The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) (10 page)

His radio was in perfect order. The man who had called that afternoon to overlook his telephone installation, which came in on the roof, had told him that he had repaired a slackness in his aërial. A tall, gaunt man with gray hair and an anxious look. Ferguson had thanked him, given him a glass of medicinal port. The man had choked over it, he remembered, but drained the glass.

The old clock started its preliminary whirr before striking the hour. Nine! Ferguson glanced at the memorandum he had made of the proper setting of his dial to bring in WRAK.

He twirled it, seated before the set. As he made the combination he suddenly tensed, rigid. He seemed enveloped in green flame. His veins were filled with scalding fluid. The dial burned like molten lead. Only his finger tips touched it, and then he fell sideways from the chair—electrocuted.

Tuned out.

The door burst open at two minutes after nine. Ferguson lay stiff beneath the beam of Manning’s torch. There seemed to be a blotch of blood on his forehead. Manning knew what that was. The Griffin’s seal.

The lights stayed out. The radio was silent. All through the house fuses had blown out. He heard the ticking of the clock, its mechanism undisturbed, as he knelt above the dead man with the cartouche on his forehead. There was no chance of resuscitating Ferguson. He had been tuned out.

But—someone, some human agency, had placed that seal on his brow. The man with the candle appeared in the doorway.

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

“Put that candle down,” said Manning. He knew there was no use to call aid with the telephone, that it would come too late, for Ferguson. He listened in vain for the beat of motor cycles coming up the hill. But, as he guessed what might have happened, threw his ray on the devastated set, he meant to hold this man, at any cost. There might be others.

The man advanced, looking at the dead, stiffened body. Then he blew out the candle and kicked at Manning’s torch.

Manning swung the cane he still held, swung it viciously. He heard the other groan. His torch had struck some piece of furniture, gone out. The next moment someone sprang at him.

Manning grappled with his antagonist. They swayed about the room, they stumbled over the writhing body of the man he had struck across his throat. They tripped over the corpse of Ferguson.

Was this what the Crime Master meant by a demonstration of what might happen to Manning if he interfered too closely? Manning thought not. His opponent fought desperately but he seemed to have no weapon. He clutched Manning’s wrist above the hand that gripped the cane, for a while he matched him. They reeled through the open door, on to the dark well of the spiral staircase.

It was a grim wrestling match. Manning strove to free his hand, to launch a blow with his cane. They were in blackness. Both were hard pressed, but he could feel the other yielding, slowly, with dynamic bursts of energy that lessened as they floundered in the dark. At any moment the other man might come back into it.

Then he heard, above their panting, punctuated by the steady ticking of the clock, the sound of motors, striving up the hill. His men were coming. His opponent seemed to hear it, too. He put out a gust of strength, he bent Manning backward.

Manning set his crooked knee back of the other’s leg. He thrust forward. He got one arm free at last, his left, and struck fiercely. Knuckles to bone. The man’s clutch gave way. He fell, vanished, and Manning heard him falling, striking, tumbling down the stairs, himself on the verge of them, clinging to the bannisters.

The squad came in. Their torches sprayed through the gloom. Two of them stooped over a prostrate form. Two charged up stairs. The library was vacant of anyone save Ferguson’s body. The man with the candle had revived and gone.

Nor could he be found. A rear door was wide open. There were some marks of footprints, faint in the torch light, indeterminate.

“That chap at the foot of the stairs, his neck is broken,” said one of the detectives.

Manning looked at him, at his shell. A gaunt man with gray hair. A man who had mistrusted, at the last, the Griffin’s promise of protection, had, perhaps, exceeded his instructions, perhaps tried to win higher reward by killing the man who had so unexpectedly interfered.

It might have been done for the sake of his family, might have been in desperation. The Griffin might not have told him his private duel with Manning. It was a secret locked behind his lips, silent for ever. His neck was awry, his head limp on that broken stem.

