Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
V
Every morning at ten thirty a car emerged from the private grounds of Dr. Arnold Sassoon, world-renowned psychiatrist, mender of shattered minds and nerves. The grounds were masked by a high hedge of interwoven hemlock, and the driver honked his horn as the gatekeeper swung the barrier and the car entered the highway.
Sassoon and his assistant, Moore, were bound for the private hospital for neurological diseases endowed by Sassoon himself. There wealthy patients, whose ills were mostly fanciful, were told certain truths and persuaded not to interfere mentally with their automatic physical functions; and poorer ones were treated with patient kindness.
Shell-shocked veterans had left the hospital normal men again, blessing Sassoon and all his works.
The highway ran north and south across Long Island. It was not much frequented, but in excellent repair, drained by open culverts, the brush kept trimmed below the oaks and maples.
There was a sign standing by the side of the road that proclaimed “Men Working” for the Light and Power Company. One man clung with his creepers to a pole carrying electric wires, the other stood idly watching the car, the closing gate. He looked south down the road as the car passed on. There was no other vehicle in sight.
A dirt road, once a wood lane, used now as a bridle path, joined the highway in that direction, about four hundred yards away.
Out of it there came a black sedan, making a sharp curve north. It took more than its share of the road, and Sassoon’s driver, Ryan, gave it room, silently resentful.
The black sedan did not straighten out. It was fairly in the road of the Sassoon car. It leaped forward with augmented and prodigious speed, bent for a head-on collision.
It could not be avoided, though Ryan chanced the open curve of the cement culvert in his attempt to escape the smash. His face was gray and sweaty with terror, not so much from the emergency as the fact that the other car, hurling itself at well over a hundred miles an hour upon them, was
empty!
There was no driver. No passengers.
Like a torpedo, the mass of steel launched itself and hit. There was a frightful crash, rending, splintering, wrecking.
Sassoon’s car was a good one, but far lighter than the other. It crumpled under the impact, like an empty tin can under the blows of a sledgehammer. Its engine and body were swept from the chassis, the frame itself twisted out of all shape. What was left of the car lay scrambled in the culvert, partly buried in the dirt beyond the ditch.
In the shapeless mass the three bodies of Sassoon, Moore and Ryan, horribly disfigured, lay in their own blood. Gasoline caught fire from ignition and started to turn the wreck into a pyre. The car that had attacked them was on its side, hood like a closed accordion, engine stripped and reduced to scrap. It was empty.
The crash had been terrific. The gatekeeper came running up the road, fearful, breathless and upset.
The sign, “Men Working,” stayed where it was, but the man had come down from the pole, carrying with him a small wooden cabinet and a coil of wire. With the one who had watched the car he disappeared, plunging into the woods opposite Sassoon’s hemlock hedge.
There was a slight movement in the tops of the trees above them that seemed to follow their passage. Then all was still. The breeze brought the reek of the fire. The gateman, distraught and sobbing with hysteria, came pounding back to the house.
Presently a State trooper on a motorcycle came tearing to the scene. A local policeman from Blueport followed in a car that had picked up the radioed news.
The officers started to put out the fire.
Manning sat in the library of his house at Pelham Manor in an unenviable state of mind and spirit. Without vanity, he believed himself the only one capable of coping with the Griffin, and the responsibility lay heavily upon him.
Now that the Griffin was amuck, the tension lay upon Manning night and day. To keep fit he had to offset it, to be relaxed and ready. Striking without warning, the Griffin would have to be surrounded with a net of clews and evidence. It was imperative that Manning discover his outside agents, not the wretched slaves the monster held in thrall.
Manning had once liberated those unfortunate accomplices. But the Griffin had gathered them again, or others. His resources were profound.
Manning knew that crime detection meant the painstaking investigation of nine hundred and ninety-nine blind alleys before entry to the one that led to apprehension and conviction. At times—rare times—brilliant deduction or a genius flash of intuition, might prove a short cut.
But every alley that Manning discovered to be a
cul-de-sac
was likely to hold the body of a victim. He would have to find some way to anticipate the Griffin’s plans, to circumvent them, to tangle the monster in his net. Even now, though he did not know it, not one but three mangled bodies were added to the Griffin’s ghastly tally. He did not have to wait long.
