by Otto Penzler
The Adventure of the Venomous Lizard
BILL CRIDER
BORN AND RAISED in Texas, Bill Crider (1941– ) has been a highly prolific author of mystery novels (as well as numerous westerns, horror novels, and books for young readers) for thirty years. Apart from Blood Marks (1991), a violent serial-killer book, his work tends to be traditional and soft-boiled.
The Sheriff Dan Rhodes series features the adventures of a sheriff in a small Texas county where, as Crider has written, “there are no serial killers, where a naked man hiding in a Dumpster is big news, and where the sheriff still has time to investigate the theft of a set of false teeth.” The first book in the series, Too Late to Die (1986), won an Anthony Award.
Crider’s past as an English professor may have served as background for his series about Carl Burns, a teacher at a small denominational college who is a reluctant amateur sleuth, as well as the books about Sally Good, the chair of the English Department at a community college near the Texas Gulf Coast who is also a reluctant amateur sleuth. The first Burns novel is One Dead Dean (1988); the first Good book (so to speak) is Murder Is an Art (1999). Crider also writes a series about a Galveston private detective, Truman Smith, whose first adventure was Dead on the Island (1991), which was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America.
“The Adventure of the Venomous Lizard” was first published in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Carol-Lynn Rössel Waugh (New York, Carroll & Graf, 1999).
THE ADVENTURE OF THE VENOMOUS LIZARD
Bill Crider
I AM AN old man now, but on days like today, at the dank late end of spring, when the chill rain has been falling steadily for days, I can still feel the ache of the Jezail bullet that wounded me at the Battle of Maiwand, so long ago that I am no longer sure where I was struck. Sometimes the ache is in my leg, and at other times in my shoulder, so that more than once I have wondered whether I was actually shot at all or whether my memory of the event is nothing more than a dream.
But no, it was not a dream. I was there at Maiwand, and other places, too, places that I helped make known to those who were so kind as to read my tales about my great friend Sherlock Holmes. And so it is, on days like this, when going outside is a prospect with no appeal, yet staying inside has become increasingly hard to bear, that I find myself sitting quietly in a chair and going back over those recorded cases of Sherlock Holmes in which I myself played no small part. I do so both to assure myself that what I once did was indeed no dream, and in some minor way to relive those days and to experience again something of the thrill that I felt in times gone by.
And sometimes, as I go through those yellowing manuscripts, I recall other adventures, as yet unrecorded, and I find myself smoothing a sheet of paper and reaching for pen and ink to set down the facts before they flee my mind forever. How I wish, at those times, that I had in my possession Holmes’s carefully indexed volume of cases, through which he would occasionally pore! Then I would have at my fingertips a veritable trove of information. But I find that I do not need it. As I write, those days come back to me with the clarity of a vision, and give me, if not a chance to relive my life in actual fact, a chance at least to remember what it was, in the days that Holmes and I embarked on the singular adventure of the venomous lizard.
—
It was on a day very much like the present one. The winter seemed reluctant to release its hold on the land and hovered over the city for weeks past its allotted time filling the air with the chill of fog and rain. The Jezail bullet discomfited me. The cobbles were slick and glistened in the evening lamplight. Raindrops slid down the windows of 221B Baker Street as Sherlock Holmes stared gloomily out at them and smoked his pipe, the smoke curling up from the bowl and wreathing his head. There had been no one by our quarters, of late, who needed the services of the world’s only consulting detective, and Holmes was growing restive. I knew the signs.
But he was momentarily startled out of his nonchalance. Pointing the stem of his pipe at the window, he said, “Come, Watson, and observe a desperate man.”
I rose from the chair where I had been sitting and walked to the window. Outside in the thin rain, a man walked rapidly down the street in the direction of our dwelling.
“How do you know that he is desperate, Holmes?” I asked.
“Try your own powers, my dear Watson,” he replied. “It is a simple matter of observation. Note that I do not say seeing, for the difference between seeing and observing is as vast as the earth.”
He had often harped on the same string, so I was prepared, though my feeble efforts at observation never came near to equaling his own.
“For one thing,” said I, “he hunches forward and walks quickly. He is quite determined, and—look there!—he has slipped because of the careless placement of a foot. Clearly he is a man with something other than his own safety in mind.”
“Very good, Watson,” said Holmes. “Everything you say is true. But you have missed the most telling detail. Sometimes it is the most obvious things that elude us.”
“And what might that be?”
“He has no umbrella,” said Holmes. “Who would venture out in weather such as this with no umbrella, Watson? An Englishman without one on an evening like this is practically unimaginable, yet here he is. He is a man who left home in great haste, without thought for anything except whatever mission dominates his mind. I suspect that he will be knocking on our door at any moment now, for he is clearly a man in dire need of our services.”
Soon enough, he was proven correct, as there was a tapping on the door and Mrs. Hudson announced herself outside our room. I opened the door to admit our landlady and the dripping visitor, one of a long line of unusual and sometimes disreputable personages who had sought out the aid of Sherlock Holmes.
