Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
“Electrician?” asked Manning.
“No. Mechanic. Drove trucks for ‘Alky’ Simms. He could run marine engines. Claimed he was an aviator.”
“Just an all round handy man,” said the commissioner sarcastically. “Thanks, Cunningham. Leave that here. We can pick up that chap, Manning,” he said. “He’s an outside man for the Griffin. Might be hiding out, but more likely is not. Figures a roundup might create wonder why he disappeared; doesn’t figure we found his prints. He worked on that death car. He’s been mugged. Plenty of our men know him on sight. We’ll get busy and bring him in.”
“Don’t do that,” said Manning. “Let him ramble. But put your best under cover men and shadows on the job, to find out
where
he rambles, and get his connections. It’s a slender thread, but it may be like the one that led to the heart of the Cretan labyrinth and the lair of the minotaur.”
The commissioner grunted. He was not quite sure what Manning was talking about, but he understood his drift.
“It’s our only chance,” Manning went on earnestly. “To weave such threads into a rope, into a net, to trace the Griffin’s agents back until we get in touch with him.”
“Agreed. I’m with you, Manning, heart and soul, so long as they don’t ask me to resign, or fire me. I’m none too keen to look at the evening editions. Can’t you see the headlines? ‘No Clews to Triple Murder. Commissioner Confesses Police Are Balked.’ Not that I did confess it, confound them.”
“I’ll be blamed equally,” said Manning. “I’ve no job to lose, Commissioner; there I’m ahead of you. But I’ve got to save my own face, and I won’t look at myself with any satisfaction until the Griffin is in his coffin.”
“Make it a triple one, lead, steel and solid stone.”
“Amen,” said Manning, and said it reverently.
The Six Scarlet Seals
Poison Had Slain the First of Six Men Menaced by the Griffin—and Before the Moon Set Some New and Awful Engine of Death Would Snatch the Second
The latch clicked, and Gordon Manning entered the hall of the old brownstone house in Chelsea, where the man who had been his friend—and his father’s friend before him—had always lived.
Whenever it was possible, Manning visited the old professor once a week to play chess, in which intellectual tournament Manning was seldom the victor. Victor Harland, ex-curator of the National Museum of Anthropology; author, lecturer and explorer; had passed seventy and was no longer active in professional work, though his mental activity was unimpaired by advancing years. He had earned, and was enjoying, leisure.
He could, and did, play a dozen or a score of chess games simultaneously, and win ninety per cent of them, against crack opponents. Too often Manning saw a twinkle come into his friend’s eye after the twentieth move or so, and knew that Harland had recognized a vulnerable situation. It was not for the chess Manning came to see him, so much as from sincere affection and admiration.
The big room at the back of the house was the same as Manning had always seen it, whether the gap between his visits was one of a week or a year. Walls halfway paneled between bookcases, a marble fireplace, where cannel coal burned cheerily. It was only early September, but the professor’s blood was thin.
Tea things were on a table. Liquors on a sideboard. Harland was a bachelor. The wife of the man who lived in the basement, and whose husband acted as janitor and gardener, was his acting-housekeeper. The professor liked to fend for himself. He was not over fussy, but he did not like to have familiar things shifted about. He owned the house and leased the upper floors to responsible, respectable persons who were quiet and orderly.
He greeted Manning cordially. The chessmen were already set upon the board. Manning was prepared to open with a Queen’s Pawn Gambit if he won the first move. That opening would help to stall off defeat. But first there must be tea. The choicest buds of golden pekoe, that Manning saw was supplied his friend and mentor.
It was a rite with Harland. The infusion he made was perfect, to eye and nose and palate.
Plants, flowering and foliage, were inside the windows. The professor did not often use the balcony, or go outside at all. The long curtains of crimson damask were three-quarters drawn. Dusk was just approaching, and Harland had advanced the twilight by lighting the chess-lamp, with another on the tea table, where a silver urn hissed softly beside a priceless service of Crown Derby china.
It was very cosy. A canary disdained the professor’s ruse and, looking into the garden, sang happily.
