Читать книгу The Gray Phantom's Return - Herman Landon - Страница 3

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Patrolman Joshua Pinto, walking his beat at two o’clock in the morning, hummed a joyless tune as he turned off the Bowery and swung into East Houston Street. It was a wet night, with a raw wind sweeping around the street corners, and Pinto walked along with an air of dogged persistence, as if trying to make the best of a disagreeable duty. His heavy and somewhat florid features were expressionless. For all that his face indicated, he might have been thinking that it was a fine night for a murder, or wishing that he was in plain clothes instead of uniform, or picturing himself in his cozy home playing with his baby, whose lusty “da-da’s” and “goo-goo’s” he was pleased to interpret as wonderful linguistic achievements.

Perhaps it was nothing but instinct that caused him to slow down his pace as he passed a squatty and rather dilapidated building in the middle of the block. So far as appearances went, it did not differ greatly from its drab and unprepossessing neighbors, yet Pinto cast a sharp glance at the ground-floor window, which bore a lettered sign proclaiming that the premises were occupied by Sylvanus Gage, dealer in pipes, tobacco, and cigars. As if the building had cast a spell of gloom upon him, the patrolman ceased his humming, and his lips were set in a tight line as he proceeded down the block.

Being an ambitious and hard-working officer, Pinto made it a practice to cultivate the acquaintance of as many as possible of the people living along his beat. He knew Sylvanus Gage, a thin, stoop-shouldered man with a flowing beard, a black cap adorning his bald skull, and mild blue eyes that had a habit of gazing lugubriously at the world through thick lenses rimmed with tarnished gold. Despite his patriarchal appearance, he was reputed to be using his tobacco business as a cloak for a flourishing traffic in stolen goods. So deftly did the old man manage his illicit enterprises that the police, though morally certain of their facts, had never been able to produce any evidence against him. Little was known of his housekeeper, a sour and sharp-tongued slattern of uncertain age, but there were those who suspected that she was not entirely innocent of complicity in her employer’s clandestine activities.

It may have been of this Pinto was thinking as he plodded along with the measured gait of the seasoned patrolman. The soggy sidewalks glistened in the light from the street-corner lamps, and here and there along the pavement water was forming in little pools. Most of the windows were dark and, save for an occasional shifty-eyed and furtively slinking pedestrian, the streets were deserted. Pinto halted for a moment to look at his watch, then quickened his steps, “pulled” the buff-colored box on the corner, and trudged on again.

Once more he was humming a tune. Each of the scattered prowlers he met was subjected to a critical scrutiny out of the corner of his eye. Now and then he dodged into a dark doorway and tried a lock. From time to time he glanced through the window of a store or shop. It was all a matter of habit with Joshua Pinto. For seven years he had pursued the same dull routine, varied only by an occasional transfer to another part of the city, or by a change from night to day duty, or vice versa. He had broken up a few nocturnal street brawls, now and then he had foiled the designs of a second-story artisan, and on two or three occasions he had caught a safe-blower red-handed, but nothing very exciting had ever happened to him.

On this particular night, however, an acute observer might have noticed an air of disquietude about Officer Pinto. There was the merest hint of uneasiness in the way he twirled his nightstick as he walked along, in the intensified alertness with which he inspected the occasional passers-by, in the quick and somewhat nervous glances he cast up and down the shabby streets. Likely as not the rain and the wind, together with the gloom pervading the district, were responsible for his state of mind, and possibly his physical discomfort was aggravated by a premonition—though Pinto himself would have called it a “hunch”—that a tragic event was soon to enliven the tedium of his existence.

Again his footsteps dragged as once more he strolled past the establishment of Sylvanus Gage. The building was dark and still, like most of the others in the block, yet something prompted Pinto to cast a suspicious glance at the door and windows, as if he sensed an omen in the shadows clinging to the wall.

He stopped abruptly as a door slammed and a shrill feminine voice called his name. A woman, scantily dressed and with loosened hair fluttering in the wind, was hurrying toward him with excited gestures.

“Officer!” She clutched his sleeve and pointed toward the tobacco shop. “There—hurry!”

The patrolman’s eyes followed her pointing finger. A second-story window opened above their heads and a frowsy person, disturbed by the woman’s harsh voice, looked down into the street. Pinto regarded the speaker with apparent unconcern, recognizing the housekeeper of Sylvanus Gage. Another window opened across the street, and a second face looked down on them.

Officer Pinto, schooled by previous experiences with overexcited females, casually inquired what might be the matter.

“Matter!” retorted the woman. “Murder—that’s what’s the matter. Why don’t you get a move on?”

Pinto permitted himself to be led along. The driver of a milk wagon halted his nag to watch the commotion. The woman, jabbering and shivering, opened the door of the tobacco store, pushed the officer inside and switched on the light above the counter.

“There!” She pointed at a door in the rear of the dingy shop. “He—Mr. Gage—sleeps back there.”

“Well, what of it?” An impatient look cloaked Pinto’s real feelings. “He’s got to sleep some place, ain’t he?”

The woman’s eyes blazed. “You stand there handing out sass while he—he may be dying back there.” Trying to steady herself, she gathered up the folds of the tattered robe she wore. “My room’s right above his,” she explained. “A few moments ago I jumped out of bed, thinking I’d heard a sound.”

“A sound, eh? This town is chockfull of them things.” Pinto leveled an uneasy glance at the door in the rear. “What kind of sound was it you thought you heard?”

