From the body on the floor to the body in the film strip, the case seemed to grow hotter at every step, even as the trail seemed to be growing colder — and then Selby learned a very strange thing...

The naked girl on the roof was no longer screaming. But she was trying to. She stood just back of the foot-high parapet, head thrown back and fists clenched hard against her bare thighs, her whole body rigid with terror as she tried to force the frozen scream past her throat.

She was a silver blonde, with long, tapering legs, a tiny waist, and the kind of pointed, upthrust breasts that meant she was probably still in her teens.

I opened the kiosk door a little wider, stepped out onto the roof, and motioned to my detective partner, Stan Rayder, to circle around her, just in case. The alarm that had brought us barreling halfway across Greenwich Village to this three-story brownstone on Bleecker Street had said the girl was a jumper.

Although I myself didn’t make her for one — still, you can never be sure. The difference between a jumper and a non-jumper can sometimes be as little as an unexpected noise or a sudden movement.

She’d heard us. Slowly her chin came down, and then with short, jerky movement’s of her head, she turned to face us. But she didn’t really see us, I knew; she was looking through us and beyond us.

I took a single slow step toward her, paused for a moment, and took another. The girl didn’t move. She stared at me unblinkingly, and even when Stan Rayder started off at an angle that would bring him up behind her, her eyes stayed on me.

With Stan already in motion, there was no point in hesitating any longer. I tried to work up the kind of big, friendly, reassuring smile that seemed to be called for, took a deep breath, and walked across the asphalt toward her, as casually as if approaching a naked girl on a rooftop at high noon were something a man did every day of his life.

We almost lost her. With about ten feet remaining between us, her eyelids fluttered and her rigid, quivering body sagged abruptly. If we’d been only another foot apart, and if I hadn’t been a fairly fast man on my feet, she’d have toppled over the parapet and ended up on the pavement three floors below.

Even so, it was much too close. At the same instant I grabbed her, I felt my left ankle turn a little, and for a very long and very bad moment I found myself looking straight down into the upturned faces of the crowd beneath us on the sidewalk.

It couldn’t have lasted longer than a second or so, but it was long enough to chill the film of sweat along my ribs and across my back. By the time I’d recovered my balance and carried the girl a few steps away from the parapet, my heart was slugging away like an air hammer.

“A close one, Pete,” Stan Rayder said softly as he came up to us. “I thought you’d had it.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “Only the good die young, Stan.”

“Very pretty,” he said, studying the unconscious girl as I shifted her around to a more comfortable position in my arms. “And she smells pretty, too. Offhand, I’d say it was a blend of Chanel Number Five and Vat Sixty-nine.”

“That’s bad?” I asked.

He grinned and fell into step beside me as I started back across the roof to the kiosk. Stan’s a deceptively thin, deceptively mild, studious-looking young cop with a little premature silver in his crewcut, a look of perpetual surprise in his gray eyes, and a bomb in both fists.

“I was just making a clinical observation,” he said. “And besides, on this girl, even kerosene would smell good.”

“Let’s keep it clinical,” I said. “And while you’re resting, how about opening that door a little wider?”

He pushed the kiosk door all the way open, stood aside while I carried the girl through it, and followed me down the steep, narrow stairway to the third-floor corridor.

“Now to find out where she came from,” Stan said as I lowered the girl to the floor. “Which reminds me — I wonder where all the gawkers are? You’d think every tenant in the house would be up here by now.”

I took off my jacket, spread it over as much of the girl as it would cover, and turned to look down the dimly-lit corridor. “Maybe they’re scared,” I said.

“Scared? Scared of what?”

“Maybe of the same thing that scared our girl here.”

He glanced at her, and then bent down on one knee to peer at her face more closely.

“She was moving her eyelids a little,” he said. “I think she might be coming out of it.”

There was a half-open door about three quarters of the way down the hall. “Stay here with her, Stan,” I said. “I want to see what’s on the other side of that door there.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Take your time.”

I walked down to the doorway, stood looking about the living room inside for a moment, and then stepped in.

It wasn’t the kind of room you’d want to spend much time in if you were subject to nightmares. It had two bright-orange walls, one blood-red wall, and one wall painted dull black with silver lightning flashes zigzagging across it from all directions. Most of the furniture was made of chrome pipe, twisted into futuristic curves and angles and strung with fishnetting dyed pink and green and purple.

The room looked like an explosion in a paint factory, even without the bilious yellow carpet and the dozen or so colored mobiles that festooned the ceiling.

Looking very much out of place was a quite ordinary combination bar and hi-fi cabinet, and scattered about the room were a black sheath dress, a pair of very small black suede pumps, and a few wisps of black lace lingerie.

There was a draped archway in one of the orange walls, with the drapes parted just far enough for me to see the corner of a bed.

“Police officer,” I called. “Anyone that’s in there, come out.”

Aside from the muted hiss of a needle circling in the safety grooves of a record on the hi-fi’s turntable, there was no sound of any kind.

I switched off the hi-fi and walked through the archway to the bedroom, which surprised me by being as commonplace as the living room was otherwise.

Beyond the bedroom was a small bathroom, and beyond that an almost equally small kitchen. But there was no one, and nothing of any immediate interest, in either place.

I started back toward the bedroom. If there was anyone in the apartment, he — or she — would have to be in the bedroom closet or on the floor beneath the bed.

Of so I thought. As it turned out, he was in neither place. He was in the living room, lying on the floor between the sofa and the wall, where he’d been hidden from me by the furniture and the half-open hall door when I came in.

He lay on his back, a handsome, even-featured man in his early forties, with overlong hair the color of wet sand, a pencil-line mustache, and wide-set gray eyes that stared up at me with the dry, lusterless film of death.

He was lying with both arms folded tightly across his middle, as if he’d been hugging himself against the cold, and spreading out at either side of his forearms were dark blotches, stark and ragged-edged against the white of his sport shirt.

According to the rule book, of course, a cop doesn’t touch a body until it’s been examined by the Medical Examiner or one of his assistants.

Of course.

I reached down and, very carefully, grasping only the thumbs, lifted his forearms away from his chest.

There were four bullet holes, none of them more than two inches from the others, and all of them made at such close range that the cloth around them was not only stained with burned powder but charred by the muzzle blast.

They were very small holes, and if they turned out to have been made by anything bigger than a .22, I was going to be very much surprised.

I lowered the arms to their original position, walked back to the living room, picked up the black sheath dress and the suede pumps, and went out to where I’d left Stan Rayder and the naked girl.

It was hard to believe that she was the same girl I’d almost dived off the roof with. She was sitting up now, holding my jacket tightly against the front of her body, watching my approach with just about the same degree of irritation she might have shown had I surprised her while she was taking a sun bath in the raw.

Still, when I reached her, I saw that she was breathing a little raggedly, and that she seemed to have all she could do to keep her lips from trembling.

Stan Rayder was leaning against the wall, studying per bemusedly. “She’s okay now, Pete,” he said. “She snapped out of it, just like that.”

“So I see,” I said. I put the shoes down on the floor beside her and dropped the dress across her thighs.

“They’re yours, aren’t they?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Better put them on,” I said. “There’ll be a lot of people around here any minute now.”

She hesitated for a moment. Then, still holding my jacket in front of her with one hand, she reached for the dress with the other and made a tentative effort to get to her feet. “Look the other way,” she said.

Stan and I walked down the hall a few steps and turned to face the open door of the apartment I had just left.

“Anybody home down there?” Stan asked me!

“There’s a man between the wall and the sofa in the living room. Somebody hit him four times with a small-caliber gun. You could cover all four wounds with a dollar bill.” I gestured back toward the girl. “She say anything?”

“Just her name. She says it’s Doris Hagen. And she didn’t even say that until just before you got back. She came out of it all at once, but she’d lost her voice. Which figures. The way she was screaming up on that roof, she’s lucky to get it back at all.”

I’d been listening to the soft, slithering rustle of the dress as the girl got into it, but now the sound had stopped.

“You about ready, Miss Hagen?” I called over my shoulder.

She didn’t say anything, but her heels clicked toward us, and we turned around. She was carrying my jacket. She handed it to me and I put it on. Even with nothing whatever beneath it, the sheath dress fit her like so much shimmering black lacquer. How she’d managed to get into it while wearing the lacy black lingerie I’d seen in the living room of the apartment, I couldn’t guess.

She bobbed her chin almost imperceptibly and raised a small, slender hand to brush the silver-blonde hair back from her forehead. “I really threw a fit up there on the roof, didn’t I?” she said.

“It happens,” I said. “This is my precinct partner, Detective Rayder. My name’s Selby. We’ll be carrying this homicide all the way.”

“He’s — dead, then?”

“You didn’t know that?”

She looked toward the open doorway. “No,” she said. “I was hoping he...” She broke off, her eyes suddenly very bright.

“Who did the shooting?” I asked, making it almost casual. “You?”

“Me? Oh, no. God, no. It wasn’t me.”

“Who, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but I... I mean, I was in the apartment, but not in the living room. I was in the bedroom.”

“You didn’t see the person that killed him?”

“Whose apartment is it? Yours or his?”

“His.”

I turned toward the open doorway. “We’d better go inside,” I said. “After you, Miss Hagen.”

“Do we have to?”

“You won’t have to look at him,” I said. “The body’s between the sofa and the wall, where you can’t see it.” I gestured, toward the door.

She hesitated, then squared her shoulders and walked resolutely to the doorway. At the threshold she hesitated again, then quickly stepped inside, sat down in the first fishnet chair she came to, and crossed her legs.

I drew another chair close to hers, got out my notebook, and sat waiting while Stan made a fast inspection of the body. When he’d finished and had taken a seat on a hassock, I said, “What’s the dead man’s name, Miss Hagen?”

“Larry. Larry Yeager.”

I wrote the name in my book and glanced over at Stan. “How about calling Barney?” I asked. “Tell him what we’ve got and ask him if he’ll start the ball rolling on this with Communications.”

Barney was Acting-Lieutenant Barney Fells, the commander of the Sixth Precinct detective squad, and Stan’s and my immediate superior.

Stan crossed to the phone, lifted the handset by hooking his left index finger beneath the flange at the receiver end — a method that neither leaves nor obliterates fingerprints — and began to dial.

By phoning Barney Fells we’d be saving time, but we would not, of course, be going by the book. In New York, the first police officer on the scene of a crime is usually a member of the uniform Force, and SOP is for him to immediately phone the Communications Bureau at police headquarters on Centre Street.

In the present case, however, Barney Fells would take care of the call to Communications, and they in turn would dispatch an ambulance and notify the Sergeant on Patrol, the Medical Examiner’s office, the District Attorney’s office, the Bureau of Identification, the Photographic Bureau, the crime lab, and others.

“Can I get my things?” Doris Hagen asked.

I nodded, and while she was about it, I looked in the outsize handbag that had been lying on the coffee table. There wasn’t any gun in it. I handed it to her, and she stuffed her underthings and stockings into it.

“First,” I said, when she was settled in her chair again, “let’s establish the relationship.”

She looked at me sharply. “What?” Her position in the chair had caused her dress to slide halfway up her thighs, but she made no effort to pull it down again. I got the feeling that little things like that made no difference to her, either way.

“You his girl friend?” I asked.

“I guess you could say that. We weren’t engaged or anything, though.”

“You live here with him?”

“No.”

Stan Rayder finished with his call and sat back down on the hassock. “I kept one ear tuned in on you,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Suppose you take it from the beginning, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Tell us exactly what happened.”

She took a deep breath, shifted her position in the chair slightly, and crossed her legs the other way. Her skirt rode up another couple of inches, and stayed there.

“Well,” she said, “there was this knock on the door. The front door downstairs stays open all the time. So anybody who wants to come up here, well all he has to do is do it.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Just before it happened. About ten minutes of noon.”

“Where was Mr. Yaeger at the time?”

“Here, in the living room. I was in here, too.”

“I thought you told us you were in the bedroom.”

“That was later. When this knock came, I was in here with Larry.” She paused. “Look — you said tell you exactly what happened, right?”

I nodded.

“All right, then. I’d been doing... well, like a strip. It was a little game we played sometimes. What we’d do, we’d have a drink together, and then I’d take my dress off. And then we’d have another drink, and I’d take off something else. And so that’s what we were doing this morning when somebody knocked on the door. I went out to the bedroom because I didn’t have anything on. And poor Larry — he went to the door to open it.”

“You didn’t actually watch him open it?”

“No.”

“And then?”

“Well, I’d no sooner got into the bedroom when I heard the shots. I almost died. I thought whoever had shot him would come in the bedroom and shoot me, too.”

“Why?”

“Because when he saw my clothes out there, he’d know I had to be somewhere around. He’d think I saw him shoot Larry, and he’d have to kill me too to keep me from telling.”

“You say ‘he.’ You hear a man’s voice?”

“Well, no. I... Well, naturally, I just assumed it was a man.”

“But now that you think back on it, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have been a woman?”

“Well, no. I guess not.”

“How long was it before you went up on the roof?”

“Just a few seconds. Just as soon as I could move again.”

“Weren’t you afraid the killer might still be in the living room, or out in the hall?”

“I didn’t go out that way I went out the bedroom window and climbed up the fire escape.” She paused. “After that, all I remember is trying to yell for help. But I couldn’t say anything. Any words, I mean. All I could do was scream.”

“What do you do for a living, Miss Hagen?”

“Whatever I have to,” she said. “Sometimes I model a little. Sometimes I do other things.” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”

I looked over at Stan. “Feel like knocking on a few doors?” I asked. “Maybe some of the other tenants saw or heard something.”

“There aren’t any other tenants,” Miss Hagen said. “Larry was the only one.”

“In a house this size?”

“It belongs to Old Lady Gotrocks, herself. She’s in Europe. And if you want to meet a real nut, she’s your girl. You ought to see her apartment downstairs. She’s got it painted even crazier than this one is.”

“Let’s get a little information on Mr. Yeager,” I said. “He married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“Not that I know of. He never said.”

“You know any of his family?”

“There isn’t any. At least, that’s what he told me.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

“He was an actor.”

The phone rang, and Stan walked over to answer it. “Hello?... Oh, hi, Barney... They did? Fine... He was, eh?... Yeah... uh-huh... Yeah, I’ve got it. Mrs. Reba Daniels, Paragon Apartments... You too, Barney, and many thanks.”

“What was that all about?” I asked as he hung up and returned to the hassock.

“Barney asked BCI for—”

“Asked who?” Miss Hagen said.

“The Bureau of Criminal Information,” Stan told her. “Barney is Pete’s and my boss, Miss Hagen. He asked BCI for checks on you as well as your Mr. Yeager.”

“How nice of him,” she said. “And what’d he find out?”

“About you, nothing,” Stan said.

“What about Yeager?” I asked.

“He had a yellow sheet. Not that it amounted to much. He got into a hassle with his wife once and—”

“Wife?” Miss Hagen said. “What wife?”

Stan ignored her. “This was way back in 1950, Pete. All that happened was that Yeager and his wife got into a pretty loud argument, and the neighbors called the police. Yeager was drunk and took a swing at one of the cops — which explains the yellow sheet. BCI figured we’d be asking for a check on the wife, too, so they went ahead and made one. Her first name’s Reba. Since she was married to Yeager, she’s been married and divorced a second time. A contractor named Arnold Daniels. She’s living at the Paragon Apartments, under the name of Reba Daniels.”

I wrote down the name and address and turned back to Miss Hagen. “Mr. Yeager in trouble of any kind?” I asked.

“Not so far as I know, he wasn’t.”

“He have any enemies?”

“Well... not enemies, exactly. He wasn’t getting along so well with Mr. Eads, though.”

“Who’s Mr. Eads?”

“He’s the man who wrote the play Larry was going to have a part in. Warren Eads. I don’t know what the trouble was, but Larry sure didn’t like him. I heard him blessing Mr. Eads out on the phone one day. I never saw Larry so mad in all the time I knew him.”

I put my notebook away and got to my feet. “That’ll do for now, Miss Hagen,” I said. “Stan, let’s see what we can find.”

Stan took the living room and I took the bedroom. I was just finishing up when Stan called from the living room. “C’mere a minute, Pete.”

He was down on his hands and knees, about two feet to the left of the hall door. “Take a look,” he said, pointing to a narrow, inch-and-a-half shard of green glass lying propped against the edge of the carpet. “Miss Hagen swears it wasn’t there when she vacuumed this room, just before she and Yeager started their little strip game.”

I knelt down beside Stan, picked up the shard, and turned it over in my fingers. “It’s a piece of lens from a pair of sunglasses,” I said.

“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.”

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.”

I looked in the Manhattan directory, found that Eads lived at the Amador Hotel, and called him there. The desk clerk told me he was out, but that he had left a phone number where he could be reached. I called the number, listened to the click of the receiver being taken off the hook, and then to twenty seconds of the mixture of voices and clinking glassware that can come only from a bar.

“Sully’s Taproom,” a husky Irish voice said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I was supposed to meet a friend there, but I’ve forgotten the address.”

“Thirty-sixth and Third,” the voice said. “Hurry over.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and hung up.

“Hey, Selby,” Doris Hagen yelled again. “Your minute was up half an hour ago.”

“I’ll check with you in an hour or so, Stan,” I said.

“Do that, Pete. It gets lonely around here at times.”

