Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
“The doctor will leave the door of his consulting room open this evening,” Manning told her. “I want you to never leave him alone, with any of these three patients, for more than three minutes. You can make some excuse to enter if your actual presence is not necessary.”
She nodded. “They are all simple cases,” she said. “I am really only here to-night in the event of an emergency.”
“There will be
no
emergency cases to-night,” said Manning. “Persons not belonging to the household will not be admitted. I have arranged for that. You will be in the office between the reception and consulting rooms. I shall be in the reception room myself, as a supposed patient, waiting to see the doctor after his appointments are over. That often happens, I imagine?”
She nodded again, chary of speech. But her eyes pleaded with Manning, and then she spoke.
“You will not let anything happen to him? He is so wonderful! He means so much to the world. If it was somebody like myself, it would not matter, but for him to—to…. I would gladly die for him,” she burst out, after she had got a grip on herself. “So would many others.”
Manning patted her on the shoulder. She did not often show emotion, he fancied.
“I’ll do the best I can,” he said.
Again he was in tweeds, to better play the part of patient. He carried an automatic in a shoulder clip, and he knew how to use it.
It was eight o’clock when he passed through into the empty consulting room and looked out over the court. At the far end, the windows of the laboratory were dark. He stepped on the balcony, returned and locked the French windows.
Two of his men were in the yard, lurking in the rain and fog behind the trees or statues. Another patrolled the street beyond the wall.
Manning switched on a ceiling lamp. The indirect lighting revealed the details of the room, with its examination table, its gleaming apparatus behind glass, all the precise accessories of such a place. Phillimore came in, took case-cards from a steel filing cabinet, and looked them over.
Less than two hundred and forty minutes now, until midnight.
Manning watched the patients as they entered. They seemed harmless enough—the nervous woman, the indulgent man and, last of all, a man whose face was drawn and haggard, who limped a little and seemed in pain with his arthritis. Inflammation of the joints appeared to have made him something of a cripple, as he hobbled through the reception room. Manning heard Phillimore greet him heartily.
The nurse had done her part. “Thank God he’s the last,” she whispered. “Mr. Manning, may I stay until twelve o’clock? I may be able to do something, though I hope there will be….”
Manning glanced at his wrist watch. “Three minutes,” he said.
She picked up a tray, and placed a card upon it that had already done service that night. Manning watched her as she walked through the narrow office; took hold of the handle of the door.
Suddenly she swung about, her eyes bulging.
“It’s locked!” she cried. “It’s locked, and bolted!”
Manning leaped for the door; confirmed her statement. Not only a turned key, but bolts also held the heavy door. He thought he heard a light tinkle inside, barely audible. He was not certain of it.
“Call the man on the stoop!” he cried to the nurse. “There’s another in the library! Break down that door!”
He had a feeling of nausea. He had no doubt that the doctor had been murdered, that the killer had fastened the door, and escaped through the long windows, closing them after him. He might yet catch him. The man with arthritis! Neither a new patient, nor an old one. But one who had been treated long enough to be so considered. The Griffin had planted him before he called Manning, or sent the doctor the message.
The nurse rushed for the front door, and Manning bolted to the dining room. He flung back the long windows and stepped out on the balcony. The lights in the consulting room were out. The killer had escaped.
The court was like a pit, silent as an open grave. His nostrils caught an acrid tang, vanished in a whirl of wind that swept the enclosed yard like a miniature cyclone.
Manning tried the windows of the consulting room. He could not see inside. They closed with a spring latch. He stepped over the railing to the balcony and dropped to the ground, a good twelve feet, calling to his men, whipping out his gun. Phillimore was dead. He must, at least, avenge him.
He strove to adjust his eyes to the gloom, still calling, getting no answer. He gulped another whiff of tainted air, closed his lips against it. He had an electric torch with a powerful lens and batteries. Its beam fought through the downpour, making rainbow gleams of the rain.
Manning saw the body of one of his picked guards stretched out by one of the statues. The man moved slightly, gasping for breath. The other was close by, on his back, legs drawn up. He too, might be alive. They had been gassed, as Phillimore must have been. The shower had given these two a fighting chance for recovery. Phillimore, in the consulting room, door locked, windows closed, must be dead.
