The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Talmadge Powell (1920–2000) was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and attended schools in North Carolina, Tennessee, New York, and California, studying creative writing at the University of North Carolina. He settled into a career as a professional writer fairly early, selling his first mystery story to 10-Story Detective, which ran in January 1944. Although he produced stories in various genres, more than two hundred of his pulp and digest-size magazine stories were in the mystery, crime, and detective field, both under his own name and using various pseudonyms, including Jack McCready, Anne Talmadge — for the novel Dark Over Acadia (1971) — Robert Hart Davis, Robert Henry, Milton T. Lamb, and Milton Land. For four novels about Tim Corrigan, he employed the familiar Ellery Queen byline used by several other writers. His short-story-writing career spanned four decades, and many of his original, character-driven tales were adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents; they were collected in Written for Hitchcock (1989).

Of the nine mystery novels under his own name, five were about Ed Rivers, a tough but goodhearted Tampa-based private eye, including his first book, The Killer Is Mine (1959), followed by the much-praised The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer (1960), as well as With a Madman Behind Me (1962), Start Screaming Murder (1962), and Corpus Delectable (1964).

He was the guest of honor at Pulpcon in 1996.

“Her Dagger Before Me” was published in the July 1949 issue.

Pleasure-hungry Allene’s gay step-mother had nothing but time, a gigolo, and money on her hands — Allene’s money!

Chapter One Cold Meat

I had been on a divorce case, shadowing a man most of the night before; so I didn’t do anything about the screaming telephone for the first few seconds except try to swim back down in the sticky molasses of sleep and wish whoever was calling would go away.

The phone kept snarling. After a minute I was wide awake and in that state going back to sleep in the muggy, noonday Florida heat was out of the question. I heaved myself on the edge of the bed and shouted at the phone, “All right, I’m coming!”

The apartment was sodden with heat; I’ve been in Tampa a long time but I never got used to the heat.

While I’m padding toward the phone, I might as well tell you who I am.

The name is Lloyd Carter, age forty-four. I’m beginning to add an inner tube around my middle, and I don’t like to be kidded about the way I’m starting to bald on the crown of my head. I live in a run-down apartment on the edge of Tampa’s Ybor City. The bed is lumpy, the furniture old. It’s just a place to sleep. I got in the private detective business twenty-one years ago. I never intended to make it a lifetime career, but I guess now I will.

I’ve never married, which is maybe what put the pickles in my disposition. I had a girl when I was young, in New York, that I might have married, but she ran off with a punk I was trying to nail. He was cornered in Indiana by state police, made a run for it, but a fast freight got in the way of his automobile. She was in the car.

New York wasn’t the same after that, and I came south. I’ve been with Southeastern Detective Service over sixteen years...

I picked up the telephone.

“Lloyd?”

It was the old man’s voice. Henry Fayette, who ram-rodded Southeastern, should have retired a long time ago. He’s seen too much of the seamy side of life streaming through his agency. It’s in his voice. But he never could retire because he’s a spender and is always scratching hard to keep the wolf at arm’s length.

“Lloyd,” his tired voice said, “I want you to come to the office right away.”

I didn’t argue. He’d known how late I’d worked last night. If he hadn’t had to call me, he wouldn’t have.

I went in the bedroom and dressed. Baggy slacks, sweaty sport shirt. And the knife under my left armpit. I’m naked without the knife. My work puts me across the tables now and then from Ybor City characters. The only weapon some of those lads understand is a knife.

I was going to have to get my laundry out today. I wrote a note for the girl, left it on the kitchen table. I opened the icebox, drank a pint of beer, and headed for the office. The heat was terrible. Already beads of sweat were like a film of hot oil all over me.

The agency’s offices are in a sagging brick building that was young when Tampa was young, on the lower end of Franklin Street. I opened the door to Henry Fayette’s office. He was behind his desk, a tall, gaunt, rawboned gray man in a gray tropical suit. He stood up. The girl sitting at the end of his desk watched me cross the office. Without looking directly at her, I sized her up.

She wasn’t exactly plain, but she wasn’t beautiful, either. She was tall and slim, with a nice enough figure and face and rather drab brown hair. Just a girl who could lose herself in a crowd, with a sort of hungry look on her face that might mean she was hungry for food — or love. Her clothes, white linen frock and bag, indicated she had enough money to eat regularly.

The chief introduced us. Her name was Allene Buford.

“Lloyd,” Henry Fayette said with a small, tired gesture of his hand, “Miss Buford wants us to do something about her step-mother and a chap named Buddy Tomlinson. You might repeat the details, Miss Buford, to Lloyd as you told them to me.”

She sat on the edge of her chair, hands in her lap, and gave me the details. Her voice was calm, even, but it was belied by the cold fire deep in her eyes.

It was about the average sordid mess. This Allene Buford’s father had been a fairly wealthy man. Allene’s mother had died ten years ago, and her father had remarried six years later, all of which was normal enough. But the sordid part began when the old man died. In his will, he left provisions for Allene to have an income, not too large. The bulk of his fortune, Emagine Buford, Allene’s step-mother, was to hold until the girl was thirty — seven years from now.

“My father seemed to have some foggy idea that I wouldn’t be capable of handling almost a million dollars until I was at least thirty.”

“And what happens then?” I asked her.

“Emagine is to come into two hundred thousand. I am to have the rest of the money.” Her face tightened, and I leaned back with a sigh, knowing that now we were getting around to the sordid part.

Emagine Buford and her step-daughter had come south for the winter, to St. Petersburg, the resort city across the bay from Tampa. She had joined the throngs, a woman who had outlived her responsibilities. Who had nothing but time, money, and restlessness on her hands. She’d met Buddy Tomlinson. From Allene’s description, he was one of those boys who had perpetual youth, a husky physique that, at forty-five, was still trim, a disarming smile, coal black hair, and one of those little-boy faces.

