It ended the instant it registered. As Cragin’s pistol cleared the holster, the rifle flickered up in a butt-strike—which refers to what hit Cragin, and not where. The walnut stock sank into the pit of his stomach, paralyzing him. He could not even yank a shot.
He doubled up, too numb to feel the ensuing smack across the head. It was not until a long time thereafter that he even realized that there had been a blow…
* * * *
When he finally became aware of the intolerable aching of his head, he wondered why the ragged madman had pulled his punch. A rifle butt or barrel could have smashed his head to a gummy pulp. And why had Harris not heard the thump?
Cragin tottered to his feet before he realized he was grasping a hunting knife whose blade was sticky. He blinked, dropped the weapon, noted the red splashes that stained his tweeds. He kicked open the door of the proprietor’s room.
Harris was half in a chair, half sprawled across a table. The back of his coat was blood soaked. A darkening red pool drenched the floor and spread across the tabletop. Someone had pinned him to the oak, then yanked the knife out.
Westward-Ho House—hell, it was worse than a madhouse now! And when it came to bubbling, Cragin’s brain was making a monkey out of the lake.
He picked his way downstairs, cranked the telephone in the office. The line was dead. No chance of calling the sheriff. It was a long jaunt to the Bubbling Lake Tavern, whose few lights winked across the black water.
If he had the keys, he could drive Harris’ station wagon to Mineral Wells. He tramped back upstairs. As he approached the darkened head of the stairs, he reached for his pistol, just in case.
It was gone. Neither was it lying where he had dropped.
But before he could re-enter Harris’ room, he heard a choked gasping, then a scream. A door slammed open, and Adele Lafourche burst into the hallway. Seeing Cragin, she stood there, blinking and gaping.
Cragin did the same. The strong side lighting from the door at her left made her chiffon nightgown look like the vapors that hissed from the volcanic earth about the spring. His initial ideas on Adele’s structure were dazzlingly confirmed. Though full breasted, she was firm; and the incurve of her waist accentuated the roundness of her intriguing hips.
Double eyeful? That frail froth of chiffon and lace clung to a tapering sweep of ivory legs that would have dazzled a streetful of eyes.
“Oh—I had the most awful dream!” she cried. “I thought my husband was killing me!”
“Where the hell is he?” groped Cragin, wondering how she had managed to drape herself all over him in one move.
The longer and tighter she clung, the more urgent an answer became. That warm armful was making him forget his battered head and its whirling queries. And it wasn’t entirely Adele’s perfume, though that was a mighty sultry compound that probably was called Nuit d’Ivresse or something dizzier.
“That’s what frightened me,” she gasped, incoherent. “He’s gone. Suitcase and all.”
Though two plus two does not invariably make four, Cragin was willing to bet that the twelve-lunged Packard had sneaked from its stable after Lafourche had slipped the dripping hunting knife into his hand. That, of course, would cancel his first hunch that the shaggy-headed madman had finished Harris.
She seemed to sense his thought.
“He always leaves his keys on the dresser with his watch,” Adele continued. “Do go and see if the car is in.”
It took Cragin a few seconds over a minute to learn that the long locomotive was gone.
“Oh—I know something dreadful’s happened!” she moaned as he returned. “Where’s Mr. Harris? And where’s Dale?”
She noticed that Cragin’s head was battered and his face smeared with grime and blood.
“Tell me!” she persisted. Then, as he groped for words: “I know—Oh, good God! Maurice has been acting so strangely!”
She was rapidly getting out of hand. If he told her what had happened, the madhouse would be complete. And if he didn’t, she’d guess, and it’d be just as bad.
“They’re both deader’n hell!” he blurted out. “And someone damn near brained me! Now pipe down, sister, and pull yourself together.”
She threw herself on the couch and lay there, a laughing, sobbing white length. Adele was plumb loco.
He kicked the door shut, and tried to remember how to snap a woman out of hysterics. He could not leave her this way while he went for the sheriff, and he’d go nuts it he had to listen much longer.
Cragin knelt beside the lounge and tried to draw her upright. His grasp slipped, and his hand brushed curves that set his blood racing.
