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

I heard footsteps running outside, approaching the house. I went over to the window and saw the two of them, the plump one and the lantern-jawed one coming up on the porch.

Then I was wilder than ever. I had killed her. I knew that. But they weren’t going to catch me.

The doorbell rang.

I threw the gun into the closet and barked at the kids, “Head for the kitchen. Beat it. Get out of here.”

They ran off.

I went over to the cedar chest. I would get inside there. It was plenty big. Beverly’s mother had given it to her. An heirloom. She had never been able to fill it.

I was out of my mind. I’d killed her, and I was glad, but I was crazy with it.

I opened the cedar chest.

Well, he lay there, with that pug nose, and that curly black hair, staring up at nothing. He wasn’t grinning. You could see the stab wounds in his chest, ruining his white Nehru shirt. Albert Griner. She had killed him.

I stood there.

They walked into the bedroom and looked at me. The lantern-jawed one came over and touched my arm.

“Mr. Hudson?”

I just stood there, staring-down at him. She had been telling the truth.

The Very Reluctant Corpse

by Brett Halliday

(ghost written by Edward Y. Breese)

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...

I

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.”