“You’ve got Miss Hagen, don’t forget.”

He winced. “Don’t remind me,” he said.

I went downstairs, got into the unmarked police Plymouth we had left at the curb, and headed for Sully’s Taproom and a talk with Warren Eads.

The woman who answered my knock on the door of apartment 4D had the kind of beauty that makes you look a second time to make sure your eyes weren’t kidding you the first time. She was about thirty, with gray-green eyes beneath incredibly long lashes, shoulder-length auburn hair with gold highlights in it, and the body of a girl of eighteen.

There wasn’t any question about the body. She was wearing a white shorts-and-halter getup which, had she worn it on the street, would have gotten her arrested.

“Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She nodded. “What is it, please?”

“Detective Selby,” I said, showing her my shield. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. May I come in?”

“Yes, of course.” She held the door for me as I entered, then closed it and leaned back against it. “What’s happened?”

“All right if we sit down?”

She crossed to a white leather sofa, and sat down at one end of it. I sat down in one of the matching leather chairs and got out my book.

I’d noticed an almost inaudible whining sound when I came in, but I’d thought it had come from the street. Now I realized it was in the room itself.

“What’s that?” I asked. “It sounds like some kind of motor.”

“It is,” she said, smiling a little. “Don’t you recognize a Mercedes when you hear one?”

“Not every time,” I said.

“It’s on a record,” she said, gesturing toward a console at the far end of the room. “I turned it down before I answered the door.”

“I see,” I said. “And you sit around listening to the sound of car engines on records?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “We all do. We sports car buffs. I have an Austin-Healey myself.” She gestured again, this time toward a glass cabinet filled with loving cups and plaques and silver platters. “Those are some of the things I’ve won. Not in races, though. Rallies and gymkhanas. Concours d’Elégance. That sort of thing.” She drew one bare leg up beneath her and leaned back against the cushion. “Just what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Larry Yeager,” I said.

“Larry?” She smiled at me questioningly. “In heaven’s name, why?”

“You were married to him once, weren’t you?”

“Why, yes. But that was ages ago. I haven’t even talked to the man in — why, it must be all of ten or twelve years.”

“I see.”

“Has something happened to him?”

“He’s been killed,” I said. “Murdered.”

She drew her breath in sharply. “Larry? Murdered? Oh, how dreadful!”

“Most murders are,” I said.

“Do you know who did it?”

“No.”

She looked down at the floor, shaking her head, her eyes withdrawn and remote. “Larry dead,” she said softly. “Somehow it just doesn’t seem possible. He was always so... so alive.”

“You said you hadn’t talked to him in ten or twelve years,” I said. “Does that mean you hadn’t even seen him in all that time?”

“I’d seen him, yes. But never to talk to. I saw him on the street a few times, but he didn’t see me.” She paused. “We were together only a few months, you know. We got married just before the war in Korea broke out. Larry was recalled to active duty right away. By the time he came out, we both knew we’d made a mistake. We got a divorce.”

“I understand he had no living relatives.”

“That’s right. He had no one at all.”

“I wonder if you’d mind doing the police a favor, then. In cases like this, we’re supposed to have a next-of-kin identification. Which means we’ve got a problem.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll be glad to make the identification for you. Would you want me to do it now?”

“Not right this minute,” I said. “First, I’d like to find out a little about Larry.”

She sighed. “It’s all so strange,” she said. “It’s almost as if I hadn’t ever been married to him at all. Almost as if I’d never even known him. I... I just don’t feel anything.” She smiled faintly. “I suppose that sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s true. I simply don’t feel anything at all.”

“Basically, what kind of person was he?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Well, if you had to say he was one thing more than any other, it would be that he was completely self-centered. He was the most completely selfish person I’ve ever known.”

“Can you think of any habits or ways of his that might have led to trouble?”

She ran the tip of a small pink tongue across her upper lip very slowly, and then shook her head.

“No,” she said.

I put my notebook away. “I appreciate your help, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “Now, if you’d be good enough to make that trip to Bellevue, we—”

“Bellevue?”

“That’s where Manhattan homicides are autopsied. Larry’s body ought to be there by now. I’ll arrange for a car to pick you up and bring you home again.”

She nodded, got to her feet, and walked toward a door at the rear of the room. “I’ll be only a minute,” she said. “I want to put on something a little more appropriate.”

The door closed behind her, and I went over to the telephone table and made arrangements for her trip to Bellevue. Then, while I waited for her to dress, I decided to call Stan Rayder at Larry Yeager’s apartment and see whether there had been any new developments. But I had, I discovered, forgotten to write down Yeager’s phone number. I looked around for a directory, but I couldn’t find one.

I walked over to the door Reba Daniels had closed behind her. “Mrs. Daniels?” I called.

“Yes?”

“I can’t seem to find your phone book.”

“I must have dragged it in here with me again,” she said. “Yes, here it is. Whose number did you want, Mr. Selby? I’ll look it up for you?”

“Larry Yeager’s,” I said.

There was a short silence; then she called out the number, and I went back to the phone and dialed Yeager’s apartment. Stan Rayder answered on the second ring.

“Pete, Stan,” I said. “Anything new happen over there?”

“Nothing important,” he said. “Doris Hagen’s on her way to the slammer, and Yeager’s body was on its way to Bellevue half an hour ago.”

I told him about my talk with Warren Eads and June Courtney.

“Where are you now?” Stan asked.

“Reba Daniels’ apartment. She’s going over to Bellevue to make our ID for us.”

“Good. She give you any dope on Yeager?”

“No. I’ve been drawing blanks ever since I left you.”

“There was a call for you. Barney passed it along from the squad room. Whoever it was that called left his number, but he wouldn’t give his name.” He told me the number and I wrote it down.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give him a call.” I said so long, depressed the receiver for a moment, and dialed the number he had given me.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice said.

“This is Pete Selby,” I said. “Someone wanted me to call him at that number.”

“It was me. G-Man Gault. Remember me?”

I remembered him, and I ought to have remembered his voice as well. He was a roving bootlegger and part-time stoolie named Donald Gault, but much more widely, and variously, known as G-Man, Creep Eye, and Gin Bag. The last name was due to the fact that he always wore an outsize trench-coat, on the inside of which were sewn several rows of pockets the exact size of pint liquor bottles.

“I remember you, Gault,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I hear you caught the Yeager squeal,” he said. “I think I got something for you on it.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“Chief do you know a cat named Dixie Ryan?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that Dixie is a man you should hit right now. I mean suddenly, chief. From what I heard, Dixie had been laying it down that he was going to cut Yeager up real good.”

“Why?”

“All I know is it had something to do with a movie. Dixie runs a stag show once a week regular, you know. So maybe it was one of his he-and-she movies.”

“You know where Dixie’s hanging out these days?”

“Sure. He’s padding down upstairs at the Poor Boy Bar, on West Fourth Street.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look him up.”

“And listen, chief. If you hit the old jackpot, don’t go forgetting who gave you the combination.”

“I never forget a favor,” I said, and hung up.

I walked over to the door Reba Daniels had closed behind her. “I’ll be leaving now, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “That car ought to be here any minute. And thanks again for your help.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Good-by, Mr. Selby.”

I let myself out of the apartment and walked down the corridor to the stairway.

G-Man Gault was a reliable stool pigeon. If he said that Dixie Ryan had threatened Larry Yeager’s life, Dixie had very probably done just that.

The big question was why.

Dixie Ryan’s room over the Poor Boy Bar contained a neatly-made day bed, a small dresser, a kitchen table with a movie projector on it, about two dozen wooden folding chairs stacked against one wall, and nothing else.

“Those chairs for your stag-show customers, Dixie?” I asked as he closed the door behind me.

“Stag shows?” he said. “Me? You’ve been listening to the wrong birds, Selby.”

Dixie Ryan had once been a pretty fair club fighter, back in the days when there were such things. Now he was a hard-bitten, jack-of-all-crimes character who had been suspected of everything from stealing pennies off newsstands to murder. His ring-ruined features showed nothing, but beneath their tracery of scar tissue, his eyes were as cold and bright as pale blue ice.

“The same birds told me you threatened Larry Yeager,” I said.

“So what if I did?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Murdered.”

Dixie stared at me. “No lie?” he said. “And so who’s supposed to have killed him? Me?”

“That might depend on where you were around noon,” I said. “Say, from half-past eleven to half-past twelve.”

“No sweat there,” he said. “I was downstairs in the bar. You don’t believe me, ask them.”

“You can count on it,” I said. “What were you and Yeager having trouble about?”

“Maybe I don’t feel talkative.”

“And maybe a little time in the tank would change all that.”

“On what charge?”

“I could think up half a dozen in about that many seconds,” I said. “But this isn’t a bust, Dixie. I’m not interested in your damn stag show. The only thing that interests me is Larry Yeager.”

He stood there, not moving, studying my face as carefully as a jeweler appraising a diamond necklace.

“Hell,” he said at last. “You’ve leveling, aren’t you?”

“All the way,” I said.

He shrugged. “All right, then. It was over a film. A stag film. I showed it one night, along with a couple or three others. Yeager got in a hell of a sweat to buy it. He was so hotted up about it he was damn near bug-eyed.”

“He say why?”

“No. I asked him, but all he did was start trying to knock me down on my price.”

“And how much was that?”

“A grand.”

“A grand? For a stag film?”

“I didn’t say it was worth any grand. It wasn’t. But when I saw how hot the guy was, naturally I hyped the price up on him. It only cost me a hundred.”

“That’s a pretty stiff markup. What happened?”

“Well, I told him it was a grand or nothing. Then he said, well, how about renting it to him for a week? And I said okay, but it’d cost him a hundred bucks, and if he wasn’t back with it inside a week, I’d come and get it. So he gave me a yard, and I gave him the film, and that was that.”

“But he didn’t bring it back oh time?”

“No. And that’s what the trouble was about. But I was just trying to throw a scare into him.” He paused. “Anyhow, he said if I’d wait just two more days, he’d have the whole thousand for me. I thought he was conning me, naturally. But he wasn’t. Two days later, damn if he doesn’t show up with a grand. I was so surprised I almost forgot to count it while he was still here.”

“Where’d you get the film, Dixie?”

“From Fred Beaumont. You remember Beaumont, don’t you? That old joker the papers made so much over about ten years ago. You know, with what they called that sex club up in the Bronx and all?”

“I remember,” I said. “I thought he was still in jail.”

“He got out about two months ago. I bought the film off him a couple of days after he hit the street. He told me he made it just before he went in, ten years ago.”

“You know where he might live now?”

“The last I saw him, he was down in some flea-bag flop on the Bowery. The Palace, I think it was.”

“Thanks, Dixie,” I said as I turned to leave. “I’m glad to hear you aren’t running stag shows, after all.”

“Who, me?” he said. “I’d never even think of such a thing.”

Downstairs in the bar I talked to enough people to satisfy myself that Dixie had been there at the time of Yeager’s murder. Then I called the squad room to see whether there had been any messages for me.

A little to my surprise, the phone was answered by Stan Rayder. “I thought you’d still be over at Yeager’s apartment,” I said.

“I just got here. Pete, we got a break. They found the gun.”

“Good,” I said. “Where?”

“Beneath a parked car, about half a block from Yeager’s building. It’s a .22 Smith & Wesson Masterpiece.” He sounded mildly excited — which, for Stan Rayder, was a very rare thing. “And not only that, but we know who it belongs to.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Ballistics would have had time to—”

“Oh, but they did,” he said. “Their test slug and the slugs from Yeager’s body all came out of the same gun. It’s registered to a buy named Earl Lambert, 834 East 31st Street.”

“You check him through BCI?”

“Sure. Nothing on him, though.”

“You think Mr. Lambert might enjoy a little visit from us?”

“There’s no doubt about it.”

“Then Suppose I pick you up in front of the station house in fifteen minutes. Okay?”

“Right. And listen, Pete. Take your time but hurry. We don’t want to keep the man waiting.”

It took me no time to hurry, and less time to reach Lambert’s.

A big delivery truck was just pulling away from the curb in front of Earl Lambert’s apartment building, and so finding a parking space for the Plymouth was, for once, no problem.

I looked along the name cards beneath the mailboxes until I found Lambert’s apartment number, and then Stan and I rode the self-service elevator up to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor to 710.

The door was opened by a young man with a couple of big cowlicks in his dark chestnut hair, a pleasantly homely face with a lot of laugh wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and a broad-shouldered, hipless body shaped like a wedge.

“Mr. Lambert?” I asked.

He nodded, smiling tentatively.

“Police officers,” I said. “My name’s Selby. This is Detective Rayder.”

Lambert’s smile wavered a little, but he held the door open a bit wider and motioned us inside.

“You know a man named Larry Yeager?” I asked.

He said the name over to himself, then shook his head. “No, I can’t say that I do. Why?”

“Where were you around noon today?”

“Here. Listen, what’s—?”

“There’s a .22 Smith & Wesson registered in your name. Mind getting it for us?”

“It — I don’t have it. It was stolen.”

“I see.”

“I’m telling you the truth. It was in a footlocker down in the basement. Somebody broke in down there and stole it. They stole a lot of other stuff down there, too.”

“What was it doing in a footlocker in the basement?”

“I wasn’t going to be using it for a while, so I put it and some other things I wouldn’t be needing in the footlocker and stored it down there, out of the way.”

“How come you to have the gun in the first place?” Stan asked. “Somebody threaten you or something?”

“No. I used it as a target gun. I belong to a couple of gun clubs.”

“When did this burglary take place?” Stan asked.

“About six weeks ago. You can ask them over at the police station.”

“We will,” Stan said.

“What am I supposed to have done with it? Hold up somebody, or kill somebody, or what?”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“Well?” Lambert said. “You asked me if I knew a man named Larry Yeager. Am I supposed to have held him up or shot him or—” He broke off abruptly and stood there with a stunned, incredulous look in his eyes. “Good Lord!” he said. “You said noon, didn’t you? You asked me where I was at noon.”

“That’s right,” Stan said. “And you told us you were right here.”

“I was,” Lambert said. “And I can prove it. I talked with someone on the phone at noon. I know it was noon because the twelve o’clock news had just come on.”

“Who’d you talk to?” Stan asked.

“My boss,” he said. “It’s after closing time at the office, but I can give you my boss’ phone number.”

I took out my notebook. “His address too,” I said.

“I wonder what ever happened to him?” Stan said sourly.

I glanced at him. “Who?”

“Santa Claus,” he said.

When Stan and I got back to the station house, I paused at the teletype machine in the muster room long enough to read back through the alarms that had come in since noon, hoping that there might be something I could connect in some way with our homicide, but there was nothing.

“Anything on the chatterbox?” Stan asked as we started up the stairs to the squad room on the second floor.

“No,” I said. “It seems to have been a fairly quiet day.”

“And meanwhile Larry Yeager’s girl friend is sitting over there in the slammer. Man, that Doris Hagen was one mad girl when I sent her over there, Pete.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “She was working up a pretty good mad, even before she knew where she was going.”

I opened the gate in the counter that runs across the forepart of the squad room, held it for Stan, and followed him into the squad room proper.

Except for Barney Fells, the room was empty, which, considering the time of evening, was very unusual. The squad commander was standing by the water cooler, a paper cup in one hand and the stub of a cigar in the other, scowling at us — a tough, wiry, graying man with quick, sharp eyes. A cop’s cop, all the way.

I draped my jacket over the back of my chair, sat down, and gave him a fast recap of the things Stan and I had done so far.

When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “That Larry Yeager must have been one sweet character,” he said. “And so you figure he recognized somebody in that stag film and decided to add a little blackmail to his other accomplishments, eh?”

“There doesn’t seem to be any other answer,” Stan said.

“It’d be pretty hard to come, up with one, at that,” Barney said. “Pete, I took a call for you a while ago, from Ruby Wyman, over at the lab. About that piece of sunglass lens you boys found over at Yeager’s apartment. He says there was enough of it for him to work out the prescription the lens was ground from.”

“Good,” I said. “Ruby’s one of the best.”

“That he is. And another thing he did was to analyze the glass as glass. It seems there’s all kinds of optical glass, and this particular kind is fairly brittle, so it’s not so widely used as some of the others. Ruby says that narrows down the number of places that could have ground it.”

“It was a particular shade of green, too,” Stan said. “Considering that we have the exact prescription, plus the exact kind of glass, plus the exact shade, that idea of Pete’s about putting all the optical houses on the watch-and-wait just might pay off.”

“It all depends on how smart the killer is,” Barney said. “If he’s real smart, he’d never have that lens replaced at all. In any case, Ruby’s data have already been mimeoed and distributed to every optical house in the area.”

“We might even go a step farther,” I said. “Seeing that Ruby’s narrowed things down so well, why not ask the optical houses to check back through their records?”

“Hell, Pete,” Barney said. “There’d be tens of thousands of prescriptions for them to go through. Millions, maybe?”

“Not the way it’s narrowed down now,” I said. “And it just might turn the trick, Barney. If we could come up with the original prescription, we’d probably also come up with our killer.”

“Why even argue about it?” Barney said. “What can we lose? I’ll get Communications to put out a rider on that circular right away.” He moved off in the direction of his cubbyhole office.

“Well, so much for the lens,” Stan said. “What next, Pete?”