That was no way to set a woman upright. Cragin regretfully shifted his grasp. But while his next attempt did not skid on curves, it was like taking a scoopshovel of pep tablets.
When Cragin did get her propped up among some cushions, Adele wouldn’t let go. And what was pressing against his shirtfront was warm and resilient and resentful of pressure.
As soon as she calmed down a bit more, he might be able to find out why Dale and Lafourche had come from Louisiana to this lost corner of the woods, and how they tied in with Harris. Such was his intention; but about the time Adele became rational, Cragin couldn’t stand it any longer.
He caught her in an embrace that squeezed her breathless, then kissed her until he himself had to come up for air. Before they broke, Adele was again making incoherent sounds, but this time it was not hysteria. It was something like a half-hearted attempt to say “Don’t…”
Cragin gave her some bigger and better kisses; and judging from the shudder that rippled to her ankles, she forgot more than her nightmarish premonitions…
Unfortunately, absent mindedness had likewise overlooked the latch on door—
When it slammed open, Cragin disengaged himself from a tangle of arms and chiffon and other odds and ends just in time to hear a wrathful oath and see two men standing in the doorway.
One was Maurice Lafourche. The other, viewing the show from behind a single-action Colt whose muzzle gaped like a sugar barrel, wore a slouch hat, a tobacco-stained moustache, and a nickeled star the size of a saucer.
“Er…ug—gug—” But gestures as well as speech failed Cragin. It was going to be hard as the devil to explain.
“Stick ’em up!” The sheriff’s gnarled hand restrained the wrathful husband. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Gilbert Harris.”
“You’re crazy!” Cragin cut in. “Someone sapped me as I was knocking at his door, and when I snapped out of it, Mrs. Lafourche screamed, and—”
“You might try wrapping a blanket around yourself,” was Lafourche’s frosty command to his wife. Then, to the sheriff: “I heard a disturbance and saw this fellow dashing down the hall with a knife in his hand. When I found Harris dead, I knocked at Dale’s room, but he was not in.
“And so I drove out to get you. Didn’t want to alarm my wife. I never dreamed he’d come back. By God, sheriff, if I had a gun—”
“All right, young fellow!” the sheriff interrupted, “stick ’em out.”
Cragin knew that he had not a Chinaman’s chance of proving that he had been sapped by a madman with a rifle, but he tried it.
“Get Glendora,” he concluded. “Look in my room and see the bullet hole. Find out who killed Dale, up at the sulphur spring!”
“We’ll look into that,” was Sheriff Barker’s noncommittal answer as he snapped on the bracelets.
“Dale, dead?” gasped Lafourche.
“Sure he’s dead!” growled Cragin. “Ask Glendora. Look at the sulphur on her shoes, just like on mine.”
Sheriff Barker, holstering his Colt, was caught off guard by his prisoner’s vehement suggestion. He looked—
Cragin, nerves wire-edged, saw not only that the sheriff’s glance had shifted, but that Lafourche was looking
at his own sulphur-caked shoes.
Smack! The heavy circlets of steel smashed against Barker’s head. He went down, his half-drawn revolver blasting the bottom out of his holster. Lafourche, stumbling as the sheriff dropped athwart his legs, took a nosedive into the room.
Cragin, though manacled, snatched the sheriff’s revolver.
“Get up, you louse-bound—!” growled the detective, cocking the ponderous Colt and shifting it to wrap Lafourche’s stomach around his spine. “You killed Dale! You were at the spring. And you framed me after knifing Harris!”
The sheriff, though still out, was mumbling and stirring. Lafourche turned gray as he stared into the oversized muzzle.
But before Cragin could devise a way of keeping Lafourche covered while getting Barker’s keys, the indiscreet wife took a hand. She had been lying on the lounge, face buried in the cushions to hide her confusion; but the way she hurled her overnight case would have made a goal from the sixty-yard line. And as the revolver was knocked out of line, Lafourche lunged, wrenching the weapon from Cragin’s grasp.
