“You mean so the conductor couldn’t identify him later?”
“More than that. Listen how simple it was. One of the last things I remember was one of the other men getting up and walking to the back of the car. The reason I don’t remember much after that was that on his way back he slugged me with a blackjack. That’s when the lights went out—for me.
“Then look how simple it was. He sat down beside me, and his companion moved back, too. The one who’d played drunk took the seat behind. They switched tickets in the clips by the windows, and the drunken one traded hats with me and put on me the dark glasses he’d been wearing. We were at the back of the car, practically, and all of that could have been done without attracting much attention.”
Armin said, “I think I get it. When the conductor went through again, there were still the same number of people, sitting in the same relative positions and their tickets checked. One of them had been unconscious before, and he was unconscious then.”
I nodded. “And at Wilmington, the two men who were sober helped their drunken companion off the train—practically carrying him between them. Only it was me instead, and the one who’d changed places with me probably rode on to Washington on my ticket. It all checks out, see? Three off at Wilmington, and one through to Washington. And it had already been planted in the conductor’s mind that the one in the black hat was too drunk to walk alone, so—”
“I get it,” said Armin. “But why Wilmington? How do you know they…you…got off there?”
“Wilmington and Baltimore are the only stops the Flyer makes after Philadelphia. The conductors use red cardboard seat checks for through to Washington, yellow for Wilmington, and probably some other color for Baltimore. They had yellow checks, I remember, like ours are tonight.”
Armin whistled softly. He said, “It would have worked. It would have worked. So they got you off the train that way, unconscious. And they took you somewhere, you think, and staged a phony wreck while you were coming out of it and then dropped you where you were found?”
“There wasn’t any need for a phony wreck. Just sound effects, damn it. Look, my impression of that wreck is the sum of four things—sudden darkness and pain, sounds, and the seat rising under me. Look how easy that is.
“Maybe they took me somewhere in Wilmington for the runaround, or maybe they drove back to Philadelphia first. Come to think of it, Philadelphia’s more likely.
“So when I’m coming out of it a little, in a dark room, or maybe only blindfolded, they give me those sound effects. Recorded, and probably through a set of headphones. I remember now something that I didn’t think of before—a sense of pressure on my ears while this…er…wreck was going on.”
Armin nodded. “It could be, Hank, it could be. You had the sudden darkness and the pain already, and you slowly come out of it to those sound effects, and maybe they’ve got you sitting on a sofa and lifting it a bit—or maybe that sense of motion was just nausea. And I think that would account for something else—your nightmares back in the sanitarium.”
“How?”
“If you were unconscious, you’d have had no sense of time. That’s why all those things came together in your mind; the darkness, the pain, the sounds. But they wouldn’t have taken a chance on your hearing those sound effects only once. Maybe you wouldn’t have remembered them. You may have had those earphones on for half an hour or longer, hearing those sounds over and over. You’d have had no impression of lapse of time, but the repetition would have made that impression so vivid it would have haunted your dreams.”
And it had haunted them, all right. I shuddered a bit at the memory of those nightmares in a madhouse.
We were silent a moment, and then Armin said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What’s your next step? I think you’re right on Wednesday night. It adds up. And your suggestion for a reason is sound; somebody wanted you out of the way without attracting attention to the lab by murdering you. And the thing was so elaborately done, I think we can say it wasn’t any casual robbery. Those three men must have been German agents. Do you suppose they got what they wanted?”
I said, “I still can’t imagine what it was. Maybe they heard a false rumor about my lab, or got their wires crossed somehow. But they got what they wanted, if it was there, because they took my papers before they set that time bomb. I doubt if they’ll be able to translate ’em, though. I make notes in a sort of chemical shorthand of my own.”
“Want me to go to Major Lorne for you, Hank? I imagine if I tell him all this, it will certainly open his mind and he’ll start the investigation in the right direction. If you like, you can stay under cover until you’re cleared.”
“Would you talk to him? We can go right on through to Washington on this train and—”
“He’s in Philadelphia,” Armin interrupted. “We’ll have to switch back at Wilmington, but I’ll see him tonight, when we get back. We’re almost to Wilmington now.”
At Wilmington, we had to wait forty-five minutes for a train back. We got back to Philadelphia at half past nine.
In the station, I suggested, “Let’s have a drink to celebrate this. Where’s Lorne staying?”
Armin named the hotel, and I said, “You can phone to see if he’s in, while I order for us. Come on.”
In the bar, I ordered two ryes and by the time the bartender had brought them, Armin was back from the phone booth.
“Out,” he said. “Left word at the desk he wouldn’t be back until around eleven.” He picked up his drink. “Mud in your eye.”
“And tetranitronaphthalene in yours,” I told him. “But what do we do until twelve? I’d feel safer under cover, in a movie or somewhere. In a place like this, there’s always the chance someone who knows me will walk in.”
He nodded. “It would weaken your case to be picked up now, before I get in licks with the major. I’d talk to Garland instead, but I think he’s back in Washington—or maybe, by this time, somewhere else on another case. They consider this one closed, except for finding you.”
