A Redhead for Mike Shayne

by Brett Halliday

  Rourke said briskly, “I’m on my way,” and hung up.

  Shayne drank off the rest of his coffee without lingering over it, then shaved and showered quickly and was emerging from the bedroom fastening the top button of a sport shirt at his throat when Rourke’s knock sounded on his door.

  He opened it for the lean reporter who carried a folded newspaper in his hand and wore a look of hopeful anticipation on his gaunt face that was almost emaciated in its thinness.

  He stopped inside the door to sniff the air happily, and the tip of his sharp nose quivered as he looked at the bottle on the table.

  Shayne took the paper from him and said, “Pour yourself a mug and refill mine, Tim. It’s on the stove keeping hot.”

  While Rourke hurried into the kitchen, Shayne walked slowly back to the center table, unfolding the paper to the news story and picture which had come back clearly to his mind as he talked to Rourke on the phone.

  He hadn’t been mistaken. It was unmistakably a picture of the same gun that he had brought home last night. He spread it out and was leaning over it reading the story beneath the picture when Rourke returned from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of coffee with plenty of room below the brim for a healthy slug to be, added. He set them down and picked up the bottle, hesitated with it in mid-air as his gaze was caught by the objects on the table in front of him. He glanced quickly at the newspaper picture and back at the pistol, then poured cognac in both mugs and said conversationally, “I see what you mean, Mike. You think Painter’s renting out firearms to hoods on the Beach?”

  Shayne looked up from the story he was reading with a grin. “Not exactly. Though I wouldn’t put it past him if he’d known I was planted in that warehouse last night. But he didn’t, so we’ll have to skip that intriguing possibility. Ever see a gat even remotely like that one before?”

  Rourke shook his head. “I’m no expert. About all I know about a gun is which end shoots. Foreign, isn’t it? Something like a Luger?”

  “Something. Not much.” Shayne looked back at the paper. “This other man appears to have been a loner. New in town and no known record. He died before he could do any talking.”

  “Is that bad?” Rourke pulled another chair closer to the table and sat down comfortably, his deep-set eyes bright and probing.

  Shayne shrugged and said, “I don’t know. My boy died the same way last night. I hoped maybe we could tie them together somehow. That gun worries me, Tim. It’s a real son-of-a-bitch on wheels. There never was such shooting in this world before.” He dropped into his own chair and took a sip of coffee. “I was sitting in the dark waiting and he flung his light on me, Tim. Then there was one goddamned b-r-r-r-r-r … like that. Only loud enough to split your eardrums. I got off one lucky shot and that ended it, thank God. But when it was over, Tim, believe this or not, there was a row of six holes in the wall above my head. Evenly-spaced and every one the size of my thumb. Look at that muzzle. Six of them … all in the space of one b-r-r-r-r-r.” Shayne shook his red head slowly, still refusing to quite believe what his memory told him was true.

  The reporter’s ignorance of hand-guns left him singularly unimpressed by his friend’s recital. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “One bullet from your gun was more than a match for his six. What’s eating on you?”

  Shayne continued slowly shaking his head. “I don’t know … really. It’s just.… There was something goddamned eerie about my experience last night. If you’d been there … if you’d heard what I heard.…” He paused and ran knobby fingers through his coarse red hair and then grinned ruefully. “I sort of got the jitters over it,” he confessed. “I kept looking at this gun and trying to remember where I’d seen one like it before. Then I remembered this picture in the paper.…” He broke off and took a long drink of coffee-royal.

  “One thing you don’t have to be a gun-expert to notice, Tim. That gun on the table is spanking new. Like it just came from the factory. I don’t know whether that means anything, but … what about this twin in the picture? Did you happen to get a look at it? I wonder if it’s a virgin also.”

  Rourke said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t on that story myself. I’ll check if you want.”

  “No need,” Shayne told him decisively. “I’ve got a date with Peter Painter this morning, and I’ll have to turn this in to him. Merest oversight that I didn’t do so last night.”