I got out my notebook, found the page listing the names of the people who had appeared in Fred Beaumont’s stag film, and handed it to him.

“How about calling BCI and the Information Unit on these?” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to catch up on a little paperwork.”

Stan got busy on the phone, and I settled down to the job of typing separate reports on all the people I had talked to since our arrival at Larry Yeager’s apartment.

“Mr. Selby?” a whiny voice said, so unexpectedly and so close to me that I whirled around in my chair, half angry at having been approached from behind in such a way.

The man who stood there, nervously toying with the brim of a brown straw hat, was somewhere in his middle forties, with iron-gray hair parted exactly in the middle, a sharp, narrow face, an almost lipless slit of a mouth, and a jutting, undershot jaw with a two-day growth of beard on it.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m Selby. What can I do for you?”

“I was a friend of Larry Yeager’s,” he said. “My name’s Grimes. Obie Grimes.”

I nodded toward the straight chair at the end of my desk. “Sit down, Mr. Grimes.”

He sat down carefully on the edge of the chair and put his hat in his lap. “When I saw in the paper what had happened to Larry, I knew I had to do something right away. I called Headquarters and asked them who was in charge of the case. They said you were.” He sat fingering the hat nervously for a moment. “I’ll put it straight out,” he said. “I’m scared to death, Mr. Selby. I’m so scared that I’m sick to my stomach.”

“Why?”

“Because I know who killed Larry,” he said, suddenly beginning to sweat. “But he made a mistake. When he—”

“Just a minute,” I said. “When who made a mistake?”

“Roy Cogan,” he said. “When he finds out he killed the wrong man—”

“What do you mean, wrong man?”

“I’m the one he meant to kill. Only he got it all wrong. When he finds out, he’ll kill me.”

“You mean Cogan shot Yeager, thinking it was you?”

“No. What I mean is, Cogan thought Yeager was the one that’d been messing around with his wife. But it wasn’t Yeager. It was me. Larry never even knew Cogan’s wife.”

“One moment, Mr. Grimes,” I said, noting that Stan was hanging up his phone. “Stan, this is Mr. Obie Grimes, Mr. Grimes, this is my partner, Detective Rayder.”

The, two men nodded to each other, and I said, “I wanted you to hear Mr. Grimes’ story, Stan. He thinks he knows who killed Larry Yeager.”

“I don’t just think it,” Grimes said in his whining voice. “I damn well know it.”

“Suppose you tell us about it,” I said.

“It’s just like I already told you,” he said. “Roy Cogan thought Larry was fooling around with Vernice — with Mrs. Cogan. But Larry’d never even laid eyes on her.”

“Then why did Cogan think that?” I asked.

“Because we’d been using Larry’s apartment. Vernice and me. I couldn’t take her to my place, on account of my landlady, and Vernice was afraid somebody’d see her if we went to a hotel.”

“You take Mrs. Cogan there pretty often?”

“Yes, quite a bit. I’d call Larry to see if he was going to be out. If he was, he’d leave the door on the latch. Vernice didn’t want to risk being seen on the street with anybody, so I’d meet her over there. But somebody must have seen her go in there. Somebody that knew her husband. Because the first thing Cogan did when he got out of jail was—”

“Hold it,” Stan said. “What was he in for?”

Grimes shuddered. “Manslaughter,” he said. “He beat a man to death with his fists. He was in Dannemora, but I didn’t know that, of course. Vernice told me he was down in South America, working for some oil company. The first I knew he wasn’t was when he busted in on me over at Larry’s apartment.”

“Tell us about it,” Stan said.

“Well, when Roy came back from Dannemora, and Vernice wasn’t home, he went straight over to Larry’s. Vernice said later she hadn’t expected him home for another six weeks. Anyhow, Cogan knew all about her going over there all the time, and that’s why he didn’t let her know exactly when he was getting out. He wanted to catch her by surprise.

“And he almost did catch her, too. I was already there at Larry’s, and Vernice was on her way over. In fact, she got there not more than five minutes after he left.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was sitting there waiting for Vernice, when all at once the door flies open and there stands Roy Cogan. I don’t know who he is then, of course; all I know is he’s the meanest looking one man I ever saw in my life, and one of the biggest. And besides that he’s got a gun in his hand.

“The first thing he says is, ‘You son of a bitch!’ and then he comes tearing over to me and grabs me by the shirt front and yanks me up out of the chair and says, ‘Damn you, Yeager, I’m going to blow your damn head off. Where’s Vernice?’ I was so scared I couldn’t even talk. I kept trying to tell him I wasn’t Larry, but I just couldn’t get the words out.

“And all the time I was trying to say something, he kept pushing that gun harder and harder into my belly and yelling for me to tell him where Vernice was. And then he yanks my arm up behind me and walks me all through the apartment in front of him, looking for Vernice.” He shook his head. “You talk about scared? Boy, I was so scared I—”

“We’ll concede, the point,” I said. “You were scared. Go oh, Mr. Grimes.”

“Well, so when he couldn’t find Vernice, he grabbed me by the shirt front again, and stuck the gun in my belly again, and stuck his face right up against mine and said if I didn’t, tell him where she was in five seconds, I was one dead son of a bitch.” He paused. “That’s when I got my voice back. I told him I was only using the apartment a couple of days while Larry was out of town. I said if he’d look at the stuff in my billfold, my driver’s license and all, he’d see I wasn’t Larry Yeager, I was Obie Grimes!” The man hesitated, embarrassed.

“And did he do that?” Stan asked.

“Yes, he did. I didn’t think he would, but he did. And then he shoved me halfway across the room and said he ought to have known Vernice wouldn’t fool around with anybody as ugly as me anyhow.”

“What’d Cogan do then, Mr. Grimes?” Stan asked.

“Well, mostly he just stood there and cussed about Vernice two-timing him while he was in Dannemora and all. And about how he was going to kill Yeager. Then all of a sudden he whirled around and tore out of the apartment, like he’d just thought of somewhere he had to be in a hell of a hurry.”

“And you say Mrs. Cogan arrived, shortly after that?” said.

“Not more than five minutes after.”

“How about Larry Yeager?” I asked. “What’d he have to say when you told him what had happened?”

“I never told him.”

“You didn’t warn him about the danger he was in?”

“I figured he was old enough to take care of himself.”

“What you really figured was that as long as Cogan was looking for Yeager, he wouldn’t be looking for you,” I said. “Isn’t that about the size of it, Mr. Grimes?”

“Anybody else would’ve done the same,” he said. “It’s every man for himself in this world, and you know it.”

“Where’s Vernice Cogan live?”

“The Dorsey. It’s an apartment house between 65th and 66th on Amsterdam, about halfway down the street on the east side.”

I took a moment to write down the address, and then reached for my phone. “All right, Mr. Grimes,” I said, dialing BCI. “Thanks very much for coming in.”

He stood up, mumbled something to himself, jammed the straw hat on his head, and stalked out of the room.

When BCI came on the wire, I asked that they make a check on Roy Cogan and call me back as soon as possible.

“Now all we have to do is wait,” I said as I hung up. “Stan, how’d you make out with that list of people in the stag film? You get BCI and the Information Unit squared away on them?”

“I was just finishing up when Grimes came in,” Stan said. “They said they’d do the best they could for us.”

When BCI called back, it was to say that Roy Cogan, in addition to his jolt for manslaughter, had been picked up for questioning three times as a suspect in burglaries, and released each time for lack of evidence.

Perhaps, I reflected, the .22 Smith & Wesson burgled from-the basement of Earl Lambert’s apartment house hadn’t changed hands so many times after all.

I told Stan what I had learned from BCI, and then stood up and got into my jacket. “I think I’ll run uptown for a little talk with Vernice Cogan,” I said. “It just might happen that I can get a line on where her husband is.”

“You want some help?”

“She’s just one woman, Stan.”

“If the husband’s there—”

“If he is, so much the better. I’ll bring him back with me.”

The Dorsey was one of an unbroken, block-long row of scabrous-looking converted brownstones behind an iron jungle of fire escapes and barred windows.

I got out of the Plymouth, went up the trash-strewn steps to the front door, and looked around for the bell button, but there wasn’t any. I started to rap on the door, but decided I might jar loose the single glass panel that hadn’t been replaced with cardboard, and knocked on the doorjamb instead.

Nothing happened. I knocked again, waited again, and had just raised my hand to knock a third time when the door began to creak open slowly, a few inches at a time, the way they do in the horror movies.

The woman glowering at me in the dimness of the hallway was about fifty, dressed in a grimy T-shirt, sleazy black pajama bottoms, and high-heeled shoes with red anklets. Her flushed, sharp-featured face looked hung-over and she smelled the same way.

“All right,” she said in a tight, harsh voice. “What is it now?”

“Mrs. Roy Cogan live here?” I asked.

“No,” she said, starting to close the door. “She moved.”

I reached out and caught the door. “Police,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“There are worse things,” I said.

“Name one,” she said, moving back just far enough to let me step into the dank, malodorous hallway. “She ain’t here, I tell you.”

“I’ll talk to the super, then.”

“I’m the super. The super, and the handyman, and hell, you name it.”

“I’m not so sure there was one. I never seen any men around here at all. In fact, the only time I saw her was when I picked up the rent. She was a bum and a boozer, and I’m glad she’s gone.”

“This is very important,” I said. “Anything you can do to help will be appre—”

“What could I do? All she was to me was a face and a name.”

“All right, then,” I said as I turned to leave. “Thanks, just the same.”

“For what?” she said, and slammed the door. The single remaining glass panel didn’t jar loose after all.

When I got back to the squad room, Stan Rayder was hunched over his junkheap typewriter, hammering the keys so rapidly it sounded like someone popping corn.

I didn’t stop him at first.

After I’d asked Communications to put out a pickup for Roy and Vernice Cogan, I told Stan the result of my visit to the Dorsey, and then asked what BCI and the Information Unit had been able to find out about the various performers in the stag film Larry Yeager had bought from Dixie Ryan.

“They did a terrific job, considering,” Stan said, reaching for his notes. “They couldn’t do anything about that teenage blonde girl, the one that did the dance for Fred Beaumont, because the only name Beaumont knew her by was Honey. But they did fine with the other six, the ones Beaumont did know the names of. In fact, they eliminated three of them for us, right off the bat.”

“Which ones?”

“Well, first there was Dave Anders, the young guy Beaumont said was studying to be an accountant. Anders is dead. A car wreck, six years ago.”

“Who were the other two?”

“Marian Coe and Genita Garren. Miss Coe’s the one who used to work for the telephone company. She’s been in the violent ward at Bellevue for the last two years.”

“And Genita Garren?”

“Poor girl — she married a cop.”

“And that’s supposed to eliminate her?”

“It was a French cop. She’s living in Bordeaux.”

“That leaves Eddie Willard, Bill Marcy, and Leda Ellis.”

“And Honey.”

“Yes, and Honey. Let’s take them down the line. What’s Eddie Willard doing these days?”

“Loansharking.”

“Fine way for a Columbia student to end up.”

“It just shows you the value of a college education. If he hadn’t gone to Columbia, he’d probably be borrowing money instead of lending it.”

“What about Bill Marcy?”

“Like they say in the papers — a millionaire sportsman. His father left him a mint.”

“And Leda Ellis?”

“According to the Information Unit, she’s still as lively as she was when she used to go to Fred Beaumont’s parties.” He put his notes away. “And that’s it, Pete.” He paused. “Listen, Pete — you’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on, right?”

“Too much of it. Why?”

“Well, while you’re doing it, why don’t I start checking out Willard and Marcy and Leda Ellis?”

“All three of them?”

“Why not?”

“You afraid I’ll snag you into helping with the paperwork, or what?”

“Well, there’s that, too. But mainly I’m just tired of homesteading this damn squad room.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “Good-by and good luck.”

Stan had been right about my having a lot of paperwork; and since it had to be done, now was the time to do it. I lit a cigar, took the cover off my Number five Underwood, and dug in.

I worked steadily for the better part of two hours; then I went down to the corner diner, had a quick breakfast, and came back to the squad room to pick up where I had left off.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was Ted. Holly, over at Communications.

“Pete, I’ve got some good news for you,” he said. “That rider on the circular about the sunglasses paid off. The Emmert Optical Company says they ground a pair to that identical prescription, and with that same kind and shade of glass. Of course, we can’t assume that this is the only prescription of its kind. But it sure ought to do for starters.”

“It’ll do fine,” I said. “You know the owner’s name yet?”

“It was on the doctor’s prescription. The glasses were made for a Miss Helen Ramey, 212 Central Park West.”

“Thanks, Ted.”

“She a newcomer to the case?”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “She just might have been the biggest part of it, right from the beginning.”

“You mean, without her, there might not have been any case to begin with?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I mean.”

I’d done enough paper work.

Helen Ramey turned out to be a small, neat girl with worried brown eyes, short brown hair, a blunt nose, and a head almost as perfectly round as a bowling ball. She had, she told me, lost her sunglasses at Atlantic City on a recent weekend there with two other girls from her office. She had come back from the water to find that someone had kicked her towel, and that her glasses had been lost in the sand or stolen. She had been very much distressed by the loss, since the glasses had cost her nearly forty dollars.

I was able to verify Miss Ramey’s story with both of the other girls, both of whom also verified the fact that, at the time of the murder, Miss Ramey had been having lunch at her desk in the office where she worked.

All of which meant that our only real lead in the homicide had evaporated, and that the glasses could have been dropped at Larry Yeager’s apartment by almost anyone at all.

After I’d driven back to the station house, I bought a quart container of black coffee and took it up to the squad room with me.

None of the messages oh my call spike had anything to do with the investigation, and the single report in my In basket, signed by the Assistant Medical Examiner who had autopsied Yeager’s body at Bellevue, boiled down to the fact that Yeager had died as a result of having been shot four times with a gun.

I’d just finished filing the report in Yeager’s folder when Stan Rayder walked in. While he got his big white mug from his desk and helped himself to some of my coffee, I told him the sad outcome of my check on Helen Ramey.

“She has an oddly shaped head,” I said. “It’s a little large, for a woman, and absolutely round. With a head like that, the frames of her sunglasses would have to be wider than most women’s frames would be.”

“I get it,” he said. “In other words, they’d be wide enough to be worn by either a woman or a man.” He shook his head. “A bum break. It means we’re right back where we started. Our hottest suspect just went right out the window.”

“That’s just about the sorry size of it,” I said. “And as long as we’re losing leads and suspects the way we are, we might as well let go of one more.”

“Who?”

“Yeager’s girl friend. Doris Hagen. I just don’t see her as a material witness, Stan. Not with the way things’ve worked out since we jugged her.”

“I agree,” he said. “And besides, if we change our minds about her later, we can always pick her up again.”

I made arrangements for Doris Hagen to be released, and then got out my notebook. “How about a run-down on how you made out with the people in that stag film?” I asked.

“I didn’t do so well,” he said. “Take Eddie Willard, for instance. The guy hasn’t been home for over a week. Nobody’s seen him around at all. And just about the same thing goes for Bill Marcy, God’s gift to women and saloon keepers. He was at a bachelor party last night. Pretty well oiled, too, it seems. Along about two a.m. he said he was going out and scout up a woman. That’s the last anybody’s seen him. He hasn’t been back to his apartment, and he didn’t show up for a breakfast date with a friend of his. A wild man, the friend says.”

“That leaves Mrs. Leda Ellis, the woman Beaumont said liked to make jokes about her husband while she walked around in the raw. She among the missing, too?”

“Yes,” Stan said. “Her husband says she left him two weeks ago. He doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know where she is. The last time she took off that way, he says, she wound up in Acapulco with a bullfighter.”

The phone rang.

“My turn,” Stan said, reaching for the extension. “Detective Rayder, Sixth Squad... Yeah?... Hey, that’s terrific!... Yes, I will... Yes, we’ll be over there right away... You too, Bill. Thanks a lot.” He put the phone down and grinned at me. “Bill Chumley, over at Headquarters,” he said. “You remember back in the dim dark past when you asked for some men to check on whether Larry Yeager had a lock-box somewhere?”

“They found one?”

“They sure did. At the McPherson Savings Bank, on 86th Street.”

“Anything interesting in it?”

“Nobody knows. The bank says that until they see a court order, it’s strictly hands off.”

“Well, we can take care of that fast enough,” I said as I reached for the phone. “First, I want to ask Communications to put out a pickup for those people in the stag film, and then we can call ahead for a court order and pick it up on our way uptown.”

As it happened, Larry Yeager’s safe-deposit box did contain something interesting. It contained — along with a little over six hundred dollars in cash and a few personal papers — a can of 16 mm movie film.

By the time Stan and I had touched all the legal bases necessary to impound the film, rounded up a 16 mm projector, and had the film ready to roll in a small utility room at Headquarters, it was a quarter past one p.m.

The wall of the room was a little too dark to make a good screen, but it would have to do. Stan switched off the overhead light, and I pressed the button that started the projector.

Considering that the film had been made under very poor lighting conditions, with the camera in a fixed position behind a two-way mirror, the quality of the photography was surprisingly good.

“What I like about stag films,” Stan said as we watched the first couple on the bed, “is that you never have to make a guess about what the actors are up to.”

There was nothing at all on the film for a moment or so; then we were suddenly in the bedroom again, watching one young woman help another to undress. Then the film flickered off and immediately flickered on again to show both girls in the nude, sitting on the side of the bed.

