Free Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane

framed photos of old wooden sailing ships and seaports in the distant past. On his left side, against the window, was the antique desk, a handmade oaken relic from the captain's cabin of some forgotten clipper ship.
    Twice I walked around that comfortable room, mentally cataloging every item I saw, trying to put it into a perspective that would change a suicide to a kill, without success.
    Then I stopped beside the desk, which reverted to Doolan's meticulous form—no unruly work in progress, just an orderly arrangement of pens, pencils, yellow pads, and so on. But a long time ago Doolan had shown me the hidden button that opened the side panel of that museum piece. I pushed it in, gave it a half turn.
    Silently, the panel swung open and there, on mounts, were five of the six guns Doolan had so carefully preserved. They were cleaned, oiled, and I didn't have to check them to know they were fully loaded. To Doolan, a gun was only a gun when it was ready to be used and to hell with safety rules. A bag of silica gel lay at the bottom of the enclosure to absorb any moisture, a cleaning kit and a can of Outers 445 gun oil beside it.
    A real heavy-duty arsenal, a pair of matched German P38s from World War II, a .357 Magnum, a .44 Colt revolver, and a standard Colt .45 automatic. The missing piece was in the property clerk's office downtown waiting to be claimed.
    I took the .45 off the peg and held it in my hand. It felt good. A weapon just like it was sandwiched between piles of clothing in a drawer back at my hotel room. Then a tightness ran across my shoulders, and I put it back. I closed the panel to that secret place and felt my mouth go into a tight grin.
    The police shakedown hadn't been that thorough after all.
    Strange that Pat had missed that. But then again, there was no reason for him to know that it was there—I imagined precious few of us had been shown that hiding place.
    I sat on the edge of the desk. Everything still fit in place—knowing the reality of the world of pain he faced in coming weeks, Doolan would have taken out his old .38 Special, sat there in the dark being saturated by the music he loved, savored the familiar feel of the gun in his hand, then when he was ready, simply shot himself.
    I said a muffled "Damn!" and got off the desk like it was a hot burner on a stove. I snapped off the light and went back to the door in the living room.
    Doolan had been a typical New Yorker and kept himself barricaded in at night behind four solid locks fastened to the fire-resistant steel shell that backed up the door. Had it been fully latched, no cop could have kicked it in. Only the old original Yale lock had been torn loose, the kind you could open with a credit card, but was okay to keep kids out.
    For a while I just stared at the splintered wood around the tongue of the lock, realizing that Doolan didn't have any reason to button himself up completely that night. He had committed himself to a decisive move that didn't concern itself with visitors. That was undoubtedly the thinking that had satisfied Pat.
    I stepped into the hall and hooked the padlock back in the hasp.
    Everything still fit. Pat was right.
    And I still said, Bullshit!
    Doolan had been a man of habit. No matter what he had planned, he still would have buttoned up behind locked doors, just as he had done every other night in his life. Nothing cancels out a ritualized, internalized program like that.
    At any other time, when he was opening the minimum security of the old Yale lock, he would have had weaponry at hand that he damn well knew how to use. He was well aware that the old lock wasn't able to cope with so modern a chunk of high technology as a piece of plastic.
    Pat wanted me to be satisfied that Doolan had committed suicide. I was halfway there—I was convinced Doolan was dead.
    But why?
    The facts and his doomed situation seemed to say it all, sure. Then why the hell did something bug me the way it did?
    Doolan had a motive for suicide,