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

Bill Buzby looked white and deadly calm, but he still managed to keep control. “Theories,” he said. “Words, Mr. Shayne. Nothing but words. You have no proof of anything. If you did, I’d be under arrest now.”

He glared at the big detective.

Shayne looked at him gravely. “I’ve got proof.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a battered lump of metal and let it drop on the table. “This is the bullet you fired at me in the elevator today. This we can trace to the gun and the gun to you.”

Chief Will Gentry and Tim Rourke kept perfectly straight faces, though they knew this was pure bluff on the big redhead’s part. No bullet mashed so badly by its impact on steel could be ballistically assigned to the gun that fired it.

Like most people Buzby didn’t know this, but he still kept his control. “Trace away. I don’t own a gun.”

“You don’t have to own one,” Shayne said. “You fired one. Not twelve hours ago you fired a gun. There’ll still be minute traces of burned powder in the skin of your hand even if you’ve washed that hand. The traces will be there for days. We’re going to test the hands of everyone in this room for powder traces, Buzby. We’ve got you now.”

Bill Buzby was faster than Shayne had counted on. He hadn’t been fool enough to come to the meeting wearing a gun, but there was one in the drawer of the library table where he sat, and he got it out and shoved it to the back of Della Peckinbaugh’s head before they could move.

“I’m leaving here, and she’s going, along as hostage,” he said. “So much as blink an eye and I’ll blow her head off. I mean it. You all stay here for two hours. Nobody moves or phones. At the end of that time you can do as you please. I’ll be gone in a private plane and Della with me. I’ll let her go when I’ve made Cuba. Do you understand?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Keeping Della as a shield he backed across the room and through the kitchen door into the hands of the two detectives Chief Will Gentry had posted there before the meeting started.

“Could you really have found powder residue on his hands?” Della Peckinbaugh asked the men over drinks when Buzby had been taken away.

“No way to tell without trying,” Chief Gentry said. “It’s possible, but we couldn’t know for sure. The important thing is that Buzby thought we could. He didn’t dare test it.”

“Everything he did was a mistake,” she said. “Poor Bill.”

“He was a killer and a fool. The two go together,” Mike Shayne said. “His first mistake was when he stole a dollar from your husband. Everything came from that. At the end everything he did showed me more and more clearly who he had to be. The only real evidence was his own guilt. It had to come out and it did.”

“If I hadn’t blundered onto the killing, he’d have had a perfect crime,” Tim Rourke said.

“There’s no such thing,” Mike Shayne told them all.

Awry in a Parade

by Paul Yawitz

Everyone marches to a different tune, and he knew just the song to make whitie march his way at last!

* * *

VIgal knew there was no retreating now.

He was in the fermenting midst of his long-planned hold-up of the rich neighborhood branch of Newcomers National Bank.

An unexpected anxiety clamped his throat as he hurled his slender, agile body over the outer counter of the main office. For days he had steeled his every nerve for the climactic moment. He had been certain they would not waver. It was a prudently devised maneuver to free himself from the gutter of his black ghetto. His own little masterpiece that once accomplished would allow him to walk with equality. Big money was his secret.

Nothing could go wrong, he had assured himself a thousand times. For three weeks he had cased the operation of the bank. It was to be — had to be — a perfect crime executed with a precision that would prove him a pro.

It was a dangerous venture and in a few hectic, but carefully devised, moments it would be over.

In that sliver of a second that he was now suspended in the mid-air leap, the light .22 caliber Smith & Wesson in his free hand felt heavier than he had ever suspected, but his eyes caught the, red glove of the hand on which his body was weighted and it renewed his confidence. It was part of the protection he had planned for himself. No one would ever detect his fingerprints, no one. The anxiety relaxed, and his mind attuned itself instantly to the well rehearsed minutes ahead.

There were fourteen employees inside the modest quarters. All were on their backs trembling against the floor and watching his leap. Their minds were so blank with fright that not one even wanted him to slip. If he fell someone would be expected to struggle with him. It was a duty the $115-a-week guard was loath to face. He was rooting for the oddly attired stick-up man to get a million, if necessary, and to get out.