And Ferguson was dead. Manning gave his orders. They ransacked the house, found extra fuses, restored the lights. Manning, with an idea of what had happened, after his inspection of the ruined radio-set, the remembrance of the Griffin’s suggestion of automatic death, went to the roof.

The telephone wires had been shifted. They ran close to the aërials. A supercharge over them would leap to the latter. Their insulation was scorched.

Once more the Crime Master had eluded him. One of his tools lay broken, silent forever. Another had escaped.

He went down to his car, his clothes torn in the struggle with Number Nine. The four took charge of the rest. There was little to do. Ferguson was dead. Once more the Griffin had triumphed. The loss of a pawn was nothing to him.

Defeated, Manning took seat in his roadster. He started the engine and went coasting down the hill. As he turned into the highway, powerful lights enveloped him and he kept to his side of the road. A machine surged by him. He held sight, for an instant, of a face that looked out at him, the face of a devil, surely. He caught the sound of a laugh, the indetermined syllables of a voice that was familiar.

Furiously, he turned his car, swept in pursuit. But he could not gain on that crimson rear light, fast as he drove. It seemed to jeer at him. It seemed, to his exasperated fancy, to look like the seal on the Griffin’s letters, the seal he had seen set on the forehead of Ferguson. His car reeled, swayed as he held the bucking wheel. Then they came to a place where three roads met. There highways, all cemented, holding no trace of cars. Two of them curved. He tried one and, coming to a straight stretch, saw no red light. He had lost again.

VI

THE Renalia docked at ten. Manning paced up and down the wharf. He was bruised and shaken, physically and mentally, by his experience of the night before, but more stubbornly resolved than ever upon the elimination of the Griffin. His night had been racked with recurrent glimpses of that indeterminate face in the rear of the car that had outraced his own, memories of the mocking laugh, of the twisted face of Ferguson, of the red blotch of the Crime Master’s seal on his forehead.

And he was more resolved than ever to shut out Eleanor Severn from his life until he had run to his last covert this supreme criminal. It meant nothing that one gaunt body lay in the Morgue. It had not been identified. Yet it might be, might hold some clew.

He doubted it. Someone might claim that relic of a man but who could tie it up with the Crime Master!

The papers carried the news of the latest achievement of the Griffin. He had done his best. But had the Griffin done his worst? What did he hold in hand? What ghastly deeds?

The liner came proudly in. Manning forced himself to the moment. He saw Eleanor Severn waving to him. He waved back, goading himself to the immediate occasion.

Presently she came down the gangway. There were others to meet her from whom he had kept aloof, but now mingled. He felt the grasp of her hand, saw her astonished gaze.

“Are you ill, Gordon?”

“No. But I have been very busy. You look wonderful. Let me help you with your baggage.”

Her relations acknowledged his methods. The customs man chalked her trunks, unexamined, after a word from Manning, a glimpse of a badge he wore.

“You’ll come up to the hotel?” she asked him.

A messenger pushed through before he had time to answer.

“Miss Severn?”

He proffered a florist’s box. The girl took it while Manning tipped the boy.

“Did
you
send these?” she asked, her eyes aglow.

Manning shook his head. He should have thought of it—but he had not.

There was a great spray of orchids, elaborate, expensive. Eleanor Severn sought for the envelope, opened it.

“Why, how funny!” she said. “I wonder who could have sent them?”

The envelope contained a card, blank of writing but with a scarlet seal affixed, a seal that bore a griffin’s head. Manning knew.

The Unknown Hazard

“Number Fourteen,” Under Torture’s Stress, Aids the Griffin in a Terrible Plan

THE ball rebounded at eye-dazzling speed, glancing again at sharply varying angles, went hurtling back again. The skin of the two players was varnished with the sweat of their lean, athletic bodies; they seemed like a pair of wing-heeled Mercuries as they bounded about the court, evenly matched.

The decisive point was scored and Gordon Manning, breathing hard but unwinded, shook hands smilingly with the man who had defeated him—for the first time. They went off to the showers together and the old trainer, owner of the down town gymnasium, who had been watching the game from the balcony, shook his head slightly.

