Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) (8 page)

“Be very careful,” cautioned the bronze man. “We are a long way from knowing what we are dealing with.”

“I’ll tell a man!” Monk said fervently.

As the homely chemist sought the elevator, Doc Savage joined Ham Brooks in the reception room and asked, “Have you discovered anything of interest?”

Ham nodded. “The police have managed to trace the telephone call that Ned Gamble made from the Hotel Paramount upon his arrival. He called a Chicago number, and spoke with a woman named Janet Falcon.”

Interest flickered in the bronze man’s golden eyes.

“Did you get the telephone number?”

Ham tore a slip of paper off a notepad and proffered it to Doc Savage.

The bronze man took the sheet, glanced at it briefly and the number was instantly committed to his indelible memory.

Picking up a telephone, Doc Savage connected with the building switchboard operator and recited the phone number from memory.

After five rings, a nervous but professional sounding female voice asked, “Hello?”

“This is Doc Savage in New York. Am I speaking to Janet Falcon?”

“Yes, yes, you are,” the woman said eagerly. “Have you met with my fiancé?”

“What is his name?” countered Doc.

“Why, Ned Gamble. He was going to visit you.”

Doc Savage did not hesitate. “Your fiancé did arrive at my headquarters for the appointment, but we never had an opportunity to speak.”

Puzzlement flavored the woman’s crisp voice. “Why—why not?”

“It distresses me to be the one to convey this news to you, Miss Falcon, but he collapsed on my doorstep. We were unable to revive him.”

Janet Falcon’s voice became shrill. “What do you mean by that? Answer me!”

“We regret to inform you that Ned Gamble perished a few hours ago. The cause of his death has yet to be determined.”

“Oh! Oh!” The woman sobbed. Her breathing over the telephone became rushed and ragged.

Doc Savage gave the stricken woman a few moments to compose herself, then stated, “We have some questions for you.”

“Questions! At a time like this? How dare you?”

With that, the distraught woman hung up the phone with stunning finality.

QUIETLY, Doc Savage replaced the telephone receiver on its cradle, and informed Ham Brooks of what had just transpired over the wire.

“Perhaps Miss Falcon will be in a better frame of mind to talk once the news sinks in,” remarked Ham.

“She appeared to be frightened,” returned Doc. “She knew that Ned Gamble was coming to see me, so whatever his business was, we can extract that from her later.”

“If I know women,” mused Ham, “even when she settles down, we are going to have a job on our hands talking to her.”

“It is conceivable that Gamble came to me at Janet Falcon’s behest. No doubt she will blame herself, and possibly me, for his unfortunate passing.”

Ham looked puzzled. “What makes you think that?”

“Something in her tone of voice suggested that Gamble was acting as her emissary.”

“You suspect that Janet Falcon was too afraid to come by herself?”

“That is about the size of it,” related the bronze man.

Just then, Monk Mayfair came up, carrying a rag which he had used to scour the barrel that had disgorged so much unpleasant smoke. It was a tattered smudge of charcoal black.

“We should see what this stuff is in a jiffy,” he related.

Doc and Ham followed the hairy chemist into the great laboratory, where the spectrometer was once again engaged.

The results were disappointing, as they discovered just a few minutes later. The residue was not anything more interesting than black gunpowder and some other chemicals.

“This don’t match the other stuff,” Monk mumbled in disappointment.

“What was the other stuff composed of?” Ham wanted to know.

“We have no clue, Doc and me,” admitted the homely chemist.

Ham Brooks seemed momentarily taken aback. He looked to Doc Savage for confirmation.

Doc told Ham, “The substance found in the hotel is unknown to us.”

“What about the greenish shadow on our hallway wall?” prompted Ham.

“We will turn our attention on that next.”

The three men returned to the reception room and filed out into the corridor, and were soon huddled around the yellow-green shadow.

It still discolored the marble wall unpleasantly, its aspect hideous. The wall consisted of greenish-black marble below its waist, while the facing above that was sandy in hue. The discoloration stood out starkly against both types of marble.

Monk took a chance, applied his wide nostrils to the unlovely splotch, and began sniffing.

