by Graham Marks
During the day there had been a couple of other events that were noteworthy enough for Trey to have actually made a note of them. The first had been the astonishing news that the cattle hadn’t gotten out because a fence had broke! Trey had gone to see the evidence with his own eyes, and not one of the triple-stranded lines of barbed wire had shown any sign at all of rust or age, and every sign of having been sliced with wire cutters. Gramps had been beside himself, kicking a fence post so hard that he’d hurt his foot.
Trey had asked him if it was rustlers, to which he’d got the unusually grumpy reply of “No, son, it was barbarian, hooligan saboteurs!”, which, to be honest, didn’t seem likely in Kansas. The big question was, if it wasn’t rustlers or barbarian saboteurs, who would’ve deliberately let the cows out? Even though he wanted to carry on talking about the subject he could tell that Gramps really was not in the mood, so he left it for a bit; then, when they were at the tack shed, fixing up some of the older saddles, he asked Jimmy Tin.
Jimmy had stated that it wasn’t his place to say too much, but that there had been a number of other incidents which The Boss (i.e. Gramps) was of the opinion were down to the folks over at the T-Bone. He would not be drawn on which folks, or what these “incidents” were.
And then there was the sighting of the white Buick Monarch at the T-Bone ranch, which Trey had thought really was a piece of headline news. But, once again, there had been an almost complete lack of reaction from Gramps when he’d told him about it.
And that, as far as Trey knew, was it; nothing else remotely interesting had happened in the last few days, so had Gramps called this man Bob because of the gangsters, or was it the possible sabotage? Like Austin J. Randall said in Chapter 5 – Deduction: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. This piece of advice, Trey had thought, was so important that he’d copied it out and put it at the front of his notebook, as a constant reminder of the kind of thinking he had to emulate from now on.
From his point of view, the likelihood of there being “barbarian, hooligan saboteurs” in the area was both pretty impossible, and fairly improbable. Which therefore left the gangsters as the reason for the phone call to this Bob. And the need to speak to him so urgently. Because why were gangsters visiting a man Trey knew his gramps thought was an absolute pill?
His eyelids beginning to droop, Trey wondered what his favourite private eye, Trent “Pistol” Gripp (“The man with the itchiest trigger finger in New York City”, according to Black Ace magazine), would do… After checking he had a full clip in his trusty Colt .45 automatic, he’d more than likely melt into the shadows and, using his custom lock-picks if he had to, get into the T-Bone ranch house and snoop around to see what he could find. Some hope he had of being able to do that, Trey had to admit. Even if he owned a set of lock-picks, Austin J. Randall had so far omitted to instruct his readers on how to use them.
Gramps had laid the law down in no uncertain terms that the T-Bone ranch was totally off-limits. If he ever found out Trey had been anywhere near the place, Gramps would have a conniption fit. Even so, Trey was going to have to find some way of getting a closer look. There were things going on there he didn’t know nearly enough about…
5 AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT
It was, Trey thought later, extremely odd how things had a way of working out sometimes. The very next day he was with Wolf Baxter, one of the friends he’d made over the years he’d been coming down to Topeka – Mr. Baxter owned the feed store and gas station nearest to the Circle M, which was how him and Wolf had met. The two of them had been over behind one of the barns, generally wasting time in one of the best ways they knew how – catapulting pebbles at old tin cans – when Wolf casually mentioned that he’d heard there was a birthday party at the T-Bone ranch that afternoon.
“Say what?” Trey queried. “Whose? I didn’t know Mr. Dunne had kids.”
“Don’t think he does.” Wolf fired a devastating shot which spanged a can spectacularly up into the air. “My ma was talking at breakfast. Something about Mr. Dunne having a nephew from New Orleans, or New York, or New Jersey – or maybe even New Hampshire for all I know. Anyway, wherever he’s from, he’s staying, and it’s his birthday and they’re inviting people from round here – y’know, kids – so’s there’ll be someone his age there. You get yours?”
