The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito

Chapter 10

Sam Greggory and Lieutenant Tragg, racing ahead, had some trouble orienting themselves in the moonlit grounds. There was no longer any sound of screams to guide them. A spurious peace had descended upon the shadow-splotched grounds. Everything seemed calm and peaceful as the two officers, weapons in hand, moved cautiously forward.

Abruptly, Tragg clasped the sheriff’s shoulder. “Voices,” he whispered, and then added, “Steps — over here.”

They listened. The sheriff, stocky and carrying a little too much weight, was breathing heavily, making it difficult to listen — but after a moment they could hear the crunch of sand as steps came toward them.

The sounds were coming from the other side of a large, circular patch of spineless cactus. Tragg took one side, the sheriff the other, circling swiftly.

Velma Starler was walking slowly toward them. Dr. Kenward was leaning heavily on her shoulder. The nurse’s face showed white and apprehensive in the moonlight as she saw the two men converging on her. Then she recognized the officers, said, “Dr. Kenward has been shot.”

The doctor’s professional fingers were exploring the injury even as he walked. He said, calmly, “A perforation of the adductor magnus, possibly a perforation of the muscular branch of the profunda artery. Rather more extensive hemorrhage than would otherwise be expected. I think we’ll be able to control it all right. We’ll go on to the house if you don’t mind, gentlemen.”

He resumed his hobbling.

“How did you happen to get shot?” Greggory asked. “Who did the shooting? Did you fire any shots? What were you doing out there?”

Velma Starler said almost angrily. “He fell asleep when we were out here, and I let him stay there, hoping he’d get a little much-needed rest. Night calls have been wrecking his health. He doesn’t have the faintest idea who fired the shots.”

Lieutenant Tragg picked up Dr. Kenward’s left arm, flung it over his neck and shoulder so as to give the doctor more support.

Dr. Kenward said in his even, unemotional voice, “I was asleep, gentlemen. I am not certain, but I believe it was a shot that roused me yet I cannot definitely identify the thing that awakened me as being a shot. However, I do know there were at least two shots fired during the interval that it took me to regain my senses as I awakened from deep slumber. I had some difficulty remembering where I was — and then I realized that projectiles were thudding into the sand and that they were intended for me.

“I jumped to my feet and started to run.

“Apparently the person who was doing the shooting must have been partially concealed. As I ran, I evidently placed a clump of cactus between us. My assailant thereupon detoured around this cactus, stalked me in the moonlight, saw me again in time to fire more shots. It was the second of these shots that took effect.”

“I saw him fall,” Velma Starler explained, “at the last shot. I knew, as soon as I saw him running toward me, that someone had been shooting at him.”

“You never saw your assailant?” Greggory asked.

“No.”

“Saw no flashes of gunfire?”

“No.”

“I did,” Velma Starler said. “I saw the flashes from the last two shots. They were over behind that big barrel cactus. That’s about fifty or sixty feet from where Dr. Kenward had been lying.”

“You can make it from here on all right, Doctor?” Lieutenant Tragg asked.

“With Velma’s help, yes. I’m somewhat alarmed about the apparent extent of the hemorrhage, but we can quite possibly control that. Let us hope so. I should dislike to disturb another physician.”

Tragg released the doctor’s arm, nodded to Greggory.

The two men turned back toward the cactus gardens, separated slightly, revolvers drawn.

“Take it easy,” Tragg said to his brother-in-law. “He’s apt to shoot from ambush.”

Sheriff Greggory detoured still farther to the right. “Shoot first,” he said. “Ask questions afterwards. Don’t take any chances.”

They were walking slowly now, clinging to the shadows, darting swiftly across the moonlit strips of sand, working together like well-trained bird dogs moving through cover, keeping just about the same distance apart, spaced in such a way that any person concealing himself from one could not avoid the other’s angle of vision.

And at the end of their stalk they came to the gleaming whiteness of the stuccoed wall that surrounded the grounds. They had seen and heard nothing. The garden had been tranquil in the moonlight, filled with deep silence, punctuated at rhythmic intervals by the undertone of booming surf softened by distance to a vague rumble. Only the sinister red trail left by the wounded man bore witness to the deadly menace of the moonlit silence.

“Let’s go back,” Tragg said, “to where the man was lying and see if we can find the place from which the shots were fired. Then we’ll look for tracks.”

They located the rock fireplace covered with a sheet of iron which had served the prospectors as an outdoor stove and to which the smell of stale wood smoke still clung. They found the crumpled blankets at the place where Dr. Kenward had stretched out and gone to sleep, and the furrowed indentations which marked where at least two of the bullets had plowed into the sand. Converging on the huge barrel cactus some thirty yards away, the two men caught the glitter of an empty brass cartridge case as it reflected back the moonlight.

Lieutenant Tragg picked it up. “Thirty-eight caliber automatic,” he said, briefly.

There were tracks here behind the cactus. Sam Greggory, wise in the ways of the cattle country, lowered his flashlight and held it close to the ground so that the tracks would be made more distinct by an oblique illumination. By patience, he read the story of what had happened, although it took him some twenty minutes to satisfy himself.

