CHAPTER VIII
Handcuffs for a Wizard
SHORTLY after Diavolo and Mickey had gone from the Reverend Van Lio’s house in the Village, the detectives, their search fruitless, left the house next door. Pat saw them go as she watched through the mirror.
Karl Hartz, the Scarlet Wizard’s private scientific wizard, was the man who designed and built, to Don’s order, all the curious gadgets and offstage mechanisms which were the secret of many of the Diavolo illusions. He locked the door behind the dicks and waved an “All clear” signal toward the mirror.
He had known that Diavolo and the girls had returned from the theater and were next door. One of the skulls that served as bookends on the library table had told him that. He had seen it grin at him when its lower jaw moved ever so slightly, downward. The grinning skull always meant that the Reverend’s house was occupied.
Karl is a stoop-shouldered little man with a great bushy shock of white hair and thick-lensed glasses. After his graduation from a famous European University Karl’s eyesight had failed him so that he was unable to pursue his chosen profession of construction engineer.
Instead, for many years, he had toured the vaudeville stages of the world as Prof. Memo, lightning calculator and memory expert. Karl, hearing their names called off but once, can immediately recite the names of the playing cards in a shuffled deck, forwards, backwards or both ways from the center.
Ask him to give you the square of 1,684 or add ten four-digit figures in his head and he gives you the correct answer before an adding machine can make up its mind. For amusement. Karl plays chess, blindfolded.
Diavolo had met Karl in Budapest at a time when the latter was being treated by a famous eye surgeon. The treatments were eventually successful enough so that Karl, aided by his thick-lensed glasses, could see once again. But now the profession of engineering wanted younger men, and so Karl had turned to contriving whatever mechanical hocus-pocus was necessary for the Mysteries of Diavolo. The House of Magic was almost entirely the product of his ingenuity.
When Pat saw his signal she turned to a large three-sheet poster on the wall that bore a picture of Hermann the Great. She made a simple pass before it with her hand. The poster slid upward out of sight. She walked through the opening into the Diavolo living room and the doorway closed automatically behind her. No hint of such an entrance showed in the paneled wall of the living room.
“Hello, Pat,” Karl said. “Where’s Don? And what has he been up to now? Why did those detectives—?”
Pat’s frown was worried. “They want him for murder, Karl. They’ve already arrested Chan.”
Karl, whose ingenious surprises had astonished thousands, now took a big dose of his own medicine. “But … but what—” Karl floundered, baffled by Pat’s announcement.
Pat sat down and rapidly gave him the whole story. “Karl,” she said, finishing, “can a — a man climb straight up the side of a sheer wall?”
Karl frowned, thinking over her story. “Nothing’s impossible, Pat,” he answered after a moment. “You should know that by now. Give me time and money enough and I’ll deliver any miracle you name — or something that looks a lot like it, at any rate.”
“Yes, I know,” Pat replied. “A magician can appear to do almost anything. But, Karl, the Bat didn’t just look as if he was climbing that wall. He actually did. He got into Don’s dressing room and out again by the window! There was no other way—”
Pat stopped abruptly and Karl sprang to his feet.
A voice behind them — a hard, insistent, steely voice commanded, “Restez en repos!”
Beyond the archway to the hall were the stairs. A figure stood on the steps halfway down, a grim and evil monstrosity whose long black cloak fused with the inky shadows around it and seemed part of them.
A black-gloved hand protruded from the folds of the flowing cape. It held an ugly square-nosed automatic.
Pat knew enough French to know that the voice had said, “Stand still!” But the phrasing was antique, almost obsolete. Frenchmen had not spoken the words for many centuries….
The dark ominously shaped shadow moved, continued down the stairs and came toward them. It stopped just outside the archway in the darkness of the hall, beyond the edge of light. But Pat and Karl could see more than they wanted of the details of that nightmare of a head.
Zoological authorities all agree that the face of the vampire bat is the most repulsive countenance in the whole realm of animal physiognomy. Pat and Karl were looking at such a face magnified many times.
