Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
Bishop was over fifty. A man who had had much and seen it swept away. His wife was dead, his children scattered, all their prospects sunk in the depression.
But he had spirit in him yet. He had at one time in his youth been an actor, playing character parts. Money left him, and the breakdown of stock and repertoire companies by the movies had led him to business successes that the crash of ’29 had ruined.
He could still act. It was Bishop who had reported, through Farrell, the present lead. He had seen the Griffin’s car four times within the past two weeks. Its appearance in that neighborhood was like the hot scent of a fox to a wise hound.
Bishop posed as a down-and-outer, begging odd jobs, slouching about the fields. Sometimes he was a mushroom picker, with a few mushrooms in his worn basket. He trailed from farm to farm, and house to house, choosing hours when the Griffin’s car was least likely to be on the road, mostly after dark.
He too picked up gossip and he compiled a sort of record, as did other field men, of the people in that vicinity, and how they lived. That was not easy. Many were of foreign birth, close-mouthed, especially to derelicts; many spoke only broken Americanese.
There were houses here and there that had been restored, or partly restored, from Colonial days. Some of these were vacant these hard times; others had caretakers of various kinds, often poor relatives, who shut the door in the face of any rover.
Manning analyzed these descriptions, set aside the most likely. In this locale, patrolled by Bishop, there was an ancient house that had fallen, with its family, upon evil days. Once it had been the stately manor house of a King’s Grant, now it stood in a few forlorn acres, unpainted and decrepit. There were first growth trees, some dying, others blighted chestnuts, about a melancholy mere that had known more than one suicide. There was a private graveyard, with the stones tilted, the mounds heaved or fallen in, the inscriptions hardly to be read.
The natives called it haunted, not the only one on Manning’s list. A surly man and his bitter-faced wife lived there, keeping to themselves, buying cheap and scanty supplies.
For the Griffin, such a place might be a perfect camouflage, if it provided certain conveniences. Such as a site for the laboratories where the Griffin kept his nameless slaves at work for him.
They too were derelicts, like Manning’s men; but these slaves had sinned against the law, escaped from its penalties, and the Griffin held them in thrall through knowledge of their guilt. Most of them had been in high rank in the professions from which they had been banished.
Manning turned off the State highway, through the forgotten and almost abandoned village, over a bridge and by a broken dam. The dirt road was poorly kept, the taxes raised in such a section were small and highway commissioners and supervisors ignored the byways.
Stone walls crumbled, hedges grew rank, fields lay overgrown with weeds and brush. Old red barns sagged, farmhouses stood forlorn on the hills, untenanted. The ditches were clogged. Once in a while he saw gaunt cows, trying to keep alive in worn-out pastures.
Poverty reigned, with neglect. The only merit to the district in the eyes of travelers lay in the fact that here was a short cut to the bridge across the Hudson, if the weather were good.
There was an unused schoolhouse, no better than a shack. The children were picked up and taken to a central school. Gardens were neglected, save for a few, poor vegetables. He passed few cars and those were relics, chattering and staggering along, keeping together by a miracle, a prayer, and baling wire. Few people.
This was called Cow Hollow. Less than fifty miles from New York, sinking yearly into worse condition. Gnarled orchards strove to bear a little bitter, wormy fruit, not worth the picking.
Manning stopped at Farrell’s garage. He did all the business there was in the neighborhood, largely because he seemed inclined to give credit. Most of those who hung him up for gasoline or repairs on one of their rattletraps considered him a sucker.
He came out, and Manning ordered oil, not wanting to mix his own ethyl with the gas Farrell handled. The oil
was
his own brand, kept for such a time by Farrell.
There was nobody about. Farrell could talk freely.
“Bishop gave me the new code word yesterday,” he said. “Before I telephoned through to you. He’s seen that car three times this week, including yesterday. It comes through between three and three forty-five in the afternoon.”
Manning glanced at his wrist watch. It was two forty-seven.
