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

He stood at one of the several long windows in the game room wall looking out on a large swimming pool and surrounding apron. There were people out there, perhaps fifteen people, attired in varied swim togs, including a striking, long-legged girl in white blouse and green shorts and with a small camera dangling from a neck strap.

She sat in a cluster of three, and Sam Champagne thought she was extremely attractive. An hour ago the girl and the others had been raising hell, he figured, in the water and at the portable bar across the way. Now they were huddled, subdued, not sure of what to do or where to go. Even the bar had closed.

Down at the far end of the pool and off the apron, a lanky Negro boy in yellow shirt and tan slacks sat on the grass. He was staring, unmoving, at the house, as much ignoring the party crowd as they were ignoring him.

“Sam, what do we do now?”

He glanced at the door to his left. It was closed, but it opened on to the pool apron. He turned back into the room. Martin and Howell were squatted on the other side of the girl. They looked as if they were staring on moon rock. They moved around to the back side of the girl.

“Where’s her bottoms?” Howell asked. “I thought bikinis always came in two strips.”

“Maybe the killer wanted a souvenir of his handiwork,” said Martin. “Sam, what’s the make on her? You get anything out of those three guys out there in the other room, the welcoming committee?”

The “three guys out there in the other room” had been waiting for the detectives when they had arrived at 7000 Apple Drive. Sam had had a brief, unorganized exchange with them. The preliminary make on the girl was: she had been wealthy, married, divorced, married again, widowed and spumed (in that order). At twenty-six, she was sort of a sock-it-to-me kind of girl who had collected plenty of lumps.

“Zowie,” breathed Howell.

“A swinger,” said Martin.

“I’m going to talk to them again,” said Sam. “Howell, how about if you stick with the girl, guide the technicians when they get here? Ben, take that crowd at the pool. We need names, addresses, whatever anyone can give you.”

Sam went into the next room, a den. The trio was not where he had left them. He went on toward the front of the house, found them in a vast living room.

The dead girl was the subject of a heated discussion. He could feel the charged atmosphere. The small ashen man in bright yellow swim trunks was pacing. The ruddy father type whose sun-pinked belly hung over flowered trunks, fiddled with an unlighted cigar. The Mexican-American, dressed in blue blazer and bell bottom gray trousers, sat scowling in a barrel chair. None acknowledged Sam’s arrival.

“Tina was drinking too much lately,” said the ashen man, moving back and forth in a short path near a window. “She needed clinical assistance. I attempted to help her.”

“She had reason to drink,” said the ruddy man. “Roger’s death was a severe blow.”

“Hell, she was an alcoholic,” snapped the athletic Mexican-American.

“She wouldn’t have been if she had listened to me,” said the ashen man, shooting a piercing glance at the Mexican-American. “No one understood her like I did.”

“Then how come she divorced you, doctor, and married Roger?” countered Ruddy, chomping on the cigar.

“She didn’t know where she was going. She never knew where she was going, or why,” said the Mexican-American.

It earned him two piercing looks this time. Then the ashen man pushed on: “It had to be a sexual attack.”

“What I can’t figure,” said Ruddy, “is why we didn’t hear her scream. We were just outside.”

“She didn’t scream,” said the Mexican-American. “She was probably enjoying—”

“Damn it, Ramirez,” flared the ashen man, “you’re flogging a dead girl! You were to marry her! Remember?”

“That was her idea,” said the Mexican-American sourly. “Not mine.”

“Gentlemen,” put in Sam Champagne, “may I take it from here?” The trio went silent. They stared at him as if he was an unwanted intruder. The ashen man was sad-eyed, the ruddy man defiant-eyed, the Mexican-American hostile-eyed. From this friendly little group Sam already had learned:

(1) That the ashen man was Dr. James Franklin Benz, surgeon, once married to Tina nee Polk — she preferred her maiden name after the divorce. He currently was residing in this brick and stone house, had been for the last four and a half months, give or take a day or two. He had been even though he no longer was married to said Tina Polk, now deceased. Dr. James Franklin Benz was “still very much in love,” as it were, with one Tina Polk, did in fact and deed still own this plush barrier against the natural environment, and had returned to the nest and taken a room following the death of Tina Polk’s second husband, a stock broker named Roger Caldwell Jr.