The shape of the head, if it was like anything else at all possessed by any creature that ever walked or flew the face of the earth, was most nearly similar to that of the wolf. It had the same hungry snout and long, razor-sharp canine teeth. But it was a black wolfish head straight out of some maniac’s disordered dream. Large, leathery, pointed ears stood up from the sides and top of the head and the nose bore a curious erect, spear-shaped appendage characteristic of the bat family. The mouth grinned diabolically and the small black eyes had a bright look.
The figure spoke again, its voice harsh. “Tournez vous. À la fois!” The gun indicated Karl.
Karl obeyed slowly, turning his back on the archway and the figure beyond. His eyes rested on the nearby table and he tried to sidestep in its direction. Beneath its top edge was the hidden spring that controlled a trapdoor just within the archway. If he could get to it and if the Bat should come forward into the room….
But Karl never made it. The Bat moved too quickly. As soon as Karl’s back had turned, he took three long strides forward and his gun hand swung. The hard muzzle of the automatic caught Karl behind the ear. He crumpled to the floor. Pat screamed.
Then, as the thing moved toward her, one arm outstretched, the phone rang.
The Bat’s head turned quickly. “Répondez!” He motioned at the phone with his gun. Pat, partly from shock, partly from anger at what he had done to Karl, did not obey.
The fact that any human sound other than a bat’s shrill squeal could issue from that mouth was astounding enough. But what he said now was even more strange.
“Answer that! Be quick about it! And no funny business.”
That broke the spell. Pat, as much from relief as anything else, laughed and got control of herself.
“Oh,” she said, “It speaks English.”
She got up and took the phone. The Bat, his gun on her every second, watched her intently.
In the phone she heard Diavolo’s voice calling from Chandler’s office and asking her to get ready to go with him to meet the Bat. Her mind worked like lightning.
“I’ m sorry. I couldn’t possibly, I have a date tonight,” she said breathlessly. “You should have called earlier, darling.”
But that wasn’t all she did. Nor did the Bat see the slight intermittent scratching movement of her pointed thumbnail against the side of the phone receiver. The Bat didn’t see it, but Diavolo heard it. The sounds carried a message to him which, translated, read: “I’ve met the Bat already! He’s here! Hurry!”
And then, after Don had hung up, she stalled, pretending to carry on a conversation. This didn’t work for long. Impatiently the gun moved closer. Pat finally had to hang up.
Then, at once — as she was replacing the receiver — she felt the gloved hands around her neck and the two fingers that pressed quickly and steadily in the hollows behind her ears. Blackness fell swiftly like a great curtain….
The black sedan bearing Mickey and Don Diavolo roared down Eleventh Avenue, southward beneath the pillars of the elevated highway where traffic lights were few. But even so, they were too late.
In the alleyway behind the house, Don pulled the car to a screeching stop.
“Take her in, Mickey,” he ordered as he leaped out and ran toward the wall on the right. Don jumped, caught the top of the wall and drew himself up.
He stopped, resting on his hands, his feet dangling. One of the second story windows at the back of his ho
use was open, and, just below it on the wall, a black shadow moved down the side of the building — a vague shape just discernible, a bit blacker than the surrounding black.
Don started to throw his leg over the wall’s top when a set of muscular hands suddenly fastened themselves in a tight grip on his ankles!
A voice shouted, “Haul him down, Dan!”
Dan hauled. Diavolo fell. A flashlight beam shot at him as he picked himself up. A handcuff snapped around his wrist. Its other cuff was fastened to the arm of a broad-shouldered six foot Irish cop.
The voice behind the flash came from a plainclothes man who said, “Well, well. Just look at what we’ve bagged! A Rajah, no less.”
Don said, “And the wrong man again — as usual!” He started to pull the cop with him. “The Bat! He’ll get away.”
The detective, like Pat before him, said, “Hold him, Dan.” He drew his gun.
Diavolo growled at him. “Listen, gum-shoe. I tell you there’s murder in that house. I saw the Bat outside the window.”
