He leaped forward into the narrow space at the side of the bed. The couched figure rose with a gasping protest as Manning tore off a mask, the pate of which was wigged with black tresses; surrounding the skull like a helmet. Its removal exposed flaming hair—and the face of Katherine Burton, deadly pale.
Manning stood sidewise to the bed. He had used his left hand for the dramatic disclosure. His right gripped a flat automatic. Thorndyke took the warning and backed to the wall.
“I want to know where the girl is,” said Manning. “Burton has been forging her signature to receive her income and pay it out, just as he forged the letter Stanhope is supposed to have sent me—forged Stanhope’s signature to the will. An excellent forgery, but a forgery none the less, as I can prove. I want to know where Stanhope is. They may both be dead. If so, you’ll burn for it, you and Burton and Burton’s sister, masquerading in the bed now, and in the window every day as Alice Minturn—when she isn’t playing on that cracked up tennis court. Stanhope may be still alive, but he won’t be long, left to you. You’re the boss devil in this conspiracy, Thorndyke. You cooked up this scheme to replenish the funds you’ve spent—giving this woman’s jewels as a sop—and wasting the rest on the orgies in the penthouse Burton leases. I was there last night, Thorndyke and I saw.”
There came a gasp from the woman on the bed. Manning had scant pity for her.
“You love Thorndyke,” he said, without taking his eyes off the doctor. “If you had seen him last night….”
She broke into uncontrolled sobbing. A hundred happenings flashed back to her, confirming doubts she had fought against. She wrung the hands from which she had removed the gems of deception.
“That tennis court of yours aroused my curiosity,” said Manning. “You seem fond of playing on it. The man who laid the cement for it tells me he warned you to put a foundation of cinders under the cement, but that at the last moment you told him to go ahead without it, after you had held up the job for three days. I want to know why? I think I can guess, but I’m going to find out.”
The woman collapsed. Thorndyke advanced, his hands up.
“You win, Manning,” he said. “I never dreamed you’d come into this. The luck ran against me. But they’re both alive. My gun is in my right-hand pocket. It’s the only one I have. I should have known better than try to hoodwink you.”
Manning took his weapon, but he did not turn his back on the bed. This surrender, sensible as it was, came too pat. Then he saw the doctor’s hand go to his mouth. His features writhed and he fell. It looked like cyanide; but his arms wrapped themselves about Manning’s legs like twin pythons as the door burst open and Burton, with the Japanese back of him leaped into the room.
Manning, half off his balance, swung his gun. He clubbed Thorndyke behind his ear and saw bright blood spurt where the gun-sight broke the skin, opened veins, and stunned the doctor.
A shot rang out and he felt the sting and sear of hot lead in his left shoulder. That arm was out of commission as he kicked free from Thorndyke’s relaxed grip and threw a light chair at the Japanese who was crouched for a spring, knife in hand.
The bullet had shattered bone and Manning fought off the nerve-shock as he dropped to one knee while Burton’s second shot roared out. The missile tore the air just above his head. Manning fired from his hip and Burton spun about, falling with a yell, his hip smashed.
The Japanese shouted. Katherine Burton huddled under the sheets. From outside Doherty crashed the rear door with his hurled weight and raced up the stairs. He threw himself upon the Jap who landed on his shoulders, his knife driven through the thick rug into the floor.
Burton was writhing; Thorndyke lay prone. Doherty struggled for a moment with the Jap and finally clicked the handcuffs on him.
“Try your damned jujutsu with me, will you?” he panted. “Howd’ye like the Kilkenny clutch? You’re hurt,” he said to Manning.
“We’ll fix that,” said Manning. “Call up the local station and tell them to bring a surgeon. We’ve got to find that girl.”
The sheeted huddle in the bed stirred. Katherine Burton spoke in a harsh voice.
“I’ll tell you where she is,” she said. “But she’s dead, and buried under the tennis court, though I don’t see how you knew that. But we didn’t kill her. If anyone did it was Stanhope; going away and not saying where. She was a romantic sort and she didn’t care what happened to her. She came to us. We were hard up. We’d lost all we had. There were no commissions for my brother. Alice let us handle her money. Thorndyke attended her. He was hard up, too. Now I can guess where some of his income went. He made a fool out of me. Now I’m fooling him. Alice died one night when he was here. It was her heart. It meant the end of the money. She had left us some, but she had made a crazy will with all sorts of bequests. My brother owed Thorndyke money, or so he claimed. Well, the ground was cleared and leveled for the court. Soft dirt, rolled. It wasn’t much of a job to bury her and roll the dirt again. But it rained the next two days and I suppose we all got nervous. Ito had seen us and he wanted to know what we had hidden away. Elmer got the contractor to leave out the cinders and finish the thing in a hurry. It’s haunted us ever since. We’ve played on it to lay the ghost, Elmer and I. Thorndyke doesn’t play tennis, but he took his share of the income. It didn’t last long. They didn’t tell me where it all went.
“I didn’t know about the penthouse,” she continued with the hellish fury of a scorned woman. “Then Stanhope came. He had money. He wanted to see Alice. So….”