“Looks like Fred Beaumont did a little editing,” Stan said as we watched the scene progress. “Every time there was a lull in the action, he cut it out.”

The scene with the two young women lasted several minutes. When it was over, the film went to black, then brightened again to show one of the same girls, this time with a man.

“Quick switch,” Stan commented. “I wonder what she does for a change of pace?”

The film continued until we had seen, in various combinations, three different women and three different men. Then, abruptly, we were watching a very young and very beautiful blonde girl in the process of raising her skirt above her knees.

“That must be the teenage kid Beaumont told us about,” Stan said as the hem of the girl’s dress moved slowly up her legs to reveal taut round garters rolled high on her thighs. “The one who told him just to call her Honey.”

The girl was smiling directly into the camera, her face as serene and innocent as a child’s. It was an expression calculated to enhance the effect of what she was doing with her skirt, and it succeeded wonderfully.

The skirt crept past the flare of her hips, paused a moment, and then started upward again, to pause once more midway up the lower slopes of the jutting breasts. Then the breasts themselves were bared, and the girl held the hem of the skirt pressed beneath her chin, her head a little to one side and her eyes half closed, in a provocative blend of coquetry and shyness. She stood that way for fully half a minute; then, slowly at first, then faster, she began to undulate her hips, while at the same time she moved her small flat belly, in short quick thrusts in the direction of the camera.

I’d noticed nothing familiar about her face when it had first flashed on the wall, but now I began to have the uneasy feeling that I’d seen it before.

Then, the next time she turned full face to the camera, and I had a long look at the tilted, almost Oriental eyes, I realized who she was.

“June Courtney,” I said aloud as the film ended and the empty reel whirred noisily in the projector.

“What?” Stan said, switching on the overhead light.

“Honey,” I said. “Her real name’s June Courtney. It was that long blonde hair that threw me. She’s a brunette now, with short hair and bangs.”

“I know I’ve heard that name before,” Stan said. “But I can’t remember where.”

“I told you about her when I called you from Reba Daniels’ apartment,” I said. “She’s the one who’s producing the stage show Larry Yeager was going to have a part in.”

“Oh, sure,” Stan said. “I remember now. She’s the one that said Yeager’s getting murdered was the best thing that could have happened.”

“Yes,” I said, “and with a big, loud second from Warren Eads, the guy that wrote the show.”

“Didn’t you say June and Eads had real big eyes for each other?”

“Real big.”

“Well, well,” Stan said. “And she’s a girl with an outsize bank account, too, as I remember.”

“Probably so. In any case, her father has one.” I switched the reels on the projector and started the motor to rewind the film. “Neither June nor Eads made any bones about how much they hated Yeager, and they both said he was lousing up the show. But when I asked them why they’d hired him in the first place, and why they’d given him a run-of-the-show contract, they didn’t have a whole lot to say.”

Stan grinned. “Sounds almost as if Yeager might’ve had some kind of club over their heads, doesn’t it?” he said. “A little round club like — well, say like a can of movie film, for example.” His grin widened. “And with a club like that, why stop with blackmailing yourself into a stage show? Why not cut yourself in for a little cash money to go along with it?”

I turned off the projector, took out the reel of film, and replaced it in its can. “I think it’s time somebody paid another call on June Courtney,” I said.

“And on Warren Eads, too,” Stan said. “After all, Yeager wasn’t only blackmailing his girl, he was ruining his play.”

June Courtney lived at “824 Fifth Avenue,” one of those stately, elderly apartment houses whose street addresses are also their names.

She opened the door for us herself. Which surprised me. I’d expected a butler, or at least a maid.

“Well, goodness me,” she said, her tilted brown eyes smiling at me from beneath the dark, ragged bangs. “If it isn’t Detective Selby. And he’s brought a friend! How nice.”

She was wearing a sleeveless jersey blouse and taut, candy-striped stretch pants, and from the slightly disheveled hair and the bruised-looking lips, I had a strong feeling she had not been spending the last few minutes alone.

“This is my precinct partner, Mr. Rayder,” I said.

“Oh, really? That is nice. Please come in.”

We followed her down the long entrance hall and turned left into a, large living room, one entire wall of which was a paneled glass window overlooking Central Park.

Warren Eads was sitting in the middle of a long, low couch in front of the window, a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his pink moon face sheened with sweat and one red-fuzz eyebrow arched quizzically.

“You remember Mr. Selby, baby,” June Courtney said to him. “This other gentleman is his partner, Mr. Rayder.”

“Hello,” Stan said.

Eads swirled the ice cubes around in his drink and said nothing.

Miss Courtney sat down beside Eads and motioned Stan and me to chairs. “It’s so nice of you to call,” she said with mock graciousness. “Incidentally, why have you?”

“Mr. Rayder and I have just seen a rather unusual movie, Miss Courtney,” I said. “It was one made about ten years ago.”

“Now that is interesting,” she said, turning toward Eads. “Warren, baby, Mr. Selby and Mr. Rayder have just seen a movie made ten years ago!”

“Incredible,” Eads said.

“So was the fact that Miss Courtney was the star performer, so to speak,” Stan said.

June shrugged prettily. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“We thought the film might have had something to do with your giving Larry Yeager an important part in your show,” I said.

“Oh, really, now,” she said. “After all, I—”

“After all,” a man’s voice boomed from the doorway to the left, “how much longer are we going to be such cowards?”

“Father!” June exclaimed, rising quickly and half running toward him. “You know what Doctor said. You’re not supposed to get out of bed for anything.”

“To hell with what Doctor said,” the man said, looking coolly at Stan and me. “I’ve been listening to this conversation ever since it began.”

Six hours of hard, fast work later, Stan and I sat on the white-leather sofa in Reba Daniels’ living room, listening to the sound of high heels coming along the corridor outside. The carpeting out there had been rolled up for waxing, and the ping of the heels was sharp, almost metallic.

The heels paused at the door and a key grated in the lock. Mrs. Daniels opened the door, saw Stan and me, and stopped stock-still in the doorway.

“Come in, Mrs. Daniels,” Stan said quietly.

The gray-green eyes beneath their long, sooty lashes seemed to grow a little darker and the overhead light in the corridor behind her caught the golden highlights in her Shoulder-length auburn hair. She was wearing an expensively simple powder-blue dress that clung to her body tightly enough to mold the dimple in her naval and limn the edges of her lingerie.

“I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing here,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I’m simply going to ask you to leave.”

“We’ll be leaving in good time, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “Meanwhile, perhaps you’d better sit down.”

She hesitated, then walked to one of the chairs across from us and sat down.

“Just to satisfy my curiosity,” she said, “would you mind telling me how you got in here?”

“By pushing the blade of my knife against the bevel of the bolt on your door,” I said.

“And the reason you wanted in here in the first place?”

“Because it was the one place where, sooner or later, you were sure to come,” I said. “And maybe you’d satisfy our curiosity too, Mrs. Daniels. When I was here yesterday, I wanted to call Larry Yeager’s apartment. But I couldn’t find your phone book. You were in the bedroom, changing your clothes for your trip to Bellevue, and I called to you through the door to ask you where it was. You said you’d taken it into the bedroom earlier, and that you’d look up Yeager’s number for me. A few moments later, you called it out to me. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what puzzles us is how you could have looked it up. You see, it isn’t listed in the book.” I paused. “You just pretended to look it up, Mrs. Daniels.”

She didn’t say anything. The green eyes weren’t merely dark now; they were almost black.

“You’d just finished telling me you hadn’t talked to Yeager in ten or twelve years,” I said. “If you hadn’t talked to him in all that time, you wouldn’t have known his phone number. But you did know his number, because you had talked to him.”

“That’s true,” she said evenly. “I did know Larry’s number. I met him on the street one day, and he talked me into having a drink with him at a bar. He kept telling me I ought to call him sometime. He repeated his phone number again and again, and kept telling me to remember it.”

“What about the sunglasses you found on the beach at Atlantic City?” Stan asked.

“I can afford to buy my own sunglasses, I assure you.”

“But these, you found,” Stan said. “At least that’s what Earl Lambert told us when we talked to him about two hours ago. You and Lambert spent a weekend at Atlantic City a couple of weeks back, Mrs. Daniels. You found those sunglasses in the sand, and you were so taken with the frames that you were going to have them altered to fit you and have the lenses replaced with plain glass.

“A fragment of one of those lenses was on the floor near Yeager’s body. Our lab was able to reconstruct the prescription the lenses were ground by, and with that we were able to trace the glasses back to the girl who lost them.”

Mrs. Daniels lowered her eyes and sighed softly. “This is all very embarrassing,” she said. “But you can’t very well blame me for not having wanted to become involved in a murder investigation, can you?”

“Then you did drop those glasses at Yeager’s apartment?”

“Yes. I called Larry one day, just as he’d asked me to. He talked me into going over to his apartment. I had the glasses in my bag. While I was there, they fell out and broke on the floor.”

“When?”

“Last Wednesday, I think it was. Yes. Last Wednesday.”

“Uh-uh,” Stan said. “You had the glasses with you, yes — but not in your bag. You were probably wearing them as a disguise. And that piece of lens wasn’t there before Yeager was murdered. We have someone to swear to that, Mrs. Daniels.”

“This is all absolutely ridiculous,” she said. “I think you’ve lost your minds — both of you.”

“There are other things,” I said.

“What other things?”

“Your access to the murder gun, for instance,” I said. “We got to wondering how you might have got hold of it, and so we paid a second visit to Earl Lambert. We found out you’d been an overnight guest of his on quite a few occasions. On one of them he showed you his target gun. He kept it in a footlocker, and sometime later he stored the footlocker in the basement. But before he did, you had several opportunities to help yourself to the gun, and you did.”

“I did no such thing!” she said, raising her voice for the first time. “You really must be mad. I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me is that you found my fingerprints on it.”

“What we did find was hurried powder on one of your white knit driving gloves,” I said.

“You — what?”

“We were here once before today,” I said. “We took all your gloves to the lab for analyses. Your right glove contains powder of exactly the same kind Earl Lambert used to load the cartridges for his target gun. He’s a gun buff, and gun buffs like to prepare their own special mixtures. Under the spectroscope—”

“Stop it,” she said, her voice suddenly very small and very frightened. “Please. Please stop.”

“You’d told me you owned a sports car,” I said. “An Austin-Healey. So I talked with the traffic officer nearest the spot where we found the gun, which was under a car parked at the curb half a block from Yeager’s apartment house.”

“And the officer not only had seen the Austin-Healey,” Stan said, “but he’d blown his whistle at the driver. At you, Mrs. Daniels, because you were going too fast. But what really marked you on his memory was a sound that made him think you’d sideswiped another car. What he actually did hear, we know now, was the sound of the gun bouncing up against the parked car when you threw it away.”

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t... say any more.”

It was very still in the room and the seconds went by slowly. Somewhere in another apartment someone began to strum a guitar, and from the street below there was a soft whisper of tires on asphalt.

A full minute passed, and still Reba Daniels sat completely motionless, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the small hands folded in her lap.

“Do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She gave no indication that she had heard me.

“Mrs. Daniels?”

She started, looked at me blankly for a moment, and then very slowly got to her feet and walked toward the glass cabinet that contained the loving cups and plaques and silver platters she had won in sports car events.

I watched her closely.

When she started to open the glass doors, I stood up and walked over to stand beside her.

“Did you think I had a gun hidden in here?” she asked, running a fingertip gently along the handle of a loving cup.

“Such things have been known to happen,” I said.

She shook her head, gave the cup a final caress, and closed the cabinet. “I’m afraid I’ve had my last experience with guns, Mr. Selby,” she said. “I’ll never be able to win any more prizes, will I? Or wear dresses like this again.”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“What I hate most about this is that it means leaving so much behind,” she said. “I had everything I ever wanted. And now... now I’ve got to leave it. It just doesn’t seem possible this is happening to me.”

“We have all the answers we need except one,” I said.

She smiled a quick, wan smile that was gone so abruptly that I wondered whether it had ever really been there.

“You mean, why did I kill him?”

I nodded.

“He was extorting money from me,” she said. “He’d been doing it for years.”

“In what way, Mrs. Daniels?”

“By threatening to tell that we’d never been divorced,” she said. “Larry and I were married just before the Korean War broke out. About a year after he was recalled to service, I received a telegram from the Secretary of War, saying that he was missing in action. That was the last I ever heard from or about him until long after the war was over. In the meantime I had met Arnold Daniels.”

“You tell Daniels about Larry?” Stan asked.

“No. Arnold Daniels was nothing but a drunken hulk, and I loathed him. But he was also the wealthiest man I’d ever met.”

“And so you married him without bothering to divorce Larry Yeager?” Stan asked.

“Yes. I was sure Larry was dead. And I knew that a chance to marry so much money might never come my way again.”

“And then?” Stan said.

“Then, after I’d been married to Arnold for a suitable time, I went to Florida and got a divorce.”

“And considerable alimony?” Stan said.

“It was two thousand dollars a month,” she said. “And then, about four years ago, Larry suddenly appeared at my apartment. He said he’d been in a prison camp until the war was over, and that while he was there he’d realized our marriage was a mistake. When he got back to the States, he stayed on the West Coast.”

“And he’d done nothing about a divorce, either?” I asked.

“No. And then one day a mutual friend happened to run into Larry out there and told him about my having married Arnold Daniels. Larry took the next plane to New York.”

“And that’s when the black-mail began?”

She nodded. “That very day. Larry had found out exactly how much alimony I was getting. He said that if I didn’t start giving him five hundred dollars a month, he’d expose me. Going to prison as a bigamist and losing two thousand a month from Arnold was more than I could face, and so I began to pay him what he asked.”

“And this went on for four years?”

“Yes. Once I talked to a lawyer about that telegram from the Secretary of War saying that Larry was missing in action. I thought it might be possible to make my second marriage legal. But the lawyer said no. It seems that a telegram saying Larry had been killed would have been the equivalent of a death certificate. But one that merely said missing in action’ didn’t mean a thing.”

“I see,” I said. “But why should you continue to pay him for four years, and then suddenly decide to kill him?”

“He wanted a bigger share of my alimony. He said I would have to start giving him half of it every month. And then one night Earl Lambert showed me that gun, and I knew just what I was going to do. When I left Earl’s place the next morning, I had the gun in my bag.”

“Still,” I said, “you took that gun several weeks ago. Why so long a wait?”

“I just couldn’t summon up the courage,” she said. “But about three weeks ago Larry told me he had to have a thousand dollars in cash, and had to have it at once. I asked him why, but he just laughed and made some inane remark about wanting to buy a dirty movie. I gave him the money — but when I did, I promised myself it would be the last penny he ever got.”

“And was it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday I was supposed to take him a thousand dollars — half of my alimony. Instead, I took that gun and killed him.”

There was a long silence. Then Stan and I glanced at each other, got to our feet, and walked to the door.

“Ready, Mrs. Daniels?” I asked.

She rose, picked up her handbag, and walked toward us very slowly.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said in a hushed, awed voice. “It’s really happening.”

But her eyes weren’t on either Stan or me; they were on the closed door. And the look was there — the look you see only on the face of someone who stares into the kind of future that was waiting for Reba. Daniels.

“Yes, Mrs. Daniels,” I said. “It’s really happening.”

Murder stalked its bloody way among the guests on the isolated island estate: anyone could be the next victim, and anyone could be the murderer. Then Mike Shayne took on the case, using Tim Rourke, his friend, as the bait...

The charter boat Daisy Belle out of Islamorada on the Florida Keys had an outstanding day. The Detroit auto executive and his friends who paid the charter boated a six foot ’cuda with a mouthful of razor fangs, two sailfish and a near-record black marlin.

Just before dusk, on their way in to port from the Gulf Stream, the Dairy Belle also boated a corpse. The sharks hadn’t gotten to the body yet, and there were still papers in the wallet in its pocket.

There was still a length of frayed rope tied around the ankles. Apparently, whoever put the body in the water had tied on a heavy weighty but the rope had been too old, had parted, and the corpse had come to the surface. It was swollen and sodden and very unpleasant to look at and worse to smell. If it had been a dead horse or pig they’d never have kept it on board for a minute.

The papers in the wallet said it was the body of Harvey Peckinbaugh, however — and in this world the remains of a Harvey Peckinbaugh are never just tossed back for the sharks to finish.

The charter boat skipper got on his radio phone instead and within minutes a Coast Guard Cutter was on the way. Within half an hour three helicopters full of newspaper and teevy people were on the tail of the cutter and there were special news bulletins out all over the country.

The name Harvey Peckinbaugh meant a couple of hundred million dollars and a great deal of political clout in a midwestern State.

Harvey had been beaten over the head before he was put in the water. He’d also been stabbed several times with a very sharp knife.

That’s murder any way you call it. And murdering the likes of Harvey Peckinbaugh is news. Big news.

Somewhere between one and two in the morning the phone rang in the apartment Mike Shayne kept in an old but comfortable apartment hotel overlooking the Miami River close to its mouth.

It rang for three minutes before the big private detective got his head off the, pillow, clamped one big hand over the instrument and grunted a “hello” in greeting.

“Mike, are you wide awake?”

Shayne recognized the voice as that of his longtime good friend Tim Rourke, ace feature writer for the Miami Daily News. “Hold on, Tim,” he said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “What’s up!”

