I’m quite surprised, but this little story leaks at every step, there’s so much just thrown out there without an explanation, to make it a decent story it should have been longer with all the details at the right place, but as it is it isn’t worth much.
It’s not too bad to read though, the character of Reeder is interesting, which is bizarre in itself since he is described as a quite boring man. A single man without much of a private life, a love for chickens (that comes out in this story, I don’t remember hearing anything about this in the other two stories I read before), who always carries an umbrella that he never opens even when it rains. He gets embarrassed talking about love stories and often talks like he doesn’t want to investigate or has no intention of doing it, even while he is doing it.
Anyway, this story:
It starts saying that he started having nice conversations with a young neighbour, Johnny Southers, because they shared a passion for chickens. Johnny then started dating Anna Welford.
Gaylor of the police asked his help with a smuggler case, to catch Joe Attymar, a man that basically nobody knew. A real case starts when it appears that he has been murdered, because of the blood at his home, even if his body has not been found.
Southers had been lured into it with the prospect of some kind of business, and is now accused of his murder. Anna asks for Reeder’s help.
Clyde, in love with Anna too, had had a fight with Johnny but then he apologised and started acting like a noble friend, and now he comforts Anna saying that he’ll do anything he can to prove Johnny’s innocence even if he doesn’t like him.
Attymar’s sailor, Ligsey or something, wrote to Reeder and then disappeared. Clyde said Ligsey went to talk to him, but nobody has seen the guy since.
Reeder starts looking for theatre agents and boats… it is all thrown out there, one can only read on.
It isn’t really a surprise to me when it turns out it was Clyde, the murderer and evil mastermind, because he was fishy from the start and because, honestly, all this noble act was such a farse, only a gullible person could believe it.
It turns out that Clyde is in fact Attymar, he was a good actor and nobody found out. Supposedly he killed Ligsey, it appears that this is what everyone is so sure of, although it’s not clear to me whose blood was at Attymar’s house to stage his murder. Did he kill someone else too?
Anyway, he killed Ligsey because he thought he wanted to hand him over to Reeder, and tried to blame it all on Southers because he hated him, and at the end he sort of abducted Anna, but the house where he took her was already full of policemen and Reeder ready to arrest him. How did they know where he would take her? I don’t know.
Anyway, Reeder had even been hit twice by Clyde: the first time when he came to tied up in a boat, with Attymar saying he was the only criminal so smart to outwit Reeder, and that he would die at the bottom of the river where nobody would find him - he was ‘rescued’ by Clyde, who pretended that Attymar shot at him trying to kill him, to throw suspicions away from himself… and yet, why? If he had killed Reeder like he said, wouldn’t that be safer? In his mind, at least? There’s a chance that Reeder had already told everything about him to the police, but what proof could they have if Reeder disappeared?
The second time, Reeder brought Clyde to ‘Attymar’s house, to show him… what? Then he turned his back on him and Clyde hit him and went away, to get Anna and take her away with lies about Johnny being freed.
It’s all so vague. We only follow Reeder, see and hear what he can, but he never shares his thoughts, only his actions.
So: interesting character, but wasted.
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