“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“Get me a glass of cold water from Judge Carruthers’ bathroom.”
Roberts had a ruddy enough face, but it changed to the hue of chalk. His eyes became fixed, bulging. His voice was hoarse. He stared at Manning with his whole powerful body tense. Then he relaxed. Manning’s voice had been perfectly casual, the request ordinary.
“I’ll get you some from the pantry, sir, with ice,” he said.
“I prefer it chilled, without ice, from the house service,” said Manning evenly.
The butler’s thin lips stretched, parted, showing his teeth in what might be meant for a grin. His eyes shone maliciously.
“Very good, sir,” he said, and marched into the bedroom.
Manning made a warning gesture to the judge. The butler came back with a filled glass. He offered it to Manning.
“ ’Ere you are, sir,” he said with his eyes baleful.
“It’s for you, Roberts,” said Manning. “You drink it. You understand?”
Again the blood receded from the butler’s face. It rushed back again. His eyes narrowed. He took a step towards the door.
“That will do you no good, Roberts,” said Manning. “They are waiting for you to come out. How did the Griffin manage to plant you here? You’ll get off easier if you confess. You didn’t kill the judge, you see.”
Roberts’ features were convulsed with fury.
“Damn you!” he cried. “Clever, but not clever enough, Mr. Manning.”
He flung the glass, contents and all, at Manning’s face and whipped out a flat gun from his hip pocket with the precision of long practice. He fired at Carruthers in his easy chair. The weapon had a silencer, it made no more sound than the popping of a cork.
The roar of Manning’s service gun drowned it entirely. The water had checked him for a split pulse-beat. He did not know whether or not that hesitation in his own draw had been fatal to Carruthers. His bullet struck Roberts in the shoulder and spoiled the butler’s second shot, this time at Manning.
The impact sent Roberts staggering back to the wall, one hand behind him to steady him. Manning wanted to cripple, not to kill him.
“Drop your gun,” he ordered sharply. The men from across the hall had heard the report of Manning’s weapon and they were at the outer door, hurrying to the scene when the lights went out and the room was plunged into darkness, only relieved by the vague light that came through the windows. Roberts’ groping hand had thrown the switch he knew where to locate.
He and Manning fired simultaneously. A bullet zipped over the latter’s head as he crouched, expecting the attack, trying to get the butler against the window. He knew he had scored. He heard a curse and the fall of Roberts’ gun. He had got him in hand or arm.
Then he saw him staggering, swiftly making for the big window. He fancied he meant to leap through it, glass and all. Once more Manning fired and the butler toppled just as the plain-clothes men broke in and blazed at the fugitive before Manning could stop them.
Manning found the switch and put on the lights, infinitely relieved to see Carruthers alive. The bullet had gone into the padded arm of the wing-chair, missing the judge by inches. Manning’s lead had scored first, spoiled the assassin’s aim.
Roberts was dead, riddled. The detectives put a rug over him. Manning had hit him in shoulder, leg and the right wrist.
“Get the Medical Examiner up here,” said Manning. “I’m sorry you killed him, though I think it would have been a tough job to make him talk.”
“The commissioner is downstairs,” said one of the detectives. “Sergeant Morgan told me so last time I rang the lobby to report.”
Manning nodded. He turned back the rug part way, then replaced it. He fancied there had been other, swifter means of Roberts killing himself than by jumping out the window when he saw the game was up. The Griffin would never tolerate failure.
The lucky shot in the wrist had prevented him from trying to get it, preserved it for evidence. But Manning was a stickler for routine. He would not touch the body until the examining surgeon came.
“It was a diabolically ingenious device,” said Manning. “The Griffin boasted to me once that the way to murder a man was to study his habits and take advantage of them. No doubt he has done so in this case. He knew of the chilled water supplied by the building for all bathrooms. No one but the judge would use the faucet in his bathroom. And he always takes a little bicarbonate of soda in cold water before retiring.
