Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

By this time Barbara was fully dressed in the neat suit she had worn during her trial. Her makeup had been carefully applied and her dark hair was neatly combed. Her only jewelry was her wedding band and a pair of glittering rhinestone earrings.

Barbara was told of the postponement at 9:25. She had been waiting tensely in her cell with the chaplain, Father Edward Dingberg, and Father McAlister. Her spirits rose as the execution time came and went and she hoped against hope that no news was good news.

One more postponement followed and Barbara cried out in the deepest kind of anguish. “Why do they torture me like this! I want to die! Let’s get it over with!”

The final word came at last. All motions denied. Warden Teets then set the time for Barbara’s execution at 10:45. She let out a deep sigh and resigned herself to death.

She walked with firm steps toward the gas chamber, her head held high. She managed to smile weakly in reply to Warden Teets’ farewell, “Good-by and God bless you.” And then she walked into the gas chamber.

She spoke her last words to the chaplain as the guards blindfolded her, and as the stethoscope on her chest was connected to the gauge outside the chamber and the straps placed around her thin body, she repeated the “Ave.”

A guard asked her if the straps were too tight. She shook her head. The last guard gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder and whispered, “Count to ten and take a deep breath.”

The eyes of the newspapermen who stood five feet from the windows of Barbara’s tomb were fixed on her body and face. They saw her lips move in prayer, watched her cling to life for a few seconds more as her lips closed tightly, and then she opened her mouth and let out her soul.

Cops Work on Holidays by Max Van Derveer

Many men had wanted her, a few had possessed her. Now she lay waiting for her last, pale lover — stark Murder!

* * *

Sam Champagne had pounded concrete for six years and four months, got blisters on his feet, rode a patrol car for three years and seven months, got blisters on his posterior, then made detective.

The only trouble was somebody forgot to tell Sam Champagne that when you’re among the rookies on the detective team you draw all of the holiday tricks. Like this quiet, stiffling Fourth of July Friday afternoon, a very lazy afternoon on which to commit murder.

Ben Martin, another rookie detective, caught the call. At first, he did not believe it. Murder in the middle of the afternoon on the Fourth of July? That’s crank stuff. Which is exactly what Ben Martin figured he had until the guy on the other end of the line demanded superiors.

The guy on the other end of the line sounded like a man who was used to demanding high echelon people — and got them. This disturbed Martin. Who needs a superior jarred from his cold beer on a steamy holiday afternoon? So Martin finally put the crank stuff aside and said the detectives would be right out to 7000 Apple Drive. The address didn’t sound like crank territory, anyway. 7000 Apple Drive was plush terrain.

Which is what Randy Howell, a third rookie detective, thought too. Howell put on his shoes and knotted laces.

“Apple Drive is Honeysuckle Row,” he said. “I mean nobody on Apple Drive worries about when he’s gonna buy his next Rolls. These days it’s just who’s gonna make the thing?”

The girl lay in a fetal position beside a large pool table. She lay on a black tile floor of a game room in a fancy air-conditioned two-story brick and stone palace out in a neighborhood where the Fourth of July celebrations began the Wednesday before.

She lay naked in body flesh that had been tanned by many suns, except for the snow-white strip across her hips and a tiny pencil mark across her back. Her flesh was smooth and unmarked and looked good enough to touch, even in death. No telltale puncture marks on this doll. The narc had not been her banana. The lone blemish was a bruise along her jaw line.

She lay with gold hair down to her shoulders and the top of a purple bikini twisted around her neck. Her mouth was open, a bloody tongue stuck out between clamped teeth, and her eyes bugged. She also had bled from the nose, rather profusely. Most important, someone had garroted her.

Her name was Tina Polk. Until a killer had whipped the purple bikini top around her neck she probably had been a beautiful and vital girl, the kind of girl cops only dream about. She certainly had had the facial and body lines. True, she wasn’t so damned attractive now, not biting into a protruding tongue and with her eyes popped.

“Sam?”