Murder by the Sword Three people were dead, their heads bashed in, their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. All three victims were Japanese. The murder weapon was traced to Nick Martin, a veteran of Iwo Jima. Nick had spent fifteen pain-ridden years in and out of Army hospitals. He tried to drown his memories of the horror, but whisky only put him right back in the middle of that fierce battle. Nick drank a fifth the night of the killing. That’s the kind of case the police call “open and shut.” But Ed Rivers, a private detective, was a friend of Nick Martin’s. And no one was shutting the door of a death cell on Nick-not while Rivers could still go after the real, fiendishly clever murderer

I swung the wet, flat money belt, enjoying the slap of it against my leg. I had gone through a lot to get that belt. I had consorted with midgets and freaks. I had been lied to, framed, been offered the bribery of a beautiful but depraved normal-sized woman’s body. I had also been beaten senseless twice, another time left for dead, locked in the trunk of an abandoned car. And now I was home, free. “It’s a long story,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It began with a beautiful little doll who stands three feet tall. Unhappily she had an ache inside her almost as big as she imagined the rest of us to be.”

I’m a private eye in Tampa. My card reads: It all started during Gasparilla Week, when our city re-enacts the good old days when that lusty pirate, José Caspar, sailed up Tampa Bay and took over the city. Well, Caspar was only a memory now, and the atmosphere of the city was not unlike Mardi Gras. Gaiety ruled. Wine flowed. And people danced in the streets. That was fine with me, though beer is really my tipple. Until I discovered that somewhere in that mass of pleasure-mad humanity a diabolic killer was on the prowl. He’d already killed once. Could I discover his identity amongst all those mummers before another corpse turned up in the morgue?