“Tie them both and blow, darling!” said Adele, her voice tense. “Honest, I had to do something to keep him amused—”
“You didn’t need to let him paw you over like he was taking lessons on a flute!” rasped Lafourche. Then, to Cragin, “Get up, you rat—if your hands weren’t tied, I’d let you have it, messing around with my wife.”
Cragin saw that Lafourche’s nerves were at the cracking point. He also noted that Adele’s overnight case had disgorged a bale of government bonds that would choke a sewer; but most important was that Lafourche was not familiar with a single-action revolver. It wasn’t cocked.
Cragin lunged as Lafourche tugged at the trigger, catching him amidships and knocking him smack against his wife’s richest curves. She tumbled nose first into the suitcase over which she was bending. The revolver skated under the bed.
“Never mind that gun!” barked a voice from the doorway.
Cragin, however, was moving too fast to stop; but when he did emerge, retrieved Colt in hand, he saw that while the sheriff was recovering, it was not he who had spoken.
The fuzzy-headed madman was in the doorway, rifle in hand.
“All right, Mr. G-man,” he said to Cragin, “I surrender. Those bonds on the floor clear me.”
“G-man?” Cragin blinked. Then, to the sheriff: “Here’s your Colt. Grab Lafourche. He killed Warren Dale. Look at the sulphur crystals on his shoes.”
“If you mean the fellow aiming this rifle at a window at this hotel,” interposed the shaggy man, “you’re wrong. I sapped him with a piece of pipe. I can beat a manslaughter charge. I was trying to prevent a felony.”
“Sure you can,” agreed Cragin, “but where do you get that G-man stuff?”
“I’m Morton Sloane, escaped from Atlanta. Harris was the crooked auditor who juggled the books. Lafourche and Dale cleaned up. I was the boob, taking the rap. For those stolen bonds. Those on the floor.”
And then Glendora stepped into the room. She had slipped her moorings. She stared at the shaggy man and in wide-eyed dismay demanded, “Dad—what on earth—”
“Dad?” echoed Cragin, glance shifting from Glendora’s dusky beauty to the not-so-madman’s fair skin.
“This is just a paint job,” laughed Glendora. “I followed Harris to recover these bonds, the theft of which is what really sent father to Atlanta. I had the combination of the safe, but he changed it.
“And this G-man business,” she continued, “was what Harris told Dale and Lafourche. To scare them out of giving him the works for hogging all the loot. That fancy rifle is Dale’s. I saw it in his baggage. Since he didn’t expect a G-man, he must have brought it to kill Harris.
“I doped you,” she concluded, “so I could go out into the woods and warn dad against making any attempts to capture the plunder.”
“You can’t prove I killed Harris!” flared Lafourche. “Sloane came out here for revenge. He did it.”
“I guess Sloane put those bonds into your wife’s suitcase!” snapped Cragin. “You went to the spring to check up on Dale’s absence, found him dead, then found me knocked cold, and saw your chance to go for the sheriff and frame me.”
“That’ll make an indictment two miles long,” rumbled the sheriff. “Sloane, I’m holding you for justifiable homicide, an’ if you don’t get a bounty for exterminatin’ varmints, I’ll eat the sights off my gun. Let’s go.”
He loaded his prisoners into Lafourche’s big car. Cragin took the wheel, and Glendora joined him.
“Probably you’re fed up on blondes,” she whispered, smiling in sweet malice, “so I’d better wash off my false complexion along with my phony name—”
“Maybe you’d better,” agreed Cragin, “Though we might go back and start where we left off…and sort of let the color wear off…”
QUEEN OF HEAVEN
Originally published in Spicy Detective Stories, September 1936.
“Remember,” rumbled the heavy-jawed, ruddy-faced owner of the Diesel-engined Medea as he paused at the rail to address Cliff Cragin, proprietor of the one-man detective agency engaged as a guard, “absolutely nobody comes aboard without my initialed card. And that includes newspaper men.”
“Okay,” acknowledged Cragin.
Another half hour of shivering; but, as Cragin’s teeth began to click like Salvation Army castanets, a stoop-shouldered, wrinkled Chinese in a tattered, greenish-black overcoat came slip-slopping up the gangplank.