The fact that she was almost fifteen years Buddy’s senior hadn’t worried Emagine any. “She’s like a school girl,” Allene said, “with her first beau. She’s buying bathing suits and evening gowns and seeing Buddy Tomlinson constantly.”

“And where do I enter? What do you want me to do?” I looked at her over the flame of my lighter as I touched it to a fag.

Allene looked steadily at me. “I want you to mark up Buddy Tomlinson so he’ll never be handsome to any woman again!”

A second or two ticked away. She saw the old man about to speak. “Of course,” she said, “I know you can’t be hired to do that. But I know Buddy’s trying to marry Emagine. He has plenty of chance of success. My money is melting away fast enough in her keeping, and if Buddy marries her, there won’t be anything for me when I’m thirty!”

“Could Tomlinson and Emagine manage that?” I asked the old man.

“You know anything can be managed with enough money and the right lawyers,” he stated flatly.

“But it’s my money!” For the first time a bit of panic showed in Allene’s face. “He was my father; he made the money. Now it’s my money! You can’t let them do that to me!”

“Will you wait outside for a minute, Miss Buford?” Fayette asked. The girl looked at him, then got up and went out of the office.

“Lloyd,” Fayette said when she had closed the door behind her, “I want you to drive over to St. Pete with her. This is a sort of personal thing with me. I’ve known Emagine Buford for a long time. She used to live in Tampa. Then she went north to work, met and married Ollie Buford. Since she’s been back in Florida I’ve visited her a time or two at her place in St. Pete. That’s why the girl came here to us, I guess.

“Emagine’s going through a phase in her second childhood, to my way of thinking, but I don’t want anything to happen to her. I want her to have a chance to wake up. See what kind of man Tomlinson is. See if he’ll scare. Then scare him.”

“I’m flat,” I said.

He grimaced, pulled out his wallet, hesitated, and handed me the lone twenty from the worn leather sheath. “Use my car. It’s parked in back of the building. See Buddy Tomlinson, phone me back, and take the rest of the day off.”

I said thanks. When I left his office, he was punching tiny holes in his desk blotter with the tip of his letter opener...

The girl rode with her head slightly back, catching the breeze that blew in the gray sedan. Her hair rippled. Her lips were parted a little as she looked out over the bay. “Tomlinson has a beach place,” she said. “On Coquina Key. We’ll probably find him there.”

That was about all the talking we did. But I kept looking at her. She wasn’t beautiful. Yet there was — something.

Coquina Key isn’t the real name for the island, but we’d better call it that. It’s one of that long chain of islands west of St. Petersburg, all connected by bridges and causeways, that separate Boca Ciega bay from the Gulf of Mexico.

We drove through the snarled, slow traffic of St. Petersburg, took the Central Avenue causeway, stopping once at the toll gate and then driving on across the white, four-lane parkway that had been pumped up out of Boca Ciega bay. Then we were on the keys.

The islands are a lot alike, long fingers of land stretching north and south for miles, but just wide enough crosswise to separate Boca Ciega from the Gulf. Where they’re settled, the keys are built up heavily, with cabanas, frame boat houses, frame cottages, and a development here and there of bungalows. But in the unsettled stretches, the islands are desolate, white sand and shell and, closer to the boulevard, grown over with weeds, scrub pines, cabbage palms, and palmetto. Over the whole put a vast blue sky, torrid sun, surround with sparkling blue water and whispering surf on the white beaches, populate with easy-living people, put a fleet of fishing boats in the inlets, with a fine cabin cruiser at a private pier on a private beach here and there — and you’ve got the picture.

Toward the lower end of Coquina Beach we turned off the boulevard on Sunshine Way. The street was wide, white concrete, curving gently toward the cluster of squat bungalows half a mile down the island. It looked like a brand-new development, the white land so clean it was barren. Here and there small Australian pines and royal palms had been set out.

Buddy Tomlinson lived in the CBS — stucco over cement block — near the end of the street. The whole row of houses was painted a light pink. I opened the car door. Allene opened hers.

“Hadn’t you better wait out here?”

“No,” she said, “I’m coming in.”

I shrugged and we went up the walk together. I rang the chimes on the oak-stained door. Nothing happened. In the bungalow next door I could hear warm laughter, and in the background a radio playing softly.

I rang four times in all. Then I walked around the side of the bungalow and looked in a window. I looked away quick, closed my eyes for a second. The first thing I saw when I opened them was Allene’s profile. She was standing close to me, looking through the window, as I had done.

“He’s dead,” she said calmly.

I didn’t ask if it was Buddy Tomlinson crumpled in there in the living room. The description fitted like a glove. Allene had her wish. He’d never be beautiful to any woman again.

“Well,” Allene said, “we won’t have to worry about him any longer.” Then her eyes rolled up in her head. Her face was very white. And before I had time to think, she was keeling over.

I caught her, carried her out to the car. There was a half-empty pint in the glove compartment. I figured that ought to bring her to. “You,” I told her limp form, “are one hell of a funny sort of dame!”

I was tilting the pint bottle to Allene’s lips when a nearby male voice said, “Anything wrong?”

I looked at the bungalow that was next door to the one in which Buddy Tomlinson lay dead. I remembered the music and casual laughter I’d heard.

Now the music was silenced. A man and woman stood together just outside the screen door of the bungalow, on the small, hot flagstone terrace. I noticed the screen door behind them was one of those fancy jobs with a huge, white silhouette of a flamingo on it.

The man and woman were watching me warily, thinking, no doubt, that Allene and I were a pair of drunks out celebrating.

