Mike Shayne Selects Ten Cases of Murder in Miami by editor Brett Halliday

Author:editor Brett Halliday [Brett Halliday, editor]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: detective, mystery, murder, crime, suspense, hardboiled
Publisher: Dell
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Miami Mystery Puzzle

Robert P. Mills

Here’s a test of your detective ability and of your knowledge of Miami. Though Inspector Goldsmith is a northerner, less than ten hours spent in the resort city make him enough of a Miamian to spot the lie told him by one of the murder suspects.

Are you as good a detective as the inspector?

Inspector Goldsmith had seen the inside of many nightclubs in his life—occasionally seeking pleasure, more often in the line of duty—but there was something about Charlie Sanger’s nightclub that was different. Maybe, he thought, it was the lush tropical decorations that somehow did not seem out of place here as similar decorative schemes had in other clubs. Or it could be the formal dress, which wasn’t quite formal to the eye of a northerner unaccustomed to off-shade mess-jackets and evening gowns with prints so exotic. Or possibly the number of suntans when winter wasn’t properly over.

The truth was that the inspector’s plane had landed him in Miami at noon, and nine hours later he still was not used to being there. The hot sun all afternoon, the bright reds and pinks of blooming flowers, the unlikely blue of Biscayne Bay and the ocean beyond, the tall palms—none of them seemed quite believable after the long winter he’d come from. The nightclub fitted in the same pattern of strangeness.

Charlie Sanger’s dead body, however, was more familiar. A dead body is much the same everywhere, the inspector thought, whether it be a bum in an alley or, like Sanger, a Miami nightclub proprietor shot in his plush office.

Goldsmith’s old friend, Homicide Chief Reeder, came in from the outer office where the two girls were being held.

“The bartender confirms it,” Reeder said. “Daisy, the blonde, came in here about a minute after Rita. The office is soundproofed, so he didn’t hear anything—until five minutes later when the two of them ran out screaming.”

“And each of them still claims the other shot him?”

“No change,” Reeder said disgustedly. “Now how the hell am I going to prove anything?”

“Don’t ask me,” Goldsmith said. “I came to Miami on vacation because of your lies about how good the tarpon fishing is. I still think, pound for pound, a smallmouth bass is a better fighter, and if you’re going to try to prove different tomorrow, you’d better get this solved tonight.”

Reeder grunted and stared dyspeptically around the richly furnished office, at handsome, tanned, well-dressed Charlie Sanger lying dead on the floor beside his desk, at the .38 on the floor near him, at the handful of twenty-dollar bills on the desk, at the spray of bougainvillea in the vase, at the open desk drawer, at the inspector.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think if you want to go fishing, you’d better lend a hand. Let’s go talk to the babes.”

They were both dishes—Rita, the club’s headline singer, with black hair and skin like dark honey; and Daisy, a bright blonde, with creamy skin and large blue eyes.

Daisy talked first, jerkily, her face white.

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