“I don’t smell nothin’,” he admitted, mild voice puzzled.

Doc Savage had brought with him several vials of chemicals. Carefully, he began applying different substances at random points on the yellow-green shadow with a swab, changing swabs with every application.

They waited for the chemical reaction to take hold.

Surprisingly, nothing of the sort transpired.

Monk grunted, “Ain’t painted on. So what is it, then?”

No one knew what or how to answer, least of all Doc Savage.

“This deserves further study,” he said as they retreated to the reception room. “Which we will undertake with appropriate equipment, inasmuch as it is not practical to remove that section of the marble.”

No sooner had Doc closed the door behind them than the telephone commenced jangling.

Leaping, Ham scooped up the receiver. He listened for a few moments and said to the others, “It’s Long Tom.”

Doc accepted the telephone transmitter and said, “Go ahead, Long Tom.”

“I looked into this Ned Gamble fellow,” Long Tom reported. “He’s a mineralogist, of all things. Strictly small-time. Teaches at a local college. Doesn’t have a bad reputation, doesn’t have much a reputation at all. He’s on the young side. Maybe he hasn’t had time to accomplish much of anything.”

“Please get to the heart of the matter,” requested the bronze man.

“O.K.,” said Long Tom. “He’s known to people at this conference. In fact, he had been planning to attend. Obviously, that won’t happen now. Asking around the exposition, I found out that this Gamble is engaged to a woman named Janet Falcon. Miss Falcon is the secretary to Myer Sim. So they all tie in together.”

Doc’s trilling piped up briefly, then he asked, “Janet Falcon appears to be the one who sent Gamble to New York. But she refused to divulge the reason why over the telephone. Look her up, Long Tom. Talk to her. She is rather shaken up right now, but we must get to the bottom of this. So far three persons have died.”

“I’ll get right on it, Doc,” said Long Tom, hanging up abruptly.

The bronze man turned to the others and said, “While Long Tom is pursuing the Chicago angle, we will endeavor to discover who laid the trap outside our garage door.”

Monk scratched his bullet head, which was furred by rusty red bristles.

“How are we gonna do that?” he asked.

Instead of replying, the bronze man turned into the library, and passed on through its spacious expanse into the great laboratory.

Monk and Ham hastened to follow.

When they caught up with the bronze giant, Doc was standing before a large cathode-ray tube that dominated a corner of the room. This was a television device that he himself had perfected; it was far more advanced than the old mechanical scanning television devices of only a few years ago.

“As you know,” he began to say, “of late we have installed television cameras at different points around the building, the better to monitor prowlers and other undesirables. These cameras are connected by special cables to this screen, and a timer causes the different cameras to cut into the screen in rotation, displaying moving images.”

Ham fingered his well-shaven chin and said, “But what good will that do us without a means to record these images?”

Doc moved to another device, saying, “Of course it would be virtually impossible to film these images continuously for later viewing—not without several persons taking turns changing the film reels. That is impractical. So I have contrived the next best solution to the problem.”

The bronze man broke open the back of a bulky contrivance that they realized was a large still camera pointed directly at the televisor screen. From this, he extracted a black container, which he carried over to an enclosed nook that was set aside as a photographic darkroom.

Monk snapped his fingers. “I get it! You rigged that big camera with a timing mechanism to take pictures of the screen every few minutes.”

“Exactly,” replied the bronze man. “Once these negatives are developed, we may be fortunate enough to capture what happened outside the garage door in our absence.”

Disappearing into the darkroom, Doc toiled several minutes, patiently developing the photographic strip.

When he emerged, the bronze man held the positives in one hand. He laid these upon a work table so the others could examine them.

The angle of one television camera looked down from above the garage door, and it caught a man in the act of dropping a barrel off the back of an open truck.

The truck was in the shadow of the great skyscraper, and so the man and his features were not distinct enough to make out and were further obscured by a battered Trilby hat. But the license tag on the truck was.

Sharp-eyed Ham noticed it first. “Fortunate break! That truck can be traced.”

“Without a doubt,” agreed Doc. “That will be our first order of business, to locate the truck and its driver.”

