‘I guess that’s right, Carter,’ agreed Warden Kennedy tugging at his big moustache. ‘Bolts and bars are no good to keep in a man like that, who can make anybody let him out just by looking at him and telling him to hand over the keys. I suppose I’d have done it, too, if I’d been in Bradley’s place.’
‘Exactly!’ the detective responded, with a laugh. ‘You couldn’t have helped yourself. Don’t worry, though. I think we can keep him from trying any more tricks of that sort, when we turn him over to you again.’
‘Hanged if I see how, unless we give him a dose of solitary confinement, in a dark cell, and have the men blindfold themselves when they poke his food in through the grating.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Nick assured the warden as he prepared to leave. ‘We can get around it easier than that.’
Half an hour later Nick was on his way back to New York City.
He was not as light-hearted or confident as he had allowed Warden Kennedy to suppose, however.
The fact that Grantley had turned to that mysterious and terrifying agency, hypnotism, with all of its many evil possibilities, caused him profound disquiet.
Already the fugitive had used his mastery of the uncanny force in two widely different ways. He had escaped from prison with startling ease by means of it, and then, not content with that, he had hypnotized a famous actress in the midst of one of her greatest triumphs – for Nick had known all along that Helga Lund had yielded to hypnotic influence.
If the escaped convict kept on in the way he had begun, there was no means of foretelling the character or extent of his future crimes, in case he was not speedily brought to bay.
V
Grantley’s trail vanished into thin air – or seemed to – very quickly.
Nick Carter and his assistants had comparatively little trouble in finding the hotel which the fugitive had patronized the night before, but their success amounted to little.
Grantley had arrived there at almost one o’clock in the morning and signed an assumed name on the register. He brought a couple of heavy suitcases with him.
He had not been in prison long enough to acquire the characteristic prison pallor to an unmistakable degree, and a wig had evidently concealed his closely cropped hair.
He was assigned to an expensive room, but left his newly acquired key at the desk a few minutes later, and sallied forth on foot.
The night clerk thought nothing of his departure at the time, owing to the fact that the Times Square hotel section is quite accustomed to the keeping of untimely hours.
That was the last any of the hotel staff had seen of him, however. His baggage was still in his room, but, upon investigation, it was found to contain an array of useless and valueless odds and ends, obviously thrown in merely to give weight and bulk. In other words, the suit cases had been packed in anticipation of their abandonment.
It seemed likely that the doctor had had at least one accomplice in his flight, for the purpose of aiding him in his arrangements. But not necessarily so.
If he had received such assistance, it was quite possible that one of the six young physicians, who had formerly been associated with him in his unlawful experiments, had lent the helping hand.
Nick had kept track of them for some time, and now he determined to look them up again.
It was significant, however, that Grantley had, apparently, made no provision for the escape of Doctor Siebold, his assistant, who had been in Sing Sing with him.
In the flight which had followed their ghastly crime against the blind financier, Siebold had shown the white feather, and it was easy to believe that the stern, implacable Grantley had no further use for his erstwhile associate.
There was no reason to doubt that the escaped convict had gone directly to the theater after leaving the hotel. But why had he gone to the latter at all, and what had become of him after he had broken up Helga Lund’s play?
There was no reasonable doubt that Grantley had disguised himself pretty effectually for his flight from Ossining to New York, and yet the night clerk’s description was that of Grantley himself.
It followed, therefore, that the fugitive had already shed his disguise somewhere in the big city. But why not have gone directly from that stopping place, wherever it was, to the theater?
Nick gave it up as unimportant. The hotel episode did not seem to have served any desirable purpose, from Grantley’s standpoint, unless on the theory that it was simply meant to confuse the detectives.
However that might be, it would be much more worthwhile to know what the surgeon’s movements had been after his dastardly attack on the actress.
Had he gone to another hotel, in disguise or otherwise? Had he returned to his former house in the Bronx, which had been closed up since his removal to Sing Sing? Had he left town, or – well, done any one of a number of things?
There was room only for shrewd guesswork, for the most part.
An exhaustive search of the hotels failed to reveal his presence at any of them that night or later. The closed house in the Bronx was inspected, with a similar result.
That was about as far as the detective got along that line. Nick had a feeling that the fellow was still in New York. He had once tried to slip away in an unusually clever fashion, and had come to grief. It was fair to assume, therefore, that he would not make a second attempt, especially in view of the fact that the metropolis offers countless hiding places and countless multitudes to shield a fugitive.
If he was still in the city, though, he was almost unquestionably in disguise; and he could be counted on to see that that disguise was an exceptionally good one.
Certainly, the prospect was not an encouraging one. The proverbial needle in a haystack would have been easy to find in comparison.