There was just one word for the girl standing on the terrace: sleek. She was wearing a white play suit that was startling against her dark tan. She had a sultry-looking face, with wide, red lips. Her hair was midnight black, cut with bangs. She was holding her hands at her sides in a sort of theatrical way, the way models do, pointing very slightly outward.

The man beside her was tall and athletic, dressed in an expensive T-shirt that was a riot of colors, cream-colored slacks, and tan sandals. His arms and face were freckled, his hair a crinkly, close-cropped, light blond mass on his head.

He and the girl watched as I took the bottle from Allene’s lips. Allene sat up, mumbling a groan. Her lids fluttered. “I’m all right,” she said weakly, shaking her head.

I got out of the car. The strapping young blond experienced a tightening in his face. To put him at ease, I said, “The lady simply fainted.”

“That’s too bad,” the girl in the white play suit said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Phyllis!” the man said, obviously annoyed.

“Oh, they’re all right, Baxter!” she said crossly.

Then to me: “We saw you carrying the girl to the car. We thought you might be drunk!” She giggled and made dainty, studied gestures with her hands. They were graceful long hands. She probably realized it. She probably made use of them with every word she said.

“Do you know the man next door?” I asked.

“Buddy? Sure,” Baxter said. “But Phyllis and I haven’t seen him around since we came in from our sail, if you’re looking for him—”

“I’m not looking for him,” I cut in. “Have you got a phone?”

Baxter frowned. “Yes, here in the living room.”

“I’d like to use it.”

Baxter looked annoyed. Phyllis told me to go ahead. They followed as far as the doorway, stood there while I phoned. Maybe Baxter was afraid I’d carry off the ivory bookends on the table near the phone.

The Gulf beaches are not incorporated in the City of St. Petersburg, which allows the beaches to sell alcoholic beverages on Sunday and a later curfew for their nightspots. So I put in a call to Sheriff Ben Aiken. What I told him jarred a few morose curses out of him, and he said he’d be right out.

When I turned from the phone, Phyllis’ hands were fluttering about her throat. Baxter’s face looked tight — and somehow mean.

“Buddy Tomlinson is dead?” Phyllis said, as if it was simply too, too horrible for her to realize.

I was in no mood for details, and simply nodded. I went back out to the car and sat down on the running board on the shady side and lighted a cigarette. “Can I have one?” Allene said. I gave it to her.

“What will they do with him, Lloyd?”

“Take him to an undertaking parlor. I think Doc Robison has got the corner on that trade for the county.”

“I wonder who killed him?”

“I wouldn’t know.” I didn’t particularly care. I sat and smoked chain fashion, and at last Ben Aiken arrived.

There were two other men with Ben, but they were just faces. He was the whole show. He was a big, fat man, with a lot of gut hanging over his belt. His pants were even baggier than mine and his shirt was pasted to his big, sloping shoulders with sweat. He had a large, florid face with a tiny button nose in the middle of it, and a sweating bald head.

I sat there in the open door of the car, watching the house. I couldn’t see much, but I could hear Ben and the other two men working inside. Shortly the county coroner drove up. He was swallowed by Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow.

After a while, Ben Aiken came out. He came over to the car, questioned Allene and me. I told him the short, simple story of my finding Buddy Tomlinson. To keep myself clean, I told him why Allene had hired me. She was sitting on the car seat behind me, at a higher level, of course. When I brought her step-mother’s name into it, the toe of her shoe bit in my spine.

Aiken got nothing more out of her. He questioned the couple from next door. Phyllis’ last name was Darnell. She had been married, she said, but was a divorcée. Baxter’s full name was Baxter B. Osgood. Yes, he and Phyllis both had known Tomlinson. No, they hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon when they’d all been drinking at the Pelican Bar and Grill, half a mile down the beach. He and Phyllis had had a morning date to go sailing. They’d sailed and swum and come back here just before Allene and I rolled up.

When he’d finished with them, Ben motioned me off to one side. “You got any ideas on this thing, Lloyd?”

“No, I’m off it. I was supposed to warn Buddy Tomlinson off Emagine Buford. Now Buddy doesn’t need it.”

“You think the gal is holding anything back?” He cut a side glance at the car where Allene was still sitting stiffly.

“If she’s holding out on you, she’s holding out on me, too.”

Ben sighed and mopped his face. “May be one of them long drawn cases. I got to trace this Buddy Tomlinson backward, find out who he was, where he’s been keeping himself, in whose company, and so on. I might find a motive somewhere along the line.

“Funny kind of kill. You didn’t get a good look in there, did you, Lloyd?”

I hadn’t. But I didn’t say anything. I just stood passive and let Ben get it off his chest. I knew that in talking it in his confidential whisper, he was setting the details in his mind.

“Nothing in the whole bungalow had been hurt — except Tomlinson. You saw the wound in his face, Lloyd. He was shot in close. The side of his right palm was mutilated. Looked like somebody was threatening him with a gun. He made a grab for it and the shooting started.”

“What does that give you?”

“Nothing much. It must mean he was shot with a revolver. Don’t need to tell a man like you that an automatic won’t fire with pressure on the killing end of it. Ejector won’t work, gun won’t cock, gun jams up. We’re hunting the slug. From Tomlinson’s cheek looks like a thirty-eight. So maybe when I find out where he’s been keeping himself, who he’s been seeing, I might find out somebody who owns a revolver like that.”

“You need me for anything else, Ben?”

“I guess not.”

“Then I’m going back to Tampa. I’ll drop the girl in St. Pete. She’ll probably want to talk with her step-mother.”

“She won’t have much privacy.” Ben grinned. “There’s a phone in Tomlinson’s bungalow and I’m gonna have city Homicide look in on Mrs. Emagine Buford.” He mopped his face some more. “Hell to work in this heat. I’ll see you around, Lloyd.”

