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Synopsis for “Bodies and Beaches”
A young highway landscape laborer, Steve Lang, is gunned down on a Southern California freeway. His sister, Starla, contacts Kip Yardley, hard-hitting Private Investigator.
Kip is a former California Highway Patrol officer who has been having difficulties keeping his child support paid and his mind focused after a bitter divorce. He takes this case out of necessity. He needs the money. And, Starla Lang is the prettiest woman he’s met since his divorce.
Like all investigations, Kip starts this one in the usual way, questioning friends of the deceased. No one can think of anyone who would want to see Steve Lang dead, but his girlfriend, Donna, says Steve was on the verge of making a lot of money.
Kip hears of a gangland shooting of a topless bar owner and former CHP officer, Hoss Macmillan, who had a reputation around town as being one really bad dude. Thinking that Steve Lang might have masterminded the shooting, Kip goes to the scene of the crime, only to be captured by some pot-smoking goons and tossed, hog-tied, in a cellar under a barn. Perseverance and ingenuity get him out. Shortly afterwards he is shot at by persons unknown; then jailed for a killing he didn’t commit. Someone is playing hardball and Kip seems to be caught in a game where the rules keep changing.
With the help of a friendly hypnotist Kip remembers the license number of a car at the crime scene. Bells start ringing that cause Kip to think his best friend, Toby Smith, a CHP officer, might have sold him out.
A search of Steve’s house gives him some clues to follow through seedy strip joints and weedy barrio barrooms
Trying to avoid getting caught ransacking Steve’s house, Kip accidentally falls into a swimming pool and meets Rhonda, a long legged woman who wants him to swim in her pool without his clothes on. Rhonda has a good friend, however, and Kip’s mind is on finding the bad guys not the good ones. His new friends give him a bit of information that he finds interesting enough to pay a visit to Hoss Macmillan’s widow, who is now married to the hairy goon that hog-tied Kip and tossed him in the barn cellar.
Kip needs more information from Steve Lang’s friends and decides to pay another visit to Steve’s girlfriend, Donna. The crooks get there first and he finds Donna dying on the floor of her apartment. Kip flees the scene, thinking that he might be arrested for another murder he didn’t commit.
He suspects that something is rotten in Denmark after talking to the Los Angeles County Sheriff, but doesn’t have enough evidence to lay his cards on the table.
In the final scene, Kip confronts the bad guys. They get the drop on him and he gets locked in an old wine cellar with raw natural gas pouring in. The crooks think he will be pickled to death. He uses his wits both to con a confession out of the bad guys and to get out of his worse predicament since divorce court.
Funny at times, serious at others, this book is a page-turner that keeps the action moving towards the final results. On the last page, Kip walks away from it all with one thing on his mind…the long legged beauty that wants him to swim in her pool without his clothes.
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