Читать книгу The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume - Robert Wallace - Страница 10

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All through the fast two and a half-hour flight against a strong crosswind, Dr. Paul Bendix sat in the front seat beside Lannigan, and seemed half asleep. His cryptic answers to the big red-headed Irishman's questions were enigmatic and curt.

"We'll have to wait, Champ," he told Lannigan flatly, "until we find out what's been going on with Dr. Junes' metallurgical experiments. With murder at one end, and an explosion at the other, there's more than the ordinary crime-for-money motive behind this peculiar affair."

"Some big mob is working again," Jerry declared. "Another gang of crooks like that arson outfit that tried to blackmail New York City, eh? I'd like to get my hands on 'em!"

Van veiled the fragment of a wry smile behind his drooping eyelids. Jerry Lannigan was a whirlwind in a fight, fearless and trustworthy beyond reason, and far from dumb. But it was sometimes a tough job to hold the big fellow back from too sudden action that might warn off the unknown brain operating back of a sequence of crimes.

Jerry Lannigan had been the top sergeant-mechanic in charge of the pursuit squadron that Richard Curtis Van Loan had commanded as a flying major during the World War. And Lannigan, loyal and faithful, kicked and shoved by chance three times around the world since then, had tried to find the man who had been his C.O. in France.

He'd not succeeded, so far as he knew. Four burly but polite doormen had unceremoniously tossed him into the street from the aristocratic entrance to the exclusive London-town Apartments on upper Park Avenue atop which Dick Van Loan had built his penthouse bachelor home. Van Loan owned the building, in fact, but had been away when Lannigan had tried to visit him.

Van had found Jerry by accident, subsequently, during the blowing up of a Bronx River bridge, but had been disguised and Lannigan had not recognized him. Remembering the battling qualities of the big red-headed mechanic. Van had immediately hired him, letting Jerry know only that he was being employed by the Phantom.

It still stood that way now.

For Dick was afraid that Jerry's pride, damaged at having been thrown out of the swanky London-town when Lannigan had tried to look him up, would drive the Champ away if ever the likeable, fiery Irishman found that the one-time flying major he was searching for and the wealthy Park Avenue clubman were the same.

Lannigan knew some of the Phantom's disguises. He would never know the real identity of the man he sought behind those ingenious characterizations.

The Beechcraft's powerful Wasp motor beat a rhythmic, staccato monotone as the late evening sky darkened into night, making conversation difficult. The rain storm of the afternoon had blown north, but the speedy ship outdistanced it. At ten-thirty the glow and flash of Buffalo's lights were under them, and the Phantom swung the control wheel from Lannigan's seat over to his own.

"I'll land at Niagara," he told Jerry. "We'll lock up the ship. You come with me to Dr. Junes' home. I don't know what we'll run into there."

A gleam of anticipation shone in the Champ's greenish eyes as Van cut the throttle and swooped down toward the small unlighted airport at Niagara. Across the dark, thunderous canyon of the mighty falls itself, the glimmering lights of houses and hotels winked mysteriously at them from the Canadian side of the rapids.

A grim reminder of the flood force of the disaster at Rock Canyon Dam seemed to echo through the darkness from the mighty falls as the Phantom set the ship down on the field and snapped off the landing lights.

"What we want," he told Lannigan as they locked up the plane, "is a talk with Junes, if I can get him to talk. He'll know something about Dr. Paul Bendix, because I've managed to get several science articles published in the journals he reads. Then, we want a look at his laboratory, whether he'll take us there or not."

"We've cracked open tougher spots than labs," Jerry reminded him confidently. "We'll get in!"

Ten minutes later Van and Jerry were pulling up in a cab in front of a small, neat cottage on a dark, quiet street at the residence address of the famous metallurgist.

"Just in case," Van whispered to Lannigan, "I couldn't come armed. If I need a rod, how about it?"

"I'm rodded, so don't worry," Jerry told him. "I wouldn't want to answer a phone call from you without a roscoe on my hip."

Several reporters stood on the tree-shrouded sidewalk, talking in low tones with a detective and a uniformed police lieutenant.

"I'm looking for Doctor Junes," the Phantom announced as he got out of the cab. He spoke with a slightly guttural accent, his eyes studying the men and the dark surroundings from beneath the shaggy greying eyebrows of Professor Paul Bendix. "Is the Doctor at home, gentlemen?"