Manning swung his torch, and saw an agile shape moving by the wall, flinging up a light rope ladder. He heard the
clink
of grapnel claws as they failed to hold.
The man turned. Manning knew this must be the murderer, the third patient, the man with the faked arthritis. It was dope, not pain, that had made him look so haggard in the reception room. He was far from a cripple now, spurred by a fresh dose of drug.
Now he seemed, viewed through the film of rain, like some strange beast, half man, half dragon. He was wearing a gas-mask, with goggles, tube and strainer. He seemed unearthly. One hand went to his left shoulder, and as a weapon appeared, Manning fired.
This was, as usual, only an agent of the Griffin. A slave held because of the Griffin’s private knowledge of some crime. A slave who might be made to talk, if captured alive.
Manning knew his bullet struck first, high in the body, to the right. It should have sent the other down with the impact, the shock of lead on bone.
But the other only staggered back, his left hand outspread against the wall for support. There was a bulletproof tunic next to his skin.
He pulled the trigger of his weapon. Manning saw no spurt of flame, heard no report. But something tapped lightly on his breastbone, broke and fell. He heard again the light tinkle of glass as he strove not to inhale nauseating, stupefying vapor that enveloped his head, flooding his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes.
Phillimore might have been shot this way, with gas contained in a fragile globe. It was more likely he had been slugged first, and a gas-pellet tossed back into the room as the killer fled—closing the windows, avoiding the lethal vapor, adjusting his mask before he jumped to the yard, where the guards had probably been eliminated already.
Out here, in the pelting rain, Manning had a show, if he could only—only—only—
Something came leaping, hopping like some enormous toad, a hideous shape that flung two arms, tremendous as a gorilla’s, about Manning’s knees. It was Al, his head made grotesque with another gas-mask, tugging at Manning with prodigious strength to drag him down, to settle him with powerful fingers.
Manning strove to break the hold, to club the misshapen freak with his gun, even to shoot. But the force had gone out of him. His arms lost all their energy as the poison gas slowly impregnated his blood.
He tripped over the border-hoops of the flower beds; buried his face in the chrysanthemums and in the wet dirt.
That saved him. He had not taken in much gas. It was not a heavy vapor. Close to the ground he found sweet air.
The freak had left him, making his getaway.
Three times Manning tried to get to hands and knees, and three times his limbs betrayed him. There was no pith in them. He groped for gun and torch, which he had dropped. He tried to shout, but his throat was seared. He found his gun, and aimed at a shape climbing the wall by the rope ladder, now fixed. The automatic seemed heavy as an anvil. He tugged at the trigger like an infant. The cartridge exploded, but he could not control his aim.
The freak was swarming up an ailanthus tree like a baboon. It leaped, legless but agile, swung along the coping, disappeared. The other man was gone. And both had cast aside their gas-masks.
Wavering, groggy, his vision bleary and his knees weak, Manning got to his feet, like a fighter too badly punished to know his own corner.
The Griffin had scored. Phillimore lay dead. He, Manning, had failed in this encounter.
His own scorn spurred him, and he stumbled towards the wall. His two shots should have brought aid by now. The rope ladder was in place. The murderers had discarded everything in their flight, masks, ladder, even the pneumatic pistol.
It seemed to him he climbed a thousand feet, wearing the leaded shoes of a diver, before he reached the top of the wall, still dizzy, throat and nostrils raw, eyes smarting.
He saw the ruby tail-light of a black sedan that swung north into the avenue. His patrol was missing. Manning imagined him gassed, or slugged, or both; dragged into a doorway where, on a night like this, he might not be discovered for an hour.
Manning crept down the ladder, to make sure of the thing he was too certain of—that Phillimore was dead.
He would have the car chased, but he knew that was useless. He had pursued the Griffin’s cars before. No dragnet would gill that eel.
