Читать книгу The Gray Phantom's Return - Herman Landon - Страница 7

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“Roland Adair, Boston, Massachusetts.” It was thus the Gray Phantom inscribed the register at Hotel Pyramidion, while an affable clerk beamed approval on his athletic and well-groomed figure.

“What do you require, Mr. Adair?”

“Parlor, bedroom, and bath, with southern exposure, preferably above the sixth floor.”

The clerk, intuitively sensing that the new arrival was one accustomed to having his wishes complied with, glanced at his card index. “We have exactly what you want, Mr. Adair.”

“Good! I wish breakfast and the morning newspapers sent to my apartment at once.”

“It shall be done, Mr. Adair.” The clerk bowed debonairly, little suspecting that the new guest, who so unmistakably presented all the earmarks of a cultured and leisurely gentleman, was at this moment the most “wanted” man on the North American continent. The guest himself grinned in his short black beard while an elevator carried him to the ninth floor, and an acute observer would have gained the impression that he was bent upon an adventure hugely to his liking.

He ate his breakfast slowly and with keen relish, meanwhile glancing over the newspapers, which were still featuring the East Houston Street murder as the chief sensation. Nothing had as yet been discovered which threw the faintest light on the peculiar manner in which the slayer had left the scene of his crime, and it was regarded as doubtful whether this mysterious phase of the case would be cleared up until after the Gray Phantom’s arrest. It had been ascertained that the notorious criminal was not aboard any of the vessels that had sailed for foreign ports since the murder, so it was thought probable that the fugitive was still in the country, and it was confidently declared by police officials that the dragnet would gather him in before long.

The accounts in the various papers were substantially similar, but again the Phantom detected a faintly dissenting note in the Sphere’s article. It was so slight as to be scarcely discernible, but to the Phantom it signified a lurking doubt in the writer’s mind, and a suggestion that the Sphere’s reporter sensed a weak link in the chain of evidence.

“I’ll have a talk with the fellow,” he decided. “I might ask him to take dinner with me this evening. He may prove interesting.”

He finished his coffee and lighted a long, thin cigar, then passed to the window and watched the procession below. After his long and monotonous seclusion at Sea-Glimpse the life of the city acted as a gentle electric stimulant on his nerves. He glowed and tingled with sensations that had lain dormant during long months of tedium, and the strongest and raciest of these was a feeling of ever present danger.

The Gray Phantom did not deceive himself. His present adventure was by far the most hazardous of his career. On the one hand he was threatened by the nimble-witted man hunters of the police department, and on the other by the henchmen of the Duke. His only hope of safety lay in his subtler intelligence, which had seldom failed him in moments of danger, and the temporary protection afforded by his beard.

Luckily, the only photograph of him in existence, the one the newspapers had displayed on their front pages the morning after the murder, showed him smooth shaven. The beard, giving him a maturer and somewhat more professional appearance, afforded a thin and yet fairly satisfactory disguise, but it would be of scant use if by the slightest misstep or careless move he should attract suspicion to himself. In such an event, certain records filed away in the archives of the police would quickly establish his identity as the Gray Phantom. Nevertheless, he was pleased that the descriptions carried by the newspapers had made no mention of a beard.

There was a measure of safety, too, in the sheer audacity with which he was proceeding. The man hunters might look everywhere else, but they would scarcely expect to find their quarry living sumptuously at a first-class hotel. His free and easy mode of conduct, unmarked by the slightest effort at concealment, afforded a protection which he could not have found in the shabbiest hovel and under the most elaborate disguise.

Yet, despite all the safeguards his brain could invent, the situation was perilous enough to give the Gray Phantom all the excitement his nature craved. His pulses throbbed, and there was a keen sparkle in his eyes as he left the hotel and went out on the streets. The very air seemed charged with a quality that held him in a state of piquant suspense. The policemen appeared more alert than usual, and now and then snatches of conversation reached his ears from little groups at street corners and in doorways who were avidly discussing the Gage murder and the chances of the Gray Phantom being caught. At each subway entrance and elevated stairway loitered a seemingly slothful and impassive character whom his trained eye easily identified as a detective.

Chuckling softly in his beard, the Phantom walked on. No one seemed to suspect that the striking and faultlessly garbed figure that sauntered down the streets with such a carefree and easy stride, looking for all the world like a leisurely gentleman out for his morning constitutional, might be the object of one of the most thorough and far-reaching man hunts ever undertaken by the police. Occasionally he paused to inspect a window display, incidentally listening to a discussion in which his name was frequently mentioned. The East Houston Street murder, which under ordinary circumstances would have attracted but passing notice, had become a tremendous sensation because of the Gray Phantom’s supposed connection with it.

Gradually he veered off the crowded thoroughfares and entered into a maze of crooked, narrow, and squalid streets where housewives and children with dirt-streaked faces viewed his imposing figure with frank curiosity. After a glance at a corner sign he turned east, quickening his pace a little and scanning the numbers over the doorways as he proceeded. One of the buildings, a murky brick front with a funeral wreath hanging on the door and a tobacconist’s sign lettered across the ground-floor window, he regarded with more than casual interest.

“Sylvanus Gage, Dealer in Pipes, Tobacco, and Cigars,” he read in passing; then, after a moment’s hesitation, he pursued his eastward course, a thoughtful pucker between his eyes. He was trying to outline a course of procedure, a matter to which hitherto he had given scant attention, for the Phantom was the veriest tyro in the science of criminal investigation. It occurred to him that one of his first steps should be an inspection of the scene of the murder.

