In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (6 page)

Manning put in a call for the police commissioner. He was sure of full cooperation there.

“There’s a dinner at the New York Athletic Club to-morrow night,” said the commissioner. “Given to some of our Olympic winners. Cooke will be there. He’ll speak, distribute special awards. I shall be there. You’re a member, aren’t you? Good. Then we can talk with him. He’s not going to be easy to handle.”

IV

Cooke was not easy. He did not pooh-pooh the danger. No man could do that against the Griffin’s scarlet record; but Cooke declined to take special means to protect himself.

“Look at this last chap the Griffin killed,” he said. “Shut himself up with you in vaults, Manning, wouldn’t eat or drink. And he died. If my time has come I can’t stop it. I suppose I’m a bit of a fatalist. They say the Griffin is also. He reads the stars and uncovers fates. He may have uncovered mine. You chaps can take all the precautions you want to, so long as you don’t interfere with the fête I’ve arranged.

“I’m opening my new pool at my country place. No sports program except that a few record holders have kindly promised to christen the pool with the spray from their dives and sprints. It’s built just the length of my own record underwater dive and I’m going to see if I’m still equal to it.”

He looked it, Manning fancied; a man in his prime at something over forty, deep-chested, powerful. A fine specimen, a model for the type he hoped to develop.

“That’s one fine pool,” he went on enthusiastically. “I’m trying out, demonstrating rather, the new method of purifying swimming pools with ultraviolet rays instead of using chlorine to sting the eyes out of you. It works wonderfully. And I’m jing-ding-damned,” he added, half humorously but evidently in dead earnest, “if I’m going to let the Griffin put off that event. The invitations have been sent out. It’s a private affair so I haven’t announced it to the press. They’ll probably scent it and be on the job, however. Now, I suppose, I’ll have to add you and the commissioner to the guest list?”

“We’ll both be there,” said Manning grimly. “Invited or not. What’s more, Cooke, I want a list of your guests. I want to know very precisely who will be present, as guests or employees. I don’t propose to annoy any of them at all unnecessarily. We’ll check ninety-five per cent out inside of twenty-four hours. But we’ve got to know; and I want to go to your place to-morrow and look things over. I’ll drive there, may be there continually.”

Evans Cooke looked at Manning more attentively. There was a manner about the crime investigator that was as evident and compelling as a flow of magnetic current. His eyes were cold with purpose.

“You’re welcome, of course,” said Cooke. “I wish it was only as a guest, Manning. I should like to know you better. Like to have you interested in my movement. You’re the sort of chap could stir up enthusiasm.”

“I’m interested right now in
you,
” said Manning. “Take this threat seriously, Cooke. It’s more than a threat. It’s mighty likely to become a certainty.”

Evans Cooke looked into Manning’s eyes and there was laughter in his own. Not merriment, not derision, but the gay humor of a man who is unafraid. Manning gripped his outstretched hand with genuine liking. A man of this caliber was well worth preserving. Cooke made a gallant gesture.

“Te morituri salutamus,”
he quoted, and turned to greet some of the guests of the evening.

“What was that he just said?” asked the commissioner who had come up from the ranks and lacked a classical education.

“It was a slogan of the Roman arena,” Manning told him. “The gladiators stood in front of the imperial box and chanted it to Caesar or Nero or whoever happened to be imperator. ‘Hail!’ they said. ‘We who are about to die, salute thee!’ ”

“Ludonia,” Evans Cooke had named his place. It was after the Latin verb indicating “sporting pastime.” The place was on the level land of Long Island. The house itself was well designed but not unusual. There was a separate sports building with as complete an equipment, lacking the amphitheater, as Madison Garden. There was a quarter of a mile track encircling a space for field sports. The tennis courts were perfection.

Cooke practiced what he preached to the extent of his own capacity, and his guests were frequently amateurs and sometimes professionals of the top rank. The fête on the nineteenth was, however, largely a social affair. The new tank had been completed and was to be the last word in swimming pools.