“Come on down here,” Tim Rourke said. “I’m in a little trouble and maybe you can help.”

“Hold on a second,” Shayne said, coming awake fully for the first time. “What kind of trouble are you in, and where are you?”

Rourke took a deep breath before replying. “I’m down here at Key Paradiso.”

“The Peckinbaugh estate?” Shayne, like most Floridians, knew of the million dollar sportsman’s “hideaway” Harvey Peckinbaugh had built some ten years earlier. “What are you doing down there?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll give you the details when I see you. But as you know I met the Peckinbaugh’s some years ago when I handled the story of that lawsuit between his manager and himself. You remember, when Peckinbaugh’s companies were being broken up by the Justice Department and that manager of his tried to get more of the pie than his salary.”

“Yeah, I remember. I also seem to recall Peckinbaugh threatening to shoot him in the courtroom.”

Rourke laughed. “Yeah, Harvey P. had a temper. Lucky for him, the manager’s doing a twenty year stretch right now. Anyway,” he went on, his voice becoming serious. “Everybody’s being held down here for the night and probably most of tomorrow morning. We got Sam Hill, the Monroe County Sheriff himself, half his deputies and a couple of police from Peckinbaugh’s home ground all nosing around. And last night, some nut put a note in my pocket, claiming that I witnessed the murder, but he’ll pay me to keep quiet.”

“Did you tell Hill?”

“You better believe it! Hiding something down here right now would be impossible. So he wants me to hang around awhile longer. Which is trouble for me. But at least I’m getting an exclusive. And Della, that’s Mrs. Peckinbaugh to you, shamus, hinted that she’d like to have a private investigator of her own to keep track on the locals. Naturally I thought of you.”

“Natch, friend.” Shayne grinned.

“So if you get down here by morning, you can nose around a bit and see what’s going on, and then drive me back to Miami.”

“What happened to your car?”

“I rode down with Peckinbaugh. And he’s in no shape to drive me back. So if you hop to it, you can have the pleasure.”

Shayne grunted as he stood up. “Okay, I’ll be there soon as possible.”

“And shamus,” Rourke said, “Better bring a gun. Looks like the murderer is still around. We might have breakfast with him when you get here.”

“I’ll cross my fingers,” Shayne said.

Mike Shayne was starting to dress almost as fast as he hung up the phone.

He called his beautiful assistant, secretary and right-hand-woman Lucy Hamilton at her apartment and told her about Tim Rourke’s early morning call.

“I’m not sure what it’s all about,” he told her, “but Tim thinks I’d better get on down to Key Paradiso. If I can’t do anything else, at least I can drive him back to Miami.”

“If somebody thinks he witnessed the killing of Mr. Peckinbaugh, Tim could be in trouble,” Lucy Hamilton said. “So could you, Michael. I suppose you have to go down there, but please take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry about me, Angel,” Mike Shayne said.

Even though he wasted no time, it was nearly daylight before Shayne could reach Key Paradiso. He had to pack his bag and then get his car out of the garage where he kept it and make a drive of more than two hours duration south on U.S. Highway One.

Late at night as it was, there was still a surprising amount of traffic on the narrow bridges spanning the water between the Keys.

Key Paradiso itself was off the main road, lying about a quarter of mile out to the East in the Atlantic. It was actually a small island with only about twenty acres of land above high tide mark. Harvey Peckinbaugh had bought the entire Key, erected houses, recreation facilities and even built a private causeway out from the main road. It was the sort of estate that only a man who was many times a millionaire could afford.

There was a gatehouse and swinging gate at the Key Paradiso end of the causeway. When Mike Shayne pulled up there was a private security guard in a fancy blue and white uniform standing by the gate.

With him was a uniformed Sheriff’s Deputy that Mike Shayne had known when he had been on the City of Miami police force some years back.

“Hi there, McGee,” the big redhead said. “I didn’t know you were working for Sam Hill these days. How are things?”

“Well, well,” McGee said, “If it isn’t Sherlock Holmes in person. Still setting the private eye business on its ear in Miami, Mike?”

“Not at the moment,” Shayne said easily. “Right now I’ve got a client up at the big house, on the Key here.”

“I don’t know about that,” The private guard said self-importantly. “Right now we got orders to keep the public out of here. I don’t think we can let you through.”

“Oh come off it,” the deputy, McGee, told him. “This here ain’t press or general public. Mike Shayne’s an old friend of my boss. Practically on the force himself, so to speak. Swing that gate up and let him by.”

“If you say so,” the guard said. He opened the gate reluctantly and let Shayne drive onto the island.

From there on it was only a short drive through scrub mahogany and wild lime tree groves to the big house on the seaward side of the Key. Dawn was breaking with the beautiful, translucent pearly light peculiar to the Florida Keys. The sea lay still and flat as a mirror.

The Peckinbaugh mansion was a sprawling two story structure with gables and big porches. There was a huge Olympic swimming pool off to one side and a dock big enough to moor a dozen large boats. A deepwater channel had been dredged to the dock, and there was also a sizeable artificially constructed turning basin for the boats. At the moment there was only one yacht moored, Peckinbaugh’s own HARVEY II, and a much smaller sport fisherman.

At the shore end of the dock there was a standing light fixture. Nobody had bothered to turn the light off as yet. Under it was a bench, and on the bench was a slender figure in blue slacks and a blue and white check sports jacket which Shayne recognized at first glance. He left his car parked on the grass in front of the big house and walked down to the dock.

Tim Rourke got up off the bench and hurried to meet him. “Well you finally got here, maestro,” the lanky newsman greeted his friend. “I’ve been up all night answering questions, and now and then asking a few of my own. I need sleep and breakfast and a good stiff drink — in reverse order. Mostly I need to relax, but didn’t want to do that till you showed up.”

“What’s all this about, Tim?”

“This is what it’s about.” Rourke took a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it over to his big friend.

It was a piece of embossed Peckinbaugh stationary from one of the writing desks in the mansion. The message it bore was typed carefully in the center of the sheet:

“Well,” Mike Shayne asked, “does he need to say more? Who wrote this thing?”

“That’s what I need you to find out for me,” Rourke said, “I haven’t got the faintest idea. He thinks I know him, but I swear, Mike, I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman. This was in my pocket last night after dinner. That’s why I called you.”

“Who had a chance to put it there?”

“Anybody. Anybody at all. We ate buffet style, milling around the ground floor. Everybody was upset by the news they’d found Harvey, his body I mean. Any one of twenty guests or that many servants could have planted this thing on me. Mike, let’s go in. I’m tired and I need a drink.”

Mike Shayne looked at his friend and agreed. Tim Rourke showed the effects of a long and sleepless night. His face was drawn, and his thin hands trembled slightly.

“Okay,” Shayne said.

“We’ll go back to the house.” Rourke said. “Some of the servants must be up by now. I’ll have breakfast and a bottle brought up to my room. Then I can fill you in on this business.”

Half an hour later the two friends were seated by the window of Tim Rourke’s guest room looking out over the sea towards the Gulf Stream. A serving table between them held plates of scrambled eggs and sausage, hot rolls with butter, a covered bread basket, oranges and mangos and a pot of steaming coffee. There was also a bottle of brandy which they were using to lace the coffee.

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Mike Shayne Said, “Okay now. Give me the details.”

Tim Rourke looked more relaxed. “The last time anybody saw old Harvey alive,” he said, “was after dinner two nights back. The house was full of people and there was drinking and partying going on. Harvey was in the den on the ground floor playing poker with some of his business and political buddies. Sam Hill’s boys can give you the list.

“About one in the morning Harvey got up from the table. He was losing heavily, but he didn’t cash in his hand. Just said he needed air and was going to take a stroll and see how the party was going. The next time anybody saw him was when that boat pulled his body out of the water.”

“You mean nobody in this place saw him after he left the poker table? Nobody?”

“Somebody did,” Rourke said. “Somebody killed old Harvey and he had to see him to do it. Then again I may have seen him, too. At least, whoever typed me that little mash-note seems to think I did.” Rourke took a drink of coffee.

“Suppose you get down to the nitty gritty of why anybody would think a thing like that.”

“I’m getting to that,” Rourke said, “as fast as I can. Just give me a chance. As a matter of fact I’m not too clear about the whole thing in my own mind. You have to remember the party had been going on for a couple of days by then and it was a real bash. A real swinger. There was this girl. We’d been up in her room after dinner and we’d had quite a few drinks.”

“I’ll bet you had,” Mike Shayne grinned sardonically.

“Okay, okay,” Rourke said. “So I was a little sozzled maybe. Anyway the girl was more. She passed out and that stopped the fun, so I did just what Harvey told the boys he was going to do. I went out for air.”

“That’s when you saw somebody?”

“Not at first. I walked around for quite a bit,” Rourke said. “After a while I was down by the formal gardens along the shore north of the house. There’s shrubbery there and trees and benches. Dark. You know, a great place for couples. Anyway I was talking in there when I came on two people. They were under the shade of some trees.”

“You couldn’t recognize them?”

“I couldn’t even see if it was men or women. I thought first it was a couple necking. Then they seemed to be wrestling. I thought: ‘she’s trying to break loose from him.’ I couldn’t really see enough to tell if it was a couple or a fight or what. Then one figure stepped back and it looked like that one was punching or poking the other.”

“Or sticking a knife into him?”

“Or knifing him. Only I didn’t see any knife. I didn’t care anyway. It was none of my business. I turned away. I thought somebody yelled at me, but I wasn’t sure. I walked off.”

“That must have been when he recognized you,” Shayne said. “Pass me that basket of rolls over there. I’m still hungry.”

Rourke obliged.

When Mike Shayne opened the napkin in the bread basket there weren’t any rolls inside, though.

There was a dead toad impaled on a razor sharp steak knife.

“Oh, crap!” Tim Rourke said.

Mike Shayne wrapped the napkin back around the gruesome little reptile and left it in the basket. Then he picked up the brandy bottle and filled his and Tim Rourke’s coffee cups with the fiery amber liquid.

“I think your friend means business,” he said.

“I guess so,” Rourke agreed. “First the note and then this for a warning. I’d better get down and tell Hill about this latest development. And after that, maybe I can get a little shut-eye. What do you plan to do?”

“You’ve worked with me enough times to know the answer to that,” Shayne said. “I want to meet the cast of characters. Who was here two nights ago that could have a reason to kill Harvey Peckinbaugh? Who do you think might have done it?”

“That won’t be easy to say,” Tim Rourke said. “There were about thirty people here. They still are, by special request of Sheriff Sam Hill. About half of that crowd are business or political pals of Peckinbaugh from his home State, and their wives or girl friends. I don’t really know any of them well enough to know how they feel about the late departed. You can ask Bill Buzby about them. He was Harvey’s secretary, confidential man and general right bower. He’d know the poop oh that crowd.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Shayne said. “Could he have done it himself?”

“Buzby? I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know of any motive on his part.”

“A confidential assistant could have one,” Shayne said. “How about the rest of your happy group?”

“Mostly just friends from Miami like me,” Rourke said. “Most of us didn’t really know Harvey very well, but his food and liquor was triple-A good so we came for the ride. Then of course there was Harvey’s harem.”

“His what?”

“That’s what we called them among ourselves. It was a funny grouping for a party. His wife, Della, is here of course. Or maybe ‘of course’ is the wrong way to put it because the big room with the king-size waterbed down at the end of the hall has his girl friend Dolly Dawn in it. We figure that’s where Harvey did most of his bouncing around. Then to top the whole thing off Slim and Sally Peters are in one of the guest cabins.”

“Slim Peters the gambler?” Shayne asked. “The one who owns the casino in Dominica?”

“That’s the one,” Rourke agreed. “Only what you probably don’t know is Slim’s wife Sally is also the ex Mrs. Harvey Peckinbaugh.”

“Whew,” Shayne whistled.

“That’s right,” Rourke confirmed. “Wife, ex-wife and current hotlips all at the same party. Now who had what motive to do which to who.”

The redhead sat back, looking out through the window at the rising sun in the east. One big hand reached up and the thumb and forefinger tugged at his ear-lobe. That was a sign Shayne was in deep thought, so Rourke sat quietly and did not interrupt.

After a while the newsman reached out for the bottle and started to refill the cup in front of him.

About that time they began to hear the sounds of plates clattering and of voices from the dining room on the ground floor under their windows.

“That will be breakfast,” Rourke said. “It’s served buffet style like in an English country house. I don’t suppose many of the guests got much sleep last night, what with one thing and another. They’ll be down early.”

“We’ll go down too, then,” Mike Shayne said. “We can make like we’re eating, and it’ll be a good chance for you to finger the suspects to me.”

The dining room was huge, at least thirty by sixty feet in dimension, with French windows opening out to the wide verandah and the sea along the front. The guests helped themselves from a variety of hot and cold dishes on a long sideboard, and ate either at the main table or at one of several smaller tables which had been set up on the porch just outside the dining room.

They looked nervous and tense and were eating lightly. A few, most of whom Shayne recognized as Miami socialites, ate with good appetite and were busy talking among themselves. Those were the people who obviously considered themselves above suspicion and who had little or nothing to gain or lose through the death of their quondam host. They tended to favor this outside tables.

Another group, mostly older men already wearing dark business suits suitable for a plane flight, were Harvey Peckinbaugh’s business and political associates.

These men ate little and talked Jess. They looked alert and harrassed. Shayne assumed that every one of them had something at stake as a result of the murder.

The servants, too, looked nervous and even frightened. They moved about quickly as if unsure of themselves, hesitated before touching anything, and tried to keep an eye at all times on a small group of men at the head of the big table.

Mike Shayne recognized these as Sheriff Sam Hill and some of his top grade plainclothes men. That was where the big private detective headed at once.

Sam Hill was busy eating and trying to talk with his mouth full. He didn’t see Shayne and Rourke coming at first. When he did he sat back in his chair and eyed them while his jaws worked on a mouthful of ham and biscuit.

“Hello Sam,” Shayne said. “You got this thing all wrapped up already?” He dropped the basket with its grisly contents on the table in front of the Sheriff.

Sam Hill took two swallows to get his mouth clear. When he did, he said, “What in the blazing noonday sun are you doing here, Shayne? And what’s this thing?”

“I just happened to be down this way,” Mike Shayne said easily, “so I stopped by to give Tim here a ride back to Miami. I figured after what happened the festivities would be fizzling out pretty quick down here. But then Rourke and I found this. Served up with breakfast.”

“Oh Lordy,” Sam Hill said. “I don’t know what we got here. Old Peckinbaugh didn’t die of no virus of course, but we don’t know even where he was killed. Now there’s a skiff missing. Was he killed here and did somebody row him out and tip him into the Gulf Stream? Or did he row out himself and meet somebody who knifed him? And now these threats. I got to question everybody on this place.”

“Speaking of that, Sam,” Shayne said, “when do you think you’ll be through with Tim?”

Sam Hill turned to Tim Rourke and said, “Okay, Shayne, you can have him any time you want. Don’t be in too much of a hurry though. We could maybe use your help.”

“Great,” said Rourke, “I’m only too glad to get off this place. I’ll leave my little friend in your hands. Glad it’s your job, not mine!”

“Yeah,” Sheriff Hill grunted.

At that moment a younger man came hurrying across the big room to where the sheriff sat. He was darkly handsome in a curiously stereotyped way. His sports jacket and slacks were casual, but his manner put him with the business-suit men rather than the Miami social set.

Mike Shayne’s hunch that this would be Bill Buzby, the late Mr. Peckinbaugh’s confidential man, was confirmed as soon as he spoke.

“Sheriff, when are you going to begin letting people out of here? Some of Mr. Peckinbaugh’s business associates are very important people. They want to get back west, you understand. Pick up the chips that the old man’s death has scattered.”

“I have to ask some questions before I let everybody go,” the Sheriff protested.

“Of course. Of course,” Buzby said. “We all understand that. On the other hand you can’t just hold all these people indefinitely as if they were ordinary joes. Why, one of them is Lieutenant Governor of our State. Another is the third or fourth biggest car dealer West of the Mississippi. That sort of people... Can’t you just take a brief statement from them and let them go? Men like that are easy enough to locate if you need them later on. You know that.”

“Easy to locate,” Sam Hill said, “and hard as the devil to extradite if I let them out of my jurisdiction. Still, there’s something to what you say. The question is — did any of these men have reason to want Peckinbaugh dead? Answer me that.”

“That’s easy,” Bill Buzby said. “They all wanted him dead. Everybody who knew Harvey Peckinbaugh wanted him dead.”

“That makes it interesting,” Sam Hill said. His tone said; well, I’ll be damned, but he didn’t put that part into words.

“I mean it,” Bill Buzby said again, “I really don’t think there’s a man in the lot of his associates who isn’t glad the old man’s dead. He was rough and tough to deal with. You did it on his terms if you did it at all. He was greedy. That old man had money to burn, but he wouldn’t put a cent in any deal that didn’t guarantee — and I mean guarantee — him a clear forty percent profit before he started. His forty percent came off the top too, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Mike Shayne said. “We’ve got a couple of characters like that right here in Dade County, Florida. Real prominent citizens, but there’ll be dancing in the streets at their funerals.”

Buzby gave the big redhead a direct look. “Do I know you?”