“My what?”
“Invitation, fella.”
Trey shook his head, then loosed off a pebble that somehow managed to knock two cans off the fence. “I won’t get an invitation, bud. Not me…”
“Why the heck not?’
“My gramps and Mr. Dunne? They do not see eye to eye.” Trey kicked the dirt around, looking for some more ammunition. “How about you bring me a piece of cake?”
“Not me, bud…” Wolf pulled the elastic back as far as he could and aimed. “I’m not going.”
Trey watched a particularly rusty can disintegrate as Wolf’s shot smacked it dead centre. “Huh? You’re not – why?”
“Some goofy party, for some big city jingle-brain? I got better things to do.”
“Right, but…”
“But what?” Wolf rummaged in his jeans pockets for another pebble.
“Nothing…” Trey loaded up his catapult and beat Wolf to the last can with a zingingly accurate shot. He’d had an idea and it was a humdinger…
And so that was how, after lunch, Trey got to be riding away on Biscuit, ostensibly to visit Wolf at his place, but really going off on a mission to the party at the T-Bone ranch.
He did feel a tiny bit bad about ignoring his grandfather’s stated wishes not to go near the T-Bone ranch. But it had occurred to him that if he did manage to find out anything useful – about the gangsters, or who at the T-Bone was responsible for the “incidents” – then he was pretty sure Gramps would forgive him. And if he didn’t get any info, then Gramps need never know; “What the eyes don’t see,” as he was known to say, “the heart won’t grieve over.”
Slung over Trey’s shoulder was the Kodak No. 2C Autographic Jnr camera he’d gotten for Christmas. It was folded snugly in its leatherette cover and now travelled with him most everywhere he went, just in case. Thus far, Trey had to admit, he had yet to find a “just in case” moment, but he knew he would be prepared if and when he ever did.
Riding along, Trey fell to thinking about what it would be like to have a real mystery, imagining himself involved – right up to his neck, like Trent Gripp would get – in the action. Then he shook his head at how stupid he was being, as he had a case. He had to find out who the men in the white Buick Monarch were!
He started to think about the T-Bone party because that was his humdinger of an idea…he was going to walk right in, and if asked who he was tell them “Wolf Baxter”. They both had the same colour hair, and were pretty much the same size, and he was sure no one at the ranch, especially its owner, would know one way or the other that he wasn’t telling the truth.
Trey kicked Biscuit into a gallop and they stormed off down the dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust behind them.
Unfortunately, getting into the party did not turn out to be as much of a breeze as Trey had hoped. His idea of pretending to be Wolf went straight out the window the moment he saw that it looked like there were people checking invitations at the main entrance.
Riding past, as if he was on the way somewhere else entirely, Trey glimpsed activity at the end of the gravel drive that led to the T-Bone ranch house and put his mind to thinking how the heck he was going to get himself up there. Then he noticed that the side of the road bordering on to T-Bone land was effectively fenced off by thick brush and cottonwood trees, stopping him from seeing in…but then again, presumably stopping anyone else seeing out.
Trey carried on riding until he found a place where he felt it would be safe to tie up Biscuit, while he was off on his mission. Checking that there was no one around, Trey went back down the road towards the ranch’s entrance and then
, thinking to himself that it was now or never, took the bull by the horns and snuck into the undergrowth.
Keeping low, and as quiet as possible, he made his way through the vegetation to the point where he could see out the other side, then stopped to take stock of his situation. He’d read about people doing that in quite a few stories and now, here on his own and about to break cover, it seemed like a pretty good idea. He moved out of the brush and, as he went to stand behind one of the larger cottonwood trees, he noticed something on the ground in the leaf fall. Something that was so well camouflaged he’d almost overlooked it.
“Copperhead…” he whispered, stopping dead in his tracks. He recognized the pattern, the skin of one of these poisonous snakes having been nailed up on the wall of the feed barn by Deacon Ames. What had he been told about this snake? Apart from that they were poisonous? Trey thought hard and fast, recalling that Mr. Ames had said you’d be in a deal more trouble if it was a cottonmouth you were staring at.
