Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

When Stan and I got back to the station house, I paused at the teletype machine in the muster room long enough to read back through the alarms that had come in since noon, hoping that there might be something I could connect in some way with our homicide, but there was nothing.

“Anything on the chatterbox?” Stan asked as we started up the stairs to the squad room on the second floor.

“No,” I said. “It seems to have been a fairly quiet day.”

“And meanwhile Larry Yeager’s girl friend is sitting over there in the slammer. Man, that Doris Hagen was one mad girl when I sent her over there, Pete.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “She was working up a pretty good mad, even before she knew where she was going.”

I opened the gate in the counter that runs across the forepart of the squad room, held it for Stan, and followed him into the squad room proper.

Except for Barney Fells, the room was empty, which, considering the time of evening, was very unusual. The squad commander was standing by the water cooler, a paper cup in one hand and the stub of a cigar in the other, scowling at us — a tough, wiry, graying man with quick, sharp eyes. A cop’s cop, all the way.

I draped my jacket over the back of my chair, sat down, and gave him a fast recap of the things Stan and I had done so far.

When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “That Larry Yeager must have been one sweet character,” he said. “And so you figure he recognized somebody in that stag film and decided to add a little blackmail to his other accomplishments, eh?”

“There doesn’t seem to be any other answer,” Stan said.

“It’d be pretty hard to come, up with one, at that,” Barney said. “Pete, I took a call for you a while ago, from Ruby Wyman, over at the lab. About that piece of sunglass lens you boys found over at Yeager’s apartment. He says there was enough of it for him to work out the prescription the lens was ground from.”

“Good,” I said. “Ruby’s one of the best.”

“That he is. And another thing he did was to analyze the glass as glass. It seems there’s all kinds of optical glass, and this particular kind is fairly brittle, so it’s not so widely used as some of the others. Ruby says that narrows down the number of places that could have ground it.”

“It was a particular shade of green, too,” Stan said. “Considering that we have the exact prescription, plus the exact kind of glass, plus the exact shade, that idea of Pete’s about putting all the optical houses on the watch-and-wait just might pay off.”

“It all depends on how smart the killer is,” Barney said. “If he’s real smart, he’d never have that lens replaced at all. In any case, Ruby’s data have already been mimeoed and distributed to every optical house in the area.”

“We might even go a step farther,” I said. “Seeing that Ruby’s narrowed things down so well, why not ask the optical houses to check back through their records?”

“Hell, Pete,” Barney said. “There’d be tens of thousands of prescriptions for them to go through. Millions, maybe?”

“Not the way it’s narrowed down now,” I said. “And it just might turn the trick, Barney. If we could come up with the original prescription, we’d probably also come up with our killer.”

“Why even argue about it?” Barney said. “What can we lose? I’ll get Communications to put out a rider on that circular right away.” He moved off in the direction of his cubbyhole office.

“Well, so much for the lens,” Stan said. “What next, Pete?”

I got out my notebook, found the page listing the names of the people who had appeared in Fred Beaumont’s stag film, and handed it to him.

“How about calling BCI and the Information Unit on these?” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to catch up on a little paperwork.”

Stan got busy on the phone, and I settled down to the job of typing separate reports on all the people I had talked to since our arrival at Larry Yeager’s apartment.

“Mr. Selby?” a whiny voice said, so unexpectedly and so close to me that I whirled around in my chair, half angry at having been approached from behind in such a way.

The man who stood there, nervously toying with the brim of a brown straw hat, was somewhere in his middle forties, with iron-gray hair parted exactly in the middle, a sharp, narrow face, an almost lipless slit of a mouth, and a jutting, undershot jaw with a two-day growth of beard on it.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m Selby. What can I do for you?”

“I was a friend of Larry Yeager’s,” he said. “My name’s Grimes. Obie Grimes.”

I nodded toward the straight chair at the end of my desk. “Sit down, Mr. Grimes.”

He sat down carefully on the edge of the chair and put his hat in his lap. “When I saw in the paper what had happened to Larry, I knew I had to do something right away. I called Headquarters and asked them who was in charge of the case. They said you were.” He sat fingering the hat nervously for a moment. “I’ll put it straight out,” he said. “I’m scared to death, Mr. Selby. I’m so scared that I’m sick to my stomach.”

“Why?”