“This is Mike Shayne,” Sam Hill told him. “He’s a private dick from Miami and a real good friend of mine. You can trust him.”

“Glad to meet you,” Buzby said, and then turned back to Sheriff Hill. “Not only was old Harvey greedy, he was mean. He liked to make his people squirm and see them hurt. That’s the biggest way he got his kicks. They all hate — I mean they hated him.”

“Not enough to kill him, though,” Mike Shayne said. “Or at least not enough to kill him night before last and here in the Florida Keys.”

Both men turned to him.

“What makes you say that?”

“The skiff,” Shayne said. “You tell me the old man was found floating north of here and hear the Gulf Stream. You also say there’s a skiff missing.

“These men you’re talking about are westerners, not boatmen. They wouldn’t know what to do in a skiff. It needs somebody familiar with Florida to put a body in the Gulf Stream, or even know where the Gulf Stream is. Even if one of those cowboy types had tried it, he’d have brought the skiff back. That’s the way he’d have come back himself. Anybody trying to land along the Keys and walk back would have had to give himself away when he came in through the gatehouse, wouldn’t he?”

“I never thought of that,” Buzby said.

“I did,” Sheriff Sam Hill told them. “Go on, Shayne. What happened to the skiff? Suppose Peckinbaugh took it out himself and ran into a lobster boat? There’s been lobster poaching and trap stealing back and forth to the Bahamas for months. Suppose he got caught close to the traps and knifed for a thief?”

“A lobster thief in a two hundred dollar sports jacket and hundred dollar shoes?” Shayne said. “I read the description of the corpse in the papers and saw it on teevy. Those lobstermen aren’t idiots. If they’d found Harvey, they’d just have pointed him back to shore, skiff and all.”

“What do you think did happen then... and where’s that ever-loving skiff?” It was one of the Monroe detectives who asked the question.

“I think Peckinbaugh was killed right here on Key Paradiso,” Mike Shayne said. “I think whoever killed him put him in the skiff right here. Then he bolted an outboard motor to the skiff. He could get it out of the boathouse at the same time. One of those little electric one-horsepower jobs would be perfect and I’ll bet there’s a rack of them in the boathouse.

“Then the killer used his knife to punch a couple of small holes in the bottom of the skiff. Just enough to start slow leaks. He pointed the skiff out to sea, and shoved it off, but he didn’t go with it. He just started the skiff out with the dead body in it and a weight tied to the body. He probably figured the slow leaks he started wouldn’t actually sink the boat till it got out of the Gulf Stream.

“If he was right we never would have found Peckinbaugh even with the rope breaking. The Stream is deep and the currents would keep shoving the body on North till the sharks finished it. Where he went wrong was the boat sank well this side of the Stream in shallow water. The body came up and was found. Otherwise we’d just have a mystery instead of a murder.”

“I have to, admit that was clever,” Buzby said. “I’d never have figured it out.”

“Neither would most of old Harvey’s midwestern friends,” Sam Hill agreed. “I think we may be able to let them go after a short interrogation. Anyway, we’ll talk to them first.”

“Keep an eye out for one who has local friends who could have given him the idea,” Shayne said. “Come along, Tim. We’ll leave the gentlemen to their business.”

“Where did you ever think up all that?” Rourke asked as they left the group at the head of the table.

“What stuck in my craw was the skiff was missing but the murderer wasn’t,” Shayne said. “At least nobody mentioned anybody around here not accounted for. If the killer left with the body, he’d have brought the skiff back.”

“Wouldn’t that have been the smart thing to do anyway?” Rourke asked his friend.

“I think it would,” Shayne said, “because then there’d have been nothing to indicate what had become of the body. Just go all the way out and put the body in the Gulf Stream and then come back. Nothing missing but old Harvey.”

“Why wouldn’t he do it that way?” Rourke persisted.

“Only two reasons I can think of,” Shayne answered. “One would be a stupid killer, and I don’t go for that. The other is the killer was somebody who didn’t want to make the trip in the skiff because it would take a couple of hours and he’d be missed. Then when it was found Harvey was gone, the killer would have fingered himself by being gone.”

“Who misses anybody at a party like this one was?”

“Only if the missing one is very prominent,” Shayne said, “that narrows the list of possible suspects. Right now I want you to introduce me to what you called Harvey’s Harem. Start with the widow Peckinbaugh. It’s time I let her know I’m here.”

Mrs. Della Peckinbaugh had not confined herself to the master suite of the waterfront mansion that morning, but was having a substantial breakfast at a small table set for two on the wide verandah. The second seat had been occupied by Bill Buzby before he had left to join the sheriff and his detectives.

Tim Rourke took Mike Shayne over and introduced him as “My friend from Miami.”

Della Peckinbaugh gave him a long, level look before replying. She was a beautiful, auburn-haired woman in her early forties. The late Harvey P. had been seventy-three the week before he died. Della had large green eyes and a statuesque figure well set off by the simple linen dress she wore.

“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Shayne,” she said finally. “I’ve heard of you of course. I guess anyone who reads very much news has. When I heard that Mr. Rourke knew you, I asked him to phone Miami and ask you to come down and talk with me.”

Shayne smiled. “That’s flattering to say the least.”

“I’m not trying to flatter you,” she said. “Just to he honest. Harvey’s death has been a real shock to me. I won’t pretend that I’m grief stricken. If I did, it wouldn’t fool you for long. Harvey’s position and wealth were major reasons for my marriage. There was some affection at first, while he was busy courting me, but I’m afraid that was long ago. Still, with all of Harvey’s faults I had no reason to kill him. It disturbs me that someone else did. I’ll be honest with you. It shocks and, yes, frightens me.”

“I was hoping you could tell me who wanted to kill your husband and what the motive was,” Shayne said.

“On the contrary,” Della Peckinbaugh said. “I’m counting on you to find out and tell me, Mr. Shayne.”

She paused. Then, “You must find out and tell me before that same person decides to do the same thing to me as she did to Harvey.”

“Good lord Della,” Tim Rourke said. “You don’t really mean that, do you? Harvey was an overbearing man. He could be rough and tough, and he made enemies. But who on earth would want to murder you?”

She looked at Rourke.

“That’s what I want your Mr. Mike Shayne to find out for me,” Della Peckinbaugh said, and she wasn’t smiling when she said it. “Honestly, gentlemen, I think this was a personal killing. Not based on politics or Harvey’s business dealings, though God knows some of those may have-made him bitter enemies. I think this was strictly a personal thing and that the killer has the same crazy, twisted reasons to murder me.” She spoke calmly and with certainty.

“You sound very sure of yourself,” the big redheaded detective told her.

“I am. Oh, believe me, I’m in fear for my life right this very minute.”

“I believe you,” Mike Shayne said. “I also think that if you’re this sure of danger you can give me an educated guess where that danger is coming from. Who do you suspect killed your husband?”

“I don’t want to say,” Della Peckinbaugh said. “I don’t have any real evidence, at least not the sort that would stand up in court. I could be sued for accusing the wrong person.”

“Anything you say to Mike will be absolutely confidential,” Tim Rourke said. “I promise you that. You know he can do a better job if he knows who you suspect.”

She thought it over.

“Alright, Mr. Shayne. I have to trust you. Go see the woman who calls herself Dolly Dawn.”

“Your late husband’s friend?”

“My late husband’s girlfriend, his infatuation, his open and shameless light-o’-love. I’m not stupid. I know about her as I know about all the others. She’s the one.”

“But why would she want to kill him? You’re his legal wife and heir. What has she to gain?”

“You don’t know my husband,” she said. “I do. He told the same lies to each of his mistresses in turn to bind them to him. He told each one that he had put her in his will for a bequest of a cool million dollars cash. It was a lie of course, but it did heat up their feelings for him. I could always tell just when he’d told the girl by the way they both behaved. Oh, don’t look so shocked, Mr. Shayne. My Harvey was perfectly shameless in all the departments of his life.”

“I guess I’m just a bit old fashioned in a few things,” Shayne said.

“Only a few,” Tim Rourke interjected.

“To tell the truth I’m like you,” Della Peckinbaugh said. “I never quite got used to it myself — but that’s the way he was. On top of that he would hint to each girl that he would divorce me and marry her if she continued to make him happy. That was mighty effective too. Then after a while, of course, he’d cool off or find another girl. That could be an awful shock.”

“You think he was going to, drop Dolly Dawn?” Shayne asked.

“I think he was about to and that she found it out, but hadn’t found out yet that there wasn’t any million dollar bequest in his will. There was no million for Dolly, but she didn’t know it yet. Isn’t that a motive to kill?”

“Wrong, Della,” said a new voice. It was Bill Buzby who had come up to the table just in time to overhear her last words.

“Wrong?” she said. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean that in Dolly’s case there is a million dollar bequest — and she’ll collect it too. Harvey had a codicil to his will executed only three months ago. Up till then he’d just talked about doing that, but for Dolly he actually went ahead. I had to call in the attorneys and witness.”

“You never told me,” Della said.

“I didn’t expect him to die,” Buzby said to the three of them. “How could I anticipate this? I just figured he’d change his mind after a while.” He looked defensive.

“I wonder,” Della Peckinbaugh answered. “Maybe he really did love this one... Anyway, Mr. Shayne, I think you have enough of a motive to look into the young lady in depth. Don’t you?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Shayne said.

One of the servants informed Shayne that, “Miss Dawn is still in her room. She had her breakfast sent up a little while back.”

The two men went on up to the second floor of the mansion where the Master Suite and the quarters for the more important guests were located. The one assigned to Dolly Dawn was at the southeast corner looking out over the blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

They found the room easily.

Mike Shayne knocked loudly on the heavy door of the room. There was no answer. He knocked again, and this time realized the latch of the door hadn’t caught. It moved a little under his fist. At the same time he and Rourke both thought they heard a low moan from inside.

Shayne pushed the door open. There was a partly-clad woman on the floor over by the window.

Shayne took a step unto the room.

The woman sat up and threw a knife, a silver hilted little Italian stiletto. If Mike Shayne hadn’t dodged with lightning speed, it would have skewered his throat. As it was the point stuck half an inch into the solid wood of the door.

Mike Shayne was into the room with the speed of a big jungle cat, ready to grab the woman or pull his gun if necessary. Neither action was needed.

She just sat there on the floor with her hands in plain sight and looked at the two men as they came into the room.

“Who the hell are you?” she said then.

Shayne got the impression the knife hadn’t really been meant for him, that she’d expected someone else to come through that door. It would have helped if he’d known who that other person was.

“I’m a real poor target for that sort of thing,” he jerked his big thumb at the knife which was still quivering in the wooden panel of the door. “If you try that again, I’ll take the shiv and make you eat it.”

She sat there and looked up at him.

“I believe you would at that,” she said.

Long red hair streamed down to rounded shoulders and even without makeup her face was roundly beautiful. She wore pajamas which neither restrained nor concealed the ripe curves of breast and thigh. Under her auburn brows were hard, alert, china blue eyes. Shayne got the impression they looked right through to his backbone.

“I’ve seen your picture in the papers,” she said, “You’ve got to be Mike Shayne.”

“That’s me,” Shayne said, “and I suppose you’re Dolly Dawn.”

She put back her head and rocked with gusty laughter. “Two minutes I see the great detective,” she said between laughs. “Only two minutes and he goes as wrong as he could be.”

“Who are you then? This, is Dolly Dawn’s room isn’t it?”

“It’s her room alright, but I’m not her. Ask your friend there who I am. He danced with me and did his best to do more the night before last. Or were you too sozzled to remember me, Tim?”

“This isn’t Dolly Dawn,” Tim Rourke confirmed. “This is Sally Peters, Slim’s wife.”

Mike Shayne was genuinely startled.

“I came to see Dolly,” Sally Peters told him. She got up off the floor and went over to a portable bar near the window. There she poured a stiff three fingers of whiskey into a glass and tossed it down as a man would have done.

“The door was open when I got here, so I walked on in. A man, or maybe two men, I can’t be sure, came up the hall and pushed in behind me. One of them gave me a karate chop from behind and that was it. Lights out. The next thing I knew you were coming through the door. How did I know who you were?”

Shayne moved quickly about as she talked, checking the closets, bath and dressing room. There was no one else in the suite. “You didn’t recognize the men or see or hear anything more?” He asked her.

“Neither would you have if you’d been me,” she said bitterly. “Whoever it was who clipped me, he knew his business. A real pro that one.” She poured another drink and tossed it off like the first.

“Don’t you worry though, mister detective,” she said. “If I do figure out who it is, I’ll tell you. If Slim finds out first and locates him, all those fly cops downstairs will really have somebody to nail for murder one — and Slim’s too good a man to lose.”

“What did you want to see Dolly about?” Tim Rourke asked the woman.

“Are you kidding, buster?” she said. “The same thing you and the big shamus wanted to see her about. The same thing that hick sheriff downstairs wants to see her about. What else? I want to know what she knows about who wasted dear old Harve.”

“You don’t sound very sorry about his death,” Mike Shayne said.

“Sorry?” she smiled grimly. “Who’s to be sorry? Harvey was a louse. He lived a louse and he died a louse. All the sex appeal that big bum had was in his safety deposit vaults tied up with red ribbon. Not that it wasn’t enough to get me up to the altar for the everloving vows of course.”

“So.”

“So I don’t want to be blamed for knocking him off is what. I’m a practical gal if nothing else. Just my hard luck to be here when he died. I’ll be a number one suspect and I know it.”

She saw the puzzled look on their faces. She smiled and then continued.

“I’m in old Harvey’s last Will and Testament for a cool ten million clam slice of the estate, in case you didn’t know. It was part of the divorce settlement, and I had some, high priced lawyers write, it in so it would stick. So you see, I hated him and Slim hated him, and all we have to do is pull the lever to win the ten million dollar jackpot. Who else is gonna be the number one patsy around here today?”

“But you and Slim didn’t pull the lever?”

“Do you think we did?” she asked. “Why would we pull a dumb stunt like that when all we have to do is wait? Why risk a rap for murder one when the apples are gonna fall off the tree into our laps anyway?”

“Suppose I believe you?” he said to her. “What you’re saying makes a certain amount of sense. In that case who do you think arranged for your late ex-husband’s untimely departure from this world?”

She picked up the bottle as if to pour herself a third drink, but then shook her head and put it down again. “Two’s enough. I don’t want to look sozzled when the Law puts me on the grille. I’ll level with you, buster. I really will. I think his dear wife Della is the one you want.”

“Good God,” said Rourke.

“She’s got a better motive than anyone else,” Sally Peters said. “I get to inherit ten million, but she gets the whole kazoo. God knows how much. Besides she has to live with him, put up with him, let him wipe his feet on her every day. Maybe she couldn’t stand it any more than I could, only in her case she decided to take the fast way out. Why go through a divorce and get ten million when she can go the murder route and take the whole pot? You see what I mean, buster. I know you do.”

That was all they were going to get out of Sally Peters at the moment, and both of them knew it. Out on the big porch near the railing Sam Hill and two of his dark suited detective officers were talking to a red-haired woman.

Mike Shayne almost did a double-take when he spotted them. This wasn’t the woman he would have picked for Dolly Dawn. This one was small, below medium height and with a slender figure. Her face was an oval under a mass of soft auburn hair and she was small-boned and graceful.

“That’s Dolly?” Shayne said.

“Miss Dolly Dawn in person,” Rourke said with a laugh, “and miscast for the part if you must go by the looks. It’s really the body of Sally Peters that ought to be standing there if you ask me.”

Even as he spoke the woman finished talking to Sheriff Hill and came back into the house. She recognized Tim Rourke and smiled at him. The lanky feature writer took Shayne over and introduced him.

“Another detective?” she said in a soft voice. “I’ve already told all I know to the Sheriff. If you don’t mind... I’m afraid I’m quite upset this morning by all that’s happened.”

Shayne noted that she really did look rather pale and drawn, the first person he’d met yet who showed any feeling for the recently departed master of the house.

On the other hand, her feeling could actually just be fear that the Law might be closing in. It was impossible to tell.

“I don’t think you understand,” Shayne told her. “I’m sure Sam Hill has asked you all the proper questions, and that really wasn’t what we wanted to talk to you about. Actually we were looking for you because we were afraid you might be in some danger and we could help.”

“Danger?” she said with what seemed like honest surprise. “I’m not in any danger that I know of.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Shayne said. “Sally Peters was slugged in, your room only a little while back by two men. They might have been after you. Naturally we...”

“There’s something very wrong here,” Dolly Dawn said, and looked him right in the eyes. “Personally, she’s the kind who would fake such a scene. I wouldn’t put it past her to have killed Harvey herself.”

Dolly Dawn must have seen the surprise in the faces of the two men, because she repeated what she’d just said. “I said goodnight to Sally and Slim Peters about two in the morning in the hallway outside my room door last night. I closed and locked the door when I went into the room. That is absolutely the last I’ve seen of either Sally or Slim. I don’t know what she may have said to you, and I don’t really care. What I just told you is the God’s truth.”

She said it with emphasis and with a ring of sincerity in her tones, so that Mike Shayne and Tim Rourke could only nod in agreement.

She turned away from the two men and started over to the stairway.

She didn’t quite reach, the landing before Sheriff Sam Hill came into the doorway from the porch and called out, “Attention everyone, please!”

