The hotel overlooked Bubbling Lake, not far from the volcanic park at Mount Lassen. The lake really did bubble, only no one gave a damn; and the bathhouse at the steaming sulphur spring had fallen to pieces without anyone ever missing it.
Then why a house detective?
Cragin, having at one stroke locked up his worries and the doors of the Golden Gate Investigation Service, dismissed the query and watched Glendora dusting her way across the vacant lobby.
Glendora’s legs fascinated Cragin. The more he saw of them, the more he wanted to see of them. Their heart-stirring sweep was as tantalizing as the sway of her just-right hips; and whenever she stooped to touch up the polish on the arm of a chair, Cragin wished she would straighten up before he became absolutely cross-eyed trying to probe her tantalizing curves. She made all his treasured recollections of beautiful women seem somewhat uncouth.
Glendora was getting under his skin; and if he had to spend the rest of the summer doing nothing but watching that streamlined chamber maid, he’d end up gnawing doorknobs.…
The transparent, walnut tint of her skin was deceptive. She might be from the West Indies, or Central America. He’d seen quite an assortment of racial mixtures in New Orleans. He gritted his teeth and tried to think of other answers—
Glendora’s lips were not thick; just lusciously full. And the flare of her nostrils was so delicate that it merely lent an alert eagerness to her otherwise placid loveliness.
Hell, she couldn’t be an octoroon!
But Glendora’s voice was a damnation. Her speech was a shade too slurred even for a New Orleans accent.
It was getting under Cragin’s skin. Bubbling Lake. Empty hotel—
“Westwa’d-Ho House,” he said to himself, mimicking her soft, slurred enunciation. “If this dump just had a bus with a colored driver, there’d be a land office rush when he went to the station and sounded off, “Dis way, gem’mum—de Wes’wa’d-Ho House—”
Cragin’s outright laugh brought a sign of life from Gilbert Harris, the proprietor.
“What’s so damn’ funny?” he snapped. Harris was a small, sharp-faced man with black hair and shrewd, furtive eyes.
“Nothing at all, Mr. Harris,” grinned Cragin. “I just thought of a way to keep everyone from going to Bubbling Lake Tavern.”
“How?” snapped Harris, He was just griped; the answer did not interest him.
“Gimme one of those pencils, and I’ll figure the details,” evaded Cragin.
Harris had six sharp-pointed pencils projecting from his vest pocket, just in case the one over his ear should break. He was always calculating, on the desk blotter, and in large figures.
“Go—”
The retort was blotted out by the crunch of tires on the gravel drive. A long, rakish touring sedan with a Louisiana license had pulled up to the door. Twelve cylinders murmured sleepily under the hood that needed no nameplate.
Cragin had only a passing glance for the two men who emerged. The woman who preceded them was a double eyeful. She was tall and full-breasted and shapely, with sleek hips whose undulant action was subtle enough to make one wonder all kinds of things. She had a wanton red mouth and arrogant, trouble-making violet eyes that for a full moment appraised Cragin as though trying to decide whether his face was homely or interesting.
He forgot all about Glendora’ mysteries, visible and suggested. This blonde bird from Louisiana fairly radiated invitation.
He emerged from the chair to give Harris a hand with the luggage. The proprietor nailed him with a blistering glance; and later, when the trio had been assigned to rooms, he said to Cragin, “From now on, you’re a guest. Get it?”
“Uhuh,” said Cragin. Only, he did not get it. Harris was more worried than ever.
The Westward-Ho House—anyway you pronounced it—was becoming screwier every moment.
That evening, in the dining room, Glendora made an awkward job of doubling as waitress. Cragin had no appetite. Too many eyes were covertly scrutinizing him. When it wasn’t that blonde Lafourche woman, it was her ruddy, broad-shouldered husband, or the third member of the party, lean, saturnine Warren Dale.
Cragin, to end the misery, left the dining room. Harris ate in the office. In passing, he caught a glimpse of the proprietor lighting a cigarette from the butt of its predecessor.
When he reached his room, Cragin picked up a week old ’Frisco newspaper. As he began burning his way through a pack of butts, he read about Morton Sloane, the Louisiana sulphur mine promoter, who had escaped from the Federal jug in Atlanta.
“By God,” he muttered half an hour later, as he re-read the inconspicuous squib, “that’s when I got this cockeyed job…”
But the inevitable “What of it?” left him pondering.
Finally the phone tinkled. Cragin crossed the room and unhooked the receiver. Harris was speaking.
“Later tonight,” he almost whispered, “I’ll send Glendora up to move your luggage to the room next to mine. Get it?”
“Okay,” assented Cragin, cutting short the impending explanation.
But before he could find new ways of telling himself how damn crazy it was getting, he learned that he had moved just in time. There was the dry snick of drilled glass, a hammer impact against the wall, and a spattering of plaster. Without thinking, he knew it was a bullet. He flattened to the floor.
