Cherry Ames Boxed Set 17-20

by Helen Wells

  “And you think…” Bob searched for the right words, shaking his head in bewilderment.

  “I think that somehow, some way, Smith managed to get some diamonds into that package of blood samples, which he knew wouldn’t be subjected to close examination by the customs men at Dulles Airport. And a confederate in Washington picked them up.”

  “Whew! That does sound like you’re crazy!”

  “Just how it was all handled I don’t know yet,” Cherry said. “But if you’ll do a little detective work with me, I think we can find out.” For the first time during her long narrative, Cherry smiled. “Are you game?”

  “You’ve just hit me with a ton of bricks,” Bob confessed. “But sure—I’m game for anything, seeing that you’ve been playing Sherlock Holmes all this while by yourself.”

  “Speaking of Sherlock Holmes,” she said, “he once remarked that when you have eliminated everything that is impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I think maybe that applies to us here.”

  “O.K.” Bob grinned. “I’ve never read Sherlock Holmes, but I’ll take your word for it. What do you want me to do?”

  “Now here is my idea,” Cherry began. “Smith probably has some more diamonds hidden safely around here some place, ready to send to the States the first chance he gets. Otherwise, he wouldn’t still be hanging around. Or maybe he figures on picking up some more from his contact, Krynos—or someone else. So when he comes back from his hunting trip…”

  As she went on outlining her plan, Bob kept nodding agreement.

  Long Jack Robertson’s truck pulled into Ngogo in the middle of the afternoon, and Ed Smith got out lugging his equipment. He greeted Bob and Cherry with a big smile and a loud “Hello, folks!”

  “Hop down and have a cold drink, Jack,” Bob said. “You must be hot and thirsty.”

  “Sorry,” the hunter replied, “I’d like to, but I have to get my party into Nairobi by this evening. They decided to cut their safari one day short. But I’ll be seeing you.”

  Jack waved his hand, turned the truck around, and drove out of the compound in his usual rush.

  “How was the trip?” Bob asked the photographer. Cherry noticed that Bob was a good enough actor to keep any giveaway expression off his face.

  “Magnificent! What scenery!” Smith replied. “I got some pictures that I think are the best I’ve ever shot.”

  “Then I suppose you’re anxious to get them into Nairobi to be developed as soon as possible.”

  “Oh, I’m not in all that hurry. They can wait until the next time you drive in.”

  “I was going to say,” Bob went on, “that you could do me a favor. I have another package of blood samples that I would like to put on the MATS plane tomorrow. But unfortunately I can’t leave here, and Jeff is tied up with work too. So I was going to suggest that you might borrow my truck and take them with you when you deliver your film to Keeler’s.”

  Smith brightened at once. “Why, sure,” he said. “I’ll be glad to.”

  “Fine,” Bob said. “I’ll have them all ready by this evening, and you can leave first thing in the morning.”

  The sun was high in the eastern sky when Ed Smith climbed into the truck the next morning and started the motor. In the seat beside him, he had Bob’s package, wrapped securely in heavy brown paper, and his own canvas bag.

  “Anything else you need from town?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Not that I can think of,” Bob replied.

  “Well, see you tonight.” With that, Smith shifted the truck into gear and rolled off.

  As soon as he was out of sight, Bob and Cherry got into the Land Rover. Both of them hated leaving patients to wait a day, but no case was so urgent that Kavarondi or Sara could not handle it for one day. And tracing the blood samples was urgent. Jeff, strolling around the corner of the hospital building, was surprised to see Bob and Cherry getting ready to leave.

  “Are you folks going into town too?”

  They had not taken Jeff into their confidence—on the theory that the more people who are in on a plot, the likelier one of them is to accidentally give it away.

  “No,” Bob replied. He carried his doctor’s kit to make their trip appear medical, not a sleuthing one. “We have several errands all around here. We’ve packed some sandwiches and probably won’t be back until late this afternoon.”

