Going Going Gone Read online

  “I’m wonderin’ myself. We might go see if he did – I meant to go there anyway, an’ take a look around, an’ see if Riley’s man was all right,” Asey said. “Riley was goin’ to send one of his cops there to stay till Hanson could drop by an’ shut the place up official. Jennie told me,” he started the roadster and backed out of the parking space, “she said that Solatia lived all by herself in that big place.”

  “She had two maids when she first moved there, but they left to work in a factory. I don’t know a lot about her,” Cummings said thoughtfully. “Now I think of it, she must have been the only person in three townships who didn’t have the first grippe, or that half-grippe that came after, or the throat that came after that. I knew her to speak to, of course. She was on the ration board, and she once had a spotter’s shift with my wife. She’s done very well in her business, I gather, though of course she made most of her money back in the Cape boom days when all those Middle Westerners surged around paying ten dollars for someone’s old chopping bowl with a crack in it.”

  “No family?” Asey asked. “Jennie didn’t seem to think she had any.”

  “I’ve never heard any mention of ‘em,” Cummings said, “and my wife – or Jennie – would probably have known if she had. Women have the most incredible talent for finding out how many relations people have. One woman picks up some mention of an uncle in Milwaukee, another picks up a brother in the soya bean business, another lands an aged stepmother in St. Petersburg, and then everyone gets together and adds ‘em up – bang, a family! Asey!”

  “What’s the matter?” Asey slowed down.

  “I’ve an idea!” Cummings said solemnly. “It’s tremendous!”

  “Welcome, idea!” Asey said promptly. “Mayo needs you!”

  “Before someone could put Solatia into that chest, someone had to remove the books—”

  “No, doc! “Asey said firmly. “No! Don’t bring them books up now!”

  “But where are they now? What became of them? They just flipped into my mind like,” Cummings snapped his fingers, “like that! You’ve got to think about those books! You’ve got to bring ‘em up! You’ve got to bring ‘em to light! Why, those books are your clue!”

  “Doc, I’m tearin’ my mind to a frazzle tryin’ not to think of them books!” Asey said. “I’m holdin’ them books in abeyance till I can iron out a few dozen other items, like why did Gardner swear he was goin’ to have his brother’s things, an’ try to bribe Sharp to get ‘em for him, an’ then never bother with anything but that chest – an’ pay three thousand dollars for it when he probably could’ve got it for four-fifty, an – well, don’t let’s confuse things any more by thinkin’ about books!”

  “But if you knew where they were—”

  “That, doc, is most of the trouble. I’m afraid I do know.”

  “What? How d’you know? Where are they?” Cummings demanded. “Where?”

  “A beautiful girl with a pompadour threw ‘em into the fresh pond near John’s,” Asey said. “Now, please, don’t ask me any more, because I don’t know any more – an’ before we start trackin’ down beautiful girls with pompadours, let’s track down Gardner Alden, an’ settle him! I mean it, doc! Don’t talk about books now!”

  They drove along the dimly lighted highway in a silence broken only by the doctor’s occasional peevish mutterings.

  “Pompadour!” Asey heard him say under his breath. “Pompadour! Why a pompadour? Why not a wig? Who in blazes was she?”

  He squirmed around the seat, slapped his fist against the car door, chewed at the cigar stump parked in the corner of his mouth, and made noises in the back of his threat which Asey decided were meant to indicate his, general state of incredulity.

  “Hey, Asey!” he said suddenly, “you’ve gone by! It’s the old Hawes house. You’ve gone by!”

  “Have I? No, I didn’t see—”

  “Yes, you have – look, you’re way beyond, Asey. You’re clear to the Orleans fork.”

  Asey stopped. “Golly, you’re right! I wasn’t thinkin’ about the house so much as I was watchin’ for the lights – doc, I never seen any lights at all! Did you?”

  “I wasn’t even looking for ‘em,” Cummings said. “I didn’t notice. Probably the cop blacked out.”

