Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 5, April 1974

“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.”

VIII

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.