  “Well, if I’m not around,” Jeff said, “it will be because I planned to take my rifle up to that little pool—you know, Cherry, where we had our picnic—and see if I can bag an antelope when he comes for his evening drink. We’re starting to run a little short of steaks.”

  “O.K.,” Bob said. “Good hunting!”

  Driving down the trail to Nairobi, Bob took his time.

  “If Smith is going to tamper with that package,” he said to Cherry, “he’ll stop somewhere along the road to do it. Not more than one or two cars a day travel along here, so he is sure to figure that he won’t he disturbed. And we don’t want to stay close enough behind for him to see our dust.”

  They rode along for an hour, neither Cherry nor Bob saying much, both keeping their eyes glued to the road up front. Then they rounded a bend—and there, about three hundred yards ahead of them, they saw the truck parked on the side of the trail next to a hedge of thornbushes. Bob had been driving slowly. He immediately cut off his engine and pulled silently over to the left of the road under the shade of a small grove of acacia trees.

  Bob took a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment of the car and focused them on the photographer.

  “I can’t see very well because I don’t want to take any chances of exposing ourselves,” he said. “But he is sitting on the running board with our package in his hands.” He handed the glasses to Cherry. “Here, take a look for yourself.”

  Cherry peered through the glasses. But her view, too, was obscured because she, like Bob, was trying to stay hidden—even at this distance.

  They waited for more than thirty minutes, while Smith worked with the package. Then at last the photographer stood up, put the brown package back into the truck, got in, and drove away.

  Once he was out of sight, Bob started the Land Rover and they pulled up to the spot where Smith had parked the truck.

  Cherry jumped out. “Look!” she said excitedly, and pointed to the bushes that lined the road.

  The thorn branches were covered with blood that was still dripping from them in heavy drops; and little pools of blood had collected in the dirt, where it was still seeping into the hot and thirsty earth.

  “He must have opened each test tube, emptied out most of the blood, and put the stones inside!” Bob said. “No wonder he didn’t worry about the customs inspectors in Washington! It was a foolproof plan.”

  They climbed back into their car, and Bob stepped on the gas, kicking up a great cloud of dust behind him.

  “Let’s try to catch up with him before he gets to the airport!”

  “Wouldn’t it make a better case if we nabbed him just as he was turning over the package to Major Welsh at the MATS office?” Cherry suggested.

  “Good thinking,” Bob said. And he resumed a normal speed—about the same rate, he figured, that Smith would be traveling.

  Then, just outside Nairobi, as they were passing through the National Game Park, a huge herd of antelopes raced across the road a few hundred yards ahead of them. They were impalas—hundreds of them—running in great, graceful leaps of twenty feet or more, blocking the road as effectively as though a freight train were passing by.

  Bob jammed down on the brakes. For more than ten minutes they waited, until the last of the impalas had made the crossing and disappeared into the bush on the other side.

  “Now we’ve really got to make time,” Bob said, and he pressed down hard on the gas pedal.

  It was a Saturday afternoon and traffic was heavy on Nairobi’s main street. Bob fretted and fumed, constantly looking at his watch, as they inched along to the airf
ield.

  “I wish I knew more about this town,” he said impatiently, “so I could take a shortcut. But once I get off the main street and into the little twisty side streets, I’m lost. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed and hope that the truck has been held up too.”

  At last they got through the main part of the city, and Bob raced the Land Rover along the road to Eastleigh Field. When they pulled up in front of the MATS building, Cherry saw the truck driving down a road at the far end of the airstrip. Smith stopped, leaned his head out the window, then quickly pulled it back in and gunned the truck around between two buildings.

  “There he goes!” she shouted. “We missed him by minutes! And I’m sure he saw us.”

  The two of them scrambled out of the car and rushed into the office. A secretary ushered them in to see Major Welsh, who was working at his desk. He rose to greet Cherry and Bob.

  “Look, Major,” Bob said breathlessly, “did my man Smith just deliver another package to you addressed to the Abercrombie people in Washington?”