Monk grinned his widest. “Boy, oh boy, when I get my mitts on that bozo, I’m going to shake loose his teeth, loosen his eyeballs and anything else he’s got rattlin’ around in his skull.”

Going to a telephone, Doc put in a call to no less than the Commissioner of Police for New York, and made his request.

The commissioner was only too happy to oblige the bronze man. Often in the past, they had worked closely together.

“I’ll do everything in my power to get you this information,” promised the official, hanging up.

They were not long in waiting. When the commissioner called back, he related that the tag had been traced to a truck rental agency. “Here is the name of the concern.”

Doc took the information without writing it down, thanked the official, and hung up.

“We will pay a visit to the Ajax Rental Company now,” he said.

As they exited the reception room, they walked past the hideous yellow-green shadow sprawled on the corridor wall.

Ham remarked, “We still have not figured out how the man who struck down Ned Gamble at our very doorstep managed to get to this floor without detection.”

“If it was a man,” suggested Doc.

Ham’s eyes grew cunning. “You think it might have been a woman?”

“Medusa was a woman,” reminded the bronze man.

Chapter VII

THE MISTRUSTFUL WOMAN

LONG TOM ROBERTS had once been a soldier. He did not look it. He was undersized, appeared to be poorly nourished, and had a complexion that suggested future business for the mortician’s industry. His skin was pale as a fish belly, his hair was the color of straw that had lain too long in the sun, and his eyes were a blue so pale that sometimes sunlight made them seem colorless. Additionally, one front tooth had been knocked out in the past. The replacement was solid gold.

During the past war, Long Tom had been a major in the United States Army, and once saved the day by stuffing an assortment of knives, broken crockery, nails and other unpleasant projectiles into an old cannon of the “Long Tom” type. He had sufficient gunpowder for the operation, but lacked a proper fuse and matches. So he rigged up a small electrical detonator of the kind used to set off dynamite, hunkered down behind the safety of a fieldstone wall, and drove the plunger down.

The result was a calamity for the enemy—and a memorable victory for the young officer, who was forever after known to friends and associates as “Long Tom” Roberts.

Long Tom did not look like much when he left the great auditorium where the scientific exposition was being held in the heart of Chicago. He was bundled up in an overcoat; under one arm he toted a bulky box.

Weather had been Fall-like in New York City. Here in the Windy City, Old Man Winter had taken a firm grip. Long Tom kicked drifts of snow out of his way as he sloped toward an idling taxicab.

Getting in, he told the driver. “Take me to the Lincoln Apartments.”

“Sure, buddy.” The cab, an ancient thing with an overpowered motor, made a deep grinding noise as it slipped away from the curb.

As old as the cab seemed, it had good tires. The creaky hulk held the road well as it pushed its way through slow-moving Chicago traffic.

Twenty minutes later, the hack deposited Long Tom at his destination, an apartment building of yellowish Chicago brick. He paid the fare, but offered no tip. Long Tom was stingy with his money—residue of an impoverished childhood.

Still clutching his bulky box, the puny electrical wizard entered the vestibule of the Lincoln Apartments building, ran a cold-stiffened finger down the list of occupants, found the number corresponding to
J. Falcon
, and pressed the bell.

At length, a woman’s hoarse voice asked, “Yes, who is it?”

Remembering Doc Savage’s admonition that the woman might not be agreeable to talk in her grief, Long Tom told a bald lie.

“Got a package for you.”

“I am not expecting a package.”

“Well, I have to deliver it. It has your name on it. Janet Falcon.”

The woman seemed hesitant. “Does the package indicate who sent it?”

Long Tom thought quickly. “I can’t read it all, but the first name is Ned.”

“Ned!” gasped the woman. “Wait one moment. I will be right down.”

“O.K.,” said Long Tom.

He did not have to wait long. Shortly, a woman appeared and opened the inner door.

She was a cool-looking woman dressed in a tasteful business frock. Her face was marked by a thin, but not unattractive, nose. Chestnut hair was arranged in a long fall that was held together by a silver clasp. Her eyes were the clear green that sometimes suggests grass, and other times remindful of the hardness of polished jade. Right now, they had a stony quality. Her orbs were rimmed in red. Obviously, she had been crying.