Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Action and Adventure
Tolu, cat-footed, precise in his black clothes, was taking the clip from the table edge. To it was attached the service button that Poindexter had pressed as his last act. From this the cord had trailed over the floor to the wainscoting and along that to the pantry, held in place by brass eyelets.
Tolu held the clip in his hand. He had taken out the junction plug and the cord was loose. He handled the clip and button as if it was some precious object, something to be treated with great care—or with great caution. He did not see or hear Manning. Manning stood observing him, while in his mind there rose a vision of Poindexter, glass in hand, pressing the button, stricken.
Pressing the button! Which Tolu alone set in place, removed!
An answer came to him, possible, probable.
Suddenly Tolu turned and observed Manning. His decorous mien seemed to vanish. He was, for a flaming second, a savage surprised in the bush, his eyes gleaming like crimson spangles, his black pompadour bristling. He seemed about to crouch, as if to fling a spear or discharge a poisoned dart. With this atavistic throwback Manning knew his answer was correct. And he knew how to handle such a savage.
He spoke sharply to him in Mindanao.
“What have you done with Tolu?”
The man gasped. He seized at the automatic in Manning’s hand, seemed to strive for control as he answered that he did not know what the
tuan
was talking about. He answered in a strange tongue, automatically, as Manning had expected him to. And, so replying, he revealed the secret, sealed his own fate.
Tolu spoke Mindanao; this man spoke Palawan.
It is as easy to find two Filipinos that look alike—though they may come from different islands, speak varying dialects—as it is to discover two Chinese or Japanese who cannot be distinguished apart by any but their own countrymen. Easier.
And this was not Tolu. Tolu, the faithful, had been decoyed away or seized, this Palawan set in his place, instructed in Tolu’s duties, an education which must have been obtained from Tolu under duress. Manning was not far from imagining exactly what had happened in the Griffin’s torture chamber. He knew too that Tolu had been eliminated.
As to how this Palawan had killed?
The Filipino, all savage now, poised the clip so that the button was toward Manning and flung it straight for the latter’s face. Manning ducked as he fired, felt the contrivance graze his head, knew that it carried death. It had spoiled his aim, though he winged his man. The Filipino ran, swaying, and leaped for the swinging pantry door, disappearing through it as Manning’s second bullet struck the little square of glass set in the upper panel to facilitate service and avoid collisions.
Manning raced after him. The frightened cook and maids blocked his way, blocked his third shot.
The killer had snatched up a knife, flourishing it, darting out to the roof garden. Other guns from the waiting detectives stabbed red flashes through the night. The pseudo-butler staggered, badly hurt, dropped to one knee, pitched to all fours as Manning’s next shot hit him between the shoulder blades. With incredible vitality he got to his feet, reached the coping and, in a last, prodigious effort, vaulted over it.
They saw him fall, hurtling down to the sidewalk, to lie there broken. Manning sent the men down and went back to the dining room, dismissing the terrified maids as he passed them.
He picked up the spring clip of nickeled metal, holding it carefully. With the blade of his penknife he pressed down the button and saw, as he expected, a fang of steel appear through the tiny orifice in the ebonized disk. The death-point was black. It was covered with poison.
It might never be defined, but Manning believed it to be at least allied to
curari,
the plant juice of
Strychnos
toxifers, or some related species, used for arrow heads and blowgun darts, causing instant paralysis of the lungs from failure of the nerve motors.
A few minutes more and the Palawan would have removed the button, replaced it with the regular one, got rid of the deadly evidence.
The house phone rang. The detective in the hall was speaking.
“A Mr. Fleming, sir. He says he was to be a guest upstairs to-night.”
“You told him?”
“Yes, sir. He is sending up his card. He seemed shocked. He has just left.”
The elevator that reached the roof dwelling came to rest in the vestibule. The special operator was still running it. He handed Manning an envelope.
Manning opened it. There was a card inside, but it was not engraved. On it was set the scarlet emblem, the rampant griffin’s head with curving beak and open claw.
This Fleming had been the Crime Master after all. He had been in the building, but he was gone, swallowed up in the night.
Globes of Jeopardy
The Griffin, Appearing at Last Before Manning, Throws Down a New Defiant Threat to the Manhunter
THE owner and head trainer of the private gymnasium down town where Gordon Manning kept himself physically fit, looked at the renowned investigator with a critical eye as he came out of his shower.
“I’d let up on the handball for a while if I was you, Mr. Manning,” he said. “You’re looking a bit drawn, a shade too fine. It’s this devilish hot weather, maybe.”
To a casual eye, Manning, stepping naked to his locker, would have looked infinitely fit with his lean, muscular body, brown almost as a Carib Indian’s; but the trainer was an expert of long standing. Manning was one of his clients in whom he felt pride. He did not feel that way about all of them, middle-aged business men striving to get rid of the fat and softness of easy living and unchecked appetites, men with paunches like jelly bags. But Manning was different. He had never been out of condition, in peace, nor in war, where he had served with distinction in the Secret Service. Now he was avowedly a consulting attorney, but the trainer, though he did not mention it, had an idea that the trouble might be mental as much as physical.
Manning’s eyes were clear and keen as ever, but there were lines between his brows that were deeper than usual. It could not be the market. That was steady, and Manning never mentioned stocks. He had told the trainer that he did not speculate. As for the heat, Manning had traveled far and wide, largely in the tropics. Eighty degrees, even in Manhattan, was not going to bother him. Besides, he lived in the country suburbs.
He grinned at the trainer genially.
“I’ll take your advice,” he said. “I do feel a bit stale.”
He did not seem like it a few moments later, striding along the street on his way to his office, swinging his especial cane and favorite weapon, a steel rod on which rings of leather were close shrunk, pliable and effective. Now and then he nodded a greeting. Some he did not return through absent-mindedness.
