Kirkpatrick shook his head. "I'm not satisfied," he said.
Wentworth grinned. "I'm not, either," he admitted. "But I still think that Alrecht can give us some interesting information about the case. I suggest that we check all the stockholders of that Bessmo company at once, check on the lives of the men . . ."
"But," Briggs came forward timidly, but doggedly. "My daughter, Betty, what about her?"
"We'll find her," Kirkpatrick said emphatically. "Got a picture?" Briggs fumbled in his pocket, brought out a kodak picture. "Men who stole her tore up every picture in the house," he said painfully. "Mrs. Collins found this one. Old album."
Kirkpatrick took the picture. It showed a smallish girl with a merry Irish face. She had on a man's hat, a large one and she was gripping it with both hands, pulling it down over her ears. It was sizes too big for her.
"We took that one day on a picnic," Briggs said. "Always made fun of my long hair. Big hats . . . ." He struck a match and lit the cold stump between his teeth. His hand trembled and he puffed furiously at the cigar, sent out billows of smoke.
"Tell me about your daughter's kidnapping," Kirkpatrick said. He spoke gruffly. He was not unsympathetic with Briggs. As the little man said, the truth about Bessmo was important, but its peculiar power to resist crystallization was not of overwhelming immediate value. In time it might protect the people. It might be used to brace buildings against future attacks of the steel-eater, but the information was useless in the present crisis.
The story of the kidnapping was soon told. Betty was a madcap girl with a bright temper, and on a certain evening she had quarreled with her escort while at a friend's home—she had coolly taken his car and driven away, returning to her own home alone. Apparently the kidnappers had been waiting for some time for an opportunity to strike. This had been the occasion. They had seized her, used her keys to enter the house and destroy the pictures—apparently to hinder police in any possible search—then carried her away. Once every day she was permitted to talk to Briggs over the 'phone, a set formula: "Hello, daddums, I'm all okay."
Then the wire would close. Briggs had insisted on this proof that his daughter was alive before he would yield to the kidnapper's demands. "I don't know what will happen now," he said miserably. "I tried to ransom her, but they only laughed at me. I'm not a rich man, you know."
He looked up with his bright little eyes through the veil of vile-smelling cigar smoke. "Going home now," he said simply. "Betty's due to call in any hour."
"Did anyone see the kidnappers enter the house?" Wentworth asked quietly.
"No," Briggs said, "but one of the hallboys of our apartment saw a man. Hung around the two days before they got her. Man with bald head. Cast in one eye."
Wentworth straightened with sucked-in breath. Kirkpatrick looked at him and they nodded. Baldy had shown up again. Everywhere they turned in their quest for the men behind the steel-eater, for the Master, they ran across this man with no criminal past, this bald man with a head like a dome and a cast in one eye. The entire case seemed to devolve on finding him.
"If you don't mind, Kirk," said Wentworth, rising, "I'd like to work on this kidnapping case."
Kirkpatrick studied him speculatively with fatigued eyes. To him, it seemed distinctly a side-issue to the main case: the snaring of the Master, the capture of Alrecht and the questioning of big stockholders in Bessmo. He shrugged.
"If you wish to, Dick," he agreed. "Of course, we'll attempt to trace the call from the girl when it comes through. You'll get in touch with Professor Brownlee right away?"
Wentworth nodded. "As soon as we find that the steel actually will do what it's supposed to. Personally, I think there is no doubt about it."
Kirkpatrick continued to eye him, then they shook hands and Wentworth left with Briggs and Nancy Collins. The architect was morose and silent throughout the drive to his Riverside Drive apartment and his cigar went out between his teeth. They dropped Nancy at her hotel and pushed on. Wentworth leaned back in a corner and stared out at the night scene with half-closed eyes. It was spitting small hard snow and the flying specks whipped upward across the windshield and danced in little eddies on the pavement of the street. Each time they passed a corner, the smash of the gust from the river would sway the car.
