I looked through the kitchen window into the star-filled night on display. Presently I returned my gaze to those mesmerizing eyes of hers.
“What does your gut tell you?”
She looked down at her shoes, the wheels turning within her beautiful blond head. Her eyes returned to mine again and a smile began to slowly creep onto her pink cheeks.
“Maybe I can help a bit.”
I whirled around to identify the source of the voice but before I could draw my weapon I heard the snick of the hammer on his.
She nodded approvingly and rose from her chair.
“It’s about time; I was beginning to wonder if you’d received a better offer.”
He smiled wickedly.
“Darlin’, there ain’t a better offer than yours on this side of the universe. Just had a coupla things to take care of is all.”
“And what are we supposed to do with him?” she asked.
He sniffed in disgust. Then he put his hands on his hips as he inwardly deliberated the dilemma of them being saddled with a Texas ranger who had just now outgrown his usefulness. He smiled in triumph.
“I think we just take him a ways out of town. Maybe he and ol’ ‘Trigger’ had a little riding mishap on their way over here, you know, to check things out.”
“Why there was a robbery and a murder, wasn’t there?” she said, poker-faced.
He smiled broadly at her.
“That’s right.”
It looked as though someone had somehow turned up the power behind those strangely entrancing eyes of hers. They appeared luminous now as though they had been transported from another world altogether.
“You can get up now, officer” he intoned somberly.
“That’s ‘ranger’ if you don’t mind.”
I stood.
“I do mind and I don’t give a rip about what you call yourself.”
Disgustedly she added, “He’s just a small cog in a large wheel.”
He motioned me toward the front door and I reluctantly did as I was told by the wave of the small canon he held in his right hand.
It was cool and dark now as I mounted my horse and he tethered my hands to the saddle horn. The moonlight caught her eyes as she looked up at me with an odd expression of delight.
“You just follow my car and he’ll follow you; very simple, even for a ‘country bumpkin.’ Simply, ‘follow the leader;’ understand?”
“Perfectly” I rumbled.
A couple of last minute adjustments by them sent us on our way.
During the ride I allowed myself to drift off into “alpha-ville,” that in-between state where the brain is in daydream mode and the body relaxes,. My horse and I had navigated all kinds of terrain in all types of weather under sunlight and moonlight. He was practically “bomb-proof.” I say “practically” because he did spook and land me in that ravine right on cue as they’d planned when they left us miles away from nowhere in particular.
Oh, and did I mention that I was blindfolded during the entire episode?
My guess is we were at least five miles from where we’d started out and I had no idea which direction from the house that was. I do know it had been all back roads and rocky paths and a patch of woods where lonely owls serenaded our little impromptu caravan.
I heard the brakes on her car complain a little and I relaxed in the saddle, pulling up slightly on the reins and bringing my horse to a gentler stop than either vehicle’s. The doors opened and slammed in unison and I listened to their footsteps make their way over to me.
There were four pairs of them.
“Who’ve we been joined by?”
He chuckled. “Hey, hey the gang’s all here!”
“Great, let’s have a party” I grunted.
“‘fraid the party’s over, at least as far as you’re concerned” she announced.
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” I offered.
I heard the scuffle of feet, listened to them discussing their final preparations.
“April, you and Jason take Barney with you across the border and just check into the hotel and wait. For God’s sake don’t give the dog any Mexican food.”
“We know better than that, Mom.”
“We got it all under control, Mrs. Hawkins. We did the house bit okay, didn’t we?”
“I want to believe that, Jason. Just don’t disappoint me.”
My friend with the gun added his two cents worth.
“An actual ‘double indemnity’ clause. James M. Cain would be so proud of this deal.”
She responded with a breathy, “Close to five million dollars.”
“Plus the contents of the safe” he added.
“Which will unfortunately never be recovered” she said.
“Unfortunately,” he agreed with a chuckle.
I could sense the seriousness of his next question.
“How much did Captain Kramer get us for, for getting this joker involved?”
“Only fifty grand” she said.
“What a piker!” he added with a click of his tongue.
