The Phantom Detective: Tycoon of Crime. Robert Wallace
Читать онлайн книгу.
them with my own now.”
Watches came out or were turned up on wrists. The Tycoon gave the minute, and the watches were set.
“At midnight then,” came the eerie voice. It lowered, giving further orders. Then the self-starter of the coupé whined; the engine purred.
“So I will go. And you will all hurry, too. I trust you checked up, as I said — on the dead?” he pronounced the phrase with grim mirth. “Did you take all the effects of Truesdale and Garth?” Hate threaded his tone as those names were spoken. There were gruff assents. “Good! And the pilot? You made sure of the pilot?”
As he spoke eyes shifted to the ruddy, dying glow. A few faces paled a little sickly.
“Yeah, I made sure he’s dead,” a squatly-built man stepped forward to answer. The ruddy glow revealed his squarish head, set low on wide shoulders. His face was crooked-featured, as if one-half of it had slid beneath the other. “I seen his brass buttons.”
“You mean,” the Tycoon of Crime said bitingly, “that there were two such men with brass buttons, don’t you, Maxie? There was a co-pilot too.”
Maxie’s crooked face showed surprise. “But there was only one, Boss. I —”
“You bungling fool.” The whisper lashed out like a whip, in sudden, frenzied rage. “Slick, count those bodies! Tell me the count!”
Slick hurried forward. He was quick to return with an answering number, but when he told it a snarl of enraged conviction came from the coupé.
“It’s true then! One of them escaped! He’s loose! That must be Bentley, the pilot, from what I know of his stubborn character. But he can’t be far! He must be found — he must be killed!” The voice fairly crackled. “He must die before he can menace my plans!”
His fierce words lashed the whole crowd to action. Automatics glinted as they were whipped out. Ape gripped his tommy gun. Breaking up into smaller groups, thugs were scouring the vicinity — with murder in their eyes.
“He can’t escape!” The voice of the Tycoon of Crime spurred them on. “There is only one way he could have headed. Get him! Get him no matter how far you have to follow him!”
YES, PAT BENTLEY WAS ALIVE!
He was disheveled, his face smoke-blackened, his eyes wild with horror and shock — but he was very much alive as he ran furtively through a sleepy little village — the village of Mulford, New York. A long, long way from where he had last radioed a message from his doomed plane.
His brain was a rioting tumult of rage, of horror, of anguished realization. Now he knew the reason for all his presentiments. And those two men he had felt queerly about at the outset of the flight. Garth and Truesdale.
He knew now the meaning of the frightened words he had heard in their conversation. But what about those strong boxes on the plane? Had they melted, burned? Their valuable unknown contents been destroyed? Conjectures raced through his mind as the question rose: What to do!
Then his wild eyes caught the light window of an all-night drug store. A telephone!
The lone clerk on duty in the store was dozing in a corner and did not even see Bentley. The disheveled, smoke-blackened pilot lurched across the floor to a single booth. His eyes glanced wildly around, then he entered, closing the door, change jangling as his hand reached into his pockets.
“Long — distance — New York City —” his voice came in a gasping croak. “I want New York City Police Headquarters. The number is Spring Seven Three One Hundred. Hurry — emergency!”
He was crazily putting in coins as he spoke, the toll-bells clanging. The urgency of his voice evidently brought swift co•peration from the telephone office.
The connection was made.
“Police Headquarters,” boomed a stentorian voice.
“Let me speak to the commissioner: This is a matter of life and death. I’ve important information.”
There was a pause at the other end. Faint words there; then a click of switches.
“Hello!” came a gruff voice. “This is Chief Deputy Inspector Gregg. Who’s calling?”
“I want the commissioner.”
“You can tell me what you have to say. I’m in charge of the Detective Division.” And the man on the New York end of the line repeated: “Who’s calling?”
“Listen!” Again Bentley ignored the question. His voice came rapid-fire, with crisp incisiveness, with the clear yet rapid enunciation that had made him famous as a news commentator. “Something’s going to happen in New York at midnight at Grand Central! A murder — a devilish murder! There’s a fiend behind it! I heard him talking! You police must stop him! You must —”
Abruptly Pat Bentley whirled. Was that a movement outside the drug store? Or just a shadow? The voice of the Manhattan Inspector was barking questions in the receiver — but suddenly reaching anew decision, Bentley hung up without another word, without telling who he was.
He sneaked across the floor past the dozing clerk, glancing out. No one in sight. His imagination? Or perhaps a premonition. For the trail he had left would be wide open. They’d be after him.
He had done what had to be done immediately. Even as he had been talking he had realized he could not chance further information to any phone, nor tell what he knew to any police inspector. He must get to New York City, in person. He had phoned because he knew that not even a miracle could get him there before midnight, and at least he had warned the police, though they had no idea who’s murder they were to prevent or who had given the information. But now —
As he hurried through the dark village streets, Bentley’s eyes gleamed; those far-sighted eyes of the born flyer. There was one man to whom he could tell the whole ghastly story — the incredible story. The man who had been his boss when he was a newspaperman. Frank Havens, owner of the New York Clarion!
Havens would know what to do with this dynamite news that would be too inflammable for the police! For Havens knew how to contact the one person who could cope with such a thing; the great unknown detective who had unraveled other baffling and bloody enigmas.
“The Phantom!” Bentley’s dry lips whispered, as they twisted in a crooked grin of hope. “The Phantom — must be — called!”
CHAPTER III
Murder on the Balcony
NIGHT IN MANHATTAN. In Times Square, the city was wide awake and gay, the bright lights glaring. Crowds from the theaters were hurrying to nightclubs and restaurants. From the waterfront fog-horns tooted, factories still ground out their work, smoke belching from their chimneys. To the east, cars streamed like illuminated, linked chains across the bridges.
Other cars streamed west, too, to enter the Holland Tunnel, to whisk over the George Washington Bridge. There were but few lonely streets in the teeming metropolis.
Wall Street and the surrounding financial district were deserted, the office buildings rising like dark canyon walls. But its streets were still pounded by alert patrolmen.
The poverty-stricken tenement sections where evil figures stalked — drunks and derelicts, shifty underworld characters, also lay in sleepy gloom. And police were watchful, knowing that no night passed in these districts without some violence and bloodshed.
Police Inspector Thomas Gregg’s bulking form sat in the cushioned shield-bearing limousine which was whisking him and a hard-eyed subordinate uptown, toward Grand Central, its short-wave radio bringing every police call that went out from Headquarters.
“I suppose that anonymous call from Mulford, New York, was from a crank,” the Inspector grumbled “But I guess it’s just as well not to take chances. That voice I heard on the phone — There was something about it — something familiar. Kinda made me sure feel the tip was hot!”