There was the usual interchange of talk. Harland knew of Gordon Manning’s special mission and authority to capture the Griffin, but he did not mention it. At his age, he did not care to contemplate the spectacle of a monster in human form who deliberately destroyed, or attempted to destroy, the men who stood for advancement, men of achievement, of benevolence and enlightenment.
As he prepared the tea, Manning asked what had happened of interest to his host since the last visit.
“Not much. Save that I have met an opponent worthy of my sharpest steel, my boy. He may yet prove my master. He called first on Monday, introducing himself as a chess-player. He reads my column. He disputed a theory of mine and convinced me he was right. A strange character in some ways, but very keen. A brilliant mind. He was here again this afternoon and we had a match. He undertook to prove that Niemzowitsch was always right, and Steinitz wrong. And he could have proved it in that game if he had not made a slip that I saw, but naturally, did not inform him about.
“There is your tea. You do not take sugar. I should not. It destroys the fine taste. But I must have my sweetenings in my old age, my boy.”
He chuckled as he passed the cup to Manning.
Harland was far from old age. He was still good for another decade, if not two. He helped himself to two lumps of sugar. Manning sniffed at the stimulating fragrance of the tea, sipped it. Chess-table and tea-table were close together. Soon the first moves were made, and countermade. There was silence in the room, save for the cheery chirping of the bird, with its occasional snatch of melody.
Harland had black, but he began to take the aggressive on the second move. On the seventh, he suddenly castled and sacrificed a bishop. Manning knew this was not weakness but some brilliance he must solve. Harland sat back and finished his tea. Manning closely studied the problem.
Then, suddenly, Harland was gasping for breath. His eyes bulged, his speech was harsh and incoherent. He glared at Manning; tears running from his eyes. The pupils were merely points. Sweat had broken out on his skin. His face and hands glistened with it as if varnished.
“Tarrasch does not take sugar,” he proclaimed. “I defy either of you to dispute it.”
He sank back in his chair with muscular twitchings that merged into a continuous tremor, as Manning jumped up, upsetting the chessmen. He lifted the professor as lightly as if the latter were a child. He loosened waistband and collar, stripped off coat and vest. He placed Harland face down on a lounge, doused his head with cold water, flung open both the windows—wide. The canary stopped chirping. It was growing dark. Manning felt the feeble pulse.
For a split-second he hesitated between applying artificial respiration immediately, or telephoning for powerful stimulants. It was touch-and-go. Harland’s heart was blocked in its action, his respiration was more and more labored. His lungs needed oxygen. He was dying from both paralysis of the heart and pulmonary edema.
Manning had studied medicine and surgery as a means of self-preservation during his exploits in strange and remote places. He had an especial knowledge of plant poisons, many of them alkaloids known to native wizards but included in modern pharmacopoeias. Here were symptoms he recognized, though he did not attempt absolute diagnosis.
He called police headquarters and his voice rang sharply and with authority.
“Snap it through. Emergency. Gordon Manning talking. Is Inspector Sullivan there? Good—put him on.
“Sullivan? Manning. I’m at 349A West Twenty-First Street. Ground floor. Name of Harland. He’s been poisoned. I want a police surgeon, in a hurry. Tell him it looks like pilocarpine, or jaborine. We’ll need atropine. I’m administering artificial respiration. I want that surgeon in a hurry. Yes. It looks like murder. But the man isn’t dead yet. It’s the surgeon I need, more than your radio cruisers. Or an ambulance. You’ve got it straight? Atropine. Right.”
He rang off. Harland’s lower limbs were relaxed. His pulse still flickered, but his lungs had collapsed. His age was against him. Manning labored systematically. The police would send a pulmotor, he knew, but only immediate treatment could save the professor. If Manning could have got instant hold of atropine he would have had a chance.
The radio cruiser arrived first, and Manning waved the plain-clothes men aside. They knew him and his special authority, and they remained, after a suggestion to search the premises, to question everybody. They figured it as murder. So did Manning.
“It’s murder, all right,” he said crisply, “but the murderer isn’t where you’ll lay hands on him. He hasn’t been here for hours.”
“You think—this is a friend of yours, Mr. Manning?”
Manning nodded, refusing the offer of one of the detectives to spell him, as he administered first aid.