One of the reporters, wearing a ticket in his hat band, eyed the odd, stooped figure in the faded frock coat with interest. "Who are you, Mister?" He added, in a brazen aside to the other men, "This old-timer looks as screwy as Junes himself, eh?"

"I am Professor Paul Bendix!" Van said haughtily. "I am a man of science, so you have doubtless never heard of me!"

The police lieutenant stepped up close. "Didn't you know that Dr. Junes had a nasty explosion in his laboratory early this evening?"

"We just flew up from New York City," Lannigan said gruffly.

The plainclothes detective, watching them suspiciously, glanced at the lieutenant. "If they flew up, they were in the air when the report went out. They wouldn't know, I guess."

The lieutenant nodded, asked bluntly, "What did you want to see Dr. Junes about, Professor Bendix?"

"A purely scientific matter," the Phantom's foreign-accented voice answered curtly. "Doctor Junes is conducting some valuable experiments in metallurgy in which I am interested. My visit here is sponsored by Mr. Frank Havens, the eminent publisher."

"I guess I can tell you, then," the police lieutenant said, his eyebrows going up at mention of the Clarion owner's name. "Dr. Junes had a very mean shock when the explosion happened. Nobody was killed, fortunately. He was brought home by two of his assistants, and refused to talk, except to say that he was finished forever with what he was working on—I don't pretend to understand that part of it, naturally. Anyhow, he suddenly changed his mind about a half hour ago, and went back to the laboratory with the two assistants again."

"If the doctor is at the laboratory, then I should see him there," Van stated. "Is there any reason why not, sir?"

"I suppose you can go there," the officer admitted. "I'll tell you, though, Professor Bendix—a fellow from New York City visited Dr. Junes yesterday, and was murdered in Grand Central Station today when he returned to your city. The New York police notified us, so we are sort of trying to watch out, for the doctor's protection. In fact, we've got a couple of detectives hanging around as close to Dr. Junes as they can get. Which isn't very close, in that lab of his. He's a touchy old codger." The officer studied Dr. Bendix warily.

"What could that have to do with me, sir?" Professor Bendix shrugged, turned toward the cab. "I am concerned with science, not with crime. Thank you for directing me, officer."

He climbed into the taxi with Jerry, ordered the driver to take him to Dr. Junes' laboratory. As the cab pulled away, he turned sideways in the seat, watched narrowly through the rear window.

In the vague darkness behind, he caught a glimpse of the police lieutenant and the two reporters darting across the sidewalk toward Dr. Junes' cottage, evidently intent on using the phone.

"Checking on us," he said quietly to Lannigan. "Perhaps warning the detectives to watch us, or let us go through. We'll soon see."

"If we're going in, we're going in, dick or no dicks," Jerry declared flatly.

Van's eyes clouded, then became sharply alert, determinedly alive again as the taxi stopped in front of a long, squatty low building of bleak stone that stood apart from other dark buildings on a black private lane near the rumbling falls. He got out, paid off the driver, and stood for a minute with Lannigan as the taxi turned and rolled away.

A high iron picket fence surrounded the tree-shaded grounds. The large vehicle gate was locked, but a narrow pedestrian passage beside the empty watchman's booth let them through onto a winding cinder path leading to the dark laboratory.

Van led the way, making no attempt at caution. There was no sign of the detectives the police lieutenant had mentioned.

At the arched main entrance to the squat building he tried the door, found it locked, and rapped resoundingly with his knuckles.

There was no answer for fully two minutes. Then the door opened a few inches and a flashlight gleamed blindingly in their faces.

"Yeah?" a harsh voice demanded suspiciously. "What'd ya want?"

The Phantom ignored the gun visible in the hand of the man with the torch.

"Professor Paul Bendix to see Doctor Hugo Junes," he announced impatiently.

"I'll have to know more than that," the man inside growled.

"Tell the doctor," Van ordered, "that Professor Bendix has arrived from New York City and is to see the doctor in behalf of Mr. Frank Havens, the publisher."

"Wait here." The door shammed shut on them.

"I should have shoved in while he was arguin'," Jerry exclaimed.

Van shook his head. There were other means of getting inside that laboratory, if this direct method failed. If possible, he wanted Dr. Junes to connect Professor Bendix with the murdered Lester Gimble before they met, so the General Electric scientist could be prepared to give him, unobserved, the information Gimble had carried to his death. But he didn't want to use Havens' name unnecessarily.

