy,” Hargrove said. “You know who I am, Shayne. You know that no court in the country will convict me on a damned frame-up like this.”

“Sure I know it,” Shayne thought. “So does Nita-baby here, and Rocky and Mr. Jay and the Seventh Regiment of the cavalry. They all know. So you and I aren’t going out of this room alive, Hargrove. We’re going to stay here with the diamond and your corpse or mine will be labeled Mr. Big.”

He didn’t say that aloud. All he said was; “Show me the diamond, Mr. Hargrove. Put it on the coffee table there. Hurry up.”

Hargrove looked desperate, but he wasn’t a fighting man and the rest of them were. He took a soft chamois pouch out of his pocket and walked to the coffee table. He pulled the drawstring of the pouch.

Mike Shayne walked over and stood beside Hargrove at the coffee table. That put him between weasel-nose and the insurance man. Rocky and Nita Nolan and the two hoods were at least fifteen to twenty feet away and at his back.

Hargrove tipped the soft leather pouch and tipped out the gold and jeweled pendant onto the dark wood top of the coffee table.

The million-dollar diamond blazed like a miniature sun under the lights.

Mike Shayne swung a hard right hand punch from his side. The blow took Hargrove on the side of the jaw and knocked him out like a light. His limp body hit the floor between the coffee table and the couch.

Shayne swung all the way around on the balls of his feet like a pivot. As he came, his right elbow took weasel-nose back of the ear. The killer lost interest in going for his gun. He went down on the floor next to Hargrove.

Shayne’s right hand flipped down to the belt holster riding behind and above his right hip. As his hand closed on the butt of his own automatic the big man dropped on one knee. Rocky’s first shot went over Shayne’s head and smashed the big picture window.

Shayne brought his gun up with a fast, smooth sweep. His right knee was on the floor. He put his left elbow on the left knee—caught the right wrist in his left hand—braced the gun, and put a 300-grain soft lead slug into Rocky’s heart.

He braced himself for the impact of Nita’s thirty-eight but it missed his head by inches. Then the woman slid sideways along the wall and flipped the light switch. The room went partly dark. There was still light coming in from the sky outside. It’s never really dark in Miami Beach.

The gotch-eared thug was trying to get his gun out. Shayne fired at the blur of movement and heard his slug thud into flesh. The man screamed, tried to run, fell down and went on screaming and flopping like a broken-legged horse.

There was a moment of frozen inaction except for the wounded man on the floor.

The third hood called out then: “Don’t shoot, Shayne. My hands are up.”

Nita Nolan was only five feet from the man. When he called out, she twisted around and shot him through the head.

“I’m on your side, Mike,” she called. “Here. I’ll prove it.” She threw her gun over onto the floor in front of Shayne.

The battle of the New Imperial Hotel was over.

“THEY MADE IT just too damned easy to believe,” Mike Shayne told Evan Hargrove, Chief Gentry and the federal men an hour later. “Everything that happened pointed to a frame-up to convince us that Mr. Hargrove was the master mind. If I’d swallowed that story hook, line and sinker they’d have made an excuse to kill Hargrove ‘trying to resist arrest’ or something and let me sell it to you.

“At the end Nita realized I was too smart for that. We were both going to be killed and left here with the diamond. The rap would have been pinned on one or both of us.

“I knew damn well it couldn’t be Hargrove. If it had been he’d never have hired me. Above all he’d never have had the stone brought directly to him. Besides, I was sure he was an honest man.”

“Why try to frame him at all, then?” Gentry asked.

“Because a thief always makes a wrong move when he’s scared and this crowd felt the law breathing down their necks.

“Nita Nolan was Mr. Big, of course. Jay and the rest worked for her. She figured to trap the trappers, so to speak, use the diamond caper to throw the blame on somebody else and get herself in the clear by being on my side if anything went wrong. She almost made it too.”

“What made you sure it was Nita?” Will Gentry asked.

“She didn’t have to shoot that hood after he gave up,” Shayne said. “There was only one reason to do that. To keep him from spilling that she was the boss. Rocky and gotch-ear were dead or dying already. Weasel-nose couldn’t talk. She’d used him to kill before and could hang him if he did.”

“That was the only reason?”

“No,” Mike Shayne said. “I was pretty sure before that. It was only the clincher. She was the only one all day who showed enough brains to be boss of an outfit like that. It just had to be her.”