Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (7 page)

He advanced from the edge of the rug toward the desk where the Griffin stood waiting.

It might have been the quick gleam of triumph in the Griffin’s eyes, it might have been the quick tremor under his feet; Manning never knew.

But his superb coördination catapulted him in a leap from the diaphragmatic opening of the throat of the death tube, up to the top of the desk, hurling aside the bronze disks, to grapple with the Griffin.

How old the monster was Manning never knew. But he was supremely virile and in his madness his strength was that of a giant.

It was fortunate for Manning that he knew where and how to strike, how to use the art of jujutsu. Otherwise he would have succumbed instantly. He was fighting a man with the strength of four. It was not a pretty battle. Manning hit shrewdly, wherever he knew he could best sap the other’s super-vitality. They rolled from the desk to the floor, barely avoiding the open shaft. They fought round the circle of the wall, and when they came to the slack figure of Quantro there was a struggle to get the knife.

The Griffin was bleeding. His hawklike nose was smashed. One eye was closing, but the superhuman strength of the madman was in his sinews and once, when he got a scissors hold, Manning thought he was gone before he could break it. If the Griffin had known anything about wrestling that might well have ended it.

And, all the time, the Griffin gasped out incoherencies, the slime and smut of many nations, the oaths of the galleys and the ropewalks. He cursed as Manning’s thumb drove between the carpal bones of his wrist and released the Griffin’s clutch on the knife. Then Manning kicked the weapon into the shaft, where it went tinkling down. And the fight went on.

Soon the dwarf must come back to sense and action.

Again and again Manning applied Oriental holds and could not complete them against the unnatural resistance of the Griffin. Time and time again he got home a blow that should have put out a Goliath, but the Griffin seemed to have the resistance of an octopus.

All the time the barbaric music sounded. The amber incense fumed. And then, dimly, Manning heard a noise of hammering and hacking. His men were on the job.

But they would have to come soon.
Very soon!
Manning knew he was playing out. His lungs could not get air enough. His arms were heavy as lead. He could not easily get at his guns, and he did not want to have to use them.

The Griffin seemed to fail to realize that there was anything to fight with but his own body. He swarmed all over Manning, who, like a clever wrestler, let the other exhaust himself by his own efforts.

Quantro was awakening, crawling toward them. His knife was gone, but his hands opened and shut. He could throttle.

Manning set his knee deep in the Griffin’s lean stomach and heaved. He rolled away, got a gun free.

Dead or alive!

They were both tackling him.

He could sight only the dwarf. He got him, through the chest. Quantro curled up and rolled, over and over, to the steel shaft and toppled into it, howling as he fell.

Manning got to his knees, panting, exhausted, his gun hand trembling.

“Put up your hands,” he said. “My men are coming.”

They were coming. There was no question of that, but they had not arrived.

The Griffin let out a discordant laugh.

“You fool!” he panted croakingly. “Do you think I can be caught?”

He lunged across the room to his desk, slumped over it, badly bruised and beaten, feeling for certain disks.

“We go to hell together!” he cried as Manning fired.

“Well, you landed him, but he’s a mess,” said the police commissioner. “You got him just in time, nicked him back of the head with your bullet. Same thing they called creasing, out West, when they knocked down the wild broncos. And you surely beat him up. Your second slug went through his lungs, but he had touched that button and if you hadn’t had that fake excavating crew on the spot that would have been the grand finish, with the place burning up the way it was.”

Manning, stiff and sore and seared, managed a grin.

“I
told
you it was in the lap of the little gods,” he said.

“Oh, yeah? Well, you get the credit, Manning. We can’t send him to the chair, though I’d like to exhibit him down at the Battery in a steel cage. Swing him there till the gulls pecked him to death. But the law of the land will say he is an incurable lunatic—which I grant—and we’ll have to let him live, though why a nut should be allowed to live, after he’s done what the Griffin has done, is beyond me. Probably die of T.B. with his punctured lungs, they say. Meantime they want to observe him. I’d like to skin him and set him up in a museum as a horrible example.”

