The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Murder Method

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, January 1961.

We killed her, Ralph Corson and I, as surely as if we had used a knife or a gun, and it is the manner of the killing that haunts and torments me.

I met Peri in Miami. She was the wife of as good a friend as I ever had.

It was right after I lost my shirt in an orange deal. I’d bought a bunch of futures in oranges, and a freeze had killed the crop. I was sitting in a small waterfront tavern, making wet rings on the bar with a beer glass and wondering what to do next, when a man walked up behind me and laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Tom Danton,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s good to see you after such a long time.”

I turned on the bar stool and felt better right away. Marty Janus had always affected me that way, even in our college days.

A subtle change came over any room Marty entered. He was a dark, good-looking, slender, energetic man, but it wasn’t his looks that did it. It was the Marty Janus dwelling deep in the flesh and bones, the Marty who believed in the beauties and joys of life, the worth of life, the worth, decency, and integrity of his fellow man.

But by no stretch of the imagination was Marty a dreamy starry-eyed fool. He was smart, tough, courageous. The occasional individual who tried to take advantage of him because of his outlook, social position, and wealth failed to sour Marty. He accepted them as part of the world and time into which he had been born and felt sorry for them.

In short, Marty was a rare man. I suspect that if and when Marty’s kind become the majority, most of the world’s ills will vanish along with fear and hatred.

“Sit down,” I said. “I’m buying.”

“Thanks. You re looking fit, Tom.” A smile crinkled the deeply tanned flesh at the corners of his eyes. “Fifteen years out of college, and I’ll bet you could still do a broken field run that would make the other team dizzy.”

“If I had Marty Janus with me as a blocking back,” I said.

“Hell,” he laughed, “you’re just saying it because it’s true. I heard you were in Miami, Tom. Wanted very much to see you. What you been doing for yourself?”

“I dropped my roll on some oranges.”

“That’s too bad. Married yet?”

“Nope.”

“Business deal lined up?”

“Not so far.”

“No strings on you — O.K., so we’ll go fishing. We’ll get the kinks out of our systems, the cobwebs out of the old brains, and figure out an assault on the future.”

“Thanks, Marty, but I...”

“I’m planning a trip. A real jaunt. You enjoy fishing?”

Tropical water, a brilliant sun, the roll of a boat, the big ones hitting... “Are you kidding, Marty?”

“Then it’s settled.”

“No,” I said. “I meant it when I said I dropped my roll. I couldn’t make a down payment on the bait.”

“The heat’s got him,” Marty said to no one, “so how can I consider it an insult?” He turned and looked at me. “All right, you’re broke. Think of the advantage in that. You can face the future, enter the next round of the scrap with everything to gain, not a thing to lose. Check?”

“I suppose. He wasn’t simply a wealthy man talking from a lofty position of security. Marty would never have to worry about money; but he’d made it honestly, because he’d been smart enough to know the time and place for his subdivisions and because people couldn’t be in the state a week without knowing you’d get your money’s worth if you bought a home in a Janus development.

As a kid he’d lived on a Florida farm with sneakers as his Sunday shoes. He’d waited on tables, studied like a Socrates, and played football to get himself through college. He’d worked on construction jobs in South American jungles and mountains and lived on beans for two years to get his first tiny capital together.

“‘I suppose,’” he echoed, “Tomas, muchacho, that proves it. You need open sky and fresh air to put some vigor in your outlook. I got a boat docked no more than a couple of blocks from here. I was on my way to the marine supply house when I glanced in here, did a double-take, and realized it was really you. The gear can wait. I want you to see the new boat, the Peri. It’s named after my wife.”

If you knew Marty really well, you could catch the faint inflection when he said “my wife.” He said it with a vast and deep contentment, as if life, after this, could only be perfect, never topping itself.

Water sparkled in the slips and lapped gently against the pilings. The masts of the yachts made a forest of clean, slender spears against the deep blue of the sky. Marty and I paused at a slip. He looked at me with a grin.

The Peri crouched at her moorings. She gleamed, mahogany and brass, all forty feet of her. She was sloop rigged, her cabins low, her bridge straining toward the open sea, her engine housings built for diesel auxiliaries.

I shared Marty’s grin. “She makes you feel like a Viking.”

“That she does,” Marty said.

We went down the short gangway onto the deck. A girl came from aft, out of the cabin. Marty went forward to meet her, taking her hand in his.

A magazine illustrator couldn’t have done the portrait better. She was lithe and graceful in white shorts and halter, carrying the vigorous animalism of her sex appeal quite unconsciously.