IV
He trod on the pneumatic pistol, and picked it up. The fragile globes of glass it had popped out, like a Roman candle, had been filled with some product of the Griffin’s secret, suborned laboratories, the discovery of one of his captive chemists; some gas akin to cyanogen, perhaps; but more efficient in action.
Those pellets had upset all Manning’s precautions. Under cover of the night and rain, they had been shot at his two men in the court; perhaps from the top of the high wall or from the garden next door.
The freak must have been hiding somewhere, as an accessory, close at hand. As Manning went to the door in the basement he saw a big urn of stone half his own height. It stood beneath the balcony, could not be seen from it. It was empty as he flashed his light into it. But Al could have been in it, like the thieves in Ali Baba’s tale, waiting for his accomplice. With his stunted shape he could have stayed there for hours without discomfort.
Coughing, Manning pounded on the door, until it was suddenly opened. A man thrust a gun into Manning’s belly; dazzled him with a torch. There was another man behind him.
“Stick ’em up, you!” rasped the man with the gun, and then he wilted as he saw who it was.
“Think the murderer was trying to get in again, Burke? He’s a long way off by now. Blair and Neill are out there, in the court. Get them in. Howell has been done-in somewhere. Find him, sergeant. We’ll need pulmotors, surgeons! Get on with it, man. Hustle!”
Manning sped up the stairs from the basement into the reception room. The door of the consulting room had been burst open by the burly shoulders of the detectives.
The nurse was lying crumpled on the floor, but she was moving.
“She burst in when we broke through,” said one of the men. “I tried to grab her, got a whiff of the gas. She flopped, an’ I drug her out. We chucked chairs at the windows. But the doc is out for keeps.”
The nurse was scrabbling to her feet.
“He’s not, you fools, he’s
not!”
she cried. Then she caught sight of Manning. “Listen—
you
know,” she said. “I don’t know what gas it was, but we’ve got to try methylene blue. Methylene blue—do you understand?”
Her voice rose to a scream.
“I understand,” said Manning. He saw there was a chance. Any poison that paralyzed the diaphragm, that stopped the blood from carrying oxygen, might be offset by the simple dye.
“You got any?” he asked. “Know how to use it?”
He had a fair idea himself, but the girl reacted. Her eyes blazed.
“I only got a little of the gas,” she said, “I’m all right. Plenty of methylene blue in the laboratory. They use it to fix slides.”
She snatched at some keys on a hook, raced through the court. Sirens were winding alarms now, police officials and executives arriving.
But the nurse and Manning paid no heed to them. The wet wind swept through the broken glass of the consulting room, cleared it of the lethal vapor. The nurse took the head of Phillimore on her lap as the police surgeon entered.
“If it’s going to work, it works,” he said, when Manning explained. “They brought a lad back, in California, half an hour after they thought he had passed over. Where’s that methylene blue, nurse?”
It was ten minutes after the injection when Phillimore sighed. And the nurse sighed with him.
The surgeon looked at her with a mild disdain.
“He’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll take a look at the boys. You wouldn’t want to come along, nurse?”
She did not hear him, and Manning motioned him out. A clock chimed, with ten strokes. Two hours to midnight.
“You’d better stay,” said Manning to the nurse. “But I don’t think he’s in any danger—from the Griffin. He’s shot his bolt. This time, he loses.”
It was midnight, and the weather, as if sensible to zodiacal spells, was now subsiding. It had, after a fashion, favored the Griffin, but the rain had served the right, rather than the wrong, in dissipating the gas.
Phillimore was fully recovered, able to prescribe his own treatment, and that of the others suffocated by the gas, but resuscitated by a modern miracle.
A clock struck twelve.
“I’ll stay until morning,” said Manning to Phillimore, “though I see you are well cared for.”
The nurse’s face was rosy red. It had regained a not too long-lost youth.
“That’s been one of my mistakes,” said Phillimore. “I never thought I needed a guardian, until to-night.”
“We all need guardians, including the Griffin,” said Manning. He spoke a trifle shortly. There was a woman he wished would look at him as the nurse looked at Phillimore. But Manning’s love was denied him while the Griffin lived.