Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 6, May 1961

With a fleeting smile, Gough said, “That’s how I got to know him. I doubled for him in some of his motion pictures, especially the stunt scenes. I wasn’t related to him, but we were always taken for twins. A lot of people have mistaken me for Blair.”

“Yes,” Lake said thoughtfully. “Houck thought so too, apparently. Laurence Blair returned from the dead. Even a person with a sound heart might have died of fright.”

The sergeant said, “The whole thing’s damned peculiar. The girl in this snapshot looks exactly like one of Blair’s girl friends.”

Lake eyed him wryly. “You don’t say,” he said.

Charles Gough still looked vaguely bewildered.

Murder Like a Grizzly by Thomas Calvert McClary

“Some men are just about half bear, Marshal,” Cluny said. “And all grizzlies are killers!”

* * *

Marshal waring deeply respected his deputy, Tim Cluny, as a “bush man” but he was beginning to suspect the little nut-brown hunter with the child-blue eyes of having conned him into this whole investigation just for company while he surveyed the lands he meant to hunt that fall.

“We’ll just climb up this side the glacier a little piece,” Cluny had suggested casually down on the highway. “We can look right across onto Grizzly Bill’s homestead and maybe figure what he might have done with his old lady.”

The “little piece” of climb had been four thousand feet on this straight-up mountain. Now Cluny wanted to climb another two thousand feet to an overhanging promontory. The marshal had already reconnoitered the whole area by helicopter back in May, when there had been some doubt of Grizzly’s report that his woman had just vanished on him. No suspicious sign or circumstance had turned up, then or since, except that Waring’s all-Alaska inquiry had not located Grizzly Bill’s woman anywheres else.

The case had been carried under nothing more exciting than “Missing Persons,” until Tim Cluny showed up in Anchorage, mid-way of August, with the notion that she’d been murdered.

“What makes you think so?” the marshal had asked, hoping to pin down the seam-faced sourdough in a definite way.

“Well, she ain’t come back to his homestead,” Cluny said.

“Maybe she ran off with some other trapper or miner,” Marshal Waring suggested.

“Now, marshal, who in hell would run off with that piece of bearbait?” Cluny asked logically.

There was no answer to that, even in the lonesome interior of Alaska. Grizzly Bill’s vanished Annie had been bald, toothless, one-eyed, with a wooden leg made of green timber which had twisted and shortened as it seasoned. Further, she had a very short temper and was remarkably expert with a carving knife.

So the marshal had allowed Cluny to entice him out into this glacial wilderness, and now he was more or less in his deputy’s hands until the investigation was completed. And he was damned disgruntled. His legs felt as though they’d been stretched the full four thousand feet of the climb. He was sure that all of the intense heat of the seventeen-hour summer sun was concentrated upon himself alone.

And now that he thought of it, there was nothing to be seen from here that they could not have seen from Grizzly’s mountain, across the glacier. And they could have saved themselves the exhausting, back-breaking effort of an extra climb.

“What in pot,” Waring rasped irritably, “do we gain if we climb on up to that damned promontory? We’ve already surveyed the glacier from the ’copter.”

“Back in May,” Cluny pointed out mildly. He hunkered on the balls of his insulated boots and whittled a nubbin of tobacco from an old fashioned brown-black plug. “That was before the snow bridges and drift snow melted, marshal. Her body could have been in a crevasse right under you and you wouldn’t have seen it.”

The marshal silently conceded that point. He frowned out at the serene white swell of the frozen river that wound up between the mountains, rising up, and up, and up, until it blended with the sky. Although he had been in Alaska eighteen years, the vastness and timelessness of glaciers still filled him with an awe that disturbed his peace of mind and became almost menacing at times.

Cluny said, “Looks real purty and peaceable, don’t it? Soft and purty as a woman. But every second of the day and night, that little old glacier’s chewing up tons and tons of rock. You have to figure a sourdough by the country he lives in, and the animals around him, marshal.”

“All right, so he’s ruthless as a glacier and violent as a grizzly,” Waring snapped. “What do we gain by climbing any more? If he’s guilty and gets worried about what we’re up to, he could pick us off like Dahl sheep with his telescopic rifle.”

Cluny looked at him with mild reproof. “Marshal, don’t you know you can’t shoot across a glacier? The drafts rising off of there would damn near turn a bullet in a circle.”