  “Even the dumbest of Hanson’s crew would probably know when he was two an’ a half miles from the shore zone,” Asey said. “I don’t think he’d black out, an’ I don’t think he’d be sittin’ there in the dark, either. I know I wouldn’t, if I’d been ordered to go somewhere an’ stay till my boss come. I’d make myself to home. Huh! I guess maybe we better drive back slow an’ survey the situation!”

  He turned around and drove back.

  “Asey! “Cummings said excitedly as they passed by the looming outlines of the old saltbox house. “Asey, look! See—”

  “Hush!”

  He continued on past the house and around a curve before he finally stopped.

  “But, Asey, there was a flashlight in there! No lights, but a flashlight!” Cummings protested. “Blue-hooded, too! I saw it clearly!”

  “Uh-huh. I seen it myself.”

  “A cop would just snap on a light!” Cummings said. “He wouldn’t wander around with any flashlight, and a blue-hooded one at that! Asey, d’you suppose that’s Gardner Alden prowling around? I bet it is! Turn around quick, man, and go back! Hustle!”

  “Wait, now, I want to—”

  “Oh, hurry up! If it’s Gardner, you want to catch him in there!”

  “An’ if I want to catch him in there, doc, I don’t think the best way is to drive gaily into that yard with my lights on, an’ ask him pretty-please to come out!” Asey returned. “I think I got it. There’s an old wood road – yup, I think we’ll be able to make an encirclin’ action,‘all right!”

  “If you mean that old carriage road – oh, come, Asey! This car is no Porter tank! Don’t let’s go hurtling around back roads, knocking down trees and leaping over bushes! Don’t always have to take the hard way – oh, well!”

  As Asey started off, the doctor gripped the door handle with resignation, and closed his eyes.

  Five minutes later, he opened them and looked curiously around.

  “Is that over? The only possible comparison with that hideous experience—”

  “Hush, doc! Don’t talk so loud!”

  “Is the passage of a wounded tank,” Cummings went on in a furious whisper, “trying to creep home to its lair by way of several mountains and a lake – we did go through a lake or two, didn’t we?”

  “Just a bit of swamp, that’s all, an’ here we are, right behind Solatia’s barn. There’s the house, see?” Asey pointed through the darkness.

  “No, I can’t see a thing. And what are we going to do now? Creep like snakes on our stomachs—”

  But Asey was already out of the car.

  “It’s a bit brambly,” he warned the doctor as the latter followed him. “Walk right behind me, take it easy, an’ make just as little noise as you can. An’ keep your voice down!”

  “That I should voluntarily have given up the peace and quiet of my humdrum little office,” Cummings said bitterly, “to scratch my eyes out and tear my best suit to shreds – is that a Gila Monster behind that tree, Two-gun? Oh, only a wee rabbit. Hm. If a skunk takes it into his head to join this expedition, I shall—”

  “Shush!”

  Cummings subsided.

  Quietly, Asey circled around the barn, glided along the shadow of a thick lilac hedge toward the rear of the house, and finally came to a stop just a few feet away from the back door.

  Cocking his head to one side, he shut his eyes and listened.

  Except for the rustle and swish of the leaves in the tall elm trees, and the thumping of the bullfrogs in the swamp beyond, everything about the old place was as quiet as a grave.

  There were old house sounds, of course, of creaking shutters and loosely fitting windows and doors. And just above his head, in the wooden gutt
er of the slanting roof, a squirrel was chattering at something.

  “With all this fancy circling,” Cummings said in his ear, “you’ve missed him by six months! He’s gone with the wi – ouch!”

  Asey’s elbow bored sharply into his side.

  Then Cummings, too, saw the cone of light glowing in the corner room, that same eerie blue cone from a covered flashlight which they’d spotted when they’d driven past the house.

  The cone moved, slowly.

  Then the person holding the light apparently rested it on a table, for it remained in a horizontal position, without wavering.

  A few seconds later, it was moved again, this time in such a manner that the beam focused down. Not directly down at the floor, but rather as if someone were aiming at a spot on the wall about three feet above the level of the floor boards.

  The fellow must have propped it, Asey decided, for it continued to glow down at the angle.

  “Opening a safe?” Cummings breathed the words in Asey’s ear.

  Asey shrugged, craned his neck in an attempt to see better, and then turned around.