Everyone on the ground floor stopped talking and turned towards the sheriff.

“As all of you know,” Sheriff Hill announced. “It’s been necessary to keep you here on Key Paradiso this long so that we could ask each of you a few questions. Most of you have been able to answer those questions to our satisfaction, so I’m not going to keep you here any longer. You are free to leave at any time. I only ask that you leave word with my men at the gate as to where you can be located in case of any new developments.”

Someone in the archway to the dining room spoke up. “Does that mean you’ve solved the case, Sheriff? Or that you’ve given up?” The speaker gave a sarcastic laugh.

“It doesn’t mean either thing,” the sheriff said. “Most certainly not that we’ve given up. We have certain leads to what took place here two nights ago. When we follow those up, there will be action taken. What I’m doing now only means that we are convinced most of you aren’t involved in any way — and I have neither the reason nor the authority to hold you here. Just leave word where you can be found.”

Most of the guests hurried to the stairs on their way up to pack their things.

“Go get your bag,” Shayne told Tim Rourke. “I’ll feel better about you when I get you out of this place and back to Miami.”

Shayne himself went over to talk to Sam Hill.

“Have you really got any leads?” he asked the Sheriff.

“Nothing I can take to a grand jury for indictment and that’s for sure,” the sheriff told him. “You know how it is late at night at a party like this. Everybody half drunk and wandering all over the place. Half the wives with the wrong husbands, and nobody really interested in anything except their own private bash. Nobody I’ve talked to has really had anything to say that they could testify to in court.”

“I know,” Shayne said. “I just wondered if you had even a list of possibles.”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of possibles,” Hill said. “And after talking to Sally Peters just now, it looks like everybody’s a possible — but everybody. Even your pal Rourke was seen coming back from the direction of the boathouse way late at night.”

“Tim?” Mike Shayne laughed. “Probably just went down to spit in the ocean. Who saw him anyway?”

“That’s the funny part,” Hill said. “It was one of my other possibles. Slim Peters, no less.”

“Slim, eh. Why do you call him a possible? Because his wife is in for a slice of the estate? Or didn’t you know?”

“I knew. Both of them told me that. What they didn’t tell me, though — but I already knew — is that Slim’s casinos down in the islands are in a real bind of some sort. He’s in need of money right now. Lots and lots of money. Either the syndicate is fighting him or has cut itself in for most of the take. I don’t know for sure — but I did hear that the real reason Slim and Sally came to this party was to try and promote a stake out of old Harvey.”

Tim Rourke and Mike Shayne drove straight on up the stretch of U.S. Highway One known as the overseas highway to the tip of mainland Florida and then on through an endless wall of bars, restaurants, car sales lots, realty offices and advertising signs to Miami itself.

Shayne stopped first at his apartment hotel near the mouth of the Miami River to leave his bag and pick up a few things he needed. Then he drove them on to Tim Rourke’s high rise condominium.

Unlike his detective friend, who hadn’t changed his address in years, Rourke lived in the most flashy and extravagent of the lofty new buildings that had gone towering up on the near-in northeast side of the central city.

The place had everything, including an oversized swim pool and a boat dock and turning basin for nautically minded tenants, of whom Tim Rourke was not one.

The apartment also had a wide, railed balcony looking east over Biscayne Bay to the shining white towers of Miami Beach. It was here that the two friends took their tall, cold drinks and sat down for a talk while they waited for the killer to contact them with a repetition of his offer.

It was already past mid-afternoon, and the blazing Florida sun had passed over the building to the west. They sat in shade and a cool breeze blew in from the Atlantic and across the shining waters of the Bay.

“I suppose we just wait now,” Tim Rourke said over his drink.

“That’s the ticket,” Shayne said. “Whoever he is, he’s done us a favor. Instead of our having to chase all over Dade County looking for him — he’s promised to come to us.”

“Why would he do a fool thing like that?” Rourke asked. “If we had to look for him it’s a thousand to one he’d be perfectly safe. We don’t even know who we’re supposed to be looking for, let alone where to start.”

“He doesn’t know that,” Shayne said. “In fact he’s sure we do know who he is. If he wasn’t so scared by that thought he’d be a lot smarter. He can’t be smart while he’s frightened. That’s the trouble with murder, Tim. You and I’ve seen it a thousand times. As soon as a man kills he starts being afraid. Then he starts acting like a fool and keeps it up till sooner or later the murder catches up to him. It’s just a matter of time, and that’s what gives somebody like me the edge.”

“I suppose when he does call what we do depends on what sort of a proposition he has.”

“That’s it.”

The two men watched the Bay and nursed their drinks and waited.

The call they were waiting for came along about dinner time when the sun was well down towards the western horizon. Tim Rourke answered the phone as soon as it rang.

“Rourke?” the voice said. “You get off the phone and let me talk to Mike Shayne.”

“Shayne here,” the big man said a moment later.

“You listen real close,” the voice said. Shayne didn’t recognize it. “You listen real close. Real close. I’m only going to say this once. Get it or you won’t hear it again.”

“I understand.”

“Make sure you do. Both of you go down to the boat dock that goes with Rourke’s building. In the number ten slot on the dock you’ll find a runabout tied up. The Dolly. She’s all gassed up and ready to go. One of you know how to handle the boat?”

“We both do,” Shayne said.

“Okay. Take her out and go right on north. You’re heading for the yacht marina on the south side of seventy ninth Street Causeway just before the drawbridge.

“About an eighth of a mile due south of the marina and west of the channel you’ll see an anchored yacht. It’s a seventy footer, painted white. It’ll have an old outboard skiff tied to the stern. Tie your own boat to the stern beside the skiff. Go on board the yacht. I’ll meet you in the main cabin with the money. Do you get that?”

“I get it.” Shayne said flatly.

“Get started then and no tricks — no guns — no police.”

That was all. The phone went dead.

Shayne and Tim Rourke found the sleek sports runabout, Dolly, tied up where the Voice on the phone had said it would be.

Mike Shayne questioned the dock attendant, but the man denied knowing anything at all about the Dolly.

“I never saw that boat before in my life. All I know is it wasn’t tied up here last night or this morning. Somebody must have brought it in when I was off having supper earlier and then just gone off and left it.”

That would have been easy enough to do.

The keys were in the boat’s ignition as had been promised, and Shayne had no trouble casting off the lines and backing her out the short approach channel to the deeper waters of Biscayne Bay.

“This tub is named the Dolly,” Rourke said when they were under way. “Do you think maybe it could belong to Peters?”

“I’d make a big bet it doesn’t,” Shayne said with a laugh. “I think this was stolen earlier today, probably from the Dinner Key anchorage. Whoever took it probably had a good laugh at the name. Plenty of boats are called Dolly.”

He turned the boat’s bow to the north and opened up the throttle.

“I told you he’d have something up his sleeve,” Mike Shayne said as they watched the wreck of the Dolly go down into the dark water. “Sort of a single track mind though. Bombs and again bombs.”

“How are we going to get back to shore?”

“This boat is bound to have a ship-to-shore phone,” Shayne said. “Even if it didn’t, the Harbor Police will be closing in on the scene of two explosions that size. They’ll take us ashore.”

Tim Rourke had found a portable bar in the cabin, and the bar had a bottle of whiskey. He drank and passed the bottle over to big Mike Shayne.

“Our friend is a mixture of smart and dumb,” Shayne said as he wiped his mouth with the back of one big hand.

“How do you figure that?”

“Oh come off it, Tim,” Shayne said. “You can figure that as well as I can. You tell me.”

“Well, he was smart enough to know he couldn’t buy off the pair of us. Maybe he knew your reputation for honesty. If he knew that much, he could also figure we couldn’t resist the temptation to come out to this yacht. He knew if he couldn’t buy us, he had to kill us. On top of that he was smart enough to rig the bomb in the skiff. I suppose he figured he could explode it at long distance by rifle fire and run no risk from us. The bomb would have blown us up and sunk this yacht.”

“He misjudged the difficulty of hitting that mark with a rifle in fading light, shooting over water,” Shayne said. “That isn’t easy. He must be a crack shot or a rank amateur to even try it, and my vote goes for the expert. It was still a fool thing to try. Success depended on his making it with the first shot. That was dumb.”

“Maybe it was,” Rourke said, “but he was still sharp enough to close in and bomb our escape craft.”

“That wasn’t so smart, either,” the big detective said. “If I had really been on the Dolly when he closed in, I’d have had my gun with me. When he stood up to toss that bomb, I could have shot his head off, and would have.”

They heard a motor then and saw the lights of the Harbor Patrol boat bearing down.

“Okay, okay,” Rourke said. “What would you have done in his place?”

“If I’d been stuck with this caper,” Shayne said and laughed, “I’d have set the yacht here as bait. Then when we were coming up the. Bay in Dolly, innocent as babes, I’d have come close in that black speedster of his and tossed my bomb. Before we got near the yacht. That’s when we were off guard and he could have got, away with it. That’s what a real smart man would have done.”

An hour and a half later the two friends were in the oak panelled office of Miami Police Chief Will Gentry. The Chief, an old friend of both Shayne and Rourke, had had a car waiting at the dock when the Harbor Patrol brought them in.

He had glasses and a bottle of Mike Shayne’s favorite French brandy on his big mahogany desk, and a box of the long, black, Havana type cigars for which he was famous.

“Someday you’re going to stretch your luck, too far,” he said to the redhead. “Everytime you show up in the middle of a case I ask myself is this the time. One of these days the answer is going to have to be yes.”

“Not this time, Will,” Shayne said. “Not this time. By the way who owns that big yacht we were on? The estate of the late Harvey P.?”

“Not quite,” Gentry replied. “In a couple more days it would have been. The owner was trying to sell it to Peckinbaugh for a red hot price.”

“Oh? What owner?”

“The boat is registered in the name of Slim Peters, Mike. He’s been using it as a floating home down in the islands.”

“Slim Peters!” Tim Rourke exploded. “So he’s the one.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions again,” Shayne said.

“I don’t know about that,” Rourke protested. “Slim needed money, lots of it, and needed it bad. Sally’s stake in old Harvey’s will gets him out of that hole. He owns the boat so he can use it to trap us. He’s from the West so he has to have used a rifle before. It was a man who stood up in that cruiser and tossed the bomb into the Dolly. What more do we need?”

“We need evidence that would stand up in court,” Mike Shayne said over his brandy and cigar. “Look at it this way. We know Sally Peters is into the will for ten million. That’s a lot of course, but Slim Peters is running a big gambling chain with at least six casinos, and maybe more not in his own name. In a setup like that, ten million dollars is a drop in the bucket.”

“That’s right,” Chief Gentry said. “If Slim really is in trouble either with the syndicate or the island governments, he could need a lot more than ten million.”

“Sure,” Shayne said. “Old Harvey alive and maybe willing to back him with a really big bag of money, could have been worth a lot more to Slim. He’d want to keep him alive, not kill him.”

“But suppose Harvey had already turned down the idea of staking Slim,” Gentry said. “We don’t know that he didn’t.”

“We don’t know that he did either,” Shayne said. “Of course if that was so, the ten million would look better than nothing. But I think Slim’s the frugal type. He wouldn’t want to waste his own yacht.”

“The crew was ashore,” Gentry said. “They say Slim phoned and told them to take the night off. On the other hand the man who took the call can’t swear it was Slim’s voice. It sounded like him... So where does that leave us all? With one dead millionaire and three red headed women for suspects is where?”

“Correction,” Mike Shayne said. “For suspects we have three beautiful redheads, Slim Peters, and everybody else who was on Key Paradiso the night old Harvey Peckinbaugh died.”

“This is in my jurisdiction since they all came up here,” Chief Gentry said. “I’m going to have my boys look into this. I’ll have a tail on Slim and Sally Peters too. He won’t be throwing any bombs now for, sure.” Gentry shifted his cigar.

“I’m not satisfied he was the one,” Shayne said again. “Maybe, maybe not. We can’t even be sure it was a man threw that bomb. Gould have been a woman in man’s clothes — or a goon hired for the one hit. By then it was pretty well dark.”

“What are you going to do then?”

“Della Peckinbaugh said she was going to set up a ‘family’ conference,” Shayne said. “That will be sometime tomorrow. Since I’m supposed to be working for her, I’ll invite myself in. By that time I think I’ll know enough to expose the killer.”

That was all he would say.

Mike Shayne spent the rest of the night in Tim Rourke’s apartment. Not only did he want to be there in case another attack was made on his lanky friend, but there was also a chance that the killer might make another attempt to contact the ace writer by phone.

“Sooner or later he’ll have to call or kill,” Shayne said. “He can’t just sit and wait to see what we do. Not as long as he thinks you really do know his identity, he can’t.”

“I don’t envy his frame of mind right now,” Rourke agreed. “He must be pretty sure we escaped both his bombs. After that the natural thing would be for us to spill our guts to the cops. He must be wondering if there’s already a warrant out for him.”

“On the other hand he won’t dare break and run for it,” Shayne said, “for two reasons. In the first place that would be a dead giveaway. Anybody innocent right now has got to stick around. In the second place, if he runs...”

“Don’t you mean if she runs?”

“Maybe so. Maybe not. Anyway it’s easiest just to say he. If he runs he loses whatever it was he killed for. That is, he does if it was money that was the motive. Of course if it was hate or jealousy...”

“That’s an interesting word, jealousy,” Tim Rourke said. “How come you suddenly start using it? Of course all three of the beautiful redheads have some reason to be jealous of each other.”

“So they do,” Mike Shayne agreed and tugged his ear lobe with one thumb and forefinger. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind though. I suppose it’s the idea of motive that bugs me most in this case. All three women stand to get a lot of money by the murder, but not exactly the sort that makes for murder. Della gets the most of course, but she’d get it anyway. They’d all get it anyway. Nobody has to kill.”

“Dolly Dawn might lose hers if Harvey cooled off on her and changed his will,” Rourke pointed out.

“Harvey was a long way from cooling off on that one,” Shayne said. “Remember she was the only girl friend that actually got in the will without marrying him. No, I’m just not satisfied. There has to be another motive, or somebody else with a motive.”

“Maybe one of the men close to Harvey,” Rourke said. “Maybe even Buzby, though I don’t think so. What would he have to gain? As far as we know he’s not in the will, and besides he’s been like a member of the family for the last five years since Della married Peckinbaugh. He should be loyal to his boss if anyone in the world was. How about the servants?”

“If it was the servants, Sam Hill would have smelled it out. Sam’s no fool.”

“What are we going to do then?”

“First of all I’m going to try to make sure nobody gets close to you with another bomb. Then I’ll give the killer a chance to give himself away, Killers are like cats on a hot tin roof, Tim. They can’t sit still, and anything they do, anything at all, has a tendency to give them away. I want this one to make another move.”

The night wore on, and the two friends took turns getting some sleep. Nothing untoward happened.

In the morning Tim Rourke phoned down to the condominium restaurant and had hot breakfasts sent up.

About nine o’clock nothing had happened and Mike Shayne was getting restless. He and Tim Rourke went on down to Shayne’s second floor Flagler Street office. Lucy Hamilton was already there.

Shayne called Will Gentry and learned that Della Peckinbaugh had a suite of rooms in the largest and most expensive of Boulevard hotels facing Miami’s Bayfront Park.

“The hotel’s part of the Peckinbaugh estate, so she moved right in,” Gentry said. “In case it matters to you, we have the place staked out.”

He also gave the addresses of the, less pretentious hotels where Dolly Dawn and the Peters had taken rooms.

“Harvey’s confidential man Buzby is in the same hotel as the widow,” he added. “He and a couple of secretaries and lawyers who flew in from the west have rooms four flights down from Della’s suite. Incidentally, we found the guy who owned the Dolly. He wants to sue you for causing the destruction of his boat.”

“Just what I needed,” Shayne said. “Tell him to sue the thief.”

“We already did,” Gentry said. “What are you up to, Mike?”

He put through another phone call to Della Peckinbaugh.

“It’s important that I see you this morning, Mrs. Peckinbaugh,” he said. “I think I know who killed your husband, but I’m going to have to have your cooperation to prove it.”

“Oh thank God you’re alright, Mike Shayne,” she said. “I was afraid you’d been injured last night. Of course you can have all the help and cooperation I can possibly give you. Just tell me what I can do.”

“I’ll have to see you in person,” he said. “I’ve got a long standing rule not to trust phones with the really important conversations. Can I come to the hotel?”

“Of course you can. I just woke up though and I’ll have to bathe and dress and have some breakfast. Suppose you come at twelve noon. I’ll be expecting you then.”

Shayne said: “Fine. I’ll be there,” and hung up.

Tim Rourke looked at him across the desk with a quizzical expression. “So you think you know who killed her husband?” he said. “Come on, boy, and let me in on the secret. Don’t forget he’s trying to kill me too.”

“And me,” Shayne said. “I wish I really did know, but I’m afraid that was mostly bluff for the beautiful widow’s benefit.”

He picked up a copy of the Miami Daily News which Lucy Hamilton had put on his desk. “I see our little bombing spree didn’t hit the front page.”

“It’s on page two of section B,” Lucy told him. “Will Gentry didn’t give out much to the reporters. Just a couple of mystery explosions in North Bay. The police are looking into it. That sort of thing. A couple of the teevy stations didn’t even use the item at all.”

