The Faberge Egg Read Online Free

you’re the only guy I can tell it to.”
    “Sure, pal, tell me about it,” McGuffin urged.
    The next day, Miles Dwindling sat at his desk listening with a slowly sagging jaw as his new employee read his first report, listing every penny that was stolen and where it was now hidden.
    “How did you do that?” the old detective asked when McGuffin had finished.
    “I don’t know, I guess he just wanted to talk,” McGuffin answered.
    “That face, Master McGuffin, is a gift from the gods. You will go far in this business.”
    McGuffin smiled sheepishly. He hadn’t told the old man that he was leaving in the fall. And when Dwindling’s client rewarded him with an extra $1,000, which Miles, true to his word, split evenly with his new employee, McGuffin realized that quitting on the old man would be the hardest and cruelest thing he had ever done.
    And eighteen goddamned years later I’m still at it, McGuffin said to himself as he opened the ship’s door to his office, adorned with the brass plate that had eluded Miles Dwindling for thirty-odd years: AMOS MCGUFFIN: CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS.
    With a swipe of one arm, McGuffin cleared a place on the desk and opened the Kruger file. The pages smelled damp and musty. There were several newspaper articles, along with copies of the homicide and medical examiner’s report and a legal pad filled with McGuffin’s notes. He arranged the clippings in chronological order, discovered that the original report of the murder was missing, then remembered the yellowed newsprint in his pocket. He placed it on top of the pile and began to read:
    PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR SLAIN IN OFFICE
    Late yesterday afternoon, as his partner was stepping off the elevator just outside the door, San Francisco private investigator Miles Dwindling was shot and killed in an apparently motiveless crime. “If I’d been there a minute sooner I might have saved him,” his young partner, Amos McGuffin, wept.
    McGuffin tossed the clipping aside. There was no need to read it. He knew better than anyone except the murderer what had happened that day. He had just returned from what was to have been a routine background investigation for an insurance company. A logger had lost a finger to a brand-new chain-saw when one of the links gave way. He wanted $10,000 for his trouble and McGuffin assumed he was entitled to it, until he got a surprised look at the rest of the family. They were seated around a cable spool in their junk-laden backyard, eating a lunch of grits and okra, but having some difficulty with the utensils. Every member of the family, down to the smallest child, was missing two or three fingers, all of them neatly chopped off by their mother with a bloody ax. This was the fifteenth attempt, each time under a false name, to run the old chain-saw scam.
    The young detective walked slowly down the corridor, utterly depressed by the depraved greed he had witnessed that day. He was scarcely twenty feet from the door when he heard the shot and bolted for the office. He pulled open the door and collided with a small, moon-faced man with great bulging eyes.
    “Let me go!” the little man hissed, but McGuffin held tight to his lapels.
    When he squirmed and kicked and tried to bite, McGuffin slammed him hard against the wall, once, twice, and he was out. He let him slide to the floor, then lunged across the room to his boss, slumped in his desk chair, blood staining his striped shirt from suspender to suspender.
    “Hold still, I’ll get a doctor!” McGuffin said, not knowing yet if Miles was alive or dead. He scrabbled across the desk for the phone, dialed the emergency number and ordered an ambulance. As he was hanging up, he saw the first glint of life in Miles’ eyes. He was warning McGuffin of something going on behind him. McGuffin turned to see the little man inching his way across the floor to the gun at the opposite side of the room, near the oak coat tree where it usually hung from Miles’ shoulder