  “Why, yes, he did,” the major said. “Only a little while ago. I’ve got it right here.” He took the package from a desk drawer. “But in the light of what Miss Ames told us about the last one, I am going to have the flight sergeant demand positive identification before he turns it over to anybody when he gets to Dulles Airport.”

  “Have you a newspaper you’re through with?” Bob asked as he quickly untied the package. “Or heavy wrapping paper?” Major Welsh found some for him.

  Bob spread the paper out on the desktop, took one of the tubes from the cardboard box, and extracted the rubber stopper. Out came a dribble of bright-red blood, followed by a dozen or more bloodstained stones. A second tube yielded more stones. Major Welsh stood watching.

  “Those look like uncut gems,” he said. “Valuable?”

  “Diamonds, Major,” Bob said. “I’d like to get the local police on your phone!”

  When he got through to the police station, Bob gave the sergeant a quick summary of the situation, and a description of the truck and its license number. Then he kept nodding: “Yes!…Yes!…Yes!” and finally hung up.

  “Smith won’t get far. The police are putting out a dragnet for him,” Bob told Cherry and the major. “He won’t be able to leave the city limits. Maybe he won’t even get far from the airfield.” Bob wiped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Man! What a day!”

  Major Welsh picked up the cardboard box and the diamonds. “I’m going to take these myself to Government House.”

  “But what about Krynos,” Cherry said, “and the pilot of the orange airplane?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have a thing against Gus Fisher and Krynos that we can prove,” Bob said. “Just the same, I’ll ask the police to check them.”

  He called the station again and made this request.

  “Tell them they can reach us at the New Stanley,” Major Welsh said. “We need lunch, and we can talk there as well as here.”

  The major took the package of smuggled diamonds to deliver on their way to the hotel.

  CHAPTER XII

  Adding It Up

  THE VIEW WAS SPECTACULAR FROM THE VERANDA OF THE New Stanley Hotel. Over the tops of the city buildings, the high plains rolled away to the horizon, ending abruptly against the towering snow-capped peak of Mount Kenya. Cherry, Bob, and Major Welsh did not pay much attention today to the view. The MATS major was making notes; he would file a report at once. So would Bob.

  “It was that evening in Cairo,” Cherry was saying. “Krynos must have just happened to be in that café in Cairo; he couldn’t have known we were coming there. And he happened to overhear us talking about our medical project in Kenya. So he came over to our table and asked questions—it must have occurred to him that we might be the perfect front for his diamond-smuggling operation. Do you recall how Mr. Krynos forced himself on us, Bob?”

  “Yes, I remember your saying so after we left.”

  “And then there was that weird telegram that fell out of his wallet, mentioning the Mzabite and the order that was stopped. It gave me a creepy feeling that something odd was going on. Of course at the time I had no idea what it might be. Since then, I’d surmise that the telegram referred to the antelope head that the Mzabite taxidermist had stuffed with rough gems.

  “So when Mr. Krynos left us at the café, he probably telephoned his accomplice Ed Smith in Nairobi, and asked him to look us up.”

  Major Welsh shook his head, then laughed. “The CIA or the Interpol boys ought to hire you, Miss Ames. You seem to have a natural nose for wrongdoing. But it’s a pretty nose,” he added hastily, “even if it is peeling a little from overexposure to the Kenya sun.”

  Bob said, smiling, “You are quite a girl to figure all this out. As far as I was concerned, I was a million miles away. Go on, Cherry. I want to hear it all.”

  “Well, if you remember—Ed Smith came along the first day we were here in Nairobi, and he introduced himself to us, right on this very porch where we’re sitting. He didn’t even know the name of the editor of the magazine he was supposed to be working for; and on top of that, he pretended to know a man that I made up on the spur of the moment. It was about then that Long Jack Robertson told us the disturbing story of the antelope head that was filled with smuggled diamonds.”

  “I hope you didn’t suspect my old friend, Long Jack, too?” Bob said.

