Читать книгу The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume - Robert Wallace - Страница 18

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The Phantom had three more visitors that afternoon.

Congressman Harry Arnold was brought up by Deputy Rowan, who left immediately, and the interview was conducted with the bars of the cell door between them. Arnold was on his official dignity at first, but he became shrewder and more human as they talked.

"My purpose in coming here," the Congressman stated, "is to fulfill a formal duty. As Chairman of the Board of Pardons, I'm obliged to talk with every man condemned to death by the state, to make sure that he is given an opportunity to try for a pardon if his lawyer or friends or relatives have not done so."

Van stepped away from the bars and sat down on the end of the uncomfortable iron bed, studying the politician shrewdly. The man was rather handsome in a rawboned manner, and the inflection of his speech was flawless.

"I take my oratory sitting down," Van cut in on him. "After you get through about the pardon I couldn't get in a couple of million years, what're you going to talk about?"

Arnold raised his eyebrows appreciatively, and a faint smile twitched his lips.

"Aside from the fact that you're here in the death house, Kline," he said interestedly, "which means that you blundered—I'd say you were a pretty smart man. I suppose you won't be afraid to die, until the last minute or two. Or don't you give a damn any more?"

"What makes you think I don't?" the Phantom asked curiously.

Arnold shrugged mildly. "Your toughness, your hardness, Kline. The name you've acquired—Killer. Admirable qualities, sometimes. But—there's always the chair at the end."

"Nerts!" Van snapped at him. "I figure I'm in for a battle over that hundred grand I'm supposed to have tucked away—and what do I have to listen to? A sermon!"

"Dr. Jessup's point of view is rather apt," Arnold remarked, his glance still amused. "It ought to be a shame to destroy a specimen like you." He turned away abruptly toward the elevator. Over his shoulder he said, "I may see you again before Bluebold's nerves get the better of him. I'm afraid your reputation is working against you this time—speeding the last hour."

Van lay back on the bed, pondering. Arnold had been present in Frank Haven's office when the three officials from the Alleghany Penitentiary had appeared. That was about the only suspicion Van could attach to him.

Yet Arnold, being a politician, had to be a public speaker and organizer. It would take a shrewd organizer to build up and control such a fear disciplined mob of hooded devils as Van had run into.

Arnold didn't seem to possess the ruthlessness needed, hadn't evidenced such hardness at any rate. Nor had he displayed any knowledge of either medicine or chemistry—the two requirements the leader of the Invisible Empire must possess besides a genius for organization in secret.

Anyone, the Phantom reasoned, could hire a surgeon to transform the criminal faces of crooks who chose to become members. He was trying to consider the prison executives one at a time now, and kept Dr. Jessup out of the mentally probing picture for the moment. And anyone could hire a scientist, such as Kag, perhaps.

But the rub was, that no shrewd-minded commander of such a society as the Imperator controlled, would sensibly care to trust both of the main mechanical factors in his organization to hired men. He'd almost have to be an expert in at least one of the two major lines himself, over and above his executive capacity.

Van's thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Warden Bluebold. Van stood up, leaned against the bars, eyeing the prison chief sharply.

"How do you like your temporary quarters now?" the big man asked. He handed Van a fresh pack of cigarettes. "The guards give you lights for your smokes and tend to your whims okay, Killer?" His attitude was not sour, but unexpectedly cheerful.

"I'm doing fine," the Phantom told him. "Decided when you're going to tuck me into the chair and turn on the juice?" He eyed the warden sharply. "Your pal Arnold is afraid I'm getting on your nerves."

"Arnold? Humph!" Black-Jack Bluebold's voice was a tolerant growl. "Mr. Arnold isn't tough enough, I'm thinking, to make a good prison warden. Kline, it takes guys with nerve—like you and me, Killer! I'm going to get a kick out of throwing the switch on you."

"Tomorrow morning?" Van asked pointedly.

"That'll be up to you, in a way," Bluebold told him flatly.

"Saving me for something?" The Phantom's voice was caustic.

"I want to find out where that money is you got on your last robbery, Kline. The insurance company put it at a hundred thousand dollars. Want to talk about it now—or later?"