Somewhat over a second later, he heard a sharp smack that was none the less vicious for being distance-blurred. Someone had trained a high-powered rifle on him.
“That sneaking little…!” he muttered, “calling me to the phone to get me plugged!”
His first impulse was to dash down and hammer the truth out of Harris; the second was to snap off the lights; but he did neither. A dead man isn’t supposed to move.
Cragin rolled over on his back and inched himself toward the blind quarter of the room. There he noted the neatly drilled hole in the window. It was appreciably higher than the point of impact in the plaster. The sniper had fired from a level above the second floor.
Since the sound had taken just a bit over a second to reach him, the marksman must have been twelve, maybe thirteen hundred feet away. The bathhouse at the hot sulphur spring…only a guess, but a logical one.
Cragin bellied across the carpet, reached up and fingered the doorknob; but he had to wait. There were footsteps in the hall, and Adele Lafourche’s ever-animated voice. She was poisonously tired from their long drive, and would she be glad to get to bed. Lafourche, pausing to bid someone goodnight, overtook her and reminded her she wasn’t the only one who had had a weary drive.
Cragin edged his door open to slip down the hall and out the rear. Dale’s room was in the opposite direction. The coast was clear: that is, until Cragin was well over the threshold. Then it was too late to retreat.
Glendora emerged from a room two doors down, and across the hall. Her eyes widened as she saw the house detective bounding from a crouch. Before she could yeep, he was at her side, one hefty hand muffling her mouth. He edged her back across the doorway.
“What the hell you prowling around for?”
“Mistah Ha’iss done tol’ me to fix this room fo’ yo’all,” she explained.
Talk about lousy breaks! Harris, waiting for Glendora to use her key and discover a corpse, would get wise unless she screeched till the shingles shivered. No chance of a secret look-see at the sulphur spring by flashlight.
That, however, was not all that was disturbing Cragin. He had an armful of Glendora and he hated to let go. The past week’s purely intellectual curiosity was becoming something more insistent and pointed. Whether she was a Creole, or an octoroon, or some Cuban blend that had picked up a southern accent didn’t alter the fact that she had not recoiled from his grasp, that just south of the collarbone she was built like a brassiere ad, th
at the curves where legs decide to become hips were round and warm and…
The shrewdness of a long line of level-headed Cragins came to the rescue.
“Tell him I don’t answer. He phoned me the news a minute ago.”
Before releasing Glendora so that she could step to the house phone, he shifted the unintentional embrace so as to leave her without any doubts that he wasn’t fooling. She shivered, exhaled a sigh; and her assenting murmur did not entirely refer to Cragin’s orders concerning the message to Harris.
“Hell,” reasoned Cragin, as he heard her call the proprietor, “I couldn’t get there in time to catch the sniper anyhow.”
Glendora hung up the receiver, softly closed the door, and tiptoed through the half gloom to his side. He drew her to his knee; and as she clung like a wet handkerchief to a window pane, he decided that Glendora must have been reading his mind for the past week…she couldn’t have gotten that way all in a minute.…
Ethnological niceties no longer bothered him. He was thoroughly convinced that she was a Creole; but before he could settle that question beyond any doubt, Glendora murmured something about having a drink first.
As she wriggled clear of his arms, she drew a half pint from her apron pocket. That, and her rapid breathing told him that she had been doing some thinking herself.
He watched her fumbling for a pair of tumblers in the darkness and wondered how she’d look if she shed that white, severely starched dress that failed to conceal her shapeliness.
The liquor was raw and blistering, but Cragin gargled it at a gulp. It should have sent Glendora through the roof, but it didn’t. Instead, she seemed to be changing her mind about things that should have become more urgent every moment. Not that she was slapping him, but somehow she managed to keep him from going too far.
Finally, catching him entirely off guard, she slid to her feet, gave his hand a promising squeeze, and whispered something about being back in a minute. She tiptoed to the door, glanced nervously up and down the hall…
“Hell of a time to get the jitters!” Cragin grumbled to himself.
But a moment after she left the room, he ceased counting seconds. Maybe later on would be better…he was drowsy as a marathon dancer.…
And then a deep-seated instinct warned him. He was doped! Fear and wrath forced him to his feet. He could barely move, and when he did, he was like some wooden thing.
Glendora had paved the way for a second attempt. He gritted his teeth, bit his lips until the pain whipped him another wobbly stride to the door.
He was a walking dummy when he finally slumped across the threshold of his own room. He recovered, and dully dragged himself toward his suitcases.
If he had to hunt, he was finished.
But luck was with him. He found the tin of headache powders. They were an unadvertised brand confined to the west coast. They were loaded with caffeine. He swallowed half a dozen. It was the equivalent of several pots of strong coffee, the best antidote for narcotics.…
And bit by bit, the sledge hammer jolt of that overdose of caffeine overcame Glendora’s treachery. He was groggy, his heart was pounding like a bass drum, but he could carry on.
