Fly Paper and Other Stories

  His mouth-ends ran back and up again and he shook his head vigorously.

  “No, sir.” He held up his black hands and counted the fingers. “There is orange and kippers and kidneys grilled and eggs and marmalade and toast and tea or coffee. There is not dog meat.”

  “Fine,” I said, and sat down in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

  I had time to light a cigarette before Captain Sherry came out.

  He was a gaunt tall man of forty. Sandy hair, parted in the middle, was brushed flat to his small head, above a sunburned face. His eyes were gray, with lower lids as straight as ruler-edges. His mouth was another hard straight line under a close-clipped sandy mustache. Grooves like gashes ran from his nostrils past his mouth-corners. Other grooves, just as deep, ran down his cheeks to the sharp ridge of his jaw. He wore a gaily striped flannel bathrobe over sand-colored pajamas.

  “Good morning,” he said pleasantly, and gave me a semi-salute. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Don’t get up. It will be some minutes before Marcus has breakfast ready. I slept late. I had a most abominable dream.” His voice was a deliberately languid drawl. “I dreamed that Theodore Kavalov’s throat had been cut from here to here.” He put bony fingers under his ears. “It was an atrociously gory business. He bled and screamed horribly, the swine.”

  I grinned up at him, asking:

  “And you didn’t like that?”

  “Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That’s honeysuckle somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”

  “When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.’ I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn’t be hung up here waiting. He didn’t, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”

  “That’s why you’ve been trying to hurry it up?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Schrecklichkeit,” I said, “rocky skulls, dog barbecues, vanishing corpses.”

  “I’ve been fifteen years in Africa,” he said. “I’ve too much faith in voices that come from orange trees where no one is to try to give them a hand. You needn’t fancy I’ve had anything to do with whatever has happened.”

  “Marcus?”

  Sherry stroked his freshly shaven cheeks and replied:

  “That’s possible. He has an incorrigible bent for the ruder sort of African horse-play. I’ll gladly cane him for any misbehavior of which you’ve reasonably definite proof.”

  “Let me catch him at it,” I said, “and I’ll do my own caning.”

  Sherry leaned forward and spoke in a cautious undertone:

  “Be sure he suspects nothing till you’ve a firm grip on him. He’s remarkably effective with either of his knives.”

  “I’ll try to remember that. The voice didn’t say anything about Ringgo?”

  “There was no need. When the body dies, the hand is dead.”

  Black Marcus came out carrying food. We moved to the table and I started on my second breakfast.

  Sherry wondered whether the voice that had spoken to him from the orange tree had also spoken to Kavalov. He had asked Kavalov, he said, but hadn’t received a very satisfactory answer. He believed that voices which announced deaths to people’s enemies usually also warned the one who was to die. “That is,” he said, “the conventional way of doing it, I believe.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to find out for you. Maybe I ought to ask him what he dreamed last night, too.”

  “Did he look nightmarish this morning?”

  “I don’t know. I left before he was up.”

  Sherry’s eyes became hot gray points.

  “Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no idea what shape he’s in this morning, whether he’s alive or not, whether my dream was a true one or not?”

  “Yeah.”

  The hard line of his mouth loosened into a slow delighted smile.

  “By Jove,” he said, “That’s capital! I thought—you gave me the impression of knowing positively that there was nothing to my dream, that it was only a meaningless dream.”

  He clapped his hands sharply.

  Black Marcus popped out of the door.

  “Pack,” Sherry ordered. “The bald one is finished. We’re off.”

  Marcus bowed and backed grinning into the house.

  “Hadn’t you better wait to make sure?” I asked.

  “But I am sure,” he drawled, “as sure as when the voice spoke from the orange tree. There is nothing to wait for now: I have seen him die.”

  “In a dream.”

  “Was it a dream?” he asked carelessly.

  When I left, ten or fifteen minutes later, Marcus was making noises indoors that sounded as if he actually was packing.

  Sherry shook hands with me, saying:

  “Awfully glad to have had you for breakfast. Perhaps we’ll meet again if your work ever brings you to northern Africa. Remember me to Miriam and Dolph. I can’t sincerely send condolences.”

  Out of sight of the bungalow, I left the road for a path along the hillside above, and explored the country for a higher spot from which Sherry’s place could be spied on. I found a pip, a vacant ramshackle house on a jutting ridge off to the northeast. The whole of the bungalow’s front, part of one side, and a good stretch of the cobbled walk, including its juncture with the road, could be seen from the vacant house’s front porch. It was a rather long shot for naked eyes, but with field glasses it would be just about perfect, even to a screen of over-grown bushes in front.

  When I got back to the Kavalov house Ringgo was propped up on gay cushions in a reed chair under a tree, with a book in his hand.

  “What do you think of him?” he asked. “Is he cracked?”

  “Not very. He wanted to be remembered to you and Mrs. Ringgo. How’s the arm this morning?”