“I know how you feel,” said Manning. “But we’ve got him.”

“And we’ll hold him,” said the commissioner.

“Here’s hoping,” answered Manning. “I did my best.”

He surveyed his broken knuckles a bit ruefully. His shots had done the actual trick, but, after all, he relished the memory of the blows he had sent home. It had been a good scrap, man to madman.

“Mind if I use your phone?” he asked the commissioner.

“I might let it go,
this
time. Listen, anything I can get for you?”

“Thanks, but I’m afraid not,” returned Manning with a grin the other thoroughly understood. “I’m going to call my girl.”

The Mottled Monster

It Was a Fearsome Murder That Had Struck Two Victims—Murder That Had Come and Gone a Way Only a Bird Could Follow

The Insistent note of his bedside telephone awakened Gordon Manning. Dawn was not far away, but his sleeping chamber was still dark and the light outside the open windows was a deep purple.

He could afford to sleep with open windows these nights, with the Griffin insane and safely incarcerated. Yet, instantly alert, Manning noted the time, five thirty, on the luminous dial of the clock on his bedside table as he picked up the instrument.

The message was from the chief police commissioner, New York City.

“Manning? This is Melleny speaking. Something strange has happened: a double killing, or at least a double death, on Park Avenue. A local doctor was called in for one—a woman. The precinct captain has been there and two men from the Central Office. I’ve just got the report. The whole thing is almost incredible. It seems a baffling mystery, especially the cause of death. Manning, if I wasn’t sure the Griffin is safely put away—and to make sure he is I just called Dannemora—I’d feel certain that cunning devil was up to his old devices.”

For a moment Manning had also wondered whether the Griffin, in some satanic trick, had not got away once more. It had taken him months to capture the arch-fiend whose web of murder and fear had been spread over the whole United States.

“There’s only one Griffin, what’s left of him,” he said to Melleny. “At that, I’m glad to know he’s where we put him. But I need a rest, commissioner.”

“And we need you. There’s only one Manning. Your commission and authority as special investigator are not revoked. If you’ll do me this much of a favor, go there and see what you think of it, then you can say ‘no’ if there isn’t an angle to it that grips you. You’ll have full charge. I’ll hold everybody until you get there. I’m sending a cartographer and a photographer and a fingerman, though Dr. Henley says there’s nothing in it for the last. He told me to say he hopes you’ll take the case.”

If Henley was puzzled it meant something a long way out of the ordinary. The old lure of adventure, of the mysterious, came back to Manning. He was not as fagged as he had fancied after all. He was still underweight, there were still lines of strain in his hawklike features, but suddenly he was no longer tired.

“I’ll come,” he said. “Give me the address.”

He set it down with pencil and pad, touched a buzzer for Yamata, his Japanese body servant and butler.

“Good man,” Melleny replied, and the commissioner’s voice showed relief.

Twenty minutes later, having showered and breakfasted, Manning was driving his powerful roadster into the city.

II

The precinct captain had turned over the police end of it to the Central Office detectives. The three office men had made their maps and pictures, sprayed for prints. But the two detectives of the homicide squad were waiting, and so was Dr. Henley, chief medical examiner. They greeted Manning with eagerness.

It was a modern apartment house, thirty stories high, built in towering setbacks, exclusive and expensive. The woman had been found dead in her suite on the twentieth floor. The man, a well known portrait painter, was discovered on the demi-terrace at the top of the structure below a penthouse. He did not live there, but had his studio on the floor below. There seemed no reason at present why he should have been on the roof at such an early hour. Both deaths, according to Henley, had occurred about four o’clock.
Rigor mortis
had not set in, but there had been terrible changes in the bodies after death.

“You’ll want to look at them before the wagon comes,” said Henley. “There will be autopsies, but I’m doubtful about what even they will uncover.”

The chief medical examiner was a man well over fifty, experienced in surgery, an expert on criminal matters, whose findings and theories were respected on the Continent as well as in America. He and Manning had worked together before and they appreciated each other’s abilities.

