The Postman Brought Murder

by Brett Halliday

  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

  © 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 digni
tary 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.