He waited a moment longer to make sure it really was not a trap of some sort, that the London bobbies had not come up with a midget cop in mufti in the manner of that astute Cleveland Indians manager who had brought a dwarf to the plate, and then called softly from his hiding place.
“Mr. Briggs!”
“Ah!” Briggs walked over, peering into the darkness. “There you are!” His eyebrows rose. “What are you hiding for?”
Clarence chose not to waste time in senseless conversation. “Did you bring the money?” he asked, and reached for the bag.
“Here! None of that! Not so fast,” Briggs said testily, and pulled the bag back quickly. “Watch where you put your hands; that’s how people get their arms broken! First I want to see Billy-Boy Carruthers and make sure he’s in tiptop shape.” He considered Clarence curiously. “You don’t really think I’d hand over the bag to you without being sure of a thing like that, do you? Maybe your mother raised a brood of idiot children, but not mine!”
In the light cast obliquely from the overhead lamp, glistening in reflection from the spectacles covering Briggs’s sharp eyes, Clarence W. Alexander saw that whatever else the old man was, he was certainly not senile. And while he was small, he also appeared feisty, and Clarence himself was no giant. He also was in no mood to start a wrestling match on a railway platform, deserted or not; he had no assurance that the guard inside, while undoubtedly sleepy, was also deaf.
“Just hand over the dough,” he said, putting as much menace in his voice as he could muster, aiming for a tone somewhere between Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, and Lugosi’s Dracula. “Hand it over or your fat friend gets taken apart!”
Briggs, who had never seen either motion picture, looked at Clarence with pity.
“You could use a nasal spray,” he said. “Anyway, we’re wasting time.” He started for the exit, paused, and then looked back with a frown. “Well? Are you coming, or not?”
Clarence gritted his teeth and followed. Somehow this was not the way he had visualized the scene. The two men handed their ticket stubs to the gaping guard and came out into the road. Briggs looked around.
“Where’s your car? I assume you didn’t walk, and you’d have to be pretty stupid to take a taxi for a ransom pickup—” He saw the car Clarence pointed to, and sniffed. “Not much of a car, if you want my opinion. I thought you Americans were up to a bit more in the way of swank. You mean you snatched Billy-Boy in this? Must have been a tight fit, is all I can say.”
He climbed inside, holding the overnight bag tightly in his lap, and waited until Clarence had gotten in and started the engine. Clarence now saw the way things would have to go. Once they were on the road, away from even the few habitations East Westerly boasted, alone in the dark, he would simply pull off the road, take the overnight bag away from the little man, rap him on the skull a few times for luck, and dump him in a ditch. And then be off and running. It was a pity he couldn’t take the time to gag the little buzzard, who certainly liked to talk, but everyone had to make sacrifices at times.
“And no rough stuff,” Briggs advised, correctly reading Clarence’s mind. “You don’t look exactly like Harry Grebs to me, and I’m not quite as helpless as I look. You just do this my way, son, and we’ll get along fine, understand?”
“I understand you’ve got a big mouth,” Clarence said, stung, too irked by the little one’s nerve to use any but his natural voice. “I also understand that I’ve got your fat friend, and if you want to see him in one piece—”
He suddenly stopped. Something else had just occurred to him. He now had his hand not only on William Carruthers, but also on Timothy Briggs. Plus the contents of the overnight bag. He saw now how foolish he had been to limit his demands to only half of the money the old men had won in the Jarvis award. Fortunately he had not told Harold exactly how much he was demanding, and with luck the subject need never arise. He glanced over at Briggs. So the little man wanted to do it his way, eh? Fine. In the morning another letter would go out, this time to Clifford Simpson, and the result would be the other ten thousand pounds the three had picked up. And if the three old coots had to go on the breadline afterward, that was a shame. We all have problems in this life. Play games with him, would they! Still, normal precautions would still be required.
“So you want to see your fat friend, do you?” he said. “In that case I’m going to have to stop and blindfold you, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve good reason to be afraid,” Briggs said tartly, and thrust out his chin. “Try it!”
“I don’t think I’ll need to try it,” Clarence said with a faint smile. He reached over and before Briggs could bring up his hands to ward off the movement, Clarence had plucked Briggs’s spectacles from his nose and tucked them into a pocket away from the little man. “That should do the trick nicely,” he said with satisfaction, “especially at night.” He smiled grimly and settled down to his driving.
At his side, Timothy Briggs, finally silent, sat and thought. Clarence’s little game with the spectacles was meaningless; Tim Briggs had adopted plain-glass spectacles years before to give him a more distinguished look and partially compensate for his lack of height. Nor was it the fact that Clarence was smiling like a cat that had gotten into the fridge; that smile was also easily interpreted. The kidnaper now had two victims in his hands rather than one. No, the question was simply what would Cliff Simpson do when confronted with another letter in a day or two?
Well, Briggs thought bravely, time enough to worry about that when the flag goes down...
Chapter 9
At the time, admittedly many years past, when William Carruthers was busily engaged in putting to paper the adventures of Penelope Glottis and her ill-starred friend, Wilbur Tarbrush, in his opus The Mickle Monster Murders, and Clifford Simpson was similarly occupied tracing the careers of Cuthbert Sumatra, Bornean Garlic Raiser, and Hanna Hotspur, Registered Nurse, for his brainchild Up to the Eraser, Timothy Briggs was also working on a novel. This one concerned itself with the taking and holding for ransom of one Ming Toy Snodgrass by a certain Granville Graustark, Czar of Crime, and was titled Bound and Gagged. In the course of describing exactly how Ming Toy had been bound and gagged before being rescued from a dark, dank, filthy, rat-infested cellar by her fiancé, Herbert Marshgas, Tim Briggs had come to consider himself somewhat of an expert on the subject of kidnaping in general, and binding and gagging in particular.
He was, therefore, fully prepared to find Billy-Boy Carruthers bound and gagged in a dark, dank, filthy, rat-infested cellar, and one can therefore possibly forgive him his frown of disappointment upon being given back his glasses and ushered into the kitchen of the farmhouse, to find Billy-Boy not only ungagged and unfettered, but settled comfortably before the kitchen table, playing cards, with an almost empty brandy bottle beside his almost empty glass, and an almost empty bottle of champagne floating in a bucket more water than ice. It was as if Herbert Marshgas, coming to rescue Ming Toy Snodgrass, were to discover the young lady having cocktails with Granville Graustark, and enjoying them, too.