  “Rotten. I must have let it get too damp last night. It gave me hell all night.”

  “Did you see Captain Cat-and-mouse?” Kavalov’s whining voice came from behind me. “And did you find any satisfaction in that?”

  I turned around. He was coming down the walk from the house. His face was more gray than brown this morning, but what I could see of his throat, above the v of a wing collar, was uncut enough.

  “He was packing when I left,” I said. “Going back to Africa.”

  VI

  That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.

  Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.

  Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.

  His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.

  “It’s happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it’s happened!”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s happened. It’s happened.”

  I pushed him aside and got out of bed. He turned suddenly and ran into my bathroom. I could hear him vomiting as I pushed my feet into slippers.

  Kavalov’s bedroom was three doors below mine, on the same side of the building.

  The house was full of noises, excited voices, doors opening and shutting, though I couldn’t see anybody.

  I ran down to Kavalov’s door. I
t was open.

  Kavalov was in there, lying on a low Spanish bed. The bedclothes were thrown down across the foot.

  Kavalov was lying on his back. His throat had been cut, a curving cut that paralleled the line of his jaw between points an inch under his ear lobes.

  Where his blood had soaked into the blue pillow case and blue sheet it was purple as grape-juice. It was thick and sticky, already clotting.

  Ringgo came in wearing a bathrobe like a cape.

  “It’s happened,” I growled, using the valet’s words.

  Ringgo looked dully, miserably, at the bed and began cursing in a choked, muffled, voice.

  The red-faced blonde woman—Louella Qually, the housekeeper—came in, screamed, pushed past us, and ran to the bed, still screaming. I caught her arm when she reached for the covers.

  “Let things alone,” I said.

  “Cover him up. Cover him up, the poor man!” she cried.

  I took her away from the bed. Four or five servants were in the room by now. I gave the housekeeper to a couple of them, telling them to take her out and quiet her down. She went away laughing and crying.

  Ringgo was still staring at the bed.

  “Where’s Mrs. Ringgo?” I asked.

  He didn’t hear me. I tapped his good arm and repeated the question.

  “She’s in her room. She—she didn’t have to see it to know what had happened.”

  “Hadn’t you better look after her?”

  He nodded, turned slowly, and went out.

  The valet, still lemon-yellow, came in.

  “I want everybody on the place, servants, farm hands, everybody downstairs in the front room,” I told him. “Get them all there right away, and they’re to stay there till the sheriff comes.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said and went downstairs, the others following him.

  I closed Kavalov’s door and went across to the library, where I phoned the sheriff’s office in the county seat. I talked to a deputy named Hilden. When I had told him my story he said the sheriff would be at the house within half an hour.

  I went to my room and dressed. By the time I had finished, the valet came up to tell me that everybody was assembled in the front room—everybody except the Ringgos and Mrs. Ringgo’s maid.

  I was examining Kavalov’s bedroom when the sheriff arrived. He was a white-haired man with mild blue eyes and a mild voice that came out indistinctly under a white mustache. He had brought three deputies, a doctor and a coroner with him.

  “Ringgo and the valet can tell you more than I can,” I said when we had shaken hands all around. “I’ll be back as soon as I can make it. I’m going to Sherry’s. Ringgo will tell you where he fits in.”

  In the garage I selected a muddy Chevrolet and drove to the bungalow. Its doors and windows were tight, and my knocking brought no answer.

  I went back along the cobbled walk to the car, and rode down into Farewell. There I had no trouble learning that Sherry and Marcus had taken the two-ten train for Los Angeles the afternoon before, with three trunks and half a dozen bags that the village expressman had checked for them.

  After sending a telegram to the Agency’s Los Angeles branch, I hunted up the man from whom Sherry had rented the bungalow.

  He could tell me nothing about his tenants except that he was disappointed in their not staying even a full two weeks. Sherry had returned the keys with a brief note saying he had been called away unexpectedly.

  I pocketed the note. Handwriting specimens are always convenient to have. Then I borrowed the keys to the bungalow and went back to it.

  I didn’t find anything of value there, except a lot of fingerprints that might possibly come in handy later. There was nothing there to tell me where my men had gone.

  I returned to Kavalov’s.

  The sheriff had finished running the staff through the mill.

  “Can’t get a thing out of them,” he said. “Nobody heard anything and nobody saw anything, from bedtime last night, till the valet opened the door to call him at eight o’clock this morning, and saw him dead like that. You know any more than that?”

  “No. They tell you about Sherry?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s our meat, I guess, huh?”

  “Yeah. He’s supposed to have cleared out yesterday afternoon, with his black man, for Los Angeles. We ought to be able to find the work in that. What does the doctor say?”

  “Says he was killed between three and four this morning, with a heavyish knife—one clean slash from left to right, like a left-handed man would do it.”