“So Roberts, or whatever his name is, mixed some of those yellow crystals from that little box we found in his vest pocket with grease and lined the inside of the faucet. Probably with his finger. You may find traces under a nail.”
“But how did you discover it, man?” asked Carruthers.
“I didn’t,” said Manning. “I was convinced this was to be an inside job. I sent the table cigar lighter down to headquarters some hours ago to see if they could find a record of Roberts’ finger-prints, which were nicely registered on it. We should have results almost any minute. Of course Roberts would have been shadowed again. I had no intention of letting you out of my sight, judge, until dawn came. But there seemed no harm in your getting water for the dog. It was the dog that saved you, Judge Carruthers.
“You put his dish back of the settee. You could not see it, but I did. I saw the dog drink. I saw it die, instantaneously. Its body is back of the settee now though it looks as if it was asleep, poor little devil. I imagine most of the poison—whatever it turns out to be, undoubtedly some alkaloid—dissolved immediately and entirely. There was only enough grease to hold the crystals in place. Roberts, of course, did not know that the dog was dead. I wanted to confront him with discovery to force the truth out of him by surprise, but he was a resourceful beggar.”
“You saved my life a second time,” said Carruthers. “He did his best to shoot me. Do you imagine the Griffin will warn me a second time?”
“There won’t be a second time if I know anything of him,” said Manning. “Remember, he is insane. Failure breaks him. Don’t forget that he actually believes in his star readings and divinations. They have betrayed him. He will be infuriated. He will be dangerous only to himself for a while. Then he will strike again if we have not found him beforehand, but not in the same place.”
The telephone rang. Manning answered it, listening attentively for two or three minutes.
“All right,” he said as he hung up and turned to the rest. “They have traced Roberts’ prints,” he said. “They had trouble doing so because they were not in the regular files. They were part of the batch of prints the Department made at the Griffin’s aerie when we captured him. Some of those men he had working for him got away. This was one of them.
“The Griffin has been rounding them up. You told me you could guarantee your servants, judge,” Manning went on severely. “He was a good butler, I grant. But where and when did you get him?”
Judge Carruthers looked almost sheepish.
“My man, whose name was also Roberts,” he said, “had an accident six weeks ago. He was hit and badly hurt by a truck. As a matter of fact he never recovered consciousness after he was taken to the hospital. I was informed of it by this man. He telephoned me. He said he was with my Roberts and was his brother. He is about the same build and not unlike him in a general way. He told me that before his brother lapsed into his coma the main thing that troubled him was my being without a man. He offered to substitute. He showed me references, from abroad. The whole thing was so natural I never had the slightest misgiving. As you said, Manning, he was a good butler.”
“Good also at observing your habits and reporting to the Griffin,” said Manning. “You felt that it was unlikely that the dog might have been bumped by accident, and I agree with you. It was Fate and your own good fortune that it was hit where you saw it. But Roberts’ injury and following death in the hospital was not an accident by any means. Thank God we found things out in time.”
“Thank God, indeed,” said the judge. “I might have taken a drink myself before I gave one to the dog. As a matter of fact I did think of it.” He shivered. “I think a different sort of drink might do all of us good, gentlemen. How about it?”
They were in the library together. The police commissioner, Judge Carruthers and Gordon Manning. The grim procedure had been gone through. The body of the pseudo butler had been taken away. The plain-clothes men still kept the vigil that was nearly over.
Dawn was coming, graying the sky. Carruthers raised his glass.
“Give us a toast, Manning,” he said. “I don’t know whether we should drink to your health for preserving mine or to the failure of the Griffin.”
Manning lifted his own highball.
“I suggest,” he said, “that we drink to the dog.”
Day of Doom
It Seemed That Even the Griffin’s Fiendish Ingenuity Could Never Pierce the Vault of Steel to Get Manning and the Man He Guarded, and Yet….
There is an hour when the world’s greatest city, the city that never sleeps, drowses; when its din is hushed to inarticulate murmurs; the hour when both night and day seem reluctant to exchange their tasks; when the vitality of sleepers is lowest and they stir in uneasy dreams.