“Shall we try a movie then? Or, if it would bore you, I can go alone and meet you afterward.”
Armin said, “Maybe we can do something constructive. I’ve been thinking about that sound-effects angle. Maybe we can get a lead on it, since we’ve got two hours to kill.”
“Swell. What’s the angle?”
“Canned sound effects—unusual ones like train wreck noises and multiple screams—aren’t any too common. Every big radio station’s got a library of them, of course. But if recordings like those have been borrowed or stolen from any Philadelphia station recently—well, it might give us a lead. And there must be a pretty limited number of people who’d have free access to them.”
“But that would take a canvass of the studios,” I said. “We wouldn’t have time in two hours.”
“We won’t go to the studios. Not first, anyway. I know a fellow who’s salesman for the Metropolitan Specialty Co. They sell stuff like that, to the studios. We can find out from him who might have ordered recordings of that kind recently. If it’s a studio, we can figure the ones in their library were stolen, and if we can tell Major Lorne that recordings like that were stolen, it’ll be a big boost to your story. If some private party bought them direct—hell, it’s not only a boost for your story; it’s a straight lead to the gang we’re after.”
“That idea,” I said, “calls for another drink. Champagne, if you want it!”
He grinned. “I’ll stick to rye. You can order while I find out if we can see him tonight.”
The ryes were waiting on the bar when he came back, and I could tell from his face that he’d been successful. He nodded, and said, “I phoned for a cab, too. The less walking you do, the better.”
He raised his glass. “Here’s—what was it you said, in my eye?”
“Tetranitro
naphthalene. But that was in your right eye. How’s about hexanitrodiphenalymene in your left?”
We drank, and it tasted like nectar. I felt swell, better than I’d felt since last Wednesday night. I felt almost free, already.
But it wouldn’t be over until I’d helped get the men who’d killed Gene Larkin and Peter Carr.
The cab came, and Armin gave an address on Oakland Avenue. It was only a short ride. We went up the steps of the house, and Armin pressed the bell button and stepped back.
The door opened at once, as though someone had been waiting behind it. I looked at the man who was standing there, and he was one of the three men who had been on the train Wednesday evening, the one who had walked back to the lavatory, just before my private blackout.
But there was something else about him almost as startling. It was his resemblance to Peter Carr. I hadn’t noticed it that night, but now it was glaringly obvious. Maybe because he had on a hat then and didn’t have one now, and he had the same thick shock of blond hair Peter had, cut exactly the same. With the addition of a little filling out of his cheeks and a pair of shell-rimmed glasses like Peter wore, he’d have been a dead ringer.
Involuntarily, I took a step backward. Then I stopped dead, because I’d run into something that felt like a gun, in the middle of my spine.
Behind me, Armin Andrews’s voice said, “Go on in, Hank. The party’s for you!”
* * *
—
Armin Andrews—if that were his right name—was being very polite and considerate, damn him. His tone of voice didn’t differ from the one he’d always used, and he didn’t look a bit more sinister than usual.
He said, “Awfully sorry we had to tie you up, Hank, but I know that temper of yours, and I don’t want you to do anything foolish. It has turned out we need you, I’m sorry to say. Otherwise, I’d simply have turned you over to the police when I first met you tonight instead of bringing you here for the party.”
I said something I won’t put in writing and Armin said, “Now, now. We can gag you if necessary, but I’d rather talk with you than merely to you. But let me remind you that Walter is standing behind you with a blackjack. You may yell once, if you wish, but not twice. And one yell won’t bring any help. You must have noticed that the nearest house is twenty yards away, and your ears will tell you we have a rather loud program on the radio downstairs.”
“Why did you kill Peter Carr?” I demanded.
“I’ll tell you all that,” he said. “I want your cooperation and I’m going to offer you terms. I’m going to have to tell you part of it so you’ll know what we want, so you might as well hear it all. Have a cigarette? I’ll have to hold it to your lips, of course.”
I started to tell him where he could put the cigarette, but let it go and merely shook my head. I did want to hear what this was all about. If I ever got out of this, it would be important for me to know. It could be important to my country, to winning the war, for me to know.
“Very well,” he said, and lighted a cigarette for himself. “First, it must be obvious to you that I am what you would call an enemy agent. And that look on your face reminds me to tell you that I’m proud of it.”
His eyes darkened. “Damn you, you’d be proud if your government had planted you in my country long before the war, and you’d called yourself Herman Schwartz, or something, and pretended to be a German. And if you’d had brains enough to work yourself up to a top spot in the reporting game and get yourself trusted by important officials and been on the inside of stuff other reporters couldn’t touch.”
“By exposing your fellow spies, wasn’t it?”
“Wendell? I acted under orders. He was washed up. But you remember how Lorne let me write up your lab for that ordnance journal?”
I nodded, and he went on: “What I fell into there was blind luck. Listen, you think of HE in terms of what it does to steel and brick and stone. There’s something more important. Remember that experiment they made last year, with the goats?”