  “Maybe one clean cut,” I agreed, “but not exactly a slash. Slower than that. A slash, if it curved, ought to curve up, away from the slasher, in the middle, and down towards him at the ends—just the opposite of what this does.”

  “Oh, all right. Is this Sherry a southpaw?”

  “I don’t know,” I wondered if Marcus was. “Find the knife?”

  “Nary hide nor hair of it. And what’s more, we didn’t find anything else, inside or out. Funny a fellow as scared as Kavalov was, from all accounts, didn’t keep himself locked up tighter. His windows were open. Anybody could of got in them with a ladder. His door wasn’t locked.”

  “There could be half a dozen reasons for that. He—”

  One of the deputies, a big-shouldered blond man, came to the door and said:

  “We found the knife.”

  The sheriff and I followed the deputy out of the house, around to the side on which Kavalov’s room was situated. The knife’s blade was buried in the ground, among some shrubs that bordered a path leading down to the farm hands’ quarters.

  The knife’s wooden handle—painted red—slanted a little toward the house. A little blood was smeared on the blade, but the soft earth had cleaned off most. There was no blood on the painted handle, and nothing like a fingerprint.

  There were no footprints in the soft ground near the knife. Apparently it had been tossed into the shrubbery.

  “I guess that’s all there is here for us,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing much to show that anybody here had anything to do with it, or didn’t. Now we’ll look after this here Captain Sherry.

  I went down to the village with him. At the post office we learned that Sherry had left a forwarding address: General Delivery, St. Louis, Mo. The postmaster said Sherry had received no mail during his stay in Farewell.

  We went to the telegraph office, and were told that Sherry had neither received nor sent any telegrams. I sent one to the Agency’s St. Louis branch.

  The rest of our poking around in the village brought us nothing—except we learned that most of the idlers in Farewell had seen Sherry and Marcus board the southbound two-ten train.

  Before we returned to the Kavalov house a telegram came from the Los Angeles branch for me:

  Sherry’s trunks and bags in baggage room here not yet called for are keeping them under surveillance.

  When we got back to the house I met Ringgo in the hall, and asked him:

  “Is Sherry left-handed?”

  He thought, and then shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he said. “He might be. I’ll ask Miriam. Perhaps she’ll know—women remember things like that.”

  When he came downstairs again he was nodding:

  “He’s very nearly ambidextrous, but uses his left hand more than his right. Why?”

  “The doctor thinks it was done with a left hand. How is Mrs. Ringgo now?”

  “I think the worst of the shock is over, thanks.”

  VII

  Sherry’s baggage remained uncalled for in the Los Angeles passenger station all day Saturday. Late that afternoon the sheriff made public the news that Sherry and the black were wanted for murder, and that night the sheriff and I took a train south.

  Sunday morning, with a couple of men from the Los Angeles poli
ce department, we opened the baggage. We didn’t find anything except legitimate clothing and personal belongings that told us nothing.

  That trip paid no dividends.

  I returned to San Francisco and had bales of circulars printed and distributed.

  Two weeks went by, two weeks in which the circulars brought us nothing but the usual lot of false alarms.

  Then the Spokane police picked up Sherry and Marcus in a Stevens Street rooming house.

  Some unknown person had phoned the police that one Fred Williams living there had a mysterious black visitor nearly every day, and that their actions were very suspicious. The Spokane police had copies of our circular. They hardly needed the H. S. monograms on Fred Williams’ cuff links and handkerchiefs to assure them that he was our man.

  After a couple of hours of being grilled, Sherry admitted his identity, but denied having murdered Kavalov.

  Two of the sheriff’s men went north and brought the prisoners down to the county seat.

  Sherry had shaved off his mustache. There was nothing in his face or voice to show that he was the least bit worried.

  “I knew there was nothing more to wait for after my dream,” he drawled, “so I went away. Then, when I heard the dream had come true, I knew you johnnies would be hot after me—as if one can help his dreams—and I—ah—sought seclusion.”

  He solemnly repeated his orange-tree-voice story to the sheriff and district attorney. The newspapers liked it.

  He refused to map his route for us, to tell us how he had spent his time.

  “No, no,” he said. “Sorry, but I shouldn’t do it. It may be I shall have to do it again some time, and it wouldn’t do to reveal my methods.”

  He wouldn’t tell us where he had spent the night of the murder. We were fairly certain that he had left the train before it reached Los Angeles, though the train crew had been able to tell us nothing.

  “Sorry,” he drawled. “But if you chaps don’t know where I was, how do you know that I was where the murder was?”

  We had even less luck with Marcus. His formula was:

  “Not understand the English very good. Ask the capitaine. I don’t know.”

  The district attorney spent a lot of time walking his office floor, biting his finger nails, and telling us fiercely that the case was going to fall apart if we couldn’t prove that either Sherry or Marcus was within reach of the Kavalov house at, or shortly before or after, the time of the murder.