The dirtiest killer of the year was the man private investigator Ed Rivers had to save from the chair. Wally Tulman, Florida socialite, had been convicted of molesting and murdering a young girl. Tulman’s lovely wife begged Rivers to take his case - to prove him innocent. Rivers wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Then somebody tapped him over the head, just to make sure. Ed Rivers got the message. Somebody didn’t want him on the case. So he waded into it - with both fists flying.

This one was for keeps. It started the night private eye Ed Rivers went to the rescue of a damsel in distress and almost ended up at the bottom of Tampa Bay. Ed knew who was lurking behind him. His name was Russ Leppert. Russ liked to kill people. Not for any real reason - just because he liked it. Then there was the man who had once been the business of hustling pornographic stag movies. He wanted to get back into the racket again, in a big way. And, of course, the middle-aged Dixieland musician named Straight Stuff Delaney. Was Straight Stuff blowing for kicks - or merely furnishing the fanfares for other murders to come?

My name is Ed Rivers. I live in Tampa, Florida, where I work as a private cop. I’m six feet tall, weigh in at about one ninety, and am forty years old. When I look in the mirror I see a heavy, bearish face, dark-tanned and creased, the thick lids giving the brown eyes a lazy look. Women either get a charge from that face or want to run from it. Men fear it or trust it to the hilt. It isn’t a face that ever meets a neutral reaction. I’m not always happy about that, but it’s my face and I have to do the best I can with it.

Give her five minutes more, I thought . . . More than an hour had passed since Jean Putnam’s voice had promised on the phone that she would be there. As I started back to my office I gave a final look down the corridor, and suddenly she was there, framed in the stairwell. She was dressed in a very fetching pirate costume, the purposely ragged bottoms of her scarlet pants reaching to just below the hips. Her legs were bare from there on down to black oilcloth boots. She hadn’t moved, and a new sensation blew cold across the back of my neck. As I lunged for her she crumbled and fell backwards down the yawning stairwell. When I reached her on the next landing I saw that not all the redness was in her costume. A bullet had struck her in the back.