06E081
The Strange Disappearance of
Police Detective Ridder
One day, police detective Ridder was
out on a case when he noticed he was being followed by a short, stocky man in a
longshoreman’s cap. There was something
oddly familiar about the man, but he was a block and a half back and detective
Ridder couldn’t quite make out who he was without turning around and staring,
which would have been conspicuous.
However, he was sure the man had been following him for three blocks at
least.
Detective Ridder knew what to do in
a case like this. He suddenly turned
into a busy street full of early morning market-goers and people rushing to
work, fell into a light sprint and put some distance between himself and his
tracker, who, he could see, was doing his best to keep up. Detective Ridder cut around as many people
as possible and presently found what he was looking for: a man about his own
height, wearing a light grey suit like his.
Zigzagging, he managed to put this man between himself and his pursuer,
who got confused and began following the other man. Detective Ridder let him pass and then began following his
would-be pursuer at a safe distance.
The other man in the grey suit
caught a trolley. Hailing cabs, his
pursuer and detective Ridder followed him all the way to the airport, where he
boarded a flight for Tokyo, Japan. The
short, stocky man in the longshoreman’s cap boarded the next flight available,
and detective Ridder followed on another airline.
The other man in the grey suit had
entered a contest and won a trip around the world. The man who thought he was detective Ridder was an ex-convict
named O’Shaughnessy who had a grudge to settle with the lawman for getting him
arrested for petty theft. Detective
Ridder, who had many enemies, was anxious to discover who had been following
him.
Unfortunately, ex-convict
O’Shaughnessy never quite caught up with the other man in the grey suit, who
unwittingly led his pursuers a merry chase across the Orient until they ran out
of money. As police detective Ridder
had less money in his pockets, he was stranded in Bangkok, Thailand; while the
ex-convict made it as far as New Delhi, India.
The other man in the grey suit
stopped over in Bombay, then continued on to Cairo, Egypt, where he became
enamored of a cheap camera in a tourist shop and took lots of pictures of the
pyramids for the folks back in Poderosa, Oklahoma. A British lady he’d met on the flight over from Bombay obligingly
took a magnificent shot of him on a camel standing next to the Great Sphinx. “I must have enough for a hundred slides,”
he thought. “That’s a lot of lemonade
and cookies. Won’t Aunt Agatha be
pleased !”
She certainly was, and every member
of the Ladies’ Auxiliary with her ! The
traveler fell in love with one of the younger members and they got married and
went to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon.
Eventually they had three children: two girls, Rosalind and Priscilla;
and a boy, Gerard, Junior. Gerard,
Senior never forgot his wonderful trip around the world.
But police detective Ridder and
ex-convict O’Shaughnessy were never seen again.