“He knows it’s the same car,” Farrell went on, “though it has a different number each time, because its been in a smash some time, and it’s got a new rear fender on the right side. They did a good enough job putting it on, but it hugs the chassis a bit. I noticed that the time it stopped here and asked was this the right road to the bridge. That was a stall. They saw me outside and wanted to ask questions of me, see? I told ’em what you said for me to say.”
Manning nodded. Farrell was a good man.
“So I tipped Bishop off. You only notice this when the car’s passing you. They saw me looking at it but they didn’t know why. I only really saw the chauffeur. He had a sour puss, looked like it was cut out of a turnip. The one in the back might have been the Griffin. The blinds were drawn and I could just see there was someone. I told ’em I didn’t expect to see such a fine car out here and he said it was because of the short cut.”
“Been by here since?” asked Manning.
“No. They must come in over Grimm’s hill. But they swing in to the road where Bishop sees ’em. They can turn off that to get to the bridge, though it’s not the best way. Still, folks often get mixed up on the short cut. If you don’t turn off the road it leads to the place they call Manor House, the spooky dump you know about. Used to go on through to the river, I guess, but now the road peters out beyond the graveyard. Nobody uses it.”
“Where shall I find Bishop?” asked Manning.
“You can turn in at Three Elm Farm. Nobody living there now. Only two elms left. You can see ’em plain from this road. They’re by the farmhouse. No gate, and rough going, but you can make it. Cut right across the farm behind the house, down an old cow lane to where the mailbox used to be. Just the post there now. There’s some trees and scrub where you can park out of sight if you want to. The fence is down along the Manor House road. Bishop’ll be loafing round there to tell you if the car has passed or not.
“And he’ll show you yesterday’s tire tracks. It rained yesterday morning. If they ain’t changed ’em. I doubt it. They’re the regular tires for that car, and the rubber’s new. Unless they figured you had spotted the car, otherwise they’d likely keep ’em on.”
“Good man,” said Manning. He looked at his watch again. “I’ll be going.” He handed Farrell a twenty-dollar bill. “Bonus,” he said.
It was two minutes before three. With luck, he would get in touch with Bishop before the car passed. But luck, he knew, was too often with the Griffin.
For some reason the Griffin had been making regular trips. And that meant deviltry.
It began to look as if the Manor House might be the lair. Three Elm Farm was not the place. The shutters hung crazily, the chimneys were tumbling down; there was not the track of tire or hoof, or even the pads of a roaming, hungry dog upon the place.
Manning drove down the cow lane, came to some street choked with wild grapevine. He was above the Manor House road, but hidden from it.
He braked, hesitant. To his left, a man shambled dejectedly along, using a stick, a basket like a fisherman’s creel upon his back. A tramp, a mushroom picker—Bishop.
To the right, he saw a car advancing, a long, black car. It came on at a good fifty miles an hour, its weight—and the skill of the driver—seeming to ignore the inequalities of the dirt road. Now and then it swerved, or swayed a little, but it held a fair course.
It neared the shambling figure, which moved towards the ditch, humble and insignificant.
Suddenly Manning threw off his brakes, snatched a heavy automatic from a side pocket, and went rocketing down the slope. He made a beeline for where the fence was broken, distant from where a path had once led to the mailbox.
He dodged sumach, thornapples, plunged through a thicket, surged through second growth and saplings that made his passage a minor miracle. The gun was tucked under his thigh. He risked a blowout every second, but he trod hard on the gas. Now he could not see the road and every pulse-beat seemed to tick off the fatal message—that he would arrive too late.
The Griffin had been ahead of schedule, if there
was
a schedule. Bishop had been faithfully ahead of time. He was to pay for that faithfulness with a hideous death.
Perhaps the Griffin had suspected or merely disliked his presence on that road. It would take little for that monster to get rid of anything he deemed the slightest nuisance.
Manning had seen a thing that would have seemed unbelievable to any one not acquainted with the Griffin.
As the long car sped, it suddenly accumulated pace. A weird, incredible figure, like some nightmare fantasy, like a shattered gargoyle plucked from an age-old cathedral, swung to the running board. It clung there, legless, one apelike arm through the open window.
The lonely landscape held no other living things. The rushing car—Bishop—Manning, thundering, bounding down the slope, avoiding disaster by split-seconds.