“What the hell do you want? demanded Cragin.
“My got plenty tickee,” beamed the wizened, sharp eyed old fellow; and as he spoke, he produced a card reading, “Glenwood Hassler—Oriental & Pacific Export Company.”
The initials looked bona fide, but the ragged Chink didn’t. Before he could repeat his remark, Cragin had him handcuffed to the rail. He took the “tickee” and headed for the salon. It was vacant.
Cragin strode down the corridor toward the master’s stateroom. He barged in.
They say that the swiftness of the hand deceives the eye, but Glenwood Hassler did not qualify by a mile.
The girl on the lounge had the kind of legs hermits dream about. From her dazzling ankles to her beaded garters they were a delirium in silk. Hassler had been making enviable progress.
The girl with the bronze-gilt hair pulled her skirt down over her knees and flashed ironic topaz eyes at Cragin. Hassler growled, “Who the hell sent for you?”
“An old Chink handed me this card,” explained Cragin, “and he looked—”
“It’s none of your business how he looked as long as he had a card,” rasped Hassler. “Send him in. Into the salon, I mean.”
* * * *
Cragin released the shriveled Chinese; but he no longer shivered. Not after that warning glimpse—
Five more Chinese presently filed up the gang plank. Each had an initialed card. They were scarcely aboard when the Medea cast off and nosed into the biting chill of the open bay.
Cragin went down to the engine room. Maybe Olson, the engineer, would have a drink. That, however, was a bum hunch.
“But I tank there bane one bottle in das galley,” said the engineer, “Only, maybe it bane locked.”
It was. Cragin decided to hail the steward as he left the salon; but at the head of the companion-way, he abruptly halted.
The canvas covering of the lifeboat was stirring, and not because of the wind. A moment later a man emerged, dropped silently to the deck, glanced about, and tiptoed toward a porthole of the salon.
“As you were!” growled Cragin, jerking his automatic into line. “What’s the big idea?”
The stowaway waited, raised his hands, then grinned disarming!
“I’m Denby. Financial reporter for the Times,” he explained. “I heard the directors of the Pacific & Oriental were havin
g a meeting.” The sound Cragin made could be described as a snort.
“I’ll show you my card,” offered Denby, lowering his hands as Cragin holstered his pistol.
If he thought he had Cragin off guard, he was wrong. Just as he reached for his inside pocket, Cragin’s fist connected. The impact lifted Denby off his feet and dropped him in a heap in the scuppers.
The financial reporter, however, was far from out. Cragin, warned by the first sign of fight, closed in. He was met half way; but as they connected, the Medea rolled, pitching them against a ventilator. Denby, however, got the breaks. He backheeled Cragin, sending him crashing to the deck.
A blackjack plastered home. Cragin’s head exploded, but the hastily aimed blow missed enough to keep it from being lights out. He kicked, doubling Denby and catapulting him against the rail.
For a moment Denby was draped over the brass. The Medea rolled. Cragin, scrambling across the deck, clutched at the newsman’s ankle, but missed his grip. Denby went over the side.
“Man overboard!” roared Cragin. “Starboard quarter!”
Hassler burst out of the cabin before the skipper could signal a halt.
“A guy that didn’t have a card,” explained Cragin. “Said he was a reporter for the Times.”
“If you’d kept your eyes open,” snapped Hassler, “he’d not have come aboard.”
Then the Medea slowed down, and the searchlight dipped to the starboard. It picked a small launch out of the gloom. Two men were hauling something out of the water. A man. And as the exporter’s yacht swung about, the smaller craft darted into the darkness, not even a whisper of its engine reaching the Medea.
That justified Cragin.
“Boarded us after we were under way,” he said. “Waited for him to finish his work and go over the side.”
Hassler grunted, nodded, and went back to the salon.
* * * *
Cragin before going below stooped to retrieve the boarder’s blackjack. He found more than he expected. Lying near the ventilating funnel was a small costly camera. It had an imported f-1.9 lens and used motion-picture size film. A job like that could take snap-shots by an ordinary artificial illumination, and in the most fog-obscured twilight.
E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives Page 4
