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

“No sign of a struggle,” Stan said as he straightened up. “Not that that means there wasn’t one. It looks to me like the glasses belonged to the killer. Yeager probably opened the door, saw the gun, made a grab for it, and the killer’s glasses got knocked off and stepped on. Then the killer shot Yeager, picked up what was left of the glasses, and haul-tailed out of here.”

I slipped the green shard into my pocket and stood up.

“Miss Hagen, did Yeager have a safe-deposit box somewhere?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“We didn’t find any personal papers,” I said. “You know where he had his bank account, if he had one?”

She moved one shoulder just enough to qualify as a shrug. “Beats me,” she said disinterestedly, leaning back in the chair to stare up at one of the colored mobiles rotating lazily against the ceiling. “The things I don’t know about that guy would fill a book. A big one.”

We were interrupted then.

There was a sudden blur of men’s voices in the foyer down below, and then the pound and creak of heavy feet coming up the stairs.

“I was beginning to wonder where everybody was,” Stan said, glancing at his wrist watch. “They must have come by way of Bluefield, West Virginia.”

“And from the sound of them, they brought half the cops in West Virginia with them,” I said.

Stan shook a cigarette from his pack, lit it, blew an almost perfect smoke ring ceilingward, and sighed softly.

“Well,” he said, “So now the fun begins.”

III

The fun began, all right. The first group of arrivals was soon followed by a second, and within ten minutes the small apartment was crowded with more than two dozen men, only about half of whom had any real business there. The others were visiting royalty from other precincts — lieutenants and captains, most of them — who had heard about the squeal and dropped in to say hello to one another.

While the Assistant Medical Examiner made his preliminary examination of the body, and the print men and photographers set up shop with their dusting powders and cameras, I got busy on the phone.

Hooking a finger beneath the flange of the handset, as Stan had done earlier, I called Headquarters and asked for the assignment of a squad of patrolmen to, search the neighborhood for the murder gun. Next, I asked to be switched over to BCI, and requested an expedited check on Warren Eads, the playwright with whom, according to Doris Hagen, Yeager had had some kind of feud.

I held the line while the check was made, and a few minutes later BCI called back to report that Eads had no record. Then I had BCI switch me over to still another office, and asked that detectives be assigned to check with all the banks in the metropolitan area to see whether Yeager had rented a safe-deposit box.

Then I drew Stan Rayder over to a corner of the living room. “I’ve been thinking about that piece of lens,” I said. “If it was ground to a doctor’s prescription, the way a lot of sunglass lenses are, we just might be able to trace it.”

“How so?”

“Well, say the killer wanted that lens replaced. All he’d have to do would be to ask the doctor who prescribed the glasses for him in the first place. The doctor would have the prescription on file. All he’d have to do would be to pass it along to whatever optical outfit ground his lenses for him. And so, if we put all the manufacturing opticians on the watch-and-wait for that particular prescription, we—”

“Just a minute,” Stan said. “That’s all very well. But just how do you think we’re going to get the prescription in the first place?”

“We’ve got one of the top lens experts in the country, right in our own lab,” I said. “Ruby Wyman. By analyzing the shard you found, he might be able to reconstruct the prescription the lens was ground by.”

Stan shook his head dubiously. “I like the idea fine,” he said. “What I don’t like are the odds against it.”

I walked over to the chief of the tech crew, gave him the shard, told him what I wanted Ruby Wyman to do with it, and asked him to take it back to the lab with him when he and his men had finished at the apartment.

“Hey, Selby!” Doris Hagen called out suddenly. “How about me? What am I supposed to do — sit in this chair until I take root or something?”

“Relax, Miss Hagen,” Stan told her. “We’ll get around to you in a minute.”

“And a damn long minute too, I’ll bet,” she said petulantly.

Stan came over to where I stood and lowered his voice. “What about her?” he asked. “You going to hold her as a material witness, or what?”

“Let’s make it protective custody,” I said.

“Well, you’d better get set for some fireworks. Man, what a squawk she’ll make when you give her the news.”

“Not me, Stan. You.”

“How come? You going somewhere?”

“I thought I’d take a crack at the guy that wrote the play Yeager was supposed to be in. Warren Eads.”