Someone had stalked the sleeping doctor as a hunter would have stalked a deer, starting first at a point behind the wall, then emerging into the moonlight, crawling along on hands and knees through the sand, then at length lying down flat and hitching along an inch or two at a time. Then three shots had been fired. The person who fired those shots had then jumped up, leaving deep footprints in the soft sand, had rushed around to another cactus fifty yards away, and had fired two more shots. Then the tracks showed a headlong sprint toward the white stucco wall. - That much the sand told plainly and distinctly, but for the rest the record was blurred. The sand was so soft and dried that it had flowed back into the tracks, leaving it impossible to tell much about them save that the tracks seemed rather small.

Lieutenant Tragg moved off to one side, took half a dozen running steps in order to compare the indentations made in the sand by his own feet with those that had been left by their quarry.

“Small feet,” he said.

Greggory wasn’t so certain. “Ever notice the tracks made by high-heeled cowboy boots?” he asked.

“Can’t say that I have,” Tragg admitted.

“I have. It’s just a guess that these tracks might have been made by high-heeled cowboy riding boots.”

“Or by a woman?” Tragg asked.

Greggory gave that suggestion thoughtful consideration. “Perhaps by a woman,” he admitted, somewhat reluctantly. “Let’s go back to the house.”

The telephone was ringing by the time they reached the house, but no one paid the slightest attention to it. Velma Starler was working on Dr. Kenward’s leg. And the physician, sitting back with an air of professional detachment, was giving her directions.

Sheriff Greggory went to the telephone, picked up the receiver, said “Yes, what is it?”

“This the sheriff?”

“Yes.”

“Headquarters in San Roberto. A radio prowl car has just reported in over two-way radio to get in touch with you and tell you that a case of arsenic poisoning that occurred up in the Skyline district is being rushed to the Haven of Mercy Hospital.”

“Can you give me any details?” Greggory asked.

“An old battered pickup loaded with camp stuff carrying a house trailer on behind went through a boulevard stop. The prowl car pulled alongside. Man at the wheel says his name is Bowers and his partner in the trailer is dying with arsenic poisoning. He had driven to the residence of Dr. Kenward, but the doctor wasn’t home and he was rushing to a hospital. The prowl car is clearing the way with the siren. Bowers said it tied in with another poisoning case, and to notify you. There are two men in that prowl car. One of them made the report while the other was driving. I can reach them within a couple of seconds. Do you want me to contact the car and deliver any message?”

“Yes,” Sheriff Greggory said. “Tell them that I’ll meet them at the Haven of Mercy Hospital.”

He slammed up the telephone, turned to Tragg. “Banning Clarke,” he said, “in a house trailer. Car driven by Salty Bowers. Clarke’s dying with arsenic poisoning. Rushing to the Haven of Mercy Hospital. Want to go? We’ll leave the deputy here.”

Tragg started for the door. “Let us go.”

They raced down the reception hallway, their feet pounding loudly on the waxed tiles awakening echoes from the somber walls of the silent house. They dashed through the front door and into the sheriffs automobile. Greggory slammed the car into gear, shot out of the graveled driveway, skidded into the winding concrete boulevard and turned on the siren.

“After all,” Tragg protested, bracing himself between the back of the front seat and the instrument board of the car, “there are four wheels on this automobile, Sammy, my lad. You might as well use all of them at once instead of just two at a time.”

The sheriff grinned, whipped the car around another curve, still gathering speed. “When I’m down in the city, you scare the pants off of me driving like hell through traffic, so I’m glad our open roads make you nervous. It’s just a question of what you become accustomed to. We have curves. You have traffic.”

“But after all, a half a minute isn’t going to make too much difference in the case,” Tragg pointed out.

“The report is that Banning Clarke’s dying. I want to get a dying statement from him.”

“He won’t know who poisoned him.”

“You might be surprised.” There was no further discussion. The sheriff whipped and skidded around turns, hit the straightaway at the foot of the grade, and, with siren screaming, tore through the slumbering residential outskirts of San Roberto, slammed on the brakes and skidded into the ambulance entrance of the huge hospital which was located well outside of the congested district.

The sheriff’s blood-red spotlight threw the back of a house trailer into wine-colored brilliance. A little group of men was standing around the door of this trailer, and as the sheriff slid his car to a stop and jerked the door open, a nurse, accompanying a doctor who was wearing a white coat and carrying a stethoscope in his hand, emerged from the house trailer.

The sheriff pushed forward. “What are his chances, Doctor?”

The man in the white coat said quietly, “He hasn’t any.”

“You mean he’s—”

“Dead.”

Sam Greggory let out his breath in a weary sigh. “Arsenic poisoning?” he asked in the voice of one propounding a routine question merely for the purpose of establishing a foregone conclusion.

“Apparently,” the doctor said dryly, “it was a thirty-eight-caliber bullet fired almost directly into the heart at short range. There are evidences that at some time before the shooting the man had ingested a considerable quantity of arsenic, and, in view of the cardiac history given me by his friend, Mr. Bowers, there is every reason to assume that the symptoms had progressed too far for remedial treatment to have been of the slightest benefit. The bullet, therefore, merely hastened the end by a matter of minutes.”

Tragg turned to the sheriff. “And with Perry Mason in the case, is that a sweet legal situation! When you see your District Attorney, give him my sympathy.”