Only a flock of somber crows cawed through the air, witnesses of Death, striking fiendishly.
It was Al, the legless freak bought by the Griffin from a traveling circus, a deaf mute with an atrophied soul and brain, corrupted by his new master.
In its free hand the freak held something that looked like a lance, or a sharpened pole. The big car raced, charging, hemming in Bishop against the fallen fence and the hedge that backed it.
The young trees blotted that out for Manning. He had all he could do to avoid them. He could not. His running board and fenders struck them, dented and crumpled. A buried snag tore a tire and he barely escaped collision with a stump. He held on, lurching on a rim, his arms and wrists wrenched.
He crashed through the tangled fence, smashed rotten rider poles, plunged into the ditch, skidding to the road, twisting and turning on the surface, still slimy with yesterday’s rain.
He wound up with his back bumper bent against a fallen stone wall on the far side, leaped out, gun in hand.
The black car was out of sight.
Something lay twisted in the opposite ditch. A body thrust through and through with a lance, writhing in the last, convulsive agonies of death, bloody and distorted.
Manning stood over Bishop—what had been Bishop. He had seen death in many shapes but none worse than this. For a moment his blood ran cold.
Bishop was impaled upon a stake six feet long. It had been armed with a point of wrought iron, now clotted with crimson.
Al had held that lance, or had flung it. The latter was more probable. The car, with its tremendous speed, perhaps seventy miles or more at the moment, had provided the frightful impetus that had taken Bishop off his feet, as the spear sheared through belly and backbone until half of it stuck out behind; left him like an impaled beetle, squirming and gasping as he died.
The tire tracks were plain in the road. But here was the dead man, and Manning’s car was stranded with a jammed brake, a bent axle, a blown tire and twisted steering gear.
The body that had been Bishop gasped its last breath.
The cawing crows came wheeling back, as if they saw or scented carrion. And Manning stood gun in hand, powerless.
III
The Living Death
Al, the deaf mute, legless freak, squatted on a square hassock in a corner of the Griffin’s private chamber. There was no morality in him. Killing was a delight, the instinct implanted in him as it is in some epileptics who commit homicide instead of having convulsions.
And now this abnormity, whose clothing was sprinkled with the blood that spurted from poor Bishop as the car rushed past, was enjoying his reward with complacency. He squatted on his legless trunk, with an all-day-sucker thrust into his mouth, blissfully absorbing it.
When Al had been in the museum of the circus, he had put on an exhibition of shooting arrows, hurling lances and flinging knives. It was this performance that had helped decide the Griffin to buy off the freak.
This afternoon he had made use of Al’s accomplishments, staging it to suit his own love of the bizarre, adding the force and fury of the speeding car.
The Griffin had not been definitely suspicious of Bishop, nor of Farrell, but it had struck him that the lonely neighborhood had rather suddenly acquired an increase of population. He had noticed Bishop several times. He might be tramp or mushroom picker or he might be a spy. The fact he was an interloper on territory the Griffin reserved for himself, the merest thought that he might be scouting for Manning or the police, sufficed for his warranty of death.
The Griffin, seated in comfort in his car, had watched the killing with the sadistic delight of a Nero. Human lives meant no more to him than those of the guinea pigs, rats and mice used by scientists in their researches. But the Griffin experimented for no cause but his own. He was indeed like Nero, who encouraged Locusta, the poisoner, by providing her with slaves on which to experiment.
Now the Griffin sat gloating behind his carven desk as Al guzzled his sweet. The Griffin’s features were screened by the mask of thin material that looked like goldbeater’s skin, like the skin of a snake just before shedding. He looked like some ancient conception of Mephisto. The mask twitched to his grimace as he recalled the dying contortions of Bishop—who might or might not have been a spy.
He sucked at the amber mouthpiece of a hookah pipe, and the bubbles danced in the rose-scented water that cooled the smoke. The bowl burned to ashes and the Griffin rose, and began to pace up and down his chamber. He was clad in a long black robe of heavy silk brocaded with cabalistic designs. A sable skullcap was on his head.