The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

5: Gentleman of the Press

The captive picked himself out of the dirt, brushed specks of detritus from his glittering costume very carefully, and then poked Wild Bill Grant expertly in the pit of the stomach. Wild Bill said: “Out!” very loudly and doubled up in pain. Curly sprang forward like a spring released and aimed a hard brown first at the man’s mouth. The man ducked, grinned without humor, and stepped behind the Inspector. A free-for-all was averted only by the intervention of Sergeant Velie, who clamped Curly’s arms negligently behind the straight young back and gripped the captive’s neck in his other hand without effort, so that they glared at each other across the Sergeant’s impossible chest like two children. There was, as might have been expected, a surge of cowboys toward them.

The Inspector said in a snarl: “Back, the pack of you, or I’ll run you all in.” They stopped. “Now, Thomas, quit gagging this feller. I want him alive, not dead.” Obediently Sergeant Velie released his hold on both men. They shook themselves rather sheepishly. Ellery, who for reasons of his own was watching Grant, saw his leathery complexion assume a saffron tinge that was like the hue of death.

The captive produced a cigaret and lighted it coolly. “And that, Mister Tarzan,” he said in a high-pitched, gatling-gun voice to the silent showman, “will teach you to keep your dirty hands off a poor hard-working member of the Fourth Estate.”

Grant growled low in his throat.

“Stop it!” said the Inspector sharply. “All right, you. The fireworks are over. Talk, and make it simple.”

The man puffed at his cigaret for a moment. He was slight, blond, and ageless. His eyes were tired.

“Well?” rapped the Inspector.

“I’m trying to think of simple words,” drawled the man.

The Inspector smiled a thin smile. “Aha,” he said, “a Broadway wisecracker. I thought I recognized the breed in spite of the scenery. Are you goin’ to talk, or do I have to haul you down to Headquarters?”

“Horrors, no,” grinned the man. “I’ll talk, teacher — only spare the rod — or is the rod the hose in this case? Introducing God’s gift to Fraudway, Mrs. Lyons’s little boy Teddy — muckraker, round-the-towner, the world’s most famous tab columnist, and repository of more dirty secrets than you, and you, and you could shake a stick at.”

Sergeant Velie made a sound like a disgusted bison. Something distinctly uncomplimentary left his hard lips and agitated the air.

“Ted Lyons,” said the Inspector thoughtfully. “Well, well. Stepped right into a juicy little bump-off, didn’t you? Now—”

“Of course,” said Lyons jauntily, pulling up his gorgeous jeans with an exaggerated vigor, “now that we’ve properly met, Inspector, I’ll toddle along. You’ve had your fun, our friend Mr. Buffalo Wild Bill Grant’s had his exercise and a jab in the belly, and little Teddy has to dash downtown to the cruel newspaper mag-nut and report the biggest story of the year. So little Teddy—”

“Little Teddy owes us a few explanations, Little Teddy does,” smiled the Inspector. Then his mood changed and he snapped: “Spit it out, Lyons. I haven’t got all night to waste on you! What the devil are you doing here all dressed up like Jesse James?”

“Ah,” said Lyons, “li’l Inspector’s going to be nassy, eh? Listen here, old boy, know who I am? I’m Ted Lyons, and your whole damn bunch of Keystone Koppers couldn’t stop me if I started walking out!”

The Inspector’s eyebrows became arches, and he looked at Sergeant Velie. Sergeant Velie took one stride toward Lyons... Lyons looked around. The little drama was being played to a magnificent audience of twenty thousand persons.

“All right, pardner,” he said gravely, his head hanging. “I’ll talk, pardner. I’ll tell all. I killed Buck Horne with my little pop-gun, I did. I snuck up behind him, pardner, and I said: ‘Buck, you mis’able c’yote, I’ll fan yore hide for yuh! I said...”

They were too aghast at this monstrous creature’s bad taste to protest. All except Ellery, for he had seen the look in Kit Horne’s eyes; and he stepped forward and murmured: “You’re a particularly annoying specimen of a pediculus, Lyons, and all that; I wonder if even you realize what a louse you are. Don’t you know that Buck Horne’s daughter is listening to every filthy word you’re saying?”

“Ah, Sir Galahad,” said Lyons rapidly; he was backing up, and his eyes were bright and dangerous. “Boloney, you, whoever you are. I’m getting out of here, and any flatfoot who thinks he’s going to stop me—”

The rest was drowned in a rising tide of fury. Grant and his son, Sergeant Velie, Tony Mars, and half a dozen of the cowboys near by lunged at Lyons. He grinned wolfishly and his hand flashed up with an ugly, tiny weapon — a snub-nosed and incredibly small automatic pistol. The rush stopped abruptly.