The hour of crime, of fugitive crooks and furtive murderers; of mysterious night prowlers, when the shadows are deepest and justice least alert.
Mists shroud the mighty towers and spires of Manhattan; the tide, in its twin rivers rolls strong and sullen under the veiled stars, past the frowning penitentiary at Ossining where convicts twist and moan in cells little larger than a kennel, or start awake with a shriek from horrid visions, dreading to hear the slow steps of the warden—and the priest—to know their last day dawning, all too soon.
A long black sedan with its headlights dimmed, gliding from south to north, from the all-night ferry to the slow-beating heart of the metropolis, swung off the main avenue to the one-way street. Just around the corner, it braked at the side entrance to an old building that still seemed to stand, stubborn and resentful, amid the modern edifices.
The driver sat like an automaton, in sable livery, the peak of his chauffeur’s cap well down over his saturnine countenance. A man descended, cloaked from chin to knees, dressed all in black. Under the wide rim of his slouch hat features showed deathlike in their pallor and rigidity; black hair hung low inside the upturned velvet collar; black Spanish beard and mustachios, black eyes that glittered, and a nose like an eagle’s beak.
He turned for a moment to speak in a strange, uncouth tongue to a passenger, then seemed to swoop into the dark recess of the doorway.
There was the click of a key and he entered a hallway with cracked floor mosaics, walls where the paint was dingy and the plaster falling. Stairs led upwards in the gloom. An elevator cage, closed for the night, was on his right.
He pressed the button of a bell beside a door next to the stairway. Its sharp ring below was like a spark in the night that burned and died.
Above the ground floor the building was rented in studios to struggling artists who worked there by day when there was work to be done. None lived there but this man, on the top floor in a studio suite that was exotically luxurious compared to the rest, furnished with the fantastic gleanings of a painter who had met swift tragedy abroad. The cloaked man had leased the dead painter’s rooms, bought his furniture complete, adding to it certain possessions of his own.
The elevator ran only from eight in the morning until eight at night. The brother of its colored operator was the only person now in the building. Janitor and watchman in one, he styled himself superintendent.
Usually the cloaked man used the stairs. The other lessees did not see him, only the janitor who cleaned his studio and sometimes fearfully observed his somber shadow on the walls, swooping up or down like a great vulture, seeking corruption. Always between midnight and dawn.
The janitor appeared from the cellarway, his eyes rolling, his manner humble.
“You been away, Mr. Silbi?”
The deep voice of the man who had signed the lease as Silbi, boomed and echoed in the shabby hallway.
“Yes. I’ve been away. But I’m back. I trust I shall find all as I left it. I have brought back somebody who will clean my studio and attend to my wants after this. You shall be no loser by it. I know your pay is small. I shall continue my addition to it. We will call it a gratuity, a tip. Here is what is owing you for the past weeks—since I have been away.”
The janitor received the bills obsequiously.
“Anything I can do, suh?”
“Yes. This person I have brought is somewhat of a cripple. He cannot walk, at least upstairs. You can run the elevator for us?”
“Yes, suh. It’s down below. I’ll connect the current an’ bring it up.”
He dived down to his basement. The man called Silbi went to the doorway and whistled, as he might have whistled to a dog. The street lights gave him a sinister appearance, mysterious and unearthly. Spell his name backward and it became Iblis, Prince of Darkness, who was smitten of God for refusing to abase himself before God’s creation, Adam.
Here indeed was a being who bowed to no man, who loved no man, and warred on all humanity; in whose abnormal brain brewed machinations as fiendish as any plotted in the council hall of Hades.
The chauffeur reached back to reopen the door. A creature swung from the car and scuttled with horrible agility across the sidewalk to its Master. It had the body of a man. On the chest and shoulders that might have belonged to a gorilla there was set a head little larger than that of an infant, that looked somewhat like the head of a monkey, something like that of a bulldog. It was unclad and entirely hairless.
