The Untreed Detectives

by J. Alan Hartman

  “I see,” I murmured. “Is Fred around? I’d like to speak with him.”

  “Sure thing,” the man said. “I’ll get him for you.” He disappeared through a door in the rear. A few minutes later a middle-aged man came through the same door. He looked me up and down a few times, then nodded.

  “You wanted to see me, mister?” he asked.

  “You’re Fred?”

  “That’s right.”

  I showed him Cinderella’s picture. “You were a driver for this woman about a week ago, remember?”

  He smiled. “Sure do,” he said. “I’ll never forget that one. A beauty, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Where did you take her?”

  “She went to the Royal Ball for the king’s kid at the Palace.” He eyed the picture appreciatively. “I’ll bet she was the talk of the party.”

  Little did he know, I thought. “When did she leave this shindig?”

  “Just about midnight,” he said. “I remember, because the old clock practically knocked me out of my seat when it started clanging the hour.”

  “Did she seem upset?” I asked. “Was she alone?”

  He licked his lips and said nothing. His hand twitched slightly. I held out a five. He took it and stuffed it in his pocket.

  “Well, sir,” he said. “It’s like this. She came tearing out of the castle like the devil himself was after her. About halfway down the steps she loses her shoe, but doesn’t even bother to pick it up. She just jumps in the carriage and yells for me to get out of there as fast as I can.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I did exactly what she said. I grabbed my whip, put it to the horses, and took off.”

  “Where?”

  He looked to my hand again. I gave him another five, which quickly followed the route of the first one.

  “After we were out of sight of the castle, and she was satisfied that no one was following us, she told me to drive her to a road just west of here, about a mile or so.” He indicated the direction with a jerk of his head.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “When we got there, she jumped out of the carriage and ran over to a small coach hidden behind a clump of trees. She got in and rode off.” He grinned. “She sure knew how to handle those horses.”

  “Can you give me a description of the coach?”

  “Nothing much to describe,” he said. “Just a common everyday horse drawn carriage. Two horses. Brown, I think. But it was hard to tell in the dark.”

  “Which direction did she go?”

  “West,” Fred replied.

  “Anything else you can tell me about her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he grinned. “She left something in the carriage, though. May be helpful.”

  “May I see it?”

  Fred scratched his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  I held out another five. He started to reach for it, then pulled his hand back. I sighed, dug into my pocket and added another five. He lifted them gingerly and folded them into his pocket. “Be right back,” he said.

  He was gone a few minutes, then reappeared carrying a shoe. It was a beautiful piece of work, made entirely of glass, with delicate bows and flowers etched in it. Just above the heel was a tiny inscription. I held it up to the light and read it out loud.

  “Sebastian Glass Works.”

  Fred looked at the slipper admiringly, then turned to me. “What do you make of it?”

  “Could be of some use,” I said, hiding the excitement I felt. Thanking Fred, I left, twenty dollars poorer but a glass slipper away from cracking the case.

  It took a little doing, but I finally located Sebastian Glass Works in a small principality several miles away. I opened the door to a tinkle of a little glass bell. An old man was leaning over a table, torch in one hand and a glass rod in the other. He looked up as I entered, set the torch aside and rose to greet me.

  “May I help you?”

  I placed the glass slipper on the counter in front of him. “Recognize this?” I said.

  The old man nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “This is one of my finest creations. Where did you get it?”

  “That’s not important,” I replied. “Can you tell me who you sold it to?”

  The man nodded again. “Of course. I have only one customer for this. And she buys several pairs each year.” He chuckled. “Fragile, you know. She breaks them all of the time.”

  “Does she live around here?”

  The old man curled his brow into a questioning frown. “Is she in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

  “Could be,” I said. “I think you’d be wise to tell me what you know.”

  He pondered for a moment, then straightened and rubbed his hands together nervously. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Her name is Penelope Nichols. She lives around the corner, on Palace Drive. Third house on the right.”

  I thanked him and stepped out into the bright morning light. I walked the short distance to her house, climbed the brick steps to the front door, and knocked gently.

  Penelope Nichols, aka “Cinderella”, and no doubt a whole lot of other names, opened the door herself. She was a mess, with tousled hair, and mascara smudged eyes that squinted into the glare of the morning.

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” she said and started to close the door. I put my foot in it, something I had wanted to do since I had heard the expression when I was a kid.

  “Penelope Nichols?” I asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Or is it ‘Cinderella’?”

  Her eyes widened. She started to say something, but I cut her off. “I know all about your little scam,” I said. “Now let’s cut the games and talk.”

  She studied me for a long moment, then shrugged and stepped back. I brushed past her into the house.

  “How did you find me?” she said.

  “You got careless,” I said, tossing the slipper on the sofa. “You left this in the coach.”

  She picked it up, looked at it accusingly, then dropped it again. “I lost the other one during the getaway,” she said. “What good is one without the mate?” She laughed without humor and sat down.

  “King Gordon hired me to bring you back,” I said.

  “I’d rather die,” she said.

