The Grub-And-Stakers Pinch a Poke (18 page)

He probably finished what he’d intended to say, but the words were drowned out by McNaster’s anguished howl.

“Arethusa!”

“What is it, Andrew?” Arethusa Monk also had her head in the stairwell by now, but Andrew McNaster was not addressing her.

The lid was in his hand and his grief-contorted face was bent toward the brownish streak that lay pitifully sprawled at the bottom of the former Mrs. Henbit’s organizing box.

“She’s gone,” he choked.

Osbert tried to console him. “Maybe she’s only resting.”

“No.” Andy’s broad shoulders were heaving with ill-suppressed grief. “I know my snake. She’s shuffled off her mortal coil. But why, gosh darn it? Answer me, why?”

“I’m afraid it’s because she’d got too chilled before we could catch her and bring her inside,” Osbert told him. “She was slithering around on the snow after the box got broken open.”

Andy sniffed and nodded. “Cobras can’t handle the cold. I always kept her nice and warm. She had a glass aquarium only I guess you’d call it a terrarium on a stand next to the radiator, with moss and plants in it and a little miniature model of the Taj Mahal to make her feel at home. She had the best of everything. I brought her meatballs and spaghetti, whatever she wanted to eat. And to think she had to end like this? Oh, Arethusa!”

“How come you named her Arethusa?” Daniel wanted to know.

“Foolish sentimentality, I suppose.”

“Andrew,” Arethusa Monk was at the mourner’s side, her great, lustrous dark orbs abrim with unshed tears. “Did you really name your cobra after me?”

“She was all I had that I could call my own,” McNaster replied simply.

The scene was a touching one, but Sergeant Mac Vicar was not one to let sentiment interfere with duty. “Mr. McNaster, how did yon venomous reptile come to be in your possession?”

“She was sent to me.”

“By whom?”

“An anonymous donor.”

“Tumultuous tumbleweeds,” shouted Osbert, “do you mean to tell us you got her in the mail?”

“Yup. I just opened the box and there she was. At first I was kind of peeved, I have to admit. I’d of turned right around and mailed her back, eh, only there was no return address on the label. So I stuck her in this old aquarium I’d had kicking around empty since my goldfish died, and then I-well, I kind of got attached to her.”

“But you never found out who sent her?” Osbert pressed.

“Couldn’t you even guess?”

“Well, yeah, I had a couple of ideas but nothing I could pin on anybody.”

“Was Carolus Bledsoe one of your ideas?”

Andy became suddenly very still.

Sergeant MacVicar stepped to the fore. “We ken fine about you an’ your former sidekick, Mr. McNaster. Yon Bledsoe, whom you called Charlie, was your lawyer, and had been for some time before you and he had a difference of opinion over your attempt to obtain municipal lands for private purposes. How long after that did he continue to work for you?”

Andy’s face turned from ruddy to pale then back to red, but no word did he utter.

“You are in a ticklish position, Mr. McNaster. I advise you to answer.”

“With all respect, Sergeant, I think my lawyer, whether it was Charlie Bledsoe or anybody else, would advise me to keep my big mouth shut. Look, I know you folks over here in Lobelia Falls don’t like me-“

“Oh, but we do.”

Strangely, it was not Arethusa but Dittany who protested. “We like you quite a lot, Andy, now that we’re used to you. Since you haven’t been reformed all that long, though, you probably don’t realize how unaccustomed we here in Lobelia Falls are to having real bullets switched for blank cartridges and finding live cobras on our doorsteps. Things you people in Scottsbeck appear to take in stride tend to make us want to get hold of whoever’s doing them and make them stop. Or her, if you were planning to get sniffy over the masculine pronoun.”

“I don’t get sniffy over masculine pronouns. I get sniffy about my cobra being made the sacrificial goat for some lousy bugger’s foul perfidy.”

“Then you ought to be as anxious as the rest of us to catch the snakenapper, so why can’t you answer Sergeant MacVicar’s question?”

“Why can’t he answer mine?” Andy bawled back. “How come my cobra got killed?”

“I told you she didn’t get killed,” Osbert insisted. “She died of exposure.”

“Want to bet?” said Dittany, who’d been keeping an anxious eye on the open box. “Look at her now, she’s trying to coil. I move we put the cover back on, pronto.”

“Hey!” Ignoring her warning and heedless of what the dusty cellar floor might do to his natty pinstriped trousers, Andy dropped to his knees. “Come on, Thusie girl, hiss for Papa.”