The body ended at the hips. The creature propelled itself like an ape, on the knuckles of its hands. At every propulsion of its long and muscular arms the body swung clear, like a pendulum. If Iblis was its master, surely here was the familiar of that fallen angel, a thing misspawned in some fetid nook of hell.
The janitor, stepping from the elevator he had brought to the level of the floor, stood aghast, his skin turned gray.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” said Silbi. “Speaking widely, he is human. A freak. But not dangerous, as a rule. What he has of body is tremendously developed. Nature has done her best to compensate. Not so strong of brain, but it has had little room to develop. Quite intelligent, far more so than a chimpanzee. And very useful. Very useful. He will not bother you so long as you do not bother him. He cannot understand what you say though he can speak, childishly and ungrammatically, in his own tongue.”
Mr. Silbi spoke with a sort of pride, as if he had himself created this amorphous thing.
“He got a name?” asked the janitor, his curiosity bettering his awe. “He lose his legs in an accident?”
“A name? Hardly a christened one. His parents disowned him. His mother left him in a sack when he was a few hours old. I imagine she was too frightened to strangle him. You see, he was born without legs and that head of his must have been very small and rather alarming at that time. I rescued him from the ignominy of being exposed as a freak. I bought him from a sideshow.”
“That mighty good of you, Mr. Silbi.”
“Ah! Philanthropy is usually selfish at base. Suppose we call him Al. Not short for Alfred or Albert. Al was one of a very gruesome and impure group of demons in Persian mythology, found sitting in sandy places, plotting beastliness. I think Al is a very good name for him. Come, Al.”
The creature half hopped, half swung into the elevator, squatting there, grotesque and obscene, as the lift ascended.
“I expect a visitor, soon,” said Silbi. “You might let him use the elevator. He can walk downstairs,” he added, and the sentence was a statement of fact rather than a suggestion.
Al followed his master into the vast studio, three high rooms made into one, others adjoining. His restless eyes took in the curious conglomeration of carved furniture, weapons, a suit of armo
r, lamps swung from the ceiling with amber and ruby lights, lounges, deep rugs. On a desk there was a globe of crystal. Low, weird music started to play as the lights went on. Incense rose. Stars shone golden on a field of black where the signs of the zodiac slowly circled, emblazoned in silver inlay.
The man whistled again and snapped his fingers. He preferred to communicate with Al by signs rather than promote his intelligence, if that were possible. He led the way to a tiled room that seemed part kitchen, part laboratory. There were locked steel cabinets against the walls. Next to the room was a closet with a high skylight.
“I’ll get a cot for you, though you hardly need it,” Silbi said aloud. “Rugs would be better, with a cushion or so.”
He motioned for Al to stay there and the deformed creature fawned on him, stroking the hem of his cloak. Silbi locked him in, returning presently with a rug and a pillow. Al lay on his back, lumpish and inert. Silbi left him there.
In the main studio, Silbi stripped off his cloak, long-haired wig and artificial beard and mustachios. He filled a Turkish hubble-bubble and seated himself to smoke before the fire of cannel coal. By its glow his face looked more than ever sinister, Satanic.
There were signs of suffering there, and ever-snarling hate, close to the surface.
It was the face of the incarnate fiend in human form known as the Griffin, the being whose killings of distinguished men had terrorized a continent, a monomaniac of murder.
He picked up a radiator ornament from a tabouret and fondled it. It was a casting in golden bronze of the fabulous creature whose name he had adopted; half eagle, half lion, symbol of swiftness, rapaciousness, cruelty. He held it as a talisman, remembering bitterly the aerie he had built, where there had lain a golden griffin as a paperweight upon a great table in his circular room of steel.
He remembered his slaves who had worked for him in subterranean caverns, bound by his knowledge of their guilty pasts, scientists, artisans and artists. He remembered endless days and nights in Dannemora, crippled, celled. He remembered the man who had shattered his organization, cast him into prison. Gordon Manning.
Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 Page 21