I got in the car and drove off. The last I saw of the scene, Baxter Osgood and Phyllis Darnell were still standing on Osgood’s flagstone terrace, watching Ben Aiken waddle his way into the Tomlinson bungalow. Somehow, they looked scared.

I drove Allene to the Morro Hotel, in the northeast section of St. Pete. The drive along Tampa Bay was wide, beautiful, lined with fine houses and hotels. A few boats were out sailing on the bay, the small, white triangles of their sails tilted over in the light breeze.

The Morro was built like an old Spanish castle. When I braked before it, I saw a black car at the curb. Allene saw it, caught her lip between her teeth. She turned her face to me as she got out of the car. “I’d like to see you again sometime,” she said.

I looked at her for a minute. “I’ll phone you this weekend.”

She closed the car door, went running up the wide, palm-lined walk. She was staying here at the Morro with her step-mother, but I didn’t know the phone number and I decided I didn’t like to thumb through the phone books. It was just as well. I was twenty years her senior.

I drove back to Tampa and went to the office. The old man wasn’t there and I mumbled talk with the girl behind the reception desk until he came in. He went into his private office and I told Fayette everything that had happened. His chiseled, rawboned face looked gaunt. He sank behind his desk. “What’d you find out about Tomlinson?”

“Nothing, except that now he’s just a dead pretty boy. It ain’t our case. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I caught a bus and rode up through the squalor of lower Nebraska to my apartment. I bought a twenty-five-pound block of ice at the ice house on the corner, carried it up to my apartment. I put the ice in a dishpan, set the dishpan on a center table in the bedroom. I plugged in the electric fan and set it behind the pan, so that the air was blowing over the ice, over the bed.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. The air was cool and good for a second or two, until I got used to it. I reached under my left armpit and pulled out the knife. It was long, keen, and gleaming with a six-and-a-quarter-inch blade. I knew what was bothering me, now.

A living, breathing, feeling man had been killed.

I slung the knife. It flashed, struck the doorjamb, stood out from the wood, quivering.

I flopped over on the bed and went to sleep.

It was a hell of a hot day.

Chapter Two Knife for Hire

I didn’t sleep long. I woke with a mouthful of cotton, sweat drenching me, a heat-thickened pulse pounding in my head. I ran my tongue around my gums, realized that somebody was knocking on the door. As I went to answer, I plucked the knife from the door jamb, put it back in its sheath under my armpit. I looked at my watch. It was 4:40 in the afternoon.

When I opened the door, Phyllis Darnell had her hand raised to knock again. She’d changed from the white play suit, wearing now a yellow silk dress that really set off her complexion, lazy black eyes, and midnight hair.

“Oh!” she said, as if the opening of the door had startled her. She made vague gestures in the air with her hands. If it hadn’t been for that way she had of using her hands, she’d have been a very beautiful woman.

“You wanted to see me?”

“Yes, Mr. Carter. Are you busy?”

“It depends. I guess you want to hire a detective?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, my looks didn’t bring you here, did they?”

Ice flaked in her eyes. “No, your looks didn’t bring me here. Are you going to ask me in or not?”

“Why not?” I held the door wide. When she came in and I’d closed the door, I said, “You care for beer?”

“No.”

“Well, excuse me a moment. Make yourself at home.”

She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the icebox, counted the bottles of beer. The girl who’d come in to clean while I’d been out had been thirsty again. I opened a bottle of beer, killed half of it, said, “I’m listening.”

“I really don’t know how to begin, Mr. Carter. I really don’t!” She wrung her hands, real fright coming to life in her eyes. “It’s very awkward.”

“I’ve heard awkward things before. Sit down. Iced tea?”

She shook her head, then nodded. “Yes, I’ll have a glass of tea.”

I put water on to boil.

“How’d you find me, Mrs. Darnell?”

“I asked that sheriff. From the way he talked to you when he arrived at Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow, I knew you were a detective. He told me where you worked, where you lived. You weren’t in your office, neither was your boss, and the girl at the reception desk.”

“Okay, okay. I guess you wanted to talk to me about Tomlinson?”

“I yes — no. I mean, in a way I did.” She glanced about the kitchen as if seeking a way out, a way to stall. “I see the water is simmering, Mr. Carter.”

So it was. I took the battered aluminum pot off the flame, dropped in a tea bag, chipped ice and put it in a glass, and poured the tea over it. I set out cream, sugar, and scratched in the back corner of the icebox for the lone, wilted lemon there. Slicing the lemon, I said, “Why don’t you just tell me straight off? Why beat around the bush? Buddy Tomlinson has been murdered and it’s put you on the spot somehow. You want me to remove you from said spot. All right, what is it?”

The way she whitened beneath her deep tan gave her the appearance of wearing a heavy coat of dark powder. Her hands were trembling. “I... I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

I set the tea before her, sat down across the table, and finished my beer. Then I just sat there, not speaking, not moving.

When the silence began to eat away her nerves, she said shrilly, “I lied this morning! I’m married — but I’m not a divorcée. And I had every reason in the world for wanting to kill Buddy Tomlinson!”

She began to cry softly. She took out a wispy handkerchief, made dabs at her eyes.

“I really hate to say this. I really do. You see, Mr. Carter, I have a husband in Augusta, Maine. But we’re not divorced, and never intend to be. I really don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you. Oh, I’ve been a fool! I can hardly explain it to myself.