“To the hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet” she concluded.
“He’s pinning it on this low-life Jiminy character?”
“That will be his story, yes” she replied calmly.
My head was spinning.
The facts of this case were whirling around my fuzzy brain like swaths of cotton candy, surrounding my slowed thinking like so much invisible gauze.
There was absolutely nothing I could do about any of this, now or later. It was all sewn up tighter than the handkerchief around my head.
The stranger concluded his end of the conversation with, “I guess I can finally say goodbye to this lawn care van and all that goes with.”
With that, they kissed. I heard her moan, him groan and her daughter’s car engine suddenly roar to life and backfire, spraying gravel toward me and my horse.
As Bill reared and I left the saddle, Kay’s lover’s last remark replayed itself in my mind as I prepared for a painful landing on the rough and unforgiving terrain below.
I mused, “So, the gardener did it.”
THE LION’S SMILE, by Thomas W. Hanshew
T was on the very stroke of five when Cleek, answering an urgent message from headquarters, strolled into the bar parlor of “The Fiddle and Horseshoe,” which, as you may possibly know, stands near to the Green in a somewhat picturesque by-path between Shepherd’s Bush and Acton, and found Narkom in the very act of hanging up his hat and withdrawing his gloves preparatory to ordering tea.
“My dear Cleek, what a model of punctuality you are,” said the superintendent, as he came forward and shook hands with him. “You would put Father Time himself to the blush with your abnormal promptness. Do make yourself comfortable for a moment or two while I go and order tea. I’ve only just arrived. Shan’t be long, old chap.”
“Pray don’t hurry yourself upon my account, Mr. Narkom,” replied Cleek, as he tossed his hat and gloves upon a convenient table and strolled leisurely to the window and looked out on the quaint, old-fashioned arbor-bordered bowling green, all steeped in sunshine and zoned with the froth of pear and apple blooms, thick-piled above the time-stained brick of the enclosing wall. “These quaint old inns, which the march of what we are pleased to call ‘progress’ is steadily crowding off the face of the land, are always deeply interesting to me; I love them. What a day! What a picture! What a sky! As blue as what Dollops calls the ‘Merry Geranium Sea.’ I’d give a Jew’s eye for a handful of those apple blossoms, they are divine!”
Narkom hastened from the room without replying. The strain of poetry underlying the character of this strange, inscrutable man, his amazing love of Nature, his moments of almost womanish weakness and sentiment, astonished and mystified him. It was as if a hawk had acquired the utterly useless trick of fluting like a nightingale, and being himself wholly without imagination, he could not comprehend it in the smallest degree.
When he returned a fe
w minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly printed bill, one of many that were tacked upon the walls, which set forth in amazing pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were to be seen daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for a month past, “Van Zant’s Royal Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie” had been holding forth to “Crowded and delighted audiences.” Much was made of two “star turns” upon this lurid bill: “Mademoiselle Marie de Zanoni, the beautiful and peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the universe,” for the one; and, for the other, “Chevalier Adrian di Roma, king of the animal world, with his great aggregation of savage and ferocious wild beasts, including the famous man-eating African lion, Nero, the largest and most ferocious animal of its species in captivity.” And under this latter announcement there was a picture of a young and handsome man, literally smothered with medals, lying at full length, with his arms crossed and his head in the wide-open jaws of a snarling, wild-eyed lion.
“My dear chap, you really do make me believe that there actually is such a thing as instinct,” said Narkom, as he came in. “Fancy your selecting that particular bill out of all the others in the room! What an abnormal individual you are!”
“Why? Has it anything to do with the case you have in hand?”
“Anything to do with it? My dear fellow, it is ‘the case.’ I can’t imagine what drew your attention to it.”
“Can’t you?” said Cleek, with a half smile. Then he stretched forth his hand and touched the word “Nero” with the tip of his forefinger. “That did. Things awaken a man’s memory occasionally, Mr. Narkom, and— Tell me, isn’t that the beast there was such a stir about in the newspapers a fortnight or so ago, the lion that crushed the head of a man in full view of the audience?”