“Manning seemed off his game. A bit stale perhaps,” hazarded the man beside him; a successful stockbroker who believed in keeping himself fit, he was one of the veteran’s clients.

“He’s not stale, and his game was all right,” said the trainer. “But it wasn’t Manning playing, just his body. When he’s right he outguesses ’em right along. Something on his mind lately, I imagine. Mebbe it’s some tough business deal.”

“Maybe,” said the other. He knew that Manning was an advisory counsel who made good fees, never appeared in court, had a fine reputation as consulting attorney. Then he dismissed the subject.

Manning left the gymnasium, walking swiftly to his office. His body swung along with his elastic strides, but there was a frown on his brow, a look of care in his eyes that had not been there three months ago.

Youngest major in the A.E.F., brilliantly distinguished in the Secret Service during the war, he had volunteered as special agent under the police commissioner to track down and destroy the fiend known as the Griffin, also, to use the criminal’s own braggart term, written personally to Manning, as the Crime Master.

For months the Griffin had mocked at authority, at all social and civic order. The list of his mysterious crimes was appalling. His resources and information seemed inexhaustible. Without doubt he had added to his funds by the coups he had brought off. He was plunderer as well as murderer.

It was generally granted that the Griffin was insane, not a maniac, but a man whose brain had become tainted.

Upon each crime he set the scarlet seal of his identity, red as blood, an oval of heavy paper on which was embossed his crime crest, the rampant head of a griffin. Manning had worked under cover, but the Griffin had forced him into the open, had deliberately challenged him, had given him advance information concerning his latest atrocities with such carefully calculated margin that Manning always arrived too late for anything but the solution of the ingenious methods of murder, the arrest in two cases of tools of the Griffin, just pawns in the game. They had refused to divulge any information concerning their criminal.

On the third attempt Manning had come closer. He had actually glimpsed the Griffin. And he had killed, in a struggle, one of the Griffin’s servants. But the Crime Master was still at large, his whereabouts unknown, ready to strike again, as he unquestionably would.

And now another element had entered into Manning’s crusade. It was the girl he loved, Eleanor Severn. Sternly he had resolved to avoid her until the Griffin was eliminated, partly because of his own constant jeopardy, principally because he feared she might be included in that danger.

Fear did not enter into Manning’s composition, but one might be afraid for another. And the feeling he held for the Griffin admitted the possibility, lurking always in the background, that he might not be able to circumvent the diabolic intrigues of so fantastic and ruthless a creature. Not a day passed he did not dread to hear the subtly jeering voice of the Crime Master, and to receive from him a missive in his characteristic writing, bold and unusual, sealed with the scarlet mark.

He was not given to hunches, but he admitted that, anxiously keyed-up as he was, he had times of anxiety that were usually justified. Manning had traveled in many lands; he had seen strange things; he did not dispute that mental waves might vibrate through to receptive brains.

Such a mood was on him now. He was not surprised to see the heavy envelope of gray paper in his waiting mail. The address in violet ink, the flap fastened with red wax—the imprint of the griffin’s head, waiting for him to break.

Instead he slit the envelope, read the contents with narrowed eyes.

Dear Manning:

I am changing my tactics slightly. We were almost in contact on the last occasion. That proximity provided me with a genuine thrill that I trust you shared. I have often thought that the hunted and the hunter might sometimes have something in common. The lure and tingle of the chase.

Again you got rid of a pawn of mine. I am afraid he was not much use to you. Dead men tell no tales, but he would not have told you much if he had been alive and willing. As a matter of fact, I am rather obliged to you for ridding me of him. He was an overscrupulous fellow.

Next time there will be no pawns on hand for you to grapple with. To compensate for this I propose to give you the name of the next man selected from my list, as soon as that is decided. Also the date of his death. Then, my dear Manning, you will have a chance to prove yourself. You may prove a protective agent, even if you are not too successful as a detective one.

But do not overlook the fact that, as the ratio of your success increases, so does your own risk. Perhaps not only yours. I acknowledge my faults. I am a poor loser.