The Phantom covered his own surprised reaction in a Killer Kline shrug of contempt. "I was waiting for something like that, you big punk! Personal shakedown, eh? Suppose somebody beat you to it?"

Bluebold's eyes narrowed dangerously.

"Kline, I've stood about all the insults from you I'm going to take! I can fry you at midnight tonight, and by God, if you don't control that dirty tongue of yours, I will turn the heat on you then!"

Van's voice cracked back at him:

"Why the hell don't you? What's stopping you? What the devil are you waiting for?"

The warden's face reddened. He started to shout something, but bit off the words with a snap of his heavy jaw.

"If you've got a proposition to make," the Phantom told him flatly, "let's have it, Bluebold. You ain't the only one making passes at me."

"Listen, you rat!" Bluebold growled, his eyes smoldering with hate, "I ought to come in there and beat that information out of you. But there's other ways of finding out." His manner changed suddenly, became icy and deliberate. "I'm not after that dough for myself. There were two dicks up here to see about that money a while ago. What did you tell 'em?"

The Phantom's eyes glittered. Was Bluebold in with those two phony state trooper detectives, afraid they were doublecrossing him?

"I told them," Van answered, "what I'm telling you, Bluebold! Before I cough up about any dough I may have parked somewhere, I want time to figure out where I come out on the deal."

"I see," Bluebold said stonily. "All right, sucker! Figure it out your way, but don't figure too damned long. Midnight tonight!" He strode away from the cell door, stomped heavy-footed into the elevator and went down.

Van began pacing the narrow cell floor.

He couldn't figure Bluebold out. The man was harder, tougher than Arnold. And he had a reputation as a ruthless disciplinarian—an essential requirement for a man handling any secret society like the organization that called itself the Invisible Empire.

The Phantom's mind kept reverting to that underground surgical room where he'd found the Alleghany Penitentiary thermometer. It was obvious that, if there was a connecting passage from the prison down to that operating room—and Van believed such a tunnel existed. Warden Bluebold would have the greatest opportunity to use it.

With a degree of medical and scientific knowledge that he might easily be hiding beneath his harsh outward bearing, Black-Jack Bluebold could be the Imperator.

Van was still thinking about the warden when one of the guards brought him his supper. And Van's third visitor didn't show up until almost ten o'clock that night.

It was Dr. Jessup.

"I'm going to ask you a favor," the M.D. said without preliminaries when he came up to Van's cell door. "You don't have to submit to my request."

From the way he said it, though, there was little doubt that Killer Kline would conform, or else!

"Going to try to make a specimen out of me?" Van demanded.

"I'm conducting some very detailed experiments and analysis of the effect of electricity on the human body and brain," Jessup explained gravely. "I want to examine you more thoroughly than I've done—before the electrocution. I'll make the other part of the tests and experiments, of course, when I perform the autopsy on you."

"Glad you're so cheerful about it," Van said sardonically.

The cold, distant eyes of Dr. Maurice Jessup surveyed him with sharp eagerness. "Very good, Kline. We'll go down to my laboratory."

He summoned the two guards, had the cell door opened, and the four of them got into the elevator.

"Of course," Jessup said as they rode down, "I do this with the consent of the prison authorities."

The car stopped at the basement, and the Phantom was ushered across a barren concrete floor into a three room laboratory that was a strange combination of operating equipment and electrical instruments. The two guards had come into the main laboratory and stationed themselves near the door.

"The X-ray pictures come first," Dr. Jessup said, and led Van into a smaller room on the right. The place was furnished only with a large X-ray machine, a plate cabinet, and the one chair used for seating the subject. "Be seated, please," Jessup directed.

The Phantom parked himself in the chair, watching the doctor move swiftly about the small, compact space. Jessup's cold eyes seemed to be watching everything at once, and there was no lost motion in his movements.

Van's back was toward a narrow door opening into the basement proper, and a screen blocked his view of the larger main laboratory.

"Damn!" Jessup exclaimed suddenly. "I'll have to get fresh X-ray plates. Just sit where you are, Kline."

The doctor seemed to have forgotten that he was preparing to examine a criminal convicted of murder and capable of murdering again. He hurried round the screen, out into the main lab. Van could hear his footsteps cross the floor to the third of the three rooms. A door opened and shut.

