Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“Buzz off, Billy,” Yvette said as she pushed him from her. “You’re unmarketable. Nobody wants to hire somebody with a price on his head. I’m collecting unemployment till I find another client. Now get away from me. I don’t want to be hit by a stray bullet. There’s a TV camera across the street filming this. Already you’re breaking your contract with Bruno from the Bronx.”

The evening news showed Billy dashing to the cab and diving onto the floor. The camera also caught Yvette in a magnificent flounce. Security guards, fearful that Billy’s presence in a TV studio might draw sniper fire, refused him entrance, but did drop his shirt, tie, and jacket down five floors to him.

Back home, Sally Sue and I toasted each other as we waited for the inevitable collect phone call.

“Hons, I love you both,” he began. “I thought of the two of you and the good times we’ve had as I sat chained to a lawn chair in the basement of a house in Beirut.”

“The Bronx, Billy,” I corrected.

“It might as well have been Beirut,” he pouted. “I rode for miles stuffed in a car trunk and you know how bad that is for my sciatica.”

“Poor baby,” chuckled Sally Sue, who had picked up the call on the portable phone. “And when you got to the basement, were you tortured?”

“Was I! A madman wearing a beret and Groucho glasses and moustache slammed a Manhattan telephone directory on my lap and made me read it out loud for hours. He wouldn’t feed me till I got to the D’s.”

“So what did he bring you?” I asked.

“A meal not fit for a human being. Diced prunes and parsley! I was so desperate I signed the agreement.”

Oh, that Bruno! He followed our instructions to the letter. Sally Sue and I slapped hands in a gleeful high five.

“So, hons, I want to come home,” he whined. “And I’ll divide my time evenly between you.”

“Sorry, Billy, but I’ll be too busy. I’m turning my romance novel into a thriller,” said Sally Sue.

“I’m sorry too, Billy,” I said. “I’m going back to school.”

“But hons,” he wailed.

“Can’t talk any longer, Billy,” I said. “Someone’s on Call Waiting. Since Bruno from the Bronx gave our numbers to legions of sensitive, caring, nineties guys, the phone’s been ringing night and day. Ciao.”

Floater by William Beechcroft

Men who choose to develop a female sleuth as a central series character are still relatively rare in our field. William Beechcroft is trying it for the first time in the following story, which introduces police detective “Kat” Curtci in a homicide case that may make or break her...

* * *

When he caught sight of the object in the canal behind his house, Sam Wolff thought it was a manatee, not an uncommon visitor this time of year on their Southwest Florida barrier island.

“I don’t think so, Sammy,” Myra Wolff said, her butterless melba toast arrested halfway to her mouth. “It’s not moving.”

They had been enjoying breakfast in the cool of early morning on the canal-side upper deck of their piling house. Now their attention was on the large gray object nudging their dock down in the canal.

“Tide’s coming in,” Sam observed. “It’s a dead manatee, drifted in from the bay.”

He set down his coffee mug, pushed back from the glass-topped table, and walked down the rear steps to the sparse lawn.

Out on the dock, he felt as if he’d been hit with a jolt of electric current. He stared down at a human body, face down, dressed in gray slacks and long-sleeved shirt, its left shoulder gently bumping the corner dock piling.

“What is it, Sam?” Myra called from up on the deck.

“Don’t come down, honeybun. It’s a floater.”

He was surprised at his word choice. Too much TV. “A body, Myra. Some unfortunate fellow drowned.”

“Omigod!” Myra shrieked. “Should I call Nine-One-One?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” Sam shouted back. “But use the regular police number. It’s not an emergency now.”

Thirteen minutes later, he had a yardful of people.

First to appear was Katherine “Kat” Curtci, promoted to detective just a week ago. She had lucked out on this one. Assigned the undignified task of checking out a weenie-wagger report at the lighthouse end of Malabar Island, she had been muttering to herself that this was a uniformed cop’s job when the radio erupted.

The island’s thirty-person police department was normally concerned with toad-in-the-toilet and bare-bosoms-on-the-beach complaints. A response to an I-found-a-body call was a detective’s plum. When it came, Kat Curtci was only a quarter-mile from the Wolffs’ palm-shaded gray piling house.