In the nineties, Briggs spun the car downhill into the teeth of that wind, parked on the side street and fought his door open against a half-gale. They ducked across the walk into the protection of the apartment-house doorway, stamped their feet and blew on their fingers as they went along a tiled hallway to the elevators. The Negro operator got up from a chair in a corner and crossed to the cages.
Briggs pushed open the door of his apartment and walked along a long hall. He went directly to a davenport in a corner where a telephone stood on a stand at his elbow. Hard grains of snow made a gusty whispering against the windows behind him and moaned around the corners of the house.
Briggs had a fresh cigar between his teeth and that had gone out also. The 'phone tinkled and he snatched it from its cradle before the first bell note had been completed. He held it to his ear, hesitated, staring straight ahead of him, then got out a husky, "Hello!"
His eyes brightened and he said, "I'm glad, darling. Can't you . . . ?" He choked off, put the 'phone slowly back on its cradle. He looked up dully at Wentworth.
"She's all right," he said.
Wentworth questioned Briggs briskly about the disappearance of his daughter, touching several new angles that had occurred to him since leaving Kirkpatrick's office, but he elicited nothing new and left soon afterward. George took a brown whistle from a nail near the elevator shaft, whistled loudly for a cab from the doorway, but none came and Wentworth thanked him, and holding his hat, ducked out into the wind. It pushed him up the hill and he turned to the right, hugging the wall for the comparative warmth of its protection.
There was a delicatessen store at the corner which had a telephone-booth, and from it he called Kirkpatrick, then Jackson at his apartment, then Nita. He was on the point of calling a cab when he recalled that there was a Drive-It-Yourself stand just around the corner toward the underpass that ducked beneath Riverside Drive. He went there and arranged for a closed car, for he expected to do much traveling tonight, and his own car probably would be dangerous—and cabs were busy.
His call to police headquarters had elicited the information that Beatrice Ross was about to be released, that Betty Briggs had 'phoned from a drug store in Brooklyn, but a check-up there had failed to reveal any girl having been in the booth. The drug clerk was positive of that because he had had only four or five customers the entire evening and none had been women.
Wentworth puzzled over that information as he drove through the storm toward Nita's apartment in the Riverside Towers. It tied up in one way. Mickey McSwag's mob was strong in Brooklyn and McSwag was apparently the gangster the Master was using now. Nita greeted him at the door and shivered when he clasped her warm hands in his.
"You must be almost frozen," she told him. "I've got hot coffee and some of that Courvoisier '98 you like so well."
With a bound and a cavernous bark a big Harlequin Great Dane sprang past Nita and reared with its paws on Wentworth's shoulders, huge head high above his own, tongue lolling in greeting. Wentworth thumped his fist against the dog's chest and laughed.
"Down, Apollo," he ordered and threw an arm about Nita's waist as they strolled back along the hall into her studio apartment. "Apollo can't get used to being grown up," he said. "If he starts romping, the people below you are apt to have plaster in their faces."
The Great Dane that Wentworth had trained from puppyhood after importing him for Nita stalked along beside him as they entered the studio living-room. The big windows that opened on the river were covered by the warm folds of crimson velvet curtains and on a stone hearth, a fire leaped and blazed. Coffee steamed in an urn on a small table, and there was a slim-necked bottle of cognac beside it.
But Wentworth did not
drop into the chair placed invitingly beside it. He strode energetically up and down the room, tossed his overcoat and hat into a chair. He flexed his fingers, chaffed them rapidly together.
"We're near the break," he told her. "I'm going out to find Briggs' daughter tonight." He spun the story of her kidnapping. "When I locate her, I'll be close to this Baldy who's running things for the Master. Once I get to Baldy . . . ."
Nita laughed. "It doesn't sound like you're very close to the Master, Dick."
He grinned, rumpled her bronze curls with his hands and kissed her when she protested. "It's you, darling, that makes me enthusiastic. Just being here for the little while I can stay makes a new man out of me." He caught Nita by the hands and pulled her to her feet, clasped her close into his arms. For a long minute they stood like that while the fire crackled and popped and threw their merged shadow in giant size across the ceiling. Then Wentworth released her. They were serious-eyed now as they looked at each other.