  “Yes, I did, that evening when I saw Long Jack and Smith talking together here in the lobby. After I got acquainted with the hunter, and he seemed such a good sort, I wondered if that wasn’t silly of me. But I did suspect Smith—rightly, as it turned out. Why, Smith was never connected with Click magazine—and since he never took any film into Keeler’s to be developed, he probably isn’t even a photographer. He was probably snapping an empty camera all the while, using that as an excuse to stay on in Ngogo.

  “Then that first day at the clinic, when you, Bob, showed Smith the tubes of blood samples, and explained how you were going to send them to Washington by MATS planes, he saw his solution. He would put the diamonds inside the test tubes, telephone a confederate in the States, and have him pose as an Abercrombie man and pick them up. You remember that evening when he sent a radio message to someone—named Simon, as I recall—in Nairobi? The message went something like: ‘I have my story idea figured out.’ That must have meant he had found a foolproof way to get the stones out of the country. And my hunch is that Mr. Simon was actually Spiro Krynos, using another name.”

  “Miss Ames,” Major Welsh said, “if I ever forsake my career as an Air Force officer for a high-paying life of crime, I am going to stay several hundred miles away from you.”

  Cherry smiled but shook her head. “No, Major, at first I didn’t really know that anything out of the way was happening. You told me, Bob, on our drive out to Ngogo that first day, that my suspicions just were due to the mysterious atmosphere of Africa working on me. So I tried to forget it.

  “Then I saw Mr. Krynos talking to the pilot of the orange plane at the Nairobi airport—but both Krynos and Gus Fisher turned away when I called to them. And the next day Krynos showed up at our village, and denied that he had been in Nairobi the previous day. What was I to make of that?

  “When Krynos showed up at Ngogo, you remember, he shared Smith’s tent. How convenient for them! Krynos must have brought some rough diamonds with him—a lot of them—because little Kandi found one when he swept out under the cot. Possibly the gem fell off the table, unnoticed, when Krynos and Ed Smith were counting or examining the diamonds. Anyway, that’s my theory.”

  “Do you use a pocket-size crystal ball, Cherry,” Bob asked, “or a regular one?”

  “Neither one,” Cherry said, blushing slightly. “This is what my brother Charlie would call ‘Monday morning quarterbacking.’ Even that bloodstain on Ed Smith’s sleeve after he had delivered your first package, Bob, didn’t have any meaning until later, when we knew more.”

  A whit
e-uniformed native policeman came up the steps to the veranda from the sidewalk, looked around, saw them, and walked over to their table. He saluted briskly, a swagger stick tucked under his left arm.

  “Major Welsh? Dr. Barton?” They nodded. “Police headquarters asked me to report to you that Mr. Spiro Krynos took a BOAC jet out of Eastleigh this morning bound for Istanbul. He will be held and questioned by Turkish police when he arrives there. Your truck was found abandoned near the airport, but there has been no trace of Mr. Ed Smith. Mr. Gus Fisher, the bush pilot, has been interrogated, but he apparently knows nothing of any smuggling activities. He was released, but was asked to remain on call.” The policeman waited. “Anything else, Major? Doctor?”

  “Not at the moment, thanks,” Major Welsh said. “I’ll keep in touch with your office.”

  “Thank you very much,” Bob said.

  The policeman again saluted, did a crisp about-face, and left the veranda.

  “Well,” Bob said, “it looks as if we are just about where we were two hours ago. What’s the rest of your story, Cherry?”

  “I’m only guessing, you know,” Cherry said. “Where was I? Smith—When little Kandi found that diamond under Ed Smith’s cot, everything seemed to add up. I decided it just wasn’t my overworked imagination after all.”

  “We still need proof,” Major Welsh said. “But your account is entirely reasonable. It sounds complete, too.”

  “It does,” Bob said. “It sounds as if you may have solved the big diamond mystery, Cherry, even though nobody yet has been nabbed for it. But I guess we can leave that to the police. Did I tell you that the police sergeant on the phone asked me to stay in town until tomorrow and explain all these details to the Kenya officials?”