“Yes,” replied Narkom, with a slight shudder. “Awful thing, wasn’t it? Gave me the creeps to read about it. The chap who was killed, poor beggar, was a mere boy, not twenty, son of the Chevalier di Roma himself. There was a great stir about it. Talk of the authorities forbidding the performance, and all that sort of thing. They never did, however, for on investigation— Ah, the tea at last, thank fortune. Come, sit down, my dear fellow, and we’ll talk whilst we refresh ourselves. Landlady, see that we are not disturbed, will you, and that nobody is admitted but the parties I mentioned?”
“Clients?” queried Cleek, as the door closed and they were alone together.
“Yes. One, Mlle. Zelie, the ‘chevalier’s’ only daughter, a slack-wire artist; the other, Signor Scarmelli, a trapeze performer, who is the lady’s fiancé.”
“Ah, then our friend the chevalier is not so young as the picture on the bill would have us believe he is.”
“No, he is not. As a matter of fact, he is considerably past forty, and is, or rather, was, up to six months ago, a widower, with three children, two sons and a daughter.”
“I suppose,” said Cleek, helping himself to a buttered scone, “I am to infer from what you say that at the period mentioned, six months ago, the intrepid gentleman showed his courage yet more forcibly by taking a second wife? Young or old?”
“Young,” said Narkom in reply. “Very young, not yet four-and-twenty, in fact, and very, very beautiful. That is she who is ‘featured’ on the bill as the star of the equestrian part of the program: ‘Mlle. Marie de Zanoni.’ So far as I have been able to gather, the affair was a love match. The lady, it appears, had no end of suitors, both in and out of the profession; it has even been hinted that she could, had she been so minded, have married an impressionable young Austrian nobleman of independent means who was madly in love with her; but she appears to have considered it preferable to become ‘an old man’s darling,’ so to speak, and to have selected the middle-aged chevalier rather than some one whose age is nearer her own.”
“Nothing new in that, Mr. Narkom. Young women before Mlle. Marie de Zanoni’s day have been known to love elderly men sincerely: young Mrs. Bawdrey, in the case of The Nine-fingered Skeleton,’ is an example of that. Still, such marriages are not common, I admit, so when they occur one naturally looks to see if there may not be ‘other considerations’ at the bottom of the attachment. Is the chevalier well-to-do? Has he expectations of any kind?”
“To the contrary; he has nothing, but the salary he earns, which is by no means so large as the public imagines; and as he comes of a long line of circus performers, all of whom died early and poor, ‘expectations,’ as you put it, do not enter into the affair at all. Apparently the lady did marry him for love of him, as she professes and as he imagines; although, if what I hear is true, it would appear that she has lately outgrown that love. It seems that a Romeo more suitable to her age has recently joined the show in the person of a rider called Signor Antonio Martinelli; that he has fallen desperately in love with her, and that——”
He bit off his words short and rose to his feet. The door had opened suddenly to admit a young man and a young woman, who entered in a state of nervous excitement. “Ah, my dear Mr. Scarmelli, you and Miss Zelie are most welcome,” continued the superintendent.
“My friend and I were this moment talking about you.”
Cleek glanced across the room, and, as was customary with him, made up his mind instantly. The girl, despite her association with the arena, was a modest, unaffected little thing of about eighteen; the man was a straight-looking, clear-eyed, boyish-faced young fellow of about eight-and-twenty, well, but by no means flashily, dressed, and carrying himself with the air of one who respects himself and demands the respect of others. He was evidently an Englishman, despite his Italian nom de théâtre, and Cleek decided out of hand that he liked him.
“We can shelve ‘George Headland’ in this instance, Mr. Narkom,” he said, as the superintendent led forward the pair for the purpose of introducing them, and suffered himself to be presented in the name of Cleek.
The effect of this was electrical; would, in fact, had he been a vain man have been sufficient to gratify him to the fullest, for the girl, with a little “Oh!” of amazement, drew back and stood looking at him with a sort of awe that rounded her eyes and parted her lips, while the man leaned heavily upon the back of a convenient chair and looked and acted as one utterly overcome.