And, meanwhile, Helga Lund would not know what real peace of mind was until she was informed that her vindictive persecutor had been captured.
Three days was spent in this fruitless tracking, and then, in the absence of tangible clues, the great detective turned to something which had often met with surprising success in the past.
He banished everything else from his mind and tried to put himself, in imagination, in Doctor Grantley’s place.
What would this brilliant, erratic, but misguided genius, with all of his unbridled enmities and his criminal propensities, have done that night, after having escaped from prison and brought Helga Lund’s performance to such an untimely and harrowing close?
It was clear that much depended on the depth of his hatred for the actress who had repulsed him five years before. Undoubtedly his enmity for the beautiful Swede was great, else he would not have timed his escape as he had done, or put the first hours of his liberty to such a use.
But would he have been content with what he had done that first night? If he had considered his end accomplished, he might have shaken the dust of New York from his feet at once. On the other hand, if his thirst for revenge had not yet been slaked, it was probable that he was still lurking near, ready to follow up his first blow with others.
The more Nick thought about it the more certain he became that the latter supposition was nearer the truth than the former. Grantley had caused Helga Lund to break down completely before one of the most important and critical audiences that had ever been assembled in New York, to be sure, but, with a man of his type, was that likely to be anything more than the first step? He had threatened to ruin her career, and he was nothing if not thorough in whatever he attempted. Therefore – so Nick reasoned – further trouble might be looked for in that quarter.
The thought was an unwelcome one. The detective had taken every practicable precaution to shield Helga from further molestation, but he knew only too well that Grantley’s attacks were of a sort which usually defied ordinary safeguards.
The possibility of new danger to the actress spurred Nick on to added conc
entration.
Assuming that Grantley was still in New York, in disguise, and bent upon inflicting additional injury on the woman he had once loved, where would he be likely to hide himself, and what would be the probable nature of his next move?
The detective answered his last question first after much weighing of possibilities.
Grantley was one of the most dangerous of criminals, simply because his methods were about as far removed as possible from the ordinary methods of criminals. He had confined himself, thus far, to crimes in which he had made use of his immense scientific knowledge, surgical and hypnotic.
Accordingly, the chances were that he would work along one of those two lines in the future, or else along some other, in which his special knowledge would be the determining factor.
Moreover, since his escape, he had repeatedly called his mastery of hypnotism to his aid. That being so, Nick was inclined to believe that he would continue to use it, especially since Helga had shown herself so susceptible to hypnotic influence.
Could the detective guard against that?
He vowed to do his best, notwithstanding the many difficulties involved.
But it was not until he had carefully balanced the probabilities in regard to Grantley’s whereabouts that Nick became seriously alarmed.
As a consequence of his study of the problem, an overwhelming conviction came to him that it would be just like the rascally surgeon to have gone to Helga’s own hotel, under another name.
The luxurious Wentworth-Belding would be as safe for the fugitive as any other place, providing his disguise was adequate – safer, in fact, for it was the very last place which would ordinarily fall under suspicion.
In addition to that great advantage, it offered the best opportunity to keep in touch with developments in connection with the actress’s condition, and residence there promised comparatively easy access to Helga when the time should come for the next act in the drama of revenge.
This astounding suspicion had sprung up, full-fledged, in Nick’s brain in the space of a second. The detective knew that his preliminary reasoning had been sound, however, and based upon a thorough knowledge of Grantley’s characteristic methods.
It was staggering, but his keen intuition told him that it was true. He was now certain that Grantley would be found housed under the same huge roof as his latest victim, and that meant that Helga’s danger was greater than ever.
The next blow might fall at any minute.
It was very surprising, in fact, that Grantley had remained inactive so long.
The detective hastily but effectively disguised himself, left word for his assistants, and hurried to the hotel – only to find that his flash of inspiration had come a little too late.
Helga Lund had mysteriously disappeared.
VI
Doctor Lightfoot, the actress’s physician, was greatly excited and had just telephoned to Nick’s house, after the detective had left for the hotel.
The doctor had arrived there about half an hour before, for his regular morning visit. To his consternation he had found the night nurse stretched out on Helga Lund’s bed, unconscious, and clad only in her undergarments.
The actress was nowhere to be found.
The anxious Lightfoot was of very different caliber from the prison physician at Sing Sing. He had recognized the nurse’s symptoms at once, and knew that she had been hypnotized.
He set to work at once to revive her and succeeded in doing so, after some little delay. As soon as she was in a condition to question, he pressed her for all the details she could give.
They were meager enough, but sufficiently disquieting. According to her story, a man whom she had supposed to be Lightfoot himself had gained entrance to the suite between nine and ten o’clock at night.