  I shrugged. “That’s up to you,” I said, “But don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

  She looked at me pleadingly. “Look, mister, you have no idea what it would be like if I had to face that kid of his again.” She crossed over to me and took me by the shoulders. “You should have seen the little creep. He was all over me, pawing and slobbering.” She dropped her hands to her side and made a face.

  I felt a surge of sympathy for the lady. But I had my orders from the king himself. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She twisted a ring off her finger and thrust it into my hand. “Here’s the ring I filched from Dribble-face.” She nodded toward the back room. “The rest of the loot is in there. You can have it all. Just give me a break and look the other way for a minute or two. I’ll take a powder. You get the goods, and everybody’s happy.”

  I thought about it for a few minutes. If Junior was as bad as she said, I could never live with myself for dragging her back to him. After all, the punishment should fit the crime.

  I turned to her and gave her my tough guy look. “Let’s have the stuff,” I said. “And don’t hold anything back or I’ll track you down and…”

  She didn’t let me finish. Throwing her arms around me, she kissed me. Suddenly I realized why Junior was running through the kingdom with that silly shoe. Maybe his marbles weren’t as chipped as I had been led to believe.

  I left Penelope’s house with a sack full of goodies and a warm feeling that lasted all the way back to the castle.

  King Gordon was so glad to get the loot back that he offered to make me a knight. I refused gracefully, accepted my
fee along with a generous bonus, and returned to my humble practice with a sense of accomplishment that is rare in my chosen profession.

  Junior, meanwhile, found a girl whose foot fit the slipper, took her back to the castle and married her, never once suspecting she was not the real McCoy. As for Penny Nichols, she moved to another kingdom and took up with seven little men who dealt in diamonds. You probably know her by a different name. But that’s another story for another time.

  The Wrong Move

  By Rodolfo Peña

  Guillermo Lombardo is an ex-cop who worked for the Investigations Section of the Judicial Police in Monterrey, Mexico. Too self-righteous for his own good, he was fired from his job for doing the right thing (a wrong move in that police department), something he talks about briefly in this story and is amply described in the first book of the series, An Inconsequential Murder. He has now set himself up as a private investigator and the case he remembers in this story was one of the first he had in his career as a P.I. The Guillermo Lombardo series will recount in each novel a case he has been on, each one in a different city, not only in Mexico but throughout the world, as in the second book of the series, The Minister’s Secret, which takes place in Paris.

  “Your move, Lombardo,” Rodriguez said.

  It was. It was my move. I knew, or thought I knew that I had seen this position before. Or, was it that I thought I had seen this position before? Yes, yes, I’d seen it before but, what had happened? Had I won? Had I lost? Did I draw? I couldn’t remember; so, I went with my instincts, but my instincts were wrong.

  “Knight to d5.”

  “Good God, Lombardo. That is the stupidest move yet,” Rodriguez said and he took my pawn at h7 with his bishop.

  I knew it! I knew it! I had made that damned move before. I shouldn’t have moved the knight! Damn! It’s all over but the crying.

  “It’s over, isn’t it?” I asked Rodriguez to confirm.

  “Pretty much,” said Rodriguez. “You take the bishop with the king, I come at you with the queen, and so forth. Four or five moves, and it’s over, amigo.”

  I knocked over my king. “I give up. I am never going to be good at this damn game.”

  “You owe me fifty pesos, plus the beers.”

  “Here’s a hundred: go get drunk.” I got up to go.

  “Oh, sit down, Lombardo. Don’t be sore. Look, buy yourself a couple of chess books. If you’d read a bit you wouldn’t have fallen into such a dumb chess trap, something even the kids know how to avoid.”

  “Yeah, something even the kid’s know. But do you know what the worst part is? It isn’t the first time I’ve fallen into it.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, I am not. And, I should have remembered because of what happened next.”

  “I sense a story coming.”

  “Yep.”

  “One of your adventures?”

  “Yep.”

  “OK, let’s spend your hundred pesos on beer and you tell me how this dumb move leads to a story. Bartender! Two more Bohemias!”

  “Well, the thing is rather strange and complicated.”

  “Your stories usually are.”

  “This happened some time ago. I was in Mexico City, playing in a tournament. Nothing important, just a bunch of amateurs and a few semi-pros playing for a few pesos in prize money and some chess computers. I won my first game against a kid who could have been my grandson but, hey, a win is a win.

  Anyway, during my second match, I drew a teenager, some kid from the Condesa district, a real nerd, with glasses and pimples and dirty fingernails; you know the type. Well, this kid doesn’t even look at the board. Every time I make a move, bam! He makes a move a second later. Doesn’t even look at the damned board.

  He made me nervous, this kid. I couldn’t even think, so I come to the same position, as we did, you know. And what do I do? I move the knight, just like today. The kid takes my pawn with the bishop and, well you know the rest.”

  “And that’s your story? Hell, that not worth even this round of beers.”

  “No, wait. That’s how the thing started. I get up from the table and I go outside the room to have a cigarette. I had smoked half my Delicado when a man comes up to me. He’s an older man, older than me, anyway. He has a beard and is wearing those kind of transparent, pleated shirts, you know, the kind only people in Veracruz wear.”