A few blocks farther east he turned into a once famous restaurant and ordered luncheon. He dallied over the dishes, smoked a cigar while he drank his coffee, and it was after three o’clock when he left the place and headed in the direction of the tobacco store. This time he paused in front of the establishment, looked through the window, and finding the interior deserted, resolutely rang the bell. Some time passed before the side door was opened by a flat-chested woman with sharp features and unkempt gray hair.

“What do you want?” she demanded sulkily, regarding the caller with oddly piercing eyes. “Can’t you see the store’s closed?”

The Phantom lifted his hat and smiled urbanely. “Sorry to intrude,” he murmured. “You are Mrs. Trippe, I believe?”

“Well, suppose I am?”

“The late Mr. Gage’s housekeeper?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I am Mr. Adair, of Boston,” explained the Phantom, unruffled by her churlish demeanor. He and the woman had met once or twice during his stormy interviews with Gage, but he felt sure she did not recognize him. “You may have heard of me as an amateur investigator of crime,” he went on easily. “I have established a modest reputation in that line. This morning I happened to read an account of Mr. Gage’s tragic death, and some of the circumstances impressed me as interesting. Could I trouble you to show me the room in which the crime was committed?”

His hand was in the act of extracting a bank note from his pocket, but he checked it in time, a sixth sense warning him that Mrs. Trippe might resent an attempt to grease her palm.

“I don’t see what you want to pester me for,” she muttered sullenly, fixing him with a look of obvious suspicion. “The police have almost worried the life out of me with their fool questions and carryings-on. The case is settled and there’s nothing more to investigate.”

“Sure of that, Mrs. Trippe?” He had detected a faint hesitancy in her speech and manner, and he was quick to take advantage of it. Incidentally he noticed that she had aged a great deal since he last saw her, and he doubted whether he should have recognized her if they had met by chance. “What about the murder’s manner of escape?” he added. “I understand that hasn’t been explained yet.”

“Well, he escaped, didn’t he? I don’t see that it makes any difference how he did it. The Gray Phantom always did things his own way. But,” after a few moments’ wavering, “you can come in and look around.”

Her abrupt acquiescence surprised him, and he guessed it was not wholly due to a desire to be obliging. He wondered, as he followed her through the store, whether her decision to admit him was not prompted by a wish to see what deductions he would make after inspecting the scene of the crime.

She opened the inner door, remarking that the damage wrought by Officer Pinto had been repaired a few hours after the murder and that the police department’s seal had been removed only a short while ago. The Phantom passed into the narrow chamber, only slightly altered in appearance since the time of his last visit. The realization that he was viewing the scene of a crime supposed to have been perpetrated by himself appealed strongly to his dramatic instinct, and the thought that at this moment the police were searching for him with a fine-toothed comb lent a touch of humor to the situation.

The woman stepped to the small window in the rear and raised the shade, then stationed herself at the door, peering at him out of wary, narrow-lidded eyes, as if intent on his slightest move. The Phantom glanced at the rickety desk at which Gage had sat while haggling over petty sums and figuring percentages to the fraction of a cent.

“I see one of the drawers has been forced open,” he remarked.

“Lieutenant Culligore did that,” explained the woman. “That was the drawer where Mr. Gage kept most of his valuables.”

“Including the Maltese cross,” the Phantom smilingly put in.

Mrs. Trippe nodded. “There’s a spring somewhere that opens and shuts it, but none of us could find it, and so Lieutenant Culligore had to break the drawer open.”

“Yet the cross was gone,” observed the Phantom, “and the drawer was intact when Lieutenant Culligore found it. That would seem to indicate that the murderer knew how to operate the spring.”

“Well, hasn’t the Phantom proved that he knows just about all there is to know?”

“I am sure the Phantom would feel highly complimented if he could hear you say that.” He smiled discreetly, realizing that here was another item of proof, for he was willing to wager that, though he had never seen Gage work the spring, he could have opened the drawer without laying violent hands upon it. He turned to the window, carefully examined the catch, then raised the lower half and endeavored to thrust his shoulders through the opening. The attempt satisfied him that even a smaller man than himself would have found it impossible to squeeze through.

That left only the door as a means of egress and ingress, and the door had been bolted on the inside when Officer Pinto arrived, which circumstance seemed to render it flatly impossible for the murderer to have escaped that way. He tried the lock and examined the stout bolt, then stepped through to the other side, closing the door behind him. A wrinkle of perplexity appeared above his eyes. Even the Phantom’s nimble wits could not devise a way of passing through the door and leaving it bolted on the inside. The feat did not seem feasible, and yet the murderer must have accomplished it. His face wore a frown as he reëntered the little chamber.

“Can’t figger it out, eh?” The housekeeper seemed to have read his mind. “Well, you needn’t try. The police did, and they had to give it up as a bad job. The Phantom has a cute little way with him, doing things so they can’t be explained.”

“And yet,” facing her squarely, “you don’t think the Phantom committed the murder?”

A scarcely perceptible shiver ran through her shrunken figure. “What else can I think?” she parried.

He shrugged his shoulders. The impression haunted him that she was not so sure of the Phantom’s guilt as she appeared. He ran his eyes over the floor, the walls, and the murky ceiling.

“And you needn’t try to find any hidden openings, either,” she told him, again reading his unspoken thoughts. “A bunch of headquarters detectives spent half a day tapping the walls and the ceiling and ripping up boards in the floor. The Phantom——”

The jangle of the bell at the outer door interrupted her, and she looked scowlingly toward the front of the store. “I guess that’s Officer Pinto,” she muttered. “He’s on night duty, but he’s been prowling around here most of the time since the murder, asking silly questions when he ought to be in bed.”

A hard, wary glitter appeared in the Phantom’s eyes as she left the room. In an instant he had scented danger.