“I love my husband deeply and I am sure I mean more to him than life itself. I won’t try to excuse myself. But every year I take a vacation, to Florida, the West Coast, South America, or Cuba. My poor, trusting husband! His business keeps him tied to his desk, but he insists that I might as well escape a few weeks of northern winter every year. It’s on these trips that I present myself as an unmarried woman or a divorcée. That way one interests a better class of men than if one admitted being a married woman. Somehow that way it always seemed in my mind to cheapen my husband less.”

She was looking down at her hands, momentarily quiet in her lap, waiting for me to speak. To condemn her, maybe. I opened another cold beer and didn’t say anything.

“Drink your tea,” I said.

It wasn’t very good tea, but she drank it gratefully. I finished my beer and said, “Buddy Tomlinson was one of those men?”

She nodded mutely.

“You certainly made a mistake about classifying men in his case!”

She shuddered under the sentence as if it was a blow of my hand, but she continued to look silently down.

“How’d you meet Tomlinson?”

“Through Baxter Osgood. They seemed to be close friends. Baxter Osgood owns a small beer garden on Coquina Beach. I was there one night — he introduced me to Buddy.”

“And you were promptly swept off your feet.”

“You aren’t a woman. You didn’t know Buddy Tomlinson,” she said in a stricken voice. “Now he’s dead, and the letters have disappeared.”

“You made the mistake of writing him some mush notes?”

Her face flooded red. “He was in Bradenton for a week. He begged me to write him every day. He was so sweet, so boyish.” Her voice thickened with a violent anger; her hands played on the table top. “Something I said must have caused him to suspect that I wasn’t really divorced.”

“Can you recall what you might have said?”

“I— No. One night — just before he went down to Bradenton — we drank quite a bit. I was drunk when he took me to my hotel. I must have talked of my life in Augusta.”

“Afterwards he wanted money for the letters?”

She nodded again, swallowing in such a way her throat constricted with the action. “I gave him almost five hundred dollars — but he didn’t give me the letters back. I knew then that I was in a deadly game, that my life in Augusta depended on what I did. I hoped to wheedle the letters out of him. Now he’s dead. Can’t you see what might be the results if those letters come to light? My husband’s life ruined, a possible murder charge against me. Mr. Carter, you must help me. I can’t afford to be drawn openly into this kind of mess.”

I opened a third beer. She was in a jam, all right. If those letters had been worth five hundred before Buddy Tomlinson’s death, now they were worth every nickel she could lay her hands on, and somebody evidently knew that. If the police had discovered the letters, they’d have taken her in for questioning by this time. I said, “Any idea who Tomlinson might have boasted to? Who might have known about those letters?”

“No — unless it’s Baxter Osgood. I don’t think he makes all his money out of that beer garden he owns. I think there was something more between him and Buddy than mere friendship.”

“Business deals?”

“Perhaps.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help you. But get one thing straight. This is murder. Contrary to what the public thinks, private dicks don’t like to get mixed in murder. If we have to wade through murder the cost is high.”

“I know,” Phyllis Darnell said. “I’ll pay.”

“I’m not worrying. After all, I’ll have the letters, won’t I?”

I ushered her out, showered, and went over to Mac’s garage, where my coupe had been laid up with a ring job. Greasy, limp from the heat, Mac had just finished the job. He wiped his hands on a piece of waste and told me the old crate was ready to roll. I made arrangements to see him on the fifteenth and drove down to the office.

The old man was locking his private office, getting ready to leave for the day. I told him to unlock again, explained the case.

He unlocked the door, walked across his office saying, “A murder case? I don’t like it, Lloyd. I never liked a murder case.”

“I know.”

“The official boys have everything to work on a murder case, labs, organization, everything. A private agency small as ours ain’t equipped for it.”

“I know.”

I opened his desk drawer, took out the .38 police special that always nestled there. I pulled out a corner of my shirttail, tucked the gun in my waistband, and tucked the shirt back in over the gun. You’d never know it was there. A box of loads was in the corner of the drawer. I dropped a handful of them in my pocket.

The old man was already on the phone, talking long-distance.

I sat down and smoked until he finished.

He pushed back the phone, shadows over his rawboned, gaunt face.

“Ben Aiken’s glad we’re going to cooperate,” Fayette said.

“That’s good. He give you much?”

Henry Fayette nodded, his frown deep and sour. He jabbed at his desk blotter with his letter opener. “This Buddy Tomlinson was quite a guy. Convicted once in Miami on a larceny charge. Charged once with blackmail in Baltimore, Maryland, but got off for lack of evidence. Nabbed once in Brownsville, Texas, for being mixed in the marijuana racket, but beat that rap too. Miami had his whole previous record.

“Tomlinson came to St. Petersburg almost a year ago in company with an unknown woman who can’t be located. There’s nothing on the St. Pete blotter against him except a charge of driving intoxicated, for which he was fined.

“He was killed between twelve midnight and one o’clock last night, which means that he lay in his bungalow during that time without being found. The murder gun has not been located, but Aiken has got him an important witness. Guy by the name of Baxter B. Osgood. He the one you met over there?”

I nodded. “Osgood owns a beer garden on the beach. He lives in the bungalow next to Tomlinson’s. An athletic, freckled, blond guy. He could be plenty mean, I guess.”

The old man traced a pattern on the desk blotter with the opener. “Osgood says he was awakened last night about twelve thirty. Says he dreamed a backfire woke him, now realizes it must have been the shot in Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow. Osgood says his bedroom window faces the Tomlinson house, and that from that window he saw a woman leaving Tomlinson’s bungalow. There was a bright moon. You know that moon at the beach, turning night into day. Osgood recognized the woman by the red swagger coat she was wearing, and her hat. The hat had a couple of tall feathers sticking up out of it.”

Fayette flung the opener on the desk; his face was gray. “Dammit, I told you she was an old friend of mine.” Accusation flamed on the old man’s face, then he shook his head as if clearing it. “I’m upset. I can’t blame you. I got no reason to blame you, Lloyd.”