The snake hadn’t moved an inch, and Trey remembered Mr. Ames saying that, “by and large”, copperheads preferred to avoid trouble and froze where they were if disturbed. Hoping that Mr. Ames knew what he was talking about, Trey shuffled sideways then ran for it at full pelt, right into the open. As he burst out of the trees he almost collided with someone.
“Whoa!” The man, dressed in work clothes, was likely a T-Bone hand. He made something of a show of being taken by surprise. “You’re going like a bullet from a gun there, boy. What ya doing out here anyhow?”
“Um…I, ah…” For a second Trey was at a complete loss, as the reality of having almost stepped on a venomous snake sank in. “I was…I was, you know, exploring…” He waved his arms about. “And then I needed…well put it like this, I had a whatchamacallit, call of nature, so I went…” Trey jerked a thumb behind him at the trees, cursing himself for making such a dumb excuse.
“That so?” The man looked Trey up and down, then shrugged and walked away. “Next time I suggest you use the facilities up at the house, son. We call it Copperhead Alley in there, coulda got yourself bit…”
Trey watched the man go, astonished that he’d managed to survive not only an encounter with a snake, but also being discovered sneaking into the party. Someone must be looking out for him, as his gramps always said when he got an unexpected piece of good luck.
With one last glance behind him, Trey made his way up to the house, only to find the party was being held al fresco, spread out across the ranch’s extensive property. This left him somewhat nonplussed as it meant he was going to have absolutely no opportunity to go snooping round the house. Which had been another part of his plan.
According to How to Become a Private Eye in 10 Easy Lessons – Chapter 7 – Preparations, conducting a thorough investigation of your target area was of paramount importance to a mission. But now it looked like all the strategies and schemes he’d come up with (especially the one about secretly photographing the important documents Bowyer Dunne was sure to have left on his desk) were dead in the water.
The “target area” now turned out to be a large grassy expanse on which the owner, Bowyer Dunne, had gone to quite some expense to create a kind of rodeo theme for his nephew, right down to having dressed himself up in a checked shirt, heavily tooled boots, silver-decorated leather chaps and a wide-brimmed Stetson. He looked, in Trey’s opinion, like a kid who’d just walked out of a store wearing every single one of his new purchases; and while a kid might just get away with it, Bowyer Dunne simply looked ridiculous.
There were sideshows and amusements, like at a carney, and a big pit where a whole pig was being roasted on a spit, and people were also making hot dogs and hamburgers, in case you couldn’t wait for the main attraction. Elsewhere a couple of the T-Bone cowhands were giving demonstrations of lassoing and bareback riding, but this stuff was only of interest to the city-slicker visitors – of whom there were quite a few; the men in their suits, the woman in bright frocks.
But no matter where he looked Trey could see neither hide nor hair of the four men he’d encountered out on the back road. The thing was, now he was at the party and on the lookout for things – and people – to photograph, it occurred to him that some of those people might not want to have a camera pointed at them. With this thought in mind Trey kept the Kodak in its case and tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.
But after ten minutes of traipsing around, and only some cotton candy to show for his troubles, Trey decided he had to get serious, stop pussyfooting around and take some risks. Because, if he didn’t start taking some pictures there’d be nothing to put in the file. Once he started a file. He hadn’t gotten around to that yet, but he would, because Austin J. Randall was insistent that you should have one for every case you were working on. And while it was true that he didn’t have a client, he was going to treat The Mystery of the White Limousine – as the story would surely be called if it was in Black Ace magazine – exactly as if it was a piece of real detective business.
But the moment he set to work he got the very strong feeling that he was the one being watched – which made him feel decidedly twitchy. What if it was the man he now thought of as “Bad Frank” eyeballing him? It didn’t help matters that he only just avoided being introduced to the birthday boy (what a flat tyre he looked). Then some woman with enough make-up on for two people grabbed him and tried to rope him into “join a team and play a game!” As if, he’d thought as he made his escape.