“I most humbly apologise for any damages,” the man said, as water from his outer garments bedewed our floor. “In my hurry, I may say, my desperation to reach you I seem to have neglected to pick up an umbrella. I hope that you will forgive me.”
“Of course,” said Holmes, only too happy to forgive what was really a very minor annoyance in the anticipation of the tale that our visitor would soon be telling, for it was clear that the young man, for such he was, was not merely desperate but distraught.
His eyes were wide and staring, and they failed to focus on any one person or object in the room, roving, as it were, from here to there, from our cluttered sideboard to the patriotic V. R. that Holmes had fashioned on our wall by firing bullets into it, from Holmes’s face to mine, from the windows to the rug.
At last he drew a deep breath and said, “Which one of you is Sherlock Holmes?”
“I am,” said Holmes. “Watson, fetch our visitor a blanket. Mrs. Hudson, a dry towel if you please.”
In no time at all, that much-used woman had returned with a towel, which our visitor used to soak some of the water from both his clothing and the floor, after which she took the towel from him and let herself out. Our visitor wrapped himself in the blanket I had brought and was shivering on our sofa, where he began to tell us as strange a tale as it was ever my pleasure to hear inside that room on Baker Street.
“My name,” said he, “is William Randolph, and I believe I have murdered my sister.”
—
One may easily imagine the thrill of horror I felt to think that a confessed murderer was sitting on our sofa, wrapped in a blanket from my own room. But Holmes remained impassive. He had often told me that the capacity to retain one’s objectivity was of the utmost importance in the reasoning process. He did not form his theories in advance. He listened instead, and approached each case with a mind that resembled as much as possible a tabula rasa.
“When did this happen?” Holmes asked.
“I have made the discovery only just now,” the miserable young man said. “And I immediately came to you because you were nearby and because I have read of your accomplis
hments.”
Holmes nodded at the implied compliment, though he sometimes complained that my modest attempts to convey his adventures to the public exaggerated in one way or the other. “You say that you ‘made the discovery.’ That does not seem to indicate any action on your part that could be construed as murder.”
Randolph waved a hand. “I am afraid that my mind is not working in an orderly manner. Let me gather my thoughts and begin again.”
He sat quietly for a moment. Holmes smoked his pipe. I watched both of them in suspense and awe.
After several moments, Randolph began his tale again.
“Up until a year ago,” said he, “I had been living in America, in California and in that part of the country inhabited by the Mormons.”
Holmes gave me a significant look, as if to say that he knew full well what I was thinking of, a case of his that had the scarlet thread of murder running all through it.
“I was there for business reasons, not religion,” Randolph continued, oblivious to what had passed between me and Holmes. “The business is not material, but while I was there, I was attracted to the peculiar fauna of the region to the south of where I was living, in particular a type of lizard known as the Gila.”
“Ah,” Holmes said. “The venomous lizard, Heloderma suspectum.”
Randolph looked at Holmes in amazement. He was not so familiar as I with the breadth of Holmes’s knowledge when it came to things relating to poison, or, for that matter, anything deadly or dangerous, about which Holmes knew as much, or more, than any man alive.
“You are correct,” Randolph said. “So you know about the Gila.”
Holmes gave the slightest of nods. “I know that it can grow quite large, that it is mostly black with irregular orange and pink areas on its body, and that it can store food in its body for long periods of time. I also know, among other things, that its bite is thought to be fatal. I have never seen such a lizard myself, however.”
“I hope that you soon shall,” Randolph said, though he did not explain himself at that time. “As for me, I saw several in a collection in the house of a man who befriended me, and I was quite fascinated. I even wrote to my sister and her husband of the unique creatures, which led to the horrible scene I discovered only a short while ago.”
“You have not yet described that scene for us,” said Holmes, “nor have you told us why you are here.”
“I will come to that. I promise that I will. But first I must tell you what my fascination with the creatures led me to do: I brought one back as a gift for my sister and her husband.”
“And that, I take it, led to the situation that brings you here,” said Holmes.
“Indeed,” Randolph replied, and he put his head in his hands.
Holmes smoked and waited, as I continued to await the revelation that was coming.
At last Randolph looked up. “Earlier this evening,” he said, “only moments before coming to your door, I went to visit my sister at her home. It was there that I found her lying dead, poisoned by the very lizard that I had given her.”
“Good Lord,” said I. “Does this mean that even now she lies dead upon the floor of her house?”
“Indeed,” Randolph said. “And I have come to Sherlock Holmes to find the thing that killed her, for I cannot.”
“It is loose in the house?” I asked, my blood freezing at the thought.
“So it must be, for the glass cage where it lived is broken, and it was not in the room where she lay.”
As he said those words, all the colour that had remained in his face drained away, and his shoulders shook with his silent sobs.
Holmes’s face was impassive. “Watson,” said he, “I believe that you should fetch your revolver—and your medical bag. It is possible that we shall find ourselves in need of them. There are dark doings here, Watson.”