  “You mean guayaveras.”

  “Yeah, those. And, he was also wearing gold-rimmed glasses so he looks like a college professor or an intellectual. The Papa Hemingway type, you know. He says to me, ‘Do you hate losing to those damned kids as much as I do?’ And he laughs.

  I laugh, too, and I say, ‘Yeah, they get on my nerves. They’re too old to spank and too young to beat up.’

  The man laughs a big laugh, like I made a great joke or something. And he says, ‘I guess you don’t do this for a living, señor Lombardo. Chess I mean.’

  ‘I don’t even do it for laughs,’ I say while trying to figure out how he knows my name. ‘In fact, I don’t know why I do it. I’m lousy at it and I always end up irritated by the way I lose. How do you know my name, señor?

  ‘I know your name because I didn’t come here to play chess with these amateurs. I came to see you, señor Lombardo.’

  Now alarm bells start to go off. This guy’s been tailing me and I haven’t even noticed? I must be really getting old, I’m thinking. But, I stay cool. ‘I have an office, señor…?’

  ‘Blanchet, Mario Blanchet,’ he said extending his hand.

  ‘As I said, I have an office, Mr. Blanchet. Why didn’t you come to see me there? You know my name; so, you probably know where I…’

  But, he interrupted me to say, ‘Yes, yes, I do, but I wanted to meet you at a less, well, conspicuous venue.’

  A less conspicuous venue. How can a public chess tournament be a less conspicuous venue? I didn’t have to ask him that because he said, ‘I would like you to perform a service for me.’ He spoke in a rather formal, old fashioned way. He said he was from Miami and had come to Mexico City to get something done, a piece of business which could only be carried out in a country that had relations with Cuba. From his accent, I knew he was Cuban. I figured this guy must have been some sort of official, a general or one of those big land owners during the old regime.”

  “The Batista years, you mean?”

  “Yeah. If you remember, Rodriguez, I started my business way back when, after I got fired from the Judicial Police after that mess with the kidnapping of the governor’s daughter. I was really hard up for money in those days. I would take on anything…and I think he knew that.

  He said, ‘I need a man of your talents, someone who can retrieve something for me.’

  ‘Something that belongs to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something dishonest,’ he said but somehow I didn’t believe that. He had a way of smiling while at the same time looking at you, as if trying to guess what you might be thinking or as if he were trying to see if you believed what he said. He had white hair but his blue eyes were still very much alert and sharp. They moved from side to side as if looking at your features to see how you were reacting to his words.

  What he wanted was for me to go to Cuba. He told me he had fled his country after Castro came to power. Like a lot of Cubans, he settled in Miami and made his life there. He said he was ‘in business’ but he didn’t say what kind of business.

  His family had had a large estate near Santiago. It had been confiscated by the state when his family left and was now run by a community of farmers. What he wanted retrieved from there was not in the main house, he told me, but in a cottage that was on the estate, but was now, according to his information, abandoned.

  I would be paid expenses plus a thousand dollars as a retainer. If I retrieved what he wanted I would get three thousand dollars more upon my return and ‘the successful accomplishment of my mission,’ as he put it.

  ‘
So,’ I asked, ‘what is it you want me to get?’

  ‘It is a box, a small metal box,’ he said.

  ‘You can get any number of metal boxes in the market,’ I said. ‘It can’t be that valuable to you that you’d pay five grand to get one that’s in Cuba.’

  ‘Of course, not, Mister Lombardo,’ he said laughing, ‘the box I want contains some family jewelry and the papers that prove that the estate belongs to my family. You see, Cuba will be rid of the Castro brothers some day and we will be able to go back and claim what is ours.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring the stuff with you when you left the island?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we were in a hurry and we were afraid of being stopped and searched as we left. So, as a precaution, I put them there thinking the Castro regime would not last. I was wrong. And, now I want those things because I feel that once Castro dies the whole regime will collapse.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you wait it out and get them yourself once that happens, if you’re so sure it will happen?” I asked him that because I could not shake the feeling there was more to this than he was saying.

  ‘We have risked the papers and jewels being found for many years. I am an old man and I don’t want to die without leaving to my children the possibility of recovering our land,’ he said in such a convincing way that I nearly believed him. Or, at any rate, the money was so good I wanted to believe him. I was broke, as I said, and four thousand dollars in those days went a long way.

  He provided a map of the place where the cottage was and a plan of the rooms of the house. There was an ‘X’ in the square that represented the kitchen with the instructions, ‘fourth brick from the south wall and sixth from the east wall.’ I was to buy an old suitcase, fill it with old clothes, put the content of the box into that suitcase, and when I got to Mexico City, I was to leave it in the carousel at the airport. Under no circumstances was I to try to take it out of the baggage claim area myself.

  ‘Well, that’s easy money,’ I thought. In fact, it was too easy. I wondered if I was being set up or something but at the same time I asked myself who would have anything to gain from my being arrested either in Cuba or when I came back to Mexico?”