She was gold, while Marty was dark-tanned leather. His coloring made her hair seem more golden, her eyes bluer, and her hair and eves possibly made her lips seem redder than they really were. The top of her head came just above Marty’s shoulder, and she leaned against him slightly in an automatic little gesture of affection.

“Peri,” Marty said, “this is Tom Dan ton. Tom, my wife.”

She offered her hand. Her fingers were slim, cool, strong.

“I’m very pleased to know you, Tom. Marty has told me a great deal about you.”

I said something or other and let go of her hand.

Marty told her I was joining the trip, and she remarked that it was nice.

“Bring your stuff on board this afternoon, Tom,” Marty said. “Well get underway with the tide tomorrow morning.”

The rubber soles of white canvas shoes squeaked softly behind me on the hot planking of the deck.

I looked over my shoulder. A man had come aboard. Wearing a T-shirt, ducks, and an old yachting cap, he was long, heavy, big-chested in the body and short in the legs. His face was square, his features blunt. His eyes were black and small, or perhaps they only looked that way because of his black, jutting, heavy brows.

He stood spread-legged, as if the deck of a boat were home to him. He took off the cap, with the inverted V crimped in the cracked bill, and wiped the sweatband. “You get to the marine supplier, Mr. Janus?”

“Not yet, Ralph. We’ll go over there now,” Marty said. “T ran into a friend. He’s going with us. Tom Danton, Ralph Corson.”

The stocky man looked me up and down, offered his hard, callused hand for a brief shake. “Glad to have you, Mr. Danton.” There was neither welcome nor disrespect in his tone. “You know anything about sailing?”

“A little.”

“He’ll pull his share,” Marty said.

“Then we won’t need another hired hand?”

“I think not, Ralph.”

The stocky man shrugged and went aft.

“He’s not the friendliest man alive,” Marty said, so that Ralph Corson wouldn’t hear, “but he’s a competent seaman.”

I soon found out that Marty had told the truth about Corson. We fished our way down the Keys. Corson knew his business, and I didn’t mind taking his orders and instructions. But in less than a week, I’d begun to hate the man.

I couldn’t single out a reason for this feeling. It wasn’t in anything he actually said or did. His orders were peremptory, even to Marty. That was all right, as it should be. Out here, Corson was captain of the boat.

Nor was the reason particularly in Corson’s attitude toward me. He treated me as something of a cluck, a habit of sea-wise men toward the landlubber. To him, I was no more than a shadow aboard. Still, this was not enough to arouse the feeling I felt for him.

Then late one afternoon, I knew suddenly why I felt as I did. The Atlantic was as smooth as a tub of oil. Sea and sky were hushed, and I had the feeling that we were in a vacuum. We were making for port in Key West under the power of the auxiliaries because of the expected light blow. Corson was on the bridge, at the helm.

Everything aboard the Peri was secured. Marty’s wife had made sandwiches for dinner, and there was nothing to be done, aside from Corson’s task. Peri and Marty were forward, sitting very close together in deck chairs. They were talking to each other, but their tones were low and intimate and could not be heard above the steady whisper of the diesels.

They made a fine picture, sea and sky for a backdrop, she like an enticing golden thing that had come out of the sea and Marty like the hero from some book who’d captured her mind, body, and soul. Marty said something to her, and they looked at each other. And Corson stood looking at their profiles, and a bestial thing came to his face.

He didn’t know I was watching. I’d been at the stern. He hadn’t heard me come forward. I’d been on the point of speaking to him when that change had come to his face. His eyes glittered, his lips pulled back tight to show his teeth. Dark blood suffused the heavy planes of his cheeks and jaws.

His lips twisted as he spoke noiseless words to himself. I could guess that it was a speech of raw animal desire and hatred. Lust for the woman and hatred, arising from envy, of the man who could own her, and this boat, and the services of other people.

I turned and went quietly sternward. I went in the galley and mixed a drink for something to do. There was a suffocating feeling in my chest and a band of steel tightening about my temples.

I shook with my hatred for Corson.

Because I wanted the woman as badly as he did.

The revelation was not sudden, though it seemed so at the moment. It filled me with a quick and deep shame.

Marty was my friend — and she was a part of Marty. Not for a moment was there any doubt of that. She didn’t worship or idolize him. She simply-belonged to him, completely, without reservation. She wanted nothing more. She would never ask nor seek for anything more. She had found the ultimate purpose of womanhood, a personality into which her own being could fuse until the two became a single entity.

Her life had a single mainstream and anything else — Corson and I, for example — were just objects on the distant shores of that stream.

