The Knightsbridge Killings

by Ray Dyson

About the Author: I have had three books published: Smokey Joe: A Baseball Fable; Bannon: The Scavenger Breed, and The Ice Cream Blonde, a Neil Brand crime tale. A fourth book, The Naked Nymph in the Dark Flickers, another Neil Brand crime story, will be published this summmer.

Excerpt

I first met Jane Davender on the set of a boy-meets-girl picture she had written on loan to Harry York. Between camera set-ups, she vigorously besieged the morning’s Racing Form with a stubby carpenter’s pencil, making no effort to hide her fondness for honest horses and honest roulette wheels. And she could now and then step down in class. She proved that easily enough when the picture wrapped by gracefully accepting my proposal for a weekend at Agua Caliente, just across the border in Tijuana. Her spirited emerald eyes danced delightfully when she set down two strict conditions. I would be a gentleman at all times and I would book separate rooms.

To drive her south of the border in style, I borrowed a sleek burgundy-and-black Packard Speedster from the studio lot. When you run security for one of the biggest movie studios in Hollywood you get to do things like borrow burgundy-and-black Packard Speedsters – as long as the sinfully proper autocrats who buzz over the studio’s daily reports don’t grow hinky about it. Being the weekend, I figured it was a safe bet.

I promised Jane I’d be at her ritzy digs at four-thirty Friday and I was dead on time – give or take – with the Packard’s top down. Lovely in an ivory linen travel suit, Jane snapped her emerald earrings into place and we were ready to roll but for one small detail.

“I have to take these rewrites to the studio,” she told me, gathering a sheaf of multi-colored papers. “You don’t mind?”

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