Yes, I remembered. It was a widely publicized fiasco. They’d tethered goats at varying distances around a bomb to test an inventor’s claim about its concussion. The bomb had gone off, but not a goat fainted.
I said, “That was liquid air and carbon black. All right in theory except for the evaporation rate of liquid air. By the time they exploded it, it was as powerful as a firecracker. It was screwy.”
“The idea was screwy, but what they hoped to glean from it wasn’t—the disruptive effect on living tissue. You know how an ordinary bomb acts. The blast from it kills for only a short distance, unless men are struck by fragments or flying debris.”
I nodded, beginning to get what he was driving at. And it began to scare me, too, because it could be so important.
Flesh is resilient; construction materials are not. An explosive which has a high disruptive effect upon living tissue would be a discovery of the first magnitude, although it could be used only for special purposes. But think of a bomb which when dropped on a warship would kill or stun the entire crew; the ship could be taken over almost intact.
I asked, “But what makes you think that I had a lead toward anything like that?”
His face was grimly serious. “Because I felt it, that’s why. Remember when you were showing me how the tests were run? You were back at the detonating switch, and I was standing up by the panel to watch the needles jump on the dials. You were ten feet from that explosion, but I was only four.”
“You mean it…it jarred you?”
“Just a little. But for that quantity of HE—half a thimbleful! What series were you testing that day?”
I said, “I don’t remember.”
He shrugged. “You can think back and figure out. If you’d only dated those damn records of yours—Well, let’s skip that.
“You see now why we wanted you away from the lab, without doing anything that would put the FBI wise to the fact that we were doing it. A nice little hallucination on your part—
“And I guess you’ve got the answer about Peter Carr by now. Walter here, with a bit of make-up, passed as Carr—close enough that the neighborhood out there and the copper on the beat didn’t notice the difference. He couldn’t have fooled you, of course; you knew Carr too intimately.”
I said, “That was Peter who came to see me at St. Vincent’s. You must have kidnaped him just after that, and held him while your…your confederate used Peter’s keys and his identity to get into the lab every day while I was in the sanitarium. And then I escaped—”
He nodded. “We’d found by then that we couldn’t get it by ourselves—from the screwy way you kept records. So we got rid of Carr, and we were going to get rid of the lab, too, and let you take the blame for both of them. It would keep you from going to the police. And we couldn’t let Carr go anyway, after we’d held him. As for the taxi driver, he put his oar in last night when Walter was leaving the lab, dressed as Carr. Got Walter into the cab and said he was going to take him to see you. So Walter had to kill him.”
Well, I had all the answers now and a fat lot of good it would do me, probably—or them, either. I’d let them kill me before I’d talk and tell them what they wanted to know.
Not that I was feeling heroic, at all. I was sweating plenty. But just the same I knew this thing was so much bigger and more important than I was, that I knew I wouldn’t break, no matter what they did.
Armin said, “So here’s our proposition. Help us willingly, and your worries are over. You’ll have a position of honor in—”
I let go, then. The cool insolence of that offer got me, and got my temper. All the pent-up anger that I’d held in check long enough to find out what had happened, burst into invective.
Armin looked up over my head and nodded, and Walter, standing behind me, thrust a gag into my mouth and tied a cloth around tightly to hold it in.
Armin said, “I was afraid you’d feel that way. But maybe a little pain will make you feel different. Or a lot of pain will. We’ve got a man who’s an expert at that—I don’t like it myself. You think it over while I go get him.”
He bent down and looked at the knots in the ropes that tied me to the chair. He said, “Nice job, Walter. He won’t get out of that. I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
Walter said, “O. K. I’ll take Otto for a game of rummy.”
They went downstairs and a few minutes later I heard a garage door open and a car drive away.
The ropes were cutting into my wrists and ankles and my arms had been tied around back of the chair and crossed there so my fingers couldn’t even touch a rope anywhere, much less a knot. But I struggled until I felt my wrists getting numb, and from lack of circulation, my fingers would barely move.
Armin was right: I wasn’t going to get out of those ropes. Not in days, let alone in an hour or less. The man who’d put them on knew his stuff.
Deliberately, I made myself relax and think. Hank, I thought, quit trying to tear your wrists off and use your brains instead.
I looked around, and there was the telephone. It was on the desk six feet away. Could I possibly move my chair toward it without making enough sound to attract the attention of Walter and Otto playing cards downstairs?
My ankles were tied, one to each of the front legs of the chair. The knots were probably as tight as the others, but there was a trifle leeway in the ropes. I worked and twisted until I had about an inch of play with each foot. And then, taking as much of my weight as possible off the chair and putting it on to my toes, I began to work the chair across the carpet toward the desk.
It seemed to take hours, for I had to fight for every inch.
But it didn’t make much noise, and my real battle was against time. Pretty soon Armin would be back.
It must, actually, have taken me over half an hour to move that chair the six feet to the desk. But I made it, finally, and luck was with me in that the phone was standing near the edge.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 118