—
The rain had resolved itself into a heavy mist that put a frosty halo around the lamps by the time we left our apartments, and an umbrella was no longer necessary. We eagerly followed Randolph to his sister’s home, a Georgian structure that was located on Blandford Street, not far from our own lodgings.
We entered through an unlocked door, and went down a hallway in which there was an elephant-foot umbrella stand. Holmes paused momentarily as we passed the stand and looked at the umbrellas there. One of them, I noticed, was still wet. Then we walked through a dark parlor in which the embers of a fire smouldered dimly on the grate and thence into a sort of solarium, with one wall being taken up mostly by windows, though all light was now provided by two flickering lamps. There were potted green plants of several kinds, but I paid them no attention, for my eyes were arrested by what lay on the floor.
It was the body of a young woman, her resemblance to her brother plain to see even in the dim light of the room. Her dark hair was spread upon the floor, and her skin appeared to have a slight bluish tinge, obviously caused by the venom of the Gila, aptly referred to in this instance as a monster.
I immediately went to kneel beside the body to see if there was any possibility that the young woman was merely unconscious, perhaps paralyzed by the Gila’s poison. Setting my medical bag beside me, I felt for any trace of a pulse, but it was far too late for such false hopes. She was quite dead.
Holmes knelt beside me to examine the skin of the young woman’s arm, which was deeply punctured in several places where the lizard had bitten her.
As for the Gila, it was gone. There was a large glass case, its bottom lined with sand, that was lighted and warmed by one of the lamps. However, one side of the case was shattered, as if it had been broken in a struggle of some kind. Sand was scattered on the floor.
Holmes and I stood up. Randolph remained where he had stopped at the threshold of the room, as if unable to will himself to enter. His face was a study in sorrowful apprehension.
“Where could the thing be?” he asked. “To think that I brought it into this house, that I am the cause of her death! Murderer! Murderer!”
“An accident is not murder,” said Holmes. “Have you any idea whether your sister frequently handled the Gila?”
“Her name was Sofia,” said Randolph dolefully. “Sofia Randolph Bingham. I would have to say that she seldom, if ever, touched the thing. It did not require frequent feeding, and it was certainly not of an affectionate nature. You must find it!”
Holmes nodded grimly. “I do not believe that will prove difficult. I am surprised that you did not find it yourself.”
Randolph hung his head. “I confess that I was frightened of the creature. And I hardly knew where to begin.”
“It would seek warmth,” said Holmes. “An English home in winter is hardly the kind of place that the Gila would find an agreeable dwelling place. I am surprised that it has survived for this long.”
“I brought it only a month ago,” Randolph said. “However, the journey here was a long one.”
“The Gila can survive for quite a long time without food,” said Holmes, “but it needs water occasionally and warmth rather more often.”
“My room aboard ship was quite warm,” Randolph said. “Do you suppose that the lack of a temperate environment could have caused the thing to kill my sister?”
“That seems doubtful,” said Holmes. “Tell me, what of your sister’s husband?”
“He is the one who encouraged me to bring the Gila to them,” Randolph said. “He seemed as interested in the beast as I. But as soon as he saw it, he was repelled by its appearance. My sister, being of a gentler nature, pitied it, and so it remained here.”
Holmes looked around the room where we stood. “Your brother-in-law must be a man of substance to own a home such as this,” said he.
Randolph smiled feebly. “He is a physician, like your friend, Dr. Watson. While he does much good for others, I fear that he does not do well for himself.”
“The house, then, is your sister’s.”
“Yes. Our family was quite successful in the business I men
tioned earlier.”
“I do not believe you mentioned what that business was,” said I.
“It is one that was begun by my father, who was something of an adventurer. It involves the mining of borax, and I was sent to America after his death to learn how to conduct the business.” His eyes turned to the body on the floor. “Now, as a result of that, Sofia is gone like my father, and the fault lies with me.”
“Perhaps not,” said Holmes.
“Of course not,” I added. “You cannot blame yourself for the actions of an animal that you believe to be quite harmless.”
“Oh, I knew of its venom,” Randolph protested. “While I was in the American West, I heard several tales of its potent bite. They formed a part of my fascination with the lizard, and I even related several of them in letters to my sister. They were often quite vivid, and one claimed that when the Gila attached itself to a victim, it refused to let go and had to be cut away.” He shuddered. “At least my sister was spared that horror.”
“Yes,” said Holmes, “but not others.”
Randolph straightened his shoulders. “No,” he said. “But we must not allow it to happen to anyone else. Can you help me find the Gila?”
Holmes nodded. “As I said, it should not be difficult to locate him. Come.”
“Wait, Holmes,” said I. “Should we not do something with the…with Miss Sofia?”
“It is unfortunate,” he said, “but I think it would be best to leave her for now. You may cover her face, if you wish.”
I did as he suggested, using my clean linen handkerchief to conceal the sad dead face from the eyes of the world.
Holmes then led us to the shadowy parlour and said, “Is there a lamp?”