Arethusa Monk, though not unmoved by the tableau before her, did a rapid about-face. “Allans, mes enfants, let us hie ourselves hence.

Methinks we should leave them alone together.”

“What a splendid idea,” cried Archie. “Allow me to offer you my arm, Miss Monk.”

Osbert approached Dittany with equal gallantry. “Want a piggyback up the stairs, pardner?”

Daniel showed himself quite ready to abandon his absorbed scrutiny of Andrew McNaster for the nonce, and even Sergeant MacVicar beat a hasty though not undignified retreat. Andy was not long in coming after them.

“She’s going to be okay,” he told the group now reassembled in the kitchen. “I guess I made kind of a jackass of myself down there, eh.”

“Au contraire,” Arethusa told him kindly. “You but revealed a facet of your inwardly sensitive and compassionate character which you’d hitherto kept veiled against the prying scorn of unfeeling eyes behind a mask of ruthless inscrutability.”

Normally Osbert would have had something grammatical to say about the prying scorn of unfeeling eyes. Today he only nodded.

“Every one of us would have felt the same, Andy, if Arethusa had been our cobra. Wouldn’t we, everybody?”

Dittany, Archie, and especially Daniel assured Andy that they would. Sergeant Mac Vicar made a Caledonian noise that might not go quite so far as to signify assent but did at least evince a degree of sympathetic understanding.

“And noo, Mr. McNaster, pairhaps we might address the conundrum of how yon cobra got from your house to the Monks’. Hae you any thoughts on the matter?”

“Well, what it looks like to me is, somebody must of broke into my place and took her.”

“Aye? Who might that have been?”

“Somebody who needed a cobra in a hurry and knew I had one?”

“That would seem a reasonable surmise,” Sergeant MacVicar conceded. “Who knew you possessed sic a creature? Do you hae frequent visitors to your house?”

“No, I never have anybody. See, it’s not much of a place, just a little what you’d call an efficiency flat in an apartment house I own over in Scottsbeck. If I’m seeing anybody on business, we meet in my office over at the construction company. If it’s social, which it mostly isn’t, I take ‘em to the inn. At the flat there’s just me and Thusie.”

Andy sighed. “I suppose it’s not much of a life for a cobra now that I come to think of it, me being away so much and all. I ought to get her out more, let her meet other snakes, catch a few bugs, live a little. That’s the heck of being a lonesome bachelor, you never know how to handle relationships.”

“Being a bachelor has naething to do wi’ it,” said Sergeant MacVicar with some feeling. “How long has yon cobra been in your possession?”

“Since just before Christmas. She came gift-wrapped with a big red bow on the box.”

“You were alone when you opened yon box?”

“Yes, it was delivered to the apartment. I was surprised because I hardly ever get mail there.”

“Ah, and naebody save yourseF has access to your rooms?”

“Well, Fitzy does. He takes care of the building, see, and comes in to clean for me once a week or so. And Ceddie Fawcett was in last week to fix a busted pipe. Ceddie’s one of the Fawcett brothers who run a plumbing business over in Scottsbeck,” Andy explained to Daniel, who was hanging on his every word. “They do all the plumbing work for McNaster Construction.”

When there was work to be done, Dittany amended silently. Jim Streph had told Roger Munson that things were pretty quiet around McNaster Construction now that Andy had stopped making crooked deals. Hazel had passed on the news in strictest confidence, so of course Dittany kept quiet about that. She did, however, observe “No doubt Fitzy and Ceddie have spread the word about your pet cobra to all their friends and relatives.”

“I suppose,” Andy agreed wearily. “I’m sure Ceddie told the bartender at the inn because lately all the waitresses and busboys and everybody have been snickering behind my back about me getting a cobra for Christmas which I guess they figure it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I know what goes on around that place and they needn’t think I don’t. Not that I care,” he added with a bravado which fooled nobody now that the veil of ruthless inscrutability had been dropped.

“Aye, news does get aboot,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar. “Would your flat be hard to break into, Mr. McNaster?”

Andy shrugged. “Not particularly. It’s on the ground floor and I haven’t bothered with fancy locks or burglar alarms. There’s nothing in the place worth stealing, just my clothes and a few sticks of furniture and a portable TV. I keep all my papers and stuff in the safe at the oflice. Anyway, after I got Thusie, I figured she’d scare away any robber who happened along. So what happens? They bust in and steal my snake. There’s irony for you.”