There was another wait of several minutes before the door opened once more and the torch gleamed at them.

"Come on in," the harsh voice directed.

They shoved into the blackness anteroom. The door shut and the smell of a thousand chemicals assailed their nostrils. Van recognized the predominant odor of fulminated sulphur which increased as they followed the stocky figure who motioned them along with the revolver he held.

Ahead of them the beam of his flashlight outlined the bare walls of a concrete corridor, and steps going down. They descended, their footsteps echoing hollowly.

Another corridor turned off at right angles behind a heavy steel door which the stocky man opened and closed behind them. Van got one good look at his hard features before he padded on ahead again. There was another left turn, a second stairway going down, steeper and longer than the first.

At the bottom they stopped before a massive circular steel vault-like door cut into what appeared to be no longer concrete but solid rock. Their guide could not have come this far and returned during the short few moments they had waited outside the front entrance of the building. He must have phoned down here.

As the man swung open the heavy round door, Van said to him:

"How do you know I'm Professor Bendix?"

The fellow eyed him belligerently. "That'll be up to the doctor. He's down there." The stocky man stood aside, waiting.

Van looked through the circular doorway. A ladder disappeared into the well-like shaft, but light showed at the bottom some twenty feet below as he peered down. Except for a rangy shadow that moved momentarily across the light at the bottom, the hole had every appearance of a death trap.

The Phantom glanced warningly at Jerry Lannigan, nodded swiftly, and stepped onto the steel rungs of the ladder fastened into the circular stone wall. Above him, as he lowered himself, Lannigan's descending bulk blotted out the light of the electric torch above.

A moment later the Phantom stood at the bottom of the hole. He stepped away from the ladder, turned and moved into the queer octagonal laboratory of Dr. Hugo Junes.

One whole side of the laboratory was a wreck. An electric arc oven was blasted apart, and a slab of the rock wall behind it had been blown off. The debris-burnt metal, ore and scorched, blackened stone had been brushed into a heap and partly covered by a collapsed iron screen tipped over it.

The compact but barren-looking equipment across the room that had not been demolished by the explosion was now in use.

Dr. Junes himself—Van recognized the man from his pictures in several of the metallurgical journals he'd studied—was standing tall, gaunt and frightened beside a shelflike high-voltage electric oven which was already glowing whitely beneath the plates covering its heat producing arcs.

Two men, wearing heavy welder's goggles covering their eyes and faces, were watching him alertly, and a third stood back of them at a large rheostat in the wall. He, too, wore similar heavy glasses and face protector.

There was no other equipment in the room except, on a stone slab that made a workbench jutting from the wall opposite the rheostat, a heavy twenty-four-pound sledge hammer, a chisel and a steel handsaw. Beside the hammer was a small chip of silver colored ore the size of a silver dollar.

The tall, gaunt man nearest the furnace looked across at Van with an almost beseeching gleam of hope in his heat-moistened eyes. His gaze shifted a moment to Lannigan, who now stood behind the Phantom, then settled helplessly upon Van again.

"I am told," the unsteady voice of the gaunt, frightened man said with an attempt at formality, "that you are Professor Paul Bendix, of New York City. I believe I have had the pleasure of reading several of your scientific brochures. I am Dr. Hugo Junes."

The Phantom nodded gravely, and his grey eyes veiled their wary alertness beneath the drooping lids of Professor Paul Bendix.

"Excellent, Doctor," he said austerely. "And I am familiar with your remarkable work." He glanced at the glowing furnace. "I observe your experiment is already in process, despite an unfortunate explosion."

"What you observe," Junes stated with suppressed passion, "is the ultimate defeat of all my experiments with aluminum and calbite. I have returned here only to burn up what the attempted fusion reaction did not completely destroy."

The eyes of the others in the room were inscrutable behind their heavy goggles. For the moment, at least, they seemed content to listen and dart quick glances at the furnace.

"I understand your experiments are designed to fuse calbite and aluminum," Van said appreciatively. "But the explosion—"

Dr. Junes' gaze shifted to the others, then to the oven, and back to the Phantom, blinking confusedly. "I have refused to continue, or to leave any trace of my work, because of that revealing accident this afternoon. I am unable to understand what was the real cause of it, sir, but only a few grains of the composite metals, not quite fused, suddenly exploded—with the result you can see for yourself." He waved a hand toward the debris at one side of the room.