  “What about last night, Mike?” Rourke got out a wad of copy paper and a pencil. “The way I got it, you had a tipoff that warehouse was scheduled to be knocked off during the storm and you staked the place out. By yourself, huh? You want me to mention this particular gun in my story?”

  “No,” Shayne told him vehemently. “Stay off that angle right now. I want to do some more checking. Just put it down that I got in a lucky shot last night. How’s your cup?”

  Rourke lifted his mug to his lips and drained it. “Empty,” he sighed, setting it down in front of him. “Lousy service you got here, Mike.”

  Shayne said, “I’ll speak to the management. In the meantime … how about a refill?”

  “I’d love one, but I emptied the pot last time.” The reporter’s thin hand snaked out and closed around the cognac bottle. “I can still stand this stuff straight.” He tipped it over his empty mug and splashed in a couple of ounces, then held the bottle out toward his old friend. “Have one on the house?”

  Shayne shook his head with a grin. “I’ve still got to beard Petey Painter in his lair and justify last night’s killing.”

  He got out a cigarette and looked at his watch. “Joe Hogan is going to be on a spot if I don’t turn up pronto at Beach Headquarters to plead justifiable homicide.”

  Timothy Rourke nodded, sipping his straight cognac from the warm mug with gusto. “Keep me informed, huh?”

  Shayne nodded, getting up. He casually folded the newspaper Rourke had brought him, and then shrugged into a sport jacket. The reporter leaned back in his chair and watched interestedly while Shayne opened a center drawer of the desk and put flashlight and his own .38 inside, then picked up the other gun and dropped it into a side pocket. The folded newspaper went into the opposite pocket, and Rourke drained his mug and set it down regretfully.

  He got to his feet and said, “Lunch?”

  Shayne said, “Probably. At Tony’s. If I don’t show up, give Lucy a ring and she’ll know where I am.”

  He turned to the door to go out and Timothy Rourke followed him.

  4

  From the point where he had left his car parked the preceding night, Michael Shayne made an illegal U-turn in front of the bridge and headed north on 2nd Avenue. He was frowning in deep thought as he drove, and he didn’t turn East on either 4th or 2nd Street to get over to the Boulevard. Instead, he continued on to Flagler and turned right, and moved into the first vacant parking space he found on the right-hand side of the street.

  He got out and walked briskly to one of the arcades opening off Flagler, turned in and went halfway down to a ground-floor office opening directly off the arcade.

  A neat brass plaque over the door said: “Rufus O’Toole, Gunsmith.”

  Shayne opened the door onto a small, unadorned reception room with a glass counter at the end of it and several comfortable chairs and smoking stands ranged along the wall.

  A bell sounded in the workshop at the rear of the office when Shayne opened the door, and he strolled up to the counter and waited.

  In a moment a small, gnomelike man emerged through the curtained doorway at the rear. Rufus O’Toole had a hunched back, a wrinkled, leathery face, and the brightest blue eyes in the world. His eyes twinkled happily when he saw Shayne waiting at the counter, and he said in a lilting brogue, “The top of the marnin’ to ye, Michael me bye. You’re lookin’ well for an old lecher with the years you do be carryin’.”

  Shayne grinned and said, “The same goes double for you, Rufe. I need some information.” He withdrew the pistol from his pocket and laid it on the glass counter in fr
ont of O’Toole. “Ever see one of these before?”

  The gunsmith’s bright eyes studied the weapon for a long moment, and then he reached out for it with slender, strong fingers and turned it slowly, lifting it in both hands and then sliding the butt of it into his palm and holding it caressingly as he tested the weight and balance.

  “No, Mike,” he said soberly, dropping his professional Irishness. “I’ve never laid eyes on the like before. Is it for sale?”

  “I’m on my way to turn it over to Peter Painter at Beach Headquarters,” Shayne explained. “I hoped you’d recognize it and be able to tell me exactly what the devil it is.”

  “Oh, I recognize it all right, Michael.” O’Toole laid it down carefully and then looked at his fingers and rubbed them together, sniffed them and wrinkled his nose slightly. “I merely said I’d never had the pleasure of seeing or handling one before.”

  “Some foreign make?” Shayne asked dubiously.

