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

“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.