In the end it was his own caution that got the better of him.
He was so busy checking this way and that to see if anyone was watching him that he got careless about looking where he was going and walked right into a group of people standing around chatting.
“Oh, sorry…excuse me…beg your pardon, ma’am, sir…people…” Trey felt himself blush as he attempted to apologize, at the same time as back his way out.
“Oh look, he has a camera!” A woman pointed at Trey. “Smile, everyone!”
Six people turned on a dime to stare at Trey expectantly, with fixed grins slapped on their faces. At which point he had no choice in the matter: he had to take a picture. And it was there and then, as he stared into the viewfinder trying to frame the shot, that he noticed one of the men looked familiar. Staring back at him was a pale-complexioned guy with heavy tortoiseshell glasses. He finally clicked who it was as he checked the film had been wound on. It was the third suit who’d been out on the North Road, the one he hadn’t really paid much attention to!
Trey almost froze – would the man recognize him? If you were trying to do a job “undercover” it was probably best not to make an exhibition of yourself. Like being dragged in to take pictures. But it was too late now, he had to carry on as if nothing had happened.
“Smile, please!” Trey said, keeping his head firmly down, praying the man would not recollect that he’d seen him before, and pinning his hopes on the fact that he was a great deal tidier and a whole lot better dressed than when they’d last met. He pressed the shutter as they all crowed “Cheese!” in unison.
The picture taken, Trey was about to dash off and get himself as elsewhere as possible (if he’d ever had any doubts that the detective business required nerves of steel and a cast-iron gut, the last couple of minutes had certainly dispelled them), when his attention was caught by the sight of a magnificent, royal blue car – it looked like a Duesenberg – coming up the drive. He’d never seen one of these cars in the flesh before and, this being far too good an opportunity to miss, he moved to where he would get the best picture. As the auto swept to a halt (a beautiful, two-seater boat-tail coupé with scarlet coach lines, red leather interior and the top down, he noted), Trey squinted into his viewfinder and got the shot all lined up.
Exactly at the moment he was about to press the shutter release, the man driving got out, and so did his female companion. Trey couldn’t help but stare at the woman, who looked like a million dollars, dripping jewels and swathed in yards of ruby-red sil
ky material that matched both her lipstick and her shoes. Her shiny dark brown hair was cut short in the very latest style, which he’d heard his mother refer to a tad scornfully as “boyish”, although it had to be said he’d never seen a boy look anything like this lady.
Bowyer Dunne rushed to greet them; he’d taken off his Stetson – revealing a shock of bright, coppery-red hair – and was waving the hat in the air as he strode forward.
“Howdy, Mario!” Bowyer Dunne thrust a hand out as he eyeballed the woman. “And this must be?”
“My secretary…” The guy called Mario winked as he slapped Bowyer Dunne on the back. “How you doing, cowboy?”
And klick! went the shutter.
Immediately, Bowyer Dunne turned and stared straight at him, a frown creasing his face.
“Hey, kid!” he said.
Trey’s immediate thought was to hightail it pretty darn quick in the opposite direction and lose himself in the crowds, but a calmer voice told him that whatever he did he should do it slowly. Running would just make him look guilty. Before he could make a move Trey saw the man called Mario grab Bowyer Dunne by the shoulder.
“Hey, cowboy! How’s about getting us all to a bar?” he said in a very fake “western” accent. “Feels like we’ve been breathing dust ever since we crossed the state line!”
Right then a gaggle of people appeared to greet Mario and his companion, surrounding them and Bowyer Dunne, and sweeping all of them away in the direction of the house. Trey stayed where he was and breathed a somewhat large sigh of relief. That had been close.
Although he knew he should probably make himself scarce, the car was such a beauty he couldn’t leave without taking a closer look. Walking up to the Duesenberg, Trey tentatively reached out to touch one of the massive, gracefully sweeping front mudguards.