“What kind of sound! You ain’t paid for asking fool questions, Officer Pinto. All day long I felt in my bones that something awful was going to happen, and when that noise woke me up I was scared stiff. I grabbed a few clothes and ran down here, but the door to Mr. Gage’s room was bolted on the inside. He always shoots the bolt before he goes to bed. I knocked, but not a sound came from the inside. Then I shouted loud enough to raise the dead, but——”

“Your boss is hard of hearing, ain’t he?”

“A little. Say, why don’t you do something?”

Pinto walked to the outer door, shooed away a knot of curious spectators, then sauntered back to where the woman stood. There was a supercilious grin on his lips, but deep in his eyes lurked an uneasy gleam.

“So you’ve been feeling in your bones that something awful was going to happen,” he gibingly observed. “Then you hear a noise, and right away you yell murder. You’ve got some imagination, you have. I ain’t going to break in on a sleeping man just because your bones feel funny. Mine do, too, once in a while, but I don’t make any fuss about it. No, sir-ee! You might as well trot back to bed.”

The woman pulled at the folds of her robe. “I haven’t told you all yet.” She spoke fast and low, gazing fixedly at the door in the rear. “Yesterday afternoon Mr. Gage got a letter from—from a party he’s got good reason to be scared of. He hadn’t heard from him in years, and he’d been hoping he was rid of him for good. Well, I was watching him while he read the letter, and I saw him turn white as a sheet. Later, while he was out to lunch, I went to his desk and read the letter. I was just that curious. It told Mr. Gage that the writer would call on him inside forty-eight hours.”

“Was that all?”

“All but the name at the bottom—and the name was the main thing.”

“Eh?”

“It was the name of the man Mr. Gage has been afraid of all these years. When I saw that name at the bottom of the note I felt a chill all over. Say,” raising her voice, “why don’t you break in that door?”

Pinto stroked his chin, as if strongly impressed by what the woman had told him. Another group of spectators had gathered at the entrance, and he gruffly ordered them to disperse. Then he faced the inner door, turned the knob, pushed. The door did not yield, and he looked back over his shoulder.

“Whose name was signed to the note?” he demanded.

A look of awe crossed the housekeeper’s face. She raised a bony arm and steadied herself against the counter. A grayish pallor had suffused her shriveled features.

“I—I can’t tell you,” she whispered. “I mustn’t. Hurry—for Heaven’s sake!”

Something of her excitement seemed to have been communicated to Pinto, but even now he appeared loath to attack the door.

“If your boss was so all-fired scared of the guy that sent him the note, why didn’t he call up the police?” he queried suspiciously. Then a look of comprehension dawned in his face. “I guess, though, that he wasn’t very anxious to have the department butt into his affairs, and maybe he thought the other fellow’s bite was worse’n his bark. Well, here goes.”

He stepped back a few paces, squared his shoulders for action, then hurled his massive figure against the door. The woman stood rigid, straining forward a little, yet holding her hands before her face as if dreading the sight that might meet her eyes. Again and again Pinto flung his body against the door, and finally, with a crash and a long splintering sound, it flew open, precipitating him headlong into the inner room.

A queer sound rose in the woman’s throat and she lowered her hands. She made as if to follow the policeman, but something held her back. From where she stood, staring through the doorway, she could see that the inner room was dark, and she heard the policeman’s grunts and mutterings as he struggled to regain his feet. Then came an interval of silence, broken only by groping footfalls, and presently a light appeared in the rear. Pinto had found the electric switch.

The housekeeper shuddered as an exclamation issued from the other room. Evidently the officer had discovered something. Crouching in front of the counter, she strained her ears, listening. Pinto was speaking in low, quick accents, but she could not make out the words, and she heard no answering voice.

Finally, Pinto came out. His face was a little white and his lips were set in a tight line.

“He’s dead,” he declared.

The woman shrank back against the counter. “Murdered?”

The officer bawled a command to the neck-craning group at the entrance to stand back. Without answering the housekeeper’s question, he looked quickly about the store till he spied a telephone on a shelf behind the counter. The woman listened abstractedly as he called a number and spoke a few words into the transmitter. Then he stepped out from behind the counter and faced her.

“Your boss is lying on the floor in there,” he announced, jerking his huge head toward the inner room, “with a knife wound in his chest. He was breathing his last just as I got to him.”

The housekeeper jerked herself up, a look of sullen passion in her blanched face. “Breathing his last, was he?” Her voice was loud and shrill. “Then he wasn’t dead yet! If you’d hurried, as I told you to, we might have saved his life. I’ll report you for this, Officer Pinto.”

“Cut that stuff! Nothing could have saved him. He was too far gone. Say,” and Pinto bored his sharp eyes into her twitching face, “what name was signed to that letter?”

Twice she opened her lips to speak, but no words came.

“Out with it! You’ve got to tell me now.”

The woman swallowed. “Why do you want to know?” she asked faintly.

“I’ve got a reason. Just as Gage was drawing his last breath, I got down beside him and asked him if he could tell me who stabbed him. I guess he read my lips; anyhow, he was able to whisper a name. I want to know if it jibes with the name signed to the letter Gage got yesterday.”

“Well, then”—she pressed her hands against her breast—“the name on the letter was the Gray Phantom’s.”

Pinto ejaculated hoarsely.

“It jibes, all right!” he declared.