“What should we do with these two men?”
Holmes smiled. “I should think that that lifeboat, if towed at a goodly distance behind us, would make for an interesting journey back to England. Both men should be deloused by the time we arrive.”
Back in our digs in Baker Street, Holmes put his feet up before the fire. We’d been back for nearly three weeks, and the trials of Moran and Jeffers were coming up, yet there were still elements unclear to me. “When did you know, exactly?” I asked.
Holmes exhaled a heady Cavendish smoke. “I believe I have mentioned before, Watson, that when all other possibilities have been exhausted, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth. As soon as I saw the lifeboat in the water, a conjecture occurred to me. No lifeboat could have survived that explosion. Therefore, it had been lowered before the explosion. It follows, then, that the explosion was planned. When Jeffers did not hesitate to try to bring the survivor aboard, I surmised that he was in on the plot. Of course, I had to risk mutiny to prove it, but Jeffers’s involvement was the only thing that fit all the facts.”
“But he was bleeding when we came upon him and Captain Wagner.”
“Nothing is more convincing and easier to self-inflict than a superficial head wound.”
“And our — ahem — my poisoning?”
“The crewman said that the tea was from the bridge. We both assumed he meant from the captain. But a man of Captain Wagner’s personality would imprint it on his men, and if he had personally sent the drinks, the crewman would have said, “Captain Wagner sends his compliments,’ or some such thing.”
“Now that you explain it, it seems so clear.”
“Don’t punish yourself, my friend. Neither of us saw it at the time. It was not until I saw Moran in the lifeboat that I was forced to reconsider the smallest events in the chain.”
The fire burned low. “And what, finally, of Professor Moriarty?” I asked.
Holmes sighed. “Not Moran, nor Jeffers, nor Culverton-Smith will implicate him. For the present we’ve foiled him, but I fear Moriarty and I must await another confrontation.”
“And what then?” I asked, looking into my friend’s troubled face. Sherlock Holmes gazed glassy-eyed into the fire. “And then, Watson,” he said, “then one of us must surely die.”
John Lutz
Night Crawlers
from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
There’s plant life in parts of the Everglades that’s to be found nowhere else in the country, spores carried by hurricane winds from the West Indies that take root and flourish in the steamy tropical climate and are exotic and primitive and sometimes dangerous. Some say that in Mangrove City there’s animal life to be found nowhere else.
Mangrove City isn’t really a city unless you use the term generously. It’s a stretch of ramshackle, moss-marred clapboard buildings where the road runs through the swamp along relatively dry land. The “city” is a few small shops, a restaurant, a service station with a sign warning you to fill your gas tank because the swamp’s full of alligators, a barber shop with a red and white barber pole that’s also green with mold. There’s a police station in the same rundown frame building as the city hall, and a blackened ruin that was Muggy’s Lounge until it burned down five years ago. Next to the ruin is the new and improved Muggy’s, constructed of cinder block and with a corrugated steel roof. Not a city, really. Barely a town. More like something unfortunate that happened on the side of the road.
A mile before you get to Mangrove City, that is before if you’re driving west the way Carver had, is the Glades Inn, a sixteen-unit motel. It’s a low brick structure, built in a U to embrace a swimming pool. Carver couldn’t imagine anyone ever actually swimming in the thing. The algae on its surface was green and thick. A diving board sagged toward the water and was draped with Spanish moss. From the far corner of the pool came a dull plop and a stirring of sluggish water as a bullfrog, tired of Carver’s scrutiny, hopped for green cover. Carver set the tip of his cane on the hot gravel surface of the parking lot and limped toward the office.
As he pushed open the door, a bell tinkled. That didn’t seem to mean much. The knotty-pine-paneled office was deserted. Behind the long counter, whose front was paneled to match the walls, was a half-eaten sandwich on a desk, next to an old black IBM Selectric typewriter. The only furniture on Carver’s side of the desk was a red vinyl chair with a rip in its seat that revealed white cotton batting struggling to get out. On the wall near the chair was a framed color photograph of a buxom woman in a bikini and cowboy boots, riding on the back of a large alligator. She was grinning with her mouth open wide and had an arm raised as if she were waving the ten-gallon hat in her hand. Carver leaned close and studied the photograph. The woman was stuffed into the bikini. The alligator was just stuffed.
“Some sexy ’gator, don’tcha think?” a voice said.
Carver turned and saw a stooped old man with a grizzled gray beard that refused to grow over a long, curved scar on his right cheek. The right eye, near the scar, was a slightly different shade of blue from that of the left and might have been glass. The man had a wiry build beneath a ragged plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He was behind the desk, and Carver couldn’t see much of the lower half of his body, but what he could see, and the way the man moved, gave the impression he was bowlegged. His complexion was like raw meat, almost as if he’d been badly burned long ago.
“I didn’t see you there,” Carver said, noticing now a paneled door that matched the wall paneling behind the desk.
“I was in back, heard the bell, knowed there was somebody out heah.” He had an oddly clipped southern accent yet drew out the last words of his sentences: heeah. He leaned scrawny elbows on the desk and grinned with incredibly bad teeth, shooting a look at Carver’s cane. “What can I do ya, friend?”
Carver saw now that he had a plastic nametag pinned to his shirt, but it was blank. He immediately named the man “Crusty” in his mind. It fit better than the baggy shirt and pants the man wore. And it certainly went with his faint but acrid odor of stale urine. “You can give me a room.”
Crusty looked surprised. Even shocked. “You sure ’bout that?”
“Sure am. This is a motel, right?”
“Well, ’course it is. ’S’cuse my bein’ put back on my heels, but this heah’s the off-season.”
Carver wondered when the “on” season was. And why.
Crusty got a registration card out of a desk drawer and laid it on the counter along with a plastic ballpoint pen that was lettered Irv’s Baits. “You want smokin’ or nonsmokin’?”
Carver thought he had to be kidding, but said, “Smoking. Every once in a while I enjoy a cigar.”
“Be eighty-five dollars a night with tax,” Crusty said.
“That’s steep,” Carver commented as he signed the register. Crusty shrugged. “We’re a val’able commodity, bein’ the only motel for miles.”
“You might be the only anything for miles that doesn’t swim or fly.”
“Then how come you’re heah” — Crusty looked at the registration card — “Mr. Carver from Del Moray?”
“The fishing,” Carver said.
Crusty’s genuine-looking eye widened. “Not many folks come here for the fishin’.”
“No doubt they just come to frolic in the pool,” Carver said. “You take Visa?”
“Nope. Gotta be good ol’ U.S. cash money.”
Carver got his wallet from his pocket, held it low so Crusty couldn’t see its contents, and counted out 850 dollars. The cost of doing business, he thought, and laid the bills on the desk.