What some people call a hunch was beginning to manifest itself, stronger as he approached the building in which he had his suite. Manning believed by experience, particularly that of his Oriental travel, in many phenomena sometimes called occult; and he felt that he was becoming receptive, tuned in to certain vibrations. The “sending” was of evil influence. He had been expecting something of the sort for days of anxious waiting. Now he was certain that he would receive a more direct communication at his office. It might be in the shape of a letter, written in purple ink on heavy gray paper, in a distinctive, masterful hand. It might be a message over the telephone that could not be traced.
Whichever it was it would come from the Griffin.
Manning had not heard from that mysterious madman for many days. No one knew his name or where he lived, but his deeds were blazoned all over the country, and Manhattan cringed when they read of another of his ghastly, maniacal crimes.
Insane he surely was, but, as a madman has incredible strength, so this man’s brain seemed to be inspired to fiendishness in such subtle form that he still roamed at large and laughed at law and order, at all civilization.
In that warped mind of his there might have been a distorted sense of injury that now made itself manifest in devilish determination to attack the best and most useful of men, to destroy them.
Centre Street had tried to cope with him in vain as the list of his crimes mounted, the toll of his victims grew. The police commissioner had persuaded Gordon Manning to take up the trail. Manning had hoped to work under cover, but, the day after his secret appointment, the Griffin had sent him his first communication, accepting the challenge, calling it a game, professing himself amused.
In the murders that followed, Manning had come close to the Griffin himself more than once. He burned for actual contact, though he knew it would be fraught with deadly danger. The Griffin laughed at his efforts. He had some means of synchronizing the telephone system so as to utilize any instrument entirely for his own purposes. Time and time again Manning had heard his haunting, taunting laugh come over the wire.
Sometimes there were strains of exotic music. Always of late there was information that was given in mockery. He had become so daring, so confident, that he announced the name of his intended victim—and even the day on which he would die.
And always, in some fashion, he left on that victim, or in some conspicuous place, his seal, a scarlet cartouche of paper embossed with the design of the Griffin, the fabulous creature of legend, with its ravening beak and cruel eye, a crest of crime. A boast that he had been within striking distance.
It was enough to destroy sleep, to jangle a man’s nerves, even one as possessed as Manning. It told on him. The silence as much as the open challenge, the statement of what he meant to do and dared Manning to prevent.
Manning had been thinking recently that it was not altogether the Griffin’s demoniac desire to kill certain persons who had come under the ban of his inflamed imagination. He believed that the Griffin, devising some hideously artful means of destruction, experimenting with some new and subtle mode of murder; was obsessed with the desire to see its effect. His madness took the form of an exalted ego, a dementia not merely homicidal but grandiose. He exulted in choosing the most notable so that his deed should be noised abroad. He rejoiced to see the press describe him as a monster, demand that he should be caught.
It aroused this perverted vanity to pit himself against Manning. He held one great advantage. Although he chose to tell Manning when and where he would strike, he had the benefit of preparation. It was like a game of chess, he had told Manning once, and, while it amused him, he was content to play it.
“Cease to amuse me,” he threatened. “And the game will end—for you. Don’t be too clever.”
Nor was that all. The woman Manning loved, whom he believed loved him, had been drawn into the fringes of the Griffin’s net on one occasion. Her safety was threatened. That disaster was always hovering. It hung over Manning’s head like the famous sword of Damocles. He dared not ask her to marry him because of his own constant danger, and the Griffin had seen through that, had used it as a probe with which to wear down Manning’s vitality and powers. It was no wonder that he was drawn fine; that the furrows of thought between his eyebrows had deepened.
And now, he was sure, the Griffin was ready to strike again.
II
IT was there, on his desk in the office that looked out beyond the towers of Manhattan to the busy river and its spanning bridges. The biggest city in the world, the busiest, made the hunting ground, the web of this monster.
A square, gray envelope of handmade paper. The bold, somewhat erratic writing in purple ink. The scarlet seal.
Manning had tried to trace that paper in vain. As for the writing, it was at present a futile clew. To the expert Manning had chosen to analyze it, it had formed the basis of a remarkable report that coincided marvelously with Manning’s preconception of the Griffin’s character.
He opened it without hesitation. With the prospect of action his pulses quickened, his brain seemed charged with unusual vigor. The lassitude that had crept upon him lately vanished. This time, surely, he would cope with the Griffin, capture him, meet wile with wile.
My dear Manning:
I trust I have not been harrying you through my silence. I have been conducting certain most interesting experiments which, while they are not yet entirely finished, are sufficiently conclusive to permit me to advise you of my next enterprise.
The man I have chosen to eliminate is Everett Payson, that smug saint, that medieval moron, who has been striving absurdly to reconcile science with religion, who has made the statement that Science can accept the idea of a future life with—mark this—individuality retained after death.
It is my intention to let him prove his own theory. You may have noticed the controversy of late in the
Times.
I don’t know if those matters interest you. If so it may not altogether surprise you to know that the letters signed Lucifer came from me. To any sane person they would be utterly convincing, but this self ordained professor, this champion of worn-out creeds, refuses to acknowledge defeat.
There is but one way to stop it.
It will be on Tuesday, which is to-morrow, my dear Manning, to-morrow from the day you receive this.
I throw down the gage to you. Surround him with protection or let him depend upon Divine Providence, coupled of course by your own personal efforts. But he will surely solve the vexing question some time between daylight and dark on Tuesday—which happens to be the thirteenth.
Payson, of course, thinks he is not superstitious. For that jest I could almost let him off if the fool did not go spread his nauseous, noxious syrup. But there is, as you must know from your own experience, much virtue in numbers, figures. I have calculated the horoscope of Everett Payson, and his star even now enters the House of Death.