  “You stay here!” he ordered, and added emphasis to his whisper by pointing firmly at the doctor and the patch of ground on which he was standing.

  Cummings nodded a vigorous assent. Had he been able to state his mind, Asey thought as he started to inch around the side of the house, the doctor would undoubtedly have expressed some sardonic sentiment about Two-gun Blaney about to pounce on his villain, and added something about his own personal preference for staying well in the background on all such occasions.

  It had been many years since he had been inside the old Hawes place, but he remembered that it used to have a side door. The side door led into an entry, and the entry led to that corner room. If he could only enter by that door, he could sneak up on the fellow from the rear. If the door was locked, he’d have to climb up the slanting roof to one of the upstairs windows.

  But the door was open!

  Holding his breath, Asey edged in.

  He stepped over the threshold, and the next thing he heard was Cummings’ voice.

  There was something the matter with it, too. It didn’t sound right. It was dim and far off, like a bad telephone connection. And it sounded worried. Asey couldn’t remember when he had ever heard that voice sound so worried and unhappy.

  If he opened his eyes, he decided, he might hear better.

  He blinked up at Cummings, kneeling beside him, and Cummings promptly scowled at him.

  “Come to, hey?” he remarked. “Well, my fine Homespun Sleuth, next time don’t be so confoundedly fancy! Next time don’t pay so much attention to strategy, and worry a little more about your tactics! Next time just you dive through the window and grab the fellow – er – you were after – Gardner Alden, remember?”

  Asey nodded. “I’m glad you do remember,” Cummings went on. “because obviously you lost sight of the fact about twenty minutes ago.

  “I don’t know what happened!” Cummings said. “I wasn’t there! I was obeying orders, standing exactly where you planted me, out by the back door. Next to the rhododendrons. I never heard a sound – oh, I heard a thud, but I just thought that was you, jumping him. I wasn’t even very moved when the blue light went out. I thought you’d picked it up – and if I hadn’t called out to you at that point. I suppose I’d be standing there like a living statue among the rhododendrons even now.”

  Asey sat up. “You mean – gee, doc, didn’t you even see—”

  “After I called out to you, there was this ghastly silence,” Cummings said. “I yelled again, and then I rattled the back door – I frankly don’t know which rattled more, it or my teeth. When I finally got up enough courage to open it and come in, I found you here on the floor, and I remember being very grateful that there was no one else – you might as well he back, Asey. You can’t pretend you’re not still groggy.”

  “I’m all right.”

  It’s a wonderful thing to have a head as hard as yours, you know.” Cummings said. “You probably won t have a lump any bigger than a base-ball to-morrow, and I’m sure your head won’t pain after Thursday – unless you move your eyes too rapidly. I don’t like to appear harsh, but if you’d gone at that fellow more directly, Asey, I don’t think he’d have smashed you with that length of lead pipe. At least, not so successfully.”

  “So he hit me with lead pipe?”

  “Well perhaps it was copper pipe,” Cummings said. “Or a sock filled with beach sand. Who knows? Perhaps he even had a formal blackjack—”

  “What’s that noise?” Asey interrupted as someone in the next room began to moan.

  “Oh, that’s Riley’s cop.”

  “What’s the matter? Did he—”

  “Yes, Gardner used him to practise on,” Cummings said, “and because his head isn’t as thick as yours, he felt the blow more. He feels terrible. I found him in the front room, tied up with his own belt. He doesn’t know what happened. He says he was reading Joe Palooka, and something hit him. He just came to about ten minutes ago – when he started keening, I thought pixies had come out of the wall to serenade me. Hm. That fellow could pick up a lot of extra cash from vitamin ads!”

  “Who, the cop?”

  “No, Gardner Alden, of course! You know the sort of thing I mean. ‘I’m a man of sixty, but I don’t feel a day over thirty, and I have all the pep and vigour of a lad of sixteen.’ Gardner Alden not only gets around like a human jeep, he does things!”

  “He certainly does,” Asey said reflectively as he touched the lump on his head. “Old Baker at the Inn told me Gardner was a nice, considerate sort of feller – an’ he is, when you think it over! It was nice of him to leave that blue light burnin’ in the window for us, so to speak, an’ considerate of him to do ‘such a neat, businesslike job as he done on my head.”