So she was blameless. And yet she was wholly to blame, for in her, Marty had found the thing that every man seeks, the realization of the idealistic wish every man has felt to some degree when he was very young.

Corson and I had discovered there really was a woman like this in the world. It stirred the senses and fanned a fire, because there was the emptiness of the sea and sky, the smallness of the boat, the endless languorous days and nights — and the sight of her continually dangled before Corson and me.

I wanted to leave them in Key West. Instead, I told myself I couldn’t do it gracefully.

Although the season was late and there were reports of squally weather, Marty aimed the Peri at the Gulf, where he heard a few tarpon were still running.

“Those running this late,” he decided, “will be monsters. We might even set a record!”

The weather reports weren’t exaggerated, and the fifth day out, Corson asked Marty to make for Fort Myers.

“There’s even rougher weather ahead,” Corson said, “and this craft ain’t as seaworthy as she looks. She’s been built for looks, Mr. Janus — to...”

“Yes, Corson?

“All right,” Corson said, rubbing his palms on his ducks, “I’ll say it. The Peri’s a tub. I suspected it from the second I looked at her. Now I know it. She was built to grab a rich landlubber’s dollars. There’s too much of her topside. I don’t like the way she handles. I don’t like the roll of her. As a fancy toy, she’s fine, but it’d take a lot better craft than the Peri to weather the blow moving up from Dry Tortugas.”

“Well,” Marty said, “I guess I’m not the first man to get stuck.” He grinned wryly. “Nor the last. We’ll put in at Fort Myers.”

We failed to reach the port. The heavy blow caught us off the unexplored wilderness shown on the charts as Ten Thousand Islands.

The darkness and wind and rain came quickly. The tropical hush was filled with a roar. The sky disappeared, and the seas came over the Peri’s deck.

Just before the blow hit, Corson had seen the smudge of an island on our portside horizon. He swung the Peri wide, making for the island.

When the leaden sky came down to meet the angry sea, the island disappeared. Corson put the nose of the craft into the teeth of the wind and tried to hold her there. She kept sheering off, rolling heavily, like a creature alive and wanting to flee in panic.

The rain was icy after the heat of the day. One moment the diesels labored so hard it seemed they would quit; the next, they tried to tear themselves out of their mountings as the prow of the Peri wallowed heavily and the screws screamed free.

It was up to Corson now.

We stayed topside, Peri at Marty’s side, keeping her fear under tight control.

The Peri shuddered as she crested, the wind tearing at her. She fell like a toboggan, her stern free, her prow slicing to the depths of the watery trough. She met the wall of water with a booming crash. Her stability was gone, and the water swept her decks clean, pouring into her depths.

I heard Peri scream Marty’s name. Then panic blanked everything else from my mind as the world turned to angry black water.

I felt Corson’s weight slam into me. His arms grabbed for me. I slugged at him and clawed my way toward the surface.

Something hard slammed against my shoulder. I grabbed it, locked my arms about it. We’d all had on life preservers, of course, but they wouldn’t keep a man from drowning in this weather. The short length of broken mast helped.

I was under the surface more often than not as the water roiled over me. But I was alive, and I clung to the mast and gagged out water — and heard her cry out Marty’s name once again. It was a very feeble cry, but I knew she must be close. The human voice was no competition for the angry bellow of the wind.

I glimpsed her face, a few feet away. I worked the mast toward her. I felt the dizzying pitching and knew another mass of water was coiled over us. I grabbed her arm. As we went under, she was almost torn away. The water parted, and she put her arms across the mast, gagging and coughing. She never stopped saying his name for long. Only when there was no breath in her did she refrain from calling for Marty.

I felt the warm sand of a beach beneath my back, and opened my eyes. The sky was blue, bland, capriciously innocent. There was a stillness, broken only by the light surf breaking with faint, rasping sounds.

I sat up, remembering the blow, the touch of solid bottom beneath my feet. Remembering that I had dragged her with me until I’d collapsed.

My wild, swinging gaze jerked to a halt. She lay near me. I could almost reach out and touch her. She was a carven, golden image there on the quiet beach.

As I stood up, she stirred. She looked at me blankly. Then her eyes darkened, deepened. She sat up and looked toward the sea.

“We made it to the island,” I said.

“Marty...” she said.

“Maybe he made it too.”

She didn’t look at me. “No,” she said. “He didn’t.

I kneeled beside her and touched her shoulder. “Don’t borrow trouble. Let’s not decide about Marty until we know for sure.”