The service-door opened quietly and Ram Singh appeared after a moment, bowing from the arch that led to the breakfast room. Wentworth, his eyes still on Nita, drew in a deep breath. Abruptly he drove somberness from his face with a cheerful grin that touched, but did not entirely brighten his eyes. He spun to Ram Singh and spluttered out staccato Hindustani.
Ram Singh, answering, said that Jackson had replaced him just as Beatrice Ross had been released. There was a somber protest in his words at being pulled off of such an important mission. Wentworth told him, smiling, knowing the rivalry of service between Jackson and Ram Singh, that he had a task which only the Hindu could do.
The Hindu bowed again, touching his cupped hands to his forehead in a deep salaam. His eyes were proud now. Wordlessly, he backed into the half-darkness and returned a moment later with a small black suitcase. He set it upon a table and opened it as Wentworth dropped into a chair. Ram Singh whipped out a towel and tucked it beneath his master's chin, went swiftly to work upon his face with make-up tools.
As Ram Singh worked, Wentworth talked to Nita in snatches. "We've succeeded in tracing Butterworth up to a certain point," he said. "He got a passport and had it visaed for Great Britain. He has relatives in Kent. I want you and Ram Singh to catch the Berengaria, sailing at midnight and trace him down. I'll have passports made out for you by radio. Butterworth must come back, or you must get the story from him about Collins' invention and about everyone who knows anything about it."
"Then you aren't so near to the break of the case?" asked Nita quietly.
A hint of a smile twitched Wentworth's lips. "I'm always just around the corner," he said, "but like prosperity, it may be a long, slow corner to turn. If my present plans fail, there must be another move already in preparation."
"You're quite sure, Dick," Nita asked slowly, "that you don't simply want me out of the country for safety? You haven't let me do much on this case."
"I'll be glad to have you safe," Wentworth told her gravely, "but there is much more than that. Your work may in many respects be the turning point of the whole case. I don't dare entrust what information you may gain to anyone else. It seems quite clear that Butterworth is dodging someone, possibly police. He left many unpaid debts behind in Middleton. We have been unable to find what ship he took abroad. That's why I'm sending Ram Singh with you. It may come to physical battle before you get what you want from him. At the same time, I think that it can be handled better without police help."
Ram Singh fitted a covering like a wig over Wentworth's head and Nita uttered a startled exclamation. "You're posing as Baldy!" she cried.
Wentworth lifted a small hand mirror and peered at the result of the covering. Fitted tightly over his head was a bald dome that glistened like an egg. He nodded, grinning slightly.
"A good job, Ram Singh," he said softly. "Some days ago," he told Nita, "I anticipated that the need for this imposture might occur and had Ram Singh prepare the disguise."
He stopped talking, tilted his head back while Ram Singh dropped liquid into his eyes, lifted the lids and fitted bits of concave glass under them against the eyeballs. He closed his eyes, turned toward Nita and opened them. The piercing blue-gray gaze of the Spider had vanished. The left eye was a pale blue and there was a cast in it. The right eye was dull and brown.
"Those Zeiss lenses," said Nita softly.
Wentworth nodded. "They're a bit uncomfortable for a while, but I've become quite accustomed to them. It's not very easy to see with the colors painted on them, but we've perfected a film paint that permits me to see through fairly well. And in the middle of each, there's a small hole for the pupil."
He stood up, stepped into a dressing room to one side and shortly emerged with a greasy cap pulled down over his dome head. His shoulder sloped beneath an old gray overcoat that was too short for him and he walked with a furtive shuffle that took inches off his height.
"I've never seen Baldy," Wentworth said, "but Ram Singh has and he has a remarkable memory for such detail."
He tried a number of voice tones under Ram Singh's coaching and soon had acquired a squeaky, changeable voice that caused the Hindu's turbaned head to nod in satisfaction. Wentworth balled the overcoat and cap into the suitcase, donned his own and pulled his felt well down upon his head. He bowed over Nita's hands, raising them to his lips.
"I may see you on the Berengaria," he told her. "If not, I'll 'phone you tomorrow. You have two hours before sailing. You'll find your passage reserved. Jenkyns attended to that." He straightened and Nita came close to him, raised her lips.