His telephone sounded, and Manning felt the premonitory thrill of evil committed before he picked up the receiver.
He heard the weird, barbaric music, and then the Griffin’s demoniacal, triumphant laughter.
That was all. It was enough. Far more than if the Griffin had spoken. The laughter meant that the Griffin no longer warned him in advance, but advised him—afterward—that the fiend had scored.
Manning tuned in his radio on short wave, knowing what must shortly follow. He listened to the barked-out message that came within three minutes.
His car took him to Larchmont with his special siren shrieking, claiming clearance. Moments seemed hours while he revved up the motor and propeller of his private amphibian. It seemed a day before it threw off the suction of too placid water and soared to Blueport. There he dropped again to the surface and taxied to the dock where the car he had telephoned for was waiting.
He broke through the small crowd that had gathered. No officials had yet arrived from New York, but they would soon be there, with the reporters and cameramen. The Blueport chief of police was harassed, not recognizing Manning at first, but glad to acknowledge his authorities. Manning foregathered with the two officers who had first arrived, and the excited and bewildered gatekeeper. He found the State trooper succinct.
“It sounds phooey, the rest of it,” said the man, after he had given a crisp report of what he had seen. “This gate guy is goofy, or maybe I am. It’s mighty funny nobody got hurt bad enough in the car that did the trick; on the wrong side of the road, of course; so they couldn’t get away. There ain’t a sign of trouble, though the wheel’s jammed back into the seat. No blood. No nothing. And Doc Sassoon and the two with him smashed like half-roasted eggs! He was one swell guy, Sassoon.”
The trooper was trying to be hard-boiled. Manning gave him a chance to fiddle with his belt.
“Where does the gateman come in?” he asked.
“Claims he saw something like a big ape swingin’ through the trees after the car left the driveway. Saw that, mind you, but didn’t think much of it, he says. Only remembered it a few minutes ago. Can you beat it?”
“There is such a thing as registering an image without making a mental tie-up at the time,” said Manning. “Like seeing a ghost. You put it down to imagination, subconsciously. Then something happens and it all clicks properly. What else?”
“That board, ‘Men Working.’ We called up the Light and Power Company. They sent a man. He’s here now. Says they had nobody anywhere near here, an’ that the board’s a fake. Ought to have their name burned on the woodwork, branded in. The Griffin did this, Mr. Manning, and he pulled a fast one. Killing a guy like Sassoon ain’t just murder. Why, he—I mean doc—he was a prince. Cured my brother—didn’t charge a red cent. If I got a chance at that Griffin, I’d kill him with my bare hands. I’d….”
“What makes
you
think it was the Griffin?” asked Manning.
“I’ll show you. There ain’t much left but the rear end of Sassoon’s car, but there’s something stuck there. Looks like it was put there
after,
see? When the goofy gate guy beats it to the house; by one of those phony trouble men. I got it covered up. It’ll be news quick enough, I reckon.”
Manning knew what he was going to see before the trooper escorted him to the remains of the Sassoon car, still holding the half charred bodies until examination was completed.
The crowd, curious, pitiful and morbid, were being kept away. The officer had hung a dust-robe taken from the other car over the back of the death machine, as what was left of it lay on its side. The trooper lifted the light cloth and showed the sticker—the scarlet cartouche that was the Griffin’s insignum, his
memento mori,
the blood-red token of his victory.
Manning conferred with the local chief and got the road roped off, all onlookers kept well away. Then he had a talk with the gatekeeper.
“There was men workin’, all right,” said the man. “I didn’t see ’em when I run back to the house to give the alarm, but I wasn’t thinkin’ of anything but gettin’ help, knowin’ I was too late. All three was dead, mister, covered with blood, an’ the fire ragin’, an’ stinkin’. Dr. Sassoon, he was in back, all mashed-like between the seats. Ryan, he had the wheel drove into his chest. Dr. Moore’s head was nigh cut off with glass, or something. I’ll not forget it to my dyin’ day.”