"Powerful," Van commented, his nerves tightening as the impact of that information struck him. "A few grains, you say? No more?"

"A very few grains, Professor Bendix. And—" Junes smacked his palms together sharply—"it happened! My assistants do not agree with me in my refusal to continue. But consider—what would happen to humanity if the explosive power of the formula I nearly discovered became a reality! The whole world would be at the mercy of whoever could control that metallurgical combination. It is too dangerous, too terrible to contemplate. So I have refused to go on!"

"It's an endothermic compound, I presume," Professor Bendix suggested, and when Junes nodded agreement, "At what temperature did you expect to make the aluminum-calbite fusion?"

"Impossible to say," Junes declared warmly. "These furnaces produce the greatest heat of any man-made generators yet devised. And they fall considerably short of a real fusion. I've added ammonium nitrate—" He paused, frowned. "But enough. I am done. I will not jeopardize humanity."

The man at the rheostat said sullenly, "Dr. Junes is very stubborn, Professor Bendix. The explosion this afternoon has him imagining too many things a scientist should never consider."

"Bah!" Junes exploded. "You—all of you! I will not be driven, nor forced! Nor bribed. Nor threatened!" His voice rose to a suddenly terrified screech, a pitch that seemed without reason.

Two of the assistants grabbed and held him. The rheostat man nodded curtly, asked Bendix:

"Could you, Professor, finish the doctor's experiment—if you were without his hysterical prejudices?"

"Perhaps," Van answered evenly. "Given time."

Dr. Junes' tall figure jerked violently, shuddered, and suddenly collapsed as the two men let him loose. He staggered, stepped backward, his eyes wide with quick terror, staring at the opening behind Van where the steel ladder led up to the sub-cellar corridor above.

The Phantom whirled, knocking against Lannigan's big hand that almost automatically was reaching for a hidden revolver. Van gave Jerry a warning signal to wait. Then Professor Paul Bendix settled his gaze on that exit.

Standing in the well-like opening was a tall, powerfully built figure dressed in a caped black robe with a black hood over a head whose face was masked in white. The next moment the terrifying figure moved into the room.

A frightful scream of agony slashed the silence, shot a blood-chilling shock through Van as he spun back, stared with momentarily paralyzed muscles at the gaunt, writhing form of Junes.

The scientist was sprawled backward halfway across the top of the white-hot furnace plates, his body held there by the adhesive, scorching flesh that stuck to the plates and was filling the room with a nauseating stench. A final shriek died on the doctor's lips. The whole upper half of his body shriveled; the arms alone waving spasmodically in unconscious, dying reflexes.

The Phantom sprang for the rheostat, knocked aside the third masked man standing near it. He spun off the electric dial control, turned to watch the scientist's limp body slide down off the furnace.

For a fleeting second, as one of the men wearing the welding mask bent over Junes' dead body, Van caught a glimpse of the handle of a hypodermic syringe in the fellow's coat pocket. The next moment the handle had slipped down out of sight.

"A regrettable accident," the hooded figure stated sullenly, and glanced at Professor Paul Bendix with icy determination. "Did I hear you say you could carry on the unfortunate scientist's work?"

"This furnace wasn't hot enough for the experiment, anyhow," the masked man who had been at the rheostat declared. "We've been watching this stove seven hours, and the metals won't fuse."

The Phantom's seething mind clicked to a grim conclusion. He was being asked to take the place of the dead scientist. Junes had refused to aid these men in what ever plan they had proposed. Van had not positive proof, but already suspected that the doctor had been shoved onto that furnace and murdered. He decided to join them, let them force him into their scheme.

He nodded, inclined his head gravely, saw even then out of the corner of his eye what was going to happen, as he indicated Lannigan.

"Yes, it is entirely possible that I could conduct the unfortunate doctor's experiment," he said. "If I have my assistant."

At a nod from the hooded figure, one of the men had stepped close to Jerry Lannigan. A faintly blue vapor curled up swiftly from a pencil in the man's hand, and Jerry dropped unconscious to the floor.

"You shall have your assistant," the icy voice promised with a note of satanic humor. He pocketed the small chip of silver-colored ore on the stone bench, and advanced on Van.

The next instant a second pencil ejected a shot of that bluish brain-fogging gas straight into the Phantom's bearded face. The room whirled dizzily for a second that seemed endless, while the hooded face leered. Then oblivion blotted out the room.