Manning surveyed it approvingly. It must have cost plenty of money, he imagined, looking at the tiled interior, now empty, slanting from eight feet to three. The tiles had been specially designed. Fresh water was emitted through a bronze dolphin’s mouth, made exit through an overflow shaped like a giant conch shell. The tiles were specially designed to represent fishes in action, luxuriant growths of weed. The globes that illuminated the tank of a night, beneath the water line, were concealed behind shades of actual nautilus shell. The ultra-ray lamps that would automatically keep the water pure were not yet installed. Manning idly watched the man in charge of the work and passed on to his minute survey of the grounds. They were fenced and could be efficiently guarded.

The police commissioner was working on the list of guests. None seemed even to suggest suspicion, but the Griffin was wealthy. Aside from the society end there would be athletes, male and female. The game was none too lucrative professionally, expensive from a purely amateur standpoint. The Griffin had unlimited funds. He had bought his way out of Dannemora. He might buy an assistant murderer. There would be plenty of men in plain clothes to look out for everyone who might be doubted. The employees were checked. Evans Cooke vouched for them.

During the late night of the eighteenth the trained, picked men of the police commissioner came quietly to Ludonia to take up their vigil. At midnight the place was dark. Evans Cooke believed in moderation, his entertainments were never carousals. The sound body needed sleep and he set the example and not merely expected his guests to follow it, but had all lights switched off at twelve. The estate, with neighboring ones and the village, was served by a subsidiary power line from high tension wires of the main power plant, reduced through a transformer.

Manning had a battery lamp. He had also a powerful electric torch. He had been there, day and night, for a week, and he was convinced that he had built up a good defense.

Now the zero period had commenced, he had little fear that the Griffin, for all his deviltry, could pass the cordon established about the grounds and the house. Inside, Cooke slept in the room next to Manning’s. Close by there were vigilant protectors, eager and alert.

The Griffin was certainly not within the grounds. He would strike later, devise some means of delivering the blow in the open. It would fall like a bolt from the blue, it would be spectacular.

More than once the Griffin had boasted to Manning that, in order successfully to murder a man, one had only to study his habits to find the weak spot.

Manning had bestowed a week’s extensive research upon the habits of Cooke, feeling sure the Griffin had done the same.

Now, prepared for twenty-four hours of tireless vigil, he went over his notes, his deductions, instructions he had issued and was yet to issue, working like a field marshal on the eve of a decisive battle by the light of his battery lamp.

The police commissioner would arrive in the morning. The guests would begin to appear shortly before noon. An elaborate luncheon was to be served and the waiters would be chosen members of both civic and private detective forces.

He went over once more the roster of the guests. Their records were flawless. Yet Manning believed that someone would be on the spot who was prepared to carry out the Griffin’s diabolical plot.

At two in the morning he made his grand rounds. The one exception to Cooke’s ukase of “lights out” was by the pool, where they were testing the globes that, underwater, lighted the pool after dark with colors that could be combined, changed into varying effects. The switches were in a small cement building, an addition to the dressing pavilion, where also the valves for the intake and outflow of the pool were controlled.

At the pool the program of the day would center. Three girl champions, two of them Olympic winners, with two male stars, would display their speed and grace. Cooke himself would try to repeat his record. Manning believed he could, having seen him try it the day before, marveling at his host’s prowess.

V

The pool was empty now and a corps of men was busy under the brisk direction of a gaunt New Englander who had undertaken the contract and was, Cooke said, a genius in the rough. He lacked education so far as books went, but Cooke proclaimed him another of those talented products of the northeastern seaboard who begin as tinkers and wind up as Edisons or Fords.

Sentinels had challenged, and then saluted Manning in his inspection. It was inevitable that these workmen must know that special precautions were being taken for some purpose. But the master electrician seemed concentrated on his job and its success, and on that alone.

He answered Manning curtly but not rudely and showed him how the work had been planned and carried out both for the illumination and the purification violet rays. Manning saw the purple rays flash on and off. He noted the inlets and outlets for the current, inspected the switchboard. Much of the work was completed, underground. Manning was not a practical electrician, but he knew the general theory and he could see nothing wrong. Yet he suspected that tank; he dreaded the moment of Cooke’s underwater dive.