  “Just a wee bit more of that neat, businesslike consideration, and you could have had a real vacation in the hospital,” Cummings said. “But I appreciate his not bothering to biff me. That was considerate. Of course, I admit I’m chagrined to think he rates me merely as someone to elude, or to run away from, instead of a potential danger to him, like you and the cop. What was he after here, I wonder? I looked around, but nothing’s been ransacked that I can see. Her desk in the sitting-room hasn’t been touched.”

  Asey got to his feet, and found, after his head stopped swimming, that he liked what he could see of Solatia Spry’s home. The sitting-room beyond had nice mahogany, pleasant curtains, comfortable armchairs, and an air of having been lived in.

  “Can you really walk?” Cummings asked. “Oh, I suppose nothing can stop you, can it, you indestructible creature! See, her desk is as neat as a pin.”

  Asey took his time crossing over to it, because the floor had moments of seeming to rise up and hit him in the face.

  “I wish my wife would keep a file!” Cummings said wistfully. “See this little one of hers, here?” He read off the headings. “Ration Board, Business, House, Gas-electricity-oil, Insurance, Car, Taxes, Food. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live with an orderly woman. I don’t think anything’s been touched.

  After a tour of the house, Asey agreed.

  “I’d say things was as she left ‘em – at least nobody seems to have done any large-scale lootin’ an’ plunderin’.” He paused in the door-way of the front parlour, where Riley’s man had progressed from a prone position on the horsehair sofa to a semi-upright slouch in a chair. “How’s your head? Better?”

  “Yeah, a lot. Say, there’s a funny thing – I tried to telephone Hanson about it, but the phone don’t work. Something’s wrong with the wire outside, I think. It’s like it’d been cut, see?

  “So!“Asey said. “Huh! What’s the funny thing you was goin’ to phone about?”

  “It’s this beachwagon that’s here—”

  “I was going to ask you about that, Asey,” Cummings interrupted. “Who drove that back from the auction? D’you know? Bec
ause it’s occurred to me if you could find out from them where Solatia’d parked it this afternoon, then you could find out who’d been parked near her, and by checking up with people, you might be able to place the exact time of her arrival. And the identity of any passenger. You happen to know who drove the beachwagon back?”

  “Me?” Riley’s man smiled. “I’m glad it wasn’t me,” he said. “I’m glad that’s something I don’t have to explain about. Because this beachwagon’s half-way in to the barn, see, and half-way out. And one wheel’s jacked up, and the wheel’s off – flat tyre, see? And there’s a spare laid out, and that’s flat, and one of the rears – the left, I think – well, that’s flat, too!”

  “In a nutshell,” Asey said, “she had two flats an’ a flat spare. An’ the phone wire seems to’ve been cut!”

  He leaned back against the arm of the horsehair sofa.

  He and Jennie had seen Solatia backing out. Apparently the tyres had been all right then. Certainly, if she’d been aware of any tyre trouble, she wouldn’t have been backing at all. Neither would she have let them go by with just a cheerful wave of the hand. She’d have blown her horn, attracted their attention, and asked either for help or for a lift. After all, that auction had been important to Solatia Spry.

  But he couldn’t remember seeing any lone beachwagon parked in the vicinity of John Alden’s house when he had picked up Jennie after the sale. He couldn’t remember anyone’s mentioning the vehicle. No one had thought of it after the sea chest had been opened. No one had been told to drive it back here.

  “In fact,” he said aloud,” I plumb forgot all about that beachwagon myself! Doc, this is on the puzzlin’ side. Jennie an’ I seen her, seemingly leavin’ here. But there wasn’t any beachwagon left over at Alden’s after the auction. Not that I remember seein’ anyways. An’ even if it’d been parked out of sight somewheres, no one was told to bring it back here! I wonder, now!”

  “I’m past wondering,” Cummings said with resignation. “I’m bug-eyed. I’m speechless. Three flats and a cut phone – there’s something more than the long arm of coincidence there, Asey. That definitely smacks of sabotage!”