She sat looking at the sea, not feeling my touch.

A voice from down the beach called, “Hallo, there!”

The sea still held her attention, for it was Ralph Corson’s voice she heard.

He came walking up the beach, his clothing stiff with salt and sand j£ He stood breathing heavily. “I’ve been looking for you. I was beginning to think I was the only one who made it.”

“There’s no sign of Marty,” she said.

“No,” Corson said.

She made no move, sitting as if nothing could surprise or hurt her.

“We re on the island,” Corson said. “It appears to be a sizeable strip of land. I reckon we re somewhere southwest by south of Ten Thousand Islands. I think we can manage, until somebody picks us up.”

He looked down at her. “We’ve got some immediate problems to think about.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said dully. “Just give me a little while.”

Corson jerked his head. I followed him as he moved away. We walked toward the interior of the island. It was heavily grown with palms, palmetto, low brush. As we moved into the jungle, I said, “Something’s on your mind.”

“We may have to call this place home for quite awhile,” Corson said. “We’re off the shipping and air lanes.”

“The Coast Guard will search.”

“Maybe. But where do they start? Where do they look? Ten Thousand Islands may be a part of the United States, but even that area has never been explored. From this point, civilization might as well be a million miles away.”

I was sweating heavily; from the dense heat, and from his words.

“Somebody will find us,” I said doggedly.

“Or what’s left of the Peri,” Corson said. A wolfish grin came to his face. “At least we won’t starve — as long as you and the woman follow my orders.”

“You fancy yourself king of this island, Corson?”

“Damn right I do. I’ve lived in swamp country. I know how to live off the land. Without me, you and her wouldn’t last a week.”

I sensed the unleashed arrogance in Corson-I thought that if anything happened to me she’d be here alone with him.

It seemed we had to accept a king, for a little time, anyway.

Corson hadn’t been boasting when he said he knew how to live off the land.

Our first problem was water. In a small, sandy clearing near the center of the island, Corson and I dug with sticks. We scooped out a shallow pan, four feet across, nearly three feet deep. There was dampness, and from the dampness came the seepage of water.

“It’ll be brackish,” Corson said, wiping sweat from his face with his forearm. “It’ll have the taste of the sea, but it’ll sustain life.”

The next three days ran together in an endless moment of heat, toil, hunger, with only the meaty buds of the wild cabbage palm to stave of! starvation.

Corson spared himself no more than he spared Peri and me. Under his direction we gathered the wild thistle that Seminole tribes once used to mix with water and make a form of bread. We dug coontie root, scrounged bird and turtle eggs. We explored every inch of the island, until we knew where snakes might be had for emergency rations.

Wildlife was plentiful, hares, field mice, swarms of birds. We set snares and deadfalls. We fashioned crude, basket-like crab traps from strips of palm frond, baiting them with putrid meat after our traps began operating. We had vines and plaited palm fibers for cordage, and when we hauled in the first of the crabs, I looked at the size and numbers of them, and I shuddered, thinking of Marty.

There were wild bananas on the island. As for vegetables, Corson assured us that a human being could eat practically anything growing out of the earth so long as it did not run milky sap when broken.

We gathered the largest shells on the beach for cooking and eating utensils.

One of Corson’s very first achievements was fire. He took the crystal from Peri’s useless diamond-studded wristwatch. It was convex, to magnify the delicate numbers on the watch face. Corson piled a bit of tender dried grass near the edge of the jungle. He crushed more of the grass to make a volatile powder and added it to the pile. Then for a solid hour he crouched in the merciless heat, concentrating the power of the sun through the tiny watch crystal. Finally, the grass began to smoke around the pin-point of sun fire that Corson held so steadily on a single spot. We lighted sticks and carried our fire to our campsite beside the spring Corson and I had made.

And then it seemed that quite suddenly our time of exhaustion, of drugged sleep alternating with periods of violent activity, was over.

We possessed thatched huts. We ate well, even salting our food with the residue left after evaporating sea water in shallow shells. We refreshed our pile of greasy, green vegetation near the campfire. This would be thrown on the fire to send up a column of smoke, a signal, if the empty sky or brassy hot horizon ever showed a sign of life.

Until we were a going concern, there was little chance to think or feel the things that plague civilized people. Peri had to work shoulder to shoulder with us, until we were all ready to drop in our tracks. During those first days, our individuality and the things that had made us what we were aboard the Peri were pushed into the background.

Then we had a little leisure again — and I saw the grossness of Corson, because Peri was once more a woman, a very special woman, the only one of her kind in all the earth.