For almost a minute there was silence.

Then, without warning, a screaming voice shrilled somewhere out in the dimly lighted basement.

The Phantom leaped from the chair, reached the narrow door that opened directly into the basement. As his hand shook the knob, the voice sounded again, screaming words. "You tricked me! I'm making explosives for your brainless empire—I'll expose you—I'll—aaahhh !—"

The frenzied words broke off in a piercing wail of terror that chopped off into abrupt, ominous silence, punctuated by the thud of a falling body.

Van's hand jerked away from the locked door. He swung round the screen, saw one of the guards still standing by the main door, poised, a gun in his hand. The other prison guard was running out into the basement. Dr. Jessup was nowhere in sight.

The Phantom ran into the large laboratory as the second guard snapped out of his paralyzed posture. The two of them rushed out toward the uniformed screw bending over a huddled figure on the basement floor.

"Who is it?" the running guard shouted.

"Don't know," the other called. "Never saw him in my life."

But Van had seen that odd, grotesque form before.

It was Gulliver Vonderkag!

The Phantom stared down with narrowed, unbelieving eyes at that hunchback German scientist. The crippled man was already dead, but as Van and the two excited guards bent over him, no wounds or marks of violence were visible.

Remembering the gas fumes that had knocked him out in Dr. Junes' laboratory, the Phantom stooped suddenly between the guards before they could stop him, smelled Kag's lips, depressing the no longer breathing lungs. But there was no odor of gas, no sign of the purplish discoloration of asphyxiation.

The two guards yanked him back away from the body, and the two of them lifted the dead hunchback, carried him away into Jessup's laboratory.

As they laid the body on one of the operating tables, the prison physician emerged from the smaller room on the left, opposite the X-ray office. Dr. Jessup was carrying a packet of X-ray plates. He stopped, stared at the tableau, hurried over to join them.

Van eyed the doctor covertly, noted that the man's seeming surprise was replaced almost at once by a sharp, professional interest.

"Who is this man?" he demanded. "What happened?"

"We don't know," one of the guards exclaimed. "We heard a screech and some screw hollerin' about explosives—"

"I heard that part of it myself," Jessup declared, shutting off the guard's answer. "Thought it was a patient in a fit, up on the floor above." He glanced sharply at Van. "Where were you?"

"Right where you parked me, Doc!" the Phantom snapped. "What killed him?"

Jessup set down the plate case, started examining the body, while the others watched him. The doctor's fingers moved expertly over the dead cripple, removing the clothing, prodding, probing.

When he'd finished, he glanced up, frowning.

"Not a mark on him," he said. "Not a scratch!"

"A guy don't scream like that just from heart failure," Van remarked and stared keenly at the dead face.

Those wide eyes that had rolled so terribly in Kag's head were fixed now, concentrated straight ahead in glazed contemplation of eternity. Staring down at their vacuous expression, the Phantom's keen gaze caught a tiny fleck of blood that looked like a thread thin blood-vessel on the white eyeball. He bent over the still, agonized face, pushed the wrinkled flesh away from the eye socket.

"Mind, doc?" he asked, but didn't wait for permission.

On the outer corner of the left eye was a minute blood clot covering a needle hole that had penetrated the brain.

Van pointed it out to Dr. Jessup, noticing the worried, lines that appeared on the surgeon's features.

"Maybe the guards can find the needle that made that puncture," the Phantom suggested boldly. "Anyhow, Doctor, it took a medical man to know how to kill a guy that way."

Dr. Jessup looked at Van sharply, startled, but was too slow to stop him as the Phantom stepped back and crossed to the small room from which the doctor had emerged a minute after the murder.

Van reached the open door, stared swiftly through. A man moving fast could have got out of that room through a door, met and killed Kag, and got back into the room again before even the paralyzed guard could have seen him.

He scowled, stared again through that open doorway. A single glance covered the whole of the small room. There was not a door or a window in it, and the walls, like the walls of the other rooms, were of solid concrete.

Dr. Jessup couldn't have got out of there unless there was a trick door. Van had no chance to search for one. He was still Killer Kline.