Still, it seemed as if the barricade was invincible. He could find no flaw in it as he returned to the house and sat on the terrace beneath Cooke’s window, smoking pipe after pipe until the dawn came.

The water flowed into the pool. Final tests were made, the lights were shut off. The workmen left, checked out at the gate, the contractor remaining to see his work approved, collect his money.

“I wish,” Manning told himself, “that Cooke hadn’t made that gesture and used that quotation.”

He meant the
“te morituri salutamus,”
the “I, who am about to die, salute thee,” phrase that Manning had explained to the commissioner.

Half a dozen times, as he tapped out his briar, refilled it and sent the aromatic smoke into the still air, Manning deplored that little speech. “Confound him,” Manning muttered. “I wish that had not come into his head.”

The sun rose, the day wore on without sign of trouble. Vigilance was maintained. The forenoon passed, the guests arrived and were entertained, unconscious of the keen-eyed sleuths who served them deftly but watched everything, waiting for any sign of the unusual.

Manning sauntered about, introduced by Cooke as amateur handball champion. The strain was terrific, but Cooke appeared serene.

The attempt at tragedy, Manning told himself, would happen before sunset. At three in the afternoon, after the elaborate luncheon and some speechmaking, the guests assembled about the pool. Manning kept close to his host, a service gun holstered under one shoulder, his leather-covered steel cane in his hand.

Now, with a sudden quickening of inner alarm, he felt that the supreme moment of the Griffin’s would-be fatal move upon this animated chessboard was imminent. But there was no sign of it. There was no unaccredited person upon the estate. The guards were all upon the
qui vive.
The waiters, relieved of their pseudo duties, added to the ranks of the protectors. Manning saw the commissioner himself, vigilant, experienced. The only outside employee, if the man could be so styled, was the electrician who had installed the lighting.

A shadow drifted over the sparkling pool as the first of the guest exhibitors came from the dressing rooms and started to climb to a diving platform. Manning looked up and saw an autogyro hovering overhead. He remembered the Griffin’s hint that he might be present. But there were other planes close by. They had passed in circling patrol ever since sunrise. Two of them came racing up now. Police planes, armed with quickfirers, far speedier than an autogyro, if that turned out to be anything but the machine of a casual spectator out for a flight and attracted by the crowd. Someone was looking out of the gyro’s cockpit. Manning caught the gleam of binoculars. If they were merely looking on, they had a commanding position.

The body of the girl Olympic champion leaped, poised in the air with exquisite grace, making a perfect swan dive as the spectators applauded heartily. The others followed.

Cooke had gone to the dressing pavilion. Manning watched for his appearance, with his pulse gone up, his blood tingling, his tension strained to the limit. He could not foretell what would happen, but he knew it was imminent. Yet he was sure there was nothing connected with the pool, with the lighting, that was out of the ordinary, that was harmful.

He looked about him and caught the eye of the commissioner, grimly watchful. He did not notice the electrician in the crowd about the pool. After all, the man was a mechanician, not a guest. He glanced up and saw the autogyro still hovering. The two police planes were close by.

Cooke appeared and the applause heightened as he took his stance. In his diving suit he was a really magnificent figure as he acknowledged the greeting with a smile and a gesture that brought the Latin phrase flashing again into Manning’s mind.

“I who am about to die….”

Manning half started forward to stop the dive, but he was too late. Cooke crouched, his arms back, then forward, as he lanced in a flat trajectory into the pool. His body glided beneath the surface, his head came close to it but did not break the water.

He was going to make it, to equal his record, and nothing had happened. The onlookers stood ready to cheer him, Manning stood staring, waiting.

Cooke’s hands grasped the rail that ran all about the pool. He stood up in the shallow water and moved to the steps, coming out of the pool unscathed, smiling and bowing to his applauding guests. Manning almost gasped with relief. Still he could hardly believe that Cooke had passed the ordeal Manning had believed the pool somehow constituted, though he had not been able to detect anything amiss. Cooke pressed through the crowd, walking erect in a little triumphant progress to the dressing pavilion. Manning followed him. He was not going to let Cooke out of his sight until midnight.