Erle Gardner - Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Murderer’s Bride and Other Stories

Mills struggled to his hands and knees.

“I won’t stand for it. I’ll stay right here and explain to the officers.”

Leith laughed grimly.

“Listen, fat guy,” he said. “My men have just mowed down a squad of bluecoats. Think I’m going to get soft over one more murder?”

He took out his automatic, sighted it. His eyes gleamed with the fury popularly supposed to possess a murderer at the moment of the kill.

“No, no! I’ll kick through, wait!”

Mills scrambled to his feet, scuttled to the hall, and took a thick cane from the hall tree where it had been hanging in plain sight.

“Here they are,” he said, thrusting the cane into Leith’s hands. “Come on, quick. I’ll throw in with you!”

Lester Leith shook the cane.

“No, no. You can’t tell by shaking. It’s balanced with sheet lead and stuffed with cotton. The gems are nested in the cotton. You get into it by unscrewing the ferrule.”

“All right, Mills,” Leith said. “Better go out to your garage and start sweeping up the firecrackers. And you’ll find a siren connected so that it would start to wail when a piece of punk burned through a connection, just before the firecrackers went off. I was celebrating the fourth of July.”

Mills tried to speak, but the sounds that came out were not words.

“Good morning,” said Lester Leith.

“The — the — police!” stuttered Mills.

“Oh, yes, the police. They are still groping in the dark. I solved the case because the police proved my suspicions by a process of elimination. You see, your inordinate desire for newspaper publicity made me a little suspicious at the first. Then when the police looked everywhere that Griggy might have concealed the stones and didn’t find a trace, my suspicion became a certainty.”

And Lester Leith strolled from the front door with all the ease of a man who is very sure of himself.

Sergeant Ackley was pacing the floor of Leith’s apartment when Lester Leith entered.

“Well, well, Sergeant! Waiting for me?”

Sergeant Ackley spoke with the slow articulation of a man who is trying to control his rage.

“Get the stones?” he asked.

Lester Leith raised his eyebrows.

“Pardon?”

Sergeant Ackley took a deep breath.

“You ditched the shadows yesterday and disappeared!”

Lester Leith lit a cigarette.

“Sit down, Sergeant. You’re frightfully fidgety. Overwork, I guess. No, Sergeant, as it happened your shadows ditched me.”

“Well,” growled the officer, “either way, you disappeared and didn’t come home last night.”

Leith’s smile became a chuckle.

“Purely a private affair, Sergeant.”

“Then you called on Mills and set off a bunch of firecrackers.”

“Quite right, Sergeant. This is the fourth of July, you know, according to my special heat-saving calendar. I was celebrating. Mills didn’t complain, did he?”

Sergeant Ackley twisted the cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right.

“That,” he said, “is the funny part of the whole thing. Mills seems to think there isn’t any cause for making a squawk. And I ain’t satisfied about that candy yet. There are some things in this caper I’ve missed. That girl and her boy friend, for instance — couldn’t even hold them, no evidence. Couldn’t be they were working for you, Leith, in your pay?”

Lester Leith smiled. “Tut, tut, Sergeant, you couldn’t have missed anything.”

Sergeant Ackley headed for the door.

“Leith, I think you’re a crook. Sort of a supercrook, a lucky crook — but a crook. Someday I’m going to get you.”

Ackley paused on the threshold.

“Next time the instructions will be what they should have been this time, and every time — tail Leith!”

And the door slammed.

Lester Leith turned beamingly to his valet, who had been standing by during the interview.

“Scuttle, I feel that a heat-saving calendar isn’t as simple as it seemed. Turn on the heat full force, and then see if you can’t pick up a new calendar somewhere. I’m going back to November.”

“Now that the firecrackers are exploded,” said the valet.

Lester Leith smiled again.

“Certainly, Scuttle. You wouldn’t expect me to carry over a big investment in firecrackers, would you?”

The valet sighed resignedly.

“Begging your pardon, sir, I’d expect you to do almost anything — and get away with it, sir.”

The love of loyalty road in canton is a wide thoroughfare cut ruthlessly through the congested district in order to modernize the city. Occasional side streets feed the traffic of automobiles and rickshas into it, but back of these streets one enters the truly congested areas, where people live like sardines in a tin.

The Street of the Wild Chicken is so wide that one may travel down it in a ricksha. But within a hundred feet of the intersection of The Street of the Wild Chicken and The Love of Loyalty Road, one comes to Tien Mah Hong, which, being translated, means The Alley of the Sky Horse. And in Tien Mah Hong there is no room for even ricksha traffic. Two pedestrians wearing wide-brimmed hats must tilt their heads as they meet, so that the brims will not scrape as the wearers pass each other shoulder to shoulder.

Houses on each side of Tien Mah Hong, with balconies and windows abutting directly on The Alley of the Sky Horse, give but little opportunity for privacy. The lives of neighbors are laid bare with an intimacy of detail which would be inconceivable in a less congested community or a more occidental atmosphere. At night the peddlers of bean cakes, walking through The Alley of the Sky Horse, beat little drums to attract attention, and shout their wares with a cry which is like the howl of a wolf.

Leung Fah walked down The Alley of the Sky Horse with downcast eyes, as befitted a modest woman of the coolie class. Her face was utterly without expression. Not even the shrewdest student of human nature could have told from her outward appearance the thoughts which were seething within her breast.

It had been less than a month before that Leung Fah had clasped to her breast a morsel of humanity which represented all life’s happiness, a warm, ragged bundle, a child without a father, a secret outlet for her mother love.

Then one night there had been a scream of sirens, a panic-stricken helterskelter rush of shouting inhabitants, and, over all, the ominous, steady roar of airplane engines, a hideous undertone of sound which mounted until it became as the hum of a million metallic bees.

It is easy enough to advocate fleeing to a place of safety, but the narrow roads of Canton admit of no swift handling of crowds. And there are no places of safety. Moreover, the temperament of the Chinese makes it difficult to carry out any semblance of an air-defense program. Death in one form or another is always jeering at their elbows. Why dignify one particular form of death by going to such great lengths so far as precautions are concerned?

The devil’s eggs began to fall from the sky in a screaming hail. Anti-aircraft guns roared a reply. Machine guns sputtered away hysterically. Through all the turmoil the enemy flyers went calmly about their business of murder, ignoring the frenzied, nervous attempts of an unprepared city to make some semblance of defense.

With fierce mother instinct Leung Fah had held her baby to her breast, shielding it with her frail body, as though interposing a layer of flesh and bone would be of any avail against this “civilized” warfare which rained down from the skies.

The earth had rocked with a series of detonations, and then suddenly Leung Fah had been surrounded by a terrific noise, by splintered timbers, dust and debris.