“There you go again,” Cluny grunted without offense. “It’s just on account of you don’t know grizzlies, marshal.”
The marshal fumed. He fumed harder when nothing of consequence happened by sundown. One thing he was sure of, Grizzly wouldn’t risk that glacier in the dark!
Grizzly Bill was down at the edge, though, not long after daylight. He scanned the slopes on their side of the glacier half a dozen times. Finally, he went back to his cabin and came out wearing a winter parka. He carried a rope and climber’s pick. He sprawled out by the edge of the ice bridge and scarcely moved to mid-morning.
Suddenly, he straightened, cutting some sign Tim Cluny could not catch from where he was. He jumped his enormous body erect with amazing spryness. A moment later he was hustling across the icebridge with his rope and pick. He passed through some low-pressure ridges, indistinguishable to the marshal, except that he kept appearing and disappearing against the field of gleaming white.
Finally he appeared very clearly and stopped and dropped his rope and hunkered at a particular spot. The marshal’s heart began to beat with the hard rhythm of excitement every law dog feels when a difficult chase shows signs of closing. But Grizzly did nothing after that. He just hunkered there like a man at a fishole in the ice.
Cluny said, “Guess we can go back now, marshal.”
Waring stared at him. “Nothing’s happened!”
“Oh, something will happen by the time we get there,” Cluny grunted, with firm assurance, “Grizzly’s a pretty good man in the bush. He knows that glacier. But nothing this side of hell would get me out there!”
With his leg muscles and back feeling like he’d been wracked, the marshal followed Cluny down to the highway. He was convinced that leaving their vantage point was a big mistake. Grizzly might be up to nothing more suspicious than chopping a chunk of the particularly hard blue ice the sourdoughs rated so highly in this weather. If Grizzly was up to something grimmer, they might lose the evidence they could have gotten with the marshal’s telescopic camera. But Cluny apparently had something in his mind, and this being wilderness bush, it was really his show.
They drove back up the road to the other trail, and made the stiff climb back to Grizzly’s. He wasn’t around the cabin, so he was probably still out on the glacier. Cluny led the way across the ice bridge and through the pressure ridge. They came out onto clear surface two hundred yards below Grizzly just as he hauled something heavy out of the maw of the blue white ice.
What he hauled up was thickly frosted, but it was recognizable enough to be grim. The marshal drew his automatic as Grizzly turned, with the rope across his shoulder, ready to haul something back across the glacier.
The giant froze, watching them solidly as they came toward him. He slacked on the rope and started to shift his weight from one foot to the other, exactly like a bear.
“You boys got me to thinking maybe she did come out here so I come to take a look. She’s kept good enough for decent burying, but her head got kind of bashed when she fell in.”
“We can prove that in the laboratory fast enough,” Waring said grimly.
“You can?” Grizzly asked with surprise. “You mean you can tell how her head got so kind of dented?”
The marshal nodded, but Grizzly’s thoughts didn’t seem to be on his answer. He glanced up at the sun and then his eyes sought some telltale bit of shadow somewhere. Suddenly he gave a snarling laugh and kicked back with right boot, hurtling his wife’s corpse back into the crevasse. His wild laugh rose to a roar of humor.
But he had put down his foot in a coil of the rope and now it caught and jerked him flat. He clawed, but there was nothing to claw into on ice that had slicked with the many melts and refreezings of August. Roaring invective, he was dragged back into the crevasse himself.
The two men ran forward to the rim. The crevasse was not deep and it bellied out into a cavern not far below the surface. Grizzly Bill sprawled down there atop the grim evidence of the murder he had committed. One of his legs had a crooked look, as if broken. His roar had changed to a roar of sheer brute anger.
He was still roaring as the ice under their feet quivered and Cluny shoved the marshal back. The crevasse closed in front of them with a whoosh of disgorged air and a huge shower of ice particles.
Cluny looked at the position of the sun. He said, “I don’t figure it will open up again today. He’ll be froze stiff as a seal carcass by tomorrow. He musta knowed how long that crack stays open.”
The marshal looked at Cluny with grudging respect. “You had him figured to do just this.”
Cluny nodded. “If he had her buried out here. Just like a damned grizzly, marshal. And hell, that wild giant was just about half bear.”
Humor twinkled in the marshal’s eyes. He nodded at their feet. “Thought nothing this side of hell would get you out on a glacier in August, Cluny?”
“No sirree, nothing on earth would, marshal! But I just kind of got took with curiosity to see what one of these breathing cracks looks like.”
“Curious. Like a bear,” Waring grinned, but he said it to himself.
Pattern for a Crime
by Brett Halliday
The murder evidence made the police very happy, for it all pointed strongly in one direction. But the redhead knew that there’s many a slip on Gallow’s Highway.
I
When Michael Shayne entered his Flagler Street office at nine fifteen A.M., there were two people waiting in chairs. The man was about forty, tall and good-looking in a theatrical sort of way, his dark hair worn a trifle long and his sideburns a bit thicker than most men wore them.
The woman, about five years younger, was a handsome platinum blonde with a remarkably youthful figure for her apparent age. There was something about her, too, possibly the way she wore her makeup, which made the detective think of show business.
They both looked at the detective expectantly as he hung his hat on the clothes tree near the door. Giving them a polite nod, he crossed to his private office, motioning Lucy Hamilton, who was seated at her typewriter beyond the wooden railing, to follow him as he went by her.
In the inner office Shayne seated himself behind his bare-topped desk and gave his secretary an inquiring look as she closed the door behind her.
“Don’t you recognize them, Michael?” Lucy asked.
He shook his head. “Should I, angel?”
“They’re television personalities, Michael. Breakfast with the Coles. They’re on from seven until eight every morning.”
“Oh, that!” Shayne said. “I’ve heard of it. A lot of sickeningly coy conversation over the breakfast table! I don’t get up that early.”
“You should,” Lucy said. “They’re really not bad. They have quite a local following among housewives.”
“I’m not a housewife,” the redhead growled. “What do they want?”
“They wouldn’t tell me, but one or both must be in some kind of danger. They asked if you ever hired out as a bodyguard.”
Shayne frowned. “You told them no?”
Lucy nodded. “They still want to see you, though. They obviously don’t want to tell me what it’s all about, so you’ll have to get it out of them.”
“Okay,” the redhead said. “Send them in.”
Lucy went out and a moment later the couple entered. Shayne rose to greet them, motioned them to chairs and reseated himself.