“Dan,” the dick said, unimpressed. “We’d better put in a call for the loony wagon. He’s bats.”
Don’s swift movement now was like lightning. While he talked, his fingers had worked feverishly at the handcuff. As it clicked open, he caught the cop’s arm in a sudden jiu jitsu grip, stepped heavily on the man’s right foot and levered him forward. The policeman fell, sprawling head-on into the detective with his gun. They both collapsed.
When they scrambled up, cursing, and the dick had recovered his flash, the Indian Rajah was gone.
They could hear his footsteps beyond the wall, running madly toward the house. The officer’s whistle shrilled.
“Quick, Dan! Give me a lift. Then cut him off in front!”
The detective went over the wall just as the house door slammed.
He caught up with the Rajah in the living room. The Indian was bending above a girl who lay in a chair. There were two small red marks on her throat. Another man, an elderly person with white hair and glasses, lay on the floor. As the detective came bursting in with drawn gun, this man rolled over on his side and slowly started to sit up.
This tableau gave the dick such a jolt he stared, mouth open, and did not realize that the Rajah had picked up the phone until he heard the clicking of the dial.
“Drop that!” he commanded then. “I’ve got you covered.”
But the man at the phone paid no attention to him other than to say, “Go soakyourhead. I’m getting a doctor…. Hello, Dr. Graf’s office? I’m speaking for Don Diavolo. It’s a hurry call. Get the doctor here right away!”
The detective didn’t go soak his head, but he did put it out through the front door and call for reinforcements. The house had evidently been surrounded. Detectives poured in from all quarters.
Fifteen minutes later, while Dr. Graf was working over Pat, and Karl was telling his story, Inspector Church arrived. He blew in with all the force of a tornado.
He eyed the party. The detective that had tried to capture Don stepped forward to report, but Church pointed at the Maharajah and roared.
“Who the hell is that?”
Don, noticing that Graf’s efforts were having success and that Pat was coming to slowly, began to feel better. He turned to Church and bowed ironically.
“The Maharajah of Vdai-Loo,” he said with a grave face.
Church blinked at him. “Oh yeah?” The Inspector wasn’t used to meeting Indian princes at a moment’s notice and his skepticism was pardonable.
Don frowned at him severely. His voice had an Antarctic chill and the stiff-backed English accent of the Hindu who has been educated at Oxford. “The manners of the American police are distinctly reprehensible. I shall report this behavior to your superiors.”
That had Church stopped. All he could do was repeat himself. “Oh yeah?” he said again.
As Church turned his back on the Maharajah, Don allowed himself half a grin.
But the grin didn’t last. When Church heard that the haughty gentleman from the East had been apprehended scaling the wall outside, he gave the Maharajah a hard look and ordered, “Lieutenant, phone the British consul. Check up on this Maha-whatsis. I’ll bet a sacred white elephant he’s phoney as they come.”
The lieutenant dialed the phone.
CHAPTER IX
The Jewels with Wings
THE Inspector watched the Maharajah light a gold-tipped cigarette and stroll unconcernedly to the bookcases across the room. He dropped his match into an ashtray there and leaned nonchalantly back against the wall, his hands in his pockets.
Then the Inspector made a mistake. He turned to listen to the Lieutenant at the phone. When that gentleman had discovered that the consul had never heard of any Maharajah of Vdai-Loo, Church whirled on his heel to face the impostor.
But where the Maharajah had been, there was now nothing at all — nothing but a long curl of smoke that floated upward from the cigarette lying on the ashtray’s edge.
Church exploded like a dynamite bomb.
Twenty minutes later, when the detonation had subsided, four detectives had been demoted for not keeping their eyes open, and the Maharajah was still missing. Church was giving orders to have the walls torn apart in a search for trapdoors when Karl objected.
“You try that,” he said, “and Don Diavolo’s lawyers will pop up with a suit for damages so fast you’ll think they came in through a trapdoor!”
Karl was ordinarily a meek person but the Inspector’s order to tear into the walls in which he had carefully and laboriously installed a number of delicately operating, secret mechanisms made him boil.