Corson knew what I was feeling, and his thoughts were as plain to me as if he had spoken them aloud. Outwardly, neither made a move, not yet, but the men inside the cloaks of sun-blackened skin crouched and watched with mounting wariness and hatred.

Peri seemed to sense nothing of it at first. She had worked like a robot, as tireless as Corson or me. Now she walked the beach just as tirelessly, trying to find something to interest her, but never able for long to keep her gaze from seaward, from the place far out where Marty had died.

She still pulled her own share of the load. She still said little, living in those days before crashing waves had washed across the Peri.

I loved her with a tenderness I didn’t know was in me. At night, when she sat silent, bathed in the flickering light of the campfire, so beautiful she was a creature beyond belief, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to help her accept the fact that Marty was gone, forever. I wanted to say things I’d never said to another woman.

I said nothing.

Because there was Corson. Corson would never believe the way I felt. He’d never understand. I couldn’t explain to him, and so lone as Corson was in the way, I could say nothing to her.

I began sleeping badly. Even in sleep, I was aware of her near me at one hand, Ralph Corson at the other.

Then one night he went to her.

It was a night brilliant with moonlight, the skies blue and clear, a faint breeze curling off the Gulf over the island.

I woke and lay perfectly still, seeing the bulk of him standing near her shelter. He was crouching a little, looking in at her as she lay spangled with moonlight.

I heard a shuddering breath come out of him. I saw his hand pass over his face. I witnessed the final struggle of the man with himself.

There was cunning on his face as he looked toward the thatched lean-to where I slept. And I knew then that he had made his decision, finally. He had decided that the three of us could live no longer on this island. It might come to me tomorrow, or next week. He might use a club, or report to her that I’d drowned accidentally.

Or he might not wait at all.

He was looking around. Cat-like, he moved toward the fire. From the old edges of the fire he picked up a stick. It was thicker than my wrist. Its end had been burned to a fire-hardened point.

With a sound that I didn’t recognize as coming from my own throat, I threw myself out of the lean-to as he came toward me with the spear upraised.

He cursed, changed his mind, swung the stick as a club.

I stumbled and fell. I rolled away. He was in a momentary fury, beyond all reason, goaded with the knowledge that he had actually put dark thought to action and could not turn back now.

I grabbed a club, larger than Corson’s, from the wood pile. I met him snarling. The clubs crashed together. We both fell back, circled. Panting, sweat rolling down our faces and naked chests, we went at each other savagely.

This was the picture of us that Peri received. She had wakened, and she stood looking at us.

As I fell back from Corson’s heavy blows, I glimpsed her face.

For a brief instant I could visualize what she was seeing. I saw the change hit her face as a horrible understanding came to her.

Corson s swing brought his club against mine. The weapon almost left my hands. I continued to fall back. She was out of range of my vision now. All I could see was Corson’s face, the exultation in it as he sensed triumph.

He was less cautious, and I was filled with a sudden cunning. He was stronger, but I was faster. I invited a blow by appearing to be off balance. When he swung, I slipped to one side, and I had him.

I laid the stick along the side of his head. He fell, legs twisting.

He went scrabbling away like a killer crab. He seized his club, tried to rise, and I knocked the weapon out of his hands.

He fell hack and lay gasping, looking up at me.

“Corson,” I said, “you’re not king any longer.”

“You’re the boss, Danton. All the way the boss,” he panted. “Danton! She’s gone!”

I thought at first it was a trick. I stepped back, still watching him. Then I glanced over my shoulder.

He hadn’t been lying.

“Peri!”

There was no answer from her. I forgot Corson for the moment.

I couldn’t see her around the edges of the clearing. I moved down the pathway we d worn toward the beach.

I didn’t see her there, either.

Not at first.

I was in water to my waist when Corson grabbed me from behind.

“You fool,” he said, “you’d never catch her.”

Together we stumbled backward to the beach. I hated him as I’d never hated before, and I knew the feeling was mutual. I knew too that we’d live in uneasy truce until the day in the indeterminate future when someone else fished these waters and saw our smoke column and came to investigate. There was no reason now for blood letting and neither Corson nor I wanted to face the future alone on the island.

We stood and watched, and as the golden head crested the low, murmuring waves, we called to her.

I shouted, the sound an agony in the bright night, until I had no voice left.

She was out of sight then, and she would keep going. Until she reached that spot far, far out where the part of her known as Marty Janus had gone down.

Finally, Corson and I stood under the vast sky in silence, not looking at each other, thinking of the way we had killed her, and of the weapon we’d used...