Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 1959

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Magicians who perform startling feats do not as a rule wind up murdered. But Mike had some grave and dangerous misgivings on that score.

Her voice was cold, hollow, disembodied, like an echo in a mausoleum. “I have come to warn you, Michael Shayne,” she said. “If you ignore what I have to say you will be guilty of murder,”

Had Miami’s lanky, broad-shouldered, redheaded private investigator not been blessed with an immunity to hangovers, he would doubtless have jumped to the ceiling. He distinctly remembered having closed the office door earlier in the morning before seating himself at his desk.

The door, leading into the small outer office of his absent secretary, Lucy Hamilton, was still closed, and he was so alert and sensitive to its familiar click that it could rouse him out of the deepest slumber.

“Who are you and how did you get in here?” yelled Shayne at the apparition.

Only her lips moved when she spoke. They were crimson lips, moist, voluptuous looking, and the redhead’s experienced eye noted that, oddly enough, they were not made up. The words did not seem to come from her. An automaton, ghastly beautiful, a soiled wax figure from Madam Tousseau’s, yet with piercing dark eyes that were the opposite of wax-like.

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