Church backed water a bit at this and turned his attention to Pat who was by now nearly recovered, though her eyelids still drooped heavily with a strange fatigue.
“What’s wrong with her, Doc?” he asked.
“I wish I knew for sure,” Dr. Graf replied. “She’s been doped and she shows symptoms similar to that of a hypnotic trance.”
“What about those marks on her neck? If you try to tell me a bat made them too, I’ll—”
“I wouldn’t know about bats,” Graf said. “I’ve never seen one of their bites. I’m more inclined to believe the marks are those of a hypodermic needle. The dope was probably injected intravenously. What I don’t understand is how the injection could be made if Miss Collins resisted. It’s not something you can do handily if the patients object.”
Pat’s eyes struggled open. “I’ll tell you that, Dr. Graf,” she said weakly. “The Bat put his hands around my throat and pressed, with his fingers, behind my ears. I lost consciousness at once.”
Church looked at the doctor. “Yes,” the latter said, “that’s possible. There are two nerve centers there, which, if pressed upon properly, will cause unconsciousness to supervene.”
The Inspector turned to Pat. “Are you still telling me that this guy looked like a bat?”
“Yes, Inspector,” she said defiantly. “I certainly am.” She shivered.
“And you are sure you saw him before you were doped, not afterward?”
Pat nodded. “Karl saw him too.”
“I know. And Karl was knocked out. You could both be dreaming.”
“The same dream, Inspector?” Pat objected.
“Dammit, I don’t know,” Church growled. This bat story was beginning to get him. He’d heard it too often by now. He still didn’t believe it, but there were so many witnesses he had to take some account of it. He spoke to Graf again.
“You said dope. Sure it couldn’t have been something like — well, nicotine for instance?”
“Nicotine, Inspector?” Graf looked surprised. “I know it couldn’t have been nicotine. Injected into the veins, nicotine would kill instantly. It’s a poison second only to hydrocyanic acid in its rapid action. Miss Collins wouldn’t be talking to you now if it had been nicotine.” He paused a moment. “What makes you ask that?”
Church scowled. “Because a girl who was murdered this
afternoon and who had those same marks on her neck probably died from nicotine poisoning. At least that’s the medical examiner’s best guess, though he doesn’t think he can ever prove it.”
Graf nodded. “He’s got a job on his hands. Nicotine is an alkaloid. Proving its presence in the body tissues, even in known cases, is often so difficult as to be impossible.”
“Yeah,” Church said disgustedly. “Don’t I know it! When I need you most, you doctors are about as helpful as — as blank cartridges.”
Church turned to Pat and poured forth a barrage of questions. A good many of them Pat couldn’t answer because she didn’t know the answers, and Church didn’t like most of the answers she did give. He also didn’t like the mysterious way Dr. Graf disappeared!
The doctor was there one minute, replacing his stethoscope and other instruments in his little black bag. The next minute he was gone. The detectives on guard at the door swore they hadn’t seen him leave.
The Inspector glowered at Pat. “Diavolo is behind this,” he insisted. “But if he thinks he can make me vanish. he’s got another think coming.”
Karl grinned though his head still ached. “We’ll go right to work on that, Inspector,” she said. “Would you prefer to vanish gradually or all at once?”
The Inspector snorted. “If I get that magician, I’ll vanish him completely and for good! I’ve got the gadget that will do it, too. An electric chair!”
Don Diavolo, behind the mirror in the house next door, didn’t hear that crack. He was busy talking to Dr. Graf.
“I heard what you said about the hypnotic symptoms and the dope,” Don said, “and I’ve got a hunch. Could the stuff that was injected have been the Truth Drug?”
“Scopolamine?” Graf replied lifting an eyebrow. “You do read minds then, don’t you? That’s what I’ve been wondering myself. I hadn’t suggested it to the Inspector yet because I couldn’t be at all sure. But none of the symptoms contradict the theory. I’ll go that far.”
Death out of Thin Air Page 5
