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

“You’d just finished telling me you hadn’t talked to Yeager in ten or twelve years,” I said. “If you hadn’t talked to him in all that time, you wouldn’t have known his phone number. But you did know his number, because you had talked to him.”

“That’s true,” she said evenly. “I did know Larry’s number. I met him on the street one day, and he talked me into having a drink with him at a bar. He kept telling me I ought to call him sometime. He repeated his phone number again and again, and kept telling me to remember it.”

“What about the sunglasses you found on the beach at Atlantic City?” Stan asked.

“I can afford to buy my own sunglasses, I assure you.”

“But these, you found,” Stan said. “At least that’s what Earl Lambert told us when we talked to him about two hours ago. You and Lambert spent a weekend at Atlantic City a couple of weeks back, Mrs. Daniels. You found those sunglasses in the sand, and you were so taken with the frames that you were going to have them altered to fit you and have the lenses replaced with plain glass.

“A fragment of one of those lenses was on the floor near Yeager’s body. Our lab was able to reconstruct the prescription the lenses were ground by, and with that we were able to trace the glasses back to the girl who lost them.”

Mrs. Daniels lowered her eyes and sighed softly. “This is all very embarrassing,” she said. “But you can’t very well blame me for not having wanted to become involved in a murder investigation, can you?”

“Then you did drop those glasses at Yeager’s apartment?”

“Yes. I called Larry one day, just as he’d asked me to. He talked me into going over to his apartment. I had the glasses in my bag. While I was there, they fell out and broke on the floor.”

“When?”

“Last Wednesday, I think it was. Yes. Last Wednesday.”

“Uh-uh,” Stan said. “You had the glasses with you, yes — but not in your bag. You were probably wearing them as a disguise. And that piece of lens wasn’t there before Yeager was murdered. We have someone to swear to that, Mrs. Daniels.”

“This is all absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “I think you’ve lost your minds — both of you.”

“There are other things,” I said.

“What other things?”

“Your access to the murder gun, for instance,” I said. “We got to wondering how you might have got hold of it, and so we paid a second visit to Earl Lambert. We found out you’d been an overnight guest of his on quite a few occasions. On one of them he showed you his target gun. He kept it in a footlocker, and sometime later he stored the footlocker in the basement. But before he did, you had several opportunities to help yourself to the gun, and you did.”

“I did no such thing!” she said, raising her voice for the first time. “You really must be mad. I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me is that you found my fingerprints on it.”

“What we did find was hurried powder on one of your white knit driving gloves,” I said.

“You — what?”

“We were here once before today,” I said. “We took all your gloves to the lab for analyses. Your right glove contains powder of exactly the same kind Earl Lambert used to load the cartridges for his target gun. He’s a gun buff, and gun buffs like to prepare their own special mixtures. Under the spectroscope—”

“Stop it,” she said, her voice suddenly very small and very frightened. “Please. Please stop.”

“You’d told me you owned a sports car,” I said. “An Austin-Healey. So I talked with the traffic officer nearest the spot where we found the gun, which was under a car parked at the curb half a block from Yeager’s apartment house.”

“And the officer not only had seen the Austin-Healey,” Stan said, “but he’d blown his whistle at the driver. At you, Mrs. Daniels, because you were going too fast. But what really marked you on his memory was a sound that made him think you’d sideswiped another car. What he actually did hear, we know now, was the sound of the gun bouncing up against the parked car when you threw it away.”

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t... say any more.”

It was very still in the room and the seconds went by slowly. Somewhere in another apartment someone began to strum a guitar, and from the street below there was a soft whisper of tires on asphalt.

A full minute passed, and still Reba Daniels sat completely motionless, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the small hands folded in her lap.

“Do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She gave no indication that she had heard me.

“Mrs. Daniels?”

She started, looked at me blankly for a moment, and then very slowly got to her feet and walked toward the glass cabinet that contained the loving cups and plaques and silver platters she had won in sports car events.

I watched her closely.

When she started to open the glass doors, I stood up and walked over to stand beside her.

“Did you think I had a gun hidden in here?” she asked, running a fingertip gently along the handle of a loving cup.

“Such things have been known to happen,” I said.