“How about what you saw in the trees?” asked Manning.
The man stared at him. His shallow brains were half scrambled. There was a vacant stare in his eyes.
“I dunno as I see anything,” he said, half pleadingly. “It ain’t easy, lookin’ back, to remember. But it was something, mister, swingin’ through the trees, like one of them chimpanzees. I was sober, though you might think me drunk or crazy, when I tell you that whatever it was didn’t have any legs.”
Manning remembered a stormy night when a legless
thing
had tackled him. “I wouldn’t talk about it too much,” he suggested.
He doubted if the gateman would ever be called upon for that evidence, vital as it was. Or that it would be believed that the attacking car was actually empty.
He reserved his own decision.
It did not take him long to find the dirt road that showed where a car, with the same tire treads as the one that had crashed into Sassoon’s machine, had backed off the highway and reëntered it.
The road sloped upward, blank of anything but hoofprints for a while. Then Manning found the imprints of human hands, palm-flat to the dirt.
They led on, in an eerie trail, from where the legless monstrosity had dropped from a tree, until it joined two men and a car, that had come in, and left, the dirt road from the opposite direction.
Manning noted the tire prints until they struck a cemented way. The prints could be photographed, cast in plaster, but he did not doubt that the Griffin would see those tires disposed of promptly.
This killing showed that the ingenious working of the mad brain were once more in action.
Three dead men, and one woman, since the Griffin had run amuck. So far, not a tangible clew. The laughter of the fiend seemed to ring in Manning’s ears as he returned, to find the scene of the murder swarming with those whose business it is to attend such grisly functions.
They went about their grim business of removing the dead, of carrying out official routine, while those who were to give out the news avidly covered their assignments.
An inspector saluted Manning.
“We’re powdering for prints,” he said. “They must have been wearing gloves.”
“Looked inside?” asked Manning.
“Of course. There ain’t a mark on the wheel, or….”
“I meant inside the hood,” said Manning curtly. “They may have changed a tire. Powder the tools, look in the unusual places, everywhere. We’ve
got
to find somebody who bare-handled this car, Inspector, and pray to God his prints are on record. It must not be touched except by our men.”
VI
“You read about Marconi steering a ship into harbor by radio beacons,” said Manning to the commissioner. “It’s not the first time it’s been done with boats, up to battle cruisers; with cars, right here in New York; even with planes.
“That’s how it happened. The Griffin’s car, with all its numbers filed and eaten off—and no license plates—was empty when it shot out of that dirt road.
“The troublemen were fakes; one of them had plugged in to the power line. He was the control man; the other a lookout. If cars had come along they would have put it off, that’s all. It was damnably simple, damnably impossible to foresee, to prevent, even if the Griffin had warned us.”
“What about the thing in the tree, that legless freak?”
“Another lookout, to signal in some way when Sassoon’s car was coming down his driveway. He had to be treed to look over the high hedge. The man on the pole had enough to do.”
“So the Griffin wins, leaving us nothing to go on,” said the commissioner grimly.
“There are the finger-prints we found on the radio car. On the spokes of the spare tire, under its canvas cover, on a wrench; and a beautiful impression on the only spark plug that wasn’t shattered. Has the report come through?”
The commissioner touched a disk, gave an order to the man who answered.
He and Manning looked at each other while they waited. The commissioner tore the end off a cigar and thrust it into his mouth, chewing on it without lighting it.
Manning selected an imported cheroot from a pigskin case and lighted it, puffing quietly, but inhaling the strong smoke. It steadied his nerves. He did not expect too much from those prints that had been almost overlooked, but he did not want to draw a blank.
The head of the finger-printing bureau brought up his findings.
“Casey Flynn, alias Mickey Flynn, alias ‘Croaker’ Casey,” he said. “Here’s his record. Sent up for homicide, paroled, in again for manslaughter. When he left Sing Sing last he didn’t come in to New York. The boys picked him up in Albany. They had nothing to hold him on, though he had plenty of money and was living high. He told them he had struck something good. They kidded him, asked him if he was going straight, and he told them he was going too straight for any dick to follow.”