This went on for a week, two weeks, a month. It continued, in fact, until Rollo read an item in the Norwalk Hour about the Funnies Museum postponing its opening again.
“For crying out loud, the Harry Clemens is going to sit there and decay. The only Harry Clemens original known to exist, and probably nobody will ever see it again.”
Rollo desperately wanted to see it and possess it. Nights, he began to drive over to the vicinity of the Funnies Museum. He’d park in the woods and stalk up to the place like some sort of crazed commando in black turtleneck and pants — silent, intent, barely breathing.
Soon he discovered that Errol, alone in there, was spending nearly all his time in the cellar of the Fairfield Sisters’ mansion. From careful and discreet questioning of the few people, including myself, who’d actually been inside the museum, Rollo learned that almost all the drawings were stored on the second floor. He also learned that there was as yet no alarm system.
After watching five nights in a row, Rollo decided to move. He added a black ski mask to his dark outfit and sneaked up to the rear of the mansion. Climbing up a sturdy trellis, he let himself into the second-floor room that housed most of the drawings.
There were piles and piles of the damned things — politicals, comic-book pages, Sunday pages, illustrations — stacked in uneven mounds, gathering dust.
What Rollo intended to do was simple. He’d swipe a bundle of drawings so no one would guess the burglar had come specifically for the Harry Clemens. He found the huge drawing almost immediately. It had a simple black frame and stood nearly four feet high. They drew big in those days and Harry Clemens, whose problems included terrible eyesight, worked even larger than most of his contemporaries.
Rollo knew the importance of taking more than just this drawing to keep suspicion off himself, but his yearning for it made him decide to carry it back to his car alone first. Then he’d sneak back in and grab up a portion of the stack he’d found it in. He’d brought a few empty beer cans to leave behind so the job would look to the police like nothing more than juvenile vandalism.
The drawing was heavy, with the frame, glass, wooden backing, and all. Rollo found he couldn’t get it out the window and down the trellis with him. He’d have to, therefore, carry it down through the house and out the front door.
It won’t be all that tough, he told himself. Errol’s up to something in the cellar — he never comes up from there until the wee hours of the morning.
Going out the door of the upstairs room with the drawing face out in front of him, Rollo bumped into the door jamb. It only produced a tiny sound.
His heart beating fast, he halted and listened.
Except for a slight screaming from the plumbing, the old house remained silent.
Rollo waited a full minute longer before starting down the wide staircase. There were only two small wall lamps burning and everything had a pale-yellowish cast.
Errol Bojack, down in the cellar digging for gold, had heard the noise. “Those damn ghosts,” he murmured. “They’re not going to stop me.”
Yanking out his new pistol, he padded up the steps to the first floor.
Rollo had been right about Errol. The restaurant man hadn’t paid much attention to his latest acquisitions. Which is why he didn’t recognize the huge drawing of Columbia drifting downstairs toward him. In the dim light he mistook it for one of the Fairfield Sisters in her nightgown.
“It’s my gold now!” he shouted, putting five shots into the drawing. “You won’t keep me from getting it!”
Four of the five bullets penetrated Rollo, who managed to say, before he died, “Gosh dam it, you idiot, you’ve just ruined the only Harry Clemens in the world.”
A Grave on the Indragiri
by Alvin S. Fick
The investigation was sending Pine to Singapore again, and beyond...
“Why bother after all this time? 1909, you say? Three years ago. I should think you’d be satisfied to let it lie.”
The man behind the dark oak desk seemed hesitant to answer. He passed a meaty red hand over his shaven skull.
Alex Pine looked at him through half-closed eyes, assessing the muscle beneath the middle-age fat. Colter’s huge hands with scarred knuckles and wedge-shaped fingers protruded from a conservative business suit. Here was a man of great strength, perhaps a product of the docks. Maybe those shoulders came from tossing forkfuls of hay and manure on a Sussex farm, or from early years in a peat bog.
With his toe Pine hooked a chair close to his own in front of the desk, crossed his ankles, and placed his feet on its red cushion. In other offices in other parts of London he would not have done that. The gesture was a simple one, not calculated insolence but intended to move the business at hand out of the drawing room into the alley, or at least into the carriage house.
Colter seemed unwilling to make the concession. He stared at Pine’s feet on the chair, a barely perceptible shrug of his massive shoulders rippling the dark material of his coat.
“Because I want to know, that’s all.” He aimed a forefinger at Pine. “Twenty pounds a day and expenses. Take it or leave it.”
Through the open window Alex Pine could hear the clop of hooves in the street below, the creak of wheels on ungreased axles a counterpoint to the rumble of lorries with hard rubber tires carrying freight to the docks down by the river. Now and then a freshet of breeze brought in the mingled odors of the shipping district.
“A thousand pounds at the finish if you bring me conclusive evidence that my brother was murdered.”
“Not for five thousand unless I’m satisfied with your answers to my questions,” Pine said. “I agree it seems a little odd that your brother Kevin would drop dead at thirty-eight when he seemed to be in prime health. But you being in the rubber business yourself know conditions in Sumatra are not conducive to long life.
“So what if his wife says it was a heart attack brought on by heat and overwork? What difference does it make if she is wrong and he was shoved into his grave by some little-known tropical disease? There aren’t any medical examiners a hundred miles up the Indragiri River-Why does it matter to you now? What’s over is over, and you say yourself neither his wife nor the company he worked for stood to gain anything by his death. Why push it?”
“If your brother—” Colter began.
“I haven’t a brother, and I still don’t understand why you delayed, but I acknowledge the point. Tell me more about your brother’s wife.”
“She’s a Dutch girl Kevin met while she was attending school here in England. At first I thought he was a bloody fool. He hadn’t a quid in his trousers when he met her, all his money having gone for the clothes of a dandy. He borrowed a great deal of money from me. He spent most of it on a diamond ring and wining and dining her.
“Not long after they were married, he stopped by to tell me he was going to be made overseer of a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Marie, his wife, has a father who is a member of the firm, Benskoten Rubber Company, which owns several plantations there. That’s the last time I saw him. He died at Benskoten’s Plantation Number Three.”
“Did you hear from him after he went there? Any letters?”
“Not a one, although his wife wrote to my wife a couple of times.”
“Then he never repaid the money he owed you?”