“Irony indeed, Mr. McNaster. Was the cobra in her usual place when you left your flat this morning?”

“I didn’t leave the flat this morning, I slept at the inn. I do that sometimes when we’re not booked up. Last night was kind of exhausting between the play and what happened in the last act, so when I took Archie and Dan here back to the inn I figured what the heck, I might as well stay there myself.”

“You didna gae back this morn for a change of clothing?”

“I didn’t have to. I keep clean shirts and stuff there.”

“You werena worried about yon cobra?”

“Oh no. Snakes aren’t like a dog you have to feed two or three times a day and take out for a walk, you know. They only eat about once a week and I’d fed Thusie yesterday morning. She had water in her little dish that’s supposed to look like a pond and she’d have been plenty warm enough there by the radiator. Even if the heat went off, which it shouldn’t have, Fitzy being on the job like I said, the terrarium would have stayed warm enough. With the lid on it’s like a greenhouse.”

“As a matter of curiosity, Mr. McNaster, how do you manage to keep frae being bitten when you take care of Arethusa?”

“Easy enough. I wear heavy gloves with big gauntlets halfway up my arms and I’ve got a stick with a noose on the end of it that I get around her neck. I use that to lift her out and put her in a special cage with a sliding door to it while I’m getting the terrarium fixed up. When I’m through, I just slide open the door of the cage, shake her out into the terrarium, and slap the lid on it fast.”

“And what do you do wi’ yon gauntlets and stick after you’ve finished using them?”

Andy grinned sheepishly. “More often than not I just leave ‘em wherever they happen to fall. I’m not exactly the neatest guy in the world.”

“Then the snake thief would hae found them ready to hand, and thus would hae been able to extract your cobra frae the terrarium without difficulty?”

“Sure, provided he had a steady hand and iron nerve and was plenty quick on the draw with that noose.”

“We may assume that such was the case, sin’ the cobra was then placed in the florist’s box and transported to this house. Would the florist’s box in which your cobra was concealed also hae come frae your flat, by the bye?”

“Heck, no. Nobody ever sends me flowers. Not that a few people I know wouldn’t like to,” Andy added lugubriously, “provided I wasn’t alive to smell ‘em.”

“Fie, Andrew,” cried Arethusa. “Dispel such dire and darksome deemings.”

“Aye,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar. “Let us stick wi’ the facts. What is germane is that twice in less than twenty-four hours Mr. Bledsoe has had narrow escapes from being assassinated. In both cases, you, Mr.

McNaster, hae been made in some sense the instrument of his intended murder. It seems therefore not ootside the bounds of logical conjecture that the perpetrator of these ootrages may be known to both you and Mr. Bledsoe. Do you not agree that is possible, Mr. McNaster?”

“Aye. I mean yeah. Sure. You bet.”

“Than can you think of any person who might be guilty of these dreadfu’ crimes?”

“Well, not to be ungallant toward the fair sex, but there’s that loony ex-wife of Charlie’s.”

“The temperamental Mrs. Bledsoe. Has your acquaintance with her continued sin’ the divorce?”

“Look here, Sergeant, if you’re hinting there was ever anything between Ermeline and me, you’re out to lunch. In the first place, do you think I’m dumb enough to go horsing around with a lawyer’s wife? Or anybody else’s wife,” Andy added with a nervous glance at Arethusa Monk.

“In the second place, I don’t call myself a coward exactly but I’m sure not reckless enough to grab a tigress by the tail which I didn’t mean in the rude and lascivious manner it might of sounded like and no offense to the ladies present.”

“None taken,” Dittany assured him. “Did you dump Charlie, or did Charlie dump you?”

“Ar-h’m,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar. “Perhaps Mr. McNaster is impatient to return yon cobra to her wee glass hoose, gin he deems her weel enow to undertake the journey. And perhaps, Arethusa, you’d care to assist in meenistering to your namesake.”

“And perhaps you’d like us to go with them,” Archie and Daniel volunteered in chorus, both obviously delighted at the prospect for whatever their respective reasons might be.

“An excellent suggestion,” Sergeant MacVicar replied blandly.

“Mr. McNaster, it’s understood that you will hold yourseP in readiness for further interrogation.”

“Sure, Sergeant, any time you say. I’m a darn sight more anxious than you are to get this mess cleared up.”

“As weel you might be, Mr. McNaster. Noo, Deputy Monk, would you kindly step up to yon guest room and ascertain whether Mr.