“You mean the woman Baxter Osgood recognized leaving the Tomlinson bungalow is Emagine Buford?”

Fayette nodded. In his quiet, flat voice he said, “Ben Aiken’s jailed her — charged her with first-degree murder.”

I whistled softly. It didn’t help the old man’s feelings any.

It was pretty late in the day to do anything much, but Fayette insisted on driving over to St. Pete, to talk to Emagine Buford. We took my coupe. The thing I wanted out of this case was those letters of Phyllis Darnell’s. That’s what we’d get paid for. But the letters were somewhere in the pattern of Buddy Tomlinson’s death, and I knew we were going to have to sift through that pattern to find them. I didn’t like a damn thing about the case.

It’s only half an hour’s drive from Tampa to St. Pete by way of Gandy Bridge, and it was still daylight when we got in the Sunshine City, though the sun had dropped in the Gulf, leaving behind it vast streamers of crimson and gold in the western sky.

We wasted fifteen minutes talking over the case with the St. Pete men. Then we went back to Emagine Buford’s cell.

She had been crying, and her face was swollen, but even so you could see that she had been a raving beauty in her day. As Allene had said of her step-mother, Emagine was well preserved, slim, with a small, unlined face, and hair dyed to a nice shade just darker than auburn. She didn’t look a day over a young forty.

She managed a smile when the old man entered her cell. “It’s unfortunate that you have to visit me here, Henry.”

Fayette said, “We want to help you. This is Lloyd Carter. Mrs. Buford, Lloyd.”

We each said it was a pleasure, and Emagine sank on the edge of her cot. She looked at the old man with hope and trust. They talked for two minutes. She wasn’t able to tell us a thing more than the county men had. She had been home asleep, she claimed, when Buddy Tomlinson had been murdered. She hadn’t seen him since the night before his death. She spoke of him with a mixed tenderness and hot, new-born hatred.

The old man told her that we’d do our best, and we left her.

That was that, for my money. Outside headquarters, Fayette mopped his face with a big red bandanna and said we might as well eat.

We went to eat.

It was just after 8:30 when I got back to my apartment house in Tampa. The place had no garages; so if you owned a car, you left it at the curb. I locked the coupe, and walked in the apartment house. I was halfway up the flight of stairs when the door opened in the lower hall and my landlady’s nasal drawl came to me. “Is that you, Mr. Carter?”

I bent over the stair railing, looking down the hall. She was standing in her doorway. “There’s a woman in your apartment,” she said. “Said she had to see you. I let her in to wait.”

She slammed her door.

I went on up the stairs, down the hall, and opened my apartment door. Allene Buford stood up when I entered.

She’d turned on the small lamp over near the corner, and the soft light silhouetted her. I remembered her as I’d first seen her in the old man’s office earlier in the day: not plain, but not beautiful either. Now, with the light behind her like that, a light not bright enough to glare at her or to show up the room in which she was standing, she almost made the grade. She was almost beautiful.

“Are you mad at me, Lloyd?”

“For coming here? I don’t think so.”

“I’m glad,” she said in her calm, colorless voice. She took a turn up and down the room. I closed the door and stood watching her. “I couldn’t stand it in the empty hotel room any longer,” she said. “I thought I hated her, Lloyd, but she was so pitiful when the police came and took her.”

She came over closer to me. “Emagine and I never got along, but when she was gone I sat in the room there in the Morro for a while, remembering the fights we’d had. The things I’d said to her. I couldn’t stand the room any longer. I called one of the St. Petersburg detectives. He didn’t know you, but had a buddy who did. So I got your address and drove over.”

A moment of silence passed.

“Lloyd, will you take me some place?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Any place there’s some music, a glass of wine, something to eat.”

She caught my arm. “Lloyd, they won’t send her to the electric chair, will they?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what if she didn’t do it?”

“It looks pretty much like she did. Murder is a funny thing. Sometimes cops flounder around a lot on a murder case, because they haven’t got direction. But once they get direction, once they know what they’re looking for and who it’s to be used against, they usually dig up evidence.”

I sensed a shudder rippling over her.

“Let’s go have that glass of wine.”

We went down, got in the coupe, and drove over to Club Habana, a small, quiet place with Cuban music, fair wines, and fairly good food.

I sipped a beer, danced with her, watched her eat her dinner. She ate the spicy Cuban food as if she’d been too nervous and distraught to eat before. Now that she’d let down, she’d discovered she was famished. But that other hunger, that longing in her eyes — it was still there when she’d reached her coffee. It had been there always, I guessed, lonely, without an anchor.

We danced a few more times. We talked for a while. She told me about her home town, her girlhood. “I was walled off,” she laughed, “by high walls of greenbacks.” She reached over and clutched my hand. “I feel much better now, Lloyd. I think I’d better go back to St. Pete. But tomorrow — couldn’t we do something then?”

“I dunno, I—”

“Show me Florida, Lloyd! Not the Florida the tourist sees, but the backways, the way the swamp people live, the farms, and villages.”

“Sometime,” I said.

She didn’t take her hand off mine. She leaned toward me, her mouth parted a little, the soft, blue light of the Cabana glinting faintly on the tips of her teeth. I could see a pulse beating in her throat and the almost invisible sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Very softly the band was playing a tender Cuban love song.

I kissed her softly on the lips. She leaned back, said quietly, “Thank you, Lloyd.” Then she gathered her handbag, stood up, and we left the place.

She said she’d take a taxi to St. Pete, and I deposited her in one, and drove on back to my apartment.

The heat was still like a blanket, even though the night was a bit older. I had a cold beer in the kitchen. Cold beer was the only thing I’d ever found to help against the heat, but even that was a losing contest. The beer didn’t keep you cool long enough.