“He didn’t give out our names?”

“I suppose he thought you didn’t want the publicity,” Lucy said. “Frankly I’m glad. Let the bomber worry about what happened to you.”

“That’s funny,” Shayne said. “The widow P. was afraid I’d been hurt last night.”

“She must know more than she’s supposed to then,” Rourke said. “That’s obvious.”

“It is. What I’d like to know is how she found out about danger to me.”

The phone rang again. This time it was the gentle voice of Dolly Dawn.

“Mr. Shayne? I thought you’d be interested to know that Della Peckinbaugh has invited us all to a meeting in her hotel suite this evening. Something about both the murder and the estate. Do you think you could possibly arrange to be there? Anyway I feel you should know about it.”

“I’m going to arrange to be there,” Shayne said. “Thank you for calling anyway.”

“Don’t thank me. I know you were working on the matter of poor Harvey’s death. I want his killer brought to justice too, you know.”

“I appreciate that,” Shayne said.

Dolly Dawn hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know if I should mention this. I didn’t see anything in the papers... but I think I ought to say there’s a rumor that someone tried to kill you and Mr. Rourke last night. I hope you’re both alright.”

“We are,” Shayne told her. “Whoever it was bungled badly. I’m interested in how you heard about it. Can you tell me?”

“Of course I can. The Peters are staying at the same hotel I am and we had breakfast together in the coffee shop. Slim told me he’d heard a rumor about it. Well, I hope I see you at the meeting tonight.”

Shayne put the phone down.

“Tim,” he said. “It looks like our little ruckus last night is about as secret as this morning’s weather report.”

The hotel where Della Peckinbaugh had her suite was just a couple of blocks up Biscayne Boulevard from the intersection of Flagler Street, so Mike Shayne decided to walk over at noon.

Since the hotel was a part of the Peckinbaugh real estate holdings, the family always used the top floor penthouse when they were in town. Only one of the elevators went all the way up, but it also made stops at all the other floors. Like the rest of the bank it was of the self service type and the riders pushed buttons for their floors.

Shayne got on in the lobby. When the elevator stopped to pick up a passenger on the mezzanine he had a good view of the entrance to the bar on the other side of the balcony. A man and woman with their backs to him were going into the bar. Shayne thought he recognized the man as Bill Buzby. The woman was a redhead. She was ahead of the man and he got only a fleeting glimpse of her, but he thought he recognized Sally Peters. Then the elevator door closed and his view was cut off.

The penthouse had its own private lobby. Shayne got out of the elevator and rang the bell, to the apartment door and a uniformed personal maid let him in.

“Mrs. Peckinbaugh is just finishing dressing,” she told the detective. “She says will you please wait in the living room.”

Shayne complied. The room was beautifully furnished and had a huge picture window looking out over Biscayne Boulevard to Bayfront Park and then across the Bay to the coast of Miami Beach.

It was fully ten minutes before Della Peckinbaugh appeared. She was wearing a chic and expensive linen slack suit and a necklace of magnificent matched pearls. Nothing about her appearance suggested a bereaved widow.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” she smiled at Mike Shayne. “I just couldn’t stand the idea of wearing black.”

“I understand.”

“But that wasn’t what you came to talk about, Mr. Shayne. Do I understand that you have evidence to show who murdered my husband?”

“I have evidence that’s just about good enough to convince me,” Mike Shayne said. “I’m afraid it’s not enough yet to take to a jury, but I’m pretty sure I can get that within another twenty-four hours. With your help, that is.”

“Splendid,” she said. “Now I believe you’re as good as they told me you were. Who do you suspect and how can I help?”

“You can help by inviting me to your conference this evening and letting me bring Tim Rourke and Chief Gentry of the Miami Police as guests. By that time I think I can name the killer.”

“Consider it done,” Della Peckinbaugh said. “You know I’ll do anything you ask. Can’t you tell me who it is though? You know you can rely on my discretion.”

“I know I can,” the big man said gravely. “But I’d rather not accuse anyone till I have a few more facts. I haven’t told anyone yet, and I won’t till I’m absolutely sure.”

“Excuse me a moment,” she said then. “I think the private phone in my bedroom is ringing.”

She was gone only a few moments. “Sorry,” she said on returning. “It was my hairdresser making an appointment for tomorrow. Now, what else can I do to help?”

“Just a couple of questions,” the big man said. “Is there anyone outside of those I’ve met who could have a real interest in your husband’s will? Any other heirs?”

“As far as family is concerned there are only distant cousins,” she replied. “My understanding is they are provided for by generous personal bequests and by income from a family trust. None of them would have gained anything by murder. Then there are large bequests to three charities, but of course they wouldn’t...”

“Of course not,” Shayne agreed. “Just one more thing. Could anyone but you or your husband draw on your bank accounts?”

“Only Bill Buzby,” she said, “but one of us had to add a second signature to any check he wrote.”

Shayne excused himself then after promising to be at the meeting that evening.

Della Peckinbaugh went with him to the foyer and waited until the elevator arrived. It was empty. Shayne said a last goodby and stepped in. The heavy metal doors slid shut.

There was a movement — a bare flicker of movement caught by the corner of his eye. He couldn’t pin it down. Just a movement where there should have been no movement at all.

Another man wouldn’t have noticed it, or would have hesitated and died. Mike Shayne had the keen, instant reflex of a big jungle cat. He jumped by instinct to flatten himself against the wall of the elevator cage, even as his right hand flashed to draw the big Colt’s forty-five.

By the sound, the gun was a thirty-eight. The shot came from above his head and the bullet struck the floor below where his head had been just a split second before.

By the time Shayne managed to look up, the metal panel in the roof of the elevator cage, placed there so passengers would have an emergency escape hatch, had slammed shut. There was a quick scrape of feet on the roof and then silence.

Shayne jumped for the escape hatch, but it was wedged shut from above.

He knew that this was the top of the elevator shaft. There would be a balcony and exits both to the roof and to a stairwell alongside the elevator shaft. Both were provided for the convenience of maintenance and repair men.

By the time Shayne could get into the shaft the killer would have made an easy escape either down the stairs or out across the roof.

Instead of wasting time on futile pursuit, the big man dug the bullet that had been fired at him out from under the thick carpeting. The slug had flattened out of shape on the metal flooring. He dropped it in his pocket and then pushed the button for the lobby floor.

Once safely down Shayne took a lounge chair in the lobby where he could watch the elevator bank and stairs. About twenty minutes later Slim and Sally Peters came down the stairs from the mezzanine where the bar was located. They were laughing and talking.

Shortly afterwards Shayne got up and walked back to his office. He spent the next couple of hours on the phone, long distance, to newspaper offices, banks and stock brokers in Harvey Peckinbaugh’s home town in the west. Tim Rourke was also busy talking to friends and news sources in the financial community of Miami.

At nine o’clock the same evening Mike Shayne, Tim Rourke and Police Chief Will Gentry were in the lobby of the hotel where Della Peckinbaugh was staying waiting for the elevator to the penthouse apartment. From a distance they had watched Dolly Dawn take the elevator, followed shortly afterwards by the Peters.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Mike,” the Chief was saying.

“I’ve got this place staked out just like you said. You know that’s all I can do. Without some evidence I can’t even get a search warrant, let alone arrest anybody.”

“I think I can show you some evidence within the next half hour,” Mike Shayne said.

“I certainly hope you can. My boys haven’t been able to turn up a thing so far, any more than Sam Hill has down at Key Paradiso.”

“This isn’t that sort of evidence,” Shayne said. “This isn’t the sort that you can leave lying around for a cop to pick up, not even the best cop in the world. This evidence is what’s inside the killer. He doesn’t leave it lying around, but he can’t hide or destroy it either. He has to carry it wherever he goes. In a few minutes I’m going to give him a chance to show it to us.”

“All I can say is you’d better know what you’re talking about,” Chief Gentry said. “Well, come on. Let’s go.”

They found the group from the Key Paradiso party waiting in the luxurious, softly lighted living room of the hotel penthouse.

Della Peckinbaugh sat at the head of a carved mahogany library table. Her hair was beautifully coifed and she wore a midnight blue evening dress, which set off her superb figure to perfection, and a rope of sapphires and pearls around her neck. Bill Buzby, in a tuxedo, and two dignified men who were introduced as members of the late Harvey Peckinbaugh’s legal staff were at the table with her.

Dolly Dawn sat in an upholstered wing chair over by the big picture window. She looked calm, aloof and faintly withdrawn from the whole affair.

Slim and Sally Peters were side by side on a big couch near the library table. Slim wore a white linen suit and a black bow tie. The jacket was loose enough to conceal a shoulder holster. Shayne couldn’t tell if the lanky gambler was wearing one. Sally was in a matching white linen pants suit. Her magnificent red hair was piled high on her head and fastened with a flaming pearl and diamond beret.

Chief Gentry and Tim Rourke sat on another sofa facing the Peterses. Mike Shayne went to the library table and took a chair at one end.

A servant served a round of drinks, in which no one seemed particularly interested.

“I’ll get right to the point,” Della Peckinbaugh said then in a cool and incisive tone. “You all know Mr. Mike Shayne. I think you know who he is and why I’ve asked him to be here tonight. I hired Mike Shayne to find the killer of my husband after it became apparent that the police were not doing so. This morning Mike told me that he had succeeded and would name that person tonight.

“Mike Shayne — you have the floor.”

Apart from the two attorneys, the room exhibited the finest collection of inscrutable poker faces that Will Gentry had ever seen. No one said a word or even stirred a finger.

“Mrs. Peckinbaugh is right,” Shayne said after he had let the pause drag itself out until every nerve was tense. “I know who killed Harvey Peckinbaugh. I am going to name him tonight.”

He paused again, took out a cigar, and preceded to light and puff it slowly and carefully.

“My God, man,” one of the attorneys said, “Why don’t you cut out the theatrics. Name the killer.”

Shayne kept silent almost a moment longer. “All in good time,” he said. “First I think that all of you, and particularly the killer, are entitled to know how I came to my conclusions. You see, it was the killer in person who gave me the answers one by one. If he hadn’t made one basic error and then compounded that error over and over, this crime might have gone forever unsolved, and the killer been perfectly safe.”

“Tell us,” Della Peckinbaugh said.

“Tim Rourke blundered onto the scene of the murder,” Shayne said. “The killer saw and recognized Tim. His fatal mistake was that he thought Rourke also recognized him. Tim didn’t. All he saw was a confused scuffle in darkness. He didn’t even know he’d seen a killing, let alone who the parties were.”

Shayne looked from face to face. None of them changed expression in the slightest.

“The killer wasn’t a professional,” Shayne said. “If he or she had been, then Tim would never have left that shadowed grove by the sea alive. His body would have been put in the skiff along with Harvey Peckinbaugh’s to sink into the Gulf Stream too.

“The killer was an amateur who would kill only for a personal reason. He didn’t think fast enough or realistically enough. He let Tim walk away.

“That was his second mistake. His first and worst was to assume that Tim had recognized him. All the other mistakes grew out of that first one.

“Of course the killer didn’t know Tim Rourke. Tim is a brave and honest man. If he had realized a murder had been taking place, he would have interfered even at the risk of his own life. If he had recognized the two people in the thicket, he would have gone to Sam Hill as soon as he knew that Harvey was murdered.

“The killer didn’t even consider this. The killer thought that Rourke was a blackmailer, as he himself would have been. This in itself tells us a lot about the killer.

“He tried to buy Tim Rourke’s silence. When that failed and he found out I was associated with the case, he tried to kill us both. He tried and failed more than once. Each time he did, he made more mistakes that pointed more and more clearly to his own identity.

“At first all of you here tonight were possible suspects, except for you gentlemen,” Shayne turned to the lawyers, “because each of you had the opportunity and a possible motive to kill.

“By his actions the killer eliminated you one by one until the only suspect remaining was the right one.”

Shayne’s cigar had gone out. He took his time striking a match and relighting it. The tension in the room almost reached the breaking point.

“Miss Dawn was a suspect because she was in Harvey’s will for a very large sum,” Shayne said. “On the other hand she seems to have really been fond of him. She was too small and slight to have overcome him in a fight. She had nothing to gain by his death at this particular time. Most important of all, it has been established that she couldn’t have tried to bomb Rourke and myself last night. At the time that happened she was eating dinner in a public place. You might say the killer cleared her himself by the time of the bombing.

“That yacht where we were to have been bombed belonged to Slim Peters. I don’t think he would have planned to destroy it. It was worth a lot of money to Slim, and not insured against bombing. I talked to the insurance people today. In Slim’s business they’re careful what insurance they write.

“Besides, I think Slim would kill with a gun, not a bomb.

“Of course even Della Peckinbaugh could be a suspect. Her motive? To free herself from a man she found intolerable, a man who flaunted his mistresses before her, who treated her with scorn and whom she dispised.”

Della Peckinbaugh stirred in anger.

Shayne raised one big hand. “Hold on. You could have been a suspect. I’m not saying yet you are the killer. You had the most to lose by killing and to gain by waiting till Harvey died a natural death of anyone. If you killed him and were caught, you couldn’t inherit one dime. Why risk that?

“Of course, I almost changed my mind this morning. When I came to see you here I had to wait ten minutes. I know now it’s because it was you I saw in the bar downstairs with Mr. Buzby. I had to wait while a servant got you back up here. The police will question your servants and find out which one.”

“I wasn’t with Bill,” Della said. “He was having a drink with Sally Peters.”

“She joined us,” Sally said. “I left them together.”

Shayne ignored the exchange. “After I told you I knew who the killer was you excused yourself for a moment. You said it was to answer the phone. I think it was to make a phone call. The person you called tried to kill me in the elevator when I left here, so he must have been close by. Maybe still in the bar.”

Della Peckinbaugh’s calm was really shattered by this time. “You’re accusing me of conspiring with Bill Buzby to kill Harvey and then you! Mr. Shayne you’re out of your mind. It’s a tissue of lies. I had no reason on God’s earth to do such a thing.”

She started to rise, but Mike Shayne waved her back into her seat.

“Hold on there. I haven’t accused you. I’m just stating some facts.”

“I hired you to find my husband’s murderer. I wouldn’t want you killed.”

“I thought of that,” Shayne said. “Only the real killer would. He had to be someone who knew the Key Paradiso home and boathouse intimately. He had to know this hotel and how to get into the elevator shaft. He had to know the financial affairs of all of you, and where Slim kept his yacht, and how to imitate Slim’s voice on the phone to the crew. He had to be in the know on everything that happened, that is, be someone you would confide in at every stage. The only one that fits is Buzby.”

The confidential man kept his poker face. “Your hypothetical killer also had to have a motive, Mr. Shayne. Of all these people I’m the only one without a motive.”

“Oh no,” Shayne said. “On the contrary — you’re the only one of the lot with a motive strong enough to make you kill Harvey. That motive was fear.”

He paused again, and they all watched him closely.

“Somebody offered Tim Rourke two hundred thousand dollars for silence. That’s an odd amount. It should have been much less, or much more. Any of these women could have offered half a million at least, I thought to myself. The killer panicked. He offered all the money he had, or close to it. It was a mistake.

“I made some phone calls today, Buzby. A month ago Harvey Peckinbaugh got suspicious. He ordered an audit of your accounts by a good detective agency. You have a quarter of a million dollars that you shouldn’t have.

“We can check this. I think Harvey had a report that you had been embezzling from him and was going to send you to jail. That, or you had intercepted the report. You quarrelled and he threatened you, so you killed him.

“You might have gotten away with it, if Tim Rourke hadn’t blundered by and you thought he had recognized you. That was a mistake, and so was everything you’ve done since.”

Bill Buzby looked white and deadly calm, but he still managed to keep control. “Theories,” he said. “Words, Mr. Shayne. Nothing but words. You have no proof of anything. If you did, I’d be under arrest now.”

He glared at the big detective.

Shayne looked at him gravely. “I’ve got proof.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a battered lump of metal and let it drop on the table. “This is the bullet you fired at me in the elevator today. This we can trace to the gun and the gun to you.”

Chief Will Gentry and Tim Rourke kept perfectly straight faces, though they knew this was pure bluff on the big redhead’s part. No bullet mashed so badly by its impact on steel could be ballistically assigned to the gun that fired it.

Like most people Buzby didn’t know this, but he still kept his control. “Trace away. I don’t own a gun.”

“You don’t have to own one,” Shayne said. “You fired one. Not twelve hours ago you fired a gun. There’ll still be minute traces of burned powder in the skin of your hand even if you’ve washed that hand. The traces will be there for days. We’re going to test the hands of everyone in this room for powder traces, Buzby. We’ve got you now.”

Bill Buzby was faster than Shayne had counted on. He hadn’t been fool enough to come to the meeting wearing a gun, but there was one in the drawer of the library table where he sat, and he got it out and shoved it to the back of Della Peckinbaugh’s head before they could move.

“I’m leaving here, and she’s going, along as hostage,” he said. “So much as blink an eye and I’ll blow her head off. I mean it. You all stay here for two hours. Nobody moves or phones. At the end of that time you can do as you please. I’ll be gone in a private plane and Della with me. I’ll let her go when I’ve made Cuba. Do you understand?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Keeping Della as a shield he backed across the room and through the kitchen door into the hands of the two detectives Chief Will Gentry had posted there before the meeting started.