Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933
- Автор: Day Stanley, Dunn J. Allan
- Год: 1933
- Язык: английский
- Год: Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933». Краткое содержание книги:
He approached the back door and hammered on it with his fist. Knowing the suspicious natures of farmers for late-at-night visitors, he called, “Hey, there! Mr. Simpson!”
His clamor eventually produced a result. A light went on upstairs. Then a light went on downstairs. Then there was the harsh click of a bolt being shot back.
The door opened. Mr. Simpson stood there in a crumpled white nightshirt, with an electric torch in one hand, a double-barreled shotgun in the other.
He peered out at Flash, shining the light in his face, holding the shotgun in readiness.
Flash panted: “I’m Dan Horton. I got lost in these swamps back here, and. I want to borrow your car.”
Mr. Simpson said presently, from depths of astonishment, “Well, I’ll be danged! You better come in, son, and get some dry clothes on.”
“Thanks,” Flash said, “but I’m in too much of a rush. Ben Africa’s been killed. I’m just on my way to town in connection with it. Can I borrow your car?”
“Who killed him?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Hmph! Mark my word, it was that yaller woman!” Babbling out this theory, he took Flash to the barn. A down-at-heel Model T Ford touring car was protected from thieves and vandals by a padlock and chain large enough, Flash reflected, to moor a battleship.
Mr. Simpson informed him that he had told his wife only the other day that Ben Africa would come to no good end, bringing that yaller woman to Skull Knob.
“The Africas have all come to violent ends,” Mr. Simpson said, as Flash climbed into the driver’s seat.
Flash resumed his interrupted journey. He followed the Blue Rock Road to the Milltown Turnpike and turned left. Presently he left the turnpike, turning right into a narrow, rough macadam road which, after about a mile, became unpaved and narrower. The old Ford scrambled up rocky ledges and slithered down into gulleys. Houses became fewer, and the country began to assume a wilder aspect.
At length Flash turned in between two tall dark cedars. The road was now dirt, and, in marshy spots, corduroy. The car bumped and rattled along to the end of a ravine which grew narrower and higher as Flash progressed.
The feeble headlights presently picked out of the rocks and trees a gaunt gray house which, from its appearance, might have merited a reputation for being haunted. In its isolation, its wild surroundings, it had an air at once bleak and sinister.
Flash stopped the car, got out, and made his way up a rocky path to a front porch with skinny posts.
He pounded on a door and waited. Presently a light began to flit about inside, casting long shadow, striking cold glints from metallic points and surfaces. The light floated like a wraith toward him. An old man in a blue kimono opened the door. He stared at Flash in the feeble light of an electric pocket torch and made hissing sounds through his fangs. He was Japanese.
“Is Professor Zimmerman home?” Flash asked.
“In bed, sair.”
“Tell him Dan Horton is here.”
“Yes, sair. Wait in there, pliz. I make a light.”
He backed out of the doorway and went into a room which adjoined the hall. He removed the chimney from a large, green-domed kerosene table lamp, and applied a sizzling match to the wick. He replaced the chimney, bowed, and hissed again, and took his departure.
Flash waited. It was a rich and amazing room. There was nothing in it with the exception of the kerosene lamp that was not Oriental. On the walls were mandarin robes from Peking. Manchu rugs of gold and blue adorned the floor. On taborets about the room were specimens of Satsuma ware and cherry lacquer from Osaka, Ming vases, a variety of bronze, iron, porcelain and wooden Buddhas from southern Asia, a Brunei cymbal, and war gongs from Borneo.
It was a fascinating room. From a teakwood peg hung, by the hair, a cured head from the New Hebrides, the lamplight gleaming on the varnished planes of nose and cheeks — a grisly relic. About the picture molding were little wind bells of glass and silver, which tinkled in the faintest breath of air.
And over it all hung the faint, pungent flavor of incense. There was a brazier, still smoldering a little, before a large pink, blue and white fat-bellied Buddha with eyes of kingfisher jade.
A man came into the room; a red-faced little man of about seventy, wizened and stooped of shoulder, blinking sleepily behind square steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Ah, hello, there, Dan,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
It was characteristic of him to make no comment on Dan’s muddy, bedraggled appearance. Professor Zimmerman called himself a permanently retired scientist. He had spent his life delving into the mysteries of the Far East, penetrating its rank jungles, traversing its smoldering deserts, exploring its ancient cities, to satisfy an insatiable intellectual curiosity.
He lived in this house a few months of the year. Without warning, he would pack up and be off to his beloved Orient, on the trail of some new — or incredibly old — archeological will-o’-the-wisp.
Flash said, “Benjamin Africa was killed a little after midnight — garroted with a fine steel wire.”
“Hm!” the professor said. “An old Hindu custom. The thugs, or thags of northern India used the silken slip-noose to garrot their victims. They’d slip up behind the man they wanted to rob, drop the noose over his head and jerk it tight about his neck. Know who did it?”
“No.” Flash briefly described the scene of the murder, mentioned the suspects, and said, “I looked the study over pretty thoroughly for clues. This was lying near a corner of the desk blotter.”
He took out the envelope and rolled the little black ball into the palm of his hand.
“What is it?”
Professor Zimmerman picked the little black ball out of Flash’s palm with the tips of bunched fingers. He raised it to his nose. He sniffed it.
“Opium,” he said.
Chapter XIV
The Man in the Shadows
Flash nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought. I wanted to make sure. Is it any particular kind of opium? Can you tell me anything about it?”
The old man sniffed the opium pill. He held it close to the light and flaked off a little of it with a thumbnail. Then he placed his thumbnail in his mouth. His eyes rolled and narrowed.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the very finest kind of Benares opium. Very expensive stuff, this. A kind seldom seen in America.”
Flash said, “You mean, there are different qualities, or brands, of opium — like cigarettes?”
“Not quite the same analogy applies. But there are a great many different grades and varieties of opium. This is a peculiarly fine, purified grade. In the old days, only a ruby-button mandarin would have smoked such fine opium as this.”
“Is it mild?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Who would smoke this grade of opium today?”
“The highest type of Chinese women smoke a great deal of it.”
Flash replaced, the opium pill in the envelope, and restored the envelope to his pocket. He felt a little ill. Inexorably, it seemed, all trails, all clues, led to Lotus Africa. For a moment, he doubted his faith in her innocence. There was, first of all, the hairpin; now — this! Yet he found himself clinging to his belief that someone had placed the hairpin just within the dead man’s collar so that suspicion would fasten itself to her.
And this opium, actually, did not prove anything. Certainly, it did not prove that she had killed Benjamin Africa. Nor did it even prove that she used opium.
Professor Zimmerman was saying, “Perhaps Benjamin Africa cultivated a fondness for opium in China. He was an eccentric man.”