I wondered if I’d ever get used to Tampa heat.

I went in the bedroom. The ice I’d put in the pan on the center table that afternoon had long since melted, but the fan was still running, sending a stream of sluggish hot air over my face. I didn’t lie down. I simply sat on the edge of the bed, trying to get my thoughts straight. I couldn’t go to sleep; so I got up and went back down to the coupe.

I started the motor, let it idle for a minute. Then I pointed the nose toward St. Pete and Coquina Key.

It was a little after 11:00 when I rolled down the boulevard on the island. A huge moon bathed Coquina Key in silver light. White surf broke against the beach, and out in the water, moon rays lay in a great elongated splash, a pool all their own. Stars were out by the millions in a sky that was pure black velvet.

I braked in the business section of the Key. It was pretty grubby, most of the buildings of frame wooden construction, a cluster of boat houses down at the inlet, along with some bait houses. Cabanas and cottages were stacked over the area, close together. Everything there was dark, except for a bar, a chicken-in-the-basket place, and Baxter Osgood’s beer garden.

Chapter Three Kill One, Skip One

The beer garden was crowded with people in rumpled sport shirts and slacks and cool cotton dresses. It was hot, smoky, wet and rank with the odor of beer, turgidly alive with sluggish conversation and the rasping of a juke box. I bought a beer at the bar and asked if Baxter Osgood was around.

“I’m right here,” Osgood said, practically at my elbow.

I turned around to look at him. He moved up to the bar beside me, sat down on a stool.

“I saw you come in, Carter.”

“The beer isn’t cold,” I said.

“No? Why don’t you buy someplace else?”

“I couldn’t — not the product I’m in the market for.”

“No?” he said again. “What is it you’re wanting to buy?”

“Letters,” I told him.

He watched the dancing for a few seconds. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you don’t, Mr. Osgood.”

“How much are you paying for this product?”

“Enough — but not too much.”

He yawned against the back of his hand. “I’ve got to run over to the house for a minute. Like to come along — just for the ride?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll come along, just for the ride.”

We went outside. His car was angle parked at the curb, a blue convertible. We got in, and he drove down the boulevard, turned off on Sunshine Way, braked before his bungalow.

“Every time I look at the house next door,” he said as we got out of the car, “I think of Mr. Tomlinson.”

“Too bad about Mr. Tomlinson, but I understand they’ve got the woman who killed him.”

“I thought you might be interested in it — say in an academic way.”

“Not even in an academic way.”

“Just in letters, huh?”

“You said it.”

He keyed open the front door. The house was like an oven; he turned on lights, opened windows, threw the switch on an attic fan. Cooler night air began to rush through the place.

Osgood walked over to the knee hole desk, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and picked up a box of matches that was on the desk. He turned halfway back toward the desk, dropped the matches on it, and opened the drawer and pulled the gun, all in one liquid motion.

He laughed faintly. The gun was leveled at my middle.

“Well,” I said, “every man is entitled to one mistake.”

“Yes — one.”

He came halfway across the room toward me. “Turn around, Carter.”

I stood still, and he jerked the gun up. His words didn’t bother me — the sudden message in his eyes did. I turned around.

He came up behind me as if to frisk me. He hit me on the crown, where I’m starting to bald. I don’t remember much after that.

I think I tried to get out of the house. Common sense tells me I tried to pull Henry Fayette’s .38 out of the waistband of my pants. Putting it together later as it must have been, I think I crawled as far as the kitchen. There I passed out for a moment, and he must have unlocked the kitchen door and dragged me outside. I tried to stir on the powdery sand of the back yard. He hit me again, on the back of the head.

The next thing I sensed was a slow melting of black nothingness into a quivering curtain of heavy gray fire, if there ever was any such thing, against the walls of my eyeballs. As the black faded, feeling came in to take its place. My head was a pincushion of pain; my heart was laboring; and I was sucking in mouthfuls of cool, clean air. It was very early morning.

Ten or fifteen minutes later I sat up slowly. I was still in Baxter Osgood’s backyard. I stumbled to my feet, staggered to the kitchen door, opened it. The old man’s gun had still been in my waistband. Now it was in my hand. I intended to fix Osgood so he’d never beat another man again. In my state, I was no match for a fever-ridden midget, but that didn’t occur to me. I had a gun, I was on my feet, and Osgood deserved every damn thing I could dish out.

But he wasn’t in the house. The place was pretty well messed up, with drawers pulled out and stuff strewn over the floors. I decided he’d grabbed a few valuables and skipped. Then I looked out the window, saw his convertible still parked on the edge of the street. I tried to make sense out of it, but didn’t feel up to it.

As the anger burned out of me, I didn’t feel up to anything. I went in his kitchen, started some coffee making. I looked in his refrigerator. Two bottles of beer were in it. I drank both of them.

I followed the beer a few minutes later with two cups of scalding black coffee. I ate a piece of bread and butter, a slice of cheese, and followed that with another cup of coffee.

I went to the living room, opened the front door. My head was still aching and spinning like crazy. I wondered if I had a concussion. The sun was just over the lip of the earth in the east, rising in that burst of orange and crimson you see nowhere but in Florida.

Low in the air, over the edge of the beach, a cluster of gulls were wheeling and screaming.

I did a double take at that group of gulls, stared at them a few seconds, then went stumbling toward the strip of beach as fast as I could go.

Baxter Osgood was lying on his face, the water almost lapping the tips of his upflung hands. He’d been shot in the right temple, and near his hand lay a .38-caliber revolver.

I squatted on my heels beside Osgood’s body and tried to figure the way it had happened. He’d left me in the back yard, entered the house to get something. Somebody had arrived.

