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

Out back in the canal was a body, all right. Kat stripped off her shoes, hiked up her skirt, and worked her way among the mangroves down the sandy bank to the right of the dock. She waded the ten feet out to the corpse. The high-tide water was warm as blood this overcast August day, but she shuddered as the ook on the canal bottom squeezed up through the mesh of her pantyhose. The stench was impressive, but she knew that three minutes of bad odors numbs the olfactory nerves. She could hack it for those three minutes, then the Wolffs would be admiring the macho lady cop.

Largely for Sam Wolff’s benefit up on the dock where he gagged into the handkerchief he’d clamped over his nose, she probed for a pulse. The body’s neck felt like clammy chicken skin. Beneath its thick water-soaked black hair, the back of the skull appeared to have been battered inward. She checked the hip pockets of the work pants for a wallet. Nothing.

Scavengers had already worked on the ears and fingertips. All she could determine at this point was that the body was male, black hair moderately long, and he was dressed in a gray work shirt and trousers. Reaching underwater around the hips, she forced her fingers into the front pockets. She felt a round, hard object in the left one. A ring. She held it against the overcast sky. Thin gold with a lilac-colored square-cut stone. About two carats of amethyst, she guessed. What a peculiar item to be the only find in a dead man’s pockets.

With the ring clenched in one hand, Kat stood, her five feet ten elevating her chin to dock level.

“You said you spotted him just a few minutes ago, Mr. Wolff?”

“Yep. Myra and I had just started breakfast when I—”

The howl of multiple sirens drowned out the rest of what he said. The sirens cut off abruptly, doors slammed, and here came at least a third of the Malabar PD, all crowding onto the dock until there was no room for its owner. The scene of the crime had become police property.

“Come up out of there, Bela. This one is mine.”

Kat glared up into the doughy face of Detective Ellis Duckworth. Wouldn’t you know, she thought, that he’d be the detective assigned. No love had been lost between them. When Duckworth had heard about her Transylvanian heritage, he’d chortled, “Don’t go on night patrol with Bela LuCurtci.” She had surveyed his ballooning waistline and said brightly, “Thar she blows!” Thereafter he was known to the whole department as Moby Duck.

“I thought you were all tied up in the rash of burglaries we’ve been having.” She stepped back from the body and waded toward shore.

“This obviously takes precedence,” Duckworth said in the tone that he usually reserved for ignorant civilians.

She climbed back up the canal bank, pulled her shoes on wet feet, and noted with distaste that her skirt was water-soaked to the waist.

“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” Detective Duckworth chortled. He thumbed back the brim of his straw planter’s hat. “Cole Porter, I think.”

“Gilbert and Sullivan,” she grumped, looking back at the corpse in the canal.

“Whatever. How deep is it down there?”

“No need to get your toes tainted, Moby. Male Cauc, about thirty-five—”

“Drowned.”

“Nothing in his pockets except—”

“Robbed, then drowned... except what?”

She handed him the ring. He shrugged and shoved it in his pocket. “Back of the skull shows massive damage—” she managed to get out before Moby butted in again.

“Hit over the head, robbed, then drowned—”

“For God’s sake, Duckworth, stop hopping to conclusions and listen to me!”

Sunk in fatty folds, his little eyes glittered. “Got to ya, didn’t I? Go on back to your unit and put in a call for the county M.E.”

“You put in the call, Moby. You already said it’s your case.”

“C’mon, let’s have a little teamwork.”

“Yes,” she agreed eagerly. “Let’s. I want to work on it with you.”

He snorted. “In a year, maybe. When you know something. I don’t need—”

“Time of death? Two or three days ago.”

He fanned himself with his wide-brimmed hat, exposing a lot of bald skull. Then his bright little eyes almost disappeared in a squint. “Based on what?”

“A body sinks till internal gases form. It’s summer here in the subtropics, and gas forms in two to three days. Up comes the body.”

“Could have been floating for a couple of days after it came up.”

“Unobserved in a canal or out in the bay? Come on, Moby. It would have been spotted long before now by the daily geezer fishing armada. Huh uh, he came up last night and the tide drifted him in here.”

“Call the M.E.,” Duckworth growled, and he turned his back. Hadn’t listened to a word she’d said, Kat thought. Then as she trotted toward the driveway, she noticed he was furiously scrawling in his pocket notebook. Maybe he had listened.

When she returned to dockside a few minutes later, Duckworth had begun to clear the area of extraneous police uniforms. He talked the chalk-faced Wolffs back up to their rear deck then turned to Kat.