“Are the big he-men yellow?” he chattered, his eyes flashing about. Sergeant Velie leaped forward like a catapult and smashed the automatic out of Lyons’s hand. “Damn fool trick,” he said unemotionally, picking it up out of the dirt. “Might hurt someone with that thing.”

Lyons was pale.

“No guts anyway.”

To their amazement the man began to laugh. “All right, all right,” he chuckled. “Teddy gives up. But I tell you my paper—”

“Give me that rod, Thomas,” said the Inspector evenly. The Sergeant handed it over. The Inspector pulled out the magazine, looked into the tiring chamber. Not one cartridge was missing.

“A .25,” murmured the old man, and his eyes narrowed. “But it’s not been fired, and it doesn’t smell—” He sniffed the muzzle for a moment. “Bad for you, Lyons. Now talk, or as God is my judge, I’ll see that you go up the river for pulling a gun on an officer!”

Lyons shrugged and lighted another cigaret. “Sorry. Apologize. I had a couple of snifters. Nothing to get screwy about, Inspector. I did it as a publicity stunt.” His tired eyes were half-closed.

“How’d you get in here?”

“I rented a cowboy rig from a theatrical costumer on 45th Street. Got here half an hour before show time. Gate-keeper passed me through — must have thought I was with the show. I scouted around, got to the stable, picked me out a plug, joined the others in the big Ben Hur scene, and — here I am.”

“You are, of course, the worst sort of exhibitionist,” murmured Ellery, “but I fail to see what even your ego would gain from such a pointless and stupid procedure. Merely to join the troupe—”

“Nerts,” said Lyons. “I’m over my schoolboy thrill days. I’ve got a cameraman planted in one of the boxes. I was going to get near Horne on some excuse or other, and have my box-man snap the two of us. Good break for me and the paper if I’d been able to pull it off. But, damn the luck, somebody bumped the old guy off before I could say ‘Alexander Woollcott’!”

There was a little silence.

“Very brilliant, of course,” said Ellery coldly. “Just how close to Buck Horne were you riding, Lyons?”

“Not so close, smart guy,” said Lyons, “not so close.”

“How close?”

“I was at the tail end of that bunch of ridin’ fools.”

The Inspector conferred with Sergeant Velie aside for a moment. “In which box is this cameraman of yours, Lyons?”

The columnist pointed negligently to a loge only a few feet away from the one in which the Mars party had been sitting. Sergeant Velie lumbered off. He returned in a moment with a very scared and loose-lipped young man carrying a small Graflex camera. Without words this man was searched camera and all. Nothing incriminating was found; and he was sent back to his place.

The Inspector was thoughtfully regarding the newspaperman. “Lyons, there’s something smelly about this. Did you have a tip-off on what was going to happen?”

Lyons groaned. “Jeeze, I wish I’d had! I wish I’d had!”

“You mixed with the other members of the show, didn’t you? Before you all rode out?”

“Not me. Wasn’t taking a chance on being spotted.”

“What were you doing?”

“Oh, just hanging around.”

“Notice anything suspicious — anything that might help us?”

“Not a bloomin’ thing, old chappie!”

“Where’d you get that .25 automatic you flashed a minute ago?”

“Don’t worry, Commissioner. I’ve got a permit to go heeled.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Santa Claus sent it. Bought it, of course! What the hell — you don’t think I pulled this job?”

“Tag that gat, Thomas,” said the Inspector calmly. “And take those other hunks of hardware from him. Christmas, he’s a walkin’ arsenal!”

In the fancy holsters of Lyons’s masquerade costume were two long-barreled revolvers. These the Sergeant gently removed; whereupon, handing them to an assistant, he went over Mr. Theodore Lyons’s clothes and body with an impersonal vigor and thoroughness that brought groans to the victim’s lips.

“Nothin’ else, Inspector,” said Velie.

“Where’d you get these guns?” demanded the Inspector.

“From the armory downstairs. I saw all the other chumps taking ’em, so I did too... Hell, Chief, I didn’t shoot ’em off at all!”

The Inspector examined them. “Blanks. I suppose you got the ammunition down there, too? All right, Thomas, escort this piece of prime scum out of the Colosseum. But mind — be sure nobody slips anything to him on the way out.”

“I mind,” said the Sergeant jovially; and, linking Lyons’s arm in his, he marched the columnist to one of the small exits before that garrulous exponent of The Lowdown — the notorious name of his countrywide-syndicated column — could utter another word. The two men disappeared.