They went first in the elevator to the roof, one Central Office man, Sergeant Doherty, with them, the other, Eddy Hanlon, first-grade detective, remaining behind. The husband of the woman who was dead and their maid were being held.

Pelota, the dead Italian artist, whose canvases of society women had created a furor, lay underneath a blanket. Henley removed it.

Though the sight he uncovered was ghastly it left Henley, used to the dissecting room, and Manning, used to war horrors, unmoved.

The artist’s olive skin was the color of old putty. He was clad in pyjamas of an intricate pattern, crimson and gold and purple. The top was open at the throat. Over the pyjamas he wore a sleeveless robe striped in vivid colors, an Arabian
aba.

The lips had writhed back, showing his teeth. The eyes stared horribly upward. The face was a hideous mask that seemed to register terror. It evidently affected Sergeant Doherty, though Henley and Manning both knew that post-mortem expressions are not to be considered as registrations of mental impression in the fleeting moment of sudden death. They were muscular contractions attributable to other physical causes.

Pelota’s whole face was shrunken. So was his body. It was too small for the clothing. The flesh showed waxen and colorless. He had affected a small mustache and imperial, and these stood out from the chin and lip in a strained bristle.

“In life the man weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds,” said Henley. “The body has been drained of blood.”

Manning agreed with him.

“How?” he asked.

Beneath the collar bone Henley showed two tiny purple punctures. They were so close together as almost to merge.

“They go deep and straight in,” said Henley. “That is the only mark upon him, unless I find others in the autopsy. And, believe me, Manning, that is going to be thorough.”

Manning looked around. The terrace had a parapet three feet high. It was a platform some twelve feet in setback. There were shrubs and dwarf trees in stoneware vases. The whole terrace was backed by an eight foot wall of sheer cement, faced, and colored a deep green; the base of the penthouse which rose above them. There was no access from terrace to the penthouse.

The only door was the one through which they had come from the main building.

“Who lives up there?” asked Manning.

Sergeant Doherty answered:

“A guy who calls himself Zerah. A Hindu. He’s got some sort of a cult. It ain’t a fortune telling racket. We’ve had him looked into long ago. The society dames fall for whatever it is he hands them. His papers are okay, he’s got the right backing and he don’t charge fees. We’ve got nothing on him at headquarters. Some sort of a mystic, but we can’t touch him. This is a free country—in spots,” Doherty finished sarcastically.

Manning looked for clews, for some indication that somebody else but Pelota had been on the terrace at that unreasonable hour. He found none.

“Any suggestions?” he asked Henley.

“The man was strangled to death, I think. His diaphragmatic muscles are rigid. It looks like it might be some kind of poison. Those marks—it might have been a dart, but if it was, it has been taken. And where did his blood go to? I’m saying nothing till I dissect, and I’m not sure I’ll find anything. The eyes are dilated, there are baffling superficial symptoms. Damn it, Manning, I don’t know! That’s why I got the commissioner out of bed and asked for you. But—wait, man, wait till you see the other body!”

III

It was hard to believe that this corpse had once been vital, beautiful, alluring. But Manning had seen pictures of Evelyn Kyrrel Power, aside from the one framed on the dressing table. She had been young, prominent, popular, an acknowledged type of American beauty.

On the bed was a bloated thing that almost made Manning shudder when he saw it revealed. It was shapeless, discolored, monstrous.

Henley pulled up the merciful sheet.

“That staggers me, Manning,” he said, “if the two deaths are connected. They may be. Coincidence seems impossible. All the surface veins are broken, burst. Deeper ones may be the same. Tissues are ruptured. I think, but I am not sure, on account of the horrible distension, that there are two marks below the right breast like those on Pelota. I can tell better later. Here is poison again.

“Now, look outside. They have a terrace here. A door opens to it off the dining room. Under this window there’s a bed of flowers. There’s been no disturbance, unless you can find some trace of it. Supposedly, the window was open. Her husband and the maid say they were always open nights. If this was a dart, tell me what force could send it the distance from another building, even if the target could be seen.