“Then you figure it’s the Griffin?”
“I don’t figure anything, without the figures to go on,” Manning rapped. There was more noise of official arrival. An ambulance was outside. The interne came bustling in. Another radio car. At last, the surgeon. Inspector Sullivan had got the chief medical examiner himself. The name of Manning was potent. The M.E. was a genius in his specialty.
“Pilocarpine, I think,” Manning told him. “He had double vision, confusion of ideas, then tremors. If you don’t mind a suggestion, atropine might modify the edema, asthmatic spasms and abdominal cramps.”
“I’ll accept it as my own diagnosis from you, Manning,” said the M.E. They had worked together before, and respected each other. “Pilocarpine paralyses the vagus nerve. You saw sweat. Ah—profuse bronchial secretion! I’m afraid he was too old, Manning. We’ll try, of course, but he’s in the Shadow.”
As the shadows gathered in the garden, tried to invade the room with their combined force of darkness, the Shadow of the Valley of Death received the soul of Professor Harland.
II
The Voice of the Griffin
Manning handled the case. He combated the inquisition of the Press. He canceled the ordinary routine of police photography, of measurements and search for finger-prints. He knew them useless. And he rigorously resented all attempts to couple him, or the case, with a suggestion that the Griffin had contrived another murder, striking secretly.
“I know nothing about that, gentlemen,” he said decisively. “Nothing at all. The professor was no longer active in any form of research. He is not the type the Griffin chooses. See the commissioner.”
The reporters jeered a little, but not so that Manning heard them. The commissioner was hard-boiled as an egg cooked in a geyser. It was a good enough story, with Manning present, admitted a friend of the dead man. They saw that there might be plenty of motive for the Griffin to strike.
Once, he had named his victim and the day of death. But Manning had foiled him too often of late, and now the Griffin was running amuck, striking without warning. It was a wonder Manning himself was still alive. The Griffin was mad, but it was with the mania of infinite cunning. He deserved annihilation, but when Manning had managed to capture him, the law, because he was judged insane, would not kill him. They had placed him in Dannemora, and the crafty maniac had escaped. He was at large again, with the ingenuity of a fiend and the resources of a maharajah.
At last the death-chamber was cleared. The body had been basketed, and taken for the inevitable autopsy; of which Manning and the M.E. already knew the verdict.
Only Manning—and the canary—were in the room. For the first time, Manning was able to concentrate upon the cause, and also the manner, of the murder.
Harland was well when he arrived. He had talked of the man who had visited him, and played brilliant chess. Twice. The first time, a complete game, earlier that afternoon.
If only he had not taken the visit of a stranger casually! It might not have been the Griffin in person, but one of his many more or less enslaved emissaries. But Manning scored himself for having taken the incident too lightly. Harland was not big game for the Griffin, but he could stab at Manning through the professor.
He might also have stabbed directly at Manning.
It was a swift review and analysis that Manning made to an inevitable conclusion.
Harland had made tea. He had taken sugar. Manning had not. The Griffin might have known that Harland did so, from the first visit of himself, or his agent, and hoped that Manning did also.
Pilocarpine was the principal alkaloid of the leaves of the Jaborandi plant of South America, akin to hyoscine, jaborine, scopolamine. The jinn of medicine. Faithful servitors, if one knew the charm that bound them; or destroying demons, when unbound.
They could all be dissolved in alcohol. The fatal essence could be set in sugar by transmission, with as simple an instrument as an eye-dropper. All done in a moment. While Harland’s back was turned. No doubt the Griffin, or his agent, had been offered tea the first visit, refused it the second.
In a short time the alcohol would evaporate, leaving the tiny, fatal crystals.
Manning emptied out the lumps of sugar from the Crown Derby bowl and wrapped them in his handkerchief, for analysis. He had little doubt of his theory. He had none when he looked at the bottom of the bowl.
The Griffin—or his agent—had found time to set at the bottom of the container two scarlet
affiches,
ovals of stiff paper, red as blood, stamped with the Griffin’s private seal, showing the mythical monster, half-lion, half-eagle, in heraldic device, rampant and demi—just the upper half of the fabulous creature with beak and mane, with wings and claws.