“I know the rest,” said Manning. “I hope, for your sake, they haven’t made away with Stanhope.”
“Try and find him,” snarled Thorndyke. “You can’t prove anything without a body, Manning: When you disinter the one under the tennis court you’ll only uncover natural causes.”
“Aside from murder; forgery and kidnaping, fraud and a few other matters may be found interesting,” Manning answered. “I’m going to search Burton’s studio. Then I’ll turn the affair over to the police. After all, I am not a professional detective.”
“Damn you amateurs,” gritted Thorndyke and Manning laughed at him.
“That was your trouble, doctor,” he said. “You went outside your own profession.”
“It was a good guess, and a lucky one,” Manning told the commissioner, “looking for Stanhope in the studio. They’d have taken him for a ride before long. It doesn’t look as if we could pin murder on them, but there’s plenty beside that. The case is cleared.”
“Thanks to you,” said the commissioner. “There’s one thing not quite clear. You claim the letter that came with the will was a forgery. Our man says it isn’t. So does another expert.”
Manning chuckled.
“It was because the letter was forged that I got busy,” he said. “The trouble is with a good many criminal detective scientists that they can’t see the wood for the trees. They rely too much on modern inventions, micro-photography and black rays. I’ll show you something. Mind writing your name on a sheet of paper?”
The commissioner obeyed.
“I want an ordinary sheet of glass,” said Manning. “The glass out of a picture frame will do. Or what they use downstairs for mixing finger-print ink.”
It was not hard to secure. Manning placed the paper with the commissioner’s signature to the left, another blank sheet to the right.
“Nothing magical or complicated about this,” he said. “I used it as a kid to help me learn drawing. Hold that glass upright, will you?”
With suddenly revived recollection the commissioner obeyed, nodding as the image of his writing was refracted accurately on the blank sheet.
“Did it myself once,” he said while Manning traced the image over with a pen.
“Pretty good job,” Manning remarked. “For an artist with a free hand, like Burton, it would be duck soup, to quote Doherty.”
The commissioner nodded.
“It’ll make the experts sit up,” he said. “Knowing this
method and finding no finger-prints tipped you off, then?”
“That—plus a first class hunch,” said Manning.
The Unknown Menace
Seemed to Gordon Manning, as He Clung Desperately to His Dead Companion, That a Strange New Monster Had Risen in the Underworld
The old trainer of the private gymnasium that catered to those of the business men of lower Manhattan who cared about their physical condition, looked approvingly at Gordon Manning as he came naked from the needle shower, after having taken on and defeated the younger professional at handball.
Manning was fit. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his body, which was as coppery as a Carib Indian’s, neither was he too finely drawn. The lines that had been graven indelibly in his face by menace and suspense, by mental strain and physical stress, were barely visible. He was “in the pink” and the trainer told him so with both pride and affection in his voice.
He loved this efficient ex-major of Military Intelligence, world-wide traveler and explorer, recent conqueror of the most malicious and crafty of all murderers, the evil genius of the twentieth century.
“It’s the vacation,” said Manning. “I managed to wangle it at last. I’m feeling great.”
“I didn’t like the way you looked just before you ran down that devil who called himself the Griffin,” said the trainer. “I hope they keep him safe in Dannemora.”
“It’s not an easy place to get out of,” returned Manning with a laugh that, like the chime of a bronze bell, proclaimed the perfect coalition of healthy mind and body. “If he does we’ll have to put him back again, that’s all.”
At the moment, as he toweled himself, he took the grim suggestion lightly. Yet the chase and capture of the Griffin, after that madman had mockingly proclaimed and executed the death of a score of the world’s most brilliant and useful citizens, had almost made an old man of Manning before his time; had plunged society, science and commerce into turmoil; had terrorized New York and horrified the whole of America.
That was over now. The insane but brilliant being, whose distorted mind conceived the most diabolical exploits, was safe in Dannemora. He had suffered physically in his final encounter with the law and from that he had been reported slowly recovering. But his mind showed the effect of the moment when his supreme conceit had been broken by Gordon Manning, when his egomaniacal belief in his supremacy had been challenged and shattered. He was said to have alternate moods of homicidal rage and deep depression when, like Giant Despair, he would sit biting his nails and glowering with eyes in which the fires of Hades seemed to flicker.
Manning dressed and started to walk the few blocks to his offices where, as proclaimed upon the outer door, he practised as Counselor at Law and Consulting Attorney. When he got restive he disappeared and club members wondered what distant, unknown trail Manning might be following; hobnobbing with South Sea kahunas or Aleutian shamans, guest of a Tibetan Lhamasery or deciphering the runes of a pro-Toltec steles and pyramids?
Many looked at his keen, hawkish face with its beaky nose, clean-cut jaw, and his eyes at once serene and questing, without knowing who he was, but recognizing his distinction. Others were glad to nod to him, to call him by name as he strode swiftly south and east; hatless, carrying his favorite weapon, a cane—a steel rod covered with shrunken leather rings. In the hands of Manning it was as efficient as a rapier; it could flick shin or knee or elbow with a painful precision that was disabling. It had beaten many an attempted gundraw or slungshot blow.