He and the somebody had walked down here, and the somebody utterly without warning had shot him, then with panic gnawing, the somebody had wiped the gun, pressed Osgood’s prints on it, and left it where it might have fallen from his hand. I was pretty sure the gun was the same that had killed Buddy Tomlinson.

It was just a hunch, but granting the hunch, and granting that Ben Aiken fell for the suicide picture, Aiken would conclude that Osgood had killed Tomlinson because one of their shady deals went sour, then in panic had killed himself.

There was one other point. The murderer evidently hadn’t known I was in the back yard. My coupe wasn’t at Osgood’s house, but up at his beer joint. There was no other evidence that I was lying in the back yard unconscious when the murderer had called on Osgood.

I turned Osgood over, remembering the way his bungalow had been searched. I patted his torso, his waist.

The money belt was one of those jobs that blends right in with the body lines. If you weren’t careful, you could search him and miss it. I tore his shirt open, took the belt off him.

Osgood’s belt contained five thousand dollars in money and a few sheets of paper that upon reading I knew were the letters that Phyllis Darnell had written to Buddy Tomlinson.

I went back in the house and phoned Ben Aiken.

An hour after that, a small crowd of people was gathered in a room in St. Pete’s old, sunbaked city hall.

They all looked at me when I entered. I had my head bandaged, three aspirins under my belt, pile drivers still in my skull, and a feeling like a wad of cotton in my throat.

I looked over the silent room. Ben and a city dick were there, along with a stenographer, who was a big, brawny man. Henry Fayette was standing beside the chair that held Emagine Buford, who’d been taken from her cell. Allene Buford stood near the windows, and Phyllis Darnell stood with her back to the wall near Emagine’s chair.

I tossed Phyllis Darnell’s letters on the scarred table. Her gaze rabbited around the room, her hands fluttering to her throat. “Go ahead,” I said, “and pick them up. My boss will render you a bill later. For my money, you’re a dirty little tramp, Mrs. Darnell, but Ben has agreed to keep the letters confidential. Not because of you — because of that poor devil up in Augusta, Maine.”

“Then you know that I didn’t kill Buddy Tomlinson? You really do know!” Phyllis held her hands pressed tight against her throat.

I looked at Allene. She took a step or two toward me. That wad of cotton fluffed out in my throat. “We know who killed Tomlinson and Osgood both, don’t we, Allene?”

She stopped, then began moving again, circling around the room. “Are you joking with me, Lloyd?”

“I wish I was. I wish it more than you know, though maybe not for the reason you think. You knew Tomlinson had a good chance of getting his hands on the Buford money through Emagine, unless something was done about him. You went to his bungalow, maybe planning to kill him, maybe not. But you did kill him. Osgood saw you leaving. You were wearing Emagine’s hat and coat, and he thought it was Emagine at first. But when he heard her story, he was inclined to believe it and guessed it had been you.

“You had killed Tomlinson to hold on to your money, Osgood reasoned. If Emagine went to the chair, it would not only leave you clear, Allene, but would remove her as the last obstacle between you and the Buford fortune. It looked sweet from where Osgood sat. He dug you for five grand, but when you’d had time to think, you knew it was no good. It would never be any good as long as Osgood was alive. So you killed him too.

“When I found Osgood dead on the beach, I started trying to think of the whole thing as he would have thought. You were the only answer, Allene. You were the one who could have easily gotten Emagine’s hat and coat. You had motive. And I’m afraid they’ll pin it on you. There must be some of your fingerprints on the five grand I took off of Osgood. There’ll be so many more things when they start looking and digging, Allene.”

She looked from face to face, her hands knotted at her sides. Then she wheeled and lunged for the door. But the knife was quicker. The knife flashed in my hand, thudded in the door, close to her face. It paralyzed her. It paralyzed everyone in the room. She came to life first. She grasped the knife and pulled it from the wood. “You’d do this to me, Lloyd?”

That wad of cotton in my throat choked me.

“What else could I do?” she whispered. “I’d never had but one thing in a lousy life — that money. That damned filthy Buford money — and now I was going to get cheated out of that. I didn’t mean to kill Buddy Tomlinson. I only wanted to scare him. But he grabbed at the gun — and it went off. I thought that if I hired a detective to warn Buddy away from Emagine, Buddy’s body would be found and no one would ever think I had known he was dead. I thought that would take suspicion from me, and once Buddy’s body was found, the detective would have no more to do with the case.

“After that, it seemed easier. It was much easier to kill Osgood. Yes, killing gets easier all the time—”

She sliced the word off with the knife. A spasm crossed her face, telegraphing a wave of horror over the room. A little cough bubbled in her throat.

I had never thought she’d use the knife for that. I’d only wanted to scare her, to bring her up at the door before Ben and his men began pulling guns. I’d wanted her to stop, to think. To talk. To cop a plea. To live.

She had saved my life. It was the only possible way I could have saved hers.

But she’d used the knife on herself.

I caught her in my arms as she crumpled, laid her gently on the floor. The scene in the room was breaking apart, people moving, converging on her. Her eyes flicked open. “Why couldn’t it have been different, Lloyd? Why couldn’t you have showed me Florida — the — part — the tourist never sees?”

Tears welled in her eyes. A spasm shuddered over her.

I stood up, fighting the moisture in my eyes. Distantly, I heard Emagine Buford say, “In a way, I’m not surprised. She was always sort of—”

“Shut up!” I screamed.

Somehow I got out of the room. I walked down the corridor outside, not seeing its walls, not feeling its floor under my feet.

Only remembering. That longing that was almost pain. That terrible, pitiful hunger. Even death hadn’t erased it from her face, and I knew at last why Allene Buford had never been quite beautiful...