  “Indeed, yes. Our mass production economy would never waste the time and money to produce a beautifully tooled precision instrument like this.” He touched it lovingly again with his fingertips. “Not even Germany ever turned out a gun like this. They might have in the old days … if they’d had the modern alloys to work with … this particular metal has several times the strength of steel … has to in order to withstand a muzzle energy of more than two thousand foot pounds.” He paused, screwing up his face in concentration. “Twenty-one hundred and eighty pounds, I believe, to be exact. Though I would have to check before I made a flat statement.”

  He tilted his head on one side and saw from the look on Shayne’s face the figures meant nothing to the detective, and he added gently: “That, coupled with a muzzle velocity of nineteen hundred eighty feet per second and a caliber of twelve-oh-seven millimeters should give you some idea of the tremendous force embodied in this little fellow which weighs only thirty-seven ounces. That’s two ounces less than a Colt forty-five, Michael. Ten ounces less than a forty-four Magnum.”

  Shayne leaned his elbows on the glass counter and gazed down at the gun and said slowly, “Translate those figures for me, Rufe. Your muzzle velocities and energies. Remember, I just carry a thirty-eight Special … and that very seldom.”

  “Well, your regular thirty-eight Special has a muzzle velocity of about eight hundred feet per second,” explained O’Toole briskly, “and a muzzle energy of less than three hundred foot pounds.”

  “As against two thousand and two thousand on this one,” said Shayne, nodding slowly. “How does it compare, for instance, with a forty-four caliber Magnum? That’s the biggest hunk of hand-gun I’ve ever handled.”

  “Throwing a much larger slug than the biggest Magnum,” said O’Toole with relish, “this little fellow develops four or five hundred more feet per second of muzzle velocity, and almost twice the rated muzzle energy of a forty-four Magnum. And this is a fifty caliber gun, Mike. Not a forty-four.”

  Shayne drew in his breath slowly, “Sweet Mother! Those slugs that sang over my head last night! As I recall it, a forty-four Magnum has penetration of about a dozen one-inch pine boards.”

  O’Toole nodded happily and purred, “Frankly, I don’t know what it would take to stop one of the fifty caliber bullets fired by this baby. But I don’t think they’d be likely to bounce off even your skull.”

  “You’ve been throwing a lot of technical data around,” said Shayne, “but you still haven’t given chapter and verse on this thing. What is it?”

  “It’s Russian, of course. They’re the only ones with the technical know-how and the sort of police state than can order such a thing produced regardless of cost and the economics involved. It’s known as a Lenski twelve-oh-seven. It was perfected and officially announced as in limited production in the mid-fifties. Fifty-six, I think. I could check on that if you want. And there’s still one small gimmick that I haven’t mentioned, Michael. This is the first truly automatic hand-gun ever invented. It is credited with firing a burst of six rounds in something less than a second. Or, twelve rounds in slightly over a second. That’s comparable with the performance of an automatic rifle.”

  Shayne said in an awed voice, “Then I didn’t dream it. The damned thing did make a row of six holes in the wall over my head last night. Each one of them the size of my thumb.”

  O’Toole nodded sagely. “They would be close-spaced, Michael. If it was set on first automatic.” He picked the gun up again and studied it reverently, turning it around and around in his hands.

  “You mentioned twelve rounds in little more than a second,” said Shayne dubiously. “Do you mean to say it only fired half its load last night?”

  O’Toole shrugged his thin, hunched shoulders and hefted the gun in his right hand. “It’s heavy for the weight it’s said to carry. I’d guess it’s still half loaded. It carries a total of twelve rounds, Michael. See these three buttons on the side of the grip?” He turned it to expose the three buttons Shayne had discovered previously. “They control the automatic mechanism. The top button, here, puts it on single shot. Each time you touch the trigger one bullet is fired. The second one gives you a burst of six, and the bottom one empties the chamber of all twelve rounds.”

  He leaned over the gun absorbedly and his fingers delicately manipulated it, and all at once the under part of the carriage beneath the barrel swung open revealing ah intricate mechanism inside with some of the ugliest and biggest metal-cased cartridges Shayne had ever seen, spaced in a plastic belt which apparently moved on rollers to feed a fresh cartridge into the firing chamber each time a bullet was discharged.