He had sent up Doctor Lightfoot’s name, and his appearance, when she saw him, had coincided with that of the attending physician. He had acted rather strangely, to be sure, and the nurse had been surprised at his presence at that hour, owing to the fact that Lightfoot had already made his two regular calls that day.
Before her surprise had had time to become full-fledged suspicion, however, the intruder had fixed her commandingly with his eyes and she had found herself powerless to resist the weakness of will which had frightened her.
She dimly remembered that he had approached her slowly, nearer and nearer, and that his gleaming eyes had seemed to be two coals of fire in his head.
That was all she recalled, except that she had felt her senses reeling and leaving her. She had known no more until Doctor Lightfoot broke the dread spell, almost twelve hours afterward.
She had met the bogus Lightfoot in one of the outer rooms of the suite, not in the presence of the actress. Miss Lund had been in her bedroom at the time, but had not yet retired.
The nurse was horror-stricken to learn that her patient was missing, and equally at a loss to explain how she herself came to be without her uniform.
But Doctor Lightfoot possessed a sufficiently analytical mind to enable him to solve the puzzle, after a fashion, even before Nick arrived.
The detective had told him that the sight of an enemy of the actress had caused her seizure, and it was easy to put two and two together. This enemy had doubtless made himself up to represent the attending physician, had hypnotized the nurse, and then passed on, unhindered, to the actress’s room.
He had obviously subdued her in the same fashion, after which he had removed the unconscious nurse’s uniform and compelled Helga to don it.
The doctor remembered now that the two women were nearly alike in height and build. The nurse had dark-brown hair, in sharp contrast to Helga’s golden glory; but a wig could have remedied that. Neither was there any similarity in features, but veils can be counted on to hide such differences.
Doctor Lightfoot, despite his alarm, was rather proud of his ability to reason the thing out alone. He had no doubt that Helga Lund, under hypnotic influence, had accompanied the strange man from the hotel, against her will.
It would have been very easy, with no obstacle worth mentioning to interpose. No one who saw them would have thought it particularly strange to see the nurse and the doctor leaving together. At most, it would have suggested that they were on unusually good terms, and that he was taking her out for an airing in his car.
The keen-witted physician had progressed thus far by the time Nick arrived, but he had not yet sought to verify his deductions by questioning any of the hotel staff.
Nick listened to his theory, put a few additional questions to the nurse, and then complimented Doctor Lightfoot on his analysis.
‘That seems to be the way of it,’ the detective admitted. ‘A light, three-quarter-length coat, which the nurse often wore over her uniform, is also missing, together with her hat. The distinctive nurse’s skirt would have shown beneath the coat and thereby helped the deception.’
Confidential inquiries were made at once, and the fact was established that the two masqueraders – one voluntary and one involuntary – had left the building about ten o’clock the night before.
The supposed Lightfoot had arrived in a smart, closed town car, which had been near enough to the physician’s in appearance to deceive the carriage starter. The chauffeur wore a quiet livery, a copy of that worn by Lightfoot’s driver. The car had waited, and the two had ridden away in it.
That was all the hotel people could say. The night clerk had thought it odd that Miss Lund’s nurse had not returned, but it was none of his business, of course, if the actress’s physician had taken her away.
It was of little importance now, but Nick was curious enough to make inquiries, while he was about it, which brought out the fact that a man had registered at the hotel the morning after the affair at the theater, and had paid his bill and left the evening before.
It might have been only a coincidence, b
ut certain features of the man’s description, as given, left room for the belief that Doctor Grantley had really been at the Wentworth-Belding during that interval.
But where was he now, and what had he done with the unfortunate actress?
Such as it was, the slender clue furnished by the closed car must be followed up for all it was worth.
That was not likely to prove an easy matter, and, unless Grantley had lost his cunning, the trail of the machine would probably lead to nothing, even if it could be followed. Nevertheless, there seemed to be nothing else to work on.
The chauffeur of the car might have been an accomplice, but it was not necessary to suppose so. It looked as if the wily Grantley had hunted up a machine of the same make as Doctor Lightfoot’s, and had engaged it for a week or a month, paying for it in advance.
There are many cars to be had in New York on such terms, and they are extensively used by people who wish to give the impression, for a limited time, that they own a fine car.
It is a favorite way of overawing visitors, and chauffeurs in various sorts of livery go with the cars, both being always at the command of the renter.
It would not, therefore, have aroused suspicion if Grantley had furnished a livery of his own choice for his temporary chauffeur.
The first step was to ascertain the make of Doctor Lightfoot’s car. Another make might have been used, of course, but it was not likely, since the easiest way to duplicate the machine would have been to choose another having the same lines and color.
American Sherlocks Page 8