“Cleek!” he repeated, after a moment’s despairful silence. “You, sir, are that great man? This is a misfortune indeed.”
“A misfortune, my friend? Why a ‘misfortune,’ pray? Do you think the riddle you have brought is beyond my powers?”
“Oh, no; not that—never that!” he made reply. “If there is any one man in the world who could get at the bottom of it, could solve the mystery of the lion’s change, the lion’s smile, you are that man, sir, you. That is the misfortune: that you could do it, and yet I cannot expect it, cannot avail myself of this great opportunity. Look! I am doing it all on my own initiative, sir, for the sake of Zelie and that dear, lovable old chap, her father. I have saved fifty-eight pounds, Mr. Cleek. I had hoped that that might tempt a clever detective to take up the case; but what is such a sum to such a man as you?”
“If that is all that stands in the way, don’t let it worry you, my good fellow,” said Cleek, with a smile. “Put your fifty-eight pounds in your pocket against your wedding-day and good luck to you. I’ll take the case for nothing. Now then, what is it? What the dickens did you mean just now when you spoke about ‘the lion’s change’ and ‘the lion’s smile’? What lion—Nero? Here, sit down and tell me all about it.”
“There is little enough to tell, Heavens knows,” said young Scarmelli, with a sigh, accepting the invitation after he had gratefully wrung Cleek’s hand, and his fiancée, with a burst of happy tears, had caught it up as it slipped from his and had covered it with thankful kisses. “That, Mr. Cleek, is where the great
est difficulty lies, there is so little to explain that has any bearing upon the matter at all. It is only that the lion, Nero, that is, the chevalier’s special pride and special pet, seems to have undergone some great and inexplicable change, as though he is at times under some evil spell, which lasts but a moment and yet makes that moment a tragical one. It began, no one knows why nor how, two weeks ago, when, without hint or warning, he killed the person he loved best in all the world, the chevalier’s eldest son. Doubtless you have heard of that?”
“Yes,” said Cleek. “But what you are now telling me sheds a new light upon the matter. Am I to understand, then, that all that talk, on the bills and in the newspapers, about the lion being savage and a dangerous one is not true, and that he really is attached to his owner and his owner’s family?”
“Yes,” said Scarmelli. “He is indeed the gentlest, most docile, most intelligent beast of his kind living. In short, sir, there’s not a ‘bite’ in him; and, added to that, he is over thirty years old. Zelie, Miss di Roma, will tell you that he was born in captivity; that from his earliest moment he has been the pet of her family; that he was, so to speak, raised with her and her brothers; that, as children, they often slept with him; and that he will follow those he loves like any dog, fight for them, protect them, let them tweak his ears and pull his tail without showing the slightest resentment, even though they may actually hurt him. Indeed, he is so general a favorite, Mr. Cleek, that there isn’t an attendant connected with the show who would not, and, indeed, has not at some time, put his head in the beast’s mouth, just as the chevalier does in public, certain that no harm could possibly come of the act.
“You may judge, then, sir, what a shock, what a horrible surprise it was when the tragedy of two weeks ago occurred. Often, to add zest to the performance, the chevalier varies it by allowing his children to put their heads into Nero’s mouth instead of doing so himself, merely making a fake of it that he has the lion under such control that he will respect any command given by him. That is what happened on that night. Young Henri was chosen to put his head into Nero’s mouth, and did so without fear or hesitation. He took the beast’s jaws and pulled them apart, and laid his head within them, as he had done a hundred times before; but, of a sudden an appalling, an uncanny, thing happened. It was as though some supernatural power laid hold of the beast and made a thing of horror of what a moment before had been a noble-looking animal. Suddenly a strange hissing noise issued from its jaws, its lips curled upward until it smiled—smiled, Mr. Cleek!—oh, the ghastliest, most awful, most blood-curdling smile imaginable, and then, with a sort of mingled snarl and bark, it clamped its jaws together and crushed the boy’s head as though it were an egg-shell!”
The Detective Megapack Page 106