  “You see, Michael, how beautifully it is designed. Here is your second burst of six fifty caliber bullets ready and waiting for a second touch of the trigger. It’s a real beauty. We must give the Russians credit where credit is due.”

  “What would it be worth in this country?” Shayne asked.

  O’Toole shook his head and shrugged his shoulders again, closing up the gun as he did so. “There’s no catalog price. None have ever been imported to my knowledge. Collectors would pay five or six hundred … up to a thousand dollars to possess a clean specimen like this.” He cocked his head on one side and studied the gun speculatively. “’Tis comparable to a newly minted coin, Michael, or an unlicked postage stamp.” He rubbed the tips of his fingers gently over the metal surface again, sniffed them and then touched them to his tongue. He nodded with the rapt look of a winetaster testing for bouquet and vintage. “It’s been poorly cleaned by an amateur and retains traces of the original fish grease it was packed in at the factory … corresponding to our own cosmoline. And so, Michael. How did it come to Miami and into your hands?”

  Shayne said flatly, “I took it off a cheap hood last night … after he tried to liquidate me with it.” He paused and added thoughtfully, “It’s not the only one either, Rufe. Another one exactly like it turned up several days ago. Maybe Russia is shipping them into this country on the sly.”

  The gunsmith shook his head and said authoritatively, “It’s an expensive item for export, Michael. They were produced in limited quantities in the late fifties, and production ceased in nineteen fifty-eight, I believe it was. They were not regular issue, you understand, but were designed for the use of special police and saboteurs operating under particular conditions. The possession of one of these, you comprehend, transforms an individual into a one-man army.”

  “That,” said Shayne feelingly, “is the impression I got last night when I was on the receiving end of a burst from that baby.” He paused thoughtfully. “I suppose some of them could have made their way into Cuba with the Russian arms build-up there. With refugees and what-not floating back and forth, I suppose we’ve got to expect stuff like this to turn up in Miami now and then.”

  “It’s been happening of late,” O’Toole agreed cautiously. “Many queer ones are turning up about town. But this Lenski is in a different category, Michael. This gun has actually never been handled. It’s factory-fresh, you mig
ht say. A man with a case of those at his disposal would be in the way of making a fortune.”

  “There would be legal formalities about putting them on the market,” Shayne suggested.

  The gunsmith shrugged and smiled cynically. “Rare gun collectors are a breed like any other collectors, Michael. Not likely to ask embarrassing questions or stand on legalities.” He hesitated and then said quietly, “I will pay a flat five hundred each for as many as you want to bring me. Pass that word around if you run into the right people.”

  Shayne nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll keep it in mind, Rufus. Yours would at least end up in private collections and not in the hands of indiscriminate criminals.”

  “There would be that advantage to keep in mind,” O’Toole agreed cheerfully.

  Shayne hesitated before picking up the Russian handgun again, shuddering a trifle inwardly as he recalled the careless manner in which he had handled it when he innocently assumed that six rounds was all it carried. “I suppose the damned thing is cocked now and ready to start firing,” he said with a frown. “How safe is it to carry around in my pocket?”

  “Perfectly safe. It can’t fire unless one of those three buttons is depressed at the same time the trigger is pulled. It’s an automatic locking device that is practically foolproof. But I’ll be happy to unload it for you if you’ll feel better about carrying it.”

  “I would feel a little better,” Shayne admitted honestly. “But I’d better leave it as is to turn over to Painter. He’s going to take a very dim view of my walking off with it last night anyhow.”

  He picked the weapon up gingerly by the butt and dropped it into his pocket. “I’ll let you know if anything develops, Rufe.”

  “You do that. The offer I made was for a quantity, Michael. For just one I will double the ante.”

  With a grin, Shayne said, “If Painter gets wind of that he may be around to make a deal with you.” He went out with a farewell wave of his big hand, and Rufus O’Toole watched the door close behind his broad back with a speculative gleam in his bright blue eyes.