She shuddered slightly. "I don't really feel it's you, Dick, behind that disguise," she complained, then laughed and kissed him again. Her arms tightened about his shoulders convulsively. "Be careful, Dick," she whispered against his mouth.
Chapter Twelve
The Game Is Lost
RECALLING NITA'S warning three quarters of an hour later as he swung right off Manhattan Bridge, Wentworth's disguised lips twitched slightly. The rush and beat of the wind rocked the little coupe as he pushed it southward along the water front through the whip of the snow. In a few blocks now, he would be on the edge of what had been McSwag's "territory" during the great era of the rackets. That was finished now, but McSwag had turned to other criminal revenue. His mob of gunmen was the most ruthless and deadly in this post-repeal period. They robbed and killed and their immunity of prohibition days was still a shield and buckler to them.
The Master had done well to choose them—if he had a strong hand. Otherwise, McSwag might well take him over and make him serve his own ends. Wentworth would need to be more than careful to play the game he planned tonight and come out with his life. He would have to be bold and swift. His keen mind must not fail him for a second.
He gassed around a corner into Water Street. Out of the side window, he could see the far end of Brooklyn Bridge, hazed by snow, the swoop of its cables picked out by dim lights. He would be directly under it in another block. Two blocks beyond that was the pool-room-saloon where McSwag's mob usually hung out. Wentworth held down his impatience and let the coupe jounce along over the cobbles at a slow speed. There was no reason for Baldy to hurry, however much the Spider might yearn to join battle.
The neon-light sign before the restaurant spilled a bloody trail across the sidewalk, sent a crimson glow-out against the haze of falling snow. Wentworth spun the coupe around in a U curve and parked on the edge of that glow, eased out and shuffled to the doors, his shoulders hunched against the flail of wind and cold. He paused a moment, tugged once at the peak of his greasy cap and edged inside.
Four moth-eaten pool tables were picked out by the strong white light that funneled down from low-swung lamps. Two tables were busy. A stout man in a brown sweater was leaning his elbows on a grimy glass tobacco-counter beside the door. He lifted his eyes and grunted:
"Hello, Baldy."
Wentworth sneezed, dragged a limp handkerchief from his pocket. "'Lo," he snuffled. He was counting on the faked cold to turn
aside any suspicions of his voice. "Where's McSwag?"
The man's eyes showed the whites under the irises as he looked up again. "Back room," he said slowly.
Wentworth shuffled that way. The men at the tables had stopped playing and were watching him with unshifting eyes. The Spider knew their faces, killers all. His shoulders seemed to cringe even more. He snuffled and bobbed the big dome of his head.
"Hello," he said.
Not one of them spoke. Wentworth's mind was racing behind the half-frightened mask of his disguise. Was it possible there had been some split between McSwag and the Master that he didn't know about? Was he betraying his masquerade by coming here? But that seemed unlikely. The man at the door had addressed him as Baldy, and that indicated his identity at least was accepted. Something was wrong, though. He knew that. The place was too quiet and too noisy by turns. The rough laughter that burst out now and then from the restaurant seemed to have an edge.
Wentworth snuffled and eased into the back room. All his movements had the frightened air that went with the character of Baldy. Ram Singh had noticed that the man was at once cringing and insolent in his dealings with Hackerson. As if he feared the man personally and yet knew that somehow he held a whip hand. Such was Wentworth's air tonight as he went into the back room and looked about for McSwag. He knew the Irishman by sight, a roundly solid mountain of strength, with a craggy head that might have set upon the shoulders of some ancient Iberian king. And McSwag was a king in his own territory. Politicians hastened to do him favors and police wore a worried look when something came up that involved his powerful mob.
McSwag was not visible in the back room and Wentworth slipped around a battered table where men played monosyllabic poker. The four looked up as the supposed Baldy went by and the dealer stopped flipping cards to lift his eyes beneath a green shade. A white cone of light burned down and left their faces mostly in shadow.
THE SPIDER-City of Doom Page 10