There was mail waiting for him. All of it save that marked “Personal” had been opened by his efficient secretary. She laid one letter, typed perfectly but curiously on an imprinted sheet of heavy bond, on the top of the sheaf of correspondence where he would see it first. She was a pretty, red-headed girl, extremely capable, and devoted to Manning. She had intuition allied with brains and he saw now that she attached some special significance to this communication. He read it through—once. There was no need to do so again. The whole page was imprinted upon his mind as if it had been photographed there.
There was no address, extremely wide margins, single spacing.
Gordon Manning, Esq.,
Consulting Attorney,
79 Wall Street,
New York City.
Dear Sir:
As you have been interested from time to time in similar happenings, it may now interest you to learn that a plan has been made to end the life of Joseph Curran. There may be others of that name, but there is only one Big Joe. The attack will take place within the next forty-eight hours. If you should decide to try and protect him you will undoubtedly run grave risk of sharing death with him.
Sincerely yours,
Well Wisher.
With the typed letter in his hand, Manning stared out of the window, seeing, without registering, the towers of Manhattan, the spidering of the great bridge.
The anonymous writer was correct. There was only one “Big Joe.”
Joseph Curran, ex-contractor, now a man whose millions seemed to have weathered even the depression, was a power in the land. He wielded more power than any one in the State, though it was a power that never appeared in public, that disclaimed all authority.
“I have nothing to do with politics,” Big Joe said, time and time again, when he gave out interviews. “I am naturally interested in the welfare of the community, selfishly first, perhaps, and then, let us hope, more altruistically.”
But it was significant that those in the seats of the mighty took counsel with Big Joe; that professional politicians weighed the words of one who styled himself an amateur. Whoever Big Joe championed, openly or secretly, was ninety per cent sure to win. Equally those whom Big Joe did not approve went down to obscurity and oblivion.
The sort of man who has many friends—and many enemies.
Reporters wrote down what he permitted them to say with their tongues in their cheeks. If he had been the back number he professed to be editors would not have sent reporters to interview him.
He had been in politics when he was a contractor, no doubt about that. And the political leopard does not change his spots.
Not that Big Joe was essentially a leopard. He was undoubtedly fearless and aggressive, though his movements were masked, but he was faithful to his associates so long as they were staunch to principles. No one was more charitable than Big Joe Curran and, in his charities, more often than not, his right hand did not know when his left hand gave alms. The field of charity was the only one into which politics did not enter with Curran.
A big man, physically and mentally. A man who knew men. A bigger man than the Mayor of Manhattan, than the Governor of the State, than the State representatives and senators rolled into one. His influence was felt at the White House.
Some crank, Manning was convinced; some fancied victim of slight or injury, one of the hundreds to whom Curran was forced to deny or withdraw favors, meant to kill him—and might accomplish it.
There was never a bad man of any renown, whether he came from the Badlands of Wyoming or the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, who does not have imitators. Crime in Manhattan, as published in the lurid columns and pictures of the tabloids, has egged on many a man whose mind was evil, but did not otherwise have the courage to emulate Billy the Kid or Gyp the Blood when he began to figure out his own private vendetta.
As for the warning, it could have come from the would-be killer himself. Then, too, the killer might have boasted of his intended plans to someone who hoped to nip them in the bud.
Cranks were strange people, their motives as eccentric as their actions. Manning had known men who confessed to murders they had never committed; men who denounced themselves as kidnapers. Some strange wish to get into the limelight might actuate most of them, but Manning believed that there was some deep motive back of this new warning. Politics breeds not only strange bedfellows, but brings in sinister creatures. Jackals become ravening lions when denied a share of spoils they believe due the
m. Julius Cæsar was neither the first nor the last man to die of Politicalitis.
Manning resolved to turn the letter over to the Commissioner of Police, but he meant to do so with a comment that he himself took the matter seriously. No doubt the commissioner would, also. Big Joe was his patron saint. If anything that the police might have prevented happened to Curran, it was going to be just too bad for the head of the Department.
Curran was not going to be too easy to protect. As all the world that read the papers knew, Big Joe lived through the summer at his residence on Long Island, known as Blue Bay Lodge. He was unmarried. Blue Bay Lodge was Bachelors’ Hall for those lucky enough to be its guests.
There he grew roses for diversion, yachted, lived the life of a country squire, to all appearances. But big men with high ambitions went there and asked favors or received instructions. So did office holders. The week-end parties there often held far more significance than a political rally or convention.
It was quite likely that Big Joe had personal guards, more likely that his menservants, house, garage, stables and yacht were chosen with a dual purpose in mind. In any event he would guffaw at the idea that he would be bumped off by an unknown. In his time, Big Joe had made waste paper of thousands of anonymous letters. He might be hated—doubtless was—but he was also feared and even loved.
Manning had met him. Big Joe belonged to two of Manning’s clubs. They had met at banquets. They had discussed many things, but not politics. Politics was outside Manning’s life; but he knew the quality of Big Joe. He was a modern Warwick, a king-maker.
Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 Page 16