Cragin checked his .45, pocketed his flashlight, and crept down the hall. He heard the drowsy murmur and sigh from Adele Lafourche’s room, but for once he did not take time out to wish he were someone else.
The crisp mountain air braced him.
Presently, he was approaching the sulphur spring. Looking back, he could clearly spot his still-illuminated window. But whoever fired must have used a rifle with a telescopic sight.
The porous ground was riddled with uncounted tiny jets of steam, spongy and in spots yellowish with fine needles of crystallized sulphur. By the glow of his flashlight he noted a man’s footprints.
He followed them toward the decrepit bathhouse. Someone had pulled a boner, crossing that treacherous soil. The sniper wore shoes larger than Harris’. It would be a cinch, checking up on the footgear and nailing the owner of sulphur-caked soles.
It must have been someone from the hotel. No one else would have had Cragin’s room spotted. But the motive?
“Wes’wa’d-Ho House! Hell…it’s a madhouse!” he muttered, crouching behind a boulder.
The silence was broken only by the soft hissing of steam. Pistol drawn, he peered from the right of the rock as his left hand directed the flashlight around the other side.
The beam made a dull blur out of the vapors that surged from the bathhouse, but he could distinguish a man’s feet and the trousers of a familiar checkered suit. He lay flat, face down. Warren Dale!
Cragin, bounding forward, muttered to himself, “The hot sulphur fumes knocked the dirty…out! But I’ll wake him!”
Only he couldn’t. Dale’s hand was raised in a warding gesture. His Panama hat, crushed to his head, was a gory, bedraggled pulp. Nearby lay a rusty length of inch and a quarter pipe. Its end was dark with blood.
And in one corner, perilously balanced on the edge of one of the planks that bridged the sulphur spring, gleamed a rifle cartridge. Cragin, gasping and choking from the steam, missed his footing. He sprawled athwart the planks, missing a dive into a boiling pit; but the cartridge fell into the vaporous depths.
Dale’s wallet was well padded with twenties and some hundreds. Oddly enough, in one compartment was a clipping from the New Orleans Picayune: “CONVICTED SWINDLER SWEARS VENGEANCE.”
The article referred to Morton Sloane. The date line was a month older than the one Cragin had read in his room. He studied the terse summary of the case that had ended with Sloane’s sentence to Atlanta.
The same old story: paying dividends out of money raised by the sale of stock. The payment of the faked earnings jacks up the price. Suckers buy on a rising market. Then…flop!
Only, someone got wise to Sloane, the president of the gyp outfit; and the missing fifty grand in bonds snitched from the company treasury had clinched the case.
“The dirty tug oughta get life, hooking those Cajun farmers!” muttered Cragin, pocketing the clippings. “But for hell’s suffering sake, why did the guy that beaned Dale take a shot at me?”
He strode down the steep grade toward the hotel. Nothing to do now but phone the sheriff and watch the apple-knocker try get the answers.
“I kind of wish it’d been the other guy,” reflected Cragin, wondering if Adele Lafourche wore pajamas or a nightgown. “Then there’d be a widow to console.…”
Maybe Harris had not called him to the phone to put him on the spot. Come to think of it, the boss was damn worried. But the two, clicking that way, had left an impression Cragin could not erase in a moment.
A light was in the office. He tiptoed up to the frame building to catch Harris off guard.
It was not the proprietor who knelt before the safe. Glendora, skirt hitched up and displaying those dazzling legs, was in front of the steel door, twirling the nickeled dial and frowning at a penciled scrap of paper. She shook her head, sighed, tried it again.
Cragin crept into the lobby. As he slipped past the counter, he saw that Glendora’s shoes were marked with the peculiar volcanic earth of the hot spring. A fragment lay in the doorway. Sulphur crystals gleamed like topaz needles.
Cragin swallowed a mouthful of queries and bounded across the office. He throttled Glendora’s dismayed outcry. Her face became all eyes, and though her color did not change, she went limp in his arms.
Had she gone to report to the mysterious sniper? Had he brained Dale for trailing Glendora? It was all too thick to make sense.
He was determined to put her over the hurdles when she recovered her wits. But as her blossoming curves pressed against him, he began to wonder.…
He compromised by tying her with a sheet and leaving her in her quarters just off the kitchen. Then he wen
t upstairs to the proprietor’s apartment, adjoining the room where Glendora had put out the doped whisky.
The door was not locked. A thread of light filtered between the edge and the jamb. He paused to knock, but before his knuckles reached the panel, Cragin’s instinct warned him of a lurking presence.
He whirled, diving for his .45, but despite his speed, he was caught short. A gaunt, unshaven man with blazing eyes and mud-fouled clothes confronted him. He grasped a high-powered hunting rifle with a telescopic sight. He was crouched as though on guard for bayonet drill. His teeth showed in an inaudible snarl—
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.
The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure MEGAPACK ™: 14 Tales from the Spicy Pulp Magazines! Page 13
